Books I Didn't Finish: The Nobody People

We’re straddling the line between Books I Didn’t Finish and a Bad Writing Masterclass today with Bob Proehl’s The Nobody People. It’s not bad enough for the latter, but since I only got through a few chapters in it definitely fits right into the former category, and a big part of the reason why is that (among other things) the writing is pretty bad.

Avi Hirsch has always known his daughter was different. But when others with incredible, otherworldly gifts reveal themselves to the world, Avi realizes that her oddness is something more--that she is something more. With this, he has a terrifying revelation: Emmeline is now entering a society where her unique abilities unfairly mark her as a potential threat. And even though he is her father, Avi cannot keep her safe forever.

Emmeline soon meets others just like her: Carrie Norris, a teenage girl who can turn invisible . . . but just wants to be seen. Fahima Deeb, a woman with an uncanny knack for machinery . . . but it's her Muslim faith that makes the U.S. government suspicious of her.

They are the nobody people--ordinary individuals with extraordinary gifts who want one only thing: to live as equals in an America that is gripped by fear and hatred. But the government is passing discriminatory laws. Violent mobs are taking to the streets. And one of their own--an angry young man seething with self-loathing--has used his power in an act of mass violence that has put a new target on the community. The nobody people must now stand together and fight for their future, or risk falling apart.

So basically it’s the X-Men, but without the superhero stuff. That’s an idea that’s been done quite a few times before, including by Marvel themselves, but there’s still potential here. I tend to gravitate towards lower-key fantasy and sci-fi, and I’m always interested when a writer takes something very “genre” and puts a more realistic spin on it.

The Nobody People does not actually do that.

My first big issue is that—based on the limited amount of it I read—that plot description is kind of a bait and switch. Within the first few chapters the story introduces a big villain who’s basically doing the Magneto “kill all the normies” thing, and most of the Resonant characters already know each other when the story starts and have formed a group of extraordinary people—a sort “team” of “X-Men” if you will—to take down anyone using their powers for evil purposes.

At the same time, the book is still trying to be the more Batman Begins-esque grounded version of that concept, which introduces its own problems, namely that people who can shoot lasers out of their eyes are an inherently goofy concept and trying to write a serious socio-political story around the idea is a bit of a stretch. Case very much in point, the specific moment that made me stop reading the book is when Avi meets a guy who does the Mr. Fantastic stretchy limbs thing, which as a superpower is kind of hard to take seriously even when it’s showing up in a comic book series that also features a dude in a metal suit named Doctor Doom. When it’s in a story about discrimination that’s meant to be set in our sober reality, it’s just laughable.

(A lot of the Resonant powers are just familiar superhero abilities, which feels a little uncreative. There are some more original and imaginative ones, but you’ve also got your precognition and your eye beams and such).

The book as a whole seems to have some trouble deciding whether it wants to be a serious work of literature examining serious-business themes, or whether it wants to be a pulpy superhero romp. The opening prologue is about a young man working in a mine who uses his powers to save himself and his co-workers after a cave-in; the coworkers respond to this by going to his house with the apparent intention of lynching him, then when they discover that all of his younger siblings have abilities as well they murder the entire family and burn the house down. No attempt is made to justify how extreme this reaction is given the circumstances leading to it, which makes it hard for me to really accept the book as serious-business literature.

On a similar note, I find the whole “superpowered people as metaphor for minorities” thing to be a tough sell to begin with. I’m not the first person to point out that giving a group of people who are supposed to be disenfranchised and downtrodden the ability to fly and punch through concrete changes the equation of oppression just a bit. In particularly clumsy examples this can end up accidentally making the bigots seem reasonable: there’s usually an element of the ordinary people being afraid of the superpowered people (as is the case here) and when you give the latter the ability to shoot lasers out of their eyes, that fear starts to seem completely reasonable. And if you’ve explicitly positioned this as a metaphor for real-life minorities, and the anti-superpower bigots are parallels to real-life bigots, then…

Well then nothing, because in these sorts of stories the metaphor is usually discarded as soon as it becomes awkward in favour of the writer’s actual goal, which is to write a lot of cool action scenes. I didn’t get far enough into The Nobody People to see if that’s the case here, but given the comic-booky turns the story was already taking early on, I’m not too optimistic.

As a protagonist, Avi doesn’t offer much. His too most notable characteristics are that he’s seen a lot of bombings in his journalism career and he has an artificial leg; if he isn’t actively thinking about one of them, he’s usually thinking about the other. When he gets recruited into the Not-X-Men the book dumps five or six new characters onto the reader (I honestly couldn’t keep track of how many there were), and none of them stand out from each other at all except for Fahima, whose main personality trait is that she swears constantly.

Apart from the story, my other big problem witht his book is the writing. Bob Proehl’s proehse isn’t awful by any means, but he makes some stylistic choices that grind my gears even when they’re executed better than they are here. Much of the book is written in short, terse sentence fragments, often combined with passive voice. Judging by how often I see this style of writing it seems to be popular with readers and writers alike, but for me reading this is like pulling teeth.

Proehl also frequently engages in another personal bugbear of mine, which is the redundant comma. This is when an author will use a metaphor or simile or description of some kind, then instead of dropping a fat apostrophe and ending tne sentence they’ll just keep going, often restating the metaphor or simile in a slightly different way (or in the worst cases, just explaining it). The combination of these stylistic choices eliminated any lingering interest I might have had in the weak characters and plot. The short sentences. Inelegant. Lots of redundancy. Like driving over speed-bumps, obstacles in the road. It’s frustrating, annoying.

In summary: this book isn’t very good.