How timely.
Feb. 28th, 2005 07:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
electriclandThe First Annual Tournament of Books gave the laurels to Cloud Atlas over The Plot Against America.
I just finished TPAA this weekend, and found it baffling and maddening in a lot of ways.
Start with the plot. I thought, as some of these judges commented, that the resolution was facile and the ending was given away halfway through the book. Even those wrap-up comments don't really cover my problems with it, though. There's something about reviewers who aren't familiar with the genre looking at a work of alternate history -- they miss the boat in some ways. We're led to believe that after an extra year of isolationism, meaning America out of the war until late 1942, six months lost on the Manhattan Project, serious domestic strife, riots, on and on, history just shook itself off and returned to its regularly scheduled programming -- right down to the assassination of RFK 20 years later? It felt to me as though he just got tired thinking about all the possible ramifications of his conceit, and threw up his hands.
That said, it was a great conceit while it lasted, and he really made it come alive. I thought the book was at its best in the small domestic sphere -- when he started getting into the grand historical sweep it got a bit unmoored.
Then we come to style. I've only read one other book by Philip Roth, so I wasn't sure how much of what I found jarring was his usual style and how much was him being uncomfortable with the material. I thought a lot of his choices sapped the energy from his writing. The viewpoint ricocheted back and forth through time so that you almost never had a scene described to you directly; the narrator takes you right up to the point where things start to get interesting and then jumps days or weeks ahead and says something "Afterwards, looking back, I thought..." or "later, when it was all over and he had gone to hospital, we would realize...". It gets MADDENING. And he has a tic of writing long, long lists of events or places in tremendous run-on sentences; I counted one that was 22 lines long! That's 3/4 of a page! Give me a freaking break! There's no reason for it, or I wouldn't mind.
Anyway, that's less coherent than I meant it to be, but I'm late for choir...
(ETA: Stanley Crouch points out another sort of blindness. Many people seem to have felt this was a mean-spirited attack, but he's got a point. If you're going to write alternate history, you have to consider more than you might think.
I don't think I'm gonna make it to choir... home and sleep, methinks.)
I just finished TPAA this weekend, and found it baffling and maddening in a lot of ways.
Start with the plot. I thought, as some of these judges commented, that the resolution was facile and the ending was given away halfway through the book. Even those wrap-up comments don't really cover my problems with it, though. There's something about reviewers who aren't familiar with the genre looking at a work of alternate history -- they miss the boat in some ways. We're led to believe that after an extra year of isolationism, meaning America out of the war until late 1942, six months lost on the Manhattan Project, serious domestic strife, riots, on and on, history just shook itself off and returned to its regularly scheduled programming -- right down to the assassination of RFK 20 years later? It felt to me as though he just got tired thinking about all the possible ramifications of his conceit, and threw up his hands.
That said, it was a great conceit while it lasted, and he really made it come alive. I thought the book was at its best in the small domestic sphere -- when he started getting into the grand historical sweep it got a bit unmoored.
Then we come to style. I've only read one other book by Philip Roth, so I wasn't sure how much of what I found jarring was his usual style and how much was him being uncomfortable with the material. I thought a lot of his choices sapped the energy from his writing. The viewpoint ricocheted back and forth through time so that you almost never had a scene described to you directly; the narrator takes you right up to the point where things start to get interesting and then jumps days or weeks ahead and says something "Afterwards, looking back, I thought..." or "later, when it was all over and he had gone to hospital, we would realize...". It gets MADDENING. And he has a tic of writing long, long lists of events or places in tremendous run-on sentences; I counted one that was 22 lines long! That's 3/4 of a page! Give me a freaking break! There's no reason for it, or I wouldn't mind.
Anyway, that's less coherent than I meant it to be, but I'm late for choir...
(ETA: Stanley Crouch points out another sort of blindness. Many people seem to have felt this was a mean-spirited attack, but he's got a point. If you're going to write alternate history, you have to consider more than you might think.
I don't think I'm gonna make it to choir... home and sleep, methinks.)
