Trashfiction
It was the great Holly Hayton who sighed as she pushed back her chair and, standing indecisively, said “I guess I’ll go eat a trash cookie.” You know them: like pressed flour topped with violently-colored sugar paste. They’re always seasonal, somehow, at any time of year, and never perfectly round. I find that it is impossible to buy, let alone eat, a single trash cookie. They are somehow more American than apple pie. They are ubiquitous. Honestly, I’m not even sure this belabored definition was even necessary. As soon as you saw the words, you pictured a trash cookie without trying to, and I bet you felt at least a little hungry and disgusted.
So, what, you ask, is American trashfiction? Well, my friends, I have read too many Harlequin romances and Slocum westerns (something like two dozen that I’ll admit to) so that I could bring to you a comprehensive definition of trashfiction.
First, trashfiction has a unique language. Oh, certainly: it is written in words that are recognizable as English, but it’s exhausted. As I read trashfiction, I get the distinct impression that no sentence is really in any kind of context. The whole book starts over again after each period, as though the author took a long nap from the effort of ending the sentence and woke up again fresh to write the next sentence without bothering to read the last one. I don’t mean that the content is somehow bouncing wildly from science fiction to western to murder mystery or anything so egregious. I merely mean that each sentence is like an older woman sitting at the salon while her arch-nemesis from the church women’s organizing committee is getting her hair done at the next chair over. Very alike, they are, but not connected. One might even argue that the sentences are somehow in the right order, or that the author chose this choppy style on purpose, or that it was a good idea for Brenda to get color and a perm only a week before the Christmas fellowship program, but that person would be wrong. Dead wrong. Brenda can eat my shorts, which are better than hers and which I got half price at Macy’s.
Imagining a world in which the only language sin of a trashfiction novel were to dangle its sentences gives me a warm feeling. I am broken instead by the complete inability of trashficton authors to use dangerous words well. This is a famous problem for sex scenes. No penis will ever grace the pages of such works; no vaginas seem to exist. Every body part is obfuscated behind a thin layer of poorly-chosen innuendo. His manhood always seems to find her intimate folds. Her cleft weeps at the thought of his member. Somebody’s nub is all about some other body’s love canal. It’s a well-documented phenomenon, and it’s sad every time. I’m not sure if it’s a joke or not, but one author’s “
Sexy Thesaurus,” a list of innuendo, has alternate words for “lady bits” and “man parts,” meaning it’s possible that the author of this self-aware document still couldn’t use “vagina” and “penis,” which would just be the pits.
I wish this propensity were restricted to sex (which should be referred to as “the carnal act”), but once the author gets into the habit, it seems to be difficult to break. Nothing is simply what it is, but everything is poorly designed metaphor. The office is a bleary jail cell. The beer is a nectar. The two men threatening to remove the narrator’s testicles (please, it’s scrotum; don’t make the author blush) are a salt-and-pepper set because apparently the only thing important to know about them is their races.
And the most dangerous words of all, the “four-letter” variety, are a frequent visitor to the realms of trashfiction, and always an unwelcome guest. Either they’re covered over by artless indirection or they’re used entirely too enthusiastically, and I know my preference is for the first. A word of advice for the authors: if the word “shit” does not easily come into your mind, try to keep your shitty writing out of mine. There is a certain ease of use that comes with long familiarity, and if it is your goal to show such in your characters, it’s difficult to fake. “‘Shit,’ the character exclaimed,” reads in my head like a ten-year-old trying the word out in front of best friends for the first time, and they all nod approvingly. Cursing doesn’t have to be awkward or painful, friends. My sister once turned to me after returning from an alt-rock concert, and she said “The frontman is just . . . he curses so elegantly.” This is not a problem that a trashfiction novelist has ever had to struggle with, and it shows.
Second to the ubiquity of language, trashfiction has a unique content. A work of trashfiction is roughly three fourths internal monologue, as though the author heard an audiobook of Catcher in the Rye being played in their upstairs neighbor’s apartment while the downstairs neighbor blended fifty pounds of ice in a magic bullet and they thought “Yeah, that’s awesome. I could do that.” Somehow, trashfiction narrators never stop telling you what they think and, as impossible as it may seem, never think anything worthwhile. You can tell the narrators of trashfiction by saying something near them that is tangentially relevant to the plot. After that, all you have to do is wait for them to explain why you said what you did with their trademark style: an equal mix of “fun” or “quirk” with a near-godly level of omniscience. In fact, the narrators of such books are rarely limited by what might hamper a mere mortal. Their total comprehension is bounded by the exigencies of plot alone. For all other things they peer keenly through the veil of reality, perhaps, if we are charitable, because the authors have forgotten that not everyone has the whole story in their head and so such things come across as uncanny. But I am not so charitable. I think the author just doesn’t know how to give the audience information in any other way.
As we tumble further through this explanation, we find smaller and smaller elements of trashfiction that, troublingly, have a greater and greater impact. Now that we’ve wormed our way into the mind of our narrator (or been dragged there forcibly), we see every person and every action through their eyes. Perhaps only an eighth of any page is description, but every ounce of it is upsetting. I like to think that a well-meaning middle school teacher taught a classroom of bright young minds how to use rich and varied description and then just . . . forgot to mention why. The trashfiction authors, sitting in the second row with their wide eyes and Jansports just never thought to ask. Because the words don’t matter and they’re included to fill some imaginary quota, there’s somehow far less description of places, people, and events than I need, and yet every bit of description is far more than I want.
For a gut-twisting start, every character is described in terms of their sexual or aesthetic interest to the narrator. Corky is fat, and we’ll hear about it every time he moves, speaks, or breathes. Randi is old, and we won’t be allowed to forget. But Skylar—ah, Skylar is a sexual fantasy who I gave a purposefully gender-ambivalent name, whose toned arms and thin neck and rich head of hair we will be forced to imagine whenever the mood strikes. Talking to Skylar? Sure. Also when imagining kissing in Skylar’s downtown office. Also when walking past a place Skylar’s mother’s best friend runs for the mob. Also when being stabbed by someone whose existence is completely disconnected from Skylar. What will Skylar think of my new scar? Oh, Skylar’s strong, sensitive mouth will pinch into a paroxysm of concern, and Skylar’s capable hands will fly to my side. Skylar as sexual object. At least the audience is assured of the importance of Skylar’s minutiae by the obligatory sex scene; Corky’s corpulence or Randi’s decrepitude is only supposedly important to the plot or the characterization. Supposed, that is until the end of the book suddenly marches up and the author shouts “that’s all, folks!” and the reader is left wondering when, exactly, such facts will become relevant.
Sadly, it’s the relevant facts that bother me worse. It’s unfair to us, the audience, but the narrators of these sorts of books are either author-insert characters, audience wish-fulfillment foils, or both. Usually both. And as such, whatever qualities we are supposed to think of as positive are cranked straight to eleven. Female narrators become hyperfeminine fainting machines who somehow simultaneously maintain just enough autonomy that it’s suitably romantic when they “choose” to let their lover choose for them forever, an act that allows her to be sexual without all that nasty “libido” she’s heard so much about. “Libido? That’s for low-class women” she sighs. On the other hand, Male narrators are always justifiably violent, poorly-controlled boner machines whose sex drive only infrequently gets in the way of saving every one and every thing except for the characters who have been mean to him, who he punches. Lots. In this sort of trashfiction, even character flaws are charming, and are duly cranked past the breaking point. “Oops, am I cwumsy? Sowwy. I didn’t mean to be an irredeemable alcoholic. My bad.” The audience is meant to accept it.
Exhausted? Too bad. We have finally arrived at the lowest circle of trashfiction hell. Follow me, friends and gadabouts, into the realm of cloying dialogue. For trashfiction authors, dialogue serves one purpose: to give their narrators somebody else to prompt more incessant internal monologue. No one is allowed to simply speak, to have their words stand for the reader to interpret. We are seeing things from the narrators’ perspective, after all, and why are we reading the book if not to be told what to think by our favorite narrator? Watch: Chastity accidentally said something. It’s time for our friend, the only person whose thoughts matter, to explain both what she said and why she said it, and it is vital that this explanation be delivered with the confidence of intimate insight and ancient acquaintance, no matter what the facts of the two characters’ interactions are. Of course, Chastity is a new character, and the internal monologue will continue to explain everything that the narrator thinks is relevant about the character before she can speak again, when her thoughts will be dissected and explained yet again. I like to picture this as happening in real time, with the narrator turning to camera and forcing Chastity to wait for the minute and a half it takes to essentialize her. Something like this:
“Carmen, wait!”
Carmen turns and sees Chastity clutching a handbag and shivering in the street. Turning sixty degrees, our hero stares off into the middle distance and says to the open air: “Chastity always spoke with a thinness to her voice that didn’t match her hips.”
“What? Carmen . . .”
Carmen’s eyes glazed over as she continued her narration into the December night. “Chastity worked downtown at the bank, where she could hide behind a teller’s counter and flirt with the men who came in on Fridays to cash their paychecks.”
“Carmen, what does that have to do with anything? I’m dripping wet; I need your help.”
“If she was lucky, she could convince one of them to wait until the end of her shift so she’d have a fat john to barhop with until his pay was dissolved in the cheap beer of a two-am dive.” The wind tickled Carmen’s hair, but her face and body stood utterly still as if paused on a cosmic scale. Chastity walked over, her broken heel clack-slapping with the other, and she waved a hand in front of Carmen’s blank stare. Nothing changed.
“Are you . . . okay?”
“Now the fat cow had probably been roughed up by a man she’d met and dropped, and she needed my help to save her. What she didn’t know is that I had been watching while she flirted with Skylar, eyeing Skylar’s perfect skin and dreaming of trapping my love in her wicked claws.”
Chastity was caught by this. She blinked. Her face flashed a series of conflicting emotions, confusion and anger rolling across like the wind down from the mountains, blasting the little plains town with a solstice chill. As soon as it had come, the emotions resolved, hardening into detest. Her body still shutting down, Chastity dragged her broken shoes past Carmen and towards the car beyond. Carmen didn’t shift her gaze or acknowledge Chastity’s existence.
“If she wanted help from me, she had another thing coming. I looked at the water dripping in a wide circle around her feet—”
“I weigh 170 pounds; what is your deal!?” Chastity screamed as she flopped her freezing ass into the driver’s seat.
“—and deduced what she needed. Well, she wouldn’t get it from me, the scarlet whore. I had waited too long for love to come to me, and I didn’t need someone else hoovering up what I wanted. I turned to Chastity, slowly, with malice, and I said ‘I would give you a cold shoulder, but it seems you’ll turn to ice before I do,’ which was a pun she was too stupid to understand.” All at once, as she said she would speak, Carmen turned to where Chastity had been nearly a minute before and addressed her as though no time had passed. Her face was animated with disgust, her hands vibrating with repressed rage. No sooner had she delivered her final epithet than Chastity, shaking her head, floored her savior’s Camry and flashed away into the slush and the quiet Wyoming night. She was still fat, though.
I am not through with trashfiction, critically nor personally. You remember that I said I had read well over two dozen examples? That was by choice, my friends. With the same exhausted resignation thin-spread over a mountain of shaking eagerness with which I buy a box of two dozen compressed flour circles and sugar paste (thank you, Holly), I read trashfiction, and proudly, too. I have unjustifiably subjected myself to more than twenty painful experiences. I eagerly await the next thin and sexually inexperienced woman falling into the arms of a muscular gunslinger. I will regret every moment and yet read another. Why, you ask?
It may be trashfiction—but it isn’t garbage.
[
last line courtesy A. Gregory, 2019]
