I haven't read Gideon, but I have often found that kind of 'quippy-ness' annoying in other books. The first example that comes to mind is the Bobiverse series, which had some enjoyable aspects but was just chock full of the main character quipping and making dumb jokes to himself and then high-fiving himself for how hilarious he is (which in turn reads as the author high-fiving himself).
I want to clarify that I don't think Gideon gets derailed by this. And that's kinda why I wrote about it--to try to explain to myself why it didn't bother me that much. There seems to be a ton of genre fiction out there now that's nothing but an agglomeration of accelerated Whedonisms, and that seems unbearable to me
When I read Gideon the Ninth my initial thought was that it would become borderline unreadable within a few years, as the quippy Whedonisms deteriorated in cultural comprehensibility, and I already found myself getting annoyed with them as passé writerly tics as I read the text last fall, but your post made me wonder if there might be a further development where the cultural associations the prose style has with Buffy and the Marvel universe passes from cultural consciousness the book might become more readable. The notes of portentious alienness you noted were missing could develop out of the very quips that irritated me in 2019. The core structure and mythology of the book were deeply exciting to me and might possibly stand out more clearly with a bit of the withering death that comes to all works of art added in.
It would be very fitting for this specific text to function better as a Benjaminian ruin than as a novel read by the intended audience, given how central the instrumentalization of mortality is to the plot and the text as a whole.
Honestly I think your reply is smarter about all of this than my piece. I do wonder how this kind of thing will age. It might be regarded as more "authentic"--in terms of reflecting the real-life dialects of its time and place--in the future. Overall I find Gideon very readable but remain interested in the specificity of some of these choices. Still not sure I've decoded them, but thanks for this input--it'll help me get there
I've always disliked it when people insist they need to "like" a character and, snobbish though it may be, it strikes me as a very shallow way of relating to literature. (You see it crop up a lot in Goodreads reviews.) Armchair psychology, I know, but I think people who insist characters must be "likeable" are probably convinced that they themselves are very likeable, and blind to their own flaws and foibles. A great example is Quentin in Lev Grossman's Magicians trilogy - yeah, he's a selfish, moody teenager who doesn't become a mature adult until he's in his late 20s in the third book. I can't say that my own life was dissimilar, in retrospect, and if you put the first book down because Quentin wasn't "likeable" then you're missing out on one of the great subversive fantasy trilogies of the last decade.
I do think a character needs to be sympathetic in some way; and ironically enough it's usually writers who try too hard to make their characters Whedonesque that I find irritating and who lose my sympathy. An example that always springs to mind for me when I think of a thoroughly unlikeable, uncharismatic shithead of a main character who nonetheless retains the reader's sympathy is David Lurie in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace.
Yeah there are so many better metrics for character charisma than "likable." Sadly I think it's the one most heavily leaned on in publishing. Disgrace is a great example of how far you can stray from that and still write a novel that resonates in the 21st Century. I didn't love the book but I admire what Coetzee did there.
I haven't read Gideon, but I have often found that kind of 'quippy-ness' annoying in other books. The first example that comes to mind is the Bobiverse series, which had some enjoyable aspects but was just chock full of the main character quipping and making dumb jokes to himself and then high-fiving himself for how hilarious he is (which in turn reads as the author high-fiving himself).
I want to clarify that I don't think Gideon gets derailed by this. And that's kinda why I wrote about it--to try to explain to myself why it didn't bother me that much. There seems to be a ton of genre fiction out there now that's nothing but an agglomeration of accelerated Whedonisms, and that seems unbearable to me
When I read Gideon the Ninth my initial thought was that it would become borderline unreadable within a few years, as the quippy Whedonisms deteriorated in cultural comprehensibility, and I already found myself getting annoyed with them as passé writerly tics as I read the text last fall, but your post made me wonder if there might be a further development where the cultural associations the prose style has with Buffy and the Marvel universe passes from cultural consciousness the book might become more readable. The notes of portentious alienness you noted were missing could develop out of the very quips that irritated me in 2019. The core structure and mythology of the book were deeply exciting to me and might possibly stand out more clearly with a bit of the withering death that comes to all works of art added in.
It would be very fitting for this specific text to function better as a Benjaminian ruin than as a novel read by the intended audience, given how central the instrumentalization of mortality is to the plot and the text as a whole.
Honestly I think your reply is smarter about all of this than my piece. I do wonder how this kind of thing will age. It might be regarded as more "authentic"--in terms of reflecting the real-life dialects of its time and place--in the future. Overall I find Gideon very readable but remain interested in the specificity of some of these choices. Still not sure I've decoded them, but thanks for this input--it'll help me get there
I've always disliked it when people insist they need to "like" a character and, snobbish though it may be, it strikes me as a very shallow way of relating to literature. (You see it crop up a lot in Goodreads reviews.) Armchair psychology, I know, but I think people who insist characters must be "likeable" are probably convinced that they themselves are very likeable, and blind to their own flaws and foibles. A great example is Quentin in Lev Grossman's Magicians trilogy - yeah, he's a selfish, moody teenager who doesn't become a mature adult until he's in his late 20s in the third book. I can't say that my own life was dissimilar, in retrospect, and if you put the first book down because Quentin wasn't "likeable" then you're missing out on one of the great subversive fantasy trilogies of the last decade.
I do think a character needs to be sympathetic in some way; and ironically enough it's usually writers who try too hard to make their characters Whedonesque that I find irritating and who lose my sympathy. An example that always springs to mind for me when I think of a thoroughly unlikeable, uncharismatic shithead of a main character who nonetheless retains the reader's sympathy is David Lurie in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace.
Yeah there are so many better metrics for character charisma than "likable." Sadly I think it's the one most heavily leaned on in publishing. Disgrace is a great example of how far you can stray from that and still write a novel that resonates in the 21st Century. I didn't love the book but I admire what Coetzee did there.