Tag Archives: George Saunders

Treating Themes Like Shy Forest Animals

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So many thought-provoking insights were in the George Saunders interview I wrote about last week, I saved a few for today. One issue he talks about is how politics and themes enter his writing. Not deliberately. He calls the writer mind the one “that wants to pull the big manure truck with your politics and your thematics in it and dump it on the reader.” We’ve all read novels like that, that hammer home their point again and again, as if the reader is too dim to get it.

If you can keep that conceptualizing mind quiet, Saunders believes, your themes and politics will behave “almost like really shy animals.” He recommends simply ignoring them, pretending you’re not interested in them when they come out of the woods. If you instead concentrate on the story you’re telling, these ideas/themes/whatnot will be there. They’ll leach in, coming in “so honestly, and they won’t be abstract, but intimately linked to action and character.”

Maybe that’s why, not deliberately, but completely subconsciously, I didn’t even recognize how much the theme of prejudice (and its ill effects) had seeped into my novel, Architect of Courage. I hadn’t set out to write a book about prejudice; in fact, I hadn’t even realized so much of it was there, in one way or another, until after the book was finished and I was working on blurbs and synopses. You can’t hide who you are, I suppose.

This topic reminds me of how much I admired Brad Parks’s crime novel, The Last Act, which he wrote in furious response to Wachovia and Wells Fargo Banks’ laundering of drug cartel money (which I learned about only because he included an incendiary author’s note). The book itself says nothing to convey his outrage; on the surface it’s an entertaining crime story, with nice twists, but it lays up next to that theme.

Saunders believes it’s a matter of being patient with the writing and letting the story go where it wants to go (the idea of a story having its own wants is a little hard for me; it’s easier to think of letting your subconscious mind work hard), and not forcing it. When an author pushes a story in a particular direction you can run into the problem of, “Oh, she did that goofy thing for plot reasons, not because it makes any sense.” Saunder would probably disagree, but in mysteries, sometimes the plot does need to go in a certain direction, yet it cannot seem that the author is steering it that way. If it’s too blatant, readers feel manipulated.

Television shows, working against constraints of time and possibly imagination, make transparent plot-driven choices all the time. Why do tv police officers always decide not to call back-up? Why do young women wearing long nightgowns and carrying a candle that will inevitably blow out go down in the basement at night to investigate a mysterious noise? These are plot-driven actions that are character-driven only for people who are irresponsibly reckless. We watched two different Scandinavian tv mysteries in a row where a woman officer decided to trail a dangerous suspect in her car at night in bad weather despite her colleagues on the radio saying, “Wait for back-up!” Since one of the main reasons people enjoy reading fiction is finding out “what happens next,” the more the what’s next isn’t obvious, the better off the author is.

What Makes Stories Work?

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Last week was time off for family business, but if you’ve ever dealt much with the health care “system,” you’ll understand my advice to myself, “take a book.” There’s always so much time sitting around, waiting, and waiting again, that something engaging to capture at least part of your attention is welcome. You don’t forget why you’re there, of course, you just give the extraneous sights and sounds some competition.

The book I clung to was Man Booker award-winner and Syracuse U. professor George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. It’s one that works for writers who want to put more into their writing and readers who want to get more out of their reading. Saunders takes seven stories from four Russian short story masters (Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol) and breaks them down to consider why they work. This isn’t one of those craft books that debates character-driven versus plot-driven or the usual ways stories are analyzed. Instead, Saunders talks about how the stories create the effects they have on readers. So much I wasn’t noticing!

Here’s a small example. One of the stories is Tolstoy’s “Master and Man,” which in (very) short is about an arrogant merchant, Vasili, who, with his servant, drives out in a horse-drawn sledge on an errand on a blizzardy day. The master doesn’t listen to the servant’s advice about route and gets them lost; they arrive at a small village, twice, because they are driving in circles; but the master refuses to stay the night; they become lost again; and I won’t tell you the rest, in case you want to read it yourself.

Saunders says that in his work with talented young writers, two factors separate the writers who go on to publish their work and those who don’t: a willingness to revise and “the extent to which the writer has learned to make causality.” In the Tolstoy story, because of the kind of person he is, Vasili doesn’t listen to his servant’s advice and gets them lost, because he won’t stop or stay at the village, they are lost repeatedly.

Saunders says, “For most of us [writers] the problem is not in making things happen,” but “in making one thing seem to cause the next.” Why is this important? “Because causation is what creates the appearance of meaning;” it’s what makes them work.

Another gem from this same story is Tolstoy’s laundry. Outside the little village of Grishkino is a cottage with a clothesline, which Vasili and Nikita pass four times in their lostness. Each time Tolstoy describes the articles hanging there slightly differently, the wind-blown shirts waving and flapping their sleeves in increasingly desperate fashion. On their last pass, the laundry is gone. Tolstoy doesn’t make the mistake of explaining the symbolism, he just plants it in the reader’s mind to let it grow in significance. Those little repeats, barely more than a sentence each, escalate the story’s tension, even if a reader notices them only subliminally.

Try it!: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders. And read Donald Maass’s blog this week on “Effect and Cause.”

****Lincoln in the Bardo & ***The Sympathizer

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Cemetery Angel

photo: Vicki Weisfeld

How many books can you read in a lifetime, or what’s left of it? (To calculate the limits on your literary throughput, check this out). Whatever the number is, it’s finite, so the books you choose may as well be good ones. Here are two prize-winners I recently ticked off my list.

****Lincoln in the Bardo

By George Saunders – This, the first novel by Saunders, a highly-regarded short story writer, appeared on many “best books” list for 2017. “The bardo” is a Buddhist concept of a state of being between death and rebirth. The Lincoln in question is our 16th President.

It’s still the early days of the Civil War, yet death and the prospect of death loom over the country. Willie Lincoln, the President’s twelve-year-old son lies upstairs in the White House, ill with typhoid fever. Nothing can be done but wait. Then, nothing can be done. The funeral is arranged, the small still body is placed in its coffin, and the coffin is set in a niche in a borrowed tomb. Yet Lincoln cannot let go.

In the cemetery after dark, the spirits of the bardo emerge. Dispossessed of their bodies, they cannot accept that they are dead and resist the mysterious forces that attempt to persuade them that they are. These spirits counsel Willie on how to deal with his grief-stricken father.

Written in many voices, in snippets, like the libretto for a manic and desperate chorus of the dead, the story is full of humanity and sorrow, with flashes of dark humor and, ultimately, deep compassion for the grieving Lincoln. Overwhelmed by his son’s death, the President knows he cannot indulge his grief for long, with the chaos of war rising around him.

***The Sympathizer

Written by Viet Thanh Nguyen, narrated by François Chau. Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, The Sympathizer opens with the chaos and terror of Saigon’s fall in the waning days of the Vietnam war. In the middle, the scene migrates to California, in the community of formerly powerful refugees, now consigned to marginal lives, and finally returns to the hostile territory of Communist-led Vietnam, where the first person narrator—“the captain”—is captured and interrogated. This book, readers are told, is his “confession.”

The captain early on declares himself a man with two minds, equally able to see both the tragedy and the farce of the war destroying his country. “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces,” he says. Though he works for a general in the South Vietnamese Army, he is a spy for North Vietnam. Still on assignment, he accompanies the general in exile and reports on his continuing and hopeless plans to return to their native country to wage counterrevolution.

Filled with both nostalgia and cynicism, the captain undertakes various duties, some banal, some murderous, and the latter haunt him. His most irony-filled task is accompanying a Hollywood filmmaker to the Philippines to assure that “real Vietnamese people” have a role in the auteur’s shallow cinematic depiction of the war. In that process, he realizes the real Vietnamese people were no more than extras in the war itself. Like the movie, it was an American production.

For my taste, the interrogation section of the book dragged. Chau’s narration lacked the propulsive energy to carry me through nearly 14 hours of listening. Better in print.