Tuesday 140: Annoying

I recently finished Tell Me Everything, by Elizabeth Strout, a novel that follows episodes in the middle aged lives of characters in Strout's fictional town of Crosby, Maine. I didn't really like the book that much, but I'd say what I found a bit tedious about it is really a product of Strout's previous success. Her Olive Kitteridge (another novel that follows the goings-on in Crosby) is a masterpiece, owing primarily to its supremely well-rendered central and titular character. In Tell Me Everything, Olive is present, but older (a relatively spry 91), and the middle aged characters who take center stage lack her depth and complexity.

Or rather, their depth and complexity come to life in ways that are less accessible.

I thought about this a lot while I was reading the book, because Olive Kitteridge is such a moving and surprising novel about a person you probably wouldn't like if you met her. Olive is judgemental, acerbic, at points rude, but she's also authentic and honest and carries a kindness that is just a bit buried. She contains multitudes, and her novel is mostly about how a person like that is everyone, and how everyone, in every stage of their life, is human, and humans are bound together by a force that encourages them to pursue epiphany, meaning, understanding, and beauty.

This complex interiority is somewhat flattened in Tell Me Everything. There's a lack of ambiguity, and the big realizations that these characters have can be summed up simply: Life is suffering, and the point of life is to love and be loved. There are lots of different kinds of love, but that love is all part of the same fabric. It's a nice thought, but it's a bit quaint.

Throughout the reading, I found myself fighting the urge to write off Tell Me Everything. What was it, exactly, that was bugging me? For one thing, the primary plot centers around a murder that the reader solves quickly, which is fine, but the stakes never seem that high, despite the fact that on their surface, the stakes are devastatingly grim and very high. This, combined with the narrative construction of Lucy Barton (a local writer and central character) sharing stories of "unrecorded lives" with Olive Kitteridge, contributed to a tonal quality of dismissiveness, despite the insistence of meaning on the part of the characters themselves.

That's confusing, I know, but I'm getting to the point. Whenever I'd dig for meaning in the book, I'd end up thinking, "So, the point is that only middle aged people know anything? And only middle-aged people are capable of experiencing and deserve to experience anything?" Where was this coming from? Strout's not dumb. Why are these characters so annoying?

Aside from some precious tics that most of the characters retain throughout Strout's books (they say "Oh, [name]!" a lot; I'm not sure what that's all about), I found them most of all, in their own ways, annoying. They're annoying in their unflagging decency. Annoying in their often childlike thoughts and perspectives: Lucy, with whom the most central character, Bob Burgess is in love, is frequently described as "childlike," yet Bob is enraged by his 30-something nephew for "pouting" at one point, so it's like, certain infantile qualities, performed by characters of an acceptably advanced age, are endearing, while others, performed by characters of a slightly less advanced age, are vile. It's all just so annoying.

So this made me start thinking about what, exactly, annoying is, if its objective qualities can be defined, if there's any kind of taxonomic record of what it is to be annoying.

If this seems like a stupid endeavor, consider two things: First, that the word bored and the concept of boredom did not exist before the industrial revolution. It's a literal state and character of consciousness that—it can be argued, at least—didn't exist until human beings developed, and were subsequently subjected to, the machinations of industrial capitalism. Second, that I'm a busy guy. I haven't had too many great ideas lately, writing has been a bit of a struggle, and finding the time to stare into middle distance and think about this stuff is hard to come by. Plus, this is free. Relax.

Starting at the root here, is the question of subjectivity. To be annoyed is of course a subjective experience, and finding an example of something that annoys one person but not another is as easy as turning on the radio. However, I think we can start defining characteristics of an object-event or behavior that is objectively annoying if we first define different types of annoying. Primary annoying, for our purposes, will be defined by sensory quality, repetition, and discomfort: tuneless whistling or drumming of fingers on a table; a continual yet inconsistent poke in the ribs, &c. Unlike Top-40 roulette, it's a serious stretch to characterize these behavior-experiences as pleasant for anyone under any circumstance. Each example also has a pleasurable foil (a pretty melody, a light massage) that suggests the universality of the unpleasant, annoying experience.

I'm not up on my philosophical proofs, so cut me some slack here, but I believe this logic at the very least approaches the possibility of an objective secondary annoying to exist. This form is independent of sensory qualities, and although it might be possible to insert a repetitive element as a necessity, that repetition is more a consistency or a reliability of response. Consider a person who always corrects the perceived misuse of "less" vs. "fewer" in casual conversation, or—for the internet-addled—is reliably making reference to Harambe or Big Chungus in 2025. Stunted, cringey, or pedantic behavior, but above all else, annoying.

The personality traits adjacent to this secondary stage of annoying are present in the characters, though not explicitly. In a more comprehensive, generalized way, it's through an element of virtue that the reader tends to intuit or extrapolate annoying behavior--it's almost a reverse of typical characterization: Instead of learning about the characters' interior through their decisions, actions, relationships, thoughts, etc., we're often handed their interior by a narrator, then left to ascertain the details of their lives: A classic case of telling rather than showing. Which is, I discovered, prototypically annoying.

This is where I haven't exactly closed the loop: There's both a difference and a connection between the "annoying" that's founded in the itchy, repetitive, irritating and that which exists in the aura of a person so decent and good and kind and virtuous that we'd like to see them knocked down a peg. The latter type of annoying is always inclusive of some envy, and of course people like this only exist in our perceptions of them, not in their real, actual lives. It makes me wonder if perhaps what I found most insufferable about this novel could be part of the point.

Because throughout the book, Lucy and Olive have these little visits where they share stories of "unrecorded lives." It's often superficially precious, and we're left to figure out what, if anything, these story-lives mean. They're always tragic, in their own way, equal parts violent and mundane, so we're left to think, "OK, here is an example of a person's life." But of course, we're also introduced to lives as they're happening, and there's something different about them. Perhaps there's something in the notion that nothing can be known until it's over, and even then, what can or should be made of it? And perhaps there's also something to the notion that the power and meaning of a life is, in its present, often annoying. And what can we make of the space between these two realities? It becomes a question as well about perception and the reality of being perceived. Perhaps the inherent complexities of the annoying is something of a sublimation of our inability to square these unknowable ambiguities.

Now there's an annoying sentence.