“A book that’s pleasant and quiet without being boring, which is a rarity as far as I can tell.
The book has a structure to it that might turn some people off from the beginning. The narrator is a large animal doctor, and each section works kind of like this:
Call: [explanation of animal ailment]
Action: [explanation of what he did]
Result: [you’re smart. you can figure this one out]
But then the narrator deviates from the structure a little bit.
Thoughts On The Ride Home:
What I Heard With The Window Open:
What I Checked For Out The Window:
What The Spaceman Said To Me:
and so on.
It really got me thinking about the difference between a book with structure and a book with a gimmick.
For example, I tried The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell, a book in which every sentence is a question. THAT didn’t work for me. Honestly, I felt that the structure was SO rigid that it took away from the possibilities of the story. The most entertaining part was the existence of the book as an object, not the text within.
It had points where it was clever, but I don’t personally value cleverness in art. Cleverness is a great attribute when it comes to problem-solving and engineering (and therefore can sometimes work in mystery novels), but in art it can be really annoying. If I enjoy a painting, it’s likely that I’m getting a feeling from it or placing my own experiences on top of it, and that emotional result is never related to cleverness. Clever jokes are not my favorite, and usually the kind that result in someone SAYING “that’s funny” as opposed to actually laughing. A clever poem? That’s a tough sell.
So what, then, is the difference between a book with good structure and a book with a gimmick?
I thought about it a lot. Maybe it has something to do with whether the tool is something that is too rigid. If it’s too rigid, the story starts conforming and contorting to fit the frame and can never go anywhere unexpected or fun. Maybe it has something to do with the tool being too repetitive. I did notice that several people who enjoyed The Interrogative Case (of which there are many) seemed to have read it in small chunks instead of all at once.
Ultimately, though, the answer I came to is this:
Structure is a gimmick that works.”