I finished reading Marisa Silver's The God of War this evening, and I believe this makes three books I've completed this year. Three, which is a long way off from the seven I should have finished by now if I want to be on target for reading one book a month this year, but three nonetheless.
Some of my favorite books, the ones that remind me of how amazing the ability to read can be, have made me feel something. I remember as I came to the end of Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, a retelling of the Arthurian legend through the perspectives of Morgana and Guinevere, I had to read while crying. I was devastated for a week afterwards. Even having prior knowledge that Arthur dies in the end (that wasn't a spoiler, was it?) did not prepare me for the beauty of her words and the emotional blow of the scene.
Good books also remind me that language can be beautiful, not only in its sound, but its imagery. I've probably read Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams a handful of times, and each time, I want to read it out loud, because the meter of the words he uses hums along like a familiar folk song, while at the same time painting thorough and authentic vignettes of life and the human experience of it.
Some of the worst books, however, made me realize how much time I lost in finishing them, if I even reach the end at all. How many times now have I tried to wade through Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, only to be left confused and pitying myself for not understanding what the hell was going on? Six? Yet for all the praise it has received from friends and critics alike, I failed to see it. I wondered if the death sentence he received in Iran for this book was simply because the Ayatollah had wasted however many weeks and months of his life trying to finish this convoluted and overwhelming mess, bored himself to death, and now simply needed somebody to pay for what had happened.
And then, there are books like The God of War. By all expectations, I should have loved it. A coming-of-age story about a boy growing up in the mostly abandoned desert towns of Southern California, it hit upon themes that I hold dear: the swirling definitions of love, the development of an identity apart from one's family, the need to feel connected to the world. Yet I could not surrender to Silver's prose because of one thing: her use of the phrase "as if."
In just about every page (and I mean that literally), she uses "as if" to indicate comparison or metaphor ("as if the sun had leached the heaviness of living right out of them," or "as if they were in a toy store sweepstakes," or "as if trying to shake away water," all from the second chapter alone). Really, to make sure I wasn't exaggerating, I checked 10 pages, just opened the book randomly and skimmed through the page, and on eight out of the ten, these little "as if"s sat there, like potholes on an otherwise freshly paved street. Silver telegraphs her metaphors so clearly that I could barely pay attention to what was happening; I could only anticipate the next occurence of an "as if;" they begged me to see them, to recognize their brilliance, their intention, their purpose.
And the emotions of the story, the spirits of the characters, were buried underneath them.
I didn't hate the book, but I couldn't love it either. I did, however, learn something very important, something that I always knew, but this book proved decisively: good ideas and good writing must go together. To have one but lack the other is to squander the virtues of the former.
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