When I posted my 2022 reading summary last week, I mentioned that there were a number of novels I read that I thought were just "meh" but that someone else might like. I thought I would try to explain that a little more because I don't want that to be taken the wrong way. I don't want you to think I was saying something negative about those people who might like those novels. That's not what I was saying. I just meant that those novels didn't have what I was looking for in a book, but we all aren't looking for the same thing in our books.
Nancy Pearl, the the former Executive Director of the Washington Center for the Book at the Seattle Public Library, is often asked to recommend books for people. She uses what she calls her four "doorways" to help a person find the kind of book they like.
It seems to me that all works of fiction and narrative nonfiction are broadly made up of four experiential elements: story, character, setting, and language. I call these “doorways,” because when we open a book, read the first few pages, and choose to go on, we enter the world of that book. And I’ve come to believe we can help readers better choose their next book by looking at the proportion of these four elements.
A book with story as its biggest doorway is one that readers describe as a page-turner, a book that they can’t put down because they desperately want to discover what happens next.
A book with character as its biggest doorway is a book in which readers feel so connected with the characters that when the book is over they feel they’ve lost someone dear to them.
Readers of novels in which setting is most prominent say things like “I felt like I was there,” or, as one man told me, “When I finished Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, I immediately made plans to go to New Mexico—I had to see for myself where it took place.”
A book in which language is the major doorway leads readers to utter sentences like “I read more slowly because I wanted to savor the language” or “I’m not even sure what the book is about, but I loved the way the author wrote.”
I feel that any good book will have all of those doorways, but the key question is which is the MAJOR doorway?
The big doorway I'm looking for is language. If I love the author's use of language, including how she structures the story, I don't need as many of the other elements to be strong. It's not that I don't need the other doorways, I do. But I don't need all of them and there may be one that is substantially missing. For instance, sometimes I like books that have little to no plot - which drives other people crazy.
For me, a work of what is supposed to be literary fiction better have a big language doorway or I will probably judge it "meh". Many best sellers fall into the "meh" category for me. People love them because they are real page turners or because they have a fascinating character or a real sense of place and will tell me that it is a "great" book. And it is. For them. But I might find it just a "meh" book if the language doorway is the smallest doorway.
That doesn't mean I think it is terrible. I just don't rank it up there with my "great books", or sometimes even "good books". It's just ... fine. But nothing special. Why? Because the writing didn't draw my in.
Of course if the book has a great plot AND good characters that I feel attached to AND a good sense of place (one reason I love historical mysteries and/or mysteries set in other countries) I can overlook writing that is just fine but nothing special. Hence all the mysteries I read. But there is a big difference between the mysteries of, for instance C. S. Harris, who has a great writing style, and other mysteries where I notice that the dialog is clunky and people don't really talk like that.
Another thing about the way I take in a book ... it is mostly about sound for me. I can usually hear the way every character sounds, even the narrator. I don't really SEE things, at least not like a movie in my mind. Oh, I have a strong sense of color and movement. If the characters are in a forest, I have a general sense of trees and light (or moonlight) coming through branches. But the author could give me the name of every tree and, unless it's an important plot point, I don't see them specifically. But if the author is at all good, I know specifically what every character sounds like.
One of my favorite books a few years ago was Milkman by Anna Burns. Other people I know couldn't get through it. They, apparently, were not alone according to the LA Times:
... the book has been met with careful appreciation and lots of not particularly kind words in reviews stating that it is “eccentric,” “odd,” “difficult” and “complicated” — all meant to suggest it is a hard read. In the Guardian, Sam Leith, who is the literary editor of the Spectator, rounded up what he called the “epithets chosen” from reviews, including “brain-kneading” and “challenging” and “impenetrable” before making a case for the importance of such “difficult” books. The book has also been called “relentlessly internalized” and “baffling.”
Most people I know who didn't like it found it was the language, the WAY it was written, that was hard to wrap their heads around. And I think part of the problem was that the way it was written really required you to HEAR the main character's voice. Otherwise it would have seemed like just a lot of words.
Of course, if I don't like the voice I am hearing, I find it hard to like the book. That's why books that are written in the first person are sometimes difficult for me. Often, to make the plot work the character either has to be unreliable (and sometimes a downright liar) or they have to be a little (or a lot) stupid. I don't like the voices of stupid people in my head. So, even if the plot is good, and the writing is fine, this will often be a "meh" book for me. But it probably doesn't bother most other people.
Anyway, that's why I judged a whole bunch of well-reviewed books as "meh" books.
