I’ve had it with show-offy novelists

My book group recently read The Sea by Irish novelist John Banville. All seven of us were disappointed.  

  

Its first-person narrator is an unlikable, self-absorbed misanthrope who recently lost his wife but is more focused on a 50-years-ago loss. He spends his days ruminating about the past but not learning from it. I felt indifferent to his fate.  

  

Especially frustrating for me was the excess of multisyllabic unfamiliar words. I asked our group, “Why do you suppose he always chose a big word instead of a small one?” “To show off,” someone said, and nobody disagreed.  

  

I don’t like novels that seem to have no point except to flaunt how well the author can write.   

  

That sounds like I’m putting my judgment above that of the critics who raved about The Sea or the panel that awarded it the 2005 Booker Prize. On the contrary, when I don’t understand why critics praise a literary work, I’m as likely to suspect I don’t have the brainpower to get it.   

But whether it’s over my head or pretentious, I’m tired of grappling with modern fiction’s wordplay, nonlinear plots (sometimes no apparent plot), stream of consciousness, and other experimental techniques. I found agreement in an essay by novelist and critic Dale Peck, who has taken down his contemporaries with words like “shallow,” “clumsy and pretentious,” “incomprehensible,” “sterile,” and “cheap and easy.” Novelists today “think it is more important to sound literary than to make sense,” he said. “Many novels intimidate readers by making them wonder not what the writer is saying but why he is saying it.”  

  

I used to think I should embrace highbrow literature as a challenge. At this stage of life, I’m more inclined to indulge my preferences. It’s not that I’m looking for a diet of fluff novels. I want substance — moral dilemmas, conflict, and struggle from which characters grow. I like a story (yes, I want a plot) told in direct prose that I don’t have to reread. Maybe it’s my journalistic background, but I admire fiction writing that is as inconspicuous as periodical writing.  

  

How to screen books for the writing style and content I’m looking for? I’m finding that the ordinary people commenting on Goodreads and Amazon are more aligned with my tastes than are professional critics. I start with one-star feedback. Adjectives like pretentious, incomprehensible, and dark rule out the book.   

  

Screening helps, but I still bring books home from the library that I stop reading after a chapter or two. Quitting on a book is another change as I’ve gotten older. There’s too little time left to force myself to read books I don’t like.