I read a lot this year, including a number of books that were, well, bad. I’m not going to go into why I thought the below books were disappointing (though I may write individual reviews at a later date), but I did find an overarching theme. Every book below earned rave reviews from cultural tastemakers like the New York Times Book Review or NPR. I’m “naming and shaming” not to condemn any one author or work (I know each was a labor of love), but to hopefully recalibrate the ballast of public opinion that might be swayed by the substantial plaudits earned by each of these works.
- Lady Joker, Volume I
- Heaven and Earth Grocery Store
- The Trees
- The Postcard
- The Immortalists
- Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
The broad problem, I think, is this: many of the above books are fabulous ideas. Really. The Trees is a sort of horror-whodunnit wherein corpses in Alabama keep being discovered with the body of an Emmet Till lookalike nearby. The Postcard explored the idea of weaving together multi-generational Holocaust trauma by means of the eponymous postcard. The Immortalists aimed to understand the overlapping tendrils of fate and self-control.
All of these concepts are great. But in so many cases, the execution was wide of the mark.
And, in the case of airport kiosk mega-bestseller Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow — the execution was hella wide of the mark. Tomorrow is essentially Catcher in the Rye reprogrammed for the gamer generation. It’s nominally a will-they-won’t-they story, but it’s really about overlapping conceptions of identity and an anecdotal history of the development of the video game industry throughout the nineties and early-2000’s.
As someone who doesn’t game (other than internet Scrabble), I was intrigued by the idea: I don’t mind reading outside of my comfort zone. But golly, this one was a doozie: the characterizations in this novel were thinner than a CD-ROM and the plot was as flimsy as Castle Wolfenstein on a floppy disk.
For one, the narrative was repetitive. Characters have the same conversation over, and over again. No one grows up, no one learns anything, and no no one develops anything more than a video game, and sometimes not even that. Cultural evolutions are woven in and then dropped, or used in ways that feel more like socio-political signifiers than meaningful plot devices. Characters endure major expositions that are never mentioned again. There’s a brief sex scene that is, perhaps, some of the worst writing ever published by a mainstream house. I reprint it below without embarrassment, since it’s not so much a sex scene as it is the output of a ChatGPT prompt asking to explain how the vascular system works, but in Latin.
…and then she put her hand between his legs, wrapping her fingers around the cylindrical chamber of blood sponges that was his (and every) penis. He felt the corpora cavernosa, commanded by nerve messages from his subconscious brain, fill up with blood, and the tunica albuginea membrane, the penis’s straitjacket, trap the blood inside.
And this book, dear reader, is #76 on the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.
If this isn’t vibes over well, verbs, I don’t know what is.
Reading Tomorrow solidified for me that, as with the other books above, it seems like the reading public is willing to disregard style (and even substance) so long as “the vibes are immaculate.” Which is to say, as long as the precept is good, the writing can be poor, the characterization can be thin, and the plot can be circular, all will be forgiven, and the work itself might even earn itself a place alongside White Teeth and The Human Stain. And I submit that, as a society where millions of people play video games, it’s high time we had a book that universalizes what is (wrongly) regarded as niche, and that explains to stereotypically staid NPR listeners the appeal of Donkey Kong and Quest.
And there’s value in that, both as art unto itself, as well as for society writ large. But the problem is that author Gabrille Zevin aims to center game culture, while also briefly giving nods to issues like sexism, academic power structures, ableism, gun violence, abortion, Asian-American identity, and more. And so the result is a jumble of weak plot and poor writing with occasional strands of virtue signal all over the place. I’m not saying that you can’t have a novel that tackles multiple thorny concepts, but I’ve read far, far better books about Asian-American identity in, say, The Sympathizer or Interior Chinatown, wherein the authors’ scopes are tighter and they’re able to hit their marks while propelling the plot forward in a coherent, engaging way.
The end result of vibes over verbs is a compromise on quality, which does not redound to the benefit of the reading public. I think it better that we maintain high standards for literature — including, and especially, plot, character, prose, etc — rather than embrace subpar works that happen to scratch a socio-cultural itch du jour. In the long run, we’ll be better for it. And we won’t need to read sex scenes written in Latin.
Ad astra per aspera.
Silicon Spatula 