Note to Nicholas Sparks:
We at Haughty Literati Inc. appreciate the opportunity to bid on your latest book, “The Wedding.” We pass with some regret as we’re certain that this sequel to your bazillion-seller, made-into-a-movie, “The Notebook,” will do very well.
Your premise offers interesting potential: Stolid estate lawyer Wilson Lewis sets about revitalizing his 30-year marriage to wife Jane, suffering in martyred silence these many years from Wilson’s emotional detachment. One question – Why does Jane cry to her children instead of addressing her loneliness directly with her husband?
The chill between them thaws as the minutiae of planning their daughter’s wedding fill the conversational gaps. We wonder how far these two dullards can go on wedding post-game.
We don’t doubt that women will love the premise: The fault is all Wilson’s, and it’s up to him to fix the marriage through tremendous outlays of time, adoration and money. Copies of “The Wedding” will likely be placed on pillows of unromantic spouses across the United States, resulting in a boom in limo rentals, absenteeism and credit card debt. But is this really what women want – for the answer to the phrase, “If it took every penny I had, I’d spend it on (a) hungry children, (b) world peace or (c) a wedding,” to be (c)? As Wilson proudly proclaims (c), we can hear the collective rustle of Kleenex across our fine nation that 40 years ago answered the call of Kennedy’s “Ask not …” speech.
We are enclosing a copy of Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style,” which informs us that “none” calls for a singular verb when used in the sense of “not one.” We refer here to Wilson’s chess club dilemma, where “unfortunately, none of them were female.” We encourage you to examine what Messrs Strunk and White have to say about the word “hopefully.”
Control-H, aka the seek-and-destroy function, is your friend, useful in liposuctioning flabby adverbs and identifying repetitive writerly tics and twitches. In your case, we recommend in particular hunting down the following: “simply,” “of course,” “I might add,” “grabbed” and “almost.”
A note about “almost.” In your book, a barn looks “almost abandoned,” Jane “seems almost startled,” and the home has “an almost opulent air.” A writer’s most basic job is to find the right word – almost the right word is lazy writing.
On their first date, Jane and Wilson miss their reservation at a fancy restaurant because they find a poor, frightened cliché of a dog belonging to a sad little cliché of a boy. Fortunately, the obliging dog has a convenient collar and we can return to the drama of how our plucky heroes handle the crisis of a missed dinner reservation.
Perhaps “The Wedding” would be a better fit for our colleagues at Smarmy, Saccharine & Trite.
Sincerely,
The Editors at Haughty
Literati Inc.
Nicholas Sparks’ “The Wedding” (Warner Books, 2003) has recently been released in paperback.
