Christopher’s Comments (group member since Mar 05, 2009)

Christopher’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

Count me in!

Last night I finished Patti Callahan’s BECOMING MRS. LEWIS, about Joy Davidman, the American woman who had a most improbable love with C. S. Lewis. I was never a huge Narnia fan, but I remember Lewis’s TILL WE HAVE FACES as a powerful book, and I saw the Debra Winger-Anthony Hopkins movie SHADOWLANDS about Joy and Jack, as Lewis preferred to be called. But I really didn’t know much about Joy beyond that film. Patti Callahan’s novel is excellent and shows Joy’s struggles and her developing relationship with Lewis so well. In the hands of a lesser writer, this could have been schlocky, but Patti Callahan makes Joy sing.

Hi, kids! Christopher, thanks for waking us up. I just finished binge-watching Stranger Things as a reward for writing (every night I get pages down on novel #2, I watch an episode). Now I'm going to return to Run by Ann Patchett, which I started and paused about a month ago. She's such a damn good writer.

Can't wait to read this, Ben!

Thanks, Kerry! JE and the Fiction Files both get a well-deserved shout-out in my acknowledgments.

I know Emily Giffin (our children go to the same school) and she once showed me mock-ups for the cover of one of her novels, "Heart of the Matter," which was in the process of being published. It seemed at that point she had some say in the cover, but this was after a string of best sellers, so she probably had more input than a first-time author. Probably depends on the publisher, the agent, etc. I know Emily's novels had somewhat similar thematic cover designs.

Well, we do bring assumptions to reading. It's why we pick up what we pick up to read. Now, you shouldn't be too narrow in your assumptions, I don't think--I mean, you can be, but I like reading all kinds of things. I'll read The Story of Edgar Sawtelle and then I'll read a genre thriller. Genres aren't brightly marked off from one another, of course, but when you are talking poetry and fiction, well, we do expect different things from them. Forms aren't interchangeable like Legos. And yet you can get creative with them and challenge them, but at their core each form has a purpose. Shakespeare, for all his brilliant genius at language, harnesses his language in the service of telling a story, and he tells very good stories. When he wrote his sonnets, however, he wasn't concerned with telling a narrative--he was explaining or exploring an emotional state.

Poetry and narrative are not mutually exclusive, by any means, but writing lyrical poetry and writing narrative require somewhat different skill sets.

Look at Michael Ondaatje and The English Patient. That has some beautiful lines (such as "the heart is an organ of fire") and even some moving scenes, but as a narrative it didn't seem to quite gel for me. Part of that is the narrative structure--it's non-linear and jumps all around--but I've wondered how much of that could be attributed to a poet's view of the world? Poetry often seems to be about capturing truths of human experience in fleeting moments. Long-form narrative seems to be about capturing those same truths in a broader sweep, a series of events against which we measure character and plot development.

This was made even clearer by the film version of The English Patient--it looked beautiful and was moving in parts, but in its narrative form, particularly as a film (which requires a different kind of sustained concentration than a novel), it tended to bore many viewers who were expecting a story.

Thanks, you two. Something always seems to come up--scheduling, money, etc.--but I very much want to attend a Dork.

Holy Water is pretty damn good. The Last Trade was hard for me because I kept comparing it to JPO's other novels, but once I stopped doing that I enjoyed The Last Trade more.

Gotta love "A Moveable Feast."

As a young(er) teacher, I taught this book to my AP English students, and I asked them at the end to create something--a model, a piece of artwork, whatever--that physically represented the structure of this novel. When I gave them the assignment, crickets could be distinctly heard for about a full minute. Then they went to town.

What I got was pretty amazing. One student created a board game that involved lots of looping/doubling back. Another painted a gigantic vortex with various images from the novel swirling about its hidden center. A third built a tabletop hall of mirrors, with tiny lights that illuminated specific quotes from the novel embedded in the mirrors and reflecting off one another.

All of them revealed the almost centrifugal nature of the novel. In the West (and maybe this is Eurocentric), we like a linear plot of causality, or at least a clear philosophical destination, in our novels. This one is a spiral, a repeating loop that progresses in one direction: death. (Just wait until you get to the end.) The repeating character names are part of that cycling, I think.

I also remember reading somewhere that the male Buendia characters are either "Aurelianos" or "Arcadios" and that they have distinct characteristics from one another--Aurelianos are grim and fateful, while the Arcadios are more dynamic, almost volcanic?

As for the argument/discussion over the fantastical elements of this book...well, if I want more realism, I don't read a novel, I just pay attention to my own life. :)

John Thorpe is such an amusing douche bag. He's almost refreshing in how up front he is.

Okay, so I've been largely absent for the past few months--we've been trying to sell our house and move into a larger one and finally got all that arranged. It's amazing how much your mind can wander while packing boxes, and I found myself remembering funny passages from various books and chuckling to myself. So I thought, why not create a thread where people can share their choices for funny passages?

I realize "funny" is highly subjective, and that some passages are deliberately funny while others are inadvertently so. But I'd love to hear what you all find hysterical or cleverly amusing or laughable.

I've got two to share. My choice for an inadvertently funny passage is from Chapter 15 of Emma:
"To restrain him as much as might be, by her own manners, she was immediately preparing to speak with exquisite calmness and gravity of the weather and the night; but scarcely had she begun, scarcely had they passed the sweep-gate and joined the other carriage, than she found her subject cut up—her hand seized—her attention demanded, and Mr. Elton actually making violent love to her..." (I still remember doing a cartoon double-take when I first read this, then laughing my head off.)

Purposely funny passage is from The House at Pooh Corner, when Piglet, who has fallen into a pit and thinks Christopher Robin is a scary heffalump, tries to talk bravely and instead just talks gibberish:

And now being Completely Unsettled, [Piglet] said very quickly and squeakily: "This is a trap for Poohs, and I'm waiting to fall in it, ho-HO, what's all this, and then I say ho-HO again."

"WHAT?" said Christopher Robin.

"A trap for ho-ho's," said Piglet huskily. "I've just made it, and I'm waiting for the ho-ho to come-come."

(My kids never fail to laugh at this when I read it out loud to them.)

Donna Tartt's "The Secret History." Martin Cruz Smith's "Polar Star." Most of George R. R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" novels. Most of Stephen King's "Dark Tower" series (and Gloria, "11/22/63" was pretty much the same way for me, too). Dickens' "Bleak House" was pretty engrossing as well, as I recall.

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

I did like the X-Files, at least the first few seasons. And I had read that Morgan and Wong did the first one. I'm just not a horror flick fan, usually. That said, I saw the trailer for #5 and it actually looked pretty well done.

Heavens, no. I haven't seen #1-4 yet.

The Leftovers by Tom Perotta

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

Methinks there is a Patchett trend...

Kerry wrote: "So I saw the phrase "It's like Match.com but for books!" and couldn't resist clicking the link. So here it is, a website called Just the Right Book! It's a fiction finder where you take a little qu..."

Kerry--Patchett is great. I've only read Bel Canto and State of Wonder, but both are excellent novels. She has a command of language and of plot & character. Both novels get a bit unrealistic, but it's more like hyper-real than magic realism.