You Are Free by Danzy Senna

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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.