By Donna Tartt – The 1654 painting, The Goldfinch, animates the action of Donna Tartt’s third novel, which is receiving much-deserved attention (and the Pulitzer Prize). The story begins when twelve-year-old Theo is injured in a terrorist explosion at the Metropolitan Museum, and an elderly dying man orders him to pick the painting—which happens to be one of Theo’s mother’s favorites—out of the rubble. Stunned, confused, and pretty much ignored in the aftermath of the explosion, he stumbles home to show it to her. Yes, there is an over-long interlude in Las Vegas when Theo lives a feral existence with his father and delightfully reprobate Russian friend Boris, and yes, it ends with a rambling 20-page essay. Still, it’s a wonderful adventure story that at its heart is about how we decide what’s important in life, what’s real to us and worth saving, and what is simulacrum and worth saving anyway. In that essay was one of my favorite lines of the book, about how different people are strongly, inevitably drawn to certain things—“a city, a color, a time of day. The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag.” Don’t let the length put you off–it’s a page-turner. (2/10)
Category Archives: Fiction
**** The Luminaries
By Eleanor Catton – Narrated by Mark Meadows – 29 hours, 14 minutes — When will I learn I can read faster than I can listen? This book was an interesting choice for the 2013 Man Booker Prize, as its style is so “unmodern” and seemingly born of the era it describes: the 1866 New Zealand gold fields. Catton expertly weaves together the stories of a half-dozen principal characters and at least a dozen more half-principal (or half-principled) ones trying to unravel the mystery behind a series of local events–a disappearance, a possible attempted suicide, and the death of a drunkard with a fortune in gold hidden in his cabin. At first the story is a deliberate muddle, but as the seemingly disconnected actions of this multitude of characters is brought to light, the reader assembles a gigantic, delightful literary jigsaw. Mark Meadows does an amazing job developing a unique voice for each character and delivering the reading with pizazz. But it’s a lot to keep track of. Much as I admire his reading, I recommend the print version. (1/25)
Working Both Sides of the Brain
Saturday’s “business side of writing” workshop reiterated the familiar disheartening theme that today’s authors (especially new authors) cannot focus solely on their writing. They need to think like entrepreneurs. Extroverts make great entrepreneurs. Alas, most writers are introverts, people who love to sit alone at their computers and create worlds.
“I don’t want to do all that promotion stuff, and I don’t know how!” is the common reaction. It’s like telling a boy who loves baseball that to succeed he also needs to take up needlepoint.
One of the presenters, Bob Mayer, pointed out today’s writers must compete fiercely for discoverability. In recent years, the estimated number of books published (mostly self-published) in the United States is between 600,000 and 1,000,000 a year. It takes a lot of effort to have any book noticed. It’s one frozen drop in a Niagara of ice.
Only two hardcover fiction books have been on the current New York Times list of best-sellers for more than 16 weeks (alas, and my snobbery is showing, one is by Dan Brown, but the other is Gone Girl, a super read). Eleven of the 15 have been on the list less than three months. Remember when books were on the best-seller list for a year or more? Those were the horse-and-buggy days of book marketing, as gone as the girl is.
Our second coach, the estimable Jen Talty, pointed out the flaw in writers’ tendency to hang out with other writers—people who don’t ask, “So when is your book coming out?” when they learn the first draft (of probably 15) is done. What she advised writers to do is to connect with readers. That takes work and as much creativity as goes into the novel itself. “My book is for everyone” isn’t a marketing strategy.
Talty and Mayer have their own publishing partners enterprise, Cool Gus Publishing, capitalizing on opportunities in both traditional and electronic publishing. A key difference between the two is that traditional publishers are most interested in initial sales. If a book doesn’t do well out of the gate, traditional publishers’ efforts to promote it go from minimal to nonexistent, and the book vanishes. By contrast, Amazon (Kindle) and other e-publishers are in it for the long haul. Maintaining the e-file is all but free, and if an author has a book success next year or the year after or the year after that, sales of the earlier book will likely head up, too. Writers sitting on a backlist of books that never sold well are finding new revenues.
The publishing mountain gets steeper, but writers persist. It’s in our bones. Perhaps that’s because, as Mayer said, and contrary to the common expression, “Storytelling is the oldest profession.”
*** The Dordogne Deception
By Sherry Joyce – Very interesting to read the first romantic suspense novel from a new author and see her struggle with the same kinds of issues that I do. How to plant clues, how to keep the plot moving logically and organically, creating 3-dimensional characters. She picked an interesting setting, and creates a believable sense of place. Some first-timer rough patches, but congratulations to her for finishing (how many novels languish, half-written, in the bottom drawers of people’s desks?) and getting into print! (1/5)
Best Reads of 2013
’Tis the season for “best of” lists, and reading other reviewers’ lists of “Best books of 2013” is setting up my reading list for 2014 very well! Truth is, there are so many good new authors and so many interesting non-fiction books, being totally current seems hopeless.
Of the 52 books I read (or listened to—sometimes, an even better experience!) in 2013, here are the nine I liked best, the ones I gave five stars. The four-star books were pretty darn good, too. The entire 2013 list is on this website under “Reading . . .” Below my top picks are presented in no particular order, with my two absolute favorites appearing at the end.
***** The Empty Room – Lauren B. Davis escorts us deep inside the head of Colleen Kerrigan, an alcoholic, on the “worst-day-of-her-life.” A trip full of insights and terror that helps us better understand people in our own lives and their demons.
***** Victoria’s Daughters – Jerrold M. Packard. Getting all this complicated royal genealogy straight—given that Victoria’s descendants populated most of the thrones of Europe—and the different fates of her five daughters was fascinating. It’s hard to believe that Victoria, still so influential a presence in our literary minds, is the Great Great Great Great Great Grandmother of William and Kate’s son George! Full review here.
***** Flight Behavior – Barbara Kingsolver. A misdirected swarm of Monarch butterflies starts this novel on its way, intermingling science and belief and the priority a cast of mismatched characters place on each.
***** Gone Girl – Gillian Flynn. A deathmatch between two manipulative people that causes the reader to continually switch assumptions and allegiances.
***** The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection – Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler. The late 19th century Parisian demi-monde and the rise of scientific criminal detection. Full review here.
***** Telegraph Avenue – Michael Chabon. His usual high-quality writing and vivid characters whose fortunes become as entangled as jungle vines. What is it about? Ultimately? Everything.
**** Swamplandia! – Karen Russell. Nominated for the 2012 Pulitzer. Wonderful writing, I gave it only 4 stars, but Russell deserves extra praise for fearlessly exploring metaphor up to (and sometimes beyond) its full potential.
***** The Dinner – Herman Koch (read by Clive Mantle). A “nice dinner out” turns into an emotional conflagration. The perfect exploration of family secrets and what it means to have an unreliable narrator.
***** Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk – Ben Fountain (narrated by Oliver Wyman). A finalist for the 2012 National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. For a war novel, there’s almost no war in it. Fountain explores the limitless terrain of hypocrisy, as a small company of ordinary American soldiers is feted for its bravery at the Thanksgiving Day Dallas Cowboys game.
A Book AND Its Cover
What makes you pick up a new release from the tables at the front of Barnes & Noble? You might recognize the title, or the author, or it might just be the cover. Some books cry out to be investigated further. A good cover design captures the feel of the novel and the browser’s eye with equal facility. Years later, just seeing the leafy jungle cover of One Hundred Years of Solitude brings back the whole story.
The New York Times has published its annual “15 best” compilation of covers (slide show). I’d need to know more about some of the books to know whether the covers really nailed it, but I must say the amazingly simple cover for the reissue of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying certainly does. It’s fearless and would certainly have failed a censor’s scrutiny, if there were such a post as Defender of Dust Jacket Decorum.
The ability to capture the essence of a book is very different from the generic approaches typically used in genre fiction. The shootouts, dark alleys, and steamy sex on these covers, although possibly eye-catching, could pretty much be used on any number of Western, mystery, and romance novels. (A quick and clever blog post on the latter can be found here.) 
In the Times compilation, see whether you like the covers for F – Poems by Franz Wright and Middle C by William H. Gass as much as I did. I’m tired of the chalkboard writing style of The Art of Sleeping Alone, first noticed last year on The Fault in Our Stars. If you look at the B&N tables just from a design perspective, you can spot trends and copycats. Book jacket design, like everything else designy, has fashions and fads. Amazon’s blurb for Phil Baines’s Penguin by Design, calls the parade of covers for the publisher’s various book lines, which began marching forth in 1935, to be “a constantly evolving part of Anglo-American culture and design history.” Another intriguing book on the topic is Alan Powers’s Front Cover. Powers also has assembled a collection of children’s book covers and their many influential illustrators.
Book covers are designed to appeal to specific readers, which creates an interesting gender dilemma. Check that B&N table and ask yourself, is this a book for men or women or both? Women writers are concerned their books receive the “pretty” treatment, which means men are very unlikely to read them. More on this issue here—and be sure to check out this post’s coverflip slides, which show how covers of popular books might have been presented had the authors been the other gender. Eye-opening.
Notable covers on books I read this year included the one for Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior. The blue version (top), which I have (or had, since I seem to have made the mistake of lending it out), suggests the massing and subtle movement of butterflies in the trees, the phenomenon that leveraged the story’s action. I much prefer it to the more literal treatment given the Kindle edition (middle) or, least imaginative of all, the UK edition (bottom).
Another gem was the cover for Herman Koch’s The Dinner, which gives a pretty darn accurate assessment of how that particular meal went. A linen tablecloth can do only so much.
My take on both these books can be found in the Reading . . . section of this website, with The Dinner in the audio list.
What Lies Beneath
Last week I wrote about the interview with Charles Baxter and his thoughts on story endings. I recognized his name at once as the author of a wonderful book—and if you are a writer of any kind whatsoever, you should phone your local independent book store immediately and order it—The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot. It’s part of the Graywolf Press “The Art of . . .” series, which Baxter edits.
Baxter calls subtext “the realm of what haunts the imagination: the implied, the half-visible, and the unspoken.” It takes a great deal of “surface bric-a-brac,” Baxter says, to indicate what is not being explicitly shown. Perhaps it’s counterintuitive, but hyperdetailing provides the revelation, not the invocation of great abstractions. He describes how this can be accomplished—infinitely easier to read about than to achieve, I assure you—in the book’s six essays. Readers, too, will find a lot to think about. In my case, in the “what all have I been missing?!” category.
The first essay is about staging—where people are “in the set.” Like actors on stage, a lot is revealed by who is sitting close to whom, who is listening, who reaches out a protective hand, who looks away. Body language. When characters speak, we may learn as much from how a line is delivered as from the words themselves. Literary fiction pays attention to all this and provides the reader a rich human experience; what I think of as “airport novels” don’t bother, and people who write four novels a year can’t.
Another essay talks about the unheard. People in real life often simply do not hear information that is threatening or stress-inducing. Or they don’t pay attention to others’ conversation because they are listening to their own interior dialog. Such non- or semi-listening may cause a character’s response to seem off point. It never is. It’s just a different point. And sometimes a character may want to steer the conversation elsewhere. And for a reason.
I have a post-it on my computer that reads “No Tennis Matches!” Writing dialog isn’t just about lobbing the conversational ball back and forth. Realistic conversation has digressions, slips of the tongue, interruptions, unexpected associations.
Here’s a conversation from Witness,* in which the two speakers—Matchmaker Marisa and Reluctant Genie—deliberately pursue separate agendas. Like two sides playing tug-of-war, each becomes increasingly insistent on controlling the contest. Genie’s final comment suggests she was listening all along. (Wally is her editor.)
“Leo should be here any minute.” Marisa gave Genie a sideways glance, accompanied by a sly smile.
“Tell me about this restaurant Riccardo is taking you to.”
“It’s a shame the two of you cannot join us.” Marisa came and sat on the low white-leather sofa across from her friend.
“It opened recently, he said. Read any reviews?”
“Leo is a very special man.” Marisa studied her manicure. “Riccardo says he’s been lonely.”
“If you like the place, take notes, and I’ll add it to my article.” Genie’s laugh was pitched a few notes higher than usual. The door buzzer sounded. “And here he is, with news of the world.”
Other essays in this engaging collection describe how to bring subtext to the surface, moving into the metaphorical, using facial expressions to show what’s going on inside, and “creating a scene,” in which he says, “In fiction we want to have characters create scenes that in real life we would typically avoid.” Every time I read Baxter’s book (at least three times now) I see new ways his insights could deepen my own writing and reading experience. Highly recommended!
*Witness is my unpublished suspense novel out looking for an agent.
This is “The End” . . .
The Doors drone in the background of my mind as I write this, my foolish friend. I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about the beginning of novels and stories. Certainly a strong beginning is essential when you’re trying to hook an agent or a publisher—and maybe, someday, a reader!—and reel them into your narrative. So those, I’ve been practicing.
Perhaps just as important from the reader point of view—prospective agents and publishers will never know about this—is a powerful ending. Sometimes I read a book and think the author was just too exhausted by the end to give it much thought, but a book that peters out doesn’t seem worth the reader’s effort to get there. Recently, I read an interview of author and teacher Charles Baxter that touched on the topic of endings.
The interviewer had had trouble placing a story that ended with a fatal car crash that killed the protagonists. Finally, he listened to advice to change it, and it was immediately published. Baxter explained that you can’t have an accident like that at the end of a story, because it doesn’t look accidental. “It looks as if the author put it there.” And all the text preceding it, which led the reader to be interested in—even care about—the characters now appears to be simply manipulation. At the beginning of a story, an accident looks like an accident; at the end, the reader thinks, “the damn author set up this accident so that he could get away from the typewriter and get a cup of coffee,” Baxter said.
He also said he thought people would have the same reaction if the device was used in a movie, and I thought of Robert Altman’s A Wedding (user comments run the gamut)—thankfully saved by the fact that the bridal couple, though the stars of “their day,” were just two in a well-populated Altmanesque cast. Late-in-the-game manipulation prompted a few objections to Ian McEwan’s otherwise acclaimed novel Atonement.
A sentence from The Guardian’s review of that book applies well in this context: “Who can grant atonement to the novelist, whose God-like capacity to create and rework the world means that there is no higher authority to whom appeal can be made?” Create, rework, and destroy, too, for that matter. What Baxter might say is that the writer should work in a way that makes appeal unnecessary. And, in the case of Atonement, the fault lines are mapped with such geological precision that the cataclysm does not feel random, like a car crash, but perhaps more like a huckster’s bait-and-switch.
Critics today consider The Great Gatsby one of the finest books of the 20th Century. The power of its bittersweet ending is one reason why:
Gatsby believed in the green light (at the end of Daisy’s dock), the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
A Writer’s Ear
It isn’t just how Libby Neale speaks, it’s what she chooses to speak about that makes her so distinctively American. If something is on her mind, she says it. By contrast, the British characters are painfully reserved, which serves them well, because many of them are lying, anyway. Here are Libby and the main character, violin virtuoso Gideon Davies:
“What’s up then? You don’t look so great. Aren’t you cold? What’re you doing out here without a sweater?
Looking for answers, I thought.
She said, “Hey! Anyone home? I’m, like, talking to you here.”
I said, “I needed a walk.”
She said, “You saw the shrink today, didn’t you?”
And here’s how the Gideon’s violin teacher asks about the psychiatric visit, starting with a comment from Gideon:
“You were told to get me out of the house today.”
He didn’t deny it. “[Your father] thinks you’re dwelling too much on the past and avoiding the present.”
“What do you think?”
“I trust Dr. Rose. At least I trust Dr. Rose the father. As to Dr. Rose the daughter, I assume she’s discussing the case with him . . . He’s had decades of experience with the sort of thing you’re going through, and that’s going to count for something with her.”
“What sort of thing do you think I’m going through?”
“I know what she’s called it. The amnesia bit.”
“Dad told you?”
“He would do, wouldn’t he? I’m as much involved with your career as anyone.”
At the pace these two waltz around the subject, no wonder it took 722 pages to complete the story!
After the breath of fresh Pacific Coast air that Libby brought to the conversation, I began noticing what a great job George does with dialog for all her characters, and not just the familiar contrast between Inspector Lynley (8th Earl of Asherton) and his working-class partner, Constable Barbara Havers. This story contains an East German refugee who has perfected her English accent, but not quite mastered word order, lower-class accents of two young toughs from the council flats, and a younger woman who speaks differently and more directly than her older lover of the same social class. None of them devolves into caricature.
Going further, the characters’ actions often reflect the same turn of mind that their words do. Libby goes off half-cocked, intuition leads her astray, and her last impulsive act detonates the book’s conclusion. Careful language is appropriate to the characters taking time to get their stories straight. The precise German is putting her romantic ducks in a row.
The slang in this book, published in 2001, will become dated as the years pass, but remains fresh twelve years on. Meanwhile, it feels like we’re reading about real-live, unique individuals, with their own unique energy behind them, energy that leads to the actions only they would take. For a writer, inspirational, really.
The Long and the Short of It
Iconic scene from “The Third Man,” based on Graham Greene’s novella.
When I used to hand out writing assignments to people, a question they always asked was “how long should it be?” I’m afraid my initial response wouldn’t be terribly helpful, and I’d say something like, “If it’s War and Peace, keep going; if it’s boring, a page is too much.” But then I’d end end with “Oh, about 15 pages, double-spaced. That’s all we have room for.”
In fiction, really, there are no similar space constraints; instead, “the dictates of the marketplace” set the limits. Literary magazines tell you what short story length they will accept. For novels, traditional publishers generally have a 90,000-100,000-word limit on what they will consider from an untried writer. Stephen King and Neal Stephenson and Thomas Pynchon can do as they please.
What I thought of as the final draft of my first novel came in at 135,000 words. I hadn’t given the total number a single thought. It was what it was. Fortunately, my good friend Sandra Beckwith (book publicist extraordinaire) caught me up short and directed me to several good websites (See The Swivet, or All Write – Fiction Advice) addressing the question of length. Before querying the first agent, I took electronic scalpel (also known as the delete key) in hand and cut characters, scenes, and dialog so that it now is a more svelte 99,000. Painful, but necessary, and I’m ever-grateful to Sandy for stopping me from embarrassing myself. In writing my second novel, I avoided some of the traps that led me into overwriting and finished the first draft at a slim-and-trim 70,000 words, which gives plenty of breathing room to enrich the story as needed during the revision stage.
For a while now, observers of the publishing scene have commented on the rising popularity of the novella—more than a short story in complexity and character development, less than a novel in plot twists and digressions. While novels today typically run 90-110,000 words, or about 300+ printed pages, acceptable lengths for novellas vary widely, anywhere from a long short story (10,000 words) to a short novel (70,000 words).
The popularity of these shorter forms is attributed to readers’ shrinking attention span; publishers’ reluctance to invest in producing an expensive book that isn’t a guaranteed best-seller; and reading habits, with Kindle, Nook, and even smartphones lending themselves to presenting shorter works. “Readers aren’t as aware of page count in the electronic realm as they are in a paper book,” says author Jeff Noon in a recent Forbes story by Suw Charman-Anderson. Kindle Singles are an example, and their inventory includes short fiction by best-selling writers.
Novellas also are less demanding on the authors who write them. A novel “is a huge emotional investment, and it can be risky to put all your creative eggs in one basket if things go wrong,” Charman-Anderson says, yet novellas let authors practice plotting and character development and develop their voice. And they provide the joy of actually finishing something. For self-publishers, they are a boon.
Let’s face it: some plots and some ideas just don’t lend themselves to longer formats. Cut the flab and you have a more compelling read. Some of the most focused and powerful English-language storytelling has been via the novella, and an illustration of their strength is how easily they have lent themselves to dramatization and our continued attention, starting with the grandmum of them all:
- The Mousetrap – Agatha Christie – 1952. She didn’t want publication to take away from the popularity of the theatrical version, so stipulated the novella couldn’t be published in the U.K. as long as the play was running. Currently, The Mousetrap is booking at London’s St. Martin’s Theatre (60th Anniversary trailer) until January 2015, “so the novella still hasn’t been published in the UK,” according to Listverse’s fascinating review: “20 Brilliant Novellas You Should Read.”
- The Third Man – Graham Greene – 1949 – written as preparation for the movie screenplay, a British film noir classic
- Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote – 1958, the movie becoming more famous than the book and giving us “Moon River”
- Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson – 1886 – more than 120 film versions; about the recent musical, the less said the better
- The Time Machine – H.G. Wells – 1895 – feature film and television versions; inspiration for innumerable stories on this theme
- Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck – 1927 – which Listverse anthropocentrically titles Of Men and Mice, has had numerous stage, film, and television versions
- A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens – 1843 – staple of the holiday season in both film and stage versions.
So, how long should your book be?