A Crack in the Dike

Rob Woodbright

Have you ever picked up a book whose every word was a chore to read? Whose grammar, punctuation, and diction make you want to throw the book on a bonfire? Whose structure, at every level, is so shaky that you feel that breathing on the pages wrong will bring the whole thing crashing down on top of you like a Leona Helmsley high-rise?

Sure you have. We all have. Now, here's the kicker. Have you ever encountered a book with all those qualities you absolutely could not stop reading?

Now, I know what the first thing that comes to your mind is. Let me assure you-- compared to the writing to be found here, The DaVinci Code deserves every award it could possibly earn. (Whether that is because Brown is a better writer or because he had a better team of editors, this reviewer does not care to speculate.) "Mr. Woodbright" writes like an earnest, if somewhat uneducated, fifth-grader. The action stops for lengthy author's notes, commas are inserted seemingly randomly (certainly not where they're supposed to be), chapters run to eighty or so pages. To add insult to injury, cutesy terms are used in place of more adult, or technical, terms in many situations (all of which, rest assured, are the subject of an author's note or two along the way). I'm relatively sure, from the tone of the introductory author's notes for each of these, that the effect was meant to be humorous; instead, it has the odd, simultaneously amusing and annoying, effect of heightening the prurience while diminishing its effect. That, folks, is a tough, tough thing to pull off.

Despite all this, however, for some odd reason, Rob Woodbright's fictitious life kept me turning pages. I haven't put my finger on why yet, a few days after abandoning the book (oops, did I give away a review spoiler? Yes, I did ultimately toss it to the dustbunnies; more on this later). It's not that the characters are compelling, it's not the plot, and certainly not the reading experience; I think I may have kept reading just to see how bad things would get. The highest praise I can heap on the pseudonymous author, whomever he may be, is that he's the anti-Cormac McCarthy. Where everything McCarthy writes turns to gold, whatever plot, structure, etc. it may lack, Woodbright's every word turns to-- well, you know.

What ultimately killed me was the sheer bulk of the thing. One reviewer, accurate if overly generous in my opinion, called this "a three-star book with a five-star novel hidden in its many pages." And it did seem that with the help of an overly ham-handed editor, this could have been whittled into something not only readable, but quite intriguing; the amateur structuring could have been made to seem avant-garde, the humor could have had its timing improved, the author's notes could have been made footnotes, etc. As it stands, however, avoid it like the plague.