Lovers at the Chameleon Club by Francine Prose

Rating: WARTY!

This is the last thing by Francine Prose I will ever read. I think three audiobooks was enough to give her more than a fair shot at proving she knew what she was talking about in her Reading for Writers book of advice about how to write novels by combing the so-called classics for clues. I wasn't impressed with that, but I decided to try out some of her own fiction to see how well she follows her own advice. She actually doesn't. At all! She writes caricatures and stereotypes; she writes flat uninteresting characters in dreary prose; she writes boring, and tedious and depressing. The book - the parts I could stand to read - felt more like fluff than a story.

As usual the hyperbolic book blurb completely misrepresents the novel. It's actually not a story. Instead it's related through news items, diary entries, letters, and so on, which really turns me off a book. I detest the dear diary parts in particular because they're never, ever, ever written like a real person would write a diary entry. If you're not going to do it that way, then write the damned thing as a story because that's what you're doing anyway, moron, so why the pretentious pretense? This book was racist, celebrates white privilege, and favored the Nazi PoV, which is never a good thing. I have no idea what the writer thought she was doing, but whatever it is, it isn't anything I'm interested in reading, and I am now completely done with this author, permanently

Mister Monkey by Francine Prose

Rating: WARTY!

This was one of the most tedious and clueless books I've ever not read - by that I mean I listened to as much of the audiobook as I could stomach and ditched it pretty quickly. I got into this after reading a book written by this author and titled "Reading for Writers" which purported to teach a writer how to write by paying attention to the so-called classics as though all those authors literally agonized over every word they typed, so I decided to try out her own novels and see how well she does. I wasn't impressed. Not at all.

I'm sure some of those writers did agonize, and perhaps some modern writers still do, but agony doth not a great writer make. My gut feeling is that most of those antique writers simply wrote, correcting now and then of course, but otherwise never giving the writing process very much thought. The reason they did this is that they had a real story to tell about real (if fictional) people who genuinely moved these authors to write, so it required little agony to put it down on paper and little soul-searching. They were all about the story, not about analyzing it to death as we do today, and thereby destroying it in the process. And more than likely they did not dwell on it anally in hindsight like so-called professors of literature do. We could learn a lot from them, but it's not the education that this author thinks we should be getting in my opinion.

I'm not a huge fan of the classics. Do people care about the classics because they're really that great, or because we're force-fed these things in schools and colleges and by pretentious, bombastic critics until they can't think for themselves? There is a massive gulf between the writers who make money from their writing by producing novels which sell well, and the classic emulators who win awards, but about whom no one really cares that much unless they're forced to by college courses and school teachers, and by pretentious "must-read" or "Top 25" lists that try to brow-beat people into reading this book instead of that one for no other reason than that the creator of the list thinks their own opinion is akin to divine guidance.

If you're teaching people who actually want to write modern novels, then you need to read modern novels, not antique and obsolete ones, and you need to consider why it is that people buy this one and not that one. You need to ask why must we be forced to study the work of authors who made little to nothing on what they wrote and who are now being taken advantage of not because they were necessarily brilliant, but merely because they're no longer due any copyright fees, when each and every writer really does not want to be the next classic writer, but the first 'themselves'. They want to write. They need to write, and for my money what they should do is read lots and lots of the genre(s) in which they're interested, and then - in their own voice and using their own characters and plots - write something in that vein. Forget dusty professors who make a comfortable living not from their writing, but from a sinecure. They're not to be trusted.

For the sake of argument, let's pretend the classics do have miraculous things to teach us. This now begs the question: if that method is so great, why does the author of that how-to book not take her own advice? This novel was poorly-written, and it was filled with abusive stereotypes. This seems to be the author's MO, and it was insulting to everything from the chimpanzee (which it constantly and ignorantly referred to as a monkey) to the reader, whom it insults by this novel's very existence.

The author bewails the fact the game hunters shot the chimpanzee's parents, but she describes the locale as a paradoxically-named game preserve, not a wildlife conservation park! That doesn't make it right that the chimps were shot, but neither is it surprising when it's a game preserve that animals die unnecessarily. And no, chimps don't have cute little family units with mom, dad, and 2.2 children like humans do, so why did it matter that mom and dad ape were shot? Mom, yes! Dad? Not so much in a chimp's world. For all her blather about choosing your words, she completely failed here to choose her words wisely.

The title describes a play which is being put on by a bunch of appallingly cardboard and stereotypical actors. It's told from several rather confusing perspectives, and none of them were interesting to me. And blurb-writer? No, the narrative isn't madcap, it's boring. Get that much right, please. I cannot recommend this.

My New American Life by Francine Prose

Rating: WARTY!

Having read (or more accurately, listened to) as much as I could bear of Francine Prose's "Reading for Writers" which purports to teach people to write through fawning over the so-called classic writers, I decided to try some of this author's own fiction and see how she stacked-up against her own advice, and she was so far from it that I found it amusing. I got three of her audiobooks from the library and found all three to be let me say, less than satisfying. I tried to come into the first one neutrally, intending to give it a fair shot (maybe this author writes a lot better than she teaches?), but she quickly disabused me of any such notion.

This author seems like she cannot write about everyday lives and make them interesting. It's like she lacks confidence in her own writing and so has to call on the melodramatic fringe to perk it up a bit. The problem is that she seems able only to trade in stereotypes and caricatures and even about those, it seems she can tell only the most uninteresting stories in the most boring prose. Her writing style is that of poor fan fiction: he said, she said, he said, she said, ad nauseam. It's like that for paragraph after paragraph, unvaried. It is horrible writing.

That an author like this gets to be a professor who purports to teach others to write is a travesty. She doesn't seem to realize there are words other than 'said' which can be employed when ascribing speech to someone, or better yet, that there are many times when you don't actually have to specify who is speaking! Or you can indicate who is speaking by adding an action here and there. Has she not even learned that much from the classics? I mean, I wouldn't abuse this non-ascription as much as Jane Austen did because it can be confusing, but please, no endless 'he said, she said' tedium! Change it up a bit for pity's sake!

This story purports to relate "what it means to be American" but it has nothing to do with being American. Instead, like too many other such stories about the 'huddled masses', this one is all about creating insulting ethnic stereotypes, in this case aimed at the Albanians. This is a derogatory and condescending view of what it means to be an Albanian. According to this author all Albanians are the same: they think the same, dress the same, eat the same, behave the same, and a good many of them are gangsters, if we're to believe this Prose.

A disturbing number of these stories, and this one is no different, seem to be about illegal immigrants. Lula is one such person. She's a mid-twenties Albanian who is involved with gangsters she calls her brothers or cousins, but who aren't related to her. She tries to help one of them who is an out-and-out jerk, and she's too stupid to see how wrong this is and how much she could jeopardize her own future by dishonestly misrepresenting him. In the end she gets rewards she has not earned. Immigrants like Lula, no country needs.

This story was boring, and had no redeeming features. The cast was unlikable and tedious to read about. I cannot recommend this story, and I cannot understand how anyone who writes like this can profess to be a teacher of how to write novels or even someone who can tell good literature from trash.

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose

Rating: WARTY!

Have you ever noticed how all the books which tell you how to write great novels ware written by people you've never heard of, and who've never had a best-seller? Even if they had, it doesn't mean they can show you how to emulate their success.

his was another Audiobook. This time it was non-fiction. It was read, a little stridently I thought, by Nanette Savard, whose voice I don't feel I can recommend, but that was less important to me on this occasion than the content, which was about how to read a book from a writer's perspective so you can learn how to write...like a reader? I'm kidding. I like this idea in theory because reading a lot is a good way to equip yourself with writerly tools, but the question is what kind of a writer do you want to be? Francine Prose (great name for an author of a book about writing, right?) repeatedly neglects to ask this question as she fails to ask many others, and for me that was why this book is a huge fail.

Francine Prose is (amusingly to me) a Visiting Professor of Literature at Bard College. I don't know how often she visits, but it would seem that she has all the tools: her name is Prose and she teaches at a college named Bard for goodness sakes! Her book progresses from words to sentences to paragraphs, which was about halfway through and where I gave up on it as a bad job. I wasn't learning anything useful to me, and most of what she said was painfully self-evident. You'd have to be an idiot not to know it already if you're a prospective a writer.

he teaching method is to constantly refer us, the listeners in this case, back to classic novels of yesteryear, as though no modern novel has anything to tell us. I found this peculiar, but I have to confess I'm not a huge fan, nor a big respecter of the so-called classics. I don't get why schools insist upon inflicting these on children. It seems to me to be a self-fulfilling prophecy: that they're classics because the schools teach them and the schools teach them because they're classics.

Obviously it's a mite more complex than that, but even so, that pretty much sums it up. Very few of these 'classic' authors were loved in their lifetime. Like many artists, many of them died in poverty or near obscurity. It's only with the sorry patina of age that the stories they told became 'classics', and I have to wonder whether that was because they were so brilliantly written or more likely, simply because they evoke a bygone age and perhaps do it a tad better than some of their contemporaries. Just because a person does something a little better than someone else doesn't mean they're a paragon! The title genius and hero are squandered far too cheaply in this age of superlatives and soundbites, to the point where they've become practically meaningless.

The author's apparent position is that these antique authors agonized over every word and were heroically genius in their brevity and communications abilities, but to me their work seemed ordinary and no different form what modern authors are doing. My main beef is that all of her prognostication is done in hindsight after these works have been pored over so much by scholars who apparently have nothing better to do with their time, that the very words have been leached (or even leeched!) of all color and meaning. Worse, no-one ever asked the authors of these obsolete opera how they wrote or why they wrote in that way.

It occurs to me that if we could go back and ask them, they'd simply tell us that they wrote what they wrote and didn't sweat it; although they probably wouldn't use that exact phrase! I know some authors did and do agonize over every word, but they're morons. This is where the author's lack of insight shone so brightly. She seems to be laboring under the misapprehension that every writer wannabe out there wants to create clones of these 'classic' works, but few do. If you take a look at Wikipedia's list of best selling novels, very few of the writers Prose mentions are in it, at least not near the top. The ones who are up there are the ones who explicitly did not clone the classics.

I know there are many pretentious writers who desire to transmogrify themselves into wan duplicates of their idolized forbears, but most writers simply want to make a living through writing, and in this era you're not going to do that via writing classic literature. The way to accomplish that goal these days is to get a best seller. Even one best seller will set you up for life. Very few people want to write literature and those who do are doomed to make a poor living at best. Prose doesn't seem to grasp that.

All that most modern writers are interested in is writing cheap romance, paranormal romance, thrillers, whodunnits and YA. They don't care about great writing and neither do their readers. For better or for worse that's the way it is, and Prose teaching her readers and students to clone earlier authors isn't going to cut it, because it's not the people who clone the work of others who have the big success, it's the people who are willing to step out from the crowd and plow their own furrow who get the attention: people like JK Rowling and Suzanne Collins for example.

For this reason I cannot recommend this book. I don't think it serves any purpose. The only way to succeed is to familiarize yourself with the genre(s) you wish to write in, and then write, write, write and never give up!