Talking About Talking in Books

I just finished reading Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, which is the next book we'll talk about in our book discussion group. I thought it was a pretty good story. I read right through it in two evenings. But it was a little dependent upon stock characters, and I find that troubling. Someone on the back cover had compared Gruen to John Irving, and I thought, well that's one thing Irving never has -- stock characters. But more than that, I was troubled by the poor dialogue in the novel.

All the characters spoke like characters in a bad movie, or worse, a bad TV show. Any time there was a need for narrative exposition, it was handled by Jacob, the wide-eyed newbie at the circus, repeating, 'But I don't understand . . .' until some poor interlocutor had exhausted the subject. Characters even said things like, 'Oh you're good, you're very good,' the way they do in unimaginative daytime dramas.

Good dialogue is one of the hardest things to write. Not only should it not sound like how we really speak -- because real talk is, let's face it, pretty boring -- it should be unique, to help express the shades of meaning in the story itself, and colorful enough to help define characters. This can range from the broadly comedic, like Dickens's Ebenezer Scrooge crying 'Bah! Humbug!' to the very subtle. Some of the best writers of dialogue that helps define character have been William Saroyan and Virginia Woolf, and in modern times, Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy. Roddy Doyle, perhaps Ireland's best working author, sometimes writes whole books in thoughts and dialogue, with no interceding narration.

We watch so many movies, and so much television, that we are used to characters speaking in cliches, and used to hearing huge chunks of expository narrative handled by one character. Think of the typical scene in a thriller where a commanding officer or chief of police or lead FBI investigator stands in front of the only person who can handle the mission, or crack the case, or find the killer, and says, 'Let's see, you were orphaned at nine when a burglar murdered your parents, raised by a doting maiden aunt, went on to be tops in your class at Harvard, spent ten years undercover during the Cold War . . .' -- et cetera. We expect this in television -- it's probably necessary since there's a limited amount of time to tell the story. But in novels, we should hold authors to higher standards. We should at least be thinking about the misuse of dialogue when we encounter it.

What do you think?