"Smart" characters acting stupid

[transposable_element]

Finished reading a novel last night and am ridiculously annoyed to have wasted my time on it. I hate it when supposedly smart characters act like idiots. Not that smart people never make mistakes, but if they consistently make the same kind of bone-headed mistakes over and over, they stop qualifying as "smart"!

Also, while it's sort of fun to see the heroine confront her bosses and her social superiors about their prejudices, it's impossible to believe she could keep getting away with it. In the course of the book she does at least three things that ought to get her fired on the spot.

And for some reason when the protagonist's boss at the super secret spy agency she works for decides to reveal to her a dark secret about her family that the agency has been guarding very closely for two decades, he does so during a meeting of about 20 people! I guess he knew it would upset her and wanted all of her colleagues to see her raw reaction. Because that's how spy agencies are run....

But now I know that I'm not interested in reading the rest of the series, so that's good I guess.

Comments

[transposable_element]

I've never read Les Miserables, alas. Am I right in thinking that it was serialized? I tend to be more forgiving of inconsistencies and continuity errors in novels that were published that way.

I'm willing to forgive many faults if I'm otherwise enjoying a book, but in this case there just wasn't enough to keep me going. t skimmed the last few chapters because I wanted to find out if my predictions were correct (they were).

[heliopausa]

I don't think so; I truly do think that he was so intent on what he had to say that for him all that other stuff was nearly irrelevant.
I think he just had a brain that was fizzing all the time with many more ideas than could comfortably fit in a novel. So he put them in, comfortable or not. :) (There are editions that cut the "extraneous" excursions, which I deplore.)
He's rotten with women, by the way - and very long, and would be longer still if one (this is true for me - you may be more learned) stopped to track down the meaning of every name or reference dropped in passing.