I am a literary snob. There! I’ve put it out where everyone can see it. I’m not just a little snobbish; I’m steeped in the culture of snobbery. I am a complete and utter snob. When Plato talks about “forms” in the Republic, he uses me as an example of Platonic Snobbery. There I am, holding my nose up in the air, looking down at pulp fiction with the same disdain I hold for dog turds.
Once a year (typically in the summer), I read some pulp fiction just to remind myself why I like being a snob. Last year, for example, I tried to slog my way through the Glorious Appearing, the last in Tim La Haye’s 12-book Left Behind series that portrays the Apocalyse as an adolescent bloodfest. It was mindlessly delicious. Yesterday, I sat down with Skin, Ted Dekker’s sci-fi horror shoot-’em-up thriller about (spoiler alert) six epileptics from Nevada trapped in a deadly DOD-sponsored virtual reality game. Here’s the opening sentence:
When the rain isn’t so much falling – be it in bucket loads or like cats and dogs – but rather slamming into the car like an avalanche of stone, you know it’s time to pull over.
I started to laugh.
But it got worse when I read the second sentence:
When you can’t see much more than the slaphappy wipers splashing through rivers on the windshield, when you’re suddenly not sure if you’re on the road any longer, and your radio emits nothing but static, and you haven’t seen another car since the sky turned black, and your fingers are tense on the wheel in an attempt to steady the old Accord in the face of terrifying wind gusts, you know it’s so totally time to pull over.
And so it goes … ellipsis-laden … filled with really, incredibly, unbelievably, over-blownly, adverb-filled sentences … for 395 pages. My favourite sentence arrives at page 342:
“Do you see him?” Wendy asked in Colt’s ear.
When I read this sentence, I knew it was time to fire up the old Photoshop for an illustration. A couple lines later, we get this string of gems, which stretches loosely across the ear like the twang of a badly tuned guitar:
And Wendy could hardly think straight for all the impossibilities crashing through her mind.
They should be running away from Red, not toward him! But running would certainly sentence only God knew how many to their deaths, and there was no way they could deny that in good conscience.
It was then while Wendy was pressing up close to Colt, nerves strung like guitar strings, that …
Or try to imagine this one from page 347:
Clinging to this small morsel of encouragement …
I imagine a man falling from a giant muffin, clutching crumbs as he plummets to his death.
Here’s a final note about managing point-of-view. Most pulp fiction writers use an omniscient 3rd person narrator. But it’s important to remember that there are degrees of omniscience, and point-of-view can still be subtly manipulated, even here. Or, to put it in Dekkerian terms, there’s omniscience and then there’s, like, totally omniscient, you know. By page 4, I knew I was dealing with a narrator so totally omniscient, he could, like, pop out of the book and read me the label on my underwear:
For an instant Wendy thought the car might roll. But the wet asphalt kept the Accord’s wheels from catching and throwing her over.
Unfortunately, the slick surface also prevented the tires from stopping her car before it crashed into the pickup.
I had to do a double take with this one, but if you read it closely, you’ll see that the point-of-view switches from Wendy to a Godlike narrator who manages the physics of cars braking on wet pavement. And that point would have been totally lost on me if I hadn’t totally gotten into books like Emma and Pride and Prejudice when I was like training to be a Snob.
The verdict: if you’re a literary snob like me, you’d have more fun reading your navel lint.