The Tiger
I want to get a bad piece of writing (someone else’s, that is) off my chest: John Vaillant’s The Tiger (Knopf, 2010). This was a much-lauded piece of work, and based on what I heard – including interviews with the author – I was really looking forward to reading it.
What a disappointment to discover that he’s a terrible writer. He lost me in the first sitting, and in a single leaf. On page 25 he wrote of butterflies that:
hatch out to spangle and iridesce
That’s a weird use of “spangle”, so I looked it up, and found that the OED says it’s a noun or transitive verb, so okay, it’s florid language, but legal. But it turned my radar on, and the alarms sounded when further down the same page he described the tigers as:
literally, tattooed: if you were to shave one bald, its stripes would still be visible, integral to its skin.
That isn’t just a stretch – it’s plain wrong. A tattoo is the artificial introduction into the skin of a dye, pigment, or ink, and that’s exactly what it has to be in order to use the word “literally”. Skin colouration may resemble a tattoo, but it is not literally a tattoo. That’s like saying that blacks are “literally, tattooed other than on their palms and soles”, and I can’t imagine anyone not finding that notion offensive. Strike two. What a treat, then, to find on the very next page:
In the final nanoseconds of an airborne attack, a tiger’s tail will become rigid, balancing and stabilizing the hindquarters
To which I say enough, already! Big cats are pretty goddamn fast, but nothing in the animal world happens in nanoseconds. Permit me to establish some scale here, because I inhabit the world of nanoseconds. A nanosecond is one billionth of a second. As a human, your reaction time is around 300 milliseconds – a third of a second – and even if the tiger’s is a thousand times faster than yours, we’re still only talking about 300 microseconds, which is 300,000 nanoseconds, and five decimal points worth of exaggeration. Now, I’m not an animal physiologist, so I can’t tell you exactly how long it actually takes for a Siberian Tiger’s tail muscle to stiffen, but I’ll bet kopeks to kartoshka that it happens in a relatively large number – perhaps tens – of milliseconds. I get that, somehow, the word “nanosecond” has become hip in our culture (primarily among people incapable of using it properly in a calculation), but how shitty a writer do you have to be to need to use this kind of hyperbole to tart up your text? I knew that I couldn’t read this book without, page after page, getting more pissed off, repeatedly distracted from the story by Vaillant’s self-satisfied embroidering to the point that there’d be no way to enjoy it. So I put The Tiger back on the shelf, and this is the first time I’ve taken it down since. And yer out!
Postscript: I know this is going to sound petty, but even his name grates on me. It’s spelled “Vaillant”, which should be pronounced “vale-ant”, but instead he pronounces it “valley-ant”, as in the car. Maybe there’s a reason for that, but until I hear it, it’s just another stupid thing we have to put up with from this guy.
Nitpicking Bastard 