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we can write if we want to
How totally unnecessary.
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I finally caved in and bought the About A Boy DVD. And Steve bought the novel the other day - so I read it, too. Although I didn't really enjoy High Fidelity the novel, objectively I saw evidence of craft. I mean this novel is actually a slightly more interesting story than the other one, but the characters don't hit you in the gut quite as hard. Still pretty hard though - they have that brutal and painful honesty that Rob did, although no one is quite the fucking jerk that he is.
I keep saying that there's two things you have to do to write a good book - you have to have an interesting story, and you have to be able to tell it. I think one of the best ways to tell it is to have sympathetic characters. For years and years The Eyes of the Dragon by King was the pinnacle of a well-told story for me - though if you think about it, the plot is pretty weak and formulaic. But you fall in love with the characters. That's always been my bag, too. I don't have so many interesting stories to tell, as just a bunch of stuff happening to people I love. (Although technically they aren't actually people.) This is why I can't bear Tolkien; first of all, he can't tell a story for shit, and second of all, well, I didn't feel for the characters, anyway. Except Bilbo Baggins. No one else, though.
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I finally caved in and bought the About A Boy DVD. And Steve bought the novel the other day - so I read it, too. Although I didn't really enjoy High Fidelity the novel, objectively I saw evidence of craft. I mean this novel is actually a slightly more interesting story than the other one, but the characters don't hit you in the gut quite as hard. Still pretty hard though - they have that brutal and painful honesty that Rob did, although no one is quite the fucking jerk that he is.
I keep saying that there's two things you have to do to write a good book - you have to have an interesting story, and you have to be able to tell it. I think one of the best ways to tell it is to have sympathetic characters. For years and years The Eyes of the Dragon by King was the pinnacle of a well-told story for me - though if you think about it, the plot is pretty weak and formulaic. But you fall in love with the characters. That's always been my bag, too. I don't have so many interesting stories to tell, as just a bunch of stuff happening to people I love. (Although technically they aren't actually people.) This is why I can't bear Tolkien; first of all, he can't tell a story for shit, and second of all, well, I didn't feel for the characters, anyway. Except Bilbo Baggins. No one else, though.
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Can't tell a story? He might not have been able to let the fucking story GO, but the LOTR trilogy is certainly a well done story for it's time (I could have used a few less songs to be honest, and the poetry...blah...) and I, personally, wound up caring quite a bit for Merry and Pippin and Sam. The scene in Peleanor Fields with the king of rohan and merry gives me moist eyes, and the ending with sam and rosie is sad and bittersweet and perfect to me.
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Thank you.
When I say it, I am frequently smacked down. He was writing history not a novel and, for the most part, it reads like it (tedious, dry, and prone to tangential explorations of minutia only the most ardent Tolkien disciple could care about). I will admit, like the fellow above, that I did feel a little for Merry and Pippin, but otherwise the characters were just names in a very long book (or trilogy of books).
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I've read all the hornby novels, and I think high fidelity is the best...maybe because the least happens
(less happens in Fever Pitch, because it's just an extended meditation on his fanaticism for the Arsenal soccer team, but then, it's not a novel). I think as a male confessional, as a psychological novel, high fidelity is brilliant. The voice of Rob resonated with me at least.
I always got the sense that in About a Boy Hornby took basically the same character and showed another way that he can change. or at least come to some self-realization.
And then in How To Be Good, he changed it to a woman doctor and did the same thing.
Overcoming inherent selfishness and solipsism seems to be a big theme with Hornby. Or maybe just extreme self-analysis, extreme looking inward, the personal...some say that the greatest art takes the personal and makes it Universal...most of the modern novels that are considered to be really good to great--Eggers, Sidaris, Hornby have this current running through them. I personally don't think that way, but maybe I would if the last third of Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius wasn't so slow...sometimes these things just become chronicles, and I have LJ if I want that.
I guess it also depends on what you want from a novel. Craft--language--is important, but I tend to sway away from the idea of story as central to a good novel and lean more towad Milan Kundera's definition:
Novel: The great prose form in which an author thoroughly explores, by means of experimental selves (characters), some great themes of existence.
To my way of thinking a good story can make a good novel, and often does. A good story can be in great novel and often has to be. But rarely does a story alone make a great novel.
okay i'll stop talking now...books get me all worked up like.
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I went to a Q&A by Octavia Butler shortly before I started writing it, actually, and she said more or less the same thing - that the STORY isn't a mere description of the plot, the STORY is about basically the theme. Like (for example) her book Wild Seed chronicles the life of an immortal couple, but it's ABOUT morality and love. And then I though "Well, what should my novel be about?" So I started writing one about how religion is stupid, but I didn't get very far, and then I went back to an idea I had about ten years ago. This one is basically about being alienated from society because you're different. Or, to put it more succinctly, about how people suck. Which I think most good books are about really...
Haha! I'm not crazy.