October 29, 2018 - Waugh

Dear TNY,

“Waugh”.  I don’t know what to say.  It’s not terrible.  But it didn’t break my heart.  I didn’t mind that it was +7000 words.  But I also didn’t get totally into it.  I was whelmed.  But I wasn’t bothered.                

Let’s get some bad out of the way.  There were a shit-ton of characters, most of which had no defining characteristics.  I noted in the first paragraph that we were given three characters (I counted the woman) and four place names.  That’s seven proper names in a few sentences.  It’s just too much.  It’s too much for the brain to comprehend.  And a lot of it didn’t matter. The woman didn’t matter.  The rent.  Etc.  Doesn’t matter.  What I’m trying to say, I guess, is throughout the piece we have mostly cardboard people.  Now, I agree you need a host of characters to tell this story, but as we don’t get the space to know them like at least I’d want to, they just feel like props to propel the story forward.  So, in this case I’d rather see a novella with more characterization (not preferred) or better characterization with the space that is allotted right now but which does not do a great job defining.

The good.  It’s a lot of scene.  Lots of dialog.  The story moves forward in an unencumbered way.  I found myself cruising pretty easily without getting very upset at the author.  The pacing was good.  Bouncing between summary and scene.  The mechanics were all unremarkable upon read, which is remarkable because it should be noted that it wasn’t something that bothered me. 

I don’t really know why this story didn’t work for me.  Whether it was agenda or not on the author’s part, I’m not sure.  But it was done in such a way that I didn’t care.  I didn’t care about the outcome for any characters.  I didn’t care about the characters.  I guess that’s the beef, then, is that you have all these words and besides the obvious societal empathy that one can expect to feel about this story (and should), there are no feelings.  It’s not character-specific feeling, the feeling, which is how the best literature works.  This feels like it rides the coattails of a common story and/or subject matter and doesn’t come with it’s own heartbreak.  So it’s a complement to say that I’m not raging about how fucking terrible this agenda story is, but it’s also a let down to see another story that just doesn’t payoff.

Congrats, TNY.  I’m not upset.  But I will forget this story by next week.

Nick