No me tuteas

Tutear was easily my favorite verb in Spanish in high school. Babelfish can't translate it, but roughly it means "to use the familiar 2nd person pronoun", which in Spanish is a pretty big deal. (The formal 2nd person uses the same conjugation as the 3rd person.) This word has popped back into my mind recently as I crawl through a book for short stories by Elliot Perlman called The Reasons I Won't Be Coming.

I first came across Perlman when I read his novel Seven Types of Ambiguity a couple of ago. If I hadn't also read Lolita I would definitely have rated it the best book I read that year. You can click on the links and get better summaries and reviews than what I can provide, but the gist of Seven Types is that it is told through a rotating series of narrators at varying points in time. Some of the narrators tell the story in the 1st person, some in the 3rd, and a few tell the story in the 2nd person. It is very well done.

Reasons is not that well done. Specifically, it should be the poster-child example of why writing in the 2nd person generally sucks. Imagine writing a letter to someone... it would include a lot of phrases like "You remember when..." and "When you did that thing it made me feel good that you were there..." etc etc etc. That's 2nd person writing. (Or, for sports fans, Hubie Brown pretty much calls the NBA and NBA draft in the 2nd person). Unless the author can give the reader a reason to empathize with the "you" (or, in the case of a letter, you are the "you") they are pretty much wasting their time. I keep thinking "is the narrator talking to me? No? Then who am I supposed to be?"

It's all very confusing. Which is why no writer worth his or her salt writes that way. Which is why I like that the Spanish make you ask for permission to use the familiar 2nd person.

(BTW, go buy Seven Types. It's very good.)