Category Archives: Literature

Posts about writing

Decision making, Spenser style

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From Robert B. Parker’s Cold Service:

You need to know what you know, what you don’t know, and what you have to know. And you need to have it in mind. You need to know what part of what you want to do can be done now, and what needs to wait, and what it needs to wait for. Is there anything you don’t understand in this situation? Anything missing?

From Chapter 34, page 157 in my edition.

Everybody knows Parker’s detective Spenser, and I’ve quoted him before on this blog. I copied out this quote on the back of a postcard and have it propped up on my desk, next to my kid calendar. I appreciate it because it sets out a decision-making process.

I wouldn’t say that I spend my day making more decisions than the average worker bee, but perhaps it’s that I spend more time thinking about the decisions I make than the average worker bee. So any kind of guidelines to decision making are welcome; that’s why it’s propped up on the desk.

More interestingly, Parker wrote the quote, he’s a writer and was focused on putting words together, slapping covers and a generic title on them, and moving on to the next one. But the words come out of the mouth of Spenser, his detective. Consider therefore the research necessary to fully inhabit the world of Spenser. Research is more than just having a sea captain inform you about the tides in San Francisco Bay, as Isabel Allende did for her novel Ripper, which I just finished reading. It also includes research into motivations and styles of work.

Consider wondering how fully does the novel’s protagonist think like the kind of person he or she is supposed to be. This is obviously most applicable to crime novels, as the detective is often a professional detective.

Bridget Jones’ Parenting Advice

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‘THEY ARE CHILDREN!’ Mr. Wallaker roared. ‘They are not corporate products! What they need to acquire is not a constant massaging of the ego, but confidence, fun, affection, love, a sense of self-worth. They need to understand, now, that there will always—always—be someone greater and lesser than themselves, and that their self-worth lies in their contentment with who they are, what they are doing and their increasing competence in doing it.’

‘I’m sorry?’ said Nicolette. ‘So there’s no point trying? I see. Then, well, maybe we should be looking at Westminster.’

‘We should be looking at who they will become as adults,’ Mr. Wallaker went on. ‘It’s a harsh world out there. The barometer of success in later life is not that they always win, but how they deal with failure. An ability to pick themselves up when they fall, retaining their optimism and sense of self, is a far greater predictor of future success than class position in Year 3.’

—Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy, by Helen Fielding, pages 354-55

This seems like worthy sentiment, and pretty concisely phrased. By complete coincidence (I picked up Bridget off the highlighted shelf at the local Queens Library branch, and this other one I put on hold from the NY Public Library) I was reading Parentology: Everything You Wanted to Know About the Science of Raising Children but Were Too Exhausted to Ask by Dalton Conley.

So I asked, ‘How did he score on the rest of the verbal assessment?’

They proceeded to sheepishly admit that [child] Yo had scored eleventh grade on vocabulary (through an oral test, obviously, since the little dude couldn’t read) and at a twelfth-grade level on reading comprehension (again, when being read aloud to). Not wanting to alienate the teachers, I suppressed the sly smile of a proud parent, which threatened to crack my countenance…

Over the course of months and years of practice and refinement, I developed a particular style of reading aloud to them. Call it nerdish. It involves defining words along the way. In this manner, I could read texts to them that would seemingly be way over their grade level, rife with complex sentence structures and new words.

—Conley, p. 50

Conley and I went to the same high school so in some way I can see where he’s coming from. And speaking as someone who had a big vocabulary relatively early in life, I can relate on a personal level to his kids’ accomplishment. And Conley is quite frank about how much he particularly enjoys reading aloud, and I think he wouldn’t deny that he is pleased that his kids too enjoy being read to.

But when I picked up the Fielding book right afterward, I realized how hollow Conley sounds. Preschoolers aren’t judged based on their reading levels. As a parent, I know how the fantasy goes, because I’ve read it in so many Robert Heinlein juvenile novels: at some point in a young person’s life, there is the opportunity to step into a special world where one is recognized as a smart person with certain useful learned skills.

The deflating balloon of this fantasy is that even in that special society, the young person will still have to get along with other people. I will admit to having difficulties getting along with other people at times, and I will even admit to seeing these difficulties as central to several important points in my life. In hindsight, I go along with Mr. Wallaker’s central point: you have to be content with who you are.

I’m not that far along in Conley’s book, but I find his focus on hacking his kids into little superbeings to be a little misguided. Maybe later on in the book he discusses how to make his kids gentler and kinder. But that to me is the important thing in raising children, not their reading scores.

Find somebody who wants to be brainburned and use him, Pohl & Kornbluth, The Space Merchants

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Venus

“I say, ‘Find somebody who wants to be brainburned and use him.’ ” 101

The greatness of an artist is in his simplicity, Courtenay. You say to me: ‘Nobody wants to be brainburned.’ That is because you are mediocre. I say, ‘Find somebody who wants to be brainburned and use him.’ That is because I am great.

Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants, Chapter 11, 101.

The Space Merchants is some kind of rollercoaster thriller that reminds me of no book more than the Alfred Bester classic The Demolished Man. Except that the sense of peril in that sci-fi thriller is replaced by the breathtaking cynicism of The Space Merchants. Reading this mid–20th Century novel today, in 2013, I couldn’t help feeling that in the world of The Space Merchants, we are all totally screwed.

I read the book quickly, but it rewards quick reading; the Walker and Company edition of 1969 that I borrowed from the local dusty library wraps up at 158 pages, so you can finish it as I did in a single evening.

The above quote is probably not the most representative in the book, but what it does represent to me is the rainforest-like lushness of the book’s conceit, that if ad executives ran the world, the human race would be more miserable and more deluded than at any time in the past. The solipsism, clichéd phrasing, and instrumentality evident in the 43 words are what make me labor over describing The Space Merchants on this blog.

“The saddest thing in the world? A broken violin.”—Frédéric Dard, Le bourreau pleure

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‘L’objet le plus triste du monde ? Je crois que c’est un violon brisé. En tout cas, c’est la vue de la boîte à violon écrasée sur la route, avec les cordes de l’instrument s’en échappant, qui m’a le plus serré le cœur. Elle symbolisait l’accident plus encore que la jeune femme étendue en bordure du fosse, les doigts griffant la terre sèche et les jupes relevées sur des cuisses admirables.’

“The saddest thing in the world? I think it’s a broken violin. Certainly, seeing the violin case smashed on the roadway, with the instrument’s strings coming out, is what touched my heart most. It said ACCIDENT more strongly than the young woman stretched out on the side of the ditch, her fingers scratching the dry earth and her dress flopped up to show off her admirable thighs.”

— Frédéric Dard, Le bourreau pleure

What a rare treat it is to pick a book in a foreign language at random from a shelf in a friend’s mother-in-law’s home and read a first sentence like that one. I immediately asked to borrow it and finished the book on the bus ride home. (or The Executioner Cries) is from 1956, and reads like Jim Thompson’s The Getaway, set in Spain.

On a languorous Spanish vacation, the narrator runs over this girl, then fetches her back to his hotel. She recovers quickly from the accident. She turns out, however, to be amnesiac and can’t remember her name, who she is, or what she was doing in Spain, since she speaks French like a native. The narrator promptly falls in love with her and vice versa. Who is she? He traces her through the labels of her clothes to a suburb of Paris, discovers her identity and her past, and then, in best Thompson fashion, exits his own relatively conventional life to join her in the kind of twisted existential misery that could sour you permanently on the notion of “following your heart.”

On a cursory check, I don’t see Le bourreau pleure ever having been translated into English. Dard is best known for his San-Antonio series of spy novels, but this one also is still in print, fifty years after initial publication.

Fortuitously, I recently read this intriguing guide to how to write a novel in a weekend, authored by the legendary Michael Moorcock, famous for his Elric of Melniboné sword-and-sorcery novels and his bizarre and genre-defying Jerry Cornelius novels. Having last picked up a Moorcock when I was in high school, back in the 20th Century, I recall them as being completely impossible to understand or remember after having read, but lots of books are like that to me (a reason why I have such trouble working on this blog; imagine finding books to care about, week after week). Still, you have to give the fellow credit for figuring out a pretty simple formula for novel-writing.

The entire way through the Dard book, I am thinking of how it pretty much fits the model of the Lester Dent master pulp-novel formula, which Moorcock lovingly describes. You could call Bourreau formulaic, with the proviso that Dard uses the formula to the same frightening effect that Thompson did. Take the novel as a metaphor for life. Then reduce the novel to a formula, as in classic Lester-Dent pulp fiction. That’s life as we live it, most of us, according to a formula: one cup oatmeal, three cups coffee, and $2.25 for the subway to work.

Dard’s couple ends up fleeing to a broken-down old house outside an anonymous Spanish town, in a setting that resembles a Krazy Kat comic strip:

The loneliness of the place had something depressing about it. It didn’t exactly resemble Spain; rather it was like the Australian desert, something flat and infinite, with low, flat, black trees. Whose idea was it to have built such a tumbledown house in this desolate spot?…At that moment, I couldn’t stop thinking that if Hell existed, it would resemble where I was now living.

My question is this: who is really living in Hell, the character or the reader? Bourreau comes to its conclusion too soon afterward for the answer to be resolved.

“When we have the money, it’s right back on this road again”—Mr. Slaughter, R McCammon

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‘Now don’t think I have the slightest intention of letting him go,’ Greathouse said. ‘That would be a crime against humanity. But listen, Matthew: we can make him believe we’re in accord, and then when we have the money, it’s right back on this road again, across the river and on to put him behind bars. What do you say?’

—Mister Slaughter, Robert McCammon, Part II, Chapter 9

Idiot! Of course you say, “No!” Stop! STOP! Of course, he’ll say “OK” (or something less anachronistic).

Of course, this is where the book really starts. All 121 pages previous were just back-story, introducing the characters. Here’s where the protagonists make their choice to let out the insanity that the rest of the book—a serial-killer thriller set in Colonial New York—must by rights encompass. Why the author didn’t start right here, I don’t know. That would have made some kind of sense.

Did people say “crime against humanity” in 1702?

“The heavy breath of old unpolished teak, the freckled edges of the old mirrors, the lime-choked cisterns, and the chipped ceramic.” Sunetra Gupta, A Sin of Color

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‘I like a bit of dust,’ he replied, regretting that he had spoken so harshly to her, when she meant so well. But taking the frame from her hands, he saw that she has simply rubbed the dust into the corners; the effect was to him somehow obscene. And in that moment, he realized that he would rather that his whole life were left exactly as it was in that moment of terrible beauty when he realized that he loved her as he would never love any other woman, his brother’s wife, Reba. For since then, he had taken comfort in any form of desuetude: the heavy breath of old unpolished teak, the freckled edges of the old mirrors, the lime-choked cisterns, and the chipped ceramic. Decay had become nectar to Debendranath Roy on the day that he discovered that he loved his brother’s wife.

Once a mouse running over her bare feet had caused her to shudder so violently that Debendranath Roy had been crushed by the lushness of her displeasure.

The hot August nights stamped through her like herds of panting buffalo, and she woke feeling more drained and tired than when she had come to bed, dreading the rest of the day.

—Sunetra Gupta, A Sin of Color, Chapters One and Two

The story can’t help but emerge as if from a thicket, dappled with all kinds of turns of phrase, like the ones above. A Sin of Color is one of the more absurd books I’ve read lately but its absurdity, rather, the absurdity of the events which take place, is seen and raised by the vivid quality of its language and the light-filled way that the author approaches her characters. Have you ever wondered what happened to all those colorful characters who used to inhabit great literature of the past, like Bleak House and Tristram Shandy? Sunetra Gupta has found a couple and set them loose in this book.

What would you do if your uncle returned to the family manse after you had spent 20 years believing that he had drowned himself? The book I read before this one, Hari Kunzru’s Transmission, was also about failure, but many types of failure: systems failure, personal failure, failure to connect. A Sin of Color is about a kind of personal failure, as incarnated in the uncle, Debendranath Roy.

It’s Debendranath Roy’s unrequited love affair with his sister-in-law (see second quote, above) that makes sense of the whole situation. As illustrated in the first quote, it’s the kind of love whose existence makes everything else nonexistent, like an overly fatty candle throwing off sparks in a very dark room.

There is no game but golf and Al-Rahman is its prophet- Kunzru, Transmission

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‘Please,’ said Mr. Al-Rahman, when they finally caught up with him, ‘explain to me clearly what you can do for my business.’

‘Right,’ said Guy, trying to concentrate. ‘A question for you, sir. Do you think your employees are living the Al-Rahman brand in a holistic way? What does Al-Rahman actually stand for?’

‘We are a very old family, Mr. Swift.’

‘Sure, sure. But you know, at the moment Al-Rahman stands for—well, for golf. And that’s it. Golf is great, don’t get me wrong. But is it really something your people can get behind? At Tomorrow*, my team came up with a kind of banner heading about where we feel your company is at now. We think of you as “the faithful.” We have this great animation for the concept. You see this guy hitting a hole in one and it says in, like, your traditional Arabic calligraphy style, “There is no game but golf and Al-Rahman is its prophet.” ‘

There was a silence. Guy tried to fill it.

—Hari Kunzru, Transmission, page 171 of 2004 hardcover edition

For a book about failure in multiple dimensions, Transmission is kind of a success to read.

The missing link between magic realism and trashy literature

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As a reader, I have as much chance of becoming a billionaire (Sidney Sheldon) or a Hollywood superstar (Jacqueline Susann), as I do of coming across a tree with a mouth that eats things (Müller). It’s only that, as a product of a free society, I believe the possibility of fame and fortune is still held out to me, even if the likelihood is low. For Müller’s characters, living under a harsh dictatorship, those kinds of fantasies have absolutely no meaning whatsoever. No, better to fall back on myth and folklore, on the superstitious belief that a particular owl landing on the roof of a house will mean imminent death for its inhabitant.

via litlove.wordpress.com

Whomp, here it is. The missing link between magic realism and cheesy romance. While the blogger here looks at it as a way to explain magic-realistic plot turns, I am more interested in turning the lantern around and using it to illuminate in the other direction, viz:

What is it about those kinds of scary Jungian-archetype tales that can be carried over into the world of trashy literature (Susann)? How can you conceptualize the trashy lit ideas in terms of scary Jungian archetypes?

“Her worldliness applied to a very narrow band of the world,” Zoe Heller, The Believers

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via es.wikipedia.org

Rosa had some cause to regard herself as a worldly woman. As a child, she had broken bread with Daniel Ortega and sung freedom songs with ANC activists in Soweto and played softball with Abbie Hoffman. By the age of eighteen, she had seen both her parents arrested for acts of civil disobedience and had twice been arrested herself. Yet, in truth, her worldliness applied to a very narrow band of the world, and there were large areas of ordinary American life about which her impeccably progressive, internationalist upbringing had left her astonishingly ignorant. Until a year ago when she had answered Jane’s ad for a roommate on craigslist, her contact with bouncy, suburban American young women for whom cuddly toys were a meaningful expression of adult love had been negligible. And even now, twelve months later, most things about Jane—from the ‘Best Daughter in the World’ certificate hanging on her wall and the dog-eared library of Chicken Soup books lining her Pier One bookshelf to the holiday cookies she baked for Eric and the thrice-weekly, hour-long phone conversations she had with her concerned parents in Fort Lauderdale—posed an appalling anthropological mystery for Rosa. She approached all their interactions in the wary, squeamish manner of a schoolchild dissecting a frog.Happily, Jane’s natural obtuseness, enhanced by years of self-esteem training, had saved her from taking offense. Insofar as she noticed Rosa’s froideur at all, she attributed it to social awkwardness. Rosa, she had decided, was a shy girl, who needed bringing out of herself.

—Zoë Heller, The Believers, Chapter 12

“Opposites attract,” goes the cliché, but in the Hellerverse, opposites repel. In fact, everything repels; I’ve rarely read a book with so many unlikeable characters as The Believers. In this quote, Rosa, the daughter who has come home to New York after four years living in Cuba, expresses her bemusement about her roommate Jane, who works in public relations at Tiffany’s. Having once worked as a temp in a luxury-goods emporium, I am certainly ready to credit Jane with all the vapidity and inanity that Heller can muster. But the passage suffers from a lack of fixed references. The observation that someone with the certain kind of “worldly” background that Rosa has does not understand Jane doesn’t give the reader any particular insight into Jane.

On the face of it, I like the idea of a story about a woman like Rosa, a woman who has just come back from four years in Cuba in a state of disillusionment about the revolution, a woman who is living in a rented, underfurnished room in New York, watching her father spending six months dying in a hospital bed. I’m sympathetic to stories about women who have underfurnished rooms. Having read it through, however, I don’t think The Believers is that book.

It begins with a house. « Picture Book Report

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via picturebookreport.com

This drawing is so much more evocative than the painfully literal movie version.