Recent Books

I've been on a manic reading binge, fueled by the New Books shelf at the library (and just a bit by the excellent independent bookstore just the other side of the City border). Mainly I've been reading contemporary women's literary realism, a term I made up, by which I mean novels by women with women protagonists that take place in contemporary real life. Perhaps I feel the need to imagine alternatives.

In the last two months or so, I've read On Beauty, Heredity, How to Be Lost, The Devil Wears Prada, Prep, The Starter Wife, The Writing on the Wall, and Lost in the Forest. I abandoned Envy and I think I'm about to abandon Trophy House.

Some similarities, thematic, predictable, and otherwise:

- novels with lost in the title: How to Be Lost and Lost in the Forest

- novels with pieces of women's bodies on the cover: Lost in the Forest and Envy

- novels of trashy pop culture excess: The Devil Wears Prada and The Starter Wife

- novels with intense sister relationships and young girls who disapper: How to Be Lost and The Writing on the Wall

- novels in which teenage girls have affairs with men in avuncular positions: The Writing on the Wall and Lost in the Forest

- novels which explicitly reference 9/11: The Writing on the Wall and Trophy House

- didactic novels with annoying protagonists: The Writing on the Wall and Trophy House (The Writing on the Wall fascinated me--in fact I drafted a post about it that I never finished so this brief comment will have to suffice--because it was so consciously Literary and Meaningful and Crafted that it failed to come alive as a believable fictional world, though it was compelling enough, I think plot-wise, that I did keep reading; Trophy House, which I read three chapters of at the bakery with M this afternoon, is simply annoying: the main character pontificates about George W. Bush and real estate parvenus and is just way too much of a marker for a set of self-satisfied, self-righteous liberal values that I know too well and don't much like in person either)

- worst novel: Envy (you could make a case for The Starter Wife as worst, except that it is unabashedly what it is--a trashy beach read--whereas Envy has aspirations and fails at them, dreadfully)

- best novels: Prep and Lost in the Forest (both of which were like shots of pure pleasure, which I deeply appreciated, they were that good)

The thing I've been noticing most, as I read, is dialogue, I think because in three novels in a row--The Starter Wife, The Writing on the Wall, and Envy--it was so bad, and then it was bad again in Trophy House. What means this bad? Obviously bad dialogue is dialogue that nobody would actually utter (and I don't mean jabbering away about Quidditch, which surely real people would not do, but they would jabber about soccer or cricket, and the question is whether they are jabbering about Quidditch as they would about soccer or cricket). In these books, this unspeakable dialogue takes two forms (and I am going to write this without examples because this post is already long enough, so you'll just have to take my word for it). First there is stiff, awkward phrasing that you can't imagine coming out of anyone's mouth. Then there is the use of dialogue to reveal plot in a way that may be necessary for the reader but is completely unnecessary, not to mention unrealistic, for the characters, by which I mean when a character says to another character something like "you remember that time that I was lying in the bathtub and you came in and told me that my uncle had drowned and I started to sink under the water and you pulled me out and told me you didn't want me to drown?" Obviously the other character remembers this, and even if they didn't, a real person would just say "you remember when you told me about my uncle?" or "remember that time when I was in the bathtub" and the other person would remember and the conversation would go from there (this was particularly an issue in Envy) (though Envy's sins also had to do with an annoying and unoriginal protagonist with profoundly uninteresting sexual obsessions and a plot that by the middle of the novel was going nowhere and I didn't stick around to find out if it ever went somewhere).

One of the great pleasure, then, of Prep and Lost in the Forest was their dialogue, and what was so pleasurable about it, after those novels where the badness of the dialogue kept jarring me out of my reading reverie, was not noticing it, that is, just following along in the conversations between the characters, as if they were real conversations that I was overhearing. Other things that made these novels so good? How fully realized, and complicated, the characters were, and how flawed, yet how empathetically imagined. I also like books about things I know, and each of these books took place in a milieu with which I am familiar, though not overly so (I didn't go to prep school, but I know more than enough people who did; I never lived in Napa, but I've hung out there on occasion, really a fair number of occasions).

Anyway, that's what I've been reading, and a bit of what I've been thinking about it.