I just finished reading – actually skimming – what I’m tempted to name as the worst book in the history of the world. It’s a romance novel titled Forever Amber, set in seventeenth century England, which came out originally in 1944, and was banned and denounced from most of the platforms that did that for books in those days. 

I’m not for actual censorship of books deemed immoral but, if you ask me, the denouncers were on to something. It’s not the sex scenes. In the bodice busters of those days, consummations ended in three dots and candle lights flickering out. I’ll just say something about the book’s content before I get to my recoil from it.

The Amber of the title starts her story as an innocent but of course beautiful country girl who makes her way to London. As she climbs from Debtor’s prison to the Court of the Restoration king, Charles II, the reader gets a tour of the places and possible predicaments of that period. According to the Forward by Barbara Taylor Bradford, Kathleen Winsor’s novel is the product of “impeccable research that cannot be bettered … .” So we learn what life was like for the castoffs at the bottom rung of society, how one might live through the Great Plague that ravaged London in 1665, and at last we get to canvass the opportunities and pitfalls on offer at the royal Court if a lady happened to be both beautiful and shrewd. 

So why do I call it “the worst book” ever? Ordinarily, credible time travel can motivate a reader to start turning pages. Here’s the problem. The book’s heroine, Amber, hasn’t got a moral bone in her entire voluptuous body. Well, isn’t that the whole point of a bodice buster? You don’t go to the ice cream parlor for hardware. Anyway, aren’t the descriptions of seventeenth-century London alone worth the price of the ticket?

No, as it turns out. Actually not. Although intellectual historians and philosophers record the problem – which actually arose in the seventeenth century with the newly discovered power of mathematical physics – of a split between facts and values, in the life experience of real people, back then as now, facts and values coexist inextricably. That is, almost any situation we face will present a choice between better and worse alternatives. We never see Amber weighing alternatives of that kind.

Let me illustrate this weighing of better against worse with a moment from a different book, set in the twentieth century, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, a collection of essays by Joan Didion, published in 1968. What Didion wrestles with in one of the essays, “On Keeping a Notebook,” is the question of what has motivated her to jot down observations and reflections in a journal, the way she does. Was it a genuine interest in the people whose sayings and doing she records? Or was she predominantly concerned with herself, the writer?

We are, she writes, “taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing. … But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.'”

I pause over this moment of writerly self-excoriation since I would take a different view than Didion’s of the evidences in her journal. A writer by trade and vocation, Didion is self-condemned to be on the lookout for material. Which means that her access to herself – to sincerity – is partly skewed by the call to place even that in the service of her talent. In that service, what gets sacrificed is the curiosity each of us has about who and what we are – and what our purposes are or ought to be. The writer’s thoughts and experiences can’t be all her own. Long past the time when the experiences happen, they remain eligible for the draft: for enlistment as grist for the writer’s mill.

So I would dispute Didion’s dim view of her practice of keeping a notebook. My guess is not that there are egocentric concerns lurking beneath her record of other people’s conduct (which is what she thinks). Instead, I suspect that her record of personal experiences has been, in some degree, sacrificed to her talent. She can’t consecrate that record to its first and best use: self-knowledge.

But note that, in my argument with this writer (who is gone now and was young decades back), we are entertaining the question of what is good or bad – or good for what and bad for what – in the writerly vocation. To ask questions of this sort is to honor human experience. That’s far different from the heedless, headlong caper through socio-erotic opportunities in the pages of Forever Amber.

The scandal of that book is not that liaisons of the period have been to some degree revived for the entertainment of the time traveler. The scandal lies in the record, fictional or not, of a trip through time taken 

without the least sign of conscience.