UPDATES on July 28: I want to note that I finished reading the other book I had mentioned in my previous post, Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane. I didn't find it to be all that special. I also added a mention of Armistead Maupin's amazing gift for writing dialogue below.
I never got my Bill Hawley mystery from the library. (See the previous post.) After not hearing anything for many weeks, I called to see what the deal was, and the woman who usually handles interlibrary loans investigated and said the result had came back while she was on vacation: At one library, it was checked out, and none of the other libraries owned it. She said she would try again.
In the meantime, I had finished the David Sedaris book, which was a fun read, and started on what I'd hoped would be a mindlessly entertaining novel set in gay Hollywood: Tricks of the Trade. It was just mindless, with no laugh-out-loud or even short-chuckle moments. It was fat-shaming and age-shaming, and the characters were all unrelatable jerks, even the two who are intended to be our heroes and will obviously be a forever-in-love couple at the end.
I stopped reading it about halfway through, but I'm glad I made it far enough to come across some examples of what I consider to be bad punctuation, including a stellar example1 of when a hyphen should have been used to aid the reader.
And here it is: One of our "heroes" is talking about the guy he's inevitably going to end up with at the conclusion of the novel; that guy has whored himself out to a once-huge television star whose career is now in the toilet because of a kinky-gay-sex scandal in the hope that this fallen star will help him sell one or more of his screenplays to a studio. Why a hot and pretty intelligent guy like Rod, who could theoretically whore himself out to any man in Hollywood who likes men, would attach himself to a fallen star instead of a rising star or a powerful executive wasn't explained. Anyway, here's Bart, who thought he had something good going on with Rod before Rod hooked up with the not-in-shape former TV star, evaluating Rod's future with that guy2: "Even though Rod's used to tricking with flabby gut relics who have to pay for sex, I give this 'relationship' six months, no more."
Do you see where the hyphen should go? Between "flabby" and "gut" to indiciate we're talking about relics who have flabby guts and not about gut relics who are flabby. I don't know what a "gut relic" would be, but that's just my point: Throw in that hyphen, and there's no mystery to the reader what you're talking about; leave it out, and you've got people pondering what the hell "gut relics" are.
There are some other incidences of bad punctuation in these passages from the book:
"In the end, Rod decided on the jeans (sans belt and underwear), his work boots, a tight-fitting, white muscle-revealing tank top that was specially tailored to reveal the contours of his body, and a Shell service-station mechanic's shirt, unbuttoned." A comma is wanted after "white," because it's another adjective in the list of things describing "tank top." Without it, it seems like the writer might be calling Rod's muscles white. Also, because of the internal commas in the sequence about the tank top, I would have used semicolons rather than commas after the end parenthesis, "boots," and "body." And I would have inserted a hyphen between "Shell" and "service." Because why not?
That was on page 101. On the next page, we've got this sentence with a comma where a hyphen was wanted: "At three-thirty, behind the wheel of his dull, green Dodge Dart, Rod was trying to remember the exact location of Jim's place." The comma after "dull" implies his car is both boring and green. "Dull-green" would have made it clear the green color wasn't vibrant. I also would have used numbers and a colon to indicate the time: 3:30.
A billboard that overlooks the parking lot of the office I work in3 includes the following language: "LARGE 3-TOPPING FOR $7.99." The advertisement is for a national chain that, well, has terrible pizza. I'm mentioning the ad because of the hyphen. Is it warranted even though there's no noun after "TOPPING"?
I would argue it's justified. "LARGE 3 TOPPING" looks weird, and I think it's sometimes appropriate to hyphenate for a noun that's only implied in the words (but shown in the giant photo of a tempting pizza that looks nothing like the one you would actually get).
Last night, I read the first 50 pages of Tales of the City in what felt like only 5 minutes but which actually took significantly longer, because I never studied with Evelyn Wood.4 Armistead Maupin's writing isn't very showy, at least not so far; it's matter-of-fact and light on simile and metaphor. But his dialogue is perfection, and I'm falling in love with many of the characters — and I'm giddy at the prospect of being able to read eight more novels set in this same world.
1I wanted to add a "Most" before "Quintessential" in the headline, but it's already there in the Merriam-Webster's definition: "the most typical example or representative."
2I know that was an awful lot of exposition for one measly sentence.
3I haven't previously mentioned it on this blog, but I've had a full-time job since January. I'm still doing freelance work on the side, but I'm enjoying having health insurance through an employer and a steady paycheck for a while at least.
4My husband, Tony, did take a speed-reading course back in the day, and that's another example of how our marriage is a merger of opposites: He reads only the first and last letters of most words, and so sometimes asks me how to spell certain everyday words, and my jobs often involve making sure every letter of every word is correct.