“Hush Now, Don’t Explain”

Billie Holiday

Click photo for “Hush Now, Don’t Explain”

When I read a vivid description of a particular disease or condition, I confess I start feeling a slight pain in the target spot, an itch, a touch of malaise, a sink of nausea. (All the while being perfectly healthy.) Face it, lots of us suffer from–to put a positive spin on it–this kind of excessive empathy.

That tendency seems remote kin to the feeling I have when I read “advice for writers.” No matter how awful the writing habit is, “I do that!” “My writing is full of it!” But when I ran across fiction editor Beth Hill’s terrific essay, this time, I really, really think she’s diagnosed something important to me. Her brilliant Editor’s Blog essay is “Don’t Explain, Don’t Explain, Don’t Explain.” Let me explain.

Hill says the problem of overexplaining comes up repeatedly in fiction manuscripts. Fundamentally, her common sense advice requires us, as authors, to trust our readers to understand what we’re writing about, without banging them over the head with a 2×4 of explanation. Hill says:

  • Inherent in our characters and the events they experience are (or should be) the reasons they respond to situations as they do. If responses aren’t clear, fix the set-up or the characterizations, don’t take the easy way out and just tell the reader why they responded as they did.
  • Sometimes we do a good job of showing a character’s response, then wimp out, feeling the need to reiterate why the character responded as he did–showing AND telling. No, no, no. Trust the reader.
  • Whenever we explain, there we are (voice of God), elbowing our way into the story. When we do that, Hill says, we are “using real-world explanations for fictional-world events.” That destroys the story’s fictional reality. As John Gardner would say, it jolts the reader awake from “the fictional dream.”
  • Unnecessary explanations need not be page-length, paragraph-length, or even sentence-length. They can be one or two insidious words. Hill’s examples include “Timothy hollered in pain.” Unless the point-of-view character is Timothy or unless she has ESP, she doesn’t know that Timothy hollered in pain. We can just say a character hollered or frowned or wept and trust the reader to figure out why, given the circumstances. (No “Angela wept as if the tragedy of the situation just settled on her” either. That’s still point-of-view character speculation.)

The second part of this summary will appear Monday, June 27.

Who Writes the Best Crime Novels: Men or Women?

unmade bed

photo: Peter Lee, creative commons license

In the current issue of The Atlantic, author Terrence Rafferty has an intriguing piece titled “Women Are Writing the Best Crime Novels” (in the “Culture” column, no less). Hmm. For real cultural insights, skim the article and read the comments.

Rafferty attributes women authors’ strength in this genre to the growing popularity of “domestic thrillers,” the kind where your enemy sleeps next to you. Gone Girl catapulted this resurgent genre to public attention. Theirs “is not a world Raymond Chandler would have recognized,” Rafferty says. His characters’ motives were more basic (sex and greed) and their methods more direct. “Take that, you punk!” bang, bang.

Rafferty thinks Chandler’s lone detective genre is almost as dead as the corpse in the dining room, though plenty of popular books are clear heirs to that tradition. The Jack Reacher series by Lee Child, the Tess Monaghan series by Laura Lippman, and the Strike/Ellacott books of J.K. Rawlings (writing as Robert Galbraith) feature investigators working outside official channels. Their investigations are a bit hard to pull off in these technology-reliant days, but they can usually find a friendly cop to snag certain kinds of information for them. Cell phone logs and whatnot.

As a person who reads a large number of books in the crime/mystery/thriller genre—reviewing 46 in the past year for CrimeFictionLover.com—I can tell you there are some really tired tropes out there—heroes with arcane martial arts skills, who know thirty-two ways to kill a person in two seconds flat, who get beat up but bounce back in record time, and who never met a woman they couldn’t bed. A few of them also have a sense of humor.

The “girl” novels discard all that. Instead, they rely on astonishing levels of manipulation and the workings of the characters’ minds, which Rafferty says often dwell on unresolved adolescent angst. A few years hence, those features will likely seem just as tiresome and overworked as the boy wonders. I laughed out loud reading this from one of the commenters on Rafferty’s article: “I think that after a certain number of introspective life years, the Self as object d’art is too debunked to stand much further scrutiny.”

Rafferty cites a bunch of female authors he admires, including Laura Lippman, Denise Mina, Tana French. Their type of storytelling, he says, doesn’t depend so strongly on heroes, making it “perhaps a better fit for these cynical times.” Less gunplay, more emotional violence. I’d add to his list Becky Masterson, Meghan Tifft, and Cecilia Ekbäck.

But here’s where his argument gets tricky. By conflating crime fiction, mystery, and thriller genres, he makes his argument a bit difficult to follow, because they have different foundational premises and conventions, and their readers have greatly different expectations. There isn’t a lot of overlap between the audiences for John Sanford and Agatha Christie.

Yet he says today’s women writers have “come a long way from the golden age, from Christie and Sayers, from the least-likely-suspect sort of mystery in which, proverbially, the butler did it” (emphasis added). In today’s psychological thrillers, authors “know better. The girl did it, and she had her reasons.”

Reviewing my own reading of some 60 books in the broad crime/mystery/thriller category over the past 18 months, I find that whether a book is interesting, well-written, genre-stretching, and good entertainment does not depend on the author’s gender. Women and men were equally likely to write a book I liked. Great books are simply great books.

Polishing Your Instrument: Your Voice

microphone

(photo: Pete on Flickr, public domain)

Last Friday actor and writer Alex Adams led an informal seminar for local writers on reading their fiction aloud, effectively and entertainingly. He described ways to create meaningful vocal variety and illustrated his points with excerpts of recordings created for “Selected Shorts.” As an avid reader of audiobooks, I appreciate how much a reader contributes to the impact of a tale.

Alex writes specifically for live audiences and regularly presents his stories and sketches in various venues in New York. As a member of the writing group I belong to, he helps us get ready for our own much less frequent public readings (see yesterday’s post about the benefits of reading your work out loud).

Over the years, he’s developed a method for marking up his copy that helps him achieve the most effective read. By practicing the marked-up copy numerous times, these vocal changes become as integral to the piece as punctuation. He suggested that authors mark up the copy they’re going to read to indicate:

  • Pauses. Alex uses a check mark in the places where a brief pause will allow a moment of dramatic tension, time for a joke to settle, or the chance to take a breath—you don’t want to run out of air!
  • Pacing. You may want to read some passages—for example, explanatory words and phrases—more quickly, and others—such as the introduction of an important new character—more slowly. “Change-of-pace” is synonymous with preventing monotony!
  • Emphasis. He underlines critical words and phrases one, two, or even three times to make sure he gives them the attention they need. You can emphasize words by rising volume or pitch or both.
  • Special attention. He circles words that are important, need very clear articulation, are easily misunderstood, or that give him trouble in practice. Taking the trouble to say a few words extra clearly helps it stick in the listener’s mind.
  • Dialog. While amateur readers don’t need to go overboard in trying to mimic various characters’ speech, some differentiation helps the listener know who’s speaking. Jessica Woodbury in Bookriot recently complained about audiobook readers (male) who pitch the female characters’ voices too high and make them all sound breathily the same. This is not only unnatural, she says, but “They become inferior characters in the telling of the story.” Alex edits his manuscript to look more like a play script so that, as he’s reading, he doesn’t lose track of which character is speaking.
  • Freestyle. Any additional annotations meaningful to yourself and the piece you’re reading.

Alex’s presentation made me think of audiobooks that exemplified his points. One is Herman Koch’s The Dinner, narrated by Clive Mantle, a story in which the first-person narrator is deeply jealous of his successful brother. Because of the way Mantle always carefully articulated the brother’s name—Serge Lohman—loathing just dripped off it.

Another good example (and another terrific book) was Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, narrated by Oliver Wyman. At first I thought the reader wasn’t doing much, but he grew on me, perfectly capturing the main character’s puzzlement, sadness, hope, fear. This book isn’t about a larger-than-life hero, it was Billy’s ordinariness that made it so heartbreaking.

In total contrast to these insightful narrations, imagine my bafflement when I listened to a post-recording interview with Ralph Cosham, audiobook reader of Louise Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache mysteries. He said he likes to discover her books along with the listener. As a result, he never reads them before sitting down in the recording studio! Totally winging it may work for him, but the rest of us have to practice in order to mine the rich possibilities inherent in our own voices.

Joys of Overwriting

conversation, talking

(photo: Dmitry Ryzhkov)

In a provocative post at The Smart Set, Elisa Gabbert proposes the satisfactions of “writing that sounds like writing.” These days, readers—and writers, but I’ll get to that—are mostly told that prose shouldn’t call undue attention to itself. At the extreme (think Hemingway here) advice would have it that writing should be stripped of anything that announces itself as more than the everyday yakking one might hear on the street.

“Overwritten” is a harsh criticism. Like overripe, she says, the term has “judgment baked in.” (I’m not talking about amateurish overwriting, larded with unnecessary detail or trite observations here.) For my part, I enjoy being swept away in mind-stretching analogies and complex metaphors. Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2012, fearlessly explored metaphors up to and sometimes beyond their full potential, a high-wire act teetering on the calamitous.

Here’s a nice one: “Hopes were wallflowers. Hopes hugged the perimeter of a dance floor in your brain, tugging at their party lace, all perfume and hems and doomed expectation. They fanned their dance cards, these guests that pressed against the walls of your heart.” And another, “I came to hate the complainers, with their dry and crumbly lipsticks and their wrinkled rage and their stupid, flaccid, old-people sun hats with brims the breadth of Saturn’s rings.” As a reader, I’m attracted to multilayered images like these. They make me stop and consider the challenge another mind has laid down. They are important to the story. They “sound like writing.”

Worse than work that is overwritten, Gabbert suggests, is that which is underwritten. Authors who don’t go to the trouble, whose work inspires “the sense that the author has low-balled me.” The occasional New Yorker short story has this arid style. Such prose offers nothing more than the words on the page, inspiring no images or connections for my mind to chew on.

From the writer’s perspective, coming up with a juicy and apt image is immensely satisfying. If it isn’t quite right, it isn’t good enough. I spent many hours refining the following sentence from a novel set in Rome: As the bus “skirted the huge Cimitero del Verano and approached the last turn, a cloud of diesel exhaust ballooned forth, and new motes of grit wafted toward the unblinking eyes of the cemetery’s stone angels.” Overwritten? Maybe, though it has a purpose in the story. Its aim is to spark in the reader a strong contrast between modern (bus) and ancient (stone angel); transient (a bus ride) and eternal (death). Even if readers skim that sentence, it may establish a mood, a picture.

Gabbert refers to Elmore Leonard’s famous “10 rules for good writing,” which he sums up by saying, “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” This is a pretty good rule for his particular genre, crime fiction, but even he occasionally broke it with delicious metaphors, like “Wonderful things can happen,” Vincent said, “when you plant seeds of distrust in a garden of assholes.” Or this conversation: “A: Anyone who looks like she does has to be somebody…” “B: What does she look like?” “A: An ice cream. I had a spoon I would have eaten her.”

Most of us can’t think fast enough to come up with such words in everyday conversation. They are writerly statements. At bottom, Gabbert says, “I like writing that knows what writing is for; it can express things you would never say.” In deviating from the well traveled road of everyday speech and thought, such writing steers closer to the truth.

Whose Point of View?

onion, chopping

(photo: Steve McFarland, creative commons license)

Point of view is one of those tricky concepts for writers that is easier to talk about than to accomplish. I’ve recently spent a lot of time in p.o.v. purgatory in my own writing and seen a heavenly example, as well.

It is, of course, possible to write with an omniscient p.o.v. —with the narrator “the voice of god” that sees all, knows all, and can delve into anyone’s and everyone’s thoughts at will. I’m very comfortable writing in the omniscient p.o.v., moving my characters around like chess pieces. Unfortunately, the omniscient p.o.v. is out of style these days, and the closer in to a single character the writer is (though that character may change from scene to scene), the happier readers are thought to be.

I see the scenes in my novel unfold in front of me like a movie. And like in a movie, I “know” what each of my characters is thinking and why they say and do what they say and do next, and I have a bad habit of writing that down. Fortunately (for me), my talented editor is a bear on p.o.v. and dings me for all sort of infractions I would have thought, “Hey, that’s OK.” And fortunately, I cannot peer into her mind when she’s had to flag a p.o.v. problem for the umpteenth time. I can only guess what she’s thinking—and it ain’t pretty.

Here are a couple of examples, from obvious to more subtle. For all of them, imagine you’re writing a scene in which the p.o.v. character is a chef named Tony:

  • Tony sat across the table from his best customer. Mr. Fatwallet studied the menu, trying to decide between the grilled halibut and the sweetbreads. (DING—Tony doesn’t know what Mr. Fatwallet is trying to decide between, unless Fatwallet says so. Solution: the writer could put that as a piece of dialog. “Tony, help me out here. I’m trying to decide between . . .”)
  • Tony sat across the table from his best customer. Mr. Fatwallet hesitated, then said, “I can’t decide . . .” (DING—Tony doesn’t know Mr. Fatwallet is hesitating—which comes out of his internal uncertainty—until he speaks. The delay could have occurred because his attention drifted to the dishy new server. Solution: Don’t describe it as a hesitation, but as a pause: After a minute, Mr. F. said . . . Or, put the problem in Tony’s head: Tony could have chopped three onions while waiting for Mr. Fatwallet to speak.)
  • Tony was in the kitchen, chopping onions. He ran cold water on a clean towel and brought it to his reddened eyes. (DING—I can hear my editor saying, “He can’t know his eyes are red unless he’s looking in a mirror!” Solutions: a] new text – Chopping onions always turned Tony’s eyes the color of a slab of ham; b] someone else notices – Mr. Fatwallet stuck his head into the kitchen. “Tony, have you been bawling?” c] take the easy way out – He ran cold water on a clean towel and brought it to his streaming eyes.)

I’m sure my editor was tearing her hair out at the merry way I delved into the thoughts of everyone in scenes, at least in these more subtle ways, and here I thought I was p.o.v.-savvy! But that’s called head-hopping and roundly frowned upon.

The other reason I’ve been thinking about p.o.v. is writing the review of David Gilbert’s & Sons yesterday, I was reminded how the author used p.o.v. shifts to make his first-person narrator invisible. Philip Topping is the “I” on the opening page of the novel: “I myself remember watching friends . . .” We’re definitely in Philip’s head as the funeral of his father gets under way. “All this happened in mid-March, twelve years ago. I recall it being the first warm day . . .” And then, seamlessly, we are in the head of Andrew Dyer, the famous author, reduced to trolling the internet to crib a suitable eulogy.

In the first chapter, when I realized I was in Andrew’s thoughts, I had a “what just happened?” moment, so I turned back and noted how deliberately and subtly Gilbert had made the transition, erasing Philip from the scene. Repeatedly in this novel, Philip is there, then events occur that he cannot have been witness to. Where did he go? Is he the fly on the wall, the ear at the door? When the author returns to Philip’s voice, the reader is as startled to encounter him again as the Dyers, father & sons, are, when they run into him in the hallway of the apartment, at the breakfast table, on the stairs.

Near the end, Philip says “ . . . I see Andy Dyer in the distance . . . I lift my head to be seen, but he doesn’t see me, like all those goddamn Dyers. He doesn’t even see me when I wave.” The effect is heartbreaking and so are the consequences of Philip’s invisibility. By Gilbert’s manipulation of point of view, he’s made the character like Philip truly work.

****& Sons

ampersand

(photo: Leo Reynolds, creative commons license)

By David Gilbert – This 2014 novel was named a “best book of the year” by many reviewers, and it’s full of richness on every page. A literary novel in every sense, it’s about an aging Manhattan author and notorious recluse, A.N.Dyer, whose failing faculties compel him to call his sons to him and in other ways try to straighten out the tangle he’s made of his life.

His two older sons are estranged both from him and each other. Jamie is a filmmakers living on the East Coast who’s just completed a dubious project documenting, perhaps too rigorously, life’s final decay. Richard is a struggling Los Angeles-based screenwriter, who has the prospect of long-awaited success dangled in front of him if only he can deliver the impossible-to-get film rights to his father’s first and most important novel, Ampersand.

The third, much younger son, is 17-year-old Andy. (You’ll have noticed A.N.Dyer, Andy, Ampersand, and the book’s title). Andy is ostensibly the product of a liaison between Dyer and a Swedish nanny. The arrival in the household of baby Andy and the story of his conception ended Dyer’s marriage. But the real story of Andy’s origins are more significant than anyone but Dyer knows, and he’s summoned Jamie and Richard to New York to tell it. And to enlist them in ensuring to Andy’s future welfare, should he die.

Throughout, as a sort of shambling Greek chorus is Philip Topping, son of Dyer’s oldest friend, Charlie, whose funeral opens the book. Philip is the same age as the two older sons, and they’ve obviously never had much use for him and still don’t, even though he’s ensconced in Dyer’s East 70th Street apartment, the flotsam washed ashore from a foundering marriage. Topping is a “Mr. Cellophane”; they look right through him and never know he’s there. Or, as Philip himself says, “I’m guilty of easily falling in love, of confusing the abstract with the concrete, hoping those words might cast me as a caring individual and dispel my notions of a sinister center. I believe in love at first sight so that I might be seen.” But the Dyers don’t see him, even when it’s necessary they should.

Dyer’s clean-up of his affairs includes selling his papers to the Morgan Library, and they, like the Hollywood manipulators, are interested in Ampersand. They will sweeten their offer considerably if he includes a draft of it. Alas, he destroyed all the drafts years before, so is pushed into the insupportable position of having to retype the whole manuscript, inserting awkward phrases and misdirected text, which he crosses out to arrive at the version in the published book.

It’s a very New York book, with apt references not just to places and events but to the way the city and its citizens go about their business. All this seems sly and perfectly grounded. Here are a few sentences from the Morgan Library rep’s pitch to Dyer:

In my biased view, we are the intellectual heart of this city. A visitor from another planet would do well to visit here first in order to understand our human narrative. We also have a tremendous gift shop.

Dyer’s agent then suggests they’ve been approached by the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center with a much more generous offer, and receives this response, which manages to insult everyone:

If money’s the bottom line, we can’t possibly compete. Ransom and their ilk will always win. And they are a fine institution and Austin is a fine central Texas town. But if you want to maximize profits, may I suggest breaking up the archive and selling the pieces in lots. But if respect, sensitivity, geo . . .

Philip Topping is everywhere and nowhere in the book, as its part-time narrator. It also includes excerpts (freshly typed!) from Ampersand—a vicious tale indeed—correspondence between Dyer and Topping, senior, from childhood on, and texts between Andy and a young woman he’s hoping to seduce. Full of humor, human foibles, and beautiful writing—“seductive and ripe with both comedy and heartbreak,” as NPR reviewer Mary Pols said—it’s a book that flew under my radar, but which I’m glad I finally found.

Bonus: A History of the 27th Letter! The Ampersand!

Five Most-Read Posts of 2015

red pencil, grammar, comma

(photo: Martijn Nijenhuls, Creative Commons license)

Of the 208 posts I published on this website in 2015, these five had the largest readership:

#5 – Pump Up Your Vocabulary – Test the size of your vocabulary, and use these resources to rejuvenate the tired array of words we overuse. Awesome, no?! Plus a reminder of the importance of reading—fiction, especially—in building a rich vocabulary. With more words you can express more ideas, with greater precision and subtlety.

#4 – Fan Fic Fest – Lots of people over 30 are only dimly aware of this phenomenon. I wanted to know more, so audited a class devoted to it at Princeton. Wow. Takeaways: fan fiction (loosely: derivative works) has always existed; people write fan fiction for love of existing characters (Holmes & Watson; Spock and Kirk; Little Ponies), not money; it’s a tremendously diverse enterprise, though there is a strain of unexpected couplings and freewheeling sex; it’s decoupling works from the intents of their original creators and making them fractal, with derivative works on top of derivative works.

#3 – Best Reads of 2014 – Soon to be followed by Best Reads of 2015!

#2 – *****The Cowboy and the Cossack – this 2014 book review was near the top of the charts again in 2015. Generally rave reviews from everyone who’s read it, as well as from me.

#1 – Freelance Editing Services Booming – At a time when book lovers complain about the poor quality of editing in books today (and forget proofreading altogether), this article covered reports of a cottage industry in freelance editing services. Included are links to some reputable-seeming services and some “beware of” resources.

Trumbo

Bryan Cranston, Trumbo

Bryan Cranston as Dalton Trumbo

After practically having the frequently shown previews for Trumbo memorized (trailer), I finally saw the film itself. (Though one trailer scene with Helen Mirren didn’t actually appear in the movie. Weird.) This is the second movie in the past week that celebrates the role of righteous writers in upholding social values: Trumbo supporting “freedom of thought and expression,” and Spotlight pursuing “truth, however uncomfortable.” I’m basking in reflected authorial glory!

As you undoubtedly know, Trumbo is the story of the Hollywood 10, writers blacklisted during the communist witch-hunts of the late 1940s and 1950s. Joe McCarthy and all that. When called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Dalton Trumbo (played beautifully by Bryan Cranston) and the other nine refused to give Congress information about their beliefs or to rat out others in the film industry. As a result, a number of them including Trumbo went to prison for contempt of Congress (“I am contemptuous of Congress,” he said after the HUAC hearing).

He was in the slammer for 10 months and once he was out could no longer get work.

Meanwhile, some industry personages—in the movie, producer Buddy Ross (Roger Bart) and actor Edward G. Robinson (Michael Stuhlbarg)—saw their careers going up in smoke and did testify (though in real life, Robinson did not name names). The movie effectively skewers that Great American Flag-Waving Hero, John Wayne, who managed to avoid any military service during World War II and Korea. “If you’re going to act as if you won the war single-handedly,” Trumbo tells him, “it would be more believable if you’d actually served,” as he and so many of his black-listed colleagues had.

They represent the tip of the iceberg of people harmed by the virulent anti-Communism of the day, and although the movie is about the Hollywood 10, it’s really about the Hollywood One, Trumbo, the most accomplished of the lot. The composite character Arlen Hird has the unenviable job of being Trumbo’s verbal sparring partner and representing an amalgam of several of the harder-line writers’ views. Trumbo is unfailingly supportive of him, even though he inserts his political views into scripts (which Trumbo rewrites) and clearly doesn’t trust Trumbo. (This is where the “You talk like a radical, but you live like a rich man” line from the trailer fits in.)

While not a lot of acting was required of Diane Lane as Trumbo’s wife, she did a fine job, and Helen Mirren is perfect as the odious Hedda Hopper, blackmailer without portfolio. As writer Hird, comedian Louis C.K.’s acting inexperience shows a bit, as he’s up against such acting superstars, while John Goodman is all prickly geniality and Alan Tudyk plays a credible Ian McLellan Hunter. Hunter wins the Academy Award for the Roman Holiday script (the Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn classic), but Trumbo wrote it. In fact, Trumbo and the others write many screenplays for which they receive credit only belatedly, if at all. The back of the blacklist can’t be broken until a few Hollywood luminaries are willing to give appropriate screen credit.

Directed by Jay Roach with a solid script from John McNamara. While in their vision, the character of Trumbo doesn’t change much over the course of the story—except perhaps to learn not to take what he most cherishes for granted—“he is no more or less principled at the end than he was at the start,” said Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. He is forgiving, though, and in the end acknowledges that all humans are a mix of good acts and bad (except perhaps for Hedda Hopper).

The real opportunity for learning lies with the audience. While those anti-Communist days may now seem rather quaint—Congress taking on a bunch of two-fingered typists—there always are people who believe they know best what other people should think, who believe others are too dim or inattentive to grasp hidden political messages, who think citizens are like children who have to be protected from difficult ideas. That, Trumbo seems to say, is still the danger. Another film well worth the price of a ticket.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating 71%; audiences 84%.

Princeton’s Fall Literary Highlights

soldiers, Iraq

(photo: U.S. Army, creative commons license)

Fall 2015 will be an exciting time for Princeton-area followers of the literary world. The Althea Ward Clark reading series of the Lewis Center for the Arts includes three top-notch entries. The monthly series features a poet and a prose writer, usually known for fiction, and they are held in the Berlind Theatre at the McCarter Theatre Center, at 4:30 p.m.

On September 30, the program presents Phil Klay, a National Book Award winner for his collection of short stories, Redeployment. Klay is a former Marine who served in Iraq. His stories show the profound dislocation of young Americans trying to cope with a seriously broken society completely foreign to their understanding—an experience that gradually transforms their views of America too. “In Klay’s hands, Iraq comes across not merely as a theater of war but as a laboratory for the human condition in extremis,” said Dexter Filkins’s New York Times review. Also reading will be Natalie Diaz, who has a poetry collection titled When My Brother Was an Aztec and has won the Nimrod/Hardin Pablo Neruda Prize.

Short story writer and novelist Jhumpa Lahiri will appear on October 14 with poet Mary Szybist. Lahiri’s collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, but she may be best known for The Namesake and the movie made from it. Her most recent novel is The Lowland, shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker prize, and a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Her first two books tell about the displacement and loss of context of experienced by Indian immigrants in America. The Lowland, “buoyantly ambitious in both its story and its form,” said NPR reviewer Maureen Corrigan, is set mostly in Calcutta. Szybist won the National Book Award for her poetry collection Incarnadine.

Finally, on November 18 novelist Adam Johnson and poet Dorianne Laux will read. Johnson wrote the masterful 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Orphan Master’s Son, and I can’t wait to hear him read—I hope from his new collection of stories. Laux’s most recent poetry collection is The Book of Men.

More Local Events

Starting in late September, the Lewis Center will present the Princeton French Theater Festival—a diverse array of plays and readings.

The regular literary programs at the Princeton Public Library continue—book groups for mysteries, fiction, black voices, poetry, and Spanish-language stories. October 24, the library hosts the annual “Local Author Day book fair.”

On October 30 at Labyrinth Books, cultural historian Thomas Laqueur will discuss his book, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains. Right up my alley. It’s one of a dozen discussions of books on various topics (not much fiction) the bookstore has scheduled for September and October.

The End of the Tour

End of the Tour, David Foster Wallace, Jesse Eisenberg, Jason Segel

Jesse Eisenberg & Jason Segel

In 1996 David Foster Wallace’s 1079-page novel Infinite Jest hit the literary scene like a rocket. The publisher’s marketing efforts meant the book was everywhere, but the man himself—shy, full of self-doubt, not wanting to be trapped into any literary poseur moments and seeing them as inevitable—was difficult to read. This movie (trailer) uses a tyro journalist’s eye to probe Wallace during an intense five days of interviewing toward the end of the Infinite Jest book tour.

As a tryout writer for Rolling Stone, reporter David Lipsky had begged for the assignment to write a profile of Wallace, which ultimately the magazine never published. But the tapes survived, and after Wallace’s suicide in 2008 they became the basis for Lipsky’s 2010 book, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, which fed David Margulies screenplay. The plot of the movie is minimal; instead, it’s a deep exploration of character. It may just be two guys talking, but I found it tectonic.

Director James Ponsoldt has brought nuanced, intelligent performances from his two main actors—Jason Segel as Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as reporter David Lipsky. Lipsky is a novelist himself, with a so-so book to his credit. Wallace has reached the heights, and what would it take for Lipsky to scramble up there too? Jealousy and admiration are at war within him and, confronted with Wallace’s occasional oddness, one manifestation of which is the attempt to be Super-Regular Guy—owning dogs, eating junk food, obsessively watching television—he isn’t sure what to feel. You see it on his face.

Is Lipsky friend or foe? He’s not above snooping around Wallace’s house or chatting up his friends to nail his story. Lipsky rightly makes Wallace nervous, the tape recorder makes him nervous; he amuses, he evades, he delivers a punch of a line, he feints. When the going gets too rough, Lipsky falls back on saying, “You agreed to the interview,” and Wallace climbs back in the saddle, as if saying to himself, just finish this awful ride, then back to the peace and solitude necessary actually to write. In the meantime, he is, as A. O. Scott said in his New York Times review, “playing the role of a writer in someone else’s fantasy.”

The movie’s opening scene delivers the fact of the suicide, which by design looms over all that follows, in the long flashback to a dozen years earlier and the failed interview. You can’t help but interpret every statement of Wallace’s through that lens. The depression is clear. He’s been treated for it and for alcoholism, from which he seems to have recovered. The two Davids walk on the snow-covered farm fields of Wallace’s Illinois home and talk about how beautiful it is, but it is bleak, and even in as jam-packed an environment as the Mall of America Wallace’s conversation focuses on the emptiness at the heart of life. Yet his gentle humor infuses almost every exchange, and Lipsky can be wickedly funny too.

Wallace can’t help but feel great ambivalence toward Lipsky; he recognizes Lipsky’s envy and his hero-worship, and both are troubling. He felt a truth inside himself, but he finds it almost impossible to capture and isn’t sure he has, saying, “The more people think you’re really great, the bigger your fear of being a fraud is.” Infinite Jest was a widely praised literary success, but not to Wallace himself.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 92%, audiences, 89%.

farm, snow, winter

(photo: M Pincus, creative commons license)