Literary Pet Peeves: The rise of the multiple narrator...

  

This week I'm switching hosted memes and opting to join the one hosted by The Blue Bookcase:  What is one of your literary pet peeves? Is there something that writers do that really sets your teeth on edge?  Be specific, and give examples if you can.

Jordan does multiple narrators the right way!

Ask me tomorrow and you might get another answer, but aside from bad copy editing and ill usage, which are far more rampant now than even just ten years ago, my literary pet peeve of the moment is the use of multiple narrators.  It's a phenomenon from the last 25 years or so, and I think it's ultimately a sign of laziness.  In some writers' hands it can be an effective tool for exploring voice.  For one recent example, Hillary Jordan, author of Mudbound and winner of the Bellwether Prize for fiction, used multiple narrators to good effect in her book because each narrator's voice was discrete and true.  

 In most cases, though, I feel that writers who use multiple narrators are just too lazy to connect the necessary dots that an omniscient third person narrator demands.  Jodi Picoult is a current author whose writing MO is multiple narrators (and multiple typefaces to depict them--ugh!).

I'm not certain, but my guess is that nobody writing before the 20th century used discrete, multiple narrators like that. I couldn't guess when it sprang up, and no doubt the first few writers to experiment with it were bold and innovative, but now it just seems a litle too prevalent for my reading comfort.  It doesn't mean I won't read novels with multiple narrators, but if they are clearly meant to be more literary works and less commercial ones, they'll leave me sighing with frustration.