Unthrilled
I’ve realized in the past week or so that I’m really tired of thrillers.
This is a weird place for me to be, as somebody who has at various points in her life relished the work of Martin Cruz Smith, Dennis Lehane, Val McDermid, Daniel Silva, and Patricia Cornwell (among others). But Scott and I were watching the British TV show Bodies, which is thriller to the core, and while I recognize that it is excellent—well-written, well-acted, visually striking, narratively coherent (with the exception of the weird sting at the end, which I guess is a sequel hook but just left me completely cold)—I found it really hard to maintain my focus on it.
And in my own work, I’m discovering that I don’t want to write tightly plotted nailbiters currently, which is odd because that’s most of my SF output up through the Jacob’s Ladder books, and there are thriller aspects to Karen Memory and the White Space books and the Eternal Sky books—but something a little more contemplative and straightforward.
Maybe I’m just tired of being tense all the time.
The world is a scary place, and has been pretty unrelievedly scary for Some Time Now, and possibly many of us need a break, need art to be a refuge for a while. (I also know people, like my husband, who are chewing through horror novels at a stunning pace of late, so other kinds of art-as-refuge definitely exist.)
The world itself seems pretty grimdark right now, and possibly when that happens art needs to remind people that it is possible to get through the horrors of the day and keep a part of your soul. (Just as during those times when the world seems less horrible in any given place, it might be important for art to remind us that there are places where that is not true.)
I guess what I’m saying is that it’s always fashionable to deprecate this or that—to throw around allegations that certain works of art are too dark, or too cozy, or whatever. But the truth is we need both noir and clair (to use Katherine Addison’s descriptive dichotomy, which I like better than just about any others) stories. And we need works of art that straddle the gap and play with the tropes of both aspects or elements or if you prefer, trajectories of literature.
There’s a tendency to ascribe greater “literary value” (whatever that is) to works of art on the “grimmer” end of the spectrum, because we are very serious readers/viewers/etc who take ourselves very seriously, and I think that’s a mistake. Is The Wire intrinsically a “better” piece of art than The Good Place, say, because one piece posits that people can change for the better in the face of an unfair system and the other posits that the unfair system will always make the people who live under it into monsters?
Anyway, that’s what I’m thinking about on this rainy December morning when it’s too cold and wet to go to the barn. What have you been musing about lately?
Best,
Bear