I’ve had a particularly crap streak of novel reading in the last few years. It seems I either pick books that are overwritten or I get a few pages in and realize the author is going to kill off the only character I like. The latter issue might be part of the reason I’ve increasingly found myself drawn to nonfiction; since it’s a true story, you know that if someone’s going to die, it’s already happened and there won’t be some ugly surprise waiting on page 256. I’ve never attempted to write fiction, so I have no idea what this process is like, but it seems to be kind of sadistic to create a human life in prose only for the purpose of snuffing it out. Because that’s the reason many characters in novels seem to die: only to give the plot something to do, to give the other characters something to suffer over, and so on. It often seems like cheating.
Lest you think I’m some sort of nonfiction writing Pollyanna, let me provide a little context. I love bleak Russian novels and Bergman and El Greco and all kinds of dark, gloomy things. But in masterworks, characters don’t just bite it for the sake of biting it. Anna Karenina doesn’t (SPOILER ALERT) throw herself in front of a train because Tolstoy ran out of ideas; the whole book points us to an understanding of how and why that happens. Last year, I saw a pretty great production of Strindberg’s Miss Julie that was super sexy and fast paced, and yet (SPOILER ALERT) Julie’s suicide felt, for lack of a better word, natural, like the only possible way the play was going to end.
But so many novels I’ve peered into lately feel like they’re killing characters off and blighting them with terminal illnesses as an act of plot generating desperation. A few years back, I was going through a particularly bleak emotional period of my own as a family member was dying, and the final few episodes of Six Feet Under, a show I usually enjoyed, sent me spiraling into emotional crisis simply because (SPOILER ALERT) Nate’s death felt random and wasteful. How much more interesting that show would have been had he lived to raise his child, have a terrible marriage, and have a future left up to our imaginations. It felt like a cruel and unnecessary choice on the part of the writers, and ultimately a lazy one too.
I like fiction as an escape, though I don’t like escapist fiction. Like a lot of readers, I suspect that my frustrations with this kind of knee jerky, Terms of Endearment/Beaches type of plot turn connect to my own issues with mortality and having seen multiple people I cared about suffer and die. Don’t need to read about that shit again, I think as I’m paging through the latest rave reviewed novel playing “spot the death” so I can save my money and time.
So, dear reader, do you have any suggestions of contemporary fiction that’s not all about brutalizing and punishing its characters? Sure, that happens in real life. No duh. But life happens in real life too, and personally, that’s what I’m more interested in.
