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March 15, 2005

L.A. EVENT/GUEST COLUMN: SETH GREENLAND

Seth Greenland's debut novel The Bones (Bloomsbury) has been getting a fair amount of attention (most recently for the sale of the film rights to David Mamet), and Seth comes to Dutton's in Beverly Hills tomorrow at 7 p.m. to read and sign his book.  As it happens, he's also sent us this look at the lot of the first novelist ... 


A FIRST NOVEL
By Seth Greenland

Publishing a novel has never been a more absurd proposition. Literacy is declining, Americans are more television-obsessed than ever, and the Internet has caused millions of our fellow citizens to exhibit behavior more typically associated with caffeine-addled lab rats than potential buyers of fiction.

Bones Why, then, did my friend write one? He has already fallen victim to that form of internet heroin that is author rankings. Between his constant forays through the treacherous Amazonian jungle and equally rigorous Google searches (and, no, I don’t mean for internet porn – he’s looking up his own name, a far more disturbing pathology), it’s made him a basket case, unable to concentrate on anything other than the sales of his non-genre novel, a genre that ordinarily sells like Christmas ornaments in Riyadh.

And what does he learn on the internet? Only terrible things.

I don’t want to embarrass him by using his name to illustrate the following anecdote, so I will use mine. Yesterday, he noticed the web page of a bookstore at which he will be reading in Seattle referred to him as Seth Greenlander. He emailed the web-meister and, while making very clear he appreciated being mentioned at all, asked him to correct the misspelling. Which he promptly did: to “Greendland”. The third try, mercifully, was a charm. My friend was left wondering if, when Goodbye, Columbus was published, this kind of indignity was ever visited upon Philip Rothman - his joke, not mine).

Along with having descended into the hopeless modern authorial cliché of compulsively checking his own Amazon ranking (careening around like a herd of bi-polar schizophrenics without their meds, if you’re interested), he is, needless to say, also checking the rankings of friends who are authors. Right now, he has bolted to the head of the pack for the simple reason that no one he knows (other than yours truly) has a new book out. This, thankfully, allows for him to remain friends with us - at least from his perspective. How we feel about him is an entirely different kettle of fish. Meanwhile, he has made it clear it will be impossible for him to ever develop a friendship with Dan Brown. My friend’s eternal resentment is the steep price that author will have to pay for the success of The Da Vinci Code.   

Since every one of his bad qualities is being magnified by this experience, why does he persist? Because on some level, he claims, it’s like having a child, only without the discomfort, the weight gain, and (in the case of a mother) the part where your genitalia is pulled above your head so the accomplishment can wriggle out. Here is what he told me: a great fear is that while you understand each facet of your spawn’s brilliance, the world will fail to recognize it. Or the world will recognize it yet find it deficient in some way. The trade reviews have been much like a circumcision, he says; each a potentially castrating experience you hope to get through without losing consciousness. Its arrival in the bookshops is the first day of school. In the event it does not sell out its initial print run, his literary offspring will bear the unfortunate label “underachiever”. Critical approbation is high SAT scores, the Nobel Prize the equivalent of his daughter the future pediatric neuro-surgeon traveling to the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan and personally capturing Osama bin Laden. And as for a movie sale, that’s his future CEO son’s first hybrid Ferrari, a toy he condemns, but secretly envies.

His novel has recently arrived in stores where it will proudly take its place amongst the roughly five hundred new works of fiction published this month, many by people with more significant literary reputations. Locating his book at Barnes and Noble or Borders will be like searching for a familiar face during the crowd scenes in Gandhi.

How, then, to draw attention to it? Unlike President Clinton, who, whenever he has a project to flog, can pretend to not want to discuss Monica Lewinsky, my friend has no such card to play. Therefore, I’m told, he plans to only modestly claim that his novel will bestow magical powers upon anyone who reads it and, failing that, cure cancer. If sales are flat, however, he intends to web-cast his self-immolation on the steps of the nearest public library.

There will be a link to Amazon.

I say good luck, John Grisham. I would never engage in that kind of behavior.

Posted at 12:20 AM |

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

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    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

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    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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