Sarah Monette's Blog, page 16
January 13, 2016
Still Seeking Chloe and Olivia
Virginia Woolf, who knew a thing or two about writing female characters, wrote in A Room of One’s Own about the difficulties involved:
It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that; and how little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose. [...] Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers [...] literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeed literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women.
(Woolf 86-87)
This trope is echoed by Joanna Russ in “What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can’t Write,” and it continues to be almost embarrassingly apropos. Thus, the first obstacle standing in the way of writing strong female characters is that, even now, seventy-seven years after Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own, the great mass of tradition is against it.
The Sexualization of Female Characters
It is still hard for us, as writers and readers, to see women in relation to each other, rather than in relation to men. Think of how few stories there are in which the primary relationship is a friendship between women. And think of how often, in those few stories, the friendship either is or is read as code for a lesbian relationship. Now, as Woolf does, think of how many stories there are in which the primary relationship is a friendship between men.
Although the entire idea of slash fanfiction is to recode those male friendships as romances, slash is not canon. Slash is not read as canon. No one in a sober academic context would make the sort of note which occurs in my second-hand copy of A Room of One’s Own. “Chloe likes Olivia,” writes Woolf (Woolf 86); noted above the text in blue ballpoint is the word “lesbianism.”
That, too, was a large component of how I was taught A Room of One’s Own in my undergraduate Introduction to Gender Studies course, as if the erotic relationship were more transgressive than the platonic. The male homoerotic reading is contested, contentious; the assumption that two women who like each other must be lovers is par for the course.
Women are traditionally put in fiction (as Woolf notes) as the lovers of men; it is much easier for them to be imagined as the lovers of women than as the friends of women – or of men.
One of the things I dislike about When Harry Met Sally, which is in most ways a charming romantic comedy, is that it carefully proves its contention that “Men and women can’t be friends.” One of the things that most disappointed me about the long slow decline of The X-Files is that Chris Carter went back on his promise that Mulder and Scully would never have a romantic relationship.
The romantic reading is the easy reading, and the first question to ask yourself when you’re trying to write a strong female character is: who is she, when she isn’t somebody’s lover?
Male-Centered Narratives
Ursula K. Le Guin, who also knows a thing or two about writing female characters, points out in “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” that some activities – hunting, as opposed to gathering – make more exciting stories than others and lend themselves to certain patterns of narrative:
That story not only has Action, it has a Hero. Heroes are powerful. Before you know it, the men and women in the wild-oat patch and their kids and the skills of the makers and the thoughts of the thoughtful and the songs of the singers are all part of it, have all been pressed into service in the tale of the Hero. But it isn’t their story. It’s his.
(Le Guin 166)
But, as she also says (with a vicious and well-earned sideswipe at 2001: A Space Odyssey), just because those are the stories that get told doesn’t mean those are the only stories worth telling. But other stories – stories that don’t center on a capital-H Hero, stories that aren’t about war or the seizing of power or other traditionally masculine concerns – are harder to tell, and harder to find an audience for.
Studies have been done with children showing that while girls will read stories about girls and/or boys, most boys will only read stories about boys. So if you want your work to appeal to the widest possible range of readers, you’d better write stories that boys (or men) will read.
The unpleasant terms “chick flicks” and “chick lit” reflect and promote the assumption that there is a certain kind of story that only women are interested in, and, on the obverse, that all women are interested in. And the derogatory use of the word “chick” makes it perfectly clear that these are lesser stories, weaker stories: stories that are pandering to the fluffy, over-emotional preoccupations of women. Woolf skewers this prejudice with her customary acumen, some seventy years before it gained a name:
But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are “important”; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes “trivial.” And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.
(Woolf 76-77)
Thus, a great many things militate against strong women characters in fiction of any kind. We have been trained to see male-centered stories about masculine concerns as being the stories worth reading, and progress against that paradigm has been slow and difficult.
Options for SF Authors
SF is an inherently reactionary genre. Not in all ways, or even most ways, but SF spends most of its time trying to pretend that Modernism never happened. (There are exceptions, like Samuel R. Delany, but the fact that they are exceptions goes a long way toward proving my point.) In terms of narrative conventions and narrative structure, SF is old-fashioned and proud of it. And these old-fashioned models of narrative are ideally suited to telling male-centered stories; as Le Guin puts it:
So the Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces the Lawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that the central concern of narrative, including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the story isn’t any good if he isn’t in it.
(Le Guin 169)
While Modernism allowed realistic fiction writers to write stories in which “nothing happens” (i.e., the action is not what we have been trained to consider meaningful), SF is still heavily plot-oriented. It doesn’t have very much space for stories that aren’t about Saving The World, and has even less space for stories about characters who aren’t Heroes.
Which leaves one with a choice. Either try to make room in SF for women’s stories or make room in SF stories for women. And the easiest way to make room in SF stories for women is to make the women into men. It is also an easy (and cheap) way, in this the beginning of the twenty-first century, to lay claim to being a feminist writer. But it isn’t feminist to write about men with breasts. It’s a reinforcement of the patriarchal idea (most notably expressed by Freud) that all women are simply defective men.
The question, then, is how to resist this facile and meretricious method of writing about “women.” First and most obvious: don’t make a character female just because you think you ought to, or because you want to be able to say you’ve done it. If the character needs to be female, that’s a different matter, but making artificial choices about gender is just as detrimental to a story as making artificial choices about anything else.
Secondly, think about the story you’re telling. Is it a traditionally male-centered narrative? If it isn’t, you have a whole host of new problems about structure and pacing which are outside the scope of this article. If it is – and there’s nothing wrong with telling that sort of story – then you need to think carefully and thoroughly about what it means to a female character to be in that sort of story. What possibilities does it open up for her? Conversely, what limits does it place on her behavior?
Ultimately, the answer to the question of writing strong women characters lies in another realization, something our heteronormative society isn’t very comfortable with: gender isn’t binary. Neither is sex. Not all human beings are unambiguously manly men or womanly women. Most of us aren’t. There are all sorts of points along the continuum where real human beings can end up, and therefore the same is, or ought to be, true of the characters we invent.
Rather than inventing “women” and “men,” let us strive to invent people, people whose gender inflects their behavior just as their race and class do. And when we tell stories about them, let us consider possibilities that the Hero habitually ignores.
Works Cited
Le GuiLeGuin, Ursula K. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Grove Press, 1989. 165-70.
Russ, Joanna. “What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can’t Write.” To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. 79-93.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. New York: Harvest/HBJ-Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, n.d.
Doing Tolkien Wrong
I was given The Hobbit for my sixth birthday, The Lord of the Rings for my ninth. I’ve read The Silmarillion. I own the extended edition DVDs of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King–even though I don’t own a DVD player. In other words, I love Tolkien as much as the next really geeky person.
So when I say that Tolkien is an affliction and a curse, you understand that I’m saying it for a reason.
Specifically, Tolkien is an affliction and a curse to fantasy writers. This is a horribly ungrateful thing to say, when it’s largely thanks to Tolkien that fantasy writers can exist as a sub-species today at all. Certainly it’s thanks to Tolkien that so many fantasy novels, especially series of novels, can get published. But, nevertheless, the genre has reached a point where Tolkien causes more problems than he solves.
The reason for this is that, while Tolkien was a genius and a godsend to readers prepared to love secondary-world fantasy, he is a terrible model for writers. And that for a number of reasons, ranging from, on the macro level, his use of the quest plot to, on the micro level, the nature of his prose style. Imitating Tolkien – in and of itself, not a bad idea – has become mired down in slavish adherence to his product, rather than careful attention to his process.
We Can’t All Be Geniuses – Or Even Philologists
J. R. R. Tolkien was a scholar, a philologist (linguist), steeped in the literature on which he modeled The Lord of the Rings. Few (if any) modern fantasy writers can say the same, and this is where the mistake in imitating Tolkien begins.
When Tolkien drew for inspiration on the folklore and mythology of England and Scandinavia and Germany, he was doing so from a position of extreme and encyclopedic familiarity. He makes it look easy, unthinking, because what isn’t visible in the story is the years of academic training and reading and research behind it. When we (meaning modern fantasy writers) do research for world-building, we are attempting to create artificially what Tolkien had naturally.
The same is true of constructed languages (also called conlangs). Famously, Tolkien invented Elves so that he would have someone to speak the languages he created. But again, so little of the work involved is actually visible on the surface of the story that writers following in Tolkien’s footsteps are tempted to imitate the end result without understanding the years of foundational work behind it. This is not to say that conlangs are verboten in fantasy writing, merely that you have to be prepared to put a certain amount of work into it. There are resources online for anyone interested, either to improve one’s writing or simply for the fun of it; a good place to begin is the Language Construction Kit.
Elves and Dwarves and Hobbits, Oh My!
Another major problem – and this one not at all intrinsic to Tolkien’s work – is that much of Tolkien’s world-building has become cliché. Thirty years of D&D means that everyone expects elves in a fantasy world. We all know what they look like, what they act like. The same goes for dwarves, as Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books use to shamelessly good advantage. Perhaps because so much of modern fantasy is inspired or influenced by Tolkien, the elements of his world-building have become part of the genre’s common language – leading to the feasibility and hilariously painful accuracy of parodies like Diana Wynne Jones’s The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. And thus, what for him was merely a choice, about how best to tell the story he wanted to tell, has become for us a kind of black hole in our mental living room, something we get sucked into whether we want to or not.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the arena of the plot-arc. Tolkien chose a quest-plot. He did this, I suspect, for a number of reasons. He wrote a great deal about traveling, so the quest came naturally to him. It was also familiar from the tradition of literature he was evoking in his stories of Middle-earth. Grail-quests and quests to slay monsters and quests for all sorts of other reasons – those are the building blocks of Old English and Middle English narratives. And finally, the quest-plot was the shape best suited to the story he wanted to tell.
And now, fifty years later, the quest-plot is impossible to escape. It isn’t merely a convention of the fantasy genre; it’s a stereotype. It’s hard (not impossible, but hard) to imagine a story-shape that doesn’t involve some sort of questing motif. And it has, all too clearly, been done to death. When I started writing fantasy as a teenager, I tried to write quest-plots, not because I had ideas well-suited to them, but because I didn’t have any other model for how a fantasy story ought to be told.
The choices made by Tolkien to tell a particular story have been warped and magnified into conventions of an entire genre – and not to the genre’s benefit. When Tolkien set up his dichotomy of capital-G Good and capital-E Evil, he did so because he was interested in exploring how many ways there were to fall from the side of Good into the darkness of Mordor. Boromir, Denethor, Saruman, Wormtongue, Gollum, most crucially and painfully Frodo: each of these characters follows a different path into the same moral abyss, just as Aragorn, Galadriel, Faramir, Gandalf, Théoden, Sam, and the other characters who choose the side of light each has a different moment of crisis, a different strength that keeps them from falling. Sauron and the Ring are static, symbolic entities whose function in the story is to provide a fixed point of reference, a reminder of where bad choices are going to lead. In other words, Tolkien doesn’t create a Dark Lord because it’s a requirement of the genre; he creates a Dark Lord because it’s a requirement of the story.
So You Want To Write An Epic
The final way in which fantasy writers do a disservice to themselves in imitating Tolkien is in matters of prose and narrative style. As I mentioned above, many of Tolkien’s stories, and not just the most famous ones, are travel narratives. To him, this style seems to have come naturally, and thus he makes it look simple to write journeys that are compelling reading. But few people have the gift for travel narrative that Tolkien does, and thus the impression one gains from many fantasy novels of the characters wandering haplessly across the author’s carefully constructed map.
Moreover, Tolkien’s prose style (which is not always his strong point) is itself the result of careful choices made in the service of the story. He was writing epic in the old-school definition of the word–not merely a story that goes on for thousands of pages, but a story with a particular kind of thematic structure, a particular kind of character, a particular kind of mood. The Latin word gravitas, meaning both “dignity” and “weight,” suits exactly the prose style of The Lord of the Rings. But few writers nowadays (and few readers) have any interest in that kind of epic, and fewer still have the gift that Tolkien did for cadence and meter in his prose. Attempts to write Tolkienesquely generally founder and fall flat on the writer’s failure to understand either the skill or the purpose behind Tolkien’s exceedingly stately prose.
My point is not that one should not imitate Tolkien. Rather, it is that one should do precisely that: imitate Tolkien. Love the secondary world you create, understand the story you want to tell, choose your prose techniques and world-building tricks accordingly. Imitate the process, not the product. The story you write will most likely have nothing in common with The Lord of the Rings. Except, perhaps, that readers will love it.
Little Red Riding Hood & the Hospital
Today, as part of the ongoing saga of Sarah vs. her uterus, I went to the University of Wisconsin Hospitals for an ultrasound. They’ve been remodeling the hospital, and they’ve done it over in the same style I’ve seen for a lot of airports recently, or a seriously upscale shopping mall. The floors are hardwood or stone, with inlays; there’s a natural stone fountain; they’ve named the corridors things like “Main Street” and “Atrium Way.” Aside from the people in scrubs wandering around, it hardly looks like a hospital at all. It was all very beautiful and gracious, and the fact that it made me uneasy probably says more about my innate perversity than anything else.
On the other hand, and in my defense, like all hospitals, it was bewildering. I could feel myself teetering on the edge of getting lost the whole time. And that constant, almost subliminal, anxiety made the hospital unheimlich–one of Freud’s more useful terms, which generally gets translated as “uncanny,” but which literally means “un-home-like.”
Sitting in the waiting room, waiting for my hockey-puck pager to go off, I thought, semi-idly, Visiting grandma in the hospital would be a great way to update Little Red Riding Hood. And then I started thinking about all the ways to map a hospital onto a fairy tale forest, the quintessence of the unheimlich. And then I started thinking about variations on the theme of Little Red Riding Hood.
I love fairy tale retellings, frequently more than I love the original fairy tales themselves, and there are a number of ways in which a fairy tale retelling is a great way to practice storytelling. First, the plots are simple. Mozart wrote a theme and variations on the melody which English-speakers know as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and the goofy, elaborate things he does with it are achievable partly because the original is so simple. You can’t mess around very much with an original that is itself complicated or intricate before you make it unrecognizable. Second, your audience knows the story. Like Mozart with “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” or like Jimi Hendrix doing a Bob Dylan cover, no matter how crazy you get with it, your audience will be able to recognize the original melody line. They’ll be able to follow, and enjoy, what you’re doing. Third, by their nature, fairy tales come pre-loaded with symbolism and magical thinking, so they’ll stand up to whatever weight you want to put on them. (This is also another advantage of simplicity.) Moreover, the characters and events of fairy tales are always general, rather than specific. Little Red Riding Hood and her sisters (Snow White, Cinderella, Donkeyskin) are named for external characteristics. They aren’t Amelia or Charlotte or Susannah; they’re identified by a piece of clothing, or the color of their skin, or the fact that they’re always dirty. And their antagonists are The Witch, The Wolf, The King, The (Step)Mother. The simple act of giving these characters identities, of naming Little Red Riding Hood Susannah, already makes the story different, opens the door for you to bring your own meanings to it as you tell it.
And fairy tales, because they’re simple, because they’re familiar, because they’re symbolic and therefore focus on external action, offer almost limitless scope for shifting perspectives and points of view. Snow White looks very different from the Queen’s point of view. Rumpelstiltskin has every reason to be angry. Who can blame the ogre for hiding his heart? And what, really, is the truth of the struggle between Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother and the wolf?
With the girl, the grandmother, and the hospital/forest laid out, the big question becomes the wolf. I did some brainstorming this afternoon, and I came up with these nine variations:
1. The most obvious is the wolf as serial killer. An orderly or a doctor who tempts L.R.R.H. off the path and into a convenient supply room. She gets away, gets hopelessly lost in the hospital corridors, finally reaches her grandmother’s room, and–in a classic horror movie move which echoes, of course, the original fairy tale–finds the wolf there waiting for her over her grandmother’s corpse.
2. The wolf is a werewolf, whom L.R.R.H. helps to escape from the Evil Doctors who have been experimenting on him. This one is clearly the urban fantasy/paranormal romance variation.
3. The wolf is L. R. R. H.’s irresponsible selfishness, probably conveniently externalized in a group of friends who want her to do something fun with them instead of visiting her grandmother. She’s tempted off the path, has a great time, and (the kicker), gets to her grandmother’s room just as the old lady flatlines. (This would be the After-School Special variation.)
4.The wolf is a hallucination, and over the course of the story we learn that L. R. R. H. is schizophrenic. She‘s not the one doing the visiting.
5. The wolf is a real wolf. This is the magical realism variation, in which the matter-of-factly unexplained wolf symbolizes L. R. R. H.’s chance to rebel against the societal expectations embodied in her grandmother.
6. The wolf is a doctor who takes L. R. R. H. aside and tells her the truth: her grandmother is dying. This is a story about the transition from childhood/innocence to adulthood and hard choices. The doctor/wolf symbolizes the disease “eating” her grandmother.
7.The wolf is a child patient from oncology. Here, the scary wolf, rather than being a monster, turns out to be a victim. (This, I suspect, is the children’s book variation.)
8. The wolf is a secret the hospital is hiding, as the wolf in the original fairy tale hides in the forest. The nature of the secret would, of course, depend on the kind of story you want to tell (mystery, thriller, science fiction, horror, etc.).
9. The wolf is hunger, rebellion, and rage (borrowing Matthew Arnold’s description of Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre). This is the horror version in which L. R. R. H. and the wolf are actually the same character–maybe a werewolf, if you need a label to stick on her, or a Fury.
They’re all recognizably Little Red Riding Hood, but each of them is a different story, doing different work. That’s the best thing about fairy tale retellings: although they’re old stories, deeply familiar, it’s easy to make them young again, to make them do new work.
January 10, 2016
UBC: April Moore, Folsom's 93
Folsom's 93: The Lives and Crimes of Folsom Prison's Executed Men by April MooreMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
[Website: folsoms93.com.]
Does what it says on the tin. 93 convicted murderers you have almost certainly never heard of. The mug shots of all 93 are the best reason to pick up this book if you happen to find it.
Some of these 93 men were clearly guilty; some of them were guilty but insane (by 21st century standards); a couple were pretty clearly insane even by early 20th century standards (but were hanged anyway). It's not always easy to tell from Moore's writing whether her account of a given crime is what did happen or what the prosecution alleged happened, so I can't say for certain whether any of these 93 men were actually innocent of the murders for which they were hanged. (The cavalier pre-Miranda treatment of defendants' rights did on several occasions make my skin crawl.)
I am not a fan of the death penalty, and the evidence provided by this book certainly did not change my mind. Several of these murderers are horrifying (Elton M. Stone, David Fountain, Adolph Julius Weber, Earl Budd Kimball, Tellie McQuate, Walter Lewis), but so is Governor Friend Robinson, who, despite being a Quaker, was such a blind believer in capital punishment that he refused on principle to listen to any appeals. For that matter, so is Governor James "Sunny Jim" Rolph, who was opposed to the death penalty, and was generous with reprieves, but who thought that lynching was perfectly okay. And one's understanding of Rolph's opposition to the death penalty changes a little bit when he says things like, "I'm not inclined to let men hang when their crimes involve infidelity of their wife and breaking up of their home." Because if it's your wife's fault you murdered her, then surely you must be more deserving of mercy than other murderers. [/sarcasm]
Also, hanging, where you might die instantly, but you might just as easily hang there, strangling, for as much as fifteen minutes, is surely one of the least merciful forms of execution available.
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January 8, 2016
Another conversation at 5:30 a.m.
ME: That's not a very nice thing to do to a person trying to do balasana.
CATZILLA: Y'know, I really think you're over-thinking this whole stretching thing. It just goes like this [stretches forward] [stretches aft] and then you're done, see?
ME: Screw you, you smug asshole.
CATZILLA: purrs
January 4, 2016
UBC: Robert V. Cox, Deadly Pursuit
Deadly Pursuit by Robert V. CoxMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Robert Cox won the Pulitzer for his vivid deadline reporting of the kidnapping of Peggy Ann Bradnick and the massive manhunt that followed, but--I'm sorry, and I'm not saying this to be glib--you wouldn't know it from Deadly Pursuit. The writing is pedestrian at best (not vivid); the efforts to build suspense clumsy, obvious, and annoying; Cox writes from the point of view of the victim(s) of each of Hollenbaugh's attacks before the kidnapping, the murdered F.B.I. agent, the murdered F.B.I. agent's wife (for pathos), "Mary Lou Broderick" (Bradnick--one of her younger sisters was actually named Mary Louise, which makes this seem like a pretty damn tactless choice on Cox's part), a news photographer, police officers, sheriff's deputies, and--oh yeah--Robert V. Cox himself. There's something unspeakably creepy to me about the way he writes about himself in the third person--not just that he does it, although he'd really be better off to 'fess up and use first, since his identity is not secret--but the weird flat way Cox's PoV seems not a shred more real than that of Terry Anderson, which Cox is blatantly making up, given that Anderson was killed before the manhunt was even over. (I found myself surprised that he didn't drop into the PoV of one of the dogs--several dogs play critical roles in the story--because that's just the sort of cheap emotionally manipulative stunt that seems right up Cox's alley.) He does not organize his facts well, and the way he wanders from PoV to PoV makes it really quite difficult to keep track of what the hell is going on.
Also, while I'm complaining, hoo boy is it 1966 in this book. All the police officers and F.B.I. agents and volunteer manhunters are men (manly men, men in tights); all the women are victims or providers of food (no, really, that's the most contribution any woman in the book makes toward this massive effort--they contribute less than the German Shepherds. Which are male.). Women can also cry, while men are manly and uncomfortable: "While Margie and Brenda sobbed, both agents remained silent" (156). The male/female active/passive divide is absolute. And this is so completely Cox's understanding of the way the world works that it took me two-thirds of the book to notice it. I don't know if there were really no women actively involved in the manhunt or if Cox just didn't see them.
Six of the book's 200 pages are spent on Peggy Ann Bradnick's side of the story.
He also keeps raising the question of whether Hollenbaugh was really the Mountain Man, the guy who'd been terrorizing that part of Pennsylvania for two years, but every shred of evidence he gives us indicates the answer is yes. I can see why there might be reason to doubt--the Mountain Man raped one of his victims, but Hollenbaugh did not sexually assault Peggy Ann Bradnick, despite holding her captive for eight days, the (vague, confused) eyewitness descriptions of the Mountain Man don't match up with Hollenbaugh--but Hollenbaugh, from Bradnick's testimony, was using devices to alter his appearance, and otherwise, Cox doesn't explain. Is there a plausible theory that Shade Gap and environs were being plagued by two such predators? If there is, I need more details; if there isn't, stop trying to manufacture mystery out of nothing.
According to Cox, Terry Anderson was the sixth FBI agent killed in the line of duty. The blog of New York radio station WFMU says ninth. On the FBI's list, he's number fifteen. I think I know who to believe here.
So far as I (or Wikipedia) know, this is the only book about Hollenbaugh's crimes.
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December 31, 2015
UBC: Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
In Cold Blood by Truman CapoteMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I first read In Cold Blood in 1991, when I was sixteen. It terrified me then and it terrifies me now. But I'm a much more sophisticated reader now than I was then, and so I can actually talk a little bit about what makes this book so incredibly effective.
One is the narrative voice. Capote is detached, omniscient, and he understands the art of underselling. Unlike many true crime books, In Cold Blood never tries to tell its readers when to feel outraged; it leaves it up to them to do that work. It tells you what people do, and when it can, it tries to talk about why.
The second thing (and I think this is why the book's ability to terrify me remains uneroded after 25 years) is the recurrent, persistent theme of isolation. The isolation of the Clutters' farmhouse, the isolation of each of the family members in their terrible deaths, and the persistent isolation of their murderers, both physically in their cells in Garden City courthouse and on Leavenworth's Death Row (and isn't that a grisly reworking of Huis Clos? Perry and Dick stuck with only each other for eternity) and psychically (by which I mean "in terms of the psyche," not "in terms of one's psychic powers"): part of Perry's diagnosis of schizophrenia is his inability to connect deeply to other people, and Dick, for all his surface charisma and his insistence on being "normal," and for all the painfully ironic normality of his family, has no ability to reach out to other people, no shred of empathy in all his empty chrome-shiny soul. The book gives the feeling that all human relationships are precarious, that we are all isolated and vulnerable, alone beneath the wide, empty sky, listening to "the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat" (343).
In Cold Blood is not entirely factually accurate (the wikipedia entry has a section on the book considered as nonfiction), and normally I would be up in arms--I won't read Erik Larson for crimes that Capote blatantly commits: he tells us what the murder victims thought and felt, he provides passages of dialogue that he can't possibly have a verbatim source for, he moves things around to suit his narrative purpose. And certainly I would never dream of using In Cold Blood for anything that I couldn't find a corroborating source for, but either because I first read the book when I was sixteen and did not have a keen grasp on primary sources and how to use them or because the damn thing's a masterpiece, I can't help giving Capote a free pass.
N.b.: if you want to , you can Google for pictures of the crime scene(s), but you'd better be really fucking sure before you hit the search button.
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December 25, 2015
UBC: Craig Brandon, Murder in the Adirondacks
Murder in the Adirondacks: An American Tragedy Revisited by Craig BrandonMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Theodore Dreiser is so very much NOT my cup of tea. I have never read his (grandiosely titled) novel An American Tragedy and thus cannot comment usefully on its comparison to its real-life inspirations, the mysterious death of Grace Brown in Big Moose Lake, New York, in 1906.
(I say "mysterious death" because we are never going to know exactly how she died. The only witness was Chester Gillette, the man who either killed her or failed to save her, and he said first that it was an accident, then that it was suicide, and at his trial, the defense tried to claim she fell overboard in an epileptic fit. The prosecution claimed he clubbed her with his tennis racquet then dumped her in the lake.
(Yes, I know, but he really did have a tennis racquet with him.)
This is another entry in the true crime sub-genre comprised by books like The Murder of Helen Jewett, Fall River Outrage: Life, Murder, and Justice in Early Industrial New England, The Trial of Levi Weeks: Or the Manhattan Well Mystery (and quite possibly The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder, depending on your theory of how Mary Rogers met her death): women who are murdered because they have become inconvenient to their lovers. (I could describe them as "why buy the cow?" murders, but that's extremely cynical and not always accurate.) Chester Gillette got Grace Brown pregnant, but he had never had any intention of marrying her and she was very much in the way of his attempts to insert himself into the upper-class society of Cortland, New York. Later renditions of the story would metonymize this into a love triangle--Chester caught between his upper class beloved and his lower class mistress--but real life was not that tidy, nor that empathizable. Chester didn't murder Grace so that he could marry someone else; he murdered Grace so that he wouldn't have to marry anyone at all, so that he could continue flirting with and casually dating a number of girls from Cortland.
Regardless of how exactly Grace Brown died, Chester Gillette was clearly criminally culpable, whether he pushed her overboard or just sat and watched her drown. He was ready, willing, and determined to lie about it. The most horrifying part of the story, to me, is the way that Chester fled Big Moose Lake, regrouped, and kept a date he'd made on the train while he was traveling with Grace. He never missed a beat. And the more his mother, who was kind of horrifying in her own right, tried to claim that Chester hadn't meant to murder Grace, he was just a careless little boy who never thought about the consequences of his actions, the more I saw just how Chester could have become a man who could commit a murder in cold blood and walk away as if it never happened.
(Chester's mother, Louisa Gillette, was clearly, if nothing else, tone-deaf to irony. She talked about wanting to visit Minerva Brown, Grace's mother: "Of course, I shall not intrude myself if I am certain that the sight of me would be hateful to her, but I shall certainly write her a letter of loving sympathy and tell her how greatly I long to speak to her in person" (qtd. Brandon 259). "Loving sympathy" from the mother of the man who murdered your daughter? Especially given that Louisa was frantically working to get Chester a retrial, that seems a bit much.)
Murder in the Adirondacks is a perfectly adequate treatment of Grace Brown's death and Chester Gillette's trial and execution. Brandon can organize his facts (which is a real blessing in criminology); his writing is workmanlike; his thesis is weak, but he's not engaging strongly on any kind of analytical level, so that's not the handicap it could be. His weakest point is his attempt to discuss Dreiser and An American Tragedy and A Place in the Sun , but if you're reading for the true crime aspect, that won't bother you much, and if you're reading for the comparison with Dreiser, you won't need Brandon's guidance anyway.
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December 13, 2015
UBC: Scott Andrew Selby, A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin
A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin: The Chilling True Story of the S-Bahn Murderer by Scott Andrew SelbyMy rating: 1 of 5 stars
First things first: Paul Ogorzow was a German railroad worker (on the S-Bahn, Berlin's commuter rail system) who attacked at least fourteen women, and murdered eight of them, between 1939 and 1941. Seven of these women (including five of the women who died) were attacked on the S-Bahn at night, beaten unconscious, and thrown off the train. (Remarkably, two of these women survived.) The women not attacked on the S-Bahn were attacked in a neighborhood of garden allotments, also at night during the blackout, and were beaten, beaten and raped, or beaten, raped, and murdered. The police put massive amounts of manpower into finding Ogorzow, hampered by Goebbels' refusal to allow them to publicize the investigation, and finally caught him because another railroad employee had once seen him climbing a fence to sneak off the job. (And it wasn't even to murder someone. It was to visit his mistress.) They realized that this meant Ogorzow's alibi was as full of holes as a whiffle-ball, and the police commissioner in charge of the case, Wilhelm Lüdkte, in interrogation, tripped Ogorzow up once and from there, baby step by baby step, got a full confession out of him. Ogorzow put forward every excuse he could think of (the gonorrhea made him do it; the Jewish doctor who maliciously mis-treated the gonorrhea made him do it; insanity made him do it, but none of them held water. He was indicted the 23rd of July, 1941, tried the 24th, and executed (by guillotine) the 25th.
There are two particularly Nazi-esque ironies that stung me: (1) Ogorzow's heirs (his wife and two children, who had known NOTHING of Daddy's extracurricular activities, including his non-homicidal affairs with other women) were billed for wear and tear on the guillotine.
(2) Although Goebbels wouldn't allow the police to publicize the fact that they were trying to catch a serial killer, he did have a bright idea for protecting potential victims: a late-night escort service, where men could volunteer to accompany women on the S-Bahn and see them safely to their homes. The system was quite intelligently run: the women had to request an escort formally, and the details were entered in a log book. But the criteria for being allowed to volunteer to protect the fair flower of German womanhood? (a) You had to be a Party member and (b) you had to be a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA)--more familiarly known as Brownshirts.
As if that weren't bad enough, Paul Ogorzow was a Party member and a Brownshirt. He volunteered for escort duty and did in fact see all his charges safely home, protecting them vigilantly from himself.
I found the book intensely frustrating because Selby writes and uses primary sources like a lawyer rather than a historian, but he's not presenting a case, just the basic, convoluted narrative of Ogorzow's career as a serial killer. This creates a muddle of nonfiction genre conventions and basically leaves me with the feeling like there was no book in this book. YMMV.
As far as I know, it is the only book in English about Paul Ogorzow.
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December 12, 2015
UBC: Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon KrakauerMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Krakauer starts out with a question: how can two men, sane by all reasonable legal and medical standards, willfully, cold-bloodedly, and with malice aforethought murder their sister-in-law and eighteen-month-old niece and believe, sincerely, passionately, and with absolute conviction, that it was the will of God?
Much of the answer lies with the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints and its teaching on the subject of polygamy and women's necessary and ordained place (which, to be clear, is doing whatever the hell they're told to), but there's also a sub-theme here--which I picked up also in Into the Wild--which I'm not sure how to put into words. It's not the danger of masculinity so much as it is a concern about what happens when a certain kind of gender identity doesn't have a safe outlet. Into the Wild is about risk-taking. Chris McCandless had been taking crazy, unnecessary risks for years before he found the one that killed him, and Krakauer's remarks about his own mountain-climbing experience explain what called to him in Chris McCandless' story. (Also, in the prologue to Under the Banner of Heaven, where he says, "For some, the province of the extreme holds an allure that's irresistible" (xxiii).) Under the Banner of Heaven is about (in part) men who understand their masculine identity in a very clearly defined way (short version, paterfamilias), but are blocked from performing it by the changing gender and social roles of the world around them. Krakauer isn't using that to exculpate Dan and Ron Lafferty (far from it); he's just saying, here is this thing. Here is how the world looks to these men. Here is one source of their impregnable self-righteousness.
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