"Hack fiction exploits curiosity without really satisfying it or making connections between it and anything else in the world"
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Canby’s line is a neat little knife: it doesn’t just insult bad writing, it diagnoses the cheap mechanism behind it. “Exploits curiosity” frames hack fiction as predatory, not merely clumsy. The reader’s attention becomes a resource to be mined, a hunger to be triggered and prolonged, then left nutritionally empty. It’s a critique of craft, but also of ethics: the author has made a transaction with the audience and then quietly defaulted.
The pivot is Canby’s second standard, the one that hurts more: “making connections between it and anything else in the world.” Plenty of stories can deliver answers to their mysteries; hack fiction can even do that. What it can’t do is metabolize intrigue into meaning. Curiosity is treated like a slot machine’s pull-handle rather than a human impulse that wants to map causes, consequences, and character onto reality. The subtext is that plot, on its own, is not narrative achievement; it’s scaffolding. Without connective tissue - social observation, moral pressure, psychological insight - the story doesn’t reverberate past the last page.
As a film critic writing in the late 20th century, Canby was steeped in an era when “high” and “low” culture were colliding: blockbuster formulas tightening, franchises multiplying, prestige battling pulp. His complaint isn’t snobbery so much as a warning about narrative monoculture. When storytelling becomes pure stimulus-response, curiosity stops being a path to understanding and turns into an endlessly renewable commodity.
The pivot is Canby’s second standard, the one that hurts more: “making connections between it and anything else in the world.” Plenty of stories can deliver answers to their mysteries; hack fiction can even do that. What it can’t do is metabolize intrigue into meaning. Curiosity is treated like a slot machine’s pull-handle rather than a human impulse that wants to map causes, consequences, and character onto reality. The subtext is that plot, on its own, is not narrative achievement; it’s scaffolding. Without connective tissue - social observation, moral pressure, psychological insight - the story doesn’t reverberate past the last page.
As a film critic writing in the late 20th century, Canby was steeped in an era when “high” and “low” culture were colliding: blockbuster formulas tightening, franchises multiplying, prestige battling pulp. His complaint isn’t snobbery so much as a warning about narrative monoculture. When storytelling becomes pure stimulus-response, curiosity stops being a path to understanding and turns into an endlessly renewable commodity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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