Okay, so now I’ve read Mr. Reiken’s debut novel. I was sort of borderline on his second (The Lost Legends of New Jersey), on whether or not I liked it. I was impressed with his realism and some of the imagery was striking, plus I liked his almost-experimental style. Having read both novels now, however, I’m less impressed. I felt like the second book was just a rehashing of this one, with a slightly different plot. As for plot, this is about a family who is torn apart when one of the five children walks off to go swimming one day and disappears. The book chronicles five years after the disappearance, told from the point of view of the fourth child, Philip. It discusses how the different family members deal with the disappearance over time. How they deal with a death that can’t be confirmed as a death, hope that can’t be realized, and that sort of thing.

So that’s not the same as a family of four being torn apart by divorce, right? Well, it takes place during the same years (late 70s to early 80s). In both books there is/are: kids learning constellations by cheap star charts, a character with two different colored eyes, a dead/missing brother and that brother’s diary, a living character continuing the journal in some fashion, a mother who goes crazy but who eventually gets better, a father who “goes back to his roots” as a coping mechanism, characters who vomit every time they get upset (as absolutely unrealistic as that is), and a confessional-style ending (“I’ve written this as I [insert action here] and it’s taken me X-years to write it”). Even some of the characters felt rehashed – the older sister Amy in this book, for example, seems to be a whole heck of a lot like the next door neighbor’s kid in Legends. So not the same plot, but for me, the books were just too similar to feel like more than different drafts of the same story.

Of the two books, even though this one had a more interesting plot, the second I think was better written. There was at least a certain amount of memory-like quality to it to make the memories seem somewhat nostalgic, like bits of a dream you remember years later. That one fact separates it a little bit from the hordes of modern literature out there. Modern lit bugs me, the same way modern commercial fiction does, only for different reasons. Modern lit has a tendency, in both novel and short story, to turn everything into absolute banality. Every event a person lives through becomes mundane, and then nothing means anything. Okay, I can see that as a concept, but frankly it makes the reading quite boring. Modern fiction has no depth; modern lit has no surface. Neither are generally great, in my opinion. Why would I bother to read something that is boring? I have my own life for mundane banality. Why would I bother to read something that doesn’t make me think? I could watch a movie for that.

And then, The Odd Sea seems to fall into other modern traps. It focuses, even more than Legends, on the sex lives of its characters. For some reason, in modern lit, you have to talk about sex, you have to talk about drugs, you have to swear in order to prove you’re contemporary. It’s so irritating! Like modern lit writers are all sheep that have to follow these conventions! Where is the originality in that? And then, what’s worse is that they have to write up sex scenes that are absolutely devoid of feeling, to make them even more banal and mundane than the rest of the book, thus proving that as authors, they aren’t ordinary fiction writers. It all feels so childish and immature to me. Sex happens, yes, but if you want to exploit it in your book, do you have to turn around and exploit yourself as well? Half of this book, to me, just felt like a perverse daydream written without feeling in order to hide that fact.

So all in all, I don’t think I will be reading any more of Reiken’s books. He’s got very good technique, and there’s no doubt that his writing – his actual words – are well done (beyond a few lines I’d be horribly embarrassed of if it were me, things like “This was not just cold air–it was the same arctic air that polar bears had farted in.”). It’s no surprise to me that he’s a professor. But unfortunately, the books, in the main, bored me.