Except I’m currently reading a book that doesn’t use quotation marks or dashes for flashback dialogue (current dialogue is properly punctuated), and it’s made of awesome. So apparently I can be bribed.

A story: Miriam Toews is from Winnipeg and many, many years ago, I sold her a shirt. She was impressed I could pronounce her last name (she paid with a credit card, and we had to call people by their names if they did that), so I asked if she was, by any chance, the author. I think she was quite thrilled to be recognized. I went off and read SUMMER OF MY AMAZING LUCK after that, but still haven’t gotten around to the rest of her books. Bad Memory.

Yeah, but All the Pretty Horses was GREAT. You might try it on audio. Then the lack of quotation marks wouldn’t bug you.

No! I have sadistic humor! I do! I do! I just don’t like dysfunctional families hating each other and making each other’s lives miserable.

It could be really fun to replace the phrase “apples to oranges” with “Joss’s to Wes’s” in certain contexts.

The thing is, I don’t ever find Joss Whedon’s darkness truly dark, because of that safety net of background caring. And the magical/futuristic element, which always leaves open the possibility of a deus ex machina to set things right, bring a character back, reconcile arch-rivals.

I think there can be several points. Sometimes an author is consciously trying to break down the barriers between speakers—they don’t WANT those neat little organizational units, but instead something more like a stream of conversation. Others may just find them unnecessary, or find aesthetically that they clutter up the page. I mean, if you find them aesthetically pleasing, it’s only predictable that other folks might find them aesthetically DISpleasing, you know?

I guess I’ve just encountered novels that use so many different native-grown dialog forms that it seems a little petty to insist on a particular one. I quite like the em-dash style of organizing dialogue:

      —You don’t know what you’re talking about, I said. Quotation marks are clearly the best dialogue marker.
      —I’m not so sure. What have em-dashes ever done for you?

Then there are the wacky European sideways quotation marks, and the way the French sometimes insist on renewing the quote on every line for a long speech, not to mention that they put the dialogue descriptors, even LONG ones, inside the quotes:

« I have a lot to say, remarked the Duchesse
« de Rastignac, smiling sweetly as she glanced
« at Simonet. I like to talk and talk, sometimes
« for pages at a time. »

Frankly, use of quotation marks is no reliable indicator of whether or not I’m likely to find dialogue confusing. Naguib Mahfouz (at least his translator) uses regular English-style quotation marks, but he uses them for thoughts as well as speech, which is pretty darn confusing. Jose Saramago doesn’t use any quotation marks, but I am hardly ever confused about who’s talking while reading him. And even if I am confused, sometimes it’s intentional – absolute clarity isn’t always what an author’s going for, and I don’t think that necessarily means they’re affected or stuck-up.

Yep, me too. Sad and empty inside is better than totally cheated.

I appreciate your mother’s analogy but I cannot agree about the bread. She doesn’t eat the bread at the restaurants? Even when it comes with really yummy butter, or herb and olive oil type spread? I eat tons of bread.

Oh yes, I believe Miriam Toews is Canadian, and as I recall the family in the book is Canadian. They just travel through America. Maybe if you go in prepared for no quotation marks, it’ll bug you less?

Yeah, I thought that since I like black humor, The Royal Tenenbaums would be great for me. And yet it was not.

I felt very cheated by the ending to My Sister’s Keeper, to take an example of a sad ending that didn’t feel warranted. I want the authors to pay out the problems they’ve set up throughout the novel — cheating with too much happiness or too much sadness are equally bad.

Yes! Same! I like things to be nicely mixed together. Grimness is easy to do, but it’s tricky to do an effective undercut. Again I have to say, Joss Whedon at his best is very good at undercutting grimness with humor. No wonder people like him so much.