IN the reception room of a doctor’s office that I visit twice a year there is a shelf filled with novels donated by people who, having read them, are pleased to perform a charitable act by giving away books that others might find interesting. I glance through some of the novels during the 10-to-20 minute wait before I’m called to see the doctor. All of the novels, mostly paperbacks of works published two years earlier, and some very new hardbacks, are by popular authors like John Grisham and Danielle Steele, two of the very few names that I recognise among 50 or so books, all by writers whose burning ambition very probably is to be the next Grisham or Steele, for many people are lured to writing fiction as if by doing so the odds of winning fame and riches are greater than if they bought a lottery ticket. Each book that I manage to leaf through during my brief wait is decorated with glowing quotations on its covers: the prose is invariably described as “rich” or “razor-sharp,” and the work often has a “central” relevance to some contemporary sociological problem.

The settings and themes of these novels involve romance, spying, political disturbance, and sometimes a combination of all three. More than one of these novels opens with the writer presenting a situation in which a male character is so deeply engrossed in his profession (doctor, architect, engineer, lawyer, spy) that he scarcely notices the young lady (nurse, secretary, junior law partner, a politician’s mistress) who works seriously for him, or sometimes is his enemy, but whose real devotion becomes focussed on his handsome looks. Some of the novelists are smart enough to make the familiar opening seem credible enough for it not to be seen as a blatant cliché. No doubt there are still innocent readers who, being gratified that they can identify with the principal character, find the situation absorbing and fresh. But as one turns the pages one sees the formula’s relentless trundling along like a country train on an old corroded track until its desperate passage through the black tunnel of things going wrong is over and it finally comes out to the golden sunshine of a happy ending. Puff-puff-puff, and breathlessly the reader closes the book.

I was reminded of these popular novels recently during a visit to Brazil where I spent some weeks first in a country house and then in a friend’s flat in Rio de Janeiro, each stocked with a large library that consisted mainly of novels ranging from Victorian classics to works by such major recent or contemporary writers like Graham Greene and Philip Roth who have a popular following among middle-brow readers. There is a fine distinction between the obvious Danielle Steele type of popular novel, which makes no pretension to seriousness, and novels by the Greene-Roth types who package their popular content in the cling-wrap of simplistic ideas whose transparency is seen to be a dense seriousness by their dedicated followers.

I had not seen Deception by Philip Roth when it came out in 1990, having given up reading him after finding his famous early novels inconsequential, works that gave off an easily contrived aura of intellectual seriousness when their appeal was based upon the passing interest of their sociological content. Reading Deception only confirmed that earlier impression. It is written entirely in dialogue, obliging the reader to listen in to male and female voices talking to one another in person or over the phone, creating the sort of interest that appeals to people who love listening to gossip. Late in the novel, a character is made to say, “Well, I don’t believe this soap opera, really,” a remark that anticipates the criticism that the whole novel is indeed a soap opera, for anyone making it can be answered that the author was well aware of what he was doing, deliberately imitating the content of a typical soap opera but presenting it in a new dimension — it’s like making a character shout at another, “Stop being boring!” and the other answering, “Life is boring, what can I do?”. Should a critic call the whole work boring the author can respond that it was his intention, as the quotations prove, to convey the experience of boredom.

A drama of love and infidelity unfolds in Deception, but the theme of deception is given what Roth probably thought was a clever twist — in the husband-wife dialogue in the penultimate chapter, the wife presents the husband with the evidence that he has been deceiving her: she has discovered the notebook in which he has been recording the affair; the husband defends himself by declaring that he is a novelist and what’s written in the notebook is only fiction. What the reader had thought was a story about a husband deceiving his wife is supposedly really a story about a novelist deceiving the reader. The reader is no doubt expected to be amazed and shocked by this and, crying out, “Wow!”, to spring up to his feet to applaud the writer’s genius. And just to add a secondary twist, Roth follows that revelation with a concluding chapter in which the dialogue suggests that the deception that the reader had only been looking at fiction was perhaps itself a deception. And then, predictably, the final chapter ends with a character saying, “It’s such a strange story”, and another responding, “I know. No one would believe it.” It’s an ending commonly seen in undergraduate writing workshops in the stories of students yet to learn that what they believe to be a stroke of genius is, alas, only a cliché. And incidentally, there is nothing stylistically new in having an entire novel in dialogue; it’s been done before, most notably by William Gaddis. Take away the author’s famous name, which is printed in conspicuous bold on the dust-cover, and Deception will fit in quite snugly in the shelf in my doctor’s office.

As will The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene, which I found in the country house among shelves filled with the famous dead of yesteryear, novelists like Somerset Maugham, once the darlings of that large middle layer of society which conceals its ignorance behind a mask that gleamingly depicts it to be smart, educated and enlightened. As with Roth, I had long abandoned reading Greene, for in the post-Joycean excitement of making it new in mid-20th-century London he had seemed an old reactionary. Thinking that he deserved a more objective evaluation, I decided to give The Honorary Consul a careful reading.

From the novel’s opening passage, a man named Doctor Plarr is presented as the principal protagonist. He’s an Englishman in Argentina born of an English father and a Spanish mother, living on the border with Paraguay where there is some militant activity and where there are two other Englishmen, a man named Humphries, and Charley Fortnum, the latter the Honorary Consul and an alcoholic. In the absence of descriptive information about him, the reader forms a picture of Doctor Plarr as a middle-aged man until page 66 of the Penguin edition where the author writes, “… Doctor Plarr, who was still in his early thirties …”. This information comes as a surprise to the reader. It is possible that there was some phrase in the earlier pages indicative of the Doctor’s comparative youth and the reader missed it in a distracted moment, but if the writer is going to mention a character’s specific age, he ought not to wait till page 66 where some readers at least are going to have to re-imagine their idea of the character.

Greene’s descriptive prose is well-created, however, and he has a good eye for regional details as well as an attentive ear that catches the distinctive speech of his South American characters. But his focus is on the lives of his English characters, especially on the youthful Doctor Plarr and the older Charley Fortnum. One of the places where they are seen together is in the local brothel. A prostitute named Clara (“not yet 20”) is identified by a conspicuous birthmark: Doctor Plarr notices on her forehead “a little below the hairline, a small grey birth-mark, in the spot where a Hindu girl wears the scarlet sign of her caste,” which is well described, but such precise identification of a character is the novelist’s old device of marking out a character to be used later for a major role in the narrative. It turns out that Fortnum, who is in his sixties, marries her and establishes her in his country house where Plarr, given his doctor’s excuse to visit a patient, has a secret affair with her and gets her with child. The plot has moved to the territory of a conventional romance with the usual twists — and nor is it an original ploy to have a brothel, especially one run by an indulgent madame as a sort of gentlemen’s club, in a South American setting; and the idea of a young prostitute who is really a gentle soul and through whom the fallen hero will discover redemption seems familiar, too: remember Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment?

The larger setting of The Honorary Consul is a nebulous region between Argentina and Paraguay where there is militant revolutionary activity. The revolutionaries bungle an attempt to kidnap the American ambassador, capturing the English Honorary Consul instead. Doctor Plarr, the Consul’s wife’s lover, is now obliged to attempt to rescue him; conveniently, the leader of the militants, a man named Rivas, is an old friend of Plarr’s, but that doesn’t help. The British ambassador should have come to rescue the Consul, but the Foreign Office in London is not too concerned about the fate of an obscure consul, an honorary one at that. The ambassador in Buenos Aires, Sir Henry Belfrage, is portrayed as a caricature of the common clichéd idea of an upperclass Englishman, a bumbling fool who’s supposed to be jolly decent and whose imbecilic remarks are supposed to be hilarious. Complaining about the American ambassador who happens to be a teetotaler, he says, “I felt like that girl in the book who had a scarlet letter A on her dress. A for Alcoholism.” And his wife responds: “I think it was Adultery, dear.” And he replies, “I daresay. I only saw the film.” That’s supposed to be highly amusing, but is so absurdly a parody of an Englishman as to be embarrassingly silly.

At one stage, Clara, who has been living in Fortnum’s country place after marrying him, finding herself in a dangerous situation from which it is important she escape, jumps into his old Land Rover and drives away. Asking the question that comes to the reader’s mind, Doctor Plarr says to her, “But you don’t know how to drive, Clara.” She, explaining how she was able to drive so easily without ever having done so before, answers, “I watched Charley often enough. It is not so difficult. I knew the things to push and the things to pull.” Perhaps, coming from a former prostitute, there’s a sexual innuendo in those words that’s supposed to be funny, but if you’ve never driven before, you might try following her example, suddenly jump into an old Land Rover, push something and pull something else, and see where it will take you.

Rivas, who is among the kidnapped Consul’s captors, is a lapsed priest. When Plarr comes to try and rescue Fortnum, Plarr and Rivas talk in an adjacent room and assuming Fortnum is either too drunk or passed out, Plarr tells Rivas about his affair with Clara and that the child she is expecting is his. Fortnum overhears. One character receiving crucial information in this manner is one of the oldest clichés in literature: I should know — been there, done that.

As a lapsed Catholic priest, Rivas is more of a muddled intellectual than a militant revolutionary, and seems to have been created to facilitate the expression of the author’s obsessive theme, the Catholic Church, which marks so much of his work. Expecting they could all possibly die, Rivas is persuaded to tell Mass and hear confessions. There is a long debate in which Rivas, his wife and Plarr discuss the fine points of the Catholic faith — perhaps this is the important part for Greene and his Catholic readers, but it’s hard to imagine a revolutionary and his captor so coolly engaged in argument as if they sat in a Vatican council. Finally, the violent climax explodes. Plarr is killed. Fortnum survives. Much chastened by his knowledge that his friend Plarr who had been his wife’s lover had sacrificed himself for him, Fortnum discovers serenity with his young wife. At the end he finds love.

The Honorary Consul is what’s known as a page-turner. The reader who enjoys predictable formula-driven situations that he’s persuaded are surprises will not be disappointed. And Roth’s Deception is perhaps still a favourite at book clubs where literature is no more than a subject for gossip. But because there’s nothing distinctive in their style and because in each form is reduced to a formula, both are no different from the popular novels lying forlorn in my doctor’s office. Perhaps the people who donated them were not so much driven by a wish to perform a charitable act as they were to find a convenient way for recycling trash.