The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

I love the strangeness of this novel’s opening. That strangeness is quite believable—the protagonist receives a series of odd phone calls—and it sets the stage for even greater strangeness to come. In other words, Murakami declares his intentions—anything goes—early enough that as a reader I’m willing to accept whatever develops. But the novel lost steam for me about halfway through. At some point, while events kept piling upon our protagonist, and increasingly peculiar characters kept entering his life, the story stopped shifting and growing. Event and character didn’t add up to new developments in the mystery therein (disappeared wife). Too episodic for me ultimately. But I remain a fan of Murakami, particularly his short stories. Particularly the short story that became this novel and the title story of his collection The Elephant Vanishes.

Extremely Loud and Incrediby Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

I object to the reviews which complain that Foer’s use of photographs, playful fonts, unreadable and blank pages in this novel are not experimental. I think it’s valid to complain that not all of these devices work—but not to suggest that they don’t work just because they are no longer new (which I agree, they are not). Plot, character development, and the English language are not new and nobody would suggest that fiction writers shouldn’t use those. The time has come to evaluate once experimental devices on their own terms. Are they serving the story or not? With that said, Foer is sometimes way too cute, and the whole middle of this novel sags, but I was moved to literal tears by the start and the finish.

I am a fan of the two novels—The Tin Drum and A Prayer for Owen Meany—that seem to have birthed Foer’s narrator, and this may have been part of the problem for me. Once again, fandom has its dangers. Oskar Schell just doesn’t have the power of the other Oskar or the great humor or great pathos of Owen. Foer chooses to send his Oskar on a quest, which often makes for a good structure, but its resolution is not satisfying in the manner of Owen Meany’s resolution (a real feat of planning on John Irving’s part) nor is it as emotionally resonant or as life-threatening as that of Grass’s Oskar.

The Testing of Luther Albright by MacKenzie Bezos

Full disclosure: I knew MacKenzie (then Tuttle), who was and presumably still is a tremendously kind person, in college, before she married Jeff Bezos and they started Amazon.com. So I was predisposed to like this novel, but in the end, it felt technically-perfect but cold. In tone, it reminded me a great deal of one of my favorite novellas, Good Will by Jane Smiley.

As a matter of fact, Luther Albright could well be a brother to Smiley's narrator. Both are exceptionally handy physically, independent, and controlling. They both married women named Liz. They are both emotionally repressed sons of emotionally repressed fathers and emotionally repressed fathers to emotionally repressed sons. Both have relationships to their sons that grow increasingly complicated and tense as the plot progresses. But the big difference is that in Good Will the physical stakes are incredibly high—the son becomes unpredictable in dangerous ways. Bezos’s novel, on the other hand, is more like ordinary life, where the relationship deteriorates for no good reason and to devastating emotional consequences but few that are embodied in the physical. By the end of each tale, the families are substantially changed but in Smiley’s novella the change is to their entire way of life—and some of it is actually positive—while in Bezos’s novel the changes don’t seem to grow out of the events of the novel, but rather through the ordinary progression of time. I marveled at her sentences and her ability to describe technical elements of home and dam construction—but ultimately, I’ll just look forward to her next book, where she might well find a plot that matches her technical skill. I think this happens with a number of writers—Ann Patchett (Bel Canto) and Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day) come to mind—where their particular abilities are in place long before they find the plot that best marries those abilities to the right story.

The Known World by Edward Jones

I floundered at the start of this novel, but it grew on me –or more like spread within me—to the point where I had a huge admiration for it in the end. Now huge admiration is not love, but it’s still hard to come by. The structure is unlike any I would normally suggest to a writer—it reminds me of those paintings where a gazillion things are happening all over the canvas and Jones walks the reader from one corner of the painting to the next, moving regularly between characters and occasionally backwards and forwards in time. It’s the kind of structure that doesn’t appear to be working until you reach the end and it has worked, creating a depth by its width. Most editors or workshop leaders would probably be discouraging of a partial draft in this style, so perhaps there is something to be said for Jones’ approach, which was to “plan the novel for ten years and write it in four months.”

I went to a panel on workshopping the novel at this year’s AWP conference in Vancouver, and to my dismay many of the panelists simply identified the difficulties of workshopping novels and suggested that it was an unsolveable problem. Certainly most of us accept that it’s best to respond to a whole draft and that no writing should be done by committee, but if, as again most of us accept, writing is a process, aren’t there ways that I, as a workshop leader, can help with the novel process without shoehorning drafts into predetermined structures? Jones does not follow a conventional one-event- leads-to-the-next structure, yet in the end, it is clear that one event has led to the next. That Robbins’s mentorship of Henry Townsend has consequences that splay out to many characters, and most directly to Henry’s ownership of Moses. Henry’s death then leads to the relationship of Moses and Caldonia and ultimately to the lovely, lyric ending focused on the display of Alice’s quilts—which much like those paintings where a gazillion things are happening map the world and people of the Townsend plantation. Jones leaves it to the reader to make the cause-effect links, a strategy that makes the novel seem slow at first, but ultimately is rewarding. So perhaps the answer to workshopping a draft that seems unconventional is to ask the writer to identify their strategy? To acknowledge that when you resist convention you have to find a way to compensate for it and satisfy the reader in some other way?

The Shell Collector: Stories by Anthony Doerr

I've been thinking lately about what makes a story stay with me. I read quite a few stories that I enjoy momentarily, but quickly forget. I don't love every story in Doerr's collection, but a number of them --"The Hunter's Wife," "The Shell Collector" (which is the story that led me to read the rest) and "Mkondo" are lingering stories. While these stories clearly demonstrate something is at stake (that old workshop workhorse) for the main characters, they don't insist on solving or even fully idenitifying the problems at hand. Characters are hurt, upset, sometimes emotionally devastated, but they never articulate their thoughts on those problems to the reader nor do they think through their solutions/options. The narration never goes deeply into their heads, but instead stays close to the action. Instead imagery--particularly nature imagery--is used to represent emotional states--and it is those images, as well as a sense of disquiet--that lingers.

I've been feeling lately like I've been urging my students to over-simplify. Usually this is because they're so so abstract. But in fighting abstraction, perhaps I've gone to far in favor of absolute clarity. Perhaps my emphasis should not be on specifics in point of view (what is everybody thinking), but more in specifics in image (what is everybody sensing).

2005 Pushcart Prize XXIX ed. Bill Henderson

I end up reading most of the Pushcart Anthology every year but some favorite short fiction this year: "Immortality" by Yiyun Li and "Dog Song" by Ann Pancake. The Li story was simply surprising in its subject matter and in the turns that it takes. It blends an old-fashioned storytelling voice with some very contemporary language, as well as blending history with current affairs. Really interesting. And the Pancake story wowed me with its voice. Plus it's about dogs (kind of). I'm a sucker for dogs. I didn't entirely understand what happened in the end, but the language was so good that I (almost) didn't care that I didn't understand. Both stories felt very removed from the majority of stories I see in workshop, in magazines, in books ... they both felt honest-to-goodness imagined.

The Gardens of Kyoto by Kate Walbert

I read this novel when it first came out in 2001 because I liked the short story (which turned out to be the opening section) that was in the Pushcart Anthology. I reread it recently because I wanted to look at how Walbert created the tone, which is mournful and poetic, and which stayed with me for years. The opening section is still my favorite part--the plot itself feels (to me) unsatisfying in the end. But throughout Walbert uses concrete scenes to create a lyric voice. Typically I think of lyricism as coming from more abstract or metaphorical storytelling, but she is able through her sentence structure and her emphasis on certain images--which are literal not metaphoric--to inject lyricism into the characters' interactions. She helps her cause by choosing settings--like a rundown mansion that was a former Underground Railroad stop--that lend themselves to mournful description, but ultimately it's a matter of precise word choice and a very tight voice. The extended metaphor of the book--the heavily symbolic gardens of Kyoto which were saved from Allied bombing during WWII--are also used as concretely as possible--represented through a book The Gardens of Kyoto, that passes amongst several characters, and through the gardens themselves. The extended metaphor is one of the things Walbert did extremely well, allowing her to inject an entire subplot and layer of meaning into her under-plotted, but lovely novel.