The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories Review

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(More customer reviews)and so inefficient. Truly I felt that underneath this persnickety and overwrought tome of literary archetypes and movements lies a slimmer, more cogent and helpful book screaming to be let out.
The problem is not really apparent with the book's first half, in which Booker analyzes his seven different kinds of plot themes and finds some wonderful coincidences between, say, our commercial culture and long-banished civilizations. (Dr. No and the Gilgamesh both feature solitary heroes going to the far side of the world to vanquish fearsome and bizarre monsters.)
As far as that goes, the book is useful and will painlessly teach genre studies and even a bit of comparative literature to the eager reader. The problem comes about halfway through the book when Booker, who appears eager to stamp out not only interpretations of books but discussion of books themselves that don't fit his seven-fold structure, condemns so much of modern literature as "romanticism." Well, writers as diverse as Victor Hugo, Ayn Rand and E.T.A. Hoffman have all proudly described themselves as "romantic," and even that unwieldy tent under which to house those disparate authors is more helpful than Booker's cant, who damns the "romantic" canon as distracting literature (and its readers, of course) from its real purpose; i.e., to fit his seven-fold canon.
Not only is the argument circular, it is absurd. It is like saying that candles provide the best and most consistent indoor illumination, because that damned "electricity" isn't really a form of illumination, because . . . well, just because it isn't. In this case what started out to be a purposeful and useful argument turns into a circular begging of the issues and, for a moral Aristotelian, a singularly unsympathetic ways to limn out a canon, based on one man's experience, or should I say OPINIONS?
There are many, many books that have to do with the construction of a novel and its many themes. I think offhand of E.M. Forster's ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL; of course there are tons others. Despite its initial promise, this book, I think, is best left alone unless the reader cares to spend 600-ish pages at first reinforcing, then undermining his/her knowledge of what makes a novel tick.


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