Bubba
October 6, 2010
A quick note to say that a new story of mine, “What Bubba Saw,” is now posted at Prick of the Spindle, an online magazine that’s unusual in more than its name. Click on the magazine name above or on the image to go to the intro. page. Click HERE if you can’t wait to find out who Bubba is. (Hint: This story is from my collection in progress tentatively titled death, sex and dogs.)
Redoing First Grade
October 1, 2010
In my novel The Shame of What We Are, which follows a wimpy kid named Art Dennison from age 5 to 17, the 6-year-old version of Art grumbles about his first-grade teacher:
His new teacher’s rule was stupid, Art thought. Making him print when he had already begun using cursive last year in kindergarten. This was going backwards.
Though I refuse to specify how much of the novel is autobiographical, this part certainly is. Like Art, I learned cursive at a very young age, and I can proudly state that I maintained my expertise until recently.
In fact, despite year
s at a keyboard, I thought I was still adept at cursive until I started signing complimentary copies of Art’s story. Confronted with a pen instead of little black keys, I couldn’t manage to put all the letters in each word, couldn’t keep words from jamming into each other, couldn’t keep them in a facsimile of a straight line, and couldn’t compose a short paragraph without at least three scratch-outs.
This is a painful indignity, and it adds to my other problem, which is finding dedicatory words that don’t sound effusive or insincere to my oversensitive ears. I’m comfortable in being jokey or ironic but not in telling people how much they mean to me.
If any first-grade teacher is willing to coach an adult in cursive, and in writing nice, polite messages, please drop me a note—handwritten, please, to prove you can still do it.
Regards, Sim sAn SAmm
Admiring the Young Adults
September 21, 2010
Later note: I’m told I should include a spoiler alert because this post reveals the general nature of the ending of Beth Kephart’s new book. So be forewarned—although I think, from the book’s tone, any reader will expect the book to end as it does.
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Normally I don’t read young adult fiction. I tried the first Harry Potter and gave up after a page and a half because it seemed to me a clever compilation of tiresome old conventions. (Okay, so I’ve just offended 17 kajillion loyal Potterites. See if I care!)
My avoidance of young adult titles has nothing to do with my level of sophistication. After years of scanning school reading lists brought home by my kids, I admit that at heart I’ve always been a ninth grader. The tenth-grade lists get too intellectual for my taste. Besides, anyone who reads my own fiction can vouch for my immaturity. It’s just that, with so much to read—so much that I guiltily know I’m not reading—there’s no time for anything that doesn’t at least purport to offer grown-up insights.
But I was impressed when I read the new young adult novel Dangerous Neighbors and discovered that it dealt with a most adult theme, suicide. Not teen-angst suicide thoughts (which are serious enough), but a young woman protagonist who is profoundly depressed, carrying an adult load of grief about the death of her twin sister, for which she blames herself. From the outset of the novel, Katherine is determined to make amends by jumping into the blue sky from a point high above the earth.
Since the author, Beth Kephart, is a friend and marvelous writer who has published numerous memoirs and other works for big folks, the book’s vividness and delightful style were just what I expected; she brings the Centennial era startlingly to life. I’ve known, too, that recent books for teens offer edgy content. The surprise, for me, was the level of maturity with which Beth felt she could treat the theme without losing her audience. The book does have a happy ending, of course. Lovely young Katherine does not jump off the tower. Still, I’m thinking, if teens are reading about suicide, why are those of us in our supposed prime reading novels about tattooed, antisocial, obsessive, sexually casual computer hackers (see my previous post).
Note to self, and to other writers of so-called adult fiction: Grow up, wouldya?
Second note to self: The kid next door may know more than how to fix this computer. Say hello to him next time instead of grunting.
Vacation Technoreads
September 2, 2010
All current fiction must be historical, I decided some time ago. It’s a price we pay for technology.
What I mean is this: The details of our lives, the sights and sounds that give fiction its life, change so fast that anything written today will seem dated in a year or two. If that doesn’t sound obvious, take an example. A couple of years ago, a writer might have described a driver stopping to ask directions. Now readers will wonder why the GPS isn’t working, or worse, they’ll assume the driver is technologically inept.
Reasoning this way, I figure a novelist might as well date the tale immediately. If you’re writing today, place the story clearly in 2010, acknowledging that readers in 2013 will find it quaint.
So, picking up a quick vacation read, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson—one of the few times I’ve managed to get to a bestseller within five years of its pub date—I was nonplussed to come across passages like the one below, when the heroine, punk hacker Lisbeth Salander, decides on a new computer:
Unsurprisingly she set her sights on the best available alternative: the new Apple PowerBook G4/1.0 GHz in an aluminium case with a PowerPC 7451 processor with an AltiVec Velocity Engine, 960 MB RAM and a 60 GB hard drive. It had BlueTooth and built-in CD and DVD burners.
Originally published in 2005, translation copyright 2008, and already so outdated that geeks might laugh. This confirms my argument, I suppose, though the excessive detail still makes the author’s point about Salander’s obsession, and perhaps will continue to do so 20 years from now. Maybe that’s another possible tack, then—wade so deep into the nitty-gritty of the characters’ environment that the reader can’t help but accept it as a world of its own, whether dated or not.
My “literary” opinion of Larsson’s mega-phenomenon? Its dense, driving plot, spiced with multifarious secrets, conspiracies, violence and sex, helped pass time on the airplane. Yet I didn’t care how the mystery turned out, and the characters developed so little that I feel no compulsion to read the other volumes in the trilogy. Until I’m stuck on another plane. (I do admit to a vague curiosity about what the dragon means.)
By the way, Larsson’s underlying assumption—that a girl with tattoos and facial pierces looks out of place in the workaday world—itself seems, by today’s standards, almost quaint. Maybe the Swedes are stuck on an old-fashioned twentieth-century airbus; if so, at least they aren’t being charged for luggage.
The Debate About “Literary” Fiction
August 18, 2010
Though an unabashed lover of the “L” word, I haven’t paid much attention to the recent debate about whether “literary” fiction is still relevant or even still alive. Such discussions are generally too abstract for my taste; I’d rather be reading or writing the stuff than arguing about it. A post by Pens with Cojones, however, has some challenging remarks and links to other comments on the subject; it’s worth a look for the “L” folks who haven’t yet hidden under their beds and stopped taking phone calls.
Pondering Philip Hensher
August 9, 2010
Sheffield by Lewis Skinner (detail), Wikimedia Commons
Been reading The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher, recommended a couple of years ago by a friend who follows the Man Booker nominees. Feeling so strangely about it that I checked Goodreads to see what others are saying online. Not only are opinions mixed. but a number of readers, like me, seem to be struggling with their own reactions.
The long saga of two very ordinary, and on the surface boring, English families, The Northern Clemency opens in the 1970s and advances with great ponderousness into later decades. The writing is vivid, though too decorative for my taste, and the characters turn out to be mildly interesting—at long last, after the reader has become even more fed up than they are with their tedious lives. Obviously, since I’ve kept reading for nearly 600 pages now (of more than 700), it’s not the tedium that makes me ambivalent. Nor is it that the characters are mostly unlikeable as human beings.
One of my problems, I think, is the sheer moment-to-moment unpleasantness of the daily life and the environment, as Hensher describes them and as the characters experience them. Here’s a passage from early in the book when the Sellers family, transplanted from London, first encounters Sheffield:
“‘This will have been cleared by bombs,’ Bernie [the father] said, ‘these gardens, in the war. See where the old buildings stop and the new ones start? They’ll have been bombed during the war because of the steel, see?’ Francis [the son] looked around and it was right: a ripped-out space had been created, a kind of shapeless acreage, and into it, dropped in as exactly as false teeth, were new and extravagant buildings, the egg-box, a building with brass globes protruding from its top floor, others whose smoked mirrors for windows made no allowances towards the church-like blackened solemnity of the old town hall, a figure poised heroically above the entrance like Eros.”
The false teeth and the egg-box, jumbled in with a strange allusion to Eros (as a hero? on a public building??), give the scene a faintly revolting tinge. Now, I’d be the last to defend postwar architecture wherever it happened to be plopped. Granted, too, these are Londoners who don’t yet (and may never) appreciate the North. Yet it feels like the author’s own disgust must be creeping in. The first several hundred pages of the novel have so many passages of this variety that the narrative seems to be overhung with a fetid gas.
Thankfully, in later chapters, as certain of the annoying, pedestrian characters fumble into an everyday brand of heroism (with little help from Eros), the author’s lip seems less firmly curled. Here he describes a hidden wooded area from the point of view of Daniel Glover, a young man who seemed irredeemable at the start of the novel:
“He loved the summer here; loved the hover of the dragonflies over the soupy surface of the river’s pools in summer; loved those clouds of gnats like a hot fog about your head, clustering under the stickiest trees; loved the underwater hover, like a mirroring of the dragonfly hover above, of the sticklebacks, and the occasional glimpse of a bigger fish, or the thought of a bigger fish as the surface of the water gulped like a hiccup, and it must have been a carp, perhaps, taking an insect.”
There’s little conventional beauty here, and still much to repel, but we understand why Daniel loves the area, and we see that it has attributes that might be loved. Much like the ungainly, sticky, soupy characters themselves, perhaps.
Did Hensher consciously manipulate his prose to lead us on a long journey from ickiness through resignation into appreciation? Or did his style simply mellow as his characters and their actions grew less loathsome?
Enough speculation; got to finish the book.
(Later update: Reached the end. Still ambivalent. A bit of sensationalism late in the book felt arbitrary, unnecessary to the plot, making me realize that after hundreds of pages I had little sense of what the characters would do next. This uncertainty is probably true to life, but annoying in a novel. Shouldn’t a literary work have more logic than the messy world out there?)
Of Cowboys and Comedies
July 31, 2010
As the advance copies of my novel The Shame of What We Are ship to reviewers, I’m appreciating even more the wonderful illustrations done for the book by Tom Jackson. Here’s one of them, a 1950s TV set with weird images of characters from The Danny Thomas Show, or Make Room for Daddy as it was originally known. In the chapter this picture accompanies, the nerdly young hero, Art Dennison, has horrific associations with that program. On the whole, though, he loves the TV shows of the era, and he’s as mesmerized as that inert hand on the armrest implies.
Me, too—I had a real passion for TV in the old days, nothing I can summon up now, and I’m wondering why that’s the case. Is the difference just a child-adult thing, the magic worn off because I’m older? Then why is old-time TV a cult fascination for so many other people, both older and younger than I am?
Video itself was brand-new then, with a freshness we can’t duplicate today. Too, the shows were feel-good concoctions that tapped into a cultural reservoir of notions about right and wrong, good guys versus bad guys. Even though the real world offered the Red Scare, civil rights struggles, and a nuclear arms race, when you trundled off to bed you could be confident that all was right with the world. Comedians like Danny Thomas made it so, along with Superman, Joe Friday on Dragnet, and all the wonderful cowboys who pranced across the screen.
Now our action shows are ambivalent, our comedies uneasy or cringe-worthy. Our reservoir of agreed truths has sprung a BP-sized leak.
Of course, one of the premises of my novel is that the seeds of our bitter, depressed times were there in the supposedly naive postwar era, not just in the political machinations and social injustices but deeper in the American psyche. We killed off our own innocence, pardner. Plugged him dead. I guess that big white hat was just too much to take.
Props to New Jersey
July 12, 2010
Today my editor at New Door Books informed me that the first advance order for my new novel, The Shame of What We Are, has been received—from a person in New Jersey.
The buyer’s address is appropriate because, after a short Prologue, the book begins in Camden in 1951, where the nerdy five-year-old protagonist, Art Dennison, sets out on his tricycle to discover the world. Already trying to escape his family, he’s going to spend his life pedaling from one disaster to another, though he doesn’t know that yet.
My own memories of New Jersey are somewhat ambivalent. For instance:
- As a young editor working in Manhattan, I took the bus home to our apartment in Jersey. One time, absorbed in reverie, or perhaps in revenge fantasies about my boss, I missed my stop and didn’t get out until the next town over. I had no idea where I was: some other town tucked between cloverleaf intersections.
- My son was born while we lived in Jersey. Leaving wife and son in the hospital, I drove home to get some sleep, and next morning found the car and the roads so iced in I couldn’t get anywhere–an immediate comeuppance for someone determined not to be as “absent” as his own father had been. In retrospect, the ensuing phone conversation must have been funny: the young husband claiming he’d tried his mightiest to be with his wife and child, but the roads were just impassable; the young wife sounding patient but perhaps wondering if this was a sign of things to come; the baby blissfully indifferent.
- Young liberal arts majors, we knew nothing about home maintenance and repair. Thus, when the ceiling of our apartment dripped a bit after a rain, we thought little of it. The next day, half the ceiling fell on us. I think this was after the baby came home. He probably realized right away that his parents’ understanding of the world left much to be desired.
Since settling in Philadelphia, I’ve developed a great respect for the state on the other side of the Delaware River. It is, at the very least, a buffer between us and the Mets. And now, I discover, the state likes my book. Thank you, New Jersey!!
(For those who don’t get the soup-can image: Camden has long been the home of Campbell’s, and in the memory of some old-time residents, large swaths of the city used to smell faintly of tomato soup.)
The News from Gridleyville 