Essay: Bad Fiction (A Look at the Contemporary Novel)

By Hugh Blanton

 

A lot of bad novels are being published today in the name of identity politics and/or trauma porn; an author's identity being more important to acquisition editors (and award juries!) than literary talent. Nothing gives me the feeling of having been born too late than to see the long-lists of committees preparing to pin their prestigious awards on the year's "best" novels, boosting the fortunate finalists onto best seller lists. Give me any of the old time-tested novels from authors now regarded as "problematic"—Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, or maybe Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark, and I'm happy as a quahog at high tide. Novels then needed good prose and good stories to pass muster with editors, today it seems as if Big Five imprints are looking mostly for allies to aid themselves in the culture wars being waged on social media and public radio. (Check any of NPR's "best books of the year" over the last five years and you'll see what I mean.) Of course I realize how ungrateful I sound to the cultural establishment as they proclaim how lucky we all are to be reading books in these perilous and exciting times. I don't doubt their sincerity at all in what they say—but they are saying it because there is no rigorous criticism in literature today to show them otherwise.

 

It is becoming more common to find novelists attempting to illuminate and lift their prose by exploiting poetry. Like watching a small child clomping around in their parents shoes trying to play grownup, you want to pat them on the head and tell them how cute they are, but also to knock it off. Sentences that were supposed to have poetic meter ended up being nothing but clunky. Confusing metaphor and simile render other sentences comical and bewildering. Isa Arsén's 2023 novel Shoot the Moon gives us a taste of it in a sex scene between Annie, our protagonist,  and her lover Evelyn: "I slid my hands up and down her arms...my palms itching with purpose." (Itching?) Once the reader get the vision of insects or rashes out of their mind, it goes on: "I was too jellied to move in earnest for several slow molasses-minutes, all my split-apart bones floating in the air around me." It gets worse: "The trepidation in her eyes was a smear of doubt like oil on chrome." Shoot the Moon was one of BookBub's Best Books for Fall, Shondaland's Best Books for October '23, and Zibby Magazine's Most Anticipated Book. Critic Rob Merrill writing for the AP said, "Arsén writes with real heart and certainly demonstrates her talent as a storyteller." (Oil on chrome?) 

 

I don't doubt Arsén has plenty of heart, but I dare to disagree with Merrill's assessment of Arsén's storytelling abilities. Our main character Annie has aspirations to be a rocket scientist and enrolls in The College and Academy of St. Christopher the Martyr. However, she changes her mind and enrolls in a secretarial school. As to why she, or anyone, would make such a drastic and seemingly stupid decision we aren't told. It's simply a device Arsén uses so that Annie the typist can show a bungling scientist at NASA his mathematical errors. She corrects them quietly as she types them up, but eventually becomes exasperated and confronts him. These inconsistencies ("plot holes" as they're often called) are rife in fiction today; a woman in Ilana Masad's All My Mother's Lovers has been carrying on several illicit affairs that she wants to keep secret from her family, but then leaves letters detailing them lying about where anyone can find them. A character in Gabino Iglesias's The Devil Takes You Home is forced to become an assassin to pay off medical bills when all he really needed to do was file for bankruptcy.

 

In addition to mangled prose and bad stories, often we'll get a huge dose of pure unadulterated insipidness. Shannon Bowring's The Road to Dalton opens up with a prologue that instructs the reader to "Imagine this:" All we are asked to imagine is riding up a highway to the top of a hill and to look down upon a sleepy podunk. When the story actually starts we sit through thirty pages of a New Year's Eve party where no one wants to be—side glances, champagne flutes clinking, everybody silently wishing to go home. It's not uncommon for novels to get off to slow starts, and a reader might look forward to things getting going in the next chapter, but then all we get is another dinner party with strained silences, stabbing at food, and forks scraping over plates. We are mercifully let go after only twelve pages this time, but have to go through it all again in a character's telephone conversation recounting the strained silences and knowing looks at the dinner. Bowring's intent here is to paint a picture of a sleepy boring town and if the reader can stay awake through it all you really can't say she failed. Book reviewer Zachary Houle writing for Medium says of The Road to Dalton: "This is sterling fiction...", "That's how powerful her writing is.", and "...a lot of this is Grade-A stuff." And that's part of the problem with bad fiction—a lack of lively criticism. Reviewers passing out praise like penny candy is not criticism, it's publicity. Our age needs a Dorothy Parker—a critic whose reviews caused enraged publishers to pull their advertising from The New Yorker in protest of her completely accurate assessments of their books.

 

As a reviewer, after going through so many bad books, I often have to lie down with a compress of Cormac McCarthy on my head at the end of a long reading day. His first novel, The Orchard Keeper, had an unlikely path to publication—he sent the manuscript to Random House (not knowing of any other place to send it) and it was published. Of course any unsolicited manuscript sent to Random House today would go straight to the recycle bin, or more accurately deleted from the inbox, so there's no chance for a naive first time novelist getting their manuscript published by a major publisher. There are small presses out there publishing great fiction from unknown authors, but without the distribution and publicity departments that the Big 5 have, they toil away almost in complete anonymity. In 2023 the magnificent novel The Initiate by MP Powers was published by the independent publisher Anxiety Press. Mark Vanner, author of The Bone That Swallowed a Man, said of MP Powers: "I have not read a writer as capable of bringing a city to life the way MP Powers does since reading Kerouac in my early twenties." With the mediocre and the awful in the literary spotlight and taking up all the acclaim and bestseller spots, novels like The Initiate go mostly unacknowledged. The miracle of Cormac McCarthy up from the slush pile has no chance of repeating today.

 

Novelists tend to take themselves seriously, very few of them include humor in their stories. And sometimes I have to say it's better that they don't. A poor writer's attempt at humor will fall just as flat as any other narrative they attempt. In the novel Sandwich by Catherine Newman our main character is a post-menopausal mother of two named Rocky. Rocky describes her hot flashes: "As if your twat is personally shoveling coal into a terrible furnace." There's another stab at humor when Rocky's mother picks up what she thinks is a hairband from a kitchen chair, holds it aloft and asks whose it is. It's actually thong underwear left by Rocky's son's girlfriend. How it was left on a kitchen chair is anyone's guess and how Rocky's mother could be so obtuse as to mistake thong underwear for a headband is just a canard the reader is expected to ignore. Of course you have to appreciate Newman's boldness in attempting humor through a post-menopausal "twat" joke, but it comes off more cringe than funny. However, the gross can be made funny in a skilled writer's hands. In the short story "A Few Things" by Mather Schneider (collected in his book Port Awful) a park employee describes his odd coworker:

Roger was obsessed with farts. Sometimes we'd see him walking by himself and suddenly stop, bend over and start to pound his knees in laughter. Then he'd straighten up and continue walking, chuckling and wiping the tears from his eyes. If you asked him what was so funny, it usually turned out he had remembered hearing somebody fart once somewhere. He claimed to have never once farted in his life. He thought the whole idea of farts was ridiculous, absolute insanity. When anyone farted within earshot of him he would go nuts with cackles. It was infectious. Sometimes it made you almost want to go to work. The idea was to save up your farts and only let them go in Roger's presence. A fart without Roger around was a wasted fart.

It helps when writing comedy to actually have a sense of humor as your starting point.

 

If I'm harsh it's because these mediocre writers are paraded around and heaped with laurels while writers of true talent toil unacknowledged, on fire for literature but working a day job to keep the bills paid. If I'm not a cheerleader for fiction, there are plenty of other reviewers taking care of that. How can my criticism be trusted if I only review writers I admire? If I had to approach every book worrying about the feelings of an author I might as well give up reviewing. Writers and editors have blocked me from their social media accounts, I've been dogpiled by Ocean Vuong fans, at least one poet has requested that their pieces be removed from a magazine that had published my criticism. A critic can not be afraid to slay sacred cows. The Devil Takes You Home was awarded the Shirley Jackson award, the Bram Stoker award, was named a top 100 horror book by Audible, and was an Amazon Editor's Pick. And out of the hundreds of books I've read over the last three years it's one of the worst. Iglesias's prose makes one think of a student who must have flunked out of a WRITE LIKE RAYMOND CHANDLER!!! course. "The darkness around me stuck to my skin with the insistence of a child asking an uncomfortable question." "Spit flew from his mouth like fat white bullets." "Her chest rattled like an old car trying to do eighty on the highway with a trunk full of rocks." And his best: "I knew that death was serious business."

 

It isn't just the bad prose that ruins Devil, the story is equally as awful. Iglesias writes of a Mexican drug cartel money laundering scheme where "folks" (he doesn't get any more specific than "folks") are given money to take out a life insurance policy in the USA, "wait a few months," and then fake some good news like an inheritance and ask for their premiums back. In truth, American life insurance companies do not refund premiums unless it is during the "free look" period which is typically only about ten days. In another example of Iglesias's dilettantism one of the most savage killers in the book owns a Smith & Wesson 500 which she's very proud of. She displays it for her friends and exclaims, "You know why this only holds five bullets in the barrel? Cause it doesn't need six to kill!" Of course anyone with even a glancing familiarity with guns knows that the bullets are held in the cylinder, not the barrel—even those admiring critics who gave Devil rave reviews. Mulholland Books, Devil's publisher and a Hachette imprint, calls Devil a "genre-bending thriller." (The awards bestowed on it were awards given in the horror genre.) Iglesias would do good to study genre-bending thriller writers like Rusty Barnes who actually know the difference between a cylinder and a barrel.

 

Iglesias uses the characters in his book as stand ins for his social activism. In one of the more (unintentionally) comic scenes in the book, what looks like might be a vicious fight between two of the book's Hispanic main characters and a group of three white racists ends up being a lecture on racism and citizenship, with the victorious Hispanic characters giving the defeated white characters a list of Hispanic surnames to remember. The lecture is wrapped up with a slight of Donald Trump. Iglesias throws in anti-classism rants too: "Poor people have the same haunted look. We share something that makes us part of the same breed regardless of color or language." This is the kind of poppycock that middle-class and wealthy people who have never suffered poverty believe about the poor. As anybody who's ever lived in a crowded, moldy tenement or a run-down trailer park can tell you—poor people are more likely to stab each other than to hug each other.

 

Trauma porn and victimhood are two themes becoming more popular in fiction today. Andrés Ordorica's novel How We Named the Stars is written in the form of an apostrophe to the main character's (Daniel de la Luna) deceased lover (Sam Morris). Apostrophes are almost always a poor form to write in, the constant do you remember?, you did... then you... become a nuisance. Add to that the main character's near constant lachrymose wailing and you've got yet another hole in your wall from the flinging of yet another schlock novel. Daniel receives a gift of school supplies his first day of college from his wealthy roommate's parents. Seemingly a quotidian enough event, Daniel is traumatized by it: "What I needed most right then: someone to hold me and tell me it was going to be all right." When meeting someone who might be a potential love interest after Sam's death, Daniel thinks, "I was alone with no best friend to ask me how I felt about what was going on...". This kind of solipsism makes Daniel seem more like a narcissist than a sensitive young man in need of healing. Ordorica's poor prose also gets in the way of portraying Daniel as sensitive: "I mumbled between crying and heavy breathing, my nose filled with snot." Mucous does not a touching moment make.

 

Tatum Vega, the main character in Ursula Villarreal-Moura's Like Happiness, moves from scene to scene in the book on the hunt for things to be traumatized and/or angry about. A journalist working on a piece about a man that was Tatum's lover (M. Domínguez) many years ago contacts Tatum for an interview. The piece is about Domínguez's mistreatment of women, and Tatum, after rooting around in her memories, thinks she may have been mistreated by him too. Further, Tatum recalls reading M. Domínguez's book some time back and thinks one of the characters in it resembles her. Further again, she thinks maybe the character doesn't resemble her so much after all. (During their relationship M.  Domínguez paid off a huge portion of Tatum's student loan debt and even paid her travel expenses so she could travel with him.) Regardless, she still pens a screed of how she kind of might've been mistreated and sends it to him anyway. Villarreal-Moura puts on her poet's hat in Like Happiness with near comic results: "acid ricocheted into my throat." "my heartbeat deafening the roar of traffic." and, possibly channeling Dan Brown, "night inky black." The favorite dialog tag of amateur hour, "chortled," makes no less than three appearances. T. Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, says of Like Happiness: "[I]t's also a whip-smart critique of race in America, art making in the age of neoliberal 'feminism' and the crushing humor of trying to exist as a quiet person with big wants." (Ricocheting acid?)

 

Novelists think of themselves as emperors with clothes and that they should be revered. They infect their novels with politics and identity, but it's the attempts at profundity that are the worst. From Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous: "But I can't tell you why the dead outnumber the living." Poet Amanda Gorman's attempt: "We posit that pre-memory is the phenomenon in which we remember that which we are experiencing." (Maybe she means deja vu?) These are sentences that at first sound elegant and profound until you realize they're nothing more than vacuous guff. In an example of true profundity, Cormac McCarthy's Judge Holden skips the elegance and gets straight to the point in Blood Meridian: "War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner." Catherine Newman's novel Sandwich was of course a beach read and not meant to be taken seriously, but near the end of the novel she still tries a Meaning of Life statement: "To say to each other I know how you feel." The last time I heard that I was eavesdropping on a conversation between two whiskey sippers in a dive bar when one told the other his hemorrhoids were killing him.

 

Surrealism is a difficult genre for novelists to work in—how do you get a reader to stick with you through a story of impossible weirdness? The greats—Kobo Abe, Franz Kafka, Poe—are still in print and anthologized even years after their deaths. They've passed their torches on to contemporary surrealists, some that are carrying it well (Steve Gergley, Spencer Fleury, Colin Gee come to mind), and others that are stumbling and dropping it horribly. Molly McGhee's debut novel Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is a poor, almost silly, attempt at surrealism. Corporations seeking to increase the productivity of their employees are hiring a government contractor to clean up their employee's dreams. Yes, the government contractors enter these employee's dreams as they sleep and use a vacuum cleaner to suck out the bad parts of their dreams, reduce their stress, and make them more productive. Some of the dreams that are being "cleaned up" are supposed to be terrifying, but the reader can't be terrified—it's just a dream and it will be over when the sleeping employee wakes up. One government contractor goes rogue with his dream cleaning vacuum—he enters his ex-wife's dreams at night and vacuums up all her memories of their daughter so that he can take custody of her. The ex-wife then ostensibly goes through her days afterward wondering what the heck people are talking about when they ask about her daughter. Molly Templeton, former assistant editor at Tor, gave Abernathy a gushing review in Reactor Magazine: "It is a masterfully written, pointed and polished novel, and it's also, somehow, a primal scream."

 

Reviewers don't typically hit on typos they come across in books, especially if they are uncorrected ARC's. But when the book your reviewing is written with such terrible prose and you come across this:"took a swing from the bottle." (Arsén's Shoot the Moon), or this: "highway thick with lobster dinners." (Newman's Sandwich), you don't know if it's a deliberate phrase or a copyeditor's oversight. (Neither of these two books I reviewed were ARC's.) Do editors even question bad phrases that repeat themselves throughout the book? In Tommy Orange's Wandering Stars lip pointing repeatedly occurs (yes, lip pointing): "Opal pointed up to the moon with her lips." and "She pointed her lips at a horse" and "pointed over my shoulder with his lips" and "his lips pointing the way we were headed" and "pointing my lips back where we'd come from."

 

Of course, some of the blame for all this bad fiction rolling off the presses can be laid at the feet of the critics. Criticism seems to range from lavish pom pom waving to non-committal reviews by critics afraid of declarations of certainty. "What fools these readers be!" must be a common refrain in the reviewer's minds as they proclaim each novelist under review a genius. James Wood, once the terror of novelists everywhere, has been corralled and tamed by The New Yorker. Here he is fawning over Emma Cline in the June 6 & 13 2016 issue:

Twenty-seven years old, Cline is already a talented stylist, apparently fast-tracked by the Muses. I don't mean this as the critic's dutiful mustering of plaudits before the grim march of negatives. At her frequent best, Cline sees the world exactly and generously. On every other page, it seems, there is something remarkable—an immaculate phrase, a boldly modifying adverb, a metaphor or simile that makes a sudden, electric connection between its poles.

Is this a review or a blurb?

 

I write criticism to discover what I think. My opinions are often overruled by award juries and the book buying public, but both are notorious for their bad judgment. I give unambiguous opinions so that readers can give me their trust (or withhold it). Just as annoying as the perpetual cheerleading critic is the quibbler—simply tell us—is it good or is it bad? However, if readers are constantly being told "It is a masterfully written, pointed and polished novel" and they come upon silly sentences and a stupid story, are they likely to let novels continue to have a claim on their time?

Hugh Blanton's latest book is Kentucky Outlaw. He can be reached on X: @HughBlanton5