Category Archives: Fiction

“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.

***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 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.

Jane Austen’s Dark Side

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birdcages

photo: Kirk Maddison, creative commons license

Mikita Brottman recently wrote in The American Scholar about the virtues of going deeply into a narrow subject, such as Jane Austen did in her fictional world. How often do we feel that in the sweep of novels that cover centuries and generations we have lost the particular that made the years and the individuals vivid and unique? How much more can be revealed by Austen and her magnifying glass for social mores? Stuff that’s not so pretty, Brottman thinks.

Austen is a popular fan fiction subject, with 1,266 entries, pastiches, and spinoffs on the Archive of Our Own fanfic website. The author, dead almost 200 years, is on coffee mugs, and board books, coloring books, air fresheners, iPhone covers, and teapot cookies. (This may be the place to recall that when I showed up at the local post office wearing my “I ♥ Mr. Darcy” t-shirt, the clerk said, “Oh, that must be your husband!” “No, Pride and Prejudice.” “Is that a tv show?”) All these commercial incarnations underscore the bright, romantic view of Janeworld.

What was Jane really saying?

Brottman’s favorite novel Austen novel these days is Mansfield Park, with its self-effacing heroine, Fanny Price. MP has long been thought Austen’s “problem novel” and “difficult” (interesting critique from another fan here). Over time, the other, better-known novels have become less romantic for Brottman because their heroines’ world was so small—an accurate portrayal for the times. Austen herself likened her writing to “painting with a ‘fine brush’ on ‘a little bit—two inches—of ivory.’” I’ll be interested to see what Whit Stillman does with Austen in his recently released movie, Love and Friendship.

While we may remember with deep nostalgia the innocence of our adolescent ideas about love and destiny, our visions of a rich and handsome partner, and our longing to move in a refined, elegant world (“someday, my prince will come”), maybe it’s “time to give up on childhood fantasies,” says the fanfic author heleanna, who writes as The Butterfly Dreamer and has her own take on overcoming Mansfield Park’s constraints.

Below the surface of balls and calling cards, Austen is not romantic at all, Brottman believes, but rather “a very dark writer.” Under the taffeta and lace, “these well-bred young women are trapped like rats,” prisoners of rigid social rules and expectations. As some 150 years later poet Maya Angelou wrote about a different set of social constraints, “I know why the caged bird sings.”

(Brottman is a prolific author and cultural commentator. I’d like to read her brand new book The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men’s Prison, published June 7.)

Related articles

****The Birdwatcher

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birds

photo: Alan Schmierer, public domain

By William Shaw – “There were two reasons why William South did not want to be on the murder team. The first was that it was October. The migrating birds had begun arriving on the coast.The second was that, though nobody knew, he was a murderer himself.”

Birdwatching is an avocation that instills in its practitioners the virtues of patience, keen observation, and meticulous attention to detail, traits that police sergeant South brings to his work as well. He’s a Local District lead based in Kent and generally works with neighborhood groups, drug busts, traffic accidents. A good, solid copper. Murder, by contrast, is something a person can be driven to in a moment of panic and loss of control. The murder South committed took place when he was only 13 years old, and you soon understand whom he killed—his own father—and eventually you learn why.

South was born in Northern Ireland, son of a brutal enforcer in the Ulster Volunteer Force during the Troubles, and his father’s death was blamed on internecine rivalries within the UVF. To escape the violence all around them and with the intervention of a police sergeant sweet on his mum, mother and son were safely transplanted to Kent. Though he has become a policeman, South avoids any more contact with killing.

However, a new murder case changes all that, and South has been assigned to it, like it or not. The victim is South’s neighbor, retired school teacher Robert Rayner, a nice man living in a quiet place who’s been viciously beaten to death. The two bachelors have spent many hours together birding along the coast where they live. Despite the many hours spent and the friendship South thought they shared, it soon emerges that he actually knew very little about Rayner, and what he knows is faulty.

The rage that would produce a death such as Rayner’s is terrifyingly familiar to South, and in this well constructed plot, you understand it is destined to reverberate in unexpected ways. Overall, Shaw’s writing is clean and unlabored. The banter among members of the police team also are good, and much of it is funny. The characters are ones you come to care about, too.

What a Character!

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typewriter, writing

(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

This guest post by writer Robert Hebditch is excerpted from a workshop he recently conducted on developing characters for fiction. I’ve added a few examples in italics.

My way of creating character is pretty wasteful and I don’t recommend it to anyone, particularly beginners. My method leads to a lot of re-writes, restarts and a lot of cut and pasting. I often end up throwing it all away. But maybe some pieces of it will work for you!

Following Flannery O’Connor’s famous dictum that you’ve gotta “Write it down, then see what you’ve got,” I tend to write my ideas for the story first, maybe including vaguely defined characters. Then I start writing, fleshing out the characters as each new situation demands.

I draw on my own experience more than any other source. In a lifetime we are exposed to an awful lot of people—friends, lovers, neighbors, people on the street, at the club, at social gatherings, and yes, even in libraries. Most of us already know many more character types than we can invent. I take bits and pieces from these different sources and lace them together with a strong dose of imagination.

Experienced writer or not, asking yourself questions about your characters is certainly necessary, but there’s no need to have all the answers before you start. For me, the old journalistic maxim “Who, what, when, where, how and why” works well. You can selectively apply this where the situation dictates until you’ve filled out your character sufficiently to fulfill the demands of the story.

Ten Basic Points in Developing Characters in Fiction

  1. A character, especially a main character, should be “believably real,” so that the reader will suspend disbelief (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817).
  2. Some information about how characters look, and not just significant physical attributes, like body type and face, scars, tattoos, but also how they walk, dance, run or scratch their face.
  3. Robert pointed out that a great many contemporary writers prefer not to provide much physical description, following Stephen King’s advice to let the readers supply it. “If I describe mine, it freezes out yours,” King says.
  4. Similarly, Ian Rankin, in Knots and Crosses, also prefers to leave the physical appearance of his main character to the reader’s imagination. Detective John Rebus is described as having “brown hair and green eyes, like his brother.” And that’s it.
  5. What characters say, how they say it, how their speech differs from other characters, and whom they talk to. Also, what other characters say about them—a device that works best when it reveals as much about the observer as the observed. Because Robert’s insight about observer and observed  prepared me to appreciate it, I found this perfect example, in which a son is talking about his tyrannical father: “My mom had to lay [my homework] out for him next to his breakfast plate, to the left of the juice but not touching the fork, so he could scan through it with those gray eyes of his, searching for mistakes, tapping his long finger against the papers like a clock-tick.” From those few lines, you know the father’s horrible and mom and son are terrified. (from The Far Empty by J. Todd Scott). “To the left of the juice but not touching the fork”—brilliant!
  6. What characters do (their actions.) This is the key element, of course, because this is how they move through the plot.
  7. How characters act, which can be at odds with what they do, sometimes helping to create mystery or tension. For example, a man whose appearance is quiet and calm may suddenly reveal his true self by a violent action, such as knocking someone’s teeth out or kicking a cat.
  8. How character live—where they live, where they go, their history and habits, friends, relatives, work associates, hangouts and whom they hang out with.
  9. How and what they feel—emotions, moods and perceptions. At the extreme, writers have shown the emotions and perceptions of people who are insane—think of Chief Bromden’s belief in the black machinery behind the walls in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Or cognitively impaired Benjy Compson’s stream of consciousness in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Or Dr. Jennifer White, narrator of Alice LaPlante’s masterful murder mystery Turn of Mind, who suffers from progressive dementia.
  10. Minor characters are not unimportant characters. They should always serve the story by helping the protagonist move through the plot in some way, no matter how small. In Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, the little we know about the man Thursby is from the established liar Brigid O’Shaughnessy. He makes no real appearance in the novel, yet without his death early on, the whole mystery of the black bird could not unfold.

A final thought. There are so many ways to create character and no one way is the right way. What works for us is what we must go with, with the proviso that there is always something new to learn. What matters most is how our characters make a good story better.

Guest poster Robert Hebditch is a writer of short stories, a local author and is published in US 1, The Kelsey Review and Genesis. He is a member of Princeton Public Library Writers Room and Room at the Table writing groups and a retired staff member of Princeton University.

 

Guilty Pleasures: Plot

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Dickens, writer

(photo: Alan Weir, creative commons license)

In this essay for The Guardian, John Mullan has laid bare a dirty secret I share with many of you. Why do we read fiction? Watch tv & movies? See plays? Plot.

“How we love plots—and how we look down our noses at them,” Mullan begins his essay. Sophisticates are supposed to prefer in-depth character studies, deep psychological explorations, wrenching perspectives on arid reality. I’m afraid I’ve never recovered from the childlike thrill of having a story read to me whose next installment almost made bedtime something to look forward to.

But in contemporary novels, says Mullan, “it sometimes seems that the delights of plot have been contracted out to genre fiction”—especially mysteries, thrillers, and the like. In other words, my favorites.

Of course, genre fiction with believable characters, plausible action, intriguing settings, and (my preference here) significant themes are more satisfying to read, for me it is still plot that makes them worth reading at all. “Yet nowadays we admit the enjoyment of plot as if it were a low kind of self-indulgence—irresistible but ignoble,” says Mullan. We recognize it is what makes us unable to put down certain books, “but not what we any longer expect of ‘serious fiction’” (my emphasis). However, as literary agent and author Donald Maass points out in Writing 21st Century Fiction, plots is more than “clever twists and turns [that] are only momentarily attention-grabbing.”

The many significant characters in the novels of Charles Dickens all turn out to be important to his ultimate plot, even when you don’t fully appreciate their role until the end. Though the drama may have been unfolding through a series of seeming digressions, every aspect is important to the ultimate outcome. This is quite different from presenting string of red herrings and random events. Or, as Mullan puts it, “Plot is what stops narrative being just one thing after another.”

The ending of the popular television series The Good Wife or, Mullan suggests, the evolution of Game of Thrones, appear to have abandoned the connecting thread of plot development for ad hoc-ery: “matters of ingenious improvisation rather than achieved design.” When viewers began to feel this during the six seasons of Lost, what was lost was their interest.

Must writers plan out every detail of plot development before they begin writing? Of course not. When I’m writing a story, I dump in all kinds of information that comes to me as potential plot elements. As I work toward the conclusion, some of these ideas are discarded and some minor points turn out to be essential to the final resolution. In that way, I retain the freshness of discovery, which I hope I can transmit to the reader, I have a rich array of clues and directions to draw upon, and I’ve laid the groundwork for the ending.

Sometimes that groundwork needs to be reworked and strengthened, the reader reminded obliquely of a particular point here and there, but the aim is to achieve a coherent whole in the end. And for some of those points to surprise readers, to smash their expectations head-on and veer off in a different direction, but one totally supported by the plot elements that have gone before.

The Winner’s Circle

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horse racing

At Belmont, 2013 (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

Horses, horse people, jockeys, trainers, and touts. Watching the Kentucky Derby—“the most exciting two minutes in sports”—last Saturday made me think of some of the great books about horses and the quirky, obsessive people who surround them.

The horses are huge, but run on the most fragile of ankles. The jockeys are small, but mostly heart. Racing is a quick way to burn money. No wonder storytellers have capitalized on its dramatic potential.

Horse Heaven – by Jane Smiley. Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for A Thousand Acres, yet I found this novel way more satisfying. She’s developed a stableful of engaging characters as you follow the fates of several horses bred for racing, a risky proposition in the best of times. As much about people and their passions and predilections as about horses, of course.

Lords of Misrule – by Jaimy Gordon. Winner of the 2010 National Book Award, this novel is set in the lower echelons of horse-racing, among people for whom the twin spires of Churchill Downs are a distant dream. She has an almost miraculous way of capturing the way horse people think and talk.

The Horse God Built – by Lawrence Scanlan. This one I haven’t read, but it was too tempting to include a book about Secretariat—“the horse God built.” Secretariat won racing’s Triple Crown (the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont Stakes) in 1973, with track-blistering performances. This nonfiction book is Secretariat as seen through the eyes of his groom and a story of friendship. This is one of six great nonfiction books about racing compiled by Amy Sachs for BookBub.

Seabiscuit, by Laura Hillenbrand, was made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Toby Maguire, Jeff Bridges, Chris Cooper, and real-life jockey Gary Stevens. A heartwarming story, this production includes footage shot from the midst of a race—an unforgettable view of why this sport is so dangerous. Rotten Tomatoes critics rating 77%, audiences 76%.

Luck – HBO. For the full immersion experience, try this nine-episode series, developed by David Milch. It’s all-star cast includes Dustin Hoffman, Dennis Farina, John Ortiz, Richard Kind, Nick Nolte, Michael Gambon and, again, jockey Gary Stevens (who raced in the 2016 Kentucky Derby at age 53). The three touts, convinced they’re on track for riches, are priceless. Rotten Tomatoes critics rating 87%; audiences 78%

The Year’s Best Crime Fiction: 2016

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police car

photo: P.V.O.A., creative commons license

Why deal with poorly executed [!], formulaic, airport quality crime fiction, when there’s Best Crime? Booklist’s longtime crime fiction reviewer Bill Ott has combed reviews of the amazing spectrum of books in this genre—from “crime caper novels, psychological thrillers, and history-mystery blends,” to police procedurals, and every kind of crime, white collar to noir, to come up with his top 10 crime novels of the year, 5/1/15-4/15/16.

An end-of-year summary of Best Crime/Mystery/Thriller fiction of 2016, is here.

And, the 2017 update of Ott’s list is here.

Every time the award-granting groups publish their nominees for the year’s top books in this genre, I’ve usually not read (and often not even heard of) any of them. This, despite reading some 70 books a year, heavily weighted toward the new and the criminal.

Booklist’s Top Picks

Mexico, drug cartels

(graphic by Christopher Dombres, creative commons license)

I was delighted, therefore, to see at the very top of Booklist’s review two novels I not only read and reviewed, but found absolutely spectacular—Don Winslow’s The Cartel, a cri de coeur for greater understanding of the clueless U.S. War on Drugs, its spectacular failures, and its deadly impact on the people of Mexico.

The other is Bill Beverly’s Dodgers, a terrific debut novel about a young black man growing up in Los Angeles, how race and crime affect his worldview, and so much more. While I’m not usually a fan of coming-of-age novels, this one will knock your socks off. Says Ott, Beverly’s characters “all live, breathe, and bleed.”

These two books are beautifully written, with convincing characters and engaging plots, and I wish that all the thrillers I read had the same moral significance. The other eight on Ott’s list—which I now want to read to see whether they meet the standard set by Winslow and Beverly—are:

  • Forty Thieves, by Thomas Perry—says Ott, “irresistible” comic capering
  • House of the Rising Sun, by James Lee Burke—“a quest of Arthurian proportions” and, since it’s based in Texas, a must-read for me—hey, those are my kinfolk
  • Is Fat Bob Dead Yet?, by Stephen Dobyns – uproarious, says Ott, who invokes my favorites Elmore Leonard (in his comic vein) and Donald E. Westlake; “loosen the reins of realism,” he advises
  • Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye – “Reader, I murdered him.” Jane Eyre devotees need know no more
  • King Maybe, by Timothy Hallinan – “one of the best in a sinfully entertaining series” involving crooks in LA, their perfect setting
  • Little Pretty Things, by Lori Rader-Day – A Mary Higgins Clark award-winner, atmospheric and suspenseful
  • The Passenger, by Lisa Lutz – a dark psychological thriller about a woman fleeing the consequences of her husband’s death (What, no sticking around for the insurance?)
  • The Whispering City, by Sara Moliner – an evocative historical, set in Barcelona in the early 1950’s, where General Franco’s security police are everywhere and a newspaper reporter is investigating a death best left alone.

Edgar Winners 2016

While I’m at it, I’ll mention that the Mystery Writers of American recently announced its 2016 Edgar winners. None of the nominees for “best novel” were in the list above, with the winner Let Me Die in His Footsteps by Lori Roy (“a hybrid of mystery, coming-of-age and Southern gothic,” says the LA Times). MWA’s award for “best first novel” went to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (a cerebral spy thriller about the Vietnam War and winner of the Pulitzer Prize).

Be sure to check out the “Reading . . .” tab above to find more book reviews, many in the crime/mystery/thriller genre.

Where’s the Happy?

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Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman, Sense & Sensibility, Jane Austen

Kate Winslet (Marianne Dashwood) & Alan Rickman (Col. Brandon) in Sense & Sensibility

Novelist Carrie Brown, in an essay in the Glimmer Train bulletin this month, advocates a reassessment of the components of conflict that writers incorporate in their work. Too often, she believes, less experienced writers, especially, lean too heavily on catastrophe. They include “too much dark and not enough light,” believing only the bad stuff is dramatic.

Bad stuff happening is the meat and potatoes of the genre I read most often—mysteries and thrillers. Yet even there, excess abounds. Authors feel compelled to pile up ever more bodies, to make the manner of death ever more grisly, to include female characters who might offer a hope of happiness only to put them out of reach, often because they’re dead, to give their protagonists’ souls so many dark places to hide that after a while, I wonder, “why does this character get out of bed in the morning?” When I start rolling my eyes, the author has lost me.

Brown believes “the mystery of people inclined toward charity or kindness has a drama as compelling as a story of decline and despair.” These positive forces are as powerful and as complicated as the impulses that propel other people toward evil. Jane Austen knew this. So did Dickens.

The key to presenting happiness well, she says, is to capture its complexity and contradictions. She uses an example “weeping with happiness.” Think of Emma Thompson in the movie Sense and Sensibility, crying with great, gasping sobs (see the clip!) when she realizes that Edward Ferrars is in fact not married. We are infinitely more moved by her happy tears than if she’d simply grinned delightedly.

It is not easy for people to be happy, and it is especially not easy for them to be happy when they have been beset by all the other fictional difficulties authors throw at them. But, Brown might argue, these characters can—and should—be happy for that precise reason. She says happiness depends “on the nearby presence of unhappiness to be felt most acutely. By necessity, it seems, the happiest man will also be the man most aware of unhappiness.” Going back to Sense and Sensibility, that would be lovely Colonel Brandon.

An example from Brown’s own work is her 2013 novel The Last First Day, in which a long-married couple—the headmaster of the Derry School for Boys and his wife—must face the declining health that forces his retirement. Said Reeve Lindbergh in her review of the book for The Washington Post, “Terrible things happen and have happened. These people struggle and are hurt. . . . Nevertheless, [the author shows] one can see with clarity and with appreciation for certain glimpsed miracles in every day, whatever else the day brings.” One is capable of a kind of happiness.