It isn't always my job or snow or guitar or nap or walk or movie or meditation or pushups or basketball highlights or internet browsing or Animal Crossing mayoral responsibilities or the waiting that's key to my artistic approach or this video of a professional musician in the middle of a performance sneezing into his trombone that prevents me from offering a few words. Sometimes it's the luck of the draw, a book I can't bring myself to write about, if I finished at all. Part of literature is chance. Usually if one book doesn't work out, I have another in reach ready to dispel the aftereffects. But lately I've gone from one unsatisfying novel to the next, leaving me feeling undernourished, lethargic, uneasy, mildly ill.
There's the novel that barely qualifies as fiction.
There's the novel that's barely more than political tract.
There's the novel that I had to put down once an animate future world gives way to inanimate characters.
There's the novel celebrated as a classic that I've started maybe four times through the years. I like it. Still not what I'm looking for.
There's the novel that's won a major award. It's twee and lacks rigor of form.
There's the best seller from a Nobel Prize winner. I'm not the kind of reader (or writer) who can't tolerate and see past a simple sentence. One of the few memorable pieces of writing advice I've heard comes from Raymond Carver: If it's quotable, cut it. Language as a vehicle for substance. Structure and force, comedy and weirdness are not dependent on style. It can liberate the writer who obsesses so much over word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence perfection that the elementary ability to unspool a thought is lost. Lichtenberg can be referring to the trap when he says one goes from the bad to the good to a kind of bad one thinks better than good. The problem with the best seller is that its language is a simple vehicle for paltry substance.
I've gained a better understanding of what I don't like. I try to keep this in mind. But the real cure for what ails me is to find the right book. It doesn't necessarily need to be a book worthy of claiming a permanent place on my shelves, either. At a minimum it must keep me reading til the last page, generate some heat, even if it is ostensibly cold. My luck will change, my condition will improve, so long as the search continues.
