2 posts tagged “structure”

If you’re doing the book club and you don’t want any spoilers or if you don’t want your opinion tainted any further than the post title did, stop reading.

Okay I’m about halfway through this piece of shit and I’m torn between throwing it across the room in disgust or continuing to read just to see what inanity happens next. Let me summarize.

There are four parts, each w/ a different narrator. I’m partway through Pt 3. Pt 1 is narrated by a self-righteous dead 18 year old named Cheryl who made her boyfriend marry her their first month of senior year so they could fuck and not go to hell. It’s not a joke. She seems to have taken it very seriously. The action jumps all over the place. One page might be “this is the story of our wedding” and the one across from it might be “and then the blood dripped off the tables and onto my notebook.” Oh did I neglect to mention the manner of her death? A high school episode of violence, the description of which is so beyond belief that I can’t bring myself to say anything about it for fear of my eyes rolling irretrievably back into my skull.

BTW: Did you know that blood is maroon or purple? Apparently so. And in such mass quantities that you can be covered in it like glue, to the point where you stick to the hood of your wife’s car and make a ripping noise when you get up. I don’t think it was supposed to be funny. I hope not b/c it wasn’t. It was just unbelievable and gross. I mean, you can have violence well-described and meaningful to your story. This read like something written for a high school assignment.

And the dialogue? Ugh. Don’t get me started. I don’t know any human beings who talk like this (much less teenagers) and the dialogue is so alike that you can’t tell who’s speaking. Doesn’t matter much b/c all the characters are two-dimensional, unsympathetic and interchangeable.

So as I met Cheryl, the more she talked, the more glad I was that she was dead. I looked forward to finishing the section just to watch her die.

Then I went on to Jason. Jason was interesting. A drifter junkie haunted by his past. I mean, seriously. How could I not just love that? Well here’s how: nothing happens to him. First of all, he can’t just narrate his section. It has to be a series of letters to his “nephews” (wink, wink). Big chunks are missing b/c he’s blacking out but when he comes back, it’s so boring, I wish he’d black out again. Nothing of any consequence happens. He’s on a boat that sinks. Nothing comes of it. He ends up stranded on the Trans-Canada Highway w/ a guy out of the Russian mob… and nothing comes of it.

Then he actually gets interesting, right when I’m ready to give up. He starts telling this story of the day his brother is killed in a car wreck (nine years after this massacre thing; he writes the letters 10 years after, in 1998). He was on his way to his SIL’s house and when he gets there, apparently his cell battery was dead and he couldn’t call anyone (b/c who ever heard of a car hook-up charger?). BTW: This is a running gag, I guess. His gf, who narrates pt 3, has the same excuse thing happen to her. Anyway, the SIL, who just had the RCMP tell her that her husband’s dead, says to Jason “I have to have a baby NOW. I’m ovulating! It has to look like Kent b/c I will never, ever be able to conceive ever in life again.” So what does he say? I’m hanging on reading, hoping they’ll at least have angry, grief-striken sex. He says, I shit you not, “We have to get married.”

W.T.F?

So she says yes.

Now I’m dying.

They pass the scene of the accident, which is still being cleaned up, and head to Vegas. This gets better. They get to Vegas, get married at the same chapel where he married sanctimonious Cheryl. They go into the same hotel and *flash* they see a guy from their little Canadian hometown. So she goes off to play blackjack while Jason goes to the room. Come 2:30 a.m. She shows up for the fuck she had to have so badly that she hopped a plane to Vegas and married this loser. He’s all “Where have you been?” And, I shit you not, she says, “I had to kill that guy. He would have told everyone he saw us here today and I can’t have that. Now let’s make that baby.”

At this point, I laughed. I laughed b/c either it was her joking or she actually killed this guy and it is now officially the most ludicrous book I’ve ever read.

Guess which it is.

AND she got pregnant. How miraculous. With twins no less. To whom he addresses his letters.

After that, I was ready to chuck it. Then I kept reading b/c I had to know what happens next. Skimming ahead, the gf telling part three is scammed by a pseudopsychic who may have Jason in on her scheme. Then pt 4 is told by his religious nut father. All of these people have the same narrative voice, speak in the same dialogue… it’s just maddening. B/c this could have been cool but it is, to quote Syndrome, “Lame lame lame lame LAME.”

ETA: I finished it this morning. Apparently the Russian mob guy did figure. I didn’t care enough about any character to care what might have happened to Jason or why (pretty contrived situation, kind of like the rest of the book). And then the fourth part, narrated by Reg, was probably the best-written but absolutely not in keeping the the character’s established voice. You meant to tell me that the guy who’s telling me this is the same guy I’ve been seeing throughout? Doesn’t sound like him, doesn’t act like him, blech. He was the closest thing to a three-dimensional character written and when we come to the end, he’s just as self-involved and unsympathetic as all the other characters.

Oh and Jason was in on the psychic thing. He’d given the psychic a list of his & Heather’s (the gf) inside jokes so that “if anything ever happens to me, you can bilk her for thousands of dollars and she’ll feel comforted by the fact that I’m communicating from beyond the dead.

There was one single cyclical  and interesting plot point. If a friend of mine had said, “Read this for me for some feedback before I publish it,” I would have said, “this father/son issue is the key to your whole book. Lose Cheryl. Lose Heather.  Reg loses his sons, same as Jason lost his child when Cheryl was killed. Only Reg doesn’t know about Jason’s impending fatherhood and has his self-righteous “you were never a father, you can never know my pain” when Kent dies. That’s delicious. That’s huge. There’s your story.”

Instead I have 160 pages of no one to care about or identify with and I’m rooting for Cheryl to die and Jason to have unmarried sex for once in his life (yeah that showed up AGAIN in section 4, how you can’t have sex outside marriage), for stupid Heather to lose all her money and for Reg to have any kind of conversation instead of sitting in a Kinko’s writing a letter to his presumed-dead son. Oh and Heather? Is a court stenographer turned children’s author. She can’t just tell a story either. We have to wait for her to get off the phone, go to lunch, whatever. Cheryl’s dead. Don’t know how she held a pen to tell hers.

So many scenes that went nowhere. So many opportunities to tie bits of the story back to itself. Such unbelievably pompous dialogue that sounds the same out of every character’s mouth. Maybe this was some kind of POD book and I expected too much from it. I do expect that if you’re going to sit down and write a book, you should have semblance of how to structure it so that it has some kind of meaning. I feel like I just watched this author’s written masturbation. Now I sit back, having finished this book in maybe a week, and say, “And?” He zips up and leaves. Whatever.

Hey, at least I had an opinion