Hank Stuever's Off-Ramp. It doesn't hurt for a good reason, it's not about war or dentists, it's just sloppy in a way that makes me claw at my face. Check out this sentence, which made it past the editors Henry Holt presumably employs:
"After the strippers leave, but before Andy's friend Gilbert beats up a guy named Robert (whom no one invited), and way before Robert comes back angrily with a group of his bros and way, way before a bigger fight breaks out in front of the Nuñez house, and certainly before someone breaks some guy's jaw, before any of this occurs, I left."
Stuever WHAT, you use "whom" but do not have a problem with "After the strippers leave... I left?" Tell me you are a time traveler and not just lame.
Also, dude literally says stuff like "I should make a birth analogy here." So do it. Don't tell me what your text should be doing, go crazy and actually WRITE it. Only don't. Birth analogies (re getting a couch through a narrow passage) are dumb. Mentioning one in passing is dumb, weak, and hipsterfuckedly self-aware. It's gross.
I'm guilty of this laziness myself. I have pages of text thick with temporary shorthand cop-outs: "remember to explain how she got the bike," "make this paragraph awesome." You don't see me sending it to a publisher in that state though. It's not a valid stylistic choice, it doesn't make Hank Stuever cute, it just means he is as retarded as me. I look for more in an author.
A book full of funny, touching anecdotes about couch surgeons, stormtroopers, and ladies with big Texan hair should not annoy me this much.
