Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts by Michelle

Richard Yates – Revolutionary Road

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Yesterday, I settled down with Revolutionary Road and once I got started I just kept on going. What a rich, and complex book. I’m curious whether my experience reading this novel is also affected by my status as an expat. Revolutionary Road does a lot of picking and scraping at American society, at the myth of the American Dream, at that truly American style “selling” of psychological stability and me-centered philosophy. What is it about America that produces this angsty, hyperactive self-consciousness? Don’t misunderstand me, it happens elsewhere and, of course, not all Americans suffer from this special breed of narcissism but despite my need to moderate what might be interpreted as hyperbolic statements, there’s no denying that Yates makes some astute observations about many fundamental paradoxes of American culture.

 

Frank Wheeler is so self-conscious, so worried about his persona – interpreting it to himself, presenting it to others and refining it for both audiences – that he can’t get through a single conversation without play-acting. He imagines the things he will say, practices expressions and gestures when no one is looking, interprets each encounter in terms of its reflection on his own self-definition. Living inside his mind would be frightfully exhausting.

 

This makes it sound like I had no sympathy for him. Which wasn’t the case. If I ever met someone like Frank Wheeler face to face I think I’d scream and run in the other direction, but letting him function as a stand-in for “the American male” with a neurotic need to prove himself was really interesting. The same goes for April, his wife. As a specific individual, she’s nearly unbearable. But as a symbol of repression, of indecision, she’s quite powerful.

 

Revolutionary Road was published in 1961 and I was expecting the text and some of its ideas to be somewhat dated. But they weren’t at all. Frank and April’s constant anxiety about getting trapped into their suburban nothingness, filled with people riding high on complacency and stale conversation, is a theme we still have room to move around in. In many ways, it felt like reading a male-oriented version of Rachel Cusk’s The Lucky Ones or Arlington Park – a population of people trapped inside a painful understanding of their own mediocrity.

 

What I’m curious about is what creates this tension. What is generating the disconnect between what we think we will be and this sudden, horrifying understanding that we have no idea who we really are? I can’t help contrasting the emotional current of Revolutionary Road against my recent read of The Fountainhead – a novel which glorifies the antithesis (or the conquest) of the anxiety Yates so carefully explores. Take these two novels out of the time period in which they were written and it’s evident both “stories” still exist inside American culture. Rand’s vision of the self-made man who knows from day one exactly what his Purpose is and how to get there vs. Yates’s idealistic but insecure weakling.

 

I’m fascinated by the kind of destructive interpersonal interaction Yates is getting at in Revolutionary Road. Maybe that’s because I now live in a society which works very hard to avoid anything emotionally grandiose or self-promoting. But it wasn’t just that difference that kept me reading the novel, it was also how lovingly Yates gave us his dysfunctional characters. Not to mention his amazingly skilled use of an omniscient third person POV – something we don’t see very often anymore. And just the overall mood of the book. Ennui. The ins and outs and horrors of ennui.

 

Both Frank and April embody several contradictions – shallow and sensitive, self-important and insecure, intelligent and paralyzed – which is what, I suspect, keeps the reader attached to them. And their constant attempts to get the better of these contradictions created an explosive form of neurosis. It also left no room for anything beyond their selves and their couple. One of the book’s tragedies is an awfully quiet one – the legacy the Wheeler parents will bequeath their children. Again, lots to ponder when you think about it in terms of generational symbols.

 

Thank you to Zhiv for putting this book on my radar and for mentioning that there is a film version coming out in December. I will be very interested to see how well the director and the cast might render the complicated inner lives of the Wheelers. Something to look forward to!

 

 

Reading Writer – Gordimer's #5

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I’ve finally reached the half-way point in Nadine Gordimer’s fifth novel, A Guest of Honour. As I mentioned before, this novel takes a broader scope than her previous four. It isn’t so much about the individual perspective and experience of apartheid but more about the legacy of that system on an entire culture – both sides, those who had power and those who were never allowed the same responsibility or privilege.

 

The novel isn’t set in South Africa, but in a fictional neighboring state which has just gained its independence. A Guest of Honour asks two preoccupying questions – first, what are the elements of colonialism most difficult for the no-longer-colonized nation to move beyond and second, what role can (or, more importantly, should) the liberal white individual play in the dismantling and subsequent reconstruction of a culture he/she participated in along the way. For a novel written in 1970, Gordimer is exceptionally prescient as well as compassionate and I’m eager to work my way through to the end and experience either the solution she might offer or a deeper investigation of these important questions.

 

But what I really wanted to talk about today was style. In terms of writing technique, I get a lot from Gordimer. She’s a fantastic study and I just wanted to point out some of the things I’ve been noting throughout this book.

 

First, and I’ve mentioned this before when talking about Gordimer, is her remarkable facility with description. Her use of symbolic language is never heavy or extended – just a word or two, but she somehow manages to pick just the right word or image. A few examples:

 

The road to the village would be blocked, the dog ran over the soft fields breathing like a dragon…the kernel of the house was warm with oil-fired heating…

 

The spiders came out from behind the pictures and flattened like starfish against the walls.

 

Every now and then the trumpet blurted like a shout of obese laughter.

 

There were bats at the fruit, the most silent and unobtrusive of creatures, torn-off rags of darkness itself.

 

Second, she has unapologetic transitions. Simply effortless. In the example here, she moves her character from one side of town (his house) to another (his friend Hjalmar’s), to a completely different scene, as well as brings in another character, with a semi-colon and the word “yes”. It’s brilliant:

 

The trousers were a little short. He looked at himself in the damp-spotted mirror on the door of the wardrobe in his room. He had forgotten to buy a dress tie, after all; but Hjalmar would have one. Yes; and it was a beautiful tie, finely made of the best ribbed silk, with a Berlin label still on it. Emmanuelle laughed. “Nobody wears those butterflies anymore. Ras will lend you one of his.”

 

In her other novels, Gordimer already captures the flow of what I would call “party” conversation. Streams of sentences that don’t always connect, batted back and forth across whatever scene she’s got set up. In A Guest of Honour, which is heavily peppered with these kinds of busy scenes, she refines the technique. This novel features state dinners and policy discussions, dinner parties and after-hours political brainstorming. She gets the mood of these either heated or weary dialogues just perfect. I won’t quote them because they can go on for a long time but suffice it to say Gordimer can be useful to look at if you want to work on the musicality, the nonsensical nature, and the flow of written dialogue.

 

Finally, the third person omniscient narrative style she favors lends itself well to this kind of socially/morally investigative novel because she can telescope between her characters’ observations and more general insights. Here is one such example, taken from a scene when the main character Bray meets another white woman at a state dinner:

 

She did not know who he was; the curious fact was that people like him and her would not have met in colonial times, irrevocably separated by his view of the Africans as the owners of their own country and her view of them as a race of servants with good masters. They were brought together now by the blacks themselves, the very source of the contention, his presence the natural result of long friendship, hers the equally natural result of that accommodating will to survive – economic survival, of course; her flesh and blood had never been endangered – that made her accept an African government as she had had to accept the presence of ants in the sugar and the obligation to take malaria prophylactics.

 

This particular example is a bit longer than most, but I still think she carries it off because she’s able to sculpt our understanding of both characters with this kind of confident narrator. It’s such a smooth omniscient.

 

A Guest of Honour is a heavy book, rich with political maneuvering, complicated social philosophy and historical information. It’s a slow read. But at the same time, the sheer delight of turning the page to come across yet another of Gordimer’s stunning images or insightful descriptions significantly lightens the experience. Definitely one of those books I’m eager to keep reading but that I don’t really want to finish.

 

 

Kirsty Gunn – Rain

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Sometimes everything in my little book-reading universe conspires wonderfully and I come across a book, completely by chance, by an author previously unknown to me, with a story and a style perfectly suited to my tastes and expectations. What a good feeling it is to close that back cover, march right over to my book shelves and slip it next to that line of well-worn favorites. I love it when this happens. Not only because I have the memory of a blissful hour spent in the company of some pretty spectacular prose but also because I can now look forward to searching out any other work by this new author.

 

A week or so ago I ran across a wonderful review by Lily of Kirsty Gunn’s debut novel Rain. Her thoughtful review prompted me to search out the novel and thanks to bookmooch I had a copy in my hands by Saturday morning. This morning, quite happy to take a break from what has been a hectic few days, I sat down out in the garden in the sun and read the entire thing.


Rain is slim even by novella standards but its 95 pages contain some breathtaking writing and a weighty story. One of my favorite “genres” of contemporary fiction is when an author takes an event, most usually a tragedy, and then creates a meditation or a portrait of what that tragedy feels like to a particular character. Even better when the narrator is the character and when that individual’s voice flexes, both subtly and heftily, with the responsibility and familiarity of the event.

 

I like the intimacy of this type of writing. The way the story works to expand those minutes and seconds of a life-altering moment. The way the details surrounding a significant experience fuse themselves into the scaffolding of memory or regret.

 

Despite the reader’s knowledge of the book’s tragedy as early as the first paragraph –

 

Up in that part the water smells rivery. We hadn’t even passed the little bay at the end of the first beach but already the air was touched by the promise of our destination. All the trees were drowning. They reached their long skinny branches into the lake, leaning so far that their gnarled roots could barely hold the clay. You knew it was only time before whole bodies would be dislodged, allowed to drift, then sink. The water would seal over them again and that’s how it would end: you would never know there had been trees there at all.

 

– Rain just throbs with looming threat. Each page circles the event, the danger, the imminent loss. Gunn brings us into a scene, gives us exactly enough confirmation/revelation for us to understand what’s at stake and then moves on, hurtling the reader toward what we already know is coming. That push and pull creates a tremendous pressure.

 

Despite its brevity, the novella amasses a rich array of subject matter in its wake. This is a story of brokenness, of wanting, of irresponsibility and lost innocence, of parental instinct, of absolute devotion and irremediable loss.

 

 

world book day

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Today is World Book Day and I just learned that in Lausanne they have a 1932 trolleybus rolling around the city all day with book readings – how fun! I am heading into the library this afternoon so hopefully will come across some of the events they’ve planned all over Switzerland to celebrate.

 

Check out Unesco’s site to see if your country/city has planned anything to celebrate.

 

Like this:

 

In the city of Romans, in France, La Boucherie Chevaline (a cultural center) has organized a 24-hour non-stop reading session this weekend of Les Misérables including light food, drinks and surprises. I mapquested it and was delighted to find I could get there in about three hours as its just south of Grenoble but the Swiss man and I are running in a race on Saturday so no game. What a bummer! Sounds like a lot of fun.

 

But I’m promising myself to celebrate today by finishing up my translating work early and heading into town for a visit to the library, a quick stop at my favorite secondhand book shop and some quality reading time this evening after we’ve finished our training run. I reserved five books online the other night and can’t wait to pick them up:

 

  • The Secret River – Kate Grenville
  • Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates
  • Excusez les fautes du copiste – Grégoire Polet
  • A ton image – Louise Lambrichs
  • Flaubert’s Parrot – Julian Barnes

 

Otherwise, I’m almost finished with Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. Last night while I was reading it occurred to me that despite the stylistic similarities between The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway, one thing Cunningham isn’t really able to mimic is the heady breathlessness of Woolf’s book. And I’m glad. Where Mrs. Dalloway charges forward with this incredible velocity, The Hours is a slower take on the same thematic. This seems fitting for an homage, a kind of respectful self-consciousness so we don’t ever forget who’s the master and who’s doing the admiring.

 

As silly as this next statement may sound, I kind of miss reading The Iliad. But I don’t want to jump right into The Odyssey without a small break so luckily I’ve got Herodotus to tackle this month. From Stefanie’s posts (like this one) I think I will thoroughly enjoy my encounter with the father of history and hopefully he’ll fill the Homer void I’m experiencing.

 

Finally, I’m on the lookout for some truly amazing contemporary fiction by a writer I’ve never read. I want to be wowed the way I was wowed with Robinson’s Gilead, Powers’s The Echo Maker, McCarthy’s The Road, Gordimer’s The House Gun or Amis’s House of Meetings. I realize I’ve just cited five vastly different books. Still, anyone have any suggestions? What’s the best contemporary novel you’ve read recently and what was it that struck you?

 

Mary Shelley – Frankenstein

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The responsibilities of scientific discovery are a heavy burden. Just because we can do something, does that mean we should?

 

I think most readers are already familiar with the basic story of Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein – Dr. Frankenstein gives life to a being he created, abandons that creation and then sometime later learns the being has committed a series of crimes. When Frankenstein and his creation meet up again we hear about the creature’s attempt at self-actualization and his subsequent rejection by society. He asks Dr. Frankenstein to create another being, a female, so he won’t be alone. Frankenstein ultimately refuses, thus setting in motion a deadly struggle between creator and created.

 

Dr. Frankenstein is a wonderful example of a scientist blinded by ambition and hampered by an incomplete grasp of what his research might occasion. He drives himself forward in the creation of this new being on the sole premise that “he can”, never once asking whether “he should.” This discrepancy alone fuels most of the book’s commentary on the risks of unchecked scientific discovery.

 

I found it fascinating that Dr. Frankenstein’s immediate reaction upon seeing life surge forth from the being he fashioned was disgust. Awe, I could understand, and fear, too, at the sheer magnitude of his accomplishment, but not disgust. This seems so counter-intuitive to human nature. We tend to be blinded to our own creations and forgive them their inadequacies. That he wasn’t more curious to understand what he’d actually done was such a surprise. He doesn’t even try to communicate with the creature, he simply abandons it. This act was so singularly irresponsible (from a humane standpoint but also from a scientific perspective) I lost all sympathy for Dr. Frankenstein at that point. I’m curious whether Shelley’s contemporary readers would have had the same reaction or would they have also instinctively hated the being in the way the doctor did.

 

The most powerful part of the novel for me was the story of the being, more precisely, what he went through after Frankenstein deserted him. Shelley asks some interesting questions about biological vs. social determinism. We’re led to believe he was “born” good and that his treatment at the hands of society brought him to commit horrible acts. This is a bit complicated by the fact that Frankenstein assembled him from parts of corpses so there is maybe an element of the occult to be considered; he wasn’t a blank slate so to speak although Shelley does a good job of presenting his intellectual development as such.

 

Also, this part of the story reminded me a lot of Wilde’s Dorian Gray in the sense that Shelley plays with the idea that society expects evil deeds from ugliness and goodness from beauty. It could be argued that the most evil (or at least the first evil) act committed in the novel is when Dr. Frankenstein abandons a helpless creature to his own fate. And yet Dr. Frankenstein is lauded for his goodness and sublime character for the entire book.

 

Shelley does a lot with Romantic ideals in the story – all that intense emotion and horror, the desolate landscapes and awe-inspiring nature. Man pitted against both society and himself. I’d love to do a close reading of the novel to try and determine which character Shelley pegged for her Romantic hero – Dr. Frankenstein or his creation. Or maybe they represent two sides of the same coin.

 

Knowing that Shelley wrote this novel when she was eighteen makes me want to look into her work further and see if she considered the same issues again later from a more mature perspective. I don’t mean to say I felt the novel was immature in any way, I just think that would be really interesting. I mentioned before that my husband and I read this book in tandem and it has provided some really good dinnertime discussion. I enjoyed how much the questions it raises are still relevant to modern issues. The writing style can be a bit over-the-top and each of the three narrators all pretty much use the same voice and vocabulary but its definitely a book I’m thrilled to have finally read.

Reading Writer – Animal Dreams

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Writing negative criticism about books is something I dislike. Instead, I tend to avoid writing about the books I don’t wholeheartedly admire. This isn’t because I think I’m not entitled to my opinion. People have vastly different reactions to fiction and writing styles and everyone has their own personal aesthetic preferences so sometimes this is all it boils down to. But I still tend to omit a lot of my negative criticism unless I can find very specific reasons why I didn’t like something. I love picking fiction apart, discovering why I reacted positively to something, why something else put me off, where the tension comes from, how the dialogue works and on and on and on. In that vein, I’ve spent the last few days thinking about why I didn’t love my most recent re-read of Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams.

 

Animal Dreams (1990) was Kingsolver’s second novel and there is a lot to admire, in particular the sections in third person narration about Homer. The writing in these shorter sections is really powerful and the emotional structure intricate – Homer’s shifts in lucidity give the narrator the opportunity for both honesty and denial and those two moods generate a lot of tension in relation to the main story. He also muddles the past and the present in such a way that scenes spill into one another; that fluid movement provides the basis for a large chunk of the story’s revelation.

 

The main story is a first person narration by Codi, Homer’s daughter, who has recently returned to her childhood hometown, for several reasons – her father is suffering from Alzheimer’s, her sister has recently gone south to work in war-torn Nicaragua and Codi is newly separated from her longtime lover. She is unmoored. She also harbors an immense distrust for the city she feels somewhat forced to return to.

 

There are moments in Codi’s story that get it just right, where her voice and the images she chooses to illuminate her thoughts or feelings strike all the right notes:

 

Hallie had never left me before. It was always the other way around, since I’m three years older and have had to do things first. She would just be catching up when I’d go again, swimming farther out into life because I still hadn’t found a rock to stand on.

 

or

 

Carlo was a rolling stone: an emergency room doctor, which gave him a kind of freedom almost unknown to the profession. You can always find work if you’re willing to take up with the human body as soon as possible after one of life’s traumas has left off with it.

 

But there are other moments when I wished she’d let the reader do more of their own thinking. There was very often a sentence too much or a line of dialogue that could have been left unsaid. I’m being super nitpicky but when you’re writing I think it’s important to pay attention to this sort of thing. Below is one of the passages I’m talking about:

 

We hadn’t been together since the Holiday Inn lounge, two years ago, but from Doc Homer you didn’t expect hugs and kisses. (He was legendary in this regard.) Hallie and I used to play a game we called “orphans” when we were with him in a crowd. “Who in this room is our true father or mother? Which is the one grownup here that loves us?” We’d watch for a sign – a solicitous glance, a compliment, someone who might even kneel down and straighten Hallie’s hair ribbon, which we’d tugged out of alignment as bait. That person would never be Doc Homer. (Proving to us, of course, that he wasn’t the one grownup there that loved us. )

 

I put parantheses around the sentences I think we could remove. They end up taking power away from what is ultimately a very compelling paragraph. This happens again and again in Animal Dreams. It’s something I see often in first person narration. Like the author wants to make their point over and over again, just in case the reader missed it. This certainly doesn’t destroy a book, but it can really slow it down.

 

Toward the end of the novel this excess writing happens a lot and this is where I think I started getting really frustrated. If you’ve decided to give your novel a happy ending I still think it’s important to resist the urge to tie everything up in a neat little package. The reunion scene between Codi and Loyd (her love interest in the novel) is just screaming daytime drama. But it didn’t have to be that way.

 

Shortly the train began to move again, very slowly, the speed of a living creature. You could still run and catch it. Loyd and Roger kept walking toward me without seeing me. (Standing there watching him, knowing what he didn’t, I had so much power and none at all.) I was on the outside, in a different dimension. I’d lived there always.

Then he stopped dead, just for a second. I’ll remember that. (The train moved and Roger moved but Loyd stood still.

He caught up to me in an instant, with a twinkle in his eye and his bag slung over his shoulder like a ready traveler.

“Thanks for the ride,” I said.

He put one arm around my neck and gave me the kind of kiss no fool would walk away from twice. )

 

 

 

This is the end of a chapter and I think where I’ve suggested ending the scene infers everything about the rest, without giving us the cheesy line of dialogue and that awful twinkle in Loyd’s eye. Her lines about the train and the hint about running and catching it are just wonderful, they show us Codi’s ambivalence about her decision to stay without hitting us over the head with the idea. Those lines are subtle. Those other last lines are not.

 

I’m sure some people might disagree with me, since, as I’ve said, we are talking about aesthetic preferences. I think Kingsolver is an accomplished writer and I’m eager to read her most recent novels like Prodigal Summer and The Poisonwood Bible (which I read maybe eight years ago but without such an intense look at the writing) to see if this is characteristic of her style in general or was it something she did in the beginning. I can’t help thinking of it as a beginning writer thing – something we all do when we’re still learning how to trust our instincts and the story itself. Any thoughts?

 

Reading Writer – loaded conversations

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This week I’ve been entertaining a house guest and haven’t had much time for reading, writing or blogging. But I chose a book somewhat at random from my shelf the other night and tucked into Donald Barthelme’s 1986 novel Paradise. Turns out it was a great book to read during an otherwise busy week: disjointed, pithy, somewhat vulgar, intriguing and moderately experimental. I consider it experimental because it’s written almost completely in dialogue.

I didn’t realize that Barthelme actually wrote novels, but he did. Four in fact. All of which are purported to be extended versions of his fragmentary short story style. I am only a little familiar with Barthelme’s short stories but those I do know tend to focus on one scene and build it up with heaps and heaps of very specific detail instead of constructing a more traditional story arc. Also, I think I would consider him tragic-comic. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say he uses a kind of busy absurdity to highlight emptiness.

True to form, Paradise reads like a long short story. Structurally, the novel is broken up into 60 or 70 3-page chapters. The chapters alternate between existential Q&A sessions between Simon, the main character, and his doctor, and conversations (with a minimum of narrative direction) between Simon and his three female roommates. There are a few one or two-page chapters consisting of narrative summation.

Where this book interested me was in its economy. How it conveyed everything the reader needed to know about Simon through his words alone. But also, how that same dialogue depicted the novel’s other characters. I struggle with creating dialogue that isn’t wholly focused on my main character – I spend a lot of time thinking about what I want my character to reveal about his/herself through dialogue but then I end up so focused I create one-sided dialogue where my lesser characters speak in prompts for the most important character. Paradise is a great example of how effective messy dialogue can be. Not only does Simon reveal himself through his Q&A with the doctor, but the doctor begins to take on a life of his own as well:

Q: Did they ever go to Fizz?
A: I believe they went there quite often.
Q: What went on there?
A: It was a meat rack, a heterosexual meat rack. From what they’ve told me.
Q: So they picked up guys there…
A: They did, I suppose. They may have been just playing, just exercising…
Q: How did that make you feel?
A: I didn’t like it.
Q: Sometimes I think I should be a shrink.
A: Why aren’t you?
Q: It’s not medicine
A: I imagine them thinking, talking to each other…
Q: What did they say to each other?
A: I don’t know, of course. I imagine they were careful, thoughtful. Direct.
Q: My wife was the world’s champion at leaving things lying around. I spent much of my marriage picking up after her…

This last line goes on and on before the doctor picks up their original conversation with a new question. The doctor participates in their exchange, giving his own interpretation of the events Simon is telling him about. It creates a nice layering effect and also forces Simon to re-explain or even defend himself from time to time.

The voices of the three women living with Simon are less differentiated. They act and speak as a unit, mostly as a unit in direct confrontation with Simon. Dore, Veronica and Anne are young, curious, sexy, fragile, reckless, eager, angry…all the extremes. They function as a group of young women still trying to figure out what they want out of life against Simon who is on hold, terrorized really, from what he thinks/realizes/accepts his life has become. He’s resigned, cynical, depressed and numb. The tension between those two perspectives gets explored as they talk circles around each other.

“I don’t want to think we’re fucked. I really don’t want to think that.”
“We could go out and marry some more people.”
“The last thing I have in mind.”
“Yeah it does sound a little retrograde.”
Anne is in a retrospective mood.
“I won the Colorado Miss Breck,” she says. “I didn’t win the National, though.”
“Can’t win them all,” Simon says.
“It was very exciting. This stuff is very exciting when you’re a kid, people making a fuss over you. It becomes less exciting. I wanted to be a doctor.”
“Everybody wants to be a doctor. Veronica’s old man the child-beater wanted to be a doctor.”
“I know,” she says. “Helping people. Your existence is justified.”
Simon looks at his khakis; they’re a bit on the filthy side. Buy another pair. “You could still do that,” he says. “Medical school.”
“Do you want to get married again?”
“Hadn’t thought about it.”
“Probably somebody’d marry you.”
“Like who?”
“Some dumb woman. A commodity with which the world is amply supplied. Me, for example.”
“That would be pretty dumb. You need a young soldier.”
“You telling me what I need?”
“Trying to.”
“I feel affectionate toward you, Simon.”
“I feel the same thing. Not a good idea.”
“Who says?”
“Aetna Life and Casualty.”

Dialogue is superficial, in the sense that it lies directly on the surface of a book. It’s the most direct contact the reader has with any one character – it’s even more direct than the first person POV because it doesn’t pass through any filters before delivery. It was interesting then, to read a book that functioned almost entirely at this level. On the one hand I missed the more elaborate narrative interpretation I’ve grown accustomed to in most contemporary novels but at the same time I enjoyed experiencing the characters on their own terms, letting the weight of their words sink in without any distraction.

Rosy Thornton – Hearts and Minds

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Finally have some time today to write about my recent reading. I’ve shuttled my friend to the airport and although I had a lovely time taking her around the region, I’m also happy to get back into my quieter routine. Which I will kick off by finally writing up my thoughts on Rosy Thornton’s novel Hearts and Minds. 

Books about life at university often have a certain energy to them. A lot of life packed into the pages, and from all directions – from the students with their natural enthusiasm for life and penchant for melodrama, from the professors with either their honest desire to pass something along or a personal agenda (or perhaps both), and finally, from the simple concentration of so many people living and interacting within the academic bubble. Obviously this sort of microcosm is just ripe for conflict. And conflict is what Rosy Thornton gives us in this, her second novel.  

The tension in the novel is multi-faceted – gender wars, political infighting, family dynamics – and centers on two main characters, James Rycarte and Martha Pearce and their respective roles at St. Radegund’s College for women in Cambridge. Rycarte is the new Master, the school’s first male head of house and a non-academic (two unalterable sins only a few people are willing to forgive him) while Pearce is St. Radegund’s Senior Tutor, a woman struggling beneath the weight of her school and family responsibilities. 

I suspect most reader sympathies will lie most easily with Martha Pearce. She’s an intelligent and caring professor, a loving mom and devoted wife but she’s also overworked and faced with a raft of difficult personal and academic decisions. Her daughter has fallen into depression, her husband is just about the most unsupportive lay about lout possible and she’s worried about her current job and what her professional options might be for the future.  

Rycarte is appealing in a different way. He’s a bit more fragile, less inwardly confident than Pearce and quite unsure of the best way to proceed, both in his new job at St. Ragegund’s but also at this stage in his life – as a divorced father settling into a very different lifestyle than the one he’d engaged in for many years as a journalist and foreign correspondent. His awareness of the precariousness of his new situation makes him an endearing character. 

Hearts and Minds examines the inner workings of this type of small university with its suitably lofty ideals and worrying financial concerns and scratches away at the sore spot where these two preoccupations come at odds. Despite this serious focus, this isn’t a heavy book, as Thornton’s writing is brisk and clear and she strides confidently through the novel’s various intersecting themes. There is a lightness about the novel, brought about, I think, from the reader’s nearly immediate approval of both Rycarte and Pearce and how they conduct themselves through their academic and personal ups and downs.  

Family, influence, academics, political machinations, integrity, new love and weathered love…the book takes up each of these ideas and turns them over a few times in its vigorous movement through the hustle of St. Radegund’s calendar year.

Reading Writer – what am I reading for?

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One of the most useful things I took away from my MFA program was a way to read with an eye on the writing. Maybe some writers do this instinctively, maybe I was doing it a little bit on my own before I became aware of it, but now I work very hard to do this consciously and with each book that I read.

I don’t just mean the larger decisions like POV or tense or structure. I try to keep track of the smaller stuff as well, like how a particular author handles transitions between scenes or time periods or how they might break into a scene with narrative summation, how long they let that summation last and how they get back to the action. I try looking for certain stylistic repetitions and why they might be useful or what kind of decisions an author has made about revelation vs. suggestion. I’ve found that cataloguing these kind of textual details gives me something to go and look at when I get stuck in a scene or an idea and don’t quite know how to work through it.

Sometime last year I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and although this book was intensely gripping I couldn’t keep my writer brain from taking some serious notes about how he sustained such intensity for over 200 pages. First off, structurally, he does not ever give the reader a break. There are no natural pauses in the text, no line breaks and no real time jumps. Each scene moves directly and smoothly into the next, something which makes it difficult for many readers to put the book down. Second, he only allows his main character’s focus to waver from the present action (i.e. to reflect on the past) on three or four very short occasions. So those moments really stand out, like little psychic breakdowns, and are subsequently very powerful. Also, he doesn’t go into a lot of detail about any actual violence. His restraint is pretty amazing and I think it pays off. Leaving things to the reader’s imagination in many scenes is much worse. There’s plenty of examples and I should drag out my notes and do a proper post on this book sometime, because in terms of crafting this type of fiction, it’s a goldmine.

So if I ever want to write a novel with a similar intensity I would go back and read The Road about a million times, looking for all these details. I would probably also take out Don Delillo’s The Body Artist and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Another writer that comes to mind is Virginia Woolf. In To The Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway she writes with a similar intensity, keeping the reader thoroughly submerged beneath the story, although her overall affect is much less “dark”.

I enjoy going through as much fiction as possible this way because it helps me understand what kind of aesthetic I create with my own choices when I’m writing. I like what McCarthy did to establish an intense reading experience so I want to see if some of those techniques apply to my own writing. They won’t always but I hope that examining his choices is one way to develop as a writer.

Reading Writer – Never Let Me Go cont.

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Narrator, narrator, narrator. What a powerful creature you are.

On Tuesday evening, I started reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and then I finished it up on Wednesday afternoon. It’s a rare treat to focus on a book in what feels like essentially one sitting. This kind of intensive reading exaggerates the feeling I get of having completely exited my own reality and gone visiting another. And the smooth, unwavering quality of Never Let Me Go’s narrator Karen kept me firmly within the confines of the story.

I don’t want to go into too many details about the actual story of Never Let Me Go because I think it would spoil the fun of reading the book for those who don’t know anything about it. Suffice it to say the novel presents an alternate version of contemporary reality where certain scientific decisions require a new kind of social segregation. I’ve heard the novel labeled science fiction and I suppose that might be true, but I think it’s really beside the point. The point for me is the writing, combined with the novel’s careful exploration of Ishiguro’s idea.

I want to focus on the narrator. I was dubious of Ishiguro’s handling of Karen at first. I wanted her to have a different kind of voice – less explanatory, less hesitant, less flat. I felt like I wasn’t in good hands and that the way she told the story needed to be cleaned up or edited or smoothed somehow. I was worried it might be a case of a very successful writer not being held to certain standards anymore, which is something I do think happens as editors become less certain whether they can criticize or offer changes. And I held tight to that criticism for nearly a third of the book until it slowly dawned on me that Ishiguro was doing this on purpose and for a very good reason.

From the very beginning, Karen’s overall tone is one of jaded resignation. And it was driving me insane. I couldn’t detect the level of emotion I thought she should have. Nor could I understand why she felt compelled to do so much over-explaining. Until the details of Ishiguro’s frightening world started coming into clearer focus and then it all made sense. Especially when we remember that Karen begins her story at the end, when she’s eight months from leaving her job and taking on her “real” role in society, when what she has to tell us has already happened. It’s only when we get to the end, that it makes sense why she has the tone of voice she has. She’s worse than resigned. That’s the whole point.

But the point of letting this kind of narrator tell her story (something I think most writing classes or instructors would tell you to avoid like the plague because in essence she is lifeless) is where I think Ishiguro made a clever decision. Her tone of voice is specifically calculated for who she is. This sounds silly and maybe what I’m saying won’t make sense unless you’ve read the book. But she isn’t just telling her story – she IS the story. And her voice, her resignation, her understanding of herself at the end, becomes the greatest piece of evidence of the novel’s tragedy.

And Ishiguro gives us everything we really need to know about her right on page one. Pretty damn clever.