Fashionable or self-conscious method ruins a good story for me, even if it does work out as a decent plot. For several years, in order to sell a story, some authors have taken to impairing the narrators to the point we can hardly understand said person. We must decipher these texts through the eyes of someone with brain damage, Asperger's syndrome, or full-on Autism, such as the charming THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHTTIME, although some go too far, and we must endure disentangling plots of children raised by wolves, only to find out their parents were academicians whose schedules were so booked, they forgot the kids in a Peruvian airport, and crap like that.
Then there are the latest title constructions. For a while now, authors have scrambled for zesty combinations of relatives to bind together on a book binding. First we had THE KITCHEN GOD'S WIFE, by Amy Tan, which seemed perfectly acceptable at the time. . . good story, well told, fair enough. But it was apparently far from enough. Streams of similar titles have subsequently lined the shelves. A mere sprinkling of them:
THE TIME-TRAVELER'S WIFE
THE MEMORY KEEPER'S DAUGHTER
THE HERETIC'S DAUGHTER
THE SENATOR'S SON
THE TIME KEEPER'S DAUGHTER
THE PIRATE'S DAUGHTER
THE WIDOW'S HUSBAND
THE PIG KEEPER'S DAUGHTER
Surely we've seen the other titles whose writers jumped onto this paddy wagon. Eventually they'll run out of kinfolk. Picture THE QUEEN MOTHER'S AUNTIE. . . or THE ARCHBISHOP'S SWEET GODSON . . . or THE FRUIT JUGGLER'S SECOND COUSIN, ONCE-REMOVED.Thank goodness the family tree scheme should inherently be short lived.
Jonathan Franzen's THE CORRECTIONS this epic tome rose above short lists of others--its dysfunctional family characters made reluctant exits at the story's end, however shady remains the plot. Certainly I recall some of the wacky tight spots they got into. I had few qualms about the style, at least.
Kathryn Stockett's THE HELP was a triumph--it knocked me flat, its theme one of such recent urgency, according to the headlines, it's appalling. A southern writer secretly, dangerously and daringly gathers black housemaids to tell their stories of working for upper-income whites in 1950s Mississippi. The effect of its overriding fear and loathing overwhelmed me, as did its dead-on honesty.
AMERICAN WIFE, Curtis Sittenfeld's fictionalized story of Laura Bush, also renders a complex--even baffling--story very well indeed, possibly approaching the standing of Great American Novel. At the end, we know as little as we did at the beginning about why people make their decisions, and this uncertainty fulfills the plot's needs as much as do her letter-perfect character renderings.
Still one longs for something meaty in which to sink the bicuspids. Recently in a fit of literary boredom, I looked up Richard Russo's list, and discovered STRAIGHT MAN, which had bypassed me somehow.
Russo's biggest hit was NOBODY'S FOOL, a searingly poignant American story of a down-and-out drunk who attempts another bat at life; the novel was made into a movie starring the late Paul Newman. Another great one was the saga of a failing economic community, EMPIRE FALLS, one of my favorite novels in the last three decades.
I finished STRAIGHT MAN today, and found out at last what happened to comically pathetic Devereaux, the English professor who had dug so many permanent holes for himself no one could ever climb out. Did it make me want to be a better person? Well, sure. But it also opened a curtain into a whole structure of relationships--a small town university setting, its diffident royalty and its paranoid peons, their loyalties, hypocrisies and deadly grudges--making me cry at the sheer tragedy of life, while laughing at it too, most especially at my often deluded self. Would I say it's a Great American Novel? I'd have to re-read and analyze it. I'm not sure. It came close, though.
Richard Russo: wherever you are, though undoubtedly you will not read this, thank you for a good long read on the caliber of Updike.
www.librarything.com/author/russorichard
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