Wooden Pages in the Side Pocket

The Poisonwood Bible seems to be the heavy weight champion of bad prose -- no, of bad fiction, which is more. Just reading around in it, I get the clear indications this was planned, measure twice cut once, and the result is ponderous and cliché, which suggests a kind of intentional debilitation of the mind. I cannot say this author is fictionally retarded; she just works hard to write like someone with notably diminished faculties and a poor understanding of the techniques of the medium.

I needed to write to someone who could understand this. I am surrounded by people who lack the little boy inside to tell them the emperor's not wearing clothes. I am astounded by how bad this novel is, and so consistently. This woman takes a real joy at hitting notes off key, stringing together cliché and cliché as a form of intentionally annoying stupidity standing in the place of eloquence. She seems to think this style and the peculiarly fatuous tone constitute good writing. We can see the problems starting presumably with the author herself:

"The historical figures and events described here are as real as I could render them with the help of recorded history, in all its fascinating variations."

Perhaps she could have used some help from unrecorded history, fewer less fascinating variations, and unnecessary words.

"I spent nearly thirty years waiting for the wisdom and maturity to write this book. That I've now written it is proof of neither of those things, but of the endless encouragement, unconditional faith, insomnolent conversation [yawn], and piles of arcane reference books delivered always just in the nick of time by my extraordinary husband [xo xo, kiss-kiss]. Thanks, Steven, for teaching me it's no use waiting for things that only appear at a distance, and for believing a spirit of adventure will usually suffice."

Even at this point, I find myself wanting the encouragement to end, the faith to have conditions,  and that the arcane books and otherwise piled references, like so many comped adjectives arriving just in the nick of Steven, would receive a restraining order.

If that is not an affected persona, a voice not her own, we have to assume she really is deaf to how bad it sounds. "This is Greer Garson reading the personal memoir of Carl Sagan, billions and billions of years in the future." This text is so target rich for examples of cloying syntax and pithy diction for no apparent reason other than a misapprehension that that is what great writing is, that one can turn at random to any page and find chunks of the same thicker sludge gooed together by the wordy glop of the less disgusting passages.  

"Ham found his father Noah laying around pig-naked drunk one day and he thought that was funny as all get-out...but Ham busted his britches laughing...So Noah cursed all Ham's children to be slaves for ever and ever. That's how come them to turn out dark [sic]."

That's from Ruth May Price. If I were doing a radio show or making a film, her segments would be spoken by M. Emmett Walsh doing the accent he used in Blood Simple. It isn't merely the clichés but also careful use of poorly employed dialect that gives this work a quality of no man's land during the barrage, a dense tangle of barbed wire word selection, mind-traps of silly concepts, and this other intentional set of verbal gaffs, presumably to give the characters their own voices. 

Ironically of course they have no distinct voices. The method of composition seems to have been oracular; the author inhaled some fumes of lugubrious sentiment distilled from Josef Conrad and began writing every chapter in this state of mind, achieving the same feverish tone of a troubled soul, filled with the weight of the horror of slow-moving fiction like the dark river of the dark continent itself filled with dark peoples and peopled with darkness and more dark. Dense. It must be good. Got any beer to wash it down?

I would say the book was humorless, but that's not true. It's simply a book I want to laugh at but the same defects that make it impossible to read also prevent me from taking pleasure in how bad it is. Here's Leah's pseudo-voice:

"Why did the Lord give us seeds? Well, they were sure easier to stuff in our pockets than whole vegetables would have been, but I doubted if God took any real interest in travel difficulties. I was exactly fourteen and a half that month, and still getting used to the embarrassment of having the monthly visits. I believe in God with all my might, but have been thinking lately that most of the details seem pretty much beneath His dignity."

The author is allegedly a woman. However, when I read sections like this, I wonder whether she didn't have help from a moron. That passage occurs in the middle of what passes for dialogue in this book. The novel is broken into books and each book into chapters; each chapter is a monologue narrated by a character, but then there are dialogues and descriptions inside these monologues. This is something an anti-genius structure, especially as employed by this consistently inept author. There is virtually no narrative flow, no timing of conversational exchange. She is not only tone deaf to the sound of language, but also has no sense of fictional rhythms and duration of attention. She throws in distractions apparently as a means of derailing interest. In addition to the interference of what stands in the place of thinking and internal reflections from these characters, there are pointless descriptions in the monologues. Josef Conrad and Henry James would be astounded by this kind of ineptitude. I could in the right context convince the two of them this was partly their fault, but truly a deeper spirit is at work. Rachel gives us some insight:

"Well, hallelujah and pass the ammunition. Company for dinner! And an eligible bachelor at that, without three wives...Anatole, the schoolteacher...with all his fingers still on, both eyes and both feet, and that is the local idea of a top-throb dreamboat."

With careful editing, this could approach reasonable parody of itself. Rachel is the hip kid, using "Man oh man" and "A-okay." Still my beatnik heart, father-o. The author tries to vary her preference for clichés by using slightly off versions. In this section we also get "weebie jeebies." Here's a serving to some real flavor:

"Anatole seemed to be getting ants in his pants but was still bound and determined to argue with Father. In spite of the seven warning signals of 'You'll be sorry' written all over Father's face. Anatole said, 'Tata Kuvudundu looks after many practical matters here. Men go especially to him when their wives are not getting children, or if they are adulterous.' He glanced at me, of all things, as if I in particular were too young to know what that meant. Really. Mother suddenly snapped out of it. 'Help me out, girls,' she said. 'The dishwater is boiling away on the stove, I forgot all about it. You all clear the table and start washing up. Be careful don't get burned.' To my surprise, my sisters practically ran from the table."

Maybe the novel was open on the table; that's my reaction. I am astounded at how bad this is: Wooden and monotonous, like badly delivered speeches without any drama. For what reason would readers go especially to this book? What could make them “snap out of it”? I can hear Djimon Honsou in the part of Anatole. Keanu Reeves could play Rachel. I can hear it in this exchange from Constantine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5H9fhHkhH4

Thanks for listening. I have been distraught trying to exorcise these demons, the abysmal feeling that this is the kind of writing people like. I remember Mark Twain wrote a review of James Fenimore Cooper which stood on its own as a piece of entertainment. How many times must a reader do this? I'll leave with the final flourish of this incredibly long book in which we may find an explanation for why the semi-literate populous turns to work of this quality:

"...and she begins once more -- how many times must a mother do this? -- begins to work out how old I would be now. But this time will be the last. This time, before your mind can calculate the answer it will wander away down the street with the child, dancing to the African music that has gone away and come home changed. The wooden animal in your pocket will soothe your fingers, which are simply looking for something to touch. Mother, you can still hold on but forgive, forgive and give for long as long as we both shall live I forgive you, Mother, I shall turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers. The teeth at your bones are your own, the hunger is yours, forgiveness is yours. The sins of the father belong to you and to the forest and even to the ones in iron bracelets, and here you stand, remembering their songs. Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember. Think of the vine that curls from the small square plot that was once my heart. That is the only marker you need. Move on. Walk forward into the light."

I cannot even begin to express how ashamed and proud I am of that last line, the final line in this best-selling novel.

Readers are often just looking for words on a page to distract them from themselves. In that something for the mind to grasp, they seek escape from the monologues of their own lives, and since the incessant chatter of their own minds filled with problems and worries contains an invective full of a savage morality of the superego and id, they find this kind of badly executed work of a kindred character. The ill-considered ideas and images serve as a guide to their own dark quirky Freudian interior but, contrary to the usual use of writing and reading, not as a beginning but an end to all reflection, genuine emotion and to any further useful thought. That's why I had to write this and get it out or suffer permanent alienation. It's beyond the usual dark funnel of stories with characters going down, down, down to disaster and ignominious death. This book has that effect on the readers' minds, and that is what they seek in reading.