Making a Bad Name

In a book or movie, an author must choose names for characters. Sometimes it's just a matter of convenience. A character has to have a name, after all. Other times, the name is chosen with some purpose, because of its sound, or associations, or a silly pun. Sometimes the name can add something to the portrayal, and sometimes it's a distraction. Occasionally, though, an author betrays a real tin ear, picking a name that just sounds so wrong or stilted or inappropriate that it sours our memory of the character, the book, and the author.

• Bootie, aka "Frederick Tubb" aka "Ulrich New", of Claire Messud's "The Emperor's Children"; an overweight, directionless, dreary book, I mean, college dropout, who wanders into the life of his uncle, a famous writer and personality, is hired as a personal secretary, and then, having never written an article in his life, is requested to write one on spec for a new cutting edge satirical magazine; he promptly writes a scathing article about his uncle and his unpublished manuscript, is startled by his uncle's outrage, and then stages his own death and disappears to Florida, changing his name to Ulrich New, and taking a job as a busboy, only to, by what might be called a bit of a coincidence, run into an acquaintance from New York, who had early mourned his "gravitas", "ambition" and "integrity"!
• Chapter Eleven Stephanides, older brother of Calliope/Cal, the serially hermaphroditic protagonist of Jeffrey Eugenides's "Middlesex".
• Deo Gratias, of Graham Greene's A Burnt-Out Case, the obtrusively-named "burnt-out case" leper who's lost his fingers and toes, and stays on as a servant for the intellectually burnt-out and somewhat more delicately named Querry;
• Duncan Idaho, of Frank Herbert's Dune. This name keeps me thinking of "Duncan Hines" cake icing, and, of course, of good old Idaho.
• Father Time, as the oldest child was known, in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, and who dispatched himself and all the kids when they became inconvenient to the story, "Because we are too many."
• Jacks, the first name of Keanu Reeves's character in Feeling Minnesota, a movie with a bad name all its own;
• Justice, the name of Janet Jackson's character in Poetic Justice;
• Skeeter, whose poorly chosen name reflects an ill-thought-out paper character who becomes a sort of second son to Rabbit Angstrom in Rabbit Redux, by John Updike;
• Tennessee (like the state) Alice Moser, a character in Anne Patchett's "Run". The book is a maddening mash of coincidence and hyperbole, in which everyone is just super in their own way but the thing that sticks out is the names: adopted boys (in Boston of course) named Teddy and Tip; a son named Sullivan named for his uncle Sullivan. A daughter named Kenya (which counts as normal anymore), and, the true breakthrough, Tennessee (like the state) Alice Moser. You see, when Beverly gave away Teddy and Tip, her friend Tennesse (like the state) Alice Moser had a daughter Kenya and she died and Beverly decided to take the daughter and the name for reasons not, apparently, worth much explanation, but which caused great confusion in the deathbed scene where the real Tennessee (like the state) Alice (who's dead) shows up in the hospital room of the second (soon-to-be-dead) Tennessee, and has an expository chat to fill us in on parts of the story we missed. The author dutifully distinguishes between the two identically named characters by calling one Tennessee Alice Moser and the other just plain Tennessee. The chapter ends charmingly:

  "I think he has some problems," Tennessee Alice Moser said.
  "The truth is, Tenny, we all have problems," Tennessee said. "I have a new hip."
  "And I'm dead," Tennessee Alice Moser said.

• Tender Branson and Fertility Hollis, of Chuck Palahniuk's Survivor; The first name Tender is justified because he comes from a cult in which the first born son is always named Adam, and all subsequent sons are named Tender...and sent out into the world to earn money as servants. (Girls were all given the first name Biddy, but if they married an Adam, their first name became Author). The church, by the way, was called the Creedish Church. Fertility (who was not a member of the church) has only the author to blame for her name.
• Turtle, later April Turtle, the Indian baby given to Marietta Greer, (named after the town in Georgia where her Florida-bound parents stopped and conceived her when their car broke down), who renamed her ownself Taylor Marietta Greer after her car ran out of gas in Taylorville, Illinois; in Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees. Given the name Turtle because she would cling with a very strong grip (a characteristic of turtles as yet unknown to me); name improved to April Turtle after she looked interested when someone mentioned that a phone bill was for April, suggesting that April might could be her real name, and who's to say not?

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