Entitlement Publishing.

The Wind Done Gone, by Alice Randall (Houghton Mifflin, 210 pp., $22)

'No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures," said Dr. Johnson, right as always. As proof of his point, I offer in evidence Gone with the Wind. Never has a middlebrow bodice-ripper been more widely reviled by highbrow critics, yet ordinary folks continue to buy it, read it, and like it, no matter how often they're told they shouldn't do any of the above. I paid a visit to amazon.com not long ago to see how this book- the winner of the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for fiction-was doing, and found that the paperback edition ranked 1,650th in sales that day, a figure neither surprisingly high (The Catcher in the Rye was 61st) nor humiliatingly low (The Godfather was 8,030th). In fact, I'd say it was just about right for a book that has been selling steadily for six decades, and seems likely to keep on selling for at least six more.

Gone with the Wind is, of course, quite outrageously racist, a word that is almost always misused nowadays but can be applied with impunity to a novel in which one character is described as having undergone an experience that was "almost more than the brain in her little black skull could bear." Whatever her virtues, Margaret Mitchell seems to have thought of blacks as a slightly more articulate breed of dog (i.e., stupid but loyal), and you don't have to be easily offended in order to find Gone with the Wind offensive whenever it touches on racial matters, which is fairly often. Small wonder that it still draws unfriendly fire from latter-day readers who find Mitchell's lift-dat- bale caricatures odious in the extreme.

The latest assault on Tara comes in the form of a book-length parody described by its publisher as "a literary achievement of significant political force," "a call to moral attention," and (last and least) "a compelling and entertaining read." Perhaps not surprisingly, The Wind Done Gone is none of these things, and it would surely have sunk without trace had the Mitchell estate not taken Houghton Mifflin to court in an ill-considered and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to halt its publication. Instead, this first novel by author Alice Randall has been praised in Publishers Weekly, written up in O: The Oprah Magazine, and staunchly defended on the editorial page of the New York Times, proving for the umpteenth time that the most efficient way to publicize bad art is to hire a lawyer and try to suppress it.

In the improbable event that you haven't heard about The Wind Done Gone, allow me to summarize it as compactly as possible. Stung by the condescending portrayals of the black characters in Gone with the Wind, Randall decided to rewrite the book from the point of view of Cynara, Scarlett's mulatto half-sister, the illegitimate issue of a liaison between Gerald, Scarlett's father, and Mammy, her maid; in this version, Cynara steals Rhett Butler away from Scarlett, then drops him for a Reconstruction-era congressman of color. If you can't remember Cynara, it's because she's not in Gone with the Wind, which contains only a single glancing reference to the fact that some southern whites slept with their black slaves. The Wind Done Gone, by contrast, is about little else.

This might have been a passably clever idea in, oh, 1956, but countless books, many of them well-known and not a few written by white men, have since made prominent mention of the peculiar institution of antebellum miscegenation. To be sure, a gifted artist can ennoble the stalest of subjects, but Alice Randall doesn't fill the bill. A Harvard lit major whose previous "literary" efforts include a TV movie and a hit country song, Trisha Yearwood's "XXX's and OOO's (An American Girl)," Randall is no novelist. Her plot is exiguous, her prose stiff and unsure ("If it was mine to be able to paint pictures, if I possessed the gift of painting, I would paint a cotton gown balled up and thrown into a corner waiting to be washed, and I would call it 'Georgia'"). Nor is she any kind of parodist. The only funny thing about The Wind Done Gone, in fact, is the fawning press it's been getting.

All this led me to wonder how so dull a book got into print in the first place. The answer wasn't exactly tough to figure out: The Wind Done Gone is a quintessential example of entitlement publishing. Who cares if it sells? Who cares if it's good? Entitlement publishing isn't about quality, a concept that in any case has been declared oppressive and immoral by literary theorists; it's about politics. Books like The Wind Done Gone aren't any good, but they ought to be, so they get published anyway. Trend-snuffling reviewers hail them as "transgressive" and "subversive"; guilt-ridden Volvo owners buy them and delight in the sensation of being on the cutting edge of culture. Does anybody actually read them? That doesn't matter, either. Andy Warhol was righter than he knew: In the future, everybody will get to publish one book, which will remain in print for 15 minutes.

Gone with the Wind, on the other hand, will keep on being read and relished by the common readers with whom Dr. Johnson rejoiced to concur, for the very good reason that it's a pretty good novel, not to mention a rather surprising one. Over and above the pure pull of plot, it has some unexpectedly shrewd things to say about the vanity of the Glorious Cause (most of which didn't make it into the movie). Ashley Wilkes's anguished letter to his wife Melanie is a case in point: "I see too clearly that we have been betrayed, betrayed by our arrogant Southern selves . . . by words and catch phrases, prejudices and hatreds coming from the mouths of those highly placed, those men whom we respected and revered-'King Cotton, Slavery, States' Rights, Damn Yankees.'"

Moreover, Gone with the Wind is peopled with characters whose inconsistencies make them interesting, none more so than Scarlett O'Hara, an unattractive, inexplicably seductive antiheroine whom Trollope himself might well have been pleased to dream up on an especially good day. "I like to think that my parody creates a con-text [sic], an opposition text, which illuminates the text to which it responds," says Randall, speaking in the grating tones of the academy that spawned her. One would be more inclined to take her smug little book seriously if it contained even one character half as vividly drawn as Scarlett. Instead, it sucks all its fitful life straight from the veins of the infinitely more compelling "text" it seeks to "illuminate." Such are the vampirish ways of postmodern artists, who live by biting their parents' necks, then complain because they don't like the taste of blood.