Review: "The Return of Tom Sloane", by chubby redburn

Now how long has it been since I reviewed anything? Much less a story at fanfiction.net? Well, I'm going to climb back in the saddle again after hearing some kind words somewhere about my reviewing.

What would I tell anyone who wanted to get into this bizarre job? The first thing I will tell you is that you'll earn no fame from reviewing. People remember the works more than they remember what someone else said about them, unless the works are so sadly lacking that the review is more interesting than the work reviewed.

The second is that a review should not be a dissection, a transformation of something alive into something dead, like a robot trying to understand a joke by stripping it down to the grammar. Rather, a good review tells you something about the story that even the writer didn't know when he was writing it. This comes perilously close to what some people would say is "divining the writer's intent". One gets the rejoinder, "the only person who really knows what a story is about is the person who wrote it". To which I would reply, "That might be true -- but I think he ended up saying something other than he wanted to say, probably by accident."

I decided to look at a new story by chubby redburn called "The Return of Tom Sloane, Chapter 1". Anything that begins "Chapter 1" has a hard act to follow. When you say "Chapter 1", the first chapter needs to be the foundation stone for what follows, and if it isn't strong, one suspects the rest will sink into the swamp.

I'm getting that sinking feeling, and I'm feeling alligators nipping at my heels.

The story starts with the meeting of a middle aged businessman and ex-Vietnam vet named Lloyd Derry. Derry is returning from a business trip to Singapore. He's a successful businessman who believes that "people (do) business with people they knew and with whom they were comfortable," who places great value on personal relationships. On the way back to Lawndale, he meets a young marine sergeant in a dress-blue uniform named Tom Sloane.

Yes, that Tom Sloane.

It's definitely an interesting beginning. Our boy Tom has reached at least E-5, a medium pay grade and has achieved some level of responsibility. However, Tom speaks a bit oddly. He says that "the idea of having long hair is repellant to me" instead of "I hate long hair". He says "that's something I cannot do" instead of using a contraction. Initially, I thought this was Tom experimenting with being more profound and more responsible; a Tom paying more attention to his speech and making the mistake of using five words where one will do.

As it turns out, Derry speaks in the same awkward sentence structures, leading me to believe that the writer hasn't quite learned Mark Twain's rules of literary art. Rules 12 through 14 are:

"(An author should) say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it."
"Use the right word, not its second cousin."
"Eschew surplusage."

In particular, Rule 18 is violated. "Employ a simple and straightforward style". A lot of this short chapter is taken with the details of Derry getting on his plane, life on a plane, and the details of disembarking from a plane.

This was a bit disturbing to me. Someone had written, somewhere, that what distinguished a pornographic novel -- a dirty novel you hide under the covers -- was that between the sex scenes, the only goal of the writing was to get the character from one sex scene to the next. Such work has a lot of emphasis on travel, how the characters are conveyed to locations. I'm sure that Mr. Redburn was padding his work for other reasons, but if he was trying to convey the tedium of life on a plane, he could have written "it was a boring flight" and we would have all understood.

Furthermore, there are really only two interesting moments in the entire chapter.

The first is where Derry describes himself to Tom as "a poseur". Other Daria writers would probably sum up Tom Sloane as a "poseur", so one might conclude the author is going to contrast Derry's life with Tom's as a poseur. Instead, the contrast is a different one, where Derry describes how he ended up in Vietnam. As it turns out, Tom did not end up in the Marines for the same reasons ... or at least, that's what we're led to conclude. If there's some subtext that leads one to conclude otherwise, I missed it.

However, the second "big moment" -- Tom's meeting with his parents -- was a major disappointment to me, sort of a cold shower after being led to believe that something intriguing might happen. Mr. Redburn manages to combine three cliches together in the final narrative of the story, and drags in something very important that happened about four years ago which should never be used by anyone but the best of writers.

What those three cliches are, I won't recall -- I'll leave a sharp reader to ferret them out. However, I wrote a big essay on this called "Controversy More Than Ever" where I talk about the difference between controversy and melodrama. I don't think Mr. Redburn was trying to be controversial, but what he is writing breaks down into melodrama, and not good melodrama.

They are:

1. a sensational event or controversial subject
2. a building of suspense
3. coincidence
4. conventional thinking.

By that, I mean pedestrian thinking, where there is no middle ground in either decisions, conclusions, or characterization. The example I gave was homosexuality, where either one is a "good liberal" and tolerant of homosexuality to the point that one would be a heterosexual saint in the gay community or a troglodyte that wants to drag queers by chains over gravel roads. Another example would be abortion, where either one sees a fetus as no more than a group of dividing cells and its excision from the body of no more importance than clipping a toenail or a firebreathing Christonut who wants to shoot doctors and make women wear chastity belts. I am not trying to say to argue that one point or the other is the incorrect one; merely that many people fall in the unhappy middle in a lot of truly "controversial" issues.

In this final paragraph, Mr. Redburn adds conventional thinking, a controversial subject, and a bit of coincidence that sink his "killer ending" pretty quickly in my eyes. You might have liked it, I didn't.

So what was YOUR view on the story? Do you like it? Do you hate it? What are its strengths? What are its weakness? Should the author be encouraged, and if so, how should the author be encouraged without breaking his spirit? Or should he just grit his teeth and start over?

P.S. If Mr. Redburn is reading this, I apologize for having turned my cannons in your direction. In the future, I'll try not to bombard an author before first figuring out how thick the hull is.