One of the new wrinkles in my lunch group is that we are forming a laissez faire book club. The first reading “assignment” is “Love in the Time of Cholera” (catchy, huh?) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I am on p. 25 or so and I am waiting to give a damn about the characters. It’s a tone poem and a great deal of preoccupation of this writer is bringing to excruciating life every bit of squalor available in the slums of a third-world country in the Caribbean (I still don’t which one). This style of writing has gotten a lot of critical acclaim – the descriptions are supposed to be compelling and involving and unusual and intensely grabbing. I am not saying that it’s all bad, merely that I find evocative descriptions of filth and decadence less than compelling, and the alliterations, fanciful and obscure, mostly do not work for me.

The critics love stuff that eludes understanding, the thought being that only truly gifted intellects (such as themselves) get it and the rest of you Philistines live in ignorance. Yep, that’s me. Unlike the critics fawning over this style, I am someone who says get on with it.

Joyce Carol Oates affects me the same way. She goes on forever about daily minutiae. Since I am impatient with my own mindless minutiae, why would I want to read about someone else’s? To identify? Oh, great, I have a kinship with this fictional character? Get a grip, I want to tell Ms. Oates. But, of course, I am far outweighed by all the readers who worship at the feet of writers like these. I can only think they like to wallow. Or maybe it’s because they haven’t lived any of this and to them it’s a revelation. Unfortunately, I saw enough of decadence in my childhood in a semi-slum of Chicago to last me. Anyway, because I promised, I will slog on. I may wind up with a different perspective, but I doubt it.

In the 60s I cracked open “Sophie’s Choice” – the motivation was so incredibly annoying, unappealing, and, for me, unbelievable, that I stopped reading and didn’t read fiction again for 30 years. Remember the narrator is a fledgling writer who is fascinated by Sophie and her dysfunctional life. He is in agony for most of the telling. But he sticks around. I know his obsession is reality of a sort, but it's annoying because it's sick. I don't need to read about sick people. I like to admire the people I'm reading about.

I also read a John Fowles novel and was so enraged at the ending that I never read another. Wanting to refresh my memory, I looked up synopses of Fowles’ books and thought it was Magus. But nothing in this overlong, turgid, rambling account of the book was familiar. Nothing. Also, I can’t imagine that, even as an impressional 20-something, I would have stayed with a book full of this kind of insanity. When someone says, “you can’t write stuff like this”, they are obviously wrong, wrong, wrong. Insanity is alive and well in the persona of acclaimed writers (and some of them have found their way into New York Times crossword invention as well).

When I read my critiques, I understand that I am militant. I am incredibly enraged by pretention. Perhaps I see it where there is none. I’m stuck with my perspective. It suits me. Anyway, it’s not as if I don’t try. I did, after all, choose to read this book.

xx, Teal