Propositions for the Pinoy Postmodern Novel, Part One

The book itself is physically gorgeous, from the handdrawn cover art to the imported paper grade to the handwritten title headings on each page, utter artisan care was given to the book, all in aid of making it look like an artifact, the pages not merely the medium for Lee’s story but maybe even stories in and of themselves, like a dog-eared copy of a favourite book bought from Booksale, the pages peppered with underlines and highlights and marginal notes from the previous probably-already-dead owner, you know it has gone through something more than a printing press—Para Kay B’s production has that feel, all the sadder for the prose, really, once you stop admiring the look and start actually reading the book.

The story itself is not bad, but also nothing new, being an episodic meditation on the fickleness of love and its entourage of misery and abandon and wide-eyed naïveté, working off of the manufactured conceited statistic that love devastes four people out of every five, meaning only one person out of five ever achieves true happiness, and the book follows that conceit by following five different people coping with love in its various permutations, although the people are not really too different and love’s various permutations often come off as having come from the same mould. It’s a concept good enough for a Star Cinema Metro Manila Film Festival Entry, truth be told, and one can actually imagine Kristine Hermosa and Ruffa Guttierez and Kris Aquino and Anne Curtis with Ogie Alcasid (or any of those Quizon kids) in drag for some comedic value acting out the various roles in the book, and I think that’s pretty much where my problem with the book comes from.

The actual keyboard-writing of the prose is utterly lazy, with its underdeveloped syntax and very undergrad understanding of language. It is endlessly melodramatic, the prose frequently overacting, albeit ineptly, as if it honed its acting chops in a baranggay basketball court actors workshop somewhere in Cubao. The first page of the first chapter reads

Sa loob ng coffee shop, habang hawak ang menu, nakaharap si Irene sa mga kabarkadang sina Brenda (payat na pero nagpapapayat pa kaya baka matuluyan nang mag-disappear), at Susan (laging nakangiti, parang walang problema sa mundo). Saka si Donald (squarish ang mukha at me goatee), ang lalaking katrabaho ni Susan sa call center, na ibina-blind date nito kay Irene. Sige na, Irene, sabi ni Susan. Sige na, show Donald!

Napatingin si Irene sa labas ng glass window. Doon ay walang sound na nahuhulog ang mga yellow confetti, parang umiindayog sa isang di marinig na melodiya sa hangin, sinasalubong ang wala ring sound na pagsisigawan ng mga ralyistang nagmamartsa sa kahabaan ng Ayala Avenue dala-dala ang malaking streamer na nagsasabing March for Truth.

and really this is how the prose works throughout the book, stumbly, clunky, very utilitarian, and utterly dead on the page. The whole book actually reads like an extended script treatment, an overly-long outline for an episode of a more teeny-bopper version of Maalaala Mo Kaya?, writing that needs a mediator by way of visuals, normally with Lee maybe an ensemble of actors framed by the camera, but this time the mediator here, as how it pretty much is with every book written and read, is the reader’s mind with all of her collected experience and imagination, although normally the prose should be written pleasantly enough that the interaction between the reader and the page is a collaborative effort—the ideal concept is that they should meet each other halfway.

But with Para Kay B, with its lazy-eared lazy-boned prose, the book relies not entirely on the reader’s imagination or collected experience, but with the reader’s collected baggage of TV and movie culture, relying on the reader’s likely-lifelong accumulation of viewing hours to fill in the blanks within the text, and the blanks here are not only with the narrative logic or the gaps from scene to scene, but it’s also with the drama of the whole thing as the characters in the book don’t come off as living in the page—they are not real credible people with their lives transcribed for our reading pleasure, but merely stereotypes going through the motions, performing as per the prose says, they merely do stuff that’s asked of them and nothing much after that, it is TV dramaturgy, just helping the story along on its way to the end credits, stuff in between to pad the running time between commercial breaks.

The book is very much a product of TV culture, from its transition effects to clippy montages that speed things up when nothing is happening narrative-wise but then slow down when the story reaches a pertinent plot point, to its political overtones, that is, the oversimplified politics of TV melodrama. And I’m not even judging it along “literary” standards, whatever “literary” standards I still have left, this book is really just a failure even along the standards of just plain good storytelling. Para Kay B is an unbelievably badly-written novel, especially keeping in mind that it came from the same person who wrote Himala, Moral, the Rizal centennial movie a decade ago, and Tatarin, which was a good story in its own right despite being an adaptation of an already excellent Nick Joaquin short, and really, what happened?

Lee not so much hints as obliquely alludes to the possible reason for his choice of writing style for Para Kay B, that being his desire to not only be read by writers and students of literature (as his other non-novel books have been) but to be read by everyone everywhere, from people in the MRT to parents wooing their children to sleep—that ever elusive prospective reading audience called “the masses”—and thus the choice to leave dialogue unquoted or unitalicised, thus the choice for the characters to be stereotypes, thus the choice to be unexemplary. And if that is true, then it’s a really bad proposition, that to write a popular novel, “popular” being “patok sa masa,” means to leech out every little “literary” trope from the text, from formalist things like quotation marks to dramaturgical things like characterisation, in the assumption that the masa reader doesn’t care for such things. Maybe.

Or maybe this is an avant-garde thing, a new kind of writing, the next logical step from Wallace’s “Image Fiction,” writing that not only mirrors and is a product of TV culture, but writing that actually functions like TV culture, writing that actually is TV culture, the first truly postliterate text—TV literature—for the first truly postliterate Kapamilya-Kapuso generation. Maybe.

Or maybe Lee is just not the right kind of writer for read-only texts, as the story really is a perfect potential entry for the Metro Manila Film Festival, but as a novel, it’s really really bad. Seemingly, without the location scouts and the setbuilders and the propmaster and the cinematographer, without the editor and the director and the preening mestiza actors as ciphers for Lee’s prose, the dialogue and setting and plot and pretty much the whole story itself is dead dead dead. Just because you’re an excellent writer in one medium doesn’t mean you’ll be remotely functional at all one in another.

But two pages from the last word of the novel and six pages from the actual end of the book is a three-page excerpt for Lee’s second novel called Aswang, and I found in its meager three pages all the tempo, the charm, the verve, the love, the life that the preceding 243 pages absolutely lacked. Aswang is a novel Lee describes as a political satire about Amapola, who is a “baklang impersonator na isang araw ay naging manananggal. Isang pulis na Norianan ang nagpakilalang magiging guide niya sa kanyang misyong hanapin ang kakambal na si Lea, na siyang itinakdang tagapagligtas. Ayaw ni Amapola ng supporting role lang kaya tumatanggi siya sa misyon at niri-resist niya ang pagiging aswang” and really, just the synopsis alone is enough to endear me to the book, not to mention the three-page excerpt that is an absolute comedic masterpiece of slapstick proportions worthy of Dolphy (and dare I say that is a very blurb-worthy phrase). Lee’s second novel is really something I’m actually very excited about, the complete utter opposite of what I feel about his first. I suppose he had to write out all the grime to get to the gold. If only for that, well, then, I’d say Para Kay B wasn’t such a waste of time after all.

And as the music swells to a big production number finish, let me say that if Para Kay B, and more importantly Aswang, is the shape of things to come, well, the Pinoy Novel shelf is still very much empty space, still very much devoid of the popular literary masterpieces we very much need, but it’s slowly hopefully surely getting filled. There will be books that will be absolutely shit (like Para Kay B), and there will be books that will absolutely be the shit (like Aswang). The important thing, really, is to have them out there in the first place, getting written, getting published, getting studied, getting read. And I believe that that is a wonderful movie script ending if I ever wrote one.





Previously published in the Philippines Free Press