Katherine Addison's Blog, page 7

Review: Martin & Savoy, eds., American Gothic (1998)

American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative by Robert K. Martin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Lit crit is as prone to trends and fads as any other human endeavor, but the thing about good literary criticism is that it doesn't go out of date. The two essays in this collection that were great were great; the rest ranged from good to boring to my GOD that's a lot of Lacan. And the one essay I deeply disliked that was so busy disapprovingly theorizing the discourse about serial killers that it forgot that the victims were real people, too. I mean, theorize Ted Bundy all you want, but don't forget about Kimberly Leach.

Maggie Kilgour's essay, "Dr. Frankenstein Meets Dr. Freud," was a wide-ranging assessment of the gothic and its tropes that spends most of its time with The Silence of the Lambs. (Which, of COURSE it's gothic, how could it not be?) Kim Ian Michasiw's essay, "Some Stations of Suburban Gothic," aside from not being afraid to be funny, was a really interesting use of theory (unlike the crop of Lacanians). I'm not sure I entirely understood it---if you asked me the difference between a "station" and a "locale," I don't think I could tell you, except that stations are given to you/imposed on you by the social order; a locale is something you make for yourself---but I WANTED to. I may in fact go reread it and see if I can get my brain to wrap around the theory a little better.

I have a private list on Amazon called "gothic." It's so long now that I can't remember what's on it.



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Review: Weinstock, Scare Tactics (2008)

Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women, with a New Preface by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Specifically in the subtitle he means American women between 1850 and 1930, when apparently there was this enormous output of ghost stories by American female authors. One of the OTHER things I learned in reading this book is how many American female authors of this period there were that I had never even heard of. These are women who were prolific and who enjoyed tremendous critical and popular success during their own lifetimes but who somehow just...got erased. I had heard, of course, of Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Harriet Beecher Stowe, but what about Harriet Prescott Spofford, Anna M. Hoyt, Madeline Yale Wynne, Elia Wilkinson Peattie, Alice Cary, Mary Noailles Murfree, Mary Austin, Louise Stockton, Olivia Howard Dunbar, Josephine Daskam Bacon, Georgia Wood Pangborn, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Rose Terry Cooke, Alice Brown, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, Helen Hull, and Gertrude Atherton? (And those are only the women whose stories Weinstock discusses.) It's a truism, often trotted out---or at least it was when I was getting my degrees, lo these mumblecough years ago---that 90% of Victorian fiction was unremarkable: popular disposable fiction. But I wonder to what degree that "unremarkable" meant either "fiction by women" or "supernatural fiction"---both of which were sneered at by the academy for most of the twentieth century---or both.

I am not original in wondering this, I know. But wow.

This is a book of academic criticism, so it's a little dry. It is, however, readable rather than suffocated beneath the weight of its own critical jargon, and I found the subject fascinating. (Possibly, full disclaimer, because I am also a female writer of ghost stories.) Weinstock argues that American women writers between 1850 and 1930 used supernatural fiction as a vehicle/stalking horse for discussions and/or critiques of the ideology of women's roles in Victorian and Edwardian society, particularly motherhood; the failings of capitalism; lesbian desire; and the Gothic written by men. I particularly liked his reading of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Giant Wisteria" as a critique of The Scarlet Letter.



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Review: Swain, Techniques of the Selling Writer (1965)

Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


First, a warning: it is very 1965 in this book. There's only one racist joke, but the misogyny is everywhere, both in Swain's assumption that all characters and writers are male by default, and in the off-hand treatment of wife-beating. He's also writing for a market environment that largely isn't there anymore.

Second: for most of the book, Swain is laying out the formula that he says will result in "good" stories. (I put "good" in quotation marks because I'm not sure Swain and I agree on what a good story is.) His formula is a successful one (I recognize it in the Marvel movies, for example), but it is definitely a formula and it only really leads to writing the one kind of story. (Swain thinks there IS only one kind of story.) It's like a recipe, and the recipe for Key Lime Pie is all well and good unless what you're hankering for is German Black Forest Cake. Or beignets.

Third: and then at the end he goes and offers some really good practical advice about being a writer and motivating yourself to work and things like that, and that part is both insightful and useful.

So, on average, three stars.



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Review: Harrison, While They Slept (2008)

While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family by Kathryn Harrison

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


So Kathryn Harrison is famous (or notorious) mostly for writing a book about her affair with her father, which I mention because that's the angle from which she comes at this book. It isn't a memoir, but it is absolutely NOT free of Harrison's personal history of familial trauma. Sometimes this feels relevant and meaningful; sometimes this feels like Harrison intruding herself into the story of Jody and Billy Gilley.

In 1984, Billy Gilley beat his father, his mother, and his little sister to death with a baseball bat. He did it, he claimed, in order to free his sister Jody and himself from the abuse of their parents. (He claims his little sister's death was a sort of accident: she started screaming and he panicked.) Harrison wants there to be an incestuous love story between Billy and Jody, because that's the baggage she brings to the table, but she's honest enough to admit that there isn't. Billy may (or may not) have been "in love" with Jody; Jody was definitely not "in love" with him; Jody was frightened of and repulsed by him. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that yes indeed, Bill and Linda Gilley were emotionally abusive, sometimes physically abusive. 

The most interesting part of the book is the comparisons Harrison does between what Billy says and what Jody says, both about the night of the murders and about their lives leading up to that night, the way that, with Jody's help, she picks Billy's story apart (for example, Jody says that Billy was molesting her, not protecting her from their father) so that as readers we can see the weird mix of truth and untruth in Billy's story. Also the way that both Jody and Billy change between the court records in 1984 and the interviews in 2008.

I came away from the book feeling that the Gilleys died because Billy was what their abuse made him and because they refused to see what they had made. And because all the institutions and organizations that are supposed to protect children failed to take Billy away from his parents.





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2 bits of news

1. The Grief of Stones (the sequel to The Witness for the Dead that comes out in June) got a starred review from Library Journal! (warning: the review is somewhat spoilery)

2. The Goblin Emperor is on sale on Kindle for $2.99 for all of March!

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New Booth story

"The Haunting of Dr. Claudius Winterson" is up at Uncanny Magazine

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Review: Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon (2017)

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book tells a number of different stories. There's the story of the murders of Mollie Burkhardt's family, the story of the FBI investigation of those murders (and the story of that megalomaniac J. Edgar Hoover and the creation of the FBI), and then the story of the journalist who starts researching those two stories only to find himself uncovering a different story. And I think Grann never quite got those stories to jell together, never quite got the delicate interconnected houses of cards to stand up properly, just as I can't find the metaphor I want to describe the phenomenon. I did not enjoy this book as much as The Lost City of Z, although it is an excellent book, and I think the reason is that Grann isn't directing traffic quite as deftly.

I spent the book simultaneously cynically unsurprised at what white people would do for money and absolutely aghast that not only would white people do these things, but other white people would let them get away with it and help them cover it up. The breadth and depth of the conspiracies (yes, very distinctly plural) to murder the Osage for their mineral rights are corrosively chilling and an important part of the story of the European colonization of America.



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Review: Kolker, Hidden Valley Road (2020)

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


[library]
Don and Mimi Galvin had twelve children, ten boys and two girls (in that order) Six of the ten boys developed schizophrenia (or another severe mental illness, the speculation that one brother might actually be bipolar gets kicked around the book but never really answered, if "really answered" is even an option). This book is two-pronged, one prong about the Galvin family and one prong about the research their case provided invaluable material for.

I read and greatly admired Robert Kolker's first book, Lost Girls, and I was not disappointed by Hidden Valley Road. Although Kolker erases himself from the text, his shadow nevertheless is very distinct: a relentless and patient interviewer, with a gift for asking the right question and then the right follow-up question. He paints a (horribly) vivid picture of what life was like on Hidden Valley Road, both the chaotic Lord of the Flies way the Galvins seem to have raised their children and the eruptions of schizophrenia. He makes it possible to watch one boy after another disappear into schizophrenia---disappear both in the literal sense of being institutionalized and in a more figurative sense, since it seemed to me that schizophrenia was like a pirate radio station, broadcasting its lies and gibberish more and more loudly on a frequency that had originally been Peter Galvin. Or Joe or Donald or Matt.

The sections on schizophrenia research are also the product of careful, patient interviewing, and Kolker doesn't try to hide the results, even though they're a lot of research for very few answers (and Big Pharma is called out for following money rather than the possibility of a cure). Nobody knows what causes schizophrenia, although the answer seems to be that it isn't any singular thing, but a host of genetic potentialities that get tripped by a child's environment and experiences as they grow. Nobody knows how to cure schizophrenia. The drugs that muffle the hallucinations also muffle the person and lead to long-term health problems. The Galvins believe, for pretty good reason, that two of the six brothers died because of the drugs they'd been prescribed for decades. Like Lost Girls, this is not a book that has answers, only more and better questions.



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Review: Truby, The Anatomy of Story (2007)

The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller by John Truby

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I have, first of all, a beef with Mr. Truby. At an early point in the book, he says, literally parenthetically, "I'm going to assume that the main character is male, simply because it's easier for me to write that way" (40). And he does. Throughout the book, he uses the pronoun "he" exclusively---not just for the hero, but also for the writer--- unless he's actually talking about a woman. And it's like, I'm sorry half the human race is INCONVENIENCING YOU BY EXISTING, Mr. Truby, but maybe you could go the extra mile here? Also, in talking about The African Queen, a story with two heroes, he is plainly only talking about Humphrey Bogart. Katharine Hepburn is so much chopped liver. So it's NOT just, This is easier for me. It's, Hi, I'm trying to be sexist without you noticing.

So, yeah, I have a personal-is-politlcal beef with Mr. Truby.

And then there's what he's trying to sell.

In fairness to Mr. Truby, I have to say that I believe that he truly believes his system is the only right way to write stories. In fairness to me and everybody else, I have to say that he is wrong. His elaborate 22-step system is, to me, both artificial and awkward, and while he can impose it on certain stories (his favorites are The Godfather, Casablanca, and Tootsie), it's very like Aristotle basing his entire theory of drama on Oedipus Rex and thereby forcing generations of high school students to find Hamlet's fatal flaw. (Hint: he doesn't have one.) Truby insists that his formula is not a formula, but a formula is exactly what it is, just at a structurally deeper level than "boy meets girl." He also doesn't understand symbolism or irony, and he's somehow made a quite successful career as a script doctor without ever running into the idea that other people may write stories differently than he does and still have them come out okay.

I found this book very interesting, in a no-I-will-not-join-your-cult way, but I cannot say that it was at all helpful.

I would give this book three stars, except that he DOES insist his is the only way to successfully write a story, and that's pernicious. Two stars.



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Review: Zinsser, On Writing Well (2006 ed.)

On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a book on writing nonfiction, but the first part, which is about the mechanics of writing, is applicable to fiction as well and is full of good advice. Zinsser wrote it to be a companion to Strunk & White, and it's much less dictatorial in tone (although it's very clear that Zinsser believes in the rightness of what he's saying)---more "helpful wisdom" than "fiats from on high." He also does a really good job of explaining clearly why the mechanics matter. I found the later parts of the book, about writing specific kinds of nonfiction, interesting if not personally useful (and you never know what might come in handy).

Four and a half stars, round up to five.



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