Prefabricated phrases

Patricia T. O'Conner

Patricia T. O'Conner writes about prefabricated phrases in her book Words Fail Me. She doesn't like them, and neither do I.

A prefabricated phrase (her term) happens when certain modifiers predictably precede certain nouns. Take for example the phrase "foolish pride," which can be heard in any number of popular songs. Why can't they avoid the cliche and write something like "silly pride" once in awhile?

O'Conner lists many of the phrases she notices too often: oil-rich Kuwait, golf-ball-size hail, hastily summoned, seriously considered, sweeping change, measured response, overwhelming odds, viselike grip, narrow escape and knee-jerk reaction.

After George Floyd's unfortunate death several years, we saw or heard the phrase "systemic racism" everywhere. The phrase turned out to be more political than accurate, but people used it anyway, and many people still do.

O'Conner states the remedy for this kind of sloppy writing better than I could: "Modifiers should be fresh, alive, interesting, not predictable. So if a descriptive phrase springs to mind, preassembled and ready to use, put it back in the box."

Led by the spirit

The mystery in William Kent Krueger's Spirit Crossing (2024) is solved as much by the dead as by the living.

Young women have been disappearing in this area of Minnesota, but authorities concentrate mostly on the daughter of a prominent politician. That American Indian women have also disappeared doesn't interest them, even when it seems likely the disappearances may have the same explanation.

A little boy called Waaboo is attuned to the spirit world. He senses where dangers lie, and also where bodies lie. Soon he, too, becomes a target.

Waaboo's grandfather is Cork O'Connor, a retired lawman and the hero of Kruger's mystery series. He listens to the boy, even if the authorities don't. In fact, his entire family gets involved in the case, including a daughter, who has returned to Minnesota to die of a brain tumor.

If too many cooks spoil the broth, perhaps too many detectives can spoil a murder mystery. At any rate, this novel gets a bit confusing and is not as satisfying as some of Krueger's other books.

Reading positions

Hermione Lee

In his book The Upstairs Delicatessen, Dwight Garner quotes English biographer Hermione Lee as dividing reading into two kinds — vertical and horizontal.

This distinction could be taken literally. One refers to when we are upright, whether at a library table or in a comfortable chair at home. The second is mostly done in bed, but sometimes on a sofa or perhaps a recliner. In our youth we may have read while stretched out on the floor. I have done little horizontal reading in this sense. When I lie down, I usually fall asleep. Even David Baldacci can't keep me awake in bed for very long.  I prefer to read during daylight hours.

But Lee is referring to more than just body position with these terms. She defines vertical reading as "regulated, supervised, orderly, canonical and productive." Horizontal reading, meanwhile, is "unlicensed, private, leisurely, disreputable, promiscuous and anarchic."

Presumably all the adjectives need not apply to the same book at the same time. Reading can be productive without being supervised, private without being promiscuous.

Most of us would simply make a distinction between serious reading and leisure reading or, if we are still in school, between required reading and reading for fun. Many readers would probably prefer to tackle one of Lee's books while sitting upright, while saving a sexy thriller for after dark in their beds, so perhaps both understandings of the terms vertical and horizontal can apply at the same time.

Family complications

She couldn't follow all the lines out in every direction: all the people to whom she was by marriage mysteriously related.

Ann Patchett, Commonwealth

If a character in Ann Patchett's Commonwealth (2016) can't keep the members of her own family straight, pity the poor reader. But that is the point of this wonderful novel: Families are complicated.

That confused character is Franny, the novel's main character, if there is one. She is a baby at her own christening party when the novel opens, a mature woman well into her 50s when it ends at another family party. The chapters jump around from here to there, finally giving a picture of an American family as complicated as any of them.

At that christening party an uninvited guest named Albert Cousins shows up with a bottle of gin, a most unsuitable christening gift. Bert only wanted an excuse to get away from his own house and his own family on a Sunday afternoon. Soon other alcohol is brought to the party, guests drink too much and by the end Bert is kissing Beverly, Franny's beautiful mother, and an affair begins that leads to the break up of both families.

The six children from the two families often share time together because of custody arrangements. But then new marriages crumble, leading to more divorces, more stepparents and an ever more complicated family.

As if things weren't complicated enough, Franny, in her 20s, has an affair with a prominent novelist, Leo Possen, who is looking for an idea for his next book. Franny's family story becomes the plot for this novel, which is also called Commonwealth. The book complicates her family even more as members start reading it. Years later it is turned into a movie, making everything still worse.

Franny feels guilty for her unplanned role in bringing embarrassment to her own family, just as she is sorry for all the trouble that resulted from that kiss at her christening party. And yet she thinks, too, of all the good that resulted. So it goes with families. Bad marriages result in good children. Youthful indiscretions lead to mature wisdom. Negatives sometimes become positives, and vice versa.

Families are complicated.

Pluck in Portugal

If you have a taste for plucky heroines, World War II espionage and adventure stories that are (almost) G-rated, you will find what you want in Alan Hlad's The Book Spy (2023).

Maria Alves works wonders with microfilm at the New York Public Library when the war breaks out. She speaks Portuguese and thanks to her pluck manages to gain acceptance microfilming Axis publications in neutral Lisbon. She is told that she most definitely will not be a spy. If you've read the title, you know very well that this is not true.

In Lisbon, she falls in love with a bookstore owner, who supplies her with all the German books and magazines she can handle, but even so she becomes involved with a Swiss banker who works for the Germans. Soon she finds herself a double agent, spying on the Germans while supposedly spying on the British. She provides misinformation about the location of the D-Day invasion and even seriously contemplates trying to assassinate Hitler at a wedding she attends. Talk about pluck.

The novel seems a bit amateurish (not as good as Hlad's The Long Flight Home), but it should please many readers, especially girls in their early teens and old ladies.

Writing about food

Part autobiography and part Barlett's Familiar Quotations, The Upstairs Delicatessen (2023) is also Dwight Garner's tribute to his favorite things (not counting his wife, Cree) — literature and food.

Garner goes meal-by-meal through the day — breakfast, lunch and dinner — and tells us what various writers have had to say about these meals and the foods commonly eaten. He also has chapters on drinking and shopping for food. It turns out that food and drink are a favorite topic of writers great and not so great.

John Steinbeck writes in Travels with Charley about making coffee "shine" by dropping an egg white and the shell into the coffee pot. Garner tells of David Sedaris abandoning a lavish lunch to step outside and buy a hot dog from a vender. Charlotte Bronte wrote in a letter, "I have had a hideous dinner of some abominable, spiced-up mess, and it has exasperated me against the world at large." And you thought you once had a bad meal.

Garner shifts quickly from one reference to another. In a single paragraph about oysters, he quotes, or at least mentions, Vladimir Nabokov, Pat Conroy, Roy Blount Jr., Samuel Pepys, Padgett Powell, P.G. Wodehouse and Edward St. Aubyn. One marvels at his ability to accumulate these hundreds of references to food and drink. With a career as a book critic, of course, he has read a great deal and no doubt took many notes along the way.

Much of this book is fascinating. Much of it is deadly dull. But reading it is something like a buffet — you can take what you want and ignore the rest.

Heavy lifting

Whenever someone writes a mystery novel, the publisher is almost certain to ask if it is the first in a series. If not, the novel may be less likely to be published.

Publishers like series novels because readers like them. If you enjoy the first book in a series, you are more likely to buy the second and the third.

But why do readers like them. Shannon Reed explains it well in her book Why We Read: "But a series usually only asks us to do that heavy lifting at the beginning of the first book, and from then on we can simply wander."

By "heavy lifting" Reed refers to the process of becoming familiar with the major characters, the scene, the time period, etc. When one reads the second or third novel in a series, much of the mystery has already been solved — meaning the mystery of the framework of the story — and you can focus on just the mystery in that particular plot.

Any standalone novel or first novel in a series at first requires some effort on the part of the reader. What's going on? Who are these people? Why should I be interested? Just yesterday I started reading a novel and gave up on page 9. The novel began with a dream which made no sense. When the man woke up, the narrative still didn''t make sense. And I disliked both of the characters introduced so far, which I could tell from the dust jacket were the novel's main characters. That was more heavy lifting than I was willing to do, and I moved on to another novel.

One reason I do not read as many short stories as I would like is that each story in a collection requires that same heavy lifting. One must familiarize oneself all over again with new characters and new situations in each story. And let's face it, a story, like a journey, is more fun when you know where you are.

Murder? Who cares?

In the traditional mystery novel, the hero often feels compelled at the end to explain to other characters (and, of course, to readers) what really happened and what evidence led to the killer. In John Banville's intriguing 2024 novel The Drowned, however, the situation is reversed. It is the reader who wants desperately to explain everything to the hero.

The heroes — actually there are two of them — are too busy dealing with their own personal problems to give much thought to a possible murder. Quirke, the 1950s Dublin pathologist, still mourns the shooting death of his wife in a previous novel in the series. Detective Inspector Strafford is told by his wife that she wants a divorce and by Phoebe, Quirke's daughter, that she is pregnant by him. So who can worry much about a woman who disappears in the night in rural Ireland and may have drowned in the sea?

Even when the woman's body is found and Quirke discovers she has drowned in fresh water, not salt water, our investigators don't seem all that interested. Yet the novel's omniscient narrator tells readers exactly what happened, not only to this woman but to a woman murdered in a previous novel. Quirke and Strafford remain preoccupied with their own problems.

While fictional detectives, whether professional or amateur, who don't actually solve mysteries might seem disappointing, the fact is that for readers, too, their personal problems may seem more compelling than the murder.

Advantages of reading fiction

Fiction reading, often regarded as a mere leisure activity, has remarkable impacts on readers.

Walt Hickey, You Are What You Watch

There are those who seem to regard reading fiction as a kind of moral failure. Serious people read history, biography, science, politics or whatever might be found on the nonfiction shelves. If one must read fiction, it should be highbrow fiction, one of the classics, not mysteries, thrillers, romance novels, westerns or science fiction.

Walt Hickey

I have never believed this, and it was reassuring to read Walt Hickey defend reading fiction of all kinds, especially as his defense comes in a book mostly about watching movies and TV shows, You Are What You Watch.

Here are some of his arguments, rephrased in my own words:

• People often say that a particular book changed their life. Often these life-changing books are works of fiction.

• Studies find that reading fiction helps prevent cognitive decline as we age.

• Those who read fiction often make more money. (Of course it may be that intelligent people make more money, and intelligent people are more likely to read a novel once in awhile.)

• Reading fiction, perhaps even more than watching a movie or a television program, encourages a person to identify with other people, even with people completely unlike the reader. Ideally this will carry over into real life.

• Fiction helps clarify one's moral code. When we read a story, we want the good guys to win and the bad guys to lose.  We want couples to find true love. We want happily ever after.

How movies change us

We are changed by movies and television programs, as well as by other forms of popular entertainment, Walt Hickey shows in his 2023 book You Are What You Watch.

Sometimes the change is physical. Our blood really does curdle when we watch blood-curdling movies, he says. The composition of the air in theaters changes during exciting, suspenseful and funny scenes in films.

Changes can be different than what we might expect. Violent movies tend to reduce violent crime, not cause more of it, it has been found. For one thing, the young men who most enjoy these movies are spending their evenings watching them, rather than out in the streets and in bars getting into trouble. Plus, the violent scenes seem to satisfy their passion for violence at least temporarily.

What we see on screens also affects our interests. Fraternities and toga parties became more popular thanks to Animal House. Archery became more popular after Hunger Games.

Hickey gives us lots of graphs, charts and graphics of other kinds of graphics to make his book more interesting. Unfortunately he seems to have run out of prime content at about the halfway point. The second half of the book covers less pertinent topics such as a brief history of Hollywood movies and a brief history of professional wrestling.

One topic that Hickey might have covered, but doesn't, is how phones, texting and social media have changed human behavior. People don't seem to get together as much as they once did. Instead they stay home and communicate in impersonal ways. Young people tend to date strangers they find on online dating sites rather than people they work with or meet at social gatherings. Almost anyone now can potentially become a media star, whether on YouTube, OnlyFans or whatever. But perhaps all this is a book in itself.

Self-assigned reading

There are books you read because you want to, and other books you read because you think you should. As for the latter, I am not referring to assigned classroom reading. Most of us are beyond that stage of life. In previous posts over the past few weeks I have discussed required reading for book clubs and books one feels obligated to read because they were given to you by a friend. I am not here referring to those situations either.

Rather my topic is those books we want to have read but keep putting off actually reading. They are unusually long or challenging or serious or literary or old — whatever it is that makes us reluctant to actually open them when there is a thriller that offers more temptation.

I have never read The Great Gatsby, I am ashamed to say. Most college freshmen in my tear read this novel, but I was in Honors English and read Tender Is the Night instead. I have always felt I read the wrong Fitzgerald, yet have never corrected the error.

I haven't read any Shakespeare since I was in school. I rarely read any poetry, although I did read a couple of Robert Frost poems the other day. I have long wanted to tackle Thomas Wolfe. I have read Gilead, but there are so many other Marilynne Robinson novels I keep putting off. Such books are easier to purchase than to actually read, especially when time is limited and the competion for one's reading attention is so intense.

Shannon Reed

In her book Why We Read, Shannon Reed writes, "There have been so many times when I've so-called assigned myself a book because I felt I should read it and then ended up enjoying the writing itself, on its own merits." This shouldn't be surprising. Books become thought of as important, in most cases, because they are worth reading. They offer rewards, however challenging they may be. 

I have found this to be true for a number of Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens novels, as well as other classic books,  however intimidating they seemed at first. Of course, there are also intimidating books that don't hold one's interest at all once one has gotten up the courage to tackle them. But for us adults, when we assign ourselves a book, to use Reed's term, there's no penalty if we don't complete the assignment.

Mystery solved

Georges Simenon's 1965 novel Maigret's Patience is basically a continuation of Maigret Defends Himself (see "Maigret in trouble," July 24, 2023).

What the veteran Paris police officer is patient about is a series of jewel robberies that has been going on for years.The break comes with the murder of a wheelchair-bound suspected criminal, whom Maigret has, also patiently, kept under observation. Palmari may have been in a wheelchair, but Maigret suspected him of still being involved in criminal activity, perhaps even those robberies.

Interviews with the murdered man had been vital just weeks earlier, as told in the previous novel, when Maigret, against orders, investigated unfounded accusations of sexual misconduct against himself. There are many references to the earlier novel in this one.

This case is something like a locked room mystery. Aline, the young woman who cared for Palmari, had gone out, and both she and the building itself were under close police observation. Nobody has gone in or out. Other residents seem to have had no connection with either Palmari or Aline. The man had been killed with his own gun.

Maigret soon gets to the bottom of things, perhaps regretting his patience when a second body is discovered in the building.

All these years after they were written, Simenon's short mystery novels remain top-grade reading.

In or out

Jerry Seinfeld

Interested as I am in words and wordplay, one of my favorite comedy bits in Jerry Seinfeld's Is This Anything? has to do with peculiar idioms that seem to make sense until you stop to think about them.

He recalls that as a boy he lived in Brooklyn, but later his family lived on Long Island. Sometimes they went out to Jersey or down to the beach. Then he observes that we get on a train but in a cab. All this is much funnier when he says it, of course.

Seinfeld could have expanded on this. Why do we say "out west," but "back east?" This probably has to do with the fact that the East Coast was settled first, and pioneers literally went out west. Some of them returned back east. These usages have remained with us through the decades.

The phrases "up north" and "down south" probably have more to do with maps, where north is up and south is down.

Growing up in rural Ohio, when I heard someone say they were going "to Toledo" it suggested to me somewhere on the outskirts, such as the Westgate Shopping Center where my family often shopped. When I heard "into Toledo" it suggested the downtown area.

I have never understood the difference between uptown and downtown. Billy Joel had fun with this in his song Uptown Girl. Here the difference seems to be social status, upper class versus lower class. But when I was young, I referred to the center of the city when I used the phrase "downtown Toledo." The word uptown meant nothing to me at that time, and it doesn't mean much to me now.