If I thought it was hard to come up with a short list of books I liked, imagine books I disliked! I pity the fools who wrote these books. Actually, one pattern that emerged was that I really hated some books by authors whose other books I liked. Like hitters in baseball, authors can be inconsistent. These ones aren't even worth the trouble of sticking thumbnails of the covers in this list. Oh, just so you know, I really dislike fantasy and tend to avoid it.
Moo, Smiley, Jane, 1995
Abridged book tape. This is a light, fluffy romp through a plot of academic intrigue. Set in a midwestern university with suspiciously small-college administrators, this book weaves several stories together. Certain points of intersection between apparently unrelated characters are funny and surprising. Overall, though, I have to wonder why Smiley went through the trouble to write this out as a novel. She could have been just as successful producing it as a comic book.
The Suburbs of Heaven, Drown, Merle, 2000
Sometime last year, I read or heard a review of this book and this author's other title, Ploughing Up a Snake. I decided to read one of the books because they sounded similar to books by Carolyn Chute, a favorite author of mine. Chute writes about rural poverty in Maine, and Drown writes about a similar socioeconomic stratum in New Hampshire. There's an essential hope that I find in certain corners of Chute's books that I found lacking in this book. Drown uses the popular technique of a multi-voice narrative but with one clear protagonist, a middle-aged man who owes too much in taxes and is too beset by trouble to have any peace. His children all lead lives of desperation, one step ahead of (and sometimes tied with) death, the law, starvation and homelessness. His marriage, which appears to be healthy at the outset, is constantly threatened by forces in the environment of small-town New Hampshire. The story does crescendo to an unpredictable ending, but by then, the reader has been so bludgeoned by despair, it's hard to feel satisfied.
Andersonville, MacKinlay Kantor, 1955
This is one of those books I would never have read if it weren't a Pulitzer Prize winner. (I'm in the middle of a long project to read all the winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.) It's extremely long, and it took me forever (parts of at least three months) to finish. It is historical fiction about the infamous Confederate prison at Camp Sumter in Anderson, Georgia. The open pen that housed as many as 40,000 prisoners in a scant 28 acres was disgusting and inhumane. Kantor is annoying in that he continues to introduce characters in the middle of the book. Most of these characters are prisoners suffering the inhumane treatment of malnutrition, scurvy and other disease that defined the prison. The middle 400 pages (there are over 700 in all) are just about unbearable. At the end, Kantor widens his lens until the final chapter refers repeatedly to Thucidies and other classical figures associated with the morality and philosophy of war. Stay very far away from Andersonville.
Martin Dressler; The Tale of an American Dreamer, Millhauser, Steven, 1996
The first two-thirds of this book was an enjoyable, straightforward narrative of a self-made man whose fortunes grew with the 20th century in New York City. The eponymous character is a businessman whose business ventures build success upon success in the wide open economy of Gotham as development expands north visibly on the island of Manhattan. Apparently Millhauser wasn't content to write a straightforward story, though, because personal adversity mixes with fantastic exaggeration to end the book with a dissatisfying, postmodern explosion. The contour of the book truly dissatisfied me as a reader.
Remembering, Berry, Wendell, 1988
Remembering is so stultifyingly slow and boring for most of its brief length that the book felt much longer. Most of the action takes place within the damaged psyche of a middle-aged man. Again, pages at a time are devoted to topical essays that interrupt the flow of the story. While I agree with Berry's case against the corporatization of American farms and about what has been lost in the process, I'd rather read a free-standing essay on the topic than wade through a fictional character's personal analysis of the problem. I happened to read this book at a time when I was going to bed dead tired and reading a page or two a night; so a remedy might be to read the book in larger chunks, but I'm not at all sure larger chunks would improve this sleep aid.
Prince Caspian, Lewis, C.S., 1951
What is it exactly that people like about these books? We read this to Charlie at bedtime, and he really seemed disinterested. At the end, Paige asked him if he liked it; he said no. I had to agree. What a waste of time. What a lot of useless hogwash. The book even lacks the majesty of Aslan himself as resurrected Christ figure conquering hero that is at least present in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. On the one hand, I'm disappointed. I'd thought that maybe if I just gave these books a chance, I'd see what all the fuss was about. On the other hand, I feel validated. These books are pointless piles of crap, and I was right not to read them all along.
Downtown Owl, Klosterman, Chuck, 2008
After reading Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, I was excited to see what a novel by Klosterman would be like. He should stick to aging hipster social commentary. This tale of a small town in North Dakota barely gets started before it abruptly ends. Chapters organized around different people make an interesting narrative structure for a while, but a good storyteller would have had those characters eventually intersect, their lives meaning something to each other. Instead, it's all parallel story lines full of anachronism. I lived through the early 80s, and I don't think slutty Halloween costumes for young women came in until the mid-to-late 90s, for instance. It's dull. Although he plumbs the interior lives of his characters, there is nothing there.
About the Jane Smiley book: perhaps the abridgement is to blame for its lack of substance. I had occasion to read an abridged version of _To kill a mockingbird_ some years ago, and while its quality still shone through, it did not, of course, measure up to the real thing. If abridgement made Lee's great book merely good, perhaps Smiley's book was originally good and abridgement made it poor?
ReplyDeleteAbout the Jane Smiley book: perhaps the abridgement is to blame for its lack of substance. I had occasion to read an abridged version of _To kill a mockingbird_ some years ago, and while its quality still shone through, it did not, of course, measure up to the real thing. If abridgement made Lee's great book merely good, perhaps Smiley's book was originally good and abridgement made it poor?
ReplyDelete