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.

i class cniclit along with james bond & neighbours type things - chewing gum for the brian. you know what it is & just take it for that.

i get more seriously annoyed by pretenses at 'literature' where someone has attempted to write a good novel, but really it's just a bad novel with lots of overblown description in it. Cecilia Ahearn struck me as this. NO I DON'T want another description of the 'muted cappucino tones' of the main character's house, thank you.

sorry, 'chic lit' not the nonsense i wrote - struggling with brekkie, dd, & mn all at once! will go away now & focus on real life.

UQD, you are forgetting the swathe of gritty detective novels set in Glasgow. Or Edinburgh (who cares?).

I wonder what genres other UK cities might corner?

Thanks for the tip about RJ, UqD. More evidence of nepotism in journalism ... or perhaps she is an outstanding writer, I would not know.

I agree, chicklit, done well and with no further expectations from me, is entertaining - like watching Greys Anatomy.

UQD: Jill Mansell. she writes lots of novels set in non-London settings with characters who are gardeners or whatever. I love her books, not least because she doesn't seem to take herself or her novels too seriously. I can kick back and enjoy them without worrying - and without the angst referenced above. Her characters are always size 10 - 14 and LOVING it. Which I love!

Oh, and when they DO live in London, it's always somewhere instantly recognisable! Not some random suburb on the mainline station 45 minutes from town! Wimbledon is about as suburban as they ever go!

I am baffled at this obsession with "size". No male writer even feels the need to tell you what "size" clothes their protagonist takes.

Mmm... although a few do have their protagonist noticing his beer gut or thinking maybe he should go to gym more...

incidentally, my second post was in relation to the comment on where the people live, not Jill Mansell's novels.

There was a spate of books which featured child characters/narrators and you knew as soon as you read the first sentence that there was going to be a bit of paedophilia at some point (I'm not talking about misery-lit but The God of Small Things and the like). It isn't a given that children are going to be molested at some point and I think using it as a narrative technique is tasteless and lazy.

Oh, and the way that accidental pregnancies never seem to end in terminations in novels but always, after much soul-searching, a deliriously happy birth experience.

Ooh dont get me started on the portrayal of nurses and hospitals in general on tv or in books.
The only one that came close was Bodies but even that ended up with the nurse shagging the registrar.
dh thinks that when I go to work i spend the entire 12 hour shift snogging doctors in the linen cupboard or performing a life saving operation because a consultant has passed out drunk

Well, according to the radio this morning, size 14 women are 'happier' than all the others.

I was half asleep, so missed their definition of 'happiness', but judging by experience this may just be the fact that their MIL will have stopped saying 'You've put on a bit of weight haven't you?'

It's true about the beer-gut. But it's usually a plot-point - he goes to the gym and meets a mysterious beautiful woman/ is handed a package of drugs/ discovers it is a front for an international prostitution ring. That kind of thing...

How do you know what "size" you are anyway?! DW has clothes with varying size labels on depending on where she has got them from. Different shops seem to have different standards.

You visit all the shops until you find one where you can just about get a garment two sizes below your normal one done up - you then buy it and tell everyone that that is your real size .

Anyone ever read Linda Fairstein's novels about a high-ranking woman who works with the NYPD? Her close friend and colleague (a man) calls her 'blondie'. Aaaargh!! It's like nails on a blackboard. I can barely bring myself to avidly read each new book as it comes out.

And don't get me started on Patricia Cornwell's one-dimensional heroine. It's like groundhog day in there. I mean TWO lovers who die horribly and BOTH amazingly return from the dead?? Come ON!

I don't think I've ever read a novel where a woman's dress size is revealed.

I do remember, though, that Dorothea in Middlemarch has the kind of thin wrists that make cheap dresses look rather fine, a trait I have always coveted.

I agree with you UQD.

You are probably being a bit oversensitive about this though.

The only new writers who can afford to write novels for a living are people who are supported by other people. Or the state. A generalisation I know, but there is quite a lot of truth in it.

So people write a bit to dignify sahping or just sahing. And sometimes they get published. And almost invariably the result is boaksome.

I truly hate how real jobs are portrayed in modern novels. It really brings it home how far removed any of the writers are from reality. Take Nick Hornby and Joanna Trollope. Both bestselling writers of unliterary novels. They both have trouble drawing distinct characters from real life. Their writing is clunky too.

People who use their hero's musical taste as a very lazy shorthand way of describing their personality. Ian Rankin does this all the time and it makes me want to slap him. Hard.

I hate when the character's name is really improbable. Such as a 30 yr old called Dulcie or Esme.

I read 'have baby will travel' by Sarah Tucker and it was nonsense. If I'd been thick as a plank it would have given me totally unrealistic expecations. So potentially a v. dangerous book!!

I love Martina Cole books and often wonder if she really is involved (or has been at some point) in ganglabd stuff. She knows waaayyyyy too much, but its very good in fairness to her

The need for characters tio have jobs is an irksome one.

Generally readers aren't that interested in characters' jobs, unless the job is the story, as in detective fiction, or you are writing a gripping story of office life (few and far between). Most of the time it needs to be unrealistically sidelined - if it dominated to the extent it does in real life, most characters would do little else! (How many of us have expostulated at "Friends" and the amount of time they spend in each other's flats and in the coffee-shop before work. BEFORE work?! Most normal people are shambling wrecks who just about get showered and coffeed and dressed in time to get out of the door in the morning!)

It is a problem for a novelist to create characters with convincing jobs, especially when they don't do any other job themselves. A lot of writers teach, so that tends to rub off on characters.

You can, to an extent, base a lot on friends' jobs, although even then you may only have the vaguest idea of what goes on. One of my best friends is an NHS manager but I have never actually seen him in his place of work, so I don't know the first thing about the realistic details of what he does at work - by which I mean how he enters the building (swipe card? buzzer?), whether he has his own office or an open-plan one, if he is allowed to have his mobile phone switched on, what is the first thing he does when he gets in, whether he has meetings every day... That kind of thing.

Yy very excellent writers use physicality in a wonderful way. Alice Munro's heroine's often have broad faces, Pessoa with the uncomfortable and irritating fatness and sweat on a man, who has a liking for omlettes.

That's so funny, UD.

I'm basically a SAHM who does a bit of thesis-work as a hobby (well, that's how it seems). At parties I have been known to corner people at parties and question them about what it is like to , you know, go to work. For me, it has the allure of the truly exotic.

how I must ruin their night.

Lovely to think of it as a writer's problem too.