This post isn’t about any one book in particular, but about that most tragic of reading phenomena: when you read a book you really love and then read another book by that author and you don’t love it. It’s a strange thing, perhaps, to expect that an author you like once is someone you will always like, because there are so many elements to liking a book (as I discussed a few posts ago). With non-fiction, I’m not surprised if I enjoy a historian’s account of the Underground Railroad but am less interested in a thorough look at the Greek royal family. But, particularly with fiction, I tend to assume that once I find an author whose flavor I enjoy, I’ll continue to enjoy it in all its incarnations, and that’s not always true.
The disappointment can come in a few says. First, you have the one-hit wonders: those authors who write a stellar first novel but it turns out that was all they had to say that was any good. I’m looking at you, Joseph Heller, and my stupid decision to buy “Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man.” Then you have authors who write a lot but it turns out they’re just writing the same book over and over — so, no matter where you start, you think they’re good, but there are severely diminishing returns. Hello, Pat Conroy, and your semi-autobiographical abused Southern men. Or, serialized authors who set up a great premise and an intriguing question, but draw out answering it for so long that you want to, and sometimes do, give up — particularly prevalent, of course, in fantasy fiction, like Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series that he actually died before finishing, but not before writing some 11 books, some of which just seemed designed to create new problems to delay resolving the series. Then there are the radical shifters, who move about with abandon but it’s just hit or miss. I loved A.S. Byatt’s Possession, which used shifts in perspective and form to tell a few deeply personal stories. But The Children’s Book was a horrible slog that moved way too slowly, except when it suddenly would decide to skip ahead a few years. The subject matter – a couple of interrelated families of artists, writers, and revolutionaries in early 20th century England, might have been the problem, but even more so, I actually disliked every single character and kind of wanted them to die. Which some of them did, but always off the page. With these kinds of hit-and-miss authors, it’s really hard to decide whether to delve back in, and if so how to decide which books might be any good (I should note that The Children’s Book was shortlisted for the Booker, so I can safely conclude at least for myself that accolades are not a good indicator). Finally, and saddest of all, are the authors who inexorably drift away from you. I vociferously loved the first two books of Sarah Vowell’s that I read – Partly Cloudy Patriot and Assassination Vacation. They were funny, and informative, and appealed to me so much because, like me, she seemed to find learning things to be fun, and wanted to share that with the readers. But I found Wordy Shipmates, about the Puritans, to be bad – all of her attempts at humor seemed forced, and I couldn’t muster any enthusiasm about the subject matter, which was odd because beforehand I would have guessed I would be more interested in Cotton Mather than in Garfield’s assassin. And while Unfamiliar Fishes was more interesting, she just seems to have lost her spark – or, rather, whatever direction she’s heading, I’m just not following, and it makes me sad.