Daily Inspiration Quote by Ellen Goodman

The line lands like a book review written with a box cutter. Ellen Goodman isn’t merely saying she disliked a novel; she’s denying it even the dignity of being useless. “Redeeming social value” is the key phrase, borrowed from the language of censors, judges, and cultural gatekeepers who try to measure art by its public benefit. Goodman hijacks that moral-accounting framework and then spikes it with the most unliterary alternative imaginable: recycling.

The joke works because it weaponizes seriousness. “Social value” invites lofty defenses of fiction - empathy, insight, perspective - and Goodman responds with an object lesson in late-20th-century pragmatism. If the book can’t improve your mind or the culture, at least it can protect your dishes during a move. That turn isn’t random; it’s a sly nod to consumer society’s impatience with anything that can’t justify its footprint. In an era when journalism increasingly had to arbitrate taste in a crowded media marketplace, the quip also asserts the critic’s authority: not just thumbs-down, but sentence.

Subtextually, Goodman is puncturing the inflated self-importance that often surrounds novels, especially “important” ones marketed as necessary reading. The cardboard box gag is a miniature class critique, too: literature is demoted from salon object to household packaging. It’s contempt, but delivered with the poise of someone fluent in public language - civic, moral, utilitarian - and capable of turning it into a punchline sharp enough to draw blood.