Forever Isn't Over Yet - March 4th, 2008

One of the side effects of getting older, I’ve noticed, is that I’ve become increasingly exacting about the fiction I read. Tomorrow I’m going to carry yet another novel back to the library after trying and failing to get past the first few pages. “You can’t shit an old-timer,” a nun once told me, and more and more I’m finding that to be true within the first page, sometimes even the first paragraph, of a novel or short story.

In this case, it’s a murder mystery that looked promisingly grisly, tropical and topical, set in New Orleans immediately after Katrina. The prologue drew me in nicely, and had me turning the pages, but what defeated me was our introduction to the hero. He’s on a blind date, you see, a terrible, awful blind date with a terrible awful woman. We know she’s terrible and awful because she talks a lot while she’s eating. We’re not actually told what she says. Suffice it to say that she is talking a lot and that, we’re expected to understand, is bad enough.

I had fair warning, I guess. The blurb on the dust jacket tells us the hero “isn’t much of a team player” and there’s a reference to at least one encounter with a “beautiful psychiatrist.” Before closing the book I told myself I should give it a chance, that the “beautiful psychiatrist” might turn out to be a guy, which would put an at least slightly original spin on the plot. Leafing ahead revealed the good doctor to be a “she.” (This kind of fiction never involves easygoing individuals who are a delight to work with and who become entangled with short, plump, nearsighted female psychiatrists.)

To be fair to the author, the current primaries and the coverage of Hillary Clinton have left me with a tendency to narrow my eyes into two steel-gray slits at the slightest whiff of sexism. I’m an Obama supporter, but after reading opinion piece after opinion piece from liberals and conservatives about how annoying Hillary Clinton is, how “shrill,” her voice is, how “grating,” how “nagging,” how “like fingernails on a chalkboard,” I’ve become painfully aware of that assumption from which most misogyny springs; That there are few things more horrid than the sound of a woman talking. So back to the library you go, Mr. Downs. Sorry and good luck.

That’s just one example, of course. Back in the 90s, I began closing books or magazines when the hideous realization hit me that, yet again, incest was going to be revealed with a flourish like an increasingly threadbare rabbit pulled from a hat. A surfeit of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Ann Rice left me allergic to sensitive vampires. For a while I liked PD James, but her characters are so veddy veddy British that they all seem to have been injected with a local anesthetic that’s deadened not only their skin but their emotional responses. Murder in these novels often seems to be regarded as little more than a dreadful breach of taste. And as for modern literary novels, if by the fourth chapter I can’t think of a reason to care about any of the characters, or fathom why they are behaving the way they are behaving, or put my finger on an actual plot development beyond some affluent New Yorker/academic/bestselling writer looking in a mirror and thinking about how much his/her life stinks, it gets added to the stack of Annie Proulx and Don Delillo books people keep trying to get me to read.

I think I'll dive again into my copy of B.R. Myers' A READER'S MANIFESTO, always a comfort at moments like this.