Fat Vampire

Am I just a grouch lately, or are the books I'm reading really that bad? I think it's the latter; you decide.

I read not one but two novels by Mary Alice Monroe, mostly because she was recommended to me as a local Charleston, SC author. The first one, Time Is a River, wasn't set in South Carolina, so I set my negative reaction to it aside and read another one, Last Light Over Carolina. I hated it less is about all I can say. Both novels take a facile approach to complicated issues like infidelity and reputation. At one point in Last Light Over Carolina, the wife tries to head off a situation that could lead to infidelity by talking to her husband:

"You know what? Tonight there were a lot of guys at that school who took time off the boat to be there for their kids. So don't give me that old line about being a shrimper."
"It is what it is."
"Maybe that's the problem."
"What's that?"
"Just that things aren't the same now as they were when we got married. We have a child now. That makes things different."
She saw his big shoulders bow up in defense, and she felt suddenly weary of this old, pointless argument. They'd both thrown the same hurtful lines back and forth so often that they no longer heard the words. It was just annoying, like his mess strewn across the room."

And no, whatever "mess" she blames him for is never specified; it's just a generality thrown out there in a lazy kind of way.

Then I read the new Yann Martel novel, Beatrice and Virgil, and a more self-indulgent piece of fiction is hard to imagine. For the first 190 pages it follows a thinly disguised Martel figure through an odd relationship with a playwriting taxidermist, and then suddenly the relationship, the taxidermist's shop, and what the autobiographical character thought he was doing are all blown up in his face, leaving him with a manuscript that has (surprise!) the same title as the novel you're holding in your hands, which ends with another "manuscript" posing questions familiar to anyone who has known a moderately morose sixth-grader. For instance:
"Your daughter is clearly dead. If you step on her head, you can reach higher, where the air is better. Do you step on your daughter's head?"
All I can say is, thank goodness I got this out of the library, rather than buying it because I liked Life of Pi, which is what Martel must be counting on to sell any copies of this sorry sucker.

So finally I picked up a new YA novel--Fat Vampire, by Adam Rex--because you know my daughter and I still have a passing interest in vampire parodies. Also I loved Rex's first YA novel, The True Meaning of Smekday. What I found is that Fat Vampire is the best of a bad lot. It has some funny bits--like that a kid who gets addicted to the internet has a disease called "the google," and that a vampire who doesn't want to be evil not only has to refrain from drinking human blood, but should use his superhuman powers to foil convenience-store robberies and such.

It has some funny lines, like when the vampires have a meeting and tell the newly-made ones that "discretion is paramount. You tell no one what you are. You speak to no one of our concerns" and the fat vampire, 15-year-old Doug, thinks "First rule of bite club: you do not talk about bite club."

It has some moderately funny descriptions, like this one: "If there had been a fourth Little Pig who'd elected to build his house out of cigarette butts it might have looked and smelled something like this place."

It also has some good dialogue:
"I guess--I guess the real question," said Doug, "is why would any vampire make another?"
"Why?" Stephin repeated. "Loneliness, of course."
"But I mean. . . why would a vampire create a younger vampire if there was a possibility the young one might end up destroying the old one?"
Stephin stared. "If you can explain to me how this is different from parenting in general I might know how to answer that."

The ending of the novel gets too heavy-handed, though. The metaphor of the "fat vampire" becomes explicit, as though Rex doesn't trust his intended audience to be able to make the connection themselves:
"People like him--the unbeautiful, the less popular--were almost inhuman in some people's eyes. They were a kind of pitiful monster, an aberration, a hunchback. You made eye contact only by accident and then you turned quickly away. The word 'geek' had once only referred to a circus freak, hadn't it? A carny who performed revolting acts for a paying audience. Was it so different now? See! him bit the head off a live chicken. Behold! as he plays Dungeons & Dragons at a sleepover."

Fat Vampire's seven alternate endings, while clever, don't work in an interesting narrative way. They're merely another sideshow, amusing but ultimately without meaning.

And that kind of sums up my recent reading experiences--amusing but fairly meaningless. I'm looking for a little more intellectual nutrition in the next few things I pick up.