I've just finished my dinner. While eating, I read the final chapter of Robert Baldick's The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, which I recommend unreservedly to anyone who is interested in knowing what the world of writing is really all about, as well as to those who already know.
Because I've been working quite hard today, I thought it might be a good idea to relax by writing a brief blog entry. So, here it is.
I suppose the following will be something like a review, but since I have neither the time nor the appetite to read in their entirety the two books I'm going to discuss here, first of all, I should (under the right circumstances, which would probably include me actually reading the books to the end) be prepared to stand corrected etc. etc. Secondly, I should probably make some passive aggressive caveats. So, here's the first caveat: It's possible that I am too aesthetically inclined, which, if I allow myself to riff on the metaphor implicit in my use of the word "appetite", is a bit like saying, "In matters of food, I'm too concerned with how it tastes." The second caveat? I think there was one… maybe it'll come back to me.
So, anyway, I was reading a magazine about books (newbooks magazine, in fact), and I decided to have a go at the sample chapter of Room by Emma Donoghue that was featured. I forced myself to read further than I actually had any stomach for. (That metaphor keeps repeating on me.) I generally (if I think about it) consider myself not to be well read. Sometimes though (I'm afraid this is an objectionable thing to say, but I must), I am forced to consider that I might be relatively well read. This is the kind of thing that's likely to do it:
Directory reviewer Anne Cater believes Room is possibly the best book she's ever read.
So, how much have I read? Well, I've read enough that, at some time during my almost vanished thirties(I cannot pinpoint when), a change must have come about in my reading tastes. In my twenties I am fairly sure I remained omnivorous. As there is still some residual enjoyment for me, in theory, in the mechanical act of reading any text, so in my twenties, the residual enjoyment was still fresh enough to hold the foreground somewhat, and I could read almost anything with zest. This compares, I think, to the way, in my pre-teens, for a brief period, I could record 'the charts' from the radio onto a cassette, and listen to it, and think 'the charts' was great. I was slower to move out of that stage in reading than in music, because, I suppose, reading is a slower business than listening to music.
These days, as if suddenly (though the process must surely have been gradual), whenever I pick up a book that's badly written, I just can't read it. It only takes me a paragraph usually, if that. You may think this is not long enough, and I'm not giving the texts a chance. But how long does it take? How long does it take to know that a piece of food you've put in your mouth is badly cooked? Usually you don't even have to think about it. If it's bad enough, you spit it out as an immediate reaction. Most books as popular as Room produce the equivalent of that immediate reaction in me. And, indeed, Room has been a case in point.
Room is flat out badly written. You don't believe me? How can this be? you say? I'll give a few small examples of what I mean. Here's the opening:
Today I'm five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I'm changed to five, abracadabra. Before that I was three, then two, then one, then zero.
The first thing I note is the blandness of this meal. Secondly, the ingredients are not used in the correct proportion. Also, some of it is underdone and some of it is overdone. Clearly, the writer wished to telegraph immediately that we're in the mind (or at least the world) of a child. Fine, we got that with the first blunt sentence. This is also meant to evoke childhood in the child's preoccupation with birthdays, growing older, etcetera. We're travelling a well-worn thoroughfare here, and there is no unfamiliar scenery. We also have the capitalised Wardrobe and Bed, which are supposed to denote the magic of childhood through a kind of infantile animism. If one wants to convey that the world is alive for a child, or wants to suggest a 'quirky' and active imagination, I'm not sure that capitalising the names of inanimate objects is enough. In this case, 'quirky' by letters feels as clunky as 'quirky' by numbers. The feeling this gives of mere contrivance is reinforced by that fatuous "abracadabra". The rhythm and positioning of that abracadabra have nothing childlike about them; they are pure 'writers' workshop'. Contrived. And please note that by 'contrived' I don't mean 'stylised'. I mean that the writing fails to be either natural or well stylised.
So, that's the first three sentences, and my criticism of these three basically holds for the rest of what I read. For instance:
"I know you're excited," she says, "but remember not to nibble your finger, germs could sneak in the hole."
"To sick me like when I was three with throw-up and diarrhea?"
"Even worse than that," says Ma, "germs could make you die."
"And go back to Heaven early?"
Do children really talk like this? Honestly? I don't actually believe it. I wouldn't mind so much if there were something else in the prose to appreciate, but there's not. This is one small change I would make (if I were not allowed to throw the whole thing in the bin); I would change the last line of dialogue to, "And go back to Heaven?" In this case, "early" is part of an adult's idiom, used to thinking of a lifetime as a road they've already travelled some way down so that there's plenty of before and after to make comparisons with. If you have children, and I'm wrong, tell me I'm wrong. And even if I am wrong, here's a bit where the narrator pins a drawing his mother has made of him to the wardrobe:
Wardrobe is wood, so I have to push the pin in an extra lot. I shut her silly doors, they always squeak, even after we put corn oil on the hinges. I look through the slats but it's too dark.
Why are the doors silly? Because they squeak? That's tenuous. My impression is that the author is simply going on and on telegraphing that we're in the world of childhood, because at least it gives her a style (no matter how bad) to disguise the fact that she can't write. If you want to write an Irish character, it's no good just shoving in "Bejesus!!" and "Top o' the morning" willy nilly, the Irishness (if they really have any) has to be part of them, not superimposed. There's a rule of writing that says, referring to dialogue, that if a line only serves to characterise without having any narrative function then it's dead in the water. If you're actually a good writer, and know what you want to express, you can afford to disregard the rulebook, but I don't think that Donoghue is there yet.
Anyway, one reason I decided to write a blog post about this is that on the first page of Room, perhaps less than a minute after I started reading, I was struck by the thought, "Is this a new publishing trend? This is exactly the same style as that fragment of When God Was a Rabbit that I read." I'm sure there was also some description of the blanket on which the narrator was born in that, too, as there is in Room:
I look down at Rug with her red and brown and black all zigging around each other. There's the stain I spilled by mistake getting born.
In the bit of When God Was a Rabbit that I read, the narrator, as a little girl, was asking her mother if God loved various people and things. Ultimately, she asks, "Does God love poo?" I suppose the things that I noticed in common with this in Room are: the child's-eye point of view, the suggestion of a very close, caring and unorthodox parent, 'quirkiness', intimations of continuity with the pre-birth world, remembering the childhood world in great detail as an adult, recontextualised middle-class quirky faux-naive mentions of God and Heaven, a suggestion that there is something 'dark' behind the 'quirkiness', 'tragedy' and no doubt triumph over 'tragedy', etc.
By the way, the mother in When God Was a Rabbit replies that God does, indeed, love poo. That would explain why this kind of middle-brow pap rides high in the bestseller lists.
Evans writes:The last part of the childrens conversation you quoted actually derives from a possibly apocryphal exchange dating back to at least the days of the Regency. I only know if because Machen quoted from it at some point when referring to the days when he was marooned in London and had began work on his first major literary project.It probably goes something like this:’ An idealistic but penniless young man of letters asks an older writer, a Grub Street journalist, how he can survive and gain the same level of fame as he.The Elder tells him: ‘Young man, in order for your work to sell you must cut back on plot, style and originality.’The Young Man replies: ‘But if I were to do so it would not be my work: I dreamt of crafting great poetry.’The Elder: ‘Then starve and get to Heaven faster’ ‘Doubtless my memory has embellished it to some extent, but if it doesn’t go like that it ought to. Somehow I doubt the author knew of the original though.All the best,Dan
suddenly the whole world changed and for a three year old it was magic. s. had stepped into the window well outside their house. it was a clear cold day after a fierce blizzard. it was already a quiet day outside with the silent white blanket; two feet of snow. but it was all shut off as he stared at nothing but white,and s. wasn’t the least bit afraid buried in the snow.i thought i would try to write something short and simple… a gourmet image of stark experience.that was my first memory of life.now, how would you correct that paragraph to make it into ‘good writing’ ? just for fun. 💡
Nice challenge. I’ll have a go at this. Not tonight, but when I have a bit of time.
I relish the irony.
Joe Simpson Walker writes:I found a PDF “extract” of Room that’s something like 150 pages long? I have no intention of reading all of it. From what I’ve seen, the child narrator isn’t convincing for a single moment.
I’m glad I’m not the only one to think so. I think a child’s voice is fairly difficult to achieve in fiction, but there are worse things than being merely stilted – what I’ve read of Room being an example.
I’d be interested to know what you think of the opening lines of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. (If you have the time and think it worth opining about.)Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. . . .His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face. He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.O, the wild rose blossomsOn the little green place.He sang that song. That was his song.O, the green wothe botheth.When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell.His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailor’s hornpipe for him to dance. He danced:Tralala lala,Tralala tralaladdy,Tralala lala,Tralala lala.Uncle Charles and Dante clapped. They were older than his father and mother but Uncle Charles was older than Dante.—–This seems bad to me for some of the same reasons you mentioned above. Perhaps there are one or two good things that could be said about it. I’m not entirely confident in my judgment, and not only because Joyce was Joyce and I am me. Baby-talk writing isn’t to my taste at all, and sometimes I feel that I’m not a good judge of things that aren’t to my taste. About Joyce’s writing in general, in Portrait of the Artist and elsewhere, I have mixed opinions. Some passages are brilliant — indeed, some of the most striking, inventive, musical, and moving prose I’ve ever read; other passages I think are mediocre, boring, bad, or even ludicrously bad. Some passages (including some of the good ones) I wouldn’t claim to understand.
At first reading it doesn’t strike me as the best opening to a book ever. (I haven’t actually read the book.) It does seem to me more stylised than contrived, however (a distinction I attempted to make in my blog post).It occurred to me from some of what I’d written that it could seem I was championing writing by the rules, which is really the last thing I’m championing. But if one wants to be specific about what doesn’t work, and to give reasons, when one gives reasons it can come across as mere pedantic adherence to rules. This seems to me to be the great problem of literary criticism. Because I’ve struggled to understand good writing in order to practice it, I have a sense of the pitfalls that a writer can… fall into, but I’ve never taken that much time to systematise what I’ve learnt (and I’m doubtful it can be systematised). I should say at once that I’m still, very much, learning. The great thing, for good writing, is really having something to write about. I don’t mean that one has some kind of life experience like almost dying on a mountainside, or something. Having something to write about, as far as I’m concerned, includes a kind of awareness of style, but it’s a preverbal sense of a thing to be communicated. If it’s not there, it’s as if the whole edifice of a written work lacks foundation, and so tends to fall apart into meaningless bits. That’s my impression from the little I’ve read of Room. I don’t get the same impression from the lines you’ve posted here. My impression: though it’s possible that Room wishes it could be Portrait of the Artist… (and just as possible that it would eschew such), Room is written by someone grasping at the externals of what makes a story, and therefore making a hash of it, whereas Portrait appears to be written as I think fiction generally should be, from the inside out.I generally dislike ‘once upon a time’ being used in this way (in adult fiction), and for that reason alone, I trip over this right at the very beginning, and I’m not especially keen on or impressed by the style, but it doesn’t seem to me flat out ‘bad’, in the way that Room does.I don’t know if that gives a clear idea of my thoughts, but I hope it’s not entirely incomprehensible.
Thanks. That illuminates things quite a bit. I hadn’t thought you were advocating writing by the rules, and I think I got the distinction between stylized and contrived (my own taste leans toward stylized writing). But it seemed to me that Joyce’s opening was contrived, false, and maybe just plain bad in some of the ways you had been discussing. Beyond that, I had a subjective negative reaction to the baby talk (possibly due to a certain type of misanthropic narrowness on my part). It’s probably the cutesiness of that sort of thing that makes it hard to take, but I suppose I couldn’t plausibly maintain that a novel should never go into that territory just because of my aversion to it.However, what you say about grasping at the externals of what makes a story versus having a preverbal sense of a thing to be communicated, and writing from the inside out, really helps me to see the difference between Joyce’s passage and the others. Yes, that’s a vital difference; and however dubious Joyce’s opening might seem in other ways, he clearly doesn’t fail on that count as the others possibly do. Actually, the one thing I could find to like about Joyce’s opening, and almost mentioned in my previous comment, probably ties in with this. With a few quick, colorful strokes Joyce starts to sketch a world that you might want to keep reading about. You get a sense of riches to come (and there are riches to come, although Portrait on the whole isn’t one of my favorite books).This distinction between grasping at externals versus having a preverbal sense of something to write about, might also help to explain something I’ve always had a hard time figuring out: why it is that *some* old stories from the era of pulp magazines, stories written so clumsily and crudely that they might not even be publishable today, still seem wonderfully imaginative and still make for compelling reading . . . while often the latest novel by a career novelist, despite being on the surface far more sophisticated and polished, takes an act of iron will to keep trudging through. In the latter case, perhaps “there is no there there” in Gertrude Stein’s words, while in the former case the author had something to write about, something you sense that you want to discover, however crude and even laughable the presentation was. I suppose the problems with a sophisticated but empty performance might be apparent even on the seemingly high-quality linguistic surface of the prose, and could be analyzed and dissected by someone with the patience you displayed above, in a forensic investigation of why the damn thing is all but unreadable.Sorry for the length of this comment. I’m not quite finished.Concerning the representation of a child’s consciousness in literature, my own preference as a reader seems to be that an author not try to mimic child consciousness at its own level, but rather try to write at an adult level of rhetoric that somehow conveys the child’s inner experience. A couple of years ago you posted a link to a story by Saki called “Sredni Vashtar” (wonderful story; thanks) that is a perfect example of how well this kind of stylization can be done.But, come to think of it, even literary mimicry of a very simple mind at its own level can be well done. Perhaps it really is the cutesiness I can’t abide and not that kind of stylized mimicry. I’m remembering the extraordinary first section of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, in which the narrative is completely immersed in the mind of a 33-year-old severely retarded man for 92 pages, sans any kind of off-putting cutesiness. There are three other sections in the original novel, written from other stylized viewpoints, but that first section is to my mind the most powerful part, a tour de force of poetic prose, introducing the themes and settings and personages of the book at an almost mythical level of intensity. (Sixteen years later Faulkner added a 25-page “Appendix,” written in yet another style, that is, I think, even more powerful than any part of the original novel.)Concerning the problem of coming up with reasons for why something works or doesn’t work in literature — reasons which will inevitably come to seem pedantic — this to me is the great puzzle of even trying to think about these things. I’ve found that often I can come up with descriptions of what I like as a reader, and explanations as to why I like it, but then I realize that my descriptions and explanations could just as easily apply to other works that I don’t like. And descriptions and explanations of what I emphatically don’t like, once I’ve formulated them, can easily be seen to apply to things I do like. Either our lit-critical terms aren’t fine-grained enough to capture the relevant differences, or — perhaps more likely — the inadequacy of our terms is just a reflection of our introspective shallowness about what we’re doing when we’re reading.Feel free to take issue with any or all of the above, if you want to. I find that my views about these things keep changing the more I think about them.
Originally posted by gveranon:However, what you say about grasping at the externals of what makes a story versus having a preverbal sense of a thing to be communicated, and writing from the inside out, really helps me to see the difference between Joyce’s passage and the others. Yes, that’s a vital difference; and however dubious Joyce’s opening might seem in other ways, he clearly doesn’t fail on that count as the others possibly do. Actually, the one thing I could find to like about Joyce’s opening, and almost mentioned in my previous comment, probably ties in with this. With a few quick, colorful strokes Joyce starts to sketch a world that you might want to keep reading about. You get a sense of riches to come (and there are riches to come, although Portrait on the whole isn’t one of my favorite books).I’d agree with this, and I’ll give at least one example. This is the first part of Room again:Today I’m five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I’m changed to five, abracadabra. Before that I was three, then two, then one, then zero.Why the last sentence? What does it actually add to what’s already been said? It seems to me like padding, as if the author has thought, “If I can keep up something like a babbling child’s voice then I might be able to get to the end of the story without coming up against any brick walls.” Now Joyce:Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. . . .This is inchoate. The next line gives it shape by saying his father told him that, and his father, apparently (unless I’ve got this wrong) was baby tuckoo. So we have the beginning of family mythology. I actually think this paragraph, on reflection is the worst in the passage you quoted. Look at the last paragraph:Uncle Charles and Dante clapped. They were older than his father and mother but Uncle Charles was older than Dante.Fairly plain and not exactly quotable writing, but it introduces characters with economy and with a due sense of “this will be important later though it’s blurry now”. Also, if you compare the rhythm of Joyce’s prose to that of Donoghue’s, Joyce’s is brisk and precise – he’s actually being mindful of rhythm because he’s mindful of what he’s saying. Donoghue’s rhythm is meandering and lost.Originally posted by gveranon:This distinction between grasping at externals versus having a preverbal sense of something to write about, might also help to explain something I’ve always had a hard time figuring out: why it is that *some* old stories from the era of pulp magazines, stories written so clumsily and crudely that they might not even be publishable today, still seem wonderfully imaginative and still make for compelling reading . . . while often the latest novel by a career novelist, despite being on the surface far more sophisticated and polished, takes an act of iron will to keep trudging through. In the latter case, perhaps “there is no there there” in Gertrude Stein’s words, while in the former case the author had something to write about, something you sense that you want to discover, however crude and even laughable the presentation was. Yes, I think not all good writers, or what might be called genuine writers, have got the craft down, and, well, the degrees to which writers have the craft down vary hugely, of course. A writer with ‘something there’ will always be preferable to a writer with craft, but nothing there, in my opinion. But there may even be something like a false dichotomy here, as, in my opinion, any genuine craft has to proceed from ‘something there’ in the first place. Maybe no writer quite has ‘nothing there’, so there are plenty with relatively good craft that proceeds from almost nothing there.
Originally posted by quentinscrisp:Maybe no writer quite has ‘nothing there’, so there are plenty with relatively good craft that proceeds from almost nothing there.i can’t help thinking that this is connected to what the writer has experienced. if he has experienced ‘nothing’ of any value, then there is nothing there. just saying…just saying, living a life comes first. :happy:
Originally posted by I_ArtMan:i can’t help thinking that this is connected to what the writer has experienced. if he has experienced ‘nothing’ of any value, then there is nothing there. just saying…just saying, living a life comes first. I think I agree with this to an extent, but it doesn’t seem to be a strict correlation. Some people can have extraordinary experiences and, although they try, never turn them into good writing. Similarly, other people who have extremely uneventful lives can end up writing extraordinary things. There’s more to say about this. Maybe later.
yeah, it is a very flexible scale.