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randomsome1 (randomsome1) wrote,
@ 2008-05-23 22:48:00

Entry tags:

in ur novel eatin ur book

I'm about a third of the way into The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld and am not quite sure what I think of it. The gist of the book is this: Freud and Jung arrive in New York City (yes, it's NYC again) as one young heiress is murdered and another rendered speechless by an unknown assailant. Psychobabble follows, along with a ton of extraneous detail & offshoot stories as padding. With Elizabeth George I know that all the little side stories will come into play. Here, I'm getting every impression that we don't need to know the exact amount of money Ms. Hoity-toity spent on X ball where she invited Y number of guests to a hall that was Z feet long and decorated with this, that, and the other (in these shades).

(It's like the Tolkien of period writing, in a way.)

The characters are what's getting me the most, though. Jung is thus far absolutely batshit insane. Now, I know Jung was crazy--though maybe newageamazon & I just ran into the wrong professor and Jung wasn't as crazy as we may think--but there's talking about collective unconsciousnesses playing into dream interpretation and there's being a frothing out-of-control neurotic lying racist. And on the other hand, Freud is idolized by the ~~author~~ ~~main character~~ author's self-insert, and behaves like an absolute saint. Sort of.

See, I think real!Jung was crazy but I think real!Freud was worse. I read Freud's case history of Dora once and decided that for all his analytic writings he really knew jack shit about women. So when book!Freud conversationally drops a recognizable (later cited if not footnoted) block paragraph from the Dora file of how the character "Nora" reacted with disgust to being accosted/molested & propositioned by a friend of her father's because she was really just sexually frustrated and wanted to do him? And the author's insert character (who still hasn't had a physical description--besides visually appealing, of course) is only defending her because he himself is attracted to the girl? Fuck no. Freud didn't seem to believe that a young girl could be skeeved by being assaulted by someone. No, Freud apparently believed that young girls respond sexually to everyone, no matter the guy's age or approach--thus putting them on a lower level than animals, who can and do choose whether or not to mate with one male or another. And his later claim (in the book--I don't remember if this was in the file) that the girl told her father about the assault just to get back at the guy for not pressuring her into bed? Yeah, no. But it's okay, of course, because book!Freud knows everything.

So yeah, between the quotes, the pacing, what looks like an authorial insert (The author did a thesis on Freud and loves Shakespeare. The main character loves Shakespeare and idolizes Freud, and is thus far described only as strikingly handsome and especially well-moving.), Freud being both Stu!Freud and jackass!Freud, and what looks like a wholesale vilification of Jung, I'm not sure that I'm gonna make it through this thing--which is sad, because the premise was definitely an interesting one. :(

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threeoranges
2008-05-26 09:36 am UTC (link)

It must have been at least a year since I read THE INTERPRETATION OF MURDER: the only memories I have of it are the responses "Decent period detail and action sequences", "Yeah, this Jung's definitely a frootloop", "That is a wilful misreading of the 'To be or not to be' monologue" and "Wow, this book really doesn't like women."

Of course I should have made the connection between the book's latent misogyny and the fact the author fanboys Freud, but then my knowledge of both Freud and Jung is extremely shallow. As far as I understand it, Freud is the one who argues that if you make an error you unconsciously meant to sabotage yourself, whilst Jung is the one who takes coincidence and tries to argue that it constitutes "proof" of something higher. Seen in this highly simplistic way, Freud = "personal responsibility" and Jung = "magical thinking". Maybe that's why Freud's more in fashion nowadays?

But then again, I did know that Freud seems to regard women as universally "gagging for it", even if they clearly aren't. I'd better add both F & J to my holiday reading pile - I may find out I've misjudged both of them.

As for the rest of the book - well, I enjoyed the period detail and some of the twists came as a genuine surprise, but the ending left a slightly unpleasant taste and it wasn't something I wanted to keep as part of my permanent collection.

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randomsome1
2008-05-26 03:03 pm UTC (link)

I think people pay a little more attention to Freud because Freud eventually boils down to sex, scat, and the sekrit wish to diddle your own parents--and that first one there ranks pretty high in today's society. I'm not too well-versed in Jung, unfortunately, but I do know that they both are exceptionally dense reading and I wouldn't recommend sitting down with any of the collected works unless you have a pen and paper handy for note-taking.

I haven't gotten to the ending yet--I've been working on other stuff and the boy's been running a Supernatural marathon, so I've seen firsthand the dearth of decent female characters (where the vast majority are too stupid to live; otherwise there's been two strained female cops, a handful of demons [none of which are visually unattractive and all of which have the same speech pattern], one relic-seller that you just wanna kill twice over, and only one chickie from back in season 1 who picked up a weapon on her own and basically said "Fuck this, I'm gonna save mah peeps. How do I do it?").

BTW, I miss college. And Buffy. :(

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	randomsome1 2008-05-27 03:22 am UTC (link)
	And at about the halfway point, I stopped note-taking in the margins in favor of a dog-eared page with the big black label of "Fuck this shit." Sweet Jesus, this may be one of the most outright misogynistic things I've ever read. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

threeoranges
2008-05-27 07:21 am UTC (link)

Haha! I envy the person who next gets the book with your annotations :D

Please let me know if the new Elizabeth George is any good - I adored her early stuff, but am increasingly finding the later stuff either stupid or unreadable. (Also, if you want some more misogynist shit, try her IN THE PRESENCE OF THE ENEMY. I was always dimly aware that George was a conservative - maybe it was her jones for the British aristocracy which gave it away - but in PRESENCE there's a feminist and gay-hatin' undercurrent I found rather disturbing.)

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	randomsome1 2008-05-27 05:58 pm UTC (link)
	Hmm . . . I've only thus far finished What Came Before He Shot Her, and didn't find it to be antifeminist so much as detailing plain ol' human ugliness. Slowly. The other I might have to avoid entirely. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

threeoranges
2008-05-28 08:05 am UTC (link)

That was the one I found unreadable, though I admit that there's a personal reason for that.

In the opening chapter she describes an area of London - East Acton - and in particular a place called "Henchman Street". She describes it thus:

On this particular January day, though, Joel Campbell took note of none of these features of the journey upon which he was embarking. He was in the company of three other individuals, and he was cautiously anticipating a positive change in his life. Prior to this moment, East Acton and a small terrace house in Henchman Street had represented his circumstances: a grubby sitting room and grubbier kitchen below, three bedrooms above, and a patchy green at the front, round which the terrace of little homes horseshoed like a collection of war widows along three sides of a grave. It was a place that might have been pleasant fifty years ago, but successive generations of inhabitants had each put their mark upon it, and the current generation’s mark was given largely to rubbish on doorsteps, broken toys discarded on the single path that followed the U of the terrace, plastic snowmen and rotund Santas and reindeer toppling over upon the jutting roofs of bay windows from November till May, and a sinkhole of a mud puddle in the middle of the green that stood there eight months of the year, breeding insects like someone’s entomology project. Joel was glad to be leaving the place, even if leaving meant a long plane ride and a new life on an island very different from the only island he’d so far known.

“Ja-mai-ca.” His gran didn’t so much say as intone the word. Glory Campbell drew out the mai till it sounded the way a warm breeze felt, welcome and soft, with promise gilding its breath. “What you t’ink ‘bout dat, you t’ree kids? Ja-mai-ca.”

Good description of a place, but not a fair description of reality. I used to walk through Henchman Street on the way to a job and what I saw was an example of the *best* kind of council housing. It had a prime location (minutes from the Central Line Tube link into Marble Arch, Oxford Circus etc.), the houses were two-storey, fairly spacious, and I often saw kids playing happily on the patch of grass outside. (I certainly never noticed any "sinkhole of mud" there, and I used to walk past it, come rain or shine, for a period of about nine months in total.)

I'm not saying life in council housing is a picnic, but there are far FAR worse places one could live. This Joel, however, is turning up his nose at a FREE THREE-BEDROOM HOUSE in a prime location, simply because of a bit of litter, some out-of-date Christmas decorations and a few toys left behind by the kids. Such snobbery I could understand from the viewpoint of a millionaire - and one coming from America, where space is not at such a premium - but from a boy who's been brought up on benefits all his life? Such a kid would just be thankful he lived in a house where he could have his own bedroom, and in an area where he wasn't likely to get stabbed for no reason!

Instead, this kid is looking forward to going to Jamaica, scary crime capital of the Caribbean where he's going to have to deal with drug and knife crime on a far greater scale than anything in London?

WHAT?

Elizabeth George has been accused of not trying to get into the "British mindset" before this; however, this was the first novel where I actually noticed her making a mistake, and it proved a stumbling block that I just could not get over.

I do, however, recommend FOT THE SAKE OF ELENA or PLAYING FOR THE ASHES, which are terrific psychological explorations as well as decent mystery plots.

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randomsome1
2008-05-28 05:10 pm UTC (link)

Heh, I read that as him being a twelve year old boy (of dubious rationality) who's so hung up on getting to Jamaica that he's happy to turn his nose up at where he's living. Kinda like how Ness in later chapters nurses a teen-girl type fantasy where she's suddenly the head of the hatmaking outfit for being a natural and amazingly brilliant when it comes to creation. As for the setting problems: maybe George asked the wrong person or saw a picture of it in an off year?

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threeoranges
2008-05-31 08:03 pm UTC (link)

I do get your point about the boy being only twelve, but I don't see the narrator as being "in tune" with the way a twelve-year-old would think.

If she'd have had him "bored" with such a quiet area that would be fair enough, but instead we have words like "grubby" (as if a twelve-year-old boy is fanatically obsessive about cleanliness), the dismissive "three bedrooms up" (as if this isn't enough for Milord!) and finally the mention of an "entomology project". We in Britain don't do "science projects" or "science fairs" like the Americans do, and if you were to stop twenty random twelve-year-olds in the streets of London I'd be amazed if you found one who had even heard of the word "entomology", let alone be able to define it precisely.

Perhaps it was that crevasse between working-class character and middle-class narrator which led to me switching off? Or maybe it was the fact that she must have got off the Tube at East Acton, wandered around the corner, come across "Henchman Street" and decided that the name was just so portentous that she would use that location, and to buggery with the fact that it was actually quite a nice place to live.

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	randomsome1 2008-05-31 09:23 pm UTC (link)
	This is a good reason for me to make up a location. :P George also did poke the fourth wall a number of times during the book, so her shifting away from the proper perspective of the character didn't really blip on my radar. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

threeoranges
2008-05-31 10:30 pm UTC (link)

Well, you can use a real-life location all you want - just please be fair in your judgement of it! Portray it unfairly, or warp it to "fit" the theme of your story, and people who know it will distrust the rest of your book.

I have no problem with a strongly-characterized narrator, but George is crossing two culture barriers here - American/British, educated middle-class/uneducated working-class - and so IMHO she really should have taken extra care when using free indirect discourse. When the narrative can't possibly have come from the character himself, and yet is supposed to represent his thought processes, you're not doing it right.

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randomsome1
2008-06-01 05:47 pm UTC (link)

I know I'll get shit at some point or other for underground placement of coal seams, but there's enough variance in the local strata that I might be able to get away with it. Just because this particular one here was 200-some feet down doesn't mean that the one a few miles away wasn't about sixty, and that one north of here wasn't exposed/going into a hillside.

Now to reconsider my own poking of the fourth wall. :P

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	shikomekidomi 2008-06-01 04:43 am UTC (link)
	Ah, Freud. A man who took some trends noticed by dealing entirely with highly repressed upperclass Victorian people and then extrapolated things were even worse than he'd found and universal. Brilliant, in a lot of ways, but completely nuts, too. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	randomsome1 2008-06-01 05:37 pm UTC (link)
	I've found in his wording more than a few echoes of the Marquis de Sade, which does nothing to negate your last sentence there. (Reply to this) (Parent)