Reading for Writers

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

2011-12-07T08:22:00.000-05:00

So a lot was made about literary novelist Colson Whitehead crossing over to genre writing with this zombie novel, and as a result, I had in mind that he'd crossed over to commercial fiction (plot driven, less attention to language, super easy page turner), but it turns out genre and commercial are not equivalent (which is not to say this novel hasn't sold well, it has). In this case, what people really meant by genre, I guess, was it has zombies in it, which it does. But this is far more like zombie realism (Let's just make a note of that term I've invented; I'll say it again: zombie realism) than it is like a science fiction novel. But there again, I guess I'm equating genre writing with commercial writing rather than acknowledging what genre writing really is... a matter of content, not of style. So by content, yes, this is a futuristic, post-apocalyptic, zombie-shooting science fiction novel. But by style, it's very much a Colson Whitehead novel (bit satiric, very finely detailed, absolutely believable). All of which is to say I liked this novel way more than I thought I would; I really really liked it. Also, from here on out, I'm going to try say commercial fiction when I mean commercial fiction (fiction deliberately made accessible in order to reach more readers) and genre fiction when I mean genre fiction (fiction that takes as its subject certain things--a mystery, another planet, etc).

What I really really liked about this novel was all the ways it was different from McCarthy's The Road, which I liked okay but not with the ecstasy that every other reader seemed to feel. Because what I kept thinking when I read The Road was McCarthy did the easy part--make me sad by putting a child in danger--and not the hard part--fill in all the details. Now I get that this was a deliberate choice and McCarthy is very capable of filling in all the details, but it bugged me that the novel was all dialogue and action and almost no reflection and exposition (again I get it, I just didn't love it). But Zone One is pretty much the inverse of The Road, nearly all details, everything filled in. It is the kind of novel in which you recognize yourself (ah, that is how I would act, think, feel) rather than a novel in which you interject yourself (ah, this situation is terrifying, what would I do in this situation). And the first is my preferred kind. Actually The New Yorker has a great article on this subject this week, on how for certain types of readers, the concept is all they need--they need Middle Earth to exist more than they need Frodo to exist--because they want to write themselves into the story. Anyway, in this zombie novel, the zombies are mostly off-stage and the main character's reflections and memories are centered in the midst of a finely detailed new world. And the new world and the zombies themselves clearly become a commentary on our world and us... like this:

"In the time before the flood, Mark Spitz had a habit of making his girlfriends into things that were less than human. There was always a point, sooner or later, when they crossed a line and became creatures: following a lachrymose display while waiting in line for admission to the avant-garde performance; halfway into a silent rebuke when he underplayed his enthusiasm about attending her friend's wedding. Once it was only a look, a transit of anxiety across her eyes in which he glimpsed some irremediable flaw or future betrayal. And like that, the person he had fallen in love with was gone. They had been replaced by this familiar abomination, this thing that shared the same face, same voice, same familiar mannerisms that had once comforted him. To anyone else, the simulation was perfect."

The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje

2011-11-25T10:57:00.000-05:00

There are few novels I like as much as I like Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, and so it seems unfair to hold other novels to its standard, even when those novels are written by Ondaatje himself. But I feel an obligation to acknowledge that while I liked this novel, I didn't love it the way I love The English Patient. Still any Ondaatje novel, and this is no exception, is like a nice warm bath in a clean hotel room in a foreign locale.

I read something recently about ornament in art--the decorative embellishments that appear on buildings or serve as repeating patterns in some art forms (like an Islamic arabesque) and I've been thinking about what might be ornament in writing. I'm also a little obsessed with this "growth chart" I once read, about the stages of reading we go through--starting with identifying with characters, moving on to seeking stories outside ourselves and ending up at "aesthetics." In my opinion most readers don't reach the aesthetics stage... but me, I'm buried in it up to my neck. Nowadays my favorite parts of novels are aesthetic--what others might call mere ornament. So The Cat's Table, a lush episodic recreation of a sea voyage taken from Sri Lanka to England by a young boy (named Michael), has at its core two plot lines, one about three boys who become friends, and one about a prisoner on board the ship. But those plot lines are slight, and not meant so much to anchor the novel as provide a rope line that you can cling to as you walk across the decks (see what I'm doing there?)... This isn't a novel centered on plot, and it's not really a novel centered on character, I'd say it's a novel centered on ornament. The snippets of dialogue overheard by the narrator and recorded ("This man said he could cross a desert eating just a date and one onion a day" and "I have a specific dislike, I am sorry to say, of the Sealyham terrier"), the image of an Olympic swimmer furiously rushing through her laps, the sound of men playing bridge late at night as the narrator lies in his bunk... the whole world of this novel is established by ornament...let us not underestimate its value...

Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia

2011-10-17T09:16:00.001-05:00

I decided to reread this novel in anticipation of Cristina Garcia's reading at FAU (Oct 20, 5 pm, at University Center for Excellence in Writing) and was delighted by it all over again (I confess I had a certain bitterness connected to it in my memory based merely on the fact that I loaned my original copy to my then boss in 1995 and never got it back; that bitterness has happily been erased) (though I'm still annoyed that I loaned my copy of Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land to someone in 1998 and never got it back). Anyway... what I want to talk about is an idea related to that of "significant detail"...

Most undergrad workshops will at some point talk about significant detail--it's the idea that an author doesn't choose what to describe at random. We don't try to give a complete sensory portrait of a scene, nor do we point and click our cameras indiscriminately. We choose key images because of their connotations--emotional and intellectual. But my point is we don't just do that with sensory images--the things that physically exist in the imagined world of the story (or poem or essay) but also with figurative language, and with exposition, and with dreams... things that are planted into the story even more than those significant (and sensory) details are. So when someone chooses a metaphor as a means of description they are not actually trying to provide a more apt description of the image (the orange does not seem more orange-like because it has been compared to the sun), they are trying to point the reader to an emotional reading of the image (the orange seems more intense, more dangerous, more fiery because it has been compared to the sun). A better example: in Garcia's novel "Celia fingers the sheet of onion parchment in her pocket, reads the words again, one by one, like a blind woman." Through the use of the simile, we are meant to understand that Celia is literally running her fingers over the letter but also we are supposed to take on the layered meaning of blindness--someone who literally can't see, but also someone who can't understand... the moment provides the reader with a clear picture of what is happening, but also with a subtext, an implied understanding of the character...

Likewise, when author's insert dreams into their narratives this kind of subtext or connotation is often their intended effect: to add an emotional and intellectual subtext to what is "real." And that can be a huge mistake. Because readers are so trained to see dreams as symbolic that we can be highly suspicious of them; it feels like the author is taking a shortcut to meaning simply by inventing a dream that the character had. Now, of course, a novel titled "Dreaming in Cuban" is likely to be loaded up with dreams, so I thought it interesting to consider how Garcia gets away with such a potentially manipulative plot device... and I've decided she does because the "vivid and continuous dream" (see John Gardner, Art of Fiction) of this novel is not interrupted by the literal dreams. The trouble with writing dreams usually occurs because of the way they stand out from the rest of a narrative and how they take an otherwise realist experience and insert the surreal into it (yeah, this is how dreams operate in life, but fiction is not a direct representation of life, now is it?). So dreams work in this novel to add symbolism and meaning to the story, but they don't interrupt the story... just as your figurative language and your flashbacks/exposition also don't interrupt the story but rather feel of a piece with it. So my suggestions is if you want to use dreams in your writing, don't suddenly switch tones and styles and go into dream language but rather relay the dream (which can still be surreal and strange) in the voice of the rest of the story... maintaining the "vivid and continuous dream" that you have put your readers under.

Likewise, if you send your characters off into waking dreams (aka their imagination--also a useful way to add emotional and intellectual connotations), you need to maintain the tone of the rest of the work. Another example from Garcia: "Ivanito imagines the vines and tendrils, taut and violent as a killing rope, snaking along the floor to his bed, wrapping him in place, tighter and tighter, choking off his breath while his sisters sleep."

Don't you want to read this book now? You should.

You Are Free by Danzy Senna

2011-10-02T11:24:00.000-05:00

The first story of this collection was my favorite and the one I want to talk about. "Admission" is about a mixed race couple who are deciding whether to enter their child in private school or public school, and who receive a highly coveted admission spot in a very upscale pre-school (I had to return the book to the library, so I'm working from memory, I'm pretty sure it was pre-school). The husband wants to say no, the wife considers saying yes. But (spoiler alert!) in the end they say no. At which point this realist, quiet, but good story goes a little bananas. The admissions officer starts calling their home, visiting, essentially stalking them trying to figure out why they won't say yes... It is so weird and unexpected that it really makes the story. And because the admissions officer is a minor character whose thoughts the narrator does not have access to, we never know why she's doing what she's doing. Sort of like how we never learn why Bartleby "prefers not to" in one of my all-time favorites, Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener". And it had me thinking--you can Bartleby pretty much any story, even the most realist and quiet. People are often inexplicable and unexplicated. Not everything in your story has to be explained. Of course, you can't Bartleby all your stories. That would be silly. But maybe if you're stuck on one, can't get it going...Bartleby it. (can you see how I'm trying to make that a catch phrase? is it working?)

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

2011-08-24T10:43:00.000-05:00

Of all the much hyped books of the past year, this novel was by far my favorite (by the way, the author's first name has an accent over the e that I couldn't figure out how to add). It's set in the Balkans and essentially moves between three storylines (a classic braid structure): the narrator's contemporary life as a doctor in a war-ravaged country, the stories her just-deceased grandfather told her about his life as a doctor in a war-ravaged country (with the added bonus of encounters with a character who is the nephew of Death), and the stories her grandfather told her about his life as a child in a village threatened by a tiger who has taken up residence near-by (and threatened by the woman who becomes the tiger's wife). Now this might sound like magical realism and apparently comparisons to Garcia Marquez have been tossed around, but it reminds me more of Michael Ondaatje. Obreht doesn't use magic so much as she uses legend. I mean there's a big difference between a novel saying Death's nephew is real and a character in a novel (the grandfather) saying Death's nephew is real. And I loved how Obreht used the histories and legends that are attached to her setting--any setting has them! It made the whole novel feel bigger and more believable because everything had a history. Naturally I was particularly interested in the traces left behind by the Ottomans--such as the Jannissary's gun that was passed down generation to generation and so because of its historical significance (and the fact that it was the only gun in the village) was used to hunt the tiger...

The contemporary storyline of the novel is less developed than the other two lines (deliberately so) but what interested me was how Obreht got away with this because the other two storylines filled in the contemporary storyline. The narrator is not fully examined and revealed, but everything we learn about the grandfather casts more light on her because it has been established that the two of them are the proverbial peas in a pod. So developing the grandfather has the secondary effect of revealing the narrator. And similarly the Balkan country is described in a somewhat limited fashion in the contemporary storyline but because we know so much of the place's past through the other two storylines, we end up understanding it quite well.

As I read this novel I actually looked forward to reading it again in the future--that's something I love, when I know I'm not getting everything the first time around and that I'll come back again.

The Blog

2011-08-17T14:23:00.000-05:00

So, I know, I've been gone awhile. It's not that I haven't been reading. It's just I've had a series of disappointments (Swamplandia! ,Visit From the Goon Squad, some others I won't name). And even when I read a book I really liked, say A Widow's Year by Joyce Carol Oates or Moby Duck by Donovan Hohm, and I made some notes to blog...I just didn't. Sometimes I just don't feel like having people pay so much attention to my thoughts. I've also been researching a lot for the stories I'm working on, and that means I've read a lot of things that are blog-irrelevant. I'm not kidding these were for just one story:

Anderson, Ronald and Anne Koval. James McNeill Whistler: Beyond the Myth.
Babinger, Franz. Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time.
Croutier, Alev Lytle. Harem: The World Behind the Veil.
Faroqhi, Suraiya. Subjects of the Sultan: Culture and Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire.
Freely, John. Istanbul: The Imperial City.
Haskell, Francis. “A Turk and his Pictures in Nineteenth-Century Paris.”
Itzkowitz, Norman. Ottoman Empire and Islamic Tradition.
Le Men, Segolene. Courbet.
Lewis, Bernard. Istanbul and the Civilization of the Ottoman Empire.
Lewis, Bernard (ed.). A Middle East Mosaic: Fragments of Life, Letters and History.
Lewis, Raphaela. Everyday Life in Ottoman Turkey.
Lindsay, Jack. Gustave Courbet: His Life and Art.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Turkish Embassy Letters.
Nochlin, Linda. “Courbet’s ‘L’origine du monde’: The Origin without an Original.”
Sancar, Asli. Ottoman Women: Myth and Reality.
Tinterow, Gary, ed. Gustave Courbet.

But the semester starts Monday, so we're back on, people. I'm sure I'll have something to say soon.

Things That Fall from the Sky by Kevin Brockmeier

2011-05-03T07:49:00.001-05:00

I've been thinking lately about how a short story really doesn't need to be a bullet, traveling a fast and straight line (do bullets travel in straight lines? what do I know? not according to this, at least). A hazard of overly applied rules of writing can be that short story writers fear both digressions and exposition, and especially expositional digressions. But for me those can be some of the most surprising and moving parts of stories. For example, Brockmeier, in the midst of "These Hands" a story about a male nanny who falls in a deep, not exactly disturbing but not exactly comfortable, love, for the baby girl in his charge, interrupts the flow of events to bring us this: "An old story tells of a man who grew so fond of the sky--of the clouds like hills and the shadows of hills, of the birds like notes of music and the stars like distant blessings--that he made of his heart a kite and sailed it into the firmament." It's possibly my favorite sentence in the story. But it's the kind of line that interrupts the story--and so what I'm arguing for is the possibility of interruptions in what can otherwise be too tidy narratives.

The other thing I've been thinking is how some writers who write in multiple forms or genres will claim that they know instantly if an idea is a story idea or a novel idea or a poem idea ... And maybe they do, I can't read their minds. But for me at least, this seems to be a conscious decision--though sometimes my inability to execute my decision leads to a new decision. For example, I worked one collegiate summer at the Philadelphia Marionette Theater, and I thought I would work the experience into fiction, but then I wrote about it in poetry, then I thought nonfiction, before finally the poems got combined back into fiction and became the start of a story that eventually appeared in The Saint Ann's Review (I can't remember the title; that's embarrassing... ah wait, it was "The Theater Itself; or Sam, Sometimes"). Anyway, just yesterday I read an interview with a big name writer in which she said the character and plots in short stories were typically characters and plots that could not be sustained over the length of a novel. I'm not buying it. What made me think about this was this page in Brockmeier's story "Small Degrees":

"'You think that people are nothing but time,' she said. 'You think that I'm nothing but time. But I'm not time,' she said. 'I'm something else.'

"What was he to say about such a thing? If he was this sort of person he had never recognized it. As he tried to puzzle it through, he heard her breathing deepen. A cricket sounded at the window, and the house and all its spaces seemed to spread with an electrostatic silence. 'I don't know,' he said, 'Perhaps you're right.' And when she didn't reply, he closed his eyes and gathered the blankets to his shoulders.

"He was soon asleep.

"The next morning there was an answer waiting for him on his desk, written in his wife's hand: I love you, it read, but the word love had been crossed out and replaced with the word miss, which had been crossed out and replaced with an empty space, as though his wife had given up on the message altogether.

"He looked for her in the kitchen and the pantry and the bedroom, though he'd just come from there. He stood on the front walk and watched his neighbors drifting by like sails: she was not among them He even tapped on the trapdoor of the attic with a broomstick, querying her name with a brief little note of embarrassment in his voice. When it became clear that he was alone in the house--and because the day was supposed to begin this way--he lit the stove and drew the curtains and prepared a breakfast of eggs and toast. ... All day long he listened for the sound of her shoes in the hallway, their change from pad to click at the edge of the carpet and floor. He listened for the snap of wood as she spurred the fire, and the creak of the pantry door on its hinges, and the thousand peripheral noises that told him he was home and she was near.

"It was not until the sun fell that he realized she had left him."

To my mind, that works great as a complete piece of flash fiction. But the whole story--with expanded character development, expanded plot--worked great as a short story. And if Brockmeier so chose, it could work great--with expanded character development, expanded plot--as a novel. Couldn't it? Doesn't it just matter what we want to turn the seed into? What it interests us to do? (and what we're capable of doing) Granted some ideas immediately seem big enough for a novel (or too big for a story), but isn't it all in how we choose to treat those ideas?

The Anti-Romantic Child by Priscilla Gilman

2011-04-28T13:22:00.000-05:00

Full disclosure: Priscilla's my agent so obviously if I hadn't liked this book I would have pretended--for my whole life--to have not gotten around to reading it. Fortunately I have the good sense to surround myself only with the talented and the wise, so I'm never put in such awkward situations.

This memoir will rightfully be praised as a sensitive portrait of what it's like to parent a child on the autism spectrum, and I'm sure it will be advertised as a great book for parents of autistic children to read, but I found myself admiring it for a number of different reasons. It seems to me too often memoirs are about only one thing--they are very on the nose in terms of focus and subject and meaning. Novels are assumed to need layers and complications and multiple ideas, but some memoirs seem to narrow life down to just one thing (usually something marketable). To some extent this makes sense--focus is where you get a hook--and it allows, just as in fiction, for a book to run "narrow and deep" (copyright Toni Morrison). But there is such a thing as narrow and shallow ... so one of the things I admired most about this memoir is that while it centers on parenting an autistic child, it has a number of other layers, and one in particular that resonated with me. And that's how reading has been co-opted by academia in a way that isn't so good for reading. Students are often encouraged to separate the texts they read from the lives they lead, and as a result, reading feels unimportant; it feels...academic. Now, I'll be honest, I'm the first person to steer students away from talking about their personal lives in the classroom, but that doesn't mean English professors can't find other ways to connect literature to human experience. In the writing classrooms, we talk all the time about creating literature out of human experience, so how come in the literature classrooms it sometimes comes back out so differently? One of my big frustrations is that so many people see reading as a way to escape from life as opposed to a means to understand and confront and live life. And in her memoir, Gilman points out the ways that reading has shaped her--both for the better and the worse. Literature is one of the lenses through which she sees life, and throughout the book she shows how specific poems sometimes gave her unrealistic expectations for the future, but also how the very same poems helped her see her child as the unique being that he is. So, beautifully threaded throughout this parenting memoir is an argument for reading and a critique of academia (Gilman leaves the kind of tenure-track gig that most PhD's (think they) would sacrifice multiple limbs for) that I found just as compelling as the (very moving) kid stuff.

From a craft perspective I also want to point out one thing I noticed about how Gilman does characterization. At the heart of the memoir is Gilman's dilemma between seeing her child, Benj, as a unique, free-thinking individual, but also accepting that there is a diagnosis--hyperlexia--that explains a lot of what he says and does. And one of the keys to the book is that readers must see Benj the person and not just Benj the diagnosis. If readers didn't come to the same understanding that Gilman herself did, the book would, to put it bluntly, fail. And Gilman is very good at showing through example and quoted dialogue and cinematic descriptions how charming and joyous and also emotional and challenging Benj is. This is a good use of traditional technique--show show show. (my favorite example of anecdotal showing is when Benj who has complained vehemently about his mother changing the lyrics of James Taylor's "Sweet Baby James" to "Sweet Baby Benj" expresses delight at the lyrics being sung correctly to his new baby brother...James). But Gilman also characterizes Benj through a technique that hadn't really occurred to me before, and which would also work well in fiction. Gilman juxtaposes Benj with other characters, and as a reader, I started to see bits of Benj everywhere. His father, his grandfather, his grandmother, and even his mother all share some of his traits. Especially charming is the relationship between Benj and his grandmother, who is delighted to finally have someone so entirely rational (like her) in what has up until then been a family of wishers and dreamers. So what I'm saying is, instead of seeing Benj as a composite of symptoms (hyper-literal, anxious, obsessed with routine) you see him as a composite of those who surround him--just with their traits taken to the extreme. Most of the time, writers do characterization through dialogue and through point of view (either getting into the character's head or hearing the narrator's thoughts on the character), but this third way seems almost like sleight of hand. You aren't even looking at Benj, you are looking at his joyful but extremely sensitive grandfather, when you think, hey that reminds me of Benj. But because you know the grandfather isn't hyperlexic, you think, well that's just a personality trait not a symptom. And so you re-envision what first seemed like one of Benj's symptoms as one of his personality traits. This is the kind of echoing that is often done with theme (we call those things that get repeated motifs) but I confess I never really thought of echoes or motifs between characters before (I know about foils, but we're not talking opposites here, we're talking variations on a theme). Sometimes it takes nonfiction--which is, of course, reflecting reality, in which people in close proximity often share character traits--to show me what can be done in fiction. This trick of characterization has the added affect of reminding readers that these things really are on a spectrum, and many of us who would be diagnosed "normal" because we find it easy to follow the rules of school aren't so far off from those who sometimes are too conveniently labelled "abnormal." Gilman expresses directly how important it is not to see Benj--or any kid--in terms of normal and abnormal but instead just see them as they are. A useful lesson for life of course, but an equally useful one for writing.

Eight Questions...again

2011-03-18T12:30:00.003-05:00

Some very interesting questions raised here. I especially like how one of the labels for the blogpost is lawnmower. By way of one answer, I would probably be a better writer if I were outraged, but no, I'm more along the lines of detached ... the form of the essay came about because when this happens, which is all the time, it feels exactly like I'm inside of a play in which I can't seem to stop myself from saying the prescribed lines. As if I didn't write them. Which, of course, I did.

Eight Questions...

2011-03-08T19:54:00.001-05:00

This sure does make me sound a lot smarter than I am. I am seriously appreciative of how thoughtful this reading of my essay is... plus, how did they get the accent on my name right? I don't even know how to do that.

A Few Words on First Drafts

2011-02-24T12:12:00.000-05:00

I've been moving between two first drafts lately (my least favorite part of writing). And I've realized that a lot of my early drafting is me looking for the rhythm of the story (also the voice, but more specifically the rhythm of the sentences). I can't really go until I have a sentence that's my anchor, that gives me a model to hold onto while I write the rest. Sometimes it's the first sentence, sometimes not. In this case: "The fair was open into the night, but finally there would be a time when the gates had closed, and even the stragglers had been expelled, and the villagers had their village to themselves," it's a few pages in. But it wasn't until I got this sentence (which probably seems quite mundane to you) that I felt confident that the story would actually happen.

Another thing I realized lately is sometimes my draft isn't going well because I simply haven't given myself enough to work with. First I wrote this sentence "They had arrived a month before the fair began, after a steamer trip from Constantinople to New York, and a train trip from New York to Chicago" which was basically a filler expositional sentence but then on a whim, I changed it to this sentence: "They, with one exception, had arrived a month before the fair began, after a steamer trip from Constantinople to New York, and a train trip from New York to Chicago" ... and it felt like I had something to build on. Stories are often built out of difference I think--the one person or event or what-have-you that doesn't fit the mold. Might not keep it, but it's an indicator of where most of my ideas come from. From the sentence. As I write it.

American Idol and the Art of Storytelling

2011-02-18T07:16:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure anyone else is still watching American Idol, but I'm quite enjoying the new judges and whatnot. But my mom and I have decided that what's really needed is an overhaul in the editing department--by which we mean the people who craft all the narratives that get created around the idol wannabes. The problem is this: American Idol confuses melodrama and sentimentality with good storytelling (just like many an intro to creative writing student) Melodrama--look at all the terrible things that happen to people!--and sentimentality--cry for me, terrible things have happened to me!--are being employed to try to shortcut viewers into caring about the "characters". It doesn't work. On the other hand, the storyline the other night, in which a baby-faced fifteen year old, Jacee was cut from his group in the middle of the night leaving him stranded actually made for a good story. Why? Because the "villain"--the guy, Junebug who decided to cut Jaycee was 1) a likeable, kind of funny looking, talented singer who 2) did a bad thing for a good reason. Jacee, by all appearances, couldn't project enough. He was going to mess up. The group was probably better without him. So good reason. But Jacee is really young (vulnerability!) and it was really late in the game to cut someone (cruelty!). So bad thing. As a result, I could understand why the group wanted to cut him but I felt really bad for him when they actually did it... and so I became invested in what would happen next. Would Jacee find a new group? Would Junebug be punished for his wrongdoing? ... suspense! tension! a narrative that wasn't backstory (like most of what the show tries to use for characterization) and in which the characters were active agents in the story (as opposed to victims of circumstance). And even better, it turned out there was a group that needed another member...so when they took Jacee in, it was not just because they felt sorry for him, they had needs of their own (characters always have needs of their own). And when Jacee messed up with the new group, he still got voted through to the next round...why? because he had a story! People felt for him! Probably if he hadn't gotten kicked out of his old group, he would have been sent home... Now in all of this, Jacee was a somewhat passive character--he got kicked out of one group and pulled into another as opposed to quitting a group and joining another, but he remained interesting because of his reaction to the events. He was obviously hurt by it, but he was so dignified (which contrasted wonderfully with his babyface) and tried to act unemotional but the tears kept sneaking up on him. He was the exact opposite of the hysterical, incredibly annoying people that American Idol keeps putting on the show for drama. (again confusing drama with melodrama). So, my point is, and American Idol producers should take note (alert the media!)...it's very hard to create characters if you don't give them a story to operate in. You want us to care about these wannabes, give them a narrative in which they are active participants who engage in recognizable and understandable human emotions.

House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer's Journey Home by Mark Richard

2011-02-07T19:00:00.001-05:00

When I was in the middle of this memoir I thought, I should only read books this good. Wouldn’t my life be better if I only read books this good? But truthfully, not that many books are this good.

Many times over I’ve read (or let’s face it, written) a piece with a strong, compelling voice right at the beginning that then switches over to a weaker, more conventional voice. And the reasoning is either—I, the writer, couldn’t sustain that voice over a long period or the reader wouldn’t want to read a whole book in such a noticeable voice. Well. This is a case for committing, for stick-to-it-iveness, for not underestimating the reader. I know Richard wrote the essay that became the opening to this memoir about fourteen years ago, and given that the memoir is out this month, I have to assume there were quite a few years in between the essay and the developing of the essay into a book. But the voice. It never falters. The moment where the essay leaves off is invisible.

So let’s talk about the voice. It’s second person. An entire memoir written in second person. I think on principle most people hearing of such a thing would just say no. The guy who came up to me when he saw me reading the book at the airport said, “that would never fly in workshop” (he was coming from the same writing conference I was; I don’t think random airport travelers know about workshop). But there are a couple of reasons a book-length second person isn’t a problem, at least in this case. For one, Richard isn’t writing in scene so you don’t get awkward dialogue tags. And for another he almost never writes action. So you don’t get a lot of You do this, You do that. In fact “you” rarely starts a sentence; it is almost always buried inside. Now before you go all “show don’t tell” on me, let me explain that while Richard doesn’t write much dialogue or action (otherwise known as scene), this memoir does nothing but show. It’s just expositional showing. It’s like a memoir of every striking image, Richard has ever seen. And you quite literally see the world through his eyes, and as a result you feel like you know him intimately (probably much more so than if he gave you the usual blend of scene and reflection).

Case in point: “The snake gets in there and unhinges its jaw and starts to try to swallow the baby headfirst when the mother comes in from the neighbor’s laundry and the baby is screaming with a snake on its head like a skullcap with a length of yellow and brown tail.”

Full disclosure: One of my favorite memories of graduate school is Mark Richard reading the "Why I Write" essay that opens this memoir to our class. And he gave me a copy of this book for free, which was really nice. The even nicer thing is reading the book made me think, Good grief, I need to work harder.

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales edited by Kate Bernheimer

2011-01-30T07:07:00.001-05:00

I'm a well known fairy tale fan and so of course I liked this anthology of fairy tales by some of my favorite authors (Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Lydia Millet...)(full disclosure: editor Kate Bernheimer once published a piece of mine in her journal Fairy Tale Review). But probably my favorite of all the tales was "A Day in the Life of Half of Rumpelstiltskin" by Kevin Brockmeier. And it had me thinking about how I read. I sometimes ask students what, if anything they are picturing when they read a story, and some of them will claim that they are seeing it play like a movie in their heads. But I don't really believe them. If they are, they are filling in an extraordinary amount of gaps. I mean even the most scenic of stories doesn't have anywhere near the visuals of a movie. When I read, I am hearing language and usually not seeing anything. Occasionally an image will stand out and I'll see it clearly--sort of like looking at photos while someone narrates their vacation (good grief, is reading fiction like a power point presentation?). I'm bringing this up now because in this story the main character is ... Half of Rumpelstiltskin. I mean he's literally half of a person. And Brockmeier does describe him: "He is like a pentagram folded across its center or a tree split by lightning. He is like the left half of a slumberous mannequin, yawning and shuddering, rising from within the netlike architecture of his dreams. He is like that exactly." But if I spent the story actually visualizing, or if Brockmeier spent the story constantly describing, half of a man...well, it would be a huge and horrible distraction. Instead Brockmeier calls the character Half of Rmpelstiltskin all the time. That's his name. And the repetition gives a lot of strength to the voice while tonally affecting how you think of the character. I can't help but have sympathy for someone cut in half, and of course, it's more important thematically that he's half of himself than it is literally. The story wouldn't work if Brockmeier didn't treat the half body realistically (it hops, its clothes don't fit right...like Gregor Samsa's bug body, it's treated as absolutely real) but because Brockmeier doesn't constantly worry about what you're seeing, you aren't distracted by the body, but are instead engaged by the character. I'm not suggesting we abandon physical description (I like the slide show portion of my reading) but just want to suggest that the sound attached to a character, the tone of how he's described, can do more work than the statistics of height, weight and hair color.

Little Man, What Now? by Hans Fallada

2011-01-25T13:01:00.001-05:00

I found this book in my parents' basement--as you might have imagined I grew up in a house where there were, and still are, books at every turn, quite a few of which are more than a hundred years old (my reading habits are genetically encoded over many generations). Anyway I decided to give it a go since Fallada has been put back into print recently. The novel was first published in the US in 1933 (it's German) and weirdly this copy has a book plate from the Public Library of Mexico City, Special Tourists Rates, 10 cents a day ... this could be quite a fine if they come after me (2011 - 1933 x 365 x .10 = 2487!). Anyway one thing that struck me about this German novel from the 1930s is how few mentions of the Nazi's are in it ... oh, they're in there, but they are definitely just a bit of colored border surrounding the central plot. Now if a 21st century writer were to write a novel about 1930s Germany, I suspect they might be inclined to talk quite a lot about Nazis and the coming storm. Because it's hard for writers of historical fiction not to forecast the future... after all, they know it already. But it's important not to. One of the keys to historical fiction it seems to me is to hide an awful lot of what you know...rather to imagine what it was like to not know.

The novel by the way is really resonant for today's times as it's about a young couple who get themselves deeper and deeper into debt in a one thing leads to another fashion. And while you can see their trouble's coming (why oh why did he buy that dressing table) you feel sorry for them (I know exactly why he brought that dressing table--as a failed last stand against further humiliation) and while you know that things are going to get worse you wonder just how... As I was reading the novel I kept describing it as funny though now that I look back, the dominant tone is unquestionably sad. But there is a comic sensibility to some key scenes and one or two characters, and those are a pretty vital contrast to the depression.

Joe by Larry Brown

2011-01-24T13:07:00.001-05:00

Okay, I thought I would blog more given sabbatical...but it turns out, no, I won't. And I waited so long to blog about this novel, which I liked a heck of a lot, that I forgot I had read it until I saw my blog entry draft just now. But according to my notes what I wanted to say was when beginning writers include alcohol and other drugs in their stories they almost always show the character at the height of his/her altered-mind-state. The point of the whole scene becomes to show what it's like to be in that state. But it is in fiction as it is in life, and the drunk person at a party is usually the least interesting one to listen to. So scenes of drunkenness can be a bit dull to read. Now in Brown's novel there are a number of alcoholics. The two primary ones are the most heroic character in the novel and the most villainous one in the novel. The villain, you know right away, is a drunk and a villain. The hero, it takes you some time to realize is also a drunk. Which alters your thinking on the villain a little (not much). But Brown is also savvy about how he uses drinking in the novel. He doesn't stay long in scenes of drunkenness and doesn't go into the minds of characters when they are drunk (their drunken points of view just wouldn't be that interesting), but rather he lingers in the consequences of their disease. And with the hero, when he finally acts out in a state of drunkenness, you realize this is not an escape from who he is and how he acts (the typical drunken teenager trying to be someone else via alchohol), instead you realize that this rage reflects his real despair that he has been fighting so hard to suppress. What Joe does when he's drunk suddenly shows the reader the difference between who Joe wants to be (and fights to be most of the novel) and who he instinctively is. And suddenly you realize that Joe's kind acts throughout have been this heroic fight against his natural inclinations, and so in his downfall, he becomes both more tragic and more heroic. The alcohol instead of being some deus ex machina that gets a character to do something dramatic he would normally otherwise never do becomes a way to reveal the character's deepest despair...when he's sober.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

2011-01-01T15:15:00.001-05:00

I've been hearing about this young adult novel for years and meaning to read it for just as long. It's a page turner and well done. And I suspect the things that bugged me about it only bugged me because I'm an adult and not really of the intended demographic. The novel sets up two mysteries at the start--the first, what is going on with this narrator (who is an intense and emotional fellow) and two, who is he writing to (the novel is epistolary and the first letter makes clear he does not really know the person he is sending the letters to). Both questions get answered, but what was interesting to me was that the answers ultimately meant very little to my experience of the novel. The reason that he's a little off is not exactly predictable so much as it is familiar, but without giving it away, I only think it felt familiar because I'm a grown-up and this isn't the first time I've read about that subject. If I were a teen/pre-teen this might well be my first exposure and therefore much more powerful. The recipient of the letters isn't completely explained but is revealed just enough that you don't wonder who s/he is...but I really didn't care at all who s/he was...which raised the question for me: would the novel be better or just as good if it wasn't written in the form of letters? The first person voice is definitely a strength of the book, but first person narratives don't need to be justified... So then is the form of a letter particularly key to the novel...not so much, I mean we get direct dialogue and scenes which make it more like a conventional first person narrative than actual letters. And because the recipient is a stranger--barely more familiar to the narrator than I the reader am--his/her existence doesn't change how the story is told either. The novel could just as easily have been written as a diary (though the narrator makes a point of saying he doesn't want to write a diary because they can be found). Thematically the letters probably matter--they mean the narrator is reaching out to someone, but not to someone who he is close to. But that doesn't really change my reading of the novel or my understanding of the narrator. So is the point of the letters just to set up a mystery for its own sake? I kind of think it is. And in the end, that seemed fairly okay. I zipped through the book not just because it's young adult but because I was very curious about what would happen and what was going on. And I felt satisfied in the end--it's an emotionally effective novel. So did it matter that I was "tricked" into wondering about something that didn't matter that much ultimately... I guess not. Which surprises me. My impulse would be to say, of course that matters, don't do that. But as is so often the case, writers get away with a lot as long as they write a good story.

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith

2010-12-22T12:53:00.000-05:00

Zadie Smith is one of the few writers whose writing about writing I find as interesting as her fiction. And in one of the more personal essays in this book, she reveals that her father was the model for Archie, the central figure of her first novel, White Teeth. Smith famously published White Teeth when she was 24 and has since tried to distance herself from it--calling it something like a ginger-haired child tap-dancing manically. But I'm a big fan--then again I wouldn't mind seeing a ginger-haired child tap-dancing manically either. Now I wonder if she has distanced herself from the novel because it is partly borrowed from her father. It had never occurred to me that White Teeth was at all autobiographical, perhaps because it's so over-the-top; and honestly, I find it a relief to discover it has such true-to-life seeds. That makes the achievement seem less daunting--that this brilliant insanity was not entirely invented out of nothing.

Also included in this collection is an essay I like quite a lot, "That Crafty Feeling," about how when you're writing a novel suddenly everything that you come across seems to fit into your novel. Words pop into your life, theories, people...and they all seem to slide right into the novel. I don't so much believe in this as deliberately practice it. I don't believe the arrival of these notions is fate, but that they are tools I can use. I like the fun and challenge and randomness of seeing if I can fit the things that fall into my life into the thing I'm working on at the moment (because this is often a number of things perhaps it's not such a tough challenge). There's something about allowing the layered and coincidental nature of life into fiction that I think makes it feel more real--more layered itself. It also (I hope) breaks up my tendency to make everything in my fiction fit too neatly (or as Russell Banks once told me, the tendency to keep my hands too tight on the steering wheel) (Toni Morrison once almost hit me with her car in the university parking lot when I was an undergrad, so maybe Banks wasn't speaking metaphorically. Come to think of it in the same conversation he told me how as a teenager he once ran away from home in a stolen car. I'm not sure exactly what he was advising there.) (But I loved him.) (Still do.). Then again, maybe this practice is just more evidence of my need to organize everything; this time by fitting it into fiction. Either way, it makes writing a bit more of a game, and that appeals.

Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting

2010-12-20T15:55:00.001-05:00

This collection of short stories won the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, and I love the fearlessness of the author. The world herein is our world but wackier, as if the weirdest of our natives were the only ones to survive the nuclear blast and repopulated the earth. As a result, Nutting gets away with some of the wildest figurative language I've seen. Last semester I talked with my grad class about similes and metaphors and the conclusion I came to (whether or not I really convinced them) is figurative language is much more about setting tone than anything else. It may seem at first glance like it's meant to convey scents and touches and tastes, but really that's rarely the case. Literal language is pretty good at describing literal things. Figurative language is much more about describing feelings--how we feel when we see a sunset, not what we actually see. And so Nutting's figurative language is often about creating the mood..which is often uncomfortable and even a little scary. Case in point was the line Twitter wouldn't let me write all of: "I was like a turd inside of someone who'd accidentally swallowed an engagement ring: I was nothing, yet I carried something uniquely special." If that image doesn't make you deeply uncomfortable with the narrator's state of mind, well, you're not me.

My Los Angeles in Black & (Almost) White by Andrew Furman

2010-12-20T15:45:00.000-05:00

Full Disclosure: You know that sitcom joke about having a work spouse? Well, Andy is my work big brother.

I confess when my friends write nonfiction it's hard not to be charmed by these visions of their childhood-selves (here it's young Andy and his homing pigeons!). But that aside... Andy's memoir is about playing high school basketball during the years of forced integration in Los Angeles, and what I found especially interesting was the way it blends memoir, history, and reflection. In his introduction, Andy acknowledges the hybrid nature of the book, specifically, chapters that detail the law cases relevant to desegregating the LA schools versus chapters that detail Andy's life as a child and teen. But I would add a third strand of hybridity--the reflective nature of the adult narrator who is trying to figure out how his life then fits into his life now, and how his belief in social justice is (and sometimes isn't) reflected in his life now. That third strand, for me, is probably what holds the hybridity together. It would be fine for the book to jump between an academic voice and a personal voice, readers can make those shifts when the content connects them, but it definitely mattered to me that there was an adult narrator who could reflect on both sections. The book then became not just a depiction of the narrator's past experiences but a quest to determine the significance of those experiences...and therefore it felt both more personal and more intellectually important. Andy has, more than once, said to me, how lucky we are to hold jobs that pay us enough to live on so that we don't have to worry about the marketability of our writing. We don't have to chase popular success, but can stick to our guns and write what we believe. And I have to agree--this book is made more original because Andy didn't have to answer to a trade publisher's fear of alienating their audience with academic talk...and as a result, this is a memoir that moves beyond navel-gazing and actually achieves social relevance.

Living Like a Writer

2010-12-08T08:23:00.001-05:00

This fall I had intended to require my graduate students in the fiction workshop keep an artist's journal of some kind (physical, virtual, in words, in pictures...) but I never got around to it. Mostly because I wanted to try keeping one myself before requiring it of them and I never got around to that. I mean, I have notebooks for jotting things down willy-nilly, but I've never kept anything I'd call an artist's journal. But I'll be teaching a graduate workshop this summer, and I've decided to partially focus that class on inspiration's role in the writing process (I usually have an unannounced focus for my grad courses so that I don't just repeat the same old formulas every semester...I don't think the students ever notice, but so what? ... this past semester it was "avoiding the workshop story" in case you were wondering...). Now, anyone who's been in my physical presence within the past few days, knows I am about 48 hours worth of grading away from a semester-long sabbatical, so I figure I'll keep my artist's journal during my sabbatical as a prelude to the students' assignment. Which is all a way of saying, I'm refocusing, or perhaps unfocusing the blog, to include more than just my reading, and to be a part of, maybe all of, my artist's journal experiment.

You Can Read...

2010-11-03T04:40:00.001-05:00

...my short-short, "Self-Portrait with Birds," in Pank 5, the latest print issue of Pank Magazine. For the time being, there is also a link to the story online. Pank publishes a print issue and a separate online issue, both chock-full of good things to read.

On Book Collecting

2010-10-07T06:59:00.000-05:00

I own a lot of books. But I've never really thought of this as collecting; it's just my version of living. But every now and then--like today when it occurred to me that I own signed copies of things by three Nobel Prize winners (Toni Morrison, Orhan Pamuk, and the latest Mario Vargas Llosa)--that I could have a focused collection. Maybe that would be fun. But maybe it would just be shopping. I don't know. Just thinking about it I'm suddenly regretting missed opportunities to get Doris Lessing, Seamus Heaney and Kenzaburo Oe to sign things for the collection I could have had. I think it would just give me anxiety. Do you collect?

Car by Harry Crews

2010-09-26T11:35:00.000-05:00

All the stories I've heard of Harry Crews suggest as a teacher he is brutally opinionated (which I consider slightly different than brutally honest), and he supposedly tells his undergrads if you get an A in this class you should keep writing, if you don't, you shouldn't. But this is all hearsay, so I take it with a grain of salt, and you should too. (He also has many former students who are devoted to him either despite or because of these things). But, all in all, the things I'd heard didn't exactly cause me to run out and read his work. But then I watched (via eleven five minute installments on YouTube) the Emmy-winning tv documentary "The Rough South of Harry Crews" and I found Crews to be more sympathetic and more compelling than I had imagined. So I finally got around to reading something.

And I found this novella (the publisher calls it novel but it runs about a hundred pages, so I suspect that's just a marketing decision) completely charming, and sweet, and extremely intelligent, and funny, to boot. It's about a guy who decides to eat a car and it stays centered on that plot--will he, can he, etc. But, as the title suggests, the thematic center of the novella is all things car. And all things car turns out to be a great metaphor for all things human. Everything that can happen in a car happens here (one of the funniest dialogue scenes I've read since White Noise's is-it-raining-or-isn't-it scene is between two characters who are having sex in the back of the car to be eaten). But what is most significant is the various ways these characters love cars (and they all do) reflects the various ways one can love. Herman, who dreams of doing something big, and so decides to eat a car, has a pure kind of love. He just wants to feel a part of the bigness of the world. His brother Mister loves money and so loves how cars can bring him money. His father, on the other hand, loves cars for what they are, machines he can understand. His sister loves cars for the excitement--the life--they represent. All in all, it's a short book with a big feel precisely because it takes on one subject in depth. The choice of subject matters, of course; cars are omnipresent in American life and therefore contain multitudes, but it seems to me so could butterflies or corn or ... you name it. Now if it weren't for the humor and the charm and the seriousness of the characters, the thematic center would not have held...but the two in combination (characters and theme) made for a really rich read.

Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow

2010-09-26T09:01:00.001-05:00

In his wonderful soap opera-y novel Ragtime, Doctorow became one of the first writers to fully embrace writing fiction with real people in it. What’s interesting about this novel about the Collyer brothers—possibly the most famous of the famous hoarders (one brother died under a pile of his accumulated and booby-trapped stuff and the other subsequently starved to death)—is the way Doctorow uses public knowledge of the characters as part of his storytelling. (Though just to be clear Doctorow does fictionalize some of the facts).

The novel is narrated by Homer, the blind brother who essentially cannot escape his brother Langley who has been made crazy by exposure to mustard gas during WWI. And Homer, in part because of his physical limitations, in part because of his emotional limitations, is slow to pick up on the fact that his brother is completely mad. And only in glimpses does he reveal the physical state of their house. The temptation for many writers would have been to glory in detailing that house, but Homer can’t see…he can’t tell us what the house looked like. And really he doesn’t need to. Because most readers know that story—and can certainly imagine. So Doctorow chooses to make this a very interior novel. I suppose that’s the fun of taking real people and putting them in fiction. Seeing life through their eyes as opposed to seeing their life through our eyes, which biography already allows us to do.

And yes, the fact that he is a blind storyteller named Homer also brings an additional layer to the story. Most readers will get the reference to the author of the Odyssey and the Iliad and will understand that the allusion is meant to grant an epic status to small and confined lives.

Full disclosure: I received my copy for free from Good Reads First Reads.

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

2010-09-14T10:09:00.002-05:00

Possibly the hardest thing about writing a novel is writing a middle that lives up to your beginning. Starting a novel isn't really so rough. Big Bang openings occur to writers all the time. And endings aren't so bad either. In short stories the end is where things either come together or fall apart, but with a novel, readers can be quite forgiving of a so-so finish. One of my favorite novels is Elizabeth McCracken's The Giant's House (about a librarian who falls in love with a teenage giant) and I don't like the last chapter one bit. (same with Bel Canto's crazy epilogue) Yet I still call it one of my favorite novels. Because I could happily live in the middle forever. With popular genre fiction, the middle tends to exist merely as a bridge to the end. It's the thing you get through as quickly as possible to find out what happened. But with literary fiction, the middle is the part where readers want to linger, where they don't want to reach the end... so, of course writing the middle is hard. Because if you have a Big Bang opening how do you write an even bigger middle?

I like to think of this as making a mystery of the middle. And in Geek Love, Katherine Dunn does it masterfully.

Her title, her table of contents, her epigraph, and the first two pages of her book all set up expectations for what's to come. It seems like this will be a quirky, probably humorous, tale of a family of carnies (including an albino dwarf, a set of Siamese Twins, and Arty the AquaBoy all born to a carnival ringleader and his chicken-head-eating wife). The parents seem like they will dominate, the family will be threatened by the outside world, and their bond will prevail. It will be an examination of darkness that shows how darkness is really lightness. What we think is dark is not. At least that's what I expect on reading the first couple of pages. And that's enough to make me read on...I'm interested in that book. But what I think really makes the novel a success is the way that the middle of the novel regularly subverts our expectations and gives us a much bigger, and more surprising, novel than we anticipated...

One of the novel's tricks is to use a fairly traditional frame in which there is a present tense story where the characters are grown older and readers can see how dramatically their circumstances have changed. This is one way to make a mystery of the middle--getting readers to ask how did our characters get from point a to point c, but I actually find it the least interesting of the tricks Dunn uses. Perhaps because it's the most expected. The real reason the frame is important, I think, is it demonstrates how Oly, the narrator, is impacted by everything that happened in the middle. She's not really the center of the plot in the middle. The frame lets her be the center of the plot in the end. So that's one unexpected aspect of the middle--the peripheral nature of the first person narrator.

Conventional wisdom says short stories are harder to write than novels, but don't you believe it. In a novel, as in a short story, you need the sense that a story is escalating and building, but you need to sustain that over such a long period that you run the risk of entering the absurd. (this is how tv shows jump the shark). Dunn takes her novel into really extreme territory in terms of character behavior, this is how she creates a novel that is bigger than her quite large opening. But she's very savvy about how she builds to that extreme. You realize on page seven (after the loving family scene that opens the novel) that these kids are "abnormal" because their parents bred them to be that way. This is pretty startling. But the extent of their parents science experiments is withheld until p. 53, when you see the many failed results. But just when the reader starts to see the parents as villainous, Doctor Phyllis, a crazed surgeon arrives and you see how she's even worse. And just when you think you can predict that Doctor P. will be the dark heart of the novel, you realize Arty, the Aqua-Boy, is the even bigger villain behind it all. So these other characters act as evolutionary steps on the way to Arty. This escalates the plot, surprises the reader, and makes the extreme actions of Arty more believable because they are worked up to gradually.

Yeah, this novel has an actual villain in it. But it's key that he's not a single villain in a world of good characters--he's a higher step on the ladder of bad. So it's surprising but not unbelievable...

A note on villains: this is one place the choice of Oly as narrator is very useful. Seeing Arty through Oly’s childish and sisterly eyes helps make him more palatable. The reader is never asked to love or forgive Arty—only to understand that Oly does

Another regular trick to making a mystery of the middle is to bring in and develop new characters while letting others fade to the background. Sometimes these faded characters come back into the center, sometimes not. Some of these new characters come in and you expect them to be more important than they are—it’s sort of like a murder mystery where there are multiple suspects and they each have their own mini-story, but they don't all factor in at the end. They do all factor in to the story somehow however. They change what can happen.

In Geek Love, a new son is born in the first third of the novel (new character enters) and he brings with him the first "magic" of the novel. Up until then everything has been true to our physical world as we know it. But Chick, who looks normal, has special metaphysical powers. Now in workshop I'd probably caution a writer against suddenly having a magical element enter a novel so late. Traditionally a novel would establish itself as fantastical very early on. But Geek Love works as an exception because this is such a heightened world--not quite real anyway--that it feels like a surprise, but not impossible. Like with Arty's villainy, it's an evolutionary step away from what came before, not a total shock. And again this takes the middle in directions the reader hadn't anticipated.

Dunn also uses conventional methods like foreshadowing and flash-forwards to heighten a reader's curiosity. But whereas in a novel where the middle is a bridge to cross, she does not withhold her answers to those mini-mysteries for very long. So questions are raised in the middle and they are answered in the middle. Then new questions are raised and answered. Sometimes on the same page, sometimes a few pages later, sometimes fifty pages later...you can't predict what you'll learn when.

And finally, one last technique, that I don't think works so well actually, is introducing new voices into the text in the middle. In the novel's last third, a newspaperman enters the story, and so we get his notebooks and articles. This provides a break from Oly's first person voice and gives us information that she can't and a perspective outside hers. But personally, I didn't need it. It can work though, just in this case, it felt like it told me what I already knew.

I don't want to suggest these things are formulas you want to apply (the season six commentary on "Lost" persuaded me never to talk about the hero's journey in class again because the writers seemed so sure that merely hitting the steps on the "journey" would make their story work). The main reason Geek Love is such a classic is the ideas, the characters, the words...but structure helps too, it allows for all the rest to feel like it adds up to something.

Mentor: a memoir by Tom Grimes

2010-09-01T11:41:00.002-05:00

I mention with possibly annoying frequency that I believe in mentors. And I think it's important to have mentors who are just above you in terms of your goals and aspirations, ones who are way above you in terms of your goals and aspirations, and even those who are unattainable (generally because they are fictional heroes). Right now, and I mean this without any irony whatsoever, my two biggest role models seem to be Coach Taylor from "Friday Night Lights" and Detective Chief Superintendent Foyle from "Foyle's War" (they're so decent! so honorable! so handsome!...oh wait...). But more particularly as relates to this blog, I've had the privilege and pleasure of a wealth of mentors who model the writing life for me (including some of my peers, my undergraduate and graduate professors, and some people who are just inexplicably generous with me). But lots of my role models or mentors are people I've never met or people I've worked with but not known well. Lives I've read or heard about, who give me an idea of how things are done, what can go wrong, and how much conscious effort it takes to live a satisfying and dignified life. Recently I was surprisingly affected by Haruki Murakami's nonfiction book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which is mostly about marathon running but also novel writing. What came across most powerfully was just how much physical effort it takes to achieve a career like Murakami's. A viewing of the documentary "The Rough South of Larry Brown" in my grad workshop last night also reinforced the benefits of applying a working class work ethic to writing (sample Brown quote: "Based on the first fifty stories that I wrote you would have to believe that I had no talent. You would have no choice.")

But I've realized, too, that if you're not in the right space to receive the information, witnessing other people's writing lives can be pretty devastating. I mean it's hard out there. And there are very few models that suggest otherwise. I once showed one of my favorite documentaries, "Stone Reader" to a grad workshop and at the end of it they looked as if I'd spent the hour and a half kicking them in the gut whilst shouting, "stay down! stay down!" For the record, I view "Stone Reader" as a movie about how vital reading is for some people...my students viewed it as a movie about an Iowa grad who writes a huge book, gets a glowing NYT review, goes crazy and never writes again. Still, I recommend it. Anyway, Tom Grimes's memoir, Mentor, ostensibly about his relationship to the late Frank Conroy, then program director at Iowa, but really about Grimes's whole writing life, is a book that I valued for its honesty about writing, certain writing workshops, and about mentor relationships. For the record, Grimes views Conroy as a pivotal figure for him; I, on the other hand, came out of the book thinking, I will never ever teach like Frank Conroy, and nobody else should either. Because Conroy's approach, as I understood it through the lens of the book, was pretty much to encourage the one or two students he felt had natural talent and ignore the rest. And I don't mean that he made a particular effort to work with the talented students or their writing, rather he told them keep going, keep going and helped them get an agent etc in the end. But Grimes's story makes clear that what Conroy could do in terms of getting him an agent and getting the book out in the world had only a limited effect. The book didn't make money, didn't go to paperback, and Grimes in the end had a, possiby related, nervous breakdown (as did Conroy for unrelated reasons). I don't think nervous breakdowns are more inherent to writers than anybody else or that writing causes them, I'm just saying that having a mentor who can give you professional contacts isn't going to save your life. Nor will it make or break your career. In fact my view of mentoring is the opposite. I'm here to encourage everybody to work hard at their writing, to advise them on that writing, to advise them on how to make their own contacts...but I genuinely believe my students are better off if they find agents and publishers who respond to their work rather than ones who respond to me (not that I have that kind of sway anyway). But to get to the point, a review of this book suggested that apprentice writers might want to steer clear because so much of Grimes's experience is negative. But I think the more apprentice writers have a rational view of what writing can and can't do for them, what mentors can and can't do for them, and how to best define success as a writer...the better. So I recommend it. Plus it makes clear that Iowa's MFA program is great for some, but really shouldn't be the number one choice for all MFA applicants--its practices would not suit most of them. A timely message given those silly MFA rankings in Poets and Writers this month.

Too big for Twitter

2010-08-31T12:37:00.000-05:00

"It's such a loved picture--the alienated, isolated, individual writer, beleagured but fiercely alone. A loved picture, but a truly lethal one. Because if we buy it completely, it keeps us single, weak, disconnected, vulnerable." --Toni Morrison, "For a Heroic Writers Movement"

I'm back, I guess

2010-08-25T11:36:00.001-05:00

So I know you've all been thinking I spent my summer watching "Mad Men" and punking my fellow faculty, but I didn't. I don't even like "Mad Men." (I know, that is surprising, isn't it? I was surprised.) People sometimes complain writing is invisible work, but I like it that way. If the folks at the coffee shop start to recognize me, I switch coffee shops. Really I'd prefer not to talk much about my writing or even necessarily my reading. But I do it for you, because I feel like talking about my process is part of what I signed on for when I became that semi-public figure known as a writing professor. So even if I was invisible for the summer, you should know, I wasn't doing nothing. Not most of the time anyway. Naturally I read quite a bit (including David Copperfield and the first two volumes of Proust, who I am in love love love with), I have a short-short coming out in Pank magazine, and an essay coming out in Creative Nonfiction, and I have seven stories in various states of dress. They all have openings at least and so here, for the time being anyway, are seven first sentences. Just so you know I'm still here.

"In the last years of the nineteenth century, the third strongest man in the world was said to be a Turk named Yusuf Ismail, known in his homeland as Yusuf the Great, or Yusuf the Large, and known everywhere else as the Terrible Turk, the first of a line of legendary, savage, monstrously large wrestlers all called, one after the other, the Terrible Turk."

"There were nearly 6,000 speeches given to 700,000 people."

"While we waited we were visited by the ghosts of the girls who had already died, those who were closest to the explosion, in the kitchen sneaking butter and bread when the gas ignited, the ones who died immediately, in a sense without injury, the girls who died explosively."

"It was the age of automatons and already there was a fly made of brass, a mechanical tiger, a peacock, a swan, an eight foot elephant, and a duck that swallowed a piece of grain and excreted a small pellet."

"His eyes were frequently inflamed and he feared going blind."

"Soon there will be a girl who will not eat."

"Most nights, Isabel could see, through the bedroom window of her Istanbul apartment, the writer James Baldwin at work at his kitchen table in his own apartment across the road."

2010-08-04T09:22:00.002-05:00

I have decided to take ten of my older short stories, previously available only in hard copies of various hard-to-find literary magazines, and make them available as an e-book on Lulu. For a mere $5.99, you could have your very own download: https://www.lulu.com/product/ebook/things-to-do/12091953.

Feed by M.T. Anderson

2010-06-01T08:24:00.003-05:00

This futuristic young adult novel takes place in a world where anyone who nowadays would have an Internet connection at home essentially has it in their brains instead--this is called the feed. They can IM each other without talking, can look up any information they want, can share memories, and they stream ads pretty much continuously. They also have flying cars and party on the Moon and stuff like that, but the key to the novel is the feed. So introducing the feed to readers is not too hard and establishing its cool futuristic factor is not too hard. But what's interesting is Anderson chooses to have the feed malfunction for the narrator early in the novel and then come back. And that way the true value of the feed (and obvious negatives of the feed) are made very clear to readers. And so when the feed is at stake for another character, we get it... Most writers I think would have just established this cool (and horrifying) thing and then put it at risk. But Anderson establishes it, takes it away, gives it back, and then puts it at risk... kind of like the Turkish proverb that says if God wants you to appreciate soemthing he first takes it away and then gives it back to you. Philosophically sound and a good plot device.

Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino

2010-05-22T10:40:00.002-05:00

Content-wise, I wasn't as held by this short novel as much as by other Calvino works...but all the same it gave me new ideas about what can hold a novel together. Years ago in an nonfiction workshop one of my students, upon reading Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius said, it showed me new things writing can do... That feeling happens quite a bit when one first starts reading seriously as a writer... less so, the more you've read simply because you've been exposed to a lot more. But what I appreciated about this novel was how it's centered on a character's point of view--how he sees the world--more than on what happens to him. It reminded me in a few ways of The Mezzanine, perhaps it was an evolutionary step for Nicholson Baker. Anyway, my point is a lot of writers are wary of reading because they don't want to be influenced. But what I see in early classes is poorly read writers write really unimaginatively. In my experience, creativity is born of knowledge not of an absence of knowledge. So read on!

Siam by Lily Tuck

2010-05-17T10:42:00.004-05:00

A slender novel that stays almost entirely in scene, covering the time that a young wife lives in "Siam" with her mysteriously employed husband during the Vietnam War... the novel is fairly episodic, rotating between moments of the wife taking language lessons, visiting tourist sites with other wives, going to the dressmaker, watching her husband swim, having conflicts with her staff... and while those events are all united by their impact on the protagonist (and on her central conflict, adjusting--or not--to her new home), Tuck interestingly uses an exterior storyline to act against the episodic nature of her plot. At the start of the novel, the wife meets a high society American who disappears days later. And while his disappearance is not of any direct impact on her, it becomes a main event that holds the whole novel together--and which she obsesses about. So it works as a kind of skeleton to the novel despite the fact that the drama of it (kidnapping! murder!) are exterior to the central events of the protagonist's plot. In this case, the skeleton does more to shade the novel's tone and theme than it does to actually change the protagonist.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

2010-05-05T08:17:00.006-05:00

This nonfiction work has been all over the various media because the summary of the book is immediately interesting--the most famous cell line in all of science--the HeLa cells--they were used to create the polio vaccine, study cancer, and test the affects of the atom bomb--turn out to come from Henrietta Lacks, an impoverished black female tobacco farmer who died of cervical cancer in 1951. And her family never knew about the HeLa cells until scientists came calling wanting to study their DNA...and explaining their case so poorly that Henrietta's husband first thought she has been kept alive in a lab being studied for twenty some years...

Apparently Gordon Lish liked to tell fiction students that all you needed to structure a story was any three things which you would then braid together, alternating between the three. (a useful trick for when you get stuck). And one of the reasons this book is so good is because it tells not one story but three--the story of Henrietta, the story of her cells, and the story of her descendants. Structurally the braid moves you quickly along all three story lines, but most importantly each storyline is equally interesting. Her descendants are deeply deeply affected by the loss of their mother, and all the misunderstandings that follow their contact with researchers are tragi-comic, and most importantly, their belief that Henrietta is a kind of angel (her cells are called immortal and they believe her soul is in her cells) shows just how high the stakes are for them. But interestingly one of the most moving storylines for me was one that falls just outside the braid--the story of Henrietta's first daughter who was probably mentally disabled and died, unknown to her siblings, in a government home. It's a storyline that does not fit tidily in with the other three, and mainly seems to be there at the impetus of Henrietta's other daughter, who always thinks of her lost sister as a casualty of losing her mother, but it's a slightly messy addition that works to deepen the emotion of the narrative. A case for not keeping your structure or even your topic too clean and controlled.

The Irresistible Henry House by Lisa Grunwald

2010-04-29T14:38:00.003-05:00

This recent novel is about an orphan who starts life as the baby in a practice house (a fake home used to teach home economics on a college campus in the 1940s) and so, early on, is raised by the teacher of the home ec course and a rotating class of co-eds. The novel is well-written, just as many novels nowadays are well-written, but it is for sure that premise--practice house baby--that makes the whole thing original and interesting. So it turns out having an original idea--a topic that hasn't been covered much--can go an awful long way. Here's the picture of Bobby Domecon (Domecon for Domestic Economics) that apparently inspired the author.

Six Memos for the Next Millenium by Italo Calvino

2010-04-27T10:23:00.003-05:00

Harvard's Charles Eliot Norton Lectures often yield some interesting books (I'm currently reading Eco's which is partially a response to this one). In this case, Calvino died before he could actually give the lectures or even write the last one, but for those who fear aging, these are good evidence that a sixty-year-old brain can work mighty well. The first two essays struck me as especially useful..."Lightness" on using (metaphoric and literal) lightness and heaviness as contrasts in fiction and "Quickness" on using (physical and intellectual) quickness and slowness... but my favorite quote is: "Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature."

My Dog Tulip by J.R. Ackerley

2010-04-23T10:54:00.004-05:00

This 1965 memoir of a man and his dog was one of the New York Review of Books early reissues and it has the humorous sensibility of Three Men and a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), just minus two of the men and the boat. But the great thing is rather than being a totally sentimental, life lessons learned from a dog kind of thing, it's really about Ackerley's obsession with giving Tulip, a pure-bred Alsatian, a chance at motherhood. Or rather what he seems to view as the important part of motherhood--giving birth. (you can tell he's not that concerned with her parenting skills as he seriously considers, but ultimately rejects, drowning all of the pupplies once they're born). And this obsession reveals a lot about what some men assume women need to feel fulfilled. And probably reveals a lot about Ackerley's own hang-ups.

Readers looking for Marley and Me moments would probably be horrified by the graphic and insanely funny descriptions of Ackerley's efforts to mate his dog with appropriate purebreds and even more graphic and insanely funny descriptions of his attempts to prevent inappropriate nonpurebreds from mating with her--capped off by the moment when he finally allows Tulip to make her own choice (let's just say it all ends with a small dog upside down being dragged across the yard while in congress).

Now it's well-known I'm a friend to dogs (also small children and hedgehogs), so naturally I enjoyed this book; and the general American love of dogs at least partially explains the overall popularity of dog books in their many forms. But reading this memoir made me ponder just why dog books are so consistently popular and what fiction writers can learn from that popularity...

I think part of it is we can attribute qualities to dogs that would be cartoony in people... heroism, blind loyalty, and intense romance all get projected into dogs without straining reader's credulity (I believe this also explains the popularity of Edward Cullen and Jacob Black)...also human characters are allowed to behave in ridiculous manners with their dogs (human devotion beyond sense is permitted because these animals never grow out of their dependent infancy)... so really it's the human-dog relationship that's interesting, more than the dog itself. Humans seem very loveable when they are loving their goofy, needy dogs. And similar types of overly-devoted, irrational relationships pop up in a lot of popular fiction (between humans and their pets, but also between humans, and between humans and vampires and werewolves...) but in literary fiction, they don't read believably. Literary readers get annoyed at characters who are blindly devoted or ridiculously foolish... so what can the literary writer learn from the popular reader's love of dog lit? Perhaps that relationships interest readers more than single characters do? I dunno, I'll have to think about it some more...

If you like...

2010-04-07T09:55:00.003-05:00

...Charles Baxter's essays on craft, then you will surely like The Half-Known World: On Writing Fiction by Robert Boswell. In my opinion, Graywolf has become the go-to press for craft writing.

Swimming by Nicola Keegan

2010-03-01T16:52:00.003-05:00

It often gets said (by me, even) that fiction writing should make the familiar unfamiliar or it should make the unfamiliar familiar...but this is a novel that makes a case for letting the unfamiliar remain unfamiliar. What I mean is the protagonist is extreme--an Olympic swimmer who is not just great but once-in-a-lifetime, super-great---and the impulse might be to take this character who gets to have experiences that most of us don't and normalize her (making her more familiar) in lots of other ways, like through her personal life. But no, her personal life is extreme (a lot of tragedy). So you might try to create a heavy dose of realism through style or other details--but no, the style is zany, sometimes "the" gets dropped in the weirdest places, and the way of describing feelings is comic and nutty and really great. If you ask ten people what makes good fiction, nine and a half of them will say relate-ability. They want to relate to the character. Well, there's some of that here--she is a really vulnerable character, and we can all relate to that, but mostly she's weird and her life is nothing like mine, and the novel does nothing to make me believe this could happen to me...and yet I was moved all the same. I didn't need her to remind me of me; I liked that I was meeting someone different and my empathy kicked in just fine...

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

2010-03-01T10:51:00.004-05:00

For my young adult literature class in choosing texts I pretty much went with things that are on the line between adult and young adult so that there would be enough to analyze and discuss in a lit class, but the more I read around in the genre, the more I realize my favorite books are the ones that are on the line between children's lit and young adult lit. Let's call that a new category--books for twelve year olds. Those books often have the strong cadences of voice that children's books have but also the more high stakes plots that young adult books have. This weekend I read both this novel, the first in a very popular trilogy about kids forced to fight it out to the death and The Mysterious Benedict Society, a less carnivorous but still exciting mystery. And as much as I love literary fiction for adults and all its accompanying grey areas, these two books did make me appreciate the pull of a lives-at-stake plot. And it made me realize one of the reasons y.a. lit can get away with these plots is that the characters are children and therefore less likely to behave sensibly. One of the rules in writing for kids is to get rid of the parents as fast as possible (thus the prevalence of orphans), and that's ostensibly so that the kids can be at the center of the plot, responsible for themselves (and often the fate of the world). But really it's because if their parents were around they wouldn't let them do the things that drive the plot. This points out one of the problems with writing about grown-ups. If they behave sensibly they keep themselves out of trouble, if they don't behave sensibly--we question why they are acting like children. So in order to create a high stakes plot you often have to figure out a reason to have your adults behave without sense but for a sensible reason ... or you have to write about characters who aren't sensible. There's no way in a novel for adults to get the adults out of the way...is there?

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory by Peter Hessler

2010-02-21T09:11:00.002-05:00

Full disclosure: I've known Pete since I was a freshman in college and he was a sophomore. He also once stopped me from being run over by a car with a timely "head's up."

As with his first two books, this is a great read--funny and informative and thoughtful. And as with his last book, Oracle Bones, it's interesting to see how he finds a way to take disparate magazine articles and turn them into a reasonably cohesive book. One of the things I noticed this time is how the book is being sold more as a Peter Hessler book than as a book about driving in China. His name is above the title and in red...And most interstingly, it's described as the last in the trilogy of Pete's books on China. I have to assume this is because he's ready to move on to new subjects (or even genres) and so is declaring early: the next book you see is going to be something different. It's not a strategy I've noticed before, but it makes sense: you can get pigeonholed by your success and this could be a way to build anticipation for whatever new thing Pete will do as well as a way to declare to his publisher and his public, this is it for the China stuff.

A couple of notes on the writing. One of the mistakes I see writers make when taking on cultures outside of their own is they are either too romantic or too condescending. Ah look at the poverty of Africa portrayed so lyrically and tragically. Or ah listen to how funny those wacky Vietnamese are. But this book uses humor really well without being condescending, and it definitely never romanticizes. (One reason is Pete lived in China for something like nine years, so naturally he's better able to convey the place than someone who just spent their junior year abroad). But, of course, Chinese bureaucracy can be funny and of course there are funny things that happen when an American journalist goes to live among Chinese peasants. So how does he convey that? Aside from the fact that Pete often positions himself as the object of humor, and that he fully characterizes the Chinese men and women in the book so that when they do something funny it's not a caricature, for the most part the book uses language as an object of humor as opposed to using people as an object of humor. My favorite examples are the quotes from the Chinese written driver's exam threaded throughout the opening section: "True/False: In a taxi, it's fine to carry a small amount of explosive material". And Pete's also very good at using his own quirks of language to add humor. Instead of holding out a thumb, Chinese hitchhikers bounce their hands up and down when looking for a ride, and to Pete this looks like they are petting an invisible dog. So throughout the book, he'll use that phrase "petting the dog" so that you see how the action is funny through his eyes-it reminds us that he's the foreign and strange one, not them. Another nice trick of language is that when referring to the car he rents and drives all over Mongolia he uses its brand name--the City Special--repeatedly so that the car itself gets a personality. Similarly when he gets lost due to the mismarkings on the Chinese maps--called Sinomaps--he says that he has been "Sinomapped" into sand or "Sinomapped" to a dry creek bed. It's a good reminder that attention to language--no matter your genre--is always going to be a good thing.

The Art of Time in Fiction by Joan Silber

2010-02-19T13:56:00.003-05:00

One of the reasons I like teaching writing is I like talking about craft. A lot of people, even teachers, don't really care for the idea of zooming in on various technical elements of writing and talking about them in prescriptive ways. They worry, justifiably, that doing so oversimplifies writing and makes it more mechanical. But I like it for two reasons--I like reading for craft (duh, whole blog about it) as a way of reading in and of itself, and I find it useful when brainstorming to actively think about how some of these craft elements could enter a new piece. I tend to let go of such distinct thoughts on craft once I'm actually drafting, but it helps me conceptualize. This would horrify some because it's a very self-conscious way to write, but hey, I get to do it any way I want. But also, and here's my point, I think it's fun to invent names for things that haven't been named. And Joan Silber, in this craft book from Graywolf's "The Art of" series edited by Charles Baxter, does a great job of naming different ways of depicting the passage of time: classic time, long time, switchback time, slowed time, fabulous time... And after giving these different practices names, she's able to dissect what they do and how they are created. It's a simplistic thought, but one of the ways we, as writers, can look more closely at craft is by first naming what's happening... name it so you can study it. Anyway, you'll have to read the book, which I recommend, to actually learn something about time...I'm just musing about craft writing in general.

I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier

2010-02-07T20:23:00.004-05:00

This is a young adult novel that's been on my to-do list for a long time. But once I started it (about twenty years late) I zipped through. It's engagingly written, has very short chapters, and is very mysterious--all condusive to compulsive reading. Since I'm teaching adolescent literature this semester I've become increasingly aware of the fact that many college students are still in the stages of reading that I associate with being a teenager (quite a few college students of course still are teenagers or just barely beyond). And one of those stages of reading is taking a great deal of pleasure in solving puzzles. And so in the intro to creative writing class I tend to see quite a few pieces that are meant to be solved with one right answer. These pieces tend to fare well with the other students and much less well with, say, me. Because adult literary readers tend to want puzzles that don't have one right answer. Ambiguity can be great, a mystery with a solution feels a lot less complicated. And students in the lit classes get confused as well--they're still expecting their reading (especially poetry) to be a puzzle to be solved with one right answer. They're not so comfortable with the idea of multiple interpretations each of which has to be argued.

All of which is a long way of getting to my point...this novel is a puzzle to be solved with one right answer and it works; it's a classic. It's a really good puzzle, well executed, surprising in the end...a good example of what can be done with this kind of mystery. And it made me wonder if I am unfair in so regularly rejecting this kind of writing when it comes to literary fiction for adults. A lot of literary novels set up a mystery, gradually reveal clues so that the reader can be actively solving the mystery as they go, and then in the end...they solve the mystery and tell us just what did happen. A genre mystery doesn't really bear rereading because once you know the answer, the text isn't compelling. But a literary mystery can bear rereading because you care about the characters and the language and the ideas... so I guess it's fine to have a puzzle, as long as you also have the other stuff.

With that said, I still maintain my equally strong reaction against ironic endings. I just saw the film A Single Man and my reaction to the last five minutes was to wish I had closed my eyes and plugged my ears for that bit. Liked the movie a lot, but I reject its finish.

Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen

2010-02-04T18:06:00.003-05:00

I reread this novel after picking up a one dollar copy at the Delray Beach Public Library, and I remembered admiring the voice, but I hadn't on my first reading read Hansen's novel The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and so I hadn't noticed how similar the voices are, except for the fact that Jesse James is a really long novel and Mariette in Ecstasy really short, and Jesse James is about outlaws and Mariette in Ecstasy about nuns. The voice is lyric and pretty and full of poetic lines arranged like lists--and oddly enough it works perfectly for both novels despite the differences. Probably because the prettiness is a nice surprise in Jesse James and while not surprising in a novel about a convent, it is a good fit. I don't really have a point except to say both the unexpected and the expected can work depending on what you do with them. And that an author might have a voice that carries between works (they're not an exact match, don't get me wrong) but that doesn't mean the works feel repetitive or even similar.

for New Yorkers

2010-02-01T13:57:00.003-05:00

If you happen to live in or near Manhattan, my remarkably patient and supportive agent Priscilla Gilman is participating in this, surely informative, free event:

From the Writers' Institute at the Graduate Center of The City University of New York:

THE ART OF THE PITCH

"Come hear Chris Cox from The Paris Review, Priscilla Gilman from Janklow & Nesbit, Hugo Lindgren from New York Magazine, David Propson from The Week Magazine, and Eben Shapiro from The Wall Street Journal discuss how to craft a great (and perfect) pitch. Feel free to bring along anyone interested as well as all the questions you’ve been dying to ask."

DATE: Wednesday, February 3rd from 5:30 to 7:30
PLACE: Segal Theater, at the Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue (and 34th)

The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell

2010-01-27T09:40:00.004-05:00

Let me say first, the jacket design of this novel is great. I used to love looking at jacket covers and then so many started to look alike (photos of people whose heads are out of frame or photos of cityscapes or reprints of famous pieces of art)... but while this cover art is a photo, it's clever and just right for the text. It's a twisted up guy holding on to and staring at a backwards red question mark all on a white background without author name or novel title. It's curiousity raising and thematically appropriate. Kudos to the designer (the publisher Ecco is highbrow, so they do things right).

Anyway, the novel itself runs the risk of being too clever by ten--it's all questions, nothing but questions, questions questions questions--but it totally worked for me. It's an unidentified narrator asking 160some pages of questions of an unidentified "you". It seems to take its premise and voice from Whitman's "Song of Myself"--the epigraph is from the poem: "Do you take it I would astonish? Does the daylight astonish? or the early redstart twittering through the woods? Do I astonish more than they?" And ultimately it does read like a song of the self.

From start to finish the novel is like its opening paragraph:

"Are your emotions pure? Are your nerves adjustable? How do you stand in relation to the potato? Should it still be Constantinople? Does a nameless horse make you more nervous or less nervous than a named horse? In your view, do children smell good? If before you now, would you eat animal crackers? Could you lie down and take a rest on a sidewalk? Did you love your mother and father, and do Psalsms do it for you? If you are relegated to last place in every category, are you bothered enough to struggle up? Does your doorbell ever ring? Is there sand in your craw? Could Mendeleyev place you correctly in a square on a chart of periodic indentities, or would you resonate all over the board? How many push-ups can you do?"

The first effect was to make me think about me--I read it more like nonfiction, an examination of what defines the self. It made me want to write a book length series of answers: "Yes. Yes. Love the potato as long as it isn't sweet. Definitely not. Horses don't make me nervous. Depends on the child and the presence or nonpresence of a diaper. Yes. Yes. Yes, yes and no. Yes. My doorbell is broken. Always. I have no idea what Mendeleyev could or couldn't do. More than you'd expect by looking at me." In other words, it was a pretty narcissistic read for awhile, but like many narcissistic experiences, that was pleasurable.

But increasingly I found myself thinking about the choice to define this as a novel. I suppose that was partly due to the fact that Padgett Powell is known as a fiction writer and so it might not even occur to him to call this a nonfiction, but once you accept that it's a fiction, you have to wonder: are there two characters being created (the narrator and the "you") and is a relationship being implied? It's not too long before you notice the narrator has certain interests--bugs being pinned, a nostalgia for the way things were, a doubt in the way things are, a political lean to the left, a suspicion of religion...and it's interesting to notice that the posing of a question can reveal something about the beliefs of the questioner. For example: "I believe I asked you this before, but let me again if I did, because it is important to me: can you picture those old metal roller skates that had a metal shell or clamp up front under which you slid your shoe and a leather ankle strap in the rear to secure your ankle, the chief feature of which skates was that they had no flexibility or suspension and the wheels gained no traction whatsoever if you were on a surface smooth enough to pretend to skate on in the first place, and which, the wheels, since that surface was generally concrete, gradually wore down to sandblasted-looking remnants of themselves and became even more useless and treacherous than they had been new, so that the net effect of skating on these things was akin to ice skating on concrete? Weren't those old metal roller skates great?"

(as a writing exercise, you might write a conversation in which the person asking questions is actually revealing more about him(or her)self than he is learning about the other person)

Finally it starts to seem that the narrator is trying to find things out about the "you" but also to impress her (I read it as a her because she gets asked things like did your mother teach you to sew as opposed to did your father teach you to catch a football--for the record, my grad school colleague Howie Axelrod taught me how to catch a football and I immediately thereafter made a touchdown, which shows Howie's good heart because he wasn't even on my team)... Anyway in the long run it gets you thinking about how you define yourself, how you connect to other people, how you try to feel close to other people, how you judge them...

One of the interesting technical things is though the book is a series of questions that never build to any narrative (the last five pages don't read differently than the first five--which may be a flaw, I admit I started to skim at the very end). So every single question has to be good. Each question has to essentially stand alone as an interesting read, or the reader could pretty easily put the book down. But despite the lack of narrative, Powell uses paragraph and section breaks. And while there are some thematic groupings (often two or three questions in a row have to do with one thing) for the most part these paragraph and section breaks seem to operate more on the idea of the breath than anything else. You need a moment of silence not to jump in time/space (as in a traditional narrative) and not to jump in idea (as in essays) but just to rest a moment (perhaps while lying on the sidewalk). Without them the book would probably be too relentless--but I kind of wish he'd tried it just to see...

The final question is why not just do this as a short story. Why push it so far? Well, personally I would have made it 20-30 pages shorter so that it could be read in one longish sitting, but while it could have worked as a clever short story it's the very excess of it that makes it so interesting as a novel. That he could sustain it--it's pretty astonishing.

What have you been reading?

2009-12-08T07:23:00.002-05:00

It's well known that I enjoy lists (though I'm troubled by the revised and updated edition of "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die"--I already have 755 to go without them adding titles)

Anyway, tell me this:

1. What were the most compelling books you read this year (published any year)?

2. What do you think I should read (and blog about) next year?

Stitches by David Small

2009-11-28T15:20:00.003-05:00

A disturbing but compelling comic book memoir (graphic novel seems wrong given that it's not fiction and therefore not a novel) about a boy whose doctor father, thinking he was treating his son's sinuses, gave him hundreds of radiation treatments that subsequently gave the son cancer. At least that's the hook that's been used to promote the book, but truthfully Small's father giving him cancer seems a much less significant element of the memoir than the fact that his parents treated him extremely coldly and everyone in the family seemed to be in their own silent misery...

But storyline aside, I was thinking about how comic books are particularly well-suited to childhood stories because they can so clearly depict the child's eye view through the pictures. Prose writers always have to cope with the problem of putting the child's perspective into language which often exceeds the child's actual capacity for language and so you get a lot of articulate child narrators... Interestingly like many prose stories about childhood the narrator of this memoir is an adult looking back...so the whole thing is actually in past tense. But while in a piece of prose writing this perspective is usually very noticeable (we never forget that it's an adult talking about his childhood), in this case I frequently forgot that it was an adult narrator. I think this is because a comic book can essentially have a present tense narrative and a past tense narrative running simultaneously. The pictures show things from a kid's eye view and feel like they are happening in the right now. And the dialogue is without tags so it never has to use said vs says. Thus the pictures are a present tense narrative. But the accompanying "voice over" is in past tense and adds that layer of adult reflection. So most of the time you feel like you're in the present tense (inside childhood), but when the past tense comes in, it's very easy to make the transition into adulthood. Prose writers could choose to write childhood in the present tense when in scene and past tense when doing more reflective adult narration, but I suspect it would never feel so seamless. And even in scene you'd most likely end up with non-childish language.

So in the end, it seems comic books are a particularly good form for looking back on childhood experiences...in this case, pretty dark and scary ones.

Slumberland by Paul Beatty

2009-11-24T17:32:00.005-05:00

A very funny novel by the author of the also funny White Boy Shuffle. The narrator, who goes by DJ Darky, moves to Berlin to find a reclusive musician, nicknamed The Schwa, to have him record the perfect beat the narrator has created. It's kind of a quest novel and so it does feel resolved when the Schwa gets found and the beat recorded (I'm not giving away much of a surprise there) but it's not really a novel too worried about plot. Instead, in DJ Darky, Beatty has created a narrator so clever and word-wise and observant that Beatty can take the novel anywhere. It's really just a forum for all his insanely sharp and original observations about life in the right now (except the novel takes place when the Berlin wall is coming down). This kind of thing--a novel that's mostly a stringing together of thoughts by a really clever narrator--could get pretty irritating if it came across as smug or overly convenient or just plain boring, but Beatty is just unbelievable in his ability to give a fresh take on familiar subjects. And it's precisely because the narrator can go anywhere in his references at a given moment (Beatty's ability to connect disparate things is uncanny) that the novel stays interesting. Back when I read The Master and Margarita, I talked about how the plot can go anywhere because Bulgakov holds it together with one central event, well in this case, the thinking can go anywhere because it's held together by one central character.

Case in point:

A dialogue between the narrator and his girlfriend when she won't turn on the heat: "'Doris, it's eight degrees in here. Do you know what that is in Fahrenheit?' 'About fifty degrees.' 'Fifty-one-point-eight degrees to be exact, which is the temperature at which black men lose their f-ing minds. In 1967 when my Uncle Billy turned down a scholarship to UCLA and volunteered to go to Vietnam, it was eight degrees Celsius. On that clear, blue, carry-me-back-to-Ol'-Virginny morning when Nat 'Crazy Like a Fox' Turner looked directly into a solar eclipse and decided there and then to kill every white person in the world--it was eight degrees Celsius. In Rocky II, when Apollo Creed agrees to give Rocky Balboa a rematch in Phila-f-ing-delphia, Rocky's hometown, it was eight degrees Celsius...'"

Or this: "I'd never been in love. I'd always thought love was like reading Leaves of Grass in a crowded Westside park on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, having to suppress the urge with each giddy turn of the page to share your joy with the surrounding world. By 'sharing' I don't mean quoting Whitman's rhythm-machine poetics to a group of strangers waiting for auditions to be posted at the Screen Actor's Guild, but wanting to stand up and scream, 'I'm reading Walt Whitman, you joyless, shallow, walking-the-dog-by-carrying-the-dog, casting-couch-wrinkles-imprinted-in-your-ass, associate-producer's-pubic-hairs-on-your-tongue, designer-perambulator-pushing-the-baby-you-and-your-Bel-Air-trophy-wife-had-by-inserting-someone-else's-sperm-bank-jizz-in-a-surrogate-mother's-uterus-because-you-and-your-sugar-daddy-were-too-busy-with-your-nonexistent-careers-to-f--k, no-day-job-having California Aryan assholes! I'm reading Whitman! F--k your purebred, pedigreed Russian wolfhound! F--k your WASP infant with the Hebrew name and the West Indian nanny! F--k your Norwegian au pair who's not as hot-looking as you thought she'd be! I'm reading Whitman, expanding my mind and melding with the universe! What have you done today? It's ten in the morning, do you know where your coke dealer is? Have you looked at the leaves of grass? No? I didn't think so!' That's what I thought love would be like. Reading Whitman and fighting the urge not to express your aesthetic superiority."

And also, the novel very cleverly sets its tone by having the black narrator go to a tanning salon in the first scene--seemingly a pointless, possibly crazy action--and he lets the reader see the absurdity of the moment--and then he reveals the narrator is in Berlin and desperate for some serotonin-sunshine. An absurd action committed for a rational reason. This is the narrator in a nutshell--he seems like a nut until you know him better.

The Wild Things by Dave Eggers

2009-11-24T17:17:00.003-05:00

I don't have much to say about the content of this novel (an expanded version of the film version of the picture book, requested apparently and sanctioned by Maurice Sendak) other than I found it to have the same pros and cons as the film, which I liked but didn't love.

But what I really want to talk about is the fur! As many of you probably know, the novel came in two editions--regular and fur-covered. And I (of course!) bought the fur-covered one. I intended to give it to a family member as a gift but I decided she'd be too freaked out by it, and so naturally I kept it all for myself. And I am totally freaked out by it! And fascinated by it! The fur is presumably fake, but very convincing--I have a very wolf-like dog and this is very wolf-like fur, nearly indistinguishable from the dog's when I vacuum. But the fur (which covers the whole exterior of the book minus the two eyes peeking out) gets ruffled periodically and naturally I have to smooth it out (much like in a petting motion). And I am here to tell you petting a book makes you love it more! This is the answer to digital mucketymucking in the world of books. Publishers must make us love our books more! They should be like those electronic gadgets you have to feed and babytalk so they don't die. Put a chip in our books--if we don't read them or stroke them or speak them aloud--they die!

Okay, perhaps I go too far, but I've long thought that the publishing world is going to go increasingly high and low--e-books being low and fur-covered books (or the aforementioned bite-marked Firmin by Sam Savage) being high. The physical book (as opposed to the digital book) as art object and not just reading experience is a path I wouldn't mind following. Except in my opinion the low (e-book etc) should be priced way way lower than it is now. And I say that as someone who hopes to make royalties one day.

American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever

2009-11-19T08:06:00.002-05:00

This is a nonfiction, non-academic work about the relationships that existed between Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau--with some appearances by Herman Melville, Henry James, and other notables. I always like reading about artists' communities and how friends can push each other to heights of success. And it always raises some questions: was it a genius-cluster (something in the water), how did such a thing form... In this case, the link is geography (much preferable to Facebook in my opinion)--these writers all lived in Concord, Mass--but also personality--as in the personality of Emerson. The book suggests it was really Emerson's financial support that allowed Thoreau, the Alcott family, and for a time Hawthorne, to survive. So while networking may also have helped each member of the group professionally, and mentoring and modeling (as in role-modeling) presumably also helped (I imagine especially for Alcott who was younger and got to watch these men build their writing careers), patronage may have mattered the most. The book is an entertaining read if you're interested in such things (I, for one, had no idea Thoreau was Alcott's teacher for awhile; and also knew next to nothing about Margaret Fuller or the Peabody sisters, who all turned out to be fascinating) and for all those who fuss about MFA programs, I can't help but think what we're trying to do formally is exactly what Emerson tried to do informally--provide financial support, mentoring, and community for developing writers.

Ecotone

2009-11-14T19:17:00.003-05:00

Go check out my friend and colleague Andy Furman's essay in the latest issue of Ecotone!

Martin Dressler by Steven Millhauser

2009-10-30T16:45:00.003-05:00

My adaptation class recently read Millhauser's short story "Eisenheim the Illusionist" and that prompted me to finally read this Pulitzer prize-winning novel. I'm a big fan of Millhauser's first novel Edwin Mullhouse and of his recent short story collection that I'm suddenly forgetting the name of, but I knew my feelings wouldn't be so strong for this novel which I had started in the past and never finished. Yet I admired it in the end.

Two interesting things: first, the novel has a subtitle (as does Edwin Mullhouse), in this case, "The Tale of an American Dreamer" and that does a lot to point the reader to an interpretation of the novel that goes beyond the character-plot stuff on the surface and second, it starts off as a very realistic piece of historical fiction but turns into a more speculative piece of alternative history. And the turn works partly because it's a Millhauser novel and so anybody who's read his work before is comfortable with his inventive imaginings and because the style from the start of the novel always feels a little unreal, fable-ish. Readers of "Eisenheim the Illusionist" will recognize a similar thing at play--he creates a very real sense of history through known facts and convincing detail, but simultaneously creates a sense of fantasy through style, metaphor, and a near absence of direct dialogue (so that the characters feel a little unreal). So when he wants to move away from history to his own alternative, it doesn't feel out of nowhere--the shift still feels of his world.

While what makes Millhauser unusual is his ability to invent really original stuff, I think what I admire most is his use of imagery. Whether describing something real or something imagined his ability to create an atmospheric photograph (it's often a frozen moment) is really top notch. It's what makes both the historical and the speculative storylines believable. And it's a good reminder that realism and fantasy require the same attention to detail to be effective.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

2009-10-26T14:21:00.003-05:00

I always love a good Big House novel and especially a good British Big House novel with a little Comedy and a little Romance thrown in. And this novel from the 40s fits that bill. Eccentric family living in poverty in a run-down castle (no I didn't mean a jailhouse, I meant an enormous house), all narrated from the point of view of the clever sixteen year old daughter. I can kind of see how it fell out of print--eccentric Brits living in diminished circumstances is not an unheard tale--but I also see why it came back. It's compulsively readable. And what I noticed was the basic structure--we start with one family and another family moves in nearby. The various members of the two families intersect in a variety of changing relationships. And so a novel structure is born. By bringing two whole sets of characters together enough complications ensue to cover hundreds of pages.

Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen by Marilyn Chin

2009-10-24T07:09:00.004-05:00

I was really excited to discover this story collection which a colleague recommended. I confess lately fiction about children of immigrants has started to blend for me into one big story of one big generation gap. But these stories are a new take, both fresh content and a fresh style, and--added bonus--they are really funny. The collection, largely centered on twin Chinese sisters, Moonie and Mei Ling, and their feisty ninja grandmother, uses folk tales, fables, manja, Buddhist parables and all kinds of other forms as its stylistic base, but what makes it feel so fresh to me is the way both the older generation and the younger generation have become this mix of old and new ways.

Another fresh aspect: Chin doesn't ignore the bawdiness of folk tales the way most contemporary re-writers of the form do--she really embraces it (Let's just say Hello Kitty has some new connotations) and lets the twins, or at least one of them, be odd sexual adventurers, ultimately creating female characters who are unabashedly strange and audacious not just in their sexual behavior but all around.

I'm not really conveying the spirit of the collection which moves quickly from episode to episode and style to style...but it's funny and fun while being political and sophisticated. The tone is antic but there's a lot under the surface. Probably the most original story collection I've read since George Saunders came on the scene. (though admittedly I haven't been reading that many story collections in the past few years)(I'm happy to hear any recommendations).

The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk (trans. Maureen Freely)

2009-10-06T10:54:00.005-05:00

I'll say up front that a lot of my interest in this novel came from its Turkishness, and there are aspects of it that I forgave because of that. My colleague who lent it to me was perhaps less forgiving, so you can take this with a grain of salt.

The novel is about a man who has an affair with a younger woman while he's engaged. Both the affair and the engagement end badly, and the man spends the rest of his life obsessed with the younger woman. Now having just read, about a month ago, the Ottoman tale of Leyla and Mejnun, I was both quick and proud to recognize this novel is in many ways a rewriting of that tale. And so I was also quick to forgive or at least believe in much of the ridiculous behavior that the narrator engages in. Because he's following in the steps of Mejnun there isn't the same need to justify his actions. Except maybe there is... not just because as a Nobel Prize winner Pamuk has many Western readers who won't get the reference, but because shouldn't a fiction always stand on its own? Well, maybe not. I'm on the fence. Pamuk makes the reference pretty clear, so maybe he is fairly saying if you want to get the most out of my novel you need to understand the literature it has grown out of and if you don't, well, that's your own fault. Or maybe he's not even thinking of his Western readers--after all, you wouldn't worry too much about making sure your rewrite of Little Red Riding Hood would stand alone, would you?

But just so you know, Mejnun is famously crazy. He falls for Leyla, goes mad, runs off into the desert, and eventually enters a love so deep that he's one with the universe and therefore one with Leyla and doesn't even really want her anymore (in the physical sense) because he's got her (she's part of him spiritually). And Pamuk's narrator is a version of Mejnun. But what's interesting about the narrator (except that he's only kind of the narrator--a gimmicky thing I won't even bother to explain) is he doesn't sound in the least bit crazy. It's pretty common to write madmen stories in which they rant or speak in heightened voices or say things that are obviously off. But the narrator here sounds at all times quite rational and calm--his actions are not at all rational, but he hasn't lost his ability to have a conversation, to explain his own thinking--it all feels much closer to mental illness as I've witnessed it--and makes for a more sophisticated character (not an over-the-top, hair-tearing lunatic).

Also, Pamuk makes good use of first person here--writers are always aware that there are limitations to what a first person narrator can know but usually it's just a matter of making sure you don't violate the rules. But in this case, the fact that the reader can't know what Fusun (the young woman) is thinking makes a huge difference. It's not just that the narrator doesn't know what she's thinking, it's that we can't tell if his interpretations of her thoughts/actions are rational or crazy. She might still be in love with him; she might not be.

And lastly, the title comes from a museum the narrator sets up in honor of his lost love. It's small stuff like her hair pins and cigarette stubs, but it's a museum modelled after the small museums of the world--like the homes of authors which then put on display their typewriters and old cans of uneaten food. It's an addition to the novel that has nothing to do with the plot--I mean it's easily dropped--but it's the kind fo thing that declares this as a more ambitious, literary novel than most. It's sort of Kundera-ish in the way that it adds a layer to the narrative by commenting not just on the characters but on the ways of the world, the things we treasure, and the ways we store our memories. It was probably my favorite aspect of the novel. And while it's not the kind of thing you can add to say a realist novel (probably), it's worth considering: what if you took your imagining one step further into the unexpected...

Taking Chance

2009-09-21T06:24:00.003-05:00

Congrats to my old high school pal Ross Katz for his three Emmy nominations for writing, directing, and producing the HBO film Taking Chance, about the return home of a US soldier killed in Iraq. You can check the film out on DVD. It makes a good case for the power of quietness in storytelling.

Go Fords!

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

2009-09-12T11:02:00.003-05:00

There's an MFA canon that runs parallel to but only occasionally overlaps (Hemingway, O'Connor, Welty...) the literature canon. It includes people like Alice Munro, George Saunders, Donald Barthelme...people who are always taught in workshops and loved by many many writers...and Lorrie Moore just might be the queen of that canon. Her story "How to be an Other Woman" was one of the most personally important stories I encountered as an undergraduate--it made writing seem both pleasurable and possible. So the truth is I probably wanted to love this novel too much--I set us all up for disappointment.

The first half--funny and sincere and believable--is everything I wanted. But then Moore gets REALLY big in her plot. I mean these people suffer. And you know what--I just didn't believe it. Normally I only blog about books I recommend, but I figure Moore--one of my writing heroes--can take a little criticism. Actually if I had read this book back in the early nineties when I read the rest of Moore's work and found it so influential, I probably would have liked it more. So maybe it's just my tastes have changed and the stage of my writing life that I'm in requires different influences.

But her sentences are so good--it may be worth the read anyway. What I struggled with were the four major dramatic events that happen in proximity to the narrator--one related to a boyfriend, one to her employers, one to her roommate, and one to her brother. I'm not going to spoil the plot, but let's just say these are BIG events. Each the kind of thing with the potential to change or end a life. And our narrator has four of them in one year. And none of them are caused by her but rather happen to people close to her. So not only did I struggle to believe what was happening (there is no such thing as "suspension of disbelief," people--you have to earn my belief with every sentence) but I wasn't superinvested because the narrator had nearly no way to interact with these events. All she could really do was grieve them.

Still it made me want to go back to Anagrams and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? both of which I haven't read in a long time...

Big Machine by Victor LaValle

2009-09-12T10:48:00.004-05:00

An enjoyable enough novel by the author of The Ecstatic, which I admit I preferred. LaValle is very very good at generating suspense to start (it was the plot in the middle where I kind of flagged)... he uses a classic mystery set-up and places a number of strangers in a remote location all gathered by some strange man with a plan. Because LaValle is so good with voice you'll happily go for chapters not knowing what's up because you like the narrator so much and so he can withhold information for quite awhile. Not to mention, about fifty pages in you meet a new character who has no connection to the narrator whatsoever until he describes her as"my future wife." So you can't help but read on to find out how on earth they go from the position they're in to being married in two hundred pages.

But what I wanted to mention is for a long chapter in the last third of the novel the point of view switches from first person to third person and relates the past history of the wife character. It's set up so that you understand she has told the narrator this story--but it's not told to the reader via his first person or hers. It's just set apart--given a title of its own--and dropped in. Which made me think you can get away with this kind of thing if you own up to what you're doing. Just switching without announcing the switch would have bugged me more. But this seemed okay. In my adaptation class we've been talking about handling flashbacks and I have a similar theory about them--they work best when the film acknowledges the change and doesn't try to make that flash seamless. In a number of ways LaValle is up front about writing a comic book in the form of a novel, and I suspect this third person section--a side adventure for a secondary character--may have also been under the influence of comics.

Bookworm

2009-09-08T17:32:00.003-05:00

O Magazine has a great profile on Michael Silverblatt the host of Bookworm--the one podcast every writer should listen to.

Excuses #1-5

2009-09-05T10:03:00.004-05:00

Beginning of the semester is always a bit busy. Plus I started a few books that I wasn't motivated to finish. And I'm waiting for my Lorrie Moore to arrive from Amazon. Also, I've been watching a lot of episodes of Dexter. And I've been working on my bowling.

But I have in hand a library copy of Big Machine by Victor LaValle, an advance reading copy (courtesy of my hooked-up friend and colleague) of The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk (which I hear contains a character named Papatya, a fact I am ridiculously excited about) and the aforementioned Lorrie Moore has been shipped.

So I should be blogging more soon.

Father and Son by Larry Brown

2009-08-18T07:24:00.003-05:00

I'm a big fan of this novel--it makes a good case for how horror can be conveyed very quietly and be all the more moving for it. There was lots I admired, but a few things stood out:

One is that the early pages of the novel set up its circumference--the premise: a guy gets out of jail after three years and returns home, the place: rural, poor, everybody knows each other and both grudges and friendships go back generations, the characters (and their conflicts): sheriff (Bobby), ex-con (Glenn), and friends and associates of both. And the whole novel stays within that circumference--but though you think you know what will happen based on information and assumptions that you enter the novel with (about ex-cons in rural poor places and the who and the what you think they come from)--you really don't know what will happen (or what happened in the past). And it all unfolds quite gradually (it's a good novel to study for what is revealed when), so that your attention is held as new pieces of info are relayed. There's also the feeling early on that Glenn's behavior (largely bad) will be explained by the alcoholism of his father, who he bitterly resents--and while that's partially true, there's a much bigger story that Brown reveals in an interesting way. He uses his third person omniscience really intelligently because as he moves between characters, and into and out of their perspectives, you realize that Glenn often believes things that really aren't true. And he misjudges people, a lot. But even when you learn that...and you know some kind of tragedy is on the way (the novel sets that up from the start--which helps earn that ending), you don't (or at least I didn't) predict what actually happens.

So structurally it's well done, but stylistically I loved it too. The writing is very matter of fact, the chapters very short (and Brown has some clever chapter transitions--e.g. one character goes to sleep at the end of a chapter, different character wakes up at start of next chapter), and the amount of time spent in characters' heads is quite limited--which all helps balance out the potential melodrama of the action (let's just say the body count is high for a literary novel).

One of the best novels I've read in awhile, I say.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery (translated by Alison Anderson)

2009-08-04T09:54:00.002-05:00

I happened to read three newish, well-received novels in a row (this French novel, How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steven Hely, and You Or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr) that were in some way about reading (I guess that's not that much of a coincidence given my taste). The Elegance of the Hedgehog was by far my favorite but all three seemed to struggle some with balancing a novel of so-called ideas with an actual plot. The Hely novel is a mostly funny satire about a guy who decides to write a bestseller (he succeeds) in order to impress an ex-girlfriend at her wedding (he fails). And while it's got some funny bits about writing, mostly it's funny on the split between what is considered popular and what is considered good. It raised an odd question of audience though...as someone who thinks about the split between popular and good I should have been an ideal reader, but he was in essence telling me what I already knew, so I kind of smiled my way through rather than laughing aloud. On the other hand, a reader who wasn't already in the choir would likely be insulted by his thoughts on popular taste. The Burr novel has a different problem in that it needs its characters to behave in a way that suits the ideas that are being raised. And while I enjoyed the premise (Hollywood is swept up in book club mania), I struggled with believing the actions of the character who creates all the tension. Because the whole reading/book club thing was rather disconnected from his actions. They felt like two separate novels. But still not a bad book. But Elegance of the Hedgehog...

that had for 99 percent of the book a really great balance between the characters' thoughts (which are on philosophy, reading, class...) and the characters' behaviors, which were charming, interesting, funny. And a certain amount of tension is set right at the start by one character's declaration that she is going to kill herself on her thirteenth birthday. You pretty much trust that she won't (I mean, good grief if she did!) but the tension still resonates because you worry about someone who is so unhappy. And then halfway through a new character arrives (always a way to move the plot along) and the action picks up even more. But then ... but then... I really hated what happened in the end. It felt like the intellectually sound finale (it ties the philosophizing up nicely) but felt so contrived as a plot point. Very coincidental, very sentimental, very melodramatic. All things I have a personal prejudice against that I maintain is a personal prejudice you all should share. So the question is how to have it both ways...ideas and plot. Philosophy and character resolution. Well, I suppose you just can't force the action to fit the philosophy, which is what both Barbery and Burr seem to do. Hely is writing such a ridiculous book (meaning satire) that he can get away with that much more readily. Barbery is writing a sort of realist fairy tale blend, so she could get away with a slightly unreal finish...but not the one she's got, I think. Still I love that this novel, in translation no less, has gotten such good press and I love that I had to wait months before I could get it out of the library because so many people were reading it. And I loved the book itself up to until pretty much the last chapter which I may just mentally scissor away.

The Atlantic Annual Fiction Issue

2009-07-27T06:23:00.001-05:00

is now online.

Essayists might also enjoy the Washington Post's Summer Reading Issue.

Live Through This by Debra Gwartney

2009-07-19T14:07:00.003-05:00

One of my favorite This American Life segments was about 12 year old and 14 year old sisters who run away and their mother and their eventual reconciliation. Now, quite a few years later, their mother has written a memoir of that time, and it's just as powerful and upsetting and empathy-producing as the radio show was. And it raises some interesting distinctions between what a radio segment does, what an essay does, and what a book does. The advantage of the radio was the girls also told their story and so there are things that aren't in the book that they revealed on the show--like what they were thinking and doing during the time they were away. But it's interesting that despite the fact that Gwartney now knows more of what the girls were doing--at least what they've told her--she chooses not to reveal much of it. It's very much her version and her experience and that's one of the reasons the book works as a complement to the much-replayed radio program rather than as simply another version of the same thing. It does raise the interesting possibility, though, of what if memoirs were written by a collective of people--constructed from multiple voices like the show was. I guess in some sense that's what journalists do when they write other people's stories, but I mean more allowing each person to fill in their part as a portion of the overall structure (which would need to be authored by someone).

Anyway, the radio show by nature of its length is more like an essay than a book--and this book is a good argument for what the long form can do. The radio version, and likely an essay version, powerfully convey what it was like to have the girls run away, and it suggests Gwartney's sense of guilt, it suggests the things that lead up to the worst events and how they were reconciled...but the book tells a much more complicated version. Only now do I realize how many years of problems there were. How serious those problems were. How different the two sisters actually are (in the short form they kind of merge into one character) and how different the relationship between mother and each daughter actually is. You also get a much much closer understanding of how guilty Gwartney feels and how she really did make some mistakes (understandable, human mistakes) and how both genetics and her ex-husband were factors. And you get a much closer understanding of how long the recovery period for this family was (is). So it's an obvious statement, but the book tells the bigger story and is a case for why sometimes the short form can't do quite as much.

By coincidence, I'm also reading the novel Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks which is about a teen boy runaway just a few years earlier, and it made me consider how much I appreciated that this memoir was about girls. I lived in Tempe, AZ from '96-99 and it was a big period of grungy kids riding into town on the freight trains and camping out in parks in the warm weather, so I have a strong picture of how these girls were living--and it's important to realize that those troops of youngsters were in no way just a bunch of guys hobo-ing and testing their manhood. It was a weird communal horrifying tribe of kids and girls were/are very much a part of it.

The Sister by Poppy Adams

2009-07-17T10:56:00.003-05:00

An enjoyable enough novel narrated by an elderly woman with a penchant for lepidopterary who grew up in a Victorian house with hundreds of years of ancestral burden. The novel makes pretty clear that the narrator has some version of autism and that she may have as a child pushed her sister out of a tower (sister lived) and may have as an adult pushed her mother down some stairs (mother didn't), but it withholds, naturally since it's first person, quite what the narrator's condition is and whether or not she did these things. But the writer is a little stuck, I think, because she can't straight out say what's going on, and clearly that's supposed to be part of the draw of the novel, but she still wants to reveal more in the end than she did the rest of the way. And so what happens is the narrator suddenly seems a lot more impaired toward the end. And it's not that she seems to have changed physically but what she is able to tell us and how she tells it and what she does (with some provocation) kind of has. And that makes certain conclusions obvious. And it feels a little like a cheat, though like I said it's an enjoyable read and well-plotted. But it raises the question of why have this narrator tell the story. Clearly it was her inability to openly tell the story that was of interest to the writer, and it creates a kind of tension, since the truth can't be told outright, but it all feels a little coy. You know something's wrong with her--as well as the other characters do--and there's not actually that much suspense to withholding the info about the possible murder. I had mixed feelings about it. All these novels with impaired narrators start to feel a little gimmicky. There doesn't seem to be much point to using this narrator other than for her impairment. It doesn't actually feel like an intimate look at what it would be like to have autism or be the sister of someone with autism; it's more of a well-written murder mystery.

Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser (revisited)

2009-07-10T11:00:00.004-05:00

I already posted on this book once, but I found myself thinking about a number of the stories a lot, long after I read them, and so I read it again recently (with the thought I'd teach it in my grad workshop in the spring, which I probably will). And it really is a pretty great collection. The stories are big in the way of Alice Munro's, but often reaching into some alternate history or alternate future and they're full of both science and wonder.

What I was paying most attention to this time was how unflashy the sentences are, and yet how there is always a moment in the story where what is said is so much more surprising or profound than what has come before that the story steps to a new level. A lot of the stories are heavy on concept, something student writers often respond to, but that moment has to come when the concept goes where the reader couldn't have imagined. The danger with heavy concepts is the summary of the story (it's about high school students who form a laughing club) can be as good as the story itself if you don't take it past what the ordinary reader would imagine on his/her own. And Millhauser is really good at examining an extraordinary idea in a believable way and then connecting it to some deeper emotion or less directly connected thought...leading to that moment of surprise. Which he then goes past. The moment of surprise is not the end of the story, it's more like the middle or the beginning of the last third--so a whole chunk of the story arises out of the unexpected shift.

The Spider Sermons by Robert Krut

2009-07-10T10:43:00.002-05:00

Full disclosure: Bob was a friend of mine in grad school and though I haven't seen him in years I still hold him high in my esteem and in my heart.

I'm feeling old today, so reflecting on being out of grad school ten years may not be the best idea, but regardless...it's always a pleasure to see my grad school colleagues publish, partly because I can see the echoes of their student work and partly because they've moved so far from their student work. I never took a workshop with Bob since he was a poet (mostly) and I was a prose writer (mostly) so I only remember some poems from readings and such, so I'm not sure how many, if any, of the poems in this book are from his grad school years. But I can see the writer he was then still in them, and I can see growth too. I sometimes say to my graduate students, "This is not your practice writing, this is your writing," and I mean it. It doesn't pay to think this is my student work and I'll take myself more seriously when I'm not a student. But the truth is, it is all both your practice work and your work. All we do is practice (this is a very yoga-ish thought, I suppose).

And you probably won't and maybe shouldn't find your ONE voice as a student writer. Hopefully you will find a voice, but hopefully you won't spend your life feeling limited to it. So it's cool to see lines like these, which remind me of the Bob I knew and remind me there is another older Bob who I don't really know:

"Gravitypants Rocketboy is fashioning a flying apparatus
made of old newspapers and wood from his childhood home."

(side note: I was recently asked what I wanted my "bowling" name to be--I went with my own--but only because I hadn't heard of Gravitypants Rocketboy (Rocketgirl?) then)

and

"because I want you to help me
because I don't know what it means--
the dream where everyone
I know is hurting themselves,
and it begins with my voice."

and

"I'll be honest--
this is how it has been lately:
a coat of skin thrown
over a six foot tear."

I like how I don't know if that last word is tear as in drop or tear as in rip.

Firmin by Sam Savage

2009-07-05T19:27:00.005-05:00

Anyone who has taught an intro to creative writing class is wary of books narrated by non-humans and I was seriously disturbed by my childhood reading of Stuart Little (though E.B. White is one of my all-time favorite authors, I say if you want to put young people off of the idea of sex for awhile just let them believe that they might give birth to a mouse)...so it took me years to come around to reading this novel, narrated by a rat, despite only having heard positive reviews. But when I was browsing the bookstore, and I pulled it off the shelf to read a page or two with the idea of getting it from the library if I liked it, I saw the book had a bite taken out of it. I mean the publisher had faked a large bite going all the way through. So I had to take it home. (some books are like puppies, they cannot be left in the store). Publishers are getting a little wonky nowadays with their panic over the Internet and the Economy and the End of Art Appreciation ...but I firmly approve of a little bravery and innovation when it comes to the physical object of the book. And it turns out a chunk missing from the side of the book makes for a very comfortable resting place for my thumb. I'm thinking of carving out little thumbholders in all my books.

Anyway...the content: in the past in my studies of anthropomorphism in fiction I've talked about how doglike is the dog or how tortoiselike is the tortoise, but this isn't a novel about rats, it's a novel about reading. It reminded me more of Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader or Walker Percy's The Moviegoer than it did any animal books. So why not write about a person, rather than a rat, who reads-and fantasizes his life more than lives it--well, I think maybe while we know lots of people like that (and some of us may be a little bit like that ourselves), they aren't the most sympathetic characters when they're all passive and reading and unhappy. But a rat who is reading--well, he actually seems really active, an over-achiever. And when he's unhappy, it's understandable--he's a rat, and while he can read, he can neither talk nor type nor execute sign language (all of which he tries). It reminded me of a children's book author who talked about how she could have animal characters push each other out of trees, but obviously you couldn't have child characters doing that. So sometimes it's useful to write about the things that humans do, without using actual humans. Readers are more sympathetic. In the end, while Firmin gets a lot out of reading (and movie watching and music listening)--the novel makes clear that a life that's all reading is not all of a life. (clever, huh?) So it's pretty sad in the end. Not entirely a novel For Me, but I appreciated it all the same.

Guernica

2009-07-01T07:13:00.003-05:00

It's not that I haven't been reading, I've actually been reading a lot; it's just I'm in that state of speechlessness that frequently follows months of teaching. So in the meanwhile, check out this poem by one of my nearest and dearest, Oliver de la Paz, in the latest issue of Guernica.

Movies for Writers

2009-06-09T11:56:00.002-05:00

One of my graduate students has started a blog that I imagine readers of this blog will appreciate:

http://moviesforwriters.blogspot.com/

A Person of Interest by Susan Choi

2009-06-01T15:03:00.004-05:00

Don DeLillo is one of my all-time favorite fiction writers, and so I always notice when a contemporary writer gets given the DeLillo comparision. And sometimes I wonder why. DeLillo himself seems so varied--all out funny in White Noise, meditative and serious in Mao II, floaty and strange in The Body Artist, all inclusive in Underworld... but I think what critics mean when they pull out the DeLilloism is the author has taken on social issues of our contemporary world.

And this novel, which I much admired, is the story of a Korean scientist and professor who is suspected of being a Unabomber-type when his colleague gets blown up by a mail bomb. It's a combo (and I think I read this in an interview with Choi) of the suspicion that the Asian scientist at Los Alamos came under and the Unabomber story. And the connection to real life definitely adds weight to the fiction. But really it's interesting for the characterizations, and it's weighty for the level of psychological, human insight not because it has something to say about the American media, or about othering, or about the Unabomber. DeLillo (in Mao mode) would have had lots of narrative comment about all those issues, but Choi tells the story of this one guy and what it would be like to be a real live, flawed, and innocent person suddenly under suspicion. I appreciated that she felt free to use contemporary history, but didn't feel obligated to comment on it directly.

One of the most interesting choices she makes is to veer off nearly 2/3 of the way through the novel (maybe more) into the point of view (still third person limited, just not the protagonist we've been with for most of the novel) of an unexpected character. It's the kind of thing that is a violation of the fake rules of the fictional universe--set a pattern and stick to it (in layman's terms, don't all of a sudden change perspectives)--but as a reader I didn't mind at all for the simple reason that she kept the writing and the character super interesting. There was no dip in her level of execution so I gave her the benefit of the doubt--and in fact felt a little relieved to break from the claustrophobia of sticking with an interesting but maddening character. And the pay off is good because the choice of whose perspective she followed is so good--and so unexpected. Now this could backfire--readers are suspicious of the hand of the writer suddenly coming up through the page and showing itself--but she immersed the reader so quickly and so deeply in this character's perspective--the psychic distance is so close to him--that you don't have time to pull back and go, what just happened? You go with her. Or at least I did.

One other small thing, the main character is called by his last name throughout--even other characters call him by his last name--and this has a great distancing effect. He's the kind of guy that doesn't let other people in close and that choice reflects that very nicely.

The Signal by Ron Carlson

2009-06-01T14:49:00.003-05:00

Full disclosure: I have a deep and abiding love for Ron Carlson, who has been my mentor for more than ten years now. But who would you be if you didn't blog about the books by people you love?

One of the interesting things about reading everything that one writer puts out (and it's rare that I do that), is you notice when they drop certain habits. And lately Carlson has dropped the habit of being funny. Now, I'm sure he still is and can be, and I wouldn't be surprised if he comes out with some short stories soon that are once and again really funny. But this novel, despite some moments of humor, is not funny at all. It's absolutely and completely sincere. And lately it's not that often that I read fiction that is completely sincere. It's about the mourning of two losses the protagonist's wife (who he betrayed and she divorced him) and his father (who died just before his romance started years before with his wife). And even though the plot is a combined Western-shoot-out-Secret Agent thriller kind of thing (done literarily, of course), the book's heart is about how those two losses--and the nostalgic memories connected to them--seep through all the camping and hunting and manly action.

So it just made me think maybe humor sometimes comes at a cost. Because the light tone that I associate with a lot of Carlson's short stories--which I really enjoy--would have prevented the reader from really feeling the mourning that comes with this novel (as with Carlson's previous novel, Five Skies). Not to say heartbreak can't come with humor...probably my favorite novel of all time (if I really had to pick) is Catch-22, which is uber-funny and yet uber-serious. But perhaps a certain kind of narrator--that charming, smart-alecky one, needs to interrupt itself, and choose a different tone, for deeper impact. And in short stories, it's harder to vary tone. So short stories are often serious and sincere or funny and ironic. I'm not sure about this... for class we just read "Jon" by George Saunders, which is funny and ironic and a little bit glorious and awesome (in the literal sense not the Valley Girl sense) in its end. So I guess certain writers pull it off.

I recently mentioned in class that I never seemed to read comedies as realist and there was much protest at this--as real life is quite funny and often absurd--but real life doesn't come with such a one note point of view as most comedies do (because they leave out all the unfunny stuff). The context for the comment was Zadie Smith's White Teeth, another favorite of mine, but an example of when humor eliminates the chance of heartbreak (or heartlift). She chose humor over heartbreak though, I wouldn't say she went for both.

You Can Read

2009-05-27T06:22:00.002-05:00

my essay on getting tenure at The Chronicle of Higher Education Career Network. The editor cut a line that I kind of like so here it is as a teaser: "There are obviously an infinite number of uses (not practical uses, not desirable uses, just uses) for a spoon."

You'll have to guess where it went.

I am

2009-05-14T14:02:00.001-05:00

briefly on the Brevity blog.

My Students Make Me Proud

2009-05-09T05:50:00.004-05:00

Brevity has announced on their website that the essay "Why" by FAU MFA grad Kathrine Leone Wright has been selected by Dzanc Book for The Best of the Web 2009 (available in late June).

Regular readers will recall that's a piece of Kathrine's thesis essay.

You can read

2009-05-06T15:33:00.003-05:00

my essay in the current issue of Brevity.

Also check out the essays by my dear grad school friend Rigoberto Gonzalez and the wonderful Richard Robbins who gave me my first job as a professor.

Pulitzers

2009-04-21T05:07:00.006-05:00

Three women fiction writers were finalists for the Pulitzer this year: winner Elizabeth Strout, Louise Erdrich and Christine Schutt. Should you care to, you can read my posts about the Strout, Olive Kitteridge, and the Schutt, All Souls. And awhile back I posted on Schutt's short novel Florida, then a finalist for the National Book Award . I generally enjoy Louise Erdrich but haven't really kept up with her output since Love Medicine.

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken

2009-04-13T15:13:00.004-05:00

This slim memoir of the births of fiction writer McCracken's stillborn first child and her healthy second child is moving and poignant and agonizing for all the reasons you would expect when a horrific subject and a beautiful subject meet a skilled and subtle writer. But through all the tears (mine not hers) I couldn't help but read it as an insight into the writing life of the novelist who wrote one of my personal favorites, The Giant's House. What kept making my jaw hang were all the pages that McCracken referenced writing that never saw the light of the printing press. She described a novel she gave up on, a memoir of pregnancy (pre-stillbirth) she gave up on...literally hundreds of pages, years of effort... Now I'm well accustomed to the idea of writers having first manuscripts that never got published (and never should) pre-success but it was a bit disspiriting and a bit reassuring to realize that writers also have projects that get drawered post-success. So in part I liked this book for the same reason that I like Ann Patchett's memoir Truth and Beauty (which lots of people criticize because they see it as exploitive of its subject, her friendship with the (deceased) writer Lucy Grealy)... because on the margins it's a book about being a woman writer and how that fits into a larger life.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

2009-04-13T07:21:00.004-05:00

This novel hit so big that even some of my undergraduates--who surely have no time for pleasure reading--were going around talking about it. I can see why it was popular--driving plot paired with so many hooks--mute child protagonist, dog breeding farm setting, Hamlet rewrite--that the media coverage wrote itself. And it's good, way better than the typical best seller. Personally I responded most to the dog farm--it's a good example of creating a world that the average reader doesn't know and teaching them how it works. But I suppose the Hamlet layer is what interested all those book clubs and high schoolers. Shakespeare makes for good cannibalizing because he has such layered plots that they can be novels and the characters have such dominant traits that you can turn anyone into a Hamlet or a Kate or a Lear. E.g. being a prince is irrelevant, it's being indecisive that matters, hence you can give a mute kid indecisiveness and call him a Hamlet.

What I noticed as I read this novel was how dependent my acceptance of the plot was on the pre-existence of the play. The character actions--murder! revenge!--are only believable because they were the actions of Claudius, Hamlet, Laertes...they aren't believable as the actions of Claude, Edgar, Glen... In other words, if I read this novel without having any knowledge of Shakespeare I would seriously question the character motivations. But because Wroblewski chose Hamlet (assigned in almost every high school and part of the cultural collective conscious and likely to be known by those who will pick up a 500 page literary novel anyway), he doesn't have to sweat it. If you model your novel on some unknown text, your novel must stand alone. But if you model your novel on Hamlet, you are choosing not to have it stand alone. I guess it really shouldn't stand alone--or why else is Hamlet in there? Still the character thing troubled me ...

Palate Cleansing Pratchett

2009-04-03T06:20:00.004-05:00

This is why I like Terry Pratchett (from The Wee Free Men):

"'There's a headless horseman after me!' she [Tiffany] shouted.

'He'll no make it, hinny. Stand ye still! Look him in the eye!'

'He hasn't got any eyes!'

'Crivens! Are ye a hag or no? Look him in the eyes he hasna got!'"

Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolano

2009-04-03T06:06:00.004-05:00

Bolano is having a posthumous renaissance now that so much of his work is being translated into English, and I read about half of his novel The Savage Detectives and about half of this collection of stories (though some might not call it a collection of stories) both with pleasure--though apparently not enough interest to get all the way through. That fact, though, has more to do with personal preferences (so much Pratchett to read now!) and limited time.

So this book is a collection of profiles of fictional writers (as in made up people not writers of fiction) with Nazi sympathies. And while that may seem like a concept built for shock value--it's surprising unshocking. Instead it's really really funny. One of Bolano's big interests seems to be looking at the lives of writers, of movements, of non-writers interest in writers...but by choosing Nazi writers instead of say Leftist writers or Catholic writers or any other designator that has supporters and foes in equal measure, he eliminates the sense of making an overly obvious political statement. While the world obviously still contains Nazi sympathizers, there's no way readers will think this book is taking a pro-Nazi position or that it would really bother to take an anti-Nazi position, so you have to look deeper for significance. And the parts I read had a lot to do with why people write (and Bolano can be quite judgemental about this) and why people read...

What interested me most though was how the structure of a character profile--a mini biography--can absolutely work as a short story structure. These characters are at times endearing, disturbing, entirely mockeable... and despite the encylopedia type structure of the book, despite the lack of a "story" in terms of a building plot, you care about them.

Reading for Writers

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje

Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia

You Are Free by Danzy Senna

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

The Blog

Things That Fall from the Sky by Kevin Brockmeier

The Anti-Romantic Child by Priscilla Gilman

Eight Questions...again

Eight Questions...

A Few Words on First Drafts

American Idol and the Art of Storytelling

House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer's Journey Home by Mark Richard

Recommended Reading

Recommended Reading

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales edited by Kate Bernheimer

Little Man, What Now? by Hans Fallada

Joe by Larry Brown

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith

Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting

My Los Angeles in Black & (Almost) White by Andrew Furman

Living Like a Writer

Recommended Reading

You Can Read...

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On Book Collecting

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Car by Harry Crews

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Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow

Recommended Reading

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

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Mentor: a memoir by Tom Grimes

Too big for Twitter

I'm back, I guess

Recommended Reading

Recommended Reading

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Recommended Reading

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Feed by M.T. Anderson

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Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino

Siam by Lily Tuck

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

The Irresistible Henry House by Lisa Grunwald

Six Memos for the Next Millenium by Italo Calvino

My Dog Tulip by J.R. Ackerley

Recommended Reading

If you like...

Recommended Reading

Swimming by Nicola Keegan

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory by Peter Hessler

The Art of Time in Fiction by Joan Silber

I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier

Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen

for New Yorkers

Recommended Reading upon the Death of J. D. Salinger

The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell

Recommended Reading

What have you been reading?

Stitches by David Small

Slumberland by Paul Beatty

The Wild Things by Dave Eggers

American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever

Ecotone

Martin Dressler by Steven Millhauser

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen by Marilyn Chin

The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk (trans. Maureen Freely)

Taking Chance

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

Big Machine by Victor LaValle

Bookworm

Excuses #1-5

Father and Son by Larry Brown