Pronouns? No, I don’t care what he calls himself. I object to his adverbs. A novelist should know better than this. He can’t just write about a guy walking to the store. He has to say that the guy walked there pensively or distractedly or whatever. You hear him tell a story, and it’s like he wants to nail down every possible element of it so hard that there’s no room for you to work any imagination. Plus, adverbs are all sort of boring anyway. He can’t say that a flight was long, or tedious, or even long and tedious. He has to call it a tediously long flight. For real, what does that add? It’s almost an anti-word. It sucks meaning out of the sentence. And it’s pompous. Some writers like to pad their word count and make fatter books, but that’s not what’s going on here: long and tedious is three words, tediously long is two. The flowers blossomed aromatically, my God. And the bees! The bees buzzed cheerfully. Do you know how many neurons there are in the human brain? Twenty-one billion. A bee has 170 thousand. That’s about 123,000 times fewer neurons. Do you think a bee is buzzing around feeling cheerful? Or feeling anything at all that we would consider feeling? It’s the pathetic fallacy on top of everything else. Liquidly, languidly, lavishly, lividly. Are there proportionately more adverbs that start with the letter L? Or is that just another weird tic of his? Luckily, lucratively. Lustily. That’s another thing. Sex talk is not improved with adverbs. She approached seductively, I can just about allow that one. But she rasped huskily? Or husked raspily, or whatever it was? Tantalizingly, delectably, spicily. Thirstily, get her a drink of water, my man. Women pose fetchingly. Guns are waved menacingly. Cars speed off rapidly. Bad guys act sinisterly. Look, a minute ago I used the word proportionately, I know you think that’s a gotcha but what other word would you use? You’d probably say in proportion to, but then you have to rearrange the whole sentence to work it that way and it’s awkward. Sometimes you don’t have a choice, I’m not a fundamentalist about this. But there’s a limit. To be clear, I don’t object to flat adverbs. A car can drive fast. The color blue can be a deep blue, at least it’s not coloring bluely or whatever. It’s those -ly sounds, every time I hear one, the prose deflates a little more. Oh, and plus, his books are also just full of people with names ending in -ly. Beverly, Bailey, Emily, Billy, Tilly, Lily, it’s like he’s self-aware enough to know he’s overusing the sound and is making jokes about it. But you can’t just say, I have a bad habit, and then just keep drawing everybody’s attention to your bad habit. That doesn’t improve life for anybody. It just makes you seem like a jerk.
         I met a guy in the airport bar the other day, we got to talking and he asked me, If you had one wish, etc., and I said, I want to get rid of every adverb in the world. And he said, Thy benefaction shall be consummated ere the eve of the next full moon, and at first I thought he said it menacingly, but then I realized I was wrong and he had just said it in a menacing manner, and who knows, maybe the guy wasn’t just some crank, because I’m reading the new novel at the moment and I have to say it’s a whole lot better in the adverb regard.
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