My Own Biases

Scott started the ball rolling with his excellent Friday Column (and a quick aside, take the time to check out his Friday columns early each week - it's obvious just how much time and thought he puts into these and they're well worth your time), and then Ed followed suit.  While Ed didn't invite me personally to play along (spending time instead on his favorites - TEV, Kevin Smokler, John Freeman and Jessica Crispin), I'm going to anyway.

What this is, is an attempt to explain what I specifically look for when I sit down and open up the pages of a new book.  What I hope to find in order to further enhance the chances that I'll love the book and really want to pass along my love via review, or mini-review, or just plain old word of mouth.  I'd like to think that the 300 some odd reviews over the last six years would have established most of what follows, but it may not.  Some of the things that I came up with surprised me a bit when I tried to place an order on the various elements.

Darkness

An author almost always has to take me to a dark place, even if only slightly, in order to maintain my attention.  It may explain my penchant for southern novels and stories that stray into gothic territory.  If there is no basic good vs. evil situation somewhere in the story, I tend to find myself fading, at least a little bit, in terms of the attention I'm giving the words on the page.  Examples would include Tom Franklin's short story, Poachers;  A.M. Homes short story, A Real Doll; the novels of William Gay; and might explain why I enjoyed Cormac McCarthy's, Child of God, more than any of his other titles so far to date (this would be the one with a protagonist who is, among other things, a necrophiliac).

A Sense of Control

I love it when I'm drawn in within the first few paragraph of a short story, or first few pages of a novel, and realize that the author knows exactly who their characters and their situations are.  This isn't at all to say I won't be surprised somewhere along the way - not at all.  It's more to say that I am quickly positive that the author is fully aware of the world that he/she is creating.  Examples include the works of T.C. Boyle, especially his short fiction;  Daniel Woodrell's novels, especially those since Give Us A Kiss; and many of Lorrie Moore's fiction.

Take Some Sort of a Chance

Realizing that the author is going a bit out there always has me giving the work at least one extra chance.  To me, some prime examples of this come from two short story collections from the fairly recent past.  In Kellie Wells' collection, Compression Scars, there is a story narrated by two fraternal twins while still in the womb.  The story is written in side by side columns and the reader gets to see the change over time in which twin is the dominant one based on the story.  In Dean Paschal's story collection, By the Light of the Jukebox, he has stories that include one narrated by a dying dog, one narrated by the dead body of the runt of a litter that is residing in the family freezer, a story where a boy falls into a sexual relationship with a mechanical girl, and one that is written from inside the head of an emergency room physician as he contemplates ways of killing a frequent returning patient with drug issues.  These stories all had many extra chances to not be perfect in my mind while I read them.

Storyteller

I find absolutely no reason for literary fiction to not include a plot.  I want to be told a story while I'm learning about different places in the world, different philosophies, and the various other things authors are (sometimes not so) subtly trying to instill in my mind.  The works of Rupert Thompson are a fine example of this.  He never slights his readers in terms of sending them off with a tale when they sit down with his novels.

Black Humor

While this is pretty similar to my original element, Darkness, I do find them to be different.  I enjoy laughing while reading - sometimes even out loud (always a plus when reading in public!).  Authors rolling out funny situation after funny situation work for me at times, but more often than not, it's an author tossing out something that's only funny if you can get past the wickedness that is implied at the time.  Some authors that I think provide fine examples of this element include the aforementioned T.C. Boyle and A.M. Homes, as well as Mike Magnuson and Lee K. Abbott.

Characters

I enjoy fully developed and realized characters.  I love it when an author has a character so consistent that the only way I'm surprised as a reader late in the novel by the actions of the character, is when the character is also surprised that they performed in such a manner.  I want the author to know their world so well (which ties in a bit with the earlier element, Sense of Control) that the character's development is fluid.  Not a big pile of likes and dislikes thrown at me, the reader, within the first 20 pages or so, but a steady development that continually makes sense.  Rick Collignon and his trilogy dealing with the Montoyas is a great example.  Another, more well known example would be Faulkner's oeuvre.

Give Me Something New or Different

A bit similar to Take Some Sort of a Chance in that I love it when an author finds somewhere new to tell a story from.  Nancy Zafris setting The Metal Shredders in a metal scrap yard, Mike Magnuson using an appliance repossession man as his protagonist in The Right Man for the Job, or Brady Udall having an Indian orphan who starts off his novel having his head run over by the mailman as his narrator in The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint are all great examples of this.

And in following with the little testing the Scott set up and Ed followed up on, two of my responses will show why anybody with a true love of literature need never show up at this blog:

The Intuitionist vs John Henry Days - John Henry Days

Mailer, Roth or Updike - Literary heathen that I am, I've never read anything by Mailer or Updike.  My Roth consists of being stunned by Goodbye, Columbus, finding Our Gang funny, disliking The Breast, and finding that I couldn't have wasted more time in reading Portnoy's Complaint if it has been rolled in dog excrement before I started.

Fitzgerald or Hemingway - Fitzgerald

White Noise or Underworld - Underworld

Pale Fire or Lolita - Pale Fire

Romanticism, Modernism, or Postmodernism - Reason number two!  For crying out loud, I was a Statistics major.  I have no fucking clue what any of those terms mean or what books would be considered examples of any of them!

Comments

[Li]

I find absolutely no reason for literary fiction to not include a plot.

Amen.

[Josh Maday]

Right on, man, Daniel Woodrell is amazing and just keeps getting better, and Cormac McCarthy's 'Child of God' is certainly a gem, a very dark gem. Fine taste you have, Mr. Wickett.