Louis Arata's Blog, page 9

Book Review: Long Ride Home

Part of my reading challenge this year includes selecting works from a genre I don’t typically read.  So, I chose a Western.  Specifically, Louis L’Amour’s Long Ride Home.
Where have I been?  This was a lot of fun.  Who wouldn’t love some gritty, hard-riding, gun-slinging action?  Actually, I can think of only a few Westerns I’ve read:  Lonesome Dove, The Oxbow Incident, Dances with Wolves, and The Octopus (which probably doesn’t qualify as a Western, but I remember there’s a shootout at the end).
Long Ride Home is a collection of frontier stories.  Here you’ve got gamblers, cattle rustlers, miners, and trick rodeo riders.  All the heroes are tough fighters, all the villains wily snakes, and all the woman a combination of beauty and grit.


I'll show some true grit.A few weeks ago, I read Patricia Highsmith’s Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, which left me a bit disappointed.  She didn’t give me many insights into constructing plot.  L’Amour, on the other hand, with his tightly written stories, showed me more about good storytelling.
He keeps the focus on the drama, so each of these short stories feels as packed as a good action movie.  There’s a good variety of plots, from the lightly comic “That Triggernometry Tenderfoot” to the revenge tale, “Shandy Takes the Hook.”
In “No Man’s Man,” Lou Morgan and Nana Maduro meet after many years.  As they are talking, a young man eavesdrops, so Lou roughs him up a bit.  Of course, this is pulp fiction, so you get fun descriptions like this:

              I swung him from his feet and muscled him up, half strangling, and held him there at eye level, my arm bent to hold him, my knuckles under his chin.”
            Then I slapped him, booming slaps that left his face white and the mark of my hand there …
            But those slaps had been good for my soul, venting some of the fury I was feeling for [Nana]!  Not the fury of anger, although there was that, too, but the fury of man-feeling rising within me, the great physical need I had for that woman that stirred me and gripped me and made my jaws clench and my teeth grind.

          “That was a private conversation,’ I said.  ‘The lady and I understand each other.”

The final story, “Long Ride Home,” is a nicely crafted culmination of the theme of endings and beginnings.  L’Amour turns poetic in his descriptive sense of depth to the landscape, a travel odyssey from one’s past into one’s future.  Tensleep Mooney is looking for peace, after years of fighting, but his journey is interrupted when he encounters a Tarahumara Indian injured by a wealthy landowner.  Mooney gets the injured man and his granddaughter safely home, only to incur the wrath of the landowner.  It’s one last battle to face, as though this decision will make manifest his fate.  It’s a poignant ending to an entertaining collection of stories.

In Memory of Mary Tyler Moore

In memory of Mary Tyler Moore, I am reposting a blog I wrote a few years ago about The Dick Van Dyke Show.

**********************

You want to know a good way to learn how to write dialogue?  Watch a really well-written sitcom.  The lines are crisp, efficient and still manage to convey character.
As a child of the 70s, I was definitely influenced by sitcoms:  M*A*S*H*, All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Odd Couple, Barney Miller, and The Dick van Dyke Show (this last one I discovered in syndication).


Of all these shows, The Dick van Dyke Show shines with a natural style of dialogue.  While it can be goofy and slapstick, it never falls into the line-line-joke, line-line-joke formula of other sitcoms.  The actors stay light on their feet, giving the show an effervescent quality.
Laura:  Rob, if I thought that you sent this boat here to trap me …
Rob:  Oh, honey, I ordered this long before we did the sketch.  This is what gave me the idea.  Honest.
Laura:  Rob, I tried not to open it, I really did, but I – I guess I’m just a pathological snoopy-nose!
Rob:  Oh, honey, everybody’s a snoopy-nose.  We all like to know what’s inside things.
Laura:  I guess so.
Rob:  Why, I know so.  You know something?  I’m very, very curious about something right now.
Laura:  What?
Rob:  Well, I’m wondering how long we’re going to keep on with this polite talking before we get down to serious kissing!
Laura:  About three seconds.
Rob:  Three?
[Rob looks at his watch]
Rob:  One, two …
Laura:  I forgive you!
[they kiss]
[excerpt from “The Curious Thing About Women” (1962)]
Instead of maintaining a stony-faced decorum, the characters are allowed to banter and to laugh at each others' jokes -- which is more like real-life interactions than some of the sarcasm-laden approach of other sitcoms.  
Mel (exasperated):  Rob!
Rob:  Buddy!
Buddy:  Sally!
Sally:  Mel!
Mel:  Rob!
Rob:  Sally!
Sally:  Buddy!
Buddy:  Go ahead, Curly.  It's your turn.  Say "Rob."
Mel:  Rob!
[Buddy and Sally applaud drolly.]
Buddy:  Beautiful.
Sally:  Oh, wonderful, wonderful.
[excerpt from "Who Owes Who What?" (1962)]

The show makes me smile.

Book Review: We Need to Talk About Kevin

A mother wrangles her way through her relationship with her son, who is incarcerated for killing eleven people at his high school.  In a series of letters to her absent husband, Eva Khatchadourian examines who she is as a mother and who her son innately appears to be.  She questions whether people are born depraved or are products of their environment.
Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin is a chillingly intimate analysis of the factors that might drive a youth to massacre his classmates.
In 2003, when the novel was published, the U.S. was still reeling from the Columbine shooting.  Since then, the ante has been upped, and in 2016 alone there were at least fifteen (as reported in Wikipedia). 


Shriver’s initially focuses small before going large.  The first quarter of the book establishes Eva Khatchadourian’s character.  She is surprisingly candid about her ambivalence over becoming a mother.  Recently married to Franklin and with a booming travel guide business, she is not ready to move into full-time parenthood.  Her uncertainty only worsens when her firstborn exhibits what could be described as sociopathic behavior, a decided propensity for control battles.  Even as an infant, Kevin seems calculated.  Nothing gives him pleasure, and in a wickedly determined manner makes sure that Eva does not have an easy ride.  To make matters worse, as Kevin grows up, he learns that he can dupe his father into believing he’s a gee-whiz kind of kid and that any difficulties that Eva has is all in her imagination.  Talk about gaslighting!
As the novel progresses, the focus expands beyond the nuclear household as Kevin interacts with neighbors, classmates, and teachers.  Shriver now starts looking at the big picture.  She pulls in details of actual school shootings, until fiction and fact effectively blend.  By the time Kevin instigates his massacre, the reader has a greater sense of the ripples that brought on this tidal wave, and yet in the end, even as we crave a definitive answer as to why it all occurs, we have to accept that there may not be one.
I had to read this novel in small doses – five to twenty pages at a time.  This was partly due to my discomfort with Kevin’s increasing levels of cruelty as well as the story’s evident trajectory.  Another reason I read it slowly was that Shriver gives you a lot to think about.  Her prose is keenly articulate and rich.  She excels at similes that often left me amazed that I had never thought about something that way before.  For example, Eva describes their modern-style, glass-and-brick home as resembling “the headquarters of some slick, do-gooding conflict-resolution outfit … where they’d give ‘peace prizes’ to Mary Robinson and Nelson Mandela.”  Later, she adds that “the moving parts of the house were all silent, its surfaces smooth.  The closet doors had no handles.  None of the woodwork had fixtures.  Drawers had gentle indents.  The kitchen cabinets pushed open and shut with a click… [The] whole house was on Zoloft.”
One interesting symbol Shriver uses is Kevin’s propensity for wearing clothes that are too small for him.  It may be a peculiar fashion statement – his cuffs are at his shins, his pants don’t buckle over his hips, his shirt exposes his midriff.  But it’s the perfect metaphor for this child/adult juxtaposition of the school shooter.  An adolescent enacts a crime that seems too adult to perpetrate.  So, how do you stuff an adult-sized crime into the clothes of a youth?  When a shooter is tried as an adult, the justice system is stating that the criminal cannot hide behind the façade of age.  There are certain actions that we know are wrong, so you can’t play innocent.
But Shriver seems to be proposing that there are myriad factors as well as innate characteristics that determine how an individual acts.  Both social environment and inborn traits fashion each person, so you can’t point to one or the other.  Everything blends.  There is a big picture of the world and a smaller, more focused picture of the individual.
I have two, very small critiques of the novel.  One is the title, which has a sensationalistic quality to it.  I kept considering other possibilities yet could not come up with any.  I guess it works, since the book has been on my radar for a while, probably because the title is memorable.  It also emphasizes the notion that we all should be talking about to address the violence in society.
My second critique is that when Kevin is an infant, and Eva is going through a rough spell being a homebound mother, the author practically demonizes Kevin.  He is such a difficult child that I almost expected his head to spin around as he vomits and curses in Latin.  Given that when ten-year-old Kevin comes down with a fever and his behavior temporarily softens, he must have some internal awareness of how to interact normally, so his challenging infancy comes across as diabolic.
Still, these are small complaints.  I am fairly certain that this novel will be on my end of the year Best Of list.  I’d have to read a bunch of other mind-blowing books to have this one bumped off my top ten.

Book Review: Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction

When I write, plotting is more a series of premises and consequences.  I write a scene then consider what might unexpectedly occur as a result of it.  In the first draft, there is a fair amount of exploration involved.  The downside is that it’s rarely a linear process, and I spend an excessive amount of time working things out.  It’s not a terribly efficient way to tackle a first draft.
To help improve on this, I’ve been reading books on writing to see what techniques I can use to make this an easier process.  How do you write a suspense novel?
I'll just keep you in suspence
about that.Patricia Highsmith is well-known for her suspense novels.  She is great at setting up unusual circumstances then exploring the psychological and social repercussions.  In Strangers on a Train, two men meet.  One proposes they trade murders – each will kill the other’s wife.  The second man thinks it’s all a joke, until the first one actually does it.  What a creepily thrilling storyline!
So, who better to read on how to formulate a good plot?  Her nonfiction book, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, analyzes elements of fiction – everything from the germ of an idea to development, plotting, snags, and revisions.
Unfortunately, I came away from her book pretty disappointed.  There wasn’t much concrete in her examples, and her recommendations often had an offhand quality:  “Oh, by the way, you might want to try this.  But don’t do that.”  The writing had a kind of stream-of-consciousness quality to it, as though Highsmith had jotted down notes for the book and occasionally referred to them:
“I can give no advice, or do not presume to give any, on the question of concentrating on character or plot in the course of developing a story idea.  I have concentrated on either or both.  Most often for me comes a short bit of action, with no characters attached, which will be the hub or the climax, occasionally the start, of my story.”
In other words, she’s tried a lot of different strategies, and they work or they don’t work, so you’re on your own.  Her language is like tomato soup that has been diluted with too many cans of water.  I can’t get a grasp of anything specific.  Admittedly, she states that this is not a how-to book.  Still, I expected a bit more to work with.
The chapter titles – “The Suspense Short Story”; “Development”; “First Draft” – suggest a very specific focus, but no subject is developed very far.  In the chapter “The Second Draft,” she writes, “I used to make a complete second draft, and then a third … Lately, I am a little more efficient and do not have to retype every page of my first draft to form a second draft …”
I’m glad she has that kind of efficiency, but again it gives me nothing to work with.  While Highsmith is upfront that she is describing her techniques and not other writers’, she remains frustratingly vague.  Probably the best section of the book is her analysis of her novel The Glass Cell.  Only there does she go into detail about how she constructed the plot and how she revised it when the book was initially rejected.
Highsmith seems to have a workman-like approach to writing.  When writing a 200-page novel, certain key elements need to occur within the prescribed allotment of text.  Okay, that makes sense.   But when she analyzes the opening lines of various novels, she talks more about the number of lines involved rather than what those lines contain.  For example, when she examines Graham Greene’s “The Basement Room,” she provides the first sentence of the story then she goes on to write, “And so on for four lines, then a paragraph of five lines, then eight, then six.”  I’m not sure what this is supposed to teach me about writing, other than that paragraphs have varying lengths.
The biggest problem with Plotting is the sagging, lackluster tone.  For such an accomplished writer to sound so bored about writing is a puzzle to me.  Where is the love for the craft?  Where is the curiosity about the unexpected discovery?  It seems awfully ironic that someone who can construct exciting suspense fiction cannot use language with any sense of urgency.

Top Ten Books (I've Read) of 2016

Life intervened with many projects and responsibilities that often kept me from curling up with a book.  I would go for long stretches where I wouldn’t be reading anything. 
However, I did manage (barely) to meet my GoodReads Challenge of 50 books this year.  Also, I participated in a fun game with my family in which we read the following:
A book published this yearA book you can finish in a dayA book you’ve been meaning to readA book you should have read in schoolA book published before you were bornA book that intimidates youA book you previously abandonedA book you’ve already read at least once
My family has very eclectic taste, from James Baldwin to Barbara Kingsolver, from The Old Testament to The Lives of Tao, from Jonathan Livingston Seagull to The Year of Magical Thinking.  We’ve already compiled the categories for 2017:  A book in a genre you don’t normally read; a graphic novel; an autobiography, a book translated from a non-romance language, etc.  It should be a lot of fun.
So, with that preamble out of the way, here’s the list of my favorite ten books from 2016.

To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: An Informal Autobiography, Lorraine HansberryOne of my favorite books from 2015 was A Raisin in the Sun, so when I came across this autobiography, I was excited to read it.  It takes an unconventional approach: rather than a linear, memoir style, this bio is a collection of journals, letters, speeches, interviews, and excerpts from Hansberry’s plays.  Instead of chronicling her life, the book focuses on themes and issues that fascinated her.  She is sharp, insightful, contemplative, and witty.  I came away feeling exhilarated and challenged to examine the world as I see it.




Winnie-the-Poohand The House at Pooh Corner, A.A. Milne
After the grueling political season, I needed something uplifting.  These two books were favorites when I was little.  I still believe there really is the Hundred Acre Woods with all its adorable denizens.  Pooh may be a bear with very little brain, but he has a heart that is gargantuan.  I needed to rediscover that.








84, Charing Cross Road, Helene Hanff Quirky and charming.  An American writer has an extended correspondence with a British bookseller.  Though they never meet, it doesn’t matter, because friendship transcends time and space.  A true story.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Barbara KingsolverAkin to a modern-day Walden, Kingsolver writes lovingly of the exquisite rewards of following the natural growing seasons. She and her family, for one year, grow their own produce or eat locally-sourced food.  This book made me rethink my relationship to what I eat and how I shop.








A List of Things That Didn’t Kill Me, Jason SchmidtSchmidt’s memoir covers his unconventional childhood:  the son of a drug dealer/addict, Jason lives on the fringes of society as he and his father move up and down the west coast.  For all its grueling nature, Schmidt’s memoir is very readable and sometimes quite funny. 






 The Chocolate War, Robert CormierSet against a fundraiser at a Catholic school, The Chocolate Warfocuses on the individual vs society.  It’s one of the most frequently banned/challenged books, ostensibly for its strong language, but my guess is that adults are uncomfortable with Cormier’s chilling depiction of nonconformity and mob violence. 




 CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, George SaundersA short story collection that is satiric, scathing, funny, and sometimes sad.  Very sad.  The stories are set in various metaphoric versions of a rundown Disneyland, with characters struggling for dignity and love, but are often shamed into submission.  While this may not sound particularly funny, Saunders does know when to put in some quirky humor.






A Monster Calls, Patrick NessThe story of 13-year-old Conor, whose mother is dying of cancer.  He is tortured by a recurring nightmare that is so frightening that he will not tell anyone about it.  Then one night he subconsciously calls into an existence an ancient monster intent upon telling him three stories.  There are plenty of novels about children facing enormous, heart-wrenching challenges, but Ness taps into deep, emotional currents with his fairytale-esque novel.  I wish I’d written it.







A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth 
Dickensian in scope, Seth’s novel of 1950’s India is brimming with life.  Political turmoil, social commentary, family soap opera, and of course love story.  At 1500 pages, you need strong arms and commitment to read it, but it’s well worth it.  I’ve read it twice.





The rest of the 50 books:
Anywhere at Once, 826CHIThe Complete Fables, AesopThe Complete Collected Poems¸ Maya AngelouTom Swift and his Motorcycle, Victor AppletonSelected Poems, Gwendolyn BrooksGirl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy ChevalierAnd Then There Were None: A Mystery Play in Three Acts, Agatha ChristieThe Children of Odin, Padraic ColumPlot, Ansen DibellI’ll Tell You Mine: Thirty Years of Essays from the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program, ed. Hope EdelmanThe Memory Keeper’s Daughter, Kim EdwardsThe Circle, Dave EggersThe Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ralph Waldo EmersonThe Eyre Affair, Jasper FfordeSharp Objects, Gillian FlynnAsgard Stories: Tales from Norse Mythology, Mary H. FosterDescent, Tim JohnstonThe Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Mark HaddonTokyo Ghoul #1, Sui IshidaBatman: The Dark Knight Archives, Vol. 1, Bob Kane and Bill FingerScowler, Daniel KrausGoat: A Memoir, Brad LandMoon over Buffalo, Ken LudwigGrace Notes, Bernard MacLavertyHeroes of the Negro Leagues, Jack MorelliMad Tinker’s Daughter, J.S. MorinThe Best American Poetry, ed. Paul MuldoonLolita, Vladimir NabokovIn the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, Nathaniel PhilbrickThe Mysteries of Udolpho, Ann RadcliffeLibrary of Souls, Ransom RiggsThe Spaceship Under the Apple Tree, Louis SlobodkinPrivate Life, Jane SmileyApocalypticon, Clayton SmithPants on Fire: A Collection of Lies, Clayton SmithBatman, Volume 1: The Court of Owls, Scott SnyderKes, Lawrence TillFences, August WilsonNothing, Anne Marie Wirth CauchonHow Fiction Works, James Wood

Book Review: A Monster Calls

“Stories were wild, wild animals and went off in directions you couldn’t expect.”  So is the lesson at the center of A Monster Calls.  It couldn’t be more accurate.
“Stories are important, the monster said.  They can be more important than anything.  If they carry the truth.”
Patrick Ness’s novel, inspired by an idea by Siobhan Dowd, follows the story of 13-year-old Conor, whose mother is dying of cancer.  Conor is tortured by a recurring nightmare that is so frightening that he will not tell anyone about it.  He barely will allow himself to think of it.
Then one night a giant yew tree outside his house turns into an ancient monster.  It claims that Conor called it into existence, though the boy cannot figure out how or why.  The monster shares three stories about heroes and villains.  Yet in each case, the tales twist at the end, revealing an unsettling truth about the complexity of life.
In turn, Conor will share his story, his truth.  And that leads him back to the nightmare.
There have been plenty of novels about children facing enormous, heart-wrenching challenges:  life and death, terminal illness, physical abuse, war. 
Ness takes these same elements and layers a fable quality over them, while still remaining grounded in Conor’s internal world.  Everything is filtered through Conor’s lens – his awkward relationship with his father, the cold war with his grandmother, the cruel interactions with the school bully.  Yet each time the monster appears, though it seems fantastical, it is an elemental part of Conor’s story.  Whether the monster is a manifestation of his psyche or an actual creature from the Old World come to life, it doesn’t matter, because the true monster of the story is the truth that Conor has to face.
I love novels that tap into deep, emotional currents where authors have expressed in uncanny detail what a tragedy or a victory feels like.  There are many times I have teared up, and not from sentimentality but rather a sense of communion with the characters.
Patrick Ness is one of those authors.  I confess I have faced challenges similar to Conor’s, but that wasn’t the simple reason I had tears running down my face.  Rather, it was that the author knew how to express that precarious balance of complex emotions.  Grief isn’t one thing; it’s many.  Anger isn’t shameful; there are legitimate reasons for feeling it.  And Ness carries us through the maelstrom of Conor’s inner world and brings us out into a surprisingly tender conclusion that hasn’t anything to do with miracles.  It has to do with recognizing that people are “complicated beasts,” as the monster describes them, who are capable of holding contradictory thoughts – the intellect and the heart at war with each other, and one isn’t any more right than the other.
Yes, stories are wild and dangerous.  They have to be, especially when they deal with the truth.

Book Review: Lolita

I really didn’t enjoy this book.
The plot involves Humbert Humbert, a 40-year-old man who becomes obsessed with 14-year-old Lolita, and eventually they become sexual partners.  His behavior is unnerving, to say the least, especially through the lens of a predator sexually abusing an adolescent.  The power differential in the relationship is unpleasant, no matter how he tries to convince the reader that it was Lolita who did the seducing.
But that wasn’t what got me.  I’ve read other novels with challenging stories and didn’t have such a hard time getting through them. 

None of the characters are terribly engaging.  Humbert is a humbug, as his name would suggest.  Lolita (Dolores) is manipulative.  The secondary characters who drift through the story come across as petty annoyances.
But that still wasn’t what got me.  I’ve read other novels with unlikeable characters. 
No, what got me was the language.  Vladimir Nabokov employs Humbert as narrator imbued with such pomposity that the sentences are a snarl of wordplay, hyperbole, and puns.  There is spattering of French throughout (which makes sense, given Humbert’s background), but every time it appears, I suspect there is a joke going on, and I don’t get the punchline (I admit that that’s my limitation, not the writer’s).
Linguistic legerdemain
is my thingI recognize that Nabokov is doing something original here.  I recognize that this is a unique story, and given how the term “Lolita” has become part of our language, clearly the author has tapped into something in the cultural psyche.  I acknowledge that there is a lot of richness to the language and great heaps of humor throughout. 
And yet, I didn’t enjoy it.  I was bored.  I was bored with untangling all the sentences.  I was bored with Humbert’s quirks and his obsession.  I was bored with the endless ruminations.  I was bored.
Lolitais listed fourth in the Modern Library’s greatest English language novels of the 20th century.  It’s included in Time magazine’s 100 best English-language novels published between 1923-2005.  It is highly praised and critiqued and analyzed.
I get it.  It’s an important book.
It’s just one that I didn’t really like.

Book Review: The Mysteries of Udolpho

What’s a 21st century guy like me doing reading an 18th century novel like The Mysteries of Udolpho? 
I’m a big fan of Victorian literature, so this is merely a step backward to the era of Frankenstein, when Gothic novels were the rage:  a mixture of romance, mystery, and horror.  A sweet, young heroine.  A brooding villain.  Overwrought emotions.  Supernatural elements. 
In Ann Radcliffe’s Udolpho, Emily St. Aubert is a recently orphaned young woman who is taken under the charge of her selfish aunt and her Italian nobleman husband, Montoni.  Montoni is the prototypical Gothic villain.  He is grim and cruel and exerts complete control over poor Emily, endeavoring to force her to marry for his political gain.  For a year, she is trapped in Castle Udolpho, which is replete with ghostly voices and strange things hidden behind curtains.  Eventually Emily escapes from Montoni’s clutches, and she returns home to reclaim her parents’ estate.

Along the way, Emily meets Valancourt.  Talk about a perfect name for the heroine's love -- suggestive of valor and courtliness (or courtesy).  Don’t worry; what follows next is in no way a spoiler.  Though they appear destined to be together, the course of love never runs smoothly.  Valancourt has a weakness for gambling.  While Emily eventually forgives him, she is unwilling to risk her heart with him.  Of course, it proves all a misunderstanding, and by the end of the novel, they are wed.
"You can quit fainting now.
It's only the wind."Radcliffe spends excessive amounts of time describing the scenery of the Pyrenees and the Appenines – great overblown paragraphs of Nature with a capital N, in which everything is lush and rich, pulsing with life.  Sometimes the scenery inspires young Emily to compose lengthy poems, which intersperse the novel.  The irony is that the author never visited any of these locations and instead she used travel books to guide her descriptions.  These passages, unfortunately, halt the course of the action.  I thought that this was merely my 21st century sensibility to not have the patience to wade through thick language, but evidently contemporary reviewers had the same complaint:
“[Radcliffe’s] talent for description leads her to excess.  We have somewhat too much of evening and morning; of woods, and hills, and vales, and streams.  We are sometimes so fatigued at the conclusion of one representation of this kind, that the languor is not altogether removed at the commencement of that which follows.”  The British critic, and quarterly theological review, 1794.
"Oh, sweet mysteries
of Udolpho,
at last I've found you!"One amusing aspect of this Gothic story is the role of overwrought emotions.  Characters are forever swooning and quaking before apparently supernatural events.  Emily herself often finds herself trembling under the pressure of too much emotion.  When she overhears some mysterious notes of music through her bedroom window, she cowers for the entire night.  But when another character is afraid that ghosts or specters are wandering the corridors, Emily indulgently humors them, as though they are childlike in their imaginations while she is the strong one.  Well, if that isn’t the kale calling the cabbage green.
Even the author herself cannot always face the terror.  In one incident, Emily draws aside a veil, thinking to see a painting, but instead finds herself face-to-face with … something so horrifying that Ann Radcliffe cannot even bring herself to describe it.  It’s not until the very end of the novel that the object is revealed.
The Mysteries of Udolpho is like a tasty dinner buried under too much guacamole.  I’m not sure I can recommend it to anyone other than diehard fans of Gothic literature.  But then of course, if you are a fan, you’ve probably already read it.

So Long, Darlings

Something has to go.  That’s what the agent tells me.  At 110K words, my novel Reston Peace is too long.  It should be between 60-80K.  I know that; I really do.  Now, how to figure out what to cut.
A brief history.  Reston Peace is a novel I’ve been working on for ** years (I guess the number doesn’t really matter), and it’s gone through 4 distinct iterations.  Every time, I’ve tightened the scope of the story, and every time I feel like it comes out better.  But this latest round, I must admit, has been the toughest bout, because now I have to remove entire subplots and eliminate several characters.  Ross:  Kenny’s abusive stepfather.  Ross was an overwritten, nasty piece of work that was meant to act as a smokescreen to the real sexual abuse that Kenny was suffering at the hands of his mother.  I took him out, and the story is definitely better off without him.
If William says so ...Nancy: waitress at Gallimar’s Restaurant.  Kenny has a brief relationship with Nancy, but they prove incompatible.  Her part kept getting whittled down until she really no longer had a function in the story.
Mr Gallimar: owner of Gallimar’s Restaurant.  In the very first version of the story, Mr Gallimar was a bit of a father figure to Kenny.  As the story underwent extensive revisions, his part also was reduced.  He’s still there as a very minor character, but only has one or two significant appearances.
If Stephen says so ...Marilyn:  Kenny’s manager at the shopping mall.  Her role has been given to Nathanya, who used to serve a different purpose in the story.
Christopher: one of Kenny’s sexual partners.  His scenes are most difficult pieces to cut because he is Kenny’s emotional doppelganger.  I folded his role into Carmena’s (another of Kenny’s partners), but in doing this, I have to jettison a scene I really worked hard on.  But as Faulkner advises, kill your darlings.
There is still more work to do to get it within the 60-80K range, but I have made some significant headway.  Take a deep breath before the next plunge ...

Book Review: A Suitable Boy

“The secret to being a bore is to say everything.” Voltaire
That’s the aphorism at the beginning of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, and it couldn’t be farther from the truth.  The book ends just shy of 1500 pages, but there is little that is boring about it.  It’s packed full of vibrant characters whose lives are an interwoven medley of family dynamics, Indian history, politics, culture, and religion.  Sometimes Vikram doesn’t know where to stop.   The story starts with Mrs Rupa Mehra’s wish that her 19-year-old daughter Lata marry a suitable boy.  Over the course of the novel, Lata meets three eligible young men:  the athlete Kabir, the poet Amit, and the businessman Haresh.  Who she will marry isn’t so much based on what these men do but rather who they are – how through their sense and sensibility they interact with the world.
The author is throwing a broad net over a volatile period of India’s independence in 1951-52.  The Congress is on shaking legs, elections are approaching, and there are potential conflicts across the Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Buddhist communities.  Through the tactics of political parties jockeying for power, Seth touches on all levels of society, from shoe makers to MP’s.
Roll over, DickensThe story is very Dickensian in scope, with plenty of eccentric characters and comic turns that are thrown into contrast against decidedly dramatic incidents.  Seth keeps things colorful through the holy days and the festivals.  He delights in the small details of dress and custom.  You can see the kurtas, saris, lehengas, and dhotis.  You can taste the paan, dal, and samosas.  Mention ghee, and my mouth was watering.

Twenty years ago, I read A Suitable Boy and knew I would read it again someday.  This year, on January 1, I pulled it off the shell.  I finished it on September 19 – 263 days later.  Granted, I’m a slow reader.  But taking that much time made the novel a particularly immersive experience.  I found I could dip into it from time to time, and because Seth developed such believable characters, I rarely lost track of where the story was going.
Seth is currently completing the sequel A Suitable Girl which is to be published in 2017.