I still read books
Some books that suck suck from start to finish. Others start out ok, even quite good, and then commence to sucking partway through and burn up all the goodwill they had previously generated.
Of the latter group, some of them become sucky gradually, almost imperceptibly; with others there is a thick bright line separating the part which is good from that which blows goats.
And down the left-hand path of this taxonomical tree of sucktitude we find The River Why.
The River Why is reasonably entertaining, intermittently witty, and no more than ordinarily problematic (for a book that farts around with philosophy) up until page 151 of the Bantam Trade PB edition. Then we encounter this line:
"...it was no ordinary person up in that tree... No. It was a girl up in that tree."
And from that point forward nothing at all goes right.
Not just because I'm a dreadful hairy-legged feminist, either; leaving aside the gender issues (which are severe), the philosophy descends into religion, the characterization lurches towards caricature, the main character - while supposedly attaining transcendence - becomes so abominably self-centered that the Vietnam War is treated as an inconvenience that can be solved by getting a high draft number, and, for reasons utterly inexplicable to anyone who has spent time around nature (as both the main character and the author allegedly have) it is presented as a serious theory that non-human animals and even plants would like to be humans. This, even more than the idea that someone who is supposed to be your muse should just in the course of things take your name, strikes me as ridiculous (the author of course cheats by presenting this theory through the person of a dog; certain dogs probably do want to be humans if anyone does. Which is not saying much.) If there's one thing that non-human animals are damn good at, it's being non-human, and bravo for them I say. Of course, accepting this would mean accepting that the climax, in which the narrator seriously inconveniences a salmon, is in fact not a communion but a crock of shit.
And that is in fact what it is. A crock of shit. Which is too bad, since as I said, it started well.
Of the latter group, some of them become sucky gradually, almost imperceptibly; with others there is a thick bright line separating the part which is good from that which blows goats.
And down the left-hand path of this taxonomical tree of sucktitude we find The River Why.
The River Why is reasonably entertaining, intermittently witty, and no more than ordinarily problematic (for a book that farts around with philosophy) up until page 151 of the Bantam Trade PB edition. Then we encounter this line:
"...it was no ordinary person up in that tree... No. It was a girl up in that tree."
And from that point forward nothing at all goes right.
Not just because I'm a dreadful hairy-legged feminist, either; leaving aside the gender issues (which are severe), the philosophy descends into religion, the characterization lurches towards caricature, the main character - while supposedly attaining transcendence - becomes so abominably self-centered that the Vietnam War is treated as an inconvenience that can be solved by getting a high draft number, and, for reasons utterly inexplicable to anyone who has spent time around nature (as both the main character and the author allegedly have) it is presented as a serious theory that non-human animals and even plants would like to be humans. This, even more than the idea that someone who is supposed to be your muse should just in the course of things take your name, strikes me as ridiculous (the author of course cheats by presenting this theory through the person of a dog; certain dogs probably do want to be humans if anyone does. Which is not saying much.) If there's one thing that non-human animals are damn good at, it's being non-human, and bravo for them I say. Of course, accepting this would mean accepting that the climax, in which the narrator seriously inconveniences a salmon, is in fact not a communion but a crock of shit.
And that is in fact what it is. A crock of shit. Which is too bad, since as I said, it started well.