Briante – The Market is a Parasite

Posted on by September 4, 2014
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Susan Briante, on PBSToo Subtle For Words

Briante, Susan (2011). The Market is a Parasite that Looks Like a Nest. Chicago: Dancing Girl Press. 16pp chapbook. www.dancinggirlpress.com.

Susan Briante gave a poetry reading for the U of A Poetry center (http://poetry.arizona.edu/), in the iconic Congress Hotel in Tucson.  I bought this little chapbook there because I liked some of what she read.

The idea is that the various New York stock exchanges, often called simply “the Market,” are often collectively personified in financial reporting. “The market had the jitters today.” “The market regained its confidence today.”  Briante decided to treat “the market” as if it were literally some kind of animal, maybe a person, maybe a beast (there are bull and bear markets, after all).  So the collection of poems tends to be playful and ironic.

Her presentations are in the style of prose poetry, I would say.  Most are lineated, and some are metered. Here is the opening  of one she read aloud:

The Market wonders where the soul goes,

Decides that God must be a cripple to make the rest of us

Feel whole, remembers a trip to Mexico

When he was just out of college.

 

It goes on to cite impressions from that trip, at random. Street names, purple jacaranda trees, bells at night, a girl in a hotel, the Rolling Stones on the radio. It’s a fond memory, of a person who is older now, and like all memories, it’s composed of fragments, sensory impressions, feelings. “The Market” is some self-alien person, someone the narrator once was perhaps, or maybe it’s Everyman.

That piece is probably the nicest of the bunch because it has that coherence of being a memory of a time and place. Other pieces seem more like word salad. They’re lovely words, but nothing, or nearly nothing, holds them together. Here is a fragment for example:

 

The Market always felt so heavy

by the sea, weighted with a thousand

sacks of coins impossible to sort to let

go without hemorrhage, to lighten

Would be to dissolve not like an ocean

Against a horizon but to sink

From continent to silt to slam

down taking walls and foundations

 

For me, that’s a vaguely a seaside reflection, perhaps allegorical for a person’s (the Market’s) inner turmoil, but that water is either too deep or too shallow for me; I’m not sure which.

Four of the pages of the chapbook, fully 25%, are graphs of the intraday fluctuations of the Dow Jones Industrial Average for several unspecified days in 2009, an endnote says. That would be a mindless page-filler, except that one of the graphs is wrong. It shows an x-axis that ranges from 880 to 900. The Dow hasn’t been below 1000 since 1973. Was that just a sloppy error? What else could it be?

But because I spotted a similar monster error during her talk, I now think the graph is there on purpose as an extremely subtle message, planted for the odd reader who actually knows something about “The Market.”

During her reading, Briante projected images of market data: some DJIA charts, some network charts, and in one case a table of numbers showing the DJIA closing value and trading volume for each of the prior 30 days. It was all routine data except it showed a volume of over 65 billion shares for the previous Tuesday. Recent volumes should be around 50 million, and I spotted the error on the screen and thought, “Well, she doesn’t really know much about the market or she’d know that was a ridiculous number.”

Now, having read the chapbook with its similar howler of an error in the charts, I’m convinced she was pulling our collective legs at the reading too!  Who are the jokes for? Not just for someone who is familiar with market data, I think. Anyone who took the trouble to read those numbers with care, study those charts in context, would spot the outlier in each case because it was so whoppingly large. If you just glanced at the data and thought, “Oh, financial data,” and moved on, you wouldn’t see the error. You wouldn’t really see anything. To read data, you have to be reading and thinking, reading for meaning, interpreting each point in its context. Just as you read the words of a poem. Ha! The joke was on me.

Now that I’m hip to the extremely subtle humor, I appreciate the craft of it.

I paid $5 for this chapbook and I think I’ve gotten my money’s worth of enjoyment.

Vann – Caribou Island

Posted on by August 29, 2014
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Caibou IslandIt Was A Dark and Stormy Tale

Vann, David (2011). Caribou Island. New York: Harper-Collins, 293 pp.

This is a dark, unrelenting story set in a dark, unrelenting land. A long-married, long-bickering couple try to build a log cabin by hand, on the eponymous island in Alaska. She thinks the cabin is stupid; he believes it is his destiny. There are literal and metaphorical ominous storms, slashing rains, dark clouds, rough seas, areas of thin ice, cold nights. It never gets better, never lightens up, and in the end, they die, the cabin unfinished.

The story is supposed to be an intense psychological study of these characters, their lives, frustrated aspirations, crushed dreams, and so on. And that would have worked, except that they are unmotivated. The husband, Gary, is obsessed with building this cabin and annoyed at his wife’s lack of enthusiasm. Why? No reason is ever given. He’s just moody and crazy.  He wanted to be a scholar of medieval languages but never finished his dissertation, so he’s building a cabin in Alaska instead, despite having zero building skills, no capacity for planning, and questionable intelligence.

As for Irene, the wife, she is convinced he is going to leave her and that grips her with fear. At first it seems she is delusional, since there is no evidence, but later, the narrator switches to Gary’s POV and he just says he’s going to leave her. Why? Because she doesn’t support his dream. Why, we might ask, is Irene so afraid of being separated from this miserable husband who treats her like dirt? No reason is suggested.

Irene falls inexplicably ill early in the novel, with migraine headaches, severe musculo-skeletal pain, loss of appetite, and a host of other symptoms. Doctors find nothing wrong, so, she just has to suffer. She pops pain pills for the rest of the book. Her husband thinks she is faking, to punish him because he needs her help on the cabin. The mystery illness remains unresolved.

I never could get a fix on these characters. The narrator is wont to make declarations about their psychological states and motivations, but those are arbitrary and situational, with little evidence to support them. These two people simply resent each other. That can happen, I guess, but it doesn’t seem like such a  relationship would persist long enough to support a marriage, let alone a novel-length story.

Likewise, the sub-stories involving family members are populated by opaque, one-dimensional characters. Rhoda, Irene’s daughter, is obsessed with her mother’s illness and safety, to the point where she can hardly do her job. Her fiancé, Jim, has been fooling around and we learn later that he has no intention of ever being faithful. Why not? No deep reason beyond generic horniness. Rhoda remains oblivious. Other family members are equally flat caricatures.

Finally, the ending, while surprising, is manufactured, unmotivated, and not believable.

There are sections of nice writing, both in description of the landscape, and of psychological moments. Descriptions of working on a salmon fishing boat were particularly vivid. However, the writing too often turns purple or bland.

Selected at random: “Carl climbed out awkwardly, having to straddle the side of the taller boat and getting rocked in opposite directions. But he did it without falling in or dropping his lunch… Why was he here? He stood on the back deck and looked vaguely at the horizon. The question seemed larger somehow than just this boat or this sunrise or Monique or even Alaska. Something about his life, something impossible and dimly urgent, but this effect was probably only from lack of sleep.” (p 79, quotation marks added for clarity.)

How do you “look vaguely at the horizon?” What’s the alternative? And he felt something inside of him bigger than Alaska? But maybe not?

There are no quotations marks in the book, for no apparent reason. In fact, the book opens in media res, with a direct quotation from Irene, that itself contains a direct quotation, so you are set up to believe you are reading a first-person tale. Then it turns out the narration is actually third-person-close, and you have just read a half page of a quotation, so you must totally reorient and re-read. Why would you start out a novel by deliberately confusing the reader?

The author hates verbs. The book is filled with sentence fragments. Why?  No reason is apparent, and the practice becomes tedious.

“Hollows inside him, only hollows. No substance. She had somehow blown the center out of him. He could see her face, when they had first gotten together, when it seemed that she loved him. Her smile a little hesitant, even as if she were nervous too.”  (p. 139, quotation marks added for clarity).

I wanted to like this book. I did enjoy the descriptions, but the characters remained flat, the story unchanging and the narrator intrusively declarative, so in the end, I can’t say I learned anything or was entertained much.

Hemingway – The Sun Also Rises

Posted on by August 29, 2014
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Sun Also Rises-PMWealthy Drunks Swan About Europe

Hemingway, Ernest (1926). The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner’s Sons.

This was Hemingway’s first novel, written shortly after a visit to Spain, where the novel is mostly set. It famously features vividly colorful descriptions of bullfights and the running of the bulls in Pamplona.

The story is a love triangle. First-person protagonist, Jake, an American newspaperman in Paris, is in love with an English aristocrat, Lady Brett, and she reciprocates his love, but they are held apart by the fact that Jake was wounded in World War I and is impotent. As Lady Brett has high libido and enjoys expressing it, her relationship with Jake is doomed to Platonic frustration. The other acute angle is Robert Cohn, a close friend of Jake’s in Paris, and a Jew, who sleeps with Brett (who doesn’t?), but he took the encounter as proof of true love.

Over the course of the novel, Jake comes to be jealous of Cohn and breaks off the friendship, even though he knows he himself can never be a competitor for Brett. For her part, Brett scorns Cohn’s possessive mooning and vows to marry Mike, another gentleman. This crowd is soon joined in Spain by Bill, an American gentleman.

And they are all gentlemen of means. Only Jake is a working man (although he doesn’t actually do much work in the novel, but at least he has a job and plenty of money). The others are idle and rich. They knock about Europe aimlessly, bored and drunk, treating the locals badly, hoping perhaps to find some kind of direction, or at least amusement, which is how they ended up in Basque country.

The narrative of the story is 95% drinking, eating, getting drunk, being drunk, sleeping it off, getting up at noon, eating again and  getting drunk again immediately. Prodigious quantities of alcohol, more than what is believable, are consumed by all.

Brett becomes smitten by a young bullfighter and runs off with him, to everyone’s dismay, and the party is over. Jake finds her in Madrid, alone and broke. He takes her home.

Plot, there is none. Story through-line, no. The text is mostly a set of loosely connected, impressionistic scenes featuring all these characters being drunk. The balance is the vivid descriptions of the festival of bulls that they all watch, drunk. So why is this considered one of the greatest American novels?

It does leave you with a feeling for how affluent Westerners after the war were left without meaning and direction. The war had been so brutal, destructive, and stupid, that the prior values of the aristocracy were destroyed. The upper classes can only reign over the rest of us if we look to them as paragons of virtue. If nothing means anything anymore, and virtue is undefined, the rich have nothing to do but get drunk. That sense of mood was palpable in the novel, a considerable achievement. In that way, it is comparable to how Robert Bowles, in The Sheltering Sky, evoked the nihilism that prevailed after World War II.

The writing is Hemingway-esque, as it were. It’s hard to find an adjective or adverb anywhere in the book. Subordinate clauses? Forget about them. Everything is written in simple sentences with strong nouns and verbs. That is certainly worth noting, although The Old Man and the Sea is a better demonstration of that style.

There are some sub-themes of minor interest. Brett’s promiscuity would have been radical at the time, as the traditional roles for women changed in the 1920’s. Jake’s quiet nobility (though he is not a nobleman) is interesting, especially since he is deprived of reproductive capacity, which seems to stand for his “manhood.” He is thus the least among the men, yet the most admirable.

Jake makes up for his deficiency perhaps by being enthralled with the bulls. The bullfight is a symbol for the War – cruel and bloody, but ultimately pointless, staged for the amusement of the callous few. The heavy drinking might be a comment on prohibition in America. The frustrated relationship between Jake and Brett is enigmatic, implying as it does that love requires sex, but proving just the opposite. These themes are all interesting, though subtle and not particularly insightful.

The dialog is appallingly repetitive and boring. Yes, there is the occasional subtext, for example, where sexual jealousy of Cohn is expressed as anti-Semitism, but this is not Hills Like White Elephants. It is just plain, boring dialog, and there is lots of it to wade through.

May a bull gore my belly for feeling only lukewarm about this iconic novel, but apart from the colorful descriptions and Hemingway’s terse writing style, The book is only mildly interesting. Worth the read because it is short, and because you cannot hold your head high if you have not read it, but it does not go on my list of favorites.

Long – The Writer’s Portable Mentor

Posted on by August 4, 2014
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Writers Portable-mentor-330Advice for the Experienced Writer

Long, Priscilla (2010). The Writer’s Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life. Seattle, WA: Wallingford Press, 349 pp.

My shelves are heavy with how-to-write books, some helpful, some inspirational, most inert. Priscilla Long’s book is different because it gets down to the nuts and bolts of writing, the brass tacks, the irreducible, atomic elements of the craft. You can read books all day on how to write scenes, develop character, and manage pacing, and those books are essential for beginners, but where writers often get bogged down is in neglect of, or ignorance of, the basics.

What are these basics?  Chapter 2 is about using words better. It covers topics like Where to Find Good Words, collecting words, creating your own lexicon, sound effects, verb work. The exercises at the end of the chapter, like those in every chapter, are original, useful, and genuinely productive. For example, Take a page of a piece you’ve written. Circle all the verbs. Question each one. Change at least one.  The result can be revelatory.

The chapter on observation is likewise an eye-opener, if only because it reminds the writer to rely on observation rather than abstraction. What is anger on someone’s face? Anyone can come up with a set of words, probably involving flushed cheeks, dilated pupils, flared nostrils; the usual stuff. Long encourages us to actually observe the face of someone who is angry. You’ll probably see few of the  cliché pseudo-observations listed above, and you’ll have an original, compelling description based on what you do see. The same is true for observing gestures, voices, and colors. Simple advice, but stunning when you take it.

The longish middle section on “Finding a Structure” was a stretch of molasses for me. Granted, every work needs a structure. You can’t (or shouldn’t) just write into the void,  without direction or form. But I thought Long’s overly-detailed, lengthy examples belabored the obvious, were uninteresting, and not well-written. In most cases, her explication of what the example was intended to illustrate amounted to little more than restating excerpts from that example, which explicates nothing. So the center of the book is weak and saggy, in my view.

However, the pace picks up strongly again toward the end with excellent chapters on grammar and punctuation; and these are not just lists of rules, but reminders of the possibilities. Many of us, without thinking about it, write in whatever syntax we’re familiar with. A wider syntactical scope can seriously enliven the writing.

There’s a tantalizing short chapter on metaphor and simile. It reviews basic definitions and provides examples, but it is tantalizing because it offers little analysis or advice. Aristotle said use of metaphor could not be taught, and maybe he was right. Long provides no exercises for this chapter.

The chapter on revision reframes what that task is. Instead of dreading the process, I now look forward to it with excitement. The chapter is a kind of summary of much of the previous material. The problem with revision is usually that you don’t know what to do about it. Sure, you can always find errors and improve your verb choices, but with Long’s checklist, you can visualize ramping the piece up to a whole new level of quality.

The final section, on how to get your work critiqued and ultimately published seems addressed to a beginning writer rather to the more experienced audience presumed so far. I can’t imagine anyone who has been writing for a while who doesn’t realize that you need to have readers who will give you feedback, and that you need to send your work out if you want to get it published. It’s a short, harmless chapter, but not a strong ending to an otherwise earth-moving book.

Emotions By The Number

Posted on by April 30, 2015
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BrandoWildOneMy project titled Chipotle is on hold. I had previously posted about a half dozen process notes on its development. I had the end zone in sight.  Now it’s packed away for a while. The reason is that I had sent an earlier manuscript, Being Ruby, out to a writer’s workshop for July. After a week at the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference (www.unm.edu/~taosconf/), the manuscript has been thoroughly critiqued by amateur and professional writers and agents, and that project now has the momentum, as I knew it would, post-conference.

The feedback was generally positive, but there were problems everyone agreed on.  Many were technical issues that will be easy to fix. The most challenging criticism was that my characters lacked sufficient emotional density. The characters were too rational, too surface, emotionally untethered. I was advised to develop their emotionality, especially in the relationships. I have to agree, this was a valid criticism.

Some of the emotional flatness is vestigial. The story was first written as a genre P.I. tale, but over rewrites, I decided to develop it into a character study. More of the hard-boiled genre mood remained than I realized. The story still tends to focus on plot points, and the relationships are utilitarian.

The problem is, I’m not sure how to fix that. It’s not enough to have characters laugh or cry at each new development. Displays of emotionality must arise organically from the characters and their situations. So what do they feel? I don’t know. I, myself, don’t ride on waves of feeling throughout the day. I get angry at injustice, disgusted by thoughtlessness, find joy in natural beauty, sadness in death, and so on, like everyone else. But such moments don’t come up often.

Usually, I’m following words, ideas, perceptions and images, looking for new patterns, new ways of understanding. When I read, or watch films, I’m tracking the writer’s craft and insight, the filmmaker’s skills, the actors’ methods. When I interact with people, I observe them closely, try to understand what they’re meaning. If someone insults me or flatters me, I’m not bowled over with emotion. Rather, I struggle to put the comments in context.

I asked randomly selected people at the conference what makes them emotional. Most people, it turns out, live their whole lives in seething cauldrons of emotion. They get worked up over the slightest deviation from absolute normalcy. Anything to do with family relationships is fraught with emotion. People get emotional over other people’s families; even fictional families. They get choked up reading Hallmark cards. The most stereotypical gestures of love and loss are emotional train wrecks. One woman told me that a certain AT&T advertisement on TV makes her cry every time.

Those findings are consistent with the rank sentimentality that oozes from a lot of popular fiction. So what’s wrong with me? I must be a Martian. Actually, I have long suspected I was; this development is not really news to me. But it’s going to be a problem for the next rewrite of Being Ruby. How will I develop the characters’ emotionality?

I’m a retired psychologist. I have studied scientific and anecdotal theories of emotion in some detail. Most of them are nonsense. In truth, psychologists don’t know what emotions are or what causes them or what purpose they have. How-to-write books are no more helpful. They assume you already know what emotion is and when it should occur, and they advise you on how best to represent it in words. But that’s the easy part.

OlivierHamletSo I developed my own theory of emotions from scratch – what they are, what causes them, and what purpose they serve in psychological life. I’ll spare you the details, but if you’re interested, the ideas were derived from my non-fiction essay, “The Three-In-One Mind: A Mental Architecture” (billadamsphd.net/). With this theory, I can account for my own experiences of existential poignancy as well as the Hallmark card banalities that devastate others.

Now I must apply those ideas to my manuscript. I know, I know. Experienced writers out there are thinking, “Good luck with that, buddy.” But maybe the process is like acting. Some actors channel their characters; get deep into them so that the characters’ emotions are their own emotions. Marlon Brando famously used “the method,” as it’s called. Other actors, however, take a different approach, selecting from a toolkit of gestures and expressions to precisely convey the emotions needed. Lawrence Olivier famously followed that procedure, which he called simply, “acting.”

As a Martian, the choice is made for me.

Silber – The Art of Time in Fiction

Posted on by July 28, 2014
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Art of TimeNot A Waste of Time

Silber, Joan (2009). The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as it Takes. Minneapolis, MN: Greywolf Press, 114pp.

 

I bought this book on the recommendation of a writing instructor when I was having trouble presenting backstory. The book was not very helpful. It is not a “how-to” book. Like the others in this series (The Art of X in Writing), it’s a short (114 small-sized pages) essay, strictly an overview. The success of the format depends on the writing skill of the author and his or her degree of insight into the topic. Baxter’s The Art of Subtext was revelatory, proving that the formula can work. This one however, is only mildly interesting.

Silber spends most of her essay on “Classic Time,” where the story is told from beginning to end in a straightforward manner. This is the least interesting, most obvious, and least problematic time structure for writers, although I did appreciate the insight, taken from Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse,” that one nifty technique is to contrast the inexorable and mindless time of nature (tides, seasons, decay and rebirth, etc.) with the sharp intentionality of human time, which is outside of nature.

There is insight to be had from this book, but Silber spends most of her word count reviewing plot and characters of various example stories, usually not drawing out a clear  lesson of fictional time. From  a long consideration of Proust’s “Recherche,” we learn that “Time, in fiction, is infinitely flexible.” You would have to be an extremely naïve writer to not know that fiction can compress and elongate time. In other examples (e.g., Maupassant and Flaubert), we learn that it is possible to show characters aging over a whole lifetime. How this is best done is only hinted at.

The other “kinds” of fictional time covered are even less useful. My particular concern, how best to represent backstory, is covered in a short section called “Switchback Time.” There I discover that flashbacks and other time cuts are possible in fiction, something I was quite aware of. Examples don’t make any particular point. Alice Munro’s stories are recommended, but without much discussion of why, beyond the conclusion that “Different characters can tell a tale in different ways.” Hemingway eschewed the past, preferring to stay in the present, “without dawdling in the lyrical.” Lots of examples are cited for each of these points, but the points themselves are superficial.

Fabulous, or non-realistic time, is not even defined. The main example is Marquez’s famous opening line from 100 years: “Many years later, facing a firing squad, A. would remember X from childhood.” (A crude paraphrase, I apologize). What is so fabulous, or magical or nonrealistic about that?  It’s a remarkable sentence, and a remarkable phenomenology, but what I want to know is how to tell a story in forward gear while providing context from the past. As I recall 100 years, that book simply jumps from the firing squad into the deep past.

In the final section, “Time as Subject,” we learn that all stories (logically) end in death, that everyone is surprised to get old, and that death ends subjective time.  Examples from The Death of Ivan Illyich are apposite, but offer no help for a writer. This topic, which amounts to little more than the assertion that time exists, seems out of place in a book about managing time in fiction.

Overall, I extracted a half-dozen crumbs of insight, and I’ll probably read more Alice Munro now, but overall, I didn’t see much in this book that isn’t covered in any generic how-to-write book. I had high expectations because of Baxter’s book on subtext, learned a few tricks, but was generally disappointed here.

Suskind – Perfume

Posted on by July 11, 2014
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A Smelly Book

PerfumeSuskind, Patrick (1986). Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. New York: Vintage. (Translated from the German by John E. Woods.)

It’s difficult to conceptualize smells and to describe their essence in writing. Even familiar smells, like coffee or lemon, are difficult to bring to mind. To describe them, about all you can say is “coffee” or “lemon.” But Suskind presents remarkably complex and layered descriptions of smells that make you understand smell in a new way. He’s a master of synesthesia in that sense.

The central idea of this novel is that an impoverished, gnome-like man in mid-1700’s France discovers that he has no personal smell, even while he has a nose more sensitive than any dog’s. He can navigate the streets of Paris in total darkness just by following the flumes, ribbons, and balloons of smell everywhere. And cities really did stink in those times before toilets and bathtubs. So the protagonist, G., doesn’t stink, but he smells.

What could be more perfect for G. than to become a perfumer? So that’s what he does, eventually making his fortune synthesizing exotic fragrances “by nose.” However, he discovers that not having a personal smell makes other people ignore him, so he sets on the quest to make the perfect “human smell” for himself. Unfortunately, that requires him to murder flocks of young virgins, and thus the subtitle of the book.

The interesting parts of the story are the descriptions of how perfumes were made during that period, and the descriptions of the stinking cities and their cruelly hierarchical societies. The arc of the main character G., parallels that of Frankenstein’s monster, with a whiff of Phantom of the Opera. An element of magical realism is skillfully woven, as G. performs amazing olfactory feats that defy literal realism. Ultimately, the scent of  “human being” he seeks seems to be “essence of love” or possibly, “essence of adoration.” That’s what he really wants.

The writing is average, notwithstanding the long, often tedious lists of odors presented. Suskind overwrites severely, restating what has been stated, explaining the obvious, and clarifying what has been shown. This could be a translation problem, I have no way of knowing. But the writing is by no means lyrical or transcendent. On the contrary, it seems to revel in the muck of everyday detail. I did have to use my dictionary a few times, so that was good. (Eleemosynary is a very fine word, I discovered). Plotting was ridiculous, because there were so many effects without causes, and causes without effects. In the last half, the story line was so arbitrary, it became  unintentionally laughable.

People say the book and the character of G. were memorable but I disagree. Aside from the clever conceit of a man with the nose of a dog, there is nothing here to remember – no haunting characters, no believable drama, no illumination of the human condition, no lyrical writing, no echoing dialog, no clever plot.  And we don’t remember odors well, so those are already gone.  I think the book will be about as memorable as child’s fairy tale, which is mostly what it is.

Kennedy – Ironweed

Posted on by July 11, 2014
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IronweedBums with Feelings

Kennedy, William (1983). Ironweed. New York: Penguin, 225 pp.

This beautifully written novel is a character study of homeless alcoholics in Albany during the depression. Sounds depressing, but it isn’t, because the characters are so alive and interesting. Main character, Francis, was once a major league baseball player around 1910, back when there was no money in baseball. During a depression-era trolley strike, he killed a man and went on the lam, beginning his descent into alcohol. He eventually managed to pull together a life, got married and achieved stable lower class status, despite his drinking, until, while drunk, he accidentally dropped his baby, killing it. In shame, he ran away again and we pick up the story when, 20 years later, broke and homeless, he goes to the cemetery and apologizes to the baby’s grave.

Throughout the story, dead people from his past appear (in his imagination) and have conversations with him. That represents his ongoing effort to come to terms with the life he has made for himself.  Francis the bum has a longtime girlfriend, Helen, also a bum who once studied piano at Vassar but descended into the bum’s life after her father died. The idea is that a fate like this could befall anyone; we are each a hair’s breadth from desolation.

In fact though, there are always other factors, not the least of which are the genetic components of temperament, addiction, mental illness, and other brain characteristics. You don’t just become alcoholic and homeless because you feel ashamed, or because your father died. Misfortunes happen to millions of people and they get past them somehow.  I attribute bumhood to biological predispositions more than other factors, but that is a modern view not prevalent in the 1980’s when this was written.

This novel suggests that bums are noble savages, who, in poor economic times, were defeated by misfortune. They are noble because they are decent to each other and they take responsibility for the choices they have made, and continue to make. They don’t envy anyone, don’t blame anyone. They’re more fatalistic than unhappy being bums, despite the extremely hard life. Maybe we are supposed to learn that anyone can be a decent human being, even at the farthest margins of society. Basic humanity shines through circumstance.

Thematic considerations aside, the dialog is perfect, the humor is honest, and the characters are believable and likeable despite the incredible squalor of their situation. There is a touch of sentimentality I could have done without. The writing is beautiful, and overall, the story is memorable. This book, the third in a trilogy, won the Pulitzer Prize.

Shacochis – The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

Posted on by July 27, 2014
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Shacochis, Woman Jacket 9780802119827.JPGThe Novel That Didn’t Know When to Stop

Shacochis, Bob (2013). The Woman Who Lost Her Soul. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 713 pp.

I’d characterize this as a spy thriller, in the camp of LeCarre, perhaps, although unlike LeCarre, it is a sprawling epic rather than a tight story.

In Florida, a shady, ex-CIA informant hires Tom, a lawyer who has worked for an NGO in Haiti, to accompany him back to the island to help him investigate a murder. This is in the late 1990’s after the Americans deposed dictator Chevalier and the country was in political, social, and economic chaos. We experience the squalor, violence and corruption,  of Haiti, but the investigation is soon sidetracked by shady government “operatives” who recruit Tom to investigatr war crimes. Amidst all this, he meets a young woman, “Jackie,” a photographer of unclear provenance, who attaches herself to him. Everybody in this novel is shady or of unclear provenance.

Tom is inexplicably attracted to the girl. Sure, she is beautiful, but his lust for her goes beyond rationality. Conversely, she treats him badly, except when she’s flirting with him. She acts like a psychopath and he acts like a schoolboy. Their relationship is hot, steamy, tense, and uninteresting, since it is motivated only by animal urges, which you can see anytime on the nature channel.

Nevertheless, Jackie is interested in voodoo rituals and Tom takes her into the mountains to see one, where she asks the priest if it is possible for a person to lose their soul. Of course, he says. Then there is a shoot-em-up and some other stuff, and that section ends.

In the next section we are in WWII Croatia, where a young boy watches his father beheaded by Nazis and his mother tortured. The village is burned, but before the bad guys leave, the main evil one has a talk with the boy and tells his name, and leaves him alive.  If that isn’t a case of Chekhov’s gun, I don’t know what is.

In the next section, we meet Dottie, a young woman living in Istanbul with her shady, government-operative father, who teaches her tradecraft and also sexually molests her, although that part is off-stage and only referenced. Dottie falls in love with an Arab boy, who turns out to be a revolutionary and is mysteriously drowned by Turkish police. She suspects her father had something to do with it.

In another section, Dottie is working with her father on a “case” in which she is supposed to play a prostitute to entrap an evil Italian fellow. She is supposed to seduce him into a hotel room, where her father will suddenly appear and kill him. What could go wrong?  Well, it does go wrong. Dottie flees, rejects her father utterly, along with all the rest of humanity, and at this point we assume she has lost her soul.  And we realize it has been a flashback, and that Dottie is Jackie, the cold-blooded woman we met earlier, so no wonder she had no soul. We never do learn why her father did not just sneak up on Mr. Evil in the street and shoot him in the head. The prostitute ruse was a writer’s device so Dottie could lose her soul along with her dignity, faith, and hope.  At this point the story is over and it’s page 470. But Shacochis was apparently having fun and continued for another 300 pages, which I think was a mistake, because nothing else of consequence happens.

In the last section of the book, we see various government shenanigans in Haiti and elsewhere, as we discover the arrogant, golfing, intelligence leaders that love war and run ruthless operations around the globe to promote it.  This part is heavy-handed editorializing, uninsightful, and not necessary.  Where were the editors?

The first 470 pages are written with some wonderful, memorable sentences, lots of rich local color, strong sense of time and place and the historical moment, all of which make the reading quite  worthwhile, despite the thin plot. If that were the entire book, the Pulitzer Prize would have been easily justified. The last section of the book is not as well-written, and seems even as if it could have been written by a different author, and it brings down the whole reading experience. So my recommendation is to read the first 34 chapters, then quit while you’re ahead, skipping “Book Four” entirely, and you’ll have a good time.

Writing Without A Muse

Posted on by April 30, 2015
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calliopeThis is another in my irregular series of posts documenting the process of writing my first non-genre novel, working title, Chocotle. Previous posts are lower in the stack. The purpose of this documentation? Many. One is that it helps me move forward. I write these when I’m stuck. Often, writing out what’s on my mind helps me get past the problem, which is usually my own preconception of what should happen.

Also, based on past experience, when this project is done and I’m on to the next one, my memory of writing this will be erased and it should be interesting to revisit the present moment from the point of view of an alien future. I tend not to repeat myself too much, and I keep changing, so my future self will be nothing like my present self.

This is my fourth novel-length story, and each has come from a different head space. My first was a madcap adventure-thriller across three continents,  with stolen treasures, mistaken identities, multiple murders, and sentimental relationships. I undertook it mainly just to see if I could write from a female point of view, but I learned a lot about writing in the process.

The second effort was a mystery-thriller of sorts, involving a divided self rather than outright mistaken identity, with only one murder, and making a determined effort to embrace more realistic characters, consciously backing away from the cartoon  people  and plots that permeate mass media culture. But it was still in the category of a “romp,” a shaggy adventure story for its own sake.

The third one, starring a hard-boiled police detective, was in some ways a regression to the cartoony mystery genre of earlier work, but I wanted my detective to undergo a serious character arc, changing from Manichean absolutist to nuanced humanist. I started him out as a hard-boiled cop to contrast with where he would end up (not as a cop). There were plenty of murders, because he’s a homicide detective, but they were all off stage. This was the first time I tried to include an explicit theme, or story question in a novel. I was exploring whether a rigid, black-and-white personality can ever really change to accept more subtle views of self, world, and other. The answer was yes, and the magic potion was love. That project still needs a lot of editing because it reads like two stories mashed together. The arc did not arc as gracefully as I had hoped.

This fourth project, Chocotle, aspires to leave the genre terrain behind. It is a story about ordinary people doing relatively ordinary things. There are no murders, not even any guns. The dramas and conflicts arise mainly from within families and romantic relationships (as in life). I’m terribly worried about this novel because on the face of it, “nothing happens.”  But I am determined to push through to the end before I pass judgment.

And the ending, or lack of it, is what has me stuck at present. I am in the END section, which should be about 25% of the whole.  The large, sprawling MIDDLE is over. I’m at 65K words, which feels about right. What I’m trying to do now is provoke the final climax and reversal, leading to the resolution.  Wrap it up and get the hell out, that’s the mission. As usual, the unfolding is going slowly, proceeding through a fog, the destination only dimly discerned.

The main problem is that I have lost the muse. I’m writing from my overall outline, in which I have set high-level goals for the characters and their situations. I look at that and I say, “Okay, in this chapter, this character has to get from Place A to Place B, and has to change his or her outlook from X to Y.”  Then I write words to make it happen. I’m not guided by any vision or inspiration for the characters or their plight. It’s more mechanical than that. I’m using the narrator to compress time, to make things happen quicker.  Dialogs are briefer and though I hope, still full of tension, they present fewer surprises to me. Characters say what I want them to say, what they need to say for practical reasons of the outline and the chapter goals.

I don’t think I’m writing badly, only differently. I don’t sit around waiting for inspiration “from where I dream,” as they say. I just write, getting the job done. I crank out a 10-page chapter in three to five days. It’s rough-draft quality, that goes without saying. But it’s something, and making something out of nothing is the job. It just feels odd to be “cranking” instead of following the beckoning of a coyly smiling muse.

Maybe I simply know my characters better now. I am on chapter 22. I don’t have to wonder what they’ll do or say because I know them. Maybe I’m counting on my readers knowing them better too by this point, so I don’t feel the need to delve so deeply into the heads as before. At the same time, the plot has thickened, so maybe I’m being pulled along by plot devices as much as by characters’ motivations, a regression to type. I think there is some of that going on. It’s not necessarily bad.

So I’m going to crank it out to the end, some kind of end, and then go back and evaluate the whole thing. That’s the only way forward. If I stop and get self-judgmental now, the momentum will die and so will be the project. Can’t stop writing…