We Came Along with a Hammer

So, uh….We’re back. Or rather, I’m back. It was all my fault. I could go into it, but why bore? New job, new city, new lots of stuff, including, eventually, a new library which had…..dunh dunh dunh…the Able McLaughlins.

Which was terrible. Worse than Poole? Ah, now there’s a puzzler. If you expect me to answer that you’ll have to pony up for the cost of a six month sabbatical on the top of a Tibetan peak, whence I could curl up into the Lotus position and truly devote my mind to such and abstruse and ineluctable philosophical puzzle. It’s terrible in its own way, really.

What was so terrible about it? Let me list the ways:

It had no plot to speak of. It had a succession of incidents which occurred in roughly chronological order.

Its main character is named Wully. Which is Scottish for Willy, it seems. It’s not the book’s fault that the only other person named Wully I’ve ever come across is the numb-skulled pictsie [sic] Daft Wullie in Terry Pratchett’s kids’ books. But it didn’t help.

It uses rape as a glib plot device. The victim is understandably and justly traumatized by the event when the plot requires it, and pretty much over it when the plot requires that, shuttling back and forth between these states several times. (You could easily say the same of several deaths which occur in the book.)

It was twee. As twee as fuck. Twee avant la lettre. When the most accurate, precise, and perceptive passages of description — the bits in a book where you read and go, Lo, here at least the author knows whereof they speak — concern a roomful of adults goo-ing at a baby, you’re twee and nothing but it.

In fact, that was maybe my biggest problem with the whole book….the most interesting, original, true-to-life bits felt like a rip off — when you’d come across a striking detail or telling bit of psychological insight, you’d think, “I wonder how she met her” not “I bet she made that up. ” It’s hard to pinpoint, exactly, yet I’m sure most people have had that feeling, especially reading a bad book — all of a sudden a character suddenly pops up off the page, a bas-relief portrait in a stick figure drawing, and you have the distinct feeling that this is a person the author’s remembering, not one they’re assembling. They say you can catch a liar by watching their eyes, that people look up and to the right when remembering, and up and to the left when making stuff up. Maybe that comes through on the page somehow.

Everybody steals, of course, especially from themselves — their own experience —but the good writers steal bits, use a glimmer of thread and not whole cloth. I remember when I was on a big Nabokov kick in college, I read several of his books quite close together, including his autobiography. I was somewhat horrified when he mentioned his mother had, after her husband’s death, worn his father’s wedding ring over her own, tying them together with thread. For he had given that same detail to the mother of one of his characters, in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. (The mild-mannered protagonist of which was outfitted with Nabokov’s younger brother’s mouse-grey spats.) It seemed to me a violation, to steal such a gesture of sorrow from one’s own mother, and use it to make pitiable one’s fictional creation.

But that’s the thing — when I first read about the two rings in Sebastian Knight, I believed in them as fiction, because Nabokov’s a great writer. I believed him fully capable of imaging such a precise symbol of a widow’s grief, and it was a little shock to see he’d nicked it from reality. The observed detail enhanced the fictional world, and fit within it — Nabokov may have adorned his fictional widow with real jewelry, but the detail was selected to illustrate a character whose purpose and personality were known, and served the story.

Maybe that’s what the difference is with a bad writer, and a bad book — you read these sharp and particular descriptions about one character, and they don’t serve, they’re not leading to anything, they don’t snap like a puzzle piece into place, making the big picture that little bit clearer: They’re just there. That’s how you feel about a lot of Wilson’s best writing — it’s just there. She wants to cram it in, wants to show you these people she finds fascinating, the the plot of the story is just draped around them somehow, while they remain inert. Reading about the most interesting of them made me mildly curious about life on the plains back in the day, but if anything more contemptuous of the author.

So, in a word, blech. Onto So Big.