One thing he does (repeatedly) that drives me bananas is his tendency to restate something. For example, in one chapter, he refers to a particularly character's passivity about seven times -- it keeps popping up while referring to the character, and it makes me want to say YES, I GET IT. SHE IS FUCKING PASSIVE. Same chapter, he mentions that character's "ironic smile" -- over and over again, maybe five times.
It wasn't just that one chapter -- it happens throughout. Now, this could've been fixed with better editing -- had I edited the book, I'd have queried the author and said as much: "Au: You mention her 'passivity' and 'ironic' smile 5-7 times in this chapter; is there another way to put this?" Or something like that.
Similarly, there was a point where he mentioned a group of characters drinking whiskey, neat. And less than a page later, one of the characters is drinking "another cognac" -- I'm like "Buh? ANOTHER? He was drinking WHISKEY." Again, it's an editorial complaint, although, had I written that scene, I sure as hell would've gotten that right.
But he has this elliptically leaden way of writing that goes something like this...
"Martin put his hands into his pockets and found nothing but bits of shredded paper that had been through the laundry, so they were more like paper pills. A car drove past him, splashing oily water in a pothole as it went. An old Lincoln. Martin gazed at the bits of shredded paper and wondered what he'd put on them. Laundry lists? Old receipts?
Martin looked at the old Lincoln at the stoplight, waiting for red to go to green. The pothole water stilled, oily-brown. Then he looked back at the paper pills in his hands, and wondered what he'd put on them, and how he'd forgotten to take them out of his pockets when he'd done the laundry. Because he was usually rather fastidious. The light turned to green, and the old Lincoln drove away, leaving Martin wondering what he'd written on those paper pills in his pockets that he'd laundered."
Now, I'm just winging that, but just imagine hundreds of pages of that, sort of looping and backtracking and looping, almost like Straub was trying to remember where he was going while writing it. Again, a better editor would've queried it and tightened up the prose. Given that the book was written in 1979, when fiction editing was still a credible profession, I'm sort of surprised by it.
Had to run through that one chapter, since I wanted to take a highlighter to it (but, it being a library book, I abstained, naturally, Gentle Reader)...
"Her mouth was bracketed by two faint lines of irony."
"...the faint lines beside her mouth twitched as if at a private joke."
"...to mark an intense passivity."
"...like a princess in a tower."
"...the ironic, tactful passivity of the beautiful..."
"...her passive self-sufficiency."
"...a soft, almost invisible irony..."
"...the princess locked in the tower of her own self-regard."
"...the veneer of disinterested irony."
"...essentially passive."
"...an androgynous quality to her passivity..."
And so on (and it does go on).
Now, Straub is writing as another writer in the scene above, so one might think he's adopting a "style" by inhabiting the novelist character, but the problem is that this kind of backtracking occurs throughout the book, where the reader is bludgeoned into submission by the repetition of those details.
I prefer not to force-feed the reader with literary foie gras. I think that everything in a scene should matter, every detail, and if you're forced to backtrack, it's a problem of the original setup of the scene. The above is like telling a joke repeatedly to the same audience member -- each successive pass of that same "joke" offers diminishing returns, until the audience gets frustrated and annoyed.
But the above is really an editing problem; the fiction editor should've noticed this tendency and queried it, tried to get him to get his point across without using the same words over and over again.
And, no, I'm NOT going to tell you what Martin put on those shredded bits of paper. ; )
