I reject the notion that anything popular can’t be good. I don’t want to be obscure; I want to be read.

–Michael Crichton, 1994

I’m sure everyone’s heard by now that the best-selling novelist Michael Crichton died earlier this week, yet another victim of cancer, struck down at the relatively youthful age of 66. I have to admit that my feelings about him and his passing are a bit more muddled than is usually the case when I write these tributes.

I used to be a big admirer of his back in high school and college. His prose was serviceable at best, never soaring, but he was a master at plot, which was my primary interest in fiction in those days, and I found the science on which he based his plots fascinating and thought-provoking. I was an aspiring novelist myself, and on something of a personal crusade against the sort of high-minded literature that was read in academic settings but no where else. Actually, I should clarify that: I had no problem with Literature-with-a-capital-L itself — I even liked some of it — but I hated the snobbery that came along with it, the implication that there was something inherently wrong with fiction that simply entertained. (I still hate that attitude, come to think of it.) The popular stuff was what I preferred to read on my own time, and what I wanted to write myself, and I was always on the lookout for something that would validate my feelings on the issue. Crichton became a hero to me after I read that quote up there at the top of this entry in a newspaper interview; I scribbled it down in my notebook and used it for inspiration — and ammunition during arguments — for a very long time.

But then, perhaps inevitably, I cooled on Crichton, partly because my tastes were changing and I was finally coming to understand some of the criticisms of his writing, and partly because I think the quality of his work declined following Jurassic Park. The final straw came a couple years ago, when I was moved to publicly denounce him after learning of his shameful and childish attack on a journalist who’d had the temerity to question his ideas. You can read the details yourself, but the short version is that my old hero revealed himself to be a royal jerk. He wasn’t the first of my heroes who turned out to have feet of clay, but he was the most extreme in terms of how genuinely distasteful he revealed himself to be.
So now, upon his untimely death, the question for me is, which Michael Crichton should I be remembering? The one whose work I enjoyed and found inspirational as a young man or the one whose pettiness and total lack of class utterly disgusted me as a grown man? Which was the “true” Crichton?

Perhaps the best way to memorialize him is as a genuine human being who, like all human beings, was more complicated than strangers knew or believed, who had it in them to both please us and let us down. He wasn’t a marble statue, and he didn’t ask a naive college freshman into idolizing him.

And I should also keep in mind that despite my disillusion with the man, The Great Train Robbery, which he directed, is still a damn entertaining movie…