Mark Willen's Blog, page 4

Can Books Still Change the World?

So, I’ve been reading Frederick Douglass’s autobiography. I like to keep up with the latest fads and, as President Trump pointed out recently, Douglass “is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job that is being recognized more and more.”

Douglass is probably the most famous abolitionist of all time, and his work was widely recognized in the years before, during, and long after the Civil War, including by President Abraham Lincoln, whose response to Douglass’s criticism was to invite him to the White House to talk about their differences. Over time they developed a strong friendship and at least a partial reconciliation of their views. Lincoln listened, changed, and came to appreciate Douglass, and the feeling was mutual.

Douglass, who educated himself and escaped slavery, published the first of three autobiographies in 1845. It is as powerful and upsetting today, even after we know the horrors of slavery, as it was when it was published. Much of that power comes from Douglass’s remarkable skill as an author. Consider this passage about how he felt when he was free from slavery:

“I suppose I felt as one may imagine the unarmed mariner to feel when he is rescued by a friendly man-of-war from the pursuit of a pirate. In writing to a dear friend, immediately after my arrival at New York, I said I felt like one who had escaped a den of hungry lions. This state of mind, however, very soon subsided; and I was again seized with a feeling of great insecurity and loneliness. I was yet liable to be taken back, and subjected to all the tortures of slavery. This in itself was enough to damp the ardor of my enthusiasm. But the loneliness overcame me. There I was in the midst of thousands, and yet a perfect stranger; without home and without friends, in the midst of thousands of my own brethren—children of a common Father, and yet I dared not to unfold to any one of them my sad condition. I was afraid to speak to any one for fear of speaking to the wrong one, and thereby falling into the hands of money-loving kidnappers, whose business it was to lie in wait for the panting fugitive, as the ferocious beasts of the forest lie in wait for their prey. The motto which I adopted when I started from slavery was this—‘Trust no man!’”

The passage strikes me as particularly relevant today in light of the uncertainty facing so many immigrants standing on American soil.

Douglas didn’t stop with writing three volumes of his autobiography. He was one of the effective orators ever and he even started his own newspaper. But his autobiography had had such a profound effect on American society that it was undoubtedly an obvious pick when the New York Public Library selected the “Top 25 Books That Changed History.” It’s an interesting list, ranging from the King James Bible (as well as the Koran and the Torah) to The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. It also includes Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique, Darwin’s Origin of the Species, George Orwell’s 1984, and John Hersey’s Hiroshima.

What struck me about the list (other than that I’ve yet to read too many of the entries) was that the most recent book was Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown, which was published in 1970. Perhaps there is nothing more recent because it is too soon for anything to have had such a profound effect. Or, more frighteningly, it is because books are losing their influence.

In today’s world, it is much harder for any work—novel or nonfiction—to break through and reach a mass audience, especially if the work is serious, scholarly, or high literature. The best seller lists are stacked with genre novels meant to entertain more than to enlighten. And there is so much more competition that it is harder for any book to break through unless the author is already well known.

And of course, books now must compete for the attention of a public with a shorter attention span, while readers are flooded with social media of all types, as well as movies and music readily available on demand.

I’m not suggesting that books aren’t still thriving, just that there are so many more of them and so much else that it’s harder for any single work to have a strong and lasting impression. I can’t judge whether this is good or bad (or neither), but I’d welcome your thoughts on that, as well as suggestions for what you’d put on the list of most influential books published after 1970.

Please list your suggestions in an email to mark@markwillen.com or in the comment section below.

10 Great American Political Novels for Trying Times

As the campaign season draws to a close, there’s one thing we can all agree on: Truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction. But what about fiction with a strong political theme? Can it help us understand and make sense of the world around us? You bet it can, and I’ve got just the list to prove it.

Whether you’re fed up with politics and need an escape or you just can’t get enough of it, here are ten American political novels worth considering before Inauguration Day. The choices are mine, and I’ll warn you that I’ve left out a few that might seem particularly partisan (Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, for example), as well as the many great foreign political classics (1984, The Trial, War and Peace, to name just a few). Most have been made into movies, but trust me, the books are better.

The list of strictly American political novels has to start with All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren’s classic about the rise and fall of Willie Stark, a 1930s Louisiana politician (patterned after Huey Long) who sells his soul for political power. This Pulitzer Prize winning novel remains as relevant today as when it was published seventy years ago.

druryAdvise and Consent by Allan Drury provides a fascinating and intimate look at the workings of the U.S. Senate. Another Pulitzer winner (1959), it tells the story of a battle over the confirmation of a secretary of state who once belonged to the Communist Party.

Democracy, an American novel by Henry Adams, first published anonymously in 1880, is filled with characters based on the major politicians in the years following the Civil War. It is a novel about the acquisition, use, and abuse of political power. What’s amazing is how little has changed in the 136 years since it was published.

The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon is a gripping story about an American POW captured in Korea and brainwashed by the Chinese, who send him home programmed to kill the president. It was published in 1959, just four years before President Kennedy was assassinated, and remains a gripping and horrifying tale.

Catch-22, the satirical novel by Joseph Heller, is a different kind of political story. Set during World War II, it follows the life of Captain John Yossarian as he attempts to maintain his sanity in an impossibly insane world.

A Dangerous Friend by Ward Just seeks to make sense of the American experience in Vietnam. Just recreates the complications of U.S. involvement and manages to convey the war’s complexities and the struggles of American diplomats who are both well intentioned and misguided.

7-daysSeven Days in May by Charles W. Bailey and Fletcher Knebel (1962) is set at the height of the Cold War and involves a plot by the American military to oust the president in a coup. It’s a fun and engaging story.

Lincoln, Gore Vidal’s fictional biography of the 16th president, is historically accurate but written with a lively, creative style that makes it both informative and entertaining. Vidal provides vibrant portraits of Lincoln and several of his contemporaries.

Like Drury’s novel, Richard North Patterson’s Protect and Defend (2000) deals with an ugly confirmation battle, this one involving abortion and the nomination of the first female chief justice of the Supreme Court.

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (2004) has drawn attention this year because of some surface similarities to the 2016 campaign. Roth creates an alternate history in which Charles Lindbergh wins the 1940 election, adopts discriminatory policies against Jews and others, and signs a treaty with Hitler promising that the United States won’t interfere with German expansion.

That’s my list of the ten best American political novels. If you think I’ve got it wrong and want to suggest something else, comment below or send an email to mark@markwillen.com.

Open Magda Szabó’s Door and You Won’t Regret It

So you devoured Elene Ferrante’s tetralogy and now you’re wondering what other international gems are out there—books so good you can’t believe you never heard of them. Well, look no further than Magda Szabó’s The Door. If you like Ferrante, I guarantee you’ll like Szabó.

Magda Szabó, who died in 2007 at age 90, was one of Hungary’s most important 20th century writers, widely read and admired at home but only recently getting the love and attention she deserves worldwide. The Door was published in 1987 but not translated into English until 2005, when it appeared in Britain. Last year, the New York Review Books classics offered it up to American audiences in a new, widely praised translation by Len Rix. We should all be thankful.

Born in 1917, Szabó left her teaching career and took a job with the government in 1945. She published her first work—a collection of poems—in 1947. A second collection published two years later won one of Hungary’s premier prizes, but the prize was immediately withdrawn by the Stalinist rulers of Hungary, who named her an “enemy of the people.” Szabó then lost her government job and was barred from publishing anything between 1949 and 1956. During her “frozen” period she wrote her first novel, Freskó (Fresco), but wasn’t allowed to publish it until 1958.

Szabó’s biography is important to The Door because the first-person narrator, a “lady writer” also named Magda whose career was also “frozen” by the Communists bears a close resemblance to the author, and Szabó acknowledged in interviews that the work is largely autobiographical.

Magda, though, is not the central character of the novel. That honor goes to Magda’s housekeeper Emerence, a remarkable, gigantic enigma of a woman who is one of the strongest and most intriguing characters you’ll ever meet in literature.

The novel opens (and ends) with Magda recounting the recurrent dream that has led her to write her story. She wants, she tells us, to confess that “I killed Emerence. The fact that I was trying to save her rather than destroy her changes nothing.” If that won’t keep you reading, I’m not sure what will.

Magda begins her story in the late 1950s, after she and her husband have moved into a large apartment and soon after Magda’s political rehabilitation in Communist Hungary. She is now a full-time writer with no time for housekeeping, and a friend recommends she hire Emerence. They meet and Magda quickly offers her the job, but Emerence demurs, saying she must first check out Magda’s reference. “I don’t wash just anyone’s dirty linen,” she explains. It is the first indication that Emerence is not about to assume a subservient role.

Emerence takes the job but on her own terms. She’ll keep the house in order (as well as several other households she manages), but she’ll come and go when she wants. That proves fine with Magda—the house is always spotless and all her needs are attended to—and Magda slowly adjusts to her housekeeper’s penchant for criticizing Magda’s work, lifestyle, and religion. It seems a small price to pay for having her household in order.

Emerence is unusually strong (she regularly sweeps the snow in front of eleven buildings in addition to her housecleaning duties), and serves as a pillar of the community. Everyone in the neighborhood relies on her, she is generous and always the first to help anyone in need, her friendship is valued by all, and even animals gravitate to her. She is also practical, anti-intellectual (she won’t even look at the books she dusts), hostile to the church, proud of her working-class routes, and fiercely independent. In short, everything Magda is not.

Still, their friendship and love gradually grows over their twenty-year tempestuous relationship, although it is always Emerence calling the shots. When Magda and her husband rescue a dog from death, Emerence encourages them to keep it and then trains it so that it will only obey orders from her. The dog takes on a larger than life role. Indeed, you are unlikely to meet an animal in literature with more human-like qualities. Emerence insists naming the dog Viola, even though it is a male. The significance of the name won’t be apparent until much later. That is true of many of the book’s most important details, with Szabó doing a masterful job of doling out information in little pieces, while employing an increasingly ominous tone, so that their significance in the broader picture doesn’t become clear until the climax. Her prose—concise yet intimate—is perfectly suited to the task.

Although their friendship grows into something close to real intimacy, there is always a door between them, both a physical one (Emerence allows no one to cross the threshold of her apartment) and an emotional one (Emerence’s insistence on keeping part of her history and herself secret is symbolized by the head scarf that she always wears).

For many readers The Door is likely to bring to mind Ferrante’s Neapolitan tetralogy for several reasons, notably the friendship between the two principle characters in each book. Both involve an odd combination of affection, intimacy, codependence, and abuse. Both have narrators who are writers and may or may not be reliable, and both involve a friend of extraordinary talents who remains a mystery to the narrator.

This year New York Review books will publish a new translation of another of Szabó’s novels, Iza’s Ballad, which first appeared in Hungary in 1963. I can’t wait.

A Sense of Place; What We Can Learn From Richard Russo

When I was in graduate school and working on an early version of my first novel, Hawke’s Point, my thesis advisor asked me if I’d read Richard Russo. I hadn’t, but when he said my writing reminded him of Russo’s, I rushed out to get everything I could lay my hands on. The advisor’s comment was reinforced when a reviewer of Hawke’s Point also cited a similarity to Russo.

At first, I didn’t really see it. Sure, Russo has set many of his novels in a small northern town that was inseparable from the richly defined characters that populated it. The setting defined the people and the people, not the plot, drove the narrative, which is what I was trying to do. Russo also uses my favorite point of view—an omniscient narrator who gets inside all of the important characters’ heads. Later, when an agent told me she was rejecting my novel because it was character-driven rather than plot-driven and “no one buys those anymore,” I wanted to yell, “Richard Russo, Richard Russo, Richard Russo.”

To me, though, the similarities between my work and Russo’s were superficial, and I would never dare to put my work on the same level as his. But the connection that others saw inspired me to study his books and learn as much as I could from them. My task became a little easier when I discovered an essay he contributed to Creating Fiction, a textbook edited by Julie Checkoway.

Russo’s essay is entitled “Location, Location, Location: Depicting Characters Through Place,” and it’s invaluable to any writer who wants to explore the importance and potential of setting, as well as anyone wanting to better understand Russo’s novels. I reread it last week just after completing Everbody’s Fool, Russo’s recent sequel to his Pulitzer Prize winning novel Nobody’s Fool, published more than twenty years ago.

Russo’s starting point is the tenet taught to every beginning writer that place can be a character. London is obviously a character in almost everything Charles Dickens wrote, just as the East Buckingham neighborhood outside Boston is a character in Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, just as West Texas is a character in Larry McMurtry’s wonderful Lonesome Dove, to name just a few examples. (Incidentally Lehane’s East Buckingham and Russo’s North Bath are both fictional places, but it doesn’t matter—they become very real in the hands of the writers.)

everybody's foolIn his essay, Russo separates interior and exterior settings. The interior, the personal living space and objects that fill it, are easily identified and are self-evidently important. Everyone knows, to use Russo’s example, that “a person who owns an ice bucket and silver cocktail shaker is different from someone who owns a claw-footed tub for bathing.”

Much harder to understand the importance of exterior setting, and the truth is, it doesn’t always matter and it isn’t always useful, especially in today’s modern world where a highway strip sheltering a McDonald’s, a Pizza Hut, a Wal-Mart, and a Home Depot could be almost anywhere. And certainly plenty of great novels aren’t set anywhere (Where is Kafka’s penal colony? Does not knowing detract from the reading experience?).

But many of us readers prefer to be grounded in a specific place and many of us writers believe it can make a big difference to the trajectory of a novel. Again, to quote Russo: “The only compelling reasons to pay more attention to place, to exterior setting, is the belief, the faith, that place and its people are intertwined, that place is character, and that to know the rhythms, the textures, the feel of a place is to know more deeply and truly its people.”

It’s a belief that drives my writing and it’s a belief that is certainly evident in Russo’s latest, Everybody’s Fool, a novel driven by characters who are fully imagined and beautifully brought to life, in large part because the small, down-on-its-luck factory town they all call home is so fully rendered and in part because its influence on the people is so clear that you can’t imagine them living anywhere else. The novel isn’t perfect—there are too many characters too fully developed for my taste—but for anyone interest in studying how to use setting or who appreciates the value of doing so, there is nothing better.

When War Inspires Great Novels

What is it about war that produces such compelling literature? And what is it about World War II, in particular, that continues to capture us like none other?

As long as there has been war—and that’s since the beginning of time—storytellers have been trying to capture the experience, first to preserve it for history (think epics like Homer’s Iliad) and then to try to make sense of it. They have tried to explore it as tragedy (Shakespeare’s Henry V), as philosophy (Tolstoy’s War and Peace), through psychology (Pat Barker’s Resurrection), as memoir (My War: Killing Time in Iraq by Colby Buzzell) and even as comedy (Joseph Heller’s Catch 22). But whatever the approach the aim has been the same: to describe what can’t be described, to find humanity in the midst of cruelty, to understand what can’t be understood.

The modern American War novel had its beginnings with the likes of The Red Badge of Courage, and then on to Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, later to Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam novels and stories, including The Things They Carried. Today, and now Iraq and Afghanistan (One Hundred and One Nights by Benjamin Buckholz, Roxana Robinson’s Sandbox, and Helen Benedict’s Sand Queen).

But no war has produced as much great literature as World War II, and what surprises me is that it keeps on coming, more than seventy years after the war’s end and well after the torch has been passed to writers born long after it. A quick check shows there are 867 World War II novels currently on sale at Amazon, compared to 454 for Vietnam and 310 for World War I.

All the lightWhat got me thinking about this special fascination for World War II, if that’s the right word for it, was a recent reading of All the Light We Cannot See, the marvelous novel by Anthony Doerr that has racked up prizes and top reviews, all of them richly deserved, since its debut two years ago.

The novel is a brilliant lyrical story of two teenagers, a blind French girl, sly, resourceful, and courageous beyond belief, and a young German soldier, an orphan with a preternatural understanding of the magic of radio electronics, whose paths eventually cross in the battle for Saint-Malo, an occupied French town freed by the Americans soon after D-Day. The novel tells their parallel stories, jumping back and forth through time and different sides of the conflict.

You can appreciate this novel on many levels but for me, what was particularly striking was the depiction of occupied France and the different ways in which the citizenry reacts and copes, as well as the struggle of the teenage German soldier, a fundamentally decent child, entrapped by the cruelty of Hitler and haunted by the killing he witnesses but never engages in. Doerr bring them all to life with an extremely skilled pen.

But why did Doerr go back to World War II for his setting? He could just as easily have chosen Iraq or Afghanistan or one of a dozen more recent conflicts that involve innocent youth caught up in foreign occupation, resistance movements, and the peculiar cruelty that is war.

When I went to look up Anthony Doerr’s background, I was expecting to find a direct tie to the war, one that made writing about it all but inevitable. But if such a tie exists, it’s not apparent, and the author gives a wholly different explanation for his choice.

DoerrAn American who grew up in Cleveland, Doerr got the idea for the basic plot long before he picked a time and setting. But during a visit to Saint-Malo in 2004, he was stunned by its beauty and mentioned that to his editor. His editor asked if he knew the history. He didn’t, and was stunned to learn that the beautiful city he was seeing had been completely destroyed by American bombers trying to dislodge the German occupiers. It was only then that he decided to set his novel in World War II. In an interview with NPR, he said he worried that there were already too many books about that particular war but ultimately decided it was important to write another:

“Right now we’re at this incredible time. I feel really passionately about this. We’re losing thousands of people for whom World War II is memory every day. In another decade, there will be nobody left — very, very few people left — who can remember the war. And so history becomes something that becomes slightly more malleable. And I worry about how my own sons, my 10-year-old sons, are learning about the war, whether it’s through video games or the History Channel. Often, particularly politicians, they’re often presenting the war as a very black-and-white narrative. I worry that that’s dangerous. I think it’s important to empathize with how citizens come to a certain point, and you know, that might be a more meaningful way to try and avoid what had happened.”

That explanation works only up to a point. Much the same could be said of the wars going on today, which leaves me no closer to answering the question I started with. Why does this war still yield so much great literature?

What Makes a Good Book Series?

Check the best seller list on any given week and you’re bound to find lots of familiar authors writing about familiar characters. The heroes of mysteries and thrillers often lead the pack (Jack Reacher, Alex Cross, Lucas Davenport), but series characters also dominate in fantasy and even appear in literary fiction (John Updike's brilliant Rabbit series). That’s no surprise. Picking a book to read can be difficult and sometimes it’s easier (and safer) to spend a few hours with a character you know in the hands of an author you trust.

Jonathan SandfordJonathan Sandford
In the last year, I’ve been reading—and studying—a lot of these series, trying to separate the good from the mediocre, the fresh from the tired, the exciting from the ho-hum. Apart from the obvious (good character, good plot, good writing), it’s not always easy to figure out what separates the strong from the weak. James Patterson lost his allure for me long ago because his formula is always the same and his plots are full of absurdities. Yet I’ve probably read a dozen of Jonathan Sandford’s Lucas Davenport novels and still find myself looking forward to the next.

I divide the series character into three categories: The Peter Pans who never age or change (Lee Child’s Jack Reacher), those that grow and change in such significant ways that you almost have to read the novels in sequence (Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache or J.K. Rawlings’s Harry Potter), and those that age, marry, divorce, or change jobs but still remain true to themselves in what matters (Sandford’s Davenport or Michael Connolly’s Harry Bosch). Any of these can and do work well for authors and readers if the writing and characters are strong enough. It’s only when the writer gets lazy and takes his or her readers for granted.

I’ve had a good reason for studying series characters: I’m closing in on the second book in what could be a series of my own. When I wrote my first novel, Hawke’s Point, I was sure it was a one-off. I couldn’t even imagine a series. After all, my protagonist, Jonas Hawke is 73 and long past his prime. How many encores can there be?

But as I talked with readers about the novel, I realized that Jonas and his unlikely friend (a middle-aged, part-time call girl named Mary Louise) had struck a chord with readers who wanted to know more about them. Equally important, I realized there was more that I wanted to know.

Plus my publisher thought it would be a good idea.

So I decided to give it a try. At first I felt like a cheat. I knew these characters – how they thought, how they acted, what they cared about -- and it was easy and comfortable to write about them. But I soon realized that I had barely scratched the surface. It was like spending time with good friends. You know them, perhaps very well, but you can always know them better, and if you put them in circumstances they’d never encountered before, you get to learn all sorts of unexpected things.

When I started, I didn’t know where Jonas and Mary Louise would fit in the three categories I’ve described, but I soon felt them changing. The changes are sometimes subtle, sometimes significant. No one will have trouble recognizing Jonas, though outside events have put him in new circumstances that test his mettle, his values, and how he wants to leave his mark on the world. Mary Louise, being younger and facing a different kind of life change, is making a bigger transformation, and whereas Jonas knows himself pretty well at this stage in his life, Mary Louise is still learning a good deal.

In the end, I’m cautiously optimistic that it will work—and there may even be a third (though certainly final) novel in the Hawke “series.” But it’ll be awhile before we know, and readers will be the ones to decide.

Johnston's Remember Me Like This

Reading Bret Anthony Johnston’s Remember Me Like This brought me back to 2003, when kidnap victim Elizabeth Smart was released after eight months in captivity. I was teaching a course in journalism ethics and I asked my students to assess the media coverage, which included 24/7 speculation about why Smart hadn’t escaped earlier and what horrors she’d been subjected to. That led to a vigorous debate over the conflict between the right to privacy and the public’s right to know. I argued that in this case there was no right to know, only prurient interest and morbid curiosity. Not everyone agreed (and certainly not cable news). If only Anthony’s novel had been available then, it would have been assigned reading. It’s the perfect answer to media callousness.

Remember Me Like This is the story of a family trying to cope with a miracle—the return of 16-year-old Justin Campbell four years after he left the house with his skateboard and did not return. The search for him has consumed the family and much of the small Texas town where they live. The family never stops looking, but their efforts are all in vain until a flea market vendor recognizes the boy and calls the police. It turns out Justin has been held all this time in nearby Corpus Christi, imprisoned by a shadowy misfit but allowed enough freedom to play with other kids. He even had a girlfriend.

Why Justin hasn’t tried to escape and what unspeakable abuse he’s been subjected remain unknown to the family and to readers. Justin doesn’t volunteer much and his parents and his younger brother Griff have been instructed by Justin’s therapist not to ask. They are all too glad to obey. More important, the author takes the same advice.

john_9780812971880_cvr_all_r2.inddThat’s because this isn’t the story of Justin’s time in captivity; it’s the story of his family trying to return their lives to normalcy in a small town where everyone knows what happens and where everyone now wants to treat Justin like a celebrity, with well-meaning acquaintances asking for his autograph (but never for details). His return isn’t the end of the story; it’s just the beginning of another one.

The family has a lot of work to do. It’s been shattered by the kidnapping, with mother Laura withdrawing to spend her nights monitoring an ailing dolphin, father Eric finding moments of solace in the arms of another woman, and brother Griff grappling with misplaced guilt, blaming himself because he and Justin had argued just before Justin left the house.

The family’s attempts to adjust after Justin’s return are described with remarkable sensitivity and insight. We feel for them as much now as we did when Justin was missing. They don’t know how to adjust, and at first each goes about it in his or her own way. Eric tries to get closer to Justin by teaching him how to drive, while Laura devours books on the Stockholm Syndrome, and Griff tries to prove he can be as unhappy as he thinks Justin is. While each deals with his own guilt and regrets—and they all have plenty—they must learn anew how to relate to one another because they’re all different people now, especially Justin.

Johnston, who directs the creative writing program at Harvard, has worked hard to get inside the heads of Laura, Eric, and Griff (as well as Justin’s caring grandfather), and he succeeds in intimate detail. I can’t remember a book, fiction or nonfiction, in which I came away with a better understanding of the characters’ though processes. But Johnston wisely eschews Justin’s point of view so that we, like the rest of the characters in the novel, never get more than fleeting indications of what he is thinking, feeling, or suffering.

In an interview with National Public Radio, Johnston says he intentionally kept his distance from Justin, and particularly from the details of his years in captivity:

It was a conscious move. I really didn’t include it because I wanted to respect the character. I wanted to spend most of the time on the page with his family and not with what had happened to him. I understand that the reader is going to be curious about it. But I didn’t leave it out for any kind of tactical reason. I think the information is in the book. It’s just there in small, obscure, kind of off the page ways.

At one point in the novel, Griff works up the courage to ask Justin what life was like in captivity. “Is that a clever way of asking if he raped me?” Justin responds. Griff denies it, but he knows he’s lying and hates himself for wanting to know.

As Johnston notes, readers will be curious, but like Griff, we will hate ourselves for it. I think Johnston deserves a lot of credit for knowing when to be silent. If only the media could learn the value of such restraint, life might be just a tad bit easier for other victims.

The Novels of Paul Auster

I’ve become a big fan of the American writer Paul Auster—and not just because his first novella, City of Glass, was rejected by seventeen publishers before finding a home and launching a prolific, thirty-year literary career (and yes, that means I’m a bit late in joining his fan club). I read the New York Trilogy (which includes City of Glass) last year and loved it, but it was only last month that circumstances led to me to pick up another Auster novel, Invisible (2009), which I found even more fascinating.

Auster’s novels often include certain themes and patterns: they contain a good deal of autobiography, often made obvious when main characters are writers who either bear Auster’s own name or have the same initials, a frequent use of coincidence, a missing father, a sense of imminent disaster, and perhaps most important, an ambiguity about the story and the novel it appears in. This often takes the form of a book within the book, with the reader not discovering this until midway through the reading, or even later.

Invisible, for example, begins in 1967, with the first-person account of 20-year-old Adam Walker, who was born in February 1947, the same month as Auster, and who is attending Columbia University, as did Auster, and who spends time in Paris working as a translator and struggling poet, as did Auster.

But while Auster may have a penchant for including real-life touchstones in his work, his writing is fiction at its best. Invisible is a coming-of-age story about life and love, told through a series of interlocking love affairs. The prose is fluid, lean, and unpretentious, and it’s easy to read it too quickly, which is partly why I think Auster throws in the surprises that force a reader to stop, reconsider, and question everything that may have previously seemed clear. (Reader warning: The rest of this review includes spoilers.)

Invisible moves along briskly until page 65, when an unexpected act of violence stops the reader—and Walker—cold. And then on page 75, in part II of the novel, we learn that what we’ve read so far is actually the first part of a memoir written forty years later by Walker, who is dying of cancer. He’s sent the manuscript to an old college chum, Jim Freeman, also an author, to find out if it has any merits. A meeting is set but not for several weeks, and because time is literally short, Freeman urges Walker to keep going. While Walker is the narrator of the first part, his writer friend is the narrator of the second.

The next section of the memoir is the heart of the novel. It’s the telling, in beautiful but disturbing passages, of a passionate, month-long affair between Walker and his older sister, leading up to Adam’s scheduled departure for Paris. This section is told in the second person, with Walker talking in a sense to himself, a fascinating device that allows some distance, as though the subject matter is too personal, too difficult, for the pronoun “I.”

There is a clean break ending the incestuous affair, helped by Walker’s move to Paris. He knows that the physical relationship can never be reignited or even spoken about (it’s invisible like everything in life that truly matters), but still Walker is unable to get over it. In Paris, he becomes involved with two other women. Neither affair ends well, and Adam ends up returning abruptly to New York under shady circumstance.

After Walker’s death in the last section of the novel, Freeman is left to decide what to do with the manuscript. He decides to add his own comments to the memoir and publish it as a work of fiction, in a volume that presumably would look much like Invisible looks to the reader. Before he does that, however, he shows it to Walker’s sister, who verifies several key points, but denies that there was ever an incestuous affair. Freeman doesn’t know whether to believe her or Walker’s manuscript, and neither does the reader. And of course that makes the whole story questionable, with the reader left to draw his or her own conclusions. This is Auster’s trademark.

I found the use of the different first-person points of view—and especially the second-person section—quite interesting, as both a reader and a writer. In an interview with the The Paris Review a few years ago, Auster talked a little about why he likes to experiment with different approaches, preferring to avoid the common third-person point of view:

“The third-person narrative voice in the traditional novel is a strange device. We’re used to it now, we accept it, we don’t question it anymore. But when you stop and think about it, there’s an eerie, disembodied quality to that voice. It seems to come from nowhere and I found that disturbing. I was always drawn to books that doubled back on themselves, that brought you into the world of the book, even as the book was taking you into the world.”

Though Invisible and many of Auster’s other works have won critical acclaim and a host of awards, he’s not without his critics, most notably the respected James Wood, who wrote a scathing article in the Nov. 30, 2009 issue of The New Yorker:

“What Auster often gets. . .is the worst of both worlds: fake realism and shallow skepticism. The two weaknesses are related. Auster is a compelling storyteller, but his stories are assertions rather than persuasions. They declare themselves; they hound the next revelation. Because nothing is persuasively assembled, the inevitable postmodern disassembly leaves one largely untouched. (The disassembly is also grindingly explicit, spelled out in billboard-size type.) Presence fails to turn into significant absence, because presence was not present enough.”

That’s a minority view, as Wood acknowledges, but not one you should necessarily ignore. I guess you’ll just have to read the novel and draw your own conclusions.

Kids Say the Darndest Things

As a writer I love to read—first, for the joy of devouring a good book and, second, because as a writer I always learn something I can use. And as an aging baby boomer, I love to watch and try to mentor the youngest generation as it finds its footing in the world. That’s why I look forward each week to the 90 minutes I spend leading a teen writing club. It combines the best of both my worlds, and invariably I learn a lot—about life and about writing.

I first volunteered as a club leader after I gave up the 9-5 world to pursue writing fiction. I had recently completed a late round of graduate school, and I was again excited about the academic world. I thought I could bring that enthusiasm to a young group of would-be writers. To a certain extent, that’s been true, but more surprising has been how much I’ve learned from them.

At the outset, I was amazed at how good they are. Kids as young as 12 are writing full-length novels, and many show real promise. Sure they include amateur mistakes and too often the protagonist is a carbon copy of the author. But in a world when so many kids graduate high school without basic reading skills, these kids can really write—with strong “voices,” good dialogue, and telling descriptions. A surprising number are into fantasy, which is a problem for me because it’s never been a genre I’ve read (though they’re giving me an education). But that’s one of many examples of them opening my mind to something new.

We try to operate as a workshop. The aim, after all, is to provide peer support and feedback. Writing is a lonely venture, and it’s important for these kids to realize they’re not the only ones holed up in their room past midnight, tapping away on their laptops. I worried at first how they’d give and take criticism, but the bigger challenge has been eliciting any. They’re too quick to embrace everything, too slow to point out ways to make it better. But that reflects the fact that they’re open to everything, and when they do offer criticism, it’s always polite and gentle. And I’m constantly impressed at how well the older kids, some of whom are high school seniors, work with the seventh graders.

More than anything what impresses me is their basic approach to the writing process. They write about whatever interests them, and if they lose interest halfway through a long novel, they just put it aside and start something else. At first, I worried about this tendency not to finish what they’d started, but then I realized that they are writing for themselves, so why shouldn’t they pursue what interests them at the moment. Writing is important to them on many levels, but what frequently comes through is that it’s a way to process what they see and hear every day. It helps them understand their world and think through their problems.

That’s why they’re less worried about someone else’s approval. Sure, they love to have their friends read and like their stories, but in a world where peer pressure can be severe, approval doesn’t seem to be a requirement for these kids. They’re not writing to be published; they’re writing because they want to.

In the end, I wonder if too many adult writers are doing the opposite: Writing with publishing and sales in mind to such a degree that they’re limiting the scope of what they can accomplish. I’m not suggesting that readers don’t matter or that writers don’t need publishers or that publishers don’t need sales to survive, but I wonder if we’ve lost the right balance between the art of writing and the requirements of selling.

I’ll have to ask the kids what they think.

Rachel Joyce, Harold Fry and Queenie Hennessey

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of sequels, and even a few prequels, because I’m working on a sequel of my own. I’ve also been reading a lot of books with older protagonists because my main character is in his seventies. So it was no surprise that I picked up Rachel Joyce’s The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, a follow-on to her enchanting best seller of 2012, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. The principal characters are the same and the new novel is in many ways another chapter of the story, but it is neither a prequel nor a sequel. It’s an “equel.”

The first novel tells the story of Harold Fry, a retired brewery sales rep living a quiet life in a less-than-perfect marriage when he receives a letter from an old colleague and friend, Queenie Hennessy, whom he hasn’t seen in 20 years. They were once close, so close that when Harold went off his head after the death of his son and wrecked his boss’s office, Queenie stepped in and took the blame, saving Harold’s job. She soon left town and now lives on the other side of England, with Harold still unaware of her unrequited love for him, let alone her creation of a sea garden that pays homage to him.

Queenie has reached out to Harold to say goodbye because she’s dying of cancer. He writes a modest note in return and sets off to mail it, but he passes one mailbox after another until he decides he’s going to keep walking and deliver the letter in person. Never mind that Queenie is 600 miles away or that he has no plan, no change of clothes, and is wearing yachting shoes. He calls the hospice where Queenie is staying and leaves a message for her: “Wait for me.”

It’s the makings of a delightful story and in Joyce’s accomplished hands, it became a remarkable novel, longlisted for the Booker Prize and an international best seller.

As she made the rounds to promote the book, readers and interviewers kept asking Joyce if a sequel was planned. She said no, she never had any intention of doing that. Then she realized that something was missing.

queenieThe first book told readers very little about Queenie’s side of the story and eventually Joyce set out to fix that. The second book, which she prefers to call a companion to the first, takes place in Queenie’s hospice—and in her memory—during the time that Harold is on his journey. It helps that in the first book, Harold won the attention of the national media, which in turn allows all of the residents in the hospice to follow his walk on TV. In short order, they begin to feel that he is coming to see them as much as his old friend, and they, too, try to hold on until he arrives, with mixed success. Queenie decides to use the time to dictate a letter to Harold, which fills in a good deal of her history, both for readers and, tellingly, for Harold.

Each novel stands on its own, but each also adds meaning and depth to the other. This second book, though, is altogether different from the first. Both are rich in insight, mixing human foibles and life tragedies with humor, but Queenie’s story carries much more of a burden. On the one hand, Queenie’s life story is a sad tale of missed opportunities. And on the other, describing life in a hospice without invoking a reader’s pity is a huge challenge. The risk is that the story will be either very depressing or unbelievably upbeat. Joyce somehow manages to find the right balance. She makes us care deeply about all of the characters—Queenie, Harold, the nuns and volunteers who work in the hospice, and the other patients struggling to come to terms with their imminent deaths—without straining credulity or leaving us unbearably sad. The feelings I had when I finished the novel made me think of how I have felt when I’ve been able to say goodbye to a loved one by celebrating that person’s accomplishments, mitigating the loss of their presence.

Joyce, who’s 53, also has an understanding of older people, including the dying, and how to write about them. It’s something I’ve struggled with since an agent in her twenties looked at my query letter and exclaimed, “Your protagonist is 72? No one wants to read about an old man. Can’t you make him twenty years younger?” Well, no, and in the new book, he’s 74.

There are of course thousands of great works about older people—from King Lear to Old Filth—but suffice it to say, that in Joyce’s hands, older protagonists show a wisdom, an ability to look back and find meaning, a sense of humor, an appreciation for life, an understanding of people and human nature, and a reckoning with life’s tragic moments. That’s what makes Joyce’s companion novel so valuable to readers and it’s why any writer would do well to emulate her.