Kevin asked:
"Or, like, read and learn. No matter what someone writes,
someone will miss it. Where would it stop? Street maps for
people who don't live in the city the story is set? A
dictionary/glossary at the back for big words? Annotations
and footnotes?"
Actually, most of these have been tried. And in my mind,
they've often gotten in the way. As cool as the covers look
of the Dell "mapbacks," I seldom, if ever, consult the maps
while reading the book. Iceberg Slim's Pimp has a glossary in
the back, but I seldom consulted it. And it's not that I
understood all of the words, but I picked up most from
context and stopping to look up the others would have gotten
in the way of Slim's flow.
I have a similar problem when the author spends too much time
explaining or providing background. It's been a long, long
time since I've read James Grady's Runner in the Streets, but
I remember there being long passages whose only purpose was
to proclaim authenticity, to prove Grady had gone on a lot of
drivealongs with DC cops. Unfortunately, this verisimilitude
stopped the story in its tracks. It's one of the reasons I
never got into much sci-fi -- okay, nice story, but why'd it
have to be set on another planet? All of the setting got in
the way of telling the story.
So I usually prefer an author who just tells a story and
expects the reader to pick it up along the way. And George
has never felt like Dennis Miller to me. I find iller very
funny, and feel very smart when I get his more obscure
references, but many of them seem to be there only to prove
something about the speaker. George seems pretty transparent
to me, his references meant to reveal something about his
characters, not himself. And I never get the feeling that the
characters think of their music taste, for instance, as
anything but normal. This may be because I'm a big music fan,
but I know plenty of times when a favorite band of mine, the
knowledge of which I take for granted, has never been heard
of by someone I'm talking to and vice versa. However, those
bands are so obvious to us that we'd never annotate them,
especially not in our own thoughts, unless someone asked who
the hell they were.
Also, too much knowledge on the reader's part can get in the
way. I just finished Benjamin Schutz's The Things We Do for
Love. I'm going to talk more about his books in general in a
later post, but my point for now is that this one was set in
the late-'80s DC rock music scene. I spent a lot of time in
DC clubs at that time. So I was pretty intimately aware of
his setting. This led me to spend too much time trying to
figure out places and locations of his renamed clubs, going,
wait a minute, there's no club at that location, but he must
be talking about Desperado, or is he talking about Posers, or
moving 9:30 to a different location? Still a really good
book, but I've liked his others better and part of that is
because I spent too much time mapping something I wouldn't
have done if it had been set in a different city.
Mark
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