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.
Sunday, February 07, 2010
Thursday, February 04, 2010
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.
Monday, February 01, 2010
for New Yorkers
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)
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)
Friday, January 29, 2010
Recommended Reading upon the Death of J. D. Salinger
Catcher in the Rye gets most of the chatter, but when I was in high school Franny and Zooey was the book that put me under its spell. In the graduate workshop, we just read Nabokov's essay "Good Readers and Good Writers" and he ends with the idea that a writer should enchant... that novel for me was definitely an enchantment.
And then I went to college and my beloved thesis advisor, Russell Banks recommended Nine Stories...which was one of THE books that taught me to love short stories.
So post-mortem don't try to reread Catcher in the Rye, it won't be the book you remember because you're not that person now, try the other two...
And then I went to college and my beloved thesis advisor, Russell Banks recommended Nine Stories...which was one of THE books that taught me to love short stories.
So post-mortem don't try to reread Catcher in the Rye, it won't be the book you remember because you're not that person now, try the other two...
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell
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.
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.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Recommended Reading
My friend and colleague Andy Furman has another great essay out. This one, on snook (that would be a fish), is up at Agni Online.
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
What have you been reading?
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?
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?
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