[Sorry about the long three-week absence, I have four books in my hands (two collective volumes, a monograph, a translation of a collective volume) and a journal issue, and no energy left to write. Also, blame Donald Trump for absorbing my mental energy with so much fretting about the appalling consequences of his random decisions]

I think it’s about time we ring the alarm bell and show our collective concern about the limitations of current storytelling in all media, from print to the audiovisual. I read recently a tweet by a woman who wondered whether she was done for good with reading. Her complaint was that, even though she was trying very hard to like the books she was reading, they soon became boring and she found herself abandoning more volumes than she finished. Even worse, she was forcing herself to read certain books despite knowing she would find no satisfaction in finishing them, just for the sake of telling herself she still loved reading.

Poor thing, this woman thought her disengagement from reading was personal, when, feeling like her, I think this reflects a pattern beginning to emerge. If we, the habitual readers, keep silent about our disillusionment, this is for two reasons; firstly, we do not want to give non-readers the chance to feel smug; secondly, we do not want to be too harsh on authors. Stephen King protested this week on his Bluesky account that it’s just too easy to complain if one has never written fiction, and he is right (if only partially).

Among the books I have recently enjoyed very much, I’ll mention Edward Zwick’s memoir Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood (2024). Zwick gives an excellent overview of his career, denouncing the financial narrowmindedness that prevents Hollywood from offering better narratives. Among many relevant films, Zwick directed in 2006 Blood Diamond, based on a plot by Charles Leavitt and C. Gaby Mitchell, and scripted by Leavitt himself. Zwick’s movie is a political thriller set in the Sierra Leone Civil War (1999-2002), dealing with the efforts of local miner Solomon Vandy to escape slavery. The concept ‘blood diamond’, meaning a diamond tainted by the horrifying exploitation of the workers employed to extract it, gained currency thanks to the film. Yet, Zwick narrates in his memories how one of the studio executives told him this was the last ‘adult’ film they would produce, as new currents favoured superhero-based light entertainment, for which he was very sorry.

Zwick’s memoirs set me thinking about why I dislike most of the films (and novels) I approach today, and I concluded that they have forgotten how to connect the personal with the social. I posted recently about John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, a film that fits my argument: the screenplay offers family melodrama, but this is firmly tied to the struggles of Welsh miners at the end of the 19th century. As I wrote then, not all stories need to follow that path, and be as serious as Ken Loach’s cinema, but I’m missing that social dimension in most stories I read or watch.

If you want another example of poor storytelling, I’ll mention Sean Baker’s Anora, this year’s Oscar winner. This is the story of a sex worker, Ani, who deludes herself into believing that she’s in love with the ultrarich Russian brat who first employs her and then marries her to spite his parents. Baker, however, does not raise any issues concerning Ani’s employment or the origin of her young husband’s fortune. You might counterargue that these issues are not raised either in Garry Marshall’s Prety Woman (1990), but at least the director knows what he’s doing and offers at least good entertainment (I hate the film, but I cannot say it bores me!). Anora is just bad storytelling uninterested in the potential issues it could (or should) have raised: in short, a mess that is not engaging at all.

So, why did it get an Oscar for Best Film? (against Emilia Pérez, A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Nickel Boys, I’m Still Here, The Substance, Dune: Part Two, Wicked, The Brutalist). To be honest I don’t know. I have not seen yet all of these films, but the ones I have seen (Emilia Pérez, Nickel Boys, The Substance, Dune: Part Two) were films I also disliked profoundly. The worst one was Nickel Boys, which I could not even finish watching (I’ll read instead Colson Whitehead’s novel). So, here’s my theory: when the awards season comes, the prizes are given anyway regardless of the quality of the films released that year, for they need to be awarded (I’ll come to the novels in a few paragraphs).

Anora ended up winning five Oscars: one for leading actress Mikey Madison and four (!!) for Sean Baker for best direction, screenplay, film editing, and film. This is something I totally fail to understand. I enjoyed Baker’s The Florida Project (2017) but I just don’t think that Baker is as talented as this year’s Oscars suggest. Others might disagree, but this is my view. Overhyping, as noted, also plays a role. A spectator complained recently that he hated The Substance because it had been overhyped by critics and award juries, but he could have enjoyed it without so much fanfare. He named No Hard Feelings (2023), with Jennifer Lawrence, as a film he could enjoy precisely because it had not been overhyped, much the opposite. If it had received any hype, he wrote, “now I would be roasting Jennifer Lawrence instead of Demi Moore.”

I don’t follow series much but, checking the 2024 Emmys list of winners, my impression is that they seem to be less affected by the same pattern of overhyping and exaggerated award winning. Shōgun, the main winner last year, seemed to me a very good example of great storytelling combined with solid issues, such as power within feudal Japan, the interference of foreign missionaries and traders, the role of women and many others. Severance and Adolescence, two of the productions most hyped these past months that might win the main awards, are also quite solid.
There is indeed a case to be made for series offering right now the most solid storytelling, provided, that is, they don’t go beyond season three, when they start fizzling out. Miniseries, then, like Adolescence, might be now ideally poised to strike that engaging balance between good narrative and appealing issue-based content that I’m defending here, though, of course, they can also be overhyped. I could not go past episode one of Netflix’s Ripley as much as I like Andrew Scott. He was totally miscast as young Ripley and Steven Zaillian’s direction was awfully misguided in its use of pretentious black and white.

Now for the novels. The two novels I most disliked last year, among the ones I managed to finish (about 60% of the ones I started), were Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (2007) and Samantha Harvey’s Orbital (2023). Kang is the most recent Nobel Prize winner and Harvey won the Booker prize for her novel. That both are by women is irrelevant, there were many books by men that either I didn’t finish or didn’t like: Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (2011) or Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) come to mind, within the category of novels I did read. The combination of overhyping and the awards reaped worked very much against Kang and Harvey, for the higher the expectations, the deeper the disappointment.

I totally accept that other readers might have other opinions, but what baffles me is that, systematically, in recent years the opinions of professional critics and award juries seems to find much to praise in works which are underserving. I’ll insist again that since awards must be granted, for nobody would consider withdrawing any major award for lack of quality, underserving works are reaping distinctions for the wrong reasons. What I can’t explain is why professional critics pour so much encomium into works that are, in my (very demanding) view, just middling novels.

What the novels I can’t stand have is common is a lack of the effort, a refusal to provide good characterization and a renunciation to connect personal experiences with the larger issues beyond the narrow lives of individuals. I miss this in mainstream, realist fiction, but also in the more recent genre fiction. I used to enjoy SF because it extrapolated the main issues of the present onto an imaginary future, but now that fantasy has crept into this genre, SF offers mostly bland stories which seem to have been randomly plotted.

Luckily, good storytelling is not dead, though it’s found where you least expect it. I found it this week in Robert Harris’s Conclave (2016), the novel that has inspired one of the nominees to Best Picture in this year’s Oscars. I have not seen the film yet, but I found the novel perfectly balanced: great plot, memorable characters, and very interesting issues, ranging from religion and power to gender. I found myself wanting to read Harris’s novel and not wanting it to be over so soon (this is not a very long volume), which is a marvelous feeling in comparison with wanting to be done with a boring novel. Harris did a lot of research, cared about his characters, worked hard to surprise his readers with an excellent final twist, and connected his plot to current concerns. Was he trying to innovate narrative technique or did he use literary prose? No, but I found his novel entirely satisfying, a feeling that recently I have been only getting from documentaries and non-fiction works.

Some say that after thousands of years narrating stories, there is nothing new to narrate under the sun. I don’t believe that is true. I’m not complaining about the lack of originality of, as mentioned, The Vegetarian (a woman adamantly refuses to eat meat) or Orbital (how does the ISS’s international crew deal with political conflict on Earth?), but about the author’s decision to strive for originality rather than for engaging storytelling. Of course, the opposite also disappoints. I’m now reading Suzanne Collins’s Sunrise on the Reaping, the fifth Hunger Games novel, and I found on GoodReads many complaints, which I share, about Collins’s laziness in imagining an original, appealing plot. There is much anger at how she has taken the easier path (repeating the scheme of the Hunger Games, focusing on the ones Haymitch Abernathy won), instead of exploring many other aspects of the universe she created. The list is endless.

So, here’s another key factor in the failing standards of current storytelling: the premises may be interesting but storytellers rarely have the ability to make the most of them. This is something you notice as you age and can compare decades worth of storytelling in your own lifetime. It gets harder to be satisfied with new stories, seeing how they pale in comparison to others acclaimed in the past you’re familiar with. I’m not saying that any story invented in the past is better but that the impulse to narrate well (except in miniseries?) is being lost. If a mediocre story suffices and you find a producer or a publisher, and even critics and juries love it, why work harder?
The public is so hungry for novelty and so uninterested in past storytelling that they’ll go for whatever passes today for great storytelling. Or not? We all do, until one day we tire and yell ‘enough with so much mediocrity!’