Post 173

I picked up Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman from the Provo library before heading home for the holidays. I was intrigued by the book's subtitle ("A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary"), and when I saw that William Safire called it the "linguistic detective story of the decade," I figured I couldn't go wrong. But it's that darn voice thing again, you know? This is a fascinating account of modern British history, but I just don't like the way Winchester writes.

Some examples:

In talking about the sacrifices of some Connecticut soldiers in the Civil War, Winchester writes, "The world, President Lincoln was to say six months later when he consecrated the land as a memorial to the fallen, could never forget what they had done there." Wow. Way to break up a simple and very direct quote with an unnecessarily lengthy reporting clause. (Page 51, btw)

A couple pages late (53), Winchester gives this lengthy editorial paragraph:

"Given what we now know about the setting and the circumstance of his first encounter with war, it does seem at least reasonable and credible to suppose that his madness--latent, hovering in the background--was triggered at that time. Something specific seems to have happened in Orange County, Virginia, early in May 1864, during the two days of the astonishingly bloody encounter that has since come to be called the Battle of Wilderness. It was a fight to test the sanest of men: Some of the occurrences of those two days were utterly beyond human imagination."

I dunno. This just sounds like a chintzy, "Cower in fear, O reader, for the horrors our hero is about to face far surpass what he has hitherto known." Yeah, yeah. How 'bout we just move on with the story, huh? Don't tell me that you're about to tell me something really great--just tell me!

Also, this guy really loves dashes. I mean, I like dashes a lot, but look at this from page 55:

"The fighting therefore was conducted not with artillery--which couldn't see--nor with cavalry--which couldn't ride. It had to be conducted by infantrymen with muskets--their guns charged with the dreadful flesh-tearing minie ball, a newfangled kind of bullet that was expanded by a powder charge in its base and inflicted huge, unsightly wounds--or hand-to-hand, with bayonets and sabers. And with the heat and smoke of battle came yet another terror--fire."

I dunno. I'll probably finish the book because it's short and I'm on vacation and I wanna know how this story unfolds, but I really don't like the way this guy writes.

This has been a problem for me lately with the non-fiction I've been looking at. During Thanksgiving, I picked up Theric's copy of Hooligan by Douglas Thayer, and I was so annoyed by the way he dropped his verbs that I had to put it down (unfortunately, I didn't take note of any examples of that, so I can't really tell you what I mean, but I remember thinking, "Dude, who do you think you are, Michel Thaler?"). A week or two before that, I picked up Prozac Diary by Lauren Slater because I had heard such good things about her engaging and distinctive voice, but here I ran into the opposite problem because, even though I did find her writing fairly engrossing, the subject matter was a bit disturbing to me, so I walked away from it too.

*sigh* What's a poor boy to do?