(no subject)
"What is love? As far as I can tell, it is passion, admiration and respect. If you have two, you have enough. If you have all three, you don't have to die to go to heaven." -William Wharton (courtesy of the soon-to-be-mentioned book)
I read a lot, so I read a lot of book descriptions. Amazon aggregates them nicely, so I read theirs, but the snippets come as often from critics as from book jackets, so I end up reading a considerable amount of opinion. One relatively frequent complaint (at least in the genres I read) is a lack of realism, a lack of true-to-life situations or dialogues or emotions. But it occured to me today that saying a book's characters are unrealistic is really saying that you can't imagine yourself ever being or knowing anyone with those qualities or feelings.
An example: I've moved what can be termed "a lot." I don't mean that in a competitive, bragging way - because, really, the jury's still out on whether it reflects psychosis or causes it - and it's not even the number that's important. What's important is that I don't miss those places. Places are stories for me; they're memories, discussions, guidebooks. They're my experience capital, and I use it with other people and by myself - to make friends and to make decisions - but I don't want to go back. I never come back to my new place after a long day and wish I was back in the old one, with the comfortable couch and the familiar kitchen. It just never occurs to me to think this way, and I suspect that this is rare. I don't know what it's like to look back, to miss, to long for a place - whether I've lived there a month or four years (my record). So, maybe people who do seem unrealistic to me, and I can almost guarantee that I seem absurdly unreal to them. If they read about a character in a book who described feeling the way I do, they could call it untrue to life, and it would be subjectively true.
It strikes me as increasingly difficult to get something down on paper which doesn't sound trite or stupid. Those publicized plagiarism cases in recent years, I think, are based on a combination of the business aspects of publishing (thinking it's easy to write a book, the push to pump out more in certain genres, the push for increased entrepreneurship, etc.) and the fact that there are already a lot of books out there and an extant (though not necessarily natural) limit to people's creativity.
Where I'm going with this is that it's not so common for me to really feel a book. Yeah, I get these loopy grins on my face because I purposefully read books that will end well. (Call it what you will, but *something* has to turn out right and be in my control.) At the end or when the hero and heroine get together or when something funny or witty happens, I smile or I laugh, and I'm in the book, and I've forgotten that I'm really a girl with problems XYZ sitting on my bed. They pull me in, and I'm not saying it's hard to do; here's my suspended disbelief on a platter, ok thanks.
But sometimes it happens that a book pushes through that, and I start to get uncomfortable. I'm squirming, and I need to finish it now because how could I not know already what's happened because she's (inevitably, the narrator is a woman) me or my friend or my other self or whatever, but I need to know NOW.
I read a book like that today. She had a good thing with a guy, she screwed it up, she realized it, she was asking for it back, and he wasn't biting. And I flashed back to my sophomore year and the exact moment when my version of the hero said no, that it was definitely over and could never be again. And you know how you try to remember moments? I say that I take mind pictures on gorgeous days when the sun is in my hair and the trees are waving to me and it feels as perfect as it could, but I don't really remember them later; they disappear, and I don't have that experience to replay in my head. But this was one of those that you remember clearly by accident, without trying: where he was sitting and where I was standing and looking him right in the eyes, but more than that, the feeling of that day, the day before, the next weeks, melded into that memory with it. I want to be clear that I'm not saying I was in love with him. I'm saying that when this author described how she felt waiting to hear his response, the fear of hearing an unalterable goodbye, the dread, the sinking in of how much of an idiot you've been, of how much it meant to you - all of that, I felt it again. I wasn't reading about a girl having an experience. I was feeling it with her.
And then the book ended, and it was barely a happy ending, and I wasn't sure whether I wanted it to end "realistically" or the way it had, but with more assurance of a happiness ever after. Because my realism had been a breakup. But that isn't always the realism. The realism, I guess, isn't just what happens, but what could have happened. Maybe what will happen.
I read a lot, so I read a lot of book descriptions. Amazon aggregates them nicely, so I read theirs, but the snippets come as often from critics as from book jackets, so I end up reading a considerable amount of opinion. One relatively frequent complaint (at least in the genres I read) is a lack of realism, a lack of true-to-life situations or dialogues or emotions. But it occured to me today that saying a book's characters are unrealistic is really saying that you can't imagine yourself ever being or knowing anyone with those qualities or feelings.
An example: I've moved what can be termed "a lot." I don't mean that in a competitive, bragging way - because, really, the jury's still out on whether it reflects psychosis or causes it - and it's not even the number that's important. What's important is that I don't miss those places. Places are stories for me; they're memories, discussions, guidebooks. They're my experience capital, and I use it with other people and by myself - to make friends and to make decisions - but I don't want to go back. I never come back to my new place after a long day and wish I was back in the old one, with the comfortable couch and the familiar kitchen. It just never occurs to me to think this way, and I suspect that this is rare. I don't know what it's like to look back, to miss, to long for a place - whether I've lived there a month or four years (my record). So, maybe people who do seem unrealistic to me, and I can almost guarantee that I seem absurdly unreal to them. If they read about a character in a book who described feeling the way I do, they could call it untrue to life, and it would be subjectively true.
It strikes me as increasingly difficult to get something down on paper which doesn't sound trite or stupid. Those publicized plagiarism cases in recent years, I think, are based on a combination of the business aspects of publishing (thinking it's easy to write a book, the push to pump out more in certain genres, the push for increased entrepreneurship, etc.) and the fact that there are already a lot of books out there and an extant (though not necessarily natural) limit to people's creativity.
Where I'm going with this is that it's not so common for me to really feel a book. Yeah, I get these loopy grins on my face because I purposefully read books that will end well. (Call it what you will, but *something* has to turn out right and be in my control.) At the end or when the hero and heroine get together or when something funny or witty happens, I smile or I laugh, and I'm in the book, and I've forgotten that I'm really a girl with problems XYZ sitting on my bed. They pull me in, and I'm not saying it's hard to do; here's my suspended disbelief on a platter, ok thanks.
But sometimes it happens that a book pushes through that, and I start to get uncomfortable. I'm squirming, and I need to finish it now because how could I not know already what's happened because she's (inevitably, the narrator is a woman) me or my friend or my other self or whatever, but I need to know NOW.
I read a book like that today. She had a good thing with a guy, she screwed it up, she realized it, she was asking for it back, and he wasn't biting. And I flashed back to my sophomore year and the exact moment when my version of the hero said no, that it was definitely over and could never be again. And you know how you try to remember moments? I say that I take mind pictures on gorgeous days when the sun is in my hair and the trees are waving to me and it feels as perfect as it could, but I don't really remember them later; they disappear, and I don't have that experience to replay in my head. But this was one of those that you remember clearly by accident, without trying: where he was sitting and where I was standing and looking him right in the eyes, but more than that, the feeling of that day, the day before, the next weeks, melded into that memory with it. I want to be clear that I'm not saying I was in love with him. I'm saying that when this author described how she felt waiting to hear his response, the fear of hearing an unalterable goodbye, the dread, the sinking in of how much of an idiot you've been, of how much it meant to you - all of that, I felt it again. I wasn't reading about a girl having an experience. I was feeling it with her.
And then the book ended, and it was barely a happy ending, and I wasn't sure whether I wanted it to end "realistically" or the way it had, but with more assurance of a happiness ever after. Because my realism had been a breakup. But that isn't always the realism. The realism, I guess, isn't just what happens, but what could have happened. Maybe what will happen.