Recently Read: Paperback Writer by Stephen Bly

Paperback Writer by Stephen Bly
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

SRP (Summer Reading Program) Why Bite: What could have been an interesting plot is muddled by a confusing gimmick, repetitiveness, and low reading level.

I haven’t read any Christian fiction since junior high, but I thought I’d give it a shot. Bly is well known in the genre, so when I came across this book in the library, I decided to pick it up. Indeed, Bly is evidently enough of a literary success that he felt justified in the cheesy move of having the main character refer to him as a successful author, tooting his own horn. One of my gripes about current mainstream fiction is that books often contain numerous sexually explicit scenes. I figured Christian fiction would be void of that particular scene, but, if this book is any indication, it also tends to be plentiful of opportunities to preach the faith and talk someone on the fence into full conversion mode. I wouldn’t mind this so much, if it is written realistically. However, I find in what little Christian literature I’ve read, including a series of YA novels of drug addicted street children finding salvation and a book of short stories published by MOPS, that characters paraphrase the Bible often in normal, every day conversations. I’m around Christians all the time. We don’t spend every conversation witnessing to each other, and do not consider every event or complication in life God’s teaching moment, but evidently characters in Christian fiction do. But I digress.

This book has its moments of grandiose preaching, but not as much as I expected. Although, at one point the main character does succeed in converting his fictional creation to Christianity. But even these brief moments would be tolerable if the story was somewhat entertaining. Unfortunately, this book fell well short of that mark. The narrator tells the story of a moderately successful “paperback writer” on his way home from a motel after finishing novel number 55 in a detective series. He has quite the adventurous day, but turns out it’s all make believe. Throughout the novel, the reader is led to believe that some scenes are real and some are not, but the main character, Watson, can’t tell the difference and just keeps going back and forth between the two. Problem is the reader can’t tell the difference either. I’m sure to Bly this seemed like an interesting gimmick to capture the interest of the reader, but all he accomplished was a confusing plot that was extremely difficult to follow. Even at the end of the book, the reader is left wondering what, if any, scenes actually happened, or if it all occurred only in his mind on the drive home. The book seems to be an attempt at illustrating the process of how a writer comes up with ideas and develops a story, and that this particular writer does so as an ordained service to humanity. But really, it would have been far more interesting as a straight adventure story without being enveloped in a convoluted gimmick, even though the action sequences were predictable and cliché, including a couple completely random departures from the plot in which Watson solves the personal problems of friends and deals with his adult daughter’s new boyfriend over the phone. The action seems to have been appropriated from every television action adventure show from the 1980s, including “Magnum, P.I.” which is mentioned multiple times and clearly the inspiration for Watson’s Toby Mackenna. In addition, the passages and dialogue were incredibly repetitive. The main plot points and objectives, as well as Watson’s personal issues, are repeated so often that I started rolling my eyes a third of the way through the book. The average reader is capable of remembering key details without them being retold every few pages.

As it stood, I would have given this book two stars, but I knocked it down to one based on the quality of writing alone. There are blatant typos throughout this specific publication, and in one particular passage the narrator refers to the main character by a different name, Weston, chapters before an imagined FBI Agent Smith mistakenly calls him “Weston” repeatedly. There is no connection between the separate passages and this was clearly a glaring error that couldn’t be overlooked, and one that is perhaps not limited to the publication I happened to read. These easily avoidable errors aside, what truly bothered me was the reading level in which this book was written. It was clearly below what I was used to reading, even though this novel is supposedly classified as adult fiction. I tested a passage from the first chapter, and it scored 3.8 on the Flesch-Kincaid scale. As reference, I tested a passage from a Magic Tree House book, which scored a 3.0, a passage from a Vonnegut novel, which scored a 7.3, and a passage from a Harry Potter book, which scored an 8.5. I found this so interesting that I have decided to research the reading levels of adult fiction further with passages from various novels. But I digress. (In the interest of fairness, this review scored an 12.0). While Flesch-Kincaid is not particularly accurate or scientific in its assessment, it does give a ballpark idea of the reading level of a work. This book’s ballpark appears to be the third grade.

All in all, I was rather disappointed in this book. I feel like I could have gotten more entertainment from a rerun of “Knight Rider.” This novel was dull, uninventive, and flat. Bly tried to write something unique, but failed to write a compelling piece of fiction.


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