Being Mean

I was talking to a friend and fellow writer the other day and, within the the context of whatever we were talking about, he said, “I don’t mind rough talk in books or graphic descriptions but I don’t like just plain meanness.” Wow! I never thought of it in those words but I agree completely.

It was some time back when I first read E. Annie Proulux’s The Shipping News when I encountered one of the nastiest sentences I had ever encountered in a book. I won’t repeat it verbatim but she compare the color of the sky to “day-old” urine. The phrase so revolted me that I put the book down and it took me a long time to go back to it. Maybe there are some readers who thought it was funny but I found it unnecessarily nasty and I wondered why a writer of her gifts found it necessary to write something so vulgar.

This is something I’ve been aware for awhile now in popular fiction. Maybe I am overly sensitive to male writers who describe women’s bodies in microscopic detail but when they do it with a flat out nastiness it turns me off completely. I used to like Robert B. Parker but I stopped reading him after one too many snide descriptions of women who didn’t measure up to his standards of beauty (he, no model of svelte physique himself!)

There is just a lot of gratuitous meanness around these days anyway. I stopped listening to Jay Severin (who has NO room to criticize ANYONE’S looks!) because of his incessant, hateful, mean rants against Hillary Clinton’s appearance. I’m not a fan of Ms. Clinton but her looks have nothing to do with her abilities or lack thereof.

In fact the entire extreme partisan hatefulness that pervades our country now is so saturated with plain old gratuitous meanness that I avoid political discussions with a good many people. If you want to talk issues, fine, but I am not interested in hearing arguments prefaced with nasty, snide comments that have nothing to do with the issues. That kind of meanness is only useful to people who haven’t got much else going for them.

But it bothers me more in novels than anywhere else. Art, as I understand it and in the words of John Gardner, is meant to elevate, not to debase. I think it is entirely possible to tell the truth of a situation in all its ugliness and reprehensibleness without resorting to gratuitous meanness — if anything the meanness detracts from the overall quality of the work. I have started Orhan Pamuk’s Snow about a poet and journalist who travels to an impoverished village in Turkey where a group of teenage girls have begun committing suicide. I am dazzled by his ability to describe the poverty the people of Kars live in and the sadness of the lives of the young women who are taking their own lives without resorting to vulgarity. I wonder how many American writers working today could do that.

What is it in these writers that makes them need to be mean? When Spencer, the heroic Boston detective that everybody has loved for years, describes the wrinkles and loose flesh of an incidental character who just happens to be a woman of a certain age I wonder why Parker wrote that. Yes, I know that writers write the truth of characters and situation ut it is not the existence of such features but rather the snideness of their description that revolts me. Is it as simple as a subconscious contempt for women who are no longer lust objects? I wonder.

I am going to try to monitor meanness in my own life and try to start a movement toward that end. It serves no purpose. It is time to let it go.

Thanks for reading.