Tag Archives: novel

Concrete Images: Emotional Impact

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wasp

(photo: Serena Epstein, Creative Commons)

Author John Thornton Williams, writing a recent Glimmer Train essay about his strategy for connecting readers with characters, touches on “one of the most important accomplishments of fiction” and one of the trickiest. Certainly writers receive plenty of advice not to come right out and say, “Mary was angry that Bethany was flirting with Ben” or “Dan felt sad when his dog died.” First of all, those feelings are pure obvious, given the situation, and second, naming a feeling doesn’t make the reader feel it.

An alternative, which Williams terms “a lengthy expository digression into the psyche of a character, perhaps accompanied by physical cues,” like “his stomach was in a knot, his throat was on fire,” he says, “generally proves detrimental to how I experience the story at hand.” It distracts him from the narrative, rather than immersing him in it. Or, as Donald Maass says, in Writing 21st Century Fiction, “when you supply everything readers are supposed to feel, they may wind up feeling little at all.”

Williams makes a third choice, especially for a story’s crisis moments, when emotions run highest and, often, at cross-purposes. He calls this approach “indirection of image.” To accomplish this, he takes into account how his characters would see a situation, based on their emotional state. “Something as simple as a car parked on the street surely looks different to a lottery winner than to someone who just got evicted,” he says.

His example recalls a favorite exercise from John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction: “Describe a building as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in a war. Do not mention the son, war, death, or the old man doing the seeing; then describe the same building, in the same weather and at the same time of day, as seen by a happy lover. Do not mention love or the loved one.” This exercise is many times harder than it might appear, and it’s perfect practice for the “indirection of image” approach Williams recommends.

Indirection of image, he says, “is a way to take abstract emotions and project them onto something concrete.” This actually expresses our lived experience. How many times has a car or a piece of furniture or a particular shirt become more significant in our minds because of its symbolic association with a whole range of emotions, beyond what we can tease out and easily express? Our childhood home. The ghastly color of its bathroom tile. The relentless ticking of the mantelpiece clock. A dead wasp.

By giving readers space to project their own emotions into the situation, by leaving a little ambiguity, readers can experience the emotion on a level that connects with their own experience, Williams says. They can, in other words, get inside the character. Here’s a link to one of his stories.

***The Orphan Train

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Orphan Train

Orphan train flyer, 1910 (photo: wikimedia)

By Christina Baker Kline – This book tells an interesting story, two of them, in fact. The modern-day story is about foster child Molly, goth makeup and hair, piercings, who has trouble fitting in with the multiple families she’s rotated through. Not an orphan, her mother’s persistent drug abuse has made Molly a ward of the state of Maine. When she steals a copy of Jane Eyre from the library, she receives the surprisingly harsh punishment (reading ought to be encouraged, one would think, the classics especially!), of 50 hours of community service.

The job she finds is helping 91-year-old Vivian clean her attic, but it turns out Vivian doesn’t really want to discard anything; the tidying up is an excuse for her to revisit the boxes of memories hidden away up there, some of which she hasn’t touched literally or emotionally in decades. Vivian, it turns out, was one of the 200,000 abandoned, homeless, or orphaned children transported on the “orphan trains” from the East Coast to the Midwest during a 75-year period between 1854 and 1929. Many found loving homes, many others found conditions of neglect and near-slavery. It was a confusing, uncertain, and frightening time for them. (The orphan trains were the subject of an American Experience documentary, also, if you’d like to learn more about this topic.)

For both Molly and Vivian, growing up had its perils, though the advantages they had in sheer intelligence may have set them apart from other children in similar difficult situations. They both have secrets and have to learn to trust each other, if they are ever to be able to share them. A quick read.

***How the Light Gets In

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Dionne quints, Louise Penny

The Dionne Quintuplets (photo: wikimedia)

By Louise Penny. Narrated by Ralph Cosham. Louise Penny’s Quebec-based Chief Inspector Gamache novels are wildly popular—this one was nominated for several awards, and it’s the second I’ve listened to. The story’s multilayered plot (no spoilers here) is a mix of the intriguing and barely plausible, but Penny’s characters and setting are nicely developed, not the cardboard cutouts that populate many mysteries. Penny’s first novels initially were called “The Three Pines Mysteries,” and this one brings in the remote village of Three Pines and its clutch of eccentrics quite believably.

In this book, ninth in the series, two investigations are under way. One involves the death of the last of the Ouellet (WEE-lay) quintuplets, modeled on Ontario’s exploited Dionne quintuplets from the same pre-fertility drug era. Penny might have been inspired by the photo of the real Dionne quintuplets, above, in devising a theme for her fictional quints of one being always a bit apart, separate, beginning even before birth.

The other, much shakier plot, is political. It suffers from the stakes-raising trend among mystery writers, who have decided an interesting death or two isn’t enough to capture readers’ attention.

Penny has a habit in this book of withholding from the reader. “He made two telephone calls before leaving the office.” Only later will we find out what those calls were. Use this device once or twice, OK, but it occurs so often, it starts to feel manipulative—I hear the author behind the scenes hammering together cliffhangers.

Apparently Ralph Cosham, who narrates the series, is well regarded for bringing Gamache to life, and he did grow on me a little, but generally I find him plodding. The book’s title comes from fellow Canadian Leonard Cohen’s song Anthem: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” I didn’t tumble to the Cohen connection, though I understood the title and the cracks, even without the author’s explanation near the end. Ironically, in a post-story conversation between Penny and Cosham, she talks about the kinds of things that should be left unsaid because “the reader has to do some of the work.” I totally agree, and thought the title, which captured the book’s entire theme, was work I could have done and had done.

10-28-14 ****Bastard Out of Carolina

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Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison, Southern gothicBy Dorothy Allison – The West Windsor Library’s annual book sale is where I stock up on books I should have read a long time ago. Set in Greenville, South Carolina, this debut novel, published in 1992, was probably somewhat more shocking as a tale of parental oversight and abuse at the time, and so beautifully written it’s no surprise it was a National Book Award finalist. It remains a powerful and empathetic portrayal of class and gender differences in the 1950’s.

Prior to this book, Allison had published two volumes of poetry sharing the same main title, The Women Who Hate Me, and it’s interesting how she’s able to tamp that back and stay in the voice of the pre-teen first-person narrator, Ruth Anne Boatwright, whom everyone calls Bone, even as she reveals great depth and precision of language. Bone both lovingly and mercilessly describes the hard-drinking, violence-prone Boatwright men and the frustrated and hard-working Boatwright women. They may be poor—“trash” people call them and they call themselves—but they are tender toward Bone and her only thin protection against her mother’s new husband.

You may be familiar with the 1996 movie version of the novel, but I haven’t seen it. Anjelica Huston directed, and it starred Jennifer Jason Leigh, Ron Eldard, Christina Ricci, and Dermot Mulroney. Jena Malone played Bone. A 100% critics rating from Rotten Tomatoes!

10-24-14 ***Still Life with Bread Crumbs

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Anna Quindlen, Still Life with Bread CrumbsBy Anna Quindlen (2014). Unanimity in my first book club meeting about this book—thin, unrevealing, wish fulfillment for 60-year-olds. This was my first Quindlen, so I was glad to hear from others who’ve read many more of her books that this one is an aberration. It’s the story of a dyed-in-the-wool Manhattan photographer, age 60, who moves to an upstate New York cabin to save money while she sublets her apartment.

The man who comes to evict the raccoons in her attic happens to be very handy around the house, in more ways than one, and her biggest quandary is whether to succumb to someone 15 years her junior. There are a few more plot elements, most of which lack believability, as does the portrayal of small-town life. But it’s well-written and an easy read for a day when you’re not up to much of a challenge.

I don’t scoff at reading for entertainment, but the “everything tied up neatly at the end with a bow on it” resolution strained my patience. The book group debated whether this was pure chick lit—I say “yes.”

Mysteriously, it was well reviewed. NPR said Quindlen “still has her finger firmly planted on the pulse of her generation.” Not so the 20 members of her generation in my book club. They were particularly riled by Joanna Rakoff’s New York Times review, which called the book “a feminist novel for a post-feminist age.” What could that possibly mean? Especially applied to a character notable for not taking charge of her life in any plausible way.

This is a book you can skim. It’s kind of like eating a Dunkin Donuts cruller. You know there’s no sustenance there, but if you’re in the right mood, it might taste pretty good.

****Sandrine’s Case

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Sandrine's Case, Thomas H. CookBy Thomas H. Cook & narrated by Brian Holsopple. This psychological suspense novel provides a day-by-day recounting of the capital trial of Professor Samuel Madison, accused of the murder of his wife Sandrine. A first-person narration, Madison tells the reader up-front that he did kill her, which gives the author a tall mountain to scale in order to make this protagonist likeable, so he doesn’t try. The prosecutor, the police, his defense lawyer, possibly even Sandrine herself, and certainly the reader decide Sam is “one cold fish.”

Sam and Sandrine are erudite college professors at a second-rate college in a small Georgia town. He claims her death from too much alcohol and too many pills was suicide; the police and prosecutor think otherwise. He calls a note found by her deathbed a “suicide note,” but hasn’t read it. It turns out to be about her academic work, about Cleopatra, and when the police detective refers to “the Egyptian Queen,” Sam—instead of behaving like a recently bereaved husband, confronted with his dead wife’s last words—says, “Cleopatra was not Egyptian.” She was Greek, evidently. This and similar pedantics show how intellectually superior he feels to the authorities and the jury, an intellectual condescension that puts him, as he slowly realizes, in considerable risk of his life.

At first, the day in court punctuated by Sam’s lengthy flashbacks to his and Sandrine’s life together seemed awkwardly handled, though I got used to it. For the middle third of the book, I thought “too much Gone Girl,” but other readers will have to decide that for themselves. In a way, this book might not have worked if Gone Girl hadn’t preceded it. I can’t be sure, because I can’t unread those pages.

The plot is nevertheless intriguing and ends up in an interesting place. The characters—especially Madison’s attorney and several minor characters—are people the reader can imagine breathing real Georgia air. Not so much Sandrine and the daughter Alexandria, but that’s the thing with a first-person narration—is may just be that Madison’s view of them is not quite in focus, either. Holsopple does an excellent narration of most of the characters, especially the relentless prosecutor, but the venomous way his Alexandria spits out the word “Dad” in nearly every line of her dialog became like the jabbing bite of Cleopatra’s asp.

* The Highway

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By C.J. Box – I met this popular and award-winning thriller author at a conference two years ago, and he was so highly praised there, I figured I was missing something by CJ Box, The Highwaynot having read any of his books. I still am. Box, a Wyoming native, sets his books in the West, with his series character, Joe Pickett, a Wyoming game warden. This book (a gift) isn’t part of that series, and it was a real disappointment. The book is told through the eyes of several of the characters, including long-haul trucker Ronald Pergram, who calls himself the Lizard King, for his well developed schemes for trapping, torturing, and murdering “lot lizards,” the prostitutes who prowl the parking areas of the big Interstate truck stops—and any other women he comes across when the need to “go hunting” overtakes him.

Being inside the head of this character and privy to his disturbed (and not very original) thoughts is some especially sordid category of TMI. It’s a relief when Box switches to the point of view of the women in the story. We follow Cassie Dewell, a new Investigator for the Lewis and Clark County (Montana) Sheriff’s Department. Inexperienced and unsure of herself, she ends up alone on the trail of disappeared teen sisters—disappeared, as the reader knows, by Pergram. And parts of the story are told from the perspective of the younger of the sisters, sixteen-year-old Gracie Sullivan. Box handles girl teen-speak rather well, and the girls seem plausible enough, as is Cassie.

The book doesn’t lack for tension. During the early scenes in which Pergram is chasing down the girls’ little red car in his 80,000-pound Peterbilt (teach your daughters to pay attention to the “check engine” light!), I wasn’t sure I could keep reading. A number of Amazon readers’ comments show mine was a common reaction: “I almost took an early exit from ‘The Highway.’” “I hope that ‘The Highway’ was just the result of [Box] taking a wrong turn on a bad day.” “I love the Pickett series, but I just couldn’t stomach this one.” I may have to try again.

The West is a great place to live in, but Ronald Pergram’s head is not.

*** The Woman Who Rode the Wind

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The Woman Who Rode the Wind, aviatrix, Ed Leefeldt, flying machinesBy Ed Leefeldt – Never one to turn down a free book, I was handed a paperback copy of this novel at a local author event and put it in the ‘to-read” pile, without any expectations one way or the other. Now that I’ve worked my way down to it, it turns out to be a charming tale of the early days of flying machines. Told by a two-time Pulitzer-nominated journalist, the book demonstrates a reporter’s skill in picking significant details, and what it lacks in character development and literary flourishes is overcome by the sheer joy it conveys, as people capture the miracle of soaring with the birds. Published in 2001, it was recently reissued for the Nook.

The story takes off from the first chapter when a wealthy Parisian announces a one million franc prize for the first person to circle the Eiffel tower in a powered aircraft. The race is on, and the contestants are three: a dashing Frenchman whom the Parisians adore, a murderous German with the backing of the Kaiser, hopeful the win will demonstrate German technical superiority, and a wealthy American who hires a debauched stuntman to pilot his craft. An American woman—the novel’s main character and daughter of an airplane designer—helps engineer the wealthy man’s plane. There’s plenty of action, intrigue, and romance to keep the pages turning.

Set in 1901, the novel was inspired by such early women in flight as Harriet Quimby. Except for one near-sex scene interrupted by a suicide (no doubt tame stuff by today’s standards), this easy-to-digest story might be one young teen audiences also would enjoy.

 

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****The Cottoncrest Curse

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Michael H. Rubin, The Cottoncrest CurseBy Michael H. Rubin – Met this author—a Baton Rouge-based lawyer—at a recent mystery writers’ conference and was fascinated by the premise of his brand new book. (And a bit awed that it was published by the prestigious LSU Press, which has created a nice website for it.) The story takes place in three time periods—in 1893, with Reconstruction ended, and the wounds of the Civil War a decade fresher than the end of the Vietnam War is now; in 1961, when Freedom Riders went South to push the Civil Rights movement; and a much briefer framing story set in current time.

Cottoncrest is the eponymous plantation in which the novel’s inciting events take place—the murder-suicide of a respected Civil War Colonel and his beautiful young wife. The book’s hero, Jewish peddler Jake Gold, in the course of his itinerant business interacts with everyone for miles about—the erudite Colonel, as well as black shantytown residents, poor white sharecroppers, and wily Cajun trappers. And with Gold’s egalitarian streak, he gets along with most of them, too—the honest ones.

Rubin portrays these complicated Louisiana social milieux convincingly, though I hardly had time to fully enjoy the richness of the lives he portrays because the plot was speeding me through the burning cane fields and down the treacherous bayous. Breakneck plots have a way of reaching implausible velocity, but not this one. Every danger and twist he describes is absolutely believable. Though the reader ends up unraveling the mystery behind the murders and the recurrence of the curse, the characters from the present-day scenes will never know what we know, for good and certain.

Rubin’s accomplishment is all the more impressive because this is his first novel. An impressive debut!

Junot Díaz & Difficult Characters

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Junot DiazJunot Díaz, fellow New Jerseyan and one of America’s top young writers, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao(2007) and a certified MacArthur Foundation “genius,” is interviewed in the fall 2014 issue of Glimmer Train. Last year, he published a book of short stories, This is How You Lose Her. (This is the book a friend of mine starts reading whenever she and her husband have a disagreement.)

“She’s sensitive, too. Takes to hurt the way water takes to paper.”(TIHYLH)

About his recurring character Yunior, who narrates much of sci-fi addict Oscar’s story, and who also features in the short story collection, Díaz says “He is the classic dumb-ass character who makes all the right mistakes to produce, for me, in my mind, great stories.” Yunior shares some biographical details with Díaz, a parallelism that he believes makes writing—or reading—a little easier. “You get free heavy lifting from readers . . . by blurring that line between fiction and biography, a confusion that adds an extra serving of real to the tale.” Getting readers to do some of the work for him, some of the world-creation that keeps them on the page, is especially important in fiction, he believes, when writers “are asking them to confuse our work for the world and often to connect to characters who are difficult.”

“Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn’t have passed for Normal if he’d wanted to.”(BWL)

“Her rage filled the house, flat stale smoke. It got into everything, into our hair and our food, like the fallout they talked to us about in school that would one day drift down soft as snow.”(BWL)

Junot DiazOne of the ways Yunior is difficult is in his relations with women, his infidelities, and his objectification of women, and Díaz explains that he includes that aspect of his character because it’s “one of the standard ways our culture operates.” Díaz gets some blowback on this, and says the shock of recognition when readers see this aggressively masculine point-of-view on the page “in what I think is so honest a way, it often repels us in ways that the very presence of it in our real lives doesn’t. . . . It’s as if it’s only in this book where these guys exist.”

“You can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.”(BWL)

While the writer of the Door Stop Novels blog called Brief Wondrous Life “incredibly offensive,” she added, “it is also absolutely one of the funniest books I have ever read in my life.” Her bottom line: “I think that is what I like most about Díaz —the man goes for broke.” He isn’t writing allegory, with a lot of message overlaid about his real political views; he isn’t writing religious. He is describing the worldviews of very particular people, and it’s in the detailed rendering of those views that make people love or hate his work, but, either way, to believe it’s real.

“The half-life of love is forever.”(TIHYLH)