Holloway TELLS a Story

This blog post is going to be about how Monica Holloway did too much telling rather that showing in her novel Driving with Dead People.
After reading that sentence do you want to continue reading my post? Is there any suspense whatsoever left in what I have to say? I felt that Holloway's writing style often threw in summarizing sentences, similar to mine above, that gave too much away before the reader even had the chance to get interested or invested in the scene. For instance, when we meet the mother's new boyfriend for the first time the narrator tells us right off the bat, "I decided to hate him," rather then showing us how she hated him (142). Then she goes on to tell a zoomed out rendition of there first meeting with sparse dialogue that revealed very little about his character.

Conversely, the most shocking scene in the book had no introduction, "He stood there for a moment, and then punched me in the face" (187). She did not dilute the statement with some leading sentence, or thesis statement like she so often does in the rest of the book. The reader had no warning, and I read drop-jawed from page 187 to 190 as the scene unfolded. This is how I wish every scene could have been designed. I felt Holloway lacked faith in her readers which is why she included so many telling statements.

However, Holloway may have given too much away at times, but her ability to keep the most vital secret to the plot, the father's sexual abuse, till the end was impressive. She foreshadows the abuse once in 256 pages when the mom warns the girls about how their dad has been looking at them lately. It took Holloway 256 pages to get to that life, and story, changing moment when Jo Ann admits, "Dad molested me." I suspected this was where the story was going, but still felt a level of shock upon hearing this confession. Perhaps Holloway needed those 256 pages of zoomed out descriptions of her childhood to position the reader so they too could feel what it was like to have something so repressed come to light.

I felt that Holloway made few choices about which scenes she included in her novel making it a seemingly scattered and in-concise series of events. This book dragged, and I wonder why she didn't use a more challenging craft style, like having the narrator's voice evolve with her age, to keep the reader engaged. Her occasional repetitive sentences like, "I couldn't get up and I couldn't breathe. The fall knocked the wind out of me, which had never happened before" irked me as well (173). When this is stated the narrator is already laying on the ground. Plus, doesn't getting the wind knocked out of you imply that you couldn't breathe? The entire first sentence was unnecessary and wordy distracting from the scene itself.

Now I am going to conclude my blog post by noting one negative and one positive component of Holloway's writing. She may have included a lot of leading sentences ruining the suspence, but she certainly knows how to keep a secret until the end.

- Margaret -