Admirably Perfect and Impossible to Love: When Mastery Creates a Yawn

Abstract

photo : katherine dewey hill WORLDLIT.ORG 15 On a sultry and tinto-infused afternoon in Spain some years ago, a group of mystery writers from several nations were gossiping about editors and agents, contracts and jacket covers, and, of course, where to go for dinner. Our conversation drifted to the latest movies. Several writers vented their distaste for an adaptation of a novel by a writer we all particularly loathed, and having chopped it apart frame by frame, moved on to a prestige production, a Merchant and Ivory–like film (if not an actual Merchant and Ivory production) based upon a Forster-like novel featuring veddy, veddy English characters and their repressed passions. There had been a several years’ vogue in this sort of film and public television series, and each similar production elicited respectful treatment by critics. These dramas were the kind of productions that receive award nominations, but not so many awards, and speaking against them immediately identifies you as a philistine. One of our group, an eminent British novelist, had seen the latest of these productions and was asked her opinion. “Well,” she said, “one cannot find a flaw in it. The acting is extraordinary, the costuming is totally authentic, and the cinematography is delicious. On the whole it is a nearly perfect film, and utterly, utterly boring.” Typography should have a way to represent her elongation of the word “boring” to emphasize her reaction to the film’s relentless and unendurable high culture. But having seen the film, I understood exactly what she had meant. For all there was to admire, there was not much to love. Every element of the film was in the right place and executed well, and yet the whole was so unmemorable that I am no longer certain which film it was. Like most art of a defined type—pop music, westerns, romance novels, pastoral paintings— many crime novels have this same problem. They are so well done they have lost whatever should crime & mystery Admirably Perfect and Impossible to Love When Mastery Creates a Yawn by J. Madison Davis 16 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2017 make them tasty, and as with flavors, the molecules making the difference between the sublime and the ordinary are difficult to identify. At a loss for precision, many writers will simply dismiss a book with the cop-out, “It doesn’t work for me.” If a book is one of those brilliant gems that come along once in a great while, most writers will happily point out a number of sparkling facets and examine each in minuscule detail. If a book is appalling, most writers will have even more to say about it. However, the book that “doesn’t work” is neither bad enough to lambaste nor compelling enough to earn anything more than a few words of diffident praise for its mechanics. “It’s good if you like that sort of thing” means someone likes it, but not the speaker. “The setting / atmosphere / time period is portrayed well” means it predictably meets expectations. “The author shows mastery on every page” refers to a book to admire, but not to enjoy. Patterning is inevitable the moment a publisher classifies a novel into a genre, and crime novels are especially susceptible. The detective has to be the sort of person who can be a fictional detective , with keen insight into motivation and the stubbornness to pursue the case until the end. Though this leaves many possibilities as to characterization , it also limits likely characterizations. While the solution to many crimes may not be uncertain in the “real world,” the reader of crime novels expects a solution and will be highly vexed if denied one. Periodically, one author or another attempts a crime novel without a solution and is praised by critics for “bravery,” but readers on the whole feel the bravery consisted in the author’s bald-faced con. Ironically, who and how “they done it” is just a device to close the story. The guilt could usually be hung on many of the suspects with a slight adjustment of justification. It is the process of the investigation that entertains us over the course of the novel...