Wednesday, April 03, 2002
An absolute and utter waste of a day. Or, perhaps only the sort of day I can't pretend, by virtue of apparent productiveness, is anything other than a waste. I had to make an unexpected and rushed trip to and back from Atlanta, so no writing was done. Little of anything was done.
I've been very vocal over the years about Amazon.com's curious practice of mixing a virtual bookstore with a virtual forum for disgruntled (and gruntled) readers. It seems to me that a certain conflict of interest exists between the business of selling books and the alleged service of reviewing them. Imagine, for example, walking into a real bookstore and, upon approaching a display of the latest by Anne Rice or Mario Puzo there's a great big sign which reads something to the effect of: "Joe Schmoe (identity and credentials withheld) says this book sucks." Mr. Schmoe, helpful (if anonymous) soul that he is, has even gone so far as to give the book in question only one or two out of five stars and thus, by reducing a novel to something which can be scored on a five-point grading system, has saved you from making a grave literary mistake. This scenario seems fairly outlandish to me, and yet this is precisely the practice encouraged at Amazon.com and other internet booksellers, who bank on the web's interactivity to get people to loiter about in hopes that they might someday buy something.
For example, a new "review" from Amazon, by a "Lauren Leatherman," which I ran across this morning. It's titled "Altogether disappointing" and in this "review" Miss Leathermen writes:
The end, though, is weak, mainly because we have no idea what it is supposed to signify. Are the characters enlightened, disillusioned, or forever scarred - both spiritually and psychologically? No light is shed on their reactions, or, truly, on what the purpose of their entire involvement in the world of monsters and angels was - or symbolized. The end of this book does not lend to a greater feeling of awe in the reader. It lends to confusion, and in my case, frustration . . .
Warning. Spoilers!
If you've not read Threashold and, despite Miss Leatherman's comments, would someday like to do so, you should avert your eyes from the following, as my replies to her criticisms will surely spoil the book for you. That said, the final pages of Threshold can hardly elucidate mental changes which its characters have not experienced. Miss Leathermen is unusually articulate for an Amazon "reviwer," but that doesn't make up for her apparent inability or unwillingness to follow the action in a narrative. At the end of Threshold, the psychological clocks of the characters have been, essentially, set back a few months by the things that Chance Matthews does when she enters the tunnel and finally meets the book's apparent antagonists. At novel's end, you know what "happened," and I know what "happened," but for Chance and Deacon, Dancy and Sadie, the events of the book have not occurred, have "unhappened," and so we cannot how or to what degree these events have changed them. However the characters were changed, they have been unchanged, for the most part. Of course, this isn't entirely true. We do get to see the events of Threshold visibly alter the characters, but these alterations are seen before and at the climax, not afterward. The Scarecrow gets a brain, the Tinman gets a heart, the Cowardly Lion find his courage, and Dorothy Gale goes home to Kansas, but all that happens before Sadie and Dancy are killed, and before Deacon and Chance enter the waterworks tunnel with the intent of blowing it to Kingdom Come. Indeed, had the characters not endured the events of the narrative and come out changed in their respective ways, they would have all been unable to finish the quest before them.
A caveat. The epilogue implies that the "unhappening" is imperfect. Chance begins to have nightmares about a strange albino girl, and, looking for answers, finds Dancy in a sanitarium in Florida. Dancy seems to remember a good bit, even though, strictly speaking, none of it ever actually happened (and what do we call people who "remember" things that never happened . . .?). The ending of Threshold is not ambiguous, it's just strange.
My other main complaint lies with Miss Kiernan's treatment of her characters - mainly, Dancy and Sadie. As readers, we sympathize with Dancy. But while we care about her, it seems that the author that created her does not. Dancy's purpose in this book, it seems, is to be a receptacle for absolute misery. She endures terrible pain and horror only to, apparently, remain entrapped by that pain and horror. It almost seemed that Miss Kiernan was using Dancy as a means by which she could vent her anger and frustration. Although this may not be the case, I got this impression, and was in turn quite upset and disappointed by her treatment of Dancy. Similarly, I was unhappy with her treatment of Sadie. Why create a character - why let the readers into a character's head - if you are simply going to make her vanish at the end of the story? I think that Caitlin Kiernan owed us some explanation of why Sadie's presence in the book was ultimately important."
This paragraph contains a very interesting proposition, and one that I have spent a great deal of time contemplating over the years: that authors have a moral obligation to their characters. Not their readers, but their characters. In effect, if this is indeed the case, then we are truly gods and goddesses and our whims may bring genuine pain or joy to the people we create and move about like puppets to suits our needs. If this is true, then writers find themselves faced with a most unsettling moral dilemma. Unless all our works conclude with all our characters having been treated kindly and to, ultimately, a happy ending, then we are behaving immorally. If authors wish, by this line of reasoning, to avoid being a bad god and behaving cruelly and immorally, we must refrain from telling many sorts of stories. Perhaps most sorts of stories, as the world seems repleat with injustice and pain and good people who come to bad ends and bad people who come to good ends.
I have to wonder, for example what our Miss Leathermen would make of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice? Or Romeo and Juliet? What about the poor characters trapped within Oedipus Rex and Frankenstein? Yes, her accusation is true. Dancy passes from a miserable life (though one filled with awe and duty) to a miserable death, and back to a miserable life. That's why it's fair to say that this story is, in large part, concerned with horror. Horrible things happen to people who may not necessarily have it coming. And we're left to wonder why, or if, indeed, there even is a why. Horror. Perhaps Miss Leathermen would be happier with a Hello Kitty coloring book? I would send her one, to assauge her disappointment, if she would only be so kind as to e-mail me her address. As for Sadie Jasper, we don't see her after the "unhappening" because she never became involved with Deacon (beyond their brief meeting in "The Long Hall on the Top Floor"), because Deacon never broke up with Chance, because Deacon never slept with Elise, because Deacon, Chance and Elise never entered the waterworks tunnel that rainy April night. I think perhaps Miss Leatherman simply doesn't trust me as a narrator. When I show the "unhappening," I wasn't kidding. I meant it. The events in the book never occurred. Sadie gets off with a pretty good deal, as I see it. She helps save Chance and Deacon (and Dancy's life, if not her sanity), and Lord only knows what else, and then she gets her own life back and never has to know what horrors she's lived though. I suppose we could lamment her loss of an all but shiftless, alcoholic boyfriend, but I suspect I was doing her a good turn in that regard. She takes the blue pill . . .
I'm trying hard to learn not to mouth of at critics of no consequence (though I do chafe at the thought that someone might decide not to try Threshold because Miss Letterman is a poor reader). Friends continue to advise against it. But I'm especially annoyed, almost angered, at the accusation that the book's conclusion followed from my disinterest and/or laziness and that I don't care about the characters. Miss Leatherman has every right to dislike the novel, even to dislike it for reasons which are wrongheaded, but she should know that she's quite mistaken on all these counts. And surely, if it's fair for her to speak her piece, it's is at least equally fair for me to speak mine (even if doing so may be only an elaborate waste of my time).
Well, at least no one can complain that tonight's entry was short.
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