The Cynic Express(ed) 2.11: Pass the Pulp, Please

     I have spent the last couple of evenings poring over a couple of recent issues of River Styx, a little literary magazine here in St. Louis. I got them after I accidentally sent the Big River Association ten dollars to enter one of its annual poetry contests, and the consolation prize was a subscription. Now, I do not have anything against the River Styx in particular, even if one of the magazine’s two senior editors acts as the epitome of bad open mike denizen, using Sunday nights at Brandt’s to ramble on and on for an hour about how he knew Ginsberg and then leave immediately after his other Midwest micro-literati friends have finished reading. No, I forgive River Styx that, but I do have a bone to pick with most of the contents of River Styx and other intellectually postured conglomerations of soy ink and recycled wood. Literary fiction sucks.

     I think the title of the last of the River Styx I read about sums it up: Bad Sex and Dreams. I’m surprised that they didn’t bother to drop some adjective in to properly explain how those Dreams became broken, shattered, misshapen, or simply grew tattered over time. From my limited experience of literary fiction (only a Bachelor of Arts), the natty dreams account for at least half of the bad fiction in existentialistence.

     My fiction professor once said that there exists but one plot: the loss of illusion. How true. And how like an academic writer he put it. Pick up any Harper’s or Atlantic Monthly, and you’ll find the same incomprehensible mishmash of aging writers, professors, or editors populating greyed-out stories of failing marriages, business misdealings, and bad sex. Or attempts thereat. In the worst case scenario from my own days as a literary editor at the St. Louis Artesian comes a story in which an aging professor agrees to exchange sex for a grade to a tawdry vixen of a freshperson, only to be unable to perform properly at the moment of, er, the turning point in the story.

     Even worse than the true-to-life stories of banal existence among the pseudo-literati, some stories peek at the other side of stereotypes. Poor saps die on lonely railroad tracks while drunk. Stoned groups of angry white children take to the streets to rampage before turning in and then doing something subtly redeeming to flesh out their characters. Puh-leez.

     Somebody pass the pulp. I could use a couple good dashes of the Continental Op to spice my reading life. Some Raymond Chandler. Stories that set the world as a cold place are fine, but only where the good guy wins, or merely survives without compromising a set of ethics or himself. Perhaps a good copy of Ringworld or a fantasy novel, where a whole unexplored and awe-inspiring world of the unexplained and the gee-whiz exists, where the protagonist(s) will discover something to make it comprehensible (but I’ll pass on the "Our Universe is just the latest in God’s series of science experiments, and one doomed to fail at that." Thanks, Mr. Clarke and Mr. Lee, but I did not read well over a thousand pages of Rama over ten years for THAT).

     Because I read fiction for a place to escape the humdrum or the guttural of this world. I read fiction to experience the wonder and the thrill of mankind at his finest. If I want to read about depravity, I’ll go check out an in-depth study of the Ik tribe of East Africa, who harm children and old people for fun.

     No, I’ll stick with detective and science fiction novels and the far-too-infrequent Mark Helprin thrown in. I want to read stories which clip parts of lives and even lives into ascendant arcs, where the hero resolves a wrong or at least recognizes that life means something. I’d like to think that the loss of illusion means the gain of wisdom.

     But perhaps I am just cynical. I think some people write about life and mankind as they view themselves and want everyone else to be. For some people, the protagonist is a twerp. But for others, the ones I respect, the protagonist triumphs.