I was going to write a post yesterday called "A Post-Black-and-White America?" full of percentages of Latino versus black voters and voter turn-out stats from the last two elections culled from the U.S. Census Bureau's wonderfully informative website, but was suddenly seized by a bowel-shaking bout of profound and utter boredom with the whole thing.

Bla bla bla. Blabidee bla bla blabidee bla. Bla bla bla-bla-bla-bla. Shut the fuck up. I don't even care what I think about any of this, why on earth should anyone else? Christ.

To make matters worse, I'm reading a boring book I'm too far into not to finish. I started Jim Crace's The Pesthouse on my morning commute Thursday, I think it was, and have plowed through about 200 pages going hither and yon since then. I am now to the point where how appallingly boring a vision of life after Bird Flu it is is almost motivation enough to finish it. (But the real motivation is my new year resolution to finish each and every book I start, no matter how quickly the task turns mentally masochistic on me.)

The problem with The Pesthouse is that Cormac McCarthy's The Road is still fresh in my mind, and his terse prose is so much more real and compelling than Crace's turgid, redundant, too-clever-by-half brand of wordcraft. After reading McCarthy’s take on the apocalypse, I don’t think you need to read another in a generation or two. Honestly. The clarity and simplicity of McCarthy’s chiaroscuro vision never falters. His grasp of human psychology is so far superior to a writer like Crace's that it transcends degree and kind. There's just no comparison.  There’s never a moment with McCarthy where you stop and roll your eyes. I couldn't take mine off the page long enough.

But The Pesthouse is surprisingly light and flaky. Precious moments sprout like mushrooms from the charred and rotting corpses that litter the landscape. If there were such a thing as post-apocalyptic Harlequin Romances there are passages here that indicate that Crace could make a fortune ghostwriting them. There are moments that are laughably counter-intuitive and show the writer's inability to identify what is inessential, and ultimately undermine the believability of the world he's depicting and the characters that inhabit it. If it weren't a case of authorial ineptitude, it would be comical. But there's a point where even fish-stories get tedious, if the teller never concedes the ridiculousness of the tale.

There's an episode where the heroine, a petite woman, whom Crace goes to great lengths to remind us is both inexperienced and nervous around horses, not only steals one from a gang of vicious banditos, but gallops off on it, with a toddler tucked under her arm...

She pulled herself onto its back, tucked [the toddler] between her thighs, and held her tight with her left arm. She surprised herself by riding efficiently with just one hand on the reins, though more rapidly than she had intended....

One of those Harlequin moments there.

But as dashing a figure as his female lead cuts here she and her sidekick, a gangly naif of a hero, are so simple-minded and guileless in a world so bitterly corrupted, where death and violence are everywhere, that we can hardly believe in them at all. Their innocence is not the kind that tugs at your heartstrings (unless you're the type to read romance novels); it's the kind that makes you want to see them lose it, and become more complex and interesting in the process.

But in plumbing the depths of his two post-plague Pollyannas Crace gives no indication, much less any hope, that they'll ever become more interesting than they were the moment he introduced them to us. There’s a scene early on where the young man has “rescued” the woman from the plague, and as they’re fleeing the village together, a crowd of travelers trying to make their way across a river to the coast to escape to England and back to civilization (Crace is English, by the way) stone them because they think the young woman is infected with "the flux." The two escape by a secret passage across the river, and as they cross, the young man thinks back to the crowd of travelers…


Burning questions. Golly, I wonder why I didn't run right back to those people who just tried to stone me and my lady friend here to death and clue them in on the secret passage across the river we found? Why was it again?

There's a fine line between an omniscient narrator conveying the cluelessness of his characters and coming off as disarmingly clueless himself. And Crace crosses it again and again and again.

He does have some dazzling descriptions, even if he errs on the side of verbal flatus and falters with human psychology. One that I liked went: “He had then watched the ferry, unladen but now set against the river, being towed back upstream by a team of oxen on a winch and beached for the night at the mooring.” Now, that’s some fine prose.

My hope is that in the remaining fifty or so pages I have yet to get to, something truly audacious will become of our two heroes, and they will at least suffer an interesting death. It's not looking good, though, if you want to know the truth.  I'm just hoping I won't die of boredom before they do.