When I was fifteen, my father cornered me. "Sweetheart, three of the filthiest books I've ever read were brought into the house by you. I'm wondering, was it an accident? Or does your mind run that way?"
"A little of both," I said. The books were Peyton Place, God's Little Acre, and Not as a Stranger. I got them all from the library.
"Oh," he said. "I was just wondering."
What a lucky child I was, to have parents who did not censor my reading.
Censorship in some form or another is popping up all over. Book banning used to from the right. Now it's just as likely to come from the liberal community. I've heard several authors complain about their publisher subjecting a manuscript to evaluation by a "sensitivity expert." Or even more daunting, focus groups who record any lines they find offensive.
Yikes!
If it's not words that set people off, it's the content. Moving up the scale even more is whether the author had the "right" to tell the story. Is the author the right color? the right gender? the right race? from the right culture? the right nationality? Worse, was the story inspired by the author's very own personal experience?
None of the great historical novels would pass muster. Of course, authors such as Pearl Buck would be out. She wasn't Chinese, after all. As to Madame Bovary, Flaubert was obviously the wrong gender. What could he know? And Tolstoy. How dare he write a novel with multiple female voices. Bet he wasn't even in that war.
A friend of mine who was in a writing group for a short time (a very short time) said an English teacher had criticized her offering saying there's a child in your story and I don't believe you could know how a child feels. So. All of our novels should only be about ourselves. The exact age we are now.
There are practical considerations. We all subscribe to a sort of self-censorship. Thomas Kies pointed that chapters are much shorter now, and books are too. He also stated that Michener would not be published because of the length of his novels. Ironically, I'm rereading The Source, which is in my all-time favorite book collection. I'm curious as what moved both of us to dig out these old classics.
As to books on my all-time great list. Not as a Stranger is one of the very best medical novels ever written. It's egregiously overwritten and a real door stopper. I adore it.
