Month: November 2004

The Los Angeles Times today published a scathing review of the BLACK WIND, the latest Dirk Pitt novel. 

But Cussler’s prose is uniformly and relentlessly awful. Not just in the occasional howler ("You have an annoying proclivity for survival, Mr. Pitt, which is exceeded only by your irritating penchant for intrusion"), but sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, it’s hurried, sloppy, ungrammatical, clichéd.

We finish "Black Wind" with profound relief — that the world has been saved once again, and that we don’t have to read more.

I haven’t read a Dirk Pitt novel in years, but the following story point is enough to keep me from ever reading this one:

Cussler, assisted by his real son Dirk, is a good mechanical plotter. Every few chapters, he puts the Pitts or other good guys in seemingly hopeless predicaments — shot out of the sky in a helicopter, trapped in deep-sea wreckage with air running out, imprisoned in a sinking ship, tied to a platform under a rocket about to be launched — and dares us to guess how they’ll escape. Once, for the fun of it, he cheats. Dirk Junior and Summer, swimming a five-mile-wide river, chased by thugs in a speedboat, are rescued by a restored Chinese junk piloted by … Clive Cussler himself.

I hate it when real-life authors literally insert themselves into their fictional stories as characters… it’s very, very rare when an author can actually pull it off without making the reader cringe (I understand Stephen King manages to make it work in his latest book).

But this review also points out a pet peeve of mine… the rampant use of cliches in bestselling novels. Aren’t editors editing any more? I found the following cliches on just one page of a recent, bestselling thriller:

1. Let’s rock and roll.
2. They had all the bells and whistles.
3. He took one look at her and wanted to head for the hills.
4. We got down to the nitty-gritty.
5. Close but no cigar.
6. He entered the picture and swept me off my feet. He was my knight in shining armor.

How could any author write that last line, in particular, and not hit the delete key? One writer I know defends using cliches like those above by arguing "That’s how people talk."

To me, it’s just bad writing… and more and more of the most successful writers in the mystery-suspense field are doing it and that saddens me, particularly when it’s one of my favorite authors. Perhaps its the pressure of turning out a book a year that’s making them sloppy… or perhaps it’s hubris, getting so big they think they’re "beyond" editing any more. I don’t know. What’s your take?

From the desk of Lee’s still better looking and, apparently, filled-with-free-time younger brother Tod, keeping the site warm until Lee’s return from prison.

An Open Letter to Kurt & Karen Krueger, Proponents of Book Banning,

Dear Kurt and Karen,

Your kids are going to hate you. Seriously. They are going to hate you. Do you want to know why? Because you’ve done the one thing that children recognize as bullshit: you’ve made an issue out of your own parenting, or, perhaps, your own lack of confidence in how you raise your children. You recently asked the school board in your town of Merton, Wisconsin to ban "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" by Stephen Chbosky, "Like Water for Chocolate," by Laura Esquivel, "Chronicle of a Death Foretold," by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and "The Joy Luck Club," by Amy Tan from an elective course in contemporary literature. You said that these books should be removed from the reading list because they "are filled with suicide and things that don’t reflect the standards of the community," including, you noted, oral sex, masturbation and, that most dreaded scourge, homosexuality.

Fortunately, people with an advanced sense of humanity voted this week not to ban the books you think are ruining the moral fiber of your city from the course, but to require parental consent forms, which, in my opinion, is almost as bad. At any rate, Mr. & Mrs. Krueger, you decided that now that you’ve lost that appeal, the book should be banned all together, lest children learn how to give blow jobs, masturbate or, worse, turn to same sex love.

"Now I want it banned," said Karen Krueger, who had argued all along that she wasn’t asking for the book to be completely removed from the school. "Their parental notification is ineffective."

Mr. and Mrs. Krueger, you do understand that books are fiction, that life is real, and that words only do harm to those sheltered by reality. Teenagers have oral sex. Teenagers masturbate (a lot). Teenagers kill themselves and teenagers are gay. Members of the adult community in your city do likewise, and worse. Asking intellectual property to be banned invites your children to be close minded and unprepared for life. Asking for a book to be removed from a school because it goes against your moral code and then impressing it upon other children not your own is dangerous and borders on the malicious. If you don’t want your children giving or receiving blow jobs, masturbating or becoming gay, I suggest keeping them locked in the closet, because those are the types of things that happen in the real world, with or without books you don’t like.

Finally, Mr. and Mrs. Kruger, I suggest you read a book or two. I say, start with Fahrenheit 451 and work your way back to reality.

Sincerely,

Tod

About a month ago, an anonymous romance writer — or at least she was anonymously interviewed, but apparently other romance authors sussed her out — claimed that the government came in and seized her computers and work under the guise of the Patriot Act, ostensibly because of the research she was doing

(From Necessary Dissent, which posted this from an article in the Romance Writers Of America trade magazine): 

SB: What type of story were you researching?

Dilyn: Mainstream women’s fiction adventure. It was set in (Cambodia, all about the theft of antiquities. In my research I learned, about the atrocities that still go on there even today, much of it coming from one the Al Qaeda-linked groups. I actually went back though my book and deleted those specific terrorist references after 9/11 and changed the terrorists to a rogue band of thieves because of 9/11 and terrorist sensitivity.

It turns out, this anonymous writer is actually not anonymous at all…and that they seized her computers because, as the Associated Press and FOX News in Indianapolis reports, she was under criminal investigation for something entirely different:

Marion County prosecutors have charged a husband and wife in connection to a social security scam. They’re accused of allegedly bilking the government agency out of nearly $83,000 in unentitled disability benefits.
Police arrested the Dianne Holmes-Despain, 51, and her husband Joel Despain, 43, Tuesday morning. They’re being held at the Marion County Jail.
Prosecutors say an anonymous tip to the social security fraud hotline started the investigation rolling last year. Holmes-Despain is charged with theft, fraud and 14 counts of forgery. She began receiving disability benefits in 1985 when she was determined to be eligable claiming she had rheumatoid arthritis and couldn’t work. However, prosecutors say she was getting disability checks while she continued to teach education classes at IUPUI.
They also say she was writing romance novels and books at the time under different aliases like J.J. Despain and Dianne Drake and getting paid.
Many are books about cheating the system titled "Government Secrets, "Money Secrets" and "Inside Info: The Secrets You Should Know."
Allegedly she used her husband’s social security number to conceal her income. Joel Despain is charged with conspiracy to commit welfare fraud.
"I think they put a substantial amount of effort into keeping this a secret. I mean that seems to be what she was doing. She writes about keeping secrets, she writes about government secrets and publishing secrets and the whole time the biggest secret of all is that she’s not disabled," Marion County Prosecutor Carl Brizzi said. In the end the couple collected about $83-thousand dollars over a nine year period. Holmes-Despain could spend as many as 16 years in prison. Her husband could be looking at eight.

Nothing too romantic about that, he interjected tersely.

From the desk of Tod Goldberg, Lee’s better looking, fully ambulatory brother:

Lily Tuck has won the National Book Award in fiction for  The News From Paraguay, a novel I haven’t read, but which literally dozens of other folks have, which I don’t think is a knock in any way against her nomination and eventual victory. When I was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for my novel Living Dead Girl my competition was Scott Turow, George Pelecanos, Henning Mankell and Stephen L. Carter, which, aside from Carter, whose book The Emperor of Ocean Park I found to be unreadable crap, made me feel like I was in some pretty fancy company, irrespective of book sales. Good is good, no matter how many people choose to buy the book, which, in the case of Living Dead Girl, was strikingly small in comparison. I, for one, was happy the NBA wasn’t all about Phillip Roth and stuffy men in bad sweaters, though I thought for certain my favorite book of the year would be nominated, at least.

The New York Times has the full rundown of winners.