Some Books I Didn’t Finish Reading

Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land by John Crowley

I find—and anecdotal evidence suggests that others agree—the epistolary novel to be an inherently wearying form. The e-mail epistolary novel is not just wearying, but ugly. Whenever I see the letters “lol” committed to print—actual ink on real paper—a little piece of my soul dies. Given that Crowley’s novel is about Ada Lovelace—godmother of the computer—it makes good sense for Crowley to compose half his novel in electronic mail. I just can’t read it, though. I can’t and I won’t.

Trance by Christopher Sorrentino

My objection to this novel, like my objection Lord Byron’s Novel, is formal. It’s purely aesthetic—visual, actually.

As you may know, this is a fictionalized account of the Patty Hearst story. Hence, there are gun-toting radicals involved in such high-adrenaline activities as stealing cars and sporting goods. These are, then, people in a hurry—such a hurry that they utter sentences like “The fuck took you so long?” and “The hell happened back there?”

Now, I know that the omission of the “What” from the beginning of each of these sentences is supposed to denote that the speaker is frantic and possibly a little out-of-breath. We may also assume that these radicals employ a casual, slangy kind of English. Nevertheless, I absolutely detest the way these sentences look. The fact that they are rendered as perfectly intact, complete sentences with no indication of elision really, really bothers me. The stuffiness of it seems to counteract the sense of urgency that the words—and absence of words—is supposed to convey. If these sentences were rendered as “—the fuck took you so long?” and “—the hell happened back there?”, I would most likely still be reading this book.

Looking for Jake by China Miéville

I’d been meaning to read something by China Miéville for a long time when I saw this book at my local library. If I ever do pick up Perdido Street Station or Iron Council, it will be despite, rather than because of, this collection.

Each story I read is basically a gimmick—sometimes a very intriguing one—and little else. I found the title story to be a total snooze. Ditto for the second entry, “Foundation.” Both tales had all the depth and none of the drama of a Twilight Zone episode.

“Familiar” had a lot more promise, but Miéville’s failure to deliver on that promise was thoroughly frustrating. The eponymous entity who serves as protagonist is an original and creepily compelling creation: It belongs to a down-market witch, and it starts life not as a black cat or a raven or anything so cozy, but as an oozing lump of matter. The witch, too repulsed by this grotesque spiritual excreta to make use of its power, tries to drown it like a kitten, at which point the resourceful beast embarks on a gruesome picaresque. It acquires body parts through killing and dismantling, and it acquires knowledge in the same way. This is a great beginning, but Miéville doesn’t build an actual story around it. The creature grows, and that’s pretty much it. The story also contains clues to an odd and interesting world, but clues are all we get. The climactic scene, during which much is intimated but little explained, is nothing but vague and clichéd imagery passing as profundity.

I skipped everything else in the collection and went straight to the closing novella. I hoped that, given its length, the story might actually go somewhere. However, I was only a few paragraphs along in “The Tain” when I decided that there was just no way I was following a lone man with a gun across a post-apocalyptic landscape for 72 pages. I acknowledge that Miéville might have done something brilliant and inventive with this hoary sci-fi trope, but the fact that the book I picked up from my bedside table when I put Looking for Jake down was a study of Neolithic bog bodies in Northern Europe should give you some idea of just how dreary I found the prospect of reading this story.

Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link

I really, really want to like Kelly Link, and I do, based solely on the strength of the absolutely perfect “Stone Animals.” I have been sadly and consistently underwhelmed by the rest of her oeuvre, however. I found “The Faery Handbag” to be entirely too precious, and the author clearly found her quirkily breathless teen narrator much more charming than I did. I was more irritated, though, by the fact that the story doesn’t really go anywhere. It’s all concept, with oddity substituted for absorbing narrative.

I found this to be the case with most of the stories in this collection. Consider “The Hortlak”: It’s about a convenience store that has succeeded from the chain. It’s also a convenience store where the clerks have taken up residence. One of the clerks wears nothing but pajamas, pajamas covered with impossible prints. And, finally, this convenience store is on the edge of a zombie-filled chasm. After reading the whole story, I was left thinking, “Yes, but so what?”

I will admit that I like for my magic to be the uncanny kind. That is, I enjoy stories in which the weird encroaches upon the mundane. I suppose that’s why I love “Stone Animals” so much: It’s essentially a haunted-house story, and nothing is more uncanny than a haunted house. When a story is nothing but strangeness, unmoored from reality’s gravitational pull, I just don’t care.

I skipped a few entries, and I gave up reading early in the title story, another tale peopled with adorably precocious kids who got on my nerves fast. Indeed, the effect of reading this story—as much of it as I read, anyway—was not unlike spending an evening with kids who do nothing but quote Monty Python.

I was going to let the above simile stand, but I feel compelled to explicate a bit. I do, of my own free will, spend time with people who make Star Wars jokes that 1 out of, I don’t know, 10,000 Americans would get. I have also been known to hang out with folks who could make prodigiously arcane jokes about Tolkien, except that I don’t know any Tolkien fans who joke about Tolkien. This is to say that I have nothing against geek culture—in fact, I often enjoy the Star Wars jokes once they’re explained to me. But the fan boys and girls (OK, mostly boys) I know are clever and inventive in their referencing, and they can talk about a variety of other topics, whereas quoting Monty Python is just tiresome. It’s speaking in a secret language but not actually saying anything, and I feel both Link and Miéville often engage in a similar—and similarly alienating—practice.