The same dang thing over and over again

I just started reading Alessandro Manzoni's On the Historical Novel (1850), which includes many of the arguments I and others have made this week, couched in a subtle, ironic rhetoric. I think it's ironic - maybe he means exactly what he says. So far, Manzoni has used his essay to completely demolish the historical novel: "it is the historical novel itself that is completely at fault."* Manzoni is himself the author of one of the best historical novels ever written, The Betrothed (1827), so perhaps I am misreading.

Regardless, it's full of useful ideas. I may return to it soon. A Professional Reader might have thought to look into the subject before writing so much. Ah well.

Anyway, my final complaint or concern or prejudice is more about books that come in series than about historical novels as such. The mystery series is the mode of our age, what people read. On trips to Germany, I have marvelled at the richness of the literary culture, about the attention received by serious books. But what do Germans really read, really, more than anything else? Mysteries that come in series. I'm using "mystery" generically, including thrillers and such - the Owen Parry novel I read claimed to be a "novel of historical suspense."

I know that people still write and read romances and sea stories and knights-in-armor stories. But I do not believe that those genres have the equivalent of the amazing rack of books I recently found in a library, a collection of knitting mysteries, and candle making mysteries, and gardening mysteries. Used book store mysteries. Antiquing mysteries. Pie mysteries. I am for some reason currently using a bookmark that advertises a series of handbag mysteries.**

Everything gets shoveled into mysteries now, including stories about the birth of Italian Futurism and stories about New York City midwives. When I described my pile of six mysteries, I didn't say anything about the plots, not because of concern about spoiling the surprise, but because the plots don't matter, not in any of them. The settings matter, a lot, and the choice of detail, and the voice. But the plot, the actual mystery in the mystery, is always just something pulled off the shelf of time-tested devices.

Because the clever author (and every author I tried was clever enough) knows that we cannot just march from the beginning of the mystery to the end, the story has to be well-larded with incidental material that slows us down, with each episode of the novel giving us 1) one piece of genuine information, 2) several interesting but in the end deceptive pieces of information, and 3) directions to the next episode. There must be writers who can break free of this formula. But if they do so, are they still writing mysteries?

So if I find myself wearied with the repetition found among six different authors, I can guess how I'd feel reading more books by the same author. Steve Hockensmith's cowboy Watson and Holmes are in four novels now. Besides the train, one's on a ranch in Montana, one's in San Francisco, one's in Texas. That's something. But they're really just the same dang thing over and over again, aren't they?

I suspect that's true of more authors than Hockensmith. It's not what I'm looking for in fiction. With some time - a year, years - I'm likely to try one of these authors again, probably Parry or Hockensmith. The memory of the original pleasure will have dimmed, and I will be ready to enjoy the same dang thing. That formula works in one way - I turned every page of every book, faster and faster until I got to the end.

* P. 72 of Alessandro Manzoni, On the Historical Novel, tr. by Sandra Bermann. University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

** Now if someone were to write or has written a pie sea story, I might just read it. 'Cause the idea is so stupid.