This week’s JABBIC has a pretty intriguing and mysterious cover. Four of our contributors guessed the premise of Adam Ross’s novel with only this cover image available to them. Now it’s up to you: which paragraph below is based on the real novel? The answer, and who wrote which fakery, will be posted in the comments later today.

1.) MacDonald Rathwaite has had enough. The new gangster kids on his block call him “Mr. Peanut.” They think it’s funny, because he walks with a cane and cause his head looks weird. They think he’s stupid, they think he doesn’t notice. They don’t know him, and they sure don’t know what he’s done for a living for the past forty years—the job that gave him the limp, and shattered his skull. Rathwaite sat by when the gangsters sold drugs on his porch, and when they spray-painted the bodega on the corner. But when they start in harassing Lola, the young single mother who lives in 3C, that’s more than Rathwaite can take.

2.) It’s on the side of a tin on a shelf in every pantry in America: the smiling face of Mr. Peanut. But look closer…  Conrad Frayn is a defamed illustrator and aspiring artist. When he tries to relaunch his career with a new take on a marketing icon, he soon learns that he infringed on the wrong trademark. In this Pynchon-esque thriller, Adam Ross weaves a tapestry of commercial conspiracy and personal redemption that just might have you thinking twice before you pop open your next can of cashews.

3.) A factory mishap ships a popular brand of powdered makeup with exceptionally high levels of a peanut extract, causing allergic reactions and deaths nationwide. Disfigured from the incident, male model Antoine Feinderlacht uses the situation to rewrite the rules of fashion, and of terror, in this taut and hip thriller.

4.) Nathan and his friends thought they could ruin any teacher Cedar Creek Middle School could throw at them, but Mr. Peanut, their permanent substitute shop teacher, isn’t going to crack so easily. When even their best pranks fail to temper Mr. Peanut’s ardor for woodwork and whistling, the boys come to respect and befriend their teacher, making him an honorary member of the Creek Creep Gang. And when a mysterious figure from Cedar Creek’s past shows up at school asking strange questions, they must solve the mystery of Mr. Peanut’s mermaid tattoo, or else he, and the rest of the Creek Creep Gang, will be history.

5.) Alice Pepin’s lifelong struggle with depression, insecurity, and obesity comes to an abrupt end at her kitchen table when she is found dead with a peanut lodged in her throat. She has suffered suicide by anaphylactic shock—or so claims her husband, David, a quiet computer game programmer obsessed with working and re-working a draft of his unpublished novel, a violent possible masterpiece. Gradually, the two detectives on the case begin to see disturbing parallels between their own marital dramas and the Pepins’ cruel rotations of brinkmanship and adoration.

Judge a Book by Its Cover is basically Balderdash for new or forthcoming books.  A number of our contributors have made up synopses for an interesting-looking new book based only on its cover and title. This week, the book in question is Light Boxes, by Shane Jones.

Can you guess which of the following paragraphs is the real premise of Light Boxes, just by looking at the cover?

Answer (and who wrote which fakery) coming later today in the comments.

1. Light Boxes follows the plight of a town battling to free itself from the brutal hold of the month of February, a meanie that has not allowed its wintry grip to lift for hundreds of days. When the despairing townspeople, led by valiant Thaddeus Lowe and his wife and daughter, suffer reprisals from February for trying to break the weather, a group of former balloonists don bird masks and, calling themselves the Solution, instigate a rebellion. Thaddeus’s daughter, Bianca, is kidnapped, along with other children, leading Thaddeus to plot ways to deceive February. Will they defeat February in time to save the town?

2. Shane Jones’s Light Boxes is a fictional memoir recalling the hilarious happenstance of its own creation. One snowy Monday, Jones and friends dressed as art-house movie penguins and stormed Penguin, Ltd., demanding that the powerhouse publish his book-in-progress (the plot of which was indeed progressing before the receptionist’s eyes). Penguin’s president, Morgan Freeman, who just happens to love art houses and penguins, gave the project a quick green light. Drama ensues when the 13-page manuscript was almost pulled for brevity. Thankfully, a 100-page color insert featuring the waddle in a variety of poses saved it in production. Light Boxes is well worth the $72 cover price.

3. For generations, the Grape family has lived by the Three Iron Laws: no women, no liquor, no knives. But then their youngest son, Gabe, is kidnapped by the notorious knife-wielding, booze-swilling, womanizing Parakeet Bandits. Gabe quickly learns that the outside world is much more fun than his forebears led him to believe, and he soon joins the gang. When his oldest brother sets out to bring him back to the fold, Gabe Grape must choose between his new life as a Parakeet and his devotion to his family.

4. In the tiny, remote town of Vinchizstrasse, the men all wear masks and the women all wear veils; in fact, it’s considered a sin to show your face to another human being. One spring, as the ice thaws to snow, the townsfolk begin acting weird—Henniger the butcher attacks Mrs. Leep and Jolimar the magician kills his assistant in front of a live audience, but neither has any memory of their actions. They quickly conclude that the people of neighboring town Tulingradstock (who have always been jealous of the Vinchaise) are forging masks and impersonating the Vinchaise men while committing horrible crimes. When Henniger and Jolimar confront them, the Tulingrash insist it’s a mind-disease that’s already crippled several other towns. Can the Tulingrash be trusted? The only way the Vinchaise can know for sure is to throw away their masks, but that might be more than they can take.

5. There are only five oiseau men left, and none of them have ever seen the sun. They’re condemned to spend their lives in Lincolntown, where it’s always cold and cloudy. At the bidding of invisible overseers, the oiseau perform mundane tasks like copying notes, folding papers, and whittling trinkets. Their ignorance about the outside world doesn’t protect them from an aching emptiness as they face the certainty of their extinction. However, just a few miles away in sunny Noirville, the Herschel family hides the only oiseau who’s ever escaped, and he’s been working tirelessly on a plan to free these mysterious men the only way he knows how…

Sales do not make a book "unputdownable"

Publishing is not a victim of the iPad, it’s not a victim of Amazon’s $9.99 pricing model, it’s not a victim of piracy, it’s not a victim, period. Publishing is slowly strangling itself by myopically hard-selling each and every title it cranks out, instead of nurturing the readers who sustain it.

I believe the novel is the best form of entertainment available to modern humans. Reading a novel offers a deeper, richer, longer, and more satisfying experience than any other media. I read four great novels last year (one, two, three, four). I enjoyed those four books more than any movies or TV shows I saw last year, more than any album, or live show, or play, or anything else.

But there were only four of them.

The flipside of the entertainment equation is that books are more expensive than movies, TV shows, or albums—more expensive in terms of both money and time. If you hate a movie, you’re out ten bucks and ninety minutes. A book might take up days of your time, and up to $25 in hardcover—if you read a bad one, the sting is much worse. And it gets exponentially worse when publishers overtly lie to their readers—like say, The Girl She Used to Be, which was nominated for a mystery award though it’s neither a mystery nor worth printing, let alone reading.

Publishers don’t seem to realize this, and they’ve taken a shotgun approach to bookselling: they think if they can fire enough tiny pellets of low-grade iron, one of them’s got to hit something. I’m here to disagree.

Problem: Publishing too many books, and too many crappy books

In 1993, according to Bowker, U.S. publishers released just over 10,000 books classified as either “Fiction” or “Literature.” In 2007 (the last year Bowker has a final tally for), publishers released more than 62,000 Fiction/Literature books (via; find the raw numbers here). That’s one work of fiction published every eight and a half minutes, all year long.

Since the average reader takes slightly longer than eight minutes to read a novel, we’ve got to choose. In 2009, I had a bad year choosing. I read and reviewed 31 books for C4 last year. Eleven were bad; ten were “OK, but…”; six were good; and only four were great.

Even if you lump in good books, that’s a 32% success rate. Less than a third of the contemporary books I read were worth the time and money, and that’s excluding all the books I tried to read, hated, and never finished.

Here’s an idea I don’t understand: Why—in an age where books have to compete with more TV shows and more movies and more video games—why are publishers releasing even more books? More than six times as many as just 17 years ago, which means one of two things: either six times as many publishable novels are being written, or publishers are lowering their standards. You might be able guess which theory I agree with.

Get your stupid from the TV, come to books for smarts

A billion Dan Brown fans might tell me I’m wrong, but I don’t think books do a good job with stupid, mindless entertainment. TV’s got stupid and mindless covered. Books should play to their strengths: intelligence, depth, and drama. Not that all novels should be stodgy period pieces, but neither do so many need to be vampire books because Twilight was popular, or any of the thousands of other coattail-riding knockoffs. And neither do we need thousands of plain old crappy books with half-conceived plots, pushed out to meet a pub date instead of being actually nurtured until they were good (or simply rejected).

In this piece, Jay Nicorvo says editors are putting out blockbusters and clones because of more guaranteed sales. That strategy might work in the short term; it might make more money this quarter. The downside is that it’s actively killing publishing, bit by bit.

Right, so, let’s just make all books better. That shouldn’t be too difficult, right?

Before you start poking holes in that proposal: I know that it’s a pipe dream. I know judging a novel’s quality is a subjective activity, I know that publishing is a business, and I know there are many many more publishing houses now than there were twenty years ago, all trying to make a buck. But, as a reader, I feel disillusioned. It seems like publishers are willing to release 50 mediocre novels in the hope that one becomes a hit, rather than select the 5 best and put more effort into them.

It seems, in short, like publishers aren’t culling bad novels like they should be, and then readers have to do it, which means sifting through dozens or hundreds of published novels to find just the few worth reading. And that gets old.

If we’ve got so many choices, we need a better way to choose

A while ago, I floated the idea of trial periods for ebooks, some length of time during which readers could return books they don’t like. I think that would go a ways toward reestablishing faith in the publishing industry (tag line: “Never read another bad book”), but I think to fully stabilize and grow the industry, publishers need a major shift in attitude.

Instead of publishing as many novels as possible and trying to market their way to good sales figures, publishers should focus on cultivating readers. By that I mean the first priority of a publisher should be to ensure that readers find books they love. That doesn’t mean describing every book as “hilarious,” it doesn’t mean puking out Harry Potter clones in the hope of getting a few more sales, and it doesn’t mean bending over backward to convince people that the latest stock vampire novel is actually good or different (they did that with the last stock vampire novel, and they lied). Instead, publishers should be finding the qualities that individual readers look for and pairing them with novels that actually have those qualities.

This is the kind of thing that companies like Amazon got right—as much as it pains me to admit. When publishers told Bezos to delete negative reviews on Amazon.com, he replied, “We don’t make money when we sell things, we make money when we help people make purchase decisions.”

Like Bezos himself, that response is 90% creepy robot, but he’s got a point. If you match readers with books they love, they will read more, they will like books more, and they will spend more money on them.

Publishers, for some reason, hate to match readers with books they will like. Look at the descriptions on Random House’s fiction page, and let’s play Glowing Platitude Bingo. “Dazzling”? “Wondrous”? “Lush”? “Moving”? Bingo.

I want a Netflix system for books, one that goes beyond Amazon’s linked metadata, and doesn’t require me to read bought reviews by Publishers Weekly, or dozens of customer reviews by people who might or might not know what they’re talking about. (Just take a gander at the responses our own Sean Clark got when he uploaded to Amazon a fairly even-handed review of what appears to be an unquestionably bad book.)

Another symptom of the disease: Publishers’ hatred for libraries

The root problem, again, is myopia. Publishers want to sell more books right now, not in a few years or decades. But their customer base is eroding. People have many more ways to spend their free time now than they did in 1993.

This myopic attitude was thrown into relief by Macmillan CEO John Sargent’s thoughts about libraries, which he expressed in March. He said that he wanted people to pay for library books, and questioned how libraries could possibly be good for the publishing industry.

From a certain angle, this makes a bit of sense. If people can get books for free, it must eat into profits at some point. But here’s the other angle: when I was eight years old, my parents told me they’d buy me as many books as I wanted. That lasted a couple of months before they cut me off and sent me to the library. If there had been no library, I would’ve watched TV and found something else to do with my life.

Let me say it in no uncertain terms: if we eliminate free public libraries, it will be exactly one generation before there won’t be enough readers to publish 1000 books a year, let alone 60,000. Libraries nurture readers. Publishers should learn from this.

One last plea

It’s arguable whether or not there are 60,000 publishable novels written this year. But if, as an industry, you’re going to give me 60,000 choices, you’ve got to give me the tools I need to find the books that are right for me. Otherwise I and your other avid readers will wander off into the wilderness of the millions of crappy books you’re all too willing to bring into the world.

Publishers, please. Please help me. I’m speaking as someone lost deep in the forest here; I love books, but I’m enjoying reading less and less these days. Something has to change. Quit whining about piracy and ebook prices. Fix this instead.

Twilight sucks. We don't have to keep talking about it. But we can, if you want to.

It’s pretty easy to work up a good hate for intellectualism—especially the smarmy, condescending kind. Books (or “literature” if you want to get snooty about it) and the serious discussion of them sometimes get confused for just that sort of pretentiousness.

One instance of such confusion is an essay called “I Just Want to Read,” by Ann Nichols, in Open Salon. In short, Nichols bemoans the overuse of formal literary theory, and pines for the days when, like the title says, she could read just for pleasure.

She makes some good points, especially about the ease with which you can fake hifalutin-sounding insights about literature (just learn and use a few words like “postcolonial” and “metafictional” and you’ll get a B in most lit classes). But for the most part, Nichols’s anti-criticism rant irks me, for several reasons. Here they are.

Nichols starts with an anecdote that immediately sets off my internal BS alarms. It’s the old when-I-was-a-kid bit, this time about a wide-eyed girl with a stack of books and a dream:

I was reading critically in the sense that I liked or disliked books, and knew what did and didn’t make sense or appeal to me, but there was not, at that blissful time in my life, any imposition of an external standard of quality or any requirement that I investigate the author’s prerogatives or background.

First of all, critical reading is not the imposition of an external standard of quality. I would define critical reading (I’m talking only about fiction here) as the formal analysis of writing in order to intellectually understand your emotional reaction to a certain work.

Secondly, nobody should be investigating any author’s background in relation to any work of fiction, ever. Once an author finishes a book, he is a completely different entity from his work. He cannot defend it, he cannot explain it, and nothing he says about it should be trusted. The author is a curiosity and nothing more. It’s interesting to hear what Michael Chabon has for breakfast, but it has nothing to do with his novels.

Nichols continues:

I didn’t have to delve deeply into the behind-the-scenes world of a book to understand or enjoy it.

This sounds an awful lot like: a) nostalgic blowhardery; and b) laziness. Let’s get this out of the way: everybody has nice memories of childhood. Even if it sucked, you had a couple things you liked that were uncomplicated and fun. And that’s nice. But it doesn’t mean those things in the grown-up world are still uncomplicated, nor should they be. And just because they’re complicated doesn’t mean they can’t still be fun.

Severe problem #1: Nichols isn’t interested in complexities. In college, she finds:

Studying literature involved what seemed to me to be a desecration of art based on bizarre and irrelevant external standards.

Again, critical reading should not be the application of external standards, it should be the use of intellectual tools to better understand a work of literature. Nichols maintains that the act of reading should instead be the equivalent of looking at a van Gogh and saying, “That’s pretty.”

I might need to understand how my car worked in order to fix it or maintain it properly, but I do not need to see, fix, repair or disassemble the “works” of a novel or poem in order to have the experience intended by the author. If I do, there is something wrong with one of us.

Jon Gruden is the James Wood of football.

Instead of mechanicry, I’m of the opinion that art criticism should be closer to something like football commentary. Great football analysts can discuss a game on several different levels. They can tell you simply that a team is good, or they can explain how West Coast offenses require quick-throwing QBs who don’t need strong arms, and exactly why Flozell Adams is worth 15 yards in penalties per game. Listening to knowledgeable sports analysts is no different than listening to knowledgeable, competent art critics. The major difference is that football never gets that anti-intellectual backlash (and also some some stuff about subjectivity/objectivity).

Even though I love great analysis I certainly don’t think that every book needs to be formally deconstructed, and I wholeheartedly agree that English lit classes can too easily devolve into mishmashes of gobbledygook. (My own nemesis was the “reader-response theory,” which states, basically, that you can say anything you want and it will be a valid point. I’m not sure if Nichols would love or hate it.) The solution to gobbledygook, though, is not to shut down all analysis, instead monosyllabically grunting and farting our responses to history’s greatest masterpieces. I think we can find a middle ground here; for starters, I want even the laziest reader to be able to answer the question, “Why did you like this?”

Even that seems to be too much for Nichols. She says that books, during her simple, idyllic childhood, “were ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for me” and she cringes at the thought of delving a molecule deeper. Implied in Nichols’s nostalgia is the idea that a suitable defense for anything, even drek like Twilight, should be “I liked it.” She seems to want those three words to end arguments and insulate her from further thought.

Of course, certain tools are appropriate for certain jobs. Nichols mentions a blog post that argued Twilight author Stephenie Meyer “‘wasn’t educated in critical perspectives on race, class and gender.’” That’s a bit like taking a Howitzer to a paintball fight. Meyer sucks for many, many reasons (even NPR ripped her to shreds), and her perspectives on race and class are pretty far down the list—at least below her failures at prose, dialogue, and character. But just because that kind of criticism outclasses a book you like (and should feel guilty for liking), does not mean that we should stop reading critically. I worry about this.

More broadly, I worry that a lack of continued critical thinking will lead to more formulaic narrative art. There are things that people historically like and don’t like, and it’s pretty easy to crap out the literary equivalent of Iron Man 2 and mildly amuse some people who don’t know the difference between quality and familiarity.

The job of great art, however, is to surprise and educate, and so answering the question, “Why didn’t you like this?” is every bit as important as answering its opposite. We don’t need to bring in postmodern ontological-schism theory to every piece of fiction in the world, but neither do we need to limit our criticism to a yes/no response.

The Hanks write-up is more of a detailed summary than a review, and the analysis is limited to two pretty tepid sentences:

Although his ambition is admirable, the literary complexity and the simplicity of feeling Martel is aiming for don’t comfortably mesh. “Beatrice and Virgil” has its rewards, but the frustrations are what stick in the mind.

Contrast that with this from the Kakutani review:

Though Virgil and Beatrice are sweetly engaging characters, the play in which they appear remains a derivative recycling of Beckett, and Mr. Martel’s efforts to turn their tale into a kind of philosophical meditation on the Holocaust result in a botched and at times cringe-making fable.

And, later

…they are another awkward element in this disappointing and often perverse novel.

These shenanigans are all too common in the Times. Akin to what reviewer Garth Risk Hallberg dubbed “The Kakutani Two-Step,” this might be called the Sunday Switcheroo.  I first noticed this with Kakutani’s savage review of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City, which she called a “tedious, overstuffed novel” full of “a lot of pompous hot air.”

Ten days later, in the Sunday Book Review, there was this glowing review, in which Gregory Cowles calls Chronic City “turbocharged,” “astonishing,” and “intricate and seamless.”

The old switcheroo!

Imagine these quotes next to each other on the dust jacket, and you’ll see the problem.

In both reviews, I agree with Kakutani more than the apology-review that follows. But I disagree with the practice. Readers look to influential reviews in the NYT, WSJ, PW, Chamberfour, etc., to find out if a book is good first and foremost. From time to time, certain books will be controversial and warrant reviews from those who both love and hate them. Lolita is such a book, as is American Psycho and, recently, Jonathon Little’s The Kindly Ones. These seem more like back-pedaling to undercut vitriolic reviews. Readers find Kakutani’s review in the regular Arts section, where she savages the successful author, and the second piece—by an unknown reviewer in the Sunday Book Review—weeks later. Which review are we supposed to believe?

Maybe issuing conflicting reviews is a NY Times policy, but it sure is confusing to readers (not to mention how confusing it must be for the authors…”They called my book “Intricate and seamless” and “a tedious, overstuffed novel?”).

But if it works for the New York Times, it may work for C4. In the days to come, you can look for favorable reviews to off-set our least favorite books. Sean will rave about Going Rogue. Nico will put up a post touting the value of the Amish-slice-of-life genre in Plain Pursuit. And Eric Markowsky, long missing in action, will come back from retirement to praise the works of Douglas Preston. Stay tuned!

DBC Pierre is a Mexican author from Australia; his parents are English and he grew up largely in Texas. He was a cartoonist and a drug addict for a while, then he became an award-winning novelist on the first try. He’s not so easy to categorize, and neither is his work.

Pierre’s debut novel, Vernon God Little, won the Booker when he was 42. In it, our hero and narrator is Vernon Little, an awkward teenager in the small town of Martirio, Texas. Vernon’s voice is a mix of Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye and Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces. In other words, funny, quirky, cutting, perceptive, and with a realistic hillbilly twang.

Before the novel begins, Vernon’s best friend, Jesus Navarro, opened fire in the middle of the high school and killed many people before turning the gun on himself. Since Jesus is gone, the town wants someone else to blame, and they settle on Vernon.

Those previous two paragraphs don’t seem to work too well together. But Pierre somehow pulls it off and Vernon God Little is the funniest book about a school shooting that you’ll ever read.

Pierre not only succeeds with that difficult premise, he also doesn’t cheat you on either the humor or the grittiness and emotional complexity. Vernon has to deal with abject betrayal from all sides, and his one true friend is not only dead, but the cause of all his problems.

The story itself is full of thrills, injustice, and compelling drama. Inside that framework, Vernon’s unique voice is the engine that makes the novel go. Here’s an example, from a passage in which Vernon discusses his dead friend, Jesus:

[Jesus] needed a different role model, but nobody was there from him. Our teacher Mr. Nuckles spent all kinds of time with him after school, but I ain’t sure ole powder-puff Nuckles and his circus of fancy words really count. I mean, the guy’s over thirty, and you just know he sits down to piss.

And here’s a passage in which Vernon describes himself, and Pierre manages to make him simple and slightly nonsensical, but poetic, too, and still believable as a redneck teenager:

You don’t know how bad I want to be Jean-Claude Van Damme. Ram her fucken gun up her ass, and run away with a panty model. But just look at me: clump of lawless brown hair, the eyelashes of a camel. Big ole puppy-dog features like God made me through a fucken magnifying glass. You know right away my movie’s the one where I puke on my legs, and they send a nurse to interview me instead.

Usually with a book that’s as dependent on style and voice as this one, I’d tell you to go read the first chapter in the bookstore, and judge whether you love the style or hate it. Vernon God Little is different, though. You might not like it for several dozen pages, and I don’t think you can get into it in just the first chapter or two. It takes at least a few chapters to acclimate to the premise alone.

As the saying goes, great books teach you how to read them, and this is one of those books. It’s ambitious and audacious, precise, well-executed, funny, and full of humanity. All those buzzwords that publishers use to describe their crappy books? This is the novel that they actually apply to.

Further reading: Since Vernon God Little, Pierre has published Ludmila’s Broken English, an underappreciated novel in the Gary Shteyngart vein, i.e. a funny, touching story about Russian immigrants. Pierre also has a third novel, Lights Out in Wonderland, coming out… soon, hopefully this year. He previewed it almost 18 months ago, but there’s still no firm word of its release. Fingers crossed.

We’re not trying to pick on authors with this tag. Our contributors pick all their own books to review, nothing is assigned or required. So when a contributor writes a negative review, that reviewer genuinely thought he or she would like the book. Still, we make every effort to be even-handed and objective, and highlight the strengths of a book every bit as much as the weaknesses.

However, when a reviewer uses the babytown frolics tag, that means he or she thinks the book should never have been published. That means something in the book-producing, -marketing, -buying, and -reading process has gone seriously, seriously wrong.

All too often these days, certain publishers care about their bottom line, not just more than the quality of the books they produce, but to the exclusion of quality. A very important role in the publishing world is that of gatekeeper, the entity that keeps utter drivel from reaching the hands of innocent readers. Since publishers don’t seem to want this job anymore, we try to do our part to keep out the drivel. Most of the time we try to use a velvet rope, but sometimes we have to break out the tear gas. “Babytown frolics” is our way of trying to have fun while getting the dirty work done.

Occasionally, we might also drop the tag on an author whose ego and sense of entitlement has outgrown his talent (I’m looking at you, Douglas Preston).

The phrase “babytown frolics” comes from the pilot episode of the very funny animated show, Archer.

• What’s the purpose of libraries in the 21st century? Salon says the new main branch of the Cambridge Public Library (just blocks from C4 HQ) isn’t practical. The Guardian says libraries still matter in a digital age, and so does an Australian librarian (via). And Ars Technica reveals how libraries help America’s poor. We already know Macmillan hates libraries. I don’t enjoy this line of discussion.

• What’s the last great book you read? John Crace in the Guardian discusses how difficult it is to find a great a novel these days, because there are far too many books and publishers will tell you each and every one of them is mind-blowingly fantastic. I couldn’t agree more. Crace recommends genre fiction; meanwhile, on the Guardian’s books blog, a post about how shorter can be better for fiction. And then, crime novelist Ian Rankin discusses/defends crime fiction (via). I’m inclined to agree with all this, the only problem is that I’ve been reading all the Edgar award nominees—supposedly the best of the year in a genre that’s right up my alley—and not a single one of them has been great. It’s a nice theory, though.

• Piracy is still a hot topic, though now people are complaining that “piracy” is such a sexy word it makes people want to pirate. The ethicist at the NYT says you can steal a copy of an ebook you previously bought—counterpoint. Despite the ethicist, IsoHunt will essentially be shut down has essentially been shut down. Finally, Big Content wants the U.S.’s new intellectual property enforcer to eliminate peer-to-peer file-sharing. Good luck with that.

• Here is an article from the NYT about literature and cognitive science. Basically, it’s about how empathy relates to reading fiction, and how readers process interrelated or overlapping points of view. Or “what the scholars call levels of intentionality.” Read it.

Obligatory iPad and Amazon news—and lots of other stuff—after the break.

• Some obligatory iPad news— Farhad Manjoo says resisting the iPad is futile, and on the day of its release 300,000 people didn’t even try. Also, a quarter million ebooks have already been downloaded, which seems like a lot. The big iPad question, from an ebook standpoint, is whether it will replace E-Ink ereaders. The answer is an overwhelming yes. Umm, or no. Or kind of. So probably not, in other words. That wasn’t too confusing, right? Anyway, the comics app looks pretty outstanding. Here are some more reviews of the iPad, and that’s just about enough of it. Wait, one more, for haters: will it blend?

• The obligatory Amazon v. agency model news— After Amazon finally capitulated to the agency book-pricing model (and a transition that was anything but seamless), they made sure everybody knew who was raising prices. Random House doesn’t want an agency deal, though, possibly because they hate authors. More likely because it doesn’t make any sense to make less money on each ebook and also sell fewer books. Meanwhile, HarperCollins gave away so many ebooks that it seemed simply too good to be true. Finally, between agency models and Apple iPads, what would you do today if you were Jeff Bezos? (I would cackle and cackle, simply because I could.)

• A few weeks ago novelist Carrie Vaughn left Grand Central Publishing, and wrote this post about why she did it (via). It’s an interesting piece, and it’s mostly about a non-compete clause. Coincidentally, Grand Central is responsible for this travesty of literature, which is very bad.

• Quick takes: the Guardian on the “lost Booker”; David Mamet on drama; Elmore Leonard and sons on writing; a terrific essay on Maoists in India by Arundhati Roy, part one and part two; what constitutes fair use?; how not to title a novel.

• Random of the week: A pair of brothers spent several months “squatting” on the side of a wall in Rio de Janeiro as part of an art installation. Here are some more pictures.

"The Girl She Used to Be" is the laziest novel I've read in a long, long time

A few weeks ago, I saw this post in the Guardian (same title as this post, here, that you’re reading). The Guardian post was a good-humored response to a silly little thing in the American Book Review which contended that such books as The Great Gatsby and All the Pretty Horses (and even Let the Great World Spin) were among the forty worst books of all time. Their chief criterion for the list was that the bad books on it had to be worthy enemies—by which they meant interesting books that people cared about.

As someone who primarily reads contemporary novels, I see a worthy enemy in the suffocating glut of miserable fiction flooding our bookstores and minds every second of every day.

So I’d like to present my own theory of what makes a bad book bad. It’s quite simple: lazy writing makes bad books bad. (The problems I’m about to outline could also come from a simple lack of talent, but I’ll give bad writers the benefit of the doubt.)

Now, I’m not saying that hard work magically creates great fiction—after all, great fiction is much more than the absence of bad writing—but when it comes to genuine garbage, nothing churns it out better than laziness.

What makes laziness so bad? How, specifically, does laziness impact storytelling? Where does laziness intersect with unbelievability and artifice in a half-assed pentagram of unholy awfulness?

I’m so glad you asked. Let’s find out.

Laziness ruins writing in a wonderful variety of ways. This is not a comprehensive list by any means, but these four lazy-writing crimes are the easiest to demonstrate, the most common, and the most easily fixable (which makes them worse). These crimes also address important but often-underestimated or ignored aspects of fiction writing—I’ll get to that at the end.

For examples, I’m going to cite The Girl She Used to Be, by David Cristofano, a novel that I reviewed for this site —somewhat harshly—just before this post. I’m sorry to pick on this novel again, but… well… OK, I’m not sorry because it’s the laziest novel I’ve read in at least a year, possibly the laziest published novel I’ve ever read.

Here’s a quick recap if you missed the review. Girl is a novel about a 26-year-old woman named Melody, who’s been in the Witness Protection Program (or WITSEC) for twenty years. She whines a lot. Because she’s bored or something, she takes off with the son of the mafia don who killed her parents. They fall in love. It’s a bad book. I know you’re itching for more specifics, so brace yourself for lots of them.

Lazy writing crime #1 — Not cutting out your crap

This is one of the most frustrating symptoms of lazy writing because it’s one of the easiest to fix.

Here’s a quick example to warm up with:

Randall Farquar, whose name I intentionally mispronounce toward the more phonetic, will not be happy when I call …

There’s no need for that phrase between the commas. It can come right out, and the sentence would only be less confusing.

At first blush, this first misdemeanor seems a little oxymoronic. After all, he’s writing more, right? How can he be lazy for writing more?

Well, he’s writing more crap. Anybody can write crap. Anybody can clutter up a sentence with a half-cocked joke. When you cut out the crap, you by default make the reading experience more pleasurable.

Here’s another example. During a remembered romantic encounter with a man she calls Nameless Guy, Melody says,

“‘Call me… Melody.’”

It’s not good to give people your real name when you’re in WITSEC. Nameless Guy doesn’t notice, but just replies:

“‘Yeah, babe … call me … Steeeeve.’”

So why is he Nameless Guy and not Steve? Mostly because Cristofano was too lazy to fix the scene. Obviously, either the “Steve” line or the “Nameless Guy” line should’ve been cut, if only because together they lead to the excruciatingly awkward rationale for their mutual existence:

“Now I still consider him nameless because of the way he said Steve, like it was this highly forbidden thing.”

More importantly, we simply don’t need the whole Steve bit. We can skip ahead (cutting seven paragraphs in all) to where he says, “‘You told me your name was Shelley’” and take it from there. You know, where the drama picks up again? Those seven paragraphs are meaningless filler and they are making the novel worse.

Lazy writing crime #2 — Making embarrassingly large errors

This somewhat falls into the category of not cutting, because both are symptoms of incompetent editing, by both writer and editor. But “errors” are distinct from “crap” in that crap is a relatively subjective description, while errors are just bald-faced mistakes. Like this one:

Melody loves math. You can tell because the chapter numbers come in the form of equations (e.g., “3x = 15″ for Chapter 5), and the only thing she’s ever requested from WITSEC is a job as a math teacher. Later on, she reads a book on string theory for fun. When she’s driving with her marshal, she discusses why she loves math so much, saying:

“It’s rigid. It’s firm and unyielding. It never lies.”

All that goes out the window when Melody royally screws up a very simple math problem three pages after she says those words.

She wants to calculate her odds of survival. She finds that there have been 250 witnesses to Bovaro-family crimes (like her). 25 of those witnesses have been killed. Pretty easy, right? Then, astonishingly, she says this:

“That’s one in ten, Sean. The odds of my survival are one in ten. Not too good, huh?”…

I can feel him staring at me, stuck.

For the record, the odds of her being killed are 25 in 250, or one in ten. The odds of her survival are 225 in 250, or nine in ten, quite different. So Melody makes a simple, enormous mistake, and then gets all pouty about her (grossly incorrect) findings.

She’s a math teacher!

(This was the point at which I started questioning why and how this book had been published.)

Lazy writer crime #3 – Flat characters

It’s difficult to create three-dimensional characters. In fact, it’s one of the hardest things about writing fiction. I don’t ask for a full cast of richly nuanced characters, especially not in a mystery, but I do like them to reveal their personalities by their actions, and not by the words the author uses to describe them. Like the old cliché goes, you should show and not tell. The fact is that authors always show their characters’ personalities, whether they want to or not.

For instance, when Melody tells us (over and over and over) that it’s so hard being in WITSEC and that she’s lonely and ugly and nobody likes her—she doesn’t come off as sad, she comes off as whiny, annoying, and entitled. And when sadness is supposed to be her primary character trait, it makes following her a fairly excruciating experience. (Especially because sadness is an emotion and not a character trait, but we’ll stick to the basics for Mr. Cristofano.)

For example this scene. Though she specifically requested a job as a math teacher, these are Melody’s thoughts while she teaches a math class.

… as a pawn in the WITSEC game … you get to live.

The price is an existence of tedium. You have just become irreparably average. You are not special. You are not unique.

… I can’t help thinking that I am experiencing the slowest death known to mankind.

The problem here is that Melody actually is showing us her true personality, and that personality is much different from the one Cristofano wants her to have. He wants Melody to be frustrated, impetuous and eager for adventure, blah blah blah. But when he bashes us over the head with this kind of garbage, Melody instead becomes whiny, entitled, angsty, and immature.

Later on, Cristofano writes an entire scene in which Melody does nothing except hammer home the idea that she’s sad and misses her dead family. So we get this laborious emotional billboard:

this place … has one thing in it I love, a thing present in every mall in every Middleton and Middletown and Middleburg and Centreville across this great land: a Hallmark store. … it is here I get to witness the true essence of family, of love:

The man who clumsily pokes through the cards for a half hour until he finds the one that will touch his wife’s heart, …

The daughter who sifts through the cards until she finds the one for her mother that makes her suppress a giggle, …

This is my nameless family.

Ignoring the fact that it’s quite bad prose, this is a lazy, unconvincing way to establish the idea that Melody is sad. Cristofano seems to think he can prove it to us, like her being sad is the first step in a geometry problem. Then he’ll move on, and not bother to have her act or think in a way that a real sad person would.

Again, the bad writing and juvenile way of expressing emotion transfer those qualities to Melody. In trying to make Melody sad, Cristofano has only made her obvious, self-centered, self-pitying, obnoxious, and melodramatic. Honestly, who—besides an angsty teenager or a lazy writer—would go to a Hallmark store to find the true essence of love?

Let me put it another way. Imagine you’re at a party, and among the crowd you notice two women. The first woman is going up to everybody she doesn’t know, warmly introducing herself, joking with people, asking them about themselves, and generally getting to know them. The second woman is walking up to people, leaning in, and bellowing, “I’M A VERY FRIENDLY PERSON! LOOK HOW FRIENDLY I AM! YOU LIKE ME BECAUSE I’M FRIENDLY!”

Melody is the second woman.

Lazy writing crime #4 — Gross contradictions

When an author doesn’t have a firm grasp on the story he’s telling, it can lead to problems of consistency. Characters or events suddenly, drastically changing does not make a story complex, it just reminds the reader that there’s a man behind the curtain. Here’s an example.

When Melody meets up with her longtime WITSEC contact Randall Farquar, she spends six pages harassing him, and insulting his competence and intelligence. Then he announces that he’s going to retire, and suddenly:

I bristle. The only person who ever understood me was Farquar … I consider saying something but I merely phase out, stare into the distance.

OK, so, fine. Maybe she was projecting her frustration with the program onto Farquar, and now the prospect of losing her only ally has given her some perspective. Wrong. Just as I was giving Cristofano the benefit of the doubt, here comes Melody’s last thought as Farquar leaves her life forever, and uses her new WITSEC alias on the way out the door:

He turns back and smiles and says, “Good-bye … Michelle.”

And as the door closes behind him, I writhe; I don’t want to be a Michelle.

Ha! She didn’t care about him at all! Fooled you! That passage makes it clear that Cristofano doesn’t have any memory of what he’s just written, or the effects it might have had on his characters or his readers.

Every time he sloppily contradicts something he just wrote, we readers paying attention get jerked out of the story. We become acutely aware of the artifice of the writing, rather than staying immersed in a consistent fictional world, and that leads to problems of believability and a general lack of trust in the author.

Here’s another show-stopping contradiction. When Melody gets a new marshal assigned to her, she recounts the events of the crime her family witnessed, the events that put them in WITSEC in the first place.

Six-year-old Melody wanted breakfast at this certain place in Little Italy in New York. 26-year-old Melody describes it like this:

“Anyway, this particular morning, I really wanted to go to Vincent’s. My folks reluctantly agreed, … When we got there, however, the place was closed. … The sign in the window … clearly stated they should be open at seven in the morning.”

Her family is so sure that Vincent’s should be open—again, at seven in the morning—that the father walks around the building and barges into the kitchen, whereupon the family witnesses a brutal murder.

OK. Already stretching believability, but it could happen, I guess. Then, in the present, Melody’s new marshal innocently asks her how many other people might have seen them that morning.

With all the snottiness and angst Melody can muster, she responds:

“What are you joking? How many restaurants do you think were open in Little Italy at seven in the morning on a Sunday? There were no other witnesses.”

Oh. But you just said there was a place open. In fact, your whole story was predicated on the idea that the restaurant was open at seven in the morning. Why is that a stupid question to ask? None of this makes any sense!

Final verdict

I know I can be a harsh critic. I know writing is a hard, exhausting job. And I know that these complaints can sound unimportant and small. And that last one might be true, they might be small complaints. But they’re certainly not unimportant. Each one of these little issues is a thread in the fabric of the novel, and every time a lazy author ignores one of them, that fabric unravels just a little bit.

Every time a lazy writer leaves in a stupid joke, or bashes us over the head with a characterization, or forgets what he was just saying, it’s another reminder that he’s there, controlling everything. Every one of these yanks us out of the experience of the story, back to the real world, where some dude is trying to manipulate our emotions with a thinly veiled teenage-girl fantasy.

To put it another way, these fits of laziness break the bond of trust between writer and reader. If readers can’t trust you to get your math problem right, how can we trust you to know who your characters are? How can we trust that you mean (or even know) what your sentences imply? How we can trust that you have any idea what you’re doing or where you’re taking us?

We can’t.

When you screw up every one of the little things—simply because you couldn’t be bothered to make everything fit together neatly—your characters become hollow, your plots become ridiculous, and your sentences become wastes of time.

And that’s what makes a bad book bad.

We all know the story. But if you have not read the book, do so. If it is not too late, don’t spend $23 to see a computerized smile come flying at you in 3D and Johnny Depp in yet another role where you cannot help think pedophile. Instead, pick up a used copy of the book on Amazon for a penny (actual price) and go to the park and read it. Better yet, patronize your local library…and hope you don’t encounter that pedophilic character after all.

The story we know as Alice in Wonderland is actually an amalgamation of the two books Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. I originally considered writing about just one of the two, but each are not much more than 100 pages and the font is bigger then I’m sure the numbers on the phone the “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” lady couldn’t reach, so I’m cool with treating them as one.

They are two separate stories, but they go so well together as one, so you should really read them both. I might argue the TTLG is better. It has a little more continuity of theme and some of the more memorable characters and verse. Regardless, though, it is not the story that makes the books so great. Both don’t really have any plot depth and have rather lackluster endings—they are children’s books when it comes down to it.

Kids are sure to love the fantastical world of Wonderland, but it is because of the wordplay that you, as a reasonably mature, literary-minded adult, should read and love the books. It is not the story that makes Carroll’s works great, but the delivery—not so much what happens in Wonderland, but how Carroll, through the peculiar personalities of his characters, relates what happens in Wonderland.

Carroll is a master of the absurd. It was probably all laudanum, but whatever. He can make the nonsensical beautiful. Take the poem of the Jabberwockey, which begins.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsey were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Alice says it best herself: “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are!” Such is the same with Carroll’s writing as a whole. There is so much nonsense, but you love it. A later explanation of the poem by Humpty Dumpty (a cameo I do not necessarily approve of) provides no more clarity. After relating that brillig mean 4PM, when you begin broiling food for dinner, and slithy is a portmanteau for lithe and slimy, Mr. Dumpty continues.

“Well, ‘toves’ are something like badgers—they’re something like lizards—and they’re something like corkscrews.”

“They must be very curious creatures.”

“They are that,” said Humpty Dumpty: “also they make their nests under sun-dials—also they live on cheese.”

You get the point.

You can try and make sense out of everything, and, sure, there is plenty of depth to be found: the religious overtones of the Walrus and the Carpenter parable; the whole world being the dream of the Red King, a dream within a dream; the potential social commentary on the charade of monarchial authority, the arbitrary rule of law, and the fruitlessness of martial conflict.

My take, though, is that trying to be too cerebral ruins the experience. Everything does not have to make sense. In Wonderland, logic and reason are at odds and oddity is the logical reason for everything:

“Crawling at your feet,” said the Gnat (Alice drew her feet back in some alarm), “you may observe a Bread-and-Butterfly. Its wings are thin slices of Bread-and-butter, its body is a crust, and its head is a lump of sugar.”

“And what does it live on?”

“Weak tea with cream in it.”

A new difficulty came into Alice’s head. “Supposing it couldn’t find any?” she suggested.

“Then it would die, of course.”

“But this must happen very often,” Alice remarked thoughtfully.

“It always happens,” said the Gnat.

There are many reasons to like the books. Like it for your own reasons, but just give in to the whimsical absurdity and try not to make the text something it is not.

My favorite quote from my favorite character, the Duchess:

Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.

Exactly.