“X-rated soap opera”

“X-rated soap opera” is John Wolf’s blunt description of T. S. Garp’s novel The World According to Bensenhaver, and a phrase that becomes a compact argument about the porous boundary between fiction and life. Wolf treats the book’s intensity as both a literary strength and a problem of excess; Garp’s answer is that life itself can be just as excessive.

Wolf’s Judgment of the Novel

In New York, Wolf hoped that the visceral reality of Garp’s language and the intensity of his characters might rescue The World According to Bensenhaver from seeming like sheer soap opera. Yet he privately imagined it as a daytime television series called Anxiousness of Life, edited for invalids, senior citizens, and preschool children. His final assessment was that, despite its vivid language, the book was an “X-rated soap opera.” The phrase compresses his ambivalence: he recognizes the writing’s force while doubting whether the material’s sensational intensity adds up to a publishable novel.

Wolf’s concern was not simply whether he liked the book. He wondered whether he could justify publishing it, and relied on an unusually successful instinct for predicting popularity. He was often envied for calling which books would become popular, though nobody knew how he did it. His problem with Garp’s manuscript therefore involved both literary judgment and the uncertain commercial prospects of a work he found difficult to classify.

Garp’s Response and Retrospective

Garp did not seem bothered when Wolf called the novel soap opera, and replied that life itself was too much. Much later, Garp would agree that The World According to Bensenhaver was his worst work. But that concession did not erase his grievance: he wrote to Wolf that the world had failed to credit his first two books, so he was owed. The phrase thus marks a split between retrospective artistic judgment and the resentment that had shaped the book’s reception in Garp’s mind.

Garp’s defense does not deny the excess Wolf identified; it relocates the charge. If the novel feels like an X-rated soap opera, Garp suggests, that may be because life supplies the same unruly material. The reply is at once a defense of the book and an acknowledgment that fiction can inherit the world’s melodrama rather than impose a tidier order upon it.

The Phrase Reappears in the News

The expression returns when Garp and his family watch a television news report. The broadcast shows a car speeding away, circling pickup trucks and police cars, a man lying dead in a dark puddle, and a close view of a deer rifle. The report also notes that deer season had not officially opened. With no nudity on screen, the event is nevertheless described as an X-rated soap opera from beginning to end.

That recurrence gives Wolf’s critical phrase a wider reach. What first seemed to be a verdict on one novel becomes a way of recognizing the lurid, compressed drama of real events as they are presented to an audience. The novel, the phrase implies, may not be the only thing that resembles soap opera: televised reality can supply its own violence, suspense, and sensational turns.