The beginning is extremely clumsy, especially the “…this is all that I was able to suppose” part. It’s clunky, imparts no new information and has no narrative utility.
It strikes me as being extremely self-conscious . . . the message it’s giving me is “Look what a great writer I am! Do I get an ‘A’?”
How do you suppose an image?
Transpose it on a dinner table?
I agree with most of the comments, but I deny the need for a chainsaw; if the author wants to belong to that school of writing, she has that right. But a good editor would have cleaned up a lot of what’s superfluous, and punched up some of what remains. I’ll give it a try:
"Here is what I imagined, all I could imagine: Frankie’s big old black Lincoln Continental parked in a dead end in downtown Des Moines. The left front fender ruined, both headlights shattered, the wheel rims gone. Inside, a gaping space where the radio had been, and another where the glove box had been pried open, its lock broken and bent.
“The luxury automobile was now a shell, cast off and left behind like a chrysalis abandoned by its butterfly. There was not one trace left behind of Frankie Crane. Not even a crushed-out cigarette with lipstick kisses on its filtered tip. She might as well have never been.”
ETA: If it had been my writing, I’d have trimmed even more – but it’s not mine, and I don’t want to cut what the writer wants to say – only what gets in the way of saying it.
Most likely the description of the car sets the mood of the story. For some reason, Frankie Crane reminds the narrator of Frankie’s abandoned car, even though the car bears no trace of her.
I agree the sentences are labored, but in writing, it is still important to paint a picture for the reader. No, you don’t want to overdo it, but you can also overdo brevity, which can lead to a flat colorless report type style that not everyone enjoys.
I’m as prone to purple prose as anyone. I get a kick out of it. Even I find the quote in the OP overwrought, however, not to mention choppy. I get what the author was trying to do, but it could have been done with fewer words, more power, and a less strained metaphor within the metaphor.
Shall we start a competition to rewrite it, keeping the original tone and intent while improving the actual writing?
Well, is that a serious question? The writer was obviously trying to underscore what wasn’t there (i.e., any sign of Frankie) by going into the details of what was there. If nothing else, the passage succeeds in getting the reader to wonder: “What the heck happened to Frankie?”
It’s not bad. It’s a little melodramatic, but it does capture a sense of the viewpoint character’s voice. The copious use of detail, to me, evokes a horrified feeling, with the images of vehicular carnage and a frantic, desperate search through the wreck for something to remember Frankie by. The “improved” paragraphs on this thread sometimes seem to erase that energy. For me the biggest problem is some use of cliché language:
This sentence is the worst offender. Not quite “toss it against the wall and hope it makes a satisfying thunk” level, but definitely an eye-roll or two. It’s also a pretty cliché and overused introduction to a book - but yeah, I’m not feeling the complete disgust other folks are reporting. YMMV.
ETA: Tarwater, I actually really like “the radio had been extracted” - yeah, it’s pretty gross, but I got a strong image of someone zeroing in on the radio (since it’s one of the more valuable parts of a car) and yanking it out like a rotten tooth.
You should probably stay away from William Faulkner, and definitely Claude Simon, then.
I like the more journalistic styles of writers like Hemingway or Capote, myself. But if every novel were written with this type of authorial voice, things would get boring really quick. Why the desire to genericize writing? I might take a gentle razor to this passage but, overall, I agree with the poster who says there is no need to take a chainsaw to it. If you did, you would suck all the personality out of the writing for some clinical, Strunk & White minimalistic ideal (and this is spoken as somebody who has defended S&W here in the past.)
…and it was after reading the paragraph that I leaned back in my swivel chair and lit up a cigarette, using the same lighter I used on a draft card a lifetime ago when I thought I knew the answers to everything, but like Frankie Crane, the kid I’d been then was gone without a trace, lost among the trees and swamps of the jungles of southeast Asia, having learned that the society I sneered at was unforgiving, so I changed to match and upon my return, left a discarded series of women in my wake, like the memorial flowers scattered in memories of souls lost at sea, those memories reluctantly fading, like the fading shadow of Frankie Crane, shrunk to nothing in the harsh overhead sunlight of high noon in Des Moines baking the paint of her ruined car at the peak of a blazing summer that unlike the youth I was - and if she was dead, the woman Frankie was - seemed never to end.
You need to alternate longer thoughts with short, staccato sentences if you want to make an effective pastiche of Ms. Chehak’s writing. This sounds nothing at all like her style, to me.
Sanity check:
Am I the only one interpreting the passage from the perspective that the car is Frankie? That there is no literal abandoned car, but only a (labored) metaphor for a woman who has wrecked her life, or been warped beyond recognition by booze and/or drugs?
I have not read the book, and don’t particularly want to. I’m just curious as to whether I’ve read more into the passage than is actually there.
What I got was there was a literal car, wrecked and abandoned. Probably Frankie was too. Yes, it’s a metaphor, but if there’s no actual car, why not just say “Frankie reminded me of a wrecked, abandoned car.”?
Oh, I know what it’s attempting to do. It’s doing it ineffectively. I did a read of the first couple of pages of the novel on Amazon to confirm my suspicions. They were equally as awful. If the writer was trying to create a convincing series of images, she’d do well to put some thought behind the selection of details, and hone her craft by reading other writers who had done successfully what she so clearly failed to do here. Imagist writers like Pound and William Carlos Williams would be a good place to start.
[QUOTE=guizot]
Well, is that a serious question? The writer was obviously trying to underscore what wasn’t there (i.e., any sign of Frankie) by going into the details of what was there. If nothing else, the passage succeeds in getting the reader to wonder: “What the heck happened to Frankie?”
[/QUOTE]
No, it was a rhetorical question.
[QUOTE=Electric Warrior]
Tarwater, I actually really like “the radio had been extracted” - yeah, it’s pretty gross, but I got a strong image of someone zeroing in on the radio (since it’s one of the more valuable parts of a car) and yanking it out like a rotten tooth.
[/QUOTE]
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I thought it was a major violation of authorial voice, given the context and style of description that precedes and follows it. Taken would have been a better verb.
[QUOTE=pulykamell]
You should probably stay away from William Faulkner, and definitely Claude Simon, then.
[/QUOTE]
William Faulkner is one of my favorite writers. I’ve read everything he’s written. Here’s an exercise: can you tell me the difference between the passage transcribed by the OP and the following?
[QUOTE=Faulkner]
It was empty at this hour of Sunday evening - no family in wagon, no rider, no walkers churchward to speak to him and carefully refrain from looking after him when he had passed - the pale, powder-light, powder-dry dust of August from which the long week’s marks of hoof and wheel had been blotted by the strolling and unhurried Sunday shoes, with somewhere beneath them, vanished but not gone, fixed and held in the annealing dust, the narrow, splay-toed prints of his wife’s bare feet where on Saturday afternoons she would walk to the commissary to buy their next week’s supplies while he took his bath; himself, his own prints, setting the period now as he strode on, moving almost as fast as a smaller man could have trotted, his body breasting the air her body had vacated, his eyes touching the objects - post and tree and field and house and hill - her eyes had lost.
[/QUOTE]
Well, Faulkner has a much keener ear for the sound of the language than the author quoted in the OP and is much more interesting in his choice of what to detail than the OP. (As well as being much more irritating to follow with his overly long sentences. I love Faulkner, too, but sometimes I wish he’d throw in a period or at least a frigging semi-colon.) But, to use your flippant dismissal of the author’s writing, doesn’t everyone know what an empty street looks like? However, I will agree with you (if I’m understanding part of your criticism correctly): the details she chooses to pick out and describe can be much stronger and evocative. But I don’t think that makes this writing particularly terrible. It’s run-of-the-mill, at worst.
I imagine it’s saying a lot can happen in a week. But that passage sure doesn’t make me want to read Faulkner.
This passage doesn’t strike me as unusually bad, although it is rather overwrought. Anyone who’s curious can read more on the Amazon preview.
I actually read this book quite a few years back, and while I can’t remember it very well I know I didn’t think much of it at the time. I personally wouldn’t recommend continuing past the opening if that doesn’t grab you. The character Frankie was from a poor family and had been sponsored by the main character’s family through one of those “For the price of a cup of coffee…” type programs. She shows up at their house as a teenager and they take her in. Turns out she’s a “bad girl” type, and melodrama ensues. Mostly I remember it as being really boring.
Like Diogenes, I don’t consider the passage worthy of serious critical attention. You’ve pretty much nailed my argument, though. But to clarify: the fundamental shittiness of her writing isn’t signified by the awkwardness or clumsiness of her prose (and it is definitely both), but by her failure to charge her description with an emotional or thematic weight. The passage we’re discussing is the very first paragraph in the book. It’s possible that it would work better if it appeared halfway through the book, once the readers are more familiar with Frankie, and are capable of making the metaphorical connections between her person and the abandoned car that the author so clearly wants them to make.
I’m being nice by saying that. The truth is that there’s a lot of description in the passage and none of it is good or tells the reader anything interesting about Frankie - what are we supposed to come away with, knowing that both headlights are broken, that the front left fender ruined, or that wheels and and hubcaps have been stripped, that we couldn’t know with Two Many Cats’ far more interesting summarization (“In Des Moines, there was a wrecked abandoned car with no trace of its owner, a girl named Frankie Crane.”)?
The reason Two Many Cats’ summarization is better writing, is that it’s straightforward in its attempt to make a metaphorical connection between Frankie and her big old black luxury automobile. Do you understand what I’m trying to say? Frankie’s character is signified by her relationship to her wrecked and abandoned car. You don’t get this in the author’s original description because there’s absolutely no way to make a connection between two broken headlights and an aspect of the character’s personality. Maybe she’s blind? Doesn’t like headlights? Who knows? The summarization is also instantly intriguing: who is Frankie? Why has her car been abandoned? In the original passages, the readers are wondering: why is any of this important? Are we supposed to gain any insight from the specificity of her description?
Beyond the first sentence which makes too little sense, and a poorly chosen semi-colon, it’s not horrible. A bit purple and overwrought, sure, but they’re trying to set a stage. An entire book like this would be hard to read, though.
When they found Frankie, her radio had been ripped out too: the back of her skull had been caved in, and the brain roughly extracted. Her mouth gapped, bristling with broken teeth. Shredded clothing strewn the ground. Discarded travel pamplets sugested a fight had taken place. With her hands and feet bound like they were, Frankie’s body reminded me of a fly caught in a spider’s web.