During the past week or so, I have been working my way through two recently published novels that I have never read before: A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book, which I purchased myself; and Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, which was a gift. Other than the odd coincidence that both feature a major female character named Olive, these books have almost nothing in common, including my enthusiasm about reading them. 

I would not call Byatt my favorite living fiction writer (that would have to be Alice Munro), but she may be my favorite novelist. This doesn't mean that I wholeheartedly love her work, but I am always impressed and challenged by it. She is so curious; and even when that curiosity clutters up her narratives with a junkshop of cultural facts or balloons into irritatingly academic meta-excursions through her characters' brains, she keeps me edgy and jangled and eager for more. I love the way her best novels overflow with characters, and colors of trees, and textures of dresses, and strange observations about pottery, and arcane plays-within-plays. They are so vigorous and ambitious, her novels. She wants to say everything.

This is not true of Strout's Olive Kitteridge, which tells, by means of a series of linked stories, the story of an annoying, obnoxious, sometimes cruel, yet good-enough woman who lives a plain life in a small Maine town. One might think that this is exactly the sort of book that would appeal to me, seeing as I am also a woman of mixed motives who lives a plain life in a small Maine town. But this is such a bland novel, and I cannot understand why it has been so lauded. Although the observations about human emotion and motivation are plausible and the story plots are concise and believable, the prose makes me feel as if I've been smothered in a blanket. True, one might argue that the prose is intended to match the dimness of the setting and the characters, but I think such an argument is fallacious. John Updike's Rabbit novels were about a dull, not-too-smart man living a tedious life, but the story itself sparkled.

Anne Tyler is another very popular writer of self-effacing prose, and clearly, given their tendency to win prizes, etc., such novelists have a following. They are comfortable writers to read, I suppose, as Billy Collins is a comfortable poet to read. And it's not that I don't take a certain pleasure in the modesty of their voices. After all, I'm the person who is resurrecting Milly Jourdain's poetry. But I would never give Milly a Pulitzer. 

Just as an example, I'll open up the books I've mentioned and give you a few haphazard sentences. I always love the way randomly chosen passages can illuminate one another.

from Byatt's The Children's Book

Tom was not only sunny, he was sunburned. Everywhere exposed to the sun had been painted a ruddy-tanned colour, with paler hairs gleaming on it. The V of his shirt-neck, the bracelet of colour-change on his upper arms, various zebra-gradations of gold on his calves and thighs.

from Strout's Olive Kitteridge

Angie, in her youth, had been a lovely woman to look at, with her wavy red hair and perfect skin, and in many ways this was still the case. But now she was into her fifties, and her hair, pinned back loosely with combs, was dyed a color you might consider just a little too red, and her figure, while still graceful, had a thickening of its middle, the more noticeable, perhaps, because she was otherwise quite thin.

from Updike's Rabbit Is Rich

Harry realizes why Nelson's short haircut troubles him: it reminds him of how the boy looked back in grade school, before all that late Sixties business soured everything. He didn't know how short he was going to be then, and wanted to become a baseball pitcher like Jim Bunning, and wore a cap all summer that pressed his hair in even tighter to his skull, that bony freckled unsmiling face. Now his necktie and suit seem like that baseball cap to be the costume of doomed hopes.

I really ought to quit writing this letter now and go feed the animals. So maybe I'll save my thoughts about these passages until tomorrow. But I do think there is significant variation in diction, word choice, use of details, and control of past and present. If you have thoughts of your own in the meantime, I'd love to hear them.