What would you sacrifice to become a classic?

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I don’t remember now where or how I heard of Sheri S. Tepper or her novel Beauty, but when I managed to run down a copy, I was expecting Sleeping Beauty Finds her Way to a Modern Dystopia. Which sounded like it might be a fun addition to the ever-evolving list of dystopian novels I offer my students each semester.

Spoiler alert: it’s not making the list. Her time in the dystopia is not that many pages, although those pages have a blackhole-like gravity that changes the shape of the rest of the novel.

The novel is wonderfully varied. It starts in the 1300s with precocious young Beauty. She sneaks out of the curse but then bumps into documentarians from the future who take her back to their home, a place that reminded me most of THX-1138. Eventually they escape to 1990s Los Angeles (it ends up, the explosion of homeless populations in the ‘80s and ‘90s was largely do to dystopian escapees. But then she goes back to her home time and then to an entirely imaginary world and to Faery and eventually even to hell and all kinds of strange and marvelous places. We see her age well past age one hundred (being half faery herself, she can live quite a long time). These places are marvelous to visit and their inhabitants too are wonderful to meet and observe.

By any reasonably measure, this book should be considered an absolute modern classic up there with Princess Bride or Earthsea or The Last Unicorn. So why isn’t it? It won the Locus Award. It’s not like people didn’t discover it. So why is there only one copy (in a plain mass-market paperback, no less) in our 65-interconnected-library-systems system? Why has it vanished away?

I think I know the answer. And it comes down to Tepper making subtext text.

She has political opinions and she needs you to know about them. Some of them (like the evils of mass extinctions and overpopulation and men who write horror novels) are hit hard—and over and over. Some just get a couple deeply unsubtle sentences (abortion, for example), but regardless, she doesn’t want you to misunderstand her. And she’s a-gonna cram’m all in.

Look: I also don’t like mass extinctions. And while the risk of overpopulation doesn’t really seem like the problem it did in the 1970s (overconsumption on the other hand…), I get being worried about it. The problem is Beauty harps on these issues So Much (like a lazy dystopian novel) that it starts jumping in front of the novels many, many excellent qualities, waving its arms and shouting, Do you get it? Do you get the point? Do you see the point I’m making and understand why this point is important? Do you do you do you? And it’s upsetting because this novel is so dang good in so many ways.

In one sense, this is just a matter of aging poorly. And this I take as a lesson. I have a novel that’s a third written which is going to demand me diving into contemporary politics and their eventual results. And another that a publisher actually wants to see that is always trying to get me preaching my opinions about the current state of law enforcement. In both cases, the issues are plot-centric and vital to the overall story. As they were in Beauty. But I need to be careful or they may render my novel entirely and solely an artifact of the 2020s. And I don’t want that.

In another sense, maybe Tepper made the right decision. Maybe it’s better to assure no one can miss the important issues you want them to see. Perhaps that’s the responsible thing to do when you’re given a platform. Maybe I’m just being an aesthete and a snob rather than a proper human being and contributing member of society. Could be.

I dunno. But I think that’s why Beauty is not today in 9 out of 10 American libraries.

But I want to come back to another of her soapboxes, her tirade against men who write horror novels. It seems pretty clearly aimed at writers of the era like Stephen King and Clive Barker (not that I am equating those two). This novel explicitly says that novels like theirs lead to people committing evil acts. It explicitly states that their making of these works gives power to the devil. It says that creating evil art (which is what she says they are doing) is morally equivalent to actually performing such evil actions in reality. Because art as creation is just as real as acts performed within God’s creation.

Needing to discuss this aspect of Beauty is why I finally wrote the Neil Gaiman essay I’d been postponing. For two reasons.

First, few people have written more elegantly or voluminously than Neil Gaiman about how believing in things make them real, even if they are born of pure imagination.

Second, because, as I discussed in that essay, many people see bad things in art being evidence of the artist being a bad person—and vice versa.

Never mind the irony of Beauty having one of the most upsetting rape scenes I have ever read (or its horrifying descriptions of a hell made up of male artists’ evil imaginings), I just find it kinda bonkers that a writer of Tepper’s skill and depth can be so dismissive of other people’s work. I’m not saying art intended to be evil cannot exist, but to spend so much of your own novel preaching down to the sinners whose work you don’t like is wild to me. (Not that writers don’t do this all the time, but man, does she come down hard on horror writers. She might not like that Wikipedia says the same of her.)

The point of all this is, I think, writing advice to myself.

Character and story, plot and setting, these are the true providence of the novel. As the horrible person Stephen King wisely wrote in On Writing, of course books should have themes and whatnot. And yes, in rewrite, the text should be sculpted so such things resonate to maximum effect. But never should they be the most visible and pointed-at aspect.

Beauty is an incredible accomplishment. And I think its forgotten entirely because it forgot the reason people read novels. All the points and arguments in the book could have been left below the epidermis of storytelling and still come through just fine. But she couldn’t do that. She couldn’t risk us missing them.

And so future generations will.

If you’ve read the novel, I’d love to hear your take on it.

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