Re: CRIT: Niche

Ben Crowell wrote:
A hiker approached the town on California Route 520. Along the

Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't have used the word "town" for the
place described below.

mountain road, what the bluejays and chipmunks heard first was the
flap-flap-flap of the soles of her shoes, which were just barely
attached. The highway had been easy to find and to follow, at least
on foot, but there had been landslides in a few places, and fallen
trees, and that was why Lily Ouellette wasn't sharing the road with

I too found the introduction of her name to be jarring. It's like the
name is trying to sneak in unnoticed the way a tall man in an orange
tutu might sneak across the front of a stage.

any humans. It had been a long journey. She should have felt a sense
of accomplishment, but actually she would long since have given up,
if she hadn't already reached the point where it was easier to
survive by going forward than by going back. Her hopes for a
scientific career seemed like a fairy tale now.

Coming down around a curve, she saw her destination in front of
her. The scene was close to what she'd been expecting from the map:
the Tuolumne River, and the tiny mountain village, which had never
been much more than a junction and a gas station. If the hamlet was
still inhabited, it wasn't obvious, although she'd seen goats grazing
nearby that were probably domesticated. Downstream would be the
bigger town of Muir. Back home in Quebec, the Tuolumne wouldn't even
have been considered a riviere, hardly more than a ruisseau.
Reflexively, her biologist's eye observed what climate change had
done to its valley: the eroded slopes, and the dense overhang of
tropical riparian forest along the banks.

Now there's a clever way to tell the reader both that we're in the
future, and what kind of future it is.

Today she had kept walking until late in the morning, and if she

I think that the "Today" is a bit superfluous, and it might be easier
to work out the clause without it. You could try things like "It was
late in the morning and she was still walking . . ."

didn't stop now she'd be courting heatstroke. She found a good flat
rock in a shady spot, and sat down to wait until evening. The Bugs

Good time for a drink of water. I assume that she is carrying water, or
she would be in a hurry to get a refill from the "river" up ahead. And
I prefer narrators who show that they understand certain basic facts,
such as that you need a good supply of water to survive out in the
wilderness, or that a blow to the head doesn't just put you to sleep
for a little while.

In other words, I'm that sick and tired of fictional characters who get
hungry but not thirsty, and who recover easily from head injuries. I
want to know that I'm not reading another of those stories.

had been getting thicker for the last few days, their thumb-sized
blue-gray carapaces most easily picked out when they alighted on the
reddish dirt. She saw three of them here by her feet, disassembling
the body of a cricket. They were thick by the river, she could hear
as well as see them. There was every sign that she had arrived at
their epicenter.

Evening came, and as Lily continued down the hill, the first person to
see her coming was the goatherd Dan Bloom.

What the hell was the woman doing coming from that direction? It

I think that what doesn't work about this is that up until now the
narrator has seemed literally omniscient, reflecting a character's
thoughts only in terms of what they do know. But now the narrator
doesn't know and is asking questions. The narrator suddenly went from
knowing all to knowing no more than what one character knows. And
before this the narrator was reporting a character's thoughts as a
different person, but now the narrator appears to be actually thinking
just what the character is thinking.

It's like this isn't really the same narrator all along. For the first
few paragraphs, (s)he was talking like someone who knew Lily's
backstory. Now (s)he doesn't.

didn't make sense. Dan was still alive for several reasons. Habit was
one of them, and luck was another. Luck was why he'd survived the
cholera, and Tracy and the kids hadn't. Luck, or whatever you wanted
to call it. Experience was another of the reasons. From experience,
he'd learned to assess the strangers who came through this junction.
Travelers with money in their pockets. Soldiers or deserters.
Refugees (harmless in small numbers --- he'd been one himself, once).
This woman looked like a refugee, but it had been years since he'd
seen anyone come from that direction, so where was she a refugee from?

"Evening," Dan said as she came around the old rusted-out gas tank.
She'd be a hell of a good-looking woman when she was clean and not
half-starved.

Looks like it could be interesting, but I don't trust the narrator to
tell the story without having frequent identity crises. It might read
better if the narrator would say when (s)he is moving into a
character's head, rather than just doing it without comment.

It's partly a question of reliability. The narrator who gets into
characters' heads is unreliable, but the narrator who seems to change
his/her own identity and knowledge, without even mentioning it, can be
more unreliable than I would like. Especially when the narrator stays
in third person otherwise, thus appearing to have a sort of continuity
of identity.

--
Alex Clark

". . . He's always talking about the goblins he's had done in; he's
had them drowned, he's had them dropped off buildings, he's had them
poisoned, he's had them cooked in pies. . . ."
- _Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix_

.

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