Trendy Writing

I read Mark Haddon's latest novel The Red House yesterday and what a mistake that was. Not only are the characters unlikable (unless you're a fan of moaning and whingeing), but the prose style was irritating. He has this trendy affectation of interspersing his regular sentences with lists of descriptive words. So instead of a regular description of a house, say, you might get "Newpaper on floor, unripe fruit, musty sofa." Which is fine once or twice, but every third sentence is a list and if I want to read lists of words, I can read a thesaurus.

Even worse, he eschews quotation marks for speech. Instead italics are used to ambiguously denote speech or thoughts or quotations. This confusion leads to reader rage which is probably not the author's intended result.

These two stylistic choices are enough to turn me against the author FOREVER ! Unless he personally apologises to me.