Can a writer's prose be TOO good?
Helen Humphries writes absolutely beautifully. Wild Dogs reminds me in many ways of Karen Connelly's memoir, Touch the Dragon. The imagery has unusual clarity. Both writers use metaphor and other devices with a sure hand. Both writers are poets.
Good poetry makes you want to savour the words. A poet can say in very few well chosen words what could not possibly be expressed better. All the flux has been burned off. You want to commit the words to memory, save them in your journal like precious jewels. You want to be able to come back to them and taste them over and over again. Most poems are small enough to allow us to hold those perfect phrases in our memories, or at least to be able to find them again easily.
However; when a poet writes a novel or memoir, it is hard to move ahead. I want to bathe in such prose, not swim through it. I don't want to move away to find out what happens next.
Is it possible to write too well, I wonder? When the reader focuses on the writing instead of the story, is that a problem?
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I'm always dissappointed by writers who have these lovely poetic starts to books then seem to get bogged down with writing the plot that they abandon it and get to it. For me its like they switched from bathing in words to doing the dishes! So, without having read this I'd say no, there's no such thing as too good a writer. My favorite book is actually nonfiction by a poet - Woman and Nature - The Roaring Inside Her by Susan Griffin. It was so hard getting through it the first time I deserved a medal BUT I go back over bits of it over and over again. It's so well (t)read I've had to replace it twice.
Now its time to get her latest - The Book of the Courtesans: A Catalogue of Their Virtues - a real history of famed 18th and 19th century courtesans - much better than fairy tales about hollywood hookers with hearts of gold :-)
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