Books of 2015 Part 6: Bottom 12

Just to confuse you of course, I'm now in countUP mode. Yes, UP to the BOTTOM of my list. That makes sense.

61) Breakfast at Tiffany's – Truman Capote

#NewAuthors #BooksIFeltIShouldReadAtSomePoint

Yes, I’d never actually read any Capote up to this point, and I have to admit that part of the reason is I was put off a little by Gore Vidal’s unflattering portrayal of the man in his memoir Palimpsest (I'm pretty sure Vidal uses the term “absolute fuckstick” to refer to him throughout most of the book), as well as the similarly unflattering portrayal in his namesake film. Nevertheless it seems myopic to prejudice myself against a man’s writing based on his character, so down we went.

This is obviously a fairly iconic work, and the introduction of an iconic character in the form of Holly Golightly. It’s a bite-sized novella as well, really quite glib for all its legacy, and although I don’t recall having seen the Blake Edwards adaptation, I couldn't avoid imagining Audrey Hepburn’s voice coming out of the character throughout.

All this being said, which doesn't seem particularly negative (and believe me, I have an eye for the negative), why is this part of my bottom 12? Firstly, it’s not a big grand experience encountering for the first time such a short piece of writing when the story is already quite familiar. Secondly, although the story is familiar, it’s still irritatingly frustrating reading the hapless blokes fawn over such a flagrantly manipulative and selfish character as Holly.

I felt a similar kind of situation in Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust with all the men buzzing around this magnetic figure, but Capote’s characterisation of Holly just seems so transparent that it makes everybody so unsympathetic, to the point where I stopped caring what they did or what happened to them. It’s alright, but I certainly didn't love it.

62) Cujo – Stephen King

#NewAuthors

I remember a few years back, somebody posted on a LibraryThing forum a question: which authors working today would still have a legacy in one hundred years? OP put forward Stephen King as a suggestion because he’s done so many iconic works that have also been turned into so many iconic movies. I was snobbish and sceptical at the time but only finally took the time to do a bit of investigating this year.

Maybe Cujo was the wrong one to start with, but there’s very little in King’s writing that really makes me feel he has legacy-level staying power. What little there is exists solely in his ability to evoke feelings of unease; basically, he does horror well.

The trouble with Cujo is that there’s an attempt to draw out chills by evoking the legend of a serial killer in a small Maine town (King’s bailiwick, as far as I can tell) while telling the unfortunate story of a rabid German Shepherd dog. The attempt is just pure bluster, though, since the actual circumstances of the rabid dog attacks are an unfortunate coincidence, and those characters who explicitly recall the horror of the previous killings while encountering this dog just come across like small-town superstitious types. Basically, the parallels drawn by characters didn't have any manifestation in how I experienced the book.

Moreover, for the most part the writing and story are quite facile, and feel a little trite and clichéd when it comes to evoking suspense. There’s a completely ridiculous moment, towards the climax of the story, where the following happens (really rather large spoiler alert, if you care):

He turned and ran back to the cruiser. The dog chased him but he outran it. He slammed the door, grabbed the mike, and called for help, Code 3, officer needs assistance. Help came. The dog was shot. They were all saved.

            All of this happened in just three seconds, and only in George Bannerman’s mind.

I refer to this bit of silliness as a ‘reverse R.L.Stine moment’: the author’s egregious manipulation of the reader’s emotions by leading us quite clunkily down a garden path towards one outcome only to yank away the deliberately-conjured mirage as soon as we reach it. Inversely, with R.L. Stine it’s the case of “something horrible and terrifying happened! *new chapter* oh it was only a prank by somebody” but in this case I found it less forgiveable, because I should be treated with more respect than Stine’s pre-adolescent readership, and it seemed a laughably pointless event in the greater context of the story.

Anyway, ramblings aside, I think there is merit in King’s writing when it comes to evoking mood, but in this case he really pushes that advantage beyond its most absurd limits.

63) The Wapshot Chronicle – John Cheever

#BooksReadForNoReason #DoesntNeedAHashtag

This was my second real taste of Cheever, after Falconer came out #36 as part of the second half of my TIME reading challenge two years ago, so I guess it’s evident I'm not a huge fan of his stuff. I found out later this year that this was actually a National Book Award winner, and apparently I'm just contrarian when it comes to Cheever.

I should say that, like Roberto Bolaño, I first heard of Cheever as a short-story writer as part of the New Yorker Fiction podcast, and I think that his short story shortcomings become apparent here; sometimes your short story needs a bit of a creative flourish or stylistic innovation to stand out from the pack, and such formal inventiveness is utilised in the earlier parts of this book. However, as they quickly become unnecessary to drive the story forward, they seem kind of abandoned.

The only other reason this book is down so low is because I found it unremarkable, and as such unmemorable. It was a little slow-going, where I wasn't all that engaged with the family saga unfolding. Others, like the National Book Award panel, might react more strongly, but it frankly didn't take me long before I’d lost interest in this story or its characters and I just cruised through the last half of the book.

64) The History of the Siege of Lisbon – José Saramago

#CatchingUpOnMyBookshelf

Wow, how are the mighty fallen. I know I had The Cave at a fairly lowly position last year, but for my dearly adored Saramago to crack a bottom ten? I’d say ‘sacrilege’ if I didn't agree with myself on this account.

This is definitely the weakest piece I've read from Saramago (which frankly isn't hard, since so much of his stuff is phenomenal), first and foremost because it’s just a bit dull, but more specifically because the concept is mostly mundane, whereas his more Kafkaesque work is usually so arrestingly vivid and provocative.

This tells the story of a freelance proofreader who, on a whim while editing a writer’s history of the famous medieval Siege of Lisbon by the Moors, decides to insert the word ‘not’ as a correction to completely alter the facts of history. While it doesn't exactly go in an interesting direction from there, it does go suitably Saramago-esque, as this one naughty ploy gets the interest of his attractive sub-editor, and together they explore how the Siege of Lisbon would have gone had this ‘not’ conveyed a true depiction of the historical facts.

The main trouble is that Saramago’s strength is in writing plot, rather than character, so when his chief interest here is in exploring the protagonist’s psychology in an introspective way, the whole prose takes on a dry, academic tone which, when combined with the ‘revision’ of a history with which I'm unfamiliar, is very much a fruitless exercise in intellectual overanalysis.

In theory this is an interesting take on history and romance, and the notion that we’re constantly writing and rewriting history merely by living, but in its execution I found it sadly uninspiring.

65) Picnic at Hanging Rock – Joan Lindsay

#NewWriters #AustralianAuthorsIGuess

I thought it would be an interesting experiment to pick up this book - after I watched Peter Weir’s film adaptation a couple of years ago - and have a look at the comparison. My primary interest in reading this was in examining the portrayal of Edith, whom I found to be one of the most fundamentally unlikeable characters in film history, and I thought the book might add more dimensions to the character.

What’s remarkable, and really soured my opinion to a large extent, is that Lindsay’s portrayal of Edith is somehow worse than in the film. Every opportunity is seized upon to comment on the fact that Edith is stupid, fat, or fat and stupid. It’s just so much ludicrous bullying of your own fictional creation.

Do I have sympathy for Edith as a result? No; Lindsay allows no room for sympathy because Edith is such an unquestionably noxious presence. I could in theory feel sorry for an ethereal concept that may have been imagined into a laudable character, but when you do that you’re just siding with a non-existent character against the creator, which doesn't even make sense.

The book overall could be read as a ‘man vs nature’ tale but everything is so elusive and enigmatic that it doesn't quite have the grounding. It just doesn't quite have the portrait of the unforgiving bush landscape that the film manages to evoke.

At the same time, there is something unmistakably seductive about the mystery itself because it’s so elusive and ambiguous. So the book and the story’s legacy I can still fathom, even if I didn’t meaningfully connect with it.

66) The Last Tycoon – F Scott Fitzgerald

#ImAMasochistIGuess?

Yeah, I guess it’s that time of year when I again apologise to myself for reading an F Scott Fitzgerald and just consign it to the ash-heap of the bottom ten where he always, always belongs.

Actually in this case that isn't so true. Although Fitzgerald typically belongs in the bottom ten of any list (except for ‘writers that MOST make me want to vomit with rage’), this is a surprisingly enjoyable story while it lasts. Set in the ‘glory days’ of Hollywood, it’s largely a satire or lampoon of the Hollywood machine, of the type that if it were a film it would definitely, definitely win Best Picture at the Oscars.

It’s an unfinished novel, though, so there is a lack of finality to it, and it’s a little hard to get a firm grasp on it. It has some wryly amusing perspectives on Hollywood and the nature of fame, and the main reason it’s down this low is that, being incomplete, it had a fair bit of potential that just gets cut short. Interesting, really, that I was quite engaged with a Fitzgerald work but have had to drop it down the rankings due to its unfulfilled promise, but that’s where we are.

There is a sort of ‘afterword’ in the published edition that runs through “what would have happened next if Fitzgerald had finished it” which basically reads like summarising Gone With the Wind as “Scarlett hates Rhett. Scarlett loves Rhett. Rhett leaves Scarlett”. Ultimately there’s no actual value in this unfinished work unless you’re a big fan of Fitzgerald, in which case you’re a moron anyway and there’s no actual value in your opinion. Hey I'm just kidding, you’re alright. Let’s have a big round of applause for the moron, folks!

67) Heat and Light – Ellen van Neerven

#BookGroupReading

Wow, I keep contradicting myself with how many Book Groups I attended this year. Seems it was actually four instead of my originally thought two.

This one was Catie’s choice, and I can’t really remember what possessed her to choose it – I think it was just the interest in this book as a winner of the David Unaipon award, a literary award given to an unpublished Indigenous writer - so basically this book was unpublished and undiscovered until given the accolade.

But there’s a reason for it being unpublished and undiscovered (and if I remember correctly, those in attendance at this meeting were pretty well on the same page, although naturally I'm far more snarky than anybody). Mainly it’s a structural or thematic issue: a collection of short stories doesn't actually need a coherent through-line to be interesting, but it certainly helps. On the other hand, a collection of wildly diverse and variegated short stories can also be engaging in a different way. The trouble with Heat and Light is it falls into neither.

There’s a very explicit through-line for the first selection of stories, revolving around the fortunes of an Aboriginal family living in the shadow of Pearl Kresinger, the ‘matriarch’ of sorts, but the collection then takes a 90 degree turn and the remainder have nothing to do with it, or each other. There are similar themes covered in many of the stories (Aboriginal and lesbian identity being a key one), which vary from being really quite imaginative and engaging (as in part two, Water, which is just one long short story) to utterly dull and samey.

Basically there are some interesting stories in here but when taken as a collective whole, it’s just a bit of a mess, and nothing that really sticks around in my memory as engaging.

68) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce

#YepDefinitelyAMasochist

Perhaps more appropriately than Fitzgerald, here indeed is a writer with a perennial spot in my bottom 10. Bottom 5, even. I guess it’s safe to call James Joyce a bottom 5 writer for me, especially given that Dubliners (#57 of 63 books last year) and this (#68 of 72 books this year) were posited to me on r/books as things to ‘change my mind’ about Joyce given how much I hated Ulysses, and yet here we are yet again.

There is certainly less density, less experimentation with style, generally less ‘fucking with the reader’ in these two works than in Ulysses, so I don’t take issue with Joyce fans recommending I read these to try and change my mind, but for various reasons, Dubliners and this just didn't work for me either.

I guess my major issue with this book involves actually its key strength, which is the third chapter, involving a crisis of, and struggle with, the Catholic faith, full of hellfire imagery and sermonising. It’s all a bit heavy-handed and preachy, but I also found it a good self-contained story of internal struggle. It was interesting, too, that this was put in the middle of the book, as it frankly had the feeling of an ending about it, with the protagonist discovering grace.

I say that that was interesting, but it also seemed odd, and moreover, meant that when the book then moved on from there it basically went downhill. It’s all so much free-flowing introspection that unless there’s an intriguing personal crisis going on it’s just too slippery for me to latch onto.

What’s more, that third chapter underlined to me the fact that Joyce can write, but his vainglorious level of apathy for his reader’s interest or engagement is genuinely astounding.

69) Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels

#BaileysPrizeWinners

Tragically, this isn't even the lowest ranked of the Baileys Prize Winners, although we’re really down in the sub-basement of my list by now. I don’t have anything in particular to say about this book’s awarding of the prize; in fact I think it’s quite possible others might get a lot out of this book.

What I found most off-putting is that in the wake of my bottom book of last year, Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel, I found some echoes in this book, particularly in the way it tries to extrapolate the notion of globalisation from what should really be contained in a personal memoir style. Michaels’ writing style (she’s better known as a poet, and it shows) I found very oppressive, and egocentric, with far too much style clouding any substance. Too, many, commas, as well. I feel like there were more commas in this book than there were prepositions.

In spite of all this, and though it took me until the end of the first part, I had started to get into the story a bit, but then it just leaps through time and space for a second part that despite being explicitly connected, is really only relevant story-wise to the first part through a tenuous thematic thread. Frankly I found the second part completely unnecessary.

This was also the most de Kretser-esque part, as it was a lazy narrative device to introduce a supplementary story without a tight connection (de Kretser’s greatest faux pas was in trying to make a big dramatic link between two tenuously-joined stories). There are big events told throughout but I didn't feel they were earned, as Michaels’ dense writing prevented me from learning enough about the characters.

As I said, it’s possible others might have profoundly the opposite effect if they could get into the writing, but I found it haphazardly written, very stop-start and too technically detailed, almost clinical at times. Michaels is not as wildly pretentious as de Kretser, but the book felt more about her own writing than about the story she was trying to tell. It needed more story-telling, and fewer poetic flourishes.

70) The Secret History – Donna Tartt

#OhYeahTheMasochismIsStrongInThisOne

Speaking of perennial losers…

So I don’t know why I picked up this book. I don’t know why I then took the book to the borrowing desk and signed it out. I don’t know why I then insisted on reading it. Every damn day I was reading it, Bec would see me reading it and say “Why are you reading that,” given that The Goldfinch, Tartt’s even-more-acclaimed Pulitzer Prize winner, achieved such a lowly rank in last year’s reading.

The fact is that despite my ranking, I didn't despise The Goldfinch as much as others in my Book Group did, and furthermore, in the critical reception of The Goldfinch I caught wind a few times of this prevailing opinion that The Secret History was a different sort of book and, in many people’s opinions, actually better. Therefore, I think, I read this just to verify such opinions for myself.

And…they’re wrong.

Not only is it not particularly different in style or substance to The Goldfinch, this is a significantly inferior book: less interesting characters, far more mean-spirited and utterly, utterly heartless and pointless. I put it down and could only rack my brain to think of what was the purpose of writing such a narrative?

Let me explain the plot basically. A no-hope loser with zero personality, quite similar to the protagonist in The Goldfinch (except this kid has no “my mother was killed in a terrorist bomb blast in an art museum that I survived” reason for being so utterly devoid of charisma), gets involved with a clique of elitist Greek scholars at college (which gives Tartt open licence to make as many references to Plato as is physically possible), and then discovers his newfound friends accidentally killed a guy while on a Dionysia binge that more closely resembles a Satanic possession (I wish I was joking), and then when their more obnoxious acquaintance gets wind of this accidental murder, they all conspire to deliberately murder said acquaintance, also because he says things that hurt their feelings occasionally, and then Tartt tries to get all Dostoyevskian and people become alcoholics and shit.

It’s a genuinely awful piece of writing, actually made worse by the fact that Tartt throughout makes numerous intertextual allusions that are – unlike Michelle de Kretser – surprisingly erudite and even witty, demonstrating that she’s not stupid.

But where I felt that the protagonist of The Goldfinch was merely an unfortunately blank slate, onto which the larger and more dynamic personalities of the surrounding characters could be projected, our hero here (all hail the hero!) is just a massive loser. There’s a really weird recurrent plot point where he’ll tell a bald-faced lie about his background or even himself (because he wants his wealthy blue-blooded new friends to be impressed by him), without having any background knowledge or having done any research about the substance of the lie, and that is easily checked and verified, and then he gets shocked, astounded and deeply humiliated when that lie is very simply exposed for the bullshit it is. It will be something very much along the lines of (NOTE this is not an actual quote from the book, but it may as well be):

“Last week at a dinner party I had the most delightful long chat with Haile Selassie”

“Oh, really? I’m pretty sure Haile Selassie died in 1975.”

“Nope.”

“Oh. Well, did he tell you any interesting stories about his time as emperor of Ethiopia?”

“What’s an Ethiopia?”

And yet it’s not ameliorated, like The Goldfinch was, by the fact that there are stimulating personalities on the fringes, either: everybody’s just a stock-standard college cliché: the solitary intellectual, the bi-curious rich boy, the beautiful temptress, and of course the turbulent haunted alcoholic twin brother of the beautiful temptress. And for some reason, Tartt thinks we’re also fascinated by the hundred or so other characters that are incidentally introduced throughout the time at college: so much so that the final chapter gives us an Animal House­-­style rundown of what became of all of the fringe characters I couldn't give a shit about and mostly don’t remember having been mentioned. As seen in the miserable last chapter of The Goldfinch though, Tartt really struggles with conclusions.

It’s probably not worth the effort to spit so much venom on this mediocre book, but the two salient facts here are, firstly, I'm enjoying it, and secondly, I think it’s crucially important to dispel any rumours that The Goldfinch being so overrated was somehow anomalous in Tartt’s oeuvre, or that Tartt is in any way a writer worth bothering with.

The other real tragedy is, as I mentioned above, Tartt demonstrates in both of her books that she’s not stupid, yet her plots are so emotionally vapid, her characters so shallow even while they do zany things, and the books ultimately seem so pointless. I think if she tackled subject matter actually worth something instead of these flights of torrid fancy, she could actually be an interesting writer. But I'm highly unlikely to give her a third chance, now. That would make me the stupid one.

71) The Rainbow – D.H.Lawrence

#CatchingUpOnMyBookshelf

So what could be worse than Donna Tartt, you ask? Why D H Lawrence of course, that author so bewilderingly beloved by the shadowy forces in charge of the British literary canon and so despised by anybody who actually reads him. Well, obviously I'm in a bad, ranty mood after writing up Donna Tartt, but whatever else Lawrence may be, he’s not a writer capable of holding my attention for more than a sentence or two.

This was my second taste of Lawrence, after my much despised Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and I started to muse while I was slogging through this on the fact that, to me, Lawrence is the anti-Greene. You know how I say that Graham Greene, no matter what genre or content he turns his mind to, is a consummate storyteller? He writes generally with little or no fanfare, efficient but mesmerising at spinning a tale.

Lawrence is the opposite: he can evoke a time and place and themes admirably – possibly better than anybody else, but beyond that doesn't tell memorable stories. I just got hopelessly, irrevocably bogged down in his language, so languorous and turgid. There are some awkward turns of phrase, too, that make every third sentence a garden path that requires re-reading. Basically it’s everything that an English schoolboy should dread.

And there’s the crux of the matter: there is so much fodder in this book for a high school syllabus. While I didn’t care a jot what happened to Tom, Anna or the rest of the Brangwens, you could almost play a drinking game with the ‘colour’ imagery evoked: every page there’ll be several juxtapositions of “colour”, “bright verdant hills”, “shimmery white”, “black”, “shadowy” etc. so while it’s the sort of thing to give schoolboys nightmares, it’s the sort of thing that interrupts scholars’ and semioticians’ sleep for completely different and messier reasons.

There were peaks and troughs of action, don’t get me wrong, but it was the occasional peak followed by passage after passage of monotony, and I found this far more trouble to get through than it could possibly have been worth. What could be worse than such tedium? Well…

72) Bel Canto – Ann Patchett

#BaileysPrizeWinners

Facile soap opera ridiculousness is what’s worse than tedium.

This book, somehow bestowed with the Baileys Prize crown, was the most sappy, flagrantly manipulative drivel I've had to trawl through. As with the A.M. Homes, there’s semblance at its inception that it might be heading into interesting, murky territory, as a private opera recital for a Japanese entrepreneur visiting an unnamed (or fictionally named, I can’t remember) central American country is crashed by a group of terrorists who takes everybody hostage.

From there it progresses to an inexplicably bizarre romance story, as the siege goes on for days, then weeks, and all of the captives and terrorists take the time to really get to know and love each other in meaningful ways. It’s quite convenient that a couple of the child terrorists turn out to be girls, one of whom happens to be stunningly beautiful, while one of the captives is (as part of the premise) a world famous opera singer who makes everybody instantly fall in love with her by singing. Another of the captives happens to be amazingly adroit at playing the piano, which is handy when the soprano’s actual pianist dies in the only real bit of pathos from a diabetes-induced coma.

Firstly, the confined setting which in more adept hands could have been used to create an atmosphere of oppressive claustrophobia is merely used as a contrived capsule device to restrict the scope and allow for a potentially intriguing political thriller to be reduced to a romantic microcosm of people from different backgrounds forced to fall in love through circumstance.

Certainly there is a sense of impending doom for twenty pages or so, but as the siege wears on – and Patchett can’t even write herself out of the ridiculousness – the setting becomes routine so all we do is go through the cast of loveable characters and their relationships, even including some absurd “I love you so much I just want to tell you. Oh it feels so good to tell you. Now I’ll leave you alone forever because I love you so much.”

There’s something so childish and Mills & Boony about twisting a hostage crisis into bifurcating romance plots, and Patchett uses a lot of contrivances to work the story in convenient directions. There’s a Red Cross man, for instance, who is allowed to enter once a day and who becomes the deliveryman for plot devices required to establish the next romantic coincidence.

What’s worse, the writing itself is not sophisticated enough to ameliorate the far-fetched story. I hate to resort to being prescriptivist, but when the author herself uses phrases in diegesis like “they could care less”, it just feels lazy, resorting to colloquial clichés rather than being considered and thoughtful about the way language can evoke a mood. The whole thing is very episodic, and the storytelling progresses in a way that when the hostage crisis becomes routine, so too the book just starts to drag.

When it comes to considering that this was awarded the Baileys Prize (then Orange Prize), I find this all very problematic. As a white, middle-class male, I can’t help but feel that this sort of flowery rose-tinted arrangement of romances and people discovering new inner strength is exactly the sort of piffle that your typical misogynist would imagine when considering a “women’s prize for fiction”. So not only is it not a great book but I also find it’s not a great ambassador for the prize’s own value and merit.

I said to Bec when I was about three quarters through, and I’d just been bombarded to the point of exhaustion with saccharine tripe, that Patchett had better end this with everybody being killed – not just because it would become the only thing bordering on reality that had occurred up until that point, but because I needed some destruction and misery to reaffirm my faith in the intelligence of humanity.

So, spoiler alert (don’t read this book though): it comes too late, but kind of everybody does get killed. Not only did it seem a belated tokenistic gesture to verisimilitude, though, but Patchett simply wasn't satisfied with a book full of contrivances and a bitter ending, and had to throw one last piece of utter stupidity garbage in for the last chapter. Yes, two of the surviving characters may have had their lovers killed and it’s all so unfortunate after such a sweet story, but oh well at least the two of them can get married besides having little to no personal interaction up to that point, and they can live happily ever after hooray! HOORAY FOR JOY AND HAPPINESS!

Fuck off.