Comment by BoingBoomTschak
14 hours ago
Read some mature Discworld content (Guards! Guards! is the best entry point, I'd say), it's an easy read too. Pratchett's skill with English would make even a tax report smooth and riveting.
No need to always flex with some highbrow stuff to find a masterful style.
Yes - he's popular for a reason, not pop, but that he deserves popularity. I wonder about being highbrow... in that yes you're right, that's how he's viewed, and he's well-known and it's fantasy and it's comedic and therefore cannot be highbrow (awful how we judge these things) but he has some very insightful ideas or ethics he wants to communicate. If, to me, lowbrow vs highbrow is about depth or insight, or long-lasting value in literature (will he be read in a hundred years? Yes), he is high, even if 'easy'. You're absolutely right, 'masterful' in style.
He writes sentences around how they're, eh, delivered? Can't think of a better word. Lots of footnotes and clauses and parentheticals. And the timing of his words make the jokes.
His stories are beautiful. The language is very ordinary. (Not a criticism.)
I would absolutely call him a landmark writer, but I wouldn't call him lit fic in the publishing sense.
A bit too reductive, methinks. Even if you're only speaking in the literature professor sense, the vocabulary and sentence structures are a bit more varied and exercised than in a "very ordinary" style, words I'd reserve for mainstream best-sellers like Harry Potter and other YA fodder.
I'll be honest: my (for now quite small) experience with the /lit/ canon has been very hit-or-miss for now. It feels like Literature with a capital L is something only ivory tower academics and New-Yorker or Parisian critics have the right to stick to works and they decided that comedy cannot be part of it. They're also very quick to ignore small and larger crossings into purple prose territory when it pleases them.
Similar in a sense to the music world, where the crowd that decides what is Serious Work^tm is enshrining contemporary classical, post-modernism and performance art instead of sifting through the (admittedly lackluster) popular music world that has produced genuine pearls often rivaling, sometimes eclipsing their dominion.
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End of rant, sincerly sorry.
tl;dr: yes, Pratchett isn't literature in any sense of the word (nobody claimed so, anyway) but your scale may be a bit too logarithmic, putting him and much worse stuff in the same basket.
Well, I think the wisdom is too neatly packaged (basically: Vetinari speaks, so listen you pillock) and his simplistic views often hamfisted by shaping the world to make them sound Right^tm to be "highbrow" per se, but still, it's not for the idiot either.
> He writes sentences around how they're, eh, delivered? Can't think of a better word. And the timing of his words make the jokes.
You put the words in my mouth, very accurate way of describing his style!