JABBIC is kind of like Balderdash with book covers. Based only on the cover at right, four of our contributors made up a one-paragraph premise for this week’s contestant, Pandemonium, by Daryl Gregory. Can you reverse-engineer their fabrications and pick out the book’s real plot? (The answer will be posted in the comments later today.)

1. Were early American naturalists actually members of a secret Satanic cult? When NYU art major Chelsea Robards discovers a hidden series of three sixes in a William Bliss Baker painting, she launches a personal investigation through America’s art museums. Fighting through cover ups and death threats, Chelsea uncovers long-held secrets that, if revealed, would shake America’s artistic foundation to its core. Should Chelsea share the horrors she’s discovered? Will she even live long enough to do so? In this searing portrait of an American artistic movement, Daryl Gregory has created a work that is part alternate history, part Dan Brown-like thriller … and all evil.

2. Greg Daniels has spent his life dealing with Tourrette syndrome. But when he enrolls in a painting class at the local community college Greg’s twitching subsides into smooth and careful brush strokes. While Greg excels at his newfound pastime, he is about to discover a dark truth—that the scenes in his paintings are the sites of future murders.

3. When he discovers an idyllic countryside, failed artist Adolf Swinesburg believes he has found the subject that will finally allow his work to grace the walls of the local coffee-shop-slash-independent-gallery.  His paintings don’t improve, but one day he realizes his beloved calligraphy brush from Japan has gone missing. A search of a seemingly innocuous farm house reveals a family of nymphs who love to play harmless tricks on their human neighbors– or so it seems, until Adolf stumbles upon the body of a long-missing poet.

4. A long time ago, artists had powers. Sculptors could create life, musicians could cast spells, and painters could shape—or destroy—the very fabric of the world. Young Lorence Polike is thrown out of his house at age ten, when he accidentally crafts a minor demon out of mud. Now, alone and forced to sculpt more demons just to survive, he’ll set out to find the most legendary magic artist of all: Leonardo da Vinci. The epic quest might save his life—if it doesn’t kill him first.

5. In this fascinating alternative time line, thousands of demon possessions have been carefully recorded by scientists each year since the 1950s. Each case is always the same: a recognizable, named strain of the disorder possesses a person, wreaks havoc and then jumps on to its next victim. Del Pierce’s case is unique: when the Hellion possessed him at the age of five, it never left. Now an unhappy 20-something, Del undertakes a dangerous quest to exorcise the Hellion as it fights him for control. Readers will delve deeply into Gregory’s highly original demon-infested reality and hope for a sequel.

Author: Per Petterson

2010, Graywolf Press

Filed under: Literary

Many reviews of I Curse the River of Time (like this one, from Shelf Awareness) have called it “atmospheric.” A Time review blurbed on the cover says, “Reading a Petterson novel is like falling into a northern landscape painting.” I agree with both assessments, but I found Curse atmospheric and painting-like in that it doesn’t ever seem to move.

It reminded me, oddly enough, of the super-slo-moed Justin Bieber song that made the rounds a few weeks ago. Like the song, Petterson’s novel feels like it was intended to be shorter, but got artificially stretched by 800%. Both song and novel are hard to actively dislike, because both are so unassuming and calm. But both are also hard to focus on, or enjoy, or really get anything out of, besides the vague, disconnected feeling of experiencing them.

Petterson’s novel is about Arvid Jansen, a 37-year-old Communist, who travels to visit his mother when she’s diagnosed with cancer, and he’s just found out his wife is divorcing him. Arvid and his mother have always clashed, especially when a younger Arvid decided not to go to college, but instead to work in a factory like a good little prole. His mother, who worked in factories her whole life, thought it was a stupid decision, and told him so. Since then, they’ve been estranged, emotionally if not physically.

You can find all that information on the flap copy, and you won’t find a whole lot more inside. Arvid’s mother is acerbic and sometimes mean toward him. He loves her despite himself, and sometimes cries. He thinks about his life. That’s the vast majority of the novel: them existing dysfunctionally together, interspersed with Arvid’s memories.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with that premise, but there’s also nothing particularly enjoyable about reading its execution. Petterson’s prose is spare and minimalist—in other words, dry and devoid of personality. It’s tough to dislike because he doesn’t take any risks: there’s nothing to offend anybody, but there’s also nothing that makes it unique. Take this passage, when Arvid talks to a co-worker, on his way home from the factory:

A car came down the street and honked loudly, and we were still standing in the middle of the junction, and then Frank whose name was not Frank said:

“Go get yourself some sleep and wake up fit for a fight,” and I said I surely intended to. Then he crossed to his side, and I crossed to mine and the car drove past and I walked through the arch and crossed to the stairwell and up the two flights of stairs and stuck my key in the lock.

There’s just nothing in this prose that you can sink your teeth into. When a specific incident does come along, its purpose is to reinforce what you first learn about Arvid, not to complicate it or add a different perspective. For instance, that Shelf Awareness review brings up a “Brilliant little vignette” in which Arvid is press-ganged into making a speech at his mother’s birthday, but doesn’t have anything to say. Well, that fits perfectly into the Arvid we know from the jacket copy, and Petterson gives us precious few surprises during our time with him.

Here’s another, more overtly telling passage, in which Arvid expresses his feelings toward his mother:

I shouted:

“Fuck! Fuck!” and I could have flung my old bicycle on the tarmac and ripped the saddle off the pole, twisted the handlebars into an “S” with my hands and stamped the spokes around the hub into spaghetti, or turned around in the middle of the road and raced her to the petrol station and declaimed a sentence that would build a stunning bridge from my heart to hers. But I did none of those things. I just cycled down the street into town, across Gammeltrov, past Dommergaarden with the drunk tank to the right, where once I had been forced to stay the night, and after that I sailed across Nytorv and along the Danmarksgade, which was the main street in this town.

I suppose I simply want more than this, more actual drama, and activity instead of passivity. Or at least a scorching good prose style, or some kind of insight into life, besides the impression that it takes forever.

But there isn’t anything more. Curse feels atmospheric and painting-like, a short story overstretched, told at a glacial pace. It’s hard to hate, but impossible to love.

Similar: Liars and Saints, by Maile Meloy, for a great novel that spans decades; The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford, for phenomenal interiority

Author: Thom Jones

1995, Little, Brown, & Company

Filed under: Literary, Short Stories

I loved Thom Jones’s debut collection, The Pugilist at Rest, so I was thrilled to find parallels to his previous work everywhere when I started Cold Snap. His protagonists are still hyped up on life and drugs, desperate, terminally ill, caught in extreme situations or else throwing themselves into disaster. His prose still manages the precision of surgery with the pacing of a car chase. Ad Magic, the amnesiac hero of one of my favorite stories from the previous collection, even makes an appearance.

So if you liked Pugilist at Rest, then there’s a lot to like in Cold Snap. Unfortunately, there’s not much else. For me, these stories were a confirmation of Jones’s talent and a strange disappointment. No single story disappointed me completely, but neither did any deliver with the same force as the best stories in Pugilist, and most of the stories here offered only echoes of Jones’s earlier work.

Maybe it’s ungrateful to complain about more of the same when the original was so good. And certainly when I open a new book by an author whose older work I’ve read, I’m looking for something I found there before. It would likely have been a much bigger disappointment to find that these stories sounded nothing like Thom Jones, to find that they had nothing to do with drugs and epilepsy and boxing. Maybe what I’m looking for, then, is a familiar voice, a familiar style, even familiar content, but a new angle.

The strongest stories in Cold Snap managed to provide some of that. The title story, “Way Down Deep in the Jungle,” and “Ooh Baby Baby” all introduce a new character to Jones’s menagerie of fuck-ups: doctors returned from or working in third world countries, people who have gone to extremes to help others, burnt out or burning out. These docs fit the mold of Jones’s characters almost effortlessly while adding an element of competence, even success, to the mix of desperation and mania. In the end though, these docs are themselves too similar to each other for any one of these stories to stand out. They all face the same struggles with being ineffectual; they all share a death wish.

On the other end of the spectrum, the weakest story in this collection was almost too un-Joneslike. “Rocketfire Red” is an experiment in Australian dialect, and while the characters and events are exciting and tragic, the voice is overwrought. It wanders for several pages leading up to the heart of the story, a tale of an ill-fated drag racing team, and lingers on for several pages after the big race. The voice winds down as if it can’t stop until it has used up all the idioms at its disposal: “Good on yer, then. I’ve ‘ad me say. Waltzin’ Matilda and all that lot. Whacko-the-diddle-oh! Hey!”

Between the strongest and the weakest, Cold Snap offers only the Jones we already know, solid stories about boxers and marines and invalids. Call it classic Jones or stock Jones; either way it’s exactly what you might expect if you’ve read his first book. If you haven’t, then I’d be curious to hear your reaction to these stories. Cold Snap is a good enough encore. I enjoyed it even though I expected something better, but I can’t help wondering if I would’ve enjoyed it more were I not constantly comparing it to The Pugilist at Rest.

Similar reads: The Pugilist at Rest (Thom Jones), Jesus’ Son (Denis Johnson), Bear and his Daughter (Robert Stone)

Author: Liz Carlyle

2007, Mass Market

Note: [We're not scoring or filing JNR books as reviews--that's just too mean]

Despite the deceptive title, a duke is in fact deceived by a dashing damsel in distress in this dreadful Dickensian drama. Antonia Warneham somehow deceives duke Gareth Lloyd (perhaps by forgetting to spout her back story immediately, in everyday conversation, as all the other characters do) and, boy, does she ever pay the price.

Apparently, the book is Carlyle’s warning against the damning deception of dukes, because Antonia suffers greatly for her deceit. If you deceive a duke he will do terrible things, like have sex with you while you are sleepwalking on the rampart (which is considered rape by most) and later say things like, “Let me feast my eyes on your pure English beauty” when the consensual sex actually occurs. (“Let me feast my eyes on your pure English beauty” is what a serial killer says to someone he is keeping tied up in his basement.) So take warning. After deceiving a duke, you will be subject to both his cringe-inducing constant narrative and the awkward sex that nearly, but not entirely, interrupts his babbling. And, of course, a healthy amount of “throbbing” and “thrusting.”

Along the way through the authors plodding, maddenlingly-predictable plot, Carlyle shoe-horns in themes of the time’s antisemitismby with the subtly of a jack-hammer, casually mentions Gareth’s teenage rape at the hands of some scurrilous sailors, and fails to set off even the most basic love triangle. If you were playing a drinking game to this novel by taking a sip of beer whenever you found a romance stereotype, you’d be passed out or sick in less than an hour.

John Fowles’ great novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman is, for all intents and purposes, similar to Carlyle’s novel. Both books are set in Victorian England, both concern romance between star-crossed lovers thwarted by the aristocracy and a rigid class system, and both feature main characters rebelling against their era. What’s missing from Never Deceive a Duke, though, is the character of Fowles himself. In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Fowles’ narrator often deliniates to educates the reader on the customs of Victorian England, not only setting the story’s place in history but also countering the social sniping and stuffy Victorianism with a modern voice of reason reflecting on a socially confused time. Together, both reader and narrator shake their heads at the plight of poor Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff, and see them as they are: casualties of Victorian England’s moral hypocrisy.

In Never Deceive a Duke, the reader is left to provide this voice of reason for him (or, much more likely, her) self. Maybe all that’s really missing is someone to look pityingly on the two dunces in this novel, and giggle at the author’s abysmal prose. With a narrator like Fowles’ elucidating the conventions of the Romance genre, pointing to the myriad clichés as they arise, and cringing, as any modern reader does, at the mystifying dialogue, Never Deceive a Duke could be enjoyed not for the romance that it fails at conjuring, but for the unintentional comedy that so often succeeds. “Come along with me,” such a narrator might say as she takes out her scalpel to dissect this awful novel. “Let us feast our eyes on this pure B-rate beauty.”

Eddie Signwriter

poet talks too much

“very tall, very texty”

still worth the reading

.

The Imperfectionists

August’s first Great Read

billed as a novel–it’s not

top-nitch short stories

.

It Feels So Good When I Stop

partly a good book

the music stuff didn’t fit

give it a B+

.

Street of Crocodiles

another Great Read

a very unique novel

you should read this book

.

The Nobodies Album

Parkhurst writes quite well

structured like a wet noodle

book comes close, but no

.

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter

this Abe’s a badass

structured like a good bio

plus undead slaughter

.

There Once Was a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby

good Russian product

these short stories: harrowing

love the damn title

.

The Thieves of Manhattan

a publishing spoof?

this book is bad on purpose?

that sounds frustrating

.

I loved To Kill a Mockingbird when I was twelve years old. I read it for the same reason most twelve-year-olds do: it’s standard fare in middle-school literature classes. A compelling look at the south pre-Civil-Rights, it focused enough on outsiderness to trick my nerdy twelve-year-old self into believing it was just as interesting as the X-Men comics filling my bookshelves. Because, you know, they were the bar for judgment, not that silly Pulitzer Prize nonsense.

I just plain skipped school for most of seventh grade, feigning migraines to get out of going to the mid-sized North Georgian junior high that I despised. As a result, I was “homeschooled” for eighth, which generally meant my parents left me alone in the house with an Algebra 2 textbook and a mail-order encyclopedia on world history. My father would suggest books for me to read, ranging from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to The Stranger. We didn’t really have a system in place for judging my reading comprehension; instead, my parents, both math types, liked to regale me with stories of their own high school English classes, where they read the first and last chapters of books and nothing else. (Note that I believe these tactics are generally frowned upon by serious homeschoolers.)

My father thought I’d like To Kill a Mockingbird. Because of our demanding educational standards, I only remember bits and pieces of the novel from this period of my life, but it did leave me with the general sense that it was The Best Book of All Time. It had all the great characteristics that my favorite comics had, including children thrown into adult situations way beyond what their peers had to deal with (the anti-mutant sentiments of X-Men are based on racism), an older male mentor figure (Atticus Finch and Professor X would be BFF in a merged universe), a cast whose clearly superior morals made them outcasts (okay, so depending on which era of X-Men you read, this was debatable, but I was still pretty entrenched in the cartoon version on Fox Kids).

Recently, I decided to revisit To Kill a Mockingbird to see if it lived up to my vague memories. It turns out the story twelve-year-old Kat remembered isn’t the same as the one that I read as an adult. And no, I don’t mean that I’ve picked up on more sophisticated themes than my younger self could (although that’s true as well.) For some reason, I remembered this book as including a lot of kooky shenanigans with Scout, her older brother, and their creepy-but-misunderstood buddy, Boo Radley. It took me until about halfway in this time through to realize Boo is not, in fact, an active character for the majority of the tale. Instead, there’s some geek named Dill who dresses oddly and spews a lot of tall tales, and there’s a hell of a lot more about their father’s trial than the scenes in court.

At the time, I was engaged by the larger story of the novel: right versus wrong, racism in the South, etc. Rereading it now, I’m engaged more by the finer brushstrokes in the story: the changes in Jem’s character as he ages, the clear ambivalence on Aunt Alexandria’s part, the way Walter Cunningham’s father wavers pre-lynching when he realizes Scout is in school with his own son.

More specifically, I think the difference in my reading focus lies in the fact that Atticus Finch is a Good character. As a child, his Goodness was easy for me to latch onto—the same way it’s easy to fall for Harry Potter or Superman. This man is seemingly without fault: he’s smart, he treats everyone fairly—even the recluse next-door neighbor who may or may not have stabbed his father’s leg with a pair of scissors—and he abhors guns, despite being the sharpest shooter in the county.

The excitement of the story was watching him try to fight The Bad Guy—in this case, the Ewells and the inferior morals they represented—and the scenes that stuck out in my mind were the ones that supported this vision of a world with Good Guys and Bad Guys: I don’t remember games the children played that indirectly tormented the Radleys, just the goodies Boo left for them in the tree outside his house; I don’t remember Scout trying to deal with the other children’s taunts in the schoolyard and her misunderstanding of the meaning of their ridicule, just that the rest of the town was racist and the Finch family was not; I don’t remember all of Atticus’ interactions with the other townspeople leading up to the courtroom, just the case itself, and that Tom Robinson had clearly not committed the crime he was accused of.

As an adult, it’s nice to believe such characters exist, but I think that the aspect of To Kill a Mockingbird that makes it so compelling is that Atticus’ existence forces the other characters, with their weaknesses and strengths, to grapple with their own beliefs. The portrait of him painted by his daughter is, essentially, without human error. Were the story focused on him alone, it would probably be too flat to feel realistic. Instead of simply being a story about good versus evil, it’s a story about how average people deal with moral decisions.

Sadly, the VHS tapes of the X-Men cartoon didn’t have as much replay value.

Lights Out in Wonderland, by DBC Pierre, reviewed by Alan Warner (Guardian)

I’m unspeakably excited for the new DBC Pierre novel. I loved his debut, Vernon God Little, and I was one of the few who liked his sophomore effort, Ludmilla’s Broken English. So I didn’t read this review past the subhead (“Alan Warner is impressed by DBC Pierre’s fast and furious satire on contemporary decadence”) in the interest of not spoiling a single bit of the book. This profile of Pierre is pretty safe, though. The only bogey on the radar: Wonderland still doesn’t have a release date in the U.S.

Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership, by Lewis Hyde, reviewed by Robert Darnton (New York Times)

A few weeks ago, I got in a Facebook fight about the recent rash of library closings around the country—I argued that free access to all the world’s knowledge should be considered a human right in any industrialized nation. Hyde, in Common as Air, goes a step further: he uses the writings of America’s founding fathers to argue that all “knowledge is ‘common property.’” Hyde digs into intellectual property law and the thorny issue of copyright, Hollywood and Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Mickey Mouse. It’s an excellent review of what sounds like an excellent book.

The Nearest Exit, by Olen Steinhauer, reviewed by Paula L. Woods (L.A. Times)

Woods says, “Olen Steinhauer makes another bid to be the espionage writer for our times with ‘The Nearest Exit.’” Strong words, and while the premise seems a bit familiar (hero searches for X amidst shadows), there are a few inventive details, like the “Department of Tourism,” which is really a division of the CIA. The real power of the novel, Woods says, comes from its willingness to ask deeper questions about the people who are asked to sacrifice—and sometimes to do horrible things—for “the greater good.”

Phantom Noise, by Brian Turner, reviewed by Courtney Cook (Washington Post)

The Hurt Locker was based on a poem? Evidently yes, and its writer is back with another collection of wartime poetry. Cook says this of the two collections: “Taken together, these books are an unusual two-part portrait of a decade of war: its strength, its wounds, its fantasies of home and, as it happens, the strange beauty of a stubbornly foreign culture.” Sounds good to me.

City of Veils, by Zoë Ferraris, reviewed by Diane White (Boston Globe)

Some of my favorite mysteries are set in far-off lands with exotic, entirely foreign cultures. The last few of these I’ve read—this one set in Thailand, and this one set in India—have disappointed, but even when the mystery is crap, you’ve at least got an interesting semi-travelogue. Ferraris’s new mystery—her second—is set in Saudi Arabia, with its brutally strict laws and savagely misogynistic attitude. White calls Ferraris “a formidably talented writer,” and says her characters are “utterly human.”

JABBIC is kind of like Balderdash with book covers. Based only on the cover at right, four of our contributors made up a one-paragraph premise for this week’s contestant, The Interrogative Mood, by Padget Powell. Can you reverse-engineer their fabrications and pick out the book’s real plot? (The answer will be posted in the comments later today.)

1.) Peter Grey had a back like a question mark. No one ever thought he would amount to anything. But one day Gray decided if you can’t beat it, embrace it–or rather de-brace it. Upon throwing away his back brace and any attempt at improving his physical condition, Grey does what would have never occurred to anyone who ever saw him: works manual labor in the tight spaces of a Pennsylvania coal mine. Knowing his fellow workers are not built for the narrow mines like he is, he spends the little off time he has not building a family, but fighting for the rights of his fellow miners. Peter Gray becomes the greatest labor advocate of the Twentieth Century that no one ever heard of. In the end, there is no question about the upright nature of Gray.

2.) All Sam can remember is that she has a family, somewhere. But who then is she living with now? She knows she has lived and worked where she has for years; she has memories.  Yet each morning she awakes beside a husband-stranger  with an ineffable feeling that the life she lives is not her own. How can one even begin to search for the impossible?

3.) Are your emotions pure? Are you leaving now? Would you? Would you mind? Thoughtful, cajoling and absurdist, Powell’s book of random non sequiturs are not without their method, sounding some tenderly recurring themes, such as a middle-aged ruefulness for simpler times, a longing for more elegant forms in clothes, tools, cars and looks and a tenderness for elephants, dogs and children. Are you bothered by your cowardice? Hilarity, irony, and sheer perverseness vie to question essentially what we know and how what we know makes us what we are.

4.) It’s a matter of inflection; with the right emphasis, facts become questions. Jasper Carl owns an art gallery in Greenwich Village, a proven testing ground for young up-and-coming abstract painters. Now, pressured by divorce, financial ruin, and a mysterious art dealer pushing his unheard of client with soft threats, Jasper must wrestle with some hard questions he has tried to ignore for years, questions about how he rose to his present place in life, and how he staid there.

5.) Is there a book by Padget Powell written entirely in hypothetical questions? Will it chronicle the intellectual and emotional awakening of one New York City Town Clerk as she begins to question her world? What will she discover as she interrogates her friends, family, former lovers, and even her own memories? Where will these questions, and their answers, lead her? And just who is leaving the notes underneath her door each night, prompting her interrogation with the riddles posed in each? Why are the questions taking on a terrifying menace as they become more personal, and threatening? Can she survive The Interrogative Mood?

In the past few years, I’ve noticed more and more so-called literary writers crossing over into genre fiction. Crossover has never been all that rare, but literary writers used to separate their genre work: Mike Beeman discusses Graham Greene’s “entertainments” here, and here’s a Washington Post piece about the pseudonyms that writers once used (at least partially) to write in different genres.

These days, the crossover is more condescending and less satisfying. In “mysteries” like The Missing and The Nobodies Album, authors attempt to elevate genre formulas with literary sensibilities, but they succeed only in creating hollow mishmashes, prettily written but horribly plotted.

I think I know why. During my extended MFA career—which began before the iPhone and ended last week—I’ve grown to hate one piece of clichéd workshopspeak more than any other. It goes like this: “True mystery is not what happens, it’s how it happens.” You hear this from the aspiring “literary writer” in each class, the one whose characters are forever ambling through picturesque foreign cities and having torrid but chastely described love affairs. In other words, the one who can’t write a plot to save his life.

It’s particularly grating in writing classes because it reflects such flat-line contempt toward plot, from ostensible students of the craft—no other facet of fiction writing is as widely reviled, or even reviled at all. Imagine a fiction writer declaring, “Characters are for movies,” or “Descriptions? What is this a catalog?” And yet, the prevailing school of writing education considers it acceptable to dismiss plot as an opiate for the masses.

It betrays a sneering arrogance, and it leaves gaping holes in the skill set of many literary writers actually publishing books. Those holes become most noticeable when those literary pens attempt to write mystery without deigning to craft a plot.

Before we get much further, let me say this: I understand the purpose and intent of the “true mystery” statement, and, from a certain angle, I don’t mind it. I understand that it’s meant to convey that novels are not converted police blotters—they should not be strings of spiritless events (“He ran down the hallway, then opened the door, then ran down the stairs”).

Character is a crucial element of fiction, and in most contemporary fiction, subjective experience is a crucial element of the narrative. Things happen—or appear to happen—in different ways to different people, both in great fiction and in life. When I give “true mystery” the benefit of the doubt, that’s how I read it: you need more than just events, you need to capture the way your character perceives those events.

That’s not how most people, at least people in my classes, mean it. Instead, they use it to throw away the “what happens” of a piece of writing. Events, to these literary aspirers, become mere jumping-off points for rumination, or endless conversation. They hit that first phrase so hard, “not what happens,” that they often don’t bother to make anything happen at all.

Don’t get me wrong: there do exist writers who can pull off fiction where nothing much happens. One of my favorite novels of last year was The Believers, by Zoe Heller, a plotless, but riveting, family portrait. One of my all-time favorites is The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford, which takes place over an innocuous holiday weekend and consists of probably 95% interior monologue—just a guy thinking about his life. There are events in both these novels, of course, but it’s the prose and the emotional acuity that make them riveting.

The problem comes when literary writers decide to write mysteries and then they think, “True mystery is how it happens,” and they refuse to write a plot.

That’s when you wind up with a novel like The Missing, which was up for an Edgar award, but doesn’t actually contain a mystery. The author, Tim Gautreaux, tells you who the bad guy is a third of the way through, and stretches out an extra 300 pages describing (in very nice prose) a steamboat. You can almost hear his contempt for the “what happens” of his story, and you can feel your eyes unfocusing as they glaze over.

Even more frustrating is a novel like The Nobodies Album, in which a very good literary writer has absolutely no idea how to structure or plot a mystery, and so her protagonist wanders around, almost aimlessly, and the mystery lurches about separately, of its own accord, to a separate conclusion. The emotionality is precise, but the rotting mystery foundation ruins the experience of reading it.

Plot is a craft and an art every bit as much as character or prose or dialogue, and mystery is the most plot-centric of all genres. Great mysteries have great characters, too, but for one to be even good, it has to have a plot. A beautifully written literary mystery with a poorly crafted plot is like painting a masterpiece on the wall of an old barn: it might be pretty to look at, but it’s no fun standing in shit.

And yet, writing teachers in MFA programs treat plot like Kansans treat evolution. When I was working on my thesis (which is a mystery novel), I asked advice from my advisors about which plot fork was less predictable. They responded with the rote “Let your characters decide” answer, which is about the same as telling surgical interns to close their eyes and let the organs tell them where to cut.

When writers learn to rely on such black-box voodoo, they hobble themselves. Perhaps it’s largely unnoticeable, most of the time, and at cocktail parties they can tell boring stories about their characters surprising them. Please, though, “true mystery” stalwarts: write your breathless, action-free bildungsromans all you want—I will read them—but if you decide to write a mystery, make sure it’s got a plot.