Thursday, January 24, 2019
Winter reading
It was time for Robert Parker; I've been putting this off, because despite how good his early books were, as they progressed his relationship with his Lady Love, Susan, slowly and subtly changed from mutual admiration and unequivocal acceptance to him sniping at her and about her cooking, her driving, her shopping habits. Basically she changed from a stand out human being to a bimbo.
The only way around that, is to read the earlier books, and skip the susan parts when they start to wobble, and when it gets to be too over the top "I opened the fridge and the only thing in it was a bottle of Rolling Rock and a lettuce leaf."
Robert Heinlein did this too, especially in his later books, and I finally gave up on him, for the same reasons. Stand-out writer with interesting and important things to say about how to rule a country, autonomy, etc, but all the women in his books were built like Dolly Parton, no matter how bright they were. And he managed to have his way with most of them. sigh.
addendum:
Found this, which explains a LOT about ghost writing
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My theory about this, and other popular writers whose work deteriorates is that once the characters and plotlines are established, the writer hands over the basics to ghost writers and goes off to do other things while still getting an income from book sales. I have a theory about practically everything!
ReplyDeleteThe writing is as good as always, but slowly Spenser begins to subtly denigrate his girlfriend--the first crack is when he lightly criticizes her driving. Later on he begins cooking for them both rather than trading off. And now, with this last book, "Catskill Eagle" the writing is still top notch, the interplay of characters is just the same, but Susan is no longer eating, but just picking at her food, leaving half of it untouched.
ReplyDeleteThis is where it starts to come undone for me. I doubt if a ghostwriter would take that kind of liberty with a main character. It's meant to be humorous, but after a bit you realize that he's doing the writer's equivalent of guy talk where they verbally nudge each other when she makes a comment, and snicker.
Eventually he will open her refrigerator and find a limp lettuce leaf and nothing else. And when they go out to eat, she takes an entire meal to eat a french fry. Sigh.
I'm giving it one more book, and then we are on to other stuff. Maybe Lord of the Rings again.
I do have my suspicions about Elizabeth George, since the last book of hers I read was so complicated and convoluted it WAS the last book of hers I'll read. The writing errors in that one are the sort of thing no established writer would or should ever try to pull off.