What Was Missed in the Frenzy About American Dirt

A recent Persuasion opinion piece titled “Beware of Books” reminded me of the national uproar that was swirling around American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins before the pandemic. It aroused so much fury, it’s surprising that Congress didn’t launch an investigation, or that our 45th president didn’t try moving some Pentagon funds to build a wall around the book.

Its part-Hispanic author was pilloried far and wide for many things:  ignorance, stereotyping, shallowness, whitewashing, appropriation, trauma porn, inaccuracy and saviorism. What seemed to infuriate some of her detractors most was Oprah Book Clubism, making-a-lot-of-moneyism, and movie dealism.

How dare this literary imposter tread on sacred Mexican/Mexican-American ground when apparently only someone of that ethnicity could handle the subject matter? Didn’t she realize that her book must represent the entire rich reality of Mexican culture, not just some sordid aspects of it?

There’s apparently a Geneva Literary Convention stipulating restrictions like these that I must have missed while I was publishing and teaching over the last few decades. Some of the strongest protests attacked her for daring to make money, lots of money, when there are apparently so many more deserving Latinx authors who were being ignored by publishers and readers and should be doing better. What a selfish woman….  A seven-figure advance?  Outrageous! 

Cummins was even vilified for what she said in her Acknowledgments, which must be a first. In a slash-and-burn review loaded with relentless invective, writer Myriam Gurbo scored Cummins’ gratitude:  “In Dirt’s acknowledgements, Cummins announces her ignorance by thanking people for ‘patiently teaching me things about Mexico.’ She lists writers ‘you should read if you want to learn more about Mexico’ and lists a slew of authors.” I suppose the book’s type font was okay.

Memoirist Marcelo Hernandez Castillo even attributed super powers to the American Dirt author. As he put it, “The problem is the gross bastardization of the subject and the erasing of others who have written about this and are writing about it.”  Imagine one author doing all that with one best seller.

I’ve been a published author for a long time and guess what? The world of publishing is wildly unfair and complaints about who does well and who doesn’t reek of jealousy and childishness. Books have their own karma, and grousing about how a certain book hits a cultural sweet spot while others languish is a total waste of time. Likewise besieging an author because she happened to write a popular or noteworthy book at the right time.

Let’s not forget that before the dirt hit the fan, the book won extraordinary pre-publication praise from some major American authors who seemed to agree with the publisher’s claim that “it is one of the most important books for our times.”  Stephen King hailed it as “extraordinary: a perfect balancing act with terror on one side and love on the other. I defy anyone to read the first seven pages of this book and not finish it. The prose is immaculate, and the story never lets up.”

Ann Patchett opined that “American Dirt is both a moral compass and a riveting read. I couldn’t put it down. I’ll never stop thinking about it.”  Tracy Chevalier advised that the novel was “essential reading for our time.” Latina author Sandra Cisneros was adulatory: “This book is not simply the great American novel; it’s the great novel of las Americas. It’s the great world novel! This is the international story of our times…a masterful work of great spiritual power.”  John Grisham got very personal in his praise: “I strive to write page-turners because I love to read them, and it’s been a long time since I turned pages as fast as I did with American Dirt. Its plot is tight, smart, and unpredictable. Its message is important and timely…It is rich in authenticity.”

Well, all the sound and fury from the nay-sayers made me have to sample the book on Amazon, and I confess that I gave up at the end of the first chapter. The writing bugged me in various ways, partly because it seemed too sophisticated in describing what a kid was feeling. But what truly turned me off were the closing lines after a scene of major gunfire:

“Outside the window he hears Mama’s tentative footsteps, the soft scuff of her shoe through the remnants of something broken. A solitary gasp, too windy to be called a sob. Then a quickening of sound as she crosses the patio with purpose, depresses the keys on her phone.”

This is truly a hot mess. How does the kid know that the steps are tentative? What are the remnants of something broken? Is that poetic or a reference to objects of some kind? Bodies? Something else? And why would she be scuffing through them, why wouldn’t she avoid them? How can he possibly know that his mother is crossing “with purpose”? And finally, if he’s inside, how can he see her depressing the keys of her phone?  Is he some kind of superhero?

Sloppy point of view kills a book for me because I lose faith in the author’s ability to tell a story deftly and clearly. In the many years I reviewed books for the Detroit Free Press, the Washington Post and half a dozen other newspapers, magazines, and radio stations, I learned to trust those warning signs. Maybe a novel like that gets better, but I’d rather not continue when a novel raises serious doubts in the very first chapter.  Sorry, Mr. King.

The uproar over Cummins’ so-called lack of authenticity and every other publishing sin she apparently committed drowned out possible complaints about the prose in American Dirt. And for that I blame the author’s use of the present tense which as a reviewer I’ve seen hypnotizes far too many readers and reviewers.  They seem to end up believing that the book they have in their hands is important and deep, perhaps even a cultural milestone.

Of course readers like those never got to hear this leaden prose in person because Cummins’ 40-stop book tour was cancelled. As quoted in the New York Times, the publisher cited the cancellation was due to “specific threats to booksellers and the author [and] we believe there exists real peril to their safety.”

Lev Raphael is the author of 27 books in genres from mystery to memoir.

Why I’ve Been Publishing Academic Satire Long Before It Was Discovered by Netflix

In my academic mystery series, I exiled professors to basement offices well before The Chair became a series starring Sandra Oh.  I’ve seen much worse behavior and it’s inspired my fictional English department since the 90s.  The New York Times Book Review has noted that “The Borgias would not be bored at the State University of Michigan, that snake pit of academic politics.”

Of course they wouldn’t.  Academia  has the egomania of professional sports; the hypocrisy of politics; the cruelty of big business; and the inhumanity of organized crime.

But fans sometimes ask me if academia is really that bad.  Are professors that selfish, backbiting, and ungenerous?  Yes, they can be. Academic culture from school to school has quirks and even idiocies that make great material for satire (and crime).  Sometimes the behavior is egregious, sometimes it’s just ridiculous. Either way, it’s great fodder for fiction.

Here’s a case in point.  At one private college where I read from one of my most successful books, I wasn’t brought in by English or Creative Writing faculty, but by a different department.

I love readings.  I have a theater background, years of experience on radio, and I’ve done hundreds of readings on three continents. I’ve also taught workshops for writers on how to do readings; they require practice, art, and planning.

Only four people turned up for this particular campus reading, and the disappointed coordinator explained why.  Whenever she brought in a speaker who writing students would naturally be interested in, English and Creative Writing professors consistently failed to do anything to promote the reading.  They wouldn’t be co-sponsors, didn’t encourage their students to show up, and basically boycotted the event.  Why?  Territoriality.  Apparently they felt that  they’re the only ones who should be inviting authors to campus.

It made me laugh, because it seemed so typical of academic pettiness.  But it also made me sad because the writing students might have learned something and enjoyed themselves.

I never obsess about  numbers when I do a reading: 4 or 400,  the audience deserves my best, and that’s what I gave them at this college.  Too bad the small-minded English Department and its writing professors don’t do the same, don’t really care enough about their own students to point them towards opportunities right there on their own little campus.  It makes you wonder how else they may be giving students less than they deserve as they jealously defend what think is their turf and nobody else’s.

Lev Raphael’s latest academic mystery is Department of Death.  He mentors and coaches writers as well as edits manuscripts in all genres at writewithoutborders.com.

Marjorie Taylor Greene Has Company Distorting the Holocaust

Marjorie Taylor Greene is at it again, comparing mask mandates in the pandemic to being a Jew in Germany headed off to the gas chambers.  I wonder if her dismal understanding of the Holocaust is based on reading bad novels like Kate Breslin’s For Such a Time which features a bizarre romance between a Nazi and his Jewish prisoner.  Breslin’s attempts to root the book in the Holocaust are clumsy at best and her knowledge of Judaism and Jewish culture is way off.  The book’s editor also seems to have been AWOL.

Examples abound.  Why does she use the word Hakenkreuz rather than Swastika?  The latter word is one most readers would be familiar with.  Hakenkreuz is a feeble attempt to make the book feel historically accurate.  So is using Sturmabteilung rather than SA or Brownshirts.  Both of those are much more familiar to readers of historical novels or thrillers set in Nazi Germany–and more understandable.

Why field the obscure word Gänsebraten when “roast goose” would do just as well?  Surely anyone picking up this book will understand after the first few pages that it’s set in Germany.  Breslin doesn’t need to keep reminding us, as when she substitutes the word Kaffee for coffee over half a dozen times. But Kaffee isn’t italicized, which it should be since it’s in a foreign language.  Page after page, you feel she’s just overdoing it and the publisher is careless and clueless.

That’s unfortunate, given Breslin’s weak grasp of German and Germany’s history with Jews.  Breslin’s heroine is addressed as “Jude.”  That’s the masculine for Jew in German, not the feminine, which is Jüdin.  But more egregious than that, the Nazis had many terms of abuse for Jews, and simply calling her a Jew is not pejorative enough–given the period.

Breslin’s understanding of Jewish culture and religion is also grossly off-base.  In a glossary at the book’s end, she defines a yarmulke as a “prayer cap.”  No it isn’t.  It’s a skullcap that’s not just worn at prayers by observant Jews.  More incorrectly, she thinks a shtetl is a “small town or ghetto.”  That’s flat-out wrong.  It’s the Yiddish for a small Jewish or heavily Jewish village or town in Eastern Europe–not remotely the same thing as a ghetto.

If that inaccuracy isn’t enough, the glossary says that Jews in the Holocaust wore a “gold” star to identify “their Jewry.”  (MTG also thinks the stars are gold).

Breslin further makes a hash of history when she says that “Sarah” was “a term that Nazis used for Jewesses.”  That makes it sound like a synonym.  It wasn’t.  What she seems to be fumbling with is the legislation in 1938 which forced Jews with “non-Jewish” names to add “Sara” [sic] or “Israel” as middle names to their identity papers so that there could be no doubt they were Jewish.  She and her publisher also seem oblivious to the fact that the word “Jewess” isn’t just dated, it’s widely considered offensive.

All these errors come from an author who claims to love the Jewish people. As the Erasure song goes, “Who Needs Love Like That?”

Lev Raphael is the author of 27 books in many genres including Rosedale in Love, set in New York during The Gilded Age, which is also available as an audio book.

Academia: A Nest of Vipers?

Over the years and on many book tours for my mysteries, people have asked me “Is academia as vicious as all that?”

The answer is Absolutely. How do I know? Because I not only escaped that world with lots of notes, but I have many friends who are still there, reporting one fiction-worthy incident after another to me.  Reality, not satire about the university,  is what’s over-the-top.

I’ll start with a minor example that shows you how petty and small-minded academia can be. Back in 2011, I was invited to teach at Michigan State University’s English department, where I had earned my PhD years before. The current chair had realized via a news story that I had published more books than the entire creative writing faculty put together. He was impressed, and I was flattered.

When I started teaching, the office manager wouldn’t order a plastic name plate for my office door, the kind that all the faculty members had. We’re talking about something that costs just a few bucks and is recyclable, for a department with a budget well in the millions. That was as silly as it was insulting.

My mystery State University of Murder focuses on a charming but dictatorial chairman of an English Department, Napoléon Padovani, who manages to alienate almost all his colleagues in an oppression blitzkrieg. He’s a composite of department chairs I’ve heard about from across the country.

One chair had a bizarre approach to resolving a conflict between two professors: he suggested that the two of them get drunk together at the annual Christmas party and all their problems would be resolved—they would be friends forever! That’s on the ludicrous side, to be charitable.

Another held academic “cage matches.” Adjuncts competing for the possible tenure-track positions that might, just might be opening up each year had to present their work-in-progress every week (!) and put it in the best possible light and hope they might win the prize. The pressure was intense, the competition ugly and brutal. There’s a department chair I heard of who revealed personal psychological information about a professor during a department meeting while supposedly “worrying” about her mental state, totally violating that professor’s privacy.

And another chair who knew a faculty member was going to complain about his disregard for university regulations and not only tried to stop her from a formal complaint at a university committee, but sat behind her at the meeting along with one of his henchmen and muttered derisively when she read her statement.

A religious studies chairman I know of argued with a rabbi teaching in his department as an adjunct that Judaism was absolutely not a culture but could only be spoken about and taught as a religion. Their disagreement was a major reason the rabbi wasn’t rehired.  I should add that the chair was not Jewish.

When my office mate at Michigan State University reported that a graduate student in the department who was a former boyfriend had burst into her apartment, knocking the door off her hinges, and roughed up her current boyfriend and threatened her, the chair did absolutely nothing.

And dispatches from a department I know report that the current atmosphere is “Stalinist.” While there’s significant disapproval of actions the chair is taking to limit academic freedom and free speech, those faculty members who disagree are afraid to speak up for fear of harassment and punishment. And the faculty listserv is now off limits to discussion of anything remotely “controversial.”  Anyone stepping out of line is instantly attacked and vilified.

My Nick Hoffman series is satirical, taking real situations and people, extrapolating from them, making them more ridiculous, more threatening–but the emotional core is ultimately true. And the emotional toll this kind of rampant and widespread abuse of various kinds can take is also true.

There’s no evidence that George Bernard Shaw actually said “If you want to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh,” but whoever is the source, that quote has guided me through my series and will continue to do so.

***
Lev Raphael is the author of 27 books in genres from memoir to mystery, most recently Department of Death.  He mentors and coaches writers at writewithoutborders.com.  This blog originally appeared at Mystery Fanfare.

Why I’m Teaching Creative Writing Online

I come from a family of teachers. My mother’s father taught economics in Poland. My mother taught language and literature in Belgium. And in New York, my brother taught special education.

I picked my undergraduate college, the Lincoln Center branch of Fordham University, specifically because of one creative writing teacher I’d heard about as inspirational. It was a great choice. I ended up taking all her classes and didn’t just learn the subject matter, but also how to teach, how to orchestrate a class, and how to have fun doing it.

In senior year, she took me on as an unofficial apprentice because I told her my twin goals in life were to write and to teach. I watched what she did in classrooms as an observer, and she even showed me how she graded papers. When I started teaching, her model was always in my head. She was in my head.

Recently I’ve been teaching at Michigan State University. Like many colleges and universities, the powers-that-be have no idea what a good learning environment is for teaching literature or creative writing. They especially overcrowd the creative writing workshops, which means students can’t get the attention they need in class or out of it. That’s grossly unfair to the students, many of whom work more than one job to help pay their tuition.

Typically I’ve had twenty-five students in writing workshops, though once it was thirty. Yes, thirty. These class sizes not only made it harder for me to give students all the attention and feedback they need, the overcrowding made it harder for students to get to know each other and feel comfortable sharing their work. But administrators don’t seem to care.

Luckily I’ve also been able to teach independent study students and supervise their senior theses, where individual attention is the critical foundation.  When you sign up for one of my workshops, you’re really doing an independent study.

I’m applying what I’ve learned in many years of classroom teaching in a very focused way. I get to coach and mentor writers at all stages and offer the kind of individualized attention that learning to write requires. No matter where you are in your development as a writer, sharing your work with someone requires trust and an atmosphere of safety. That’s what I saw my college mentor create over and over. Teaching online, I can truly share what I learned from her, and carry on a family tradition in an exciting new way.

Lev Raphael is the prize-winning author of twenty-five books in a dozen different genres, including a guide to the Writing life, Writer’s Block is Bunk. You can find his creative writing workshops at writewithoutborders.com.

Guest Blog: How Should Women Authors Write About Crimes Against Women?

Women crime writers have reacted in outrage to the Staunch Book Prize, a UK award for “a novel in the thriller genre in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered.” Internationally acclaimed author Val McDermid’s comment: “Baby, bathwater.”

One of my first thoughts was that if you eliminate fiction about crimes against women, you’re left with male on male violence—war stories are the ultimate example—and crimeless fiction. That’s not true. The 2018 prize went to Australian writer Jock Serong’s On the Java Ridge, described as a “literary political thriller” that presents an “anguishing portrayal of world refugee crises.” It sounds like a fine book. Reviewers also called it “dystopian,” a “novel about sibling rivalry, family, masculinity, and the game of cricket,” and a “noir tour de force.” In other words, it’s the kind of book that male writers write that absolutely must be balanced by crime fiction in women’s voice about women’s experience.

This is precisely the reason I decided readers needed my new anthology, Me Too Short Stories. The subject—crimes against women, tales of retribution and healing. Full disclosure: I needed such an anthology, because neither my usual short story markets such as Ellery Queen’s and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazines nor the noir e-zines that published darker fare were likely to want my latest story, “Never Again.” Why not? Because the first-person protagonist is a molested child, a fourteen-year-old girl whose father has been raping her since she was four. As a therapist for thirty-five years, I can assure you this is not uncommon.

What we need to object to is the graphic, lovingly depicted presentation of violence toward women—the serial killer’s point of view, the description of a rape, the beauty of blood spatter and a victim’s terror. Instead, e-zines whose guidelines invite submitters to bring on the horror, crudity, and gore, have a single caveat: No child abuse. (Oh, and no animal abuse, but that’s another story.) Noir editors seem to think avoiding the topic of child molestation entitles them to a white hat in the matter.

The Me Too Short Stories call for submissions—to women authors only, because I wanted maximum authenticity of voice—mentioned only “crimes against women.” Yet almost half of the stories in the anthology involve children. It’s not surprising, considering that child abuse is the seed from which adult violence grows in the form of both abusers and victims. Children are vulnerable by definition. Their protectors may be absent or neglectful or impaired. Or these protectors may themselves be at the mercy of those who have physical, emotional, social, or economic power over them.

When I added a second protagonist to my “Never Again” story, I made her an adult married to an abusive alcoholic. But her secret “me too” story started at age nine, when the preacher’s son molested her. Now he’s a deacon in the church the whole town attends, and her shame is expressed in fat and compulsive eating. This too, all of it, happens in real life.

Me Too Short Stories: An Anthology was created to give me and the other contributors the chance to write about violence toward women and girls not with loving emphasis on our pain and helplessness but by making them the protagonists, giving them a voice, showing the reader their courage and survival. That is how I think crime writers, men and women, can contribute to new attitudes toward violence against women.

Elizabeth Zelvin is the editor of Me Too Short Stories: An Anthology. She is also author of the Bruce Kohler Mysteries and the Mendoza Family Saga, a Jewish historical series, and editor of Where Crime Never Sleeps. Her short stories have been nominated three times each for the Derringer and Agatha awards and have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine among others. Her author website is http://elizabethzelvin.com. Liz is a psychotherapist who lives in New York and treats clients online at LZcybershrink.com.

How My Mother Inspired My Mystery Series

I started a mystery series in the 1990s thanks to my absurdly well-read, multi-lingual mother. When I was publishing literary fiction in the 1980s, she had surprisingly urged me more than once to write for a wider audience. She was right, though it took me a while to see that. Once I did publish mysteries, my audience grew and so did my name recognition.

She had filled me with a love of all kinds of books as a child by reading to me, helping me learn to read myself, getting me a library card early, and taking me to our Beaux Arts library every week. She never forbade me borrowing any book no matter the subject or reading level, and she mocked the juvenile reading assignments we had at school. Sometimes she even mocked my teachers themselves. Born in St. Petersburg and raised in Poland, she spoke English better than a few of my native-born teachers and she was a scathing critic of their pretensions when she returned from parent-teacher conferences in elementary school, especially the one who tried speaking French to her because my parents had lived in Belgium for five years. When that teacher had asked her something in (awful) French, my nonplussed mother reported saying, “Excuse me? What language is that?” It was delicious to feel part of a conspiracy with my mother, and I think I was already learning something about appearance, reality, pomposity, and satire that would help me years later in my mysteries.

(my first library on West 145th Street in Manhattan)

This erudite and witty Holocaust survivor who loved Thomas Mann, Tolstoy, Aldous Huxley, Balzac, and Stefan Zweig also adored mysteries. Devoured them. She read mysteries with the devotion she gave to the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle, which she said had helped her perfect her English once she got to the United States. I suspect it might also have helped her face the puzzle of her own life, her miraculous survival when so many dozens of her family members had perished or been murdered during the war.

On a typical day, the shelves in my parents’ bedroom where she kept her library books would have a wide range of mysteries, and thanks to her, I discovered Agatha Christie, John Creasey, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, Daphne du Maurier, and Phoebe Atwood Taylor–a very eclectic bunch, no?

My mother was also a splendid, unpretentious cook. She had grown up somewhat privileged in northeastern Poland in a bourgeois-intellectual family with a maid, and had never prepared any food for herself, not even a cup of tea until after W.W. II—or so my father claimed. Whatever the truth of that, her cooking was deft and never called attention to itself. She casually cracked eggs with one hand, stirred bowls like a magician casting a spell with his wand. Her omelets were miraculously fluffy, her cakes and cookies the envy of my friends. Though she couldn’t sing or dance, she was at her most elegant when she cooked or baked, despite our small Washington Heights kitchen.

When I started my mystery series, I quietly dedicated it to her, though she would never be able to read any of it, because by that point she had drifted far out onto the sea of dementia. I made my narrator, the besieged professor Nick Hoffman, a foodie and a book lover. I also made him something of an outsider since he’s a New Yorker in Michigan. In another private nod to my mother, I gave Nick in-laws who were refugees from Belgium. Lines that my mother had said or might have said weave their way through the series in silent tribute.

Someone who idolized that paper, she would have been proud to see my series reviewed in the New York Times Book Review more than once. I hope she would have recognized herself in this line from one of those reviews: “Nick Hoffman mows down intellectual pretenders with his scathing wit….the idiocies of academe always bring out the caustic humor that is the best part of him.”

My mother was the child of revolution, born to a Menshevik father who had to flee St. Petersburg when the Bolsheviks seized power. Through my childhood and adolescence, I watched her endlessly discuss history, politics, and state power with neighbors and friends. Her perspective on international affairs was informed by her deep reading in current events and her encounters with Soviet and Nazi brutality, but that didn’t mean she had lost her sense of humor. She once quipped that Spiro Agnew’s droning speeches reminded her of “Stalin on a bad day.” And she noted that a week before Stalin died, she had toasted to his demise at a party of Holocaust survivors. “It worked! Maybe I should have tried that sooner?”

She loathed Nixon and the Vietnam War and had made plans to get me to Canada should I be drafted. I know she would be appalled by the growth of our national security apparatus and the way it’s trickled down to local police departments who have become obscenely militarized. I wrote Assault with a Deadly Lie, due in October, with that massive cultural shift and my mother very much in mind. It’s the darkest book in the series. Nick Hoffman’s academic world is invaded by stalking, harassment, police brutality, and much more. In a way, this book is not just a continuation of the series, it’s a continuation of the conversation I’ve been having with my mother ever since she stopped talking to anyone back in the early 1990s, ever since that voluble, highly intellectual woman disappeared into silence. She may have been dead now since 1999, but in my mysteries, this one especially, she’s profoundly, beautifully alive.

Lev Raphael is the author of 26 books from memoir to mystery, most recently State University of Murder.  His next online creative writing workshop is Mystery Writing 1.0 and runs for the month of June.  This blog originally appeared on the Mysteristas site.

My Mother’s Beautiful Life Lesson

I think about my literate, multi-lingual mother all the time, even though she died twenty years ago.

Well-read and well-educated, she inspired me with a love of learning for its own sake. She was always ready to help me with homework in any subject, made me pay attention to politics and the news, and encouraged me to follow my dreams of travel to Europe. Even though I started learning French in fourth grade, my command of that language wouldn’t be as good as it is if she hadn’t been so thorough and patient a tutor.

More than that, she also taught me a valuable life lesson. I was pretty young when my parents, my brother and I were walking into some downtown Manhattan restaurant for lunch and we were approached by a homeless man.

I didn’t understand anything about how people in our wealthy society could end up at the bottom, I’d never been in a situation like that, and I was embarrassed and confused.

Dressed in several layers of clothing including a tweed topcoat that seemed too heavy for the season, the man asked my mother for a cigarette, sounding as formal as a college professor. She opened her purse and offered him a whole pack of Larks. And money.

He shook his head in thanks, said, “One cigarette was all I asked for.” And that’s all he took.

Inside, I asked why she had offered him all of her cigarettes. My mother was a Holocaust survivor and had seen worlds of horror that I was only just beginning to learn about. What she next said has always stuck with me: “I could never beg for anything in the war. If someone does what he did, I have to say yes.”

It was an eye-opening, heart-expanding moment.

Lev Raphael is the best-selling author of 26 books in genres from mystery to memoir. He also teaches creative writing on line at http://writewithoutborders.com/

Sunday Night’s Battle of Winterfell Was a Hot, Dark Mess

SPOILERS AHEAD

I’ve been watching GOT for years and have enjoyed the battle scenes, but yesterday’s over-long episode was a dud, and stole too much from World War Z and The Lord of the Rings.  It may have cost millions to film, but it looked like crap.

Yes, there were some exciting moments in the long-awaited confrontation, but they didn’t sustain almost ninety minutes of slashing and stabbing and hacking and running and shouting.  Much of it pointless, and some of it ridiculous.

My main problem was with the choices of the director and cinematographer.  Most of the episode was murky and hard to follow, especially the long periods where John and Dany piloted their dragons in the sky and it was hard to know what exactly they were trying to do or where they were.  Would it have spoiled anything to have been able to see the action more clearly or killed the writers to add even one line of dialogue?  Grunting doesn’t count.  And how was John suddenly so adept at flying a dragon when he’d only recently climbed aboard one?  Did he take a seminar?

Scenes inside Winterfell were just as murky as the ones in the air, but worse than that, they felt as repetitive as all the endless zombie attacks in The Walking Dead where the heroes stab and hack at a horde of zombies or loners. And they were very confusing because of the editing.  It would look like someone was dying, then it didn’t, then it did? That’s a cheap way to build suspense or at least try to sustain it.

Why did Arya flee to the library of all places when it wasn’t defensible? Likewise, why did we need to see her run through one hallway after another?  Yes, we got it: she was trying to escape.  Shouldn’t she have been able to find someplace better to hide–it’s her home after all.

More questions proliferated.  How did Dany survive amid the gigantic scrum of the dead attacking her? Why did the Red Lady give up the ghost? Why did we have to see the Night King approach Bran in slow motion? And given his amazing powers, why didn’t Old Blue Eyes head directly to Bran since Bran was so poorly defended?  If Bran was his target, the armies massed against the White Walkers and company could have waited. The entire battle was a frigging waste of time.

Previous battle scenes in the series have been clearer, more exiting, and more coherently filmed.  Most of this episode felt like the endless last half hour of a superhero movie or action thriller.  Instead of explosions we had dragon fire.  Lots and lots and lots of dragon fire.  And dead people tumbling all over each other like lemmings.

The night-time battle at Helm’s Deep in Lord of the Rings, which was echoed throughout the episode, was much more dramatic and more clearly staged and filmed.  Halfway through last night, I didn’t care who lived or died, just hoped the episode would end soon because it was so tedious and illogical.  Final questions: Did Sansa and Tyrion really need to stare at each other wordlessly for what seemed like minutes before actually doing something?  And how did Arya suddenly appear out of nowhere to become the savior of the Seven Kingdoms?

I’m a fan of the novels, but this battle did not live up to their promise or even match previous seasons of the TV series itself.  It was dreary, dull, and self-defeating.

Lev Raphael teaches creative writing on line at writewithoutborders.com.  He is a big fan of fantasy and science fiction in print and on screen.

Literary Snobs Aren’t The Only Genre Snobs

Writing in The Guardian, author Emily Maguire complains about literary snobs who look down on the sorts of books she likes to read, without listing any of them.  In general, though, they’re not in “the canon,” not written by :”dead white men.”

As if the canon has never changed and has never included Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, the Brontes, Elizabeth Gaskell, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton–and many others.

Literary snobs may have gotten in the way of her self esteem, but genre snobs  come in all shapes and sizes. The owner of Michigan’s wonderful mystery bookstore, Aunt Agatha’s, once griped on Facebook about academics in her college town dissing mysteries, and rightfully so. But mystery fans themselves aren’t above genre-bashing.

I’ve been on a mystery readers’ and writers’ listserv for about fifteen years and way too often a predictable thread emerges. Somebody complains about being sneered at for reading mysteries by somebody else off-list who thinks they’re silly, trashy, mindless “escape reading.”

The list starts to seethe: some of the “victims” quickly turn victimizer and start trashing “Literature” or “literary fiction.” What’s that? Well, as defined by a best-selling mystery author at a conference I attended years ago: books where not very much happens to people who aren’t very interesting. Wasn’t he insightful? He certainly knew his audience—people roared their approval. Snobbery clearly works both ways.

What usually happens next on the list is that more people chime in with complaints about Proust or whoever they think is highfalutin and boring. That expands to include all Modern or Contemporary Fiction, however it’s defined, which is usually whatever book that person doesn’t like. Or disliked in high school. Or was told was brilliant but they hated. Or anything dubbed “classic.” And the authors and their fans are of course elitist.

The contempt these mystery readers sometimes feel directed at them seems to get recycled as they express disdain for books which have been written and enjoyed by people they have to denigrate. That’s not an argument or even a defense: it’s insecurity.

Sometimes they’ll point to all the crime writers on the bestseller list and sneer that literary novels only sell “a few copies” and are usually written “for the author’s friends.” Or they’ll make lavish claims and say something like “Anne Perry is a better writer than George Eliot.” I’ve had dinner with Anne Perry and I doubt she would make that claim. I’ve also read Eliot’s novels extensively. You can’t compare the two authors.

I’ve done radio and print book reviews since the early 90s and I’ve found plenty of bad writing in every genre. If you don’t like a certain kind of book, don’t read it. But trashing a whole genre doesn’t make you sound authoritative or thoughtful, it only makes you sound like you’ve got a giant chip on your shoulder.

Lev Raphael is the author of The State University of Murder and 25 other books in genres from memoir to mystery.  He teaches creative writing at www.writewithoutborders.com.