[a 3-second skim]
This 14-page short story (cited below) contains 15 instances of “as if”. That’s roughly an “as if” per page. Trimming the “as if” stuff would streamline the pacing and strengthen the metaphors the “as if” bits introduce. Trust the reader to be intelligent enough to guess that “The Moon was a curtainless window,” for example (mine), is a metaphor, not a statement meant to be taken literally, within the reality of the text, and, bonus: that sleeker sentence simply reads better than “As if the Moon were a curtainless window… “. Lopping off the “as if” leaves the sentence clean, confident, direct. A few “as if” bits, per story, fine. But there were three “as if” bits in one paragraph, of the cited text, alone, and, again, twelve more all over the place. As if they’d been deposited by a sneeze. Gooey.
The text in question is by a post-or-para-Carverian writer. Possibly even one of Ray Carver’s, or Gordon Lish’s, students. Fans of such texts are often bourgeois ghetto-fetishists, or denizens of the ghetto who hope to acquire a bourgeois readership. Just like in Hip Hop. There’s some connection between Peter Christopher and Ray Carver but I can’t remember what, and this is supposed to be a quick lesson, though Carver has a lot to answer for. American Lit might have gone ahead and sucked, anyway, without Carver’s bad example (little talent/ dumb acclaim), but it could have sucked so very differently. Texts which rely on the milieu, of the setting (the mean streets of Carverville or the yachts of the Cruelly Handsome Billionaire paperbacks economy), to sell themselves, are minor, or, that is, closer in spirit, to the pejorative tilt of the word “Genre,” than might be absolutely necessary. Smart Lit works just as well so lean that way.
I don’t think terribly much of this particular story but I think it could be improved in order to reduce my disgust by taming my disgust to the generous edge of indifference. I’m not going to unfurl a proclamation detailing the many ways that America is destroying English language literature (it most certainly fucking is) because America is the coolish oaf, with a flashy (rented) car, whom everyone wants to be, aping his mannerisms and his sideburns and the raspberries he blows at the recondite immanence of the glyph…
Second lesson: no matter where you think the end of the first, or second, draft, of your story, comes, it probably comes three or four paragraphs before that. I can’t remember if this is my rule or someone else’s but it’s an eerily reliable rule. Possible explanation: the initial ending of your story/book was probably the Hollywood ending. Hollywood endings were trite, already, nearly a century ago. Do we think they’re smarter now? Smart Lit doesn’t explain everything it gives you to think about; it doesn’t tie up all the loose ends; it makes you want to re-read. Immediately.
So that’s three rules in one lesson: 1) cut down on the “as if” junk, and 2) smack the terminal protuberance of your opus slightly hard and see if it doesn’t snap right off, revealing the Actual Ending and, 3) the reader must always be presumed to be at least as smart as you, The Writer, are. Only idiot writers condescend. For the readers who are dumb, as rubber ladders, it won’t matter anyway.
THE IMPERIALIST 