Sentimentality &
Other Sticky Stuff

30} EMOTIONS UNEARNED: TEARS, VOMIT, &
OTHER SENTIMENTAL BODILY FLUIDS

If melodrama is action in excess of circumstances, or unearned action, then sentimentality is emotion in excess of circumstances, or unearned emotion. Melodrama and sentimentality both bubble away in their symbiotic soup. One can’t exist without the other.

In weak fiction, characters cry a lot. Tears routinely pour, drizzle, stream, or cascade down faces in quantities sufficient to supply the rinse cycle of an automatic dishwasher. Or they may fall singly (“As little Sheila slid, with a gasp, to the floor, a single tear slipped from the corner of her eye”). Either way, the tears are gratuitous. Which is to say, sentimental.

We tend to think of violence in terms of violent action. But there’s such a thing as emotional violence. When tears stream down people’s faces, as in mediocre stories, they are no less a manifestation of gratuitous emotional violence than a “bloodcurdling scream.” In bad fiction, all bodily fluids are fodder for sentimentality.

Case in point: a story about a woman visiting her developmentally disabled kid brother in prison, where he has been condemned to Death Row for a murder he didn’t commit.¹⁵ Even before she has pulled out of her driveway, Gloria “puke[s] three times.” She does so, presumably, because visiting her brother in jail upsets her so—though she has made this voyage a dozen times before.

When she arrives at the prison gate, the guard “crinkle[s] his nose at the faint eau de vomit.” Here the author has sacrificed sincerity for sentimentality: In all likelihood Gloria (the narrator) doesn’t really smell her own puke, nor can she know why the guard, standing several feet away in his wooden kiosk, “crinkles his nose.” The guard’s response doesn’t belong genuinely either to the guard or to Gloria. It has been contrived by the author and foisted upon her readers, in the hope that they’ll be gullible enough to buy it.

And some readers will buy it. The best-seller shelves are brimming with sentimental fluids, overflowing with unearned actions and emotions.

By all means write such a book, but know that you’ve done so for the sake of commerce, and not art. Then laugh all the way to the bank.

31}

THE BATHETIC BEDROOM: SEX (OR THE LACK THEREOF) & SENTIMENTALITY

Sex is certainly part of “real” life. And, unlike murder and suicide, it’s a commonplace occurrence, as common as every woman, man, or child you see on the street. But for the act of sex, they wouldn’t be there.

However commonplace, in fiction (as in life) even sex should be treated with caution and with respect for both psychological and physiological truth, and not exploited for sentimental value in the name of shock or poignancy. This exploitation typically takes the form of gratuitous sex, with clothes flying off of bodies that have barely met, and whose superficial souls, assuming they have any, are as easily stripped away. In that case, we call the result pornographic.

But sex can be sentimentalized by other, less graphic means. It can even be sentimentalized out of existence.

A student submits a story in which an upper-middle-class family, living in a tame Connecticut suburb, takes in a homeless boy from New York’s urban jungle. Even less credibly, the parents put twelve-year-old Ricky in the same room with their pubescent daughter.

A sensational premise, full of “dramatic” potential. But the more sensational the choice of raw material, the greater the burden of plausibility. The author must convince his audience that the world in which such things happen is “real” and exists somewhere proximate to the world you and I live in. Every time an author introduces an inauthentic or incredible detail into a story, however trivial, the reader loses faith in the “reality” of the story. We slip through the cracks and find ourselves standing outside of the story, in judgment of it, rather than inside it, living it.

So, in the above story, when I learn that Ricky and Jennifer share a bedroom, having been told that in his former life Ricky was a child prostitute, what am I to make of their innocent nocturnal cuddling? How “innocent” can it possibly be?

You say: “Well, to have them have sex would be even more sensational, more gratuitous. Wouldn’t it?”

What makes a fictional element gratuitous is a lack of motivation, an insufficient grounding in “reality”—either our reality, yours and mine, or its own reality, established in the first paragraph or sentence of the story (see Meditation # 2). Here, what is gratuitous (and sentimental) is the innocence of that “innocent” cuddling, the lack of sexual experience or sexual heat, excised— presumably—to permit what the author deemed a more touching scene of interracial asexual harmony, however spurious.

In writing fiction, we have to deal with realities, either the realities of our world or those of an invented world. We can invent the facts, but we can’t—or anyway we shouldn’t—ignore them.

32}SENTIMENTALITY SELLS:
BEING NICHOLAS SPARKS

Telling students not to write sentimentally can be a thankless undertaking, like telling a child not to believe in the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus.

How often have I had to endure the argument that Nicholas Sparks is the world’s greatest writer, and the proof lies in his having sold X-million books, and therefore I should take all my arguments to the contrary and … (I’ll let you guess what my students think I should do with my arguments.)

I have nothing personal against Mr. Sparks. In fact I think him supremely gifted at what he does. And what he does is write books that sell and sell and sell. But they are commercial, not artistic, achievements. They are to great fiction what Cheez Doodles are to cheese. Guess which product sells in greater quantities?

Here is a sample from The Notebook of Sparks-style dialogue:

She leaned into him. “Tell me, Noah, what do you remember most from the summer we spent together?”

“All of it.”

“Anything in particular?”

“No,” he said.

“You don’t remember?”

He answered after a moment, quietly, seriously:

“No, it’s not that. It’s not what you’re thinking. I was serious when I said ‘all of it.’ I can remember every moment we were together, and in each of them there was something wonderful. . . . Poets often describe love as an emotion that we can’t control, one that overwhelms logic and common sense. That’s what it was like for me. I didn’t plan on falling in love with you, and I doubt if you planned on falling in love with me. But once we met, it was clear that neither of us could control what was happening to us. We fell in love despite our differences, and once we did, something rare and beautiful was created.”

Discounting the fact that people never talk to each other this way, the thoughts expressed here are pure, unadulterated, industrial-strength mush, designed to suck tears from gullible eyes. Sparks can write: As a stylist he knows a thing or two. But slash the sentiment from this scene and what’s left? Nothing. No scene. No characters.

Offered here, as a corrective, some love-chat in Ivan Gold’s less sentimental hands:

    “You’re so very good,” she said.

“I’ve never done that before.”

“Done what?”

I came off her, rolled away, and took her hand.

“The . . . how shall I say . . . reverse flip?”

“Oh. Did you like it?”

“It was priceless.”

“One can’t move very much.”

“This is true. You like to move?”

“Yes.”

“I’d noticed.”

“You find it unpleasant?”

“No, babe, not unpleasant. A little overexciting, maybe.”

“The water is boiling away.”

“So it is. You want some coffee?”¹⁶

The success of most fiction bestsellers owes at least something to sentimentality: sentimental plots (Nicholas Sparks’s The Notebook; The Bridges of Madison County, by Robert J. Waller; Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones); or a sentimental prose style (Toni Morrison); or both (The Road, by Cormac McCarthy).

Call me a snob, but I don’t care how well a book sells; I care only how good it is. And unless it’s well written, a book can’t be good, not as far as I’m concerned.

Not that bestsellers can’t be good. Stephen King at his best is a superb writer. Jodi Picoult’s novels are popular and well done. In his time Dashiell Hammett was a bestseller and a damned good writer, and so was James M. Cain. So was Dickens. So was Jules Verne. So is Susan Isaacs. Alice Hoff man. Anita Shreve. Amy Tan. Wally Lamb. Carl Hiaasen. Patricia Highsmith. Ken Follet. Len Deighton. Peyton Place and Gone With the Wind have more virtues than vices. To the list of writers who are both good and successful there’s no end.

(You may now stop calling me a snob.)