Are We There Yet?

This series is exhausting me. What series you may ask? Does it matter? I don't read series anymore. I can't. I can't bear it. They make me feel like a nine year old on a cross-country car trip in which the car is a 1958 Edsel with no air conditioning and a 60 year old man at the wheel who refuses to stop for bathroom breaks or go over 40 miles an hour. In other words, all I want is out.

Let me clarify what I mean by a series. Here's what I don't mean: anything with an end, a destination, if you will, a clear narrative arc leading to a conclusion despite the number of volumes. Or anything in which each book is loosely connected to the last one, where the old characters appear or are related to new ones but aren't the main focus of the new story. Let's take a little quiz, shall we?

Harry Potter? Not a series because, and this is very important, it ENDS. That, my friends is the key difference. There is a finale, a closure, a cut off point for the story arc.

What about Jo Beverley's Company of Rogue books? Not a series because each book stands alone and you can read them out of order, some not at all, and never be left out of pertinent plot points. Characters from one book appear in other books, but it is like visiting old friends and you don't feel like you are being jerked around on a never-ending merry-a-go-round of drama, like an episode of "Days of Our Lives" in which ten years in real time only equals about 48 hours in soap opera time.

How about mystery novels in which the same detective solves different mysteries in each book? Okay. Now that's a tricky one. It depends. Let's take Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. Not a series. Why, because one does not have to read them in order. Hercule Poirot changes very little from book to book. Ditto Sherlock Holmes. Some may argue with me here, but the point is that the narrative structure of these mysteries is constructed around solving the individual mystery NOT the character arc of the protagonist. Mysteries in which the mystery is a device by which the character grows and changes from book to book are the type of series I'm talking about. Why these but not the others?

The main issue I have with series is this, if I may again use the car trip metaphor. Most series are like getting in the car and just driving for God-knows-how-long to God-only-knows-where. The driver clearly has no idea where they are going. There probably was never a destination in mind, in the first place. They are just rambling along, heedlessly. Stop! Stop! I want out.

Hercule Poirot mysteries are like riding around on a tourist bus. There's always the bus but you stop, you get out, you look around, take pictues, pee, eat and get back on the bus. There are several destinations that you visit but the bus remains the consistant element. Poirot would be the bus in this metaphor just in case you didn't catch that.

A story necessitates a destination. It does not have to be a grand conclusion or an illustrious site full of meaning. It could be the Denny's in the strip mall. But with many series you just feel like you are being jerked around from story to story, waiting for hints dropped in the first books to pan out in others and yet, they rarely ever do. There's always a point in the series where the author decides to be clever or suddenly realizes they've already done this or that the characters aren't interesting to them anymore and then they go and betray the whole charm and purpose of what the story had to say to begin with. Characters cease to grow and become caricatures of themselves, plots become either more and more absurd or just recycled from previous books, prose becomes stilted and choppy. Readers begin to ask themselves: haven't we been here before? This looks familiar. Oh my god, we've been going in circles. Shit!

Whenever I suspect something might be a series, I run, run, run in the opposite direction. I will not even start a -ology until I know for a fact that it is going to end. If I wanted rambling, pointless anecdotes that lead nowhere and leaving you feeling bereft of meaning or purpose, I'd read Proust (ba dum bum. Ching!) Hey! YA novels, sci-fi writers, fantasy authors, and romance mavens. You aren't Proust. You are working in genres that require an ending. If you want to write long, wandering, circling prose with no narrative structure or character development you have two options: One, write for "Days of Our Lives" or better yet, "Passions" in which both lack of narrative, absurd, random twists and total lack of character development are assets, or write experimental fiction in which you can discuss how the randomness and absurdity of your circling prose is a reflection of the random, absurd nature of a uncertain existence. Ta da! Problem solved.

But don't tell me we are going to the opera or to Shang hai or to Wally World and then take me on a never-ending tour of Canada. That's just cruel.