Trashy fun and funny trash: Some correspondents are sharing reading lists or favorite books. I could compile a list that would cement everyone's opinions of me as half foppishly intellectual, half hopelessly weird — Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Villette; Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day; everything by Dorothy Parker, E.B. White, Nathaniel Hawthorne; Dickens's A Christmas Carol; and an odd series of pairs — animals (Walter Wangerin Jr.'s The Book of the Dun Cow and Richard Adams's Watership Down); mind-boggling intellectual stunts (Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest); my epic college romance (Eliot's Middlemarch and Thackeray's Vanity Fair). But it's summer and too hot for fine literature, so I'm going to write a posting or three about potboilers, mystery or thriller series, good trash, and bad trash.
I should begin by confessing I've been vaguely planning to write a novel or two myself, but have been all talk and no action for over a decade, so let the record show that the hacks I cite with snide scorn are in fact more sincere and harder-working writers, put-their-money-where-their-mouths-are published novelists, than pantywaist dilettante snob critics like myself. That clear? OK, now stop by Amazon.com and tell me if you've ever in your life (outside of Joan Collins or Robert James Waller; let's try to stay above monkeys at typewriters here) read any more thuddingly one-dimensional, leadenly choppy, comically purple pulp than the opening pages of Allan Folsom's 1994 blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow.
The challenge of writing page-turner trash is that the author either gets you — lures you to step aboard his or her speeding, cardboard-charactered, written-with-movie-deal-in-mind novelization — or doesn't, and the line between captivating and chuckling is razor-thin. Folsom's stayed with me all these years as an example of stepping on the gas too fast and stripping the gears: in his third sentence, before even introducing his main character, he has the fellow look up "for no particular reason" and realize "Across the room sat the man who murdered his father" — and we're into the staccato sentence fragments and cliches ("His fist a runaway piston, wrecking flesh and bone") before we're ready.
By contrast, after seeing the recent movie remake I went back and reread The Bourne Identity and another couple of Robert Ludlums and realized his writing is far worse than I remembered, but provides sufficient foreplay to get us hooked; the breathless redundant italics and exclamation points are hilarious signs of hackwork, but by the time we reach them we're reading so fast we don't mind (hell, the two-mortal-enemies-must-escape-the-deathtrap-building-together scene in The Matarese Circle is a freaking tour de force).
Another howler, similar to confusing a fast pace with whiplash, happens when an author takes a great potboiler plot and pushes it just one step too far, and there's another out-of-print example that haunts me: In James Byron Huggins's Cain, the hero finds himself fighting an unstoppable super-soldier engineered from a dead body, one of those military experiments gone wrong with titanium-spring legs and steel teeth and the strength of 100 men — oh, yeah, and it's Satan, not only the ultimate killing machine but possessed by the Evil One himself. Bzzzt! So sorry, thank you for playing, you should have stood on a perfectly good 17 but tried to draw blackjack and busted.
An author who does this today is Steve Alten, whose cheerfully cheesy Web site praises his readers as well as his agent and freely admits he hasn't changed his template since his first book: "[Movie Title 1] Meets [Movie Title 2]," just like the Hollywood pitchmen who gush, "It's Speed on a train! It's Die Hard in the White House!" MEG was Jaws meets Jurassic Park, i.e., the shark is 200 feet long instead of 20, and had a cutely audacious ending (spoiler: the hero, swallowed whole, uses his knife to saw his way to the monster's heart and kill it from the inside), but when he isn't desperately (and unsuccessfully) flogging the film rights, Alten is writing unreadable sequels — not only MEG III, but two apiece in franchises he describes as "Indiana Jones meets The Matrix" and "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea meets 2001." The last, this year's Goliath, is about a supersubmarine shown in a really neat drawing submitted by a fan and animated in one of Alten's Flash "movie trailers," just like the spaceships and rocket cars my friends and I doodled in junior high; the sub is controlled by a Michael Crichton-esque supercomputer and the book is readable until the computer steps over the line from merely being an ultra-smart adversary (Crichton, 2001) to corny, crazy psycho shouting "I am God" (Saturn 3, Demon Seed, Colossus: The Forbin Project). Sort of like the last few Tom Clancy books, in which authorial alter ego Jack Ryan has gone from being studly warrior Superman to, basically, the Supreme Being.
More on this, including recent techno-thrillers that succeed in suspension of disbelief and earn my guilty-pleasure praise and musings about (verbosity warning: I damn near wrote my master's thesis on) James Bond, next time ...
4:21:11 PM 
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