I will read almost anything. Yes, it's true that when left to my own devices I gravitate toward 19th-century English novels and/or young adult fiction and/or stuff with magic/wizards/aliens/spaceships, but I'm pretty open-minded when it comes to fiction. I spent a lot of my youth being frustrated by people around me who judged my favorite books by their genre, so I try my best not to repeat the behavior, and if someone I trust recommends a book to read, I will read it. I may not like it, but I'll certainly give it a try.
And yet there are some stylistic tics that bother me, across all genres. I realized this about two and a half years ago, when on the recommendation of several friends, I picked up The Time Traveler's Wife. It should have been right up my alley: urban fantasy (not that it packaged itself as such, but it was) mixed with a love story. I should have connected with it. Instead, I found myself turned off by three stylistic choices:
1. Narration in the first-person present tense2. Multiple first-person narrators3. Chapters beginning with the name of the present narrator
For whatever reason, these three things combined to create a style that kept me from liking the novel. Since then, I've only read one novel that makes the same three choices (Old Magic by Marianne Curley, which I read on vacation when I had run out of other books in a non-English-speaking country), but I've read many more that meet one or two of these criteria -- especially #1.
So why do these things bother me?? Is it just because I've been conditioned to believe that the first person should be an exclusive perspective, or that novels should be written in the past tense? Why is it that first person and present tense narration don't bother me when used separately, but feel so inelegant in combination?
If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say part of it is about the conditioning. Off the top of my head, I can only think of a handful of present-tense novels I've read, and they are by and large very recent productions (excluding portions of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, because including it would just open up a whole new can of worms). Same goes for novels with multiple first-person narrators -- although these have been more prevalent in the literary canon, with Wilkie Collins infamously producing novels like The Moonstone out of a series of stitched-together witness accounts.
But part of it may go deeper than that. How often do you find yourself thinking or speaking about yourself in the present tense? Not the present progressive -- "I'm doing this, I'm going here" -- but the present -- "I do this, I go here"? Maybe this is just me, but I don't go around narrating my life to myself as it happens. So when a character in a book starts, effectively, to do just that, it sounds strange because it's not a mode of speech I'm used to.
In contrast, first-person past tense isn't as strange. We're all used to relating stories of what we've done after-the-fact. We're incredibly familiar with third-person past-tense, as it is, essentially, the narrative mode of gossip: "He did this, they went there, and she wore that hideous dress." I'm not sure how third-person present-tense narration fits into all of this (and to the best of my knowledge I've never read any long-form works in this style), but for whatever reason, "He walks across the room" is easier in my head than "I walk across the room."
Still, this isn't to say that good works of fiction can't be written in the first-person present-tense. I flew through Holly Black's White Cat despite its use of this exact style, and now that I'm halfway through the sequel, Red Glove, I hardly even notice the narration as strange. Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy, though not as much to my taste as the Curseworkers novels have proven to be so far, also uses the same style and is no less worth reading because of it.
Maybe I've realized that it's stupid to dislike books specifically for their style of narration. Or maybe I've just read enough of this style, now, to be conditioned out of seeing it as anything out of the ordinary.
I loved Suzanna Collins Hunger Games trilogy. Just saying. As far as the rest of your stylistic preferences, I say that whether I like a novel or not has more to do with whether I like the characters than the choice of narration. I do understand where you're coming from.
ReplyDeleteI recently got done reading Neuromancer. And while Gibson did and extremely good job describing certain physical aspects of the story I don't feel he did near as good with making the story coherent. So I don't think it's a bad thing to dislike a book because of how it tells a story (even if that story is good), it's just a thing. Some movies that absolutely dislike others think are amazing (Black Swan and Quentin Tarantino's movies come to mind). Even if the books are considered 'good' they can still grate on the literary nerves of others who read them.
ReplyDeleteA couple of the gimmicky Animorphs books do #2 and #3, to varying success. (#2 often ends up with #3 to make #2 easier, though #3 is sometimes used for third-person as well, e.g. in A Song of Ice and Fire)
ReplyDeleteGood attitude in the first paragraph, which I think entitles you to have personal dislikes.
Again, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.
@Adam: I read Neuromancer a long time ago and had much the same opinion. Of course, "a long time ago" was middle school, so I probably need to re-read it anyway...
@Jordy Rose: Was definitely thinking of GRRM in terms of ways to do #3 right. (In his case, it's both a ballsy and necessary move...seeing as how I suspect his character count is on par with the average Dickens novel!)
ReplyDeleteAlso, because I don't know if I said this before, I have read If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (and enjoyed it more than I thought I would) -- but in general, second-person is another one of those weird techniques that doesn't quite fit in.