Reading, Writing, and Ramblings

Yesterday I finished another of Sophie Kinsella's bestsellers in my ongoing effort to learn the secrets of comedy gold. Unfortunately, this time the only lessons I took away were negative ones.

The book of the week was The Undomestic Goddess, which has four and a half stars on Amazon.co.uk and glowing reviews from chick lit lovers everywhere. Two pages in, I hated it.

Here's the gist of the plot: Samantha Sweeting, a high-powered attorney for one of the biggest firms in London, loses a client's 50 million pounds and, subsequently, her job. Devastated, she takes a train to nowhere and ends up knocking on the door of a wealthy couple. The couple mistakes her for the new housekeeper and she lies her way into the job. Unfortunately, she doesn't know squat about cooking or cleaning. The handsome gardener finds out she's been ordering in those fabulous lunches, and he and his cottage-dwelling mother kindly keep her incompetence a secret and teach her the joys of domestic drudgery (complete with scenes of ironing lessons in which Mr. Handsome Gardener must disrobe for pedagogical purposes). Later Samantha finds out that she didn't lose the 50 million pounds; one of the partners of her firm had stolen it and covered up by framing her for a mistake she'd never made. To save face, the prestigious firm offers her a full partnership, but she declines and lives happily ever after with her muscular lover.

There are a few reasons I hated it. First, the theme song for The Nanny kept going through my head during the setup. Second, I don't find gross incompetence humorous or remotely adorable. Samantha Sweeting has always had maids at her beck and call, so at the age of 29, she has no idea how to operate a washing machine. She can't even make a sandwich and solves her problems by throwing money at them. And third, though I'm not a feminist by any means, the career-woman-finds-happiness-through-domesticity theme gets on my nerves. The book presents an either/or choice for the modern woman: either you give up your femininity and your soul to make money, or you live happily ever after ironing shirts and baking fresh cakes for your prince. I thought we stopped with that nonsense decades ago.

But the real reason that I hated the book was because, while Samantha is supposed to be a genius with an IQ of 158, top of her class and the youngest ever partner of Carter Spink, she doesn't do anything. Rather, she spends the entire 371 pages having things done to her.

One of the first lessons of Fiction Writing 101: "Protags Protag." The plot of this book was driven entirely by side characters, and Samantha was just carried along for the ride. First evil lawyers manipulate her into losing her job. Then she just happens to wander onto the doorstep of a couple who mistake her for the new housekeeper, and she goes along with it. The gardener solves her dilemmas by sweeping her away for homemaking lessons with his mother. She doesn't do anything for him in return, but sits back and waits for him fall for her while feeding him half-truths about her background.

When she gets her beloved job back, you would think she would wake up and take charge...but no. Her former bosses and the British media toss her around to serve their own interests, and she just wrings her hands and frets. In the end, she takes a baby step towards independent thought by publicly embarrassing all of her colleagues at a press conference. When someone asks her directly, Are you going to be a lawyer or not?, she announces her grand decision like this:

"I...don't know," I say in despair. "I just don't know."

In effect, she never makes a decision at all. She just runs away. Then she happens to stumble into the love of her life on the train platform and they ride off into the sunset.

Sweetie, who is much better versed in gender politics than I am, calls this sort of thing "female hypoagency." Samantha is primarily passive, and even when she's active, she's cowardly and ineffectual. The people who direct her fate are almost exclusively men: the evil bank-robbing partner Arthur, the sweet gardener Nathan, the steady ally Ketterson, and the jealous former love interest Guy. Even her "mistress," Trish, is portrayed without an ounce of femininity. She's crass and racist. She smokes, she shrieks, she has ridiculously bad taste in fashion, and she bosses her meek husband around. It's like Kinsella is shoving a caricature of Cinderella's stepmother in our faces and saying, "This is not how likeable women act. Likeable women are not powerful or outspoken. Likeable women are pretty and useless and spend much of their time on the verge of tears."

But hypoagency in fiction isn't exclusive to female characters. Harry Potter, for one, has very little agency at all. The Dursleys boss him around, then a giant swoops in on a flying motorcycle to carry him away, then the whole wizarding world tells him he's a hero and he learns to act the part. Throughout the series he's rescued from mortal danger by his classmates, by the mark of his mother's love, by his father's surviving friends, by his father's surviving enemies, by centaurs and Snowy Owls and gay 130-year-old headmasters. In most of the books, his heroics are secretly orchestrated by the devious Lord Voldemort or his followers. Even his weapons find him, not the other way around (his wands chose their master, the Sword of Godric Gryffindor pops out of a hat at his convenience, etc.).

There's one big difference between Harry Potter and Samantha Sweeting: Harry's adventures begin when he's 11 years old. Samantha Sweeting is 29. Children and adolescents don't have much autonomy in real life—their thoughts and actions are controlled by the peers and adults around them. So in young adult fiction, just the illusion of agency is enough. Bella Swan can sit around mooning over Edward while vampires and werewolves play tug-of-war over her baby, and teen girls will love it because they're not used to controlling their own lives anyway.

In real adult life, much of our behavior is dictated by other people, too. We make money to pay our landlords and utility companies. We dress up and work hard to please our bosses. We put on smiles to get along with our neighbors and we follow the law to avoid conflicts with the government. But in fiction, at least, adult characters should act like they have free will. They should do something.

Kinsella didn't have to make Samantha Sweeting a helpless princess who's never used a vacuum in her life. She didn't have to make her a spineless brat who runs away from her responsibilities and hides in a web of lies. There are many alternative scenarios with the same basic premise that could have worked.

• High-powered lawyer Samantha Sweeting is fired from a prestigious City firm. Suspecting some unsavory business behind her termination, she becomes a housekeeper for the family of a wealthy banking director to reveal his evil-doings and recover her job.
• After Samantha Sweeting loses her job at a prestigious City law firm, she moves to the country to set up an independent practice. But now that she's dropped from 500 pounds per hour to 5000 pounds per month, she needs to learn how to work the stove and fend for herself.
• After a lifetime of doing everything her high-achieving parents expect of her, Samantha Sweeting finally decides to live for herself. She quits from her stressful job at a prestigious City law firm and moves to the country to start afresh. Unfortunately, the only job opening around is for a head maid in the mansion of the village's wealthiest family. Samantha can barely spread butter on toast, but she sets out to prove her mother wrong and become the best damn housekeeper in the UK.

All of these would have given Kinsella the same material for laughs, but with a heroine who isn't a jellyfish on land. But then all of Kinsella's heroines are jellyfish, so I don't know what I was expecting. In Remember Me?, the heroine wakes up from an accident with the last three years of her memory erased, and she spends the book being pushed and pulled by the men who are apparently her husband and her secret lover. In Twenties Girl, the heroine is a bumbling rag doll for her dead great aunt, who's come back as a ghost to recover a family heirloom. I haven't read the Shopaholic series, but from the reviews I've seen they feature a heroine who lives for designer purses and romance and who makes the same stupid mistakes over and over.

Maybe these fictitious women are a reflection of Kinsella's own personality, but most likely she's using a formula that sells. From the 4 and 5-star reviews of her books, women like dumb, passive heroines. They like to pretend that all they have to do is look pretty and men will come running to set everything right. But plots and characters like these annoy the heck out of me.

On Thursday I had a telephone interview that will be sealed forever in my memory as one of the most mortifying experiences of my life, second only to that time in my freshman year of high school that I impulsively hugged my crush. He stood still and said, "Uh...Hi?" Then I ran away.

Because I was anxious to impress this employer, I asked to use the land line at my workplace. We started off on the wrong foot when the committee called my cell, so I had to cut them off at the beginning and give them the number for my office. It was only then, when I switched, that I realized that this phone was glued to my desk at a very awkward angle. Nobody has used it much before, including me, for more than answering wrong numbers and informing the last coworker to leave that, yes, I am still here, please don't turn on the alarm and send the police after me. So I'd never noticed that the phone is stuck fast to the far corner over the big filing drawers, so the only way to use it from my chair is to sprawl face-down over the desk, as if I'd dived heroically to answer it.

After they secured my permission to record the interview for an absent committee member, we started with the interview proper. I couldn't hear anyone very well because they were using a conference phone on speaker. Of course I couldn't see anyone, either, so when each of the five present introduced themselves in turn, I could only answer like my bewildered crush ten years ago: "Hi!" "Hi!" "Hi!" "Uh...Hi!" They asked me why I was interested in this particular position, and I babbled about having a background in the life sciences, and I did my MLS because I had an interest in academic librarianship, and this position offered a little of everything I liked to do: liaison work, research support, emerging technologies....

And then, dead silence.

"Uh...Hello?"

I looked at the phone in my hand. I hung it up. I waited. It rang and I picked it up again with profuse apologies. They laughed and moved on.

"Tell us about a time when a reference or teaching experience didn't go well, and how you could have improved the outcome."

So I droned about the times at CeDIR that people would call us up in tears because their car broke down or their heater stopped working and their disability payments weren't enough to cover the repairs, and how the only resources we had to offer were cobbled together by students who didn't know what they were doing and...

"Hello? Hello? Are you still there?"

God effing damn it. I put the phone down. It rang. I picked it up. Dead silence. "I think we should switch back to the cell," I said into the void. "Did you hear me? I don't know if you can hear me. Okay."

My cell rang. I answered with profuse apologies. "I'm so sorry. The land line was supposed to be more reliable." Polite laughter all around. I got in a bit about role playing with coworkers to prepare for tough reference situations. They moved on.

"Can you tell us the ways you would like to improve as a professional, and what science librarians in general should be doing in the next five years to meet the changing needs of their patrons?"

At this point, I was a mess. My mental composure had been shattered into tiny shards on the office floor. I was pacing in manic circles, subliminally aware of stopping only inches before ramming into the filing cabinet, the desks, my supervisor's prized potted plants. I babbled about how, "as a student and a young professional," I was limited to the lowest rung of the ladder and never had the opportunity to supervise people or to develop collections, and how you can study such things in the classroom but you can't master them until you gain experience in the workplace, but that's just me personally, and for science librarians in general...

"For science librarians...um...Well, I wouldn't know because I haven't been one yet."

Brilliant! My genius sparkles under pressure! (When I told Sweetie about the interview later, he said I'd shot myself in the foot with some of my earlier answers. When I got to this part, he changed his mind. "You didn't shoot yourself in the foot. You strapped yourself with C4 and walked onto a crowded street to blow yourself up.")

I usually talk too fast and too high (it's the curse of the short vocal chords), but in the final stretch I reached Alvin and the Chipmunks territory. I tried to save myself by talking about how you can't recognize the weaknesses of a field until you've worked in it for a while. I guess the default answer would be that we need to be more involved with web development and new technologies. I asked for more details about the position and grasped for brownie points by chattering about how refreshing it would be for all of the subject librarians to collaborate together in one building. I gushed that it's a wonderful idea for the job to begin in summer before the rush of the new school year, while the faculty have the time and inclination to get to know the new staff.

And then my memory gets a bit fuzzy, but I know the woman from HR said they'll invite the top candidates to fly in for on-site interviews in the first or second week of June.

I don't expect I'll be finding a ticket in the mail.

At least it's all over. The only remaining mortification is that the absent committee member will be listening to the whole recording, probably snorting espresso up his or her nose.

And I get to do it all again on Tuesday, when some nice people from Oklahoma will be ringing me up.

In the interest of making Kagemusha as zippy as I can, I've been scouring the shelves for popular comedic novels. As I mentioned in my post bemoaning the modern predilection for Writing Novels Like Screenplays, nobody likes to write comedy. And after a few days of browsing grocery stores and online booksellers and libraries, I've come to the depressing conclusion that the few people who do are bloody British.

Plenty of American comedians write memoirs and essays. Oh, do they love their essays. David Sedaris, Stephen Colbert, and Jon Stewart will top any list of the Best Humorous Books of 20XX. Some write comedic books for children and teens—Lemony Snicket, Dave Barry, Meg Cabot...but nobody writes them for adults. It's like writers and publishers think that as soon as people turn 18, their funny bones dissolve and the only things that will interest them for the rest of their lives are romance and violence.

There are only a few left willing to fight the good fight.

• Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy)
• Sophie Kinsella (the Shopaholic series)
• Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
• Terry Pratchett (Discworld)
• Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones' Diary)

And they're ALL bloody British.

There's nothing wrong with being British. They can't help it, the poor things. But reading London-based humor doesn't help me much here in Indiana, for several reasons.

Americans Like Different Characters

In stereotypes, Americans are crass and the Europeans refined. But when it comes to TV shows, books, and movies, it's often the other way around. An American hero is the Underdog, the Every Guy, the Girl Next Door. British and Australian characters are unapologetically ludicrous.

From the British fiction I've read lately, they like main characters that are immature and idiotic and who, over the course of the book, more or less stay that way (maybe with a few obligatory epiphanies). But on this side of the pond, we have a compulsion to redeem everyone.

You can see it clearly when BBC shows are remade in Hollywood. In The Office, for example, the original protagonist David Brent is pompous, bumbling, self-deluded and oblivious. When the show was ported over to the US, the producers erased his nastier traits and made Michael Scott a sympathetic buffoon. Michael is also self-deluded and oblivious, but he really cares about his company and his customers. His jokes are immature, but rarely mean. He gets his heart broken a few times. Jim spends a day in his shoes and finds out that, actually, being the boss is harder than it looks, and Michael's tactless behavior is just his misguided attempt to connect with his staff. English David is basically an arrogant prick; American Michael is a great salesman who was promoted to management before he was ready.

I've never met an American who likes Bridget Jones. They love the movie because they love to drool over Hugh Grant and Colin Firth—with their handsome faces and exotic accents—but they don't identify with the heroine. She's vain, vapid, obsessive, and sub-par all around. So are the main characters of Absolutely Fabulous, which ranks #17 in the British Film Institute's greatest TV programmes of all time. I read an epistolary novel series as a teenager about some sex-obsessed kid in London and it was pretty much the same. Couldn't stand him, didn't laugh once.

In short, British people seem to find deeply flawed characters side-splittingly funny. Americans laugh at flaws in short MADtv or SNL skits; but in print, we will tolerate them in tiny doses if and only if the character's visible core is solid gold.

Americans Have a Different Vocabulary

The thrust behind a lot of the comedy in British novels is not in situation or action, but in word choice. Frankly, most of the time not a whole lot goes on, and what little does isn't objectively funny. The humor comes from the way the authors express themselves. Take the opening to Kinsella's Twenties Girl:

The thing about lying to your parents is, you have to do it to protect them. It's for their own good. I mean, take my own parents. If they knew the unvarnished truth about my finances/love life/plumbing/council tax, they'd have instant heart attacks and the doctor would say, "Did anyone give them a terrible shock?" and it would all be my fault. Therefore, they have been in my flat for approximately ten minutes and already I have told them...seven lies. Not including all the ones about Mum's outfit.

I can't do that. We don't have flats or a council taxes or Mums, and no American doctor would ever ask about "a terrible shock." I don't even know what the unvarnished truth about a council tax could be. Are they very high? Is she not paying them?

A favorite trick of British comedians is to express vulgar ideas through antiquated, rambling, or affected language.

"Duz yer mum know yer out, Fats?" asked Nikki.

"Yeah, she brought me," said Fats calmly, into the greedy silence. "She's waiting outside in the car; she says I can have a quick shag before we go home for tea."

Or there's the reverse: using vulgar language when politeness is expected, like in this conversation between Lexi, the main character of Remember Me?, and Jon, the architect of some ritzy lofts for the very rich.

"So," I say politely. "How do you think of all these ideas? All these 'statements' or whatever they are."

Jon frowns thoughtfully and my heart sinks. I hope he's not going to come up with a load of pretentious stuff about his artistic genius. I'm really not in the mood.

"I just ask myself, what would a wanker like?" he says at last. "And I put it in."

The second trick I may be able to pull off, but we don't have real equivalents to "wankers," "tossers," or "cows." Our insults are much less pleasant sounding.

But the first trick is next to impossible. American English doesn't have a formal or hyper-polite version to make fun of. We just have "standard" language and the other flavors go downhill from there. If we want to sound high-brow and affected, we'll mimic a British accent. Badly.

Americans Have a Different Writing Style

In the above excerpts, you'll notice a lot of adverbs and dialogue tags. A lot of "wrylies," as parentheticals are called in screenplays. Fats jokes calmly, Lexi speaks politely, Jon frowns thoughtfully...the British sure love their adverbs.

But Americans are allergic to them. In particular, American editors are allergic to them, and writers who listen to those editors will skewer you gleefully for putting the letters "l" and "y" in succession more than once per book. In fact, I bet if J. K. Rowling had tried to submit the first Harry Potter manuscript to American publishers, none of them would have read beyond the first page. The Bridget Jones series would never have made it off of Helen Fielding's computer.

Friday 27 January

Had dream date in an intime little Genoan restaurant near Daniel's flat.

"Um...right. I'll get a taxi," I blurted awkwardly as we stood in the street afterwards. Then he lightly brushed a hair from my forehead, took my cheek in his hand and kissed me, urgently, desperately. After a while he held me hard against him and whispered throatily, "I don't think you'll be needing that taxi, Jones."

Egads. Five wrylies in one three-sentence paragraph I picked at random. A lot of sex, too.

Americans Are Puritans

From the popular novels I've seen, the funniest subject in the world to a Briton is sex. We have a lot of sex-related jokes, too, especially in gross-out comedies aimed at teens and college students, but the British are relentless. They love graphic descriptions of embarrassing sexual encounters. Rambling complaints about the mundane components of sexual encounters. Books for preteen girls called Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging that launch into bras and breasts on page one, sentence six.

Good for them for being open and comfortable with their bodies, but Americans aren't. Americans really, really aren't. We take a peek at sex and quickly avert our eyes. We dance around it. We poke at it shyly and giggle.

You might get the impression that we're comfortable with sex because there's lots of it on TV. But there isn't, actually. There's lots of hinting at sex on TV. There's lots of attractive people making out. Lots of men and women wearing underwear or bedsheets, and one presumes that they have recently engaged in hanky panky. But it's all vague, off-screen, and oh so mysterious and glamorous. The innocence-shattering ménage à trois scandal on Gossip Girl consisted of three hands-off kisses and a shot of everyone sleeping, fully covered.

Watching anything obviously erotic or talking about sex directly, without the glitz and hand-waving, is shameful and dirty. You don't write about it openly, unless you're cool with your work being labeled trash, smut, and/or a bad influence on the children. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret is banned in libraries across the country because there's talk of bras! And menstruation! And, dear Lord no, Spin the Bottle!

Americans Can't Make Fun of Other Countries

If there's anything the British might find funnier than sex, it's Americans. They love to rag on Americans—how dumb we are, how obnoxious we are, how much we enjoy going out to shoot Muslims on weekends. I think they can be prosecuted for high treason if they write about Americans without insulting us as a whole.

Here's a snippet from High Fidelity, after the main character spends the night with a singer from Texas.

"I don't care if you've got the blues," Marie says. "It's OK. And I wasn't fooled by you acting all cool about...what's her name?"

"Laura."

"Laura, right. But people are allowed to feel horny and fucked-up at the same time. You shouldn't feel embarrassed about it..."

I'm beginning to feel more embarrassed about the conversation than about anything we've just done. Horny? They really use that word? Jesus. All my life I've wanted to go to bed with an American, and now I have, and I'm beginning to see why people don't do it more often. Apart from Americans, that is, who probably go to bed with Americans all the time.

Hardy har har. But you know what it's called when Americans make fun of other cultures? Hate speech. Racism. Proof of just how self-centered and arrogant we are.

We can toe the line with Canada, Ireland, and maybe France, but anyone over the age of 25 who tries it looks pathetic (and, frankly, kids under 25 who try it look pathetic too). The only fair game for us is fellow Americans...and then only the white ones.

In short, if we want to write comedy, we have a lot fewer tools to use. We have to do it clean and straightforward, with likeable people and inoffensive material and sparse description. Or at least you do if you want to sell mainstream.