Here are some useful
hints for avoiding bad reading and viewing.
The first thing
to keep in mind is that nothing ever gets better. Not
books, not television shows, not movies. If it opens badly,
it can only get worse. Shut your book, switch the TV channel
or take a hike from the theater. This is more true of television
than movies and more true of movies than books. In TV, you may
take it as a given that the management is making every effort
to engage your attention immediately and weld you to their product
lest you switch to another station. If what you see up front
is bad and that’s their best shot, forget it. A movie often
has the same aim but the management knows you’ve paid a
nice buck to get in and are not quick to decide. Also, in a movie
house you can’t change channels.
You need not be
so hasty with a book. Though the author may be trying
to entrap you with his opening words, if those first
pages glaze your eyes you might do well to let the rest go on
without you. If the book has literary credentials, however, you
should give it a little more time to grow on you. A good writer
may craft his words carefully and lay groundwork instead of beginning
with a grabber. Myself, I can recall only once that I wanted
to put a book down after a few pages but plowed on as it got
better and better. That was more than 20 years ago. The book,
D. N. Thomas’ The White Tower. Dody, who liked it, told
me stick with it. I’m glad I did.
The quit rule
does not apply for 19th-century classics. Back then, writers wrote
as if they and their readers had all the
time in the world and could be maddeningly leisurely about introducing
story and character. Dickens, for example. The first 50 pages
or so, he’s just getting the fuzz off his quill pen. If
you have a little patience, I can’t recommend a more entertaining
writer.
If the characters
in a novel have preposterous names, beware. It may be because
the writer is trying to make up in character
names what he/she is unable to do with narrative skill. A capable
writer doesn’t need that.
Dickens, of course,
was an odd-character name master. Uriah Heep, Barnaby Rudge,
Mr. Bumble, Mrs. Pipchin, Ebenezer Scrooge.
I can’t think of any contemporary novelist as happily inventive
with names. Al Capp, who did the old “L’i’l
Abner” comic strip, had the gift. Lonesome Polecat,
Pappy Yokum, L’i’l Abner himself. I’ve tried
to have fun with a character name myself. In a novel named Going
Public, I named a character “Jael Nayler,” wondering
how many readers would get the joke. I never found out if any
of them did.
Jael was the Israelite woman who invited the evil Canaanite
general, Sisera, into her tent and after he fell asleep drove
a nail into his head and killed him.
Oh, one more generality
about movies. If it’s one you
can sit though and has multiple evil characters, remember this.
The baddest die lastest.
