Cheesy Books

So this weekend I managed to go through more than a book a day starting with a Pearl S. Buck novel about a quarter Chinese kid growing up in Vermont, The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett (good, but Bel Canto was better) and The Secret Life of Bees which everyone went on and on about but it seems like just a cheap and unbelievable version of To Kill a Mockingbird.

These books will all be easily and gratefully forgotten in a few years because the characters are fundamentally unbelievable and shallow. I don't even know why I read this stuff other than I have to read something and I get weirdly sucked in to finishing these books to see if they are going to get any better (See review of Ha Jin's War Trash--It didn't get any better for the record.)

So here's the thing. Nobody was ever motivated by just one thing unless they are crazy. If your character is going to be motivated by just one thing it should probably be something like revenge and not something like an inexplicable desire to lie (The Patron Saint of Liars) or an equally inexplicable desire to take your black nanny to a town your mother (who you accidentally shot and killed) may have visited in order to escape white racists who your nanny (again without reason) threw a spitoon at (which she wasn't even carrying until the moment she threw it). This is (and I'm not even kidding) the premise of the Secret Life of Bees.

And yet I'm sucked in. I think its the desire to see if anyone can redeem these godawful plots and these unbelievable characters. It never happens. If an author thinks that telling a really great whopper is enough to motivate someone for 20+ years that author is not going to be able to get her character out of the mess she created.

And here's another rant--If you, as an author, have chosen an interesting subject, you should try to live up to it. For example, Middlesex is about a hermaphrodite and yet I was bored. Same problem with the Virgin Suicides--teenage girls offing themselves right and left and yet I'm not entertained. Oh and the Confession of Max Tivoli. The man lives backwards and manages to seduce a woman three times while going from an old man to a young man and yet I came away with the impression that his real misfortune was to be born such a godawful whiner.

Geek Love is the one book I can think of that had a gimmick and is truly great. Can anyone think of another one?