How to and how not to

Man, have I picked some dudleys lately.  Southland is — how do I put this nicely? — just awful.  I’m going to give it a little more time, since In America just surprised me so pleasantly, but the main fault I find with the book is Revoyr’s writing.  I think it’s just not great.  (Not to mention that her main character is such a drag.  She’s a lesbian, Japanese lawyer in LA, estranged from her parents and most of her emotions, in a failing relationship, unhappy and stressed out and tired all the time — thanks, I’ll go slit my wrists now.)

Here’s a for instance.  Read this character description from Southland:

He had a really good face.  His forehead was wide and expressive, and running across it were three long wrinkles, just starting to lay claim in the flesh.  His nose was stately, and Jackie noticed that when she said something, it registered not in his eyes but in his flaring, widening nostrils.  His lips were full and moist, and his jaw was square and anvil-like; any fist that struck it might disintegrate on impact.  The thing that both disturbed his face and underlined its perfection was the deep, inch-long scar just inside his left ear.  James Lanier was on the verge of being a beautiful man, and his scar both pushed him toward that distinction and held him safely away from it.

What does “a really good face” look like?  Why not leave that out and jump straight to the description.  A “stately” nose?  Are we talking like Roman senator stately?  And what’s all this business about his flaring nostrils and his full, moist lips?  He sounds ridiculous and comic.  The anecdote about a fist striking his “anvil-like” jaw is — what, foreshadowing of violence?  And really, a scar?  Let me guess, an outward physical scar to reflect the inward pain he has experienced.  Did I get it?

Oh, but there’s more.  A page later we get another lengthy monologue on Mr. Lanier.  I’ll skip a bit at the beginning and just give you the meaty bits:

And [the boys] accepted him and admired him, his sternness and discipline.  But women didn’t know what to do with him.  He was like a mountain that provided no avenue for scaling, no trails up through the dense and thorny brush.  So it was no surprise to Lanier that this woman didn’t know how to approach.  Not that men understood him any better.  Although they admired his purity, his complete independence, they couldn’t see that his strength came at the price of company and comfort.  They didn’t know that half Lanier’s sternness was loneliness calcified.  The empty solitude on top of the mountain.

Keep in mind we’ve just met this man two pages ago.  What to do with this information?  Men admire his purity and women think he’s a mountain, but no one seems to notice that he’s lonely.  Now he’s going to find an unlikely friend in our unhappy protagonist, who is likewise lonely and “calcified.”

Contrast that writing with some excellent descriptions from James Lee Burke’s Lay Down My Sword and Shield, which I picked up to get the taste of Southland out of my mouth:

Mr. Posey rose from his round-backed wicker chair on the porch and shook hands.  The lower portion of his stomach was swollen all the way across the front of his pants.  His skin was soft, pudgy to the touch, and his head was almost completely bald except for a few short gray hairs.  His eyes were colorless, and his voice had the bland quality of oatmeal.  He reminded me of a miniature, upended white whale.  When he sat down the watch in his pocket bulged against the cloth like a hard biscuit.

Mr. Posey is an attorney who showed almost criminal neglect in defending a recent client, a Mexican union picketer.  The details we get of him (as he sips tea on the veranda of his ranch house) all show us that he might think such a client wasn’t worth his gentleman’s time.

Here’s another description, of the town sheriff:

The sheriff sat behind his desk with a handrolled cigarette between his lips, and my billfold, pocketknife, and muddy boots in front of him.  He wore steel-rimmed glasses, and his ears peeled out from the sides of his head.  His face was full of red knots and bumps, a large brown mole on his chin, and his gray hair was mowed right into the scalp, but his flat blue eyes cut through the rest of it like a welder’s torch.  He put the cigarette out between his fingers in the wastebasket, and started to roll another one from a package of Virginia Extra in his pocket.  The tips of his teeth were rotted with nicotine.  He curved the cigarette paper under his forefinger and didn’t look at me when he spoke.

He didn’t come right out and say, “The sheriff was an ugly man,” or “The sheriff had a stern look about him,” but we get that, along with some great lines like “his ears peeled out from the sides of his head.”  We don’t have to be told that a fist might shatter on his face; we can tell this is not a guy we want to mess with.

Burke has a great way of building character through dialogue, too, which would take too long for me to type out, whereas Revoyr just vomits up all her characters’ back stories and feelings and neuroses in long stretches of exposition.  Even minor characters (like one of Jackie’s law school classmates) get the VIP treatment, and we have to read a whole pointless graf about her life.  Tighten up that writing, Revoyr!  Create interesting characters! Build some tension!  Trust your readers!  Stick to details that matter!

Overall, Burke gets an A; Revoyr gets a C-.

Susan Sontag’s In America

I hated this book at first.  The prologue (a first-person narrator, who is absent from the rest of the book, begins by imagining herself a few hundred years ago, observing from a corner of the room a party in Poland; she makes up names and back stories for the party-goers, who become the characters who inhabit the novel) was confusing and ponderous.  The first few chapters were incredibly slow, and I put it down a few times without intending to pick it back up.  But driven by boredom, I did just that, and I’m glad I did.

Sontag’s style of writing is unique.  Dense, intelligent, and at times strangely skimming the surface of her characters, she takes a while to work up momentum, but then manages to hold the reader’s attention.  (Well, sometimes; the reviews of In America on Amazon are varied.)   I found her changes in tone particularly interesting.  Several times, she switches from a third-person limited to first person scenes, diary entries, letters, theatrical dialog, streams of consciousness, etc., without announcing the change or telling us who is speaking.  The reader simply has to be swept along with the current until she can catch up.  Some of these, particularly the streams of consciousness, are very beautiful stretches of writing.  I did wonder at her choice to end the novel with a long monologue by the famous actor Edwin Booth, who was mentioned previously but didn’t play a part in the story.  The tension had been building, and I was expecting some sort of hubris-driven collapse, but the novel just sort of ground to a halt at Booth’s monologue.  I still haven’t figured that bit out yet.

The story follows Maryna Lezowska, a Polish actress, and her entourage, who immigrate to America to start a utopian community.  Interestingly, Maryna Lezowska is based on a real woman, Helena Modrzejewska.  (I love learning more about real-life people from fiction.)  Also interestingly, the Wikipedia entry on Modrzejewska claims the book generated controversy because Sontag was accused of plagiarizing other books about her.  Too bad the other books didn’t win the National Book Award.  (Sontag claims, unconvincingly, “There’s a larger argument to be made that all of literature is a series of references and allusions.”)

In America raises a lot of questions to explore about utopia, art, love, and Americanness (Old World vs. New World).  I love her categorizations of Polish national identity and what it meant to be an American at the turn of the century.  It would be fun to pull this novel apart for more in-depth study, but that’s not what I’m about these days (le sigh).  Besides, just reading In America demands a lot of attention and engagement.

I’ve just started reading Southland, by Nina Revoyr.  More to come on that soon!

Philip Roth’s The Human Stain

Warning: plot spoiler

This is my second Philip Roth experience.  I read American Pastoral in grad school and completely fell in love with his grand, swooping prose.  The Human Stain is another Nathan Zuckerman book, so the tone and voice is the same, and I still like it very much.  He occasionally overwrites — everything is fraught with introspection and analysis, so no one is every just fishing or watching a symphony, but it all means something — but by and large I think he navigates his books very well.  I mean, the guy’s written thirty books, so we can assume he knows a little bit about what he’s doing.

The Human Stain began to drag just a bit for me after Coleman Silk’s death, and I wanted it to just end already.  I couldn’t understand why there were so many pages left.  But then I came to the last scene, with Zuckerman and Les Farley out on the frozen pond, and I understood that we needed to get to this point.  That long interaction between the two men was one of the highlights of the book.  It was really beautiful and nuanced.

I like the way Roth, through Zuckerman, always plays with POV.  He almost effortlessly melds a third-person voice into a first-person consciousness.  And when you get to the end, you have to wonder how much was true and how much Zuckerman just made up.  That uncertainty was even more palpable at the end of American Pastoral because Zuckerman wasn’t so present as a character in that book as he is in The Human Stain, in which we never forget that it’s Zuckerman telling us the story.  Good work, Zuckerman.  I liked it.

Rainy day

No. 1 thing I wish I had known before choosing my outfit today: my boots leak.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

One Hundred Years of Solitude is considered Marquez’s magnum opus.  It won him the Nobel Prize in 1982, and some consider it the work that has most shaped world literature over the past 25 years.

I thought it was pretty good.

Much of Marquez’s writing inhabits a beautiful and fantastical dreamworld, and One Hundred Years read, to me, like nothing more than a long and lovely fairy tale.  Marquez has an amazing capacity for imagination.  But the repetition of names and histories (one of the major themes in the book) grew wearisome to me by the end of the novel (although it’s certainly impressive how he managed to keep straight all those Aurelianos and Jose Arcadios).  Still, my very favorite line came near the end.  The wise Catalonian packs up all his books and boards a train to return to his homeland.  He says, “The world must be all fucked up when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.”

I also started Kurt Vonnegut’s Hocus Pocus, but, I’m sad to say, I may not bother to finish it.  I’m just not enjoying it at all, although quitting on a book doesn’t sit well with me.  I don’t like the way the narrative is chopped into small chunks, and oh my goodness, please tell me one more time about how your mother-in-law and your wife were certifiable, because I think maybe I missed it the first fifty times you told us.  Also, I find a great deal of the story boring, to be perfectly honest.  I don’t care about the long history of Tarkington College.  Unfortunately, Hocus Pocus is the only Vonnegut volume at the sad little Caroline Library.  Interlibrary loan, anyone?  Yes, please.

In praise of idleness

I have been out of work since Sept. 1.  My old office has been stripped and shut down, all of us laid off and left to fend for ourselves in the worst job market since the Depression.  I am loving every minute of it.  I love not working.  So hard.

So it seemed rather serendipitous that I stumbled upon Mark Slouka’s old essay “Quitting the Paint Factory,” (reposted from the Nov. 2004 issue of Harper’s on what appears to be a now-defunct personal blog) which only served to strengthen my resolve never to work again.  Provided we’re not in danger of starving to death.  Regardless of your views of the rat race, this is a beautifully written essay and bears reading.

John Dufresne’s Johnny Too Bad & Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother

I’m baaaack!  It’s amazing how much time a newborn takes up.  He doesn’t do anything but eat, sleep, and poop, so why is it that my hands always seem occupied?

Anyway, I finally made a trip to the library last week, and I finished two really swell books: John Dufresne’s collection of short stories Johnny Too Bad and Mark Haddon’s novel A Spot of Bother.  They’ve both written other books, and I’m excited to read more of their work.

Johnny Too Bad was fun because many of the stories were related, about the life of a writer named John (how coincidental) and his very animated dog Spot.  I’m not sure why writers love to write about writers, but it’s very common.  What’s not so common is how Dufresne handled the matter.  Because not only does his protagonist share his name and vocation, but the character’s own fictional protagonist also bears striking resemblance to the character John.  John says in the title story, “I told Dad that Spot was in the book, that he belonged to the central character, a writer, not so unlike myself.  I told him the writer’s father had vision problems, so naturally he assumed the father is him.  I did not tell him that the writer and his father have a problematic relationship.  I did not want my father hurt by his misperception.  Even if I told him now that he’s not the character, he’ll think I’m lying.  Spot’s Spot, after all.  The writer’s a pathetic little scribbler who left his loving wife, after all.”  Ouch.

Dufresne is just as good at the long story as he is at flash fiction, and both types of story are displayed in this collection.  “Close By Me Forever” is a very powerful story about memory and love, and it packs a great twist at the end.  “Based on a True Story” plays with the form and condenses part of the story into a numbered list preceded by, “And then what happens is this.”  As much as I enjoyed Spot’s antics in the stories about John, I think “Died and Gone to Heaven” may have been my favorite story; it’s the kind of story that once you’ve finished, you can almost physically feel the author’s skill in crafting the tightly wound threads of the story.  For starters, the story opens with this magnificent two-page sentence, the kind you have to go back and start over a few times till you pick up on its rhythm.  It’s about an old murder, a family of really despicable people, and a police officer who can’t leave well enough alone.  The last sentences are every bit as beautiful as the first: “And he looked up into the clear night, saw the Milky Way splashed across the sky, and realized how everything in the universe was so far away, and was, he knew, speeding away from everything else in the universe, speeding away from him, this place, this earth, this small patch of bottomland where he sat bleeding and remembering, getting smaller and smaller.  He sank his hands into the soft clay of the bayou bank, shut his eyes, and held on.”  Another of my favorite lines appeared in “I Will Eat a Piece of the Roof and You Can Eat the Window,” after a funeral: “And while they laughed and drank, they were able, I suppose, to forget that they, too, were dying.”

I haven’t read Haddon’s prize-winning novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, but I’ll be picking it up very soon because I loved A Spot of Bother.  It’s about a man named George who finds a lesion on his hip, convinces himself that it’s cancerous, and subsequently develops a debilitating fear of death.  He sees death everywhere, and he suffers panic attacks wherein the floor falls out from underneath him, and he wedges himself between the toilet and the bathtub and softly recites nursery rhymes to himself.  Meanwhile, the rest of his family is falling apart: his wife Jean is having an affair; his daughter Katie is getting married, then not getting married, then getting married again; and his gay son Jamie is desperately trying to win back the love of his life before it’s too late.  Haddon is a marvelous writer, and he makes his characters’ unhappy lives very funny while still poignant.  And poor, dear George.  He must be the most sympathetic character I’ve read in quite a while; you just want to give him a big hug and tell him everything will be okay.

I’m headed out to the library again today.  Hopefully, I’ll find another couple of gems as delightful as these!  Happy reading, all.

Music

I haven’t had my Sirius radio since my Plymouth exploded, but the van we drove to Connecticut last weekend had XM Radio, and I was delighted to hear some of my old favorites, like Vampire Weekend, Spoon, Modest Mouse, Deathcab, Beck.  I tried to figure out why it felt so incredibly refreshing, as though I hadn’t listened to music in years.  Then I realized: I don’t share an office with Matt anymore.  Matt was my music man, constantly introducing me to new artists or showing me music videos or playing our stand-bys to help get us through the work day.  I’ll bet you $10 he’s listening t music right now.  I miss you, buddy.

Long lost

Hello, dear reader(s)!  You must have thought something tragic happened to me, since I’ve been out of comish so long.  Well, the truth is, I ran off and had a baby, of all the ridiculous things, so life is a bit on hold for now.  I’ll get back in the saddle as soon as I can!  To hold you over, here’s a picture of the gorgeous little guy:

Holden

The new literacy

Clive Thompson reviewed Andrea Lunsford’s literacy project, the Stanford Study of Writing, for Wired Magazine.  Lunsford’s project is intriguing: it was a five-year study “investigating the writing practices and development of Stanford students during their undergraduate years and their first year beyond college in professional environments or graduate programs.”  She collected 14,672 student writing samples, including everything from in-class assignments to emails and blog posts.  I find it particularly interesting that they measured the students’ confidence in writing as well as the quality and volume of their writing.

According to Thompson, Lunsford thinks that technology, far from destroying writing and literacy, as is the oft-repeated lament, is reviving them.  But here’s where I find myself becoming skeptical: Thompson says that for starters, “young people today write far more than any generation before them.”  He claims, “Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.”  How can he possibly know that?  What about journal entries and the long-lost art of letter writing and pages and pages of bad poetry that’s kept private by the writer?  “Never wrote anything, ever,” is an awfully big claim to make without providing any supporting evidence.

Still, Thompson makes a good point (I suppose) when he says, “The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.”

I wonder if limiting the study to Stanford students affects the ability to apply its findings to the general American populace.  I’m not trying to say anything about Stanford in particular (I don’t know anything about the school, in fact), but schools generally have a particular identity, a certain homogeneity, that may have impacted the outcome of the study.  The Stanford Study of Writing was designed specifically to help augment the school’s program on writing and rhetoric and the writing center, but I’d love to see a wider-ranging literacy study of this nature.

Thompson also links to Marcus Berkmann’s New York Post review of David Crystal’s book txtng: the gr8 db8.  Crystal agrees that non-standard writing like texting actually challenges literacy skills because it demands sophisticated skills in reading and writing.  I know I’ve spent hours poring over enigmatic shorthand texts or facebook posts, trying to figure out what the heck the writer was trying to spell.  I love the playfulness and the mutability of language, which as Crystal points out is part of a long “European ludic (playful) linguistic tradition,” but I still think text-speak is irritating.  So there.