Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This book is a pretty detailed biography of Degas, one of the founders and/or inspirations for the Impressionist movement in France, and a number of full color reproductions of his work. He, like Remington among my recent art reading, did not live a life of penury. Instead, he was pretty comfortably comported with a banker father (who proved to be less successful than thought). Degas travelled abroad and studied art and achieved enough success that he could exhibit with the Impressionists at no real risk to himself. Apparently, showing with that riff raff instead of at the Salon was quite a statement.

At any rate, Degas’s work with the human form falls into my wheelhouse of Impressionist appreciation. As you might recollect, I prefer Impressionism to include human figures instead of just landscape. Degas also worked with sculpture and wrote sonnets, so what’s not to like about the guy?

I think I’m reaching a scientific breakthrough on these books. I liked the first, where Odd Thomas interacted with a lot of people. I didn’t like the second, where Odd was on his own thinking to himself as much. I liked third, where Odd interacts with lots of people, more than I liked the second. Now this one, the fourth, and Odd spends a lot of time wandering in the fog on his own being a bit of an action hero, and…. Well, if you were taking a standardized quiz, you would best fill in the circle for “He didn’t like it much.”

In this book, Odd Thomas is on a seashore town trying to prevent an apocalyptic vision from occurring. It somehow involves a cryptic mother-to-be who seems wiser than her years and seems to know a lot about Odd Thomas. And it involves Odd wandering around in the thick fog of the seaside town trying to dodge corrupt cops and to prevent the aforementioned apocalypse.

And he does, of course, almost as a matter of course. He seems to be in no real jeopardy as the story progresses, even as a woman mystically drawn to people in trouble appears out of the fog to give Odd a gun so he can be an action hero for a bit. Then the book ends as Odd and the cryptic mother-to-be head to parts unknown as he’s pledged to defend her with his life. Because he does. Never mind, I don’t get it either.

I snuck a look at the Wikipedia entry for the series, and I see Koontz plans a couple more books and has a graphic novel or two in the series already as well as a Web series going on. Ah, I see. That would explain a bit of it, then. The plotting and depth of the book sort of match what you would get in a graphic novel, but with more Odd Thomas interior monologue to fill it out. Not quite up to snuff. And this book ends kind of in the middle of a larger story, unlike the others, which detracts from it. I didn’t want to read a comic book without pictures.

I hope the other books in the series pick it back up.

Well, there it is. A novel about QA. Well, no, strike that, it’s a literary novel set in software development in the 1980s where a software defect is the MacGuffin and one of the main characters is a software tester.

Not by choice, oh, no. You can tell you’re reading a LITERARY book because the main character is clear to state that she has a doctorate in linguistics and only ends up working as a software tester when her academic career peters out. This is how you direct a book to an audience that does not work in the field the book covers, by saying ATTENTION! This character is the fish out of water and will explain to you the things you need to know because this character is just like you (in the field of academics or whoever reads Literary novels) except they work somewhere exotic (software development in the 1980s).

The book, as I mentioned, takes place at a database developer in 1984. They’re building a database from the ground up, including a GUI front end written from scratch that uses a mouse and everything. The main character, aforementioned, finds a defect that crashes the system, but is hard to replicate and appears to happen randomly, but usually in big demos. The book bounces back and forth between a first person double-effect narrator (since the story is told from present day ca. 2000ish after the dot.com bubble bursts, spurred when the narrator sees the one of the old screens still in use) and a limited omniscient narrator peering into the point of view of the developer to whom the defect is assigned.

The defect itself is a MacGuffin since the book deals mostly with the break-up of the tester’s and the developer’s personal relationship and the breakdown of the developer as he doesn’t think he’s a good developer and struggles to find this bug. That’s pretty much it. Enough technospeak and actual code and UNIX commands thrown into the mix, kind of like you’d find Hindi interspersed through a Kipling work to add authenticity. The tester finds self-actualization or empowerment by learning to code. The developer abruptly hangs himself, and even that did not cheer me. Uh, retroactive spoiler alert.

I didn’t care for it much, either for the plot nor the technical aptitude. The main characters are pathetic; I didn’t like either of them. The secondary characters are very, very stock and cardboard. The other testers are, essentially, the boss who is tough and fair minded and the other one whose dialogue mostly consists of her character tic of saying, “Meep.” The developers are mostly interchangeable except for their specialties, told to us of course. And I don’t know what the point of the frame story is, frankly. To show us the pathetic main character becomes rich but remains pathetic? Or to allow someone to feasibly set a book in 1984 when it’s written in 2002?

The best QA fiction is definitely genre fiction, mainly a thriller. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been written.