All the Doerr I Cannot Read - A review of All the Light We Cannot See

All the Doerr I Cannot Read.
By Julia Summers

  Anthony Doerr is a hack writer and I cannot imagine how such a poorly-written work even made it to the best seller list anywhere in the world (even America), or  claimed any one of its prestigious awards.  There are troublingly few newspapers that weren't lavishing absurd amounts of praise on the writer when the book came out. Yet, like the little boy who pointed out the naked emperor, I will refuse to be coerced by mass-opinion: this is a prime example of just how far literature has sunk in the last few decades. 

Loose sentence constructions, banal lists of miscellany used to create just-so ambiances,  the excessive use of hyperbole, a constant cascade of clichés and unoriginal metaphors; These are my main charges against the novel. Examples of this last feature can be found the first page, take for example: “a delicate atrium vaults over the seafood market,” (a lazily misappropriated gerund which means "to jump". How can vaults - roofs - vault anyhow?). It doesn't do the English language justice. Full-time Accountants and Computer programmers with literary side-interests wouldn't know the difference -well that's okay for them but the dumbing down of literature is what's at stake. In the next sentence there is a sea-side mansion “studded with chimneys.” (who hasn't heard of this lazy metaphor before in freshman literary forès?; I am reminded on the studs of your chintzy punk days belt) And so it goes on....Like I say, this is only the first page! feckless metaphors interspersed with clichés smothered with lists of things to give the illusion of writerliness... It's endless, and need I say it? The response by critics has been needlessly "dour!"

To get some perspective, we might contrast Doerr with masters of present tense writing - writers like Cormac McCarthy, who Doerr claims influenced his style or Dylan Thomas who melds logic with sheer imagination to create striking, bold metaphors in describing towns. By the brightness of these masters of poetic language, we can see the complete dullness of Doerr's book. Of their classical elixir, the substance of worthy literary writing, there is no trace to be found in Doerr. Because of the way the entire 540-page All the Light We Cannot See uses the present tense, there is little change in the pace of the novel either and little means of achieving it - another in a myriad litany of lapses in planning out this monstrosity. If you've read The Road by Cormac McCarthy, you'll know that the book uses the present tense to magical effect and that entering into the psycho-narrative plays a large role in this. However, this usually requires a kind of surgical diligence and furthermore, an understanding of how to create suspense.  Doerr, on the other hand simply does nothing to make present tense interesting. Little surprise, since his latest work is pulp fiction and intended for mass consumption, that it's been artificially drummed up by people in the right circles. Fine, I'll admit that it may be unfair to compare Doerr with literary giants, but please sir, do some minimal homework using them. The fact I'm trying to impress on my reader is that he doesn't even make an attempt at being classically memorable. This book seems like the outpourings of a man who just needed to get in his daily 10,000 words, lashed them together, and somehow had the right connections to publish them. 

In  his scattering of a few foreign words like "bonjour," "Monsieur", or the "rue such-and-such" here and there, Doerr seems to think he has recreated a French tradition. There are short moments of inspiring prose amidst the vast reams of uninteresting writing but on the whole, Doerr does far too little to develop the work into an original, insightful, much less meaningful historical commentary. It just doesn't have any feeling behind it. I have derived more imaginative pleasure from Ian Kershaw's history of Hitler, despite his being a non-fiction historical writer, and I could even go so far as to aver that he would have written a far more profound piece of fiction on the period. But then who wouldn't have? 

In the following all-too typical example of Doerr's prose, Werner's (one of the two main characters') military training school is being described. Here we see Doerr's tactic of listing banal objects in the hope of evoking ambiance. The first words of the sentence sound like the start of a bad joke:

“ On Werner's first day, he walks past the half-open door of the technical sciences
laboratory and glimpses a room as large as Zollverein's drugstore lined with brand-

new sinks and glass-fronted cabinets inside which wait sparkling beakers and graduated cylinders and balances and burners.”


Wait, "Drugstore?" And this is supposed to be one of the most moving passages of the book as well? Science is Werner's great passion! Yet we see no passion at all. We see  a modern commonly occurring list of instruments that could be found in any part of the world today. School labs in Scandanavia, Russia, the Bahamas would have such objects, not least of all, the modern-day United States from whence Doerr originates. Americanizations like "drugstore" are so common throughout the work that I often felt I was reading about a cardboard cut-out of a European city in a Disney dining alcove. There is even a point at which Jutta, Werner's sister says she will "mail" a radio announcer, yet another lazily appropriated, Americanized(this time) gerund.

This is a hack-piece from any literary standpoint, (except for receiver-centered models of literary criticism, which are based on raw popularity). If the bulk of your reading and writing is done on Facebook, of course, you'd enjoy it. But if you're serious about art and if you're considering buying it, or taking it out at the local library, I would caution you not to waste your money or your time. You may like the moral of the story, but if morals are the only important thing in writing, then I know a fairly good litany of fairy tales that would do a far more gratifying job.  "The Emperor's New Clothes" for just one example.