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One problem big-name authors face is that once they become certain cash cows for the publishing industry, they have no incentive to change. That means that whatever their flaws, they are likely to repeat them. Any prolific and critical reader has probably spotted some of these by now. I'd like to hear yours.
My subject is Harry Turtledove, alternate history/SF novelist. Here's what annoys about him:
1) With Turtledove, characters are their genders, ethnicities, religions, economic levels and so on. I grant that such factors usually have at least subtle impact; with Turtledove, the characters can never meet without immediately having those matters out in a blunt, frank discussion before they even get to know one another. Nearly every subordinate in a hierarchy talks back to his or her seniors, and the seniors come in mainly two flavors: mean Colonel Blimps and chill Average Joes. If a character is Soviet, that character can't talk (can't even think) without ideological patter. Gender relations are bad enough; race relations are the worst. A black and a white, in the lands of Turtledove, can't just complete a simple business transaction--it has to go into black/white relations. Every. Single. Time. Is there anyone out there in this world so obsessed with group membership that he or she cannot buy a can of pop without bringing it up? If I acted like this in real life I'd get a lot of strange looks. When I go to my mail place and say howdy to Monica, the manager, not only do I not make comments about the fact that she's female and a manager, I frankly had better not do so, or Monica will think I've got issues and find me creepy. And Monica would be right, especially if I did it almost every time.
2) What accentuates this is that Turtledove has an irresistible compulsion to slip Jewish characters into as many situations as possible. While I don't have a basic issue with this, it has become so dully predictable one comes to look for it. Of course, following 1), for the Jewish characters it's all about being Jewish. All the time. And it's just about always Ashkenazi eastern Europeans of middling piety, as if there aren't any other kinds of Jews in the world. Being a non-Jew who happens to speak Hebrew, I think I can safely say I've met quite a few Jewish people: Chasids, secular Jews, Conservative rabbis, semi-observant housewives, ideological firebrands, Israeli army veterans, baseball players and so forth. Never in the process have I met any of Turtledove's Jews, because the vast majority were normal folks with whom one could have conversations that didn't have to involve their Judaism. In fact, as above with Monica, it would be more than a little creepy if I was always bringing up their Jewishness, or if they were. In real life, they are Jewish, whereas I ain't; no big deal unless I'm thinking of suggesting we all go out to Bob's Bacon Buffet, and even then, all that will happen is I probably will think of a better dining option after reflection. Or if I don't, they'll laugh at my obliviousness. Or maybe they're secular and BBB sounds like a great dinner. In any case, it's not going to cause a flipping incident. It's not like I slurred Sandy Koufax or something.
Okay, fine, Turtledove is Jewish; "write what you know," and I can hang with the idea that maybe Jewish stories don't get told often enough in SF. Any fair-minded person would make some allowances for the impact of protracted historical persecution leading up to one of history's most horrid atrocities. But can't he include some of the normal, non-self-obsessed Jews I've met in real life? Mr. Turtledove, if your guy is named Goldfarb, I get that he's Jewish. Great. Now can he just be a radar tech (or doctor, or colonel, or restauranteur, or kibbutznik, etc.) for a while?
Hardly any critic ever seems to mention this, probably for fear of being accused of anti-Semitism. It's not anti-Semitic to point out a glaring writing flaw. It would be just as glaring if the selected ethnicity were Irish-Americans, or Tamils, or Afrikaners, or Masaai, or Argentines. In fact, since one of our social rules is that you can mess with your own ethnicity all you want long as you don't pick on others, I'd like to see what would happen if Turtledove obsessed about Hispanic people instead, and made near-caricatures of them. Or Polynesians. There's be an uproar. This is only tolerated because he followed the social rule--and because critics are nervous to speak up.
It's bothersome because there are things Turtledove does very, very well. I find his writing fundamentally sound and mostly tight enough. He has few if any peers at seeing alternate timelines and imagining events unfolding from those. He has a great sense of humor, like when Lee noticed how clean the Army of Northern Virginia was after a battle, and remarked to himself that of all the terms one might have ever used to describe the ANV under any circumstances, that would not be the term. Or when he give the Lizards a thinly disguised Wal-Mart, or when the Lizard fleetlord tells an adjutant to tell his hated rival fleetlord that he can't come to the phone, as he has become a Muslim and is busy praying. He has created some great, nuanced characters (when they aren't wasting my time playing up to their group memberships and stereotypes). Why can't he get the people factor even close to right?
I've never met Turtledove, but I saw him at an SF con. He was introduced as a guest of honor at the opening ceremonies. As I recall, all he had to say: "Thanks. Glad to be here. Buy my books." Well, that was subtle. Yeah, Mr. Turtledove, I already did. And while I enjoyed them for your strengths, they aren't half as good as they could be thanks to weaknesses you seem disinclined to correct.
Must be nice to be such a big name one can get away with lousy characterization and tactless sales pitches.
I can't think of any. If their bad habits annoy me enough, I just quit reading and never pick up another one by that writer. The one sort of exception to that would be Tom Clancy. I loved the movie version of The Hunt for the Red October, but after seeing him in an interview on PBS, I wouldn't touch any of his books with a 10 foot pole, no matter how well they were written. Anyone that full of himself, with such an overwhelming sense of self-superiority, gets nothing from me.
The phenomena you are identifying with Turtledove is actually his serial reliance on characters to provide narrative rather than to come across in a more realistic manner. In a sense, most Turtledove characters are issues rather than people, each representing an area of his storytelling which is a component of the general plot. Thus, the Jewish characters constantly concerning themselves with Jewish issues, is done because that is Turtledove's absense of literary imagination, he cannot think of a smoother way to handle introducing the issues.
It isn't just the ethnic types conducting these heavy handed, issue oriented dialogs, it is everyone. How often do Turtledove chapters open with two characters chatting with one another and conducting a superfluous review of facts and events already well known to one another?
"Well, Sam, you may be the brightest young artillery officer in the army and proved your worth at Sicily and Normandy, but you've still got a lot of war left to fight if you want to get back to Idaho and marry that pretty redheaded school teacher you're always talking about."
"You're right about that, Shorty" Sam said to the dark skinned and balding Captain Roger Hoffman, whose German sounding last name had been the source of a lot of kidding ever since he left his Sante Fe home to join the army when he was seventeen by lying about his age, which he got away with because he had always looked five or six years older than he actually was, "And there would be a lot less war left if Montgomery and those flyboys hadn't messed up that Operation Market Garden which was an attempt to outflank the German right by a northern crossing of the Rhine in Holland."
Then sixty pages later we get back to Sam and Shorty who restage the same sort of chat, repeating much of the biographical information and adding in some new clunker narrative dialog to cover what had been happening to them since we last saw them.
The screaming flaw in Turtledove books is the insane repetition of information already presented. How many damn times did we need to be reminded that this sailor had a problem with sunburn because of his fair skin, or that good tank commander rode standing in the turret with the hatch open so that they could see better, even though they would be safer with the hatch closed and less visibility, or this officer wasn't going to be rattled by some problem, not when he had spent twenty years serving with the hot tempered and foolhardy General Custer?
I have a theory taht Turtledove is actually a factory of writers, each provided with character summary outlines and a general plot structure information. This would go far in explaining the extarordinary repetition, one writer doesn't know that another has already used the info from the character sheet, so it gets put in there again...and again....and again.
The other grounds for such a suspicion are the immense swings in quality of writing that are found within the same book. When reading the first half of the last volume of his WW II interupted by alien invasion series, I was thinking that this was probably the best writing that Turtledove had ever done. The suddenly, with half the book to go, it was like it fell off a cliff...and remained at the bottom the rest of the way. Clever gave way to cliche, tight and coheisive became muddled and wandering.
Also supporting the case for factory writing, is Turtledove's prolific output, he typically cranks out three new 500 page novels a year. It's difficult to avoid concluding that Turtledove supervises the writing and provides the basic plotlines he wants followed, but does not write everything himself.
All Turtledove characters are stereotypes, deliberately so because they are meant to represent a type.
Thanks, Grandstander. What you said is what I wanted to say and didn't find the words to express as completely and clearly. And I'm thankful I'm not the only one who sees the problem.
I too begin to suspect that Turtledove is a factory operation. Maybe he just edits them after ghosts do all the grunt work.
I got tired of Stephen King's habit of packing his writing with brand names a long time ago. It was cute the first time, even the second. But not since.
I grew weary of Dean Koontz and his constant conspiratorial activites by secret government agencies in his books. I guess that is more of a boring plot device than a bad habit, though.
I particularly dislike the use of ghost writers. Aside from the obvious definition, I include any book where the big name author has his name plastered across the top of the cover with a second author's name at the bottom. I don't think James Patterson or Tom Clancy have written a book in years, but you'd never know it looking at the shelves in the local bookstore.
I have a peeve that won't win me any friends hear, I'm predicting. I'm going to call this thing I don't like, Americanitis. This is the tendency of Many otherwise very good American writers to always stretch the story line into unbelievable regions of obvious BS. I would say a prime example of this is the writing of John Grisham. The guy can obviously spin a very good tale but it's almost always ruined for me by stretching many of the story lines into some kind of Lala land fantasy. Pat Conroy is another like that. His otherwise good stories and well written books are ruined for me because of all the BS. I actually threw "The great Santini" in the garbage can for that very reason. I read the first half and then skimmed the rest and read the last 20 pages or so and his making everything bigger than life, weirder than is possible and just generally beyond reality wrecks the book for me. By the way "The prince of tides" is a great book but it suffers from the same excesses.
I have a peeve that won't win me any friends hear, I'm predicting. I'm going to call this thing I don't like, Americanitis. This is the tendency of Many otherwise very good American writers to always stretch the story line into unbelievable regions of obvious BS. I would say a prime example of this is the writing of John Grisham. The guy can obviously spin a very good tale but it's almost always ruined for me by stretching many of the story lines into some kind of Lala land fantasy. Pat Conroy is another like that. His otherwise good stories and well written books are ruined for me because of all the BS. I actually threw "The great Santini" in the garbage can for that very reason. I read the first half and then skimmed the rest and read the last 20 pages or so and his making everything bigger than life, weirder than is possible and just generally beyond reality wrecks the book for me. By the way "The prince of tides" is a great book but it suffers from the same excesses.
One of my all-time favorite novels. But I know what you mean. There was a lot he could have gone back and edited out and it still would have been a great book.
I got tired of Stephen King's habit of packing his writing with brand names a long time ago. It was cute the first time, even the second. But not since.
Stephen King was the first author I thought of when I read the thread title. The saturation of his books with current pop culture references will render those books indecipherable in about 50 years' time, or maybe sooner. The pop culture references are not essential to the plots of the novels; it's almost as though he threw them in just to demonstrate what a truly hip guy he must be.
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