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.