The kind of fiction I don't want to write
/I just read The Daughter of Time, a wonderful old detective novel by Josephine Tey, for the first time over the weekend. I greatly enjoyed it and hope to write a proper review, but for now I wanted to share a short passage from the first chapter.
The protagonist, a police inspector named Alan Grant, lies immobile in the hospital following an accident during his pursuit of a thief. Well-meaning friends have given him a huge stack of novels to read, but he finds himself utterly bored by all of them. The passage in which Tey describes the books is a hilarious litany of still-current genre types:
A high-minded historical novel, “earthy and spade conscious all over seven hundred pages,” full of intrigue, psychological torment, sex, and manure.
A fashionably “elegant” literary novel in which the author, “being arch about vice,” winks and insinuates and fills his pages with so much “cheap and convenient” wit that it becomes boring.
A hardboiled crime novel full of gun-toting hoods speaking in “synthetic American.”
A lighter detective novel, perhaps the ancestor of the cozy mystery, in which Grant finds “three errors of procedure in the first two pages.”
Grant has read a thousand books like these, and you probably have, too. He decides that there needs to be a moratorium on publishing any new books for a generation, just to spare him the “lot of fool nonsense” people have been sending him.
What made me pause and think in the middle of his funny and sharply observed passage was an aside, a reflection from Grant coming at the end of his forlorn tour down the stack of unfinished books at his bedside:
“Did no one, any more, no one in all this wide world, change their record now and then? Was everyone nowadays thirled to a formula?”
He could not remember what the thin blue book at the bottom of the pile was. Something earnest and statistical, he thought. Tsetse flies, or calories, or sex behaviour, or something.
Even in that, you knew what to expect on the next page. Did no one, any more, no one in all this wide world, change their record now and then? Was everyone nowadays thirled to a formula? Authors today wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it. The public talked about ‘a new Silas Weekley’ or ‘a new Lavinia Fitch’ exactly as they talked about ‘a new brick’ or ‘a new hairbrush.’ They never said ‘a new book by’ whoever it might be. Their interest was not in the book but in its newness. They knew quite well what the book would be like.
First, here Tey anticipates the rise of “content.” Down with content. I have a 5,000-word essay on this topic in my head that I will “produce” someday, though not as content.
More seriously, though, Grant’s impatience with this stack of fiction comes down to sameness and predictability. These traits unite all the works across their disparate genres and subject matter. The authors write the same story—with the same characters, the same themes, the same deeply-rutted plot beats—over and over. It’s their brand. Most of the authors you see in the book section at Walmart or the bestselling new releases at Barnes & Noble, authors whose names are printed larger than the titles on their covers, are guilty of this. I could name names (and so could you, I’m sure) but that’s not why I or this blog are here.
Let Grant’s impatience and tedium be a goad—don’t write books like these. Don’t be predictable. Change your record now and then. It’s my hope, at least, that if anyone is talking about my novels in years to come, it’ll take more than my name to answer the question “What’s it about?”
