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Letters from an Age of Reason, Nora Hague
I was looking forward to this novel. I'm sorry I can't recommend it. I'm going to make a short list of things I think are important for historical novelists to contemplate, points where this novel went wrong.
1. If you want to tell your story in epistolary fashion, stay true to the form.
Rarely do people recount whole conversations in letters using quotation marks and the conventions of fiction.
2. Letters are interesting because they provide a way to bring out the writer's personality in a way that limited third person POV narrative can't. If letters or journal entries are being juxtaposed, it's crucial that the two are strongly distinct from one another.
3. Pay attention to the details that make the character realistic within the setting. For example, in 1860, a person who has little money could hardly afford to send a thirty or forty page letter from New York to New Orleans.
4. If you find it absolutely necessary to write one character's dialogue in an approximation of the dialect they speak, be careful that the character doesn't come across as stupid or caricatured -- which demeans the author as well as the character. Letters from an Age of Reason provides an example of exactly how not to handle dialect in dialogue; I kept thinking of Prissy in Gone with the Wind, a high screeching: don know nuthin bout birthin no babies Miss Scarlet, dat's da trut!
5. A big, complex plot can be a great thing, or it can trip you up. Sometimes, less is more.
I didn't like this novel, in fact, I found a lot to dislike -- intensely dislike -- about it. If anyone would like to argue for its merits, please. I'd be interested.
December 1, 2005 09:44 AM
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Comments
I understand and agree with your points, not on this book (I've not read it), but how they can apply to any novel. The epistolary style seems to trip up a lot of writers, and I remember reading Arthur Phillips, The Egyptologist with the same feelings as it appears you felt with this book. I wanted to like it. I really did. I could accept the fact that whole dialogues were relayed with dialogue tags given the grandiose male personalities that comprised the two characters who did the majority of the writing (one was a private detective who was trying relive his glory days and the other was the Egyptologist of the title), but I could not, would not accept the ending. You cannot have a character write a letter/journal entry about an event that has yet to happen like it is happening! Especially when it's an event that leads to his death. Good freakin' lord, he's not clairvoyant!
Of course, I might have accepted even this if I had liked or identified with the characters a little bit more. I'm a firm believer that you don't have to like a main character, but I do believe that you need to have some interest in what happens to them (even if it is to see if they get their nasty downfall). What I got instead were two characters that left me ambivilant, and a couple of interesting characters that I would have loved to have learned more about, but who were so marginalized that even the few tantalizing clues weren't enough to make me spin my own plot ideas in my head.
Unlike your feelings with Hague's book, I don't feel any raging dislike, just disappointment because the story did have so much going for it. Because of this I actually recommend the book to bookclubs because the topics of discussion are endless (from character discussion to format issues), and it's interesting to hear what people thought worked and what didn't. It doesn't appear that Hague's novel falls in the same category. Good to know.
Oh, congrats by the way. Had several customers come in to pick up your newest paperback Donati release. It's also getting face time in the front of the store (whether that's due to a decision by my company or money from your publisher, I don't know), and seems to be doing well.
Posted by: Bookseller Chick at December 1, 2005 10:25 AM
BC: somehow I missed this comment of yours. Pardon me, please. Now I'm curious about The Egyptologist, if I would dislike it too or if it work for me on other levels. I'll try to get a hold of it.
And thanks for the good news re Fire Along the Sky.
Posted by: Sara Donati at December 6, 2005 05:20 PM