I haven't owned a TV since I left Saudi Arabia in 2013. I do enjoy the occasional Netflix movie or series which I watch on an iPad, but for the most part, I consume my news and entertainment by reading them, not passively viewing them.
I've always been a reader. The spiffy certificates with the gold seal sticker that they awarded for summer reading contests at the elementary school library were nice but I hardly needed any encouragement.
During vet school, I didn't read much of anything that wasn't directly related to vet med. Now that I'm free to read what I want, you'd think I'd have (virtual) stacks of books lined up, waiting to be read. (I switched to electronic books almost a decade ago.) Sadly, that's not the case. I might spend a couple of hours browsing the local library's online selection to maybe find three or four books that I might want to read. I say "might" because one of the things I've learned over the years is that I am absolutely free to stop reading a book that I don't like. I don't need a good or logical reason. My time is precious and I won't waste it reading a story when I don't care how it ends.
An author I've avoided for years is Joyce Carol Oates. She is a prolific writer with dozens of novels and other written forms under her name and two pseudonyms. But I find her writing style by turns bloated and dry, and frankly repetitive. Her stories have never sung to me. But I recently got a copy of Blonde, which she wrote in 2000. It's not a straight up biography of Marilyn Monroe but instead an introspective exploration of known, historical events. In Blonde, JCO's prose is more bloated than usual. But that feverish, dream-like prose creates an anguished tone that is the perfect setting for those known, historical events, the tragedy that was Marilyn Monroe, the actress and the person. It's still a slog, JCO will not ever let the reader off easy, but I can't stop reading it. I won't be rushing out to pick up more of her books but I am really enjoying this one.
In contrast, I was waiting for the release of Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters with considerable anticipation. In fact, I put in a request that the local library acquire it, and they did. I had already read a couple of reviews of the book and heard an interview with the author and I was excited to finally get to read it for myself. And I was so disappointed when I had to stop reading it about one-third of the way through.
The book is ... not good. It is told in chapters alternating between current events in the book, which are roughly today, and flashbacks to past events. There are two and a half main characters (yeah, that's one of the problems). One is a transwoman, another is a man who was a transwoman and the lesbian lover of the first transwoman who decided to transition back to presenting as a man but who still views himself as a transwoman inside, and the half is a ciswoman with whom the man has an affair and who gets pregnant. There, all clear, right? I actually don't have problems with this. It could be the set up to some great tragicomedy, if we are able to work through only having half a character as one of the main actors.
Prose in the chapters of the book where the the main character is relating stories from her past, about her journey to become who she is now, about her lovers, and her self-love, that prose sparkles and crackles and jumps off the page with wit and pain and love and beauty. Fabulous writing. The stuff the author added to those bits to turn them into a novel? Complete shit. The plot of the novel? Utter shit. So many huge plot holes and clumsy attempts to stitch that crap into one book instead of what this should have been, a collection of short stories.
I stopped reading when the half-character, the ciswoman, tells her lover, the former transwoman, that her mother (hang in there, I know it's bad) said she should communally raise the baby with the transwoman, the lover who is a man but still views himself as a transwoman, and herself because babies "need all the moms" when in fact the very backstory of the half-character ciswoman made it clear she was raised in virtual rural isolation (on a mink farm, wtf?) with a barely attentive mother. Where did all this crap about "all the moms" come from? It was so completely out of character for an already barely limned character that I just threw up my hands and said, this is fucking stupid and poorly conceived. I couldn't stand to read another word.
The author has a lot of promise, and I hope that she gives us a collection of short stories because I would love to read more of that. This ridiculous attempt at a longer narrative? Just stop.
No comments:
Post a Comment