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neadodsI've pretty much made up my mind about a book by page 20 and this one is so slow it's putting my fillings to sleep. So far we've seen a little girl wake her family up, the mother announce she's pregnant again, the kids go outside and play, the father hide in his study, and everyone poke at dinner. Page 19, and that's it for the action. The rest of the space is taken up with what everyone thinks about it all and how they feel about each other (vaguely resentful).
Guess I'm one of the crew, because I hate 'em all too.
Thing is, it's not because the writing's so bad - it isn't. Oh, it's turgid and all, but it's a prime example of a literary movement I've decided to dub "70s Sociopathy." Remember books and movies like The Graduate, Virgin Suicides, Separate Peace? They were all the same - such boring people leading such boring lives that they're all clinically depressed, and they're so pathologically self-centered that they blame everyone around them for their stultification. I remember when such things were considered "edgy" and "real" because they "peeled back the artifice" - but if you take a closer look, who was REALLY the cause of everyone's misery? Themselves. They never talked - excuse me, were "unable to communicate" - and they were so empty that even they couldn't figure who they were, and had to go "find themselves" as if their personality had gone out for a gallon of milk and never come home.
Everyone blames every other person in the world for limiting them, trapping them, not dedicating their lives to entertaining and sustaining them. Caught without empathy but with plenty of resentment, whatever dirt one person does to another becomes ennobled, because it is somehow striking back at the oppressor. (The Graduate is a really classic example of this. Everyone finds their only gratification in hurting someone else - the circle shit instead of the circle jerk.)
At the end of the book or movie, some people might be dead and maybe even one or two have had a lesson hammered home with such a big clue-by-four that it made a shallow dent in their concrete self-absorption, but the rest of the cast is just left with the eternal, unanswered question of "how did it get to be about anyone else when the world is all about me?"
This particular book - nameless because it will eventually be reviewed - is theoretically a private detective novel, although we have yet to see crime or detective. Instead, we have passages like these:
"Amelia, dreamy and languid with the heat, lay on her back on the scorched grass and fired earth of the lawn, staring up at the endless, cloudless blue, pierced only by the giant hollyhocks that grew like weeds in the garden. She watched the reckless, sky-diving swallows and listened to the pleasing buzz and hum of the insect world. A ladybird crawled across the freckled skin of her arm. A hot air balloon drifted lazily overhead and she wished she could be bothered to wake Sylvia and tell her about it."
or
"But one thing was true - Victor would be nothing without her, but he was also nothing with her. At that very moment he was toiling in the cool dark of his study, the heavy chenille curtains closed against the summer, lost in his work, work with never came to fruition, never changed the world or made his name. He was not great in his field, merely good. This gave her a certain satisfaction."
Get a life, people!
Guess I'm one of the crew, because I hate 'em all too.
Thing is, it's not because the writing's so bad - it isn't. Oh, it's turgid and all, but it's a prime example of a literary movement I've decided to dub "70s Sociopathy." Remember books and movies like The Graduate, Virgin Suicides, Separate Peace? They were all the same - such boring people leading such boring lives that they're all clinically depressed, and they're so pathologically self-centered that they blame everyone around them for their stultification. I remember when such things were considered "edgy" and "real" because they "peeled back the artifice" - but if you take a closer look, who was REALLY the cause of everyone's misery? Themselves. They never talked - excuse me, were "unable to communicate" - and they were so empty that even they couldn't figure who they were, and had to go "find themselves" as if their personality had gone out for a gallon of milk and never come home.
Everyone blames every other person in the world for limiting them, trapping them, not dedicating their lives to entertaining and sustaining them. Caught without empathy but with plenty of resentment, whatever dirt one person does to another becomes ennobled, because it is somehow striking back at the oppressor. (The Graduate is a really classic example of this. Everyone finds their only gratification in hurting someone else - the circle shit instead of the circle jerk.)
At the end of the book or movie, some people might be dead and maybe even one or two have had a lesson hammered home with such a big clue-by-four that it made a shallow dent in their concrete self-absorption, but the rest of the cast is just left with the eternal, unanswered question of "how did it get to be about anyone else when the world is all about me?"
This particular book - nameless because it will eventually be reviewed - is theoretically a private detective novel, although we have yet to see crime or detective. Instead, we have passages like these:
"Amelia, dreamy and languid with the heat, lay on her back on the scorched grass and fired earth of the lawn, staring up at the endless, cloudless blue, pierced only by the giant hollyhocks that grew like weeds in the garden. She watched the reckless, sky-diving swallows and listened to the pleasing buzz and hum of the insect world. A ladybird crawled across the freckled skin of her arm. A hot air balloon drifted lazily overhead and she wished she could be bothered to wake Sylvia and tell her about it."
or
"But one thing was true - Victor would be nothing without her, but he was also nothing with her. At that very moment he was toiling in the cool dark of his study, the heavy chenille curtains closed against the summer, lost in his work, work with never came to fruition, never changed the world or made his name. He was not great in his field, merely good. This gave her a certain satisfaction."
Get a life, people!
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no subject
Date: 2004-10-22 09:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-22 09:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-22 09:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-22 09:45 am (UTC)I adore this phrase. :-)
And am right there with you on that genre. I think it brings home for me what I liked about The Witch of Exmoor: it was full of those people, but for the purpose of having a couple of the characters (along with the author) grab and shake them. The interest lay in seeing if it did any good. Which, for the most part, not so much (which I think is part of why I didn't love it), but there was some effect.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-22 09:47 am (UTC)Stolen from Erma Bombeck. Swipe from the best, that's what I say!
no subject
Date: 2004-10-22 10:03 am (UTC)When I used to write reviews in an apa, my rating scale was:
1 star - a dud, don't waste your time
2 stars - some flaws, but an okay read
3 stars - solid, well-written, competent (this is my baseline for "average")
4 stars - distinctly above average
5 stars - awesome, knocked my socks off
On a couple of occasions I had to rate a book 0 stars because I couldn't finish it.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-22 10:47 am (UTC)These bitch sessions (and the reply comments) let me gel what I'm going to say in the review. Doubtless part of this will show up there, although I'm going to have to distill it down to hit my word count.