Angie Kim has a great message. Unfortunately, she wrapped it in an unattractive package.
Because we are human, she reminds us, we tend to carry stereotypes with us about people who are disabled. Think—talking louder to someone in a wheelchair when clearly the issue isn’t being hard of hearing.
Kim’s novel Happiness Falls alerts us to one in particular—assuming that people with physical disabilities also have mental disabilities. We may find ourselves unnecessarily talking to them more slowly or with simpler vocabulary or maybe talking about them as if they are not in the room at all.
We all need these reminders. It’s too bad that Kim serves up this healthy nourishment in an unpalatable soup. How so? The first-person narrator of Kim’s story is an immature, self-absorbed, mentally scattered person who routinely destroys evidence and obstructs justice regarding a potential crime. It is hard to be sympathetic with someone like that, and it is just too annoying and tiresome to stay inside the mind of such a person for 400 pages.
The author would have been better off writing the book in third-person omniscient or writing each part of the book from the first-person perspective of a different character in the story—the mother, the brother, the detective, the therapist, the person who is disabled. I would guess that the editor suggested such a shift, a shift the author sadly rejected.
That’s probably why, not typical for a novel, we find a lot of explanatory footnotes in the book. It’s the only way the editor could convince the author to get at least some of the extraneous, highly detailed reflections out of the narrative. But it was not enough to salvage the book, I fear.
The lesson here for writers is: choose your rut carefully. Especially for longer pieces like books, the tone had better not be too intense—whether too sweet or too depressed, too hyper or too relaxed, too mysterious or too detailed. Otherwise readers may not appreciate the value of what you have to say.
If you want readers to stick with you, when it comes to tone, less is more.
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Image by WikimediaImages from Pixabay
