My Foray into Modern Fiction

I come from a family where reading is the favorite pasttime, except perhaps for eating, and almost all of my friends (except my boyfriend) are big readers. A conversation with any of them at any given time will usually include the mention of a book that we're reading or have just finished. Now the caveat here is that the books I read are usually suspense thrillers, murder mysteries, or chick lit; however, they're still books and I'm still reading. Every once in awhile I can mention that I'm reading Faulkner (every year I take a Faulkner book to the beach) book, or something by John Steinbeck (my favorite American novelist of the 20th century) or something by Latin American authors--I like Vargas Llosa in particular and now I've just discovered Isabel Allende. Basically, though, I lag behind my siblings and friends when it comes to reading books that were not written to get a $4.5 million advance and the Edgar Award for Best Mystery.

Recently, I've started pondering this, probably because I feel inadequate when I discover all the esoteric books my family and friends are reading. From the time I was 13 until I was about 5, I read all kinds of great fiction written in the 20th century by authors as diverse as Chaim Potok, Milan Kundera, Jerzy Kozinski (not spelled correctly), and Kurt Vonnegut. Why have I not continued in this vein? When my sister lists all the authors she likes on her blog, why don't I recognize any of their names? Why am I more excited about Sue Grafton's latest novel than the latest book by the guy who wrote The Kite Runner?

I was in the process of purchasing a Wally Lamb book that didn't really appeal to me just to say his name when someone asked me what I was reading rather than "Lisa Scottoline" or "Sara Paretsky" when I mentally slapped myself back to reality with a cathartic thought: I don't like books written by people like Wally Lamb. And the reason I don't like them is very simple: they just aren't interesting or even well-written. On several occasions, I've fallen for a critic's lyrical praise of a new work of fiction or a book that's won some National Book award or even a Pulitzer Prize and I've bought it at Barnes and Noble on a whim. Almost every time, I've been disappointed. All of these books are dreary books about painful human relationships that are caused by cold, unfeeling parents and told from the point of view of the multitudes. They run in three basic writing styles.

The first I like to call "diarrhea of the adjective and run-on sentence in present tense" and this style reads something like this:

She pours the lukewarm sepia tea that is supposed to be green but is always oversteeped so that it is never really green but somewhere between sepia and midnight oil out of the teapot that has poured countless such cups because she somehow thinks that tea is more motherly than another beverage and trying to be motherly is what she is all about although she has as much clue about how to be a mother as one of those animals that eats their young. Why do I do this? Every week I answer her call as if she is one of those hunters that blows a duck call and all the ducks come flying out of the bushes and over the murky lifeless ponds of winter just so the hunter can shoot them and brag triumphantly about bagging a bunch of ducks that might as well have been sitting because they fell for this siren's call and were not prepared for death. I sip her witch's brew and listen to her recount the details of her very uninteresting life that is filled with minor skirmishes over those empty headed despots she considers her social equals. I sip and I brood and I hate her with every fiber of my being for everything she has done wrong or not done right and I gleefully think of her choking on that tea and falling face forward into the plate of limp watercress sandwiches that she thinks are sophisticated but are just her pathetic attempt to look classy.

Do you like this narrator? I don't. One paragraph like this and I close the book angrily, especially if I've bought it. I know that the author is trying to emulate writers like Faulkner who see language as something rich and lush. The difference is that Faulkner knew how to write and even though his characters are tragic, they are sympathetic.

The second style is the complete opposite of of the diarrhea affliction, and I'd like to credit my sister Lindsay with helping me perfect my satire of it.

"Would you like some tea?" she asked.

"Yes, please," I reply.

We drink in silence. Later, on the subway ride home, I burst into tears.

Books like this are full of tantalizing vignettes that never really explain the story. They often have no ending or beginning. You are left wondering if the author simply followed a few people around, jotting down their conversations and recording their actions with no real knowledge of them or why they behave the way they do.

The third style is what I call "unnecessary character development in print." It is my understanding from a statement made by one of my clients, that nowadays, workshops about writing fiction emphasize character development rather than plot. My client opined that because I write nonfiction well that I couldn't write fiction because fiction involved character development and my nonfiction is based on telling a story. At the time, I was mildly insulted because I thought that telling stories and writing novels are one in the same. However, as I look over all the books that people praise that have been written in the last 20 years, I see that my client had a point.

Many modern novels are nothing more than the index cards that workshop attendees accumulate to use as background material for their characters. The result is 400 to 900-page tomes where every character, no matter how minor, has at least a chapter devoted to his point of view. There are some novelists that can a get away with this, most notably Vargas Llosa in his book La Ciudad y los Perros and Maeve Binchy, but that's because they manage to use these voices to tell a story irather than just spilling every voice in the book onto the pages. And the worst part of it is, I don't like any of the voices. It appears that the age of ugliness is upheld by book after book filled with ugly, bitter, savage people who hate for no reason and people suffering internal angst when they actually have wonderful lives.

Lest you all think that I'm just a cranky curmudgeon who likes to complain and has nothing positive to say about anything, I am pleased to report that this blog entry ends on a positive note. After spending 20 years searching for a writer as good as the writers that inspired and challenged me when I was in my 20s, I finally found one. About three weeks ago, I checked Ravelstein by Saul Bellow out of the library. Even though this book was another one where one male character idolizes another male character (often for reasons only known tp the narrator), such as Dr. Faustus, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and the Robertson Davies trilogy, Bellow writes so well, that I was caught up in his fantasy whereby an antihero is really a hero and I ended up enjoying the celebration of the main character, Ravelstein. I wish I hadn't returned the book to the library so precipitously because there were some great lines in the book that I can't quote word for word. But, my favorites go something like this: "He was one of those large men whose hands shake when he has to perform a small task" and after a comment that during Hitler's Germany, the world was convinced that Jews should not live, he wrote something like "That's something you feel down to your bones."

Good writing like that is something that I feel down to my bones.