Literature: the bane of high schoolers sans Spark Notes and bored college students with other things on their minds, like beer, everywhere.

Why is literature a must? Shakespeare won’t ever configure into Bob’s MBA. And Jackie is a chemmie. And if ANY engineer knew a word of poetry, maybe there wouldn’t be so many single engineers.

So it seems the lates and greats of the language have a very small corner of the market, and an unmarketable corner at that. The best job an English major could ever hope for is in the services industry. Enjoy your apron and paper hat there, pal.

Chances are, that English major never wrote a term paper on Stephen King or Alice Sebold. The volumes of waxing poetic bull on such exalted folks as Ernest Hemingway, Jane Austen, Alexandre Dumas, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and the Brontes, however? Endless. What makes one so worthy but not the other? It all comes down to the basics of storytelling.

Plot.

I defy you to identify the plot of Moby-Dick. You just can’t make that many pages of inner monologue into a decent movie. The human condition is not a plot. The Death of Ivan Ilych sounds promising, but the man’s death only comes after enduring pages and pages of careful consideration of life and death.

At first blush, literature is boring. Not entertaining in the least. But that’s why we have popular fiction. Too much Cervantes weighing on your mind? Take a break with John Grisham. In a year, who’s going to stick with you – Don Quixote, or…. The Firm? The Firm may have had plot, but the pace at which it moves must have been designed partly with concealing shoddy writing in mind. Meanwhile, Tolstoy might use a lot of words, but each one is warranted, even if the whole thing can be summed up with “He died. But he learned a lesson.” What does the plot of The Firm mean, in the long run, compared with a treatise on man’s final destination?

I do admit that the human condition is not exactly fascinating, particularly to high school students, and that three pages of Pride and Prejudice were three pages too many before I developed a migraine.

Style.

Popular fiction writers are a dime a dozen and if you pick a genre and its top-selling five writers or so, their writing styles begin to blur. Grisham is virtually indistinguishable from fellow lawyer-thriller writer David Baldacci. Paperback by female mystery writers everywhere all have dramatic titles, enticing cover art, and familiar plot-driven twists and turns. Characters tend to be one-dimensional, physically attractive, and hardworking yet carefree. The bad guy is usually the semi-helpful guy near the beginning (as we start to enter Dan Brown territory) and the good guy almost always wins, barring a sequel, tragic illness, or immediate successor. The story’s staying power is roughly equal to the author’s book deal or the amount of his advance. In contrast, how long have The Tale of Genji and The Canterbury Tales been printed?

Popular fiction runs together. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Beowulf, Anna Karenina, and The Picture of Dorian Gray stand apart. The penmanship required to carefully wrap a noun in a single, significant adjective (rather than a string of meaningless ones) or corral a paragraph-length sentence into sensibility (a la Hemingway) is just not a priority of publishing houses’ cash cows.

Characters.

Idle blog surfing revealed the opinion of one blogger, who has since vanished into the Internet, that popular fiction characters are either attractive or at least portrayed by attractive actors in their film options. The appearance of literary characters, however, is treated much differently – either the character is ugly or deformed in some way, or “interesting,” or some part of the body (such as feet, or décolletage) is the focus of another character. An attractive actor might play a literary character, such as Nicole Kidman – in which case she wears ample amounts of nose putty. Oftentimes these flaws indicate or are symbolic of some kind of personality quirk – self-consciousness, shame, an overdeveloped ego, or some kind of compulsion stemming from childhood incidents. Childhood and one’s formative years figure greatly into literary characters’ psyches. Literary characters HAVE psyches! They have reasons for doing the zany things they do, and not simply because the story needs a creepy guy to move it along. Humbert Humbert may like little girls, but not arbitrarily. Mustache-twirling evil geniuses, evil for evil’s sake, are a different story. This is not to excuse Humbert’s behavior, though Vladimir Nabokov does raise disturbing questions about prepubescent sexual behavior.

Escapism.

Popular fiction transports us away from our lives, while literary fiction has us examine them. A books like Bridget Jones’ Diary has the (almost invariably female) reader thinking, is this what my life is like? Am I Bridget? It’s uncanny! But it’s like reading a celebrity gossip rag. We are transported to Bridget’s life, encountering Bridget’s problems, and cheering when something goes her way. It distracts us from our problems, and though we may relate to them, other fiction is not meant to be taken seriously. Janet Evanovich’s stories are entertaining, but her female bounty hunter whose apartment has been firebombed at least once hardly figures into most people’s lives. War and Peace, however boring and lengthy, could have been the real thing. It mirrors life, forcing us to comprehend the real thing.