The first time I remember disagreeing fundamentally with my family is the PATCO strike in 1981.

I was six.

I didn’t yet have the political vocabulary or even much understanding of the strike itself. I was precocious, of course, far more than most even very intelligent kids, but not some sort of superhero.

I just remember thinking that if that many people were willing to walk off the job and risk their livelihoods, there must be some meat of substance to their claims. Of course I had no working experience and no real way to identify how much merit their action had, but it seemed in its extremity to warrant some sort of attention.

What I thought was no more sophisticated than that. (And yes, I was paying attention to politics to some extent at that age; I could read fairly well at ~3 and could type at ~4, and started reading newspapers around ~5, and National Geographic from cover to cover with nearly-full understanding at ~6. As I said, I was precocious.)

But as my family – in particular my father and grandfather – ranted and raved about how evil and terrible the strikers were, and how they were loathsome liberals and everything that was wrong with America, it just didn’t seem right to me. As I said, I didn’t really understand why I thought that. I had no idea of class analysis, or even any understanding that I was in fact poor, but just that it seemed wrong to fire 11,000 people because they wanted better working conditions.

That wasn’t my first hint that I was really different from my family, but it’s one I remember pretty well.

There is a very high chance if any of the lit crit types describes a writer’s sentences as “shimmering,” I won’t like their works.

Even though when I was callow and far more arrogant I used to read more for this sort of “shimmery sentence” experience than for plot, these days I far prefer plot.

As I can craft those allegedly “shimmering” sentences myself, I just don’t think they are that difficult or remarkable.

Plot is much more difficult. At least having a cogent, intelligent and comprehensible one that hews somewhat close to verisimilitude.

This is why very few literary novels have even a semblance of a plot that a two-year-old couldn’t have thought up, and even outside of the literary sphere decent plots are pretty damn rare.

I just wish more writers could do both. The only one I’ve seen come close recently is Jeff VanDerMeer with his Southern Reach trilogy.

Close, but not quite there. The writing is really good. Expressive without being showy. But the plot tapers off toward the end.

That trilogy is still worth reading, though. The “biologist” character is one of my favorites from any novels I’ve read in the past few years.