Don't try to dictate what I should feel!

I'm watching the evening news and somebody's been killed in a car crash. Let that be a lesson to us all to drive more carefully, I think. A life cut short: a tragedy for his family and friends.

Then they bring on a representative of said family and friends to spell it
out for me, to mumble through the cliches of loss just in case I haven't got the message. Hey, I want to tell the programme editor, I'm a grown up. I've been to that place where you can't understand how the world keeps turning without that person in it but, even if I hadn't, I think I'd understand that if you lose a loved one you feel sad. My heart hardens for every talking head that tells me how wonderful the deceased was. I think of all the senseless deaths from war and poverty and corruption that don't make it onto my TV.

Don't try to dictate what I should feel!

I get a similar reaction reading some fiction, where the required emotion seems to be shouting at me in capital letters, bold type and underlined  three times. I don't think I'm lacking in compassion – in fact, I'm quite easily moved to tears – but it's been known for an overdone death scene in more than one bestselling novel to have me in fits of laughter.

there’s the story which isn’t actually saying anything terribly subtle or interesting about death and what it does to those left behind. I’ve read lots of stories which amount to saying, "Death makes people sad"                                                                          Emma Darwin

A good novel should take us on an emotional journey but, frankly, if the writer lacks the wherewithal to carry the reader with her, perhaps she shouldn't leave the house at all. Or perhaps a leisurely stroll to the coffee shop is the right journey for some if a round-the-world tour entails lost
luggage and a night in a prison cell. A lot of people can appreciate a really good cup of coffee: it doesn't have to be the big drama every time.

What do I think does make for an emotionally satisfying read?

One option is to tell the story from the point of view
of a naive narrator: because she's never experienced a different kind of life, Cathy doesn't recognise the tragedy of her predicament, freeing the up the reader to feel the full impact on her behalf ...

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… or from the perspective of a baffled child who inevitably won't have access to the whole picture, but the adult reader will feel the full poignancy of the impact of the tragedy on both him and his parents.

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And always always understatement: trusting the reader to know enough about the workings of the world to understand that there's something seriously wrong when it doesn't occur to a child to tell her father that her boots are pinching her toes and she needs new ones. (I know, not the main scene of the novel, but nevertheless a beautiful depiction of child neglect.)

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Or keeping us hoping for a favourable outcome against the odds – whoever heard of a hostage situation where they all lived happily ever after? – as if the reader were living it with them day by day. I've read this a couple of times and I still don't know how she does it, but I feel like King Canute trying to hold back the  tide.

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Again on endings, how about the shock emotional punch? We knew from the start that Kevin had killed several of his schoolmates, but I was in tears when I discovered that that was only the half of what he'd done. Then another thing that makes this book so powerful is the complexity of Eva's  reaction. She's as far removed from the grieving relatives on my TV news as you can get. Having struggled to love her son since before he was born, we might expect her to be glad of an excuse to give up on him, but it seems that it's only once the world confirms that he's evil that their relationship can really begin.

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Much as we might wish, in real life as in novels, bad things
only happened to bad people, we're less likely to feel manipulated as a reader if we find a less sympathetic character tugging at our heartstrings. So Eva
Khatchadourian, so David Lurie: they feel like real people, rather than symbols for a particular emotion, stumbling through life in a not particularly admirable way. They're
also caught up in something much bigger than themselves, so that what we feel is not just for them as individuals, but for the whole situation, in Lurie's case the pain of a country picking up the pieces after the damage wrought by apartheid.

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Of course, this is nothing like the whole story. There's much more could be said about each of these novels as well as about the markers of emotional depth. And not just a little anxiety in setting such a high standard in relation to my own work. (I can only fail, and each time fail better.) But an important theme, I think, and one to keep coming back to.
What do you think?