I started reading a book last night, a book I thought would be fun. It didn’t grab me, but I was sleepy. So I crashed and after getting up, I read some more.
Then I made breakfast. I ironed a skirt to wear to a barbecue. I wrote a post for tomorrow’s Jacket Copy. All the while, I thought about the book. Still wasn’t grabbing me. I have to get to page 50, I thought. I flipped it open. I was past page 50.
Keep going, I thought. Look how far you are!
But I started noticing things. Like the listing: “There was a bakery, a variety of cheeses, wines, homemade jams, relishes, and salad dressings, and a mishmash of housewares, personal hygiene products, and curios. In one corner, they had jeans, hip waders, fishing lures, and, honest to God, cowboy boots.” At first I wasn’t sure why the listing was bugging me, then I realized: it’s the emptiness. This list is empty of a character’s perception or narrator’s message, empty except for the incredulity at the cowboy boots. What kind of cheeses? What does a variety of cheeses mean? Is this place upscale or touristy or homey or a hard-to-decipher combination? It is none of these things. It is a list.
And it wasn’t just lists of things. This is how a character cleans: he “scrubbed down the entire room, dusting, polishing, mopping, vaccuuming the mattress and the drapes.” The listing started to strike me as lazy. No choices, just words piled on, like an undergraduate trying to reach a minimum page count. Another character is attracted to “this pretty, competent redhead, with her clear blue eyes and sharply carved face. There was something irrefutable between them, a flirtation, an attraction.” God, as I type them the words bug me much more than they did the first time. I crave an editor. Can we just pick one, please? How about an irrefutable attraction? A flirtation? Something between them? Do we need all those things, really?
The other issue was the wackiness/improbability quotient: things got unlikely for no reason, except to ratchet up the kooky factor. Small town. So it’s OK if you want a character’s jealous ex-girlfriend to be a highly-competent dot-com refugee ex-lawyer and the mayor, too. It’s not OK if she’s the one hammering nails into his tires, because then she is a crazy person, not highly competent. It’s OK if you have an aspiring Hollywood producer bring an out-of-control has-been Hong Kong action flick actress to his brother’s smalltown farm because they’ve been kicked out of their hotel; it’s not OK if the brother walks in unaware and said actress is freshly naked and knocks him out with a kick to the jaw. Because that requires a host of illogical things to happen — the producer-type breaking in instead of waiting, the actress riding in a car for two hours without learning where they were going, or noticing they were in a private home, choosing to walk down a strange hall naked and dripping out of the shower instead of finding a towel, having impeccable reflexes even though she’s a has-been, etc…. It’s OK if you have a guy leave a highly successful NY art career, even a People’s 50 Most Beautiful People kind of successful art career, for a smalltown California Brussels sprouts farm, and it’s OK that he’s the last holdout against the evil corporate developers who want his land for a golf course, it’s even OK, despite the fact that we’re to believe he’s the misanthropist of the century, that he makes friends with a local surfer, of all the local surfers the one who lost a foot in a freak shark attack, I’m still OK, even here, but it’s not OK that the farmer has teamed up with said surfer to grow some pot on his property, the same property he so desperately is trying to save from the developers, and accidentally grows too much and he can’t believe the surfer has told his friends about it… because none of that fits. Stoner surfers share. People in fear of losing their land don’t grow pot on it, especially when their ex-girlfriend the mayor has a vengeful ex-husband who’s a cop. And when an artist walks away from the art world, (a la Lee Bontecue, that doesn’t mean they stop making art, stop thinking about art, stop needing to do the art that got them bigtimefame in the first place.
It was at page 112 that I cried mercy. It was contrived, not fun. I felt like I was reading an elaborate storyboard, not a novel. If someday it gets made into a wacky movie — well, I don’t think I’ll make it to minute 112.
So you’re just getting around to that Pessl novel?