I don't know how many novels have been written from the time when they started being popular, about two centuries ago. An estimate that I found on the Web says that some 129 million books in total have been published. Of these, probably half are novels. So, about 60 million novels. You could read all of them in less than 200,000 years if you could read one every day. Maybe God can do this, maybe he has already done this, I wonder how he feels about this mass of stories that his human children have been producing.
Lacking god-like capacities, my exploration of the novel world is rather haphazard, and the cover you see at the beginning of this post is a book that I found a few days ago on top of a pile of waste. Acting on the idea that whatever happens has a reason to happen, I took it home. I cleaned the cover, stained by a mysterious goo. And I read it.
I don't know if this book was a message from God. If it was, it is difficult for me to decipher. Honestly, this book is rather bad. Let me say it better: it is truly, truly bad.
What to say about this novel? Well, for one thing, it illustrates how difficult it is to write a novel, even for a professional. It is supposed to be a kind of erotic literature but, frankly, it is not much more erotic than a frozen mackerel.
The protagonist, Marlowe Wyatt, is said to be about 30 at the time of the story, but she behaves more or less like a 16-year-old girl. We know a lot of what she does, what she eats, where she lives (in New York), where she has lunch and dinners, and where she has cappuccino and pastry. But, as a character, Marlowe is simply flat. She never shows a spark of life. She is supposed to have been shocked for all her life because she made love to her stepbrother when she was very young. I suppose it can be a shocking experience but in the novel we don't really feel it is relevant. It happened ten years before, come on, girl, get over it, stop reminiscing and move on! Another demonstration that no author can write a good novel unless he/she cares for the characters they create.
The other characters of the novel are rather flat, too. We know plenty of details about them, but nothing that gives us a hint of what makes them move. The whole novel is supposed to pivot around a situation not unlike what we sometimes call the "commedia italiana" a romantic misunderstanding that the protagonists unravel only at the end.
Here, the protagonist is supposed to make a living by writing erotic letters for her customers. A bit unlikely as a job, but in a novel it may be fine. Then, the main twist of the novel is that Marlowe writes letters for her friend Vivienne. Then, a new customer comes, Gideon, who clearly has also an erotic interest in Marlowe. The twist is that Marlowe doesn't know that she was writing love letters for Gideon to give to Vivienne, and to Vivienne to give to Gideon, while at the same time she (Marlow) is being courted by Gideon.
It could have been an interesting plot, but the reader (nor Marlowe) is never given a hint of this triangle until the very end of the story. When Marlowe discover the trick, she is upset, but Gideon just says he had dumped Vivienne earlier on, and Marlowe says, "oh, then it is fine" -- end of the novel.
And so, what did God want to tell me by letting me find that novel? Well, the ways of the Lord are many, but maybe He 8or She) will be clearer with the next novel.
