Tired out fiction
There is nothing more boring than having to read the same characters and similar story lines from a authors 5th book. Its like a 25 year old television soap .
In the guardian Toby Lichtig wrote
I was considering this recently when I picked up the new John Irving novel, Last Night in Twisted River. My first thought was this: I wonder when a bear will appear?
This was followed by similar conjectures about severed body parts, young men being seduced/abused by older women, flatulent dogs and riffs on wrestling. Sure enough they all turned up (the bear early on; a severed hand and farting dog much later). And this annoyed me. It is one thing to make a genre out of your own writing and to return to the source of your preoccupations; it is another to litter your oeuvre with the same leitmotifs time and again. Irving’s work is not about bears or wrestling or what it means to be (or be around) a farting dog. So why do these flights of fancy always seem to crop up?
Of course there is a limit to what can actually be written, I in fact enjoy reading novels set during the world war 2, its the authors views that appear fresh that appeal to me.