Genius

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Jude Law, GeniusDirector Michael Grandage’s movie Genius (trailer) about the relationship between legendary Scribners & Sons editor Maxwell Perkins and flamboyant author Thomas Wolfe had received generally tepid reviews. (while I’m delighted an editor is finally receiving screen time!).

Wolfe was an author whose moods, enthusiasms, and output were not easily corralled, even by someone with Perkins’s experience. After all, he had already brought works to the public from other writers with outsized personalities and personal difficulties–notably Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

It’s easy to imagine the slammed doors that would greet an author today who showed up with a 5000-page manuscript as Wolfe did with his second book, Of Time and the River. The challenging task of turning this behemoth into a publishable manuscript epitomizes the editor’s dilemma: “Are we really making books better,” Perkins says, “or just making them different?” Getting 5000 pages down to a still-hefty 900 made Wolfe’s work different, for sure. And better, at least in the sense of more likely to be read.

Colin Firth, as Perkins, keeps his hat on during almost the entirety of the movie, symbolic perhaps of how his character tries to keep a lid on his difficult author. Jude Law as Wolfe is by turns outrageous, contrite, drunk, hostile, and sentimental. Pretty much like the novels, actually. His performance is consistently inconsistent and always interesting. He shows Wolfe as a man with a lot of words bottled up inside him who can’t always control the way they pour out.

It’s odd to see a mostly British and Australian cast playing so many titans of American literary history, including Perkins and Wolfe, Guy Pearce as Fitzgerald, and Dominic West as Hemingway. (The Hemingway scene required an ending credit for “marlin fabricator.”) The women in the lives of the protagonists are Laura Linney as Mrs Perkins, perfect as always, and Nicole Kidman, who believably portrays the obsessed Mrs. Bernstein. She’s left her husband to cultivate and promote the much younger Wolfe and has her own flair for the dramatic. The performances make the movie worth seeing.

The National Book Award-winning Perkins biography by A. Scott Berg was transformed into a screenplay by John Logan. New Yorker critic Richard Brody dings the script for its departures from the detailed and more richly peopled original, including the book’s fuller explanation for the rupture between Wolfe and Scribners. Brody says a lawsuit and Wolfe’s unsavory political views played a part, and leaving them out does seem a mistake.

Portraying in cinema an intrinsically intellectual and abstract enterprise is difficult (The Man Who Knew Infinity struggles with the same challenge). Like me, reviewer Glenn Kenny at Roger Ebert.com apparently had not read the book, so did not have Brody’s reservations. Kenny found “the exchanges between editor and author exhilarating. Logan’s script . . . is invested in the craft of words like few other movies nowadays, even those ostensibly about writers.”

Wolfe blasted onto the American literary scene like a runaway train and departed before he could accomplish a judicious application of the brakes. Yet, he eventually realized who’d kept him on course, as his moving deathbed letter attests.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 48%; audiences: 56%.

Crime Prevention: Burglary

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Burglar Alarm

photo: vistavision, creative commons license

Yesterday’s local “newspaper” used most of the front page to list the 25 New Jersey towns with the most burglaries, an overall number that’s been dropping. Whatever the community-wide data reveal, having your own home burglarized is 100%. So, how to prevent it? Can you? Geoff Manaugh, author of the new book, A Burglar’s Guide to the City (promoted as “you’ll never see the city the same way again”), presents a frustratingly balanced article on this topic in the May issue of Metropolis.

Criminologists and beat cops agree that certain home features may affect the likelihood it will be burglarized, yet it seems there’s always an “on the other hand. . . .” Decreasing the likelihood of a break-in involves a series of trade-offs that we mostly don’t think about much.

Something we probably ignored when selecting our house (and can’t fix, anyway), is its position on the street. Manaugh says a house on a corner is more likely to be broken into. Conversely, a house on a cul-de-sac or in a neighborhood with curving streets and dead ends is less attractive to would-be thieves. Ease of escape is the issue here. On the other hand, such neighborhoods tend to have fewer police patrols.

If your house is set back from the street or ringed with tall shrubbery, it may be harder to notice. On the other hand, it gives a burglar “the same privacy it gives you.” Clear visibility into and out of your home discourages thieves. For the same reason, a rainy night is burglars’ most-favored time for a break-in; people aren’t out on the streets, and it’s hard for the neighbors to notice that ladder up to your second-floor (unalarmed) window. You know, the ladder you told the painters or the arborists or the . . . , “Sure, just leave it out there for the night. You’ll be back tomorrow.”

Pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods are safer, unless the pedestrians are there because a house is close to a subway station or train depot. Neighborhoods near schools receive more patrols and a closer watch from parents. Those near woodlands provide an opportunity for escape.

A burglar sees your house as a set of entry and exit points–back doors, side windows, porch roofs, and sliders. Are they protected? Is your alarm system a preventive, or does it suggest you have something worth stealing? A friend lives on a block where every house has been broken into except hers. The other difference between her and her neighbors? She has a dog.

Finally, Manaugh asks one simple question applying to all of us: “Do you really know where all your extra sets of house keys have gone?”

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“Hush Now, Don’t Explain”–Part 2

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Billie HolidayFiction editor Beth Hill has written excellent advice to authors in her Editor’s Blog essay, “Don’t Explain, Don’t Explain, Don’t Explain.” I covered four of her points here on Friday.

Here are two more and an example from Cormac McCarthy:

  • It isn’t necessary to stop the story’s action to define what something is or how it works, Hill says. These are digressions and most readers don’t like them. Many authors enjoy doing the research for a book (I do!). They aren’t just making stuff up, they’ve grounded their work in reality. They want to share. And probably shouldn’t. That said, readers of some types of sci-fi and techno-thrillers expect to be given an understanding of the science and mechanics behind the story. Authors who write in those genres get a little slack on the “how stuff works” front. I read a terrific military novel lately (The Empty Quarter), where Amazon reviewers criticized it for not explaining every acronym and term. I wasn’t bothered, thinking I’d figured most of it out, but reader frustration was great. So it may be that a careful balance is needed.
  • Hill says if a character speaks several languages, she doesn’t need to repeat her words or thoughts in more than one of them. Writers should pick phrases or opportunities to use the second language when the meaning will be obvious by word form or context. Cormac McCarthy uses a lot of Spanish in The Crossing, and even though a not-to-be-specified number of decades have elapsed since I had high school Spanish–which certainly never touched the topics McCarthy writes about–I had no trouble following. This exchange between several Mexican men and two young Americans takes place after an old man has drawn them a map of where they want to go and walked away (McCarthy does not use quotation marks):

When he was gone, the men on the bench began to laugh. One of them rose to better see the map.

Es un fantasma, he said.

Fantasma?

Sí, sí, Claro.

Cómo?

Cómo? Porque el viejo está loco es cómo.

Loco?

Completamente.

In this and in many different and subtle ways, McCarthy confirms the reader’s understanding of what is said without a mechanical translation of every phrase (or, by extension, technical term). By the time I finished this book, I was following so well, I thought I could actually speak Spanish!

Again, I encourage you to take a good look at Hill’s full essay. Avoiding overexplaining will help keep you in step with your readers, which is what every writer wants!

“Hush Now, Don’t Explain”

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Billie Holiday

Click photo for “Hush Now, Don’t Explain”

When I read a vivid description of a particular disease or condition, I confess I start feeling a slight pain in the target spot, an itch, a touch of malaise, a sink of nausea. (All the while being perfectly healthy.) Face it, lots of us suffer from–to put a positive spin on it–this kind of excessive empathy.

That tendency seems remote kin to the feeling I have when I read “advice for writers.” No matter how awful the writing habit is, “I do that!” “My writing is full of it!” But when I ran across fiction editor Beth Hill’s terrific essay, this time, I really, really think she’s diagnosed something important to me. Her brilliant Editor’s Blog essay is “Don’t Explain, Don’t Explain, Don’t Explain.” Let me explain.

Hill says the problem of overexplaining comes up repeatedly in fiction manuscripts. Fundamentally, her common sense advice requires us, as authors, to trust our readers to understand what we’re writing about, without banging them over the head with a 2×4 of explanation. Hill says:

  • Inherent in our characters and the events they experience are (or should be) the reasons they respond to situations as they do. If responses aren’t clear, fix the set-up or the characterizations, don’t take the easy way out and just tell the reader why they responded as they did.
  • Sometimes we do a good job of showing a character’s response, then wimp out, feeling the need to reiterate why the character responded as he did–showing AND telling. No, no, no. Trust the reader.
  • Whenever we explain, there we are (voice of God), elbowing our way into the story. When we do that, Hill says, we are “using real-world explanations for fictional-world events.” That destroys the story’s fictional reality. As John Gardner would say, it jolts the reader awake from “the fictional dream.”
  • Unnecessary explanations need not be page-length, paragraph-length, or even sentence-length. They can be one or two insidious words. Hill’s examples include “Timothy hollered in pain.” Unless the point-of-view character is Timothy or unless she has ESP, she doesn’t know that Timothy hollered in pain. We can just say a character hollered or frowned or wept and trust the reader to figure out why, given the circumstances. (No “Angela wept as if the tragedy of the situation just settled on her” either. That’s still point-of-view character speculation.)

The second part of this summary will appear Monday, June 27.

Who Writes the Best Crime Novels: Men or Women?

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unmade bed

photo: Peter Lee, creative commons license

In the current issue of The Atlantic, author Terrence Rafferty has an intriguing piece titled “Women Are Writing the Best Crime Novels” (in the “Culture” column, no less). Hmm. For real cultural insights, skim the article and read the comments.

Rafferty attributes women authors’ strength in this genre to the growing popularity of “domestic thrillers,” the kind where your enemy sleeps next to you. Gone Girl catapulted this resurgent genre to public attention. Theirs “is not a world Raymond Chandler would have recognized,” Rafferty says. His characters’ motives were more basic (sex and greed) and their methods more direct. “Take that, you punk!” bang, bang.

Rafferty thinks Chandler’s lone detective genre is almost as dead as the corpse in the dining room, though plenty of popular books are clear heirs to that tradition. The Jack Reacher series by Lee Child, the Tess Monaghan series by Laura Lippman, and the Strike/Ellacott books of J.K. Rawlings (writing as Robert Galbraith) feature investigators working outside official channels. Their investigations are a bit hard to pull off in these technology-reliant days, but they can usually find a friendly cop to snag certain kinds of information for them. Cell phone logs and whatnot.

As a person who reads a large number of books in the crime/mystery/thriller genre—reviewing 46 in the past year for CrimeFictionLover.com—I can tell you there are some really tired tropes out there—heroes with arcane martial arts skills, who know thirty-two ways to kill a person in two seconds flat, who get beat up but bounce back in record time, and who never met a woman they couldn’t bed. A few of them also have a sense of humor.

The “girl” novels discard all that. Instead, they rely on astonishing levels of manipulation and the workings of the characters’ minds, which Rafferty says often dwell on unresolved adolescent angst. A few years hence, those features will likely seem just as tiresome and overworked as the boy wonders. I laughed out loud reading this from one of the commenters on Rafferty’s article: “I think that after a certain number of introspective life years, the Self as object d’art is too debunked to stand much further scrutiny.”

Rafferty cites a bunch of female authors he admires, including Laura Lippman, Denise Mina, Tana French. Their type of storytelling, he says, doesn’t depend so strongly on heroes, making it “perhaps a better fit for these cynical times.” Less gunplay, more emotional violence. I’d add to his list Becky Masterson, Meghan Tifft, and Cecilia Ekbäck.

But here’s where his argument gets tricky. By conflating crime fiction, mystery, and thriller genres, he makes his argument a bit difficult to follow, because they have different foundational premises and conventions, and their readers have greatly different expectations. There isn’t a lot of overlap between the audiences for John Sanford and Agatha Christie.

Yet he says today’s women writers have “come a long way from the golden age, from Christie and Sayers, from the least-likely-suspect sort of mystery in which, proverbially, the butler did it” (emphasis added). In today’s psychological thrillers, authors “know better. The girl did it, and she had her reasons.”

Reviewing my own reading of some 60 books in the broad crime/mystery/thriller category over the past 18 months, I find that whether a book is interesting, well-written, genre-stretching, and good entertainment does not depend on the author’s gender. Women and men were equally likely to write a book I liked. Great books are simply great books.

***Charleston

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Longwood, Christmas, poinsettias

photo: Vicki Weisfeld

By Margaret Bradham Thornton – There’s something about a man who’s “too perfect.” The feeling that something will go wrong hangs over your head as you turn the pages, waiting . . .

In this debut novel, Eliza Poinsett is the daughter of an old Charleston family. (Supposedly, she’s a descendant of  diplomat Joel Roberts Poinsett, a Charlestonian who introduced the flower that became the ubiquitous Christmas plant.) Educated at Princeton and Columbia, Eliza decamped to England after the love of her life, Henry Heyward, told her he was marrying someone else. His wife-to-be Issie was pregnant, and the marriage lasted not much longer than it took for her to produce young Lawton. Henry sued for custody and got it, and Issie departed for less socially correct climes.

At the start of the book, Eliza has established herself in England with a job, a pending fellowship, and Jamie, her proper English boyfriend. Then she runs into Henry at a wedding. He’s available, Jamie doesn’t really move her, and she’s on the verge of her first return trip to Charleston in years, to attend her step-sister’s coming out party.

She waffles about going, but of course she does, straight into the snares Henry quite cheerfully admits he’s setting for her. At one point, she tells now nine-year-old Lawton that she prefers tennis to sailing, because “I could never figure out which way the wind was blowing.” Ah, but the reader can.

Nevertheless, Eliza dithers half-heartedly, weighing the pain of missed opportunities in England against the hope of second chances. Since the book is written from Eliza’s point of view, it would have been helpful to explore more deeply what underlies her ambivalence.

The author does a wonderful job of evoking Charleston—its geography, weather, history, architecture, and most of all, culture. That part of the book I enjoyed a lot. In other areas, the text signals “research!” or some obvious error plants a seed of doubt about the whole enterprise. For example, she refers to a pastel portrait as a “painting” or to a watercolor “canvas.” Those are slip-ups a good editor should have helped her avoid and they would have mattered less if Eliza weren’t an art historian, supposedly up on such basics.

For my taste, the book is too much of a soap opera romance, moving at a soap opera pace, with only its admirable atmospherics to sustain it. The ending, which I won’t reveal, shouldn’t burst out of the blue as it does; it needed some careful foreshadowing. Again, an editor should have helped with that.

I was puzzled about the naming of the principal characters Henry H. and Eliza, since the parallel with the more famous duo stops with the names. The explanation is in an author interview with Adam Parker in The (Charleston) Post and Courier. Thornton said,

“When we restored our house, we found on the original paint layer of a door jamb the names and heights of the Heyward children who had lived in the house in the 1830s. I liked the idea of taking the name of one of the children for one of the main characters. In Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion,’ Henry Higgins brings Eliza Doolittle into the mannered world of aristocratic London. In ‘Charleston,’ Henry goes in the opposite direction and brings Eliza into the untamed world of Lowcountry swamps.”

OK, but without that explanation, and perhaps with it, it’s a confusing choice.

I wish there were perfect men like Henry in the world waiting to sweep us gals off our feet, but, meanwhile, we have the fascinating city of Charleston. As New York Times reviewer Meghan Daum says, in this book, “the real femme fatale is the city itself, a place where the breeze in the laurel oak sounds ‘like a slow kind of applause.’” The story takes place around 1991, and I wonder how much Charleston—whose ways and mores here seem set in amber—has changed in the interim.

The Man Who Knew Infinity

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Dev Patel, Jeremy Irons, The Man Who Knew InfinityEven if you’re familiar with the broad outlines of Srinivasa Ramanujan’s amazing history, this movie (trailer), written and directed by Matt Brown, is intriguing and moving on many levels.

A mathematical genius, mostly self-taught and with no university degree, Ramanujan’s insights are still being applied and their significance explored today.

“Almost a century on, his work remains a fertile field of study, an object of astonishment, and a source of pride to his native land,” says Anthony Lane in The New Yorker.

Ramanujan grew up poor in early 20th century Madras (now Chennai), India. When his talents are finally taken seriously, he is encouraged to contact G.H. Hardy, a leading mathematician at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Hardy (played superbly by Jeremy Irons) is a bit of a misanthrope. He brings Ramanujan (Dev Patel) to Cambridge and becomes his mentor, not especially to do the young man any good, but for the intellectual challenge. He insists Ramanujan develop the proofs of the theorems he derives, it seems, by intuition. But Ramanujan is “a genius who can only explain that his propensity for solving problems and equations comes from God!” says Mimansa Shekhar in India Times.

Ramanujan struggled with the proofs, resenting that they keep him from developing new ideas. The tug-of-intellectual-war between the him and Hardy forms much of the movie’s conflict. Both of them confront a calcified British academic hierarchy, reluctant to admit an Indian could match—much less surpass—English intellectual prowess.

Hardy is interested in math. Full stop. While he recognizes Ramanujan’s mathematical powers, he’s little interested in the other aspects of life that animate his protégé—his culture, religion, and love of his wife (Devika Bhise) whom he’s left back home under the hostile supervision of his mother (Arundathi Nag).

Ramanujan does have advocates at Cambridge—Hardy’s mathematics colleague John Edensor Littlewood (Toby Jones) and Bertrand Russell (Jeremy Northam). But it’s the start of World War I, and people’s attention is mostly elsewhere.

Jeremy Irons is perfect, and I liked Dev Patel’s performance, too. Jones and Northam are always good. As with any biopic, the plot is constrained by the actual events of Ramanujan’s life, and in his case, those events—significant and earthshaking though they were and continue to be—take place mostly inside his head. Even if we moviegoers could see them, we wouldn’t understand them! Nevertheless, I found the story moving along rather perkily, aided by excellent scenes of India and his wife’s coping with her obsessive mother-in-law.

Definitely worth seeing, and a worthy subject for a film. In India, Ramanujan’s birthday, December 22, is celebrated as National Mathematics Day.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 62%; audiences, 80%. (Why the gap? My guess is audiences are less bothered by the conventional story.)

***Cold Blood, Hot Sea

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Maine, lobstermen, boat

David Nicholls, creative commons license

By Charlene D’Avanzo – This story, billed as “A Mara Tusconi Mystery,” introduces Mara, age 31, whose work at the Maine Oceanographic Institute (MOI) centers on the timely subject of climate change. D’Avanzo deserves credit for taking on the difficult task of making a science topic accessible to a general audience and taking advantage of the possibilities for drama inherent in this contentious field.

The story holds several key points of friction. First, between Mara and an aquaculture startup corporation up the Maine coast a short distance, which she believes may be fudging its data—anathema for any reputable scientist. And, second, between her fellow climate researchers and an apparently well funded cadre of climate change deniers who increasingly resort to spying, sabotage, and threats of physical violence. She has her personal issues as well: she gets seasick easily and she’s a behind-the-scenes player, deathly afraid of public speaking. At the same time, she’s trying to persuade Maine lobstermen that her research isn’t the threat, but the underlying changes in sea temperatures that could jeopardize their livelihoods.

As the novel begins, Mara and other MOI researchers head out to sea on their ship Intrepid to launch huge data-gathering buoys that will reveal ocean temperature trends. The buoy of her friend and colleague Harvey (a woman) goes into the water without incident. Because Mara is seasick, she turns the launch of her buoy over to Peter Riley, a young MOI PhD. Something goes disastrously wrong with the winch, the buoy slips, and fatally injures Peter.

An old MOI hand advises Mara to investigate Peter’s death on her own, secretly. She says the organization’s administrators may try to cover up any problems, in order not to scare off potential funders. Thus amateur sleuth Mara starts on a bit of a whirlwind of plot-driven activity.

D’Avanzo gives Mara a large cast of potential allies and antagonists, almost too many to flesh out in sufficient detail. Partly because the novel is told strictly from Mara’s point of view, we don’t get to know these other characters in very well. Stronger characters would create more unpredictability in the outcome and make me more invested in it.

When the opportunity arises for Mara to play a more prominent role in the climate change debate, she must weigh the risks of harassment along with the opportunities to make a vital contribution, and her personal strengths against her fears.

A longer version of this review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.

*****The Far Empty

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Chisos Mountains, West Texas

photo: Robert Dees, creative commons license

Written by J. Todd Scott – It’s hard to believe this well-crafted crime thriller is a debut novel. The author’s experience as a DEA agent lends authority to his prose, and his meticulous rendering of the Big Bend country south and east of El Paso, Texas, and its fictional town, Murfee, takes you to that dusty back-of-beyond. Outlaw country.

The two key voices in this multiple point-of-view novel are those of 17-year-old Caleb Ross, son of Big Bend County’s despotic sheriff, who’s called “the Judge,” and new deputy Chris Cherry, once a local high school football star. Caleb’s mother disappeared 13 months before the novel begins, and he’s convinced his father killed her, which colors their every interaction. Cherry lost any hope of a football career when he blew out a knee and still isn’t sure where his new future lies.

Caleb and Cherry are lost souls, floating under the brilliant West Texas stars, staying out of the deadly orbit of the sheriff, and trying to find out what kind of men they will be. Scott does not give them an easy path, and you’ll hold your breath as they are repeatedly tested.

These two narrators are joined by another deputy, Duane Dupree—a living, violence-addicted, coked-up example of why it’s best to steer clear of the Judge’s snares. You also hear from the Judge himself. One way or another, he knows everyone’s secrets.

Not only are these male characters convincingly portrayed, but Scott does a good job with his women too. You get part of the story from the perspectives of Caleb’s friend America, his teacher Anne, and Cherry’s live-in girlfriend Melissa. Their problems are believable and compelling enough for the characters to take the actions they do.

You have to root for Deputy Cherry, who has a bad habit of actually trying to investigate stuff. Early on, he responds to a call from a rancher who’s found a dessicated corpse and, while the Judge’s other deputies would gladly assume the deceased was “just another beaner” who died in the desert, Cherry isn’t sure. Because of the extent of the sheriff’s corruption as well as his confidence in his absolute authority, he reacts to Cherry’s probes like a horse responds to flies. They warrant a twitch, maybe, but no more.

The chili really starts bubbling when a gunshot couple is found in a burning SUV, far from anything.

Scott keeps his plot threads alive and moving at a clip. I never lost interest for a moment and even forgive a little deus ex Máximo at the end. (Not a typo. Trust me.) Readers who enjoyed The Cartel, which appears on many lists of the best thrillers of last year, will appreciate this sharp view from the northern side of the border.

A longer version of this review appeared recently here on CrimeFictionLover.com.

Maggie’s Plan

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Ethan Hawke, Greta Gerwig, Maggie's Plan

Ethan Hawke & Greta Gerwig in Maggie’s Plan

Tons of history and your mom tell you falling for a married man is a chancy way to find happiness and a father for your baby. In this romantic comedy by writer-director Rebecca Miller (trailer), the unlikely happens and aspiring novelist John Harding (played by Ethan Hawke) actually divorces his self-absorbed, chilly wife Georgette (Julianne Moore) and marries the girl. They have a lovely baby. A couple of years on, though, the marriage is just not working.

That’s when Maggie (Greta Gerwig) develops her plan. She’ll try to get John and Georgette back together.

There are some nice moments and some funny moments, though the comedy is never quite as screwball as it might have been. As a tale of female manipulation, Maggie’s efforts don’t reach the delicious complexity of Lady Susan Vernon  in Love & Friendship, also in theaters now.  Lady Susan plows ahead like an ocean liner, let the devil take the hindmost, and that creates a more comic effect than the rather more realistic angsty New Yorkers in Maggie’s web.

Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph are a prickly married couple, long-time friends of Maggie, stuck to each other like burrs. Mina Sundwall is John And Georgette’s teenage daughter, a perfect adolescent cynic.

Gerwig gives an engaging performance, Hawke is always interesting, and Julianne Moore shines as the ambitious academic—with a Danish accent, no less. There’s a real New York feel to the film, too. Says Christy Lemire in RogerEbert.com, director Miller “truly gets the city’s rhythms and idiosyncracies, and her dialogue frequently sparkles.”

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 84%; audiences 59%.