Actually, I do.
If you want to be nitpicky about it, I hate books. That doesn't mean I dislike all books, it just means I dislike more than one of them. It's more accurate than saying, "I hate a book." Plurals can be weird that way (1). Still, I've noticed that I seem to enjoy a disproportionately small percentage of the books I read. I can only remember one book I've ever read cover to cover multiple times: The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex. Then again, I may have reread some of Brian Jacques' Redwall series back in middle school, but I now have so many qualms with those stories that I prefer not to admit to having liked them at any point in my life. (2)
Luckily, I have a theory about my aversion to the majority of the world of literature. For a long time, I told my teachers that I liked to read nonfiction and write fiction, not the other way around like the school work forced me to. I still adhere to that principle to some extent. The thing that gets me is that I write fiction, and my inner editor is particularly vindictive.
For those of you who don't spend a sizable amount of your internet time frequenting the NaNoWriMo website, your Inner Editor is the personification of negative perfectionism that looks at the sentence you wrote and says, "That sounds stupid," or interrupts you in the middle of outlining a large writing project and says "Your structure sucks," or thinks far too much about the plot holes in the fiction you are writing and disregards the concept of suspension of disbelief. Basically, it's there to prevent you from ever being content with your work. (3)
The problem is, my Inner Editor is so nasty that it won't stick to just the stuff I wrote. I am intensely critical of the things I read, but not when it comes to message and the overall aura of a piece of writing. Instead, I get hung up on small details in plot, continuity, and sentence structure (4). In the case of a piece of literary fiction that has no immediately apparent plot and is written in a style that would be unsuitable for a plot-based work, my chances of being able to enjoy the book and appreciate it for what it is are seriously limited.
There. I said it. I didn't enjoy The Mezzanine.
A Howie page-a-day calendar would have been fine. Howie in the form of a short story would have been fine. Howie writing poetry would have been fine (5). But when I pick up some writing of any sort of heft, I turn increasingly judgmental and approach the book with my own strict set of ideas about what components make an enjoyable novel.
This "enjoyable novel" outline is admittedly geared towards mass-market fiction.
Thus when I sat down to do my summer reading and the narrator promptly broke every rule of writing style I had ever learned (6), I was unable to take Howie seriously or appreciate his insights. My apologies to Mr. Mitchell with regards to not following the rules from the summer reading assignment sheet: "Don’t
worry about how this book is unlike
other novels you’ve
read; take it on its own terms, and be open to its beguiling and
distinctive effects." Sorry, it was an unconscious reflex.
In parting, I offer a video clip with Stephen King giving what my Inner Editor believes is the best writing advice of all time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqp7A0B7abc
Footnotes (because, after all, this is about The Mezzanine):
1. A sampling of my opinion on certain books...
Liked: The True Meaning of Smekday, The Diamond Age, Jurassic Park, Things Fall Apart, Leviathan
Meh Books (reasonably enjoyable, but either plagued by minor failings or not outstanding enough to warrant "liked"): Railsea, Dune, 1984, The Hunger Games, Airborn, Silverwing, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Frankenstein
Disliked: The Mezzanine, Never Let Me Go, Boy Meets Boy, The Scarlet Letter, Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, Pride and Prejudice, Redwall (retroactively), Micro, Beautiful Creatures (I did the reading equivalent of force-feeding myself in order to finish this book. It was purely for research purposes, not entertainment.)
Then there are books I reject outright... I don't judge them by their covers, but I definitely judge them by the inside book jacket. I won't list these.
2. The more I think about those books, the more I hate them. Everything was saccharine, simplistic, and, if you ponder it for too long, racist. Why are herbivorous and insectivorous mammals always kindhearted, wholesome individuals, while carnivores are predisposed to be evil (with the odd exception of badgers and otters)(this was only ever challenged in The Taggerung). Why are said wholesome mammals so clever and educated, while birds, amphibians, and reptiles are depicted as barbarian and stupid? And what's up with the fact that mammal paws can be used to weave tapestries, build complex structures, and wield medieval weapons with precision, but the feet of birds (which in nature are more dextrous than those of most mammals) are only of any use if they have sharp talons? Crows use tools in real life. Why are the birds in Mossflower such butterfingers?
I think my dislike of Redwall increased in proportion to my interest in ornithology.
3. Eventually you have to decapitate your Inner Editor, or at least rip its tongue out, so that you can ignore your work's failings long enough to publish it.
4. For example, I got really flustered about a portion of The Hunger Games in which the verb tense lingers in past even when the story is advancing in the present.
5. I have a much higher tolerance for artsy tomfoolery in short stories and poetry than in long fiction. If I didn't, I'd never be able to stand being editor of Unique.
6. Focus on conflict, don't be wordy, focus more on describing actions than appearances, don't add anything extraneous...
Maybe I'm just a territorial hypocrite when it comes to writing...
It's posts like these that make me appreciate how easy to please I am when it comes to books. If I don't want to read critically, I can turn off my mind to anything I don't get pleasure out of. (It's related to being able to tune everything out and read even in a busy place.) That being said, I had the same experience as you of loving Redwall and then retroactively hating it.
ReplyDeleteAll of the books followed the same plot and the characters were completely one dimensional and interchangeable with characters from other books. The world of Redwall wasn't particularly clever either. And it still bothers me to this day that in the opening scene of the first Redwall book, the leader Rat is transporting his army in the back of a hay trailer pulled by a horse, indicating a presence of horses and humans that would never be mentioned again in the entire series.
I would add to your footnote that in one of the later books (maybe you were smarter than me and stopped reading them sooner) there is a stoat who comes over to the good side and then leaves the abbey and goes and builds boats. And in another, even more recent book, a shrew turns evil. (I can't remember any of their names. the names are the first thing to go for me.)
Redwall was one of my favorite series to read subbie year... I was obsessed with them. They were just a fun read with cute little characters and a typical/predictable but still entertaining plot line. Aside from a few plot holes (like the horses that jonny mentions) I did enjoy the books back then, but I don't think I'd ever bother to re-read them.
ReplyDeleteAlso I think that in one of the books, the birds in the attic of the abbey are discovered and although they are at first rejected as horrible animals I think (if I'm remembering correctly) that eventually the birds in the tower and the animals of the abbey come to respect each other? Or perhaps I'm just remembering this wrong.
Would you say that you enjoy stories with more character in them, like Virginia Woolf was saying in the handouts? Because it seems here that you get annoyed when authors spend too much time dilly-dallying on unimportant things in life, or if they just give in to simple cliches. But at this rate of criticism that you have towards writing it seems that you'll never find the perfectly written book... unless you write it yourself.
If you were Baker's editor, how would you have fixed his novel? What advice would your overly critical mind give him? I'm curious to see how you would rewrite the Mezzanine if you could, or if you would even bother to.
The kind of stories I enjoy typically have plot and character development of equal importance (Jurassic Park, with it's menagerie of cardboard characters, is an exception). Characters should act the way they do for better reasons than to advance the plot, and the plot should not just be a sequence of events that expose the inner workings of the characters.
DeleteIt's unlikely I'll ever write a book I consider perfect... my inner editor gets even more active when it knows it has the power to change what's been written. I'll just be able to write a book that consists largely of elements I like to see in a book. Under those circumstances, my inner editor is more critical of the execution of the idea than its substance, which causes me to write five pages of a story or script and then delete the whole thing and start over.
My main suggestion, if I were Baker's editor, would be to add more conflict to The Mezzanine. He doesn't necessarily have to extend the plot beyond an escalator ride in order to do this; it could be mentioned in any one of Howie's anecdotes. In the entire book, the biggest challenges Howie ever comes across are:
1. Broken shoelaces, and the possible causes of the situation
2. Somewhat awkward interactions with other people
3. Peeing in a corporate men's room.
By the end of the book, I've learned enough about Howie to know how he acts and thinks on a day-to-day basis, but I have little idea what he would do if he found himself outside his comfort zone. His life seems to be free from stress, which is a bit hard to identify with for a Uni student going through the college application process.
Maybe we could learn about Howie being fired from some previous job, and how he dealt with that. He could talk about his breakup with a previous girlfriend. He could describe a traffic accident he was involved in, and obsess over the mechanical intricacies of seat belts, crumple zones, and airbags. It doesn't have to be something big, but we should at least see that his life isn't all milk and cookies and green benches among evenly-spaced trees.
Although I do believe that the length (relatively short, by novelistic standards) of _The Mezzanine_ is crucial to its experiment (that is, he has to be able to make a fully fledged novel out of "nothing" plot-wise; he has to demonstrate by doing it that all these details of daily life can be subject to "microscopy" and remain engaging, forward-moving reading), I love the idea of the Howie page-a-day calendar! (Can footnotes be incorporated into the page-a-day design? Smaller sheets affixed to the back of each main date-page?)
ReplyDeleteAnd I have to admire the student who proudly declares his dislike of nearly every book he's ever read (*especially* those he's been compelled to read by a tyrannical syllabus) as his first blog post at the start of a new year in an English class!
Might it make any difference if you were to approach a book like _The Mezz_ as "nonfiction"? To genuinely set aside expectations about plot and take it as an actual "record" of a particular lunch hour in a real guy's life? If the complete disavowal of most "fictional" conventions is what leads you to not take it seriously, try taking it seriously as something other than fiction.
Applying Baker's style to nonfiction definitely helped when writing the pastiche. I ended up using somewhat embellished but otherwise true experiences and thoughts in the footnotes and random musings, and tied them together with a fictionalized account of my showering routine. I don't know how well this would have worked when reading The Mezzanine, though, since the majority of nonfiction I read is reference books, which tend to be concise and to the point.
DeleteI could handle Baker in small portions, but when Howie's memoir was expanded to fill an entire 130-or-so-page book, it became tedious. There would be short bursts of stuff I found interesting or funny followed by long periods of slogging through revelations about the 1980s corporate world that I really couldn't relate to--the pattern of interest/disinterest matches that of a game of football or baseball. I may have been less vindictive about the book had I not tried to shoehorn it into my concept of a work of long-form fiction, but I would still have found sections of it boring and somewhat irritating.
I'm having a similar experience with Mrs. Dalloway. I get sucked into the book whenever Septimus is around (except now he's dead, so who knows how engaging I'll find the rest of the book), but then the story jumps back to Clarissa or the excruciatingly boring Peter Walsh and reading goes from enjoyable to "at least it's better than The Mezzanine".
I'm not exactly sure why I tolerate Woolf's writing style more than Baker's... maybe I feel like people from before World War II (especially upper-class British people) have more cause to be wordy. On the other hand, I absolutely hated The Scarlet Letter (partially on account of the impenetrable writing), so that theory doesn't exactly hold water.