...the thing about Lightning Rods is that of all the books in the tourney this year, it is probably the one I would be least likely to recommend. I would have to know you really well before I would suggest that you would like this novel.
A month or so ago I was in a coffee shop before school with my five-year-old and a few mothers from the neighborhood who were also there with their kids. Someone asked me what I was reading and I said a book called Lightning Rods, and they asked what it was about and I opened my mouth to reply and I looked around at these three women, friends of mine, all of them, and I looked at their preschool kids, and then I looked at the moms again and I had a hell of a time even describing it.
Kevin Guillefoile at the Morning News Tournament of Books.
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ReplyDeleteAargh. Mith! I thought his comments re difficulty of recommending the book were meant to be mildly humorous and friendly. I find myself cravenly hoping my uncle and extended family won't read it. (Though glad to hear it appeals to people when described by you. Have you ever thought of taking up a career as an agent?)
ReplyDeleteThough, OK, his comments on the copy-editing of The Last Samurai do suggest that he lacks the in-depth knowledge of this gripping subject available to loyal readers of paperpools.
I guess you're right. I found it vicious. Probably I'm getting tone-deaf. This is what years of unbearable loneliness and failure in the Midwest can do to a person. I'll remove the comment.
ReplyDeleteIf I were an agent I'd have to be something like the guy on Entourage (though I haven't really watched that show and could be wrong about his character). You know, the curse at people and make them feel like scum kind of agent. Which I can't imagine really exists in the literary world.
But it really does bother me that people who comment on books feel like they can say all sorts of things about your character when they don't seem to do this for most other people. Actually, even if they did do this for others I'd still find it infuriating.
ReplyDeleteAnyway anyway anyway, hope you're doing well.
I think loyal readers of pp know that rage and bile are what made Night Hauling such a pleasure to read (and by your standards this comment was strangely mild-mannered). Though it's possible KG is not a connoisseur.
ReplyDeleteWell, I don't mind people making comments about my life; I'm baffled when they think I am adamant that everything in a text is right and nothing can be changed. The point is that agents, editors, copy-editors and so on vary widely in the amount of time they are willing to spend discussing the text with the author. When you negotiate a contract with new people, you have no way of knowing how much care they will take. So they may all think that all numbers below 100 must be spelled out because it says so in the CMOS, without bothering to see what the CMOS actually says. If people are just making a lot of off-the-cuff pronouncements, and I check various works of reference and find that these are not in agreement with the off-the-cuff pronouncements, it seems silly to make a lot of changes to the text, and also silly to spend a lot of time writing marginalia setting out the ruling of works of reference; it makes more sense simply to have a contract giving the author the last word, and offer people the change to discuss issues they care about if they wish to do so. (If they are not willing to consult standard works of reference, though, it's hard to feel they much care.)
ReplyDeleteThe type of person who reads Language Log on a daily basis would probably not see this as trivial (and one might like to think that a copy-editor would be the type of person who reads LL on a daily basis), but I can see that for a lot of people it would seem too much like inside baseball.
I think I've said this before, but I work as a copyeditor, and it rapidly becomes clear to me when I start reading a manuscript whether the author knows what they're doing and the kind of effects they're going for with their prose or whether they are simply thrashing about helplessly, cramming in bits of jargon and badly expressed thoughts and hoping the whole thing will somehow cohere. In the first case, I edit very gently, leaving queries when I think I may be misunderstanding what the author wants; in the second, I beat the text ruthlessly with Chicago until it succumbs.
ReplyDeleteLeah and I are cheering along at home as the tournament progresses. Unhappily, I made the mistake of reading the comments following the most recent pairing and it was a little frustrating--if for no other reason than I lack the literary knowledge and intellectual capacity to hang in there and discourse intelligently about modern fiction. Are there any recent English majors available to polish my rustic opinions so they might have some hope of being taken seriously my the TMN crowd?
ReplyDeleteWell, needless to say, my first instinct is to weigh in and comment right back (someone is WRONG on the Internet!!!!!), but this is probably bad form. I can't help feeling, though, that there are some brilliant, ambitious books in the tournament - the sort of book I might have finished if publishing The Last Samurai had not been such an ordeal - and any of those has a better claim to the Rooster. (Maybe the Archibalds will take on a new chicken in my name and let me come and visit it . . .)
ReplyDelete"I made the mistake of reading the comments following the most recent pairing and it was a little frustrating--if for no other reason than I lack the literary knowledge and intellectual capacity to hang in there and discourse intelligently about modern fiction."
ReplyDeleteThat's ok, Danny. So do the commenters. (Suffice it to say, I found the discussion in the comments deeply painful and wildly ignorant. Lightning Rods, on the other hand, I thought was excellent, though it's true I probably wouldn't recommend it to my mother.)
We'd have to get a special permit from the town to take on a rooster... neighbors don't like the noise I guess. I could get a feathered hat on a hen though, as a sort of disguise, if that would entice you to visit.
ReplyDelete