The trouble with truths

I think I've figured out what it is about The Inheritance of Loss that's keeping me from a) reading it faster and b) enjoying it more fully. It's not something necessarily specific to this novel, because once I recognized it, I realized that I've seen this in a lot of more contemporary novels ... The story is built around axioms.

This is very troubling to me. Especially since, as I've said, it seems to be sort of a contemporary trend in fiction writing. Come to think of it, most of the books that I've strongly disliked lately have shared this same flaw.

Let me give you some examples; the following are quotes from a single 3-page selection of the novel:

"When you build on lies, you build strong and solid. It was the truth that undid you."

"A new language provided distance and kept the heart intact."

"The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind."

All of these statements are the type that force you to pause and think, "Yes, that's true." And then you underline them, dutifully, feeling that Desai has just told you something that is very important. And if you're me, you find yourself becoming bored by this pattern - a spurt of narrative, a nice little axiom to sum it up. An axiom, a spurt of narrative to prove its point. Etcetera. Each of the tiny little sections that the chapters are broken into, in fact, can be read as a sort of parable.

Now, I'm not saying that Kiran Desai's insights are not valid. They are, absolutely so; and if I were just given a list of all of these little "truths" that she's sprinkled throughout the book, they would provide much fascinating fodder for philosophical musings. The problem is that I don't think it is valid to use a fictional narrative as merely a vehical for adagia, as it were. It cheapens the literature. And it keeps you from truly being able to care about the trajectory of the story, because the point is not the story, after all - it's the morals one is supposed to draw from the story.

This is exactly the same problem I had with the movie "Crash" - it seemed like the moral came first ("Let's make a movie showing how racism affects people in Los Angeles!") and the story and character development came second, forced to contort into unnatural alignments in order to support the writers' agendas. I have nothing against the agenda of tolerance and acceptance - but I do have something against using an art form merely as a soapbox for political or moral beliefs. Art should speak to the quality of the human in all of us, and in order to do that, it must come from a place of subconscious truth. The place Kiran Desai is coming from is very conscious. Again, that is not to say that she has nothing important to impart to a readership - but I'm not sure that literature is the best way to do that.

Perhaps that is why I love Faulkner so much - there are certainly no easy adages to be found in his works. And, on the opposite end of the spectrum, the same holds true for Hemingway. He may have thought of the axioms in his head, but he purposefully omits them from his writing.

In any case, I'm still pushing through this book - maybe now that I know why it bothers me, I'll be able to finish it faster.