Getting angry at authors

[nancylebov]

There's a discussion in sartorias about reader contracts, and I thought I'd mention a couple of times when I felt an author had defaulted on me. Imho, the way you can tell the contract has been broken is because you're personally angry with the author--and not about their personal behavior or their possible effect on the world, but because there you were in a nice readerly trance, and Something Went Wrong.

One is that the book shall not slop over into the real world too nastily. I can remember reading Jerzy Kosinski's _The Painted Bird_ when I was a kid, and being edgy about being near members of my physically harmless family for an hour or so--just because they were human beings. I swore that I'd never read anything by Kosinski (seeing the movie of Being There doesn't count), and, while I don't take that sort of an oath seriously--not after decades, I haven't gotten around to any of his books since.

Another is _The Name of the Rose_. There's no way to go into any detail without spoilers, but let's just say that it's not a conventional mystery novel, and I was expecting one.

Now that I think about it, the Kosinski thing isn't exactly about the contract as usually conceived--that's about genre--it's more about what I expected from books generally.

When have you guys gotten really angry at an author for how a book affected you?

Comments

[supergee.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on Kosinski. The book of his that isn't bloodthirsty crap is Being There, which he probably plagiarized. I remember when someone retyped Steps and sent it around to the publishers, and thought it proved how bad they were when they all rejected it. (Apparently, none recognized it.) I think the publishing world finally got it right.

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

I remember when someone retyped Steps and sent it around to the publishers, and thought it proved how bad they were when they all rejected it.

Ah. So it wasn't only Casablanca that got this treatment.

But the movie deserved to have been made, however haphazardly it was created and came together. (What it did NOT deserve was colorization, but that's a whole other rant.)