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Jan. 22nd, 2021 06:24 pmWhen I complain about how bad writing is still bad because it's on purpose, I usually mention Redshirts. But the worst case I've seen is Open City by Teju Cole.
Open City is a book about an incredibly irritating man walking around the city and thinking about the people he meets. He has vaguely liberal intuitions about all kinds of problems he sees that need to be solved, but takes no action to solve them. He thinks for a while about whatever tragedy and then moves on to the next one.
It took me about a hundred and fifty pages to realize this guy was intentionally being mocked. He's built a mental picture of himself as a good, caring person, and he's impervious to the reality that he doesn't give a shit about helping anyone. When he turns out to be a rapist, it's not even that surprising, because of course someone like this could do something terrible and then model himself as the kind of person who couldn't have done that and would never do that.
But he's not just a bad person, he's an incredibly boring one. I don't want to spend time inside the head of someone so uninvolved and tedious, regardless of the author's reasons for why he's that way.
Open City is a book about an incredibly irritating man walking around the city and thinking about the people he meets. He has vaguely liberal intuitions about all kinds of problems he sees that need to be solved, but takes no action to solve them. He thinks for a while about whatever tragedy and then moves on to the next one.
It took me about a hundred and fifty pages to realize this guy was intentionally being mocked. He's built a mental picture of himself as a good, caring person, and he's impervious to the reality that he doesn't give a shit about helping anyone. When he turns out to be a rapist, it's not even that surprising, because of course someone like this could do something terrible and then model himself as the kind of person who couldn't have done that and would never do that.
But he's not just a bad person, he's an incredibly boring one. I don't want to spend time inside the head of someone so uninvolved and tedious, regardless of the author's reasons for why he's that way.
