John Dennen
posted 16 May 2007

I am entirely indifferent to Lisa Moore’s Alligator. Which is, I fear, the worst insult one can level at a writer. There are worse books. There are better books. Her book doesn’t irritate me, she’s not an incompetent writer. But nor does it excite me. I can happily describe the thing in one word. Meh.

Which is a problem in what is essentially an exercise in characterisation. We have four major characters who knock about in a town in Canada. Each chapter is written from the point of view of one these characters and each chapter helpfully comes with their name as its title. So there’s Frank who has a hotdog stand. Valentin is a rotter, not just because he’s Russian but because he thinks things like: 'Thug was an English word with which he identified. He liked its truncated sound, its gangster-movie anonymity, its gritty truthfulness'. I don’t want to be too picky but I would like words to be used to refer to something that made sense. If Moore is going to indulge in constant sensory descriptions, I would like her other descriptions to be attached to something vaguely tangible. What does gritty truthfulness look like? How does it refer to the word ‘thug’?

I wouldn’t mind so much, but Moore does this too often. You begin to worry that she’s not thinking too much about what she’s writing. There are strong passages but they’re then let down by this whittering. There are only so many times you can read about the 'loud, erotic gushing' of pouring sugar without wondering what the hell that sounds like (no laughing at the back please). The style Moore is writing in is meant to replicate the way her characters think, so the narrative interrupts itself, its attention wanders. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with doing this. I imagine it’s useful for developing a character’s voice. But I read on with a mounting dread that, rather than showing anything meaningful, Moore was just writing what she saw. Which is what I would call whimsy.

Then Colleen, so the backcover dutifully informs me, is a hard-edged female Holden Caulfield. Good Lord, whoever wrote the backcover was really writing the book’s death warrant. You’ve just told me to compare your book to Catcher in the Rye and, guess what, the comparison is not flattering. I salute the ambition and in principle there’s nothing wrong with having a female Holden Caulfield. But you’ve set yourself up for an ugly fall. To survive it, all the book needs would be good writing. But then if you had good writing you’d have, you know, an actual character all of your own.

So Colleen goes to pour sugar into the engines of bulldozers, vaguely because of the environment but mainly because she’s rebellious. This is a cause of concern for her mother, who worries whilst pottering about in the kitchen. Her aunt isn’t that fussed because she’s trying to make a film before she dies. She has a bad heart. Sadly, I was entirely indifferent to the fate of this film and indeed the fate of Aunt Madeleine. We gather this film is meant to a good ‘un because Madeleine wants it to be better than Bergman. It is a neat concept to describe a film that you’re never going to see but it left me cold. It’s a device that’s been done better elsewhere. To make an unfair comparison, I was thinking of the book of poems that Orhan Pamuk can’t find in Snow. He’s been told what some of the poems were about but we never get to read the poems themselves. Here I felt no sense of loss at not getting to see this film.

Maybe it’s me. But I think the weaknesses of Moore’s writing are to blame. She spends too much time telling me what her characters are feeling with these woolly phrases. If she had indulged in something as old-fashioned as a plot then I might have been able to see what was at stake for her characters and maybe given a damn. But she just lays it out. For instance, she could have set up the fact that Frank really wanted his hotdog stand but was $300 short. Created something known as dramatic tension. But instead we get: 'Frank felt, that if he went home without the hotdog stand it would break his will'. Which is all well and good but, if you bluntly tell me like that, I’m not going to feel a thing.

There’s no rule that says Lisa Moore has to do anything she doesn’t want to do. The beauty of a novel is that you can go anywhere, you can do anything. You can jump into people’s thoughts or jump around in time, as Moore does. But the danger is that without structure the work sprawls. If anything can happen, then it’s hard to be surprised or care when something does. The weak passages erode your confidence that the writer knows what she’s doing with this. It’s an effective technique, for example, when Moore drops you into a burning building and you have to rewind to find out how you ended up there. But, when the sentences fall into themselves and the narrative slips inexplicably from third-person to first-person, the reader can’t get a handle on what, if anything, is going on. The style here fragments and undermines the work.

Which is a shame because, taking a step back, there’s some good stuff in Alligator. The idea is that these characters are absorbed in themselves and despite knocking against one another, any emotional contact between them is only fleeting. Moore does surprise you. For example, you’ve been set up to expect Frank and Colleen to get together. He picks her up after a wet T-shirt shirt competition (yes, exactly what a female Holden Caulfield would do). They have sex, make eye contact but rather than anything emotional happening she steals his money and makes off to where the alligators roam.

So there you have it. The acts done on random impulse lose their impact because there is no plot to contain them, no real plot to be offset or surprised. Stuff happens and yes, I concede that stuff does just happen in real life. But I would like a novelist to try to hack some meaning out of that stuff. To do what Moore is trying to do you’ve got to be good. And whilst Moore isn’t bad, she’s not good enough.