Life- The Worst Novel Ever!

It occurs to me that life- in general, i.e. the lives of all humanity as a whole- would make for piss-poor storytelling. It has important characters, but no central character. Seven billion + minor characters, the majority of whom live lives not worth a footnote in the back of the book, all living out plot lines that go nowhere.

And for a work of non-fiction, it has such fantastically unbelievable plot points as to make the story an absolute fiction, the product of which could have come from a 3rd graders imagination. If you take religion’s word for it, some god or gods, who are fantastical in themselves, created everything that is and was and will be. And if you take the generally accepted notion of science’s word for it, at some unknown time in the past, somehow nothing became something in a grand burst of mass and energy forming the building blocks that random chance would mutate into what we see around us, which to me is even more fantastical. But either way, in storytelling, either one would be placed on the shelf with all the other fiction.

The story has yet to have a logical conclusion point satisfactory enough to end all the tiny intertwined plot lines going on. (Of course no story of fiction or nonfiction has an end, only a stopping point. Even a character’s death only leaves you to wonder what happened to the characters that survived them, whether they were mentioned in the story proper or not.) And I’m going against the generally held opinion that it shows signs of stopping any time soon. Yeah, there’s a high probability of something wiping out all life on earth, but there are other planets that have life-sustaining possibilities. Even if there is no other life in the universe, it is arguble that the story goes on to tell the goings on of the universe without humanity, even if no one is around to write it.

In the Story of Life’s defense, it has some astounding and detailed scenery. And even if the plot lines of the 7 billion minor characters are at times meaningless or boring, there are some character’s whose lives could be argued to be meaningful in the grand scheme and all of them could be argued to be meaningful to the plot lines of the characters they are intertwined with on the microcosmic scale.

Assuming the universe has a language (which I’m guessing would be mathematically based with a lot of physics and some philosophy thrown in for good measure), we still haven’t found out the full meaning of a lot of that language. So overall, with the poorly thought out plot, the barrage of minor characters, the lack of a conclusion and the hard to follow language, I give it a C-. Maybe once it has a conclusion that brings together all the subplots and the grammar is fleshed out into an understandable form, it’ll become a classic of literature. Until then, I’ll bear with it and keep reading what I can from it.

Peace,
CCG