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

Christopher’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

Dan wrote: "awesome post Chris!"

Thanks, Dan. :)

Feel free to post, Noreen. We all met online--or most of us did--and while I consider some of these folks to be good friends, I haven't yet met any of them in person.

No tinkering with texts. Providing editorial context via footnotes or forwards, sure--that's what makes new editions interesting. But editing because of sensitivity over language? Why not get rid of all anti-Semitism in The Merchant of Venice? Or all racism in Heart of Darkness? Jane Eyre is full of prejudice against non-British people--"oh, Adele, she's so vain and shallow, but you know, she's French," or the horror of the madwoman in the attic, who is not only animalistic but from Jamaica and (shudder) of mixed race. Should we edit that out, too?

My authority on this may be lessened by the fact that I am a white Southern man, but I think editing out the word "nigger" from Huck Finn does not do a thing to lessen racism, and in fact could inadvertently strengthen it, if only by instilling ignorance in readers. If we delete the term "Nazi" from history books, will we delete facism?

We're a highly imperfect species. We perpetuate horrible acts upon one another. And yet we're also capable of great goodness. We learn from our mistakes. Hiding evidence of those mistakes is not the way we progress. And literature is not a sterilized presentation of who we are.

There's always Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried."

Adrian for the win.

I'm reading David Liss's A Spectacle of Coruption and finding it every bit as good as A Conspiracy of Paper and The Whiskey Rebels--historical fiction with just enough history and a lot of intrigue, plus a great character in Benjamin Weaver.

Margaret wrote: "It's still the only Arkady Renko book I've read. are the others as good?"

Polar Star is, in my opinion, better. Red Square, the third Renko novel, is quite good, especially for those of us who remember the fall of the Soviet Union. The remaining Renko novels are not as good, although they are more than readable, and Wolves Eat Dogs is the best of the later ones. Haven't read the most recent one yet.

Shel wrote: "I'm reading Gorky Park, The Art of Description: World into Word, and Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence...

Gorky Park is really, really good."

FINALLY--someone else who recognizes Gorky Park as a great book! :)

Kori Thickjaw here. (Thanks for the Viking name generator, Adrian.) The narration really makes this book. At times I want a little more dramatization, but Bengtsson was very good at telling a tale. The Vikings come across as twelve-year-old boys on the cusp of adolescence--they can be serious and sober, or they can be impulsive and at times feral. And when Vikings speak to each other in terms of formal challenge, it's like a parody of The Lord of the Rings.

I love the understatements, too, and the brief glimpses of characterization, like this nugget about King Ethelred the Unready of England, who has just heard of Viking invaders: "But King Ethelred yawned at his table and offered up prayers against the Northmen, and lay cheerfully with his chieftans' women." That last part, casually tossed in, is the kind of thing Bengtsson does so well.

Now this is pretty damn funny:

http://www.cracked.com/article_18645_...

But I also thought it might start some discussion on how our perceptions of literature change over time. Or you could just laugh.

An early attempt at a review: damn good.

The Return of the King--J.R.R. Tolkien

The Perfect Storm - Sebastian Junger

The Day of the Jackal--Frederick Forsyth

Adrian wrote: "Chris wrote: "Just glanced at a handful of the 900+ comments on Shivani's article and found these two to be quite good:

"The number one failing of MFA fiction programs is that they fail to teach, ..."

See, that kind of b.s. just pisses me off. I'm all about avoiding the pitfalls of genre fiction--predictability, paint-by-numbers plots, quality of writing ditched in favor of gruesome melodrama--but teaching people to loathe genre does a disservice to storytelling.

Just glanced at a handful of the 900+ comments on Shivani's article and found these two to be quite good:

"The number one failing of MFA fiction programs is that they fail to teach, or even acknowledge, plot. Anyone can write. Seriously. Just walk into Borders. But few writers can hang a story on a great plot.
A plot is a study in causality. Yet this most fundamental of rhetorical devices is pooh-poohed by MFA programs. Plot smacks of commercialism, a betrayal of that inner voice struggling to find the light. No. MFA fiction programs are not interested in story-telling in its purest, plot-driven sense. They are about group therapy, about finding your inner volice - and fooling yourself into believing the world really cares about your Lovely Bones or Snow Falling on Cedars.
Believe me, I know. I attended an MFA program. I still bear the scars."

And a follow-up:

"...there is nothing at stake in contemporary American fiction, and their readership is suffering for it - witness the mass migration to Swedish writers Henning and Larson (sic) [emphasis mine:] - why are they so popular? because they understand how character evolves out of plot - and plot means something is at stake..."

Might be one reason why many of us who are reading Larsson's Lisbeth Salander trilogy complain about Larsson's prose and endless descriptions of tea-drinking and unnecessary details, yet at the same time we are gripped by the characters and plot.

Ouch is right, but having attended two graduate creative writing programs, I think Shivani is on to something about the industrial assembly-line style of fiction that can come from such programs. I learned an awful lot from those programs--not least of which was finding support from other people who were hopelessly enmeshed with the idea of writing their own fiction as well--but I think the emphasis was on style and sentence-level writing than on plot or, more simply, story-telling. Which is why an awful lot of creative writing course fiction consists of second-rate characters, rejects from a Raymond Carver story, sitting around and talking about not very much. "I just need to get my characters up and out of the living room," one of the more promising writers in one class once said, which I thought was one of the bravest and most honest things any of us said.

Like all lists, this one is pretty subjective. I agree with a fair amount: the hermetic nature of modern criticism and the "academy," the glorification of certain styles and tropes, the banality of Michiko Kakutani, the impenetrability of Marilynne Robinson. I disagree with other points: Billy Collins as a bad poet? I understand that perhaps he isn't, say, Wordsworth, but even Wordsworth (who bottled lightning at least five or six times in his career) wrote a lot of dreck. I'd much rather read Collins than, say, Jorie Graham.

I'm very interested in reading Shivani's underrated version.

Okay, the "Jerry Maguire" model: fewer clients, less money. I like that. Now if only I could find a Jerry Maguire.

So as someone definitely on the outside of the publishing business who is trying to peek in...do we need the publishing companies? Really need them? The smaller houses have all been bought by the half dozen or so big houses, so there seems to be a move toward homogeneity...

On the other hand, I have this fantasy that one day I will have an agent AND and editor, both of whom will talk with me about my work, offer support and criticism, and help me get my fiction in the hands of readers. If there are no publishing houses, then does all this get reduced to a bunch of e-mails with an Amazon Publishing call center? And I love my hard copy, printed, bound books.

Guess I'd like to know what the folks who have access to the publishing kingdom think about this whole shakeup in the publishing industry.

Looks like I was wrong on the casting for the Hollywood version:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1568346/

It's odd how engaging these novels are to many of us, given the issues we have with the writing. Although as a veteran of several creative writing classes, I can tell you there are legions of people out there who can write well-turned and even beautiful sentences, but can't tell a story to save their lives. The whole violence-against-women-is-evil meme is effective, particularly because of Lisbeth Salander. She's a believable character (just), Blomkvist more so, and we want to know what will happen to them amid the insane plot devices (serial killers, KGB, Swedish security cover-ups, financial manipulation, etc.).