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The books of E. Nesbit were massively influential on me as a little kid, and, having gone back to The Enchanted Castle last year, they still hold up for the most part very well. There's a segment in The Enchanted Castle where Gerald figures out the mathematical logic to the changing powers of an invisibility ring, and I remember it striking me as having a massive, and deserved, confidence in the intelligence of the reader that many contemporary books for adults don't have. I have a feeling that a lot - by no means all - of adult literature aims for "voice" and authenticity over interest through complexity. I think that winds up being dichotomous, like, are you enjoying a book because it features themes and matter that you recognise and find interesting due to their gross and literal relation to the facts of your experience, or are you enjoying a book because it features themes and matter that would be interesting even to someone who was previously unfamiliar with them? Most narratives need both, but I feel like outside of fairly ambitious work, most fiction targeted specifically at adults tends to lean towards the former. It's comfort food that reaffirms a certain received truth about everyday life. Relatability is key, to the point where a plot is often secondary, arbitrary, and swift. A lot of it worships this weird cargo-cult naturalism that's actually a fairly fantastical entity in itself - naturalism as delivered by a TV drama, with characters trading snappy but recognisable aphorisms and never pausing, or saying something that the imagined Average Person wouldn't say, or using words that might be unfamiliar to the casual reader. This is called "good dialogue". In fact, outside of the more rarefied branches of literary fiction, complexity is often seen as an active deficit in a way that it isn't in many popular children's books. Instead, characters act and speak in the most mundane, believable ways possible, in the hope that the affair they're having or the ghoul who menaces them or their struggles with their children will "connect" to an audience for which the publishing market generally has vanishingly slim amounts of respect. Not that a lot of children's fiction isn't like that too. But I feel like...there's more respect there, somehow? It's less patronising. It often feels like children's authors are somewhat more aware of the risk of patronising their audience, and at least have some level of respect for children. You can tell when you're reading a James Herbert novel, for instance, that James Herbert thinks you have a room temperature IQ and is taking care to keep things simple for you, while barely hiding his contempt for your prurient hunger for zombies and monsters. Same deal with a lot of stuff in the romance, thriller, detective genres. Honestly though, it's not limited to genre. A lot of lit fic does a gentler version of the same thing. You wonder if authors are so worried about reaching an audience in a difficult market that they're intentionally trying to be ultra-approachable, to the ultimate detriment of the prose. This isn't really a fully developed idea. Just something I've been thinking about lately.
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Oct 11, 2019 15:16
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This could just be because I read The Survivor by Herbert, a truly execrable book, early this year and it made me so mad at the concept of reading that steam blew out of my ears. Recency bias and all.
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Oct 11, 2019 15:23
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Pachylad posted:Horrible Histories was my poo poo growing up; in hindsight being an Asian kid in an ex-British colony, Terry Deary was probably the best choice for a white British dude inculcating in me a healthy distrust of his own kind. I really enjoyed those too. They definitely taught me more about the Holocaust than my primary school saw fit to!
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Oct 11, 2019 16:29
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