{"id":223713,"date":"2025-06-29T10:06:17","date_gmt":"2025-06-29T10:06:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/223713\/"},"modified":"2025-06-29T10:06:17","modified_gmt":"2025-06-29T10:06:17","slug":"this-2025-novel-is-perfect-for-you-according-to-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/223713\/","title":{"rendered":"This 2025 novel is perfect for you, according to science."},"content":{"rendered":"

In the 1990s, the Russian-born conceptual artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid hired professional polling firms to survey 1,001 people about what they liked most and least in a painting. The artworks they created using this information, the public\u2019s \u201cmost wanted\u201d and \u201cleast wanted\u201d images, were published in Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid\u2019s Scientific Guide to Art<\/a>. (The \u201cmost wanted\u201d painting was a landscape with water, wild animals, and George Washington; the \u201cleast wanted\u201d was an angular abstract in fuchsia and yellow.) This enterprise proved so amusing that the pair, in collaboration with composer Dave Soldier, repeated the experiment with popular music, releasing the \u201cmost wanted\u201d and \u201cleast wanted\u201d songs together on a CD with a cover photo of all three men wearing white lab coats<\/a> and pointing at a calculator. Sadly, the pair stopped short of what I view as the greatest challenge: producing novels that reflect what Americans like and dislike in fiction. Now, at last, with People\u2019s Choice Literature<\/a>, by the writer\/artist\/composer Tom Comitta, a new \u201cscientist\u201d has taken up the task.<\/p>\n

People\u2019s Choice Literature offers its readers two novels for the price of one. The first is a thriller whose heroine tries to prevent her boss, a new age\u2013y tech mogul, from launching a quantum computing network that will bring about a total surveillance state. That\u2019s the most wanted one. The least wanted novel is much harder to summarize, encompassing such ostensibly despised elements as stream of consciousness, explicit sex scenes, an extraterrestrial setting, metafictional commentary on novel-writing itself, talking animals, second-person narration, and tennis. Because this least wanted novel is such an extravagant farrago of weird elements, it may sound more entertaining than its counterpart. However, Comitta (who uses they\/them pronouns) is sufficiently dedicated to their project that it is not. They have diligently included, for example, some long, dull epistolary passages about a polar expedition\u2014a style and setting that 1,045 survey respondents found particularly unappealing. Full disclosure: While Most Unwanted often made me laugh, it also put me to sleep five times.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \n <\/p>\n

    The Video Game Industry as We Knew It Is Over. Something Unsavory Is Taking Its Place.
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n

  2. \n <\/p>\n

    We Have Our First Great Summer Movie Disappointment of 2025
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n

  3. \n <\/p>\n

    Brad Pitt Faced Serious Allegations. Now He\u2019s Back With His Biggest Movie in Years.
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n

  4. \n <\/p>\n

    Netflix\u2019s Ingenious New Hit Movie Is an Unlikely Mashup of Two Very Different Genres
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    <\/p>\n

    \"The<\/p>\n

    <\/a><\/p>\n

    \n By Tom Comitta. Columbia University Press.\n <\/p>\n

    \n Slate receives a commission when you purchase items using the links on this page.
    \n Thank you for your support.\n <\/p>\n

    Most Wanted is a surprisingly competent genre novel, although the question of why this surprised me prompted some reflection. The belief that, say, the thrillers of James Patterson are so rudimentary and formulaic that anyone could write one is widespread but erroneous. True, Patterson\u2019s novels are extremely basic. Nevertheless, if anyone could write them, many more people would have success in doing so, and the bestseller lists would feature more authors not named James Patterson. It\u2019s harder than it looks.<\/p>\n

    The most refreshing aspect of People\u2019s Choice Literature is Comitta\u2019s genuine curiosity about how such books are crafted. In writing Most Wanted, they didn\u2019t just take into account what readers said they wanted. They also read more than 20 thrillers; studied 2016\u2019s The Bestseller Code, a book that purports to use data analysis to \u201creveal a secret DNA of bestsellers\u201d; and watched online courses taught by David Baldacci, Dan Brown, Walter Mosley, and, of course, James Patterson. While Comitta found thrillers to be \u201clargely a masculinist, right-wing art form\u201d\u2014one presumably not to the tastes of an experimental writer who eschews masculine pronouns\u2014they nonetheless paid a degree of attention to the genre that even many of its fans can\u2019t be bothered to devote to it, often to great comic effect.<\/p>\n

    \"A<\/p>\n

    Tom Comitta.
    \nBeowulf Sheehan<\/p>\n

    In the book\u2019s introduction, in which Comitta explains the method and parameters of their project, they note that \u201cnearly all American thrillers feature a love interest who is a current or former FBI agent,\u201d and also that the hero is frequently named Jason, so the novel\u2019s heroine, Alix, teams up with the hunky Special Agent Jason Stone. Comitta also observed that thrillers always mention both the make and model of every vehicle featured in the narrative, a detail that becomes increasingly hilarious as the novel\u2019s characters are menaced by a series of homicidal Ford Fusions under the direction of the villain\u2019s quantum computer. Comitta mimicked Dan Brown\u2019s custom of dropping in potted travel-guide descriptions of historical or cultural sites where the action takes place, a practice Comitta themself finds \u201crepetitive and a real slog\u201d to read, though they can hardly argue with Brown\u2019s success. Danielle Steel\u2019s habit of repeating chunks of exposition \u201calmost verbatim from one page to the next\u201d struck Comitta as \u201cnot just emblematic of but virtuosic in the world of thriller writing,\u201d leading them to declare Steel \u201cGertrude Stein with a Lifetime subscription.\u201d<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/p>\n

    \n Jenny G. Zhang
    \n Thanks, Wealthy Magazine Editors, for Telling Us How Good You Once Had It
    \n Read More<\/b>\n <\/p>\n

    <\/a><\/p>\n

    Comitta also used OpenAI\u2019s Playground, the most advanced large language model before the release of ChatGPT. The fact that Playground offered up \u201cflat\u201d prose that Comitta would then heavily edit struck them as being particularly appropriate for this experiment, given that, like LLMs, commercial fiction tends to draw from much-frequented wells. This, Comitta writes, \u201coffered a polyvocality to the writing that seemed to resonate with the many perspectives represented in the poll results.\u201d Few people read thrillers for the prose, of course, but along with the genre\u2019s Ford Fusions and Jasonmania, Comitta also picked up a good feel for the plotting and pacing required of the form. It\u2019s impossible to care about the banal characters in Most Wanted, but that\u2019s true of plenty of thrillers, and this one is certainly easy to read.<\/p>\n

    The same cannot be said of Most Unwanted, a novel that ricochets all over the place, from a colony on Mars founded by tennis-playing refugees fleeing an Earth taken over by anthropomorphized cats, to a pastiche of Robinson Crusoe, to three pages in which the words and drift and float repeat over and over again, to a long digression in which Robin Hood and Maid Marian live in a throuple with a forest sprite. Most of the characters\u2014including \u201cyou,\u201d the main character, since the novel is told in the second person, a choice that is very unpopular unless you are Jay McInerney\u2014are elderly aristocrats with names like Lord Brad and Lady Kimberly. Also, it is Christmas, and everyone talks about this incessantly.<\/p>\n

    Comitta interrupts Most Unwanted now and then (unpopularly, metafictionally) to explain why you\u2019re reading such nonsense: \u201cWest Virginia? Cat pirates? It\u2019s true, people don\u2019t want these things in their literature.\u201d Although that is not strictly true. Faced with a dearth of productive prompts when it came to unfavored fiction, Comitta decided to pick up some ideas from the answers to an open-ended question in the People\u2019s Choice Literature poll. Respondents were asked, \u201cIf you had unlimited resources and could commission your favorite author to write a novel just for you, what would it be about?\u201d The answers ranged from \u201cJay-Z writes my biography\u201d to \u201cIt would likely be about Elves that are forced into hiding among humans.\u201d (One of these responses was the source for the idea of the cat takeover, for example.) These requests are so eccentric they seem to put the lie to the bland mid-ness of Most Wanted, but really we are a nation of readers with tastes so diverse that the only things we can (mostly) agree on is that we like a fast-paced mystery with a love story, working-class protagonists, and\u2014for a villain\u2014a tech billionaire who\u2019s a bad father.<\/p>\n

    But if we like love stories so much, then how did romance end up as the least wanted fictional genre, according to the polled readers? How have classics remained classic\u2014by definition books that people have loved for centuries\u2014if \u201cclassic literature\u201d clocks in at the third-least-popular genre, after romance and horror? And how do these responses jibe with the fact that novels by Emily Henry and Stephen King regularly top the bestseller lists? This aversion to \u201cclassics\u201d offers a clue. For most readers, classics are the books assigned to us in school and read grudgingly and often uncomprehendingly. We most actively dislike books that have been foisted upon us, like a diner whose indifference to country music turns to hatred only when he can\u2019t eat at the local barbecue restaurant without being forced to listen to it at top volume. More often than not, our dislike of certain books is a reflection of how much someone else loves them and tries to push them on us: the teacher who makes you write a paper on Hemingway, the fellow book club member who just adores Colleen Hoover, the latest romantasy trilogy that keeps cropping up in your TikTok feed.<\/p>\n

    It makes sense, then, that some parts of Most Unwanted were exactly what I wanted to read (I enjoyed an Inception-style chase scene through a series of virtual realities), while others, like the lengthy sex scenes, had me skipping pages. One of the respondents to that open-ended question on the poll about what sort of novel the reader would want custom-built just for them requested \u201can experiment poetry-prose hybrid work with an audiovisual component.\u201d That sounds like one of the upper levels of hell to me\u2014not quite a lake of fire, but getting there. But for someone else, it\u2019s heaven. What the people want, more than mystery or romance or science fiction, is the freedom to read the books that speak to their own idiosyncratic imaginations. Whatever books the people choose, what really matters is that they have a choice.<\/p>\n

    Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the 1990s, the Russian-born conceptual artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid hired professional polling firms to survey…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":223714,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[3444,77,70,28939,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-223713","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-slate-book-review","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114766098372250024","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223713\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/223714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}