Stupidities and irritations in novels

[UnquietDad]

What are the things which annoy you most in fiction? Things characters do, assumptions authors make, etc?

I think my number one has to be the "affluence assumption", where people who are supposedly worrying about money still "have" to send Jonty and Jocasta to the lovely little prep school and violin lessons. (Mind you, there's enough of that on here.)

DW has just finished reading these, which feature such laughable idiocies as a state primary school where people talk about "first years" and "second years" and which has its own dedicated science block and music block.

There are an awful lot of thirty- and forty-something women writing novels these days who are out of touch with any reality beyond their cosy little London mums-and-coffees-and-gym circle. And - surprise, surprise - they are books about cosy little London mums-and-coffees-and-gym circles.

Hang on, while I agree with you broadly on irritating characters and assumptions, if you're a cosy little london mum with a coffee and gym circle and that's what you write about, isn't that what you're supposed to do? I thought all the experts always say, "write about what you know"?

It's the cosy little coffee mums trying to write about tough inner city life that I find irritating.

My most frustrating one though is Brigit Jones! The woman is a complete and utter idiot and yet somehow she still has friends, an apartment, a job. She can't even get dressed in the morning. If anyone acted like that around here, they'd get fired pretty sharpish!

I love your churlish diatribes UD.

What the hell is she doing reading that crap? (Rachel Johnson is the high priestess of it at mo.) Divorce her instantly.

I once went right off a bloke I was going out with as I discovered he spent hours on the bog reading Terry Pratchett.

Yes, but there are too many of them. The world doesn't need any more cosy smug affluent SAHM novelists!

I did read BJ - god knows why - and found it mildly amusing, but I agree she is a total waste of space and would get fired in the real world...

Oh, Pratchett is OK. Reading on the bog, though - yuk.

The most annoying book that I've read recently is The Devil Wears Prada. Now I know there are some very ambitious people out there, but to allow the witch that is Miranda Priestley to treat her so badly, just so that she can get her real dream job in 12 months' time, made me really angry whilst reading it.
No job is worth that sort of treatment surely??

As someone on MN once said, the ones who really need their pubes ripped out (slowly) are those who 'divide their time' between Wiltshire and Puglia.

Heh-heh. I don't think I used quite that expression, moondog, but I have a pathological aversion to time-dividers too.

I 'divide my time' between v poor rural area in Wales and Bangladesh. Not quite the same, I feel....

So really, your issue is with yummy mummies writing novels?

I've somehow managed to read several "privileged New Yorker" novels this year, where designer labels hang off practically every sentence, and darling daughter can afford to take years and years off to finish her precious book because daddy is a big-shot high-profile journalist. And yet somehow we're meant to care about the characters. ha ha.

beautiful heroines. yawn. grafted on romances in thrillers/crime novels where it's really incongruous. overwritten books that cross the is, dot the ts and then some - like Jodi Piccoult. and virtually all dual timeline novels - particularly those that feature "races against time", "conspiracies" and "the grail".

Snort at 'the grail'

Also lot of guff about 'unlocking mysteries' and 'secrets that threaten to tear families apart'

Gimme a break!

meaningless genre descriptions like "literary thriller".

I can't read books set in schools; descriptions of classroom discussions (invariably featuring either incredibly articulate year 7s understanding poetry instantly and coming up with insights that a lecturer would be pleased to elicit from undergaduates OR 'street' speaking children using slang that was outdated when I was at school, but nevertheless being bright, polite and attentive underneath) wind me up too much. They also feature things like teachers smoking in staffrooms, assemblies straight out of a 1950s film and activities that wouldn't be permitted under any H+S rules I've ever heard of. Would it be THAT hard to go to a school? Even ten minutes spent being given a tour on a normal day would show how crap most of the descriptions are.

Mind you,there is a bottomless market for crap.At boarding school (early/mid 80s) we would devour Judith Krantz and Danielle Steele. Lots of swirly embossed gold writing on cover.

Badger, that's why i can't be doing with a lot of films, 'Son of Rambow' being main offender.Kids just aren't like that. Ever.

It always makes me laugh in "The Railway Children" when the impoverished family escape to that haven for the destitute, the "little cottage" (actually a bloody great big farmhouse) in Yorkshire, and mum takes up that well-known lucrative pursuit, writing short stories for magazines.

Yes, how about a few more "slummy/scummy mummy" novels?

Aaagh, the Grail, save us from the Grail! And from races against time which threaten to uncover secrets which will tear families apart! And from "shattering events" after which "nothing will be the same..."

badger and moondog, you are so right. Is there any convincing state-school-set fiction at all?

I like kids; they're funny and mostly pretty smart and kind, but have you ever listened to them talk to each other when they don't think adults are listening? They talk RUBBISH. Just vast amounts of garbage. Which is fine, they're children, but it bears no resemblance to the conversations children have in films or novels.

totalchaos - to be fair, I bet authors aren't really happy with those monikers either. They are desperate attempts by publishers to slap labels on stuff. I've never really understood what makes one book "literary" and another not.

No.
Not even any authentic boarding school stuff.
Peopel were never discussing the Big Issues.All we talked about was Spandau Ballet, and getting off with fit lads.

TV does a bit better on the school front. Jimmy McGovern's "Hearts And Minds" with Chris Eccleston showed a lot of what it was like, and even "Grange Hill" started to show the teachers actually leaving when it was dark with big boxes of marking, rather than just knocking off when the kids did!

I very rarely finish a school-set novel, so I don't think there are any. That Jilly Cooper one was an unsuprisingly egregious offender.

To answer OP's q, how about YOu, the (dear) reader, being referred to! (While it's not a thing of today I find it the single most irking technique going...)

"Reader, I married him?"