You’re reading a novel.

Great, good, indifferent; in any event, one that provides enough incentive to keep reading. And then you hit the chapter where the author lost track of what he was doing.

This is not to be confused with the mere interesting controlled digression, like a red herring character in a murder mystery, or the unrelated crime scene in a cop story, or even the side-chapter like the brilliant one Joe Lansdale once did about an aggravating conversation with a stupid dude who flushed his dentures. Those are grace notes. (And they’re all over Dickens.)

I am talking about actual evidence of authorial flailing.

It can be that chapter in the middle of Dan Simmons’s THE BLACK HILLS where, showing off his research, he gives us many thousands of words on the engineering attributes of the Brooklyn Bridge. (Defeated me. I never returned to the book.)

Or it can be that section of THE STAND, set in Boulder after the Plague, where by his own admission Stephen King got caught up with the minutiae of rebuilding a community, of governing the place, of cleaning it up so people could live there. (It served a story function, to be sure, but he had to put the book aside for a few months, utterly stuck, before realizing that he quite literally needed a bomb to go off. Until then, he was just playing a game that had not been invented yet, SIM CITY.)

This false trail can just as easily be the character who shows up who your author cannot drop, who he circles for twenty-thirty pages before finding his thread again.

Or the plotline that he really should have dropped, that Mario Puzo kept returning to just out of self-gratification. THE GODFATHER, the novel, tells us that Sonny Corleone had a monstrously huge cock and introduces us to Lucy Mancini, a woman with a cavernous vagina capable of accommodating him. Long after Sonny is dead and Lucy has departed from his family’s orbit, whenever Puzo needed to fade away from the Corleones before returning to them after some time had passed, he kept giving us updates on the travels of Lucy, the girl whose vagina came equipped with an echo. By the time the book was done, so much of it had disappeared up Lucy Mancini’s wazoo that to delete her chapters would have seriously impacted the word count.

Reading novels, you can tell when the author is pursuing false leads down blind alleys. They’re often edited out. But sometimes they are left for us, fascinating evidence of the author’s helpless wandering. This happens to great writers. It is all over HUCKLEBERRY FINN, for instance.

So I’ve got to tell you.

Tom Bombadil is Tolkien’s Sonny Corleone cock.

Tags: Charles Dickens, Huckleberryt Finn, Joe R. Lansdale, Lord Of the Rings, Mark Twain, Stephen King, The Godfather, The Stand, writing | Category Books, Writing