Actually, I confess I was flying through the Bridges of Madison County, sort of wondering what all the fuss was about, and then I got to a sad part and started bawling my eyes out. Much to my consternation, I might add.
So my friend gave me Suzanne’s Diary For Nicholas. I got partway through this and I did what I never, ever, ever do. I skipped to the back to see what the hell happened. Then I threw the book across the room and was thrilled to death I didn’t waste any more of my time on it.
The thing is, I usually read anything. Good or bad. It’s really saying something when I give up on a book so early. It was SAPPY, it was STUPID, it was MANIPULATIVE, it was humorless in its formulaic adherence to “romance.” It’s as if James Patterson, like Robert James Waller before him, had to prove that a man can be sensitive by writing the most gag-inducing syrupy melodramatic piece of crap imaginable.
Time to go back to writing those chapter-a-page sicko murder mysteries, Mr. Patterson. Or may your career sink as mercifully fast as did Mr. Waller’s.
Well, it’s a bit off-topic, but TNT is running Message in a Bottle this week. Talk about manipulative. Let’s color in a chick flick by the numbers, shall we?
Lonely (but beautiful) divorced woman finds message in a bottle. Goes down to the Outer Banks and finds Kevin Costner who is not only hunky, poetic, and tragically heartbroken but also restores gorgeous twin masted sailing schooners. (And apparently has spent all his life in the Outer Banks while maintaining a mid-Western accent – I guess after Robin Hood, they decided not to have him attempt any more accents.) In order to complicate things, the woman, who is a journalist, instantly decides to play lying weasel and hide the reason she came there, just so there will be some artificial tension.
I couldn’t watch it. Half an hour into the movie, I could predict it all. I couldn’t buy Costner as a blue collar boat restorer. And if I could, I couldn’t see what he would see in Robin Penn Wright who was playing a character with no depth whatsoever because the screenwriters obviously confused “beautiful” with “interesting”.
me, too…but I was an adolescent when I read it and some of the humor actually appealed to me. the whole series was like watching a marathon of “Three’s Company” episodes, with Jettero Heller as “Jack” and Soltan Gris as “Mr. Furley/Roper”.
Don’t count on it. Patterson’s day-job is being the president of an advertising agency.
If he spent half as much time on the composition of his novels as he does on their marketing, it’s entirely possible they wouldn’t suck as much wind as they do.
I don’t disbelieve you, but I’m in shock. How the hell does he write that fast with a day job? (He puts out, what, two or three novels a year these days?)
Or is it the obvious answer – he just types as fast as he can, and every 600 or so manuscript pages is a “book.”
Isn’t Patterson that chubby balding guy who does his own TV commercials in which he reads some of the glurge he writes with pursed lips and a look that either indicates supreme sensitivity or else that a turd is stuck sideways? Those ads make me puke little carrots! If they are representative of the ads his company produces I don’t expect him to last very long in EITHER capacity.
I wish I could say “hear, hear,” but the sorry truth is that this guy could buy and sell the two of us about four hundred times over.
You see, he is now a bona fide Best Selling Author, which means that the mighty Sales & Marketing Machine of AOL/Time/Warner is lined up behind each and every scrap of shinola he feels like publishing, and the rubes are lined up in the Barnes & Nobles to buy 'em.
And neither Patterson, the Sales Director, the Marketing Manager, or the President of Barnes & Noble cares what we think of the quality of his writing. “Laughing all the way to the bank,” a wise man once said.
