Degree of Difficulty, pt. 2

When 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.

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reservoir before I turn thirty, pockets weighed down with candy corn, craft beer caps, and zip drives containing my unpublished oeuvre, I recently decided to sign up for an extracurricular writing class conveniently located in my nabe.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.

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 Room and The Magicians 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.

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.

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 Freedom. (Those who aren't reading it on 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. 

Don't let this be you.



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 The Time Traveler's Wife or Middlesex.  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.

Difficulty certainly is in the eye of the beholder -- that's an obvious enough point and one that I made in my previous post 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?

Child Neglect: Some Thoughts on Emma Donoghue's Room

Kids say the darndest things -- especially in contemporary literary fiction, where they have a tendency to shoot their mouths off on every subject from 9/11 to their own rapes and murders.  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.

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.

It isn't just what she sees, but the way she sees it.

Emma Donoghue's novel Room 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.

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.

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 as the speaker knows it.  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.

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.

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.

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 brings him with her (to which I must say: WTFFF?), and he sits, silently listening and hardly commenting even in his narration, as she delivers seven and a half pages of exposition and directly stated thematic material.  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.

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.

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 Goodnight Moon, 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.

Dying of Consumption: Bookstores, Libraries, E-books, & Guilt

I 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.

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. 

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.

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.

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 library.'"

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?"

"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 bars, here in New York.  If you can buy a drink, you can buy a book."

I fell silent.  During the time I'd been in grad school, I had bought many drinks.  Many, many, many drinks.

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.

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 thingness 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.

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.

I am a double agent for the KGB, pt. 2

Check out my new review on the KGB Bar's website!  This time I'm writing about Pirate Talk, the new novel by Terese Svoboda.  Here's the link:
http://kgbbar.com/lit/book_reviews/pirate_talk

It's a Zoo in Here: Animals in Fiction

When I was a child, one of my earliest lessons about fiction was on the component parts of a story: the primary ones hit upon were conflict, setting, theme, and characters.  Our teacher explained that "characters" were the "people" in a story, the actors who either caused the action or suffered the consequences of it.  I immediately raised my hand to ask if stories that featured only animals were then in fact stories at all.

Obviously, as my second grade teacher explained to me then and as I am well aware now, personified animals or even inanimate objects (from Toy Story's Woody to Asimov's robots to Pynchon's Byron the Bulb) can just as easily function as the protagonists and antagonists in fiction as actual living humans can, and many great stories, especially for kids, feature relationships between humans and non-humans front and center.  In stories of this kind, the enchanted creatures become the child's imagination externalized, made flesh, and tend to either mirror the child's thoughts about the adult world (Alice in Wonderland, The Phantom Tollbooth), provide fantastical tests for real-life moral quandaries (The Chronicles of Narnia, the film The Labyrinth), give the child the opportunity to reverse roles and take on the duties of protector or parent (The Indian in the Cupboard, the films The Iron Giant or ET), or supply reliable friendship and comfort while allowing the child to explore his identity outside of the confines of family (Winnie the Pooh, the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes).  In all of these cases, though the creatures themselves certainly have independent goals and motivations, we see them through the child's eyes, and ultimately, we judge them in terms of the effect they have on the child in question.  As much as a reader may like a talking faun or a lovable robot, it's clear she's not meant to locate herself in those characters.  By definition, they are the Other.

We're aware that we see this character through the child-character's eyes.

For that reason, something odd tends to happen in stories where people and their civilization are conspicuously absent: we are forced to identify with someone inherently dissimilar to ourselves.  As a kid, my first exposure to stories of this kind was in Aesop's fables.  Interactions between a fox and a raven or a cat and the mice it pursues were unsettling, not just because of the unmitigated cruelty and violence (no second chances here), but because these animals, unmoored from the context of my world, were deeply unpredictable to me.  One story in particular, the fable of the scorpion and the frog, was especially creepy: a scorpion hitches a ride on a frog's back to cross a fast-flowing river.  The frog is uncertain if it should trust the scorpion not to sting it, but as the scorpion points out, if it stings the frog mid-journey, they will both sink and drown.  Still, in the middle of the river, the scorpion stings his companion anyway.  Why?  "It's in my nature."

What does this mean, "It's in my nature"?  Is the scorpion good or bad, active or passive?  Does a scorpion have free will?  Even as a young child, I knew that humans are sometimes slaves to their own biological imperatives: the need for a bathroom on a road trip, the need for a puke bucket during flu season.  Was the scorpion's need to sting akin to these exigencies?  Or was its need to sting more like the other, less uncontrollable urges I experienced: the temptation to palm a roll of Lifesavers from a convenience store or to break my toys in the midst of a tantrum?  If the scorpion had been placed in a story with a little girl, it would have been clear where my sympathies should fall -- the scorpion would be a villain, or, simpler than that, a mere danger, like a lit stove.  But in Aesop (whatever he may have intended), this clarity was lost to me; try as I might, I couldn't locate myself in either character.  Although the altruistic frog was certainly more lovable within the context of the story, the scorpion's needless cruelty raised questions about him too.  If a scorpion's nature was to sting, then what was a frog's nature?  And if that nature was just a matter of instinct, genetics, not something chosen, then wouldn't his potential for goodness or badness entirely depend on whose perspective the reader chose to adopt?  After all, if a story were told about the frog from the point of view of a fly, the frog would seem inherently evil too.

One of the big complicatons in stories entirely about animals comes with personifying more than one species of animal at a time.  I call this the Animal Farm effect.  In the novel Animal Farm by George Orwell (which does, in fact, briefly feature humans as well, though not in the same way as the kids' stories I described above), a mass revolt against an unjust farmer leaves the animals in charge.  Yet, over the course of the story, the pigs -- originally placed in a management role because they are the smartest of the animals -- take on more and more of the qualities of humans in their interactions with the other barnyard creatures, until finally they are living almost exactly as their human masters once did, inhabiting the farmhouse and walking on two legs while others serve them.  The rules of the farm, which once represented the interests of all, are now reduced to one simple credo: ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS. 

Orwell, who was using the story to make a statement about Stalinist Russia, clearly meant for us to reject this maxim: the barnyard animals are all sentient, all capable of speech, and thus all equal on the novel's terms.  But I think that "all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others" does reflect something that's frequently true about the use of animals in fiction.  When creating a world dominated by animals, something must still be regarded as the Other in order for the animals' social order to be comprehensible to us -- in order for their life to at all resemble the relationship of human society to the natural world.  Even in Animal Farm, rats, songbirds, and rabbits play this role: the other animals attempt to "tame" them (signalling to the reader that "tameness" is the "humanity" of animals in this scenario) but without success.

The mid-90's Disney film The Lion King, for all its many embarrassing faults (if I never hear the saccharine song "Hakuna Matata" again, it will be too soon), succeeds in this one respect, at least.  With the exception of a meerkat, a wild boar, and a toucan -- all of whom are treated basically as servants and comic relief -- all of the speaking characters are predators, and the prey are basically de-personified.  In one memorable scene, a herd of bison trample a lion to death, not out of anger or a desire for revenge, but because they literally cannot be reasoned with.  They are running out of blind, unarticulated animal fear, seemingly unable to understand or even hear the cries of the main character for help.  For some lions to be "good" and some "evil," for the choices of a lion to have any moral weight, we must first establish that the central nature of a lion qua predator is morally neutral.  And we must do that by making it clear that the story is told from a lion's perspective.

I got to thinking about all these issues over the weekend, after seeing Zack Snyder's fun, gorgeous, and intermittently disappointing kids' feature, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'hoole.  After Watchmen (particularly the magnificent, absurdly ambitious, aggressively postmodern ultimate cut version, which I wrote about here, here, and here), I doubted he was going to top himself with a picture about magic talking owls, and unfortunately I was right.  However, moments of this picture are still fucking glorious, beginning with a sequence at the beginning when an owl swoops down to snatch a mouse off a branch and then continues effortlessly in its flight.  There are a few ornithological non-sequiturs throughout (one plot thread asserts that owlets can be turned to zombies by being forced to stare at the moon as they doze off -- a weird idea, considering that the laws of nature and even the film itself firmly establish that the little dudes are nocturnal), and a feel-good musical montage that made the Lion King soundtrack seem as edgy and smart as Sweeney Todd's in comparison.  But the movie's best moments come when we see owls' own natural behaviors unexpectedly invested with emotional import. 

"Branching," when owlets glide from branch to branch while learning to fly, is a little like athletics, a little like driving lessons, yet not exactly like either: it occupies a space in an owl's life not quite equivalent to anything in ours.  And an even better scene (easily my favorite moment in the film), comes when the little sister of the two main owlets hawks up her first owl pellet, a solidified mass of mouse bones and fur that resembles something fossilized.  Panting and traumatized, spittle dripping from her beak, she stares in horror at the thing her body has just unwittingly ejected, while her nursemaid, a dippy snake, bustles around saying things like, "Oh, it's a beautiful day, the day of your first pellet!"  "You mean," the stunned chick replies, voice quaking with trepidation, "it's going to happen again?"  Vomiting up an owl pellet is a little like menstruation is to humans, yet it also happens to boys; it's a bit like losing a tooth, but it never stops, not even in adulthood.  At heart, it's a thing that happens only to owls, and it isn't transformed to parallel directly with human experiences -- but the way they respond to it, socially and personally, seems more or less the way people would, if people were owls.

Sure, they look real cute... until you see the gunk that comes out of their mouths.

In this sense, stories about animals or other non-human characters can be deeply subversive, and not just because they allow the author to veil controversial opinions under the guise of fantasy.  Rather, these stories are subversive because of the way they allow readers or viewers to set aside their own perspective to emphathize with one that, by its very nature, is profoundly foreign, even disturbing or grotesque.  Especially for kids, but really for all of us, that's a lesson that can't come soon enough.

Deviant Art

I've always envied cartoonists.  Not animators -- their frame-by-frame slaving sounds like a variation on that old childhood punishment of writing an apology over and over until the words become meaningful only as a carpal-tunnel ache -- but graphic novelists, comic book artists, whatever you want to call them.  I loved newspaper comics as a kid, Calvin and Hobbes and the Far Side especially, as well as collections of one-panel wonders from The New Yorker magazine, the old ones by Thurber and Charles Addams.  As an adult, I read comics less often than I used to; with the exception of Watchmen, I haven't tackled any of the big series in the superhero genre, and I only read a graphic novel every once in a long while.  But the directness of the medium, the way it combines cinematic visual techniques with the one-on-one intimacy of an author's connection with a lone reader, still fascinates me.

A few months ago, I read Black Hole by Charles Burns.  I borrowed it from a friend, consumed it almost immediately, and then hung onto it for a long time, thinking I would write a blog post about it.  Obviously I never did, and this post isn't primarily about it either.  But today, thinking again about my ongoing discussion about difficulty, some of the images from that book sprang to mind.

Black Hole tells the story of a group of teenagers in the 1970's, beset with a mysterious STD that turns them into freaks: a girl sheds her skin, a boy develops a tiny talking mouth on his neck, and others contract maladies even more difficult to encapsulate in words.  This is pulpy, suspenseful, and compelling in itself, and if Burns relied on the bare bones of the story to carry us through, I'd probably still have kept turning the pages.  However, what he does is a lot stranger.

When reading the book, I was at first inclined to think that the disease the teens suffer from is meant to represent something from our world, most likely AIDS.  But by the end, I became convinced that Burns is not working metaphorically, using one set of images to stand in for another set that the reader can supply.  Black Hole, instead, is about the hidden connections between images: the way an incision in a frog's belly or a cut on the sole of a foot looks like a vagina, the way a tail resembles a penis.  And as the book goes on, far from becoming easier to parse, these connections multiply.  Objects -- bones, pipes, sandwiches, snakes -- stream across the pages, freed from their original context; panels break out from their orderly grid.  We're no longer decoding symbols.  The meaning of the objects clearly can't be divorced from the particular way they're depicted.

This is something we're more inclined to accept in visual art than in narrative.  Perhaps it's because of the way literature is taught: at least at the places I attended, most American schoolchildren grew up thinking that it was possible to figure out what a poem "really meant," what a story was "about," and articulate this without the work's meaning being lost, as if literature were simply a foreign language they were learning to speak.  Stylistic embellishments stood as obstacles in the way to understanding, an odd regional accent that made the speaker's words tougher to translate.  "What is Wallace Stevens trying to say here?" one high school teacher said of the poem "Anecdote of the Jar," facing a classroom of dead silence.  He sighed, deciding to give us a break.  "All right, I'll just tell you: it's about environmentalism." 

Yet, with visual art, the work qua object is not so easily dispensed with.  Words can describe a painting or sculpture, but even a nine-year-old knows they cannot replace it.  And thus, even if the technical aspects of the artwork -- the perspective, the composition, the colors -- are perceived to be unpleasant or disagreeable, difficult, they're still treated as part of the thing we're seeing, rather than something that prevents us from seeing that thing clearly.

Perhaps, though, the popularity of graphic novels (at least sophisticated ones like Black Hole) can serve as a bridge between these opposed ways of seeing visual art and narrative.  Wouldn't that be nice?

Send in the Clones

I am not a proponent of the faithful film adaptation.  Many of my favorites (like Stanley Kubrick's Lolita or Terry Zwigoff's Ghostworld) veer wildly from their equally magnificent source material, and others (like Tim Burton's soul-consuming masterpiece Big Fish) actually improve upon the so-so books they tackle.  To me, the important thing is not that a movie is true to the vision of the book upon which it's based; I only care that the movie is true to its own vision, that it creates, in its characters, settings, and story, something that takes advantage of the visual medium and creates a world unto itself.

However, when a film adaptation systematically skips over all of the incidents that made the novel original, poignant, and tenderly observed, when it drops out emotional complexity and internal conflict from its depictions of the characters, when it strips settings of their power and objects of their meaning, and when it neglects to replace any of these elements with anything, anything at all, besides horrible treacly predictable Hollywood schlock -- well, it's at those times that I wish I'd waited for the DVD.  In his lovely and accomplished novel Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro describes a landscape through the eyes of the main characters, who have just, for the first time, left the boarding school where they grew up.  "We could see hills in the distance that reminded us of the ones in the distance at Hailsham, but they seemed to us oddly crooked, like when you draw a picture of a friend and it's almost right but not quite, and the face on the sheet gives you the creeps," he writes.  Mark Romanek's mediocre film adaptation of this very novel gave me a similar feeling, except that instead of "the creeps," one could more accurately say "the intense desire to cram Junior Mints in my ears to muffle the awful score."

 

Inside, I was screaming.

To be fair, the movie isn't all bad.  Romanek used to be a music video director (he also did the spooky Robin Williams vehicle One-Hour Photo), and he's decent at creating the film's visual world, which alternates in mood between a scruffy-preppy teen fall fashions photoshoot and the chilly operating rooms of Cronenberg's Dead Ringers.  And the actors are all right, although in the later parts of the film, the exaggerated naivete and perpetually open mouth of leading man Andrew Garfield made me wonder if maybe his brain was in fact his first organ donation. 

But the real problem here is the screenplay, a despicably shallow and mechanistic interpretation of the irreducibly complex relationships evoked by the book.  After a 10 PM showing last night, I actually went home and reread over a hundred pages of Never Let Me Go, just to make sure I wasn't crazy for having liked it in the first place.  I wasn't.  One of the things the book excels at, above all else, is revealing the thorny and delicate nature of lifelong female friendships.  The main character, Kathy H., and her best friend Ruth are close from the age of six or seven on, but this closeness isn't static: they draw close and pull apart, again and again, in a kind of dance.  Superficially, Ruth is charismatic and social, more "popular" than her quieter friend, and there are moments when she holds this over Kathy.  Yet Ruth is also intensely needy and vulnerable, desperate to be loved.  Kathy understands this about Ruth in a way that no one else seems to; her attunement to Ruth's often minute internal fluctuations of mood make her irreplacable, but also provide her ample opportunities to call Ruth out on minor pretensions and casual half-truths.  Neither girl is perfect, but their friendship with each other is precious, the defining tie of their childhoods and early adult lives.

The famous "Bechdel Test," taken from the comic strip "Dykes to Watch Out For," was derived from a panel where a character states she only will watch a film if it satisfies the following three requirements: it has to have at least two women in it, who talk to each other, about something besides a man.  I think treating these components as prequisites is misguided and limiting -- many terrific movies feature only male characters, or only a man and a woman, or only a single woman navigating a male-dominated environment.   However, I do think that this rule speaks to something that is regrettable about the way that female interaction is often depicted onscreen. 

Case in point: in the stupid, stupid screenplay for Never Let Me Go, Ruth and Kathy's entire relationship is reduced to their mutual attraction to Tommy, a boy from Hailsham.  Kathy loves Tommy.  Ruth steals Tommy.  Ruth gives Tommy back.  The film turns Ruth into an evil man-eater and Kathy into a pathetic, sniveling victim.  In this scenario, there is no reason for the girls to be friends, nothing between them except for barely concealed hostility, resentment, and competition.  Yet the movie, for some reason, expects that viewers will invest in the girls' connection with each other -- that when they reunite, after ten years of separation, we'll care.  Huh?

Moreover, this set-up reduces Tommy to an object, a pawn, entirely and inexplicably under Ruth's control.  It's clear he and Kathy are sweethearts from day one; as small children, they exchange loving glances with such irritating frequency, it's like they're auditioning for an episode of the Wonder Years.  But when Ruth decides she wants him, he takes her hand without hesitation.  If the movie chalked this up to the fact it's Keira freaking Knightley, I'd believe he was just under the spell of an intense sexual attraction.  But instead, it's weirdly apparent that he takes no pleasure from their love affair -- he even covers his eyes while they get it on, I guess to think of Kathy.  So why is he with Ruth at all?  I guess because he's a pathetic, sniveling victim too.  He and Kathy really are soulmates... that is, if they have souls at all.  I have to say that, by the end of the picture, I still wasn't entirely convinced.

Never Let Me Go is a science fiction story in that it has a speculative premise: these characters are being raised to donate their internal organs as adults.  But even in the novel, this premise is the weakest part.  I never really found it believable that the majority of ordinary people would accept the practice of raising clone children just to slaughter them for their livers and kidneys.  I can't imagine what kind of science would necessitate the creation of full-fledged human donors with personalities rather than organs grown independently, or harvested from insentient bodies cultivated in farms.  Even the widespread passivity of the donors is tough to swallow -- although I believe it about the students from Hailsham, whose misplaced loyalty to their alma mater keeps them from entirely turning their backs on the purpose for which they were raised.

Yet though I do think these logistical problems mar the novel, Ishiguro manages to deflect attention from them by keeping the focus on the personal, the everyday: the shades of meaning in an off-handed comment, the inside jokes and odd slang, the awkward hedonism of the characters' one night stands and communal porno collections.  (As a sidenote, I think it's interesting how much sex Hollywood removed from this story.  In the book, donors are unable to conceive children and thus are encouraged to enjoy casual sex for pleasure, even as young teenagers -- Kathy herself sleeps around compulsively. In the film, of course, she's treated as a repressed and saintly virgin, while smokin' hot Ruth stalks around post-coitally in a short robe: yet another way their friendship is dumbed down to fit catfight cliches.)

In other words, Kathy, as the book's narrator, is not concerned with the big picture of the world in which she lives; she's interested in the particularities of the people and places who have meant the most to her in her life, and she evokes these characters and settings so skillfully, so effortlessly, that it's tough not to feel like you've known them yourself.

In the movie, though, there is no such veil of minutia to shield us from the plot's gaping holes and so, at the very moments when we're meant to feel, we find ourselves thinking instead: about how the hell all of this could come to pass, about when it's going to end.  Fortunately for us, if not for the characters, it's all over sooner than you'd expect.

Spoiled Rotten

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to finagle a free ticket to an advance screening of the hot new documentary film Catfish.  I thought the movie was terrific and unsettling, but this post isn't primarily about that.  This post is about the marketing strategy for that film, especially the tagline on its posters ("Don't Let Anyone Tell You What It Is"), and about the concept of spoilers in general.

As you may have noticed in my reviews of books and movies on here, I don't tend to shy away from talking about the twists or surprises of a story's plot (although I do give last-minute SPOILER ALERTs as a courtesy).  To me, it seems impossible to discuss the work as a whole without making reference to the way it concludes, even/especially if that conclusion demands a reconsideration of the entire story that preceded it.  Yet, as a viewer or reader myself, I do like to approach a narrative with as few preconceptions as possible -- not just about the ending, but in general.  My own tendency to inflate my expectations for works made by my favorite writers or directors often amps up what would be moderate dissatisfaction to all-consuming anguish (Tim Burton, for the love of God, why?), and sometimes the early reviews or buzz surrounding a project will harden my heart against it, either out of writerly jealousy, that bitter green-eyed editorial assistant of the soul, or out of resentment toward what the author/director/story "represents" -- ignoring, of course, what the piece actually is.  To me, the purest experience of new work would probably involve a blindfold, a mallet to the back of the head, and a rude awakening in a world where civilization creeps along atop the smoking ruins of mass media and the blogosphere.  Until the Great Server Apocalypse claims us all, however, I tend to regard book and movie reviews as something best consumed after experiencing the work, when I'm desperate to join some sort of conversation with others who are wrestling with the same questions I am.

Back to Catfish, though.  I don't think it's weird or bad that the filmmakers want to keep the story's conclusion veiled in secrecy: they're trying to draw in viewers through the sheer force of curiosity, one of the oldest tricks in showbiz (PT Barnum would surely approve).  But there is something a little odd about the fact that commentators, whether or not they enjoyed the film, have adhered so closely to the creators' wishes -- especially considering that the meatiest and most reaction-provoking parts are in the last third or so, when the mystery rapidly unravels. 

I'm not going to buck the trend and give away anything about the picture here, but I think it's fair to say that the movie is more of a character study than a horror story, and like any good character study, it thrives on detail and psychology, not on the lynchpin of any single incident or "reveal."  And moreover, I think the makers of Catfish made it that way on purpose.  Their footage (and the way they edited it) shows they weren't just after the one-two punch of their dramatic revelation.  In fact, it's in those later parts that the film becomes the most impressionistic: I'm thinking in particular of a scene at the beach, and of the movie's title, which, far from being a coy hint, actually comes from a weird and poetic anecdote that relates to the story's action only metaphorically.  All of this demands discussion, dissection, argument, yet none of that is happening in the public sphere.  The filmmakers want to "get people talking" -- just not the people who have already seen the film. 

The concept of spoilers comes, I think, from the idea that criticism is like a product review: that the reviewer's role is to tell potential readers or viewers what to buy.  In this model, criticism is not so much a response as it is a preview: an advertisement or a warning label, depending.  It's not a perspective that intrinsically values criticism as an art, one that should be whole and complete in itself.  Instead it says that criticism must be good for something, for someone.  It also puts an expiration date on reviews' cultural import, at least for films and books that become well-known enough to enter the popular consciousness.  Imagine reading an essay about The Crying Game or The Sixth Sense that played coy with those films' third-act disclosures.  Such an essay would seem almost aggressively irrelevant, not only revealing little about the films' own internal structures but also next to nothing about how or why their endings spoke to the public's obsessions -- like an article on the 2008 election that didn't mention who won.

Yet, when filmmakers or reviewers do divulge a story's secrets -- even if they're not so secret -- the public tends to rebel.  I've been fascinated by this second phenomenon occurring with another film that just came out: the movie Never Let Me Go, based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro.  I haven't seen the picture yet (I'm planning to go tonight), but I'm puzzled by the fact that so many folks, both online and in print, have flipped out about the alleged spoilers in the film's preview and pre-release coverage.  Metro, the free NYC daily that my dog uses for toilet paper, even titled their review, "Never Watch the Trailer First."  OK, I guess I should throw down a SPOILER ALERT of my own, but: really, guys?  I haven't seen the movie yet, but in the book the supposed "shocker" is strongly implied even on the very first page.  That "shocker" is in fact not a twist, but the premise: that the characters are clones who are going to be used for organ donations.  Their understanding of this fact is riddled with denial and contradiction -- they wish it could be avoided, they sometimes picture other futures -- just as our own understanding that we will all die someday comes accompanied with many hopeful caveats.  But they know, and the story that transpires in the book is in many ways concerned with that knowledge: with what it suggests about timidity, passivity, the desire to please authority, to conform at any cost, versus the forces of self-expression and love.  The fact that people are responding so strongly to perceived spoilers where there are in fact none suggests to me something larger is at work here.

We live in a culture saturated with entertainment options.  It isn't possible to read or watch everything, and it's completely understandable that people (including myself) want guidance on what to consume that does not completely forecast the work in advance.  But I also think that informed, thoughtful, and comprehensive  responses to narrative shouldn't dumb down or silence themselves.  I'm not sure what the answer is.  All I know is that Bruce Willis is a ghost.

I am a double agent for the KGB.

This is sort of cheating on my promise to post daily this week, but here goes: I've started writing (non-pseudonymous) book reviews for the KGB Bar Online Lit Journal, and my first one was just published to their site. So check it out! Here's the link:
http://kgbbar.com/lit/book_reviews/the_kasahara_school_of_nihilism

Degree of Difficulty, pt. 1

I've been complaining a lot lately about the way that we discuss -- or rather, don't discuss -- difficulty in fiction.  To recap, it seems to me that the critical response to a "tough" or "inaccessible" book often falls into one of two categories: either the reviewer feigns comprehension, praising and criticizing so vaguely and so respectfully that calling him out on his confusion is nigh well impossible, or, perhaps even worse, the reviewer adheres to the Lev Grossman school of preemptive anti-intellectualism, declaring that the whole project of the novel or story collection in question is defunct, academic, "a drag," with no real regard for the specific approaches, techniques, and aesthetic of the work in question.

The problem with both of these approaches, in my opinion, is that they're motivated by something other than the writer's attempt to convey his own experience of a particular book.  They are political, not in the sense of national party politics, but in the more general sense in which we might describe "office politics" at a company or "campus politics" at a college or university.  The writer who pens, for example, exclusively positive reviews of experimental or avant-garde works is trying to pony up a readership, not so much for the book in question, but for other books of the same ilk, including, perhaps, his own; he also may hope to curry favor with other, more successful writers, meaning that the review is not, in fact, intended as a communication with other potential readers, but with the author of the book under review -- on the street, we call this "sucking up." 

On the other hand, the anti-intellectual reviewer, while seeming to go on the offensive, actually is also playing defense, trying to protect the novelistic conventions (and pleasures) of yore from what he sees as an invading tribe of egg-headed marauders.  Like the Fox News nutjobs who remind us every year that Christmas is under attack, these bozos seem to think that the works of Dickens and Austen (and Franzen and Updike) are in dire peril of being crowded off the shelves by the likes of Joy Williams and Gilbert Sorrentino.  It's all a game of literary politics, and like any other form of politics, those politics cast every statement made under them in the seedy light of half-truth and overgeneralization. 

Yet, what is it that actually makes a book difficult?  And why are some kinds of perceived difficulty considered more impenetrable than others?

Perhaps the most extreme form of difficulty can be found in books that are difficult at the level of the sentence.  The obvious example that springs to mind here is James Joyce, though he's not really an author I can handily cite.  Confession time: I have never read Finnegan's Wake, and to be completely honest, it is likely that I will be nothing but a rotten smell behind a locked apartment door long before I ever attempt it.  I have, however, opened it, and this is what greeted me within:

"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.  Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passen-core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Lauren's County gorgios while they went double their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick..."

This is the kind of prose that sends me reeling through the stacks in the direction of the T's, groping around for Thurber's collected works as an antidote.  I don't claim this is a universal reaction.  But what, exactly, makes it so off-putting to me? 

I'll admit it: there are some things I'd rather not find on my bookshelf.

I'd like to point out a couple of things that have occurred to me.  The first is that, although I certainly don't know the meanings of all the words in the preceding passage, I don't think the issue is strictly one of vocabulary.  As Lewis Carroll definitively proved in his wonderful poem "Jabberwocky," it's possible to have a piece of writing that thrives not on the reader's facility with the language used but simply with the context.  Here's a brief passage from that poem that illustrates my point:

"He took his vorpal sword in hand: / Long time the manxome foe he sought – / So rested he by the Tumtum tree, / And stood awhile in thought. / And, as in uffish thought he stood, / The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, / Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, / And burbled as it came!"

At least seven of the words in those eight short lines are nonsense words, words that literally no one could possibly understand.  Yet Carroll does two things to keep the verse from becoming incomprehensible.  The first is that he keeps the sentence structure simple.  We're never perplexed about what part of speech a word is.  It's especially clear to us who the two subjects of these sentences are – "he" and "the Jabberwock" – and the verbs Carroll uses are action verbs, placing these subjects in motion.  This gives us the illusion that we can visualize the scene he's laying out, although we of course supply our own meaning to both "Jabberwock" and "whiffling" in the second sentence.  The second thing Carroll does is place the "difficult" (i.e. nonsense) words mostly in what I'd describe as low-impact locations in the sentences.  By this I mean that the difficult words are most often used as modifiers (specifically here, as adjectives, five out of seven times in this passage), which could be removed without significantly changing the sentence's meaning.  For example:

"He took his sword in hand: / Long time the foe he sought – / So rested he by the tree, / And stood awhile in thought. / And, as in thought he stood..."

Though the modifiers are necessary aesthetically – the verse clearly would lose its unique sound, and the imaginative landscape it evokes, without them – they are not completely essential for meaning.  (Sidenote: interestingly enough, the verse in the poem that uses the most nonsense words at high-impact points in the sentence ["Twas brillig, and the slithy toves..."] is even itself a kind of large-scale modifier, setting the scene just before and after the in-scene action takes place.)  Thus, the reader can appreciate these words as decoration, embellishment, without relying on them for comprehension.  These words function like the hippy chick friend who sees the world as poetry, who's moved almost to tears by the indoor rainbow that hangs in the air, however briefly, one afternoon in the mall when the fire alarm goes off and the ceiling sprinklers rain down unnecessarily.  Having her there makes everything more beautiful, more meaningful, but you don't necessarily want to copy her notes from trigonometry class.

Yet in the passage I quoted from Finnegan's Wake, the sentence structure works against the reader's attempt to contextualize the unfamiliar words.  The first sentence – or perhaps I should say mid-sentence – is in fact the more comprehensible of the two I quoted.  The second sentence, in addition to its difficult language, immediately presents several grammatical challenges.  For one thing, at least in American English, we're accustomed to "neither/nor" used in tandem as a conjunction.  Since the sentence doesn't use a "neither," the "nor" that then appears immediately sent me looking back, assuming I'd missed something.  For another, the sentence structure doesn't place the words that are (to me) difficult or incomprehensible at low-impact spots; it doesn't even make the parts of speech obvious (is "avoice" being used as a noun?). 

I'm not saying any of this as a judgment, positive or negative, of the sentences in question, but merely as a statement of fact: the James Joyce sentences repel me, not primarily because they employ words that I don't recognize, but because they don't seem to anticipate my lack of recognition of those words.  Opening Finnegan's Wake is like opening a novel and discovering it's in German: there's a sense in which I feel that this wasn't written for me.

Yet, there are times in my own experience as a reader when a work that was difficult at the level of the sentence did speak to me, even if that wasn't apparent at first.  The obvious example of this, as I've noted before on this site, is the work of Thomas Pynchon.  At the sentence level, Pynchon is, I think, a lot more easily parsable than late-period Joyce, but here's an example of a sentence from the opening section of Gravity's Rainbow that offers its own brand of WTF.  Here, Pynchon starts describing one of Captain Geoffrey "Pirate" Prentice's famous banana breakfasts that he cooks for his men:

"Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night's old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast: flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjurer's secret by which – though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off – the living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations... so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning's banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail."

Whew.  What's puzzling in this sentence is different from what was puzzling the earlier examples: with the exception of a single word ("musaceous"), I'm familiar with all the vocabulary employed here.  Even at the larger level of images, there's nothing evoked that I can't easily translate to a concrete visual.  "Old smoke, alcohol and sweat," "winter sunlight," even "living genetic chains" are all perfectly clear, straightforward, and not particularly unfamiliar.  Yet what confuses readers here – or at least what I found confusing upon first encountering it – is the rhetorical structure in which these component parts are placed.  In comparing the scent of the banana breakfast with DNA, Pynchon is not trying to better or more clearly evoke the sensory experience of the breakfast.  He skips from the level of description (which the reader anticipates at this junction) and goes straight to the level of themes, making a direct argument about the way an object's internal intricacy, its encoding, allows it to survive despite external threat.

This is a move that many traditional writers make – but at important moments, moments when the characters themselves might step back to observe the world around them with heightened clarity.  Pynchon, though, just drops this in almost at random, in the middle of a scene establishing the men's daily routine.  A lot of readers find this technique jarring and intrusive, and I can certainly see why.  The effect of it – and several other sentences like it over the course of the book – is to create a world so densely riddled with rich veins of meaning that the present action often seems distant or absurd by comparison.

There are many, many other ways that fiction can be difficult at the level of the sentence.  Another obvious one that springs to mind is when the book is written in the voice of a character or narrator whose dialect does not match the reader's: a classic case of "what's tough for me may be easy for you," and probably a secondary issue for American readers like me tackling Irish writers like Joyce.  But I guess my main purpose here, rather than cataloging every variety of difficulty at the level of the sentence, is to point out the perhaps obvious fact that a writer's style is not merely a superficial element, a mannerism to be "gotten past." 

Sentences are what a novel is made of, the air you have to breathe when you're inside the book.  When sentences are difficult, I think that more than a book's length or subject matter or themes, they are the biggest impediment to the work reaching a broad audience.  However, I also think that, if used purposefully, difficult sentences can allow writers to communicate ideas and images to their admittedly more limited audience that could not be expressed any other way.  The question, in evaluating a work, shouldn't be, "Is this hard to read?" but "What makes this hard to read, and why?"  Our desire to look past the language to the thing/world/character being conveyed is so strong, though, sometimes it makes this question tough to ask, let alone answer.

In the Haus

I do not fall in love easily.  There are many authors I like and respect, many authors who have distinct voices, who competently and intelligently ply the tools of their craft.  There are many other authors whose office chairs I wish came equipped with a remote-controlled emergency eject button, but that's the subject for another post.  My point is that I am not easily bewitched.  My first response to narrative is, generally, analytical, sober, even critical.  I love to lose myself in the dream of fiction, but I usually know when I'm asleep, and when I awaken, I'm ready with an interpretation.  A handful of times in my adult life, though, I've encountered authors who left me giddy, speechless, with little more than stammered profanity at my disposal to describe their work's impact on my ravished sensibilities.  One of these authors I had the opportunity to see at the Brooklyn Book Festival last weekend, and the experience sent me tumbling head over heels all over again.  I'm speaking, of course, of Steven Millhauser.

My love affair with Millhauser's work began when I was in college, when I mentioned to a professor that I was writing a series of slightly fantastical short stories about childhood, but intended for adult readers and with darkly adult themes.  "You should check out Edwin Mullhouse," he suggested.  "I'm not familiar with his work," I replied, feeling chronically underread; up until the previous day, I'd thought Evelyn Waugh was a woman.  "Oh, no, Edwin Mullhouse isn't the writer -- well, he is, but he's fictional."  "Wait, the writer is fictional?  Like a pseudonym?"  "No, no, the writer is Steven Millhauser."  "So, wait, what's the title?"  This who's-on-first went on for awhile, and I soon found myself in the library, searching for a book titled Steven Millhouse by Edwin Mullhauser.  The pretension annoyed me -- in my opinion, only comedians on sitcoms were allowed to give their characters such close variations on their own names -- as did the nerve of this man, who back in the 1970's had already plagiarized what I thought was my own daring and original conceit: childhood recast as adulthood in uncanny miniature.  Finally I found the book, and sitting on the floor between the shelves, flipped to the first page, eager to dismiss this pompous usurper, to parry his vision with a sharper one of my own.  My professor had compared him to Nabokov, but, I reminded myself, one imitated Nabokov at his own peril; one always forgot the visual, the only weapon keen enough to cut loose from those brambles of language.  I read, "I met Jeffrey Cartwright in the sixth grade... I can remember nothing physical about him except his tremendous eyeglasses, which seemed to conceal his eyes; somewhere in the dark attic of memory I have preserved an image of him turning his head and revealing two round lenses aglow with light, the eyes invisible, as if he were some fabulous creature who lived in a cave or well."  I murmured to myself, "Oh fucking kill me now."  Millhauser was the fabulous creature, possessed of dark and unholy powers, and by the end of the first paragraph, I'd handed him my bloody and still-beating heart.

Before Edwin Mullhouse, I had never understood the urge, possessed by characters in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, to memorize a book in its entirety.  I loved Pynchon's prose, but it was to me then as towering and mysterious as scripture, something from another realm.  The sentences in Edwin Mullhouse, on the other hand, were ordinary things, bejeweled with precision.  I fell in love with them individually, reading them aloud, out of context, to anyone who would listen.  Describing a mischevious little girl, Millhauser wrote, "Her favorite dress was a short bright red one with puffed short sleeves, from which her short solid arms hung down alertly, as if she were perpetually prepared to snatch your crayons."  Describing Edwin Mullhouse's grandmother visiting, he wrote, "After the first day, when she talked to Mr. and Mrs. Mullhouse about arthritis, rheumatism, and rising prices, Grandma Mullhouse spent all her time with Edwin... playing Go Fish and Old Maid, making vast bowls of custard or huge yellow cakes with orange icing, and telling stories about the man who thought she was thirty-eight or the man who thought she was thirty-five or the time she used to give piano lessons before her fingers got crooked or the time she was thrown from a merry-go-round halfway across the park and landed on her back and stood up without a scratch; it would have killed most people."  Of a winter day chez Mullhouse, he wrote, "On the shady side of the house the icicles hung hard and frozen, but they were less lovely than the sunny icicles, shining with dissolution."  His ability to specify tiny details that most people wouldn't even have noticed, to wrap an entire character or stage of life into a list, seemed sorcerous not because it came out of nowhere; to the contrary, the very familiarity of his materials was what made his sleight-of-hand dazzle me.  Once when I was a small child, a birthday party magician put a rubber clown nose on his face and squeaked it; he then pinched my own ordinary nose and made it squeak too.  Edwin Mullhouse released the magic power from everyday things in much the same way.

I did not read any more Millhauser for a long time after that.  I was afraid, on one hand, of him disappointing me, and on the other hand, of him not disappointing me enough.  I'd never before encountered an author so capable of influencing my writing style, drawing me, line by line, under his spell.  Though the titles of his other books enticed me, some part of me wanted to resist.  I held off until one day when, during the following summer and on vacation with my parents, I received a call from my boyfriend.  He'd tried to check Edwin Mullhouse out from the library, but they hadn't had it in stock; instead he'd gotten a story collection called The Knife Thrower.  "You have to read it," he said.

I read it, and then I read it again, and then I read everything else Millhauser has ever published.  It's all terrific, but The Knife Thrower might actually be Millhauser's masterpiece.  It's twelve stories and with the possible exception of one ("The Way Out") every single piece is a skull-melting, life-altering volcanic eruption of sheer literary force.  Millhauser is obsessed with escalation, the way that, inch by inch, an artist's mind or a community succumbs to its own excesses.  In The Knife Thrower, three separate characters vanish, or nearly vanish, into the sky's gulping blue ("Flying Carpets," "Claire de Lune," "Balloon Flight, 1870"); ordinary settings, like a department store or a suburban town past dark, open into deeper and deeper chambers within themselves, becoming self-enclosed worlds, unknowable from the outside.  But the stand-out piece in the collection -- if such a thing can exist in a collection that left me so overwhelmed with pleasure I frequently forgot to breathe between paragraphs -- is the modestly titled "A Visit," an understated short story that achingly reveals the uncharted loneliness of so much of adult life, as well as the unsolvable riddle of romantic love: that's all I'll say about it here.

Millhauser read from The Knife Thrower at the Brooklyn Book Festival last Sunday, from a passage in his story "Paradise Park."  The story concerns a Coney Island amusement park that, over time, develops from a family-friendly day trip destination into something straight out of the mind of Hieronymus Bosch.  In the passage Millhauser read, about a level in the many-tiered pleasure playground nicknamed "Devil's Park,"  he described children dressed as concubines, a lover's leap that serves as the site of multiple suicides, and a roller coaster that plunges to its destruction again and again in a dark field.

Welcome to the pleasure dome.

The other panelists looked on, aghast and admiring, respectively; the mood of the audience, like the moods of the audiences in so many of his pieces, was awestruck and more than a little unsettled: his words whizzed by our ears too close, like so many coldly glittering daggers.  But as much as I loved the piece, what I loved more was something he said during the Q&A session that followed.  When asked by the moderator if there's ever a time when he's gone "too far" in his writing, Millhauser thought for a moment and then responded that he sees fiction as a seduction, a gradual casting-off of veils.  There's no such thing as "too far," only "too soon."

This statement encapsulated perfectly what it is I love most about Millhauser's writing.  His prose is decadent, forever reaching toward voluptuous release -- but what makes it truly compelling is his restraint.  Perhaps the reason I so love his work is that, in the tenderness and care it takes in presenting each image, each rhetorical turn, it seems to love me back.

Clowning Around

Sometimes I think I was born in the wrong era: I was meant for a time when words were chiseled in stone.  As I've mentioned in previous posts, blogging does not come naturally to me.  Despite my mantra of quantity over quality, my neurotic tendency toward perfectionism tends to keep me from posting early and often, and when I do blog, the two or so hours following the new piece's first appearance on the site are usually filled with partial rereadings and the micro-panics they induce (Jesus Christ, I used the same verb in two sentences!  What is up with all these dashes, this shit reads like Morse code!).  The sentences I write haunt me, replay in my head, like the weird pronouncements of a schizophrenic's dog.  I need to get them right, or they'll never leave me alone.  In a discussion about his novel Motherless Brooklyn, which features a narrator with Tourettes, Jonathan Lethem once described his revision process as itself Tourettic, a "compulsive grooming" of language, and while my results are nowhere near as well-coiffed as his, I have to say the description resonates with me. 

It will probably not surprise many of my readers to learn that I'm working on a novel -- or, perhaps more accurately, that I am working on working on a novel.  This is not my first book.  I wrote a novel before when I was in graduate school: a bildungsroman, unsurprisingly, about a naive clown who can only understand his life and the people around him through the zany antics of his art.  I wish I could say that the book was universally reviled, but even that wouldn't be accurate.  Imagine if, at the end of the Lord of the Rings series, after all their trials and adventures, Frodo & Co. threw the magic jewelry into the Cracks of Doom, only to receive no reaction whatsoever.  Imagine now that instead of a hobbit, he's a pretentious Manhattanite in velvet overalls and pirate boots and that the ring is an MFA thesis.  Now you're beginning to understand my pain.

 The tears of a clown.

Probably because I've been burned before by the molten lava of rejection, I am writing my new novel even more slowly than I write my posts for this blog.  And it's nearly impossible for me to work on both simultaneously.  Which I find incredibly frustrating, because I need both outlets, both forms of communication.  For periods of time in the past, I've abandoned the novel, but going without writing fiction makes me feel trapped, claustrophobic in the narrow confines of reality.  Yet since I started blogging, responding to books and film and ideas in writing has become essential for me too -- it's as though I don't know precisely what I think until I work it out in prose.

I promised last month that I was going to try to write more on here -- that, like the pencil sculptor, I would adopt the credo, "This will break eventually but let's see how far I get."  Then I disappeared from the blog for nearly three weeks, a fact probably unnoticed by most everyone but me, but which I regard as a personal failing nonetheless.  So here's what I'm going to do: starting today, I am going to blog something every day for one week.  Some of the posts will be stupid.  Most of them will be short.  But all of them will be available online, for your perusal and entertainment.

A Good Book Is Hard to Find

When I recently posted about Pamela Paul's NY Times article "The Kids' Books Are All Right," I promised that I would return to something that intrigued me at the time: Lev Grossman's statement that more grown-ups, including himself, are reading YA because, "a lot of contemporary adult literature is characterized by a real distrust of plot... I think young adult fiction is one of the few areas of literature right now where storytelling really thrives."  It's an honest statement and perhaps even an accurate one, but there's something odd in it too.  The implication here isn't that YA is giving readers something new, but that adult literature is shirking its duties.  It's a consumer's mentality.  Give the people what they want, he seems to be saying, or they'll (rightly) take their business elsewhere.

At first glance, it seems like Lev Grossman is an odd person to be saying that.  For one thing, he's a contemporary novelist himself, the author of three books for adults (most recently The Magicians, which I adored and loathed in near-equal measure); for another, he's a literary critic.  Recently he got a bit more spotlight than usual, when he did the unthinkable by landing an unabashedly serious novelist – Jonathan Franzen – face first on the cover of Time.  Inside the magazine, Grossman says the Franz "is a member of a perennially threatened species, the American literary novelist... [and] I would argue — that he is the most ambitious and also one of the best."  Later, he praises Freedom by saying, "It doesn't back down from the complexity [of modern American life]."  Yet, despite Grossman's admiration for "ambition" and "complexity" and his apparent awareness that forces in our culture exist to threaten the works of literature that display them, here he extols the superior curb appeal of kiddie lit to adult readers.  What gives?

Some of the answers can perhaps be found in his obnoxiously titled Wall Street Journal piece "Good Novels Don't Have to be Hard" (brought to my attention by alert reader John).  Go ahead and click the link, but be forewarned: qua essay, it's awful, lumping together disparate writers like Kafka, Hemingway, and Proust under the single heading "Modernism," then simplifying their aesthetics to the point of moronic absurdity.  "To the Modernists, stories were a distortion of real life. In real life stories don't tie up neatly... Plot was the coward's way out, for people who can't deal with the real world."  As much as I love the mental image of Virginia Woolf screaming, "You can't handle the truth!" Jack Nicholson-style, I have to point out that shit like this wouldn't fly in a tenth-grader's term paper. 

And it goes downhill from there.  Grossman reaches a nadir of substance when he writes, "There was a time when difficult literature was exciting... But in contemporary writers it has just become a drag," then attempts to "prove" his "point" purely through statistics from Bookscan, without making a single statement about the form, content, diction, or aims of any contemporary novel.  If Grossman's only standard for a book's success is how much money it made the year it was published, he might need to reconsider his opinion of some of those beloved Modernist texts, not to mention his own career as a book critic, which, according to his own logic, was made obsolete by the invention of the adding machine.  Yet, despite the hamhanded anti-intellectualism and flat-out rhetorical laziness of the piece, there's an observation hidden in it that I found pretty interesting.

"Writers like Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Donna Tartt, Kelly Link, Audrey Niffenegger, Richard Price, Kate Atkinson, Neil Gaiman, and Susanna Clarke, to name just a few, are busily grafting the sophisticated, intensely aware literary language of Modernism onto the sturdy narrative roots of genre fiction: fantasy, science fiction, detective fiction, romance," Grossman writes.  "They're forging connections between literary spheres that have been hermetically sealed off from one another for a century."  Unlike the Modernists of old and the unnamed "difficult" writers working today, these authors, he argues, are striking "compromises with the public taste," using humor and suspense and, he implies, sometimes intoxicatingly sniffable glue bindings to keep readers crawling back for more.  With this new postmodernism – the postmodernism of fun, fun, fun! – "the balance of power is swinging from the writer back to the reader," he concludes.

There's something to what Grossman is saying here.  Going back to Barthelme and Vonnegut there have been postmodernists who have slung their weird capes over the dress dummies of genre.  But we're currently seeing a proliferation of them.  And a few of these wackos are brilliant enough to see by in the dark – in my personal estimation, so good it hurts.  But why are they so good?  Is it because, as Grossman claims, they're caving to the pressure of the marketplace – because they've observed that book sales are on the decline and they've decided to roll up their sleeves and pitch in?  One morning, did Kelly Link sit up in bed and say to herself, "Okay, Barnes & Noble shoppers, you win: I'm chucking my stream-of-consciousness novel of marital ennui.  From now on it's all zombies, all the time"?

Maybe she did: I don't know the chick.  But I do know her work, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say I don't think it's the result of a series of "compromises with the public taste."  I don't think it compromises at all.  And, although her writing is certainly accessible, I don't think that her story collections (which, I'd imagine, do not Bookscan in the millions) are great because of their widespread appeal, or, to put it more bluntly, their sales.  I think they're great for the same reasons Grossman calls Franzen's work great: because they don't shy away from the complexity that they present.  Because, although they're small in scale, they're imaginatively, aesthetically, thematically ambitious.  Because – and this is something Grossman doesn't quite say – the form and content are of a piece, neither artificially imposed on the other.

In "Good Novels Don't Have to be Hard," Grossman's fatal mistake is, I think, overlooking that last point.  He seems to think that the form of a novel can be "compromised," made palatable to readers, without altering the content.  But I don't think Kelly Link's zombies, or Chabon's comic book superheroes, or Lethem's gumshoes, or Clarke's magicians (or Grossman's magicians, for that matter), are just a concession, something tossed in to keep antsy readers placated and entertained.  I don't think they could be swapped out and replaced with something trendier (OMG vampires!!1) without some intrinsic meaning being lost.  These authors aren't Jerry Seinfeld's wife, disguising the vegetables of literary merit inside the junk food appearance of genre.  Genre is part of their work's DNA, its birthright, part of what it wrestles with and makes sense of – it's no more arbitrary or extraneous to their books than middle-class American pseudo-realism is to Franzen's.  The forms these authors use aren't impressive because they hide the content; they're impressive because they're inextricable from it.

 Thank God the new postmodernism doesn't leave kale stuck to the back of your throat.

And, in the same way, if a "difficult" book succeeds as art, it's not because we have decided "pleasure must be bought with large quantities of work and patience," as Grossman says (there's his consumer's mentality again); it's not because we're willing to strain our eyes peering through the clouded lens of difficulty to glimpse the work's true subject.  It's because that particular difficulty is part of the work's subject, and not in a vague, general, and therefore uninteresting way ("The Modernists' idea was life is, like, way complicated, y'know?"), but in a way that's concretely, specifically tied to the unique vision of that novel.

Which raises the question: what is this "difficulty" that Grossman and I keep referring to oh-so-vaguely, without providing any examples?  The flip response, which is also partly true, is that there are as many different kinds of difficulty as there are readers, since different things are tough or unfamiliar or simply disagreeable to different people.  But in my next post, I'm actually going to talk about what I think makes certain pieces of fiction difficult for me, and why.