Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [31]
The books that I don’t finish reading—and their numbers increase with the years—are generally abandoned along the way for one of two reasons. Sometimes the writer’s style puts me off; because I’m a writer myself I’ve become increasingly aware of literary technique, much as a professional musician will notice sour notes and technical flaws that would escape my attention. Unless theme or story line or characters have a great hold upon me, I’ll lose interest in an inexpertly written novel.
If the writing’s competent, my interest may flag nevertheless if I find that I just don’t give a damn whether the characters live or die, marry or burn, go to the Devil or come out the other side. This may happen because I just don’t believe in the characters the author has created. They don’t act like real people, they don’t sound like real people, and they don’t seem to have the emotions or thoughts of real people. Thus they’re unreal as far as I’m concerned, and I say they’re spinach and the hell with them.
Note, please, that my complaint is that these wooden characters don’t seem like real people, not that they aren’t ordinary people. Some of the most engaging characters in fiction, clutching my attention as the Wedding Guest hung on to the Ancient Mariner, have been the farthest thing from ordinary. Nothing about Sherlock Holmes is ordinary, yet the character’s appeal has been such as to keep the Conan Doyle stories in print to this day, and to have Holmes resuscitated and brought back to life in several novels by contemporary authors, novels which owe their success almost entirely to public enthusiasm for Conan Doyle’s eternally fascinating character.
Similarly, I’ve found Rex Stout’s books about Nero Wolfe endlessly rereadable. There’s nothing ordinary about Wolfe, and it’s not only his corpulence that makes him larger than life. I don’t reread the books because their plots are so compelling, certainly not the second or third time around. Nor am I dazzled by Stout’s sheer writing ability; while it was considerable, I never got interested in his non-Wolfe books, either the mysteries starring other detectives or the several straight novels he wrote before creating Wolfe. No, I read him as I suspect most people do, for the sheer pleasure of watching the interplay between Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, of seeing these two men react to different situations and stimuli, and of participating vicariously in the life of that legendary brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street.
Ordinary? Scarcely that. But so real that I sometimes have to remind myself that Wolfe and Goodwin are the creations of a writer’s mind, that no matter how many doorbells I ring in the West Thirties, I’ll never find the right house.
That’s characterization. It was the ability to create characters readers could care about, too, that made Charles Dickens a monumental popular success. While Oscar Wilde might have remarked that only a man with a heart of stone could read of the death of Little Nell without laughing, the truth of the matter is that readers did not laugh when they read that scene. They wept.
Some novels depend rather more on characterization than do others. In the novel of ideas, the characters often exist as mouthpieces for various philosophical positions; while the writer may have taken the trouble to describe them and give them diverse individual attributes, they often have little real life outside of their specific argumentative role in the novel.
Some whodunits rely on the clever intricacy of their plotting to hold the reader’s attention, stinting on characterization in the process. Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason mysteries