tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10895972138031409072024-03-13T14:01:10.500-04:00The Chaw ShopDelicious criticism of literature and film.The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.comBlogger98125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1089597213803140907.post-27598919808478245732013-01-22T12:06:00.003-05:002013-01-22T12:07:25.296-05:00Important news for all you Chawheads out thereHi everyone!<br />
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In the unlikely event that anyone is still visiting this blog (which I am well aware has not been updated any time in the recent past), I thought I'd let you know what I've been up to, since it clearly hasn't been this.<br />
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My first novel is coming out in March of this year from <a href="http://chizinepub.com/index.php">ChiZine Publications</a>, and I now have an author website where you can check out an excerpt, stories, and learn more all about me -- even minor details like my face and name! I hope you enjoy: <a href="http://www.chandlerklangsmith.com/">http://www.chandlerklangsmith.com/</a><br />
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Happy reading :-)The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1089597213803140907.post-38375177884317164822011-09-16T06:15:00.002-04:002011-09-16T06:26:21.036-04:00What's the Big Idea? - pt. 10<link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CChandler%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link><style>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><u>Will</u></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Asking, “What is my novel about?” is a little like asking, “What makes my life worth living?” The possibility that the answer might be, “Nothing much,” is so devastating that it often seems easier to avoid the question. But contrarywise, the possibility that the answer might be something really, really important, something that you’ve known all along but never quite articulated, something that will clarify the meaning of past choices and make future choices easier, means that asking it is essential.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">The other day, I mentioned to a friend from college that our old playwriting teacher made a few cameo appearances in this essay. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">“I’ve told you my story about him, right?” my friend asked. “One day I was in the drama office when he walked in. This girl was sitting at the table writing in a notebook. He took a look around the place, and then said, to no one in particular, ‘He’s writing his will.’ Then he walked out.” </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">“He’s writing his will.” Pronoun confusion aside, what a weird, dark thing to assume. And yet, when any of us write, what else are we doing but that, really? We’re imposing our will, our purposes and intentions, on language. We’re leaving behind a document that, ideally, is going to survive us after death and bequeath something of value to others. Why undertake such a thing at all if we’re going to do it fearfully, half-assedly, without conviction, without knowing what it’s meant to be? We don't have infinite chances to communicate something of value. We have to make our writing <i>matter</i>.</span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">I’m still not completely sure what my novel is about (or, for that matter, what really makes my life worth living). But I do believe that it’s worthwhile to keep asking the question, persistently, seriously, on every day and on every page. It’s at least worth trying to answer, because if I don’t, who will? I know more about my own work than anyone else – and on top of that, I care more, too. It’s up to me to get it right.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">back to: <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-intro-pt-1.html">what's a query for, anyway?</a> AND<a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-2.html"> the art of the pitch??</a> AND <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-3.html">literary rebellions & literary excuse-making</a> AND<a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-4.html"> thinking about answers </a>AND <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-5.html">making connections</a> AND <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-6.html">victims vs. passive characters</a> AND <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-7.html">"finding your voice" </a>AND <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-8.html">reading down in the trenches of the workshop</a> AND <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-9.html">book reports</a></span></span></div>The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1089597213803140907.post-31839681703004948182011-09-15T11:42:00.003-04:002012-07-30T02:27:22.950-04:00What's the Big Idea? - pt. 9<link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CChandler%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link><style>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><u>Book Reports</u></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">If you’re submitting your manuscript for publication and don’t want to answer the question, “What is my book about?” I have good news for you: someone else will. And even better, that person will most likely be a disgruntled, underpaid editorial assistant, or an intern doing the job out of the goodness of her own heart (and oh yeah, inexperience and career desperation), or – as in the case of a nationally distributed literary journal where I once spent some time – the high school aged child of a well-known writer, who doesn’t care to think up explanations for what he doesn’t like about your work, because “it’s just obvious.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><o:p> <span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Just hope it's not his judgment you're depending on.</span></span></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">My point is, some of the people reading your work will be idiots, idiots with power they do not deserve, respect, or fully understand. There is nothing you can do about this. Others will merely be tired, impatient, and/or chronically depressed. These are the folks in whom to place your hopes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I hope I’m not an idiot. But I am tired, impatient, and/or chronically depressed. And although I try to approach every manuscript (published or un-) I read with an open mind, I can tell you right now, reading bad or even just mediocre fiction makes me angry. It makes me angry because, as <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9eQ8_T1ytU">William Shatner once told me via my ear buds</a>, “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you’re gonna die.” When I read bad fiction, I am aware of the seconds passing, the slow internal decay of my guts, the dulling of my once sharp mind as I read sentences like, “Throwing womanly curves left and right, he realized she was a lady few could resist.” When I am reading bad fiction for fun, I can assuage my anger at these moments by hurling the book to the floor and going off in search of immediate sources of pleasure, like a walk around the block or an entire keg of Troegenator, thereby restoring my faith that the world does yet have things of value to offer. But if I have to read bad fiction for work, my only means of restoring equilibrium is to write a reader’s report.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">A reader’s report is exactly what it sounds like: a report, usually written but sometimes oral, summarizing and evaluating a manuscript that’s under submission at a literary agency or publishing house. Some editors and agents take a look at everything under consideration themselves – and kudos to them – but the vast majority rely on these reports to determine if it’s even worth cracking open the document the author sent. The reader’s report represents an argument, pro or con, for doing so. And the tenor of that argument will be informed by how angry the reader in question has become, how much of his life he feels you’ve wasted.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">When I’m in this position, reading beautiful prose without finding formal coherence beneath it is the equivalent of listening to really rockin’ hold music: sure, that sounds great, but you’re still wasting my time. Although I’ll be significantly less angry if a book at least tries to do things at the sentence level to keep me interested, my reader’s report will still primarily address not the novel’s texture and intricacies but its bones. Is there a story here? Do things that happen have consequences? Do parts of it drag, and if so, could these draggy parts be excised? <i>What, at bottom, is the novel about? </i>Because the fact is, no matter how much I like a novel’s premise or style, and no matter how much time I’m willing to devote to helping the author edit, I cannot install an underlying structure that isn’t there.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The finality of this judgment – the idea that, at the end of all the years of hard work, writing, researching, rewriting, and doubting, a total stranger can read your novel and say, “Sorry” – is terrifying. It’s so scary, in fact, that writers go to incredible lengths to avoid thinking about it. And one of the ways they avoid thinking about it is by refusing to ask themselves the questions that, on some level, they must realize these strangers will ask right off the bat – questions like, “What’s the big idea?” </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"> next up... <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-10.html">write what you will</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">OR... back to: <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-intro-pt-1.html">what's a query for, anyway?</a> AND<a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-2.html"> the art of the pitch??</a> AND <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-3.html">literary rebellions & literary excuse-making</a> AND<a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-4.html"> thinking about answers </a>AND <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-5.html">making connections</a> AND <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-6.html">victims vs. passive characters</a> AND <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-7.html">"finding your voice" </a>AND <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-8.html">reading down in the trenches of the workshop</a></span></div>The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1089597213803140907.post-6977437778697858762011-09-14T08:18:00.003-04:002012-07-30T02:20:59.523-04:00What's the Big Idea? - pt. 8<link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CChandler%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link><style>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: large;"><u>In the Trenches</u></span></span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">In a haunting scene midway through <i>The Silver Chair</i>, the fourth book published in the Chronicles of Narnia series, three adventurers search the ruins of a giants’ city for a fabled stone carving that is supposed to instruct them on what to do next. C.S. Lewis writes, “In order to understand what followed, you must keep on remembering how little they could see.” In the face of blowing snow, one of the human children, Jill, falls into a deep trench, or “sunken lane,” with vertical stone walls rising up on either side. She begins exploring, but discovers that after a couple of sharply angled turns it comes to a dead end, and she climbs back out. There are several other similar crevasses or grooves on “The Hill of the Strange Trenches,” as Lewis refers to it, but they all appear to lead nowhere. It’s only later that the adventurers look back at the landscape they’ve just traveled and realize that the trenches are in fact the stone carving they sought – they’re actually massive letters engraved into the city’s foundation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><o:p> <span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Yeah, okay, I know.</span></span></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The Narnia books may be creepy propagandistic screeds, but images like "The Hill of the Strange Trenches" are the reason that I can never fully exorcise them from my defiant, sinful mind. And, in addition to being fantastically imaginative and unforgettable, this particular image has the added bonus of doubling, for me, as a great visual metaphor for the contrast between reading a work-in-progress piecemeal and reading a completed manuscript or published book. When I read pages or even chapters from an unfinished novel, I am down in the trenches, noticing the sharp angles, wondering if the path is leading anywhere. When I read a finished book, I am looking at the whole hill, and the message is either spelled out there, or it isn’t.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Let me break this down. In a traditional creative writing class, a novel of 300 pages takes 10 weeks to workshop with submissions of 30 pages at a time. That’s if the writer gets to submit every week, which in my experience is rare. It’s more likely that writers will submit, say, every other week, which means we’re looking at 20 weeks – five months. Five months of readers’ patient, thoughtful attention to detail. Five months of limitless opportunities to forget what was set up on page 2.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">It’s obvious to me that this is an artificially slow pace of reading, imposed not by the necessities of the work but by the necessities of the classroom. When reading for pleasure, it does not take five months to get through a short novel. (It takes me maybe four days; I’d estimate that even more methodical readers don’t need much longer than a couple weeks.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">But the problem isn’t just that the pace is artificial. Reading a novel on this schedule also mimics and reinforces the writer’s own myopic experience of the work. A comma can loom in bizarre significance, while the dramatic events of two chapters ago can fade like the memory of a dream. Foreshadowing becomes meaningless when you don’t reach its object within that week’s span of pages. This leads to a strange state of affairs, in which, amid an array of contradictory recommendations to the author, many of which seem to miss the point, the one constant is this: “Keep exploring.” Encouragement isn’t a bad thing, despite what Flannery O’Connor might say about it. Many writers, myself included, need encouragement while penning a first draft. But the encouragement given by instructors and peers in a writing workshop should never be confused with serious, comprehensive criticism. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The pace at which literary agents, editors, and paid book reviewers read is an artificial pace, too: a pace imposed by the necessities of business. This pace is to read the entire work as quickly as possible – in the span of a day or, at most, a weekend. This is not a weekend spent devoted to patient, thoughtful attention to detail. This is a weekend spent building a case: for or against.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">...next up: <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-9.html">book reports</a></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">OR... back to: <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-intro-pt-1.html">what's a query for, anyway?</a> AND<a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-2.html"> the art of the pitch??</a> AND <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-3.html">literary rebellions & literary excuse-making</a> AND<a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-4.html"> thinking about answers </a>AND <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-5.html">making connections</a> AND <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-6.html">victims vs. passive characters</a> AND <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-7.html">"finding your voice"</a></span></span></div>The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1089597213803140907.post-27683673538830658732011-09-13T09:43:00.002-04:002011-09-16T11:58:39.135-04:00What's the Big Idea? - pt. 7<link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CChandler%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link><style>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-size: large;">Voice</span></u> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">I’m about to circle back around to the questions I started this essay with, about queries, pitches, and the strange difference between how writers see their work and how that same work is viewed by readers, particularly the specialized readers working in publishing. But first, I feel like I need to make one more digression, this time about that thing of which all fiction is made: language.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">I find it tougher to generalize about language than the other elements of dynamic storytelling I’ve written about so far. But a terrific essay by J. T. Bushnell in the current issue of Poets & Writers (titled, somewhat misleadingly, “The Unreliable Narrator”), got me thinking about one aspect of it: that nebulous and perplexing thing we call “voice.” </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gJhybrmqRnU/Tm9d5046daI/AAAAAAAAAHs/CclkF3nPT8Q/s1600/ventriloquist.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gJhybrmqRnU/Tm9d5046daI/AAAAAAAAAHs/CclkF3nPT8Q/s320/ventriloquist.jpg" width="320" /></a></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p> <span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">One thing's for sure: you don't want to sound wooden. (Thank you, folks, I'll be here all week.)</span></span></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">In the piece, Bushnell first wrangles with pinning down a definition: “What is voice, exactly, and where does it come from? Most craft books and teachers say the same thing as the agents: It’s how the writing sounds, what words are chosen, how sentences are arranged.” But for Bushnell, this doesn’t get to the bottom of the matter. In a sharp bit of prose, he adeptly imitates the word choice and sentence arrangements of Holden Caulfield to prove that, in fact, these verbal tics alone do not a voice make:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: small;">“I think you’ll agree… that it can’t be Holden Caulfield if the narrator is explaining his fondness for school fund-raising: ‘Boy, I loved working with old Dempsey. What he’d do, he’d dress you in some lousy tuxedo and send you to the phoniest bastards at the concert, right up to their Cadillacs, and have you shoot the old bull as they came inside. When they took their seats you sort of asked for some money. It made me happy as hell to do it. It really did.’”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">The issue, Bushnell points out, is that, although this paragraph bears a superficial resemblance to Holden Caulfield’s voice, it’s <i>about</i> something entirely different – and that matters. In<i> The Catcher in the Rye</i>, “Caulfield is obviously lonely and depressed… but he maintains his cool, casual attitude, and the disparity is what makes his voice ring.” In the imitation, Caulfield is a self-satisfied asshat. Though bringing up Caulfield’s “loneliness,” “confusion,” and “longing” may seem to digress from the question of voice, delving instead into “content issues, such as characterization, point of view, even theme,” it actually speaks to the heart of the matter, since these underlying forces are what in fact give his words their urgency and power. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">To frame Bushnell’s idea in the larger context of this essay, voice – like most everything else in a novel – needs to reflect the central goal/obstacle relationships that drive the story. It needs to<i> matter</i>, to <i>connect</i>, in order to succeed in holding the reader’s attention.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Moreover, once deep-rooted connections to the central goal/obstacle relationships are in place, voice becomes easier to master. It’s no longer something that you as the author have to generate in a panic, out of thin air. Since the character (or close third-person narrator) has <i>reasons</i> for seeing the world a certain way, keeping the voice consistent is a fairly straightforward task, a question of examining those reasons, of asking, “Would the character say, think, or feel this? Why or why not?” As Bushnell puts it: “Understanding my characters’ secrets, illusions, and pretenses lets me see clearly how they’ll act, what they’ll say, how the action of the story challenges them. And once I have this clarity of vision, the words and sentence structures come naturally, without thought.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
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</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">...next up: modes of reading:<a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-8.html"> the workshop vs. the slush pile</a></span></div><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">OR... back to: <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-intro-pt-1.html">what's a query for, anyway?</a> AND<a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-2.html"> the art of the pitch??</a> AND <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-3.html">literary rebellions & literary excuse-making</a> AND<a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-4.html"> thinking about answers </a>AND <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-5.html">making connections</a> AND <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-6.html">victims vs. passive characters</a></span></span></div>The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1089597213803140907.post-9077540826642270942011-09-12T10:11:00.002-04:002011-09-13T09:45:33.745-04:00What's the Big Idea? - pt. 6<link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CChandler%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link><style>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: large;"><u>Victims</u></span> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Passive characters don’t get much love in the creative writing classroom. Yet passive characters number among some of the strangest and most memorable in classic stories: just think of Hamlet (“To be or not to be”), Bartleby (“I prefer not to”), and Fanny Price (“Don’t fucking touch me”). So what gives?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">The problem is that passive characters have been conflated with victims. Victims are characters whose problems have absolutely nothing to do with who they are. A victim is someone who is mowing his lawn when a giant radioactive pterodactyl from outer space takes a dump on his head. There is no way he could have prepared for that contingency. There is no way he could have prevented it. And there’s no reason that it happened to him rather than to his next door neighbor.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">It’s fine to open a story with the character as victim. A lot of revenge narratives start out this way, for example, with a person getting cheated, raped, or seeing a loved one murdered, often for no real reason other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But this is actually only the preamble to the real story, which begins when the victimized individual responds to the event by taking some kind of action. The trouble with victims comes when they stay victims – when, to misquote Chumbawumba, they get knocked down but don’t get up again. Watching someone lie motionless under a pile of glowing pterodactyl excrement is only entertaining for the first couple of minutes. Then it gets dull fast. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Passive characters, on the other hand, are characters whose inability or unwillingness to act brings about dramatic consequences. Hamlet’s tortured indecision about whether or not to avenge his father doesn’t bring the story to a halt; to the contrary, it has disastrous repercussions for almost every character in the play, which could have been avoided if he just accused Claudius and they duked it out. Bartleby’s refusal to do his work, and later, even to eat, torments his boss and ends up taking Bartleby’s life, permanently removing him from a bleak world of brick walls and dead letters. Fanny Price’s abstinence from the drama ( both theatrical and romantic) surrounding her and her rejection of a marriage proposal in fact craftily position her to get everything she thinks she wants.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Just like action, passivity needs to <i>matter</i>. It needs to present an obstacle to achieving or a means of attaining a <i>goal</i>. It needs to connect with what the story is <i>about</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">...next up: <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-7.html">voice</a> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">OR... back to: <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-intro-pt-1.html">what's a query for, anyway?</a> AND<a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-2.html"> the art of the pitch??</a> AND <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-3.html">literary rebellions & literary excuse-making</a> AND<a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-4.html"> thinking about answers </a>AND <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-5.html">making connections</a></span></div>The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1089597213803140907.post-90802410104643833032011-09-10T07:57:00.003-04:002012-07-30T01:59:55.741-04:00What's the Big Idea? - pt. 5<link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CChandler%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link><style>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-size: large;">Connections</span></u> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Looking back over the previous sections of this essay, and then at the ruinous wasteland of the novel I’m currently attempting to write, I feel I should clarify something. I don’t think it’s necessary, or for many writers, even possible to answer the question, “What is my novel about?” fully from the get-go. It’s also likely that any definitive answer to that question will, in the course of writing the book, change beyond recognition. What I do think is necessary, though, is engaging with the question from the beginning and then constantly thereafter. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">A good way of approaching this is to look for connections.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">When I’m writing, I often find myself stressed out at the prospect of having to come up with new ideas. Character motivations can be particularly difficult. I’ll have a character do something that feels necessary for the story, but I won’t know <i>why</i> he does it, or how he feels about what he’s doing. At those moments, I often convince myself it’s necessary to invent an elaborate explanation: I’ll give the character a convoluted interior monologue explaining his philosophy or politics or a heretofore unmentioned earlier backstory that somehow justifies his actions in the present day. These passages are not fun to write, because they involve creating out of formal necessity, not out of inspiration, and they usually feature (in my own work and the work of others) the highest density of clichés and the lowest level of clarity in the prose. For these reasons, they’re also not much fun to read. But more importantly, they fail at what they’re meant to do, which is to make the reader believe the character would act this way.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Allow me to provide an example from fiction’s younger and more glamorous sibling, the screenplay. A moment like this occurs in the movie Juno, when the title character has a change of heart at the abortion clinic. Juno, who we’ve so far been lead to believe is a spunky, independent, irritating, and fairly intelligent teenager living in the contemporary United States, has knowingly scheduled an appointment for a procedure that anyone with a television and eyes knows is highly controversial. Abortion rhetoric on both sides of the issue is in fact so numbingly overfamiliar that it seems doubtful anyone could be unacquainted with it, even the Amish, much less the kind of smart-aleck who rattles off pop culture references at such a clip it’s like she’s composing a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snZcn3Qt1xI">Barenaked Ladies song</a> in ordinary conversation. Yet screenwriter Diablo Cody appears to have gotten her as far as the clinic and gotten stuck. Juno needs to stay pregnant for the story to proceed, but <i>why</i>? To answer this, Cody went through the process I describe above and invented an elaborate explanation: the poorly articulated and entirely unoriginal arguments offered by a protester outside suddenly, inexplicably convince Juno, as if she’s never heard them before, and she flees.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">What could have Cody done differently? I would argue that, instead of inventing something, she could have looked at what was already present in the rest of the story and tried to find connections. To me, the answer is obvious: Juno loves the guy who impregnated her – though she hasn’t yet admitted it – has a high opinion of herself, and believes their combined genetics will produce a great kid, one that could bring joy to the lives of others, including adoptive parents. (It’s right there in the screenplay: she even looks at an ultrasound of the fetus later in the film and enthuses over its resemblance to the father.) If, for example, Juno’s annoying friend said something like, “It’s too bad, though – you and the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbnnoVoxuJI">worst actor</a> from Arrested Development would’ve made a super cute baby,” and Juno pondered this, then decided to leave, it would make sense with her character and resonate with the rest of the plot. Bringing politics into the situation isn’t just unbelievable; it actively distracts from what the story is about, because it isn’t connected to anything else.</span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-jSt-XaFzG_Q/TmVMA3L70wI/AAAAAAAAAHQ/Iy6YiS42lzs/s1600/david+cross.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="284" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-jSt-XaFzG_Q/TmVMA3L70wI/AAAAAAAAAHQ/Iy6YiS42lzs/s320/david+cross.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><o:p> <span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Of course I don't mean you, Tobias.</span></span></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">My point is that, while writing, it’s often not necessary to invent anything new; you’re better off using (or re-using) what you already have whenever possible. Oddly, this can actually be easier, too, because you don’t have to make things up out of desperation. And it’s particularly important when it comes to characters, their goals, and the obstacles to those goals. If you want us to care what happens to someone, then that person should have internal coherence: the way he acts should be organically connected to what we already understand about <span style="font-size: small;">what </span>he wants and how he sees the world. And complications that arise should arise naturally, at least partly as a consequence of those actions; they just shouldn’t drop out of the sky from an authorial hand. More on that in the next post. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">...next up: <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-6.html">victims vs. passive characters</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">OR... back to: <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-intro-pt-1.html">what's a query for, anyway?</a> AND<a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-2.html"> the art of the pitch??</a> AND <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-3.html">literary rebellions & literary excuse-making</a> AND <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-4.html">thinking about answers</a></span></div>
</div>The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1089597213803140907.post-53591195956168860422011-09-09T09:43:00.005-04:002014-08-31T14:48:37.026-04:00What's the Big Idea? - pt. 4<br />
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<u><span style="font-size: large;">Answers</span></u></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">Last night I saw my old playwriting teacher in a dream. He stood on a plinth in the midst of a desert of white sand as panelists from AWP crept past him on their hands and knees. Some of these he allowed to pass; others he incinerated with a single glance, sizzling them where they lay with blue-white thunderbolts from his eyes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">“Professor,” I called to him, “I believe I’m beginning to understand. Story is about a character encountering obstacles on the way toward a goal. Isn’t it?”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">He did not reply. In the distance, I saw a great sleuth of bears roaming over the dunes toward the handful of panelists who had survived.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ytVY-WFU09A/TmVHsLdmZnI/AAAAAAAAAHI/s0KRLj8wZAY/s1600/sleuth+of+bears.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ytVY-WFU09A/TmVHsLdmZnI/AAAAAAAAAHI/s0KRLj8wZAY/s400/sleuth+of+bears.jpg" height="245" width="400" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Oh shit.</span></span></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">When I say the writer must answer the question, “What is this book about?” what do I mean, and how do I expect him to do it? I certainly don’t consider it easy. If telling stories were easy, my copies of Poets & Writers wouldn’t be all tearstained and covered with rings from the bottoms of pint glasses. But I do think there are certain things to look for, and certain danger signs to avoid. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">A good way to start is to think about goals and obstacles for a character. Because I am obsessed with clowns, let’s start there. Most clown routines are predicated on a goal/obstacle relationship. Take this scene from Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">Chaplin’s goal in the scene is to get from one end of the tightrope to the other (to impress a girl, but that’s not important for our purposes here). His obstacle? Monkeys. Monkeys who pull down his pants. Chaplin manages to get past the obstacle to his goal; he also could have definitively failed by falling off the tightrope or being rescued by someone else. But either way, there’s a clear source of tension, because we know what’s at stake, and there’s a natural point at which that tension is resolved. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">Many writers understand this goal/obstacle relationship when it comes to short stories, but somehow, the novel seems like a different thing entirely. In the early stages of composition, a novel can feel like an endless expanse, the bottomless void of outer space in which even the most basic natural laws no longer apply. I get this. Part of what’s exhilarating for me about writing book-length fiction is the initial feeling that I’ll never run out: of new facets in my characters, of new places in the book’s world to discover, of thematic material, which seems to glimmer self-evidently everywhere I turn my authorial gaze. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">Whittling all this down to a handful of central goal/obstacle relationships seems about as impossible and pointless as carving a redwood down to a toothpick. Yet when I look at fiction that succeeds in holding my attention, I find almost invariably that this is what the writer has sneakily managed to do. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">Consider Jonathan Franzen’s overreaching doorstop FREEDOM. By rights, this novel should suck the big one. It’s chock full of sentimentality, intellectually lazy politics, and incompetently managed narration (Franzen, just admit that Patty did not write that section, you goddamn liar). Yet Franzen makes it work through the oldest trick there is: thwarted romance. Everybody in this book wants somebody else in the book, and in every case, there is a major obstacle in the way of the relationship working out. Lalitha wants her boss Walter, who loves his wife Patty, who wants to bone his best friend Richard, who is Not Good Relationship Material. Meanwhile, Walter and Patty’s son Joey wants to have hot meaningless sex with conservative coeds but he’s hindered by his abiding love for Connie, his girl back home. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">These characters have goals as obvious as the straight line a tightrope makes above the rings of a circus, and though some of their obstacles come from internal sources (guilt, being a douchebag), they’re not a hell of a lot more complicated than those adorable cheeky monkeys. It’s this very simplicity that makes the book a page turner in spite of itself. Because we know what each character is after, we know when to say, “Oh no!” or “Whew, close one!”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">I’m using the words “goal/obstacle relationship” rather than “conflict,” because I think that the word “conflict,” especially when applied to character’s internal thought processes, has been corrupted to the point of total meaninglessness. In common parlance, a character can be “conflicted” about just about anything – his identity, his relationship to his family or heritage, his past life choices. But this “conflict” does not relate to story unless it poses an obstacle to action in the novel’s present day – unless it <i>gets in the way</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;"><a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2009/10/night-music-for-robots.html">Kazuo Ishiguro</a> is the king of this particular goal/obstacle relationship. His characters’ obstacles are almost always* psychological, of their own making, but daunting and impassable just the same. The obstacle in the way of an Ishiguro character’s true goal is usually a kind of competing goal, a desire to fulfill a duty. The butler can’t allow himself to experience love because he believes being a butler should always come first. The clones can’t run away and find happiness because they believe they should do what they’re “supposed to” and give up their internal organs. The detective can’t be with his lady until he finds out what became of his parents.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">However, the form this kind of story often takes in lesser hands is something along the lines of “…and it fucks him up.” As in, “This character was abused as a child, and it fucks him up.” Or, “This character always wonders what happened to his murdered sister, and it fucks him up.” The particular “conflict” doesn’t specifically obstruct the present action, mentally tying the character’s hands and preventing him from reaching a goal. Instead, it makes the character sad :-(</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">Let me just say this once, writers of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">America</st1:place></st1:country-region>. SAD CHARACTERS ARE NOT DRAMA.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">...next up: <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-5.html">making connections</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">OR... back to: <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-intro-pt-1.html">what's a query for, anyway?</a> AND <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-2.html">the art of the pitch??</a> AND <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-3.html">literary rebellions & literary excuse-making</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">*This is even arguably the case in his masterpiece <i>The Unconsoled</i>, but here the psychological obstacles are literalized into the dreamscape the narrator navigates throughout.</span><span style="font-size: 9pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1089597213803140907.post-27684501840114907852011-09-08T08:59:00.008-04:002014-08-31T14:28:38.401-04:00What's the Big Idea? - pt. 3<link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CChandler%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link><style>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: large;"><u>Rebels</u></span> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">In the literary world, we often talk about writers who “break all the rules.” Obviously, this is hyperbole. If a writer broke <i>all</i> the rules, his book would be incomprehensible. But there are occasions when a book ignores one or more of the major foundational elements upon which most fiction rests. Not every work of fiction has incident or meaningfully developed characters, for example. <i>The Mezzanine </i>by Nicholson Baker is a novel where nothing happens: a man rides an escalator and thinks about shoelaces, popcorn, doorknobs, and CVS bags, among other things. <i>Invisible Cities </i>by Italo Calvino consists of descriptions of fifty-five fantastical metropolises, loosely linked together by passages relating a meandering conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. <i>Letters to Wendy’s</i> by Joe Wenderoth<i> </i>is an entire book of bizarre comment cards written to the eponymous fast-food restaurant. All three of these books – and there are plenty of others like them – succeed not in spite of but because of the way they throw off convention. They make major defining decisions and stick with them: they entirely exclude certain strategies and devices from the work’s purview and do something else instead. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">In my work at three literary agencies, I have encountered only a handful of submissions that attempted to do something comparable to the above-mentioned titles. The vast majority of fiction manuscripts are not trying to “break all the rules,” or even any of the major ones. These books have incident and character development, scenes and dialogue and descriptions. These are the types of books I’m going to discuss.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Here’s a common scenario. A writer turns in a novel. In it, a woman’s husband gets kidnapped. As she waits for news from the detectives on the case, she remembers their long marriage and problems they’ve overcome as a couple – at one point, she had an affair, but he forgave her. Meanwhile, the daughter, distraught about her father, acts out with friends, experimenting with drugs and losing her virginity. Then we have a couple of scenes thrown in showing the husband in an underground cell. In the end, the detectives manage to track down the kidnappers, who turn out to be religious extremists, and they return the husband to his family.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"> <span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: x-small;">Egads. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">From the writer’s point of view, this is highly commercial material. It’s got it all: kidnapping, adultery, teenage drug culture, and ripped-from-the-headlines nutso fundamentalism. And let’s just say that on top of that, it’s “beautifully written,” meaning the author’s word choices are strikingly original and the close third person feels appropriate to each character. “Wow,” thinks the writer, “I have hit this motherfucker out of the park.” What could possibly be the problem?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The problem, of course, is that nothing <i>connects</i>. In the present day of the novel, neither the woman nor her husband take any actions with consequences – they sit in rooms and think. The daughter’s actions may have the consequence of disillusioning her, but they have no bearing on the main arc of the novel or on anyone else. And there’s no connection between earlier events in the characters’ lives (like the wife’s affair) and their present situation (the kidnapping). One thing may <i>follow</i> another, but one thing doesn’t <i>cause</i> another. It may have characters, settings, and scenes, but it isn’t a story.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">However, here’s another likely scenario: when an agent (or editor, or critique partner) points this out to the writer, the writer’s response is often to say, “But I don’t <i>want</i> this to follow a traditional narrative arc. I’m trying to do something innovative, something that breaks all the rules.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">What is going on here? For me, and I suspect, for a lot of writers, fiction is particularly appealing because it allows us to inhabit a place where the rules of everyday life don’t apply. The idea that our fiction is in some way “traditional,” “conventional,” and thus beholden to certain “constraints,” immediately presses a button in the brain marked REBEL. This REBEL button shut down my brain when teachers asked me to sketch a story in one or two sentences, both in early college and later in graduate school; this REBEL button may have something to do with the odd way so many writers (perhaps most famously <a href="http://www.ninetymeetingsinninetydays.com/lorriemooore.html">Lorrie Moore</a>) boast of their allergy to plot. Yet this rebellion is a half-assed, timid, meaningless one. If authors like Russell Edson or David Markson are aesthetic bohemians, wandering the land restlessly, rootlessly, and sleeping in tents of thin silk upon the rocky soil, then their faux-rebellious counterparts (my less enlightened self very much included) are assholes in midlife crisis who want to have it both ways: they take off for a week, ignoring their kids and cheating on their spouses, then expect to return home to central air and the welcoming embrace of a Sealy Posturepedic as though nothing ever happened. They want the comforts of drama, its familiar satisfactions, but they don’t want to do the work of setting it up.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">It’s also difficult to look at a document of 300+ pages of meticulously constructed sentences and say, “I need to tear this down and build something entirely new with the scraps.” Yet this is basically what’s necessary in a case like the one I described. And that’s why I began this series by advocating that writers ask, “What is this book about?” in the very first stages, not at the end, where for all but the humblest and most persistent it’s really just too late.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">...next up: <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-4.html">how to start thinking about maybe beginning to consider answering these questions</a></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">OR... back to: <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-intro-pt-1.html">what's a query for, anyway?</a> AND <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-2.html">the art of the pitch?? </a></span><br />
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The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1089597213803140907.post-33116936638012945182011-09-07T10:06:00.008-04:002011-09-10T08:12:59.562-04:00What's the Big Idea? - pt. 2<div style="font-family: inherit;"><link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CChandler%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link><span style="font-size: small;"><smarttagtype name="place" namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags"></smarttagtype><smarttagtype name="PlaceType" namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags"></smarttagtype><smarttagtype name="PlaceName" namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags"></smarttagtype></span><style>
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</style></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><u>Pitches</u></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">I took a playwriting class in college, which I did not understand at the time. Our professor was a towering figure, nine feet tall and carved from granite, with glaciers for eyes and rough leather catcher’s mitts for hands. I also seem to recall him breathing fire and talking to God on the telephone, but perhaps I’m confusing him with someone from the English department. With a few rare exceptions, he spoke only in riddles. Despite all this, one of the first exercises he had us do for the course seemed almost laughably simple: he told us to write a story in one or two sentences and read it out loud to the class.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Yet it wasn’t so simple after all. Again and again, as we went around the room, he informed us that the words we’d read were not, in fact, stories. They were characters, or settings, or descriptions, but they were not stories. I became frustrated and confused. It seemed impossible to me to tell a story in one or two sentences. I did not know what he wanted.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Years passed. I graduated from college. I legally drank alcohol out of a flaming dish shaped like a volcano. I moved to a big city. I bought a futon and dragged a coffee table into my apartment from the street. A tiny dog appeared on the floor of my kitchen, yappily demanding things. I did not get any smarter. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iqgY8LZMzYs/TmVKI1eOdlI/AAAAAAAAAHM/hVF-_Hxdwm0/s1600/volcano.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iqgY8LZMzYs/TmVKI1eOdlI/AAAAAAAAAHM/hVF-_Hxdwm0/s320/volcano.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">So many rites of passage.</span></span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">And then, one day when I was in MFA Skool at <place w:st="on"><placename w:st="on">Columbia</placename> <placetype w:st="on">University</placetype></place>, the administrators of the program announced an upcoming event: the agents’ party. Combining the most terrifying aspects of a job interview and speed-dating, the event threw a dozen or so agents into a room crowded with an enormous herd of sweaty, overdressed would-be authors in various degrees of inebriation. The cacophony that then filled the place to the ceiling may have sounded like the death bleats of learned goats in an abattoir, but it was in fact the sound of those authors, myself included, attempting to “pitch” their books in one or two sentences. Our volume in delivering these “pitches” was only matched by the disdain with which we set about the task of composing them. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">For me, at least, such crass salesmanship seemed fundamentally at odds with the work I was doing in the program. In workshop, we read each others’ novels in chunks of no more than thirty pages at a time. These pages gave us plenty to talk about, and talk we did: about the need to dramatize a moment in scene vs. describe it in summary, the appropriateness of a metaphor, the tangibility of a setting. Sometimes a person’s comments would veer toward the larger structure of the novel: “Where is this story <i>going</i>?” someone would cry, as if waking from a dream to discover the landscape outside the windows had changed. But these questions, being unanswerable, largely went unanswered. These books weren’t even finished yet; it was far too early to ask what they were <i>about</i>. That was a question for readers, scholars and critics especially.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Before we met with the agents, we attended a mandatory prep session, where a faculty member gave us a crash course in the art of the pitch. My memories of these instructions are hazy, but the gist was that a pitch was supposed to be a couple of sentences, tops, and yet somehow encapsulate the whole whirring carnival in which I’d installed the better parts of my soul. It was, in fact, virtually the same exercise from that long-ago playwriting class, only this time, instead of inventing a story, I was meant to explain one already in progress. It might have crossed my mind that the task should seem less puzzling to me by now, that perhaps my befuddlement indicated a lingering gap somewhere in my knowledge, but I did my best to ignore these thoughts. Instead, I called bullshit, decried “selling out,” and told my significant other that I planned to start my conversations with agents by saying, “I’m obsessed with clowns” (a worthy profession of which my protagonist numbered). He gently suggested I might want to try harder to appeal to the “clown neutral” reader, and I grudgingly set about cobbling together a less off-putting introduction to myself and my life’s work.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-UsIsY_9Df3E/Tmd6Is8teYI/AAAAAAAAAHk/T_sGk-7d6Oo/s1600/Emmett_Kelly.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-UsIsY_9Df3E/Tmd6Is8teYI/AAAAAAAAAHk/T_sGk-7d6Oo/s320/Emmett_Kelly.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">I still say that if you find this guy "scary," you're out of your freakin' mind.</span></span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">It didn’t occur to me at the time that asking a writer to convey, in words, what her book was “about” might in fact be a perfectly reasonable question. It didn’t occur to me that, perhaps, it was important for the writer to know the answer to this question herself. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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</span></div><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">...next up: <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-3.html">literary rebellions & literary excuse-making.</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">OR.... back to: <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-intro-pt-1.html">what's a query for, anyway?</a> </span></div>The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1089597213803140907.post-78977848750287944452011-09-06T09:01:00.004-04:002011-09-10T08:12:12.432-04:00What's the Big Idea? - Intro & pt. 1<link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CChandler%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link><style>
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<span style="font-size: small;">This is an essay in ten (short) parts, in which I investigate what makes the parts of a novel cohere into a meaningful whole. Although I’m using it to inaugurate what I hope will be a regular series of advice posts for emerging writers, this isn’t so much advice as it is an attempt to map out the landscape of my own thinking about a subject that continues to torment, confuse, and fascinate me on a daily basis. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><u>Queries</u></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I have worked in publishing – as an intern, an editorial assistant, and even, briefly, as an agent – off and on for the last six years. And that means I have read some very shitty query letters. I have read query letters that annoyed me, bored me, creeped me out, confused me, and made me laugh aloud for reasons clearly contrary to the author’s intentions. I have signed into a briefly neglected email account to find literally hundreds of query letters shimmering in a rainbow of colors and a torrent of fonts; I have read them laser printed, typed on typewriters, and handwritten from prison. I’ve read query letters from precocious, vampire-obsessed high schoolers who offered classmates’ lukewarm praise as potential blurb fodder, and from retired businessmen eager to imitate the dick-lit espionage thrillers that gave shape and meaning to their decades spent flying business class. I’ve read query letters for literary novels and diet guides, addiction memoirs and middle-grade chapter books. I have read the same query letter from the same author more than 100 times, thanks a lot, <a href="http://oscarwhitfield.com/">Oscar Whitfield</a>. I have sent so many form rejections that some day, I’m sure a very special corner of Writer Hell awaits me: perhaps <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/12/public-enemy-number-one-pt-1.html">James Frey </a>will stand over me with a whip while I’m forced to piece together copies of his books from a ball pit full of shredded galleys. Yet, in spite of all that, or perhaps because of it, I’ve come to what seems like a counterintuitive conclusion on the craft of the query: I think it barely matters at all.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I don’t deny that you can tell a lot from a query. You can generally discover if the author has published broadly, if the author has attended an MFA program or has an Internet presence, if the author is aware that this is business correspondence and not a <a href="http://postsecretarchive.com/2011/04/help-me/">PostSecret</a>. You also generally get a vaguer sense of what the book is about, if it sounds like a flagrantly bad idea, and what other published work it’s consciously imitating. You find these things out because this is the information a query letter usually contains: it’s the text, not the subtext. And if some of this information is omitted, you (this being the tricksy, undefined second-person “you,” by which I of course mean, “I”) most often cynically assume it’s being omitted because the author has Something to Hide, or, perhaps more accurately, especially as concerns publication history, Nothing to Hide, because, like a resume, a query letter usually offers up whatever selling points its author can think of. But there’s no secret Scantron Query Decoder 4000 employed at every literary agency, no hard and fast universal rubric to apply. A query letter is just that: a letter, sent from one person to another person, who considers, briefly, what the first person has to say.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I say all of this because, of late, I’ve observed a high degree of anxiety concerning the “right” way to prepare a query letter in my immediate circle of literary friends and acquaintances. Some of this, I think, is due to online resources like the immensely popular QueryShark, who eviscerates letter after letter for minute, seemingly unguessable infractions, like <a href="http://queryshark.blogspot.com/2011/06/206.html">saying you “just” finished a novel</a>, as opposed to, I guess, saying you finished it six months ago and then allowed it to properly marinate in a drawer full of hesitation and self-doubt. I’ll point out something obvious: agents can be pompous assholes, but there is not a one still roaming the charred wasteland of what used to be American literary culture who would turn down an otherwise appealing prospect for employing the wrong adverb in a fucking query. “Mistakes” like that are just an excuse for the real reason that queries get rejected, which is that the agent can’t imagine the book therein described ever making money, or even being interesting to read. And if you’ve already finished working on the book in question, that’s not something you as the writer can do very much about.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Let me make this perfectly clear. If you ask yourself, “What is my book about?” for the first time when you sit down to write your query letter, you are already royally screwed. “What is my book about?” is a question that should have occurred to you long, long before, at least during the revision process but probably even earlier, during the composition of your first draft. And by, “What is my book about?” I don’t mean the premise (which by its very nature is an unavoidable first step) or vague thematic stuff – “loneliness” or “modernity.” I mean major defining decisions about the book’s structure, and in the case of almost all fiction, its pivotal events, their consequences, and what’s at stake for the characters.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I say this not in a spirit of condescension, but empathy, because it took me ages to start understanding how this works, and it’s still not clear or easy. But it all boils down to this: you, the writer, must engage the curiosity of potential readers. You must give them a reason to read your book. Doing this is not “marketing” your work. Doing this <i>is</i> the work. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The right way to answer the question, “What is this book about?” is not to come up with some clever spin long after the fact in the form of a 250 word query letter. The right way to answer it is to come up with a story and tell that story on every page of your book. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">...next up: <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-big-idea-pt-2.html">the "art" of the pitch?? </a></span></div>
The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1089597213803140907.post-84023005124799094862011-04-19T07:51:00.003-04:002011-04-19T10:38:38.496-04:00I am a double agent for the KGB, pt. 5<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7rvygz11e30/Ta12x3PD-LI/AAAAAAAAAGI/xUY0uns8t0k/s1600/spy+vs.+spy+flower.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="270" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7rvygz11e30/Ta12x3PD-LI/AAAAAAAAAGI/xUY0uns8t0k/s320/spy+vs.+spy+flower.gif" width="320" /></a></div><br />
Good news, everyone! My latest book review (of <i>The Dewey Decimal System</i>, a futuristic noir by Nathan Larson) is now live on the KGB Bar site. Check it out here:<br />
<a href="http://kgbbar.com/lit/book_reviews/the_dewey_decimal_system_by_nathan_larson">http://kgbbar.com/lit/book_reviews/the_dewey_decimal_system_by_nathan_larson</a>The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1089597213803140907.post-17723499011702762312011-04-07T09:55:00.019-04:002011-04-07T14:46:43.559-04:00In the Realms of the UnrealBefore I went to see Zack Snyder’s new film Suckerpunch last weekend, I watched the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrIiYSdEe4E">trailer </a>– for the fourth or fifth time and in my usual state of fist-pumping enthusiasm – ostensibly for the purpose of showing a friend who’d agreed to come along what we were in for at the local Imax. Amid my exclaimed profanities and endorsing narration (“Look at the composition of that shot! And that one! Also: zeppelins?!”), he managed to get the gist of the preview, and said, once it was over and he could get a word in edgewise, “It’s a little like Henry Darger, don’t you think?” To which I squealed, “Oh my god, you are so right!” and nearly keeled over from the sudden rush of ticket-buying endorphins flooding my bloodstream.<br />
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Frequent readers of this blog will know that <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/01/watching-watchmen-pt-2.html">my affection for Zack Snyder</a> is matched by few things, and one of those things is <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/03/we-dont-need-no-education.html">my passion for Henry Darger</a>, the Chicago janitor who, working in total solitude, spent decades of his life creating a mammoth illustrated novel entitled In the Realms of the Unreal. This volume tells the story of the Vivian sisters, blameless children fighting a battle in a magical, Narnia-like realm against a confederacy of male evildoers wearing what Darger described as “college-professor hats” (mortarboards). My buddy was right on in seeing the parallel between this vision and Snyder’s admittedly juiced-up fantasy of Lolitas in peril. Darger’s postmodern visual technique involved pulling images from everywhere in commercial low culture – advertisements, coloring books, magazine illustrations, tabloid photos – via tracing, collage, and later, photo enlargements for inclusion in what was a bizarre, obsessively personal world. The sisters in particular were cribbed from clichéd paradigms of girlhood innocence, cloying figures wielding beach buckets or cowgirl hats while all around them, apocalypse unfolded. Replace Darger’s newspaper comics and Coppertone girls with anime, graphics-heavy videogames, classic sexploitation, and some back issues of Heavy Metal, I figured, and you’d be looking at something like Suckerpunch. In both cases, the characters the story follows are paper dolls, flat and familiar to the point of near invisibility. The mind we’re actually exploring is the creator’s – Darger’s and Snyder’s, respectively. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>In some respects, Suckerpunch did not disappoint this expectation. The movie is fucking gorgeous, for starters. In four of the movie’s set pieces, we watch Baby Doll (Emily Browning, looking like the platonic ideal to which so much plastic surgery aspires) duking it out with clockwork samurai, steampowered doughboys, dragons, and a monorail full of robots. With enough money, anyone can film gadgets and explosions (and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418279/">anyone has</a>), but Snyder has a deep understanding of the choreography of fight sequences, and a painter’s eye for the panoramic landscapes in which they play out. As four music videos – or more accurately, silent films, since they each outlast the duration of a single song – these would be rococo, ridiculous delights. <br />
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The trouble, for me, comes from Snyder’s attempts to cram the dodecahedron of his imagination into the square hole left by <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/07/hes-dreamy.html">recent Hollywood successes</a>. I’m speaking here of that inconvenient thing: the movie’s screenplay. <br />
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If, unlike me, you weren’t too distracted by the trailer’s pulsating soundtrack or its images of badass dragons to see the warning signs, you’ll have gathered that the story’s frame concerns a mental institution from which our heroine wishes to escape. Her attempts are psychotically reconfigured in her ailing brain, first into a strip club/whorehouse and then into the action numbers described above. <br />
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This frame is a regrettable choice for a couple of reasons. First, it necessitates a series of scenes in which Baby Doll and several other characters talk. Let me be perfectly clear on this point: none of these characters should speak. Ever. It is totally unnecessary and invariably embarrassing when they do. I’m not maligning the actresses, who do the best they can with dialogue that sounds like it came from a cut scene in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzer_Dragoon_Orta">Panzer Dragoon Orta</a>. But, if their sexy goth Halloween costumes discouraged us from imagining these women’s inner lives, their conversations confirm they have no inner lives at all. In Snyder’s masterpiece Watchmen, I considered the over-the-top obvious exchanges (“What happened to the American dream?” “It came true! You’re looking at it!”) to serve the same purpose that the superhero stances on window ledges or in fiery hallways did: the characters were striking poses, iconic ones, that served to define something significant about themselves. But in Suckerpunch, to put it bluntly, the dialogue is boring and meaningless. While writing this post, I referred to IMDB in hopes of finding some <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0978764/quotes">“memorable quotes”</a> from the film to cite, but except for the fake-mysticism twaddle from the movie’s inexplicable voiceovers, even that resource seems to consider most of what these ladies say eminently forgettable. <br />
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Because Baby Doll is not believable as a character with an inner life, period, Snyder exacerbates the second and larger problem with the story's frame. It’s effectively impossible for the movie’s stunning dreamscapes to have originated in her mind. According to the production materials, the mental institution is supposed to be set in rural Vermont in the early 1960’s; because of the sepia tone, Edward Gorey-esque set design, and our heroine’s vintage sailor dress, I pegged it for even earlier. Regardless, though, the story comes from an era prior to the vast majority of the film’s many allusions and centers on a character who, as far as we can tell, is ignorant of all of them. Let’s be real: why would an orphaned cutie in New England during the Eisenhower administration fantasize about destroying androids with a samurai sword? Why would she imagine racy dominatrix outfits for all of her friends? Why, in fact, does the story that she tells herself have the structure of a videogame? <br />
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And most importantly, what does it add to any of this imagery to claim she’s the one behind it? Ultimately, this is where I got stuck. The visual world of this movie is interesting precisely because of what it suggests about the imagination behind it, an imagination saturated in the popular culture of the last 50 years. Suckerpunch has been polarizing for a reason: just as Darger’s obsession with the Vivian girls’ courage and virtue led him to create exceptionally disturbing images of violence against children, so does Snyder’s apparent girl-power message contain an immutable gender binary and a prominent rape fixation. Where is <i>that </i>voice coming from? Claiming it’s all in Baby Doll’s head feels like a cop-out, one that insults the intelligence of the viewer – or, alternately, suggests that Snyder has no idea what his picture is really about.<br />
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I’m not saying that’s the worst thing. Artists don’t always know what they’re up to, or where the dark heart of their material lies. I claim to love Darger, but I’ve never read the thousands of pages of fiction that accompany his dazzling paintings, and I probably never will. It’s certainly possible to enjoy the action sequences in Suckerpunch as the stunted masterpieces that they are and ignore the rest. But if Snyder wanted to make a full-length film with this material, and supply it with an accessible emotional and psychological arc, I would have suggested he take a page out of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0268126/">Charlie Kaufman’s</a> book and insert himself – or a character like himself – into the picture. By doing that, he would have foregrounded what’s unsettling and original about the movie by making us complicit: sympathetic with the type of male gaze that condemns lechery and sexual aggression while only calling women by their stripper names, with the form of escapism that celebrates bloodless violence without consequences. And even more than an icepick, that’s the kind of thing that sticks in a viewer’s mind.The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1089597213803140907.post-49775370587497809022011-03-08T20:40:00.014-05:002011-10-07T01:50:06.744-04:00Grist for the MillerAt the end of last month, I took the subway up to Columbia University for a talk on book reviewing by Laura Miller of Salon.com. I'm fairly familiar with Miller's work: I sometimes read her column, and I eagerly raced out to buy her collection of essays on the Chronicles of Narnia, THE MAGICIAN'S BOOK, when it first came out in 2008. Though it was a lot less provocative than I hoped and expected – in my estimation, Lev Grossman's novel <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/03/magic-for-intermediates.html">THE MAGICIANS</a> does a better job of critiquing the authoritarian underpinnings of Lewis's original text and celebrating the imaginative possibilities it offers – I did at least appreciate her interest in digging into her subject at a far greater length than most non-academic readers would consider palatable. Even if the book too often veered into a weird combination of straightforward literary biography (we get accounts of Lewis's religious conversion, love life, and relationship with his brother) and overgeneralizations based on vague personal anecdotes ("Adults remember learning the truth about Santa Claus as a miniature tragedy. Some of us cried."), Miller seemed like the kind of writer who cared more about the ideas she was expressing than about the size of her readership.<br />
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That was before I heard her talk. Miller opened her lecture with a lengthy discourse on Google Analytics, a tool that, in its mathematically precise tabulation of “hits” has come to serve as the only muse Miller dares consult in her selection of new titles to review. Miller explained that with her audience, reviews of nonfiction always garner more online attention than reviews of literary novels or, god forbid, story collections; that reviews of books by white authors usually trump reviews of books by writers of color; and that reviews of debut fiction get the fewest hits of all. Expressing repeated concern over the possibility of losing her job – an excuse that sounds more like “Just following orders” to me every day, but maybe that’s the <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2011/01/life-after-mfa.html">unemployment </a>talking – she explained that, though she could occasionally “get away with” (more on this telling phrase in a bit) reviewing books by worthy minorities or serious novelists, she’s ultimately beholden to her readership. Her loyalty, she told us, is not to the books she discusses, but solely to those nameless clickers scrolling away at home.<br />
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While Miller was saying all this, I sketched a portrait of her with horns and dripping fangs holding a pitchfork, and wrote, “This lady is the devil” below in Gothic script for good measure. But after even a moment’s reflection, I had to admit my feelings were far more complex. For one thing, it’s tough to fault someone for being honest, especially when she’s speaking to a roomful of intellectuals and being honest means admitting she routinely throws her fellow intellectuals under the bus. (This is not something <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/12/public-enemy-number-one-pt-3.html">James Frey</a> would do, for example.) For another thing, Miller wasn’t passing the buck – “My editor told me to review this book, not that one,” etc. She wasn’t just claiming that a change in her reviewing habits would result in her dismissal from Salon.com (of which she is a co-founder); she was arguing that it <i>should</i>. At one point, she mentioned that some readers have gotten burned from reading too many appreciative reviews of novels that will in fact bore or disappoint them. These readers, Miller feels, have been betrayed by the very folks whose job it is to tell them about books they’ll like. They’ve been let down, and she’s not going to do the same thing to her audience. Like P.T. Barnum, she believes in giving the people what they want.<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-JPsGi-EogQ4/TXa3jMItx8I/AAAAAAAAAFw/-8HFhJ4fi2A/s1600/laura+miller.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-JPsGi-EogQ4/TXa3jMItx8I/AAAAAAAAAFw/-8HFhJ4fi2A/s320/laura+miller.jpg" width="252" /></a></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Laura Miller: the carnival barker of the literary world.</span></div><br />
This, the founding principle of Miller’s philosophy of book reviewing, went unremarked in the lecture I attended, but I suspect I wasn’t the only one there who felt there was something potentially controversial in it. Critics, after all, haven’t always played the role of Consumer Reports, directing book buyers to the products best suited to their existing wants and tastes (“Readers who liked THE LOVELY BONES also enjoyed SKELETON PROM”). We don’t regard books by great 20th century authors like Woolf, or Faulkner, or Pynchon as significant because the average straphanger – then or now – can rip through them like tween vampire romances. We regard them as significant because someone in the intellectual community at the time recognized what the authors were up to, and championed it. <br />
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Now don’t get me wrong: I totally get why Miller would regard nepotism, or even charitably exaggerated praise, in reviewing as dishonest, because I do too. But priding oneself on consistently delivering the goods to a community that isn’t much interested in, among other things, African-Americans or the English language also seems to be missing the point. Maybe I’m idealizing the past, but wasn’t there a time when a critic’s responsibility was to articulate and advance a certain aesthetic – when she was compelled not merely to predict what her readers would like to read, but to prescribe for them a new way of reading? When, to put it plainly, the critic’s responsibility was to art? <br />
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It seems to me that there was such a time (and that maybe it’s <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/sep/30/his-glory-and-his-curse/">not quite over yet</a>). Yet even in the second two thirds of Miller’s talk, where she addressed the question “What do critics look for in debut novels?”, art didn’t come up much. Miller instead spent much of her time rattling off a laundry list of what she acknowledged were idiosyncratic personal preferences – she doesn’t much care for novels about stage magicians or ranch hands, for instance – with the inevitable caveat, “But if you do it well, you can get away with anything.” <br />
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</span></div>There those words were again – “get away with.” This compound verb troubled me at the time, and troubled me again even more deeply when I read <a href="http://entertainment.salon.com/2011/03/01/description/">the essay Miller wrote about the same Columbia lecture for Salon.com</a>, where she uses the phrase twice in quick succession. The words “get away with” imply a set of rules, a duty that one is cleverly escaping via loophole. Yet what obligation does a writer have to cater to Miller’s unguessably individual predilections, or even the more widespread, but equally arbitrary penchants of the majority of readers? <br />
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</span></div>The unnamed obligation, I’d say, is economic. What Laura Miller is actually espousing is only a slightly more sophisticated variant on the shopworn capitalist slogan, “The Customer is Always Right.” In “Advice to Writers: Skip the Scenery,” for example, Miller starts out making what seems like a justified criticism about the way passages of scenic description pointlessly slow the action in Tea Obreht’s THE TIGER'S WIFE. One expects Miller to go into a discussion, a la Gardner, of the fictive dream, or of the needless intrusion of cinematic conceits in contemporary fiction (the excerpted sketch of the village reads to me like an establishing shot in a so-so screenplay). But instead, Miller's next move is puzzling. She doesn’t argue that the quoted passage, or others like it, makes THE TIGER'S WIFE less worth reading – she simply claims that the problem with the passages is that they will make the book less read: “[T]he risk is great that readers will conclude [that] the novel has no particular place to go and will soon wander off themselves.” And she condemns all similar passages, sight unseen, for the same reason: “When it comes to more than two or three sentences of description at a go, a novelist is always somewhat on sufferance with contemporary readers” (though of course “a writer of genius can <i>get away with </i>just about anything” – emphasis mine).<br />
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Arguing that there’s difference between “less worth reading” and “less read” may sound like pure semantics, but it really isn’t. To say a book is “less worth reading” is to pose an argument about aesthetic value, one that ultimately demands an underlying theory or point of view about how fiction can and should work. But to say a book is “less read” or will be “less read” is to make a statement about market viability – about the number of “hits,” actual or probable. Remember Google Analytics? Perhaps the reason Laura Miller so admires it is that it automatically knows what people actually read – a task to which she, not being a computer, has chosen to devote much of her time and critical thought.<br />
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</span></div>And thus that troublesome “getting away with” makes a lot more sense. When Miller refers to a book “getting away with” something, she means that the writer took a risk with, but ultimately didn't sacrifice, market viability. According to Miller (again in <a href="http://entertainment.salon.com/2011/03/01/description/">the Salon.com essay</a>), Elizabeth Kostova and David Wroblewski both succeed despite their long descriptions, though Miller finds Kostova’s descriptions evocative and Wrolewski’s pointlessly florid. In Miller’s critical framework, there’s no possibility that Kostova’s work succeeds because of the very element that makes it less appealing to a broad audience. To Miller, market viability and success are synonymous. Just as she considers herself responsible to the web surfers behind her column’s page view spikes, so too (she would say) are literary authors responsible to their pool of likely readers. Anything that makes the book tougher going for these folks risks the whole enterprise, regardless of what it accomplishes aesthetically. <br />
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“The most ravishing descriptions in the world are wasted if they aren't read in the first place,” Miller writes. I suppose I’ll concede this point: if a book filled with “ravishing descriptions” is written, then instantly incinerated before a single human being can read it, and the memory of the words within is magnetically erased from the mind of the author and then, for good measure, a superhuman turns back the wheel of time till before those cursed words were ever inscribed upon paper, then yes, that would be a waste. But this isn’t what Miller is actually talking about. In reality, even books that are published by eensy presses and go out of print in a matter of months have some readers, sometimes very devoted ones. (Believe it or not, even poets get the occasional fan letter. And somebody’s buying <a href="http://skreened.com/barrelhouse/i-m-famous-at-awp">these shirts</a>.) Miller is saying that a book that reaches a tiny but loyal following is a waste compared to a book that reaches a much larger audience, regardless of what the books in question are up to, and regardless of how intense an impression each work makes on those who bother. And it’s there that I have to disagree with her. If I spend years of my life writing a novel and I reach only a couple of people, but I really reach them – touch them, amaze them – in the way my favorite books have reached me, then I’m going to consider the time well spent. <br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;">And if one of those people happens to be a book critic, well, so much the better.</span></div>The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1089597213803140907.post-33520889896161265832011-02-21T15:37:00.005-05:002011-03-09T14:07:30.045-05:00I am a double agent for the KGB, pt. 4<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KbwnGCzrtEo/TWLMktvQMzI/AAAAAAAAAFk/1AtP5FTntVc/s1600/Spy-vs-Spy-full.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="286" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KbwnGCzrtEo/TWLMktvQMzI/AAAAAAAAAFk/1AtP5FTntVc/s320/Spy-vs-Spy-full.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
One of my favorite authors, Charles Baxter, has a new book out. Luckily for me, I got a chance to review it here: <a href="http://kgbbar.com/lit/book_reviews/gryphon">http://kgbbar.com/lit/book_reviews/gryphon</a>The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1089597213803140907.post-46620428557207032272011-02-19T15:36:00.013-05:002011-03-10T02:27:36.254-05:00B.R. Myers: The Bottom of the Pecking Order<style>
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B.R. Myers is the poor man’s Dale Peck, and by “poor,” I mean “intellectually impoverished.” As frequent readers of this blog will recall, <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/04/pecked-to-death.html">I was no fan of Peck’s <i>Hatchet Jobs</i></a> when I read it last spring, but now, in comparing it with Myers’ <i>A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose</i>, I feel I may have shortchanged the ax man. While <i>Hatchet Jobs </i>courted controversy with all the subtlety the title implies, relying on theses better suited to hostile tweets (“Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation”) than to substantive essays, and frequently resorting to aggressive non-sequiturs (“with friends like this, literature needs an enema”) in the absence of any subtler wit, Peck was remarkably successful in one area where many writers fail: creating an unforgettable character – in his case, the character of Dale Peck, book critic. As bizarre as it may sound,<i> Hatchet Jobs</i> was at least partly written in a spirit of generosity. Peck was willing to overstate his points, to play the fool – to be “clownish,” in his words – in order to get a passionate conversation about current books started. B.R. Myers, on the other hand, thinks the literary conversation should have ended for all time sometime in the middle of the 20th century, and spends almost 150 pages saying so.<br />
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<i>A Reader’s Manifesto</i> is a worthless piece of garbage. But I’m willing to dignify it with a response because of the one value Mr. Myers and I do share: our desire to attack and publically humiliate the writers who piss us off.<br />
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</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Y9VU2CvMU7g/TWAk6v1NSjI/AAAAAAAAAFg/BXbPcYrA92Y/s1600/i-will-destroy-you.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Y9VU2CvMU7g/TWAk6v1NSjI/AAAAAAAAAFg/BXbPcYrA92Y/s1600/i-will-destroy-you.jpg" /></a></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><i>A Reader’s Manifesto</i> is divided into five major sections: “Evocative Prose,” “Edgy Prose,” “Muscular Prose,” “Spare Prose,” and “Generic Literary Prose.” (The beginning and end are heavily padded with a preface, introduction, conclusion, epilogue, and appendix, I guess to fill the book out to manuscript length.) These headings suggest that each section or essay will explore a specific problem Myers finds endemic to contemporary writing, defining his terms, citing examples by a range of authors, and, ideally, reaching toward some larger points about what this trend might mean. But each essay might as well be named for the author it discusses, since each confines itself almost entirely to one: Annie Proulx ("Evocative"), Don DeLillo ("Edgy"), Cormac McCarthy ("Muscular"), Paul Auster ("Spare"), and David Guterson ("Generic") respectively. <br />
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</span></div>It is the first of several tricky rhetorical moves that Myers makes. By confining each essay to a particular author’s body of work, Myers can generate a wealth of like examples for whatever “problem” he’s discussing. Generally, unless a certain type of metaphor or elevated language really <i>is </i>a mistake (in the sense of being an anomalous authorial oversight) it will occur again and again in that author's short story, novel, or even career. To paraphrase an old saw, if you do it once, it’s an accident; but doing it over and over quickly becomes a style. A critic may judge a style to be aesthetically successful or unsuccessful and can advance an argument either way, of course. But to be thorough, any such argument must offer more than an uncoordinated series of apparent grammatical corrections: it must address what patterns emerge, and what results from those patterns. <br />
<br />
Myers, however, does no such thing. By claiming that each of his essays is about a “type” of prose, rather than the style of a particular author, Myers abdicates the critic's responsibility to establish any larger context other than isolated sentences. He abdicates, in fact, the critic's obligation to address an author’s larger project, or even the form and structure of an entire book. <br />
<br />
In other words, Myers is making the argument that sentences are <i>inherently </i>good or bad. He's saying that the <i>way</i> literary language communicates can be evaluated separately from <i>what </i>it's communicating. He’s saying that there are rules about the way sentences <i>should </i>work that apply regardless of the larger form or aesthetic of the fiction in question. I think this is the kind of idea with which one can easily disagree, because I consider it batshit crazy. Sentences, even sentences that don't make literal syntactical sense, are inherently neutral; their worth comes from the contribution they make to what Poe would call the work’s single overall effect.<br />
<br />
I don’t mind that Myers disagrees with me about this: he's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Style-50th-Anniversary/dp/0205632645">not alone</a>. I do, however, object to the way he rules out any possibility of disagreement in his Introduction, writing, “We can all argue about whether a story is interesting or a character believable, but few literate people would deny that ‘a clash of sound, discordant,’ is repetitive, or that ‘from whence there could be no way back’ is absurdly archaic for a story set in the Truman years.” Myers here is trying to establish common ground by disguising evaluative assessments as objective ones. “A clash of sound, discordant” is (kinda sorta) repetitive, sure, but repetition can be used to great effect, as even Myers (kinda sorta) admits when he references Hemingway. “From whence there could be no way back” is archaic, but to add “absurdly” is to make a value judgment in no way justified by the excerpted text. (And even describing something as “absurd” is not necessarily a criticism.)<br />
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What’s even batshittier is the fact that, when Myers observes a particular writer’s style displays impressive internal consistency, or when a work's style appears connected to its themes, or both, he takes this as a sign that the book is even sloppier than he realized at first. About Proulx, he writes, “[Her] wordplay virtually never lets up; it is hard to find three consecutive sentences in which she isn’t trying to startle or impress the reader.” He describes Don DeLillo’s writing in <i>White Noise </i>– a book largely set in grocery stores and concerned with the disposable products of consumer culture – as a “lazy shopping list” and points out its pop cultural references have “dated like an open box of cereal.” (Bet DeLillo cried himself to sleep after reading that.) Of Cormac McCarthy, he writes, “The novel is a fundamentally irreverent form: it tolerates epic language only when used with a selective touch. To record with the same majesty every aspect of a cowboy's life, from a knife-fight to his lunchtime burrito, is to create what can only be described as kitsch.” And so on. Although Myers turns his critical eye on individual sentences only, what actually bothers him the most is their purposefully achieved cumulative effect – an effect that overwhelms him, disturbs him, lingers in his mind, <i>even though he doesn’t like it</i>. To me, that’s the surest sign that these authors are doing something right.The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1089597213803140907.post-44069046596773151342011-01-31T16:05:00.009-05:002011-02-02T01:10:41.823-05:00Life After the MFA<span style="font-size: small;"><o:smarttagtype name="place" namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype name="PlaceName" namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype name="PlaceType" namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags"></o:smarttagtype></span><style>
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Believe it or not, I didn’t disappear for more than a month because I was charged with the <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/12/public-enemy-number-one-pt-1.html">felony cyberbullying of James Frey</a>. Nor have I abandoned the blog to enter the <a href="http://attentionemployees.com/2011/01/27/employee-profile-ann-kisco/">high-stakes world of corporate events planning</a> under an alias. I haven’t spent the last several weeks trapped in a wine cellar with zero access to wi-fi – though wouldn’t that be nice? – nor did I embark on a voyage of personal discovery and ingest a rare tropical parasite in the process. Instead, after a flurry of houseguests over the holidays, and quite a few flurries of the meteorological variety, I’ve been spending most of my time doing what I’m doing right now: typing on a little red laptop on a big red couch. <br />
<br />
I’ve been working on a novel, to be more specific, and I’ve been able to focus on it lately because at the end of 2010, I took a step even less advisable for an unpublished writer of uncertain talents: I quit my day job. Now before you call in the calm young men with the restraints, let me explain that I don’t have any illusions that I’m going to be able to support myself with my fiction, now or in the future. Like most everyone, I have dreams where the zombie of Maxwell Perkins and the werewolf played by Danny DeVito in Big Fish hand me a giant check and fireworks implode backwards in the sky and an ostrich with a human face raises her head out of the sand and whispers, “You’ve arrived.” <br />
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</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_T3_62xJBgCw/TUcfOTg9UwI/AAAAAAAAAFY/jCre9bw58oU/s1600/deeproy_neverendingstory_teenyweeny.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_T3_62xJBgCw/TUcfOTg9UwI/AAAAAAAAAFY/jCre9bw58oU/s320/deeproy_neverendingstory_teenyweeny.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Also, this guy blurbs me. Admit it, you’ve had this dream too.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div>Realistically, though, I know that’s never going to happen, and in a lot of ways my decision to join the ranks of the funemployed had nothing to do with writing at all. But at least temporarily, my newfound free time has given me an opportunity to recommit to my creative work – something that would have sounded like unnecessary bullshit to me a few years ago.<br />
<br />
Because I made this decision already -- on several occasions, in fact, but most recently and dramatically in my decision to spend two years and a not insubstantial chunk of change to attend an MFA creative writing program conveniently located near the diseased but still-beating heart of America’s publishing industry. At the time, I certainly hoped this would lead to something unspeakably glorious, like a book deal or admittance to some eternal <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1977/02/21/1977_02_21_033_TNY_CARDS_000322267">Barthelmian conservatory</a>, but at the very least, it seemed like the choice would stick – that forever after I would walk through life as a WRITER, the brand upon me like some mark of Cain that doubled as a hand stamp for readings at bars with a cover. <br />
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Then three years after graduating, I found myself crouched under my boss’s desk, muttering curses at a broken printer whose orange error light glared like the eye of Sauron, wondering what the hell had happened to me. I’d changed, seemingly overnight, into someone I hardly recognized. In grad school, at the beginning of the semester, classmates would greet me with, “How’s Bernie?” – asking after the protagonist of my first novel as if inquiring about the health of my son. Now I rarely told people I wrote fiction at all. I’d become cynical and witty, or at least snide, on the subject of publishing; a daily reader of Publisher’s Marketplace, I watched trends roll through the industry, as boring and unavoidable as weather, but the deals that cut me to the quick were the rare few that sounded like books I could have written if only I could really <i>write</i>. Instead, I felt like a study in existential inauthenticity, pouring my intellectual energy into rigorous, vehemently argued reports for work or comments that went ignored on strangers’ blogs, then staring at my own latest Big Project in stunned despair. I’ve rarely identified with a character as much as Oona Lazlo in <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/02/chronic-city-pt-3-love-death.html">Chronic City</a> when she discovers her best work will never be published, not even pseudonymously: “Apparently, I’m who you enlist when you’re selling out in this town.” I also felt like I was ghostwriting someone else’s life, and badly.<br />
<br />
I’m not describing all this to elicit sympathy – as the expression goes, when you make your own bed you have to lie on it, curled helplessly in a fetal position and praying morning never comes. I’ve known writing was a tough racket, theoretically, since I was old enough to attend poetry readings in my hometown, where thinly veiled suicide threats masqueraded as verse and the espresso machine was louder than the microphone. But I have to say that I think the post-MFA slump has been the toughest test of my resolve so far, and I don’t think that I’m alone in that.<br />
<br />
So the title of this piece doubles as a call for comments – for those of you former MFAers out there in blogland, what have you done to hold onto your discipline, your sense that the work you’re doing is important, even/especially when success didn’t come easy? And what, if anything, could MFA programs do to better prepare fledgling writers for what they face afterwards? I’ll plan to talk about both those subjects in future posts.The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1089597213803140907.post-90345483597894965722010-12-15T12:45:00.009-05:002010-12-16T00:51:16.459-05:00Public Enemy Number One, pt. 3This is part of a series about James Frey—<br />
<a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/11/public-enemy-number-one-pt-1.html">Introduction</a> (why this guy?), <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/12/public-enemy-number-one-pt-1.html">Part 1</a> (on the memoir), <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/12/public-enemy-number-one-pt-2.html">Part 2</a> (on the novel)<br />
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For those of you just joining us, here's my thesis again: James Frey is a despicable hypocrite. He says he cares about literature, but he only cares about money, and in fact, his main way of making money has been to repeatedly, unapologetically, and viciously curb stomp everything that a legitimate champion of literature would stake his life on trying to protect. This thesis is supported by a large body of evidence primarily consisting of everything James Frey himself has said and done throughout his entire career to date. Yet, even with the blood splatters of all that is worthy gleaming on his sneakers and the pavement at his feet, James Frey attempts to explain away his behavior by claiming that it's all part of his "art," assuming -- perhaps correctly -- that most Americans are either too stupid or too easily intimidated by "artistes" to follow this line of logic any further. We cannot allow James Frey to get away with this.<br />
<br />
Because this matters. I'm not saying that in jest. We live in an era of anti-intellectual fatalism, an era where appearing on television is taken for a symbol of divine right to power and riches, an era where a refusal to compromise one's work or morals is taken for simple naivete about the machinations of capitalism. But it is not inevitable that fraudulent douchebags will get huge book deals and dominate the literary landscape, all the while exploiting younger, poorer, and in all likelihood, more talented writers. And if this circumstance does come to pass, due to the human errors of the cynical and feeble-minded, the least the rest of us can do is say something about it.<br />
<br />
Or so was my thinking a little over a month ago, when I first saw this <a href="http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/69474/">harrowing and well-written piece</a> in New York Magazine about James Frey's fiction factory.<br />
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<div align="center"><span style="font-size: large;">On the Fiction Factory</span></div><div align="center" style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div align="center" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;">Full disclosure: I'm a graduate of the MFA Creative Writing program at Columbia University (although I don't know the author of the NY mag piece or anyone featured in it), and I've ghostwritten a couple of books myself.</span> So it's fair to say that the scheme described in this article hit close to home. Although I'd certainly be repulsed by Frey's behavior regardless of what vulnerable population of writers he chose to prey upon, the fact that he chose this particular community -- a community that in my recollection was made up of wildly ambitious, dizzyingly insecure individuals, most with no business training and the daunting apparition of 5- or 6-figure student loans forever looming over the flip screens of their buggy laptops, a community both energized and lightning struck by the buzzing voltage of the industry surrounding it, a community of writers who may claw each others' eyes out in workshop but will still start a bar fight to protect one of their own -- well, let's just say it intensifies my ire. And the fact that I actually have some first-hand experience with book packagers and the deals they usually cut with ghostwriters intensifies my suspicion about Frey's plans and motivations.</div><div align="center" style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div align="center" style="text-align: left;">So let's start with the business end of things. Here's the deal offered to ghostwriters, according to author Suzanne Mozes:</div><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">In exchange for delivering a finished book within a set number of months, the writer would receive $250 (some contracts allowed for another $250 upon completion), along with a percentage of all revenue generated by the project, including television, film, and merchandise rights—30 percent if the idea was originally Frey’s, 40 percent if it was originally the writer’s. The writer would be financially responsible for any legal action brought against the book but would not own its copyright. Full Fathom Five could use the writer’s name or a pseudonym without his or her permission, even if the writer was no longer involved with the series, and the company could substitute the writer’s full name for a pseudonym at any point in the future. The writer was forbidden from signing contracts that would “conflict” with the project; what that might be wasn’t specified. The writer would not have approval over his or her publicity, pictures, or biographical materials. There was a $50,000 penalty if the writer publicly admitted to working with Full Fathom Five without permission.</div></blockquote><div align="center" style="text-align: left;">Later in the article, Conrad Rippy, a publishing attorney, points out another unusual aspect of this deal: there's no audit clause in the contract, meaning that there's no way to verify the amount that the writer is to get 40% of. </div><div align="center" style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div align="center" style="text-align: left;">In a normal book packager's ghostwriting contract, the writer gets no credit and a flat fee in the thousands. When I was ghostwriting, I wouldn't have had it any other way. To me, writing trash that I didn't own was as faintly disgusting as it was amusing, the occupational equivalent of reaching into a toilet for lost ring; it might make a good story later, but it wasn't the first image of myself I wanted to present. The upside of the deal consisted entirely of being able to walk away afterwards with a check in my pocket and my intellectual and artistic reputation intact. It worked out okay for the packager too: they got their books on time and, after paying me, were able to stash the royalties with no further computations.</div><div align="center" style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div align="center" style="text-align: left;">What Frey is attempting to do here is something very different. He wants to own the work, sure, but he wants to own the writer too.</div><div align="center" style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div align="center" style="text-align: left;">Why doesn't Frey just write these books himself? Well, first of all, that would take work. But second, the contract, at least as it is here described, is a contract for the writer as cash cow, or writer as scapegoat. If the writer's career takes off down the line, then Frey is free to plaster the dude's face to the book's jacket and put a stop to lucrative deals the writer might try to make with other packagers or publishers. If the book is a legal disaster (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/07/arts/07frey.html?_r=1">which has been known to happen</a>), Frey can denigrate the writer and have him foot the bill. And if the book is a success but Frey sees no particular benefit in giving credit where credit is due, then Frey can just take that credit for himself.</div><div align="center" style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div align="center" style="text-align: left;">Moreover, the fact the writer is paid only $250 up front puts all of the risk on the writer as well, despite the fact that the company has all the creative control. Let me repeat that one more time. <i> All of the risk is on the writer, despite the fact that the company has all the creative control. </i> So imagine the following scenario: Columbia MFA Pollyanna Goodheart writes a salable YA novel. Over a period of weeks or months, James Frey makes her change everything about it, then makes further changes himself (perhaps inserting a subplot involving evil motorbike riders). Editors everywhere patiently explain that the book, in its current state, is a piece of shit. Pollyanna Goodheart no longer owns any version of the material she spent months writing, and 40% of nothing is still nothing. She returns to her Morningside Heights studio apartment with $250, fifty of which she immediately needs to spend on antidepressants and rat poison from her local Duane Reade, while at the end of the day Full Fathom Five presumably still has greater assets than two hundred dollars hidden in a Frito bag and a birthday check from Grandma. As Suzanne Mozes puts it, "So there's nothing to lose? Except my time?" Frey's reply -- "I have nothing to lose" -- seems right on the money. </div><div align="center" style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div align="center" style="text-align: left;">I fear that here we've returned, once again, to the Kingdom of the Obvious, but since this is where Frey's culpability resides, we may be spending quite a bit more time here during this post. Because this man is almost cartoonishly villainous. And the worst part of his villainy, at least for me, is the fact that he won't own up to what he's doing, which is squeezing young, unpublished, desperate writers for the few valuable things they have: their talent, their time, and their reputations. James Frey instead claims that he is trying to make an "art factory," the literary equivalent of the "factories" created by Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst. Let's examine that claim a little further.</div><div align="center" style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div align="center" style="text-align: left;">The first prerequisite of an art factory, I'd submit, would be that it, you know, <i>make art</i>. "Well, how do you judge what art is, that's so subjective, art can be anything, it can be a urinal in a gallery, remember you love that movie with the plastic bag blowing in the wind -- you could say it's garbage, but maybe to him it's art," says the dippy sixteen year old me, who still sprawls on a beanbag chair somewhere in the backrooms of my mind, listening to Fiona Apple on her headphones and sobbing herself to sleep. After smacking her around for the better part of an hour, here's how I'd reply. </div><div align="center" style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div align="center" style="text-align: left;">Art can be successful or unsuccessful, but what defines it as art is the attempt, on the part of the artist or artists, to convey a truth about the human experience. What makes something not art but artistic prostitution is the attempt to pander to the audience in order to separate them from their money. (Remember the cruise ship essay<a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/12/public-enemy-number-one-pt-1.html"> I mentioned</a>? DFW says it better than I ever could.) And although there are occasions when the status of a work as art or not art can be subject to debate -- Castaway: auteur film or extended Fed Ex commercial? -- this is in fact not one of them.</div><div align="center" style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div align="center" style="text-align: left;">I haven't read the books produced by Full Fathom Five because life is too short. But even if I did, you could argue that I'm biased against them anyway, since I would be reading them with the sole intention of tearing them apart for this post. So let's go with the opinion of someone who is, if anything, biased <i>in favor</i> of these books. Yes, that's right. Let's start with how James Frey <i>himself</i> defines literary art. Here is a list of statements he's made on the subject:</div><div align="center" style="text-align: left;"><ul><li>Frey told us, he wanted to write in the tradition of <i>Tropic of Cancer</i>, “A Season in Hell,” and <i>Paris Spleen</i>—transgressive works by transgressive authors. As he pointed out, heavy hitters never write like the established writers of their own time. Hemingway used short, declarative sentences; Miller wrote about sexuality in the first-person present tense; Mailer blurred the line between fact and fiction. These men created their own styles. (from Suzanne Mozes)</li>
<li>"I’m a big fan of breaking the rules, creating new forms, moving on to new places... In literature, you don’t see many radical books. That’s what I want to do: write radical books that confuse and confound, polarize opinions." (direct quote, NY Mag)</li>
<li>His goals as a writer are "to play with genres, to play with truth and reality, play with the rules people place on writing and art, which I wholly reject.” (direct quote, Vanity Fair)</li>
<li>"I spent ten years teaching myself to write. I spent ten years trying to find my voice... Throughout that time, one of my goals was to remove any and all signs of obvious influence from my work. I did not want to be a clone. I did not want to be the next version of someone else." (direct quote from "Music and Talking: An Essay" by James Frey)</li>
</ul></div>OK, so based on these statements, what sort of projects would one expect to come out of an "art factory" headed by James Frey? Well, we'd see books that are risky, innovative, and shocking, both in terms of form and content -- maybe something a little like the list published by a press like <a href="http://www.akashicbooks.com/mechanics.htm">Akashic</a> or <a href="http://www.featherproof.com/Mambo/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=192&Itemid=27">featherproof</a> or even <a href="http://mhpbooks.com/book.php?id=376">Melville House</a>, but really too inimitable, explosive, and new to compare to anything currently on the scene. <br />
<br />
So how does Frey describe the kinds of projects he wants to see his laborers tackling? Here is a list of the statements he's made on the subject:<br />
<ul><li>Frey believed that Harry Potter and the Twilight series had awakened a ravenous market of readers and were leaving a substantial gap in their wake. He wanted to be the one to fill it. There had already been wizards, vampires, and werewolves. Aliens, Frey predicted, would be next. (from Suzanne Mozes)</li>
<li>Frey said he was interested in conceiving commercial ideas that would sell extremely well. (from Suzanne Mozes)</li>
<li>“I’m sorry, but we’re looking for high-concept ideas that we can pitch in one sentence. We know it sounds cynical, but it’s what we know we can sell.” (through his assistant, NY Mag)</li>
<li>In the meeting, Almon handed me a two-page outline, something that Frey said he uses in all his projects, to help my book with pacing. It was a classical Greek three-act structure, with suggested page numbers and advice on tracking the emotional narrative of the book, similar to a redemptive Hollywood movie. (from Suzanne Mozes)</li>
</ul>Interesting: an "art factory" that, by Frey's own definition, <i>doesn't produce art.</i><br />
<br />
Interesting... interesting...<br />
<br />
What am I saying? "Interesting"? Like hell it is! There's nothing interesting about this at all! The guy is a liar and a fraud! He started as a hack screenwriter, wrote a memoir full of stuff he made up, got a 1.5 million dollar book deal for something that reads like Raymond Carver on Robitussin, and now he's exploiting writers to produce garbage so he gets even more money for DOING SHIT THAT IS WRONG. Am I the only one who can see this? Am I the only one here who is sane? Listen, American literary culture: stop picking on Jonathan Franzen. Here's the dude whose glasses you need to steal.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_T3_62xJBgCw/TQj3ptg-lsI/AAAAAAAAAFQ/cRdHruMajms/s1600/frey.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="286" n4="true" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_T3_62xJBgCw/TQj3ptg-lsI/AAAAAAAAAFQ/cRdHruMajms/s400/frey.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">And if he isn't wearing his glasses, knock the contact lenses out of his eyes!</span></div><br />
OK, OK, I'm not advocating violence here. But really, guys. Stop checking your Amazon ranking, minimize your grant applications, close Publishers' Marketplace for just one second, and listen to me. This is worth getting upset about.<br />
<br />
Because here's the thing. We all want to be read. We all want to have enough money to keep writing. And we're all aware of the nonsensical demands of the industry that can provide us those things -- an industry all too often populated by soulless dreameaters who care nothing for the survival of our art. But we do not have to become like them. The one thing we have going for us, the only thing that makes our struggle worth doing, is the fact that <b>we're right</b>. We're the ones who give and don't just take. We're the ones who value something more than money. We're the ones who question the status quo. And that doesn't just make our lives bearable -- it makes the lives of the people who read our work more bearable, too.<br />
<br />
So let me end this on a positive note. There's nothing we can do to stop James Frey. But there's also nothing he can do to stop us. We just have to remember not to believe his lies: about what happened, what he's doing, or what matters, on the page or off, in a writer's life. <br />
<br />
There's more I could say about this -- there's always more I could say -- but for the time being, I consider James Frey properly chewed out.The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1089597213803140907.post-26104819526157454462010-12-09T12:36:00.022-05:002010-12-17T23:47:12.334-05:00Public Enemy Number One, pt. 2<span style="font-size: small;">This is part of a series about James Frey—</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/11/public-enemy-number-one-pt-1.html">Introduction</a> (why this guy?), <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/12/public-enemy-number-one-pt-1.html">Part 1</a> (on the memoir), <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/12/public-enemy-number-one-pt-3.html">Part 3</a> (on the fiction factory)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span> <br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">On the (new) novel</span></div><br />
BRIGHT SHINY MORNING, which is either James Frey's first published novel or his second, depending on when you started the meter, is made up of several loosely connected narrative threads, featuring a diverse collection of characters in the LA area. Frey includes all types, and believe me, they are all <i>types</i>: a vain and secretly gay movie star, a sad but hardworking Mexican-American maid, a struggling but upwardly mobile African American couple (whose mamas got their backs), a philosphical hobo and the teenage runaway he takes under his wing, and a couple of crazy-in-love kids who go to the City of Angels to seek their fortune, only to incur the wrath of an evil gang of motorbike riders.<br />
<br />
Yes, you heard that right. An evil gang of motorbike riders.<br />
<br />
One could argue that the prose here invites comparisons to Raymond Carver. Here's the one I would make. Imagine an uneven short story collection by Raymond Carver. Now imagine that Ed Wood writes a screenplay based on that short story collection. Then imagine somebody hires James Frey to write the novelization of that screenplay. That would be the book BRIGHT SHINY MORNING. <br />
<br />
Such a comparison is the only way I can think to explain the rapid tonal shifts of this book. Every few pages, the writing veers from the effectively sentimental ("It took four surgeries to put his legs back together. His football career was over.") to the half-baked hardboiled ("Young, angry men, often without stable homes, are given money, guns, a sense of respect, a sense of belonging, and turned loose to buy, sell, rob and kill... There is little the police, or anyone, can do about it. Arrest one and there are ten more, twenty more, fifty more.") to the sexploitational ("He is an American hero. Amberton Parker. Symbol of truth and justice, honesty and integrity. Amberton Parker. Public heterosexual. Private homosexual."). <br />
<br />
Yet these shifts in tone are rarely accompanied by the other shifts -- in diction, in sentence structure -- that we might expect in a book that delves into so many different lives and subcultures. Frey's voice, the same "tough guy tells it like it is" tone of his <strike>memoir</strike> <strike>first novel</strike> <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/12/public-enemy-number-one-pt-1.html">whatever</a>, doesn't allow us to access the inner worlds of these people, the intricately woven threads of their internal logic. Frey announces their emotions in quick cliches -- "it broke her heart," "he was reduced physically and mentally," "she did what she could to bolster his spirits" -- and sometimes we get a character's stray thought (for example, the Mexican-American maid contemplates saying fuck you to her boss, though that "would go against everything her parents had taught her"). But the self-awareness is missing. The characters that Frey holds up as admirable here are selfless strivers who never look inward; they're forever single-mindedly focused on doing honest labor to get ahead, sure, but more importantly (and without exception) to support dependent family members. No one -- except for bad boy Frey himself, of course -- calls bullshit on the system. The characters' occasional retreats from contemporary culture, always into inarticulate depression, are self-indulgent fugues that they eventually snap out of, for the good of their loved ones.<br />
<br />
At times, these characters remind me of the characters in the great social-realist novels of the 20th century: <i>Sister Carrie</i> by Dreiser or <i>The Grapes of Wrath</i> by Steinbeck. Those novels were content to depict ordinary people primarily as the unwitting fuel for the cruel machinery of capitalism, rather than as complexly thinking individuals. Yet what machinery is Frey protesting against here? It doesn't seem to be capitalism, at least not exactly. In the world of BRIGHT SHINY MORNING, the busy worker bees confront obstacles, but as long as they don't set their sights unreasonably high, they're able to achieve their dreams. Illegal immigrants raise their daughter up right; despite a sports-career-ending injury, the African-American football player and his wife have an idyllic marriage and a small home; the Mexican-American maid finds love and a job at Staples; even the crazy-in-love kids have a cute wedding (though they shouldn't have crossed those motorbike riders). And it's abundantly clear that the hobo's status on the outskirts of society is the result of his alcoholism: his primary virtue is in trying to help his meth-addled charge avoid the same fate. The game isn't easy, but it also isn't rigged, and hard work, however humbling, results invariably in the spiritual payoff of contentment.<br />
<br />
What Frey does see as nasty, demeaning, and fruitless is the attempt on the part of any ordinary person to enter the glittering world of LA's entertainment industry. In what I see as the novel's iconic scene, Maddie (Crazy-in-Love-Kid: Female) whispers to her lover, "I think I want to be an actress... Yeah, I want to be a movie star." "Really?" he replies with some chagrin, and then, "If that's what you really want, give it a shot." But of course she's just kidding: "It's not what I really want...I got what I really want." What's that? "I'm pregnant." <br />
<br />
OK, so this girl isn't exactly a fount of intelligence, imagination, or ambition, and I can't say I expected her to do anything much more interesting (April Wheeler she's certainly not). But what is Frey actually trying to say here, and in the rest of this novel, which he has set so squarely and insistently in Hollywood USA? It seems to me that the main theme of this novel is that creating art, creating entertainment, is inherently vain, selfish, and false. The pure of heart don't allow themselves to be drawn to its artificial glow; instead, they keep their eyes on the things of this world: the broom in their hand, the baby on their lap, the time-tested rituals of graduation, marriage, the keeping of a home.<br />
<br />
Nowhere in the book is this theme more clearly explored than in the section -- starting on page 229 of the paperback edition and continuing through page 240 -- that lists dozens of aspiring entertainers, the age at which they arrived in LA, the age that they are now, and sometimes, their day jobs, which range in quality from lousy to tragic. Here are a few examples (direct quote).<br />
<blockquote>Katy. Actress. Left her husband and three children to become a star. Works at a grocery store. Cries herself to sleep every night. [...]<br />
<br />
Lee. Actor/model. Moved to Los Angeles at 21. Waiter and occasionally a bartender. He is now 27. <br />
<br />
Brad. Actor. Moved at 20. Works as a bartender. He is now 27.<br />
<br />
Barry. Singer. Moved at 18. Works in the ticket window at the Wax Museum. He is now 31.<br />
<br />
Bert. Writer. Moved at 24. Bartender. He is now 50.</blockquote>And this doesn't even include the ones who have turned to prostitution. Oh, they're victims, and it's sad, so sad: Frey practically orders us to pity them. But there's something more going on here. If we're to assume that, despite their time downwind from the fragrant streets of San Francisco, these folks are still capable of rational thought, then they can't just be victims. They're chumps. <br />
<br />
And Frey's pity for them is well seasoned with condescension. By choosing to list their ages or their menial day jobs, rather than, for example, why they love the movies, what inspires them, or what their greatest creative achievement to date has been, he's implying a couple of things. First, he's suggesting that the time spent in pursuit of their dream has been entirely wasted; that the quest itself (for an acting career, or a screenwriting career, or a directing career) has resulted in no personal artistic satisfaction for these people; that it's impossible to produce anything of value without being <i>successful</i>, and that success always means industry recognition and more important, fame. Second, he's suggesting that their perseverance is not admirable, but pathetic. It may be sad for a 20-year-old to want to direct films, but it's even sadder for a 30-year old to want to, and when a 40-year-old is still trying, it's flat out heartbreaking. Third, he's making these characters interchangeable with each other, and with anyone else who has the same aspirations. "It is estimated that 100,000 people a year move to Los Angeles to pursue careers in the entertainment industry," he gravely informs us, in a paragraph that reads like a PSA. "They come from all over America, all over the world. They were stars at home, they were smart or funny or beautiful. When they arrive, they join the 100,000 that came the year before they did, and they await the 100,000 who will arrive the year after, the year after, the year after." In other words, these people aren't making a conscious choice to live their lives pursuing their passion. Instead, they're <i>stunted, </i>they're <i>delusional.</i> They're losers who either can't or won't grow up, who aren't willing to accept the self-evident truth that <b>they aren't special</b>. Because their work has been deemed unworthy by the industry, because they haven't been chosen, they deserve our pity but not our ear. <br />
<br />
And that's the thing: unlike, say, Jonathan Franzen, who locates someone very like himself in an unsuccessful screenwriter in his novel THE CORRECTIONS, or John Kennedy Toole, who allowed us to see both the lunacy and the majesty of his crank writer's prose, Frey does not bother giving even one of these wannabes a subplot. I think of a line from Aaron Sorkin's screenplay for The Social Network: "If you'd invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook." This seems like something Frey might say. In the aforementioned passage and others, he comes across like the self-defeating voice in the back of every creative person's head. If you really wrote a screenplay, he seems to say, if you really knew how to act or sing, if you really had a vision as a director, wouldn't we have heard of you by now? Those people with regular 9-to-5 jobs, with marriages, with families -- those people really have something. What do you have? 'The work'? Give me a fuckin break.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_T3_62xJBgCw/TQEFY7v9M4I/AAAAAAAAAFM/FMrcVwlKR88/s1600/kissing+a+fool.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" n4="true" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_T3_62xJBgCw/TQEFY7v9M4I/AAAAAAAAAFM/FMrcVwlKR88/s320/kissing+a+fool.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Let's face it: not every creative person will achieve <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120723/quotes">something like this </a>in his lifetime.</span></div><br />
And what about the successful entertainment-people in this book? Well, they're even worse, because the only way to that type of success, as Frey sees it, is through a mile-long shit-filled pipeline of total ethical corruption and megalomania. The novel's one villain (OK, except for those pesky motorbike riders) is Amberton Parker, the "public heterosexual, private homosexual." A matinee idol along the lines of a Brad Pitt or a Tom Cruise, his entire life is about keeping up appearances -- to others, but also to himself. He's obsessed with the way he looks, his clothes, his hair, and obsessed with being loved. As the novel progresses, he uses his wealth and power to enslave Kevin Jackson, a young agent at the talent management firm that represents him, in a kind of bizarre sexual servitude. But even as he blackmails this dude into sleeping with him, he's still not satiated -- he still wants Kevin to admit that he does, in fact, love Amberton, despite all appearances to the contrary. "Do you love being with me?" he asks. "Do you love making love to me?... Do you at least love my body?" Kevin's responses are "No," "No," and "No," but Amberton is unfazed: "You're hot when you're angry," he says, and forces himself on the guy once again. <br />
<br />
Amberton, the only character in the novel who has chosen to make a life in the arts, is a kind of vampire. He doesn't care about the work itself, just about how big an ego boost it will provide; he chooses projects based on the fawning letters that accompany the scripts, or on the basis of "which movie will make the most money and take the shortest time to shoot." We never see him actually at work on a movie set or thinking about acting. All we see is the opulent life this fame has given him, and the fact that for Amberton that's still not enough -- it still feels empty. And it's empty, at bottom, because it's founded on a lie. <br />
<br />
In Amberton's case, that lie is his supposed heterosexuality. But I don't think Frey is really interested in the fact Amberton is gay; what Frey hones in on is the falsehood. In the passage that introduces Amberton, Frey hits us over the head with this again and again. Amberton dates "the biggest!!! actress in the world. Dates a model who goes by one name. Dates a debutante, an Olympic swimmer the winner of six gold medals, a prima ballerina." Amberton even gets married to a woman and has three children. And because of all this -- and ONLY because of this -- is he allowed to become a major action star and romantic hero. Long before Kevin arrives on the scene, we see Amberton is corrupted: he's betrayed his true self, sold his soul, and as he roams the world searching for someone or something to fill the void inside him, he's aware he's done it knowingly, that he's brought this on himself.<br />
<br />
I mean, the guy even "wr[ote] a memoir."<br />
<br />
So, in the world of BRIGHT SHINY MORNING, creative people are one of two kinds: chumps or vampires. And although we pity the chumps, we can't exactly hate the vampires either, because fame, once tasted, cannot be untasted; the ego's mad craving never stops, and nothing is ever enough again. Or so James Frey would have it.<br />
<br />
<div align="center"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">continue to <span style="color: #c16e00;"><a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/12/public-enemy-number-one-pt-3.html">Part 3</a></span>...</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1089597213803140907.post-87018858682348054782010-12-06T14:18:00.035-05:002010-12-17T23:48:04.046-05:00Public Enemy Number One, pt. 1<blockquote><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">I want to be rich and I want lots of money / I don't care about clever, I don't care about funny / I want lots of clothes and fuckloads of diamonds / I hear people die while trying to find them / And I'll take my clothes off and it will be shameless / 'Cause everyone knows that's how you get famous... / I don't know what's right and what's real / Anymore...</span> </blockquote><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">- Lily Allen, "The Fear"</span></div></blockquote><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">This is part of a series about James Frey—</span><br />
<a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/11/public-enemy-number-one-pt-1.html"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Introduction</span></a><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"> (why this guy?), </span><a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/12/public-enemy-number-one-pt-2.html"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Part 2</span></a><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"> (on his recent novel), <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/12/public-enemy-number-one-pt-3.html">Part 3</a> (on the fiction factory)</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">James Frey is not personally responsible for the excesses of contemporary literary culture, but in his work and his career, he has come to stand, for me, as a symbol of all those excesses taken to their worst extreme. Everyone knows that James Frey is a liar -- that's a statement of fact, not a value judgment. He's lied in print, on television, and on the radio. But lots of people lie for all kinds of reasons, and the simple fact that someone lied does not, in my opinion, make that person permanently contemptible. The reason that James Frey is permanently contemptible is because he's also a hypocrite. When he calls himself a writer, an artist, he is not affirming a commitment to truth and beauty, a commitment that at times comes at great personal cost. He is offering an alibi for actions that are clearly, nakedly motivated by a desire for money and fame. Someday, when sentient robots inspect the dross of our ridiculous civilization for clues as to what, exactly, went so terribly awry, they will come across the moldering archive of Frey's contributions to the world of letters, and those robots will weep until their face plates are streaked with rust.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Who is James Frey, anyway? He's most famous as the guy whose addiction memoir, A MILLION LITTLE PIECES, a runaway bestseller and Oprah Book Club selection in which he referred to himself as a Criminal with a capital C, turned out to be heavily fictionalized, despite the author's public assertions that the book was accurate and had even been fact-checked by Doubleday, his publisher (which, obviously, it never was). Despite the subsequent media storm and an avalanche of hate mail, Frey kept writing, eventually publishing the novel BRIGHT SHINY MORNING with HarperCollins in 2008. His most recent project is Full Fathom Five, a young adult book packaging company.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">To keep this post manageable, I'm going to divide it up into three chunks: the first about Frey's memoir, the next on his novel, and the last on his book packaging company.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large;">On the Memoir</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">I haven't read A MILLION LITTLE PIECES cover to cover, and the scandal surrounding it has been discussed to death elsewhere, so I'll do my best to keep this short. But I do think the debate over this book provides a good illustration of the kind of "controversy" Frey has courted over his career. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Because the thing is, in my opinion, there should be no controversy, at least not literary controversy. What happened with A MILLION LITTLE PIECES had nothing to do with art and everything to do with money. Frey was financially motivated to publish the book as memoir, not as a novel, and then, when the factual inaccuracy was discovered, he claimed to be an artist fighting the good fight. The fact that <i>anybody</i> listened to him, that <i>anybody</i> took him seriously, says to me that our national debates about literature have degenerated to the point of total incomprehensibility. In the 1950's, Americans asked more of their </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiz_show_scandals"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">game shows</span></a><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"> than we do of the literary world today.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Consider this: according to an <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/sep/15/usa.world">article</a> on Frey in the Guardian, Frey's agent submitted A MILLION LITTLE PIECES to seventeen New York publishers as a novel, and all of them rejected it, including Doubleday. Only when it was resubmitted as a memoir did Doubleday make an offer. The words in the book were the same, but the categorization was different. So what exactly did James Frey think was going on? If he believed the accuracy of the book didn't matter, why did he think they changed their minds?</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">I would argue that there are two basic modes of reading. One is to read for aesthetic pleasure, and the other is to read for information. The concept of the "found poem," or of appropriated text in fictive works by postmodern authors like Donald Barthelme, hinges on this division of reading modes. With a found poem, readers approach text that was intended to be read as information -- instructions in a grammar book, poorly translated warning signs around a swimming pool -- in an aesthetic mode. And of course, approaching a book in a search for information can grant value to aesthetically questionable material. Everyone's familiar with the old saw, "Truth is stranger than fiction"; we say that because we allow nonfiction writers liberties that we wouldn't give their fiction-writing counterparts. Coincidences, freak accidents, out-there statistics might seem "unbelievable," but we believe them anyway if we're given to understand they've been verified. What frequently makes nonfiction interesting is the very thing that makes fiction uninteresting: it seems implausible, farfetched, too perfect -- like someone made it up.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Fiction sometimes contains kernels (or more) of information -- historical details, geography, the nuts and bolts of a character's profession -- and nonfiction can offer aesthetic pleasures, too. Naturally, the reader often switches back and forth over the course of the book</span><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">, sometimes enjoying a well-crafted turn of phrase, sometimes learning a new fact. But for a book to "work," it doesn't have to provide an equally valuable experience to readers in both modes. For example, I would strongly advise against reading CHRONIC CITY for factual information about the life and death of Marlon Brando, or most of the other pop culture subjects it touches on, even though the aesthetic pleasures it offers are off the charts. And I haven't read Obama's DREAMS OF MY FATHER, so this is not my opinion, but I've heard several (hugely Obama-supporting) folks comment on its overdone sentimentality and unpalatable earnestness; at least one rabidly Democratic yet perhaps painfully astute reader told me it "sucked." But a book of its kind at least has the potential to convey information that could be useful to voters: factual information about Obama's background, and the added bonus of some insight into his values and reasoning. Unless it was ghostwritten. In which case I'm going to have to vote for Palin next time, because everyone knows she writes her books all by herself.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_T3_62xJBgCw/TPlb9ikSepI/AAAAAAAAAFI/WsM4EhnciSI/s1600/SARAHWINK.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_T3_62xJBgCw/TPlb9ikSepI/AAAAAAAAAFI/WsM4EhnciSI/s320/SARAHWINK.jpg" width="240" /></span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">My point is that evaluating the quality of a book is always partly dependent on knowing if it's supposed to be read as nonfiction. And whether or not Frey saw his own book as having enough artistic merit to draw an audience primarily motivated by aesthetic pleasure, the rejections must have made him realize that the publishers who had read it didn't agree -- that they believed it would be valuable to readers only for the information it contained, presumably the life lessons gleaned from his battle against addiction. This meant that he had three options. </span></div><ul><li><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><b>First,</b> he could have tried submitting the novel to small, independent presses and first novel contests as it was, or with minor revisions, "sticking to his guns," trusting his original vision. If he was unable to sell his first book, he could put it in a drawer, write another one, and go through the process again. </span></li>
<ul><li><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Let me point out two obvious things about this: first, it would not have made him rich and famous, and second, it would have been sincere and honest, both factually and artistically. Our culture values wealth and fame and does not value factual or artistic sincerity and honesty, so in the story of James Frey, many people have concluded that the mere possibility of wealth and fame, the simple <i>temptation </i>of it, must have been utterly irresistible -- that no further explanation is needed to understand why Frey did what he did. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Maybe this would be more plausible if James Frey was straight out of rehab, couch-surfing and freegan, so that publishing a book looked like the only possible golden ticket to save him from his depressed existence. But that was not the case. James Frey was a successful screenwriter who penned the 1998 David Schwimmer vehicle <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120723/">Kissing a Fool</a>, among other scripts, and the advance Doubleday ultimately offered him for the book was $50,000 -- not chump change, by any stretch of the imagination, but not big bucks by Hollywood standards either. One might, in fact, argue that <i>he had already sold out</i>, so doing it twice was unnecessary. In any case, they made him an offer, to misquote the Godfather, that he certainly could have refused.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Let me point out another obvious fact: many, many talented writers -- writers much more talented than James Frey -- have penned loosely autobiographical first novels and found themselves in a situation similar to the one he was in at this time. Most of them have not falsely published those novels as nonfiction, instead choosing to go the route described above (sticking to their visions, etc.). What happens to these people? No one puts them on TV, or gives them bags of money with which to purchase tasteful modern art. No one publishes their second books with a huge publicity campaign, fueled by the controversy over their first, or reviews those second books in the New York Times, </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/books/12masl.html"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">just to give them another chance</span></a><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"> ("He got a second act. He got another chance. Look what he did with it. He stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park."). These people are left, at best, to a small readership, second best, to their pleasures of their art, and at worst, to the prospect of a life in which that art lives on only in a diminished aspect. Rejection is horrible, those editors' terse emails like a spam virus of the soul, stalling everything that once opened with ease, closing every window. Yet it's a reality too, one that sorely tests the author's commitment to what he claims to hold dear -- a reality Frey wasn't willing to face. </span></li>
</ul><li><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><b>Second,</b> Frey could have tried to "fix" the novel, to make it more palatable to commercial editors. Although memoir was a popular genre when he was submitting his book, first novels were -- DUH -- still getting published. <i>They're still getting published now, with the economy in the toilet! </i> Frey could have studied up on what sold and tried to make his book conform to those narrow standards.</span></li>
<ul><li><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">But that would have taken work. Next pls.</span></li>
</ul><li><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><b>Third,</b> James Frey could have rewritten the book <i>as a memoir,</i> adhering as closely as he could to the reality of his past while still making the prose, structure, and overall vision beautiful, engaging, and insightful. Because -- and again, here, we enter the Kingdom of the Obvious -- people do, in fact, write memoirs that are </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Autobiography-Face-Lucy-Grealy/dp/006097673X"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">actually true, and actually literary nevertheless.</span></a></li>
<ul><li><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">I imagine that, like every issue of the New York Times, all memoirs contain some factual errors -- "honest mistakes," the kinds of slips of memory and detail or even occasional, minor, intentional embellishment that we all make when recalling our lives. I am not arguing for raking authors over the coals for these kinds of errors. </span></li>
<ul><li><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">However, the errors in A MILLION LITTLE PIECES are not these kinds of errors. Frey recalls, for one example, that he spent three months in prison, when in fact he spent no months in prison. That would probably be the first thing I'd suggest he edit out.</span></li>
</ul><li><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">But again, doing this would have taken work.</span></li>
</ul></ul><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">What Frey decided to do instead was not one of the three options I would have presented to him. He decided to do something that no ethical person would consider an option at all, which was to sell a largely fictional book as nonfiction. He did so knowing that the book's primary selling point in the eyes of the publisher was the fact it was supposedly true. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Frey has pointed out that the publisher must have also known the book was untrue, because the revisions his editor suggested -- shifting timelines, altering characters -- were geared toward improving the story, not toward accuracy. I have no idea what actually happened, but this certainly seems plausible, since a lot of sleazy people work in publishing. But the fact that someone else allowed or even encouraged him to lie doesn't make sense as an excuse for lying. To me, this reads a bit like Bernie Madoff blaming the feeder funds.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">But here's the thing. People make mistakes. Sometimes they exaggerate or lie or get pretentious. Sometimes they sell out, and not even for so much money that it makes any sense. But this, in and of itself, doesn't mean they've entirely thrown their craft under the bus of their own greed, because sometimes they're also honest and repentant about their motivations.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">For example: in his excellent essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," David Foster Wallace tears into what he describes as an "essaymercial" by Frank Conroy, author and chair of the Iowa Writers Workshop, which numbers among the promotional materials for a luxury cruise. Wallace writes: </span></span></span></span><br />
<blockquote><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">The really major badness is that the project and placement of 'My Celebrity Cruise...' are sneaky and duplicitous and far beyond whatever eroded pales still exist in terms of literary ethics. Conroy's 'essay' appears as an inset, on skinnier pages and with different margins than the rest of the brochure, creating the impression that it has been excerpted from some large and objective thing Conroy wrote. But it hasn't been. The truth is that Celebrity Cruises paid Frank Conroy up-front to write it, even though nowhere in or around the essay is there anything acknowledging that it's a paid endorsement...Celebrity Cruises is trying to position an ad in such a way that we come to it with the lowered guard and leading chin we reserve for coming to an essay. </span></span></span></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Yet, after being found out for his complicity in such a depressing, monetarily motivated scheme, what is Conroy's reaction? Does he blame the limited literary-essay market? Does he blame the brochure's publishers? Does he call it a "coping mechanism"? Does he say he "struggled with the idea of it"? Does he claim he was bending genres? Does he defend the essay as essentially sincere? No. Instead he admits, with what DFW describes as "the small sigh that precedes a certain kind of weary candor":</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">"I prostituted myself."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">What. A. Guy.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">continue to <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/12/public-enemy-number-one-pt-2.html">Part 2</a>...</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1089597213803140907.post-58404332857703926852010-11-23T12:08:00.000-05:002010-11-23T12:08:39.106-05:00I am a double agent for the KGB, pt. 3<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_T3_62xJBgCw/TOre7kGqccI/AAAAAAAAAFE/U3rjNx6iXHM/s1600/spy+vs.+spy.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" ox="true" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_T3_62xJBgCw/TOre7kGqccI/AAAAAAAAAFE/U3rjNx6iXHM/s1600/spy+vs.+spy.gif" /></a></div><br />
Just thought I'd mention that my review of Patrick Somerville's masterful and amazing short story collection, <em>The Universe in Miniature in Miniature</em>, is now up on the site for the KGB Bar lit journal. Check it out here: <a href="http://www.kgbbar.com/lit/book_reviews/the_universe_in_miniature_in_miniature">http://www.kgbbar.com/lit/book_reviews/the_universe_in_miniature_in_miniature</a>The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1089597213803140907.post-33368558216540144802010-11-22T13:08:00.013-05:002010-12-10T10:11:22.321-05:00Public Enemy Number One, IntroductionFor some time now, I've thought about adding a feature to this blog, a category that -- alongside reviews and rants -- would constitute another kind of post in my repetoire. Sometimes I considered calling it "Banned from the Shop." Sometimes I considered calling it "File Under: People Who Should Be On Fire." But I think the most accurate label for posts of this kind is actually the simplest: "The Chaw Shop Enemies List." And so it shall be named.<br />
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<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_T3_62xJBgCw/TOqvhuId0gI/AAAAAAAAAE8/9NqvBKuj2Zo/s1600/nixon-enemies-list-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="223" ox="true" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_T3_62xJBgCw/TOqvhuId0gI/AAAAAAAAAE8/9NqvBKuj2Zo/s320/nixon-enemies-list-2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">I've been hard at work.</span></div><br />
The main reason I didn't start the Enemies List sooner was that it's taken me some time to work out, what, exactly, constitutes an enemy of the Shop. While one part of my brain just keeps screaming the words "<a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2139452/">Michiko Kakutani</a>!" over and over until the syllables become shrill and meaningless as the blaring of a car alarm, I don't think that writing profoundly misguided, intellectually lazy, sentence-level uninteresting criticism is in itself enough to cast one forever from the Valhalla of my good graces. <br />
<br />
The fact is, as much as I dislike her articles, Kakutani -- like a precocious eleven-year-old with an Amazon account and a thesaurus -- is simply out to share her opinions with the world. By all appearances, she truly believes in the validity of even her most hilariously deluded misconceptions. When she writes a sentence like, "Alice Sebold's first novel, <i><a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2009/12/funny-bones.html">The Lovely Bones</a></i>, is anything but a hokey, Ouija-board mystery," she is not, I think, giggling to herself about how she's just punked the nation's readers into taking what could have easily passed as a Lifetime movie novelization seriously as literature. She's only trying to communicate her own (lamentably uninspected) experience of the book. When she headlines her review of Kazuo Ishiguro's exquisitely constructed masterpiece <i>The Unconsoled, </i>"From Kazuo Ishiguro, A New Annoying Hero" and describes it within as a "shaggy dog narrative... [that] sorely tries the reader's patience," she's just expressing her frustration over the admitted failure of the jacket copy to spell out what in the heck is going on with the plot. There's a sensibility at work here, and after reading a couple of her pieces, it's easy enough to recognize it: Kakutani doesn't like to be confused, not when her head hurts and she has a book report due. She doesn't like to get lost, not even for a second, because that's weird and scary and might give her bad dreams. So whenever these things happen, she complains, and loud.<br />
<br />
Despite the disturbing cultural consequences of this bawling anti-intellectualism, concealed in a thin snugli of superficial erudition, I find someone like Kakutani -- or her somewhat less irritating colleague at the Times, A.O. Scott, who drew my ire <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/04/future-of-criticism-or-o-scott-time-to.html">here</a> -- difficult to hate for long, for the simple reason that, although she may be allergic to serious thinking, she does value books, does look to them for at least some of the things they can in fact provide: instantly accessible entertainment and emotion, for example, if not formal originality or ideas or substance. To someone like Kakutani, books do matter, do nourish and sustain (even if she prefers that nourishment to be minimally chewy). They are a form of communication between human minds (even if what she prefers them to communicate would often be better suited to a tweet). To her, books aren't mere products, valuable only in terms of their sales; they do have intrinsic worth (even if she assesses that worth haphazardly midway through her first and only speed-read of the work in question). Kakutani cares about fiction -- she just has a painfully limited understanding of all the different ways that it can operate, and she's too impatient to sit still while someone else explains it to her. Maybe she's just never seen the need to waste all that time thinking it through, since she doesn't write stories herself and she's got a steady job already. But, whatever her reasons may be, although I don't respect her opinions, I could hardly call her an aesthetic psychopath.<br />
<br />
Let me explain what I mean by that term. It's my understanding that, in psychology, a psychopath is someone who <i>understands </i>human empathy and moral motivations intellectually, who can often "read" people exceptionally well, but who is incapable of <i>feeling </i>the corresponding emotions that come, for most, as a natural consequence of that knowledge: tenderness toward others; joy in emotional intimacy; guilt and shame when he sets out to deliberately hurt someone. In this way, a psychopath is essentially different from someone who's ignorant or mentally challenged, in that he's fully capable of comprehending his full range of options and the consequences of choices he makes. Psychopaths know what they "should" do; they just don't care.<br />
<br />
An aesthetic psychopath, then -- and I use this term not as a psychological diagnosis, but strictly as metaphor -- would have to be someone who <em>understood</em> his art, who studied it closely and learned its tricks, and who knew, at least on some level, what it was capable of, the dizzying heights and devastating lows to which it could subject the human mind and heart, the scope of what it could convey. In other words, he would have to be aware of the range of choices, and the consequences of those choices, available to a practitioner of his craft. A non-psychopath, so informed by study and experience, might become even painfully sensitive to the inadequacies and subtle triumphs of his own work, and would engage ever deeper with others whom he recognizes are on the same quest, seeing their ambitions and shortcomings in excruciating relief. He would, in time, become a master of his art, and a mentor to those he instructed.<br />
<br />
An aesthetic psychopath, on the other hand, would be someone who knew all that stuff, sure, but who didn't, pardon my French, give a rat's ass about any of it. Only someone like this -- the Patrick Bateman of the literary world -- could be a true enemy of the Shop. And now, I'm both pleased and chagrined to say, I think I found him.<br />
<br />
Please allow me to introduce our guest; he's a man of wealth and taste. Submitted for your consideration as Chaw Shop Enemy Number one, I present...<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_T3_62xJBgCw/TOm6n8H7HXI/AAAAAAAAAE4/611DB_njUhg/s1600/james+frey.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="274" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_T3_62xJBgCw/TOm6n8H7HXI/AAAAAAAAAE4/611DB_njUhg/s320/james+frey.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">James Frey, j'accuse.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
In my next post, I'll dig into the particular grounds for thus awarding him, including <a href="http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/69474/">this</a>. But in the meantime, thanks for reading. You're still on my good side.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;">continue to <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/12/public-enemy-number-one-pt-1.html">Part 1</a>... </div></div>The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1089597213803140907.post-24010122852879718712010-10-29T14:12:00.009-04:002010-11-23T07:45:58.583-05:00Degree of Difficulty, pt. 2When given the hypothetical choice between the superpowers of flying and invisibility, I have always, without hesitation, chosen invisibility. Although flying would be wonderful during rush hour or late at night when subway service is spotty, there's something both profoundly appealing and alluringly disturbing about knowing what people really think of you -- what they say when you're not around. It's partly for this reason, I think, that I have always loved the writing workshop. Although most (or at least some) participants act aware of the writer's presence and her feelings when discussing a story draft, the conceit of most workshops I've attended is that the writer is in "the booth" for the period of the discussion. Though she can see and hear the conversation, she can't take part in it, can't spring to her work's defense or agree with a certain reader's interpretation. The purpose is not for the writer to intrude into the reader's experience of her story, but to eavesdrop on it: to find out what exactly the piece communicated, and what it failed to get across.<br />
<br />
Writing workshops have been an invaluable part of my development as a writer. Probably the best two years of my life were spent in grad school, where my fiction was alternately attacked and devoured by a ravenous pack of wild intellectuals; I still wear their scars with pride. So, as part of a self-imposed campaign not to drown myself in the Central Park reservoir before I turn thirty, pockets weighed down with candy corn, craft beer caps, and zip drives containing my unpublished oeuvre, I recently decided to sign up for an extracurricular writing class conveniently located in my nabe. I lucked out big time: it's an excellent group, and the reads on my work have been generous and thorough. But returning to that Conference Table of Broken Dreams (because that's what a flawed story is, isn't it? a broken dream?) after three years' absence has gotten me thinking about difficulty again, and the way it's addressed in the academic environment where so much debut fiction starts.<br />
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The writing workshop is, by its nature, biased in favor of the short story. A short story can be submitted in a lone chunk, read in one sitting, and discussed in its entirety during a single session. Although the draft of a story may be rough and the reading experience may involve an overtly critical approach (line-editing, etc.), the experience of reading and talking about a short story in a workshop is basically pretty similar to the way students would read and talk about a short story anywhere else. To workshop a novel or novella, on the other hand, requires a bigger leap. Split into twenty or thirty page chunks, the story is automatically digested differently than if it were presented in whole. A major factor in my experience of a novel, for example, is, "How fast did I feel compelled to read this?" The speed with which I'm propelled through a book isn't necessarily proportional to my enthusiasm for it (I read <i><a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/10/child-neglect-some-thoughts-on-emma.html">Room</a></i> and<i> </i><a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/03/magic-for-intermediates.html"><i>The Magicians</i></a> each in under two days), but it is a major part of the experience for me, something I nearly always mention when describing a book. Yet this large-scale momentum isn't something that can even be considered in the workshopping of a novel. And neither are other "macro" factors, like themes, image patterns, arc, or -- perhaps most important for our discussion here -- formal structure.<br />
<br />
Because that's where the question about difficulty comes in. Like the Philistine who stands too close to a pointillist painting and then complains about seeing nothing but dots, a workshop student may find himself stymied by excerpted sections of a novel that, viewed in the context of the entire work, might serve an obvious structural purpose. Then again, they might not. But given simply an isolated span of pages, he has no way to know. So novels, regardless of the extent to which they're innovative, are frequently perceived in workshop as more "difficult" -- more mysterious, unknowable, tougher to judge -- than even experimental short fiction.<br />
<br />
This is of course a fascinating contrast to the perception of difficulty by consumers of books, who (as the publishing industry knows all too well) seem to regard short stories with the same enthusiasm they normally reserve for spam email, but who occasionally deign to set aside their magic glowing Etch-a-Sketches for tomes like <i>Freedom</i>. (Those who aren't reading it <i>on</i> the Etch-a-Sketch, that is.) Maybe the reason for short stories' unpopularity isn't difficulty per se, but it's certainly something akin to it. Short stories, as a form, are characterized by qualities like compression and elision. For them to hold together, every element, sometimes even every word, has to serve a function. Stories, in other words, present a conundrum for many modern readers, in that their "blink-and-you-miss-it" aesthetic requires intense concentration. Although stories take much less time to read than novels do, they demand a different kind of time, ideally uninterrupted and sustained, and a reading style that hones in on detail and language over plot. And when you add formal experimentation into the mix, many readers will panic, thinking they've picked up a book of contemporary poetry by mistake. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_T3_62xJBgCw/TMsH29Cy-LI/AAAAAAAAAEw/b6wSTHdav2Y/s1600/caught_screaming.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" nx="true" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_T3_62xJBgCw/TMsH29Cy-LI/AAAAAAAAAEw/b6wSTHdav2Y/s1600/caught_screaming.png" /></a></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Don't let this be you.</span></div><div align="center"></div>But I don't mean to make fun. Reading a short story is an intellectual sprint, and not every jogger is good at sprinting. (I can enjoy a nice leisurely power walk, myself.) What I find interesting, though, is the fact that many readers, who are not writers themselves, who would never pick up a short story anthology or collection or a literary journal, or even flip to the fiction section in the New Yorker -- let alone formulate impassioned opinions about what was printed there -- manage to tackle and (in book clubs and other forums) actively discuss contemporary, formally complex novels like <i>The Time Traveler's Wife </i>or <i><a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2009/12/stuck-in-middle-with-you-pt-2.html">Middlesex</a></i>. By keeping their focus on the big picture, these non-writer readers glide over and see beyond the smaller stumbling blocks that become the exclusive and intensely debated focus of so many workshop discussions...and that sometimes derail authors midway through a manuscript.<br />
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Difficulty certainly is in the eye of the beholder -- that's an obvious enough point and one that I made in my <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/09/degree-of-difficulty-pt-1.html">previous post</a> about this subject. But difficulty is also in the means of transmission (short sections versus the complete manuscript) and the speed at which the work is consumed. Plus, there are doubtless other factors, too. So tell me, kind readers, what adds to your perception of difficulty in a piece of writing? What takes away from it? And if you could either fly or be invisible, would you still bother with reading at all?The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1089597213803140907.post-70273941171480320672010-10-22T12:28:00.017-04:002011-09-12T15:03:47.663-04:00Child Neglect: Some Thoughts on Emma Donoghue's RoomKids say the darndest things -- especially in contemporary literary fiction, where they have a tendency to shoot their mouths off on every subject from <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2010/04/for-kids-of-all-ages-pt-2-new-york-city.html">9/11</a> to <a href="http://chawshop.blogspot.com/2009/12/funny-bones.html">their own rapes and murders</a>. As a device, child-narration can be tough to pull off, but when it works, it's equally tough to resist. In his introduction to the Vintage Book of Amnesia, Jonathan Lethem cites amnesiacs as a natural subject for fiction, since invented characters, by their very nature, come to us without pasts, assembling themselves before our very eyes: "Conjured out of the void by a thin thread of sentences, every fictional assertion exists as a speck on a background of consummate blankness." Child characters are the same way, newly arrived and bewildered in a realm of unexplored possibility -- with an added bonus, too: as young creatures with still-developing minds, they are by nature curious, full of wonder and energy and the potential for intense joy or sadness over the most seemingly insignificant things.<br />
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Yet, when child-narration succeeds, it succeeds not because the child in question stays a blank, an innocent, but because she rapidly acquires her own specificity: because we see the adult person within her forming and transforming, struggling to get out. In his 2005 masterpiece Tideland, filmmaker Terry Gilliam tells the story of a lost child, Jeliza-Rose, who finds herself orphaned in a run-down farmhouse on a featureless plain when both of her parents die from drug addiction. Despite these dire circumstances, she subsists on her imaginings, and her beautiful visions of sentient Barbie doll heads, talking squirrels, floods, and rabbit holes share equal time with the setting's increasingly grisly realities (her neighbors include an overzealous taxidermist, and the subject of a botched lobotomy with a stash of dynamite under his bed). In a wonderfully weird introduction to the picture, Gilliam explains, that he's finally found his inner child, "and she's a little girl." It's clear from watching the movie that this is true. Even amid disaster and horror, Jeliza-Rose quickly reveals she is no tabula rasa for viewers to project their own child-selves onto. Like Gilliam himself, she has a distinct, idiosyncratic sensibility that would be recognizable no matter what world we saw refracted through her eyes.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_T3_62xJBgCw/TMGdA72CdEI/AAAAAAAAAD8/BkvRAmvfhuw/s1600/tideland.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="223" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_T3_62xJBgCw/TMGdA72CdEI/AAAAAAAAAD8/BkvRAmvfhuw/s400/tideland.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">It isn't just what she sees, but the <i>way </i>she sees it.</span></div><br />
Emma Donoghue's novel <i>Room</i> starts with a similar premise. The novel's narrator is Jack, a five year old boy, who is growing up in a grotesquely disturbing home environment: an eleven-by-eleven shed in a maniac's backyard. His mother, we learn, was kidnapped and imprisoned there at age nineteen, and since then, she's been raped almost daily by the psychopath (referred to only as "Old Nick," not his real name), who keeps her alive on a meager diet of frozen foods, canned goods, and pain pills. But, like Jeliza-Rose, he's never known a normal life, so to him, "Room" is the world: magical at some moments, frightening at others, but never monolithically vile.<br />
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In my opinion, the best moments of this novel unfold in this setting, a place at once otherworldly and plainly, grittily observed. It's clear that the story is set in the contemporary era -- Jack watches Dora the Explorer on TV -- yet the touches of pop culture, rather than grounding us, make the situation seem even more surreal and impossibly removed. Room is a realm where the traditional categories of realism versus fantasy no longer clearly apply. Divorced from the context of larger civilization, Jack and his mother are forced to construct their own society, their own rituals and meaning, and although these behaviors often seem escapist and deluded, confronting their daily deprivations would not just be unlivable for the mother, but incomprehensible for Jack. Instead, she teaches him to live in life as they know it, without an inkling of anything beyond the contents of their cork-lined cell.<br />
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A person's world is defined, we begin to see in Room, not by objective "truth" or even the sum total of knowledge available to humans somewhere, but by the knowledge passed down by authority figures within his particular community. The whole of North America was once unknown to Europeans; the whole of Europe was once unknown to North Americans. And Jack's mother doesn't speak Spanish, so to Jack, Spanish is not a "real language." For him, food or books or toys don't exist until they get inside Room; the idea of their manufacture or purchase is just as mind-boggling as a time before the universe's creation. He has no idea that Old Nick's nightly visits to his mom's mattress had anything to do with his own conception. And fairy tales are just as real as anything on the evening news. This is not magical realism, but reality <i>as the speaker knows it</i>. And, if Donoghue lingered for longer in Room, allowing Jack to engage with this reality as he grows up (or even just grows a little older), we would come to learn just as much about the particularities of his character as we would about a kid, say, in the Middle Ages, who treats bloodletting as a hated inevitability in service of a greater good (like modern orthodontics), but who still has other qualities, other traits and interests, that make him distinct.<br />
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Unfortunately, just as Jack is beginning to come into focus, rebelling against certain of his mom's restrictions (tellingly, his first disobedient act is to come out of the wardrobe where he sleeps at night to take a good look at his father/captor) while continuing to accord with others, Donoghue suddenly moves the plot in a whole new direction. Jack's mom begins to dismantle the ideas she's imparted to him since birth, fessing up that other boys and girls, sky and trees, are not "just TV," but real things, just past the door. And SPOILER ALERT, she's planning an escape.<br />
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It's at this point that, for me, Jack as a character begins to recede. His first experiences with the outside world, including a chase sequence where he leaps out of a moving truck, are page-turning stuff, and Donoghue makes a good point by showing him as more terrified and homesick than anything else as he encounters people and situations that just weeks earlier would have seemed as strange to him as taking a trip to Mars. But after a few pages of listening to him wax nostalgic about Rug and Sundaytreat (the one special item they got to ask Old Nick for each week), I realized, with a sinking feeling, that Donoghue really had no idea who this kid was. Jack's actions and interactions, his desires and fears, are profoundly predictable, scars left by his confinement. But there's nothing more personal under them, no sensibility at work that we could recognize even if his experiences had been different.<br />
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And so Donoghue switches gears. Jack becomes a passive observer of his mother's struggle to re-acclimate herself, and the story suddenly becomes something I'd flip past on Lifetime. In what's easily the worst scene I've read in awhile, Jack throws a temper tantrum just before his mother is supposed to be interviewed for TV -- so she<i> brings him with her</i> (to which I must say: WTFFF?), and he sits, silently listening and hardly commenting even in his narration, as she delivers <i>seven and a half pages of exposition and directly stated thematic material</i>. This is a disaster for the novel, not just because of the laziness of the fictive technique, but because it betrays the novel's central conceit: that Donoghue is at least attempting to relate this from the perspective of a plausible five-year-old.<br />
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OK, I get that Jack is smart, and that he's been trained to parrot back what people say on talk shows (it was part of how his mother taught him vocabulary back in Room). But being able to parrot back what a person said is a far cry from understanding it, or even finding it interesting. And, with the swirling newness of everything that would go into this event -- the lights, the cameras, the wires, the boom mike, the tech guys, the clipboards, the makeup -- I find it completely absurd to suggest that Jack would sit there, attentively listening to every word spoken, without ever becoming distracted or having a strong reaction of any kind. Donoghue has completely lost interest in him as a character, and it really fucking shows. If he were a real child, the treatment the author gives him in this scene would be akin to forgetting to pick him up at day care and leaving him there for four days.<br />
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The book never recovers from this huge misstep, in my opinion, not even with its lyrical tearjerker ending (though I'll admit that passage, a callback to Jack's mother's favorite storybook<i> Goodnight Moon</i>, is crudely effective even in its obviousness). And once I shut the cover, I found myself wondering why it all had to go so awry. Donoghue created a wonderful kid in the early chapters. It's just criminal that she let him die of total neglect.The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1089597213803140907.post-45607313762869758962010-10-13T10:00:00.004-04:002010-10-22T14:53:30.466-04:00Dying of Consumption: Bookstores, Libraries, E-books, & GuiltI used to think that libraries were virtuous. When I was a kid, trips to the library were akin to trips to church. Both environments were silent, hallowed, with soaring ceilings and an occasional homeless person. Both felt like sanctuaries for a certain kind of knowledge, a knowledge yoked together with duty and obligation: the sanctity of the Word. Both filled me with a strange, humbling sense of my own insignificance. I was not the first to read these pages, be they Bible or hymnal or storybook, and I would not be the last.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_T3_62xJBgCw/TLSFtX8GvVI/AAAAAAAAAD4/goVXiziJWmo/s1600/bookshelves.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" ex="true" height="265" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_T3_62xJBgCw/TLSFtX8GvVI/AAAAAAAAAD4/goVXiziJWmo/s400/bookshelves.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
The bookstore was nothing like either of these places. Growing up, I did most of my book shopping at Chapter One, a strip mall storefront conveniently positioned just a few doors down from a Baskin Robbins. They sold activity books with paint sets and Koosh balls attached to their covers, pop-up books whose complex origami had not yet been crushed by the mashing paws of other schoolchildren, Far Side collections like vast scrapbooks of hallucinations, chapter books bursting with educational mysteries whose answers were printed upside down at the end of the book, and later, lean bumpy-covered books printed on newsprint and published bi-monthly that told tales of man-eating hamsters, werewolf camp counselors, and brave young girls who faced burning at the stake when their proto-feminism was confused with witchcraft. <br />
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I was an only child, and spoiled when it came to reading material. I read a new book every few days, and these books were usually my own. I burned through paperbacks the same way a Franklin stove devours wood shavings, entirely indiscriminate, and yet, even in the midst of this consuming passion, I saw and vaguely regretted my own decadence. A nobler person than I wouldn't be tugging her mother's arm across the parking lot in the mad pursuit of more Encyclopedia Brown or Cam Jansen. She'd be going to the library.<br />
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It was only in college that I began to recognize a library's unique appeal. It probably helped that our campus library was far closer than any decent bookstore; also it was free, allowing me to read as promiscuously as I always had and still have money left over for late night nachos, theme party costumes, ironic Walmart impulse buys ("Oh my God, a My Little Pony with an American flag tattooed to its ass!"), and bad blockbuster movies at the local cineplex. But there was more to it than that. In my growing up years, the library was overstocked, unnavigable, daunting, and once I found whatever I was looking for, I was eager to leave. In college, the library was a place to linger. I snuck in cups of coffee and wrote papers and stories in an armchair, snug between the stacks. I went in for twenty minutes between classes to check my email or read a magazine. I checked out videocassettes from their large, idiosyncratic collection (they had Weekend and Eating Raoul but not Jaws, which suited me fine) and watched them on my roommate's TV; I even figured out how to use interlibrary loan, which if anything was faster than Amazon.<br />
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All this prepared me for grad school, where I had a vastly superior library at my disposal, and which meant that for a total of six years, I bought very few books, beyond the ones required for my classes. I was, finally, virtuous, unencumbered by the rampant consumerism that had for so long contaminated my reading life. And then one day in workshop, while talking about giving readings on a book tour, my professor said as an aside, "And you know what just kills me. When I give a reading, and someone comes up to me afterwards from the audience and says, 'I loved what you just read. I'm going to go check it out from the <i>library</i>.'"<br />
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I am no economist, to be sure. But still, it's surprising that, for so many years, the thought never truly struck me that authors might not be such big fans of libraries -- that they might, actually, like to receive royalty checks within their lifetimes. "Maybe," I tentatively offered, "those people don't have that much money?"<br />
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"Oh please." My professor batted away the question. "I mean, sure, if someone really can't afford it, I understand. But most of these people can. I mean, I'm talking about readings in mall bookstores, where the person already has a shopping bag. In coffee shops, where a cappucino's four dollars. In <i>bars</i>, here in New York. If you can buy a drink, you can buy a book."<br />
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I fell silent. During the time I'd been in grad school, I had bought many drinks. Many, many, many drinks.<br />
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I did not change my book buying habits overnight. But after grad school, although I got an NYPL card, I didn't find myself using it much. Instead, I found myself spending more time in the independent bookstores, even sometimes Borders or B&N, where glossy covers glistened, face out on the shelves, luring me with that old seduction.<br />
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I think physical books are on their way out, and I don't resist that change; I think it's inevitable, and fighting it will only make writers lose time and opportunities to connect with an audience that's still hungry for the same things literary fiction has alway provided: beauty, truth, intellectual challenge, humor, wisdom, sex scenes. In some ways, physical books are themselves an obstacle to some of the most important core qualities of literature. When I moved apartments over the summer, I did a major purge of my bookshelves, eliminating not just a lot of books for long-completed courses but also some novels that I'd bought for pleasure, read once with interest, and then doubted I'd ever read again. With each title I eliminated, I literally weighed the book in my hand, thinking, "Is it worth it to haul this? Is it worth the space on my shelf?" It's strange that a book's <em>thingness</em> makes me evaluate it in these crass physical terms -- that the mode of transmitting ideas, scenes, language weightlessly from mind to mind is so goddamn heavy, a brick. That is not, in my opinion, anyway, what makes books worthwhile. That's an inconvenience.<br />
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Yet, it's an inconvenience that has been a part of my reading life for as long as I can remember, and as such it's linked inseparably to the thing I care most about in the world. Maybe one of these days I'll get myself an e-reader. But right now, I'm just shopping on my bookshelf, slowly working my way through all the fiction I bought the old-fashioned way. Which is to say, guiltily.The Chawmongerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08817936739545420642noreply@blogger.com6