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30 August 2007

Dastardly Deeds: authorial missteps. What instances do you remember of being rudely yanked out of the flow or narrative of a book by some sort of gaffe on the part of the author? What sorts of mistakes or missteps seem to particularly bug you? →[More:]

I began reading "Solomon Gursky Was Here" by Mordecai Richler, and by page 43 I was moderately into the set-up, just beginning to get the "immersion" feeling, tender new fronds of belief just beginning to tentatively reach out to wrap around the characters... when I run into this:

"The third reporter, a girl named Beatrice Wade, was a native of Yellowknife, then with the Edmonton Journal. A raven-haired beauty, with breasts too rudely full for such a trim figure and coal-black eyes that shone with too much appetite."

And... ewwww. Totally ripped out of the story. I did the reader's version of a double-take, except it more like a triple-take. "a Raven-haired beauty"? a Raven-haired beauty, for fuck's sake? "Coal-black eyes"? Um, cliché much? This book was short-listed for the Booker in 1990, gods help us, yet this description seems like it was yanked straight from some 1930s dime-novel potboiler.

It was the very first introduction of the very first female character (of any import) in the book, and this criminally ham-fisted writing, plus the whole "oh ya, she's like really slim, see? but with these HUGE bazongas, you know?" just killed it for me.

I couldn't go on. Poor Mr. Richler, what is it about describing a female character that makes your brain turn to mush and bleed out your ears? Hm?

post by: taz at: 04:19 | 27 comments

I remember enjoying "One for my Baby" by Tony Parsons up to the point where the protagonist, whose wife had died in an accident, mentioned being in financial difficulties after her death.

Now the wife character was a lawyer in a big London firm, and I KNOW that she would've had what we call 'death in service' insurance cover, which would've paid him something like 4 or 5 times her salary, at least £250,000. So that spoiled the whole book for me, just that one piece of poor research.

posted by essexjan 30 August | 06:49

Stephen Donaldson's "Gap" series, where he uses the word "visceral" three times in two pages.

posted by gaspode 30 August | 07:05

Jo Rowling's books are full of such moments, especially Book Five.

posted by chuckdarwin 30 August | 07:21

I hate hate hate when the author uses the word "tattoo" to describe something rhythmic. Like 'his feet beat a tattoo on the hardwood floor' or 'the rain beat a tattoo on the window'. It seems like every cheesy paperback I read had that line hidden in it somewhere.

posted by andrewzipp 30 August | 08:11

Yeah, me too on the tattoo.

The absolute worst authorial gaffe I've ever seen comes in Mailer's newest book, the one about Hitler. You start out being told that the narrator is a former SS officer who was ordered to investigate some questions about Hitler's ancestry; he gets a nice narrative flow going for about 80 pages, and then

(sound of needle scratching across record)

reveals that he's actually a demon, one of Satan's lieutenants, who was tasked with grooming Hitler as a weapon to be used in the ongoing covert war with Heaven; the rest of the book is then narrated in these terms.

I've seen (and committed) some ridiculous narrative/POV stunts before, but this is the grandaddy of them all.

posted by cobra! 30 August | 08:46

Yeah, when Dr. Seuss is like, "Go ask your mother," in One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. I'm all, "Fuck you, doc, you wanna talk about my mother now? Go ask your mother, you fuckin' shitbird!"

And he should know better; he's an adult.

posted by Hugh Janus 30 August | 08:47

This happens to me at least once in every Steve Erickson book, usually in his sex scenes or depictions of women. But I almost always forgive him right away-- these books are all just invitations to join him in his fantasy, and once you settle into your role as a voyeur instead of a participant, it all make a lot more sense. Soon you are lustfully lapping up sentences you'd never have considered forgivable coming from anyone else.

posted by Hermitosis 30 August | 08:58

The beginning of Henry James' The Europeans. There are two people having a conversation. First, they are "the lady" and "the young man". Then, one refers to the other as "my dearest sister", so James immediately switches to calling them "his sister" and "her brother". When the brother calls his sister Eugenia, James instantly stops calling her the sister, and she becomes "Eugenia". The same happens for her brother, Felix. Then it happens again: Felix calls her 'dear Baroness', and from then on she is 'the Baroness'.

The lady -> His sister

... the lady went on, still looking at her pretty foot.
"My dearest sister," said the young man, always intent upon his drawing, "it's the first time you have told me I am not clever."
"Well, by your own theory I can't call it a mistake," answered his sister, ...

His sister -> Eugenia

"My dear Eugenia," he murmured, "were you so happy at sea?"
Eugenia got up; ...

Eugenia -> Baroness

"You are not ambitious," said Eugenia.
"You are, dear Baroness," the young man replied.
The Baroness was silent a moment ...

It's so forced and jarring. I'm tempted to travel to Massachusetts just to hunt down James' descendants and inflict as much pain on them as possible. I'm not sure that I've managed to convey the full extent of my hate for this passage, so if you want to suffer for yourself, it's here.

posted by matthewr 30 August | 09:10

Defoe pulls this shit in one book where his narrator mentions an anecdote he wants to tell, then doesn't circle back around to it for another ninety pages or so.

Christ, what an asshole.

I don't think it's a misstep so much as a stylistic narrative thing, but that really pisses me off.

posted by trondant 30 August | 09:44

[...] what is it about describing a female character that makes your brain turn to mush and bleed out your ears? Hm?

I had a similar experience to this when reading Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy a few months ago. (By the way, if you want to meet random English people in America, just read those books in public--soon enough, one will approach you and start going on about it. This happened to me three times within a month.) Anyway, Peake does well with adolescent girls and virginal spinsters, but when he tries to write fully adult women with sexual identities (as he does in the third book) he falls on his face.

posted by Prospero 30 August | 10:09

I can't put my finger on any one instance, but regarding ham-fisted lascivious descriptions of the female body, none was more guilty than Piers Anthony. I was a huge fan of the Xanth series at a certain age (puberty) and welcomed those mildly ribald vignettes he always stuck clunkily somewhere in the story, but after awhile, even I grew weary of them, to the point of dropping the series in mid-stride.

Also, of course, the puns.

posted by Atom Eyes 30 August | 10:16

This also reminds me, I remember reading somewhere that David Foster Wallace really admires Tom Clancy's ability to just up and suspend the plot for 50 pages of exposition about how nuclear weapons work. Clunky, but I guess the technique has at least one fan.

posted by cobra! 30 August | 10:26

I started reading Smilla's Sense of Snow and got about 20 pages into it before I realized the narrator was not a drag queen, but actually supposed to be a woman. The writing was so masculine that I just assumed the character was a man wearing a sundress, because that seemed the most reasonable interpretation of the writing.

I had to go back and start it again.

posted by occhiblu 30 August | 11:19

Mordechai Richler is notoriously unable to write women. The best he was ever to manage, imo, was Nancy in St. Urbain's Horseman, where he pulled off a female POV, at least for a little while. (Of course, the woman in question is totally focused on her husband at the time, and her conflict with her mother in law, who is an unredeemed harpy.)

I was doing okay with the first Harry Potter book until the second act-- after the sorting hat. At the point where the action should have started, everything wilted away for me. I think it was partly Quidditch, actually: I'm still waiting for any kind of explanation for how the characters ride broomsticks. From my own experiments as a kid, it's pretty damn impossible, not to mention painful. Why don't the broomsticks have saddles on them? Does no character in Harry Potter have genitalia? And the books as a whole were so clumsily plotted it was too painful to read any others. [/wanders away muttering]

posted by jokeefe 30 August | 12:08

Oh, and Prospero-- I don't really consider the third book a true part of the Gormenghast narrative, actually... more like a very flawed coda. When Titus leaves the castle, the whole world disintegrates. The story ends with Fuschia's death and the fall of Steerpike, imo.

(Though his description of Titus, about to lose his virginity, with his "cock quivering like a harpstring" is something I've never forgotten.)

posted by jokeefe 30 August | 12:14

Not 100% sure, but I think it was "Armadillo" by William Boyd.

The main character is going to propose to his girlfriend, and obtains the size of her ring finger "on a pretext".

WHAT pretext? Yes I'm sure it's possible, it must have been done many times, but just how exactly did he subtly find this out? Did he borrow a glove, take a handprint somehow, or what? This is something the character would have to think about, but it felt like the author just couldn't be bothered.

posted by TheophileEscargot 30 August | 12:50

In Clan of the Cave Bear (I know, I know, go ahead and roll your eyes at me, I liked it), Auel describes how Creb's eyes we dark and mysterious, but he only had one eye. I find it worrisome when I have a clearer picture of the characters when the authors do.

Also, lack of research drives me crazy. I can't remember what books, but a pool game had been described by someone who clearly had never played.

posted by Specklet 30 August | 13:18

One-eyed Creb surveyed the table with his dark, mysterious eyes, then sunk the 14-ball in the back pocket.

posted by taz 30 August | 13:25

*giggles*

posted by Specklet 30 August | 13:38

I like to read true crime, and theres always a section that goes something like: "the verdant hills surrounding Millvale were the home of the Algoquin Indians due to their fertile land and abundant streams" and you can just tell that it was cut and pasted out of some Chamber of Commerce brochure.

(Nice thread, you guys are interesting people.)

posted by StickyCarpet 30 August | 13:44

Oh yes, when authors obviously don't do their research, and just make stuff up to suit the novel's purpose, that really jars me out of the narrative. I'm trying to think of a specific example...

posted by muddgirl 30 August | 15:31

(Though his description of Titus, about to lose his virginity, with his "cock quivering like a harpstring" is something I've never forgotten.)

I read that very passage to a friend of mine when I got to it, and her response was, "Has he ever even seen a penis?"

And yes, if I go back to those books again I'll stop at the end of the second one--I felt as if the first two books offered a complete experience. The ancillary material in the back of the volume said that the third book was essentially assembled by Peake's wife from Peake's drafts, and that the editors went to town on it--I'm not sure that's the problem, but it's certainly a problem.

Oh yes, when authors obviously don't do their research, and just make stuff up to suit the novel's purpose, that really jars me out of the narrative. I'm trying to think of a specific example...

In Irvine Welsh's The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (published in 2006), a character goes to a Star Trek convention hoping to meet DeForest Kelley. Is that the kind of thing you're thinking of?

posted by Prospero 30 August | 15:42

Oh, if you're talking about factual goofs, for some reason I always get hung up on a couple in Watchmen:

- when Big Figure and his goons are trying to get into Rorschach's cell, the dialog says that they're using an arc welder to cut metal (and the subsequent electrocution hangs on this). But you'd use a (non-electrical) blowtorch, not a welder.

- Towards the end of the book, in Antarctica, Dan Dreiberg complains that the cold is making parts of his airship freeze up, probably because it was wet after lurking underwater in the Hudson River in New York. Somehow, it never dried out in the immense amount of time it would take to fly a blimp from New York to Antarctica.

Both of those jolt me right out of the narrative every time I go back for a re-read.

posted by cobra! 30 August | 15:52

In Thank You for Smoking, any time a character went from point A to point B, the narration turned into MapQuest. I can understand trying to evoke place; I can even understand the occasional street-name-dropping to give your story street cred (when you're writing about somewhere iconic, like DeeCee), but this was just awful. Like he was desperately trying to prove that he really really really did live in the District and no, really, this was how Washington people are. No, look, I know how to get there from here and it's really a hard city to get around in. I hate that when authors drop focus to be cool.

Otherwise, I really liked the book. Until the ending, when there was no way to end it without making someone quite heinous indeed.

posted by crush-onastick 30 August | 15:57

I really liked Richler's Barney's Version, and if that's any indication, his narrators tend to flawed and unreliably so and that this is intentional. FWIW.

posted by jonmc 30 August | 18:35

It's third person here, jon. I'll probably go back to it sometime when I'm book desperate - after all, I did read Wolf's "I Am Charlotte Simmons" during a drought... but in the meantime, I'll nurse a grudge.

posted by taz 30 August | 23:41

I nuture a slightly conflicted affection for Richler, myself. I loved St. Urbain's Horseman, and Duddy Kravitz, and even the later books though eventually all his novels recycled the same plot, more or less. And his female characters-- those impossibly perfect and beautiful wives, loving mothers, gourmet cooks, etc.-- would seem nothing but expressions of his fantasy, if it wasn't for his impossibly beautiful wife, who was a gourmet cook and loving mother, devoted to her husband, etc. They, by all accounts, had a wonderful marriage.

posted by jokeefe 31 August | 15:43

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