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Heat in writing
Not sure where I'm going with this but I'm just gonna ramble :3
I noticed a while ago that two of my favorite books, though wildly different in most aspects, have one thing in common: they are written in a way that makes you feel the heat of the setting. I'll try to explain what i mean for both books individually first, hopefully that makes this a bit less incoherent.
Less Than Zero
Written by: Bret Easton Ellis (best known for his book American Psycho, which I'm actually reading right now hahah)
Just over 200 pages
This book... I really don't even know where to start.
It follows 18 year old rich boy Clay around a bunch of parties across Los Angeles as he loses his fucking mind, basically. He becomes very detached from everyone around him as his friends show how little empathy they have by doing a bunch of deeply horrible things, pretty much just for shits and giggles, and combined with the overwhelming heat of the setting, the whole book feels like a fever dream.
I read this in a single sitting after pulling it off my parents' bookshelf at random, and was stressed the fuck out the entire time. Told in first person with it's run-on sentences and almost confusingly fast pace, describing the finding of a random body as matter-of-factly as a car ride to a friend's house and without any time to linger on details, it reads exactly like a heat-induced haze. Everything just keeps going and going and going. The things that actually happen aren't really all that important compared to just the feeling of so much shit going on at the same time. You don't need to remember what happens, as long as you know that it's happening and it's horrible and it's too much and too fast and you feel like you're being hunted for sport even though you're sitting on the couch in your pyjamas reading words on a page.
Opening of the book:
People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city. Blair picks me up from LAX and mutters this under her breath as her car drives up the onramp. She says, "People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles." Though that sentence shouldn't bother me, it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably long time. Nothing else seems to matter. Not the fact that I'm eighteen and it's December and the ride on the plane had been rough and the couple from Santa Barbara, who were sitting across from me in first class, had gotten pretty drunk. Not the mud that had splattered the legs of my jeans, which felt kind of cold and loose, earlier that day at an airport in New Hampshire. Not the stain on the arm of the wrinkled, damp shirt I wear, a shirt which had looked fresh and clean this morning. Not the tear on the neck of my gray argyle vest, which seems vaguely more eastern than before, especially next to Blair's clean tight jeans and her pale-blue T-shirt. All of this seems irrelevant next to that one sentence. It seems easier to hear that people are afraid to merge rather than "I'm pretty sure Muriel is anorexic" or the singer on the radio crying about magnetic waves. Nothing else seems to matter to me but those ten words. Not the warm winds, which seem to propel the car down the empty asphalt freeway, or the faded smell of marijuana which still faintly permeates Blair's car. All it comes down to is that I'm a boy coming home for a month and people are afraid to merge.
Blair drives off the freeway and comes to a red light. A heavy gust of wind rocks the car for a moment and Blair smiles and says something about maybe putting the top up and turns to a different radio station. Coming to my house, Blair has to stop the car since there are these five workmen lifting the remains of palm trees that have fallen during the winds and placing the leaves and pieces of dead bark in a big red truck, and Blair smiles again. She stops at my house and the gate's open and I get out of the car, surprised to feel how dry and hot it is. I stand there for a pretty long time and Blair, after helping me lift the suitcases out of the trunk, grins at me and asks, "What's wrong?" and I say, "Nothing," and Blair says, "You look pale," and I shrug and we say goodbye and she gets into her car and drives away.
The Goldfinch
Written by: Donna Tartt (best known for her book The Secret History)
864 pages (I know I know)
This book is one of those things i love so much that I can barely even talk about it because i just want to start screaming like an idiot, but I'll try my best. The story takes place over a long time and a few different places, but because I'm specifically talking about heat I'll focus on the section set in Las Vegas.
As with all her books, one of the things that makes Tartt's writing so special is her ability to create an incredibly strong sense of atmosphere. Her descriptions of even the most common things are absolutely gorgeous, and she's incredible at writing a convincing first person narrator. In this case, our narrator is Theo, a 13 year old boy who survives a terrorist attack on the museum he's visiting with his mother. She doesn't survive, and with his father having fucked off to god knows where years ago, he's practically orphaned. I won't tell you too much of the plot, that's not really the point here so I won't spoil it for you, but after a while he ends up with that father and his new girlfriend on the mostly abandoned edge of Las Vegas, where he spends his time doing all the drugs he can get his hands on and trying very hard to convince you that him and Boris are just homies and actually his dog is gay but they're totally just buddies!!!
In all seriousness, the relationship between Theo and Boris is one of the most beautiful portrayals I've seen of the sort of queer friendship you have as a teenager that was never actually a relationship but can only be described as a first love, you know the one.
The writing in this book, as the number of pages shows you, is very slow. It drags on and on and on, in a way that again mirrors the heat of the setting. It's the type of heat that makes you drag your feet and slur your words and lay down on the ground for hours looking at some random object because you can't bring yourself to do anything more.
Alright, I'm done rambling and tired :3
Uhhh yeah like I said idk what I'm really saying here so I guess that's it. Go read both of these books!!!
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