Passages from The Passage, to pass the time
So, my book club is reading The Passage, which is the kind of book that happens when a literary author decides to write about secret government projects causing the vampire apocalypse. I thought it sounded vaguely familiar, remembered I'd read a review of it on Ferretbrain, and felt the first stirring of trepidation. Well, no, the second stirring. "Literary author decides to go genre slumming" is not exactly a scenario famous for amazing genre fiction. But still, that alone wouldn't be enough for me to dismiss it out of hand. My library PIN isn't working for me to get the ebook, so off to the Amazon preview I go until I can get the PIN reset.
You know what does set me against a book before I've even, properly speaking, finished the prologue?
They changed buses downtown again and rode for another thirty minutes, and when Jeannette saw the sign for the zoo she wondered if she'd gone too far; but then she remembered that the church had been before the zoo, so it would be after the zoo now, going in the other direction.
What is this inane detail seriously guys the entire book so far is like this and I'm only sixty pages in (minus the ones Amazon skips in hopes that you'll be either intrigued enough or pissed off enough to buy it). Does this give you greater insight into the character? No. You might think that it's a sign of Jeanette's dissociation given that she's just killed a guy who was going to drag her into a frat house to be gang-raped and now she's about to leave her daughter at a convent, but that isn't the case, because again the entire book is like this, and so far I've hit four different PoV characters. Gosh, it's like they're all actually one person with different names slapped on. Literary writers, I thought you were supposed to be better than this?
Jeannette had never thought about nuns eating before.
She's twenty five years old, and it never occurred to her that nuns eat? I mean I think everyone goes through that stage where they think their teachers live at school, but that's, like, preschool. It's true Jeannette has spent most of her life to this point in Shitty Diner Job, Nowheresville and then pimping herself out on the highway, but come on. I have more faith in the reasoning powers of waitresses from Nowheresville than that. Maybe he meant that she'd never imagined nuns eating mundane earthly foods like Cheerios instead of communion wafers? That she never wondered who paid the nuns' grocery bills?
Then there's Scientist Dude Who Probably Got Eaten By Bats in Bolivia, Which He Explains In Amazingly Detailed Emails. He and his scientist buddies are off looking for... something... which is hinted at by ancient statues of not-quite-humans with rippling pecs and lots of teeth found all over the world, including this one spot in Bolivia, which they're now going to investigate. He rambles and rambles to his friend back in Massachussetts about how they're rambling on and there's like snakes and stuff and it's hot, in a manner which does not seem to distinguish him in any way from any other random dude out there and isn't vivid characterization supposed to be a thing with authors widely agreed to be good? Did we give that up? I seriously cannot resolve this guy into anything but a generic blur, and he gets way too much page space for a redshirted blur. I would enjoy long pages of redshirt emails if they were interesting, and would not mind a few brief paragraphs of generic redshirt emails for informational purposes, but lengthy, loving pages upon pages of "hello my name is Plot Device and here are my feelings about the weather" is just not good literature in any genre.
After taking entirely too long to get to the point where his party is mobbed by vampire bats and four of his science buddies die, he sends an email which includes this:
I feel as if I've entered a new era of my life. What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.
HIS FRIENDS JUST GOT EATEN BY BATS. And here he is, title-dropping to help us understand the deep and meaningful themes of the book. He sounds like he's talking about ending up in a career he hadn't intended, or accidentally finding himself a family man, or going through menopause. (The Change of Life: just like having coworkers die in a horrific animal attack!) He also says he can't think of a single reason to stop heading for wherever they were headed and go home (I can... like, oh NOT DYING), because his wife died last year and he realized she isn't going to step in the door and fiddle with her hair and want Earl Gray and who writes meditative emails about their dead wife's beverage preferences when their friends just got eaten by bats I don't even. All you English majors out there, help me out. Your friends just got eaten by bats, you're depressed and maybe suicidal-by-flying-rodent, and you're probably getting eaten next: do you wax philosophical on your satellite internet connection? Really? I mean I am a total written word geek, and I do not think I would be capable of this. If anything, being vaguely suicidal would sap my will to write anything longer than "OMG my friends were just eaten by bats, I was standing right next to this one guy and there isn't enough left of him to bury and even the soldiers with their giant guns were helpless. I don't know if I can go on. You've been like a brother to me. So sorry."
Random quote, from another PoV character:
Texas, state-sized porkchop of misery
Mm, porkchops. This is in the middle of a very long passage about how this FBI dude is mad at Texas because his parents made him move there in sixth grade. Also he is divorced and his wife is getting remarried and having a baby, which makes him D: D: because something unspecified but probably fatal happened to their little girl and so he drunk dials her in a scene which I think we have all read about fifty times before. I keep looking for some redeeming quality, some reason that this contemplative digression into a character's past is beautifully written or reveals something interesting about the person or makes me see the human condition (or at least a human's condition) in a fresh light. So far I got zip.
FBI Dude is in Texas to get a death row convict to sign away his life to a sekrit government program, and flashes back to the day he got asked to join the sekrit government program club in their sekrit clubhouse (Tudor style! there are lots of such buildings in this area, which is totally irrelevant!) in Colorado.
Some higher-up Secret Government Agent Dudge gives a potted pseudo-scientific explanation of the vampire bat superpower virus. Apparently it has something to do with the thymus gland, which in most people has shriveled up by puberty. (Incidentally, mine didn't, and I don't recall meeting any hungry South American bats. The doctor said it's one of those things that just happens sometimes and they basically have no clue. Reassuring! Thanks, doc!) Anyway. Nobody knows what the thymus gland does, until now: scanning these infected terminal patients reveals that the thymus...
...and then page 48 is missing from the Amazon preview, so alas, I don't yet know whether I have super vampire bat powers. I'll let you know if I start craving blood.
It's hard to believe a real FBI agent could be so clueless as to wonder what the military would want with super healing powers, but Wolgast is, so Secret Government Agent Dude can painstakingly explain it to us. Because Cronin thinks his readers can't imagine why the military would want a bunch of Wolverines? You have to wonder who he thinks his audience is, exactly.
And on. And on. And on. I think at least a third of the sentences in this book are like that explanation of how bus routes work: in another writer's hands, they might be used to reveal something about a character's mental state, but here they just grow like kudzu through the entire text, totally irrelevant to the character or plot or even atmosphere of the scene. I can't remember the last time I saw this much padding outside mattress. Except actually I think my mattress has less. (It felt softer in the showroom. One of these days I need to buy a pillowtop.)
Thanks to the Ferretbrain article, I also know I get to look forward to sekrit government programs who can make the governor of Don't Mess With Texas give up a death row inmate Because We Said So That's Why overnight, yet cannot take a six year old into custody if she's in witness protection, plus all kinds of cringe-inducing handling of characters who aren't white men (and probably them too, really - not all white men are this strange combination of inane and awful, and this stereotyping is not helping anyone).
Only... crap... about 900 pages to go.
You know what does set me against a book before I've even, properly speaking, finished the prologue?
They changed buses downtown again and rode for another thirty minutes, and when Jeannette saw the sign for the zoo she wondered if she'd gone too far; but then she remembered that the church had been before the zoo, so it would be after the zoo now, going in the other direction.
What is this inane detail seriously guys the entire book so far is like this and I'm only sixty pages in (minus the ones Amazon skips in hopes that you'll be either intrigued enough or pissed off enough to buy it). Does this give you greater insight into the character? No. You might think that it's a sign of Jeanette's dissociation given that she's just killed a guy who was going to drag her into a frat house to be gang-raped and now she's about to leave her daughter at a convent, but that isn't the case, because again the entire book is like this, and so far I've hit four different PoV characters. Gosh, it's like they're all actually one person with different names slapped on. Literary writers, I thought you were supposed to be better than this?
Jeannette had never thought about nuns eating before.
She's twenty five years old, and it never occurred to her that nuns eat? I mean I think everyone goes through that stage where they think their teachers live at school, but that's, like, preschool. It's true Jeannette has spent most of her life to this point in Shitty Diner Job, Nowheresville and then pimping herself out on the highway, but come on. I have more faith in the reasoning powers of waitresses from Nowheresville than that. Maybe he meant that she'd never imagined nuns eating mundane earthly foods like Cheerios instead of communion wafers? That she never wondered who paid the nuns' grocery bills?
Then there's Scientist Dude Who Probably Got Eaten By Bats in Bolivia, Which He Explains In Amazingly Detailed Emails. He and his scientist buddies are off looking for... something... which is hinted at by ancient statues of not-quite-humans with rippling pecs and lots of teeth found all over the world, including this one spot in Bolivia, which they're now going to investigate. He rambles and rambles to his friend back in Massachussetts about how they're rambling on and there's like snakes and stuff and it's hot, in a manner which does not seem to distinguish him in any way from any other random dude out there and isn't vivid characterization supposed to be a thing with authors widely agreed to be good? Did we give that up? I seriously cannot resolve this guy into anything but a generic blur, and he gets way too much page space for a redshirted blur. I would enjoy long pages of redshirt emails if they were interesting, and would not mind a few brief paragraphs of generic redshirt emails for informational purposes, but lengthy, loving pages upon pages of "hello my name is Plot Device and here are my feelings about the weather" is just not good literature in any genre.
After taking entirely too long to get to the point where his party is mobbed by vampire bats and four of his science buddies die, he sends an email which includes this:
I feel as if I've entered a new era of my life. What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.
HIS FRIENDS JUST GOT EATEN BY BATS. And here he is, title-dropping to help us understand the deep and meaningful themes of the book. He sounds like he's talking about ending up in a career he hadn't intended, or accidentally finding himself a family man, or going through menopause. (The Change of Life: just like having coworkers die in a horrific animal attack!) He also says he can't think of a single reason to stop heading for wherever they were headed and go home (I can... like, oh NOT DYING), because his wife died last year and he realized she isn't going to step in the door and fiddle with her hair and want Earl Gray and who writes meditative emails about their dead wife's beverage preferences when their friends just got eaten by bats I don't even. All you English majors out there, help me out. Your friends just got eaten by bats, you're depressed and maybe suicidal-by-flying-rodent, and you're probably getting eaten next: do you wax philosophical on your satellite internet connection? Really? I mean I am a total written word geek, and I do not think I would be capable of this. If anything, being vaguely suicidal would sap my will to write anything longer than "OMG my friends were just eaten by bats, I was standing right next to this one guy and there isn't enough left of him to bury and even the soldiers with their giant guns were helpless. I don't know if I can go on. You've been like a brother to me. So sorry."
Random quote, from another PoV character:
Texas, state-sized porkchop of misery
Mm, porkchops. This is in the middle of a very long passage about how this FBI dude is mad at Texas because his parents made him move there in sixth grade. Also he is divorced and his wife is getting remarried and having a baby, which makes him D: D: because something unspecified but probably fatal happened to their little girl and so he drunk dials her in a scene which I think we have all read about fifty times before. I keep looking for some redeeming quality, some reason that this contemplative digression into a character's past is beautifully written or reveals something interesting about the person or makes me see the human condition (or at least a human's condition) in a fresh light. So far I got zip.
FBI Dude is in Texas to get a death row convict to sign away his life to a sekrit government program, and flashes back to the day he got asked to join the sekrit government program club in their sekrit clubhouse (Tudor style! there are lots of such buildings in this area, which is totally irrelevant!) in Colorado.
Some higher-up Secret Government Agent Dudge gives a potted pseudo-scientific explanation of the vampire bat superpower virus. Apparently it has something to do with the thymus gland, which in most people has shriveled up by puberty. (Incidentally, mine didn't, and I don't recall meeting any hungry South American bats. The doctor said it's one of those things that just happens sometimes and they basically have no clue. Reassuring! Thanks, doc!) Anyway. Nobody knows what the thymus gland does, until now: scanning these infected terminal patients reveals that the thymus...
...and then page 48 is missing from the Amazon preview, so alas, I don't yet know whether I have super vampire bat powers. I'll let you know if I start craving blood.
It's hard to believe a real FBI agent could be so clueless as to wonder what the military would want with super healing powers, but Wolgast is, so Secret Government Agent Dude can painstakingly explain it to us. Because Cronin thinks his readers can't imagine why the military would want a bunch of Wolverines? You have to wonder who he thinks his audience is, exactly.
And on. And on. And on. I think at least a third of the sentences in this book are like that explanation of how bus routes work: in another writer's hands, they might be used to reveal something about a character's mental state, but here they just grow like kudzu through the entire text, totally irrelevant to the character or plot or even atmosphere of the scene. I can't remember the last time I saw this much padding outside mattress. Except actually I think my mattress has less. (It felt softer in the showroom. One of these days I need to buy a pillowtop.)
Thanks to the Ferretbrain article, I also know I get to look forward to sekrit government programs who can make the governor of Don't Mess With Texas give up a death row inmate Because We Said So That's Why overnight, yet cannot take a six year old into custody if she's in witness protection, plus all kinds of cringe-inducing handling of characters who aren't white men (and probably them too, really - not all white men are this strange combination of inane and awful, and this stereotyping is not helping anyone).
Only... crap... about 900 pages to go.