Contrary

I am a fan of The New Yorker's lead literary critic James Wood.  A review of his put me on to Geoff Dyer's "Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi",  a novel I enjoyed.  I also thought highly of Alan Hollinghurst's "The Line of Beauty".  But in The New Yorker of October 17th, 2011 Woods commends Hollinghurst for just the sort of prose that I complained about in my post here of September 17. 

"In his second novel, The Folding Star" (1994), Hollinghurst described the experience of watching the Wimbledon tennis tournament on television, on a warm summer's day, with the windows open. Occasionally, a plane could be heard outside: "the sonic wallow of a plane distancing in slow gusts above." Again, the power flows from nouns and adjectives placed in unusual combinations—the slight paradox of "slow gusts" (a gust is usually rapid) and the almost onomatopoeic "sonic wallow," which truly slows the sentence down."

Well, "slow gusts" doesn't work for me precisely because it doesn't make sense.  And "sonic wallow" surely does "slow the sentence down", but I believe it is because of the hiccup it induces in the normal process of comprehension.  It is to me a whole bunch of writing … and it is some of the most lauded of our time so my distaste for it puts me in a tiny minority.

Ed and Andrew in Venice

Something else now, some more grousing and complaining.  Readers today seem to love characters whose inner lives are in constant view, who are in an almost continual state of introspection and self reflection.  These characters study their own actions rather than responding, as I believe we mostly do, by reflex and rote.  I am up every night at 3 am for a good hour of painful and mostly fruitless rumination and never regard myself and revisit things to nearly the degree most characters I read these days do.  Characters don't usually have enough "present" for me.

I have the sensation of being led, by hand, as one would a child when I'm told, rather than left to determine for myself, what motivates a character's actions.

Again I believe this puts me at odds with most readers out there.

It's the same for wine, if I'm led by the hand, I don't enjoy it so much.  I've learned that if it scores highly with one of the review sites that "score" wines it will be too obvious for me.