Category Archives: Fiction

This is “The End” . . .

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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

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Just finished Reading Elizabeth George’s A Traitor to Memory, one of her Inspector Lynley mysteries. (722 pages, by the way, which makes it practically a saga by today’s standards.) What struck me most in the writing was the dialog, which moved front-and-center upon introduction of a secondary character, a young California woman. Until she spoke, I had fallen unawares into George’s U.K. speech rhythms and word choices—except for the odd “boot,” “nappy,” and the like. The contrast started me noticing how “British” everyone else’s speech was.

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

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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?

The Author of Tomorrow

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Except for the Stephen Kings of the world, authors these days are expected to take a big hand (and perhaps the only hand) in the multiple activities of book promotion, even when the book has a commercial publisher. But that isn’t the end of it. Deciding to write a book presents the author with numerous chances for do-it-yourself consternation.

Start with the title. Author Scott Martelle (whose excellent Detroit: A Biography I read last year) thought he had the perfect title for his new book describing the search for the body of Revolutionary War naval fighter John Paul Jones. What he’d dreamed up was Jones’s Bones: The Search for an American Hero. But in a recent post, Martelle describes his publisher’s growing unease when people who didn’t know what the book was about couldn’t guess the subject. This led to fears that search engines wouldn’t recognize it, either, and as Martelle says, “if Amazon’s title search engine can’t find it, let alone Google, the book may as well not exist.” Thus began the search for a new title, one he doesn’t like as well, but which supports the notion of actually selling a few books.

Martelle’s book also went through some cover re-designs to try to prompt the John Paul Jones connection. No dice. (J.P. looks a little bemused by all this, no?) At least Martelle had his publisher’s help with that. Authors who publish independently have to work out cover designs for themselves. Some hire a good designer and benefit greatly from it. Some go the DIY route, with predictable results. Some of their creations are at this website, whose tagline is, “Just because you CAN design your own book cover doesn’t mean you SHOULD.” (For how it can be done right, see the AIGA’s 50 2012 award-winners.)

Don’t forget the interior design choices that await self-publishers like booby-traps in the swamp. Fonts, type size, page layouts, etc. Stuff you never notice when it’s done right. Did you ever pick up a book in a bookstore, probably a rather thick one, and see the type is reeely tiny? Put that baby down again. Or buy it, and schedule an appointment with your optometrist. Or you might grab a rather thin book, with generously sized type and lots of leading (space between lines). Hmmm. Not much book for my bucks.

Now a fresh opportunity to answer that eternal question “what can go wrong?” appears in the form of software that “for the first time lets anyone add a synchronized soundtrack to digital text.” Music, ambient audio, sound effects.

O.K., our hero is walking in the woods? Birds chirping. It’s evening in the U.K.? Obligatory fox barking (if you watch British mysteries, you’ll get it). Caught in traffic? Honks and screeches. Maybe a faint tire hiss. The phone rings? Infinite possibilities.  You get it.

Booktrack, which is offering this incipient catastrophe and major time-sink has developed a library of more than 20,000 audio files to make the author’s job “easier.” Now did I want a heavy knock or a more tentative one, or something more like a rap. Rap, rap, rap. Two raps might be better. Really, I kind of liked that first one . . . .

Booktrack already offers books on iTunes that have been audio-enhanced by Sound Professionals. Reviews are good, and sales of early titles have been brisk. A lot of readers like this experience. They say they get more out of the book and remember it better. But when I go back to re-read a paragraph, does the serial killer re-ring the doorbell? What if I go out for lunch, does it keep ringing? What if I stop reading to bite a hangnail, does it ring too soon? Obviously, I should try out one of these books before exposing my skepticism.

The developers’ optimism is scary. “For the first time, any writer can now add a synchronized movie-like soundtrack to their story . . .” I’m surprised to learn there isn’t any talent, or skill, or expertise involved in movie soundtrack development, just like for book cover design, just like for promotion, just like . . .

Rich Reading

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Book-Lovers’ Warning: Book Drum is a website where you may end up spending a lot of time. U.K.-based Book Drum’s slogan is “Beyond the Page” and that’s exactly where it takes you for the 176 books it includes far. Each volunteer-produced book profile includes multiple sources of enriching content:

  • Bookmarks: page-by-page commentary and illustration of the text
  • Summary: objective synopsis of the book
  • Setting: description and illustration of the main places or themes of the book
  • Glossary: foreign, invented and tricky words deciphered
  • Author: biographical information, interview videos, links and photos
  • Review: subjective analysis and evaluation of the book
  • Map: a world map pinned with descriptions of places significant in the book

The wide variety of books they’ve profiled—which feel like they’ve been taken apart and put together again—include many favorites, past and present. Classics from Dickens and Hardy and Austen up to and including Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. With Book Drum’s help, I may finally get past page 50 of Gravity’s Rainbow.

I took Book Drum for a test spin using one of my favorite books, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I reviewed maps of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. I read descriptions of the “life and times . . .” The bookmarks were fascinating—like the notes in a cleverly annotated classic, but with pictures! I know this book well, but I’d missed so much. I want to read it again, with Book Drum humming in the background. The volunteer contributor of content for Tess is novelist herself and freelance writer, as are many of the Book Drum contributors, while some are academics, recent graduate school spawn, and the like.

Book Drum sums up the diversity of its content in this way: “Whether it’s video of the Rockettes in The Catcher in the Rye, the Italian opera tracks that accompany Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, the historical context and maps of The Odyssey, stunning South American photography for In Patagonia, or video of Kabul kite fighting for Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, we take readers beyond the page to enjoy interactive content alongside their favourite books.”

Book Drum also has begun publishing for e-readers, with two titles so far, Heart of Darkness and The Turn of the Screw. This link takes you to the Amazon page for the latter, where you can See Inside. It’s the same principle as the website, but feels pushy. I might get used to it, but my initial reaction is I’d rather seek out the enriched content than be distracted by its intrusive presence. Similarly, I usually read the notes of a traditionally annotated book a chapter at a time, rather than constantly break the tenuous thread of my thought.

The site uses the Wiki approach, so anyone can contribute. Last spring, the Book Drum editors sent out a call for content for a profile of A Tale of Two Cities. Now I find this out! I wrote something very similar a few years ago when I was trying to convince Audible.com to offer companion .pdfs to some of its books, like those with lots of characters or foreign-named ones (think Russians!). It’s hard to keep track of the players without a program. I proposed one-line chapter summaries for people whose listening gets interrupted for a few days or weeks– “Where was I?,” a glossary to cover old-fashioned terms, foreign phrases, and special uses–also harder to follow when you just hear, rather than see, them. I even included a link to the raucous song the citoyens danced to in the blood-soaked Paris streets. So Book Drum has found a happy reader with me!

Thanks to writing buddy David Ludlum for sharing this resource.

Experiments

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The fall 2013 issue of Glimmer Train includes an interview with short story writer and novelist Peter LaSalle, based at the U of Texas, Austin.   LaSalle talks about his new book, Mariposa’s Song—the story of a 20-year-old Honduran immigrant girl working in a rough Austin nightclub. The story itself unwinds like a song, one very long song, in one very very long sentence.

Experimental fiction has always had its devotees and its detractors. One reader’s bold innovation is another’s annoying gimmick. The ultimate test, of course, is, does it work? Ten, twenty years on, when the glare of newness no longer blinds us, do people still read it? You’ll think of examples of successful experiments immediately (and will have forgotten the others, perhaps):

  • Benjy’s stream-of-consciousness story in Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury
  • The discovery of magical realism in Gabriel García Márquez’s 100 Years of Solitude
  • David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, which starts six stories across time in forward chronology, one through six, then finishes them, six through one, ending up where they began
  • A Visit from the Good Squad, by Jennifer Egan, creative in so many ways,  including a chapter written as a PowerPoint presentation.

The staying-power of the last two is as yet unproved Cloud Atlas was much-praised upon publication, won several awards, was short-listed for the Booker Prize and made into a difficult movie; A Visit from the Goon Squad won a Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and is being turned into a tv series. [!]

Succesfu experiments–and even some of the marginally successful ones present readers with new tools for discovery, new ways to understand the author’s fictional world and the characters in it.

A 17-year-old boy recommended Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) to me. You could see in his eyes the delight of the new and, he hoped, iconoclastic. The book is presented variously in typewriter script across the page, in regular type in columns up, down, around and diagonally across the page, as poems, photos, letters, straight text, and it contains a 42-page index containing a great many entries for “more” and not so many for “less.” When Danielewski wants the reader to speed up the pace, there is a single word on the page. A lot of impenetrable analysis has been done on this book; I’m inclined to think the author was having fun. He just has a complicated brain. And he succeeded in something Faulkner was unable to do. He convinced his publisher to publish some words and sections in color.

Similarly, Night Film by Marisha Pessl is currently receiving much publicity. It’s a suspense novel that includes scraps of movie script, newspaper clippings, photos, website screenshots, police reports. Most intriguing, it’s available as an audio book, for which, though I love audio, this book seems particularly ill-suited.

Books in their digitized forms open up new possibilities for integrating bits of film, photos, audio, alternative paths, puzzles. They have the potential to burst open like a piñata. Authors already are creating vines and mini-movies as promotion for their books; integrating them is the obvious next step that some already are taking. I’m reading the New York Times’s non-fiction The Jockey on line. Audio, video, straight text. I would say “can’t put it down,” but I’m not holding it, I’m watching it unfold before me.

I don’t know about Mariposa’s Song, though. One long sentence. Other new forms, jangled and multimedia as they may be, are perhaps a better fit with our modern attention span.

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Anticipation

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Starting to think seriously about my next vacation—only a few weeks away now—prompted by yet another flight detail change from United. The trip will start in Budapest, then float south along the Danube to Bucharest. On the journey, the boat will slip easily through the Iron Gate, the gorge separating Romania and the Carpathian Mountains on the north from Serbia and the Balkan mountain foothills on the south. Dams constructed over a 20-year period, ending in 1984, have turned what used to be a wild stretch of river into something more like a lake.

But the Iron Gates of my imagination, the ones I hope to see in my mind’s eye, are as they are described in Alan Furst’s thrillers. In his books, set in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, the Iron Gates were a perilous passage for desperate people—spies, refugees, terrorists, anyone caught up in the tightening net of loyalties and politics of a looming World War II:

“He would have to cross the Russian lines, would have to go through the white water at the Iron Gate, where the Duna [Danube] came crashing down onto the Wallachian plain to form the border between Romania and Bulgaria.” – Night Soldiers

“Europe was lost behind them—after the Iron Gate they were in a different land, a different time, running along the great plain that reached to the edge of the Black Sea.” – Night Soldiers

A few days in Budapest, an infamous spy town, is another something to look forward to:

“On 10 March 1930, the night train from Budapest pulled into the Gare du Nord a little after four in the morning. . . . In the station at Vienna, a brick had been thrown at the window of a first-class compartment, leaving a frosted star in the glass. And later that day there’d been difficulties at the frontiers for some of the passengers, so in the end the train was late getting into Paris.”—Kingdom of Shadows

“Difficulties at the frontiers”—we can imagine exactly what those difficulties were—“for some of the passengers”—and exactly who those terrified passengers were. Laced with foreboding, those lines open Furst’s thriller Kingdom of Shadows.

Other than a literary interest in things Budapestian, I have a family history interest as well. Legend has it that my grandmother (who died when I was a toddler) was a pastry chef in Budapest before immigrating to the United States. The disappointing kernel of the story is that none of her six daughters learned the art. She came from the generation that wanted to put the Old Country behind it. Truthfully, she had to have been quite young—twenty?—when she came over, so “chef” may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s a pleasant thought and one that will require eating as much pastry as possible in homage.

Another feature of this trip is a three-day add-on excursion into Transylvania—ancestral home of my grandfather, who came from a tiny village annexed to the marginally larger village of Székelykeresztúr (“Holy Cross” in Hungarian) in 1926. Google maps gives the larger town no more than 12 streets. My grandfather’s home was about eight miles from the medieval walled town of Sighisoara, birthplace of Count Dracula. I have Transylvania roots, for sure.

So, of course I enjoyed reading The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova, about a woman researching her family’s history who traverses that part of the world and at every step finds connections to Our Vlad.  “Genuinely terrifying,” said the Boston Globe.

Lots to look forward to, and I have my reading for the trip all lined up:

I’ve provided links to amazon.com, in case you want more info about any of these books, but of course would encourage you to make any purchases at your local independent bookstore!

Higherbrow Reads

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Enough lately on these pages about the best thrillers of the year and Amazon’s uninspired list of fall pre-orders. Let’s chat about a more literary endeavor—the announcement of the longlist of books nominated for the 2013 Man Booker Prize. This prestigious 45-year-old prize is awarded to the “year’s best” English-language novel coming out of Britain and the Commonwealth. Culled from some 151 candidates, the 13-novel longlist will be reduced to a shortlist of six to be announced in early September. On this first list are authors from Britain, Zimbabwe, New Zealand, Canada, Malaysia, and Ireland.

Says Robert Macfarlane, chair of the five-member judging panel, “This is surely the most diverse longlist in Man Booker history: wonderfully various in terms of geography, form, length and subject.  These 13 outstanding novels range from the traditional to the experimental, from the first century AD to the present day, from 100 pages to 1,000 and from Shanghai to Hendon.” And, for the first time, one entry (Richard House’s four-part political thriller The Kills) was first published digitally. The author, who is also an artist and film-maker, provides an enhanced edition with video that can be accessed at http://www.thekills.co.uk. (Anything featuring the rooftops of Istanbul captures my immediate interest!)

The nominees (with links to mini-bios) are:

What? You haven’t read them all? No surprise there, since five of the books (McLeod, Harris, Mendelson, Catton, and Lahiri) were still unpublished as of the longlist announcement, though their publication dates have been quickly moved forward. That all these late-appearing but apparently worthy books are by women is interesting, but perhaps only coincidence, since eight of the authors are women.

While the Booker is one of the world’s top literary prizes—or, perhaps, because it is—over the years the judges and awardees have come in for their share of sniping. Occasionally, critics have thought a choice unworthy or made because a chief competitor was politically awkward. Among the 15 Booker winners I’ve read were a few I didn’t much like, but on the whole they are a strong group. You could do worse.

Here are the ones I’ve admired most (OK, I didn’t actually read The English Patient, but I saw the movie three times) and highly recommend:

  • Michael Ondaatje – The English Patient (1992)
  • Arundhati Roy – The God of Small Things (1997)
  • Ian McEwan – Amsterdam (1998)(audio)
  • Peter Carey – True History of the Kelly Gang (2001)(audio)
  • Yann Martel – Life of Pi (2002)
  • Aravind Adinga – The White Tiger (2008)(audio – absolutely brilliant!)
  • Hilary Mantel – Wolf Hall (2009)
  • Hilary Mantel – Bring Up the Bodies (2012)

Enjoy!

Cream

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Books I read 002In front of an airport rack of books, I count up the number of titles I’ve read, usually almost none, and I do the same at B&N’s New Arrivals table, where I generally find four or five that are in my “done” stack at home. Such a sense of accomplishment to have read books other people haven’t even bought yet!

So, of course I file away January’s inevitable lists of the “best books of the year” and fell even further under the thrall of listmania when I discovered the ambitious “Best Fiction of the 20th Century”!  This meta-list compiles and compares rankings of “best books” from several notable sources: the Library Journal list, the Modern Library list, the Koen book distributors list, and the Radcliffe Publishing Course list. The lists contain 221 separate works.

About this exercise, compiler Brian Kunde says, “We may take exception to what got on the lists. We may protest over what was left off. But we do learn what others considered notable in our culture — and discover how much of it we’ve neither experienced, thought about, or heard of.”

That’s the truth! The books at the top of the list are familiar, at least by title, but nearer the bottom, memory goes sketchy. Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (#99)? Reynolds Price’s Kate Vaiden (#192)? Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (#219)?

Some of the books I’d like to check off (Done!) on these lists, did I read them or just see the movie? After the 11 TV episodes of Brideshead Revisited (#144), does anyone actually read the book anymore? TV and movie versions may have aced out the print originals of I, Claudius (#53) or 2001: A Space Odyssey (#94), too. Some books I might have read a long time ago, did I really read, or just mean to? After a few decades, memory may have resolved the matter in my favor.

The Modern Library website provides separate lists of the 100 Best as determined by its Board AND by the online votes of some 217,500 “readers.” A comparison is instructive. While the board leads its list off with Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, A Portrait of the Artist  as a Young Man, Lolita, and Brave New World (four of which I’ve read—yay!), the top ten in the reader list includes seven books by either Ayn Rand* or L. Ron Hubbard (none of which I’ve read), plus The Lord of the Rings, To Kill a Mockingbird, and 1984. The readers don’t get around to Ulysses until slot 11. How many of them have actually read it, I wonder, and how many just think they should have? I confess, I have not. Slogging through Portrait of the Artist  . . was enough, and while I used to know all the words to the song, “Finnegan’s Wake,” I haven’t tackled the book.

*A footnote about Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: Idaho state senator John Goedde brags “That book made my son a Republican!” He’s introduced a bill to require every high school student in the state to read it and pass a test on it to graduate.

Kunde takes the existing list rankings and creates a composite score—a ranking of rankings. The top 10 using his method are:

  1. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  2. 1984 by George Orwell (that’s worth a re-read now)
  3. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  4. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
  5. Lolita by Vladimir Nobokov
  6. Ulysses by James Joyce
  7. Animal Farm by George Orwell
  8. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
  9. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
  10. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

I’ve read them all, except that big lump in the gravy, Ulysses. But these are the best 20th century books, the world has moved on, and the list is old. Only four books on it are from the 1990s and less than eight percent were published later than 1980. As time passes, more of late-century works may achieve the recognition that eventually came to other books—most notably, the now #1 ranked Gatsby.

Not that sales are a reliable measure of quality, but when Fitzgerald died in 1940, The Great Gatsby was a commercial failure, having sold fewer than 25,000 copies since its publication in 1925. Today it continues to sell 500,000 copies a year.

Exploring further:

“The Best English-Language Fiction of the Twentieth Century: A Composite list and Ranking.” by Brian Kunde.

“In Search of the Century’s Best Books” by Brian Kunde

Modern Library’s “Top 100”

Advice from the Masters

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Some of our America’s best writers, “masters of the craft,” have set down their fiction-writing pens to ruminate about writing itself—what makes it good, even great, and what to avoid like the dread passive tense. I just discovered a treasure chest of these literary gems assembled by Maria Popova in her brainpickings blog—“a free weekly interestingness digest.” The collection includes advice from authors as diverse as Fitzgerald, Didion, Sontag, Bradbury, and Orwell.

Some of these authors dispense pithy observations, such as Stephen King’s “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” Some authors’ advice is more ecumenical. Elmore Leonard’s famous 10 Rules for Writing is not in this collection, though widely extracted and republished (without permission, I understand, as they are in a copyrighted book he’d prefer to sell). His book includes this revelation: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

Leonard and Hemingway are masters of the spare style, but not everyone can write that way, not everyone wants to, and not every subject fits that style. Trish, in her comment on last week’s blog, reminded me about Leonard’s admonition to “never open a book with weather,” perhaps the dullest subject imaginable for hooking a reader. But if that rule were followed to the letter, by every author, we’d miss these opening paragraphs:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. . . .

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. . . .

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

This is, of course, the opening of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, which chronicles the impact of the dawdling obfuscations of the befogged panjandrums of Chancery Court (trusts, estates, land law, guardianships), who delay the proceedings of the cases that come before them until the parties are dead and the fortunes involved have disappeared into the hands of the lawyers. The beginning, in both its plodding tone and fog-bound, muck-mired description, freighted with symbolism, sets the reader up perfectly for the entire 1000-page novel. Much different than the writer who observes his fictional world no more acutely than to note the sun was shining.

Finally, and perhaps an observation that can apply to any fiction—from spare Hemingway to florid Dickens comes from Kurt Vonnegut. Hemingway might condense it to “Be interesting!” What Vonnegut proposes is that the style a book is written in says everything about the author:

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don’t you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show or make you think about? Did you ever admire an empty-headed writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.

Now, there’s a challenge worthy of the most ambitious writer. Maria Popova, with her interestingness blog would seem to be on the right track. Or, as Mr. Leonard says, “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”