(no subject)

[xaara]

I'm reading J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace right now. I rather like it so far; I'm not gripped by it, but I want to know what happens, and I'm willing enough to see it through. I've been having problems reading 'literary' novels recently, though, and I just figured out why.

It's the dialogue.

I am constantly annoyed by the dialogue.

It doesn't sound like people, and it distances me from the characters to the point where I'm no longer really interested in what's happening to them. I want to hear people saying things that don't make sense, interrupting each other, laughing at inappropriate junctures, using improper contractions and verb conjugations and sentence structure, repeating themselves, saying 'you know' and 'I mean,' mishearing one another, speaking in fragments, omitting personal pronouns.

I'm going to pull a line from the most recent SPN episode to illustrate my point, mostly because I have it in front of me as I'm writing this and am too lazy at the moment to track another example down. Anyway. Dean, at one point, says, "Listen, sister, that car didn't try to run you down by itself. Okay? I mean, I guess it did, technically, but, but the spirit can...forget it."

J. M. Coetzee would never write that line. Ever. Okay, so Dean's from Kansas, not Cape Town, and he's anything but literary. But he sounds like a person. He tries to explain something, picks the wrong phrase, interrupts himself, tries to correct himself, and then just gives up.

I don't know if I'm explaining this well. I've just been intensely frustrated by smooth, carefully crafted dialogue lately. It's not what life sounds like, and no matter how beautiful the prose, it doesn't reflect my world.

Comments

[xaara.livejournal.com]

It definitely is, and I respect many authors' choice not to attempt to make it sound "natural." It's a stylistic choice I vacillate on, but I tend to fall on the side of trying to represent colloquial speech as well as possible.