Big Swiss, We Are Okay, my own unfinished first draft novel
inspiration and/or unspiration when reading a "so what's their deal" book
I started reading Big Swiss on a whim because the cover caught my eye at a bookstore. I’m an easy mark.
I read the back (as well), and the novel has a fantastic premise: a transcriptionist for a small town sex therapist develops a crush on one of his clients, she happens to meet her at the dog park, an affair ensues. The bulk of the book is waiting for this unethical and unsustainable decision to blow up in the face of the main character, who is no stranger to unsustainable decision making. She has no real Career Trajectory™. She’s living in her roommate’s old house that’s falling into to disrepair to comical degrees. She’s – gasp – in her forties. On one level, the affair with a married woman in her twenties doesn’t seem like the biggest red flag she has going on.
Because it’s the new year, much like every other person who aspires to words good, I have opened my in-progress novel about, in part, characters who don’t know what their problems are and feel stuck and the Point (maybe?) of the novel is why some of them learn a lesson about their issues and why some of them do not. So reading a book about a character who, ~80% of the way through, has yet to assume much responsibility in particular for her decisions (which by ~80% of the way through, have indeed blown up) got me thinking about what makes a novel about frustrating protagonists work.
I used to date someone who disliked novels about characters who kept making bad decisions. She would hate this book. If you liked, say, The Pisces by Melissa Broder or Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler, this is decidedly For You. The experience of reading Big Swiss is waiting to see if someone figures out how to get their life together. There’s a slippery slope regarding how much time the main character spends feeling sorry for herself or blaming others or generally spiraling. This month I’ve also (because I caught up on podcasts and decided I could pad the time until new episodes dropped with a short audiobook) read Nina LaCour’s We Are Okay, a novel about a young woman in college whose Deal is slowly revealed to us over the course of the novel, in ways that I didn’t love, but I’ll get to that later. The main issue at the moment is because that novel decided to save What Happened To Her for a series of reveals later in the novel, there’s a very frustrating amount of time where the reader’s experience is a first-person narrative of someone shutting people out and feeling bummed out, without us having any idea what has caused her to act or feel like this.
But if change for a frustrating main character comes too easily, that doesn’t work either; it doesn’t feel earned or realistic, and it can feel like conduct literature with its aspirations limited entirely to telling the reader how to live a moral life. Big Swiss doesn’t do that, but I’m also not yet certain what point it is trying to make. The main character doesn’t really have much going for her, and I think the main thing that frustrates me about the book is that the book seems to miss no opportunity to make her into a bigger loser. She never leaves her home. She’s always dressed like a slob. She gets stressed out about dinner with the woman she’s sleeping with and her husband and tries microdosing for the first time. She doesn’t even remember how to microdose but she attempts it anyway. Big Swiss mostly just wants us to feel bad for a character whom the other main character constantly criticizes for only ever feeling sorry for herself (which, to the book’s credit, is quite nuanced; some of her criticism is accurate, but some of it is more about her).
What’s interesting about all of this, to me, is that while re-reading the first draft of my own novel, also about characters who are the architects of their own unhappiness, I worry what I have currently is going to reveal similar flaws, that too much time is going to be spent on not providing a clear course of action for characters to get out of their own way. Will the time they spend unable to do that have artistic merit or be entertaining? I’m only a few thousand words in, so, I dunno. But some takeaways from Big Swiss and We Are Okay that are worth taking forward include:
The main character’s backstory doesn’t have to be a twist. We Are Okay’s main character had two very different types of bad things happen to her in the recent past. Even though that’s where she’s at when the book starts, the reader isn’t made privy to either of them until the main character eventually reveals them, telling her backstory in mostly chronological order. Big Swiss’s narrator mostly tells you what happened to her very early on, with some elaboration throughout when it comes up, although one reveal comes so close to the end and is so huge it really needed more breathing room. I moved up one of my three main character’s Backstory Things That Happened from the middle of the novel to instead be the very first scene. The point of the story isn’t that what happened to her is a surprise; the point should be everything that came after that.
We Are Okay is short but slow-paced. It’s almost meditative in this way. Save for the backstory, the events of the novel take place over a weekend, almost like a collection of scenes of no real importance narratively but add a lot impressionistically. Like if Twin Peaks was about sad college lesbians. Good vibes are important!
Big Swiss’s difficult main character makes a series of bad decisions, while We Are Okay’s difficult main character basically makes one ongoing decision to shut herself out. The later probably lends itself to an easier catharsis for the reader; the main character just has to grow enough to not want the ease of hurting herself anymore. The fuck-up main character has a rougher journey, and the book ends accordingly, much more open-endedly with what’s next for her and whether she’s at least begun to allow herself to love herself.
This sounds a lot like I’m shitting on Big Swiss, but I largely liked it a lot. And it got me thinking about my own writing and what I’m trying to do and what I do and don’t like about it and if a book can make me think about all that stuff – and what it is doing too – then that’s a good book!
Standard Plugs Zone
My band had its debut concert last week! There’s this whole song and this little highlights reel on instagram of clips people posted from it, which was absolutely lovely of them. Band is fun, music is good.
Speaking of music is good, I do distribution for this NYC-based local showletter/zine. It’s all small stuff, go see some new music irl if you’re around!
I copy edit for The Thorn, the DSA’s NYC chapter’s local news roundup.