Walking Hypothesis

One breed of a bad book is a disappointing novel from an author for whom you harbor expectations. Previous encounters with this author's novels have pleased you immensely, and you look forward to another opportunity. This opportunity comes surprisingly early and frequently, since this author publishes a novel every few years. But by the third novel, you experience growing indignation at the familiarity of it all. Only the names have been changed to play out the central drama that this author finds so compelling—same things seem to be cause for concern, same tensions seem to afflict the characters, and same language floats out to manifest this fictional world.

The thing is, you shared the compulsion for the first two or three novels. By the third novel, you were aware that your perfunctory appreciation was largely based on good faith. So when you encounter the disappointing novel, the author's credit is not only depleted, there is a lien placed against it. The novel feels like a walking hypothesis. In fact, from this vantage point, all this author's novels are walking hypothesis. You try to be charitable about the predictability of human thinking, a human condition, but you can't exonerate an author whose hypothesis has become tiresome through repetitiveness. These are the bad books I encounter in contemporary fiction, books that appear too quickly upon the heels of the last one, books that never had a chance at acquiring their own language and drama.