The Elegant Variation

My Favorite Writing Exercise

Every year I lop off the ending of two published stories and ask my students to write their own endings. What I mean by their own endings is that they have to write them, but in deeper ways, of course, these can't be their own endings. The endings have to be true to what has come earlier in the stories in terms of narrative, voice, details, etc. So what my students are really doing is writing what they think should be the story's real ending. It's an act of ventriloquism, in other words. Then, once they've written their own endings, we read the actual endings and see which they prefer.

Although you could do this exercise with just about any story, I always choose "In the Land of Men" by Antonya Nelson and "What Feels Like the World" by Richard Bausch. I choose these two stories because, for similar reasons, they are especially hard to end. They both involve a seemingly stark choice. In the Nelson story, a woman who has been raped is picked up from work by her three brothers, who have captured the rapist and locked him in the trunk of their car. They have a gun, and they essentially force the sister to decide whether to kill the rapist. The Bausch story, though the situation is a lot quieter, also involves an either/or choice. Told from the perspective of a grandfather, "What Feels Like the World" is about his 10-year-old granddaughter, Brenda, who is physically cloddish and socially maladroit and who, along with the rest of her fifth-grade class, is to particpate in a gymnasticts performance at the PTA assembly that evening. All the children have to jump over the exercise horse: will Brenda get over the horse or will she not?

John Irving once said that he puts bears in his stories so readers will pay attention. The same might be said of Nelson, who, instead of bears, has placed a rapist and a gun. Even Bausch, who, in employing an exercise horse at a PTA meeting, is using much tamer stuff than either bears or rapists, is nonetheless trying to draw the reader in with a basic tension that will run through the story: will Brenda make it over the horse or not? For all the differences between the two stories, both writers are faced with a stark choice: either A or B. And because the choice is so stark, both A and B feel unsatisfying. Either choice says too much, and therefore too little.

It's for this reason that my students bridle at this exercise. It's not fair, they say. We didn't write these stories; Bausch and Nelson did; they should have to figure out their own endings. And, indeed, they should. But what my students fail to recognize is that this is the problem every writer faces. It's almost always the case that what gives the story its initial impetus and drive is also what poses its biggest challenge. Yes, Bausch and Nelson made their own beds, but all writers, I remind my students, are perpetually making their own beds.

My undergraduates, especially, are drawn to creative writing because of the freedom it ostensibly allows: you can do anything. But the truth is, you can do anything, as long as it works. Put another way, you can do anything for the first word of your story or novel, and after that the possibilities rapidly narrow. The second word is beholden to the first word, and the third word is beholden to the first two words, and so on. My students feel that it's unfair for me to ask them to write the ending for a story whose beginning and middle they're not responsible for, but are we ever consciously responsible for what we have just written? We think we're doing one thing, and it turns out we've done something else entirely. To quote David Byrne, "Good god, how did I get here?" And so, I would maintain that the exercise isn't nearly as artificial as it seems. My bet is that Bausch and Nelson found themselves in the same predicament as my students. They had written themselves into a corner, and now they had to get out as convincingly and gracefully as possible.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said that as soon as he has the first paragraph for a piece of fiction, everything else follows. At first blush, Marquez seems to be saying that beginnings are excruciatingly difficult but that once you get the beginning right, everything else is easy. But I don't think that's what he means. The way I understand him is that the first paragraph determines (read: constricts) everything else that follows. I see that in MATRIMONY. You can read the first paragraph of my novel and see in utero everything to come. But that doesn't mean I knew it at the time. I couldn't possibly have. The book took me ten years to write and I threw out more than three thousand pages. There were so many wrong turns along the way. But what I was engaged in--what every writer engages in, and what every writer struggles against--is a winnowing of possibilities. In that sense, fiction is like life. We choose one path over another, and the possibilities of what can happen next get narrower. The fiction writer's struggle, then, is to take these constrictions and turn them into opportunities. That, I think, is what Marquez is saying. At the very least, it's what I'm saying. And it's why I give my students that exercise

Paperback covers

The paperback of Matrimony has a different cover from the hardback. A new cover for the PB is pretty common these days, and Vintage, my paperback publisher, does it for most of their books. Thanks to the web, you can get oodles of feedback on the matter, and one book blog, which did a giveaway of MATRIMONY a couple of weeks ago, asked all entrants to weigh in as to which cover they liked better. Lots of strong opinions. The contest also led to an extended correspondence between one of my readers and me as to whether the women's shoes that appear on the PB cover would in fact have been worn by Mia. The reader went on at great length about what Mia looked like--what clothes she wore and other Mia-related sartorial and hygiene details. She had a clear and detailed (and accurate) physical sense of Mia, but when I asked her how she knew all this, she said, "Why, it's in the book."

Actually, it isn't. I know, because I wrote the book. Yes, Mia is described physically at various points in the novel, but not in the detail that this reader offered me. This, it seems to me, is what Hemingway meant by the tip of the iceberg. If you get your details right, the tip of the iceberg implies the whole iceberg. I think of Carver's "Cathedral" as an example of a story in which the physical details about the blind man are pretty sparing (he's blind, he smokes, he has a beard), but they're nonetheless rendered so specifically and the story is animated by such a distinct voice that, boy, do you have a clear picture of the blind man. It's not true of all of Carver's work (in his lesser stories, all you get is the tip of the iceberg without the whole iceberg implied), but the best of them--and I'd include "Cathedral" in that category--are worth reading over and over again.

Present-Tense Fiction Redux

Of all the posts I wrote last year on my TEV guest blog, the one on present-tense stories garnered the most response. I'm still getting questions about it nearly a year later, evidence that there are a lot of writers and aspiring writers reading TEV. What I wrote, in essence, was that despite the fact that present tense seems to lend a piece of fiction greater immediacy, I've often found (when reading graduate applications, say) that the present-tense stories are among the least immediate-feeling. I offered some possible reasons for this, most notably that writers who don't have any actual narrative action/forward movement in their stories use present tense to give an artificial sense of immediacy--to give the illusion that something is happening when in fact it isn't. In that regard, I talked about the use of the habitual present tense. "She goes to the store" can mean she goes to the store on Tuesday or it can mean she is an habitual store-goer. One thing I was arguing is that a lot of present-tense writers overuse the habitual present tense such that their stories don't end up taking place in real time, and in scene. Another thing that I'm not sure I mentioned but that I've noticed among my students who regularly write in present tense (particularly those who write in first-person present tense) is that, when they do write in scene, they have trouble making the narrative leaps of time necessary in fiction. Because everythiing is happening right here, right now, the writer tends to indulge in a kind of blow-by-blow description. There's not enough of an editorial sensibility, and so we get aboslutely everything the character does, as if she's moving through sludge. Lorrie Moore once said that the hardest thing about writing fiction is getting her characters into their cars, and to my mind this is particularly true when you're writing in present tense.

None of which is to say that one should never write in present tense. I certainly can't make that argument, since the novel I'm writing now, tentatively titled THE WORLD WITHOUT YOU, is written in the present tense. But I've done various things to avoid the traps I've been talking about. My novel is written in third-person, from the alternating points of view of different members of an etended family, so this affords me a measure of narrative distance to compensate for the lack of temporal distance that comes with present tense. Also, the novel takes place over a single weekend. C. Michael Curtis, the fiction editor at the Atlantic (back when the Atlantic actually published fiction), who was as good as they got at encouraging young fiction writers , myself included, said that present tense works better for narratives that take place over a shorter period of time. I agree. There's something artificial about the immediacy present tense evokes if your novel is taking place over fifty years (fifty years' time can't always be present without things seeming contrived).

For me, it wasn't as if I decided that I wanted to write this novel in present tense; it's simply how the voice came to me. But if novels are like relationships (and that analogy seems true to me, even if overused), then one novel is often a rebound relationship from the previous one. MATRIMONY took place over twenty years, and THE WORLD WITHOUT YOU takes place over three days. Each mode of telling poses different (in fact, opposing) challenges. With MATRIMONY, I faced the challenge of distillation. How do you write about twenty years without turning the novel into a boring chronology--this happened, then that happened, then that happened? You need to figure out when to pause and when to make leaps in time. As I struggled with MATRIMONY, I re-read Richard Russo's EMPIRE FALLS and things started to fall into place for me. EMPIRE FALLS is a very different book from MATRIMONY, but it helped me immensely in thinking about time (specifically the skipping of time) and the relationship between the here and now and back story.

The challenge of THE WORLD WITHOUT YOU, of any book that takes place over three days, is the opposite one; it's not distillation but expansion. You have to make the three days significant enough that they can acccommodate the narrative action you aim to dramatize (one of the potential pitfalls of condensed time is that it can seem that too many big/important things happen in too short order, in a way that makes the narrative seem artificial; this is what John Updike was arguing in his largely negative review of Ann Patchett's RUN in the New Yorker.), and you often need to rely on back story to a greater degree than you would in a novel that covers a longer time period. In other words, you're faced with what every novelist is faced with, but even more so: how to make the novel go forward and backward at the same time, how to prevent the flashback from overtaking the here and now and thereby disrupting the forward drive of the narrative.

The Pleasures and Perils of Google Alerts

Thanks to Google Alerts, I get a daily email listing the previous day's blogs in which my name appears. Now, Joshua Henkin is not a particularly common name (though there are three of us on Facebook), but I have always been dimly aware of a doppelganger. An athlete, no less (a wrestler?) who competed in the Macabi Games in Israel. This was always of interest to me, since I, a decent high school basketball player, had aspirations (delusions) that involved my competing in the Macabi Games. For those of you unfamilar with the Macabi Games, they are essentially a Jewish Olympics, though my friends and I at the Jewish day school I attended thought of them more as a Special Olympics, or, at best, as an athletic affirmative action program. None of which dimmed our hopes that we would someday compete in them.

Years later, when I was giving a reading at American University, I learned that the other Joshua Henkin was alive and well and was, of all things, the stepson of Henry Taylor, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet, who taught writing at American. For several years I forgot about JH, and then, thanks to Google Alerts, there he was again, appearing in my inbox every morning: "Joshua Henkin Sandbag Fitness Program." Joshua Henkin is now apparently a fitness trainer in Arizona and he has created and patented something called the Joshua Henkin Sandbag, an object whose specific contours I'm having a little trouble visualizing but that appears to make the owner of said sandbag a stronger and generally more fit person. Whatever the Joshua Henkin Sandbag is, when I turn on my computer I am often greeted with testimonials to the wonders of the Joshua Henkin Sandbag and the wonders more generally of Joshua Henkin himself. Though I did awake one morning to the following headline in my inbox: JOSHUA HENKIN IS FAT. It's pinned above my desk now, and when I find myself sitting too long, at work on my new novel, I get up and go for a run.

Dialogue and Voice

I discussed in a previous post how Ethan Canin alternates summarized dialogue with actual dialogue at the beginning of his short story "The Year of Getting to Know Us." It's also worth noting how infrequently a story or novel starts with an actual line of dialogue. There's good reason for this. To read a line of dialogue without any introduction is like being given a head detached from a body. The principal purpose of dialogue in fiction is to characterize, and to get a line of dialogue before we even know whom it's characterizing is dizzying. It's not that we won't eventually find out, nor is starting a story with a line of dialogue inevitably a mistake. But I do think it's borrowed from the movies (and even in movies, there's generally some introduction, if only a visual one, before we hear a charcter talk). When I brought this up with a student of mine who reflexively started his stories with dialogue, he said he was trying to establish voice. But this seems to me to be a misunderstanding of what voice is in fiction. Voice, that ineffable thing, comes principally from narration, not from dialogue. I'm not saying that characters don't have voices; of course they do. But dialogue isn't voice. Dialogue is unmediated; it's a transcription of what a character says. Voice, on the other hand, isn't spoken, certainly not the way dialogue is spoken.

Take the beginning of Lorrie Moore's "The Jewish Hunter": "You had to get out of them occasionally, those Illinois towns with the funny names: Paris, Oblong, Normal. Once, when the Dow Jones dipped two hundred points, the Paris paper boasted a banner headline: NORMAL MAN MARRIES OBLONG WOMAN. They knew what was important. They did! But you had to get out once in a while, even if it was just across the border to Terre Haute, for a movie." Now, this opening is nothing if not voice-driven, and it's talky, certainly. But it's not dialogue, it's not being spoken, and the passage is effective precisely because it's not being spoken, because it's being filtered through an internal sensibility and, though it is reflective of the protagonist's point of view, it isn't literally coming from her mouth; there's a measure of narrative distance. This isn't to say that Lorrie Moore doesn't write good dialogue. She writes excellent dialogue. But when I think of her voice, of any writer's voice, it's not their dialogue that comes to mind.

Oh, the Things that get Said to Writers!

Because, as those USA Today pollsters note, every American seems to be either a secret or not-so-secret writer, one would expect admiration (and perhaps envy) to get directed at actual live published writers. And there's some of that, I suppose. But admiration slides easily into something else, which is why when I'm someplace where people don't already know I'm a writer, I'm happy for things to remain that way. There are certain things that get said to writers (every writer I know has had this experience) that leave you not sure what to say. I can't begin to count the number of times someone has learned I'm a writer and the first thing they say is, "Wow! I wish I had your discipline." This generally comes from someone who knows nothing about my discipline and who, for all I know, is much more disciplined than I am. It's true that writers need discipline, but it seems to me that what's really being said is, "I could write a really good novel myself if only I weren't such a lazy bum." And maybe they could. But not being a lazy bum is only one of the many traits required of a novelist. The more bald-faced (and just as frequently articulated) version of this comment is, "Oh, I would love to be a writer. If only I could find the time!" More often than not, this is said by an accomplished professional from another field, and I have to stop myself from responding: "Oh, I would love to be a brain surgeon. If only I could find the time!"

Oh, the Things that get Asked of Writers!

A lot of people complain about the business of blurbing, and there's certainly much to complain about. But it's here to stay, and most of us writers have benefited from it, so it's our duty, it seems to me, to give back. And if someone doesn't want to blurb at all, it's their prerogative. But no writer has reason to be offended when asked for a blurb. If a publisher sends you a book and you don't wish to read it, you don't have to.

Something else, though, seems to be at work when the request comes not from a publisher or a writer with a book coming out but from a stranger who meets you at a party, say, and who, upon learning you're a writer, confesses that he has a 500-page manuscript he has been working on and would you mind taking a look at it and letting him know what you think? Years ago, I had a manuscript-consulting business where I charged a per-page rate to read and critique people's fiction. I teach fiction writing and am very committed to it, and I think of myself as quite generous with my time, so I'm confounded by the number of otherwise reasonable-seeming people who think it's OK to ask a stranger to read and critique your novel as a favor to them. Is there any other profession where an equivalent request gets made? Yes, doctors and therapists complain about people sidling over to them at parties and asking their professional advice ("Hey, doc, do you think there might be something wrong with my liver?" "Do you think my sister might be depressed?"), but would anyone ever say to a doctor, "Hey, I have this tracheotomy I need performed. Might you be be able to do me a favor and perform it on me?"

Can Writing be Taught?

Of course writing can be taught. This is not to say that you can teach anyone to be Faulkner. But you can't teach anyone to be Thelonius Monk, and no one questions the value of piano lessons. You can't teach anyone to be Andre Aggasi, yet no one questions (at least from a tennis-playing perspective) the sending of five-year-olds to tennis boot camps in Florida to learn how to hit tennis balls for seventeen hours a day. I wrote about this subject at greater length in an essay in Poets and Writers last November called "In Defense of MFA Programs." In that essay, I made an argument in support of the teaching of writing in general and in support of MFA programs in particular (though not, of course, without qualifications. There are bad writing classes, obviously, and bad writing professors and even good writing professors who don't match up well with a particular student, and not every writer is temperamentally suited to take a writing class. The devil, as always, is in the details.)

What I want to touch on briefly here is the reason for the widespread suspicion of creative writing classes. If the most frequent comment a writer receives when being introduced to somone is, "I'd love to be a writer--if only I could find the time"; if the second most frequent comment is, "Here, can you look at my manuscript"; then the third most frequent comment, uttered when the person learns that you not only write but that you teach writing, is: "Do you think writing can really be taught?"

It's hard to know how to respoond to this question. It's a little like being asked, "When did you stop beating your wife?" Obviously, I think writing can be taught; if I didn't, I'd be engaging day-in and day-out in an act of fraud.

Why are people so suspicious of the teaching of writing when they're not suspicious of the teaching of piano, ceramics, tennis, or ballet? The brief answer, it seems to me, is that, there's nothing in our day-to-day lives that imitates, much less approximates, any of those activities. If someone wants to be a ceramicist, no one thinks it's something you should automatically be able to do. So you go take a class. But writing is another matter. Every literate person writes all the time. We compose letters and email messages and diary entries and grocery lists. And we all know how to tell stories. We sit at the dinner table, the bar, the school cafeteria and do so every day. It seems we should just be able to do it--that is, we should just be able to write a short story or a novel. But when we sit down and try, we find it's not nearly as easy as we thought. So we throw up our hands and declare it a gift. And it is a gift, at least in part. But there are different kinds of gifts, and different writers are gifted in different ways. And one thing some writers are gifted at is revising and sweating and learning how to take criticism and slowly, over time, getting better. Yes, there are gifted writers, just as there are gifted actors and singers and fencers and mimes. But to say that is not to say that there's no craft to be learned, that there's nothing to be taught, that the right teacher matched with the right student can't allow a developing writer to make huge progress. This seems so obvious it shouldn't need saying. But it does need saying, over and over again. So I'm saying it.

American Jewish Fiction and Other Hyphens

Last year I participated on a panel on the state of American Jewish fiction, and I will be participating on two more such panels in the coming months. Although the wording is different, the topic discussed is pretty much the same. Is there a new generation of American Jewish fiction writers? What does it mean to be an American Jewish fiction writer? Has American Jewish fiction writing changed over the years? Does the very category of American Jewish fiction make sense? I am, I would say, a not unreasonable yet curious writer to ask to participate in this discussion, and the fact that I'm both not unreasonable and curious points to what I think makes such panel discussions often less illuminating than ideal.

I am not an unreasonable choice in that I am an American and a Jew, and an American for whom being Jewish is not merely an incidental part of his identity. I was raised in a religiously and culturally complicated but nonetheless modern Orthodox Jewish home, I went to Jewish day school and Jewish summer camp, I spent a year studying Talmud at a yeshiva in Israel, my wife is a professor of Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and as I compose this, my older daughter will be starting her first day of Kindergarten tomorrow at the Hannah Senesh Jewish Community Day School in Brooklyn. Although the rabbis who taught me when I was growing up would likely be disappointed by many of the personal decisions I've made, I remain in my own way an active part of a Jewish community, and being Jewish is such an essential part of who I am that to imagine not being Jewish would be a little like my imagining not being male: I would be an utterly different person.

Then there's my first novel, SWIMMING ACROSS THE HUDSON, which is a book that's very deeply about Jewish identity. Two boys, adopted from different birth mothers, are raised as brothers in a modern Orthodox Jewish home on Manhattan's Upper West Side. They're adults now and are no longer religiously observant when one of the brothers is contacted by his birth mother who informs him that, contrary to what he's been told his whole life, he wasn't born Jewish. By any defintion, SWIMMING ACROSS THE HUDSON would qualify as Jewish fiction if your defintion of Jewish fiction is fiction that engages directly with Jewish subject matter.

But what about Matrimony, which, being my most recent novel and the reason I'm invited to participate on these panels, is what I'm expected to talk about? It's much harder to argue that, by the definition I've just offered, MATRIMONY is Jewish fiction. Yes, Mia, the female protagonist, is Jewish, and yes, there's a brief period, covered in about three pages, when, as a young teen, she becomes Orthodox. But aside from that, she's Jewish, as the old joke goes, on her mother's and father's sides only. The subject of Jewish religion or Jewish culture hardly ever comes up. Mia marries Julian, a WASP, and the question of intermarriage doesn't get broached. It's simply not an issue for them.

It's this last fact that has raised some eyebrows at synagogues where I've read and prompted some people who care about such things to ask whether I really consider myself a Jewish writer. I have to admit, the question leaves me flummoxed. Yes, I consider myself a Jewish writer, in the same way I consider myself a Jewish father, a Jewish husband, a Jewish basketball player, a Jewish home owner, a Jewish music listener, etc. I'm Jewish--it's one of many things I am--and it's hard for me to separate it out from everything else I am, nor would I want to. It's not as if when I write about a Jewish character I put on my Jewish identity cap.

In any case, it's a little unseemly, I think, and not particularly fruitful, to measure Jewish fiction by the number of Yiddish phrases that appear in a novel, or by the number of times someone shows up at a synagogue. There's an intermarriage in SWIMMING ACROSS THE HUDSON and there's an intermarriage in MATRIMONY. In the first book, it's a matter of deep anguish for a number of the characters, while in the second book it doesn't cause a ripple. Is one book more Jewish than the other, and was I more Jewish in the writing of one book than I was in the writing of the other? I certainly don't think so. And if writing Jewish fiction means writing about the Jewish experience, then there are many different kinds of Jewish experience when it comes to intermarriage, just as there are many different kinds of Jewish experience when it comes to any subject. Some Jews won't intermarry; some will intermarry with great regret; some will intermarry without giving it a second thought. But these are all things that Jews do, and thus, arguably, equally Jewish.

What frequently happens on these panels is that there's an (often unacknowledged) sliding between "Jewish writers" and "Jewish writing." If Phlip Roth's next novel were to take place in fifteenth-century Denmark among characters who had never heard of a Jew, it would still probably be looked at through the lens of Jewish fiction because it's Philip Roth. In light of where he grew up and what he's written about so far, Shalom Aulsander will probably inevitably be thought of as a Jewish writer no matter what he writes in the future. But does that make his work automatically Jewish? Is Allegra Goodman, an Orthodox Jew, writing Jewish fiction by dint of that fact, or does it depend on what she writes? If it turns out that all of I.B. Singer's work was ghost-written by a Presbyterian living on a farm in Indiana (as improbable as that may seem), is "Gimpel the Fool" a less Jewish story?

To my mind, the whole category of "American Jewish writer" (or any other hyphenated category) feels limiting. I'm a writer, period. Sometimes I write about one kind of person and other times I write about another kind of person. I write about who and what speaks to me at the moment. Although I know others who disagree, I think there's always the whiff of qualification when someone speaks of Jewish fiction or African American fiction or women's fiction or Latino fiction. You don't see in the course catalogue at colleges and universities courses called "Twentieth Century White Male Fiction."

Part of the issue is that ethnic writing is a niche market with potentially large sales. To take the case of Jewish fiction, there is a big umbrella organization called the Jewish Book Council that coordinates the annual Jewish book fairs held at hundreds of Jewish Community Centers across the country. It's quite a gravy train if you can get a seat on board. Every year for three nights before Book Expo, the JCC book fair representatives sit in a large room while writers of everything from novels to fitness books to cookbooks make two-minute presentations (if you go even a second over, you're gonged off the stage) in which they flaunt their Jewish bona fides. It's known among writers as the meat market, and never was there more apt a name. But a writer does what she can to sell books, and this is an avenue open to Jewish writers (and/or Jewish writing) that few want to pass up. Not long ago, I gave a reading with Andre Aciman, and he was asked whether he was a gay writer. His answer was (more or less), "Sure--if it will make you buy my book."

Mad Men

Like many Americans, I find myself in front of my TV on Sunday nights, watching Mad Men. I like the show--certainly enough to watch it at least semi-regularly--but whenver I start to get sucked in, I'm yanked out of that dream state that John Gardner talks about by the show's unflagging insistence on reminding me when it takes place (the fifties; actually, the show takes place in 1960, but the fifties are the cultural and political moment being portrayed). The degree of self-consciousness is so great--it's as if the show itself were an advertisement for an era--that when we see a scene in a doctor's office with the doctor smoking, we feel as if the scene itself were inserted just to show us a smoking doctor. Just to remind us, that is, in case we forgot, that it's 1960 we're talking about and, boy, were things different then.

Now, there's nothing wrong with self-consciousness, but in most other ways Mad Men isn't that kind of show. This is not Being John Malkovich. It's not Adaptation. It is, rather, by most standards fairly traditional on the level of narrative and character, and so the camera's relentless focus on period details feels intrusive in a show that otherwise aims not to be. The same things happens in the movie The Ice Storm--a good movie, it seems to me, but not a great movie, despite some great peformances (Christina Ricci is wonderful, just as she is in the terrific Buffalo 66). For me, at least, one of the reasons the movie is distracting is the way it fetishizes the 70s details. In that sense, the movie is true to the book, though the book, I would argue, is a great book, not merely good.

Now, in the book, too (perhaps even more so), the 70s details are fetishized, but they're fetishized in a way that's much harder to do with a camera--at least when the movie itself is otherwise fairly narratively conventional. The Ice Storm, the book, is narrated in a distant third-person voice (though at the end of the novel we learn that the whole book has been filtered through the sensibility and voice of the older son), and so the wonderful opening chapter that announces the era in which the book takes place is filtered through a particular character and a particular voice and sensibility. In the book, the era becomes a full-fledged character in its own right--which is what the movie may also be trying to do, but it does it much more clumsily.

None of which is to say that movies and TV shows should ignore period details. But the ways in which a book is self-conscious don't always translate seamlessly onto the screen, which is why it's often the case that the truer a movie is to a book, the more trouble it finds itself in. (The Virgin Suicides is another example of a movie that's very true to the book, but because the book is not a filmic book--it's deeply internal--the movie doesn't succeed nearly as well as the book does.)