The Writer’s Coin

I used to never leave a book unfinished. I would plow through even the most boring book before moving on to the next one.

Not anymore. Over the past week I started and quit two books: The Art of Fiction by John Gardner and The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.

A teacher had recommended the first one a long time ago, I had started it back then and it sat unfinished on my bookshelf. So I went back to it, wondering why I had never finished it. It went along fine for the first 40 or so pages—fun stuff about writing and the process and all that. Then it hit the Lit Crit phase and it was like sitting through a rhetoric class from Grad School. Only not fun. Didn’t take me long to quit it.

Then I moved on to The Time Traveler’s Wife, another book I had been interested before but never got to. But then I read an interview with her and it piqued my interest again. In the interview she mentioned some of the issues she had writing the book because it would be seen as a sci-fi book (time traveling doesn’t exist yet). I never thought of it since literature does all kinds of kooky things without anyone ever calling it sci-fi (unless there are aliens or talking monkeys). So I started it. Cool premise. Very interesting. I was into it. Then around page 15 I lost it all. The one character meets the girl he will eventually marry and when she acts super strange. Like she has known him all her life (due to the time-travel). Which is OK, I guess. But wouldn’t you not go around claiming that time travel exists? Isn’t that kooky too? But OK, I let it go. But then the character’s response to that kookyness is what?

“Gee, that’s strange”?

Nope. He’s all about it. Excited that somoeone is looking at him as if they could travel in time.

That’s when the kooky factor got too high for me. Sorry but that IS sci-fi in that the characters are not believable. Any time I’m thinking to myself “That’s bullshit” then the writer has done something wrong unless I’ve agreed ahead of time that unrealistic things are going to happen (which I had agreed, the title of the book has time travel in it, but still). Other sci-fi books don’t fall into this trap.

I don’t think.

No matter how fake the stuff is you’re writing about, the characters still need to be real. Or at least their behavior needs to make sense.

Am I alone out here on this? After all, this book has been incredible successful.

Coming up next: The Coast of Chicago by Stuart Dybek

Tags: Book Reviews, dybek, gardner, niffenegger