Of geckos
There’s a reason I’m wary of reading new authors, particularly those hailed as creative geniuses or The Next Big Thing. I’m a cautious reader, constantly aware of my own mortality and the absurd number of books that I need to somehow fit into this short window of time. The occasional bad book is fine, particularly when the badness is so outrageous it’s entertaining. Constantly having to engage with bad books on account of being nice to the literary market is too much self-sacrifice for me.
The most recent annoyance is Amit Varma, a famous blogger who has always wanted to be a novelist, and his recently published first novel is a huge hit. He’s the new Chetan Bhagat all right, with one major difference: several supposedly intelligent people think his book is brilliant, managing a precarious balance between “seriousness” and mass appeal. It deals with “issues” while still being easy to read. Easy to read is great; incompetent is another.
My suspicions about My Friend Sancho began when I saw its cover. Based on the artwork (pink heart, kooky font, cartoon lizard), I jokingly suggested the book was a hetero male version of chick lit and got a few laughs. The more serious problem was that I hadn’t read the book and wasn’t qualified to review it negatively (or otherwise, however unlikely). It’s a tiresome argument, so I won’t go into why I think you can often (though not always) judge a book by its cover.
To satisfy my raging curiousity (which existed despite my initial dismissal of the book), I read the free PDF version of chapter one available on Varma’s blog. I’m not inspired to read more. The writing is abominably bad. If you get past the bathos of the news report with which the novel begins, you’ll find yourself dealing with some oddly written conversation (who says “Boss can kiss my buttocks” without being publicly derided?). The clincher, of course, is the ultra-radical “This is how many times my character masturbates” introduction:
My name is Abir Ganguly. I work for a tabloid in Bombay called The Afternoon Mail. I am 23. I eat meat. I am heterosexual. I don’t believe in God. I masturbate 11 times a day. I exaggerate frequently, as in the last sentence.
It’s funny how I can’t remember the last time writing about masturbation in a dull, declarative fashion was even vaguely interesting. That’s probably because it was before I was born. Maybe it’s a throwback to Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English August. (I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.)
If there’s one thing that annoys me more than a smug writer of literary fiction, it’s a smug writer of popular fiction who wants to be literary. Or who wants to fuse the two, but is thoroughly unsuccessful. At the same time, I don’t doubt Varma’s monetary success. He’s just not coming close to Murakami any time soon.
But that’s just one novel/What’s in a name
I’ve been working on a list of annoying trends in fiction. Varma was just my inspiration to finally write all of this down.
Right on top of the list is the unnamed protagonist. Either s/he is unnamed throughout, slyly referred to as a he or she or the name is only glimpsed once or twice in conversation while the narration consists solely of befuddling “he”s and “she”s. It’s as if your character is saying, “I’m too important to be named!” or “My name will tell you nothing! The essence of me is in all the mundane things I do, think and speak” (my versions) or “I’m so important I refuse to tell you my name” (S’s version).
Here are some reasons why authors should name their characters and deign to use them: 1. People generally have names. 2. If you use your character’s name early on in the novel (for example, “Rahul went to the store to buy some candles for the badly written sex he will soon have with his overdescribed next-door neighbour” is far superiour to “He went to the store to buy some candles for the badly written sex he will soon have with his overdescribed next-door neighbour”) you won’t risk your reader confusing “he” with all the other “he”s having badly written sex in your novel. I’m done.
The other naming trend, which is only marginally less vexatious than the one just mentioned, is to give your character a hyperfictional name for some sort of juvenile teehee effect. It’s an insta-pomo technique used in non-pomo novels. Pretty scary overall.
There are some silly names I’m willing to forgive: Humbert Humbert, because it’s perfect and Nabokov is a genius; Kilgore Trout and the lot, because Vonnegut is one of those rare writers who can go meta without stimulating your gag reflex. But in general, writers should stay away from cutesy names.
Her last breath came out in a stream of yellow butterflies
Lots of amateur writers seem to have taken to writing magic realism. Marquez and Murakami, though more or less blameless in their own writing, seem to be at fault. Or rather, their popularity is. What the amateurs fail to see is the crucial difference between throwing in random supernatural events into a narrative and writing magic realism: the latter is far more readable.
Here’s where I wish I studied harder when I went through my Marquez phase. Recently I read his Nobel acceptance speech, and what hit home for me was the idea that there was no other way to trace the history of Latin America –this continent of excess — but to write magic realism.
I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.
The best magic realism, in my opinion, is strongly tied to the land, to what it has witnessed and suffered through. I’ve seen this in Marquez and Okri, and more recently in Murakami. It’s an incredibly political mode of writing, and why should we forget that, even as we enjoy it?
The Jhumpa Lahiri narrative
I have to thank R and A for this one. If you’re really clever, you will intentionally annoy me (but I’m just one person, who cares, right?) and write your own JLN. That’s how you get both the big bucks and a Mira Nair film.
The JLN is a typical ABCD* story; the protagonist is a first generation Indian-American (or whatever-American), struggling to reconcile his Brownness with his Whiteness. What you need is breadth. A lazy writer will go back a couple of decades to said ABCD’s birth or thread ceremony or first BigMac and proceed from there. A smart writer will go back several more decades to when and how ABCD’s parents’ marriage got arranged and what food his or her mother ate during her pregnancy. This gives your novel an epic quality.
Then you need a taste for the exotic and the skill to convert the exotic into suitably bland foreign-audience terms. Like calling daal “soup made with lentils.”
You’re still, however, at the short story level, with small, neat revelations for your reader. If you want scope and metaphysical grandeur, you need a literary allusion. Once you have your literary allusion (say, Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat), you need to make several parallels. So name you character something that could be an Indian version of Nikolai Gogol, like, I don’t know, Nikhil Ganguly. Then make Gogol his pet name and also his father’s favourite writer, and make an incident that explains why, and so on.
R made the astute observation that there’s no evidence from the writing that Lahiri has read The Overcoat, or anything on or by Gogol save some sweet little blurb that quoted Dostoevsky or Pushkin as saying, “We all came out of Gogol’s overcoat.” The more I think about it, the more it looks like a cheap trick to end a bland and melancholic narrative in a superficially open-ended way. I’d love to think we all find ourselves in some piece of writing or the other, but how? Tell me how and I might believe you.
Lahiri isn’t the only one milking the allusion-trick. S commented that most new stories are rewritings of the Mahabharata or Ramayana or whatever mythology is dominant in a particular country. The idea that man and woman have the same anxieties as gods, goddesses and mythical beasts is enticing for a while. Unfortunately I’ve read one too many rewritings of Draupadi’s cheerharan to pay such writers (*cough* Shashi Deshpande) any serious attention.
However, rewritings aren’t necessarily bad. Everything’s intertextual these days and there’s no outside of it, really. What I’m asking for, I suppose, is intertextual and inventive. Plus some intelligence. In other words, don’t cheat me.
*For phorin readers, an ABCD is an American Born Confused Desi, where desi = Indian.
Fatigue and the ensuing slow, painful death
I love it when experimental writers aren’t really experimental. They’re just rehashing something old without anything new thrown in. The non-linear narrative; the vampire seduction by media images à la Baudrillard; the intellectual and emotional decay of contemporary existence via white noise (DeLillo is exempt); characters with difficult but unavoidable relationships with their therapists; characters who are film/music buffs peevishly spouting trivia the whole time; characters who observe/make stories and/or conversation up about other people on a train, bus, in a restaurant, or some other urban setting; frustrated opposite sex best friend relationships; characters looking at themselves naked in the mirror and describing their every hair to you (what am I supposed to think? Yay, you’ve read Lacan?); conservative suburban middle-aged women having extramarital affairs; descriptions of insomnia or other sleep disorders; rivers and water bodies as symbols of the divine or of earthly separators; pill-popping maniacs and madmen in the family — haven’t we had enough of these?
My favourite of these despicable tropes is the city as a theme/allegory/explanation for what happens to characters. It can be done well and it has (my favourite is Dostoevsky and St Petersburg), but when you start comparing your character’s life to discarded jasmine flowers in a pool of stagnant rain water in a pothole on a very crowded Bangalore street, you’re in danger of losing your sanity and mine.
The problem with tired tropes is not that they are tired, but that the writer is unaware of their tiredness.Worse than being unconscious of one’s bad writing is being gleeful about it. Too many writers are.
I’ve been thinking about the greatest flaw a writer could have. I used to think it was arrogance. I’ve changed my mind: arrogance may have some basis in fact. A general lack of humility accompanied by high levels of smugness may be the culprit.
Edit: I’ve used the terms “popular” and “literary fiction” in the way they’re commonly conceived. I don’t necessarily agree with the terms, and I’m not referring only to genres when I say “popular”.
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– A
