Pond Scum: All Alone in a Furnished Room with Pee Stains on My Underwear
by Steve Finbow
Whilst the Frezon II silos were exploding in great cocktails of orange and red on the bandit planet of Outer Thule, Zpngrr Smith dealt the fifth ace of the pack from his six-fingered hand. Or something like that. I’ve tried to find this passage in the Bulwer-Lytton archives, but failed. Although I did find this. I’m sure I remember this quote correctly. Maybe it was from a dodgy sci-fi novel I read as an adolescent. Maybe it had nothing to do with the annual bad writing competition.
By Nicholas Allanach
If there is one thing, apart from invites to the pub, a Liverpool FC game on television, or Victoria in full kit, that causes me to put down a book (in the physical rather than the pejorative sense) it is bad writing. Now, I’m a big fan of writers considered inferior by the literary cognoscenti – and please forgive the list but these guys and gals do fall outside the “literature” spectrum: Kathy Acker, Charles Bukowski, Neil Gaiman, Stewart Home, Stephen King, Michael Moorcock, Derek Raymond, and James Sallis (to keep a short list short and alphabetical). What I mean by this is these writers are not known for their stylistic prose and are considered peripheral unlike, say, Paul Auster, Saul Bellow, William Gaddis, A.M. Homes, James Kelman, Salman Rushdie, and Zadie Smith. But they are not “bad” writers. Authors once considered genre writers are now very much part of the literary pantheon: William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, and J.G. Ballard. But what’s really upset me over the last week is how writers who have contracts sewn up in their Armani silk documents folder (just playing with you) can get away with lazy, sloppy and, on occasion, scrotum-scorchingly poor writing.
Take Paul Theroux’s Blinding Light. It’s not a bad novel. Sort of a cross between William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg’s The Yage Letters, José Saramago’s Blindness, and H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man and The Country of the Blind. Theroux’s descriptions of the jungle and analysis of the writing process are lush and incisive in turn but some of the sex writing is truly atrocious. The problem with bad sex writing – and bad sex come to think of it – is that, after a while, my eight inches of empurpled interest slowly becomes six inches of flaccid pinkness. Take this:
Leaning over him was a young woman with hot skin and an aroma
of slippery kelp on her soft thighs, like a dripping mermaid with
damp twisted hair and fish lips.Ooh! John Updike, eat your wife out. But that’s nothing compared to this. (And I apologize about the length, so to speak):
She pushed him backward onto the seat and pressed her face down,
lapping his cock into her mouth, and curling her tongue around it,
and the suddenness of it, the snaking of her tongue, the pressure of
her lips, the hot grip of her mouth, triggered his orgasm,…That’s good, baby. Keep going. That’s the way I like it. I know, I’m a cocksucking tease. Here we go:
...which was not juice at all but a demon eel thrashing in his loins
and swimming swiftly up his cock, one whole creature of live slime
fighting the stiffness as it rose and bulged at the tip and darted into
her mouth.Demon eel? Demon eel?! If I’m getting a blowjob, the last thing I want to be thinking about is some Mephistophelic moray spurting out of my cock. The above passage, nominated for the 2005 Bad Sex in Fiction Award, lost out to Giles Coren’s Winkler – well, it would, wouldn’t it? If you want good sex, read Bret Easton Ellis or Milan Kundera.
It’s not just sex. It’s cliché. In the foreword to The War Against Cliché, Martin Amis writes:
To idealize: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés
of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart. When I
dispraise, I am usually quoting clichés. When I praise, I am usually
quoting the opposed qualities of freshness, energy, and reverberation
of voice.Hear! Hear! Right – Irvine Welsh. Ar havnae problem with the auld gadge. I ken Trainspotting (freshness). Ah wipt off ma keks over Marabou Stork Nightmare (energy). And ah pished masell reading Filth (reverberation of voice). But The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs is as slappable as a rid-heided stepchild:
His mouth was twisting in the petulant pout of the Hollywood Roman
Emperor at the Colosseum games who has yet to decide whether or not
what he is witnessing amuses him.And from the next paragraph:
Aitken gave a slow, tortured nod of approval, McGhee an enthusiastic
puppy-like one. Nobody else moved. A deafening silence followed…And from the next:
There was deathly hush at the table as Bob Foy’s face reddened slowly
but steadily in anger and embarrassment, to the point that he almost
asphyxiated with fury as he contemplated this young upstart.The first passage is torturous (not tortuous) to read. Cliché-city, hackneyed metaphors, commonplaces, stock phrases. The second passage is a traffic jam of triteness, a bromide-fest of old chestnuts bulging with banality. The third is a train wreck of a sentence, full of well-worn truisms, as zestless as a skinned lemon. Also, if I were Mr. Welsh, I’d have a word with Jonathan Cape’s sub-editors. In the first 71 pages, I spotted among others:
Foy was not used to being to being challenged in this manner.
And:
...and part of me is horribly ashamed off it.
Exactly. Even I have a friend who proofreads my writing. And I’m sure Kerrie would rather be listening to Mötley Crüe, going to the gym, and shopping for shoes than checking my column for mistakes.
Read Paul Theroux’s masterly Mosquito Coast or Sir Vidia’s Shadow. Read Irvine Welsh’s Glue. Writers do not set out to write bad sentences, paragraphs, chapters, columns, or novels – I’m covering my arse here – but I would argue that good editors (and sub-editors) are scarce (I was going to write “thin on the ground”). I don’t want to read clichés. I want to read something scrupulous and formative.
What a man he was for noticing! Continually attentive to his
surroundings. As if he had been sent down to mind the outer world,
on a mission of observation and notation. The object of which was?
To link up? To classify? To penetrate?-The Dean’s December – Saul Bellow
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© 2006 Me Three
