Good Old Fashioned Entertainment
Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey
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This month, we read Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey, and we LOVED IT. I truly can’t recommend this book enough, unless you are Mormon, in which case you will likely find it highly offensive. As discussed on le pod, general sentiment towards Mormonism in the nineteenth-century United States was…not positive. And Zane Grey was no exception. But that aside! It’s an epic, romantic adventure that is not to be missed.
Riders is the tale of a Mormon woman named Jane Withersteen set in the fictional frontier town of Cottonwoods, Utah. Her father was a powerful figure both in the context of the larger town and in the church, and he left all of his lands (bounteous) and all of his cattle (plentiful) to her, his unmarried daughter. This makes Jane a kind of aberration in the community. In an effort to gain control of her, her land, her general wealth, and perhaps most importantly, her water, which supplies the whole town, the church ‘suggests’ that she marry Elder Tull, proud husband to two wives already.
Jane, set on marrying for love, refuses, and a war begins. On one side, we have the Mormons, plus the local group of rustlers—outlaws and troublemakers—led my a nefarious character named Oldring. The rustlers do the Mormon’s dirty work. On the other side, we have Jane Withersteen, the gentiles she has been kind to over, including Bern Venters, and Lassiter, the known mormon-hater who roams Utah and the borderlands seeking vengeance for…well no one is quite sure what for.
Lassiter comes on the scene just as Venters is pushed out of town, and dual story lines develop. Lassiter stays with Jane doing his best to protect her from the “unseen hand” of the church operating in the dark shadows. Venters figures he will try to track the rustlers—and the herd they recently stole from Jane—into the canyons. When he has a run in with a couple of rustlers, including Oldring’s vicious, Masked Rider, he shoots them both, only to discover that the Masked Rider is a young woman who doesn’t look very viscous at all. He nurses her back to health and they squirrel away together in the idyllic Surprise Valley.
As the Mormons squeeze Jane more and more, a battle of will versus piety rages within her. Will Lassiter be able to make her see that she owes no deference to the men who are trying to destroy her? And will Venters be able to protect his masked rider? Will he be able to protect himself from the truth of who she might really be? Or will their paradise crumble? Read to find out!!!! It really is one of the most exciting books I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading.
In addition to the excitement, Kathryn and I were both consistently impressed by Grey’s command of the language. I found his description of the natural surroundings quite striking in particular. Grey’s style has…style, and his writing feels edifying. Yes—the book feels like a movie, but it also includes real struggle. Real love. Real material to think about, written in language that, while. not difficult to read, does require that you’re paying attention.
No one is making a case for Riders as a great literary classic, and I don’t necessarily think that they should, but still! After reading, I was left with a broader question. Simply put, has the quality of writing, or perhaps more broadly even, the quality of our language in general, gotten worse?
You see, Riders of the Purple Sage is commercial fiction. From 1903 to his death in 1939, Grey published at least one book every year, sometimes publishing four or five. He was one of the most commercially successful writers of his time, beating out even Edith Wharton’s (Pulitzer Prize Winning!!!) Age of Innocence for the best-selling novel of 1921. He wrote primarily Westerns, which at the time was just a burgeoning genre, but a genre all the same.
The Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction in 2024 was a novel called Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips, which I happen to know because there was a copy sitting in my local Housing Works a few months back, but I just as easily could have never heard of it in my life. Meanwhile, it would be difficult to exist today, at least as someone who keeps a semblance of a pulse on popular culture, without knowing who Colleen Hoover is—and she’s just one example. How about James Patterson, Nora Roberts, Stephen King, Danielle Steele. Whether it’s thriller, romance or horror, genre is the stuff that sells.
Back in the 1920s, Zane Grey was not taken seriously by critics. His novels were viewed as lowbrow, his plots too fanciful and predictable, his style imperfect. I’m sure you could take any critique leveled at Grey during his time and find a corresponding one for each of the contemporary authors I listed above. But people read and love the stuff!
There’s nothing inherently wrong with loving the stuff. We all deserve to be entertained, and more and more writers are blurring the lines between pure genre work and literary work. Though you can imagine, dear reader, that I do want to convince the general populace that reading more challenging material—material that sets out to answer unanswerable questions or put to words the bafflement and beauty of life—is worthwhile, I also enjoy a bodice ripper as much as the next girl.
But then I read a novel like Riders of the Purple Sage, or to expand the thought, I read Georgette Heyer, or Agatha Christie, or going even further back than that! Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s banger of a sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret, and I am faced with the cold hard truth: half of the commercial novels on shelves today are written in basic, uninspiring, dumbed down prose. I’m being generous by even saying half. If Riders was the most popular novel in 1912, then the average reader of commercial fiction in 1912 was capable of processing written language that was more intricate and complex than the average commercial fiction reader is today.
A recent study by the OECD found that roughly 20% of adults (ages 16-65, across 31 different countries) perform worse on literacy tests than would be expected of a twelve year old. The Economist summarizes it well when they say that “the picture is one of worsening skills.” Of course the OECD, and The Economist are concerned with whether or not the general population can be useful in society—economically speaking, but this data has implications outside of whether someone can hold a job.
Worse still, the prognosis for the children isn’t looking good either. Roughly one third of eight graders in the United States have “below basic” reading skills. This means that one third of eight grade students “cannot determine the main idea of a text or identify differing sides of an argument.” Interestingly, but somewhat unsurprisingly, the declining performance of children correlates with a matching decline in adult performance over the same period. What could be causing this?
I don’t have the answers, other than that it’s obviously the phones. It’s all very dismal, and I fear it spells real disaster coming down the pipe. In the United States, how can we feel good about one third of the population growing up unable to identify differing sides of an argument? That’s like the literal point of the way our government is set up.
But in kind of good and totally unfounded news, I have a sneaking suspicion that at least part of the problem we face is not entirely a question of capability as outlined above, but also a question of exposure and a question willingness.
To increase desire and buy-in—that is the goal. Reading must be a viable alternative to laying in bed watching 150 twenty second videos in a row. And for people who aren't already into literature (not you guys probably, since you’re here reading this, but the overwhelming majority of the population) that means reading needs to be entertaining. That being said, the quality of the writing shouldn’t be sacrificed, and doesn’t need to! Even for you, my reading readers—next time you’re in the mood for something light, something designed to entertain, go for the old school.
Eve
I am glad to see that you are reading outside the New York Centric Literary Industrial Complex (NYCLIC) bubble. I love reading Joseph Wambaugh, John Burdett, Harry Crews, and many others who not considered “important” or social redeeming today. Sometimes you just want to be entertained. Your question, “Simply put, has the quality of writing, or perhaps more broadly even, the quality of our language in general, gotten worse?” is an important one. The writing published by the NYCLIC, of which I am a member, has definitely gotten worse. The obvious problem is that publishers are terrified to publish anything that might offend anyone. However, an equally large problem is that editors aren’t what they used to be. While I listen to my “official” editors, I hire Peter Dimmock, a great editor, and pay him out of my own pocket. In addition to editing 5 of my books, Peter edited Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark and Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom. In addition to working as senior editor at Random House and Columbia University Press, he wrote (A Short Rhetoric For Leaving the Family and George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time). Writers are going to write, even if they don’t live in Brooklyn, or NYC. If you ever want a serious evaluation of your writing, hire Peter. He will know and tell what you are really trying to say—it’s spooky—and that is what makes a great editor great.
Eve, I loved this review because people completely ignore writers like Zane Grey these days. Though beautiful, the language he used has become strange to people born after the turn of this century. Also, the assumption that moral values are universal has become old-fashioned. This saddens me. Seeing a young, intellectually curious person like yourself delve into these older, unfashionable books tugs at my heartstrings. There is HOPE for younger generations, at least here and there.