I picked up a book by Caitlin R. Kiernan as weekend reading material, which means I'm not expecting a high level of literary merit—just a good plot and competent writing. It's a horror/fantasy story and the characters are interesting and the plot's suspenseful and moving right along, but the author's style is beginning to irritate the crap out of me, specifically, her habit of jamming words together to make them into adjectives. The first one nearly threw me right out of the story, though it was a pretty minor one:
"All night she drove the narrow back roads north of the city, countrydark roads, just her and a pint bottle of Wild Turkey, the music blaring loud from her tape deck, chasing the headlights of her old Impala, trying to escape and knowing there was no way to go that far, that fast." [Emphasis mine]
"Countrydark" jarred me for a moment, despite the fact that it's actually a perfect description and a little poetic, probably because it just as well could have been hyphenated without losing the meaning. This is true of the many other times she does the same thing elsewhere. This compounding would be okay if she only did it once in a while, but she does it sometimes more than once in the same paragraph, which makes it seem precious and turns it into a verbal tic.
I suppose one of the reasons it bugs me is that it's something I used to do too, though never in my prose. It was a technique I occasionally employed in some of my early poetry, juvenalia I wrote in high school and as an undergraduate, most of which I now wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. Looking back at it now makes me cringe in horror. It's so . . . cute! Well, it's not, really, at least not in that Hallmark Shoebox Greetings way, or worse, Blue Mountain Arts, but it's very young and serious and a tad sentimental. What really makes me cringe though, and what elicits the cringe at Kiernan's compound adjectives is the lack of craft. If you have to continually fall back on neologisms to express your meaning, your writing is failing somewhere. Worse, your vocabulary is too limited.
This is not to say that neologisms are bad in themselves. Shakespeare used a lot of them (many of which have fallen by the wayside), and science creates them all the time. Neologisms are one of the language's strengths, in my opinion, and I'd be the first to say that slang and new words are a continual delight to me. I've been using Heinlein's "grok" (to reach an intuitive understanding with another person) for years. But what Kienan is doing is something different. Simply jamming two words together to make a compound adjective isn't a true neologism. It's just sloppy writing.
There's some reason for this particular tic: it pairs well with her headlong, breathless sentence structure, which tends to run-ons and fragments. This, too, is starting to irritate me. Take this one: "The first bad dream about a week after she moved in with Deke, right before she found the computer, and if Sadie told him that he might start talking about synchronicity and meaningful coincidence." There's no good reason to leave the verb out of this sentence. It's the first in a paragraph and it doesn't set the real tone for anything following it. I had to read it twice to realize it was meant to be that way, that it wasn't an editing error.
Sometimes, a style like this is just evidence of a young writer and bad editing. So I looked Kiernan up on Wikipedia, from a link on her own site. The woman's won several awards, and from her LJ, she does know how to write in complete sentences. So I must assume this is a stylistic choice, rather than inexperience. She's only a couple of years younger than I am and has written a number of books. Whether they all exhibit this same prose style is another matter. That was my question about Chuck Palahniuk's Diary too, which was written in a stripped-down, minimalist style I would have found irritating in a different book, but which worked really well in Diary because of the subject and POV. Then I discovered Fight Club had the same voice, the same style, and he lost me. It was like Jay McInerney (not one of my favorite writers, I must say) writing every book in second person singular, the way he did for Bright Lights, Big City, which worked because of its tense and style.
But Kiernan's writing isn't, I don't think, trying to accomplish something specific with this style. It's not stream of consciousness, it's not poetic, it's not literary. And it shouldn't necessarily be any of those things, considering what it is and who it's aimed at (though far be it from me to stop her from that intent; I'm all for raising the literary competence bar across genres). But what feels like writer's chops in Palahniuk and McInerney feels second rate here. The story is not so good, nor the characters so compelling, nor the setting so fully immersive that I can forgive Kiernan her idiosyncrasies. Her tics are actually hindering what looks, so far, like a pretty good, if disposable, book. One of her editors or her writing group, or somebody, needed to sit her down and take out those double-barreled adjectives and make her complete more of those sentences. And I say this because she's obviously good, but she could be better. The writing teacher in me has her red pen out and is itching to get at that manuscript.
Words of wisdom for my own revision work.
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