Stuff I've Been Reading, Part 3

Is it just me, or has fiction gotten weirder? I'm not talking about traditional sorts of science fiction or fantasy fiction. Nor am I talking about the recent popularity of books about ghosts or vampires or other sorts creatures that have a long tradition in literature. What I am talking about here is a recent trend in contemporary fiction towards the just plain weird.

In a previous post I believe I referred to two particular books as "weird," "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime" and "The Lovely Bones." Really, these books are only mildly weird. "Unusual" might be a better term, or "quirky." They have unconventional narrators, certainly. But the events of "Dog in the Nighttime," though seemingly implausible, are not beyond the realm of possibility. And "Lovely Bones" seems, so far, to be a straightforward ghost story.

Also in this category would be Audrey Niffenegger's "The Time Traveler's Wife" and "Her Fearful Symmetry" which are stories about time travel and ghosts, respectively, although fairly odd ones. I enjoyed reading both of Niffenegger's books and yet came away from each feeling vaguely unsatisfied. Perhaps it was because I wasn't wild about either of the protagonists. It's not that I expect (or even want) characters without weaknesses or flaws; I just find implausible the way Niffenegger's supporting characters react to her flawed hero and heroine. It is one thing to tolerate a difficult person. It is quite another thing to be so enamored of a difficult person that you will put up with all sorts of supernatural crap just to be with the him or her.

Getting slightly weirder, we have books like Michael Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay." The book is about comic books and comic book writers and, I guess for that reason, Chabon incorporates some comic-like elements into his mostly real-life story. However, I found these elements to be a distraction. I preferred his equally absurd "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" (although, to be fair, this might be because it is much shorter) up until its conclusion -- a rediculous International Zionist Conspiracy-type plot of the sort that I have no patience for whatsoever.

Moving on to weirdness of the off-the-charts, what-was-that-author-smoking-because-I-need-to-get-me-some-of-that variety are two books that I am almost at a complete loss to explain. The first is Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything is Illuminated." This book intersperses the protagonist's search for the person who saved the life of one of his relatives during the Holocaust, with a surreal history of an Eastern European village. I had a difficult time getting through the surreal passages (I may even have skipped some -- I can't remember and don't think it would have made any difference anyway) and came to the end of the book wondering why the author chose to bury a moving story of human frailty under all that absurdist garbage.

The second nominee for weirdest book I have ever read (I never read "The Metamorphosis" but it would probably be in the same category) is "The Raw Shark Texts" by Steven Hall. I am now going to summarize the plot and you are just going to have to take my word for it: A man wakes up with total amnesia and discovers that he is being hunted by a shark which is made out of words, but is still capable of literally killing him. There were elements of the story I liked and elements I didn't, but there is really not much more I can say about this book -- you just have to sort of go with it.