Detached, aloof, austere, cold, distant, plain, sparse and some permutations of these words

And a detached retina

I am interviewing Harriet Armstrong about her excellent book To Rest Our Minds And Bodies this evening and in preparation I was trying to make a list of words which are used frequently in book reviews, but really only in reviews of books by women (and especially young women). So far I have come up with: detached, aloof, austere, cold, distant, plain, sparse and some permutations of these words.

I wouldn’t use these words in a review myself because they have become tropeish and hackneyed. They now strike me as the type of lazy, hand gesture-y words people use when they are scared to try to come up with a precise description by themselves. And lots of people are scared to describe things accurately and originally because they don’t want to be wrong. (Fine, but why then write criticism? And what does it even mean to be wrong? To have a different opinion to some other people? Is that really so bad?)

When I was thinking about the generic quality of these words I remembered Wendy Erskine’s review of Kathryn Scanlan. I think Wendy is a genius, and I loved this description in that review: Sonia’s voice is unsentimental and humane, alert to absurdity and human frailty. (This is actually a great description of Wendy’s writing too, as it happens).

Unsentimental and humane. Crucially “and” not “but”, because these qualities are very often erroneously set against each other. I remember reading those words and thinking of the care, intelligence and precision in that short description. I think the charge of “cold and distant” tends to be applied when writers choose not to signpost the emotional response a reader is supposed to have to a certain scene or character, by choosing not to announce the sentimental extravagences of certain characters.

I don’t think you would be accused of “cold and distant” if characters were crying and weeping and wailing all over the place (regular readers will know this is a theme I always return to and charge with responsibility for all manner of wrongs in the world, but we are all allowed our little pet obsessions.) But I don’t think people in general do go about the place crying and weeping and wailing all the time. Is an absence of sentimentality “coldness”, or is it real life? I find it interesting when funny books are described as cold too. How does that work exactly?

When I was thinking about my list of words I realised there are a few books I have read recently which I think could be fairly described by some of them. I read Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, which was just not at all for me, for a review. The narrative style there is very deliberately aloof and detached.