"Make each chapter no longer than four pages, the average American has A.D.D."
Just wasted 400-plus pages of my life reading The Alexandria Link by Steve Berry. I don’t want to say the book was bad, just very, very average.
Now, Berry has written these little historical adventure-mysteries before, so I can’t blame him. I blame editors that jump on the “if you liked the Da Vinci Code, you’ll love this!” bandwagon. I mean, how many “the world would explode in a power keg if this religious tidbit got out!” stories can the public stomach?
And to the reviewers who claimed AL was a ‘more literary rendition’, I say, no! It wasn’t! It wasn’t any better written, and certainly had just as little character development. Even I figured out on page 84 the watch was a transmitter. C’mon!
Okay, so I didn’t get as upset as Orson Scott Card did. I didn’t take the politics quite that seriously. That’s not my axe to grind here. I just want to say no matter how many biblical bombshells you drop, it won’t make one iota of difference. Faith is belief in the presence of proof to the contrary! Jesus married? A father? Oh, no. The shroud of Turin a fake? Absolutely not. Joseph Smith a nutcase? L. Ron Hubbard a huckster? Oh, no.
So who cares where the promised land is? All I know is where the fighting is, and that’s everywhere. Because hate has no boundaries. And I don’t have Steve Barry’s agent, so my loss.
In the “Well, at least that book HAD a plot” department: I also read Remainder by Tom McCarthy.
Anyone who would care to explain the book to me, please feel free. Am I some kind of intellectual dwarf who didn’t get that it was “A masterpiece waiting to happen – again and again and again” as 3 AM Magazine said on the back cover? Or do I just like to feel something I’ve read is more than a creative writing assignment? Is this what is known as an ‘experimental novel’? If so, please don’t experiment on me.
This would have made a better short story. As a novel, it was tedious. The writing was good, but I knew it was somehow not going to ‘pay off’ in way I would appreciate; so I found myself skimming pages, bored with the narrator’s obsession. Or mental illness. Or genius. Or whatever.
At some point McCarthy just lost me. I stopped caring, began just flying ahead to get to some ‘shocker’ ending… He’s dreaming – He’s dead – He’s in a coma – He’s a woman…
Silly me. I won’t attempt a novel because I have ‘nothing to say’. I don’t have a beginning, middle and an end. I don’t have plausible characters with rich inner lives and disturbing pasts. No uncanny perception as to the intimate thoughts of a hit man, homeless woman or ten-year-old abuse victim. So I sit silently. Blogging, as that is the only format I ‘know’ – the diary. The personal observation. (Received Leaves of Grass as a gift – took me a whole ten seconds to figure out why that’s the perfect tome for the self-centered writer)
How wrong I am. All I need is a typewriter and the fortitude to produce 200 pages. Let some editor decide how they should be collated. If my first book sells, I won’t even need an editor any more. Worked for Joseph Heller and Naked Lunch guy.
Why not me?
No comments:
Post a Comment