Category Archives: Fiction

Tearful Fiction

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snowy owl, Hedwig

(photo: wikimedia.org)

What happens when a book character you’ve come to love dies—or a relationship you’ve treasured comes to naught? Grief, that’s what. The five stages of fictional grief—rereading (“did I get that right?”), dismay, rationalization and hope, anger (throw the book across the room), and never getting over it—are explored in an amusing Bookriot post by Susie Rodarme. Anger is appropriate when characters are killed off randomly, to keep them from cluttering up the plot any longer.

We saw a manifestation of these stages on social media when Downton Abbey’s Matthew Crawley came to his untimely end. “I can’t believe it!” “Nooooooo.” “I’m not watching any more!” “Maybe he’s not reaaally dead?” For readers of paranormal fiction, there’s always a chance . . .

Tess of the D’Urbervilles was a real weepy for me. I read it several times and, once I knew the ending, began getting weepy from page one (delicious!). Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing (review here) is the most recent book that prompted those “why did she have to die?” feelings, and true regret that left me down for days.

The comments on Rodarme’s post are interesting. Must be a youngish crowd, since most of their literary tear-blotting experiences are associated with Harry Potter, and repeatedly cited is the death of Hedwig, a character introduced this way: “Harry now carried a large cage that held a beautiful snowy owl, fast asleep with her head under her wing.” I’m guessing many of those who say they grieved long and hard over Hedwig, subconsciously at least, recognize her death symbolized Harry’s loss of innocence, and that’s what they regret, as well.

****Mystery Girl

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Los Angeles, Hollywood

(photo source: farm9.staticflickr.com)

By David Gordon – This book
was a gift, so I knew nothing about it when I opened its pages and fell in love with its surprises. Funny, complicated, well-drawn characters—B-movie cinephiles—living on the tattered fringes of Hollywood. “Some things are inexplicable. The human heart is one. Los Angeles is another,” said the New York Post review. The story involves failed experimental novelist, abandoned husband, and tyro-detective Sam Kornberg’s search for Mona Naught, a woman of elusive identity and tenuous reality.

The first-person narrator’s voice, occasionally uncertain, is consistently insightful and entertaining. Here’s a description of a cemetery in Mexico: “a city of tiny palaces that the good citizens had constructed to house their souls, like elaborate birdcages or the dollhouses of spoiled girls, far more splendid than their own mortal homes. After all, we are alive a short while, dead forever.” That last tiny zinger is what makes it.

Or this unpromising exchange with the Korean housekeeper of his prospective employer, when she answered his knock:

“Warren?” she asked. “No, I’m not Warren. I’m Samuel. Sam really. Sam Kornberg.”

            “You show warrant?”

            “Oh, warrant,” I said. “I thought you said Warren. No, no warrant. I still don’t know what you mean.” . . .

“Norman?”

“No, not Norman either. I’m Sam.”

“No.” She spoke slowly, for my benefit, as if explaining a simple fact. “You are Mormon.”

“A Mormon? No, I’m not a Mormon. Sorry. Jewish, I’m afraid.”

Occasionally, the narration is interrupted by other narrators, with their critical observations about Sam and his shortcomings, which put his actions in a new light. Author Gordon, in a recent New York Times blog, describes writing as a “risky, humiliating endeavor.” No surprise, maybe that about his writing, the fictional Sam is skewering: “I myself could no longer stand to read these sorts of novels, the kind I couldn’t seem to stop writing . . . It seemed I had dedicated my life to a question whose point even I had forgotten along the way.” His detecting assignment from Solar Lonsky helped him find it again.

What’s Your Green?

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Rorschach

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Having a political discussion with my friend Don is almost impossible. In conversation, I avoid the hot-button issues I know will set him off. Unfortunately more of those topics crowd the landscape of his mind than I anticipate, and stumbling on one is like setting off a land-mine. Why is it we can’t just have a conversation? It’s because our points of view are so different, there’s little room for mutual understanding, and we might as well be speaking different languages. Point-of-view determines not only which facts each of us takes in, but also what we see when we look at something as quotidian as three people standing on the street corner.

In a recent Glimmer Train essay on point-of-view, Bret Anthony Johnston, director of creative writing at Harvard, wrote that his students get this concept when he trots out the old saying, “To a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.” He says writers need to understand their characters’ obsessions—their hammerness—and those ten-penny features that loom so large in their minds. Sometimes their preoccupations are so consuming they don’t see the pile of screws right nearby or, more likely, interpret it as another pile of nails. “To the brokenhearted, every couple looks happy,” he says.

I’ve read Johnston’s award-winning book of short stories Corpus Christi: Stories, and this year he published the novel, Remember Me Like This (NPR review and interview). The novel deals with a family whose son disappeared, then is returned to them four years later. While he understood going in that this lost, this hiatus in relationships, would color every aspect of his characters’ lives, “what I didn’t know was how different and revelatory their perspectives would be.” Each family member reacted in a unique and shaping way, and required of Johnston—and the reader—different levels of empathy. “In fiction,” he says, “every detail is a Rorschach test” to be interpreted through the lens of the character. We ask about a character’s experience not “what does it mean?” but “what does it mean to her?” If we didn’t, we could never read with understanding the story of anyone not exactly like ourselves, should there be such a person.

Despite the popularity of multitasking and our self-deception about our skill at it, in truth our brains are pretty much wired to handle one thing at a time. This inattentional blindness, Johnston says, is “point-of-view in its purest form.” What captures our characters’ attention demonstrates what they are most interested in and care about the most. This is perhaps why the unimportant details that new writers include in their scenes—in a misguided effort to make them concrete—are so distracting. “Find out what your characters notice, find out where their gazes linger and why, and you’ll find out who your characters are.”

Johnston has published a nifty set of writing exercises, too, and he included one with this essay. You might try it. He suggests grabbing pen and paper and moving through your surroundings making a list of everything you see that’s green. (This will be a long list in my case, as I always say, “I don’t care what color it is, as long as it’s green.”)

see, eye, green

(photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

Done? Did you notice particulars you’d forgotten about? Will you see items in your surroundings in a new way for a while? Were memories stimulated? Briefly, “green” was your mind’s obsession. I’ll bet dyed-in-the-wool environmentalists would create a somewhat different list than would a graphic designer.

“Now do the same thing for your characters,” Johnston says. “Find out what their ‘green’ is.” What readers need to know isn’t just what your characters look at, but, more important, what they see.

 

Michael Connelly and Life Change

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Michael Connelly, Mickey Haller, Lincoln LawyerA big fan of Michael Connelly—and his fictional crew, Harry Bosch and “Lincoln Lawyer” Mickey Haller—I was eager to study his selection of “ Books that Changed My Life” on Audible.com. Connelly is one of more than 50 authors from whom Audible has gathered this information—everyone from Philippa Gregory to James Patterson to another of my favorites, Alan Furst. The authors were asked to name the smallish number of books, generally two to four, that fit the life-changing rubric.

Connelly’s picks are Neely Tucker’s first novel, The Ways of the Dead, because of the way that, despite the fast-moving Washington D.C.-based story, Tucker “always takes the time for wry observation of the humanity of the streets.” Washington Post review here. He also singled out Alafair Burke’s All Day and a Night (New York Journal of Books review here). For both of these choices, one of Connelly’s main criteria was how well the authors conveyed a sense of their cities, for example, saying Tucker “knows the turf inside and out.” Much like Bosch and Haller know Los Angeles, I’d say.

His third selection is Michael Koryta’s Those Who Wish Me Dead (NPR review here)—“full of surprises,” Connelly says. The funny thing about these three choices is that they were all published last June. Either Connelly has an attention span similar to mine, or June was a epochal month for him. At least, he seems to have a different definition of “life-changing” than Audible’s mavens intended.

As it happens, Koryta is another author asked for life-changers, and his picks are Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (“rhythm and word choice”), King’s The Shining (“a clinic in suspense”), and Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, with its “peerless prose,” which in the audio version is narrated by Brad Pitt. The three novels are All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing (my *****review), and Cities of the Plains.

As a postscript, I note the perennial difficulty of finding a review of the one book written by a woman, an issue that helped launch a great organization, Sisters in Crime.

Faraway Places

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York, England, Cityscape, roofs

(photo: author)

No doubt about it, setting a mystery in a faraway locale adds a touch of romance. Fans of the Venice-based detective stories of Donna Leon, Edinburgh’s Inspector Rebus series by Ian Rankin, or Tarquin Hall’s Delhi-based private eye stories, see their cities as practically another character. But these authors live or have lived in the places they write about. Can authors pull that off from afar? A panel of American mystery writers at last weekend’s Deadly Ink conference discussed where, why—and most important, how—they do it. This is of intense interest to me, because my mystery series character, Eugenia Clarke, is a travel writer, and stories about her take place where she’s on assignment—Alaska, Morocco, Rome.

For the most part, Annamaria Alfieri (writing about South America and colonial East Africa), Albert Tucher (beginning a series about Hawai`i—a great excuse for a tax-deductible research trip, he said), and Cathi Stoler (Tuscany and that foreign country, Las Vegas) have spent time in the places they write about, supplementing their own experiences with research. They talked about how the challenge is far greater than pasting on a few superficial references. Street names, landmarks.

When they’re really cooking, their research—on the ground, through interviews, background reading, online—will lead to a plot and characters uniquely of that place. They’ll end up with a story that could not have happened in Columbus, Ohio. Readers recognize that legitimate sense of place. For example, an estimated 500 English-language books—mostly mystery or suspense—are set in Italy, and this website rates them as to whether they really capture “the essence” or merely use Italy as a lure.

On the Murder is Everywhere blog, which features a group of far-flug writers, Alfieri recently quoted from John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, in which he describes the fundamental reason writers write: “We wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is.” Setting a story in a far-off place puts the writer’s head—every bit as much as the reader’s—in a place where that can happen.

History, Mystery, or Miss-story?

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4th of July, early America, John Lewis Krimmel, Philadelphia

John Lewis Krimmel, Fourth of July in Centre Square, Philadelphia, 1819 (photo: wikimedia.org)

A panel of six mystery writers explored the elasticity of history at the Deadly Ink 2014 conference this weekend. They were, in chronological order by their topics:

One of the most interesting questions these panelists were asked is how comfortable they are changing facts to suit the fictional purposes of their story, and the division of opinion was striking. Belsky’s point of view seemed to be “It’s fiction—do what you want,” whereas others, including Alfieri and Inglee, especially, believed that if you incorporate real historical individuals, you have to be true to their attitudes and actions.

Belsky pointed out that we may never know the whole story or maybe even the true story of past events—and Irving pointed out that applies to current events as well—freeing the author to fill in the blanks. (My own opinion on this is there’s a big difference between not knowing a fact and making one up.)

When an author must change a fact, a date, or other detail, they can use author’s notes to describe what and why. With that manes, Scott Turow acknowledges some of the liberties he took in several pivotal event in the WWII novel Ordinary Heroes: “There was no ammunition dump at LaSaline Royale, which is actually situated a few miles from the site I describe . . . Heisenberg (Werner Heisenberg, physicist) did run from Hechingen, but not because anyone had attempted to blow up the secret location of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute on Haigerlocherstrasse. FDR’s death was announced near midnight overseas, not in the afternoon of April 12, 1945.” This last detail seems to be one that could have been fictionally accommodated. It was an event, like the Kennedy assassination, that every American alive at the time remembers vividly.

Alfieri created a character drawn from life down to his toenails and gave him his own name, much as real people appear in the novels of E.L. Doctorow, but when her mystery plot required this character to commit a violent act for which there is no evidence, she renamed him. She was able to build the character in the first place because of the strength of her research, and several panelists endorsed immersive research for fiction, which must appeal to many writers’ innate inwardness.

When an author knows enough about a period—how people thought, what they thought about, what they ate, how they made a living, what they feared—new story elements arise organically from that substrate. They fit the story, the story isn’t made to fit them. Such an approach makes for an infinitely richer reader experience, even if most of that research never appears explicitly in the book. The writer moves forward with confidence.

Another reason to get the details right is that readers will be sure to ding them if they don’t. Errors can destroy a book’s credibility and readers’—and reviewers’—interest in it. To avoid mistakes, Kelly and Rubin said they work with historians. Rubin, especially, because he is published by LSU Press, has to meet scholarship standards.

A final difficulty for historical writers is language. The conversations among characters have to read as if they are of the period, yet a precise rendition of old-fashioned language—by writing “forsoothly”—may be unreadable. David Mitchell, discussing the language he used in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (I loved this book!), described writing dialog for characters who were native speakers of Japanese, who were Dutch and speaking Japanese, Dutch and speaking Dutch, English upper-class sea captains, English lower-class seamen, and so on. Plus, the book begins in 1799, with two hundred-plus years of language evolution in between. Mitchell developed a language he called “bygone-ish,” which had the ring of the old and the clarity of the current, with variants for each nationality and class.

Mitchell’s approach points out an important issue that applies not just for words and phrases. Even if an event actually did happen or a word actually was in use at the time a story is set, writers of historical mysteries may avoid it anyway, because it will sound too modern, out of place. In this way, truth is more powerful than fact. And if this seems like another way of saying, “it’s fiction—do what you want,” it isn’t.

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***The Cobweb

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spider, cobweb

(photo: pixabay.com)

By Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George (narrated by Marc Vietor)–As a huge Neal Stephenson fan, I was delighted to see this political thriller—co-written with J. Frederick George—in a special Audible 2-for-1 sale. Unfortunately, it lacked the very aspects of Stephenson’s other works that I enjoy most—complexity, humor (ok, there was a bit), challenging ideas, although there was some effective skewering of government bureaucracy.

J. Frederick George is the pen name of historian George Jewsbury, a Russia specialist—whose special expertise is little-used in this tale about the first Gulf War—who is also Stephenson’s uncle. This book was originally published under another pen name for the two of them, Stephen Bury. That’s not quite the most complicated aspect of the plot.

The story takes place in Iowa and Washington, D.C., and the title refers to how people in the nation’s intelligence agencies can protect themselves by keeping anyone who might disturb their world so smothered in procedure and paperwork and investigative committees that they lose their ability to actually accomplish anything. Ample evidence since the book’s publication (1996, reissued in 2005) demonstrates how the different pieces of the nation’s security apparatus have worked at cross-purposes and always to their own presumed advantage and protection. Amazon reviewers familiar with Stephenson’s other work gave it lower ratings (“Neal Stephenson lite,” one said), but overall, four stars.

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***The Killing Floor

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Greyhound bus, Cleveland

(photo: wikimedia.org)

By Lee Child (narrated by Dick Hill) – This is the first Jack Reacher novel (1997), and the first I’ve read. They’re so popular, fans must either get past the flimsy logic behind Reacher’s choice to become a Greyhound-riding drifter or Child at some point strengthens that case. Like Jo Nesbo’s first Harry Hole novel (reviewed here), you know from the get-go that Reacher’s woman will be an endangered species before the plot runs out.

Maybe male writers just have to get that damsel-in-distress-rescue-fantasy-thing out of their system, but I wish they would. It’s too transparent an attempt to give their protagonists some depth via a meaningful, but brief relationship with really good sex. These relationships have to be short, though, so they don’t spill over into sequels and doing the laundry, picking up the kids, and the other minutia that would inevitably follow if the relationship continued.

The plot had a pretty big “huh?” in it, too, though I quite liked the image of homeless Jack Reacher tooling around the Georgia countryside in the borrowed Bentleys. (Spoiler alert: The “huh” was, if the Margrave powers-that-be hired detective Finlay because they mistakenly thought he was slow-witted—because of what Finlay says was the worst job interview in history—wouldn’t their FBI agent confederate, who knows Finlay, have set them straight?) Superb narration by Dick Hill!

Put the Cat Out

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Siamese cat, Grant

Shut out again. (photo: author)

Steven King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft focuses on how he became a writer and the process of becoming and many of his observations about being a writer ring true to me. Like most people who dispense advice to the novice, he emphasizes the virtue of “ass-in-the-chair”—writing every day, which is a groove serious writers finally work their way into, despite the distractions of kids, jobs, and grocery-shopping. Right now, for example, my lawn is shaggy as a pony’s winter coat.

He says if he doesn’t write daily, “the characters begin to stale off in my mind—they begin to seem like characters instead of real people . . . the excitement of spinning something new begins to fade.” Like many other writers, I hit the keyboard early in the morning, and the excitement King talks about is what gets me out of bed at five to grab a cup of coffee and dive into the work.

He also insists that you shut the office door, “your way of telling the world and yourself that you mean business.” Certainly, I shut mine, mostly to keep out Grant, a Siamese cat who thinks sitting in my lap and watching the cursor move across the screen has limited entertainment value and is something to complain about. (I created a monster when I played YouTube cat videos for him.) Eliminate distractions—phones, beeping email alerts, insistent cats—anything that takes you away from the page.

King tries to write 10 pages a day—about 2000 words. That’s his goal, and he thinks every writer should have one, every day. I’m a fan of getting a draft on paper, powering through and getting the story down and fixing all the inevitable issues and lapses and problems in rewrite. After that, I revise, a chapter a day.

Room, door (and the determination to shut it), goal. Adhering to these basics, he believes, makes writing easier over time. The more you do it, the easier it gets. “Don’t wait for the muse to come,” he says, and it’s astonishing how many would-be writers talk to me about their lack of or need for “inspiration,” as if it sprinkles down from the clouds rather than up from the mind’s carefully plowed field. King says, “Your job is make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day.”

Everyone who aspires to write has likely read a lot, too. We’ve listened to lots of TV and movie scripts. Lots of other people’s words, many not very good, have passed into our brains, and our subconscious is filled with the stuff. It’s in there. It wants out. When a phrase or scene comes too easily, almost unconsciously, I’ve learned there’s a problem. It’s canned, it’s derivative, it’s not a genuine product.

So now King gets to the hard part. You have to tell the truth. Your story’s truth. The writer cannot just be a pass-through for others’ words, ideas, conversations. “The job of fiction,” he says, “is to find the truth inside the story’s web of lies.” Even when we love the characters in a book and we really, really don’t want it to end, if the book has told the truth, we can feel satisfied when we turn that last page. If not, a squeaky voice starts up somewhere in our brain, Madeline’s Miss Clavel saying, “Something is not right.” As stunning as most of Gone Girl was—a web of lies if ever there was one—I thought the ending fell unexpectedly flat, and King has put his finger on the reason. In working out her denouement, author Gillian Flynn somehow strayed from the truth of her characters.

By contrast, truth-telling pervades the Pinckney Benedict stories I reviewed this week (on the home page for now; eventually the review will end up in “Reading . . .”). One of the best quotes describing the struggle to find the truth nugget is a favorite of my writing coach, Lauren Davis, and it’s from sports columnist Red Smith, who once said, “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”

While that’s true, King also says that even the worst three hours he ever spent writing “were still pretty damned good.”

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*****Miracle Boy and Other Stories

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cock fight, cockfight

(photo: wikimedia)

It’s hard to pass up a book by someone with the irresistible name of Pinckney Benedict, and you shouldn’t. His 14-story collection, Miracle Boy and Other Stories, is something that will stay with you a long time. (“Miracle Boy” was made into an award-winning short film—trailer). I came away with a strong sense of the people, animals, and the not-necessarily-explainable happenings in his narrow, timeless Seneca River valley setting, an oasis where myth, history, modernity, and even the future exist side-by side. Other readers have been similarly entranced.

The following quote, from a boy talking about how he copes with the world, demonstrates the deceptive simplicity of Benedict’s prose: I could usually get along by just looking them straight in the eyes and smiling and nodding and making little noises like I understood [what they said] and I thought what they were saying was just great. (“Bridge of Sighs”)

How many of us have faked it just like that?

Several themes (no doubt many more than my weak skills can identify) pervade many of these stories. The possibility of falling, literally and symbolically, is a strong one. It appears in the eponymous story, in “Joe Messinger is Dreaming,” and in the jet crash of “The World, The Flesh, and the Devil”: The wet soil of the field looked soft as a featherbed. It seemed inviting, as though it wanted him simply to loose his hold on the ladder, to spread his arms, and drop down sprawling onto it. (“Mudman”)

The close melding of humans and their animals weaves throughout. Benedict’s dogs are not the bright, cute fellows cocking their photogenic heads at us in our friends’ Facebook posts. Animals can be victims, when an epizootic plague strikes the valley’s farms, or aggressors in stories of dog and cock fights. They can take on (distressingly) human qualities and tend to look out for #1 (not you). Feel the speed and powerful movement in this passage about a pack of wild dogs chasing a downed aviator: He shoved his way forward in the pack, striving for all he was worth, until there were no dogs in front of him. He flew through the forest, and the frontrunner’s howl broke from his throat, and the dogs behind him took it up adding their voices to the awful wail. (“The World, The Flesh, and the Devil”)

The river valley’s isolation nurtures altered mental states in which interpersonal connection falter and sizzle out: For a brief instant (my father) stood still, motionless as I had never seen him. It was as though a breaker somewhere inside him had popped, and he had been shut off. (“Mercy”)

I ordered this book because of an interesting interview with Benedict in Glimmer Train, and feel quite smug that I ordered it from his independent publisher, Press 53 of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, not Amazon. At the time I ordered, Press 53 was engaged in its “Books for Soldiers” campaign, and because of my purchase, mailed a book to a deployed or recovering U.S. soldier at no additional charge. Nice!

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