The Mütter, a museum of medical history, is stranger and less clinical than that description implies. Its dimly lit rooms are crowded with specimens of physical anomalies and pathologies: stillborn fetuses in jars, slices of faces suspended in an alcoholic solution, a wall of nineteenth-century skulls. One display case features the livers of Chang and Eng Bunker, conjoined twins who were widely exhibited as curiosities during the nineteenth century; in another is the corpse of a woman whose fat transformed after death in an unusual form of natural preservation called saponification. The Soap Lady, as she is known at the Mütter, has rough, blackened skin, and her mouth is open, as if in a scream. A banner outside the museum, which was founded more than a hundred and sixty years ago, reads “Disturbingly informative.” Every so often, a visitor faints.
In the 1990s, the Russian-born conceptual artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid hired professional polling firms to survey 1,001 people about what they liked most and least in a painting. The artworks they created using this information, the public’s “most wanted” and “least wanted” images, were published in Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid’s Scientific Guide to Art. (The “most wanted” painting was a landscape with water, wild animals, and George Washington; the “least wanted” was an angular abstract in fuchsia and yellow.) This enterprise proved so amusing that the pair, in collaboration with composer Dave Soldier, repeated the experiment with popular music, releasing the “most wanted” and “least wanted” songs together on a CD with a cover photo of all three men wearing white lab coats and pointing at a calculator. Sadly, the pair stopped short of what I view as the greatest challenge: producing novels that reflect what Americans like and dislike in fiction. Now, at last, with People’s Choice Literature, by the writer/artist/composer Tom Comitta, a new “scientist” has taken up the task.
People’s Choice Literature offers its readers two novels for the price of one. The first is a thriller whose heroine tries to prevent her boss, a new age–y tech mogul, from launching a quantum computing network that will bring about a total surveillance state. That’s the most wanted one. The least wanted novel is much harder to summarize, encompassing such ostensibly despised elements as stream of consciousness, explicit sex scenes, an extraterrestrial setting, metafictional commentary on novel-writing itself, talking animals, second-person narration, and tennis. Because this least wanted novel is such an extravagant farrago of weird elements, it may sound more entertaining than its counterpart. However, Comitta (who uses they/them pronouns) is sufficiently dedicated to their project that it is not. They have diligently included, for example, some long, dull epistolary passages about a polar expedition—a style and setting that 1,045 survey respondents found particularly unappealing. Full disclosure: While Most Unwanted often made me laugh, it also put me to sleep five times.
In Mona Arshi’s sophisticated third collection, Mouth, a chorus of “marginal women” from Greek tragedy step boldly into the spotlight – as if the “stuffed rags” in their mouths can be pulled out and waved like freedom flags.