I’m talking works by Kurt Vonnegut, Isaac Asimov, Joseph Heller, Stephen King, Art Spiegelman, Elie Wiesel, Daniel Keyes, etc. I haven’t read any from these I’ve mentioned, I just have a bias that tells me they’re overrated trash. I think it’s quite common on american “classics” (not just books but also films) a certain political defeatism or instead a very liberal surface level criticism of “bad things” (Steinbeck stays winning). And then these barren ideas get louded as incredible literature classics (which makes sense as far as the rulling class’s efforts for maintaining the status quo are concerned).
But as I’ve said this is my analysis a priori of having read such novels, but are there actually redeeming qualities on those novels that make them worthy of pursuing? I’m not that interested in style but I can see that some of the authors mentioned have that idiosyncrasy going for them. Also I’m sure some do get the problems they’re writing about and maybe that analysis, even if it doesn’t go all the way, is a good enough quality.
(I write this about american novels in particular but it clearly expands to other ‘classics’. Unfortunately I have read stuff by that Orwell fella which is a clear perpetrator of the crimes I’ve mentioned. I focused on the american side because most of the ‘classics’ lists are filled with them (they’re anglocentric in general but more american-sided))
I think with such a broad brush the only viable answer is “it depends”.
Some of them I actually quite enjoy. While I haven’t read him again since my politics radicalized, I always really enjoyed Asimov. Herbert and Philip K. Dick have always been two huge favourites of mine. I have always been a sucker for dystopian novels, so I quite liked Huxley as well (though I suppose he would be English). On the other hand, I never particularly cared for Faulkner and his writing style. I think King is garbage, both as an author and a person, and I am not sure his work really deserves to be considered with some of the other classics.
Others can be still worth reading even if you don’t necessarily agree with the politics, both just for the pure enjoyment of it and also as an exercise in reading things critically that you may not entirely agree with.