Mark Willen's Blog, page 5
August 11, 2015
Love Those Lists!
Some of my favorite reading comes from lists. With enticing names like “Best,” “Great,” or even “Chosen,” they promise new discoveries and hours of entertainment. I know not everyone feels this way—Washington Post book critic Carlos Lozada criticizes summer reading lists as stress inducers—but to me, reading lists actually remove the stress. Someone else has done the hard work of getting the goodies together, and I get to pick and choose what I want and ignore the rest. (I’ve even offered a few lists of my own in this space.)
One list that’s now at the top of my list of lists is the Guardian and Observer newspapers’ “100 Best Novels.” It’s an outgrowth of the Observer’s “100 Greatest Novels of All Time,” a list compiled in 2003 by then-literary critic of the Observer, Robert McCrum.
The earlier list showcased books in translation as well as books in English—from Don Quixote to Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald. The list has been a web sensation from the start, but McCrum had second thoughts. “I have had a sneaking worry that, drawn at random, from many different literatures, our selection was too spontaneous and too wide-ranging. Was there not a case for a more considered compilation? What, for example, would a list of the 100 classic British and American novels look like?”
He answers that question with the Best Novels list that he began unveiling in September 2013. Now in week 98 of the 100-week project, he’s posted his choice of English-language novels in an appealing and provocative format. The appeal is that you can click to get descriptions, reviews, interviews, should you need to further test your appetite for the recommended book. Provocative because why David Copperfield but not Pickwick Papers, why Portnoy’s Complaint but not American Pastoral? I guess because it’s Robert McCrum’s list and not mine.
If I have a quibble here or there, that’s all it is. Without his lists I probably would never have heard of Jerome K. Jerome and Three Men on a Boat. This short book tells the adventures of three young men and a dog on a river excursion around 1889, the year the book was published. It’s a story about nothing, with occasional descriptions of the English countryside thrown in. Jerome is a hoot, though he wasn’t aiming for humor. He set out to write something of a travelogue about the Thames and its scenery, but he kept stumbling into what he called “humorous relief.” Going from hilarious tangent to hilarious tangent, the author takes us on a nineteenth-century version of a Seinfeld episode.
One of my wife’s go-to lists that she often shares is Designers and Books, selections of books by designers, all kinds of designers—architecture, fashion, graphic design, interactive design, interior design, landscape architecture, product and industrial design, and urban design. The rationale for the list, according to the website, is that “there has always been a particularly special and robust relationship between designers and books: reading them, writing them, designing them, collecting them, learning from them, and being inspired by them.” I don’t know if that’s true, but the designers’ selections will lead you to books that you may never otherwise have seen.
A Woman in Berlin, by Anonymous [Marta Hillers], for example, is a recounting of her life during the two months in 1945 when the Russian army occupied Berlin. In beautiful, heartfelt measured prose, the author relates the impending Russian siege of Berlin, the fears of the women and old men at home, and the brutalities inflicted once they arrive. Hillers began the book as a diary, not with publication in mind, but was persuaded to publish it after the war. It first appeared anonymously in English in 1954 and five years later a Swiss publisher issued it in German. (The author’s name was revealed only after her death in 2001.) The book was controversial when it appeared, and it remains so. So soon after World War II, you wouldn’t find English readers shedding a tear over the degradations Germans suffered at the hands of the Russians, not after the abominations they inflicted, and German women had no wish to publicize the humiliating choices they had to make to survive. But now, with time, we can see that Hillers’ descriptions tell us something about war, something we can learn from.
Designers and Books, coming from 177 people at last counting, has a greater variety of recommendations than 100 Best Novels. There is fiction and nonfiction, books on design and books on philosophy, and with nearly 2,000 books on the list, you’ll surely find something to pique your interest.
Perhaps a good place to start is with some of the books that made both lists. Don Quixote, Austerlitz, Portnoy’s Complaint, and Emma—anyone?
One list that’s now at the top of my list of lists is the Guardian and Observer newspapers’ “100 Best Novels.” It’s an outgrowth of the Observer’s “100 Greatest Novels of All Time,” a list compiled in 2003 by then-literary critic of the Observer, Robert McCrum.
The earlier list showcased books in translation as well as books in English—from Don Quixote to Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald. The list has been a web sensation from the start, but McCrum had second thoughts. “I have had a sneaking worry that, drawn at random, from many different literatures, our selection was too spontaneous and too wide-ranging. Was there not a case for a more considered compilation? What, for example, would a list of the 100 classic British and American novels look like?”
He answers that question with the Best Novels list that he began unveiling in September 2013. Now in week 98 of the 100-week project, he’s posted his choice of English-language novels in an appealing and provocative format. The appeal is that you can click to get descriptions, reviews, interviews, should you need to further test your appetite for the recommended book. Provocative because why David Copperfield but not Pickwick Papers, why Portnoy’s Complaint but not American Pastoral? I guess because it’s Robert McCrum’s list and not mine.
If I have a quibble here or there, that’s all it is. Without his lists I probably would never have heard of Jerome K. Jerome and Three Men on a Boat. This short book tells the adventures of three young men and a dog on a river excursion around 1889, the year the book was published. It’s a story about nothing, with occasional descriptions of the English countryside thrown in. Jerome is a hoot, though he wasn’t aiming for humor. He set out to write something of a travelogue about the Thames and its scenery, but he kept stumbling into what he called “humorous relief.” Going from hilarious tangent to hilarious tangent, the author takes us on a nineteenth-century version of a Seinfeld episode.
One of my wife’s go-to lists that she often shares is Designers and Books, selections of books by designers, all kinds of designers—architecture, fashion, graphic design, interactive design, interior design, landscape architecture, product and industrial design, and urban design. The rationale for the list, according to the website, is that “there has always been a particularly special and robust relationship between designers and books: reading them, writing them, designing them, collecting them, learning from them, and being inspired by them.” I don’t know if that’s true, but the designers’ selections will lead you to books that you may never otherwise have seen.
A Woman in Berlin, by Anonymous [Marta Hillers], for example, is a recounting of her life during the two months in 1945 when the Russian army occupied Berlin. In beautiful, heartfelt measured prose, the author relates the impending Russian siege of Berlin, the fears of the women and old men at home, and the brutalities inflicted once they arrive. Hillers began the book as a diary, not with publication in mind, but was persuaded to publish it after the war. It first appeared anonymously in English in 1954 and five years later a Swiss publisher issued it in German. (The author’s name was revealed only after her death in 2001.) The book was controversial when it appeared, and it remains so. So soon after World War II, you wouldn’t find English readers shedding a tear over the degradations Germans suffered at the hands of the Russians, not after the abominations they inflicted, and German women had no wish to publicize the humiliating choices they had to make to survive. But now, with time, we can see that Hillers’ descriptions tell us something about war, something we can learn from.
Designers and Books, coming from 177 people at last counting, has a greater variety of recommendations than 100 Best Novels. There is fiction and nonfiction, books on design and books on philosophy, and with nearly 2,000 books on the list, you’ll surely find something to pique your interest.
Perhaps a good place to start is with some of the books that made both lists. Don Quixote, Austerlitz, Portnoy’s Complaint, and Emma—anyone?
July 9, 2015
Italy's Best-Known, Least-Known Contemporary Author
I wish I could introduce you to Elena Ferrante, but I can’t. The best I can do is make a stab at introducing you to her work. To some extent, of course, that is the case with all authors, although some writers appear so often in the media, we can be lulled into thinking we really do know them.
That is not a danger with Elena Ferrante. It’s not just that Ferrante is a pen name or that the author is reclusive. It is that she has, from the start, insisted her identity remain a mystery. When her first novel, Troubling Love, came out in 1991, she told her publisher that writing it was enough. There would be no signings, no readings, no appearances at conferences. Should it win a prize, she wouldn’t even attend the ceremony. Her letter to her published explained: “I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t.”
The notion that good books will find readers without an author’s promotion is one every author wants to believe, but one that no American publisher would ever go along with. But it worked for Ferrante. Her books, Troubling Love, The Days of Abandonment, The Lost Daughter, and the Neapolitan tetralogy that begins with My Brilliant Friend, have found huge audiences, first in Italy, and now that they’ve been translated into English, worldwide, making Ferrante what the New Yorker’s James Wood has called “one of Italy’s best-known, least-known contemporary writers.”
Ironically, keeping her identity a secret has fostered no end of speculation on who she may be, with much of it getting into the silly and absurd (including that her books are actually the work of another Italian author, Domenico Starnone).
None of that should matter to the serious reader because, as Ferrante believed and hoped, the books do speak for themselves, and beautifully so. The Neapolitan tetralogy traces the history of a close, lifelong friendship between two women who grew up together in a poor enclave outside Naples. They struggle to find their voice and earn a place in a culture controlled by outside forces—from abject poverty to the men who have too much say over the women in their lives. The novels are intensely personal, which may help explain Ferrante’s need for privacy. All of her narrators are women and they deal, often in shockingly candid terms, with marriage, motherhood, abuse, sexuality, and the need for independence.
Despite her reluctance to talk about her work, Ferrante did consent to be interviewed by her publishers for The Paris Review. It’s a remarkable interview, one I recommend almost as strongly as I recommend her writing, both for readers and other authors. Here are a few excerpts from that interview:
“Interviewer: James Wood and other critics have praised your writing for its sincerity. How do you define sincerity in literature? Is it something you especially value?
Ferrante: As far as I’m concerned, it’s the torment and, at the same time, the engine of every literary project. The most urgent question for a writer may seem to be, What experiences do I have as my material, what experiences do I feel able to narrate? But that’s not right. The more pressing question is, What is the word, what is the rhythm of the sentence, what tone best suits the things I know? Without the right words, without long practice in putting them together, nothing comes out alive and true. It’s not enough to say, as we increasingly do, These events truly happened, it’s my real life, the names are the real ones, I’m describing the real places where the events occurred. If the writing is inadequate, it can falsify the most honest biographical truths. Literary truth is not the truth of the biographer or the reporter, it’s not a police report or a sentence handed down by a court. It’s not even the plausibility of a well-constructed narrative. Literary truth is entirely a matter of wording and is directly proportional to the energy that one is able to impress on the sentence. And when it works, there is no stereotype or cliché of popular literature that resists it. It reanimates, revives, subjects everything to its needs.
Interviewer: How does one obtain this truth?
Ferrante: It definitely comes from a certain skill that can always be improved. But to a great extent, that energy simply appears, it happens. It feels as if parts of the brain and of your entire body, parts that have been dormant, are enlarging your consciousness, making you more sensitive. You can’t say how long it will last, you tremble at the idea that it might suddenly stop and leave you midstream. To be honest, you never know if you’ve developed the right style of writing, or if you’ve made the most out of it. . . .
Interviewer: Do you … have only one mode of writing? The question arises because quite a few Italian reviewers have attributed your books to different authors.
Ferrante: Evidently, in a world where philological education has almost completely disappeared, where critics are no longer attentive to style, the decision not to be present as an author generates ill will and this type of fantasy. The experts stare at the empty frame where the image of the author is supposed to be and they don’t have the technical tools, or, more simply, the true passion and sensitivity as readers, to fill that space with the works. So they forget that every individual work has its own story. Only the label of the name or a rigorous philological examination allows us to take for granted that the author of Dubliners is the same person who wrote Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The cultural education of any high school student should include the idea that a writer adapts depending on what he or she needs to express. Instead, most people think anyone literate can write a story. They don’t understand that a writer works hard to be flexible, to face many different trials, and without ever knowing what the outcome will be. . . .
Interviewer: When does a book seem publishable to you?
Ferrante: When it tells a story that, for a long time, unintentionally, I had pushed away, because I didn’t think I was capable of telling it, because telling it made me uncomfortable. . . .
Interviewer: Do you think this anxiety of yours has something to do with being a woman? Do you have to work harder than a male writer, just to create work that isn’t dismissed as being “for women”? Is there a difference between male and female writing?
Ferrante: I’ll answer with my own story. As a girl—twelve, thirteen years old—I was absolutely certain that a good book had to have a man as its hero, and that depressed me. That phase ended after a couple of years. At fifteen I began to write stories about brave girls who were in serious trouble. But the idea remained—indeed, it grew stronger—that the greatest narrators were men and that one had to learn to narrate like them. I devoured books at that age, and there’s no getting around it, my models were masculine. So even when I wrote stories about girls, I wanted to give the heroine a wealth of experiences, a freedom, a determination that I tried to imitate from the great novels written by men. I didn’t want to write like Madame de La Fayette or Jane Austen or the Brontës—at the time I knew very little about contemporary literature—but like Defoe or Fielding or Flaubert or Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky or even Hugo. While the models offered by women novelists were few and seemed to me for the most part thin, those of male novelists were numerous and almost always dazzling. That phase lasted a long time, until I was in my early twenties, and it left profound effects. “
Six of Ferrante’s novels are now available in English, including the Napolitano tetralogy, which were published in successive years from 2012 to 2015.
That is not a danger with Elena Ferrante. It’s not just that Ferrante is a pen name or that the author is reclusive. It is that she has, from the start, insisted her identity remain a mystery. When her first novel, Troubling Love, came out in 1991, she told her publisher that writing it was enough. There would be no signings, no readings, no appearances at conferences. Should it win a prize, she wouldn’t even attend the ceremony. Her letter to her published explained: “I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t.”
The notion that good books will find readers without an author’s promotion is one every author wants to believe, but one that no American publisher would ever go along with. But it worked for Ferrante. Her books, Troubling Love, The Days of Abandonment, The Lost Daughter, and the Neapolitan tetralogy that begins with My Brilliant Friend, have found huge audiences, first in Italy, and now that they’ve been translated into English, worldwide, making Ferrante what the New Yorker’s James Wood has called “one of Italy’s best-known, least-known contemporary writers.”
Ironically, keeping her identity a secret has fostered no end of speculation on who she may be, with much of it getting into the silly and absurd (including that her books are actually the work of another Italian author, Domenico Starnone).
None of that should matter to the serious reader because, as Ferrante believed and hoped, the books do speak for themselves, and beautifully so. The Neapolitan tetralogy traces the history of a close, lifelong friendship between two women who grew up together in a poor enclave outside Naples. They struggle to find their voice and earn a place in a culture controlled by outside forces—from abject poverty to the men who have too much say over the women in their lives. The novels are intensely personal, which may help explain Ferrante’s need for privacy. All of her narrators are women and they deal, often in shockingly candid terms, with marriage, motherhood, abuse, sexuality, and the need for independence.
Despite her reluctance to talk about her work, Ferrante did consent to be interviewed by her publishers for The Paris Review. It’s a remarkable interview, one I recommend almost as strongly as I recommend her writing, both for readers and other authors. Here are a few excerpts from that interview:
“Interviewer: James Wood and other critics have praised your writing for its sincerity. How do you define sincerity in literature? Is it something you especially value?
Ferrante: As far as I’m concerned, it’s the torment and, at the same time, the engine of every literary project. The most urgent question for a writer may seem to be, What experiences do I have as my material, what experiences do I feel able to narrate? But that’s not right. The more pressing question is, What is the word, what is the rhythm of the sentence, what tone best suits the things I know? Without the right words, without long practice in putting them together, nothing comes out alive and true. It’s not enough to say, as we increasingly do, These events truly happened, it’s my real life, the names are the real ones, I’m describing the real places where the events occurred. If the writing is inadequate, it can falsify the most honest biographical truths. Literary truth is not the truth of the biographer or the reporter, it’s not a police report or a sentence handed down by a court. It’s not even the plausibility of a well-constructed narrative. Literary truth is entirely a matter of wording and is directly proportional to the energy that one is able to impress on the sentence. And when it works, there is no stereotype or cliché of popular literature that resists it. It reanimates, revives, subjects everything to its needs.
Interviewer: How does one obtain this truth?
Ferrante: It definitely comes from a certain skill that can always be improved. But to a great extent, that energy simply appears, it happens. It feels as if parts of the brain and of your entire body, parts that have been dormant, are enlarging your consciousness, making you more sensitive. You can’t say how long it will last, you tremble at the idea that it might suddenly stop and leave you midstream. To be honest, you never know if you’ve developed the right style of writing, or if you’ve made the most out of it. . . .
Interviewer: Do you … have only one mode of writing? The question arises because quite a few Italian reviewers have attributed your books to different authors.
Ferrante: Evidently, in a world where philological education has almost completely disappeared, where critics are no longer attentive to style, the decision not to be present as an author generates ill will and this type of fantasy. The experts stare at the empty frame where the image of the author is supposed to be and they don’t have the technical tools, or, more simply, the true passion and sensitivity as readers, to fill that space with the works. So they forget that every individual work has its own story. Only the label of the name or a rigorous philological examination allows us to take for granted that the author of Dubliners is the same person who wrote Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The cultural education of any high school student should include the idea that a writer adapts depending on what he or she needs to express. Instead, most people think anyone literate can write a story. They don’t understand that a writer works hard to be flexible, to face many different trials, and without ever knowing what the outcome will be. . . .
Interviewer: When does a book seem publishable to you?
Ferrante: When it tells a story that, for a long time, unintentionally, I had pushed away, because I didn’t think I was capable of telling it, because telling it made me uncomfortable. . . .
Interviewer: Do you think this anxiety of yours has something to do with being a woman? Do you have to work harder than a male writer, just to create work that isn’t dismissed as being “for women”? Is there a difference between male and female writing?
Ferrante: I’ll answer with my own story. As a girl—twelve, thirteen years old—I was absolutely certain that a good book had to have a man as its hero, and that depressed me. That phase ended after a couple of years. At fifteen I began to write stories about brave girls who were in serious trouble. But the idea remained—indeed, it grew stronger—that the greatest narrators were men and that one had to learn to narrate like them. I devoured books at that age, and there’s no getting around it, my models were masculine. So even when I wrote stories about girls, I wanted to give the heroine a wealth of experiences, a freedom, a determination that I tried to imitate from the great novels written by men. I didn’t want to write like Madame de La Fayette or Jane Austen or the Brontës—at the time I knew very little about contemporary literature—but like Defoe or Fielding or Flaubert or Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky or even Hugo. While the models offered by women novelists were few and seemed to me for the most part thin, those of male novelists were numerous and almost always dazzling. That phase lasted a long time, until I was in my early twenties, and it left profound effects. “
Six of Ferrante’s novels are now available in English, including the Napolitano tetralogy, which were published in successive years from 2012 to 2015.
June 11, 2015
A Different Kind of Summer Reading List
When I was growing up, a summer reading list was big and heavy; heavy in the sense that it included those weighty tomes that you didn’t have time for during the rest of year—War and Peace, Ulysses, the Illiad. Gradually the summer list turned to beach reading, which was the exact opposite—easy books that you could read and enjoy without much thought. They provided an escape and a way to spend hours lying in the sun getting skin cancer without exerting too much effort. That seemed to lead to a burst in escapist literature of many genres: the kind of book you enjoyed but forgot as soon as you put it down.
Now the pendulum seems to be swinging back to more serious summer ambitions, and with that in mind, I’d like to offer my own recommendations. Most are books that I’ve read and appreciated enough to want to read again. None are as heavy as the classics mentioned above, but they all have substance in addition to being great reads. The list obviously reflects my own quirky preferences in literature, but these are books that I think all readers will enjoy on many levels and, more important, will walk away with plenty to think about. So here’s to a fun but also fruitful summer of reading:
A Gathering of Old Men by Ernest J. Gaines: This is one of the oldest books on my list (1983) but it deals insightfully with one of the most serious problems we’re wrestling with today: racism and the legal system. The novel is set on a Louisiana plantation much like the one that Gaines grew up on, starting work as a 9-year-old digging up potatoes for 50 cents a day. The novel opens with the murder of a white plantation boss, but any rush to judgment is stymied when twelve black men, all in their seventies or eighties, band together to thwart the white sheriff. Gaines exposes racial tensions on several levels, with many a twist and turn. A mystery beautifully told, richly evoking the setting and the spirit of the times. Gaines employs close to a dozen narrators to weave together this hypnotic tale.
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett: An opera diva’s performance at a birthday party for more than a hundred of the rich and famous is interrupted by terrorists who take the guests and staff hostage. Their ordeal stretches for months, allowing Patchett to show the best and worst in what turns out to be a microcosm of the world. This 2001 novel won the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction and is perhaps the best known book on this list.
Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat: In February, I wrote a very positive review in this space of Danticat’s latest novel, Claire of the Sea Light, but if you’re new to her work, a better place to start is this earlier novel. It’s the astonishing story of a young Haitian and her mother, who have emigrated to the United States, bringing with them the culture, heartaches and secrets of their Haitian past.
Mary Coin by Marisa Silver: You probably know the photograph that captured the despair of California’s Depression-era migrant workers: A seated woman looks off into the distance while children rest their heads on her shoulders, and an infant lies bundled in her lap. Now you should read the exceptional novel inspired by that photograph, a novel that captures an essential period of American history and the spirit of its people.
Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively: My colleague, Gary Garth McCann, wrote recently about Lively’s remarkable book, How It All Began, but this earlier novel, a 1987 Booker Prize winner, is a gem that’s often overlooked. Its protagonist is a 76-year-old English author who on her deathbed mentally composes a history of the world. It’s romantic and profound, with wonderful insights into human nature.
Old Filth by Jane Gardam: Gardam is a household name in Britain, but her popularity here is still relatively low. It’s time to fix that and Old Filth is the place to start. When the novel opens, Sir William Feathers, the title character, is nearing 80, has been retired for years after a brilliant career as barrister and judge in Hong Kong. He now lives in a little village in Dorset and his only close-by neighbor is also his longtime legal and personal nemesis. The two men form a caustic friendship that becomes Gardam’s vehicle for telling Old Filth’s story through flashbacks and present day events.
Stoner by John Williams: This the oldest book on my list (1964) and the only one written by someone who is no longer alive. It’s the deceptively simple tale of a man in a terrible marriage who looks for love elsewhere with tragic consequences. I wrote about this at some length in an earlier post that you can find here.
The Museum Guard by Howard Norman: Norman is best known his award-winning The Bird Artist, but you’re missing a lot if you haven’t also read this 1998 novel. Set mostly in Halifax, Nova Scotia, during the early years of World War II, The Museum Guard is narrated by a young man, DeFoe Russet, who was orphaned at age eight and raised by his hard-drinking, womanizing uncle. DeFoe turns out the almost opposite of his uncle; he’s an introvert who does his best thinking over an ironing board. Although The Museum Guard got only mixed reviews from the critics, it’s one of my favorites.
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce: Harold Fry is recently retired with nothing to do, unhappy with the state of his 47-year-old marriage and with a son who never calls, when he gets a goodbye note from an old friend who is dying of cancer. He writes a condolence letter and walks to the post office to mail it, but at the last minute decides he’ll deliver in person…by walking 500 miles across the British countryside.
The Widower’s Tale by Julia Glass: Glass is best known for Three Junes, her debut novel that won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2002. I much prefer The Widower’s Tale, a book that centers on a 70-year-old man whose quiet retirement in a small Massachusetts village gets disrupted when he agrees to rent out his barn to a popular pre-school. This is ultimately a story of family, in the broadest and best sense of the term.
Now the pendulum seems to be swinging back to more serious summer ambitions, and with that in mind, I’d like to offer my own recommendations. Most are books that I’ve read and appreciated enough to want to read again. None are as heavy as the classics mentioned above, but they all have substance in addition to being great reads. The list obviously reflects my own quirky preferences in literature, but these are books that I think all readers will enjoy on many levels and, more important, will walk away with plenty to think about. So here’s to a fun but also fruitful summer of reading:
A Gathering of Old Men by Ernest J. Gaines: This is one of the oldest books on my list (1983) but it deals insightfully with one of the most serious problems we’re wrestling with today: racism and the legal system. The novel is set on a Louisiana plantation much like the one that Gaines grew up on, starting work as a 9-year-old digging up potatoes for 50 cents a day. The novel opens with the murder of a white plantation boss, but any rush to judgment is stymied when twelve black men, all in their seventies or eighties, band together to thwart the white sheriff. Gaines exposes racial tensions on several levels, with many a twist and turn. A mystery beautifully told, richly evoking the setting and the spirit of the times. Gaines employs close to a dozen narrators to weave together this hypnotic tale.
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett: An opera diva’s performance at a birthday party for more than a hundred of the rich and famous is interrupted by terrorists who take the guests and staff hostage. Their ordeal stretches for months, allowing Patchett to show the best and worst in what turns out to be a microcosm of the world. This 2001 novel won the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction and is perhaps the best known book on this list.
Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat: In February, I wrote a very positive review in this space of Danticat’s latest novel, Claire of the Sea Light, but if you’re new to her work, a better place to start is this earlier novel. It’s the astonishing story of a young Haitian and her mother, who have emigrated to the United States, bringing with them the culture, heartaches and secrets of their Haitian past.
Mary Coin by Marisa Silver: You probably know the photograph that captured the despair of California’s Depression-era migrant workers: A seated woman looks off into the distance while children rest their heads on her shoulders, and an infant lies bundled in her lap. Now you should read the exceptional novel inspired by that photograph, a novel that captures an essential period of American history and the spirit of its people.
Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively: My colleague, Gary Garth McCann, wrote recently about Lively’s remarkable book, How It All Began, but this earlier novel, a 1987 Booker Prize winner, is a gem that’s often overlooked. Its protagonist is a 76-year-old English author who on her deathbed mentally composes a history of the world. It’s romantic and profound, with wonderful insights into human nature.
Old Filth by Jane Gardam: Gardam is a household name in Britain, but her popularity here is still relatively low. It’s time to fix that and Old Filth is the place to start. When the novel opens, Sir William Feathers, the title character, is nearing 80, has been retired for years after a brilliant career as barrister and judge in Hong Kong. He now lives in a little village in Dorset and his only close-by neighbor is also his longtime legal and personal nemesis. The two men form a caustic friendship that becomes Gardam’s vehicle for telling Old Filth’s story through flashbacks and present day events.
Stoner by John Williams: This the oldest book on my list (1964) and the only one written by someone who is no longer alive. It’s the deceptively simple tale of a man in a terrible marriage who looks for love elsewhere with tragic consequences. I wrote about this at some length in an earlier post that you can find here.
The Museum Guard by Howard Norman: Norman is best known his award-winning The Bird Artist, but you’re missing a lot if you haven’t also read this 1998 novel. Set mostly in Halifax, Nova Scotia, during the early years of World War II, The Museum Guard is narrated by a young man, DeFoe Russet, who was orphaned at age eight and raised by his hard-drinking, womanizing uncle. DeFoe turns out the almost opposite of his uncle; he’s an introvert who does his best thinking over an ironing board. Although The Museum Guard got only mixed reviews from the critics, it’s one of my favorites.
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce: Harold Fry is recently retired with nothing to do, unhappy with the state of his 47-year-old marriage and with a son who never calls, when he gets a goodbye note from an old friend who is dying of cancer. He writes a condolence letter and walks to the post office to mail it, but at the last minute decides he’ll deliver in person…by walking 500 miles across the British countryside.
The Widower’s Tale by Julia Glass: Glass is best known for Three Junes, her debut novel that won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2002. I much prefer The Widower’s Tale, a book that centers on a 70-year-old man whose quiet retirement in a small Massachusetts village gets disrupted when he agrees to rent out his barn to a popular pre-school. This is ultimately a story of family, in the broadest and best sense of the term.
May 6, 2015
Review: Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen
Some of my best friends are copy editors. No, really. After decades working as a journalist, and now as a novelist, I know how important copy editors can be, how often they save writers from embarrassing errors, and how underappreciated (and underpaid) they are. I’m also aware of the stereotype that suggests copy editors are obsessed, persnickety, humorless, and mean. Like most stereotypes, there’s some truth to it…but not that much.
Enter Mary Norris, the long time page OK’er at The New Yorker, and her new memoir, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. The book is actually a modified memoir—one part life story, one part inside look at the magazine, and two parts lessons on the rules of grammar and why they make sense (but sometimes don’t). Since publication last month, the book has received rave reviews, perhaps because a lot of copy editors, present and past, were selected by their publications to review it.
Whatever else you think after reading Between You & Me, you won’t pin the stereotype label on Norris. She’s funny, friendly, able to keep grammar and writing in perspective, and willing to see different sides of most arguments. She’s even willing to bend the rules in the relatively rare instances when her bosses let her.
The culture at The New Yorker is famous and with good reason. And Norris’s work is worth the read if only for its inside poop on how the place operates. Its layers of editing and fact-checking and proofing—and then doing it all again and again—are legendary. Obsessive? You bet. But you can’t help but wish a lot of other organizations would come closer to the model, both in print on their error-ridden web sites.
That’s not to say that others need to emulate some of The New Yorker’s idiosyncrasies that seem to exist only for the sake of being idiosyncratic. What other publication would put a hyphen in blue-stained glass or insist on the double ‘l’ in “frequent travellers,” when airlines and dictionaries don’t.
Norris is not shy about making fun of some of these practices, but she’s no easy mark for those who want to disregard grammar in the guise of modernizing the English language. Just because everyone else does it is no excuse—not even if everyone includes President Obama, who’s been known to thank people who “graciously invited Michele and I” to one event or another. She attributes the frequent use of “I” where “me” is correct to a misguided effort to sound refined, and though it’s increasingly common, it’s just plain wrong, she insists.
Norris is equally dismissive of any attempt to trash “whom” as an outdated inconvenience. “‘Whom’ may indeed be on the way out, but so is Venice, and we still like to go there,” she quips.
Norris uses one of her longer chapters to focus on one of today’s most controversial debates among writers, editors, and grammarians: the use of a plural pronoun (they, their, them) when a singular is called for—writing, for example, “everyone wants to do their best,” instead of “everyone wants to do his or her best.” She charts the long history of efforts to find a new, gender-neutral third person-singular pronoun that would serve the purpose, (ne-nis-nim, ip-ips, ha-hez-hem, ta, shem-herm; ho-hos-hom, ze-zon), all of which proved unacceptable. Norris makes it clear she wishes feminists hadn’t messed with the old standard of using “he,” which is still the best alternative in her mind, but then admits she admires male writers “who are secure enough in their masculinity to use the feminine third-person singular.”
Norris has a hilarious section on why the serial comma is essential, noting the problems created when you leave it out of sentences such as “This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.” And you don’t want to miss the debate over whether to put a hyphen in bad-hair day. Near the conclusion of that section, Norris offers a bit of wisdom that might apply to grammar in general, “I was learning…that a hyphen is not a moral issue.”
Many of the grammar lessons in the book have long been available in Norris’s podcasts at The New Yorker website, and a good chunk of the opening was published in the magazine. In some of the fresher sections of the memoir, Norris describes her personal effort to figure out who put the hyphen in Moby-Dick (a copy editor, not the author). And her loving ode to what she regards as the perfect pencil (the soft graphite Palomino Blackwing 602) and how it is made (based on a visit to the factory) is well worth the price of admission.
Enter Mary Norris, the long time page OK’er at The New Yorker, and her new memoir, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. The book is actually a modified memoir—one part life story, one part inside look at the magazine, and two parts lessons on the rules of grammar and why they make sense (but sometimes don’t). Since publication last month, the book has received rave reviews, perhaps because a lot of copy editors, present and past, were selected by their publications to review it.
Whatever else you think after reading Between You & Me, you won’t pin the stereotype label on Norris. She’s funny, friendly, able to keep grammar and writing in perspective, and willing to see different sides of most arguments. She’s even willing to bend the rules in the relatively rare instances when her bosses let her.
The culture at The New Yorker is famous and with good reason. And Norris’s work is worth the read if only for its inside poop on how the place operates. Its layers of editing and fact-checking and proofing—and then doing it all again and again—are legendary. Obsessive? You bet. But you can’t help but wish a lot of other organizations would come closer to the model, both in print on their error-ridden web sites.
That’s not to say that others need to emulate some of The New Yorker’s idiosyncrasies that seem to exist only for the sake of being idiosyncratic. What other publication would put a hyphen in blue-stained glass or insist on the double ‘l’ in “frequent travellers,” when airlines and dictionaries don’t.
Norris is not shy about making fun of some of these practices, but she’s no easy mark for those who want to disregard grammar in the guise of modernizing the English language. Just because everyone else does it is no excuse—not even if everyone includes President Obama, who’s been known to thank people who “graciously invited Michele and I” to one event or another. She attributes the frequent use of “I” where “me” is correct to a misguided effort to sound refined, and though it’s increasingly common, it’s just plain wrong, she insists.
Norris is equally dismissive of any attempt to trash “whom” as an outdated inconvenience. “‘Whom’ may indeed be on the way out, but so is Venice, and we still like to go there,” she quips.
Norris uses one of her longer chapters to focus on one of today’s most controversial debates among writers, editors, and grammarians: the use of a plural pronoun (they, their, them) when a singular is called for—writing, for example, “everyone wants to do their best,” instead of “everyone wants to do his or her best.” She charts the long history of efforts to find a new, gender-neutral third person-singular pronoun that would serve the purpose, (ne-nis-nim, ip-ips, ha-hez-hem, ta, shem-herm; ho-hos-hom, ze-zon), all of which proved unacceptable. Norris makes it clear she wishes feminists hadn’t messed with the old standard of using “he,” which is still the best alternative in her mind, but then admits she admires male writers “who are secure enough in their masculinity to use the feminine third-person singular.”
Norris has a hilarious section on why the serial comma is essential, noting the problems created when you leave it out of sentences such as “This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.” And you don’t want to miss the debate over whether to put a hyphen in bad-hair day. Near the conclusion of that section, Norris offers a bit of wisdom that might apply to grammar in general, “I was learning…that a hyphen is not a moral issue.”
Many of the grammar lessons in the book have long been available in Norris’s podcasts at The New Yorker website, and a good chunk of the opening was published in the magazine. In some of the fresher sections of the memoir, Norris describes her personal effort to figure out who put the hyphen in Moby-Dick (a copy editor, not the author). And her loving ode to what she regards as the perfect pencil (the soft graphite Palomino Blackwing 602) and how it is made (based on a visit to the factory) is well worth the price of admission.
April 11, 2015
Getting a Good Start: The Crucial First Chapter
So you’re browsing the bargain table at your favorite bookstore, the latest recommendations from Amazon, or maybe perusing your local library’s “new fiction” shelf. A cover appeals to you, you read the blurb on the back, and you open it to taste the first sentences. Within seconds, you make a decision: To read or not to read. The book goes back on the shelf or you decide to take it home with you. It’s a kind of one-way speed dating where first impressions mean everything.
I’ve been pondering the beginnings of novels as part of a course I’m teaching to would-be novelists, a course that inevitably involved critiquing their first chapters. I told them that as writers in the rapidly changing world of social media, fierce competition, and limited attention spans, the first chapter—and really the first page—is crucial to success. The opening of a story has to contain what editors call the narrative hook—an early sign of the conflict or problem that will grab a reader’s attention and pull her in. There has to be something irresistible on the first page that will make her turn to the second.
But the pressure doesn’t end there. With growing evidence that readers are more and more willing to abandon books even after reading several pages, the first chapter carries a huge burden. In addition to the narrative hook, the author must establish a voice that appeals to the reader, who has to feel comfortable spending the next few hundred pages with that voice. She also has to establish the key characters and show that they are complex, appealing but flawed, with significant problems to solve. And she has to make the reader feel that the stakes are high, so that solving the problem is important.
While the Internet age has made very fast beginnings more important than ever, good authors have always used the first chapter to lay the foundation for everything that follows. Read Edith Wharton’s classic House of Mirth and then go back and reread her first chapter. If you study it closely, you’ll be amazed to see that it foreshadows everything that will happen later in the novel, even the ending. It’s very subtle and most of it you’d never notice on the first reading, but I have to believe that this masterful chapter works on the reader’s subconscious in a way that makes the entire novel more enjoyable and more worthwhile.
I’m now in the midst of reading another novel with a impressive first chapter—Jonathan Dee’s The Privileges. The novel is a look at morals and values through the lives of a seemingly charmed couple, and the opening chapter describes the couple’s wedding day in brilliant detail. Dee has a remarkable way of describing all of the key players on that milestone day, capturing in a sentence or paragraph the essence of a dozen characters, from wedding planner to best man to maid of honor to parents and siblings of the happy couple. But most important, he uses the behavior of the bride and groom to lay the foundation for their married life (and the crux of the novel) that will follow.
In our novel-writing class, we had some fun looking at some famous first lines. My favorite was from Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea:
“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.”
This deceptively simple sentence accomplishes so much: It sets the tone and voice of everything that will follow, while laying out the central conflict and the character who faces it.
Here are some others that were offered up.
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” --1984 by George Orwell
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.” --Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
“We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.” --Tracks by Louise Erdrich
“All this happened, more or less.” --Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
I’d love to hear what your favorite first lines are. Just offer them in the comment section below.
I’ve been pondering the beginnings of novels as part of a course I’m teaching to would-be novelists, a course that inevitably involved critiquing their first chapters. I told them that as writers in the rapidly changing world of social media, fierce competition, and limited attention spans, the first chapter—and really the first page—is crucial to success. The opening of a story has to contain what editors call the narrative hook—an early sign of the conflict or problem that will grab a reader’s attention and pull her in. There has to be something irresistible on the first page that will make her turn to the second.
But the pressure doesn’t end there. With growing evidence that readers are more and more willing to abandon books even after reading several pages, the first chapter carries a huge burden. In addition to the narrative hook, the author must establish a voice that appeals to the reader, who has to feel comfortable spending the next few hundred pages with that voice. She also has to establish the key characters and show that they are complex, appealing but flawed, with significant problems to solve. And she has to make the reader feel that the stakes are high, so that solving the problem is important.
While the Internet age has made very fast beginnings more important than ever, good authors have always used the first chapter to lay the foundation for everything that follows. Read Edith Wharton’s classic House of Mirth and then go back and reread her first chapter. If you study it closely, you’ll be amazed to see that it foreshadows everything that will happen later in the novel, even the ending. It’s very subtle and most of it you’d never notice on the first reading, but I have to believe that this masterful chapter works on the reader’s subconscious in a way that makes the entire novel more enjoyable and more worthwhile.
I’m now in the midst of reading another novel with a impressive first chapter—Jonathan Dee’s The Privileges. The novel is a look at morals and values through the lives of a seemingly charmed couple, and the opening chapter describes the couple’s wedding day in brilliant detail. Dee has a remarkable way of describing all of the key players on that milestone day, capturing in a sentence or paragraph the essence of a dozen characters, from wedding planner to best man to maid of honor to parents and siblings of the happy couple. But most important, he uses the behavior of the bride and groom to lay the foundation for their married life (and the crux of the novel) that will follow.
In our novel-writing class, we had some fun looking at some famous first lines. My favorite was from Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea:
“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.”
This deceptively simple sentence accomplishes so much: It sets the tone and voice of everything that will follow, while laying out the central conflict and the character who faces it.
Here are some others that were offered up.
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” --1984 by George Orwell
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.” --Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
“We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.” --Tracks by Louise Erdrich
“All this happened, more or less.” --Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
I’d love to hear what your favorite first lines are. Just offer them in the comment section below.
March 2, 2015
Not To Be Missed: All My Puny Sorrows
Miriam Toews has managed to do the seemingly impossible: Write a novel about depression and suicide that is funny, loving, witty, heartbreaking, clever, and insightful, all while contributing to the public debate over an individual’s right to die with dignity. Toews has long been a best-selling, award-winning author in her native Canada, but readers south of the border have been slow to discover her. All My Puny Sorrows, her sixth and arguably best novel, should change that.
While complex themes run deep throughout the novel, its plot is thin, almost nonexistent. In the opening pages, a flashback introduces us to Elfrieda and Yolandi, better known as Elf and Yoli, restless sisters in a small Mennonite community that seeks complete control of their upbringing. Jumping to the present, we find that Yoli, the narrator and protagonist of the novel, has traveled to Winnipeg from her home in Toronto because Elf, a brilliant and successful classical pianist, has attempted suicide—and not for the first time. Elf is now in a hospital psych ward refusing to cooperate with the resident shrinks. Most of the suspense revolves around whether Elf can escape to try again. At first it is a struggle between Elf’s determination to die and Yoli’s determination to keep her alive. Gradually, the issue becomes more challenging, as Elf tries to persuade her sister to take her to Switzerland, where doctor-assisted suicide for depression is legal, and Yoli starts to give it serious thought. Their conversations, and frequent flashbacks to their youth, give a strong sense of the close and loving bonds that join the sisters and make the decision so difficult for Yoli.
That’s not the kind of synopsis that automatically makes a bestseller. Even the sisters’ resilient mother announces at one point that she’s tired of reading novels about sad characters. “Okay, she’s sad! We get it, we know what sad is, and then the whole book is basically a description of the million and one ways in which our protagonist is sad. Gimme a break! Get on with it!”
Fortunately for us, Toews does not give us a break. She tackles the issues head-on, in a way that will leave readers laughing and crying simultaneously—and more important, thinking. The ethical issues raised are treated with the complexity they deserve. Don’t expect any simple answers or, fortunately, any preaching. Toews sees both sides of the arguments, and so do her characters.
The novel is beautifully written. The flashbacks to Yoli and Elf’s childhood under Mennonite rule are vivid and energetic. Toews perfectly captures the casual manner in which close-knit siblings enjoy and irritate each other. The dialogue is realistic and funny, ranging over topics from the mundane to the cosmic. Toews is so good she can let her characters talk about books and art and meaning of life without sounding pedantic or pretentious. The characters—all of them—are smart, decent, and confused. We feel for them and we respect them.
The sisters’ struggle over life and suicide is all the more poignant because the roles seem reversed. Elf is a world-renowned musician with a partner who loves her. Yet she is strapped to a hospital bed. Yoli’s life is a mess. Twice divorced, she’s dealing with a precocious teenage daughter and struggling to pay tuition bills for a son at college in New York. She longs for financial and emotional stability, but drinks too much, stumbles into short-term, usually unfortunate sexual encounters, and works in fits and starts on a novel that’s going nowhere.
Toews finds humor in Yoli’s problems. As she works on ending her second marriage, she receives a text from her soon-to-be-ex-husband that reads, “I need you.” When she texts back asking if he’s okay, he replies: “Sorry, pushed send too soon. I need you to sign the divorce papers.”
The disparity between Elf and Yoli’s situations and their respective views on life is the question that Yoli struggles to answer through much of the novel. Why can’t Elf be happy? Is there some suicide gene that she inherited from her father? What keeps a person who seemingly has everything from enjoying her blessings?
Toews has acknowledged that the novel draws heavily on her own experiences. She, too, was raised in a small, rural Mennonite community. Her father committed suicide in 1998 and twelve years later her sister took her own life.
When All My Puny Sorrows was released in April 2014, Toews told Canada’s National Post, “For me, writing is an act of survival.” And therein lies an important element of the novel. While it deals extensively with death and grieving, it is also a book of hope; Yoli and the other characters who love Elf and have to deal with her suicidal wishes are also survivors, learning to go on and to lean on each other, as they navigate the trials they face.
While complex themes run deep throughout the novel, its plot is thin, almost nonexistent. In the opening pages, a flashback introduces us to Elfrieda and Yolandi, better known as Elf and Yoli, restless sisters in a small Mennonite community that seeks complete control of their upbringing. Jumping to the present, we find that Yoli, the narrator and protagonist of the novel, has traveled to Winnipeg from her home in Toronto because Elf, a brilliant and successful classical pianist, has attempted suicide—and not for the first time. Elf is now in a hospital psych ward refusing to cooperate with the resident shrinks. Most of the suspense revolves around whether Elf can escape to try again. At first it is a struggle between Elf’s determination to die and Yoli’s determination to keep her alive. Gradually, the issue becomes more challenging, as Elf tries to persuade her sister to take her to Switzerland, where doctor-assisted suicide for depression is legal, and Yoli starts to give it serious thought. Their conversations, and frequent flashbacks to their youth, give a strong sense of the close and loving bonds that join the sisters and make the decision so difficult for Yoli.
That’s not the kind of synopsis that automatically makes a bestseller. Even the sisters’ resilient mother announces at one point that she’s tired of reading novels about sad characters. “Okay, she’s sad! We get it, we know what sad is, and then the whole book is basically a description of the million and one ways in which our protagonist is sad. Gimme a break! Get on with it!”
Fortunately for us, Toews does not give us a break. She tackles the issues head-on, in a way that will leave readers laughing and crying simultaneously—and more important, thinking. The ethical issues raised are treated with the complexity they deserve. Don’t expect any simple answers or, fortunately, any preaching. Toews sees both sides of the arguments, and so do her characters.
The novel is beautifully written. The flashbacks to Yoli and Elf’s childhood under Mennonite rule are vivid and energetic. Toews perfectly captures the casual manner in which close-knit siblings enjoy and irritate each other. The dialogue is realistic and funny, ranging over topics from the mundane to the cosmic. Toews is so good she can let her characters talk about books and art and meaning of life without sounding pedantic or pretentious. The characters—all of them—are smart, decent, and confused. We feel for them and we respect them.
The sisters’ struggle over life and suicide is all the more poignant because the roles seem reversed. Elf is a world-renowned musician with a partner who loves her. Yet she is strapped to a hospital bed. Yoli’s life is a mess. Twice divorced, she’s dealing with a precocious teenage daughter and struggling to pay tuition bills for a son at college in New York. She longs for financial and emotional stability, but drinks too much, stumbles into short-term, usually unfortunate sexual encounters, and works in fits and starts on a novel that’s going nowhere.
Toews finds humor in Yoli’s problems. As she works on ending her second marriage, she receives a text from her soon-to-be-ex-husband that reads, “I need you.” When she texts back asking if he’s okay, he replies: “Sorry, pushed send too soon. I need you to sign the divorce papers.”
The disparity between Elf and Yoli’s situations and their respective views on life is the question that Yoli struggles to answer through much of the novel. Why can’t Elf be happy? Is there some suicide gene that she inherited from her father? What keeps a person who seemingly has everything from enjoying her blessings?
Toews has acknowledged that the novel draws heavily on her own experiences. She, too, was raised in a small, rural Mennonite community. Her father committed suicide in 1998 and twelve years later her sister took her own life.
When All My Puny Sorrows was released in April 2014, Toews told Canada’s National Post, “For me, writing is an act of survival.” And therein lies an important element of the novel. While it deals extensively with death and grieving, it is also a book of hope; Yoli and the other characters who love Elf and have to deal with her suicidal wishes are also survivors, learning to go on and to lean on each other, as they navigate the trials they face.
February 9, 2015
A Literary Trip to Haiti
I spent a few days in Haiti last week without leaving home. My tour guide was Edwidge Danticat, and the mode of transportation was her magnificent novel, Claire of the Sea Light, which brought Haiti’s sights, sounds, smells to my senses, while introducing me to the people and their incredible courage, perseverance and hope. It was a remarkable journey, one I won’t forget for quite a while.
The novel is set in an impoverished fishing village of only 11,000 people, though dead ancestors and returning émigrés are ever present. The eight chapters in this deceptively slim volume can easily stand on their own (two were published as short stories in The New Yorker), but they are far more effective in concert, building on one another to enrich a reader’s understanding of the community and the individuals who inhabit it, however much they have tried to leave. While different chapters feature different protagonists, their lives are intertwined in real and spiritual ways. The effect on the reader is to make us realize that we are all connected, all in some way the same, no matter how different we are in other ways.
The novel takes on a single day, though flashbacks cover a ten-year period in Haiti’s troubled history. The single day is the seventh birthday of Claire Lymyé Lanmé Faustin and the seventh anniversary of her mother’s death in childbirth. clair2On each of her birthdays, Claire and her father, Nozias, leave their stark, one-room shack to visit the cemetery, reminding Claire that “her birthday is also a day of death.” Often present on these birthdays is Gaëlle, a wealthy fabric vendor who was Claire’s wet nurse. She, too, is tied to Claire’s birthday because it is also the anniversary of a traffic accident that took the life of her young daughter. Claire’s father, meanwhile, has been trying to persuade Gaëlle to take possession of the girl and give her a better life, at least until he can go off and find a means of providing more substantially for her. To add still another layer to the cycle of life and death, Gaëlle’s husband was shot dead by gang members in Haiti on the day his and Gaëlle’s daughter was born.
Danticat could easily have shouted this novel, making more of the senseless violence, political corruption, and unspeakable poverty. Instead she whispers, leaving so much unspoken but not unsaid. The novel is filled with unforgettable images that often combine beauty and blight. In a flashback to Gaëlle’s pregnancy, we learn that she had become fascinated with the carcasses of dozens of dead frogs that have exploded due to a period of extreme heat:
“These frogs frightened not just the children who chased them into the rivers and creeks at dusk, or the parents who hastily pried the slimy carcasses from their young ones’ fingers, but also twenty-five-year-old Gaëlle, who was more than six months pregnant and feared that, should the temperature continue to rise, she too might burst. The frogs had been dying for a few weeks, but Gaëlle hadn’t noticed at first. They’d been dying so quietly that for each one that had expired, another had taken its place along the gulch near her house, each one looking exactly the same and fooling her, among others, into thinking that a normal cycle was occurring, that young was replacing old, and life replacing death, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly. Just as it was for everything else.”
Later, in a truly heartbreaking scene, Gaëlle considers going to bed with the man who accidentally killed her daughter:
“She wondered whether their coming together in this way—to love rather than kill—might resolve everything at last. Might her looking down at his sorrowful face, and his being in her sorrowful bed, help them both take back that moment on the road?”
Danticat’s novel can be appreciated on many levels and is undoubtedly worth reading many times, but what struck me hardest in my first reading was the resilience of the Haitians. They have so little and bear so much pain. Yet somehow they approach each day with hope and look where they can and how they can, not just for survival, although that is always an issue, but also at finding their way to something better, no matter how unlikely the prospects. This novel will stay with me for a long time.
The novel is set in an impoverished fishing village of only 11,000 people, though dead ancestors and returning émigrés are ever present. The eight chapters in this deceptively slim volume can easily stand on their own (two were published as short stories in The New Yorker), but they are far more effective in concert, building on one another to enrich a reader’s understanding of the community and the individuals who inhabit it, however much they have tried to leave. While different chapters feature different protagonists, their lives are intertwined in real and spiritual ways. The effect on the reader is to make us realize that we are all connected, all in some way the same, no matter how different we are in other ways.
The novel takes on a single day, though flashbacks cover a ten-year period in Haiti’s troubled history. The single day is the seventh birthday of Claire Lymyé Lanmé Faustin and the seventh anniversary of her mother’s death in childbirth. clair2On each of her birthdays, Claire and her father, Nozias, leave their stark, one-room shack to visit the cemetery, reminding Claire that “her birthday is also a day of death.” Often present on these birthdays is Gaëlle, a wealthy fabric vendor who was Claire’s wet nurse. She, too, is tied to Claire’s birthday because it is also the anniversary of a traffic accident that took the life of her young daughter. Claire’s father, meanwhile, has been trying to persuade Gaëlle to take possession of the girl and give her a better life, at least until he can go off and find a means of providing more substantially for her. To add still another layer to the cycle of life and death, Gaëlle’s husband was shot dead by gang members in Haiti on the day his and Gaëlle’s daughter was born.
Danticat could easily have shouted this novel, making more of the senseless violence, political corruption, and unspeakable poverty. Instead she whispers, leaving so much unspoken but not unsaid. The novel is filled with unforgettable images that often combine beauty and blight. In a flashback to Gaëlle’s pregnancy, we learn that she had become fascinated with the carcasses of dozens of dead frogs that have exploded due to a period of extreme heat:
“These frogs frightened not just the children who chased them into the rivers and creeks at dusk, or the parents who hastily pried the slimy carcasses from their young ones’ fingers, but also twenty-five-year-old Gaëlle, who was more than six months pregnant and feared that, should the temperature continue to rise, she too might burst. The frogs had been dying for a few weeks, but Gaëlle hadn’t noticed at first. They’d been dying so quietly that for each one that had expired, another had taken its place along the gulch near her house, each one looking exactly the same and fooling her, among others, into thinking that a normal cycle was occurring, that young was replacing old, and life replacing death, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly. Just as it was for everything else.”
Later, in a truly heartbreaking scene, Gaëlle considers going to bed with the man who accidentally killed her daughter:
“She wondered whether their coming together in this way—to love rather than kill—might resolve everything at last. Might her looking down at his sorrowful face, and his being in her sorrowful bed, help them both take back that moment on the road?”
Danticat’s novel can be appreciated on many levels and is undoubtedly worth reading many times, but what struck me hardest in my first reading was the resilience of the Haitians. They have so little and bear so much pain. Yet somehow they approach each day with hope and look where they can and how they can, not just for survival, although that is always an issue, but also at finding their way to something better, no matter how unlikely the prospects. This novel will stay with me for a long time.
January 14, 2015
Suspending Disbelief: A Tricky Road for Readers and Writers
I was watching one of the earlier Inspector Morse mysteries, on PBS the other night, thoroughly enjoying John Thaw’s rendition of a crotchety, alcoholic Morse, when quite suddenly I turned away in disgust. Amidst a complicated series of seemingly unexplainable events, Morse abruptly announced that the murdered drug dealer wasn’t the murdered drug dealer but a doppelgänger who in fact had been killed by the drug dealer. Never mind that Morse had never met either the real victim or his double or the absence of any clues that might have led him to his conclusion. It was the worst kind of deus ex machina, and it totally destroyed the experience for me. And unfortunately that’s been happening to me a lot, both in films and in books.
Almost all fiction requires a suspension of disbelief. We as readers accept that and even want it. We pick up a novel quite willing to put aside real life and enter a make-believe world. The ability to do that is one of the real pleasures of fiction. A good novel will lift us out of the humdrum of our everyday lives into a more exciting world—or at least into someone else’s more interesting humdrum. But our willingness to enter a fictional world, what John Gardner famously described as the dream of fiction, is predicated on an assumption that the author will take the responsibility seriously and make a determined effort not to disrupt our dream state. We’re quite happy to “go with the flow” without questioning every action as long as the characters are consistent, the plot makes sense according to the rules the author has established, and any departure from the rules is adequately explained and fairly presented.
I’m a fan, for example, of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels. Now Reacher is hardly a guy who makes any sense in my real-life world. He travels the country with nothing but a toothbrush and a credit card he uses to buy food and new clothes at Wal-Mart when whatever he’s wearing gets dirty (every few days or so). And he regularly fights his way out of dire situations single- handedly by overwhelming dozens of heavily armed bad guys. None of this bothers me in the least because Child has set clear ground rules and sticks to them. I accept Reacher as a super-hero who has his own code of behavior because it’s consistent and makes sense within the world Child has created. The same is true of many fantasies. Once a new world has been created and explained, I’m good to go. What I can’t tolerate is when the rules change, when characters who were never able to time travel, for example, suddenly get in a jam and discover the new power they never had before.
The point is that when a book or a movie is working well, we become so engaged in it that we get caught up in the action and don’t sweat the little stuff. In a crime drama, we don’t care if the DNA results are available almost immediately even though we know in real life the process can take weeks. And we don’t get too concerned about searches without warrants or interrogations without lawyers. We do, however, get upset when a criminal mastermind inexplicably confesses to an unsolvable crime or the detective in charge suddenly reveals evidence he’s been hiding for 200 pages or for 45 minutes of an hour-long TV show. That’s because we mystery readers like to play along and try to solve the puzzle ourselves. We want a level playing field.
Mystery and fantasy writers have particular responsibilities to keep readers in the dream state, but authors of realistic fiction must carry the load as well. In fact, it may be even more important and more difficult in realistic fiction because it more closely resembles real life. This is why it’s so important for a character to stay in character—and not suddenly act in a way that makes us shake our heads.
It’s not hard to see why writers resort to a phony deus ex machina to get themselves out of a jam. Like all authors, I’m well acquainted with plot holes. I once wrote a mystery chapter by chapter without knowing what would happen next or who the villain would be. Big mistake. You may think it will be fun to figure out who the bad guy is along with your readers, but it’s a sure way to write yourself in a corner and find yourself grasping for the improbable exits that stretch a reader’s patience. It’s what separates the amateur from the professional. And in this day and age, when readers and viewers have so many more choices, it’s almost always fatal.
Almost all fiction requires a suspension of disbelief. We as readers accept that and even want it. We pick up a novel quite willing to put aside real life and enter a make-believe world. The ability to do that is one of the real pleasures of fiction. A good novel will lift us out of the humdrum of our everyday lives into a more exciting world—or at least into someone else’s more interesting humdrum. But our willingness to enter a fictional world, what John Gardner famously described as the dream of fiction, is predicated on an assumption that the author will take the responsibility seriously and make a determined effort not to disrupt our dream state. We’re quite happy to “go with the flow” without questioning every action as long as the characters are consistent, the plot makes sense according to the rules the author has established, and any departure from the rules is adequately explained and fairly presented.
I’m a fan, for example, of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels. Now Reacher is hardly a guy who makes any sense in my real-life world. He travels the country with nothing but a toothbrush and a credit card he uses to buy food and new clothes at Wal-Mart when whatever he’s wearing gets dirty (every few days or so). And he regularly fights his way out of dire situations single- handedly by overwhelming dozens of heavily armed bad guys. None of this bothers me in the least because Child has set clear ground rules and sticks to them. I accept Reacher as a super-hero who has his own code of behavior because it’s consistent and makes sense within the world Child has created. The same is true of many fantasies. Once a new world has been created and explained, I’m good to go. What I can’t tolerate is when the rules change, when characters who were never able to time travel, for example, suddenly get in a jam and discover the new power they never had before.
The point is that when a book or a movie is working well, we become so engaged in it that we get caught up in the action and don’t sweat the little stuff. In a crime drama, we don’t care if the DNA results are available almost immediately even though we know in real life the process can take weeks. And we don’t get too concerned about searches without warrants or interrogations without lawyers. We do, however, get upset when a criminal mastermind inexplicably confesses to an unsolvable crime or the detective in charge suddenly reveals evidence he’s been hiding for 200 pages or for 45 minutes of an hour-long TV show. That’s because we mystery readers like to play along and try to solve the puzzle ourselves. We want a level playing field.
Mystery and fantasy writers have particular responsibilities to keep readers in the dream state, but authors of realistic fiction must carry the load as well. In fact, it may be even more important and more difficult in realistic fiction because it more closely resembles real life. This is why it’s so important for a character to stay in character—and not suddenly act in a way that makes us shake our heads.
It’s not hard to see why writers resort to a phony deus ex machina to get themselves out of a jam. Like all authors, I’m well acquainted with plot holes. I once wrote a mystery chapter by chapter without knowing what would happen next or who the villain would be. Big mistake. You may think it will be fun to figure out who the bad guy is along with your readers, but it’s a sure way to write yourself in a corner and find yourself grasping for the improbable exits that stretch a reader’s patience. It’s what separates the amateur from the professional. And in this day and age, when readers and viewers have so many more choices, it’s almost always fatal.
December 9, 2014
Rereading James Joyce's The Dubliners
This is the time of year for reconnecting with family and friends, a time to renew bonds and remember what makes a relationship special. So, too, with good books. I often find that the holidays are the perfect time to reread the classics, those priceless novels that offer something new, no matter how many times you read them.
That’s why I was so pleased when my book club chose to read and discuss The Dubliners, James Joyce’s first (and probably most accessible) work of prose. Published in 1914, this slim volume of 15 short stories presents a stark, penetrating analysis of middle-class life in Dublin in the early 20th century, a time when poverty was rampant, the influence of church was strong, and nationalism was at its peak.
The stories in The Dubliners are linked in theme and style and purpose. Though many have been published as stand-alone stories, they were always intended to work together. “My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me to represent the centre of paralysis,” Joyce wrote later.
The stories are arranged chronologically in the sense that they move from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, examining small but significant moments: A young boy ponders the death of a priest who befriended him, an adolescent boy strives to impress a beautiful girl only to have his hopes dashed by an inconsiderate uncle, a girl tries to muster the courage to leave home but finds she just can’t do it, a mother meddles in her daughter’s affairs to the detriment of both their reputations, and a married couple fails to connect despite their genuine love for each other.
When my book club got together to discuss The Dubliners, I was quite surprised to find that many of the members were disappointed. They complained that the characters were too similar, the stories lacked action, and some had no plot at all. Much of that is true, but for me that was the beauty of the work. The stories are all slice-of-life adventures that don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end, just as most of the chapters in our lives lack such obvious benchmarks. When one reader suggested an unknown author submitting this collection to agents and publishers today would get roundly rejected, I couldn’t help but agree—and shed a tear for what that says about the current state of publishing.
Instead of action-filled plots, Joyce was more concerned with epiphanies—a word he defined as a moment where a character experiences self-understanding or illumination. These moments seem to fascinate Joyce not because they lead to major character changes, but because they usually don’t. Consider “A Painful Case,” perhaps, the most poignant of the stories. It concerns a meticulous introvert, Mr. Duffy, whose life is perfectly ordered in meaningless routines. Against all odds, he forms a wonderful friendship with Mrs. Sinico, which he brutally ends after she lifts his hand to touch her cheek, the first sign of physical intimacy. Four years later, he learns of her suicide, and realizes the damage he’s done to both her and himself by his refusal to grasp what life has to offer. And yet despite this epiphany, he quickly returns to the same isolated routine that characterized his life before the friendship.
Much has been written about “The Dead,” the masterpiece that concludes The Dubliners. Suffice it to say here that the “The Dead” encapsulates the themes developed in the stories that precede it, exploring the intersection of life and death and the personal paralysis that prevents individuals from embracing life. The concluding scene, as beautiful and poetic as any in literature, ends with a poignant ambiguity, as snow blankets the city in what could be viewed as a symbol of either a shroud of death or a universal cleansing.
Critics have noted that The Dubliners lacks much of the complexity of Joyce’s later work. To a large extent, what you see is what you get. And that is still another beauty of the work. The language is superb, with stark images that bring dark and dreary Dublin to life—or show its lack of life as the case may be. Joyce's images are detailed and precise, with a quiet, unsentimental beauty. They speak for themselves, often to show the disappointment and despair of the people who inhabit the novel. The result is a powerful work, one that I know I’ll want to return to again in some future holiday season.
That’s why I was so pleased when my book club chose to read and discuss The Dubliners, James Joyce’s first (and probably most accessible) work of prose. Published in 1914, this slim volume of 15 short stories presents a stark, penetrating analysis of middle-class life in Dublin in the early 20th century, a time when poverty was rampant, the influence of church was strong, and nationalism was at its peak.
The stories in The Dubliners are linked in theme and style and purpose. Though many have been published as stand-alone stories, they were always intended to work together. “My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me to represent the centre of paralysis,” Joyce wrote later.
The stories are arranged chronologically in the sense that they move from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, examining small but significant moments: A young boy ponders the death of a priest who befriended him, an adolescent boy strives to impress a beautiful girl only to have his hopes dashed by an inconsiderate uncle, a girl tries to muster the courage to leave home but finds she just can’t do it, a mother meddles in her daughter’s affairs to the detriment of both their reputations, and a married couple fails to connect despite their genuine love for each other.
When my book club got together to discuss The Dubliners, I was quite surprised to find that many of the members were disappointed. They complained that the characters were too similar, the stories lacked action, and some had no plot at all. Much of that is true, but for me that was the beauty of the work. The stories are all slice-of-life adventures that don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end, just as most of the chapters in our lives lack such obvious benchmarks. When one reader suggested an unknown author submitting this collection to agents and publishers today would get roundly rejected, I couldn’t help but agree—and shed a tear for what that says about the current state of publishing.
Instead of action-filled plots, Joyce was more concerned with epiphanies—a word he defined as a moment where a character experiences self-understanding or illumination. These moments seem to fascinate Joyce not because they lead to major character changes, but because they usually don’t. Consider “A Painful Case,” perhaps, the most poignant of the stories. It concerns a meticulous introvert, Mr. Duffy, whose life is perfectly ordered in meaningless routines. Against all odds, he forms a wonderful friendship with Mrs. Sinico, which he brutally ends after she lifts his hand to touch her cheek, the first sign of physical intimacy. Four years later, he learns of her suicide, and realizes the damage he’s done to both her and himself by his refusal to grasp what life has to offer. And yet despite this epiphany, he quickly returns to the same isolated routine that characterized his life before the friendship.
Much has been written about “The Dead,” the masterpiece that concludes The Dubliners. Suffice it to say here that the “The Dead” encapsulates the themes developed in the stories that precede it, exploring the intersection of life and death and the personal paralysis that prevents individuals from embracing life. The concluding scene, as beautiful and poetic as any in literature, ends with a poignant ambiguity, as snow blankets the city in what could be viewed as a symbol of either a shroud of death or a universal cleansing.
Critics have noted that The Dubliners lacks much of the complexity of Joyce’s later work. To a large extent, what you see is what you get. And that is still another beauty of the work. The language is superb, with stark images that bring dark and dreary Dublin to life—or show its lack of life as the case may be. Joyce's images are detailed and precise, with a quiet, unsentimental beauty. They speak for themselves, often to show the disappointment and despair of the people who inhabit the novel. The result is a powerful work, one that I know I’ll want to return to again in some future holiday season.
November 7, 2014
The Book Club Meeting I'll Never Forget
I’ve been to a lot of book club meetings in my day, but never one quite like this, never one where the stakes were so high. This wasn’t going to be a casual conversation about books with a group of friends; this was going to be a conversation with eight strangers about a book that meant everything to me: Hawke’s Point, my debut novel published last summer. Was I nervous? You bet.
As soon as everyone arrived and we’d all been introduced, I tried to break the ice by urging them to be honest, assuring them that after years in writers’ critique groups, I was used to criticism and had developed a pretty thick skin. They readily agreed to be candid—so readily, in fact, that I wondered what I’d gotten myself into. But my mention of critique groups aroused their interest, and before we got into my book, they wanted to know more about the writing process and an author’s need for feedback. They asked lots of good questions about how it all worked, and that allowed me to relax as we got to know each other over a neutral topic. The wine didn’t hurt, either.
But soon we were talking seriously about Hawke’s Point. Initially, the comments were positive as they told me what they liked about the book. Character development is my strength, and I was pleased to hear the compliments about how real and complex my characters were, especially Jonas, the protagonist. Then came the first note of discord. One participant said she was annoyed to no end by Mary Louise, the call girl who plays a key role in the novel’s major conflict. She’s so sure she’s right and I didn’t understand why, the participant said. But someone else said that was one of the things she liked about Mary Louise, her conviction and determination.
I listened without rushing in. In the weeks since the novel came out, nothing has surprised me more than the intensity and controversy surrounding Mary Louise. Many readers are fascinated by her, attracted and repelled simultaneously by her chosen line of work, and eager to understand why she does it. Some readers have suggested I make her the central figure in a sequel, and one reviewer named her as a favorite character. But she’s also drawn scorn. Another reviewer strongly objected to her and accused me of glorifying prostitution.
I was gratified to hear some of the book club members compliment the writing style of the novel as clean and smoothly paced, even while dealing with complex ethical issues. One reader said there were no parts to skip, as big a compliment as I could hope for. But one woman complained that my interior dialogues all sounded alike, no matter which character’s head I was in. Their speech was distinct, she said, but not their thoughts. That was interesting and something I’ll work on in the future.
I was caught short one other time. Someone asked me why a character had behaved in a certain way at a certain time, and I didn’t have an answer. If I’d really known the character the way I should, I would have had an answer for that question.
We continued talking about the book over a casual dinner and at one point it hit me that we were talking about imaginary characters—characters that I’d created—as though they were real and as though their problems were real. As they dug deeper for meaning in the novel, I was delighted to see some of them find significance in ways that had never occurred to me. While they seemed to assume that I had a sound reason and a specific intention for every decision I’d made in writing the novel, I knew better. At first I thought that was a flaw—that I should have had a reason for every word I chose, for every action by every character. But then I realized that this wasn’t so much a failure as a different kind of success. I had made the characters real enough for each reader to interact with them on their own footing. It was an important reminder that what readers bring to a book is as important as what authors leave behind.
When I left after three hours, I was immensely gratified. The eight participants had all read the book closely and had found a lot to think about and discuss. Most important, they all seemed to “get the book.” It had been read and understood largely in the way I intended, and it had prompted debate about issues I thought were worth debating. As an author, I couldn’t have wished for anything more.
As soon as everyone arrived and we’d all been introduced, I tried to break the ice by urging them to be honest, assuring them that after years in writers’ critique groups, I was used to criticism and had developed a pretty thick skin. They readily agreed to be candid—so readily, in fact, that I wondered what I’d gotten myself into. But my mention of critique groups aroused their interest, and before we got into my book, they wanted to know more about the writing process and an author’s need for feedback. They asked lots of good questions about how it all worked, and that allowed me to relax as we got to know each other over a neutral topic. The wine didn’t hurt, either.
But soon we were talking seriously about Hawke’s Point. Initially, the comments were positive as they told me what they liked about the book. Character development is my strength, and I was pleased to hear the compliments about how real and complex my characters were, especially Jonas, the protagonist. Then came the first note of discord. One participant said she was annoyed to no end by Mary Louise, the call girl who plays a key role in the novel’s major conflict. She’s so sure she’s right and I didn’t understand why, the participant said. But someone else said that was one of the things she liked about Mary Louise, her conviction and determination.
I listened without rushing in. In the weeks since the novel came out, nothing has surprised me more than the intensity and controversy surrounding Mary Louise. Many readers are fascinated by her, attracted and repelled simultaneously by her chosen line of work, and eager to understand why she does it. Some readers have suggested I make her the central figure in a sequel, and one reviewer named her as a favorite character. But she’s also drawn scorn. Another reviewer strongly objected to her and accused me of glorifying prostitution.
I was gratified to hear some of the book club members compliment the writing style of the novel as clean and smoothly paced, even while dealing with complex ethical issues. One reader said there were no parts to skip, as big a compliment as I could hope for. But one woman complained that my interior dialogues all sounded alike, no matter which character’s head I was in. Their speech was distinct, she said, but not their thoughts. That was interesting and something I’ll work on in the future.
I was caught short one other time. Someone asked me why a character had behaved in a certain way at a certain time, and I didn’t have an answer. If I’d really known the character the way I should, I would have had an answer for that question.
We continued talking about the book over a casual dinner and at one point it hit me that we were talking about imaginary characters—characters that I’d created—as though they were real and as though their problems were real. As they dug deeper for meaning in the novel, I was delighted to see some of them find significance in ways that had never occurred to me. While they seemed to assume that I had a sound reason and a specific intention for every decision I’d made in writing the novel, I knew better. At first I thought that was a flaw—that I should have had a reason for every word I chose, for every action by every character. But then I realized that this wasn’t so much a failure as a different kind of success. I had made the characters real enough for each reader to interact with them on their own footing. It was an important reminder that what readers bring to a book is as important as what authors leave behind.
When I left after three hours, I was immensely gratified. The eight participants had all read the book closely and had found a lot to think about and discuss. Most important, they all seemed to “get the book.” It had been read and understood largely in the way I intended, and it had prompted debate about issues I thought were worth debating. As an author, I couldn’t have wished for anything more.
