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.

scottish mummy - i agree with you about jodi picoult. read one & thought it was ok, but v obvious what the 'twist' would be. starting reading another & was so convinced i knew hwat was happening, the i flicked to about the right page, and - ta da, yep, i was right. no need to read it then.

actually my last post was a bit wanky - sorry.

i read an interesting thing in the paper once about book covers - how they were being made to look more 'intellectual' so people would feel better about being seen reading them - i think 'chocolat' was the example used.

and i do like those original penguin covers.

100x of course the chicklit genre deserves criticism. It's the lack of constructive sensible criticism, and the blanket categorisation of almost everything written by a woman about a woman that results in say Rachel's Holiday by Marian Keyes being lumped into the same category as some dirge by Cecilia Ahern.

Which may be of no consequence to you, but there are millions of us who want to read books like Rachel's Holiday or Martina Devlin's Ship of Dreams and not accidentally buy shite like cecilia Ahern or Collete Caddle or Sarah Webb.

BBBeee Chocolat is a good example, nobody would have sat on the tube feeling embarrassed that they were reading it. But it's just a good example of its genre. It's not something entirely different.

I agree that Jodi Picoult is formulaic, but she can't hold a candle to John Grisham. I've still enjoyed 80% of them.

Love this thread! Yah boo sucks to the naysayer who thinks we shouldn't diss books. You're up there with 'just change the channel' obsessives on the TV discussion forums.

I agree about the cliches of chick lit. I'm a fan of Marian Keyes but the rest of the genre makes me ashamed to be female.

I went through a stage in the 80's in which every book I read for a year featured a woman being dumped then losing weight becuase of the worry, then starting a business based upon something she already does (cookery, writing childrens books) and becoming rich and gorgeous by accident. I laugh in the face of these books now.

My pet hate is that the heroine is always an 'everywoman' type who we can all identify with, but the man she prizes is of above average attractiveness. She always wins him, when objectively we all know that the bitchy, better looking best friend would snag him.

Men are even more looks orientated than we are, so why would he choose the frumpy one?

I suppose that the mass market will always demand this stuff in exactly the way that it demands bland Hollywood movies and predictable, lame soap opera.

Oh and my other 'pet noir' as Victoria Wood would say is when characters in books try to communicate with each other but are stopped from doing so by some bizarre invisible wall. See every misunderstanding in Bridget Jones and most other chick lit books. Phones exist, but us girls apparently prefer our heroes to run through airports as if their lives depended upon it, or to find us at work and shout their love across a boardroom table. Personally I'm happy to recieve a nice text and then wait until we're alone for the personal stuff.

There's a lot of this 'deliberate misunderstanding' stuff in The Broons, but I'll forgive that as it's a comic strip.

Oh, yes, the excruciating "plot point dependent on someone being unable to communicate with someone else" thing! As if we all still lived in the days of Hardy and notes under doors being tragically unseen...

If you're going to do that sort of thing, do it properly - people do forget to charge their mobiles, for instance, or have their broadband cut off for days at a time if they forget to pay the bill and emails do go astray, but you have to be a bit careful in the handling of it for it not to look idiotic.

or, if they're truly skint, they can't afford to top up, run out of credit, get cut off for not paying the bill, etc.

how about a romance between said chip shop worker and Russian gangland boss?

the only thing i've ever come across with such a scenario is the film 'Dirty Pretty Things'.

Most people on this thread seem to be objecting to the fact that a certain genre of fiction (chicklit) which is clearly designed to be escapist, is not realistic. Well, no, you're right. It isn't.

i thought they were objecting that it is badly written clichéd dross (least i am) and yes unrealistic

UnquietDad Hearts & Minds was the ONLY TV series about schools I have ever been able to watch, apart from Grange Hill when I was a kid & didn't know any better (GH wasn't anything like my girls' grammar school in middle class Beaconsfield, but I was willing to believe such schools might exist elsewhere)

The thing that annoyed me in Kate Morton's The Forgotten Garden, which I read last summer, was that at least half the female characters were described as "plump". There are so many different shapes & sizes of women and so many different words to use when describing them!

I can't bear it when they get 'cultural' things wrong for the date. I read a ludicrous book by Eva Rice (I know, I know, I shouldn't have even started it....Tim Rice's daughter apparently) about the 1950s,can't even remember what it was called but.. she was obviously trying to be like one of the Mitfords, a bit arch and lots of posh people being witty and scruffy etc etc.

So one minute they are having tea at Lyons Tea House (fine) then they are having HAMBURGERS for God's sake. I mean, hamburgers didn't even arrive here til my teenage years, let alone my mother's!!!!!!

Had a theme of liking Johnny Rae going through it, hence the hamburgers, but no upper class gel of those years would have even heard of Jonny Rae or any American popstar I think, let alone a 'crush' on them. Totally ridiculous.