Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction

Not a Review

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close-up of a young woman reading a book

I decided not to review a novel a few weeks ago, because what I was reading got under my skin. Maybe I’m thin-skinned, or maybe I couldn’t adjust to the genre. I didn’t know it was a historic romance until a couple chapters into it. That’s entirely my fault. A few clues on the cover and in the general description should have been enough, but no, I thought it was historical fiction, maybe even a bit of fantasy. I even said to myself, “I hope this doesn’t become a romance,” a few pages before the book swatted me in the gut.

A woman, taken from her home as a child, raised by nurses in a distant land, and well-trained to survive and hide in the wilderness, sees a prince who is searching for her without a clear sense of her. She is hidden in the trees on the mountain side. The wind whips around the prince, pressing his cloak to his skin, and this medieval sylan thinks to herself (paraphrase), “Wow, is his face as handsome as his body?”

Maybe I’m a puritan, but this strikes me as completely out of character.

Later, when the prince is badly injured and she begins to nurse him back to health, the narration dwells on her need to wash him, and bodies have unseemly parts . . . It’s distasteful. It was all written indirectly, because it is a Christian novel, and maybe overall the story accomplished its goal, but I didn’t want to take it in. I’ve read worse, that is, more vulgar narration, but I wouldn’t have it this time. I’m not sure why.

Authors, Fiction

Where Are the Conservative Novelists?

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Reviewer Craig Ferhman writes, “Every so often, spurred by some kind of creative liberal guilt, someone will ask: Where are the conservative novelists?” He reviews a first novel from a conservative novelist, and I have to ask, looking at this review, if foul language is required for publishing serious stories today?

Fiction, Reviews

Critic, spare that bird!

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S. T. Karnick at The American Culture ably responds to Malcolm Gladwell’s recent attack on To Kill a Mockingbird.

Gladwell’s notion that To Kill a Mockingbird, first published in 1960, is insufficiently hateful toward white Southerners and is unsophisticated in failing to embrace radical politics is a truly breathtaking instance of ignorant bigotry. It is also not original, and it is wrong.

Fiction, The Press

…and every postmodern family is a dead loss in its own way

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Jane Austen's PersuasionOur friend Dale Nelson sent me a link to this New York Times column by Ross Douthat, all about why many “literary” authors are turning to writing historical novels, rather than setting their stories in contemporary settings. His interesting conclusion is that modern culture just doesn’t present the kind of conflicts that made the family sagas of old work so well:

You can write an interesting contemporary novel based on the “Anna Karenina” template in which the heroine gets a divorce, marries her modern-day Vronsky, and they both discover that they’re unhappy with the choices they’ve made — but the last act just isn’t going to be quite as gripping as Tolstoy’s original. You can turn the Jane Austen template to entertaining modern purposes, as Hollywood did in “Clueless” and “Bridget Jones’ Diary,” but the social and economic stakes are never going to be as high for a modern-day Elizabeth Bennet as they were for the Regency-era version.

I think he’s got something there. If you want to write a novel about, say, an unwed mother, you can suggest that your plucky heroine’s Neanderthal, Bible-thumping parents don’t want her to have an abortion, but there’s really nothing they can do to stop her. The only other problem her romantic passions are likely to get her into is that of sexually transmitted diseases. In that case, she either takes medication to get better, or she’s stuck with the problem for life. There’s little scope for her to heroically defy convention and shame the small minds; there is no convention to defy.
P. G. Wodehouse wrote stories about couples being kept apart by unsympathetic fathers and guardians, well past the point in history when such parental figures had “sunk to the level of a third rate power” (to quote “Uncle Fred Flits By”). He was able to get away with it because his stories were light confections, not intended to reflect real life in any serious way. If he’d been forced to be realistic, the fun would drained out like water from a lion-footed bathtub.
Is it an indictment of modern society to say that it doesn’t offer scope to certain forms of fiction? Probably not.
But I often think of the popularity of Amish stories in the Romance genre, as I’ve mentioned here before. I don’t think it’s unrelated to highbrow authors writing historical novels. I think there’s a hunger out there to be able to live in a society where people care enough about you to tell you when they think you’re messing up your life.
The autonomous life, in the end, is a pretty lonely one.

Fiction, Reviews

Dark Light, by Randy Wayne White

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Dark Light is another installment in Randy Wayne White’s Doc Ford series. I was quite pleased with it. The author has positioned this series so as to let his marine biologist/covert ops agent hero play around in both the international thriller and the mystery genres. This one’s a mystery, with the intriguing addition of a (possibly) supernatural element.
In the wake of a devastating hurricane that wreaked havoc on the economy and ecology of his Sanibel Island, Florida home, Ford gets drawn into a dispute between an acquaintance—an old fisherman he doesn’t even like a whole lot—and a property developer. The developer, as it turns out, is not only a crooked businessman but a serial rapist and killer. Ford and his friends end up competing with the developer and his henchmen in the exploration and salvage of a World War II wreck. This attracts the interest of an enigmatic neighbor, an beautiful old woman who sometimes doesn’t seem old at all, but is disturbingly seductive either way.
The supernatural element was what intrigued me most, fantasist that I am. Is the old woman the goddaughter of a famous beauty supposed to have drowned in the shipwreck, as she claims, or is she the woman herself, some sort of ghost?
Doc Ford and his friend Tomlinson are like the extreme poles famously described by Chesterton—one doesn’t believe in God; the other believes in anything. Ford’s unsettling experience with the mystery woman can be satisfactorily explained in purely materialistic terms. And yet, even Doc himself doesn’t entirely believe that.
You used to see this sort of story more than you do now, I think. Stories framed as realistic, but with the door left open just a crack for other possibilities. I like such stories.
Dark Light was an engaging mystery, with a pleasant aftertaste. Cautions for language and adult situations.

Fiction, Writing

On character in stories

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Yesterday I wrote about a couple Stephen J. Cannell novels I’d just read, including Cold Hit. Thinking about the book some more, I came up with further thoughts about something I’d praised Cannell for—his handling of characters.
The book is oddly dated by its presentation of a worst-case scenario based on aspects of the Patriot Act. Remember back around 2005, when everybody was scared that George Bush was turning the country into a police state, and how all the powers given to Homeland Security would have progressives herded into concentration camps for crimes of sedition? All that stuff’s still in force, right? Apparently, now that the Democrats are in charge, those same laws are suddenly benign.
Anyway, much of the tension in Cold Hit arises from friction and territorial infighting between the local police and federal agencies. One character in particular, a federal agent whom Cannell spends a lot of time teaching us to hate, turns out—in the end—to be a decent public servant, one who’ll never be the hero’s best buddy, but who deserves and gives respect.
It seems to me one of the weaknesses of contemporary Hollywood (I know I’m jumping abruptly from novels to movies. That’s because I think fiction sins far less in this regard these days) is that characters in movies almost never surprise us anymore. Hollywood has become all about stereotypes. All southerners (I’m sure you’ve noticed) are gap-toothed, undereducated bigots (except for Tommy Lee Jones). All preachers and priests are hypocrites at best, and probably sexual predators. If someone hunts, or votes Republican, they will be unsympathetic. All Latinos are “simple but proud” (to quote a good line from Thomas M. Sipos’ Hollywood Witches, which I reviewed not long ago), all Native Americans are simple but proud with mystical powers added, and all African Americans are wise. Young white males are drunken slackers. Young kids are smart-mouthed, and more intelligent than their parents. The moment a character appears, you already know all about them.
If you’re writing a story, surprise us with your characters. Find good in the ones you don’t like. Find flaws in your heroes. Your work will gain a lot of depth.

Fiction, Reviews

Reading report: Cold Hit & Three Shirt Deal, by Stephen J. Cannell

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Over the holiday, I read a couple more of Stephen J. Cannell’s Shane Scully novels, Cold Hit and Three Shirt Deal. It would be pointless, I think, to give either of them full reviews, unless one of them was bad (neither is), since I’m already on record as enjoying the series. So I’ll just post some thoughts, thought while reading.

1. Does the Los Angeles police department really allow an officer to be their spouse’s immediate superior? If they do, I think they’re nuts.

2. At one point in Cold Hit, Scully as narrator talks about the integration of female officers into the force. I thought the passage was interesting, because he listed good arguments the old guard used against deploying smaller, weaker female patrol officers. He largely answered them, not with a strong counter-argument, but by saying “It’s done, there’s nothing you can do about it.” I find that suggestive (in the inviting-of-thought sense). Probably it’s just me.

3. In spite of his theoretical advocacy of a co-ed police force, Cannell makes heavy use of the inherent pressures, interpersonal and job-related, that come from men serving alongside women in dangerous situations. One could, if one wished, read the whole series as a subtle argument against female recruitment. Again, that’s probably just me.

4. When I first picked up a Cannell novel, I didn’t expect much in the way of character development. Cannell is a television writer/producer, and that medium isn’t famous for the depth of its psychological insight (though The Rockford Files, one of Cannell’s shows, featured some of the best character writing ever done in the medium). I was pleasantly surprised. Perhaps as a relief from the constraints of the one-hour series, Cannell goes very deeply into the psyches of his characters. Indeed, in Cold Hit, he probably took it a little too far at one point, having a certain character make a personal disclosure worthy of Oprah’s show, in the middle of a gun fight. But that’s a rare misstep.

5. One drawback of the series format is that it’s hard to allow the heroes to change as much as classic story structure demands. Cannell has done a wonderful job of solving that problem by making surprising changes in his hero’s relationships, especially in Three Shirt Deal. What does Scully do when his wife/superior officer, previously the prudent one in the relationship, now becomes the crazy risk-taker, and he has to act like the grownup? The results are amusing.

Authors, Fiction

Not Another Great American Novel

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“Is the idea of the Great American Novel the worst thing that ever happened to great American novelists?” asks Malcolm Jones. “Some days it does seem that way.”

I’m not sure this writer has the right frame of mind. In fact, it probably doesn’t matter if an author hopes his work will be the next G.A.N. If it is, we will discover it for ourselves.

Bookselling, Fiction

Locus Awards for Sci-fi, New Pratchett Prize

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The winners of the 2010 Locus Awards have been announced. Winner of best fantasy novel is this metaphysical mystery by London author China Miéville:

The best science fiction novel is this steampunk tale called, Boneshaker, by Cherie Priest, who earned her college degrees in my part of the world (I just learned).

Also of note: there’s a new contest for new novelists of the U.K. and Ireland. It’s The Terry Pratchett Anywhere But Here, Anywhen But Now Prize. Wild acclaim and fortune will attend the winners of this soon-to-be prestigious honor.