Never Let It End

Microsoft Word suddenly announced it was full, or wouldn't save anything anymore, or something. This was while I was typing in my journal, detailing some malaise that I naturally was seeing as the apotheosis of a downward trend and the last straw in a haystack of missteps. Suddenly I was cut off, which of course I interpreted as the universe telling me to stop whining and go enjoy the day. But I can't.

I feel sick. I think I was getting sick last night, which is one reason I couldn't enjoy the date* -- I went on a date -- as much as might have been possible. Dating is super-nervewracking, at least for me. So much anxiety surrounds every aspect of it it that no wonder I crash into illness as a response. (*Don't worry, he doesn't know I have a blog.)

For instance, I'd pretty much decided the evening should not end up at my apartment but I had to clean every speck of it in case I wavered from my avowed course -- but naturally I partially hoped we would end up at my apartment -- but I also knew if I left it filthy I'd be ensuring I didn't weaken in my idea that it would probably be a mistake.

So naturally I cleaned with no clear sense of purpose and a mounting terror.

Good times.

In other news, I just finished Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Isihiguro. Whew. What a load of codswollop. As everyone probably knows by now, it's about clones and it's written from the point of view of a clone. All I could think after plowing through 280 pages of blah, lax writing and clumsy foreshadowing devices, was: wow, I guess clones aren't good writers. Whaddaya expect? They're clones. But I still thought Ishiguro let himself off the hook with this conceit. He gets away with a lot of slack writing and the characters are flimsy and shadowy, though I'm sure a chorus of "They're supposed to be shadowy" will arise in response to this.

If you're going to have characters, why leave them uninteresting outlines? I get that the clones' world in the book was flat and poorly defined. They were secluded and no one told them what the real world was like so they live on some weird assumptions and treat each other with a bizarre combination of concern and lack of affect. I thought that was interesting. It could have been a lot more interesting if I knew who these clones were. Even clones have a few characteristics, don't they? It comes out that two of the girl clones are highly sexed. You learn about one of them early on, one of them later. But Ishiguro never gives you the slightest whiff of sexual urgency. The clones just report on needing to have it, sometimes really bad. That's what I mean -- the story comes mostly through reportage. Couldn't you have a few scenes that convey the interior world of a clone, in all its limitedness and strangeness? What's it like for a clone to have sex?

I can hear everyone yelling at me: It's supposed to be mysterious! You're asking for the regular demands of genre fiction!

Someone once said that to me and I was stung to the core.

Why can't criticisms of an artwork have validity if they're connected to conventional needs for understanding someone's person-hood (or if they aren't a person, the specific quality of their experience)? I'm happy to let that go if there's a great style experiment going on, but there wasn't here -- the weak writing bothered me more than anything. Or I'm happy to let it go if there's some other energy on hand. But if the point of the book is a love triangle and there seems to be a suggestion the reader should care about the three involved, how can you skate by characterization like you're writing the day's menu for a cafeteria lunch?

It feels like Ishiguro tossed this one off in about two weeks, ran his first draft by his publisher and was startled when they said "We love it, we want it just as is!" "Really? Er, well... " (that will save me several years' work) "okay."

That's what I imagine happened. The world rhapsodized about this book. I can't understand it.