This is a terrifying and very sad book. A husband and wife are in bed together one night when the husband wakes up to his wife shaking and not responding to him.
Things go downhill from there.
Michael Kimball, who wrote the excellent Dear Everybody, a novel written in the form of letters left behind by a man who commits suicide, uses his ear for speech to translate into text a book that finds power in simple sadness.
Take, for example, this portion towards the beginning:
I didn't want to lose my wife. I wanted to see my wife lying down in a hospital bed. I wanted to see my wife breathing again. I wanted to see her get up out of bed again. I wanted to see her get up out of our bed again. I wanted my wife to come back home and live there with me again.
Kimball has a really subtle style, a way of saying things that makes the reader really sympathize with the narrator.
To get picky:
I pulled her eyelids up, but her eyes didn't look back at me, and her eyelids closed up again when I let go of them.
A lot of writers would have left off with ..."but her eyes didn't look back, and her eyelids..." but Kimball is a writer who makes lots of little important choices that make his books great.
True to form, Kimball also experiments with the structure, interspersing his own memories of the deaths of his grandparents into the story at hand. I'm not really sure why...but something that would normally be impossible to pull off works, and I'm more interested in the fact THAT it works than HOW for the time being.
Great book, definitely one of Pete's Top of 2011.
Now, it has to be noted that there was, unfortunately, a dream sequence in this book. As prompted by a friend earlier in the week, I would like to take a moment to express how irritating I find dreams in works of art and why I think they don't belong there.
For starters, I don't believe that dreams have much meaning, or certainly not hidden meaning that we need to mine from deep within the shitty folds of our dumb brains. Most of my dreams are fairly pedestrian, involve reasonably familiar scenarios and characters, and don't really make for much exciting interpretation.
Example: Dream where I am spooning some girl from high school, then I get up to go to work.
Interpretation: Though I don't think about that person often, there she was. And in the dream I got up to do exactly what I do five out of every seven days, so it would be more unusual to me if I weren't going to work.
It's my guess that brief thought will give you all the context you need for 90% of your dreams, and the other ten percent can be chalked up to your brain just doing whatever the fuck it wants.
That said, I know that not everybody feels that way. Lord knows we've all hung out with some fool who had a dream that his grandma died, and then it turned out his grandma died. Unless you're in a really bad movie, the death was on accident and not to somehow make people believe the kid was a dream psychic, and I have to believe that this was random chance.
Math: if you dreamt that your grandmother died once every month, and on one of these nights she died, assuming that you are 27 years old, your dreams were correct .3% of the time, which is a pretty shitty average. If you do that same math a different way, dreaming something different every night for a year, one of those dreams would come true. Thinking about it that way, that you dreamt SOMETHING every night, it wouldn't be that much of a shock that one dream came true. Except that the brain is a pattern-seeking machine, and it has a tendency to really highlight the shit out of the times it's right and let go of the times it's wrong.
Therefore, some idiot has a dream that comes true once, and I have to hear about it constantly. Yet I don't call them every single day to ask them what the previous night's dreams held and to remind them that those didn't come true, and also I don't butt in to point out that even though the grandma death was prophesized, there was not a bengal tiger with bananas instead of claws involved as there was in the dream.
That's my feeling on real world dreams and why they aren't interesting, particularly. If you think I want to hear about your dreams, try this first: Start by telling me the most fucked-up dream you've ever had. If I'm interested in that, I might, MIGHT listen to some others. But start with the gold.
Back to books.
I want to put this question in your head: Why?
Why, in a story that is a complete fabrication, does there need to be a dream? A made up story within a made up story?
Every single thing on the page is made up, so why does there have to be something that appears EVEN MORE made up?
I have some common reasons this happens, patterns if you will:
-Dreams are a shortcut to expressing mood in a book without actually doing the heavy lifting of, I don't know, writing a book. Instead of using factors outside the character, or painting the character as exhibiting a certain mood, the writer can just say, "That night he dreamed of a black snake. It was swallowing him whole, and as the snake's mouth covered his own mouth and nose he stopped breathing and saw nothing."
-Dreams are a way of allowing a character to do something out of character or express a repressed feeling. The corporate drone eviscerating his boss and cooking the entrails in a skillet. That way, the character can do something awful, but we don't have to risk readers finding a strong dislike for a character. Because the last thing you want is for a character to evoke strong reactions.
-Dreams are a way for writers to feel like they can cut loose and get a little sloppy with their words. If it doesn't make sense, it's fine. It's a dream, it's not supposed to make sense. I really dislike that logic. It goes against the entire purpose of writing, which is to make someone understand something, whether it be an action or an emotion or whatever. But a sentence like, "He broke through the tallgrass walls and fell bellyfirst out of a thick, blue membrane of sleep and into a different world, a world where his feet were his feet but also part of everything else" is just annoying. It's like hearing someone describe, badly, what it's like to drop acid.
-Dreams are, in some of the more egregious cases, used to solve mysteries in the book. A detective-type will be looking something over for hours, and it’s only when he has a dream about the papers flying out the window and rearranging themselves on the ground that he figures out the code. That, my friends, is complete bullshit and you know it.
-Worst case scenario, the dream is put in front of the audience as reality, and it's only after the dream is over that we find out It Was All a Dream. This is a completely idiotic way to tell a story. First, how does your audience know to trust you? A real person would never say, "Here's what happened to me in real life yesterday" and the proceed to tell you a dream. It's a completely false presentation, and your audience should not trust you afterwards. Second, it undoes all your hard work. Famously, in Super Mario Bros. 2, the game ending shows Mario in bed and after he wakes up it turns out that the entire game, all those turtle shells and radishes and all that bullshit, was all a dream. THEN WHY THE FUCK CAN'T YOU JUST JUMP IN THE VERY FIRST PIT IN THE GAME, WAKE UP, AND GET THE EXACT SAME MOTHERFUCKING ENDING!?
Here, in another list-y format, are some more reasons I really hate the use of dreams in all formats of fiction:
-You never know where you stand with a dream because rarely does the dreaming character say anything about the dream in particular or express it fully to another character. Therefore, the reader now knows something that other characters may potentially know and may not, for all intents and purposes, exist at all in the fictional universe. If a fictional character cannot or does not remember a dream, it becomes a complete waste of time, no different than if a writer wrote a chapter and then followed it up with, "Just kidding, ignore that chapter, let's move on."
-On that same note, setting the tone with a dream is sort of like being a lawyer and asking a question that you know will be overruled. You didn't get the answer, but the jury can't just pretend they never heard it, and they can't help but speculate. A dream puts a seed in someone's brain, but it's not earned.
-I want to see characters do shit. I don't want them to dream about stabbing someone. I want them to stab someone. Or have sex with someone, or wreck their car, or do whatever the hell it is this book has been promising me so far. A novel is entirely an exercise in "What would happen if..." so you might as well make it worthwhile. There was a famous writer who suggested a technique that I remember as "Snake in a Drawer." The idea is that you throw something incongrous into the story and see what happens. Not something impossible, a pirate doesn't show up out of goddamn nowhere, but maybe someone opens a dresser drawer and there's a snake inside. Cue action. Take the snake out of the dream and put him in a drawer. Get out of my dreams, get into my car, damn it.
-I understand that dreams can be used to try and avoid cliche, using a dark dream instead of a dark sky, but the dreams end up falling back on cliche anyway. The language of dreams is less universal than the language of, um, language, and a dream has to be a lot more pre-explained and pre-loaded with what we already know in order to make any sense.
Okay, it's out of my system.
There's a time and a place for dreams, sure. Certain genres, certain types of books, can pull it off. I'm not a fan of hallucinations in any kind of media, but Fear & Loathing would not make a whole lot of sense played straight. Nightmare on Elm Street has to be the way it is, and it works because the distortion between dreams and reality is the whole point, not a throwaway scene. There's a scene in the terribly dated Empire Records where a character has a hallucination that he's at a GWAR concert being eaten alive by a giant plant, and it's funny because the character is watching himself on the TV and the audience sees his expression change as things go south.
In summation, dreams are a very specific tool, not a damn Swiss Army knife.
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