The Elegant Variation

MAN BOOKER SHORTLIST ANNOUNCED

The Man Booker shortlist is surprisinging, indeed, and disappointing for its startling omission of Netherland, which we considered a shoe-in.

Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger                              
Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture                        
Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies                                  
Linda Grant, The Clothes on Their Backs             
Philip Hensher, The Northern Clemency                     
Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

NOTA BENE: SABBATH'S THEATER

"And he couldn't do it.  He could not fucking die.  How could he leave?  How could he go?  Everything he hated was here."

- Philip Roth, Sabbath's Theater

HOME

Back in L.A., jetlagged within an inch of my life but poking through emails and news and getting some posts ready to go.  Also want to recap the travels and let you know where things stand with The Summer of Roth.  Will try to return things to normal around here before leaving for Amsterdam and Paris this Friday.  Lots of literary news to go, however - apparently the world does not stop moving in my absence.  Watch this space for imminent updates.

TEV GIVEAWAY: MATRIMONY

Greetings from the Christchurch Literary Festival ...

Whew.  Guest blogger Joshua Henkin has turned in yet another ... ambitious ... turn at the helm at TEV, leaving you more than enough to keep you occupied until we're stateside again this Monday.  But once you've run out of Henkin posts to read, and you're hungering for more, you can and should check out his novel Matrimony.  Being a full service kind of shop around here, we're happy to offer up three signed copies to three lucky TEV winners.

You all know the rules, of course:  Drop us an email that includes your full mailing address, subject line "WHY SO QUIET, JOSHUA?"  We'll take all comers until 10 p.m. PST on Friday before the Random Number Generator decides who lives and who dies, but winners will not be announced until Tuesday, when regular literary blogging resumes in these parts.  Thanks to Mr. Henkin for his energetic stewardship and thanks to you all for your patience. 

UPDATE: Congratulations to Alicia Christensen, James Harmon and Brett Anderson!

24th and Last Post of This Here Blogging Day

Help! I'm all blogged out! Thanks for reading, and for your comments, which I'll do my best to respond to in as timely a fashion as possible. And thanks, especially, to Mark, for handing me the baton and letting me run with it. And run with it. Come back tomorrow when Mark, from his perch in New Zealand, will be auctioning off five signed copies of Matrimony.

More Google Alerts

Blogging makes for some strange bedfellows. To wit: Last week, Scott Esposito of the excellent Conversational Reading turned over the helm to me at his blog, and since MATRIMONY is in part about writers and the writing life, and since everyone likes a good list, I did a list (with commentary) of ten novels I admire that are about writers/writing/the writing life. Scott Spencer's MEN IN BLACK was on the list, and in the course of discussing that novel, I mentioned that Spencer may be best known for writing an apparently good book (I never read it) that got turned into such a bad movie it ended up reflecting badly on the book itself. That's Endless Love, which featured a pubescent Brooke Shields, right around the time she also appeared in the soft-porn movie Blue Lagoon. I mentioned in passing that Endless Love marks Tom Cruise's movie debut, and the next day when my Google Alerts list arrived, there I was on the Tom Cruise fan club website: Tom Cruise News--Joshua Henkin's Ten Terrific Novels About Writers, Writing, and the Writing Life. I bet Scott never realized he's got Tom Cruise groupies reading his blog. Here's the list, care of Tom. In case you're wondering, I'm the guy in the background next to the scantily clad Katie Holmes.

Another Close Reading

Everyone likes lists, not to mention lists of favorites, which is why when you're doing publicity for your book you have to answer questions such as: What's your favorite first sentence in literature? What's your favorite last sentence? It won't come soon enough if I never again have to answer a question with the word "favorite" in it, but since this is unlikely to happen, and since I've been doing a post or two today re close readings (see Tim O'Brien), I thought I would give a close reading of the sentence I picked as my favorite first sentence. It's from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

I could go on for paragraphs about this sentence, but I'll keep it relatively short. First of all, notice the syntax, the way a single sentence captures a lifetime. "Many years later... he was to remember." In the course of one sentence we are at the end of a person's life and at the beginning of it. And the sentence doesn't just call attention to the span of time; it links past and present by having the subject of the sentence recall his childhood as he's about to be killed. The use of a kind of sliding tense ("many years later," "was to remember," "that distant afternoon") allows Marquez to meld time, to do what only a novelist can do (a movie couldn't possibly evoke this kind of simultaneity of time because one can do this only internally, and movies truck in the external, in the surface of things, and only indirectly--though at times very effectively--can they get at the internal.)

I don't know Spanish, but there's something about the sound of that name, Colonel Aureliano Buendia (the actual name itself, as well as the fact that Marquez gives us the full name along with the title), that suggests, perhaps (we will need to read on to see), a certain measure of accomplishment, or at least dignity. The implication is that this person has come a long way from the boy who discovered ice with his father.

But for me, the ending of the sentence is the killer. There's something poignant, even heartbreaking, about it: the man, about to be put to death, remembering a childhood moment with his father. And what a moment! Taken by his father to discover ice. So many questions (and questions are what a writer wants a reader to have at the beginning of a novel. The reader should be intrigued, should want to read on). Where did they go to discover ice? What does it mean to discover ice? Has the child not encountered ice before? What is the significance of this memory? Why is the colonel remembering this now? To my mind, what's heartbreaking, what evokes that earlier innocence in contrast to what the colonel is about to undergo now, is the very word "ice." Both the fact of it and the sound of it. In terms of the sound: how short and abrupt it is, such a final-feeling way to end a sentence, and disarming for its straightforwardness. What's most disarming here is the way Marquez is able to make something old and familiar (ice) look like something new--what a boy discovers for the first time. That's one of the main things fiction does. It defamiliarizes the familiar. And there's almost no one as good at it as Marquez--in this sentence and in general.

What Gets Taught in a Creative Writing Class?

Well, it depends on the particular teacher, of course. Not to mention the particular students. But my writing workshops are essentially reading classes, though we're reading in a particular way. We read as writers, with a mind to determining how the writer has achieved the effects she's achieved, so that we can then imitate what we admire and eschew what we don't admire. For me, a writing class (whether we're discussing a student story or published work) is a prolonged act of hyper-self-conscious reading. We learn how to recognize consciously what we previously experienced only subconsciously. We become self-conscious about language, about punctuation, about everything, to the point sometimes of near-paralysis--all in the name of learning how to do it ourselves as writers, at becoming so adept at it that we are able to take that subconscious matter made conscious and place it back into the subconscious again. That way, we proceed intuitively, but only once we've rewired our intuitions.

Take Tim O'Brien, who strikes me as among the best of contemporary writers at varying his sentence cadences and at using the sound of language and the architecture of his sentences to evoke a particular mood. I talked about this some last year in my first guest-post go around with respect to Jayne Anne Phillips's story "Fast Lanes." Take a look now at this passage from early in O'Brien's story "The Things They Carried." Jimmy Cross, leading his battalion in Vietnam, thinks of Martha, a college junior back in New Jersey, who writes Jimmy letters but who doesn't reciprocate his love for her:

"A dark theater, he remembered, and the movie was Bonnie and Clyde, and Martha wore a tweed skirt, and during the final scene, when he touched her knee, she turned and looked at him in a sad, sober way that made him pull his hand back, but he would always remember the feel of the tweed skirt and the knee beneath it, and the sound of gunfire that killed Bonnie and Clyde, how embarrassing it was, how slow and oppressive."

Try reading that sentence aloud. I believe all writers should read their work aloud; it enables them to hear things. It's a long sentence, certainly, but more important, it's breathless: all those "ands," those short, choppy clauses followed by a much longer clause, before the clip gets more restrictive again. It's this breathlessness that's essential, because it mimics and evokes Jimmy Cross's own breathlessness as he places his hand on Martha's knee--mimics, too, what's happening on the screen, the gunfire, the staccato rhythm of that. Reading this sentence, I'm reminded of what a writing professor of mine once said: "Given the choice between the word with the right meaning and the word with the right sound, you should choose the word with the right sound."

"Three Stages of Writing"

Exercises aside, I like to teach Bausch's "What Feels Like the World" not simply because it's a terrific story, but because it reminds my students that the even the smallest, quietest subject matter can make for wonderful fiction. The story, as I mentioned, is about whether this ten-year-old girl is going to get over the exercise horse at the PTA meeting, but of course on a deeper level it's about much more than that. It's about the relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter and, more broadly, about the ways we're unable to protect the people we love. Reading this story reminds me of something a writing professor of mine said years ago, which is that there are three stages of writing--although the way I would put it is that there are three stages of writerly confidence. In the first stage, all your characters are dying, they're exploding, you believe that if something cataclysmic isn't taking place nothing worthwhile is going on in your story. The second stage is quirky characters. You give your character a tic, a lisp, a twitch, something that will, you hope, make your characters interesting. In the third stage, you're just writing. It's not easy just to write, of course (it often feels well-nigh impossible), but it's what Bausch is doing in "What Feels Like the World," a story that was anthologized and celebrated when it first came out, probably close to thirty years ago now. If you haven't read it, you should, along with just about all of Bausch's stories, which were collected a few years ago in a volume that weighs in at around 800 pages. "What Feels Like the World" first appeared in Spirits and Other Stories.

Too Much Meat in the Can and You Get Spam

Apropos of image overload, I think of a story Michael Cunningham tells--how when he was in graduate school, at Iowa, one of his teachers took him aside and told him to go through his story and divide the sentences into two categories. The sentences he really loved, the ones that dazzled, he should circle and mark with an "A," and the sentences that were merely good he should circle and mark with a "B." Then he should go through the story and cross out all the "A" sentences. Cunninghmam tells this story as a way of warning his students of the perils of showing off. It's similar to what Annie Dillard and others talk about when they say you should kill your babies. Often it's your favorite sentence, your favorite scene, the very thing that you're building your story around, what was the inspiration for the story in the first place, that is infecting the work and demands to be cut.