Are Frodo and Sam...you know? A guide to the most common discussion at your next LOTR movie marathon viewing

I will be hosting a Lord of the Rings (LOTR) movie marathon in the near future, which explains this being my second LOTR-related post in two weeks. Much like Carlos Fuentes needed to read Don Quixote once a year, I occasionally have a mystical need to re-visit Frodo's quest to Mount Doom. It's like eating or having sex. I can only go so long without it.

Even though I've said before I'm not crazy about everything in Jackson's movie trilogy, it's still easily the best way to enjoy the story in a communal fashion. It'd be awfully hard to read through all three books in a day with a group of people. And even the films' flaws can be a good point of discussion.

If you watch the movie in the company of a lot of men, as I have many times, one topic of conversation that infallibly arises is the level of homo-eroticism in the films. Jokes and comments about homo-eroticism are a constant when a group of largely heterosexual males gathers. In my personal experience, this is as true today as it was three decades ago, even though now you would be hard-pressed to find a man even in a group of hetero-normative males who thinks there is anything essentially wrong with homosexual behavior. The jokes today have lost their mean-spirited edge of fag-bashing, of guarding hetero-normative standards by threatening harm to those outside the standards. But the jokes are still there. Why?

In my short story about male identity in the Marine Corps, "Brokedick," the main character notes that "most of the jokes they'd played (in the Marine Corps) had been either homo-erotic or homophobic. Possibly both." The Marine Corps requires that men within it become closer than most men become in normal life. But that closeness, when it starts to take on a deep and spiritual dimension, threatens hetero-normative standards. Men need to be close in the Corps, but the closeness required is itself suspect--or at least uncomfortable for most men. So men play jokes like "tea-bagging" one another. By doing this, they are able to hide physically homo-intimate behaviors that are a corollary of spiritual closeness in plain sight.

When men watch a story like Lord of the Rings together, certain male characteristics are called into question. There are heroes who demonstrate tenderness, gentleness, and compassion, traits that do not fit the standard male hero archetype. The men watching these things are at once uncomfortable with them and drawn to them. So we cope by joking about them.

...and joking, and joking, and joking...

Three types of intent

Before getting into various ways to interpret the physical and emotional closeness of Frodo and Sam, the two most important characters in the Rings trilogy, I need to make a quick digression into the question of intent.

Intent of the author

Most people who haven't studied literature seriously would most likely assume that the most important type of intent--maybe the only one that matters--is the intent of the author. Many, many discussion fora on the Internet have discussed the question of homosexuality in the relationship between Frodo and Sam in terms of Tolkien's intent (one example). Tolkien lived at a time when homosexuality was seen as a mental illness, an abomination. Tolkien was a devout Catholic. Tolkien cannot have meant these things, so Sam and Frodo cannot be gay, however it may seem to a modern reader.

It may surprise those who assume the author's intent to be the only intent that matters to find that literature scholars actually speak of something called an "intentional fallacy." That is, to think of literature only in terms of what an author meant is a mistake. This might seem crazy, and nothing more than a rearguard justification for the inventive interpretations of literary professors, but there is a point to it. We all say things that others take to have meanings we don't intend. If I tell my wife she looks nice for an older woman, I may insist I didn't mean it as an insult. I might say she is wrong to take offense, that she didn't understand my intent. But clearly, my intent is not the only thing that matters in such a statement.

Similarly, when an author writes a story, there are often images, symbols, and language in it that suggest things on their own that the author never imagined. Shakespeare may not have had in mind modern theories of the meaning of time when he wrote "there is no clock in the forest" in "As You Like It," but it doesn't matter. The statement expresses psychological truths about the way people experience time in a pastoral setting. Critics are free to view the statement's meaning on its own terms.

Intent of the text

The idea that the final written product of the author, rather than the author's mind, is the right place to look for meaning, is called "intent of the text." When I was in graduate school, we all learned to start our thoughts on what we'd read with "the text states..." rather than "Shakespeare states that..." Such a reading doesn't completely ignore the author. A reader still needs to know what a "nunnery" meant in Shakespeare's day in order to interpret a statement including a reference to a nunnery. But that doesn't mean a critic needs to restrain her possible readings to only those that she can plausibly argue might have occurred to Shakespeare himself.

There is obviously a great deal more openness in this kind of interpretation. If Frodo and Sam appear to exhibit a closeness that can best be explained by a sexual attraction, even an unspoken and unspeakable one, then that interpretation is on the table, whatever Tolkien himself believed.

However, a reading focused on intent of the text does not make any kind of reading possible. One still has to take the text on its own terms. Frodo and Sam are not space aliens. They are not ciphers for Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan, written by a prophet who guessed their presidential race 40 years ahead of time. But there is a kind of reading that might allow for this.

Intent of the reader

The most radical kind of reading is one that focuses on the reader's intent. What matters in reading a text isn't what the author meant or even what a close reading suggests. It's what the reader feels while reading the text. Much scholarship that examines Frodo and Sam in sexual terms actually focuses on fan fiction, in which readers of the stories respond by writing their own follow-on fiction about Middle Earth. This includes "slash fiction," erotic stories that focus on same-sex relationships. In a reading like this, if a reader feels that Sam and Frodo seem gay, then there really isn't anything to say that such a reading is wrong.

Which intent do I intend to follow?

A product of my academic times, I tend to favor the intent of the text, but I don't really exclude any type of intentionality when examining a text for meaning. Reading for authorial intent maintains the human side of the humanities, as one tries to see how the life of a writer lead to a certain work's creation as a response to the events of that life. A text-focused reading maintains integrity and intellectual rigor. Focusing on the reader preserves the reason any of us read: not just what does it mean, but what does it mean to you? When I attempt to give some ways to look at Frodo and Sam's relationship, I will try to keep a balance between them all.

Five Ways to Look at Frodo and Sam's relationship and sexuality, from least interesting to most

1. Frodo and Sam are sexually attracted, but either they hide it from each other or the text hides it from the reader

When I was in graduate school, Queer Studies was still a relatively new thing. I thought it was a little bit dull, because a lot of it back then seemed to amount to little more than reading old texts to see if one could find any secret clues about whether a character in it was really gay. One blogger (from whom I stole the above picture) followed this kind of reading in asserting that Frodo and Sam are "queer coded." The writer quoted a passage often cited by those who see something essentially romantic in Sam and Frodo's relationship:

Then as he had kept watch Sam had noticed that at times a light seemed to be shining faintly within; but now the light was even clearer and stronger. Frodo’s face was peaceful, the marks of fear and care had left it; but it looked old, old and beautiful, as if the chiseling of the shaping years was now revealed in many fine lines that had before been hidden, though the identity of the face was not changed. Not that Sam Gamgee put it that way to himself. He shook his head, as if finding words useless, and murmured: “I love him. He’s like that, and sometimes it shines through, somehow. But I love him, whether or no.

The blogger, Monique Jones, suggests that if Sam were a woman, we'd naturally assume the text meant romantic love here. It's a bit artificial to suggest that it must be a spiritual, Platonic love Sam speaks of.

I do believe there is a lot more at play with Frodo and Sam than just friendship. But if it's sexual attraction, then the story to me sort of just ends there. They're gay. So what? That doesn't really make their relationship more compelling to me. It doesn't add anything to my "reader's intent" interpretation. It's a possibility. There are portions of the text that certainly suggest something much stronger than friendship is there. It's possible it's romantic attraction. But if it's true that their friendship is not like most friendships, then it's also true that their sexual attraction is not like any other sexual attraction I've ever witnessed.

As Yvette Kisor put it, "What seems less likely to prove fruitful is a singular focus on the question of the homosexuality of characters in The Lord of the Rings…. Did Tolkien write a homosexual relationship between any characters, specifcally Frodo and Sam, in his novel? Clearly, no. Can readers fnd such relationship(s) in his novel? Clearly, yes."

Sam and Frodo as frustrated lovers just doesn't leave much room for continued, interesting readings.

2. Frodo and Sam are a little bit gay

Being gay may not always be the either/or thing we see it as. There is no one gene that determines sexual orientation. It's a host of genes, and those genes don't always do the same thing to everyone. Homosexuality is "epi-genetic," meaning there need to be environmental factors that "switch on" those genes.

So Frodo and Sam may have demonstrated some of the characteristics of a homosexual couple and yet still been, for the most part, heterosexual. We can reject the false dichotomy between being a rugged, hyper-masculinized heterosexual and effeminate homosexual.

3. Frodo and Sam are the closest friends ever, and every man should feel depressed he isn't close enough to another man to hold hands as they walk toward their doom 

Leonna Madill offers what I find to be a more interesting application of queer theory and feminist theory. She argues that LOTR is "not a text that invites criticism of hegemonic masculine values, but it is a text that can provoke multiple discussions about its various messages about masculinity." One discussion of hegemonic masculine values Frodo and Sam encourage is the meaning of male-male friendships. This is even truer and more interesting if Frodo and Sam are straight, rather than gay. If they are gay, all the intimacy between them is explained--perhaps even explained away, one might say--if it is all merely sublimated sexual attraction. The question of what all those gestures of affection mean is actually much more interesting if they aren't gay than if they are.

The deeper a friendship goes, the greater the intimacy within it. But modern, American masculinity--even in an era in which we no longer think homosexuality is a sin--does not feel comfortable with intimacy between men. This limits the friendships. There is a reason most men today will say their wives are their best friends. They are the only people with whom we are physically intimate, so they are also the ones with whom we tend to be emotionally intimate.

But what if we are limiting our friendships in this way? What if our insistence that any sort of physicality be kept out of a male-male friendship made those relationships anemic? Frodo and Sam aren't an example of a gay pair keeping their love on the DL; they're comfortable hetero-sexual friends without our hang-ups over what holding hands or laying you head on someone's lap means. As Madill put it, "male friendship can be more complex than simply protecting a friend from harm; caring and showing affection is another means of nourishing a friendship."

4. Frodo and Sam's relationship mirrors a parent-child relationship

The physical affection between Frodo and Sam could be understood as part and parcel of their parent-child relationship. Carolyn Hoke summarized this reading, first proposed by Verlyn Flieger. Frodo starts off as the grown-up, the wiser, more mature one. When Sam is first allowed to participate in Frodo's adventure, he "springs up like a dog invited for a walk." However, Frodo is eventually worn down by the ring, and Sam, like all children eventually do, must care for the parent who once cared for him. Sam carries Frodo "like a hobbit-child pig-a-back" when Frodo cannot carry on anymore. As Hoke puts it:

This physical aspect accentuates the spiritual bond between the two hobbits, such that in a way, it seems as if the two of them are linked in a strange, inverse relationship of power. When Sam is childish, Frodo is mature and capable; when Frodo grows physically and emotionally weak, Sam is the strong one who helps him see the Quest through.... comparing their parallel journeys in this way leads me rather to compare the hobbits’ relationship instead to that of a Parent and Child. Initially, in a Parent/Child relationship, the Parent takes control and directs both their paths, but as both mature, the Parent falls back into the second-childhood of old age and it’s up to the Child to carry their combined burdens.

5. Frodo and Sam are "married" for the duration of the quest

There is a sense in LOTR that some things happen because they are meant to happen. "You don't really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck?" Gandalf asks Bilbo at the end of The Hobbit. Gandalf also suggests at one point that what others call chance might not be chance at all.

In a world where things happen by design, one of the most obviously meant-to-be happenings is Sam's marriage to Rosie Cotton. Sam is a gardener who marries a woman named Rose. They have thirteen children named for flowers. Clearly, there is some providence involved in this union. So Frodo and Sam aren't frustrated lovers meant to be together but denied their chance by the world. Sam was always meant to be with Rose.

Yet Sam can't really be the husband, father, and lord of Bag End he was meant to be until Frodo leaves. With Frodo around, Sam is "torn in two," as Frodo puts it. That's because when Sam agreed to come with Frodo, he agreed to see it through to the end. Throwing the ring into the fire was the end for most people, but it wasn't for Frodo. Frodo carried the ring long enough that he would never truly be free of it until he traveled to the undying lands. That means Sam can never really be free of his duty to care for Frodo until Frodo leaves.

That's a pretty profound bond they have. The only bond we have in most societies that comes close is the sickness-and-in-health, til-death-do-us-part version of traditional Western marriage. I'm not sure that either hobbit realized the profundity of their tie at the beginning of the quest. Frodo didn't know when he set off from the Shire that he was headed to Mount Doom. He thought he'd be gone a short while. Sam didn't know he was headed with Frodo to Mount Doom, either. He just thought Frodo needed someone to look after him.

Frodo and Sam realize what their bond is to one another while on the trip. That passage quoted earlier in which Sam looks down at a sleeping Frodo and realizes he loves him is something Sam only realizes after Frodo has become "old and beautiful" as a result of fighting the ring's power. Frodo was called to confront evil itself and he answered the call. In that fight, Frodo became something Sam loved.

The ring binds its wearer to it. The only reason the hobbits were able to fight its power was because their bond to one another grew along with the ring's power. Their bond needed to be stronger than any bond in existence, and that meant it was a little bit of every relationship. It was master-servant. It was friend-friend. It was parent-child. It was man-wife. It was every kind of relationship you can think of, which made it deeper than any relationship you can think of. The two were, in every sense, bound to one another. You may think of them as married. Their intimacy was appropriate and natural.

Many people have opined that Frodo and Sam's relationship was more spiritual than physical, and they are right. But the spirituality of it doesn't necessarily preclude the physical. While they were together, they were bound, body and spirit, to one another. I tend not to think of the physical side of that as a Brokeback Mountain-type sexual awakening, but that doesn't mean it cannot include parts of that. C.S. Lewis distinguished between the Four Loves--storge, philios, eros, and agape--but we need not think that there are clear borders between them. Sam and Frodo developed agape love to such a degree that they were able to use the other loves, eros included, to help one another.

In the end, Sam cannot divorce Frodo. Only death can do them part, which is why Frodo needs to leave. The time when he has interrupted Sam's purpose is over.

Or is it? The book suggests that Sam may one day follow Frodo. Sam was, after all, a ring-bearer, too, if only for a brief time. Before telling Sam he must no longer be torn in two, but be one and whole for many years, Frodo wonders aloud, "Your time may come" (to go to the undying lands). I can only wonder, too.

Just arrived review of my book

All the advice I got when my book came out last year told me that if my book didn't make a big splash in the first 45 days of being on the market, it would never move. But mine has actually done much better after the first few months. Here's a review from local writer Jenny Yacovissi that just arrived. She's actually part of the Washington Independent Review of Books that also reviewed Don't Wait to Be Called last year. She invited me to be part of a panel in May of new authors, and she read my book to prepare for her role as moderator of that discussion.

Here's her review. 

I'm especially gratified that she saw the end of "Dawn Doesn't Disappoint" as a false epiphany. It was the first time I'd ever written one of those, and I was afraid I didn't leave the reader enough hints to piece together what happened. 

Lord of the Rings as Zombie Fiction

Lord of the Rings is one of those stories that continues to reward me throughout my life for knowing it. As a young man entering the Marine Corps, I drew on its characterization of adventure. The story both set me off on the course out the front door of my parents' house and also reassured me when nothing went the way I thought it would that that's just how adventures go.

As an idealistic man in my 20's and 30's after the Marine Corps, I saw the story as an injunction to push back against evil, even when it seemed like evil was likely to win. The movies came out during this period of my life.

Now, in my forties and seemingly in the middle of multiple, overlapping slogs that feel like they'll never end, I see something in Frodo's quest I appreciate now in a way I never did before: the way the hero's journey is often about fighting the same small battles thousands of times more than it is about one epic moment of heroism. It's a zombie war.

Why I would ever use stupid zombies in the same breath as my favorite fantasy series

LOTR isn't a zombie story, although there are elements in the story that have some similarities. Orcs are largely undifferentiated--one orc's the same as another. (In the book, we do learn that orcs have different dialects and factions, but largely, orcs are just orcs.) Orcs don't think much for themselves, although instead of following some primal instinct to eat brains, they follow the will of the Eye. And Aragorn saves the city of Gondor when he takes control of an army of undead soldiers. But none of these are what I mean when I speak of Lord of the Rings as a zombie story.

The best explanation I've ever read for the modern fascination with zombies was Chuck Klosterman's back in 2010. The physical prowess of zombies varies from franchise to franchise--a World War Z zombie is stronger than a Living Dead zombie--but by and large, a single zombie or a small group aren't that hard to kill. They are slow and loud and stupid. Knock the brains out of one, then do the next one. As Klosterman put it:

"If there's one thing we all understand about zombie killing, it’s that the act is uncomplicated: you blast one in the brain from point-blank range (preferably with a shotgun). That’s Step 1. Step 2 is doing the same thing to the next zombie that takes its place. Step 3 is identical to Step 2, and Step 4 isn’t any different from Step 3. Repeat this process until (a) you perish, or (b) you run out of zombies. That’s really the only viable strategy."

That's modern life for a lot of us, actually. Klosterman compares it to the act of answering hundreds of emails a day. It's not hard, task-by-task, but the downside is that what we do never ends. The same tasks keep coming back every day, just like the horde is never gone. 

Can I set up a rule in Outlook to delete this without reading?

The Fellowship leaves Rivendell around the Winter Solstice, which is about when Christmas happens. Frodo finally completes the quest around the Vernal Equinox, somewhat coincidental with Easter. In between is the sloggiest time of year. There are moments of terror and excitement in Frodo's quest, but most of it is just putting his head down, moving forward, and fighting the slow, poisoning effect of the ring on his mind. That's it. When reading the second and third books of the trilogy, which are split into a Frodo/Sam portion and a portion with the rest of the Fellowship, the Frodo/Sam portions are by far less thrilling. But they're also by far the most important. Winning heroic and desperate battles means nothing if Frodo doesn't complete his task. 

And that's the whole secret of life. "I know what I must do," Frodo says, "It's just I'm afraid to do it." He might also have said, at many parts in the book, that he knew what he had to do but just didn't want to do it anymore. 

"Time to wake up, Mr. Frodo," Sam said. "Another day of stubbing our toes as we walk about through these rocks." 

"Fuck off, Sam," Frodo replied, turning over to sleep some more. 

I often get irritated by silly people who describe their small accomplishments in epic terms. Calling a thirty-day detox/weight loss regimen a "journey," that type of thing. It seems to cheapen truly heroic deeds to describe our small lives in those terms. But maybe these people are right in a small way. There is at least some similarity between our hum-drum lives and the hero's journey. Both involve doing small things over and over until they add up to something. 

(But still, stop calling your new job at Cracker Barrel a "journey." Please.)

Zombies and writing

Writing is a zombie battle, too. It's getting up over and over and doing the same thing, mostly without any real hope of ever having a final victory. Why fight, then? Because zombies are there to be fought against. 

"If" for sedentary modernity

Life is more about resilience than anything else for most of us. Kipling told his theoretical young man that it showed real manhood to risk everything you'd won in life, lose it, and start over. But life for most of us is avoiding that drama--to never risk all our winnings on one game of pitch-and-toss. It's slowly building a 401K in the dullest fashion imaginable. It's college savings and making dentist visits on-time. It's doing what's in front of you to do, then doing it again and again and again. 

There must have been a point in Frodo's quest when Mount Doom ceased to even be a real thing in his mind. There was only thirst and soreness and boredom and fear. He kept going. That's a hero.

Years after Bilbo's great adventure, he was still somewhat romantic about adventuring. Frodo was not. He had obtained a deeper wisdom that comes of a more profound suffering. The point of all he did was precisely so people like Sam could carry out pedestrian accomplishments like having children and planting a garden. 

That's the gift this story has given me through this winter. Just keep walking. 

Nothing to take seriously: Justin Cronin's "The Passage" and what makes sci-fi worth reading

"Part of Peter knew it was all fake, nothing to take seriously..." -from Justin Cronin's The Passage

A recommendation from a friend

I mentioned a few months ago that I wanted to branch out from reading literary fiction. Lit fic didn't really seem--in spite of its reputation as the serious branch of literature--to be scratching the particular itch for meaning I look for in a book. Sci-fi, despite being sometimes despised by the literary powers that be, often did give me what I wanted, so I decided to give it a more systematic try. A friend I admire a lot recommended Justin Cronin's The Passage trilogy. If I had read what it was about, I'd probably have passed on it. If I didn't respect my friend so much, I'd have quit early on. But I kept reading. Halfway through, I realized I was just never going to like it, but I pressed on to the grim end.

If you think this post is long, trying reading this book

What's in a genre?

One can get too wrapped up in the boundaries of genre. Is Vonnegut science fiction? Is Atwood science fiction? Does it matter? Is Cronin's novel sci-fi, or does the dystopian novel have its own, separate genre? Or is the novel something else altogether, like Gothic or horror?

I don't really care what category of book you call it, but I do care about what I like. There was an excellent review of Cormac McCarthy's The Road several years ago--a novel one review likened The Passage to--that, in the process of separating sci-fi from Gothic literature, hit upon an important distinction for me. Paul Kincaid argued that science fiction, with its " espousal of rationalism and its basis in the idea of an understandable universe," was not a true descendant of Gothic literature, but horror, with its "employment of wild landscapes and weather that reflect the mental landscape of the characters...its irruptions of the extraordinary and the supernatural into the mundane, (and) its sense of charged emotions," was. Because The Road is more interested in the psychological landscape than in questions like how we came to a post-apocalyptic landscape in the first place, Kincaid argues that it is more "moral parable" than "science fiction examination of a world in extremis."

That is how I saw The Passage. It was clearly more a horror novel with an interest in the meaning of good and evil than a science fiction novel interested in man's ability to compete with his environment. Yes, Cronin does, unlike McCarthy, provide a scientific basis for how the world came to be overtaken by vampires (although we never call them that, and there is even a passage that tries to paper over never calling them that by joking about how nobody ever calls them that). But it is clearly gobbledy-gook science. A virus developed by the Army somehow switches on the thymus gland, leading to...wait for it...a "hugely accelerated rate of cellular regeneration." If this is sound science, then midichlorions are the answer to the Grand Unified Theory.

The subjects of the viral research just happen to obtain the same characteristics classically attributed to vampires. Some reviewers of the book from 2010 when it came out seemed to contrast it favorably with YA vampire fiction like the Twilight series. But the book follows the same trope of "maybe myths have some basis in fact" that Twilight did:

"The teeth, the blood hunger, the immortal union with darkness--what if these things weren't fantasy but recollection or even instinct, a feeling etched over eons into human DNA, of some dark power that lay within the human animal? A power that could be reactivated, refined, brought under control?"

This is a much abused trope in horror, that there is nothing more terrifying than what is in our psyches already. There's nothing original here. This is Gothic sentimentality in a nutshell, reading our inner conflicts into the exterior world. One reviewer insisted that the book's back-cover pitch of being about a government experiment gone wrong made it sound less impressive than it really was; I thought, though, that this description is really all the novel was, and that it never, in its rambling 800 pages, overcame its flimsy premise. (Reviewer after reviewer praised its "epic" scope, which seemed to me to just be another way of saying the book was very long.)

The eight days I spent on a book I didn't like were at least useful to me in helping to clarify what I am and am not interested in.

I wouldn't insist that a science fiction book be overly exacting about its science. There are few writers with the science chops to do that, and fewer still who could do it in an interesting way. But that doesn't mean throwing all credibility to the wind. Or if you do--if your interest is in examining something other than human ingenuity against a world that has changed in some aspect--then you cannot pair junk science with the wish to be taken seriously. Vonnegut used junk science all the time, but he was writing darkly humorous satire. Cronin was trying to have it both ways, waving a magic wand to get vampires, but also wanting to appear to have something deeply serious to say about the human soul.

You may stop reading here unless you really want to get the fruits of me reading a book way past the point of diminishing returns.

But is it a good book?

Kincaid insisted that although The Road wasn't science fiction, it was still an excellent novel. The Passage might not have been what I wanted, but was it good for what it was?

It was fascinating to me to read this book knowing Cronin was not only once a literary fiction writer, but actually came from the the Iowa Writers' program, ground zero of lit fic in America. I wondered if he would slip some writerly techniques into his vampire novel meant for mass consumption.

He did not. I'm amazed at the kind reception he got for this book from serious reviewers. Cronin seems to have abandoned everything one is taught in a writing program on the way to making hella money. Maybe it's a pointless project of me to list all the faults in the novel eight years after its release, but since I just spent 20 hours of my life reading this book, I feel I should spend at least an hour or so giving back to the world what made those 20 hours so painful.

Keep in mind, this list is greatly shortened from all the sins I found to object to.

1. Adjectives 

Any basic writing tutorial will warn writers about using too many vague adjectives. While great writers can sometimes ignore the rules, this is a very hard rule to break effectively. Cronin littered the novel with adjectives that were used to avoid the hard work of rendering a scene more fully. Here are a few examples:

Large: used about 70 times
Examples: "...set eyes and graying hair, with large hands good for work..."
                  "...long hair, prematurely gray, and large eyes, permanently damp with sympathy."
                  "...a large man with a heavy beard and powerful arms and a genial manner..."

Wide: used about 80 times
Examples: "...the big houses and wide, princely lawns of old Midtown..."
                  "Her eyes grew very wide"
                 (twenty pages later) "...their eyes wide with alarm..."
                 (nine pages later) "The soldier's eyes were wide with panic."

Long: Difficult to determine, because of words like "along," but at least 100 uses as an adjective
Examples: "...the clawlike hands and the long teeth crowding the mouth..."
                  "...pale skin and long lashes that curled upward at the ends..."


I could go on and on with the adjectival sins. Smooth, vague, slender, tall, and mild all make frequent appearances. He had to use these adjectives rather than render scenes more imaginatively, because he just included so much crap in the book he could have edited out. But let's move on.

2. Terrible or trite similes

Examples: "...fierce blue eyes, a chin that looked like it had been chiseled from stone..."
                  "...as if the muscles of his arms were hung on bars of iron."

3. Failed attempts to be poetic

Examples: "...a series of dancelike movements: bodies converging and separating, flung for brief periods into wider orbits, only to be drawn back again under the influence of some unknown power, a force as calm and inevitable as gravity."

"That was when it had occurred to Jane that the thing she'd seen was love. It could be nothing less than the force of love that had lifted Teacher into the air, into the waiting arms of the glowing bear-man, whose light was the radiance of royalty."

"Water blue like he'd never seen before." (A cheat way of describing something you can't figure out how to describe is to say the character can't describe it.)

4. Abuse of the Garcia-Marquez "looking forward to looking back" trick 

At the beginning of 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez begins thus: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” That's one of the greatest beginnings to a book ever. Cronin does this maybe 50 times in the novel, where we flash-forward to a character flashing back to the event being described. He begins many chapters this way. He also uses it over and over to convey that something has happened that leaves such an impression on the characters, they are still trying to interpret it years later. The first line of the book does this. It shows up in the middle of action sequences. ("Later, Peter would recall the scene as a sequence of discrete details.") It very much began to feel like a writer who didn't know another way to begin a chapter or to convey that something important was happening. 

5. Length

This book did not need to be so long. The first 275 pages could have been done away with, or shortened to one chapter of about 40 pages. After we see the world fall apart in pages 1 to 275, we flash forward 100 years to a colony of survivors. (All of the main characters here, in a move I'm sure had nothing to do with movie considerations, are the perfect YA age.) These survivors end up learning everything that happened in the first section anyway. 

Cronin's choice of continually shifting POV helps the reader to spread his sympathies wide, but it also adds to the length, often unnecessarily. There is a brief section in the POV of Leon, a guard at a camp who gets knocked out by the main characters. We literally never see him before or after this, and the only point of the section is to let us know that the bad guy is coming. 

And now, the plot holes

How much should plot holes matter? During the debates a few months back about whether the latest Star Wars movie was good, some apologists for the movie claimed that looking too deeply into plot holes ignored the point of a Star Wars movie. I'm sympathetic to this. It is possible to get lost in the picayune details and ignore the bigger story going on. But this story is really mired in plot holes, and that's even allowing for a virus that turns on a gland to make people into vampires.  

Two-thirds of the book is 100 years after the big vampire extinction event. In spite of that, the characters often eat food canned before the event. (One survivalist site I checked said the max date for canned food is 30 years. It might go longer, but it needs to be stored at a constant, cool temperature yet also never freeze. There should never be dents in the cans. None of this is true of the food our heroes find.)

They fix up 100-year-old cars and drive on 100-year-old tires with 100-year-old gas. They keep lights on to beat back the vampires with 100-year old power stations and 100-year-old batteries. There is one mechanic-electrician-genius who knows how to fix all of these things. 

To be fair, the book tries to acknowledge these things by having the characters bring up how you have to check the canned foods to make sure they're still good, and they do mention how hard it is to keep old rubber going. But having made these objections, they still eat canned food a lot in the book as they wander, and they drive those old tires over hundreds of miles. It felt like Cronin wrote the book, realized there were plot holes, tried to patch it over with a little bit of self-acknowledgment, then left all the holes. 

Speaking of which, how are the roads 100 years in the future even in any condition to drive on? In one section, we see a road overgrown with grass and gone back to nature, but for most of the adventure, the kids drive hundreds of miles on the highway from California to Utah and we don't ever read about a pothole.  

I was a Marine. I can tell you that if your battalion has twenty hummers in the motor pool, you're lucky if two of them actually work. But these folks manage to come across a bunch of old hummers that have zero replacement parts, fix them up, resuscitate the tires, the batteries, and so on, and drive from California to Las Vegas. They get in gun fights. They plow over stuff. The things keep working. 

It had the feel of just not wanting to keep figuring out how they got from one place to another or how they kept finding something to eat, so the author waved a magic wand over it. 

Or maybe Cronin got promotional consideration from the Hummer makers to make it look like their stupid vehicles actually work. 

Then there's the whole issue of how some rag-tag group of people are able to do what the whole of American might could not do by keeping the vampires at bay. There is some explanation of this when we realize that the vampires have become weakened after eating up nearly all the prey in America. But still, all it takes for one Colony to survive are walls and lights. You're telling me the U.S. Government couldn't have managed that? One character muses about how the world used to have so much electricity it was literally flooded with lights. How did our current world fail to build walls and turn on lights when the future can keep the lights on with 100-year-old equipment and a teenage engineer?

Cynical story-writing

I don't understand why Twilight gets hate for being fluff teenager stuff while The Passage gets a pass. At least the author of Twilight, I take it, wrote about what she really liked, while Cronin seems to have cynically written his way to $3.7 million based on a craze someone else started. There is nothing in this book that suggests it should be taken seriously where Twilight should be disregarded. In fact, the suggestion that this book is somehow better strikes me as possibly sexist. They're both brain candy. We shouldn't give one of them gravitas it didn't earn. 

I get it. People love this book. Stephen King thinks it's brilliant. Maybe I'm completely wrong. One reviewer after another (and my friend, who I still very much respect in spite of this one book) talked about how they were sucked into it after 30 pages. I pretty much hated it from the words "cellular regeneration."

Maybe I shouldn't make too much of having a different opinion from the rest of the world. I generally just don't like horror. So maybe this was just not the right recommendation for me, and I'm obtusely complaining that this Gothic story isn't a brainy sci-fi story. But it's a little unnerving to me to feel so strongly about a book so many other people like. It makes me feel like I have no idea what's good. Because if I'm wrong about this book, I'm really, really wrong. 

Restricting gun sales to 18-year-olds is not a solution

The Second Amendment is not a great piece of legislation for 2018 America. It bases the right to bear arms on the need for a well-regulated militia. None of us even knows what the hell a militia is. We haven't had one like the founding parents knew for over a hundred years. The framers of the Constitution were thinking of muskets when they spoke of arms. It is extremely difficult to apply concepts from the Second Amendment to today, which is why none of us can agree on how to apply it. At the very least, nobody seems to think we should take it literally--"the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." If we really thought that right should not be infringed, you'd be allowed to keep tanks, fighter jets, AA guns, and a tactical nuke in your barn. Nobody thinks that. Which sort of defeats the idea that the reason behind the Second Amendment is to make an armed insurrection against the government plausible. It isn't plausible in 2018, unless you managed to take over the military and turn it against the civilian leadership.

So we don't think the right to bear arms is absolute, but we can't agree on to what extent it shouldn't be absolute. But let's pretend for a moment that we could. Let's say we all agreed that X kinds of guns were good and Y kinds of weapons were bad, and so Y weapons didn't fall under the banner of the 2nd Amendment. That should mean that the right to own any weapon X is sacrosanct.

Unless it isn't. Dick's and Wal-Mart, seeing that the government seemed unlikely to move to change the law soon, have decided on their own to take two steps: to stop selling "assault" weapons (the AR-15), and to stop selling guns to anyone under the age of twenty-one. The pro-gun crowd hates the move, while gun-control advocates think it's responsible corporate citizenship.

Fortunately, nobody has yet tried to restrict the type of guns I use.

I'm not really either pro-gun or anti-gun. I'm anti-Second Amendment. I think we need to tear it up and rewrite it in a modern idiom so we have some idea what the hell it means and what its limits are meant to be. I think any type of gun control violates the Second Amendment as it's written (i.e., "shall not be infringed upon"). I also think that's an insane way to interpret the rule if you expect a government to have legitimacy, which is why we all have applied limits to it, even though those limits are not written in the Constitution. We are all in open rebellion against the letter of the law here.

However, if we are going to accept that some kinds of weapons fall under the absolute right to keep and bear, then those should apply to anyone who is a citizen. Restricting them from people of a certain age who would otherwise have such a right in the name of safety is to say the right is meaningless. It's nullification, one of the oldest forms of activism outside the law.

This is the same argument that comes up with alcohol. When I was 19, I was old enough for my country to put me in front of drill instructors who knocked me around when I did something wrong, but I wasn't old enough to drink (not that I would have back then, but still). Younger people are discriminated against in insurance rates because as a group they are statistically riskier drivers, but it is illegal to do the same thing to old people with health insurance, although they by far are the heaviest users, driving up the cost of insurance for everyone else. We mock the young for their indifference, but the moment they are of age in America, they face a de jure discrimination that makes them second-class, or at least probationary, citizens. No wonder they come into our democracy a little bit jaded.

Still, you could argue that the right to buy liquor or the right to pay the same insurance rates as everyone else until you yourself have caused an accident are not guaranteed in the Constitution. The right to a gun--whatever we decide that means--is.

I realize that just because some stores won't sell guns to young people doesn't mean they can't get them at all. This isn't a legal decision, it's a corporate one. But would we accept it if Wal-Mart said they wouldn't sell guns to older people, because their shaky nerves and lack of coordination made them unsafe shooters? Or if car dealers didn't sell to senior citizens because we all know none of them can drive? Of course not.

This is an attempt to made our terrible law less terrible without actually doing the hard work of changing it by taking it out of the hides of the young. What it leaves us with is a country in which we can keep a person from buying a shotgun in America so he doesn't shoot his classmates, but we give him an M-16 in another country and allow him to point it where he thinks is right.