Bad Fiction According to Bertrand

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Monday, February 26, 2007
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Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina like this: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Can the same be said for books? Are good novels all alike and bad novels each bad in their own horrendous way? I won't go that far, but consider this. Good fiction stimulates the pleasure zones while bad fiction engages the critical faculties. Ask me why I like a book and the answers will be brief and definitive, and perhaps a little abstract. It's a bit like being asked why I love being married. Instead of explaining, I'm inclined to say, "Find out for yourself." But ask me why I hate a book and you'll get a dissertation. Happy readers are all alike; every unhappy reader is unhappy in his own way.

So what makes this reader unhappy? Obviously, the absence of the three factors I mentioned in my post on good fiction will always do the trick. If narrative force, layered meaning, and aesthetic force are my sweet spots, then narrative weakness, unlayered meaning, and aesthetic weakness are going to tick me off. But those are unweildy terms, so I've massaged them for the sake of precision. Bad fiction is not the opposite of good fiction, after all. It's a phenomenon unto itself, and here are its traits.

Univocal narrative. Crank the fade knob on your car stereo all the way to one side and you'll find out exactly what I'm talking about. If narrative force is a matter of balance, skillfully developing all the essentials of craft -- character, plot, setting, etc. -- then its opposite is neglect of those essentials. But few books neglect them all. Univocal narrative results when authors develop one factor at the expense of the rest. We've all read books, for example, that pride themselves on being "character studies," in which the author indulges in long swathes of introspection but the character being studied never actually does anything. He's like a lab rat who refuses to get on the treadmill. By the same token, we've read books with over-intricate plotlines whose characters seem to have been written in at the last minute when the author discovered readers pretty much expect them. A univocal narrative is like a bodybuilder who only lifts dumbells with his right arm. The added effort that goes into one essential of a good story only heightens the reader's awareness that the rest were neglected.

Moral naivete. If Soviet art has taught us anything, it's how short a sell-by date dramatized polemic has. The only enduring value it has comes in the form of kitsch. Fiction is not policy by other means, to borrow from Clausewitz. At the other end of the spectrum, fiction is not meaningless. Even the most puerile entertainment has a cumulative cultural impact. In my book, thematic simplicity (or perhaps a better word would be 'simple-mindedness') and thematic indifference are both signs of a story's moral naivete. I guess that means I see the world as a complex but significant place, and can't help feeling that an author who misses this doesn't understand the nature of reality -- or can't bring it to bear in his work.

Tonal Incongruity. If aesthetic force means having the ability to do things with language, tonal incongruity is not having any control over what language is doing. It's not that the language is inert -- though it may be. The problem is that the author isn't advancing the story on the sentence level, through style and tone. My favorite example is when a workmanlike author decides to upgrade his writing, with the result that everything is prettified and thousand pound thesaurus-busters are embedded in the text like landmines. The result is prose the feels like fiction, not fact. It calls attention to its artifice when it shouldn't -- and has no artifice when it should. Tonal incongruity signals a lack of control.

I'm sure we could add plenty to this list, but for my money these are the three hallmarks of bad fiction, the things that will most readily prompt me to set a book aside. An author who can't reveal character through action without shortchanging one or the other, who can't give me anything to sink my teeth into, and lacks control over his bag of aesthetic tricks just isnt worth my all-too-fleeting time. Because these are the things I dislike as a reader, I try to avoid them when writing as well -- though not always with success.