Connie Willis: Crosstalk

It's almost painful to write criticism of any of Willis's work, since she's one of my top three favorite authors. I've been reading her books lately as I'm thinking a lot about close third person in my own work. She does it so well!

First I read Blackout and All Clear over the weekend. Then I read Crosstalk because I got so stressed out from all the panic and fear and everyone being cold and wet and starving and frightened and the falling bombs and so on. And the time travel terrifies me, since it's been going wrong ever since Doomsday Book. How would anyone ever be brave enough to get into that machine after that?

Well, okay, that's not fair. But to say why would give away the plot. 

I have a lot of thoughts about Blackout and All Clear but that's for another post.

Crosstalk is an interesting idea. It bothers me a lot of ways, though. 

First big issue is that the heroine and main character, Briddey, does not drive the story in any way whatsoever. She is pushed around and manipulated and lied to and tricked by absolutely everyone in her life. The plot happens to her. She does not drive the plot. 

This is an issue I had in the first book I wrote, an issue that rendered that book absolutely useless. Though I seem to remember the prose was excellent. Not helpful when my plot was atrocious, though. 

Sometimes it feels like life just happens to people, but that's a lie called "learned helplessness" that tells us we're not in charge of our own lives. And sorry if I've told this story before, but one day I mentioned to a class that we're in charge of our own lives--that even opting not to take control is our choice and means we're in control--and this girl said out loud: "Oh no!" She had an abusive husband. She had fallen deep into learned helplessness.

I shouldn't make it sound like learned helplessness is something that just happens. It's nearly always TAUGHT helplessness. Someone has a vested interest in making someone else feel helpless and like they're not in control of their life. That's what happened to that girl. 

There's no sense that Briddey has been abused by someone, though her family is terrible to her, completely overbearing, refusing to respect any boundary whatsoever. They show up at her job and barge in, interrupting her work and her conversations. They show up at her apartment and barge in there. Stop giving people keys, Briddey!

Everyone she works with treats her the same way, though, so it's not just the family. Everyone walks all over Briddey. 

It's odd that this isn't set up as something this character needs to work on and fix in her life, since it clearly is a major problem for her. She can't complete a single thought or phone call or anything without someone taking over and making her do what they want.

Add to this the absolutely heinous boyfriend, Trent. He's supposed to be a real catch because he has a Porsche, but he's an unmitigated asshole from the beginning. So Briddey reads as either someone who is clueless (or stupid) about how she's being treated, or likes being walked all over. Neither one is particularly appealing to me as a reader. Unless that's the arc: doormat grows a spine.

She does not grow a spine. Not to give that away or anything. 

No, she lets the boyfriend bully her into this procedure intended to bring about emotional connection, only instead she gets telepathy. It starts out scary and confusing, then gradually becomes completely overwhelming and terrifying. Enter C.B.

C.B. takes over as the bullying controlling boyfriend figure. I know, we're supposed to like him. He's nice. He's a recluse with messy hair. He's actually kind to her and helps her. But he absolutely treats her the same way as Trent, the asshole with the Porsche. He tells her what to do constantly, interrupts her, orders her around, hides enormous secrets from her, and manipulates her. 

I suppose that's how it works in reality. You replicate your patterns. But it's tricky to like even someone as likeable as C.B. when he's constantly engaging in these abusive behaviors. 

What I wanted the whole time was for Briddey to start to stand up for herself. Tell people NO and MEAN IT. Back it up. Do what you want, instead of 100% what other people want. Take control of your life, Briddey, you limp piece of string. 

Is that what people like about her? That she's so weak and malleable? That she will do whatever you want all the time, no question? GROSS. We honestly do not get a sense of what anyone likes about her other than that. Because she has no personality traits other than that. 

Seriously. What's her job? We don't really know. Who are her friends? She doesn't have any. What is her relationship with her family? Yeah, they bowl her over constantly. What are her likes and dislikes? We get no sense of that. What's in her apartment? A whole loaf of French bread, I guess, which her niece takes to feed the ducks. And some cereal she hates. 

I was riding along with this book until I believe page 466, where C.B. uses some app he invented to send a public tweet ONLY TO ONE PERSON then uses some miraculous take-it-back-within-ten-minutes technology to pull it, once it has threatened/tricked that one person enough. What??? That is not how anything works. You can delete your tweets any time. And you can't publicly tweet to just one person. There's a whole fuss about how it's going to get retweeted and spread all around the world, so it's not a DM or anything--it's definitely public. What on earth.

It's okay not to know things. But you have to ask or find out. Because that was such a ludicrously incorrect representation of a truly commonplace app that it was jaw-dropping. 

That said, imagine the glorious peace of not having Twitter. Never having had Twitter. Oooh. I mean, I've met many wonderful people through it, but at the cost of constant input of stress and ugliness and all the idiotic thoughts of so many truly terrible people worldwide...exactly as Willis imagines telepathy. WHAT A USEFUL METAPHOR THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN.

So anyway, she reinvents Twitter, only mentally, and you can't shut it off, so Briddey has to learn to build barriers and boundaries and take control of her life, for the first time ever. Another useful metaphor that could have been. 

I'm mad at this book for what it could have been. 

I'm extremely mad about the doormat character who doesn't drive her own narrative. 

I'm mad about boundary issues. 

I'm mad about overbearing, abusive people, even if Briddey apparently loves them. Maybe she's born submissive, I don't know. She doesn't seem to think so. But: oh, you think that's the last time C.B. is going to lie to you, manipulate you, keep secrets, hide things, or pretend he doesn't know what you mean when he absolutely does? She has to CATCH him in the lies before he will admit them, one after the other, near the end. He fakes a phone call right in front of her. He fakes not having telepathy. This is really someone you want to be in a relationship with? Someone who will lie to your face over and over? 

Things I liked: well, the relationship between the two of them, when it's not a constant rescue fantasy, which is most of the time. I liked Maeve, the precocious niece, even if her computer skills are (again) ludicrous. 

I hated the one-dimensional doctor and his behavior. I hated the one-dimensional psychic from Sedona who was reduced to a crying mess on the floor--that's gross. Don't do that to people. Either they're real people or they're caricatures. One is interesting and deserves fair treatment and one isn't worth your time. I hated the dumb Irish culture thing, which a Twitter friend (so there) pointed out died out in the 70s. Though that was just a cover for something else, turns out, so maybe that's okay. But I was dying of embarrassment from it anyway. The fake brogue. It's so awful. Even if the point is that it was awful, it was too awful for that to be the point. Nope. Some things are so awful that using them at all, even as cover, is going too far. I hated Trent constantly. I hated all the people at her job the whole time. They were all one-dimensional and behaved atrociously, again crossing every boundary. Like the Irish thing, it wasn't cute or funny, it was just people being terrible.

I loved the evocation of panic, which as usual Willis does absolutely beautifully. I swear Blackout and All Clear contributed to an actual panic attack I had Sunday. I loved the library, especially the inner sanctum room, but the whole library was vivid and realistic and true to life as a university library. I loved the moments of peace and comfort they had together. 

Does...how do I phrase this without sounding like an alien observing earthlings...does every relationship have to be one person being so goddamn dominant and one being so goddamn weak and needing help and protection? That to me is just toxic masculinity needing to chop wood and fend off bears and save the damsel in distress, not any way that actual human beings relate to each other. I mean, I can see noticing socialized roles existing that way, but this is fiction. We don't have to do that sort of thing. 

Even here, where Aunt Oona is actually behind the scenes saving the day, we don't get to see any of that--she never comes on the scene again at all after the beginning of the book. 

I'm trying to think whether the helpless damsel thing is thematic throughout her work. Unfortunately it sort of is. Suffering, yes. Suffering and doing incredibly hard work, those are traits of her heroines. They work so incredibly hard. But they don't save themselves. A man does that. 

It's been a while since I read Bellwether or Lincoln's Dreams or Remake. I can't really read Passage again right now due to the state of my dog's health, though I'm going through it anyway, so might as well. I've read Doomsday Book so many times I don't need to reread it. (Spoilers ahoy.) Kivrin works incredibly hard the whole book long to help everyone around her and to save herself, but ultimately she gets rescued by a man at the end. And a child. Blackout and All Clear follow the same pattern. Oh, they fight so very very hard the whole time, Eileen and Polly, but ultimately it's Mike's work that tells Colin where to find them. Well, plus there's the whole self-aware continuum thing that thought the Holocaust was okay as long as Sir Godfrey gets saved (what?) and Colin gets born, but that makes me want to smash things, so let's not talk about that.

Come to think of it, "doormat grows spine" is the plot of a novel I started then abandoned because the character bothered me too much in her doormat phase. Like I did not want to spend time with her. In real life I hate to see people living like that. I have a friend whose entire life is in service to her husband and kids, who literally won't talk on the phone with me if her husband is IN THE HOUSE because she has to be on duty for them the whole time. To me that feels like if that were my boss, I'd quit, and if that were my life, it wouldn't be. Mutual service, sure. But I bet you any money he doesn't observe the same rules. I bet he does whatever he wants and talks on the phone when she's there. 

Maybe that sort of subservience feeds people somehow? They enjoy it? They like feeling less important than someone else? I don't know. It would make me feel terrible. So would having someone constantly submit to me and serve me that way. Yuck. I'm into this thing called equality.

This novel tells the story of a woman who acquires supernatural powers and gets rid of an abusive, controlling boyfriend but replaces him with one who lies to her and manipulates her. Better, I guess. At least she actually seems to like the second guy. But oh boy, if someone lied to my face and manipulated me that way, that is seventeen kinds of massive red flag, and if you think they're going to stop just because you're "together" now, you are deluding yourself. 

My own issues aside, it's a distinct narrative issue to have the main character not the one who's driving the story, making the choices, determining what's going to happen. In class I tell them narrative is: character, conflict, choice, consequences. Repeat. So I suppose what I don't like is that the character is just a mere sketch, the conflict is not of her own making, she doesn't make any choices in regards to it, and the consequences are all far beyond her. She literally doesn't even understand what's happening to her except when C.B. explains everything (ad nauseum) throughout the book. He rescues her over and over and over. She can't even make a decision without consulting him, and then most of the time he countermands it. He speaks in the imperative to her most of the time, just like abusive and exploitative Trent. 

I object to the entire premise, now that I think about it.

Women are not helpless creatures who can't figure things out or solve their own problems, who need to be told what to do all the time. I don't like it when women are written this way, or without their own rich and complex lives. They should have tastes and likes and dislikes, with a shelf full of palak paneer MREs and a bunch of ska records. They should have friends and enemies and racquetball partners and a bowling league and a habit of staring into space then coming out with hilarious haiku, a collection of blue suede shoes and a particular sports team they like and that weird coat they love and won't get rid of no matter what you say. They should have 56 chapsticks but never be able to put their hands on one and buy three more next time they're at the store, even though they do that every time. They should be complex and ambivalent and capable of standing on their own two feet. They should frown and hang up when someone's a jackass on the phone. They should say, "No, I'm driving myself," when the jerk tries to make them get into his car, and then walk away and do it. They should have peanut butter in the cupboard, minimum. They should have clutter and complications and complexity. And they should be their own person, telepathy or no telepathy.

Maureen Johnson: Nine Liars

This is going to be all spoilers, so look out. You've been warned.

I was excited to read this book and enjoyed it to a certain degree the first time through, as I was wondering who committed the murder, but then I read it again and it all fell apart. The mystery makes no sense at all once you have read the book.

Look at all the incredible logic flaws.

The country house is set up so that it's essentially impossible that anyone else but the nine were there that night, with the power outage and the road blocked off by a downed wire and a power truck. But nobody from the nine themselves to the police ever suspect or investigate any of the nine. That is completely nonsensical. In a typical country house murder, yes, the situation is closed off so that we know the suspect HAS to be one of the people present. This does half of that and then everyone is inexplicably stricken with severe stupidity and they all go, "I don't know, burglars?" and shrug and just LET IT GO. No. Insane. The police don't even try? They take statements from these obvious liars and let it go?

The burglary theory is because people have been stealing tack in the area. Sure. (Does the murderer even know this? No indication of that.) But the murders were in the woodshed. The stables are on the opposite side of the massive house from the woodshed, according to the map in the book. Even supposing you kept tack in the woodshed, because you like having saddles eaten by mice, I guess, you wouldn't keep them all the way on the other side of this extensive building from the stables. You wouldn't keep tack in the woodshed period, obviously, but certainly not in this situation. But somehow everyone just goes, "Oh, sure, someone broke in to steal tack from a building WHERE TACK IS NOT KEPT." Why not.

The killer is not set up at all to be the kind of person who violently murders two close friends with an axe. There are no signals or clues whatsoever. The group is set up to be totally laid back about sharing each other's clothes, books, food, and beds. But one of them all of a sudden decides that someone else *just kissing a perfect stranger* is so offensive that he kills not the friend who did it but the girl herself. None of that makes any sense in any psychological universe. And then to kill two more people who have absolutely no evidence whatsoever to accuse him makes even less sense. The murders are completely unmotivated.

Killing someone with an axe in cold blood is incredibly violent and far-fetched and outrageously difficult for anyone without a history of violence to do. And there's no earthly reason for this character to use that method when so many others are available. For example, if he's a drowner, he could EASILY have lured those two people to the creek RIGHT NEARBY (where they throw the axe later) and drowned them. Bang on the head with a rock, fall in the creek, they drown with no question of murder and no suspicion of anyone.

It's also absurd to lure these two to a woodshed right slap next to the main house, when there's a whole vast landscape available. If he killed them way out in the woods, by any means, they might never even be found.

There's also the complete idiocy about the pot plants on the upper level of this woodshed, which everyone somehow lowers out the tiny window (pot plants are gigantic) intact, instead of, oh, cutting them up to make it easy--or taking them down the goddamn ladder/stairs, which they used to bring the grow lights down. There is NO REASON for anyone to do this ridiculous and difficult thing with the window except to provide a clue.

Also, the entire group of seven bereaved and hung over people cheerfully destroy all of the evidence in a murder scene. Do they not realize they're making it impossible to catch THE MURDERER??? And committing all sorts of crimes themselves? They're so stupid that they aren't ever aware that one of them has to be the murderer, so presumably they're also so stupid they can't figure out that they're destroying the evidence in the crime.

This all ties into the biggest flaw with the murder: smells like writer. Everything was set up to be convenient for the writer, not because it's what any human ever born on planet earth would ever remotely do. None of it makes any logical sense. It's so obviously structured for the writer.

Constructing a clue path in a mystery means you have to have plausible reasons for people to do the things they do. They can't all just forget that laws and reason exist en masse. And setting up the completely ludicrous woodshed tack burglary theory makes every single person involved so stupid that they can't possibly find their way out of a wet paper bag.

There were things I liked about this book, but all the excruciatingly tedious tourism wasn't one of them. The character of Vi has zero personality and is a waste of space as always, my favorite guy Nate had no role at all in the story, David was a raging asshole as usual, Stevie is an idiot obsessed with this guy who's only ever a complete jerk to her--and it's not cute or funny that she doesn't do school work--and the ridiculous denouement in the London Eye was laughable because the evidence was the flimsiest of circumstantial suppositions. You, a child, are accusing an adult of murder because someone had a toothbrush in her bag. A toothbrush. Imagine going to court with that. You'd be laughed out of the room.

Also being an Angophile can apparently reach toxic fetish levels. Gross. Get a room.

This is a bad mystery and unforgivably boring to boot.

I own all of the author's books and looked forward to this book all year, so I'm beyond disappointed and into the realm of infuriated at the laziness, the atrocious plotting, the utter lack of logic, the endless tedious tourism, the failure to give our beloved characters anything to do, and the complete inability to think through the slightest bit of the murder or the character development to make it make sense.