I suspect you may find that Midnight's Children is actually not a bad novel.

Life magazine called it "the worst novel of modern times."

Walter Allen went so far as to call it "one of the worst novels ever written, but a remarkable book".

It seemed like something out of a bad novel.

Heavens, she sounded like someone out of a bad Victorian novel.

That sort of thing is the stuff of bad novels.

All copies of this seductively bad novel must be destroyed at once.

How did we find ourselves living in a bad novel?

Yet you do see them, or else it is a bad novel.

But how can a literary author produce a bad novel?