A Novel in the Trash

I am not the sort of person who would throw away a novel.

I generally save and savor books forever.  Supposing I could imagine not wanting to keep a book, the worst I can imagine doing is sending it on to a second-hand store.

However, when I finished a novel the other day and closed the back cover, I found myself doing just that.  I reached down and set it in the wastebasket.  Where it belonged.

I'm not sure where this book came from.  It was just there, in my stack of unread books, so I gave it a try.

It wasn't the language--although there were a few words I would never use, unless for some reason it was important for me to repeat someone else who used them.  It wasn't the two or three gratuitous sex scenes, although I generally disapprove of those being thrown in just for titilatory purposes.  Well, it was partly those things that made me think that my religious second-hand store would not appreciate the donation of that particular novel.

But, what really made me set the thing in the trash was that I could not think of any value anyone could ever get from reading it.

There was a plot and three sub-plots, sort of.  The plot seemed to be to get a rascal appointed to be the vice president of the United States.  The subplots had to do with his pending divorces and on-the-side romances, a conflict in a third-world country--boringly handled, and a serial killer on the loose.  None of these plots was satisfactorily resolved at the end of the book.

Oh, the VP was appointed, all right, but the whole book had been about how vacuous his sense of morality was, so there was little point in it.  He abandons his long-term wife and family.  He lies to the president about his affair, but the president, in the end, helps him with all this.  He uproots one woman and transplants her across the country, only to never see her again because he is already carrying on with the next one.  Depressing, really.  And the author's point didn't seem to be about how disturbing it is to have our elected officials act like idiots.  It seemed to be to portray this sort of irresponsible instant gratification as normal, desirable, even.

The main characters, the fictional president and his wife, were portrayed as robots, not human beings.  The president, with a pathetic name I would not call anyone over four months old, spent the whole book handling about twenty situations a minute with perfection.  His wife was supposedly the head of the CIA.  As if THAT would ever happen!  There was no human emotion in either one of them.

The purpose of the book really seemed to be for the middle-aged author to expound his worldview that women are only in the workplace to have sex with their bosses, and it isn't ever really sexual harassment, because the women invite it.  All the women in the book looked like Barbie dolls and behaved this way.  All the business trips involved the mistake of a suite with an interior sliding door between the rooms being booked instead of two rooms, and all of the women could be found on the other side of the doors in towels or bathrobes, having just showered in preparation for their bosses to summon them.

Women accosted the president in order to thrust his hands--against his will, of course--into their bosoms.

Most exasperating, I really believe this author believed he was treating his female characters fairly because he made them all "smart," "successful," and "gorgeous."

I just can't see how a book like that is going to help anybody.  This story had nothing uplifting about it.  There was no human struggle against evil, just a wholesale adopting of it.  There was no character development, just characters with no character.  There was no humor, nothing to learn, no reflection of real life. You feel nothing for anyone at all or anything that happens.  With the exception of disgust.

It wasn't even well-written, with some clever plot twist or any degree of craft.  There just weren't any more pages.

At the end of the book was a very pompous page or two about how you could TRY to contact the author (assuming, of course), that you were a rabid fan, but it would be better to contact this person for this and that person for that.  If you wanted him to speak, you could send your money here.  If you thought you saw an error, don't bother to tell him.

For a minute, I thought of contacting him to tell him what a waste of time his writing was, but decided not to waste my time.

Amazingly, this guy seems to have about forty other books out there, presumably just like this.  Thinking about the money he might have made makes me want to weep.  And when I think about how little effort it takes to read something really worthwhile--something human and uplifting, something with a story or based on at least plausible circumstances, it seems amazing the he has been published and paid and read.

We can do better than that.