C.P. Lesley's Blog, page 57

Digging Out

So, last week, it seems, marked the nadir of my entry into summer. This week, although I still don’t quite have the energy to tackle the steppe heroines (believe me, steppe heroines demand all the attention you can give them), life is again looking up. Of the eight projects dragging down my desk three weeks ago, four have moved on to their permanent homes, no. 5 is completed, and I am one-third of the way through no. 6. By next Wednesday, I hope to have whittled the number to a comfortable two. Even the thought raises my spirits.

Better yet, I managed to clear enough time for lunch at the Silver Linings Playbook diner with my pal Diana (although we didn’t rate The Booth this time—go figure). Conversation with a fellow-writer is always fun. I finished rereading Garment of Shadows for my next New Books in Historical Fiction interview and sent off draft questions to Laurie R. King. I even pre-wrote the blog post for the interview, although I’m sure I will rewrite it after I talk to Laurie—I usually do. 

More on that next week. Meanwhile, Philadelphia is showing off its most gorgeous late spring weather. Life looks doable again.

All of which shows that indeed, things change. When I lived in Boston (I suspect other places claim this adage as well), people used to say, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.” Life is like that, too: what seems impossible today becomes just a day’s work at some point in the future.

And thank goodness it does. How would we progress, if our worst expectations always became reality?

Light in the Distance
Clipart no. 16471435

Finding Time

Two weeks ago, I came up with the idea of writing a post on steppe heroines. I may have promised, even, to do such a thing—I can no longer remember. Either way, I have every intention of writing that post soon. Yet here I am, talking about something else.

The issue is not the steppe heroines. I have spent years thinking about them and have plenty to say. No, the problem is finding time to write the post—or, to be more exact, mustering the energy to frame words on this topic close to my heart at the end of a week’s worth of eight-hour days spent editing other people’s prose.

Many books describe the roadblocks that writers put up against finding time for their writing. Some roadblocks are unavoidable consequences of daily life: toddlers have notoriously limited tolerance for closed doors and a parent’s demands that they hush. Spouses, parents, offspring, neighbors, friends, and pets all clamor for attention. Chores must be done, bills paid, bodies exercised, fed, and rested.

Other roadblocks are psychological. Writers wonder whether they have anything to say, whether the book deserves to live, whether critics (agents, editors, their fellow writers) will dine out on stories of the writers’ awfulness. So much simpler not even to put pen to paper, not to risk enduring the shame of others’ scorn.

These are all valid concerns, but they are not mine. I have published two books and am well along on a third. Tomorrow I will get up early to write. Sunday, too. And if I had the energy, I could have written every evening this week. My child is grown, my husband supportive, my pets reasonably well trained. I have finished enough books (not all of them publishable) to know not only that first drafts always reek but that the best way to keep a story moving is to work on it every day, even if I can’t manage more than a paragraph.

Yet I have not done that recently, because by the end of the day, my mind is fried. My eyes roll around in my head like Porky Pig’s, and those cartoons in the New Yorker look like serious literature. On a good day, I rally enough after dinner to read someone else’s prose. On a less-good day, surfing the Web while sneaking glances at the TV (which I normally don’t watch) seems like an achievement.



Not Porky Pig, but Me at the End of a Long Day of Editing
Clipart no. 21707401


Sometimes I think, “If I didn’t have to work, life would be better.” Maybe it would. I’d have more time to write what I really want to write.

Or would I? If I had more free time, would I do less with the time I have? Or would the habits gained from years of squeezing the most out of the time available ensure that a little less brain-frying led to a whole lot more productivity?

I can’t help thinking it might be fun to find out.

Taking Stock

Today I interviewed my friend Janet Olshewsky for New Books in Historical Fiction. The official release date for her book, The Snake Fence (if you want to know what a snake fence is, you’ll have to read the book or listen to the interview in due course—if you cheat and Google it, you will get entirely the wrong idea), comes in midsummer. As a result, the interview won’t go live until August, and I’ll give it a proper introduction then. We decided to record in advance because she happened to be visiting the area, and it made sense to take advantage of the super-clear microphone rather than relying on remarkable, amazing, ever-wonderful but just occasionally dodgy Skype.


So yes, this post is a mini-plug for Janet’s book, which follows a young Quaker boy trying to reconcile his beliefs with the realities of Pennsylvania in 1755—on the brink of what is known here in the United States as the French and Indian War and elsewhere as the more neutral Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). But more than that, this post (as distinct from the one I plan to add in August, after NBHF assigns its permanent link) celebrates the achievements of the writers’ group that made us friends.
 

Because our group is approaching its fifth anniversary—next month, in fact. And all of us have either published or will have published by the end of this year. Four of the books—The Snake Fence, my Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel, Seeking Sophia, and Saving Easton—existed in some form when the group began. The Golden Lynx emerged from an old, discarded draft and completely transformed itself in response to group feedback. More books are already in the pipeline.


Now we can’t take complete credit for Janet’s journey. She left us after about fifteen months, when she moved to Florida and of necessity found other groups and other mentors to steer her along her path. We never replaced her, and we still feel a certain proprietary interest in the fate of her main character, Noble Butler, as well as several of the secondary characters in The Snake Fence. Although the remaining group members have chosen to publish through Five Directions Press, we don’t define its limits: Diana Holquist has never been a member of this writers’ group per se, although she certainly put more effort into critiquing The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel than any one go-round on this earth should demand.


In this moment of taking stock, I have to say that I feel awed by the progress we have made. No one of us could have reached this point alone. Most of us had been struggling in isolation for years to figure out what good novel writing required. And although I would be making up stories (like those centenarians who insist they owe it all to neat whisky and cigarettes) if I were to tell you what we did so that the group would click, it seems that somehow we did find a way.


So thank you, ladies, for the last five years. May we have many, many more!

And stay tuned for the release announcement for Seeking Sophia, which is in its final proof stage.

Outsiders

Fiction loves outsiders. Fish out of water simplify a novelist’s job. They have to ask questions, because they don’t know how the system works (just like the reader). They make observations—and mistakes—that the rest of us will also make about the society being discussed. They learn as we learn, obviating the need for pages of boring description that stop the action cold.


Science fiction and historical fiction, in particular, love outsiders. So much better to show the baffled stranger struggling to understand what drives the natives to haul a pine tree indoors and string lights around it than to contrive a tortured explanation: “Well, yes, Virginia, as I have said every year since you turned three, here in the United States many youngsters believe in Santa Claus. Please, let me tell you about the North Pole, the sled, and the elves. And did I mention he also brings toys to well-behaved children?”


By this point, the snickering reader has long since nominated that book for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (“Wretched Writers Welcome”) and gone on to other, more rewarding reads.


But outsiders need not come from outside. Insiders can be outsiders, too. For good or ill, the human condition appears to include a need to distinguish us from them, even when “they” have lived among “us” for seven hundred years. This reality forms the backdrop for Lenin’s Harem—the book featured in my most recent interview for New Books in Historical Fiction.


Despite its title, the book does not involve harems in the usual sense (sorry if that news disappoints). Instead it refers to a joke/insult applied to the Latvian Red Riflemen, an elite military unit charged with guarding the Kremlin—dubbed “Lenin’s Harem” by the local wags because of its subordination to the first Bolshevik leader.


The rest of this post comes from the description at New Books in Historical Fiction.


One night in the Russian imperial province of Courland, an eleven-year-old boy more than a little drunk on his parents’ champagne slips away from his aristocratic manor and heads for the village that houses his family’s Latvian farmhands. It is Christmas 1905, two months after Emperor Nicholas II of Russia’s October Manifesto has turned his autocracy into the semblance of a constitutional monarchy, and the subject peoples of his empire are restive. In Courland, a province governed by Baltic barons who descend from the thirteenth-century chivalric orders of the Teutonic and Livonian Knights, that hope for change centers on the populace’s desire for independence from its German overlords—even more than from the Russian Empire itself.


Thus begins the story of Wiktor Rooks, a Baltic German boy who soon sees his family’s estate burned, its ancestral property lost, and his own future compromised. Wiktor yearns for the academic life, but family tradition requires him, as a second son, to become a soldier. He joins the Russian imperial army, which assigns him to spy on a unit full of Latvian soldiers eager to rid themselves of men like him. Slowly he wins their trust, and the friendships he forms there—and the wartime atrocities he witnesses—send him into the ranks of the Latvian Red Riflemen. By 1918, he is guarding the new Soviet government.


When Latvia achieves its independence in 1921, Wiktor’s fortunes change again, and he returns to the land of his birth. There he strives, once and for all, to overcome his past as the second son of a Baltic baron. But soon the forces of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia are massing, and tiny Latvia stands smack in their way.

The Wild East

Fun with History, Part 3

As I mentioned during my blog interview with Diane V. Mulligan, my secret is that I’m a total girly-girl. I have no idea how I came to write swashbuckling heroes and kick-ass heroines (or swashbuckling heroines and kick-ass heroes, if you prefer). As a child, my idea of the perfect pastime involved dressing the hair of a dozen dolls. As an adult, I have spent my last twenty-three years studying classical ballet. I don’t even have the excuse of developing a hidden talent, because no one who starts ballet in midlife—native talent or not—has a hope of success. That’s the age when professional dancers start thinking about retirement.

Yet here I am, writing about nomads and warriors and loving every minute (yes, even the ones that have me pounding my head against the desk). So when, halfway through the rough draft of The Winged Horse, I realized that I really could not duck a portrayal of the Tatar council (similar to the Afghan jirga but limited to the four or five most important clan leaders) for even one more scene, I knew I had to stop procrastinating and do some research.

I started with Jack Weatherford’s wonderful Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, stuffed to the brim with information on steppe peoples that I had read and promptly forgotten. But I wanted more. Specifically, I wanted pictures—better yet, videos.

Hello, YouTube. Here I hit pay dirt. Not so much in the short clips of Tatars doing this and that, often in Russian—as invaluable as those are. The short clips reminded me of a film I had seen and loved but not considered in this context: Sergei Bodrov’s study of the rise of Genghis Khan, Mongol (2008). Better yet, it revealed another film that I had not even known existed, also directed by Bodrov and set in eighteenth-century Kazakhstan: Nomad: The Warrior (2005). I found the DVD. And the hi-def version on iTunes. In English, no less. I watched it—and fell in love.

The thing about the steppe is that life changed slowly there in the pre-industrial age. Eighteenth-century Kazakhstan didn’t differ too much from sixteenth-century Kazakhstan—or, to judge by the costumes, the fourteenth-century entity known incorrectly as the Golden Horde. Nasan’s and Ogodai’s ancestors, contemporaries, and descendants.

Not so many council sessions as I would have liked, I admit. But enough to let me write the one I needed. And to give me the confidence to tackle the three other council scenes that for the good of the story need to precede this one.

But first I have to watch Nomad again….


Screen Shot from Sergei Bodrov's Nomad: The Warrior (2005)

Purple Sage

I don’t want to turn this into a book blog, although as luck would have it, four of my last six posts have discussed the books of others. One post addressed a classic, another high-quality genre literature, and the third an author widely considered to have churned out the print equivalent of the kinds of films that used to end up on Mystery Science Theater 3000 or as candidates for the Golden Turkey Awards. But I had yet to encounter a book that might, depending on the reader’s point of view at any given moment, qualify as all three—that is, not until the Dead Writers Society (DWS), the same Goodreads group that adopted Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth as its March read, decided to tackle Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage for April.

A couple of things you need to know. First, Riders wasn’t the only book the DWS settled on for this month. It also chose Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which I last read years ago, and Frances Hodges Burnett’s The Secret Garden, another old favorite of mine. At the same time, Laurie R. King’s Virtual Book Club (also on Goodreads) picked her Justice Hall for its April read—and because I am interviewing Laurie in May for New Books in Historical Fiction and in connection with Garment of Shadows, which in a sense builds on Justice Hall—I wanted to re-read that one too. Not to mention Lenin’s Harem for my April interview. The reading schedule was getting a bit tight.

I finished Lenin’s Harem first and decided to get a head start on April (on that book, more next week). Riders of the Purple Sage was available free for Kindle (there’s my tech reference for this post!), so I started in on it. Two hours later, I was halfway through, and the next day I finished. The first Western I’ve ever read, and possibly the last.

But I still have no clue what to make of Zane Grey. What is one to do with an author who can describe people with the melodrama characteristic of my first example but surround it with passages of raw beauty like the second?
 

“Venters, will you take your whipping here or would you rather go out in the sage?” asked Tull. He smiled a flinty smile that was more than inhuman, yet seemed to give out of its dark aloofness a gleam of righteousness. (4)

Here again was a sweep of purple sage, richer than upon the higher levels. The valley was miles long, several wide, and enclosed by unscalable walls. But it was the background of this valley that so forcibly struck him [Venters]. Across the sage flat rose a strange upflinging of yellow rocks. He could not tell which were close and which were distant. Scrawled mounds of stone, like mountain waves, seemed to roll up to steep bare slopes and towers…. All about him was ridgy roll of wind-smoothed, rain-washed rock. Not a tuft of grass or a bunch of sage colored the dull rust-yellow. He saw where, to the right, this uneven flow of stone ended in a blunt wall. Leftward, from the hollow that lay at his feet, mounted a gradual slow-swelling slope to a great height topped by leaning, cracked, and ruined crags. Not for some time did he grasp the wonder of that acclivity. It was no less than a mountainside, glistening in the sun like polished granite, with cedar trees springing as if by magic out of the denuded surface. Winds had swept it clear of weathered shale, and rains had washed it free of dust. Far up the curved slope its beautiful lines broke to meet the vertical rim wall, to lose its grace in a different order and color of rock, a stained yellow cliff of cracks and caves and seamed crags. And straight before Venters was a scene less striking but more significant to his keen survey. For beyond a mile of the bare, hummocky rock began the valley of sage and the mouths of canyons, one of which surely was another gateway into the pass. (21–22)

Is he Barbara Cartland, Edith Wharton, or somewhere in a bizarre category of his own?

Dark Shadows

I had a lot of fun this week preparing for my blog interview with L.M. David and her resident vampyre, Preston. At the last minute, I gave into the urging of Nasan, heroine of The Golden Lynx, and carried a sword. Boy, were we glad. Vampyres can be so touchy.

Alas, Preston imagines himself the Fourth Musketeer. That part of the encounter didn’t go so well—for him. Nasan had a great time.

Preston is recovering nicely, thank you. No damage except to his pride—and his pants. Hey, how was I to know he’d swish a cape better than a sword? (I do feel bad about the pants. Turned out he'd charged them to L.M. Oops!)

Here’s a (slightly edited) excerpt from the interview. But there are lots of good questions I left out, so make sure to read the whole.

Q. Tell me about the character Nasan.

A. Nasan is a descendant of Genghis Khan, which makes her a princess. At 16, she is on the brink of marriage—as her mother reminds her about 18 times a day—but she has grown up among the nomads, a world where women live much more active lives than those residing in towns. Nomadic girls learn to ride and to defend themselves; they wrestle cattle and do whatever needs doing, especially when the men are off raiding and at war. Nasan is a tomboy who resists growing up, which for a 16th-century princess means marrying and becoming a mother. She justifies her reluctance by appealing to ancient Turkic legends in which warrior heroines marry only men who can defeat them in battle, men they can respect. She also appeals to the ancestral spirits of her clan, the grandmothers, to guide her along the path to achieving her dream: to become such a warrior heroine. But she knows this is unlikely, and when she fails to prevent her younger brother’s murder, she begins to question whether she can fulfill her dream. Then her father orders her to marry the son of their enemy, a Russian nobleman, and she has to adapt to not only a new family but a new culture, a new language, and even a new religion.

Q.  What would draw a 14-year-old to this story?

A. Nasan is 16, married to a 19-year-old. She lives in a different time and another part of the world, but she has a lot of the same problems that any teenager has. Her mother and mother-in-law are always on her case, trying to get her to act like the perfect lady. Her father orders her around and makes plans without consulting her. Adults spend most of their time telling her what to do. The hot guy she’s married seems to be fooling around with another girl. She has to deal with her mean sister-in-law. And Nasan doesn’t take these things lying down. She fights back; she stands up for her right to define her own identity as a woman.

Q. Your next book, The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel, what inspired you to write it?

A. I actually wrote this one before The Golden Lynx. I read the original Scarlet Pimpernel, by Baroness Orczy, when I was 14 and loved it. It’s about a guy who seems to think about nothing but clothes, but he’s really a swashbuckling hero who saves people from the guillotine during the French Revolution. In 2005, Penguin put out a centennial edition, and I read it again. I loved it just as much, but I found myself retelling the story in my head, imagining myself as the heroine, Marguerite, and thinking about what I could do to fix her conflict with her husband. Eventually I decided to write my version down. The original is in the public domain, so I was able to use it without violating anyone’s copyright. But only about 10% of my book actually comes from Baroness Orczy; the rest is my invention.

Q.  In this story, Nina, Ian, and a college professor enter a virtual reality video game. How did you come up with this concept?

A. I didn’t want to do a straightforward time-travel novel, because The Scarlet Pimpernel is fiction, not history—and besides, time travel is kind of a cliché. I needed something that would put people into the book but still let them alter it, and computers seemed like the obvious way to do that. When I began writing the book, back in 2006, the technology to produce the kind of experience that Nina and Ian and their friends have seemed far-off, but now we have wireless refrigerators and smartphones everywhere, so I figure it’s only a matter of time before there’s an app for that.

Q. In both books, your female characters are strong-willed, solid characters. Do you see them as role models for the age group these books were written for?

A. I write strong female characters because I can’t stand to read about weak, whiny women. Of course, women often had little choice historically—even in the present, in many places—but as a historian I know that women can exercise power in ways that don’t necessarily draw attention to themselves. The two mothers in The Golden Lynx are also strong female characters. Other characters in The Golden Lynx are not, but they will get there before the series ends. A couple of reviewers have criticized my characters as too modern for this reason, but in fact I put a lot of research and effort into making them historically accurate. People just tend to assume that women in the past were downtrodden, which was not always true, especially among the elite.

As for them being role models, yes, I hope they are. Not in the sense of swinging a sword or stringing a bow, but in the sense of being true to yourself while balancing your own needs against those of others and the demands of your society—I think that’s a lesson everyone needs to learn.

Q. Do you have a current work in progress?

A. The Golden Lynx is book 1 of a five-part series. Right now, I’m halfway through the first draft of book 2, The Winged Horse. Mostly it involves Nasan’s older brother and his attempt to claim the young woman promised to him six years earlier, despite the efforts of a disgruntled half-brother to grab the girl and leadership of her nomadic horde. Nasan and Daniil appear in a side plot set in the independent khanate (kingdom) of Kazan. There’s lots of politicking, races, duels, assassination attempts, and stampedes. And quite a bit of romance, although the characters don’t really think in those terms. I’m eager to get it done, because plots for books 3 and 4 are already pounding at my brain.

Cloudy Futures

A Warning Not to Get
Too Caught Up in the Cloud
Clipart no. 21539161

One of my friends, Diana Holquist—yes, the same friend I mentioned in “Royal Purple” a few posts back—had a troubling experience this week. Apple suspended her iTunes account without warning and refused to let her back in for a variety of reasons that on the surface seem ridiculous: she couldn’t remember the answers to security questions she’d set up more than five years ago; she couldn’t supply the serial number to a computer she no longer owned; Apple has refused to accept the serial number for the computer she does own or her alternate e-mail address, even though the computer is registered to her and the address contains her full name. As I write this post, a solution remains elusive, the cause unclear. (Did one of her kids—or a hacker—try to access the account without her knowing? Did she get caught in some computerized version of mistaken identity?)

What is clear is that even the Apple Genius can’t unlock her account. Which means no access to the songs, movies, TV shows, books, etc., that she has purchased over the years. No access to archived mail messages. No access even to her own documents, which in the last year Apple has been pushing people to store on iCloud—setting up its software to save there by default, meaning that less computer-savvy people may not even realize what’s going on.

The point of this post is not to bash Apple, although when a company manages to turn a loyal customer into someone determined never to spend another dollar in its stores, that company may want to reconsider its practices. Apple got bad publicity in August 2012, when a hacker used a stolen credit card number to gain access to the iCloud account of a Wired.com reporter, then wiped all the information off the reporter’s phone, iPad, and Mac, one after another. The reporter wrote up his experience as a warning to others. So if Apple is nervous, even to the point of over-compensating, one can understand. At the same time, real people forget their security questions and passwords. They sell computers and move on to newer machines. If someone can show up at an Apple Store and prove her identity, then surely the rules of common sense should apply.

These two complementary stories highlight a real and evolving problem. Like many people, I rely on my computer. I write my novels on it. I use it to store pictures, music, books, letters, e-mail, and all kinds of important documents for home and for work. I surf the Web, for pleasure and for research. Having my computer crash, or even the house cable modem go on the fritz, feels like being thrown into the Dark Ages without a map back to the present. It’s enough to trigger a full-blown anxiety attack.

Even so, I have watched with some bemusement the growth of the various cloud services—bemusement because I am old enough to remember when the excitement of personal computers lay precisely in their independence: you didn’t need a teletype terminal to connect to a mainframe; you could maintain your own files and programs.

I am not a Luddite. I ditched my typewriter thirty years ago and never looked back. I understand that hard drives fail, that disasters happen, that it’s useful to have offsite backups. I keep copies of my novels in six different locations, including an offsite backup service. I keep multiple copies of work files, too. But I remain suspicious of large companies that promise to keep working copies of my documents on a server somewhere, even if it means that I can access them from anywhere in the world. The trend back toward machines that function primarily to connect us to an online service that stores the programs and files we need for everyday life bothers me. What happens when the company decides (as tech companies often do) that this service is not reaping the expected benefits and discontinues it? What happens if the company decides it no longer trusts you, as happened with my friend Diana?

Google Apps used to be free; now it’s not. For the moment, users who signed up in the old days are grandfathered in, but will that deal last? Google has also announced plans to shut the doors on its popular Reader service as of July 1, 2013—unconcerned that many independent RSS readers rely on Google Reader. Instead, it has announced a new Notes program, to compete with Evernote—among other services. Users are supposed to take it on faith that Notes will remain available as long as they need it. Sorry, I think I’ll wait and see.

Google is not the only company that changes on a dime. iCloud used to be MobileMe, which used to be .Mac, which began life as a free service that soon cost $100/year. Computers once came with built-in drives (disk drives, then CD drives, then DVD drives), so that you didn’t absolutely need an Internet connection just to install a program. Now, in many cases, they don’t.

I could go on, but I’m sure I’ve made my point. Things change. In the world of technology they change with more than the usual speed—often for the better, but not always. Still, you can bet that I won’t be letting my programs use iCloud as their default location anytime soon….

As I finished the draft on this post, the news came over the wire that Amazon.com plans to buy Goodreads for an undisclosed sum. The site’s users are up in arms, while its founders and staff assure them that nothing will change—oblivious, it seems, to the reality that something fundamental already has. By the end of the next fiscal quarter, the world’s largest bookseller will control access to sixteen million self-proclaimed book readers, to whom it can promote authors selected by itself by means that it will determine, because it holds the purse strings—no matter how much the Goodreads staff trumpets its independence. Wave of the future, they say, but the future looks distinctly cloudy from here.

Difficult Characters

I had been planning a post about characters—and discarding all the possible approaches as too hackneyed or too boring or both—when I finished reading Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth for the Dead Writers Society, a Goodreads group (if you happen to belong to that group, rest easy: no spoilers here). Lily Bart, the main character in The House of Mirth, got to me—as I suspect she gets to most people, because Wharton designed her to do exactly that. So I decided that Lily had the potential to become my entrée into the discussion of fictional characters. More specifically, difficult characters.

When we first meet Lily, she appears (to the modern mind) shallow, manipulative, and thoroughly unlikable. She exists on the fringes of early twentieth-century New York society, although she sees herself in, and at first appears to occupy, a place of acceptance. She is beautiful; she moves in the best circles (although her poverty places her at the edges of those circles); she has influential friends. But her thirtieth birthday is approaching, and her opportunities to establish herself are constricting. Her means don’t equal her desires, and she has trouble imagining alternatives. Within the first few chapters, she settles on a young man, Percy Gryce, who has nothing to recommend him except his fortune.

Lily sets out to seduce Percy into offering her marriage, knowing that she does not love him or even admire him. She does not succeed, in part because a woman who turns out to be her nemesis interferes, and in part because Lily waffles. She wants Percy’s money, but she lacks the ruthless determination exhibited by her nemesis. Every time she has to step up to the plate, she retreats. Every time she discovers an alternative, she retreats from that, too. This inability to be ruthlessly cold-hearted, à la Becky Sharp or Scarlett O’Hara, or deeply principled makes Lily Bart infuriating. And as the book picks up steam, we discover that Lily has exhibited such ambivalence for years. She has had many opportunities to choose love or money, and each time she draws back—spikes her own guns, so to speak. She is, in short, a difficult character.

But what makes her difficult? In part, the answer is Wharton herself. With apparent glee, she rips every possible solution away from Lily, one after another. Marry a rich man? No. Become a rich man’s mistress? No. Establish her own career? No. Marry for love? No. Wharton forces Lily into a box and refuses to let her out, presumably to make a point about the society that Lily inhabits, the society that rejects her, its smallness of mind, its focus on trivialities, its material excesses and spiritual destitution. In that sense, Wharton, too, is a difficult character.

Perhaps I’m wrong. I hope I am. But I can’t help feeling, based on my own experience, that Edith Wharton would have a hard time publishing The House of Mirth today. It’s a wonderful book, well worth reading, yet not a comfortable one. If it came in over the transom from an unknown author, what literary agent or editor would pick it up? The first hundred pages are all slow build, full of exposition and telling. In the ninety seconds that agents give a book, where is there room to discover a classic that doesn’t hit its stride until halfway, then roars toward its relentlessly uncompromising finish? These days, wouldn’t Wharton have to self-publish? And if she did, how long would it take her book to break out?

In short, have we lost the ability to appreciate difficult characters?

Walking the Line

As a historian who writes historical fiction, I am always interested in how other people like me handle the overlap between fact and imagination. So I particularly enjoyed my interview with Douglas Skopp, a retired professor of German history, in which we talk at length about how he negotiated the same boundary. The results of our conversation are now available online at New Books in Historical Fiction. As with all the New Books Network podcasts, you can listen to the interview or download it free of charge through the link above.

Doug’s podcast (and even more, his book) address some of the same questions raised during my conversation in January with Julius (Jay) Wachtel. So listen to them both. They will make you ponder what limits you might cross in service to a cause that seemed greater than yourself.

Jay also has a new interview on another site. And here is my post introducing Doug Skopp’s Shadows Walking.

“First do no harm.” Every doctor in the Western medical tradition swears to observe this basic principle of the Hippocratic oath before he or she receives a license to practice. Yet in Nazi Germany, doctors who had sworn to heal participated in grotesque medical experiments on concentration-camp prisoners, conducted sterilization campaigns against their fellow-citizens, refused treatment to terminally ill patients, and supported euthanasia, eugenics, and antisemitism. How did they justify such a perversion of their calling?

This is the question that Douglas R. Skopp addresses in Shadows Walking, his extensively researched account of the intertwining lives—like the snakes on Aesculapius’s staff—of two fictional German doctors, the boyhood friends Johann Brenner and Philipp Stein, from 1928 to their final meeting near the end of World War II. The novel opens in Nuremberg in 1946, with Johann working under an alias as a janitor in the Palace of Justice, where the Allied trials of Nazi war criminals are underway. A chance meeting with his estranged wife—furious to discover that her husband has been hiding in the city for months—sparks in Johann a desire to explain in a letter the crimes he has committed since he last saw her, the reasons why he has allowed her to believe that he died near the end of the war. Every paragraph of his letter leads into a flashback that reveals a segment of his past and pushes Johann farther down the road to Nazism and Auschwitz. Meanwhile, Philipp, as a German Jew, experiences the shrinking horizons and worsening abuse that Nazism inflicted on its victims.

Because of its subject matter, Shadows Walking is not easy to read, but it is an important book, well worth the investment of time and energy. Doug Skopp traces the path by which fundamentally decent people can descend into barbarism if they forget the importance of compassion. It could happen in Germany—and did. It could happen here. It could happen anywhere.