Is John Parker really a bad author?

Here are Parker's actual prs:

800 meters – 1:50 (relay split); Mile – 4:05.2; 2-Mile – 8:48; 3,000 meter steeplechase – 8:51.54; 3-mile – 13:45; 6-mile cross-country – 29:00; half marathon – 1:07:15 and marathon – 2:33

thejeff wrote:

Your prof, like most of his ilk, gets his rocks off by telling himself he is a contrarian. It is SO 2001.

Parker is horrible

Bettingfool wrote:

Once a Runner was the first book that I just couldn't put down. I hated reading as a kid and never was one to sit and read for pleasure. I read that book in a weekend my sophomore year and it really changed my perspective on reading for pleasure. I've read it probably 15 times over the years. Not sure about his author ability but I don't care. That book was the shiznit.

I feel sorry for you.

OAR is one of my favorite books.

HRE wrote:

assume wrote:

This ^^^. Plus they know damn well that pop fiction is not literature.

I majored in English and one thing I noticed immediately was that if a book was popular it was almost always considered trash by the English profs. When the Harry Potter books were hot the Chronicle of Higher Education occasionally published articles from academic types critiquing the series and again, none had anything good to say.

It seems that one of the criteria academicians use to decide if a book is "good" or not is ponderousness. If you don't feel like reading the book is hard work it's probably "trash." Parker tells good stories about a subject that appeals to a very specific population. He's not going to get a Nobel Prize for literature but if he weren't good at what he writes he wouldn't have so many of us enjoy his books.

I once asked a pompous english prof why John Irving didn't receive more love because I thought "Garp" was a tremendous novel and in some ways an answer to Catcher in the Rye. His answer was that it "wasn't part of the canon." He couldn't explain why the canon is the canon though. I count it as one of the great American novels.

Parker is a decent writer with a narrow audience. His prose is interesting and he uses vivid imagery. I'd say that he has an authentic quality that is endearing. OAR is a good novel, but we all know it is not part of the canon.

I too read the Chronicle.... Harry Potter is a great series about friendship and morality for children. It shouldn't be taken that seriously in the vein of "Once and Future King." The one thing that always stood out to me when my kids read this series was that they were always asking questions about what different terms meant and it provided lots of opportunities to talk about important stuff. That, to me, is that mark of a great children's series. It is insufficiently morally grey and conflicted for US lit profs.

Fjfhhy wrote:

Bettingfool wrote:

Once a Runner was the first book that I just couldn't put down. I hated reading as a kid and never was one to sit and read for pleasure. I read that book in a weekend my sophomore year and it really changed my perspective on reading for pleasure. I've read it probably 15 times over the years. Not sure about his author ability but I don't care. That book was the shiznit.

I feel sorry for you.

What's your PR? SAT score? Yearly income. Political party?

Didn't major in literature but did spend 4 years at a liberal arts school (followed by grad degrees in science). Read a lot of fiction as a kid and as a young adult, then came the internet and letsrun and I read this place for a daily joke.

OAR was a fun story, but hardly top literature. The Purple Runner by Paul Christman and Life at These Speeds by Jerome Jackson were better in that department. Nevertheless, OAR was enjoyable because Parker does get at what makes a runner tick. Plus many of this characters had charm.

TrackB0t wrote:

4Rs wrote:

14:30 is generous. Parker, and OAR, do not break 15:00. But that wins most hobby jogger events, which is where he belongs. OAR is the great American hobby jogger novel.

Nah he might even be sub 14:00.

14:30 sounds about right to me. An English lit professor should be able to tell it is a good but not great book, and a good English lit professor should study more than just the very top.

And to call it the hobby jogger novel is wrong, hobby joggers HATE OAR. The books all depend on you having a base knowledge of competitive team track & field, and they do a great job of tapping into that. They don't tap into some universal understanding, and are therefore niche.

Hobby jogger is more like 50 Shade of Gray. I made it 20 pages into the book before the grammatical mistakes and cheap imagery became too much, yet she is a better writer than the girl who never goes to the starting line.

The Michael Connor guy that wrote the response to the "Centro goes home devastated" thread is a 3:54.x guy that Letsrun keeps begging to move up to the 5000.

I think this is a good assessment of the quality of OAR. Godwin earlier in the thread said something similar.

Of course us running-obsessed types give it more credit than it deserves from a quality POV because the subject matter is so relevant to us and Parker know of what he speaks.

I think "The Great Running Novel" has yet to be written. The acclaimed Japanese author Murakami wrote about the role running plays in his life and his creative process, but the book "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" isn't a hardcore, meaty novel about the competive side as OAR is.

Ranked on quality of writing alone I'd rank Parker's novels below other running novels such as Glamville's The Olympian and Pain (whoever said the writing in The Purple Runner is better is on crack. it's atrocious) but writing quality isn't why one should read any of these books. While the character development and style of narration are far superior in the Olympian, for example, it's not a particularly enjoyable read and it's really a tragedy about the rise and fall of a sporting hero--his being a runner is not central to the story. Once a Runner by contrast is a simply told story about a good collegiate runner making the jump to world class with great emphasis placed on daily life for such a runner. OAR doesn't have any ambitions beyond that I've yet to find a fictional account that better tells the story of the life of a runner and does so in a way that makes you want to wake up early to train.

English lit senior wrote: My prof who happens to be a decent marathoner thinks Parker's Once a Runner and Again to Carthage are trash. Who's right?

Those who can't do, teach.

The running descriptions are excellent. The difference between being a true miler and suffering through cross, the mile itself, even his brief reference to the pole vault; all phenomenal. The overall story-line and all the nonsense about the protagonist getting tossed from school so-so. A great read for anyone who has suffered on the CC course and the oval. Your Prof would be proud to produce something that is still relevant 38 years later. My guess is he didn't.

I find that when I read books based on life interests like running, music, business and faith, I end up embarrassed by the quality. I love running and I had a successful college and post-collegiate career, but I do not like Once a Runner. I have read it twice, and parts of it make me cringe.

But literature is subjective, and I have no problem with someone who loves the book. I understand that. I absolutely love Friday Night Lights (the book), but I am sure that plenty of football players think it is trash and find it embarrassing in its hyperbole.

Running is a scared thing to a lot of us, and when someone tries to put it down on the page it can minimize the true emotions experienced by the runner. Parker did a good job and was successful by most standards, so good for him. I can appreciate the love of the workout and the porn-esque nature of the cabin in the woods training plot line, but it is very Rocky IV to me.

I need to re-phrase this. I do not LOVE Once a Runner. I like it just fine.

If you delete/truncate a bunch of chapters in OaR and AtC they're better. If you ignore the timeline they are ok. If you ignore a lot of the stilted dialog they start to get good. If you only pay attention to the parts about running they are remarkable. Overall I recommend them (I haven't read RtR) with those four caveats.

I'll weigh in as a college English professor who has taught Parker's novel in a course entitled "The Literature and Culture of Running."

I'd respond to your professor by invoking the spirit of the literary critic Leslie Fiedler. Parker's novel has some clunky writing in it, some feverish satire. It also has enough echoes of the sort of writers your professor (and I) might teach in our American literature surveys, especially Hemingway and Faulkner (Quenton = Quentin Compson, sort of), that it's easy to recognize Parker's own large ambitions, and to smirk and condescend to the fact that he doesn't quite have the chops to create Literature.

Except: Parker is writing from his own deep and deeply-felt experience AS a runner, and the feeling he brings to the journey that Quenton undergoes is palpable. Hard to believe this, but--and yes, I'll admit it--I'm actually tearing up thinking about the slow-building drama of that long winter and spring out in the woods. Fiedler would say that the novel succeeds DESPITE its stylistic infelicities and sometimes sophomoric humor (i.e., the mock trial sequence). Anybody who can't feel the power of the night Bruce disciples Quenton into the longest, hardest, life-beyond-death workout of his life just doesn't have a life, and needs to get one.

The novel succeeds because it calls on mythic energies, deep old life forces and death forces. It knows what they're about, and it knows how to structure the protagonist's engagement with them in an extremely satisfying way. Any serious runner who has ever been beaten up by the world and retreated to the discipline of running in an effort to transform himself (or herself), putting in long hours in the woodshed (so to speak) with an eye on emerging triumphant somewhere down the line, can sense that power. And it's why we love the novel. It is, in fact, a powerful work of literature. It's not a flawless work of art, but I'm just fine with that. I think it brilliantly achieves its primary purpose, which is to take us inside the body and soul of one talented young runner as he wrestles with his demons, and ours.

I don't know if Parker had made a study of Joseph Campbell's THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES, but the novel tracks the hero's journey, as articulated by Cambell, amazingly well.

In the service of convincing your professor that he might want to give the novel a second look, here are some teaching notes from a few years back, cut and pasted. I'll start with the notes, then with a bunch of quotes from HERO that can, with a little thought, be applied to the novel. These are rough lecture notes, but they should convince anybody that this is a novel worth assigning and discussing:

KEY THEMES for discussion in Once a Runner

1) TIME: the various ways in which time is represented as an element of runner’s lives

--Quenton Cassidy is named after Quentin Compson, one of Faulkner’s major protagonists:

--“the numbers”: personal records (PR’s) as a badge of personal identity. These also place the runner in a relationship with historical time—the many runners from the past who have run fast times at the same distance

--the three seasons of the competitive runner: cross-country, winter track, outdoor track. These seasons structure the novel’s plot—it starts in the fall and ends in the spring—and they help structure Quenton’s quest

--race-time: the drama, the experiential challenge, of pushing yourself to the limit within the unforgiving frame of a clock-focused athletic event

--training time: the long foreground to the exceptional performance—PR, race-time—is a different kind of time-cycle. The “trial of miles” is also a trial of an endless sequence of training days, of seasons

--historical time: we’re connected to this in various ways, and this sort of time interacts with the other sorts of time

 

2) RUNNING AS A CULT/COUNTERCULTURE IN CONFLICT WITH “OFFICIAL” CULTURE

--What is official culture and who are its representatives? [“conservative” but cynical and hypocritical; racist; football-focused; running-ignorant; anti-student sex (but pro adultery: DD sleeps with his secretary)

--Dick Doobey

--SU President, Steven Prigman

--Ben Cornwall, coach of track team

--“riding”: the honor system at the University

--the amateur system represented by the AAU (Denton talks about this)

--America as Vietnam Warmaking machine

--How do Quenton and the others contest the System?

--general mockery

--Quentin’s poster against war, premarital sex, pot smoking, and other tokens of general American countercultural identity (177)

--renaming themselves with foreign names; creating an alternate reality:

--setting up their own alternative “honor court” to prosecute Jack Nubbins

--Spider getting high and staging an evening “jump”: transforming a form of play that has been slowly transformed into work (administered, professionalized) back into play

--the petition that ends up getting QC booted off team

--rejecting mainstream images of masculinity and the good life (i.e., suburbanized, flavorless, unheroic life) in favor of a deeper, larger, more heroic conception of life; transforming themselves from bored accomplices of over-administered, prosaic reality into figures from myth

 

3) an outgrowth of #2: RUNNING AS A PHILOSOPHICAL ORIENTATION, A FORM OF SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

--key definitional act: differentiating the members of the cult from other, lesser beings, especially every form of recreational runner, but also other kinds of athletes

--“the Secret” vs. the “trial of miles” and “breaking down”: a sustained spiritual exercise

--pain management: “then he obtained his mental abstracts” (25); “a white haze, a normal phenomenon” (26);

--the production of a “true runner

--non-normative orientation toward women is a part of the spiritual discipline:

--all the cult phrases and language: the Fixed Order, top dog syndrome, hierarchy of ferocity, the Task

--critique of mystification: “Cassidy sought no euphoric interludes…He ran not for crypto-religious reasons, but to win races.” (121)

 

4) QUENTIN AND THE MONOMYTH: THE RUNNER AS HERO

--Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

--the monomyth: a way of describing the hero’s journey by assembling bits and pieces of myths from around the world

--Quenton is a hero in the conventional sense: a gifted and fearless individual who leads by example and inspires others; a young man of beautiful form (albeit with an admixture of too-thinness)

--But Quenton is also a hero in the classic mythological sense: his life, as described in the second half of the novel (and beginning the moment he is booted as team captain), passes through many of the stages of the hero’s journey described by Campbell

--“Riderless horses in the fog…Do you suppose it’s an omen of some kind” (159)

--the hero’s struggle to redefine crisis as opportunity (with mentor’s help): “They’ve taken away….””THEY have taken away nothing!” (166**)

From HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES:

30: “The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation—initiation—return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth.

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

--the call to adventure:

51: “Typical of the circumstances of the call are the dark forest, the great tree, the babbling spring, and the loathly, underestimated appearance of the carrier of the power of destiny.”

55: “Whether dream or myth, in these adventures there is an atmosphere of irresistible fascination about the figure that appears suddenly as guide, marking a new period, a new stage, in the biography. That which has to be faced, and is somehow profoundly familiar to the unconscious—though unknown, surprising, and even frightening to the conscious personality—makes itself known; and what was formerly meaningful may become strangely emptied of value

58: **”The first stage of the mythological journey—which we have designated the ‘call to adventure’—signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. This fateful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state; but it is always a place of fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, superhuman deeds, and impossible delight.”

--refusal of the call

59: “Often in actual life, and not infrequently in the myths and popular tales, we encounter the dull case of the call unanswered; for it is always possible to turn the ear to other interests. Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in boredom, hard work, or ‘culture,’ the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved. His flowering world becomes a wasteland of dry stones and his life feels meaningless….”

69: “For those who have not refused the call, the first encounter of the hero-journey is with a protective figure (often a little old crone or old man) who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass.”

77: “With the personifications of his destiny to guide and aid him, the hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the ‘threshold guardian’ at the entrance to the zone of magnified power.”

81: “The Arcadian god Pan is the best known Classical example of this dangerous presence dwelling just beyond the protected zone of the village boundary….He was the inventor of the Shepherd’s pipe, which he played for the dance of the nymphs, and the satyrs were his male companions. The emotion that he instilled in human beings who by accident adventured into his domain was ‘panic’ fear, a suddenly groundless fright.”

90-91: “The Belly of the Whale”: “The idea that the passage of the magical threshold is a transit into a sphere of rebirth is symbolized in the worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale. The hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, is swallowed into the unknown, and would appear to have died…[T]he lesson [is] that the passage of the threshold is a form of self-annihilation…nstead of passing outward, beyond the confines of the visible world, the hero goes inward, to be born again.” [three sets of 20 quarters]

97: THE ROAD OF TRIALS [like the “trial of miles” or “miles of trials”]

“Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials. This is a favorite phase of the myth-adventure. It has produced a world literature of miraculous tests and ordeals. The hero is covertly aided by the advice, amulets, and secret agents of the supernatural helper whom he met before his entrance into this region. Or it may be that he here discovers for the first time that there is a benign power everywhere supporting him in his superhuman passage.”

***101: “In the vocabulary of the mystics, this is the second stage of the Way, that of the ‘purification of the self,’ when the senses are “cleansed and humbled,’ and the energies and interests ‘concentrated upon transcendental things’; or in a vocabulary of a more modern turn: this is the process of dissolving, transcending, or transmuting the infantile images of our personal past.”

[connect with his memory of having died as a boy swimming in the sea]

109: THE MEETING WITH THE GODDESS

“The ultimate adventure, when all the barriers and ogres have been overcome, is commonly represented as a mystical marriage of the triumphant hero-soul with the Queen Goddess of the World. This is the crisis at the nadir, the zenith, or at the uttermost edge of the earth, at the central point of the cosmos, in the tabernacle of the temple, or within the darkness of the deepest chamber of the heart.”

136: ATONEMENT WITH THE FATHER [Bruce Denton as father figure / mentor; but don’t forget: Quenton has a father, who shows up powerfully in his flashback: he cries on his father’s shoulder there as he cries after the Big Workout]

“The traditional idea of initiation combines an introduction of the candidate into the techniques, duties, and prerogatives of his vocation with a radical readjustment of his emotional relationship to the parental images. The mystagogue (father or father-substitute) is to entrust the symbols of office only to a son who has been effectually purged of all inappropriate infantile cathexes—for whom the just, impersonal exercise of the powers will not be rendered impossible by unconscious (or perhaps even conscious and rationalized) motives of self-aggrandizement, personal preference, or resentment.”

190: “The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realizations.”

193: THE RETURN

“When the hero-quest has been accomplished, through penetration to the source, or through the grace of some male or female, human or animal, personification, the adventurer still must return with his life-transmuting trophy. The full round, the norm of the monomyth, requires that the hero shall now begin the labor of bringing the runes of wisdom, the Golden Fleece, or his sleeping princess, back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet, or the ten thousand worlds.”

217: THE CROSSING OF THE RETURN THRESHOLD

“The two worlds, the divine and the human, can be pictured only as distinct from each other—different as life and death, as day and night. The hero adventures out of the land we know into darkness; there he accomplishes his adventure, or again is simply lost to us, imprisoned, or in danger; and his return is described as a coming back out of that yonder zone. Nevertheless—and here is a great key to the understanding of myth and symbol—the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero.

One thing to consider: How many people without a connection to running would enjoy reading Once a Runner? I'm guessing not many.

That's not the case with most good fiction--you don't have to be experienced in or knowledgeable about the primary subject matter to have a good reading experience.

There's certainly a role for fiction that makes you think, "Yes, that's how it is in this world I know." But one virtue of good fiction is helping you to understand worlds you know little or nothing about.

I think the descriptions of running in OAR allow it to achieve the first of those goals. The trite story, poor character development and other faults are too much of a barrier to it achieving the second purpose.

smd wrote:

One thing to consider: How many people without a connection to running would enjoy reading Once a Runner? I'm guessing not many.

Goodreads is a good source to read regular people reviews of OaR. The reviews are all over the place. Non-runners don't seem to like the book at, but some do. Runners like it a lot.

-- "12 chapters in I was convinced it was about the stupidest book I'd ever read."

-- "After reading this book written in 1978 I understand why it went from a small publisher to being sold out of trunks during track meets."

-- "I'm not a runner and never have been a runner, but I couldn't put the book down."

-- "How in the hell is the average rating for this book over 4 stars? Oh yeah, I know, the only people who would read this book are runners...But I do know when a book makes me want to take a big sh!t."

Is it a good read? Sure - I've read and enjoyed it. Does it appeal to a very limited audience of competitive runners? Yes, sure. Is Parker a *great* author? No.

If you like it, enjoy it for what it is.

This knida reminds me of the Rocky / Rambo movies. Aside from the first Rocky, none of them were *great* movies, but they were very entertaining. That's how I view OAR and RTC - they aren't great classics, but they are entertaining.

English lit senior wrote:

I mean I don't think writes award worthy fiction, maybe a sports writing award or something, but I'd rank him in the top 10% of American fiction authors. My prof who happens to be a decent marathoner thinks Parker's Once a Runner and Again to Carthage are trash. Who's right?

Once A Runner is to runners what 50 Shades of Grey is to bored housewives.

KudzuRunner wrote:

Any serious runner who has ever been beaten up by the world and retreated to the discipline of running in an effort to transform himself (or herself), putting in long hours in the woodshed (so to speak) with an eye on emerging triumphant somewhere down the line, can sense that power.

I agree with lot of your insights (or those stolen from your students) but disagree with some. Sadly I won't be able to refute them, because I'm writing on my phone and editing the quotes would be nightmarish.

I don't think QC is training to emerge as a hero. I thought that he feels responsible for the gift of talent that he has (Spiderman complex). He has to train hard and try to be as good a runner as he can be. He's dreaming about getting a chance not about being victorious.