The Try-Works

So, I’ve been recommended The Kite Runner by several people over the last year. People whom I respect; well read folks, with impeccable taste. So, I finally took it on a couple of weeks back, delving into the book with the highest of hopes.

And, though I know this will be the most controversial post I’ve ever put my name on, I have only this to say:

If anyone ever recommends it to you, dear reader, smack them quickly in the forehead with the nearest blunt object. Then run like hell. Immediately, and without hesitation. Then delete their phone number from your cellphone and erase their email address.

They mean you no good.

The characters are the kind of dull, stock automatons usually found on Sunday night television. There are distant fathers and sons yearning for love. There are saintly hair-lipped servants who never betray their masters, not even after a round of forced buggering. There are chaste-but-shamed love interests, courted in some of the worst purple prose this side of Harlequin. (Dappled sunlight dances in her eyes. She has hollows somewhere about her collarbone. Said hollows probably invite kisses.) And the book being not being particularly shy about propagandizing, there are Hitler-worshiping, rapacious neighborhood bullies who become Taliban.

Which is pretty much indicative of the plotting. One doesn’t so much read the book as hop from one trite plot point to the next. So, about halfway through the book, when you learn that the protagonist’s wife can’t have kids, and the narrator runs into the common friend of one of his servants whom he treated rather badly in childhood, and, y’know, said servant is dead, leaving an orphan child, you probably won’t lurch out of your chair in shock at the outcome of the novel.

And that brings us to the protagonist. He’s the kind of profoundly dim idjit who’s meant to be anything but profoundly dim. In no way do I think all protagonists should be likable, but the author should have the sense to understand the character arc s/he’s representing. In this case, our narrator is a nasty, spoiled little shit who actually seems to undermine the author’s intent. I.e., what is supposed to come across as atonement and redemption for being rather nasty to his servants, only represents that the narrator’s singular lack of insight is a fault shared by the author. So, when the narrator kidnaps said servant’s son and adopts him, one can’t help but get the sleazy feeling that the book’s popularity stems from a zeitgeist of neocolonial guilt. Angelina Jolie comes to mind. As do the novels of Barbara Kingsolver.

Worse, someone turned the author on to the oldest and most overused literary device of high school creative writing classes everywhere: framing. And, hoo boy, does the author frame. A father’s slingshot is passed on to son to save the dipshit narrator, and low-class servants are buggered through the generations. Not a narrative thread doesn’t get tied up neatly. Slutty women get gruesomely disfigured and learn the value of inner beauty, cigarette smokers get lung cancer, and fathers learn to appreciate their sons (and vice-versa).

Most importantly, everyone learns not to let evil, Hitler-loving, Taliban types bugger their servants. Which seems an important point for the author. Making me fear for his servants.

Worst of all, however, is the actual writing. When the author manages to miss the chance to drop in a cliche, it’s only because he’s so badly mangled it that it no longer makes any fucking sense whatsover. Take this one: “I hobbled after him, spikes of pain battering my scraped knees.” Not to be an asshole, but if there’s one thing, just one thing, that spikes don’t do, it’s batter. Pierce, sure. Puncture, quite probably. Batter, never.

Another one? How’s about when Mr. Hosseini attempts to tweak the proverbial “elephant in the room” cliché in hopes of slipping it by the reader. He powerfully tortures that dead metaphor, referencing an elephant “sweating in the tiny room.” That one was actually physically fucking painful to read.

Why?

Elephants DON’T FUCKING SWEAT.

It’s a kind of delicious experience, to be honest, reading the book in anticipation of the next horribly tortured turn of phrase. Swabs do some smothering of the sky. Guilt stabs and slashes the protagonist in every manner possible. Etc.

You almost have to congratulate Mr. Hosseini. Any mediocre writer can write a novel based almost entirely on cliché.

But it takes a special kind of hack to so badly mangle those fucking clichés as to create an entire constellation of nonsense.

Anyway, my advice? Friends don’t recommend this book. Friends hurl their burning copy through the author’s window, saving you from having to do it yourself.