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.