Recommended Reading

There is a good chance I won't be back to blog until May when my semester is over, so in the meanwhile, I thought I'd point you to two great new books of poetry:

A Metereorologist in the Promised Land by Becka Mara McKay

and

Requiem for the Orchard by Oliver de la Paz

Full disclosure: Becka is my new friend and colleague at FAU, and once, in a movie theater, when I said, "I'd be warm enough if only I was wearing socks," Oliver gave me his.

Swimming by Nicola Keegan

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

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

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

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

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

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.