On Craft Transparency

I am reading When the Elephants Dance by Tess Uriza Holthe, a novel set in the Japanese-occupied Philippines during World War II. I was interested in it when it came out, but I heard an interview with Holthe in which she describe One Hundred Years of Solitude as “boring” and it soured me on her. (Yes, I am irrational sometimes.) However, my uncle lent me the book, so I decided to put my silliness aside and read it.

I am enjoying the book, but aspects of it have me pondering something I’ll call “craft transparency.” Sometime ago, I disagreed with someone in a writing group about her belief that the best prose style is the kind that is completely invisible because writing is supposed to be in service to the story. I contended that, no, they were both important, and just because a prose style (or narrative structure or whatever craft aspect of a work)  is distinctive does not make it of inferior quality. My enjoyment of a work comes just as much from appreciating the hand of the artist as the art.

However, this means that I am tuned into where the artist’s hand falters. I appreciate when the fine craftsmanship comes through and it adds to my enjoyment of the story, but I when it falters, it often makes me set down the book for a while. The difference is the difference between “Ah, I see what you did there!” and “Oh. I see what you did there.”

So back to When the Elephants Dance. The prose style is clean and simple  and the structure is like The Decameron — a group of confined people who tell stories to pass the time. As far as the first goes, this may be unfair, since Holthe also said in that interview that she admires Hemingway, but I find it a bit too obvious and a bit too naive, a narrative style that’s often used in works set in the ancient world or non-Western countries. And as for the latter, I may be wrong, but it seems that Holthe had a collection of short stories when she needed to have a novel, and constructed the framing narrative in order to force the short stories into novel format.

The joining seams are most obvious in the transitions from the framing narrative into the stories the characters tell. The first story is told by the narrator’s father, a man whose longest chunk of dialogue, before he switches to “Now I am telling a story” mode, is “We cannot hide forever. We must find food. Domingo is right. We must band together and help the Amerikanos. It is our only hope.” But when he starts telling the story, he talks like this:

“Perhaps that particular story belongs to another church, in another town. Maybe not, maybe all of it is true. But if I am to tell the true story, you must know from the start that the church was merely incidental. A symptom. Shall we say, of deeper troubles. Few know what really happened. Most have forgotten and moved on with their lives. The church was never the crux of the story. There is an imbalance here, you see? More focus on the church when, really the heart of the story lies with Esmeralda Cortez and with her mysterious disappearance. The catalyst of her strange departure was a mere boy of seven, and that boy was me.”

When I read that, I actually said aloud, “Ooookay” and complained about the awkward change of dialogue style to Brian. And I set down the book. The story that followed was quite good, but I had to put aside what led to it before moving on to it.

Another moment of disconnection with the narrative came when the band of people fantasize about eating chicken adobo. A woman, speaking to two other women who, like any proper Filipina, know how to make chicken adobo, says, “First you chop the garlic, saute it, then you add the cup of vinegar, half a cup of soy sauce, and the chopped chicken. A little bay leaves, salt and pepper…. That is all. It does not take much.”

Very service-y! Once again, I paused and complained aloud. I take this bit of dialogue as either the author or her editor thinking that not enough people know what chicken adobo is and deciding it needed to be explained. And it comes across as an explanation rather than a natural part of the narrative. I contrasted this with a scene in The Gangster of Love by Jessica Hagedorn that showed a character making adobo, his action part of the conversation that was going on. It drew me in, and even made me say, “He forgot the bay leaves!” and delighted me when I turned the page and the character realized, “I forgot the bay leaves!”

That was a moment of “Ah, I see what you did there!”