Punctuate! Punctuate!

[mrissa]

I'm reading porphyrin's copy of Liz Jensen's The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, and so far it's interesting. But. BUT! There's one thing driving me nuts, and that is how Jensen has chosen to render dialog. It goes like this:

--Have you been out for lunch? she asked. I was going to leave immediately.

Now, with a first-person narrator, this leaves open the following possibilities:
"Have you been to lunch?" she asked. "I was going to leave immediately."
--or--
"Have you been to lunch?" she asked. I was going to leave immediately.
Sometimes Jensen appears to be introducing a consistency, where all stretches of dialog begin with --. But sometimes not, and consistency doesn't mean "sometimes." Grrrarrr.

I understand that there are times when obfuscation lends depth to the text and variety of meanings and blah blah etc. But I will submit that who is going to leave immediately to get their lunch is not one of those times. No. Obfuscation on the lunch question is a boring annoyance, not a bit of fascinating depth and insight into the human condition.

We have dialog punctuation conventions for a reason. If you choose not to use them, I would like to see a very, very, very good reason why not. And "I thought it looked arty on the page" is not a very, very, very good reason. It's not even a mediocre reason, actually. Why not mark the end of a bit of dialog? Tell me: why not? Why not consistently mark the beginning?

Quotation marks. I don't care if they're single or double. They are your friends. Use them. If you don't know how, that is your zeroth task in writing a novel, before a plot outline or a character sketch or an organic flowing beginning or whatever it is that floats your very own little fruitbat writer boat. Quotation marks. I really mean it. I will put up with this behavior in some writers who are otherwise very good*, but I won't like it in them, either. I'll praise their book and then complain about the stupid dialog conventions.

Yes, I realize that I am a mean, horrible, cranky, rigid person. Deal.

*If porphyrin had not recommended this book, I'd have quit on page 2, when the title character starts talking to someone else and using the damned dash.

Comments

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

That's some of the problem I have with reading Spanish books. They're being slowly Americanized or Englishized or something like that, but it's still kind of confusing.

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

French are the same way. One of the main reasons I gave up early on the notion of majoring in French literature--just couldn't tell who was talking, dammit!

You're a better person than I. No matter who rec'd the book, I coudn't get past page 2 with that.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I read short stories and mostly for literature classes. I figure that I'll get used to it eventually.

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

You might. I couldn't. We get to the big emotional moment in any book... from Camus's l'Etranger (which I hated) to Gide's La Porte Etroite, and I'm finally into it, I finally think I have the hang of it, I finally am excited and reading fast... and BAM! I have to reread pages three and five times, pointing to each line and muttering, "il dit, elle dit, il dit, elle dit" to sort it out--which is something I used to do in English as a child when there weren't enough dialogue tags, but haven't had to do in years.

*pant, pant*

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I read The Stranger in English, some new translation that changed the famous first line (which I'd never heard of).
I'll have to try the he-said-she-said thing next time I get lost. I hadn't thought of that.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The characters in this book are meant to be French. I don't find that an adequate excuse.

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

Nor should you. I'm pretty sure that even if the French would never use an air quote, that doesn't much matter if it's being reported in English.

Heh. I like being cranky and unforgiving right after I wake up from a nap.

[pameladean]

As an undergraduate I once got very excited because two different editions of Chaucer had different punctuation, so that in one an important phrase was part of a speech and in the other it was part of the narrative. My professor recommended me to look at the facsimile of the original in the library, whereupon I discovered that the original book had no punctuation whatsoever. I was very indignant, until my Greek professor informed us that extant manuscripts of Homer did not even bother to space between the letters.

In modern works, I don't really see the excuse, however. Mary Renault does use dashes to indicate speech in THE LAST OF THE WINE (also a first-person narration), but she uses them consistently. Given the comments above, I suspect her early French reading to be the cause.

P.

Argh!

[pameladean]

Words! Didn't bother to space between the words. One does get a pleasing impression of a huge great inkblot painstakingly deciphered by scientists, though.

P.

Re: Argh!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's quite lovely, yes. I think I want one for on the wall.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, the minute Liz Jensen becomes Chaucer or Homer (or both, that might be neat), I'll be willing to put up with it, and in the meantime, grrr.

But now I'm reading Peter O'Donnell, who has a passing familiarity with quotation marks, so all is well or at least better.

Cold Mountain

[ammitbeast.livejournal.com]

That exact dialogue style was used in Charles Fraizer's Cold Mountain.

Now, I liked that book. Eventually. But... it took me a long while to adjust to this style, and I'd browsed the novel at bookstores many times and avoided it because I couldn't stand the arty pretentiousness of the dialogue. I'm surprised I finally gave in and read the novel, probably the final factor being that so many friends had recommended it.

I agree with you on this. It's just too damned cute, too much the writer trying draw attention to themselves -- Look at me, I'm an ARTIST! -- and it yanks your attention away from the story and into the mechanics. Ugh. I waded through Cold Mountain, but I have no inclination to be so forgiving to an author in the future. (Well, never say never, I suppose, but given that there are so many fine books out there that do follow the standard, accepted dialogue format, who really has the time for deliberate self-abuse?)

Just the differences between British and American dialogue punctuation are plenty.