Dull Dogs and Drowned Towns

Here's a book that I am not going to finish. I never used to do this. I tried to give every author a chance to make her whole case, beginning to end. I'm older; time is shorter.

I picked up this as a book-on-tape at the local public library because it purports to be about a novelist who writes (under a pseudonym) a UFO potboiler that takes off unexpectedly into bestseller-stratosphere. I thought, hey, that sounds like fun: a little fantasy trip into a place that most novelists dream of, even if they never seriously make a move in that direction.

It's a relentless drag. I had to go through three and a half forty-five minute tapes (out of 8) before anything happened involving the UFO book. Meanwhile you get long flashbacks into a rather boring marriage, and an escalating litany of miseries. The protagonist's son has caught him in adultery, behaves so hatefully that you just want to slap him, and runs away (good riddance, I thought, but his parents go into agonies). What should be fast and wicked satire is a dreary plod through one mess after another with a "hero" who is increasingly victimized in sadistically sordid situations (like the radio interview with a talk-show host who pretends to be having a blow-job while gabbing to his listeners; just a joke, of course, but so distasteful that you just want to walk away, fast).

The Hell of it is, this book is very well written. The observation of both interior and exterior conditions is clear, elegantly phrased, and convincing, and the writing throughout is supple and strong. In some ways it's an interesting counterpoint to the sure domestic eye of a writer of family studies like Jane Smiley, but with (mostly) a masculine point of view instead.

Me, I've had it. I'm going to skip to the final tape, just to see whether anything gets rescued from the protagonist's glum descent from hope, ambition, and self-respect. But frankly, I'm not expecting much. I think my strong negative reaction comes partly from a basic character flaw of my own (impatience — jeez, let's get to the point, already!) and partly from the presentation of the book, which promised a wry look at deeply compromised literary success but which delivers instead a long, downbeat study of an unhappy family and a literary success that brings nothing but humiliation and remorse.

But books that you don't like can teach you (as a writer) as much as books that you love. This one points out the dangers of raising expectations in the reader and then delivering satisfactions that are too long deferred, if not derailed indefinitely; and the dangers of writing seriously depressing stories that limp on and on through the slough of despond because that's what you set out to do and that's what you're by God doing. That may be gratifying to write sometimes, a real release for the author; but it's most often a chore to read. Many readers will not stay the course, and I don't blame them. As a person prone to writing rather dark tales myself, this is a good thing to be reminded of. I'm grateful, even as I close the rejected work and put it aside to be returned to the library unfinished.

[I did listen to the last tape; more drearyness, with an ending that I think is at least supposed to offer the hope of better times. For this reader, that faint and compromised promise just is not enough to make me want to go back and listen to the missed half of the book.]

Anybody who wants the name of this novel can request it from me via e-mail. I'm not putting it here because, given the work and the real talent put into this novel by its author, I don't feel right about identifying it further here, in an essentially negative review. Writing is tough enough without other writers shooting you down by name in public. But the lessons of books that don't succeed with a writing reader are sometimes clear enough to spell out, so I took that opportunity.

¤¤¤¤¤¤¤

I've also just finished a book by Peter Robinson called In a Dry Season, about the mystery of a skeleton found in an English village once drowned under a reservoir, necessitating some difficult and involved sleuthing into the past. The evocation of wartime England (when the crime occurred) is strong, but the solution(s) struck me as obvious pretty early on from the way the story is set up, and not particularly satisfying.

Oddly enough, not long ago I came across another book with a remarkably similar set-up — a drowned English village resurfacing and the discovery of a skeleton setting off an investigation, this time of a past crime known but unsolved — the disappearance of a child. On Beulah Height is the latest in Reginald Hill's series built around British coppers Dalziel and Pascoe. It was a doozie — strong and deeply satisfying, with a powerful pulse of anguish hanging over from the past propelling it to a perfect, if bitter, conclusion.

I've been a hesitant fan of this series — Dalziel is often too crude and nasty for me to want to spend much time in his company, and the stories tend to be overplotted for my taste — but I've liked some of the TV films made from them very much, probably because TV scripts necessarily simplify the windy plot lines. So I was interested in trying On Beulah Height, and boy was that a good decision! Here's an example of cruel events reaching the stature of tragedy, and tragedy satisfies in a way that mere sordidness does not.

As a footnote — I was in Toronto over the weekend and turned on the TV Saturday night and lo, there was On Beulah Height made into one of the fine series of crime tales on the PBS program "Mystery." It was brilliantly simplified for the screen and quite effective, and a comparison between the book and the TV film is very instructive. The film goes for much faster, broader, cruder answers, pares down the cast and the complexity of the problems involved, and delivers a solid story — but without reaching anything like the intense power of the book. So here I find myself preferring the more complex book to the simpler film.

Both book and film are well worth your time. The book takes more concentration, but the reward for sticking with it is much greater too.

--SMC
November 6, 2000

Copyright © 2000 by Suzy McKee Charnas