Reading Wednesday

[sabotabby]

Just finished:

[redacted]: This is my friend's YA novel that I was beta reading. She has a publisher and it's sitting with an editor at the moment, so I won't say much other than it has a really cool concept, I enjoyed it, and I'm looking forward to it being in print so that I can recommend it to people. I also do like the process of betaing because if you don't like something in a book, you can say to the author, "I don't like that you did this thing and you should do another thing that I like instead," and they do that.

Speaking of which...

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. I FINISHED THE TORTURE PORN BOOK YOU GUYS. I HAVE MANY FEELINGS.

Chief among them [spoiler] WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK HE KILLS HIMSELF AT THE END? what's even the point then??? He could have killed himself at least 200 pages earlier and we'd all be spared a lot of suffering. [/spoiler]



So it's a very beautifully written book, but I'm not sure what the actual point of it is. Life sucks and is unfair? Rich people have problems too? I don't know. Like, I'm fascinated by it, because the aesthetics of suffering are an interesting cultural phenomenon, particularly male suffering viewed through the female gaze—I love all things gothic and Victorian, after all—and to be fair, my issues with it were not so massive that I put it down at any point, but. Take away the lovely prose, which is indeed lovely, and you have some weird stuff going on there.

One of my early formative writing experiences was Orson Scott Card's How To Write Science Fiction & Fantasy (I got it as a gift well before we knew what a contemptible person he is). It's as fascinating for its wrong and terrible writing advice as it is for its good advice. Anyway, at one point he says that writing about a character who suffers a lot and then dies is pointless unless your story is about his life after death. This may come as a surprise to readers of obscure little stories like, oh, I don't know, fucking King Lear, but A Little Life did make me recall that advice. The difference between this and basically every Shakespearean tragedy, is that none of the suffering and death actually matters in the story. It's fully unconnected to inherent character flaws, of which Jude really has none that are relevant. He's a passive object with no agency and none of the many rapes, maimings, beatings, and losses that happen are his fault, unless it's cosmic retribution for things he does as an adult, which really doesn't make any sense. I guess it could also be an existentialist commentary on how nothing matters, but I expect more (intentional) black comedy in that case.

But the main thing is if you're going to torture your characters for 600 pages, I need to know why I should care about your characters. Which is, to me, why this felt like fanfic; the moments that make me bond with the characters and care about them are nearly all off-screen. Like fanfic, it assumes that I have a pre-existing bond, but I don't. That's why the torture felt so gratuitous to the point of comedy.

Maybe I'm wrong. For all its flaws, I was super into it, it won all the awards and critics and Tumblr liked it, which I thought was very odd as normally Tumblr is far more PC and into own-voice than I am. So what do I know?

Currently reading: Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo. This one's fun. It's about the eight occult secret societies at Yale (Skull and Bones and the seven other ones you haven't heard of) and Lethe House, which is tasked with making sure that the other ones don't kill anyone or open portals to hell, etc. The protagonist, Alex, is a fucked-up dropout recruited by Lethe despite a lack of academic credentials because she can see ghosts without the need for psychoactive magical drugs. Everything goes horribly wrong and her mentor/love interest disappears and a townie girl is murdered, and she has to go up against a bunch of wealthy occultists to figure out who's responsible.

It's one of those frustrating "why didn't I think to put that in my book? that's great and would totally fit with my worldbuilding GODDAMN IT" reads. My only problem with it so far is some pages after the tone leads me to think that it's a certain kind of fun read, Alex is raped by a ghost as a child. The scene is quite well done and puts the character's psychology in context but it's an abrupt tonal shift.

And. Look, this has nothing to do with the book, but a hilarious incident happened last year? or the year before? that I can't talk about in a public post, but included the line "I WAS RAPED BY A GHOST" and during that whole scene in the book, which was as I said quite well done and meant to be horrifying, I kept giggling inappropriately because of this. (In general I don't believe that rape jokes can be funny. In this case...look, it was a very funny story involving some bad people and no actual rape occurred.)

I am fully willing to accept that this is a Me Problem and not reflective of anyone else's experience of the story. But you should probably know that there's a ghost raping a child in it if that's a thing that might bother you.

Anyway, other than that, I'm really liking it.

Comments

[kore]

I had to read Sister Carrie, THE UNCUT VERSION, in an AmLit course and at the end of like 400 pages, which feel oh so much longer because fucking Theodore Dreiser, the main character (not Carrie) kills himself actually saying "What's the use?" The class was incensed. Why did we read this? Why did he WRITE this? What was the POINT? &c &c Just as you say, there are plenty of works of great lit where people die at the end, even stories where death is inevitable and tragic, and you don't get the "Why the fuck did I read all that for?" feeling at the end.

I haven't forgot how you tempted me re this book but OMG SO MANY PAGES. Right now my reading is like trashy true crime books (how dare Sarah Weinman steal my career), books about how the Republican party got taken over by nightmare goblins (I'm eying Reaganland but I already slogged through Nixonland by the same writer) and Pratchett rereads.

But the main thing is if you're going to torture your characters for 600 pages, I need to know why I should care about your characters. Which is, to me, why this felt like fanfic; the moments that make me bond with the characters and care about them are nearly all off-screen. Like fanfic, it assumes that I have a pre-existing bond, but I don't. That's why the torture felt so gratuitous to the point of comedy.

Oh yeah, those are really good points. I think it's kind of tapping into the Secret History crowd, only Secret History was MUCH BETTER, and also written in 1992; litfic can be way more explicit now (I remember friends of mine being surprised that Lolita doesn't actually have explicit sex scenes). I haven't read it either (SO. MANY. PAGES), but Tartt's Goldfinch (2014) sounded similar to this book in a lot of ways (could be entirely wrong there, tho). (Also, this comment is depressing, because when I was a younger reader I used to be drawn to books that promised long, long days of getting lost in them, that you could practically weigh by the pound. Now that same kind of length just makes me feel tired.)

Aww I liked Ninth House so much! I'm glad you're enjoying it.

[sabotabby]

I can think of a few good stories where the suicide works, but if the whole point of the story is "I am trying to keep this stupid meatsack alive and everyone around me is making massive sacrifices to keep my stupid meatsack alive," I'm gonna need some damned good reasons why ending in suicide is a good idea.

It was a bit similar to The Goldfinch in that I was like, "what is the point of these words?" though I didn't actually find that one as pointlessly depressing other than the beginning.

Oddly, the (unfavourable) comparison my brain wanted to make was Delaney's Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, a book which is thoroughly disgusting in ways my imagination was not capable of comprehending before, and which is approximately 90,000 pages of super gross sex acts and no plot, followed by 50 pages of actual plot, at which point I was so tremendously moved that I bawled actual tears, despite the loss that happens being inevitable and not tragic. There were points at which I was like, "holy fuck what is wrong with my life that I'm reading this," but it was ultimately answered with, "because this has something significant to say about the human condition."

I will read short books for fun but I expect long, meandering books with literary pretensions to Say Something, I guess. Though I did get lost quite a bit and there were descriptions of mental illness that ended up being very relatable.

Aww I liked Ninth House so much! I'm glad you're enjoying it.

It's very much my thing.

[kore]

I can think of a few good stories where the suicide works, but if the whole point of the story is "I am trying to keep this stupid meatsack alive and everyone around me is making massive sacrifices to keep my stupid meatsack alive," I'm gonna need some damned good reasons why ending in suicide is a good idea.

Seriously!

....wow, I wish I could read Delany's later explicit books but I just can't. (I got as far as a graphic novel of Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York, which is a lovely story and well-illustrated, but it shows Samuel R. Delany having sex! Lots of sex! I was just like, omg I feel like I saw Santa Claus fucking! It was just too weird).

[sabotabby]

I am glad to know the Delany still gets some even though he's a million years old but I don't actually need to see visual depictions of it 'cause I'm innocent. But! I'm happy for him.

[kore]

SAME

It's a very nice book but I'm never going to read it again. :-/

[minoanmiss]

*dies and is dead of lol*

[kore]

It's BEAUTIFULLY done. I was just like "AAAGH NO UNCLE CHIP I'VE BEEN READING YOU SINCE I WAS THIRTEEN"

[nyctanthes]

Haha, your spoiler comment reminds me of when I saw that movie with Lady Gaga and the guy from Alias. (A Star Is Born!) The last half of the movie I kept chanting DIE! DIE! DIE! and then he killed himself and it was a big fuck you to his wife who gave a lovely eulogy for him at Lincoln Center and, the movie implied, would probably spend the rest of her life feeling bad she was a far more talented and successful musician than him. If only she could suck to keep him from feeling bad about himself!

Ok, it's not a great comparison, but our reactions were similar. :P

is that none of the suffering and death actually matters in the story. It's fully unconnected to inherent character flaws

I get the sense that a lot of people creating tragic stories don't understand the cathartic element of them, not to mention that they should be clearly telegraphed/road-mapped/characterized/whatever. It's like they think tragedy = rip your heart out and/or SHOCK YOU. Call me old fashioned, but I think a tragedy should leave me feeling satisfied and sad and contemplating existential issues rather than crying into my pillow at the injustice of the world and the profound unfairness of life and that there's no point to anything.

[sabotabby]

Ok, it's not a great comparison, but our reactions were similar. :P

Right? To have a tragic ending that's a suicide, you want to at some level not want the character to die or believe they'd be better off dead.

I think a tragedy should leave me feeling satisfied and sad and contemplating existential issues rather than crying into my pillow at the injustice of the world and the profound unfairness of life and that there's no point to anything.

Agreed. And it's hard to pull off.

[mistersmearcase]

I had a somewhat weird interaction with Leigh Bardugo because she's a friend of a friend and the intermediate friend was like "she wants someone to write out some phonetics of the fake Russian language in her [wildly popular, apparently] trilogy." So I emailed back and forth with her, mostly just being like "ok, this is clearly Russian but with completely made up grammar so I can't really tell you?" and she was kind of lol-language-whatever so I sort of have an attitude about her. The thing that was most "oh help" was that she decided to name her class of all-knowing clerics or something The Grisha and I found some fairly polite way of saying are you fine with the fact that this is like calling your class of all-knowing clerics The Bob, and she was like yeah, just like the sound of the word.

[sabotabby]

OMG hahah I read that one. It's quite good.

Then again, I would probably name my all-knowing clerics The Bob because I'm weird and suck at naming things.

[conuly]

I don't really mind, but do you realize that whitetexting spoilers doesn't do much if the person reading your entry on their friends page doesn't have a white background?

[sabotabby]

Oh no! I did not realize that, sorry! I don't think DW has spoiler tags, does it?

[conuly]

I don't think so. If you know the HTML you can probably put the text in some weird color and then cover it with highlight in the same color... but in the end, I bet it's easier to just shove spoilers under an lj-cut.

[grimjim]

Maybe it wasn't so much torture porn as a book as it was trauma porn, and it's difficult to one-up to unalive the protagonist/victim. Trauma can be a lazy way to provoke emotional response in the reader, which would make a protracted piece a one-trick pony. Hypothesizing entirely on too little data here, but does the shoe fit?

[sabotabby]

Not really. I actually don't think anything about this was lazy or manipulative; it was lovingly written and fetishistic, which is probably why I was angry at it but found it compelling anyway.

This focuses on YA fiction but is a really good exploration of some of the conundrums of writing mental illness (focusing on self-harm and suicidal ideation) in fiction, from a writer who is also a youth counsellor. For me, he hits the nail on the head in terms of the three potential points of failure. Your audience is two-fold: people who have experienced the trauma, and people who haven't but you're trying to get them to empathize, and the needs and reactions of both audiences are different. To simplify, the potential failure points: Responsibility (not triggering people who have experienced this), realism (accurate portrayal), and storytelling (actually making this interesting to read).

I don't think responsibility an issue here. This isn't YA and it's not popular fiction. This does play into the cultural trope of "if you're gay you're going to lead an unhappy life and die an early death," but it's not like she invented that trope, and her audience isn't either young people or low-information readers who will internalize that message. I also think that readers like me who will just pick up something this size without a review beyond their friend having liked it are comparatively rare. So let's discount responsibility.

Realism: This is actually a good portrayal of mental illness. It feels very visceral and accurate. I don't have an issue there. It's not a great depiction of the queer community or life as an artist in New York City (from what I understand of the latter; to be fair I've never lived there) or how adult men interact with each other. But I don't think she's bound to realism here.

Storytelling: This is where it falls apart for me. In the video, Hello Future Me identifies where the trajectory of severe mental illness doesn't fit into a conventional three-act narrative structure, which in most cases means that the mental illness is resolved way too quickly (either through recovery or suicide) to fit the story beats and create a compelling narrative. I'd agree; almost all popular fiction fails in this regard and brushes off lingering trauma too quickly.

The structural issue I had with this book is it actually does look like a mental illness trajectory (the lowest point is at the middle, not the climax). I give the author credit for throwing three-act structure out the window—it wouldn't work here. But. The trauma is so over-the-top that we don't have any sense of the character outside of the trauma. That's the point—he has no selfhood outside of suffering, therefore suicide is the only logical outcome, but for this to actually be a story, someone in it needs to be a character. And we don't really have much sense of the other characters outside of their relationship and unconditional love for him. That's why it ultimately didn't work for me; I read enough true trauma narratives, mainly from Indigenous writers, that fictional suffering in and of itself isn't enough to make me care.

But like, I haven't written anything that won the Man Booker, and this worked for a lot of people, so what do I know?