514 pages of trash

So 50 Shades of Grey and its sequels have been red-hot sellers inevitably bound for the big screen. Why, they must be well-written masterpieces then, worthy of the likes of Gone with the Wind, To a Kill a Mockingbird, and War and Peace, right?

Right?

Wrong.

After perusing the first few pages of 50 Shades, the words piffle, tripe, and garbage flitted through my disgusted mind. The plot is contrived; the characters are stereotypes, the plot development plate-thin and on a whole, the book struck me as an exercise in thinly disguised urban fiction, a genre where explicit content is the norm.  

Yet the Grey trilogy has sold, and sold, and sold! Do you mean to tell me there are hundreds of ordinary people out there who crave perverse fantasy? Come on, we have not sunk that low as a culture and society, have we? 

Have we?

Hopefully not.

As far as the literary merits of 50 Shades, are you kidding? It boasts none at all due to the reasons listed above, especially when compared to the masterful first-person narrative of Ernst Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Such a novel whose author knew how to use the written word to convey the passion of two lovers without needing to resort to the hack’s refuge of explicit scenes that leaves nothing to the imagination.  And yet while hundreds know of 50 Shades and its ilk, few probably have ever heard of Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, or both. Sad.  

50 Shades of Grey has been slammed repeatedly as, for example, here at The Allegiant and at The Atlantic, but still the novel remains widely read. Nevertheless, this novel is a hack job through and through which will not stand the test of time. In fact, perhaps a better title for it would be 514 Pages of Trash.

Article image courtesy Hennepin County Library.