Series, sequels, sequences
Feb. 1st, 2013 01:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oursinI was inspired by reading in Winifred Holtby as I Knew Her that WH, in her book about V Woolf pointed out that several characters from previous books by Woolf were at Mrs Dalloway's party -
Which totally delighted me as a result of thoughts I was having a couple of weeks ago that never became a post.
Which themselves were generated by reading a chapter in a collection of essays on the Middlebrow about Mazo de la Roche's Jalna novels, and how these declined in critical repute from being a major contribution to the lit of Canada to 'churning out sequel after sequel' for her massive fanbase.
(Of those books in particular I can say little: I read 2-3 in my adolescence and found them indigestible for reasons that I would now call 'id-vortexyness'. Are they worth returning to in maturity?)
And then I thought
HUH???
because Proust, and various other 'roman fleuves' of the period which were considered echt-lit. Not to mention Trollope.
Maybe it was about having A Big Plan rather than turning out yet more in the Whiteoaks family saga for a fannish reading public? Or about ugh, gurlee family sagas? Or, of course, being a bloke? (Men write romans fleuves, women get sequelitis...)
I then bethought of the various ways in which people do books that are not discrete entities: series about the same character/s, particularly maybe series mysteries/thrillers; series which are intended to be a set of volumes about the interactions of the same characters (or progress of an individual character) over time but are expected to be a finite rather than open-ended number; people who turn up as minor characters in other books by the author (when I first thought this I was 'Margaret Drabble! Alison Lurie!' and I was just so thrilled to see the distinguished genealogy of this - well, also Charlotte Yonge did this, bless).
The 'sequelitis' thing also seems to presume that Author Writes Massive Hit, which may have actual merit, and then is led into the sordid business of cloning it as long as the market can bear (which I think is the presumption in play vis a vis the Jalna books, see also, and possibly relatedly in national context, Anne of Green Gables).
And me, personally, I think that sometimes the author must realise that there are still other stories there in the set-up they've created or threads left loose, and why not continue.
I also am of the opinion that the first isn't necessarily the best and everything after that falls off, since there are series I've read which don't immediately hit their stride but build over time (not to mention the up and downiness of some crime series I read, where an apparent slump can be followed by a major improvement in the game).
So: thoughts, opinions, and maybe even recommendations solicited on this topic?
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Date: 2013-02-01 01:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-01 03:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-01 01:46 pm (UTC)Pratchett's Discworld definitely doesn't hit its stride until about the fifth or so book in, after Sourcery, when the Unseen University develops its current format (big dinners rather than magical duels) and the characters of the witches become more established.
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Date: 2013-02-01 02:53 pm (UTC)Buchan's characters recur in other books, of course - Archie Roylance, in particular seems to turn up everywhere.
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Date: 2013-02-01 03:11 pm (UTC)(Given that we have already had Lord Peter and Kim turn up, in different books in the series I may add, I would have expected a bit more of a shout-out to Buchan characters.)
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Date: 2013-02-01 04:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-01 08:36 pm (UTC)Janet can do the honours if Archie is elsewhere, of course.
Leithen turns up even more than Archie in the appropriate novels.
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Date: 2013-02-01 02:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-01 05:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-01 05:28 pm (UTC)As example of a TV series that I thought turned into a soap was Vampire Diaries which seemed to start out with such wit and even sly meta, and had a strong young woman . . . but her relationship with the brothers seemed to settle into the same old same old high intensity angsting that never moved, thus: soap.
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Date: 2013-02-01 09:38 pm (UTC)I think that actually bit Pratchett in the ass while writing Discworld -- he does have characters learning and changing, but at the same time Vimes and Granny Weatherwax are well-loved and stock characters (I don't mean that as a put-down - I love both of them) so it's very unlikely they'll be killed off or really hurt or injured or even suffer a major defeat. (Vimes seemed to have something bad happen to him, with the SPOILER in Thud, but it's more or less defused -- like how Donna Noble's head would explode if she remembered! Oh wait no, she'll just pass out.)
In other words they start off more soap opera and then there are "minor" characters who learn and change and grow: Susan, Tiffany, maybe Moist, and so on. I think part of the reason he maybe went with a new series about a young witch growing into her power was he didn't have a chance to do that with the other witches (Magrat sort of, but then she basically retires, and I actually never liked Agnes a lot). It's kind of fascinating to go from the earlier books to the later ones and see how much more serious and weighty it gets.
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Date: 2013-02-01 04:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-01 05:22 pm (UTC)Sequelitis vs. Great (or Better) Art -- I've always personally liked LMM's Emily novels better than the Anne books, because there does seem to be actual change in her. Anne seems more static. (Then again there's the Wodehouse books, in which the characters are delightfully static, right? The reader wouldn't want them to be anything else. But that's comedy.)
....nothing coherent here, need more coffee.
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Date: 2013-02-01 09:19 pm (UTC)Something to do with restoration of order, maybe?
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Date: 2013-02-01 09:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-01 09:42 pm (UTC)The Anne books contain some stories of toxic people and abuse, but the people are marginal to Anne's life (and to the village itself), and the abuse is usually introduced and finished in a single chapter; a story someone tells at a funeral, or something Anne remembers hearing about.
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Date: 2013-02-01 09:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-01 10:06 pm (UTC)I wonder if part of Montgomery's power is that she did build on the same family constellation (her own, apparently) -- orphan girl semi-adopted by a household of harsh old women with a nice weak dumb man -- instead of looking for something original or more healthy.
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Date: 2013-02-01 10:24 pm (UTC)The way LMM rewrites and reinscribes her life, especially early years, is fascinating -- in the Anne and Emily series, the Story Girl, even her rewritten journals -- I'm not aware of anything else quite like it. Maybe Anais Nin, altho she was never a big seller until after her death (and then it was her nonfiction/erotica). I think there's a strong element of wish-fulfillment and deliberate optimism (which she basically had to have, to survive, if you read her biography) but there's also this fascinating equally deliberate focus on storytelling, narrative technique, almost metafictionally so....
And talk about a native talent warped by the need to make money -- didn't that happen to a lot of female authors? They wrote out of necessity, or a book was an unexpected hit, and then BOOM they had to write to make money, so it was easy to critically dismiss them. I think with LMM that happens later, tho, with the Pat and maybe some of the later books from the 20s-30s, which IIRC were sometimes fix-ups. I know she was proud of her financial success, but at the same time the CanLit establishment was really nasty to her and shut her out almost completely, which had to hurt a lot (her biographer goes into this).
.....why no I don't find her fascinating at all, heh
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Date: 2013-02-01 10:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-01 11:55 pm (UTC)LMM's storytelling seems obvious in some ways: she doesn't camouflage the gun over the mantel at all, then fires it on the very next page. It will be interesting to see if things like that were deliberate.
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Date: 2013-02-01 10:49 pm (UTC)[....]
this fascinating equally deliberate focus on storytelling, narrative technique, almost metafictionally so....
I'd love to look deeper into that! What biographer/s do you recommend?
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Date: 2013-02-03 02:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-01 09:16 pm (UTC)There are way too many bad examples: John Le Carre, Philip Roth, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, JK Rowling, John Grisham, even Patrick O'Brien and my beloved Connie Willis (her last two books were both illogical and repetitive).
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Date: 2013-04-06 05:15 am (UTC)