Peoples Choice Literature: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Novels
By Tom Comitta
Columbia University Press, 584 pages, $25
Tom Comitta, author of the new novel Peoples Choice Literature: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Novels, is eager to reassure readers that “only” about 25 percent was written by prompting the AI model Playground and then “massaging” its responses into Comitta’s own writing. This fact is mentioned in the introduction and reiterated in metafictional asides later on. Such reminders are necessary because the whole book could easily have been written by a computer. Despite this, it has received praise from award-winning author Jonathan Lethem (“an unusual and brilliant book”), Aarthi Valde of Duke University (“Comitta is a master of literary constraint), and Deirdre Lynch of Harvard (“Comitta is heir, simultaneously, to Laurence Sterne, Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, and Kathy Acker”).
The concept of the book is borrowed from Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid’s 1990s “People’s Choice” projects, in which they used polls to determine what kinds of painting and music the public most enjoyed and then produced examples of each. It was a funny joke, obviously calculated to provoke reflections on the relationship between mass taste and artistic excellence. Comitta has repeated the joke with two novels totaling 584 pages—“Most Wanted” (a thriller about an evil tech company) and “Most Unwanted” (a riffing, bizarro story about billionaire tennis players on Mars)—based on responses to survey questions.