The Scarecrow-in-the-Desert Effect

I have been trying to pinpoint what, exactly, I dislike about many contemporary fictions, a certain effect or technique. (Perhaps a lack of effect or technique.) What I dislike feels to be the same in each story or novel, at least in what it does in my brain, despite these stories and novels being from all different genres. Thus, it seems to be some sort of effect of the prose, a way the narrative is presented, an early roadblock on the path from the page to my brain. I have avoided trying to write about it, because I know I will fumble around as I attempt to describe and analyze the problem, but what's a blog for if not to work through ideas...

The provocation for this writing was a quick blip from Galleycat about an article in Wired ("Why Sci-Fi is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing"). In describing the article, Ron Hogan wrote, "So why doesn't the establishment take science fiction more seriously? Because, [Clive Thompson] observes, 'the genre tolerates execrable prose stylists.' (Like the literary establishment doesn't?)"

I've been growing dissatisfied with the word "style" recently, because often it seems like a catch-all, a way of pretending to point at something without really doing so. I could probably trace my discontent back at least to my post on "PKD and Style", where the limits of my ability to find the right words for what I was trying to describe are at their height.

Thus, to say "the genre tolerates execrable prose stylists" seems to me simultaneously obvious and unhelpful -- obvious, because my current dissatisfactions with many of the books I encounter could be caused by something that might be connected to this thing we call style; unhelpful, because "execrable prose style" is a judgment that relies so much on personal taste and sensibility that I don't, myself, find it of much use when trying to explain why some things hold my interest as a reader and other things don't.

I liked Ron's parenthetical addition, because I've had as much trouble reading books marketed as literary fiction as I have had reading books marketed as science fiction, as much trouble with stories in literary journals as stories in science fiction magazines. (Or nearly as much trouble -- I do think the effect I'm circumnavigating has less prevalence in the most self-consciously literary circles.)

I always first identify the effect as a kind of image: the prose feels open and thin, like a picture of a tattered scarecrow in a vast desert. It has less to do with the shape and structure of the sentences than the content of paragraphs. It's not that the paragraphs are too short or long -- they can be any length, although the effect most often presents itself in short paragraphs -- but that they don't contain enough of certain types of matter, or they contain too much of another. The matter they lack is sensual or intellectual -- the accumulated paragraphs feel like a wide-angle lens's view of everything -- and the matter that overfills them is unwelcome or unnecessary information. (This is how I know this problem is not one of "good writing", whatever that is, but rather of my own prejudices about what narrative fiction should do, or can do best. Intellectually, I try to stay as open as possible to all sorts of fiction, but really there are only certain types that give me real pleasure as a reader.)

Some of this began to come into focus for me when I read James Gibbons's review of Susan Choi's A Person of Interest in the latest Bookforum. Someone at Viking had sent me the novel, and I have a particular interest in stories about politics and extremism, so I decided to give it a shot. Ten pages in, I knew it was hopeless. Gibbons gets at why:

After Lee is questioned by two men from the FBI about possible links to the Chinese Communists, Choi writes:

Only one thing remained beyond doubt: Lee really had closed the door not just on native country and language and culture but on kin, all of them, said good-bye to all that and stepped over a threshold of ocean to never look back. There had never been a divided allegiance, a pang of nostalgia, not even a yen for the food, so that only months into his life in the States, when faced by two FBI agents in an American bus station, he could almost have laughed—not to be thought Chinese but anything whatsoever, apart from American.

There’s too much of this kind of intrusive analysis in A Person of Interest. Choi writes ploddingly, and at too great length, about her characters in the abstract; the effect is like reading an outline rather than a novel.

"[L]ike reading an outline rather than a novel" -- yes, that was part of it. For the next step in being able to identify the effect that is so common and causes me so much annoyance, I needed Alan DeNiro's review of The New Space Opera:

What’s more disappointing is that in almost no cases is this disassociation from emotion made part of the story (something, ironically, that literary realist stories are often decried for in some genre circles); as an unexamined baseline, the affectless life forms plod through adventures whose outcomes appear meaningless against the larger backdrop of thousands of worlds, hundreds of civilizations. As Ian Macdonald’s meandering narration in “Verthandi’s Ring” tells the reader, “war was just another game to entities hundreds of thousands of years old, for whom death was a sleep and a forgetting.” Again, this galactic void could be part of the observable texture of the narrative, picking up on how the enclosed space of a story -- much like the sealed hull of an interstellar spaceship -- can only contain so much prose.

The section of Macdonald's sentence quoted there is of the sort that, unless the context is very different from the usual context for such sentences, I most dislike -- such sentences create an almost physical reaction in me. First, there is the part about war being "just another game", which sounds like a cliche, a flatfooted attempt at world-weariness (though it could be something different in the actual story). More viscerally, though, what fails for me is the perspective. I think Alan's right that there is a problem of texture here, although I have no idea if he and I are thinking about texture in the same way -- to me, a story with creatures of such age and attitudes would likely only be effective if the attitudes were conveyed through implication -- if we were made to feel their age and disconnection from human-sized events, and if nothing were stated so baldly as Macdonald states it. It doesn't take too much of a leap for me to make Gibbons's criticism of Choi fit with DeNiro's criticism of Macdonald: here is another example of intrusive analysis, another example of what is, to me, plodding writing.

(It's interesting to me now to read my review of One Million A.D., where I said some similar things to what Alan is saying about The New Space Opera. I also tried there to get at some of what I'm trying to get at here. I'm not sure I'm getting any closer now.)

I'm tempted to say that the plodding comes from the prose not doing what I desire prose to do: offer me more to think about than just one thing, but I'm not entirely satisfied with saying that; it doesn't feel like it gets at the heart of what bothers me about such writing. It's true that the feeling I get from such writing is that my brain isn't being engaged enough, but it's also that the abstraction sends my readerly brain down paths it finds dull and vacant, that such writing creates an imaginative distance more appropriate to, as Gibbons says, an outline than a piece of narrative fiction.

To some extent, too, it's a matter of the right details. Consider, for instance, one of the few books I've read recently with complete pleasure: Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I went into the book with some skepticism -- it had garnered so much praise, I was ready to be disappointed. While I certainly don't think it's the most extraordinary novel of our time (what is?), I enjoyed reading it and found much of it moving and impressive. What particularly made it impressive to me was how McCarthy balanced action, description, and dialogue, and how he built a world through implication rather than through statement, something much science fiction aims for and only rarely achieves. Here's a randomly selected passage:

When day broke he pushed his way out of their den, the tarp heavy with snow. He stood and looked about. It had stopped snowing and the cedar trees lay about in hillocks of snow and broken limbs and a few standing trunks that stood stripped and burntlooking in that graying landscape. He trudged out through the drifts leaving the boy to sleep under the tree like some hibernating animal. The snow was almost to his knees. In the field the dead sedge was drifted nearly out of sight and the snow stood in razor kerfs atop the fencewires and the silence was breathless. He stood leaning on a post coughing. He'd little idea where the cart was and he thought that he was getting stupid and that his head wasnt working right. Concentrate, he said. You have to think. When he turned to go back the boy was calling him.

There are bits of diction (kerf, sedge) that make the passage different from the sorts of description other writers would create, but there's also much that is not extraordinary about it, much that feels artless in the sense of being straightforward, plain, flat. It's not an artless passage at all, though, because the plainness of much of the diction is countered by the complexity of the rhythms. A chain of monosyllabic words gets broken by polysyllabic words. The first sentence has sixteen words, the second five, the third thirty-one. The vowels echo off each other. Etc. So much of The Road is like this that the accumulative effect is immense, and part of the novel's emotional power comes from the shape of the prose in concert with the actions and events it describes -- McCarthy leaves much unsaid in the novel, much unexplained, and for a reader like me it is a more evocative and compelling book because of this.

Some of what I'm trying to say here could easily be summed up with the cliche command issued to aspiring writers: Show, don't tell. I'm not convinced that's exactly it, though. If my problem with so much contemporary fiction was that it tells more than shows, why, then, do I find Roberto Bolaño's work so captivating? A story like "The Insufferable Gaucho" should drive me nuts, but it doesn't. Or what about Borges? Or, to return to genre fiction, Cordwainer Smith, whose "Dead Lady of Clown Town" begins:

You already know the end—the immense drama of the Lord Jestocost, seventh of his line, and how the cat-girl C'mell initiated the vast conspiracy. But you do not know the beginning, how the first Lord Jestocost got his name, because of the terror and inspiration which his mother, Lady Goroke, obtained from the famous real-life drama of the dog-girl D'joan. It is even less likely that you know the other story—the one behind D'joan. This story is sometimes mentioned as the matter of the "nameless witch," which is absurd, because she really had a name. The name was "Elaine," an ancient and forbidden one.

Elaine was a mistake. Her birth, her life, her career were all mistakes. The ruby was wrong. How could that have happened?

Go back to An-fang, the Peace Square at An-fang, the Beginning Place at An-fang, where all things start. Bright it was. Red Square, dead square, clear square, under a yellow sun.

This was Earth Original, Manhome itself, where Earthport thrusts its way up through hurricane clouds that are higher than the mountains.

It's not about telling or showing, not about dramatizing or summarizing, but rather about what the prose is up to. Bolaño, Borges, and Smith all fill their sentences and paragraphs with stuff, but there is something about all the stuff they throw in that makes it feel, to me at least, like something other than filler -- purposeful, deliberate, specific, vivid. McCarthy's details become compelling through the rhythms they create, but so do Cordwainer's Smith's, though the details in the passage I quoted are told rather than shown -- but the telling is meaningless on a first read, since we don't know what most of the details refer to, and so we are left with their sounds and shapes, the ways they work together, the music they produce. It's a baroque and even ridiculous sort of music, and yet it works, I think, just as well as McCarthy's mostly plain, mostly ordinary sounds, because it is so very much a thing of its own, simultaneously an object and an effect.

The opposite of this is the scarecrow-in-the-desert effect, the sort of writing that makes me most impatient, the sort of writing I am least inclined -- least capable! -- of reading to the end. For some reason, it has felt to me that I have encountered it with growing frequency in science fiction short stories and novels; the reason I feel this way is probably that I have reached a personal point of saturation and my tolerance levels are particularly low, my sensitivity particularly high. The details in stories seem to be presented too clearly, too obviously, too much for their own sake and not the sake of any additional purpose. They are the details of outlines, details that plod. Statements of action divorced from any purpose except to state an action. Background information that should be made important through implication, not assertion. The perspective of the writer toward the material is an abstract one, distant for (apparently) no good reason. The tone is affectless not because it needs to be, but because it fell out that way -- or the writing is "lyrical" because that's what the writer seems to think "good writing" is.

In his much-discussed Introduction to Best American Short Stories 2007, Stephen King complained about reading lots of stories that felt "airless". My metaphor would be exactly the opposite -- too many of the stories and novels I read feel full of air. That's the desert the scarecrow is in. There's too much dead space between the sentences and paragraphs, not enough for my brain to feast on. I've read (well, tried to read) entire issues of magazines that feel this way: stories with vaguely interesting situations and characters, written by people with the ability to put together smooth sentences, and yet there's nothing else there, and the simple fact is, for me at least, smooth sentences and vaguely interesting situations and characters are simply not enough. (Why should they be?)

Do these notes even describe a single effect? I'm no longer sure. It's possible I'm not bringing myself any closer to understanding the scarecrow-in-the-desert effect so many books and stories have on me these days. I'm curious, though, if anything I've written here resonates with other readers, because by blindly groping toward a description of the effect, I hope not only to be able to better describe how certain pieces of writing affect me, but also to discover ways to avoid creating such writing myself. (Or at least, I'd like to discover more ways to try to avoid creating such writing. Any writer can make grand pronouncements, but it takes a particular mix of skill and luck to be able to live up to such pronouncements even rarely in a career. Failing better all the time...)