I tend not to rush out to buy books that are all abuzz. Because I’m not sure how that buzz comes about. Is it because the public decides it’s mad about the book? Or is it the hand on the publicity button that decides the public will be mad about the book. I tend toward cynicism, so I fear that all too often it’s the latter. That’s the reason I didn’t read The Secret Life of Bees when everyone else was reading it.

Then a friend sent me The Ten Most Helpful Things I Could Ever Tell Anyone About Writing by Sue Monk Kidd. “More advice for writers,” I muttered. But I actually liked some of the advice – Allow Yourself To Write Badly [let the imagination roam unfettered]; Loiter [it’s okay to sit and not write]; and Err On The Side Of Audacity [take risks].

I went out and bought The Secret Life of Bees and approached it hopefully.

I found the first page, that amazing image of the bees emerging from the walls as the child lays frozen in her bed, captivating. What a way to start a novel. Which eventually caused me to reexamine and qualify the idea that a novel’s beginning should be a grabber. Yes, it’s a desirable thing, but it comes with a responsibility…to then maintain that level of engagement throughout. After the initial jolt, Bees settles into a decidedly middling book. And considering the rich organic environment it inhabits…racism, civil rights, feminism, coming of age…it’s a book of pulled punches, as though we’re being protected, seeing reality through a curtain of gauze.

It’s not easy, writing a novel entirely from a child’s point of view. And although Henry Roth set a benchmark with Call It Sleep, perhaps it’s not even possible. The best we can do is to try to make the reader believe that the narrator is a child. And since the reader can’t remember any better than the author what it was actually like to be and think as a child, it often works. But that doesn’t mean the author doesn’t have a responsibility to strive for authenticity and depth and integrity of experience.

And then, of course, there’s the question of voice. Because if it sounds like a child, it must be a child, even though it’s not a child, but only an adult trying to sound like he or she thinks a child sounds. Sue Monk Kidd has an idea of how a child sounds, wisely innocent and prone to pretty metaphors, and that idea is heavily imposed.

Imposed. Imposition. Ah! It struck me, as I read The Secret Life of Bees, that I had finally met something I could confidently call tone.

Tone has always been an elusive thing to define or explain. Is it an overall kind of sense…as in, the book has a humorous tone, or a cynical tone, or a melancholy tone? There was something accumulating in Bees as I read, and so I read to the end, although I really was finished with the book much sooner. It was the book’s tone that kept me reading. I wanted to understand that, be able to define it, finally arrive at an explanation that made sense to me. And it’s because Kidd so imposes her idea of what a child should be, of how good, good people are and how bad, bad people can be, how simple seemingly complex situations are, and how, in a story narrated and therefore narrowed by an adult’s notion of a child, all the characters become children and the reader is assumed to be childish, as well.

Tone does not exist in a well-crafted novel. It’s something overlayed by the misapplied intentions of the author. The Secret Life of Bees is precious because its characters are restrained from realness by the author. Kidd has made them as she thinks they should be rather than allowing them to become authentic human beings. She has manipulated their situations into facile happenings with only a veneer of believability, and in doing this, she has created a fairy tale, not real life.

In authentic fiction, humor, cynicism, sweetness, melancholy, even preciousness rise and die like quick flames out of the reality written. The tone of authentic fiction is trueness, and trueness is invisible. Life does not affect a tone; it cannot support affectation and reality at the same time. Strive for reality. Avoid tone at all costs.