Soldiering on
I have this compulsive, sort of masochistic tendency when it comes to books. Once I start one, and have gotten to a point where I feel like I'm fully vested (generally about 20 or so pages in, although it's been both less and more in some cases), I have to keep reading until I finish, regardless of if the book is any good or not. Part of this, I think, is due to an overdeveloped sense of duty and obligation, the other part is me trying to generate good writer karma in the event that I ever publish a novel of my own. And besides that, I usually just want to give a story the benefit of the doubt, hoping that I can just stick with it long enough, it'll prove itself worthy of my attention. This has worked in some cases, generally more so when dealing with "classic" literature, which I've noticed tends to call for a lot more patience and trust that the author is building towards something, but it has also led me to suffer through some real stinkers (American Psycho comes to mind immediately) and has been the cause of some recent distress.
I've been reading this collection of short stories (it might be classified as a novel in stories) called All This Heavenly Glory, which focuses on the trials and tribulations of one woman, alternating between the present day and childhood. Most of her problems stem from her inability to sustain a healthy romantic relationship, or in the childhood stories, from being generally awkward and also being subjected to the dysfunctional lives of her friends from school. I almost didn't continue after the first story, which feels like it's being told in one, rambling, breathlessly annoying sentence littered with parenthetical asides that, while punctuated correctly, were really confusing to decipher, especially in the instances when brackets indicated an additional parenthetical within the parenthetical. I got so frustrated with this piece that I seriously came close to hurling the book across the room, which is something that's never happened to me before. But I tried to put aside that strong reaction, and keep an open mind, because I understood that the intention was to convey the scattered, neurotic, mind of Charlotte Anne Byers, the narrator/protagonist. I tried not to condemn the writer for daring to be a little experimental, and even chastised myself for being immediately dismissive of a book that challenged me.
As I kept going, I was happy to find that the parenthetical asides diminished somewhat, but I still wasn't entirely sold. The voice and the rambling style definitely fit the character and didn't feel put on, but it was still too precious and self-indulgent to win me over. I started questioning whether I might just be jealous, not because it was better than my own writing, but because it was more fearless, more revealing of raw, emotional truth. I never came to a definitive conclusion on that, and I'm still thinking about it, but once I got to the last five stories, I got the payoff I'd been desperately hoping for. The title story was the first of the five, and had a moment where the narrator is replaying an interaction between her and a guy she's crushing on as if she's watching a movie starring Christina Applegate as herself and Benicio Del Toro as the guy. It was laugh-out-loud funny, and left me disarmed as I finished the book. I can't say specifically what it was about the remaining stories that I liked better, but they definitely weren't as much work to get through, and when I finished the last piece I decided that even though this book might not be to my taste as a whole, it wasn't bad writing by any means.
So what's the point of me sharing all this? I don't think there is one, aside from the fact that sometimes dogged persistence is worth the trouble. Mostly I just wanted to work out my thoughts about this book outside of my head, and start making this journal a place to assert my opinions.
I've been reading this collection of short stories (it might be classified as a novel in stories) called All This Heavenly Glory, which focuses on the trials and tribulations of one woman, alternating between the present day and childhood. Most of her problems stem from her inability to sustain a healthy romantic relationship, or in the childhood stories, from being generally awkward and also being subjected to the dysfunctional lives of her friends from school. I almost didn't continue after the first story, which feels like it's being told in one, rambling, breathlessly annoying sentence littered with parenthetical asides that, while punctuated correctly, were really confusing to decipher, especially in the instances when brackets indicated an additional parenthetical within the parenthetical. I got so frustrated with this piece that I seriously came close to hurling the book across the room, which is something that's never happened to me before. But I tried to put aside that strong reaction, and keep an open mind, because I understood that the intention was to convey the scattered, neurotic, mind of Charlotte Anne Byers, the narrator/protagonist. I tried not to condemn the writer for daring to be a little experimental, and even chastised myself for being immediately dismissive of a book that challenged me.
As I kept going, I was happy to find that the parenthetical asides diminished somewhat, but I still wasn't entirely sold. The voice and the rambling style definitely fit the character and didn't feel put on, but it was still too precious and self-indulgent to win me over. I started questioning whether I might just be jealous, not because it was better than my own writing, but because it was more fearless, more revealing of raw, emotional truth. I never came to a definitive conclusion on that, and I'm still thinking about it, but once I got to the last five stories, I got the payoff I'd been desperately hoping for. The title story was the first of the five, and had a moment where the narrator is replaying an interaction between her and a guy she's crushing on as if she's watching a movie starring Christina Applegate as herself and Benicio Del Toro as the guy. It was laugh-out-loud funny, and left me disarmed as I finished the book. I can't say specifically what it was about the remaining stories that I liked better, but they definitely weren't as much work to get through, and when I finished the last piece I decided that even though this book might not be to my taste as a whole, it wasn't bad writing by any means.
So what's the point of me sharing all this? I don't think there is one, aside from the fact that sometimes dogged persistence is worth the trouble. Mostly I just wanted to work out my thoughts about this book outside of my head, and start making this journal a place to assert my opinions.