Reading at the beach.

I admit it: I was desperate. I had taken two books with me on vacation: Balzac's Old Goriot and a book about Helene Cixous from the Continuum Live Theory series. The first was to read while actually on the beach; the second to read before bed. However, by Wednesday I had finished Old Goriot and I hadn't yet visited any of the used and discount book shops that crop up along the boardwalks in Rehoboth and Bethany (and until recently Ocean City).

So I borrowed a James Patterson novel from a friend. The Beach House. I had read a James Patterson novel before -- Kiss the Girls or Along Came a Spider...I don't really remember -- and remember sort of liking it. Mainly when it comes to "junk food" reading, I'll choose a mystery every time: I read about all of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot novels when I was a teenager, and I've even given a paper on Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, so I figured a good potboiler was just what I needed to take me through the rest of the drowsy vacation week.

And it was good for about 250 of its 352 pages. Then it got stupid. Extremely stupid. I'm talking hard boiled detective fiction meets Airheads. I finished the book deeply deeply unsatisfied. It was like eating a whole bag of chips by yourself and realizing that you've probably come one chip short of actually poisoning yourself.

In general though, detective novels -- at least the ones that follow in the hard boiled tradition -- do highlight the corruption that money brings with it. For that reason alone, they're worth reading as cultural objects. Why is it that a large segment of our popular fiction holds as a basic premise that wealth and power are naturally at odds with democracy and fair play? Given that basic premise, why is it that these novels, consumed by a vast swath of the reading public, seem to provide little motivation to strike out against the jobbing of the system? Really, the better question is why do these novels, that take such a populist stance against the wealth and power of our society's elites, achieve such success within a reading public that seems complacent and accepting of the abuses of wealth and power by the real-life elites? Or perhaps we don't actually believe that wealth influences the direction of the wheels of justice, that people -- even government employees -- can be bought off, or that power provides privileges inaccessible to the run of the mill American.

What good is a vicarious wish-fulfillment of revenge against the elites when in real life we perpetuate the system that allows such abuse? Literature is essentially a field of play, where multiple realities can be explored and either embraced or rejected. Often where our current realities can be replaced by idealized and impossibly removed realities (esp. in fantasy and romance). Mystery fiction is often no different -- the worlds in which the detective finds himself are portrayed as outside the norm, almost to the extent that they become nightmarish fantasylands in which the only rule is the rule of money. The detective straddles the playground of the rich world and the everyday working world -- the authentic world in most detective fiction -- and we are led to that very conclusion that the realities of the rich are simply not ours and don't adhere to our rules of fair play -- whereas of course we always do.

So we let the detective rail against that world for a few hundred pages and generally reach -- at least in our contemporary era -- some sort of victory against the forces of wealth and power, and then we go on with our lives. Fitter. Happier. More Productive.

And all because I couldn't see myself sitting on the beach trying to concentrate on Cixous.