Pick up a novel and suddenly you’re at the whim of the author’s imagination. Plot, characters, setting — you have no say in these matters. This is part of the appeal of fiction.
Now, perhaps for the first time since Choose Your Own Adventure, Tom Comitta tweaks the equation in “People’s Choice Literature,” coming out from Columbia University Press on June 3. The hefty 584-page volume contains two distinct works: “The Most Wanted Novel” and “The Most Unwanted Novel,” each incorporating results of an opinion poll on the literary preferences of 1,045 readers from across the United States.
Think eggs to order but fiction, served on the same plate as the most unappetizing breakfast imaginable.
“The Most Wanted Novel” is a thriller about a woman fighting a murderous tech leader. “The Most Unwanted Novel” is an experimental epistolary romance set on Mars.
“The point is to create levity and humor and lightness,” Comitta said. “The books take literature seriously, but also recognize that all human endeavor is absurd.”
Comitta, who uses they/them pronouns, has long explored the boundary between prose and performance art. In graduate school, they published a journal of intentionally terrible writing. (Its title rhymes with “literature” and the first syllable is an unprintable synonym for excrement.)
Their most recent work, “The Nature Book” (2023), is a supercut of descriptions of the natural world from classic novels; “Patchwork,” coming out from Coffee House Press in August, takes a similar approach using tropes and clichés.
“I’m constantly pushing up against received ideas of what is good writing and either doing the opposite or figuring out my own way,” Comitta said. “I’ve never had writer’s block because of that. It loosens you up a bit, removes the pretension.”
Inspiration for “People’s Choice Literature” stems from a pair of survey-based projects involving other art forms. In the 1990s, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid created two paintings based on the preferences of strangers — one in the style of Thomas Kinkade (wanted), the other a kind of Kandinsky gone wrong (unwanted).
Later, David Soldier took the same approach with music, composing a blend of R&B, rock and smooth jazz (wanted) alongside a companion piece featuring banjos, piccolos, bagpipes, Walmart jingles and an opera singer rapping to cowboy music (you guessed it: unwanted).
Comitta heard both works performed live and noticed how audience members loosened up during the second. “The mood completely shifted. People laughed more,” Comitta said. “In that moment, I felt the true power of the most unwanted.”
They embarked on their project after the 2020 presidential election, when trust in opinion polling was at a low point. Komar and Melamid’s poll had been conducted around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union; now, Comitta said, “it was a different inflection point in democracy’s history.” There was suspicion of “big data,” and dismay over algorithm-inflated bubbles that allowed people to isolate. The time had come, he believed, to put statistics to work in a fresh way, as a point of connection rather then division. Fiction was a logical place to start.
But first Comitta needed to determine whether polling tactics used in earlier projects would still be scientifically accurate today. They spoke with sociologists and data scientists and the consensus was that, yes, polling was still the best way to determine taste — even more so for products (like novels) than for presidential races.
Then Comitta raised $10,000, “a herculean effort.” They turned to Katherine Cornwall, at the time a Ph.D. student at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education, for help with polling logistics. Together they spent a year refining a survey, beginning with past people’s choice polls and adding questions tailored to fiction.
“I found it fascinating,” Cornwall said. “It was a nice break from the academic slog.”
Questions ranged from reading habits (how many novels do you read in a year?) to writing mechanics (do you prefer a first, second or third person perspective?) to story types (do you prefer a sequence of flashbacks? a straightforward approach? a stream of consciousness?).
The poll went live on Dec. 1, 2021. Over the next two days, respondents from 45 states weighed in on preferred character traits, ideal settings and favorite types of novels, with thrillers leading the charge and classic literature bring up the rear. They revealed how much sexual content they liked to read (not much), how much time they wanted a novel to cover (it depends) and whether or not they enjoyed short or long descriptive passages (the latter).
There were some contradictions. “The most wanted activity for characters to experience in a novel was ‘falling in or out of love,’” Comitta writes in the introduction, “but the most unwanted genre was romance.”
Answers to an open-ended question — “If you had unlimited resources and could commission your favorite author to write a novel just for you, what would it be about?” — were even more idiosyncratic.
“Jay-Z writes my biography,” one reader wrote. Another wanted a “prose-poetry hybrid work with an audiovisual component.” Still another craved a story involving cats and “how they take over the world.”
Comitta started writing as soon as the results were tallied, fearing that the data would grow stale. They formulated two “recipes,” including all the ingredients that needed to appear in each novel; watched MasterClass tutorials by Dan Brown, James Patterson and David Baldacci to learn how to write a thriller; and pored over Danielle Steel’s “Dangerous Games” for pointers on the repetition of basic detail, a technique that was (surprisingly) a must for “The Most Wanted Novel.”
Six months later, Comitta had drafts of two novels. “I didn’t have a full-time job; I was a freelancer. I didn’t get out much,” they said. (Now Comitta designs illustrated books for kids.)
The book was rejected by 50 publishers. One was interested in “The Most Wanted Novel” but balked at the package deal.
“I wrote to art galleries: Can we call this an art project and publish this as an art book?” Comitta said. “Nothing was working. Nobody would do it.”
Comitta considered self publishing. They struggled with depression. They leaned on their partner, Medaya Ocher, the editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
They never gave up on the project, though: “I thought this was a marketing team’s dream — the most wanted novel in America!” (Comitta claimed not to have a preference for one book, but it was clear that they had a certain fondness for the underdog.)
At a book party for Dan Sinykin’s “Big Fiction,” which explores the reshaping of the publishing industry by corporate conglomerates, Comitta met Philip Leventhal, an editor at Columbia University Press. He later bought the book.
Leventhal isn’t quite sure how readers will approach “People’s Choice Literature.” “My hope is that people will come to the book and read it in the way they find most interesting,” Leventhal said, “and that it will help generate conversations about literary taste and conventional publishing.”
Comitta suspects that most readers will gravitate toward the novel they feel most comfortable with. But they’re hopeful that thriller fans will dip a toe into experimental waters and vice versa. And maybe that’s the point of the exercise.
“We’d benefit from breaking out of our bubbles,” Comitta said, “and I think the book gives you an opportunity to explore a genre and a style and a story that you might not usually get.”
Elisabeth Egan is a writer and editor at the Times Book Review. She has worked in the world of publishing for 30 years.
The post Novels Inspired by Opinion Polls? They’re Here, and They’re Weird appeared first on New York Times.
