A Terrible Boredom Is Born

Last night I was musing on my lack of interest in reading. Is it laziness? Alzheimer’s? Poverty? None of the above—it’s boredom! You gotta wade through beaucoup stinky prose swamps to get to the few tropic islands of lush text. Which is why I abandoned my latest read, Slaves in the Family by Edward Ball. In fairness to Eddie, he took on a heavy task—racism, slavery and their horrid legacy. But his prose stunk up the joint. After trudging through 100 pages or so, I decided to apply the Dakron Test: blindly riffle the tome, point and quote a few sentences. Here’s what I poked at on page 128:

“Michael was twenty-one, handsome, polite, tall, and mild-mannered. His eyes, like those of his mother, were clear and white. But while Carolyn Goodson's eyes were vulnerable, Michael's eyes showed determination. When he directed his eyes, it was as though Michael held out two white lights, unblinking, focused, adamant.”

So how is this prose bad? Mwah ha ha—in so many ways. Not even delving into our interviewer’s strangely erotic undertone, the basic flaws are 1) substituting the subjective for the factual, 2) using the wrong terms and 3) sloppy metaphors.

Let’s start with no. 1, declarative substitution. The first sentence starts out factual—Michael is 21. But he only seems handsome, polite, etc. Fussy? Nuh uh—all flaws flow from this first error. Bringing us to no. 2, wrong terms. “Goodson’s eyes were vulnerable…” No doubt! Mine hurt too when you poke them. Eyes can dilate or go cloudy—the rest is expression conveyed by facial muscles. But let’s accept switching the trope eyes for facial subtleties, and move on to no. 3—whoa! These anthropomorphic eyeballs are Disney worthy. They strike bullfighter poses (“show determination”), are from zombie statues (“white…unblinking”) or cavefish (“clear”) and prance around under glaucomaic klieg lights while being “directed” by some Speilberg in a floppy beret. Mr. Ball is interviewing a family of zombie actor cavefish statue eyeballs. Let’s edit him:

“Michael was 21 and seemed one polite hunk. His gaze held mine in hot stasis. He talked smack with his shy mom, his eyes flashing like razors at a Delta blues fest.”

Just as creepy sexy—but it don’t bore you.