Can't Stop Writing...

Woodrell – Winter’s Bone

Posted on February 12, 2014 by bill.adams111@gmail.comFebruary 12, 2014

Unrelenting Squalor

Woodrell, Daniel (2006). Winter’s Bone. New York: Hachette Book Group

When I saw the movie several years ago, I thought the cinematography was overdone. Every scene was filled with squalor, so much so that it created an unnecessarily dark mood and actually verged on non-believable. Now I know the movie was just being faithful to the novel.

The mood is so consistently “down” in this book, it becomes tiresome. A poor, rural family in the Ozark mountains of Arkansas struggles to survive. A teenage girl, Ree, is the protagonist. The father, a meth cooker and dealer, has disappeared. The mother is mentally ill, a near-vegetable. Ree cares for two young boys. She struggles to find food and clothing. She shoots squirrels for dinner. She chops wood in the snow. She hangs laundry to dry on lines across the kitchen. It’s dark, hungry, cold, sore, wet, and hopeless on every page, and it never lets up. Maybe that’s how it is in that actual society, but that’s hardly artistic justification for using such a monochromatic mood.

The people in her neck of the woods are family clans, some close, others less so. All seem dimwitted, uneducated, and self-obsessed. Most of the men are involved in cooking, selling, and taking methamphetamines. They drink smoke, swear, bluster, do drugs, mistreat women, neglect children, ignore the law, and drive rattle-trap trucks with shotguns in them. Characterization of the social environment is unrelentingly depressing. Why? What is the artistic purpose?

The basic story is that Ree’s missing father has put up the house as collateral against bail bond, and must appear in court in one week or the house will be lost to the bondsman. The story is structured as a series of episodes wherein Ree treks through snowy woods to the neighbors’ places to find her father before it’s too late. Nobody knows anything but we get to meet the strange, mean, ugly, and weird people who live near her “hollow.” Will she save the farm? Of course she will, and we always knew she would, but that was just an arbitrary scaffold the author hung his words on.

The writing has several strengths. One is close observation: just the right color of the melting snow, just the right smell of smoky air, just the right scars on a face. The observational detail is perfect. Another strength is the dialog and its accompanying Ozark dialect, slang, and idioms, all of which are very authentic-sounding and interesting.

Offsetting those strengths, the writing is straightforwardly descriptive, not particularly poetic or insightful, except that it was fascinating to note how many human body products were described: all of them. Dialog, while rhythmically musical, is mostly the quotidian back and forth of stupid people discussing their tiny lives.

Characters are revealed by their actions and words, but they are revealed to be dim bulbs without much awareness of self or world. The only virtue highlighted in this bleak tale is that in time of great trouble, eventually family will help you. Even non-family might, if the community is small and ingrown enough. I’m not sure if that’s a good enough reward for such a dark journey.

Robinson – Housekeeping

Posted on February 10, 2014 by bill.adams111@gmail.comFebruary 20, 2014

Deck Chairs on the Titanic

Robinson, Marilynne (1980). Housekeeping. NY: Picador

This story is about housekeeping the way that rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic is about required maintenance. First-person narrator Ruthie and her eccentric aunt, Sylvie, go on a frenzied housekeeping spree to impress the neighbors, and the sheriff, with a demonstration that they are responsible and upstanding, and that Ruthie should not be removed from Sylvie’s care and placed in a foster home. But it’s too late for that. The ship is already sinking.

Ruthie has a younger sister, Lucille, and the two of them ran virtually feral when they were young, skipping school and playing alone near a cold, glacial lake somewhere in Montana. Their mother committed suicide by driving her car off a cliff into that lake when they were barely able to understand. Prior to that, a train jumped the tracks on the bridge over the lake and sank irretrievably, taking all the passengers, including their grandfather. So this is no ordinary lake. It is the Lake Of Death. It is the river Styx.

Aunt Sylvie nominally cares for the girls, but she is eccentric and diffident, and the girls continue to run feral until puberty sets in, when Lucille decides she is embarrassed by Sylvie and the decrepit, garbage-filled house they live in, and she runs away to live with a schoolteacher. Nobody seems to mind, but Ruthie is hurt and alone and worried about being abandoned even by Sylvie, until finally, the sheriff knocks on the door.

There is no story; nothing happens. Instead, Robinson paints an impressionistic word portrait of the town, the girls, and Sylvie. The main theme is the girls’ loneliness, of many kinds: from having lost their mother; from being socially isolated from townspeople and schoolmates; from fear of being abandoned by Sylvie, who seems to care about them but provides no direction, either verbal or behavioral. They feel the loneliness of being separated from each other, loneliness of having lost their past, and the threat of ultimate loneliness, death, represented by the ever-present, cold, dark lake.

The greatest success of the novel is in the separation of tone and mood. The narrator’s tone is even and matter-of-fact, even when descriptions are of death, biblical-scale flooding, near-starvation, loneliness, and incredible squalor. There is no whining. Ruthie just tells it like it is. Yet for the reader, the mood feels devastating, dark, constricting, and hopeless. Robinson accomplishes that separation with exquisitely tiny brushstrokes of words. The novel almost, but not quite, falls into the category of prose poetry. You read it for the fine sentences, not because there is any real story.

Drawbacks are several. The language is often very complex and ornate, verging into “purple” territory more than once, and all that from the lips of an undereducated pre-teen, then teenage girl. Her soliloquys often become virtually omniscient, so you are always aware that you are hearing Marilynne Robinson, not Ruthie. Consequently, it’s difficult to identify with the novel’s main character.

Those long, flowery (and ultimately pointless) descriptions often ramble into pseudo-philosophical speculation, often peppered with gratuitous biblical allusions, as is Robinson’s wont, and these digressions struck me as self-indulgences, not informative or poetic contributions to the work.

The book is 90% narrative description. Dialog is extremely rare, and when it does occur, it is usually perfunctory. Consequently we never have much dramatic opportunity to identify with any of the characters, and again, we must settle for Marilynne Robinson.

Finally, Robinson’s pointillistic method will not be to everyone’s liking. For example, the lake and the town are always cold, dark, and wet. Always. Even in the summer. On one page, words like “cold,” “ice,” and “frost” can appear over a dozen times. In one page, these words appear in close succession, “dark,” “darkness,” “black,” “darkness,” “shadow,” and “soot.” Must have been dark, I guess. In one scene, when Sylvie and Ruthie are out on a boat, the word, “boat” appears a dozen times in a page and a half. I found this technique distracting rather than poetic.

Another favorite device is the false tension scenario, when some character goes missing and the worst is feared, but then that character shows up again a few pages later – just went for a walk or something. These numerous little faux-mini-dramas are the only things that keep the forward motion of the narrative from coming to a complete stall.

Despite many such heavy-handed devices, there are often sentences and phrases that stop the eyeballs in their sockets and compel multiple readings.

“For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?” (p. 92).

“It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible – incompletely and minimally existent, in fact.” (p. 105)

There are enough of those to keep the pages turning right to the end, and after it’s over, to make thoughts and images haunt you for a few days. Aren’t all our lives filled with routine housekeeping, even though we know the ship is sinking?

Boswell – The Half Known World

Posted on February 6, 2014 by bill.adams111@gmail.comFebruary 20, 2014

How to Surprise A Reader

Boswell, Robert (2008). The Half Known World. Mpls, MN: Gray Wolf Press

Robert Boswell presents 9 personal essays exploring different aspects of the craft of writing fiction, all addressing the idea that you should be writing about something that escapes complete comprehension. If you describe and show all aspects of your fictional world, then you are writing genre, or possibly a technical manual. Literary fiction is supposed to confront regions of human experience that are not fully susceptible to rational understanding. Consider what it would be like to come out of prison after 20 years and enter normal life. There’s a lot that can be said about that experience, and a lot that cannot be said. Boswell’s point is that you don’t need to say it all, and you shouldn’t.

It’s an interesting thesis, and it rings true, if you agree that literary fiction is an art form, and that the purpose of art is to use the form to convey something interesting about the human condition. The idea doesn’t stand as a universal prescription. Half known to whom? Someone who has given a great deal of thought to a topic may have more understanding of it and more to say about it than a naïve person. What’s half known to you might seem superficial to me. What I find utterly mysterious might be transparently simple to you.

At the other end of the spectrum, it seems to be true that nothing, nothing at all in human experience, can be fully comprehended. If you stare at a stone long enough, it becomes mysterious. Boswell’s dictum thus becomes a truism.

Perhaps his advice is really that you, the writer, should strive to confront whatever is only half known to you.

And then there’s the question of why you should do this. What makes this good advice for writers? Boswell doesn’t address that question squarely but merely gives multiple examples from literature of what he means by it. He suggests that a character that you only half understand might do something surprising, and presumably readers of literary fiction enjoy fresh, surprising material. As somebody famous once said, if the writer is never surprised, the reader surely won’t be. I’m not sure that’s true, but it might be.

The essays vary in interest and effectiveness. On writing characters, he contradicts many writing teachers who say you should know everything there is to know about your character before you start. Boswell says you should only know one or two essential things. Get inside those, and something surprising might arise from the unknown part.

To surprise the reader, a character can show a surprising change, or a social paradigm can change, such as after a revolution, either martial or cultural; a setting can radically change, such as getting out of prison, emigrating, getting elected, becoming disabled. One chapter discusses the technique of switching foreground and background for a surprise, but it emphasizes that themes (as with symbols and other devices), must evolve organically. If you plant your theme or symbol, it will stick out as a crude device.

One excellent chapter discusses the omniscient narrator, one who knows everything and is judgmental about it all. That’s relatively rare these days. Today we prefer third-close or third-limited. We don’t trust a narrator with full omniscience. Boswell argues that omniscience is actually the best narrative voice for a mature writer who has something to say. It’s a detailed and compelling argument, perhaps the strongest in the book. In another strong essay, he summarizes an argument by Chomsky, delineating the social and moral responsibilities of any intellectual.

Some of the chapters are far weaker, some almost pointless rambles. And nearly all of the essays are slow in getting to the point, usually beginning with frustratingly irrelevant first-person anecdotes that may or may not illustrate the gist of the essay. These often feel like warm-up exercises. The last chapter is devoted entirely to one of these autobiographical indulgences, and while I admit it is really well-written, it has nothing to do with anything.

Overall, this is not a step-by-step how-to book, but a consideration of an idea that can make for good literary fiction.

Baxter – The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot

Posted on February 2, 2014 by bill.adams111@gmail.comFebruary 20, 2014

The Unspeakable

Baxter, Charles (2007). The Art of Subtext. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press

Subtext is hard to write, because you don’t write it. You set it up and let it show, but it remains unstated. When done effectively, the reader has a sense of discovery far more clear than if the message were stated starkly.

Subtext is mainly found in literary writing. Genre writing tends to state and describe everything, even the obvious. A lot of people like that, and there’s nothing wrong with it. I used to enjoy it, before I started reading literary fiction, and alas, I am now incapable of going back to my formerly beloved mysteries and thrillers.

Married couples are masters of subtext:

“Honey, have you seen my cufflinks?” “I’m not the keeper of your damn cufflinks!”

What’s that about? It’s not about cufflinks. A wife’s one-liner as they head out to a social event: “Is that what you’re wearing?” Woody Allen did a memorable riff on the topic of subtext in the movie, Annie Hall.

Baxter’s book is not exactly an instructional on how to write subtext, but if you think about his examples, you can extract plenty of lessons. The book is more like a set of meditations on subtext, divided into six chapters.

To write good subtext, characters must already be well-known to the reader so that a line of dialog, or a gesture, can carry double meaning. That’s the secret.

One way to do that is to set a scene in a place that defines a mood which can then be used as subtext. Baxter gives plentiful examples from literature to illustrate his points. For example, a woman leaves the room, visibly upset. The man goes to the window she was looking out of and sees the cemetery she saw. He knows then what she was feeling. A meaningful communication has occurred without a word. That technique depends on the characters having a prior history, known to the reader. The past is always a good subtext to the present.

The difference between what a character wants and what they get is rich ground for subtext. The ten-year-old opens his gift and says, “Socks. Thank, you grandma.”

Obsessions are fertile for subtext because they are a compound of mixed motives and emotions. Ahab cannot explain his obsession with the whale. It resists rational discourse. Once we understand that, we can interpret what he says and does in a different way. “This is about the whale, isn’t it?”

A good writer pays attention to how characters fail to pay attention, says Baxter. Willful deafness and misunderstanding are excellent subtext devices. What happens, for example, when a family taboo is finally spoken, yet still goes unheard? Character A makes an emotional and risky confession. Character B replies, “Have you been drinking?”

Baxter describes dozens of techniques for developing subtext, illustrated with examples. The book is a revelation. If only doing it was as easy as understanding how .

Torres – We the Animals

Posted on January 29, 2014 by bill.adams111@gmail.comFebruary 20, 2014

Childhood Vignettes

Torres, Justin (2011). We the Animals. New York: Houghton-Mifflin/Mariner

This short novel (125 pp) is fronted by 9 pages of superlative blurbs by reviewers, a sure contrary indicator for me. That means the publisher felt the need to tell me it’s a good book because I couldn’t be trusted to decide that on my own. True enough in this case.

Three brothers, 7 to 10, grow up in an impoverished Puerto Rican family in New York. The 19 “chapters” are just unconnected scenes, vignettes without any story arc. Over the course of these snapshots, especially toward the end, the boys are older, and one of them, the first-person narrator, reveals his gender-identity secret. In that sense, the work could be construed as a coming-of-age story for the unnamed narrator.

The language itself is ordinary, not lyrical, but the descriptions are imaginative, energetic, and vivid, and that is the book’s main attraction. Here is a sample taken randomly, expressing how the neglected children ate:

“We ate peanut butter on saltine crackers and angel hair pasta coated in vegetable oil and grated cheese. We ate things from the back of the refrigerator, long-forgotten things, Harry and David orange marmalades, with the rinds floating inside like insects trapped in amber. We ate instant stuffing and white rice with soy sauce or ketchup.” (p. 30)

The mother was pregnant at 14, seems to be alcoholic now, and works at a brewery. The father hustles in vague deals as he can. The brothers are the animals, fighting, prowling, skipping school, breaking windows, always on the edge of trouble. A band of pirates or Musketeers, they call themselves.The author keeps the bond tight among them by frequent use of the first-person-plural voice which creates a sense of a communal consciousness, much as Julie Atsuka did in Buddha in the Attic.

Many of the vignettes are exercises in pure sentimentality, a favorite trope being one where a stranger acts kindly to the three menaces, because they are “adorable.” In one scene, the brothers pool their pennies to buy a half-pint of milk for a stray cat (the shopkeeper lets them have it even though they don’t have enough money – because they’re adorable), and they literally save the cat. What could be more precious?

Another adorable trait of the brothers is precocious thoughts and language. From time to time they explain death, or God to each other, or invent a fantasy about an anti-gravity device that would let them fall right up to heaven. Is that cute or what?

In the last two chapter/scenes, the narrator is much older and reminisces on childhood, especially in a jarring switch to an unidentified third-person voice that seems way out of place. At the end, after having reverted to first-person, the narrator suddenly becomes second-person, addressing the reader directly, as he goes into a dissociative fugue. It all seemed desperately writerly to me.

Overall, I took away a sense of “a life,” one different from mine, different from that of most middle class book-buyers, I would guess. But it seemed to have no point. The story doesn’t illuminate anything, like Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land did, for example. The book is lauded as autobiography, but if so, it falls short of explicating its subject. If it was a novel, it doesn’t have enough to hold it together. Nor does it have the lightness of language to make it airborne as prose poetry, like Marguerite Duras’ The Lover. It’s a hybrid form, whose purpose is not clear to me.

Baxter & Turchi – Bringing the Devil To His Knees

Posted on January 28, 2014 by bill.adams111@gmail.comFebruary 20, 2014

Meditations on the Craft of Writing

Baxter, Charles, & Turchi, Peter (Eds.) (2001). Bringing the Devil to his Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 258 pp.

This collection of 19 essays is not really a “how-to” writing book, but an exploration of various perplexities and problems that arise in writing fiction. The title comes from a 1888 quotation from Chekhov,

“I am displeased and bored with everything now being written, while everything in my head interests, moves, and excites, me – whence I draw the conclusion that no one is doing what is needed, and I alone know the secret of how it should be done. In all likelihood everyone who writes thinks that. In fact, the devil himself will be brought to his knees by these questions.”

The usefulness of the essays is variable, as you would expect. Richard Russo opens with a strong article in defense of omniscient narration, which has fallen out of favor. Everyone today seems to prefer third-close or third-limited, but he argues that third-omniscient gives most creative freedom to a mature writer who has something to say. If it sounds a little old-fashioned to the modern ear, so be it. It was a persuasive argument and will affect how I think about my next project.

Other essays are exercises in frustration. Three of them concern the question of voice. Everybody wants it. Editors call for it. Authors struggle to find it. What is it? The findings from three articles? Nobody knows what it is or how you get it.

Debra Spark has a halfway useful essay on beginnings and endings. It’s only half useful because the section on beginnings amounts to little more than a list of great opening lines and paragraphs, from which no generalizations are drawn to further the effort of writing one’s own openings. On endings however, she is very informative and helpful.

A way off-base article by Karen Brennan tries to argue that memory is an epiphenomenon of neurology, a thesis I just don’t buy, on philosophical and empirical grounds. Her main point, that good writing needs a balance of wild free-association and careful narrative control is valid, but has nothing to do with neurology.

On the other hand, I did enjoy an essay by Robert Boswell, who drew a parallel between the theory of evolution in biology, and the evolution of symbol, device, and metaphor in fiction. Let those evolve organically from the writing, he argues, let them be discovered. If you plant them, it won’t work.

Perhaps one of the most practical essays was a humorous one by Kevin McIlvoy, a former editor, who writes a rejection letter to Stephen Crane for The Red Badge of Courage, criticizing it (fairly) on many points. Then he writes an acceptance letter for the same submission, highlighting (fairly) the book’s many literary virtues. The lesson for me, as I head toward a writers’ conference: treat every story as if it were a masterpiece submitted by a master, and keep your ego in check.

These are just a few notes on a few essays, in a book filled with thoughtful observations and questions about the craft of writing.

Stoker – Dracula

Posted on January 20, 2014 by bill.adams111@gmail.comJanuary 20, 2014

Stoker, Bram (1897). Dracula. New York: Norton Critical Editions

Psychological Time Machine

Modern life just wouldn’t be the same without the vampire novel. Bram Stoker didn’t invent the form, but he crystallized it into the classic story that has spawned so many imitators and variations since 1897. Count Dracula, the main vampire, goes to London for fresh blood. A team of locals becomes aware of his presence and his danger and eventually drives him back to Romania and kills him.

The 27 chapters of the book are collections of documents: diaries, journals, letters, invoices and newspaper clippings, so technically, there is no single narrator. The epistolary form was more common in earlier novels, perhaps to add a sense of authority and help overcome incredulity at the story itself. One result however is that the reader is further removed from the action, which is all described in retrospect, at a distance, as recorded by a journalist after the fact. Stoker overcomes that fault by making the journal entries morph into intense, first-person narratives that are so detailed as to seem like real-time descriptions.

Dracula is a horror story, but it is pretty silly stuff, a sharp-toothed Count biting the necks of fair maidens. I confess I’m not a fan of the horror genre. I find such stories more humorous than horrifying. What’s interesting to me are the themes Dracula presents indirectly, such as fear of vampires. What would it mean if another person bit you on the neck and sucked your blood? What’s that really about?

Pretty obviously, at first glance, it’s about sex, an exchange of bodily fluids between a man and a woman. A dominating, evil man sucks the life force out of a woman. It’s a rape, and much of Dracula carries a misogynist message, despite Stoker’s attempt to fight it by glorifying his heroines, albeit in a patronizing way.

There’s much more going on in Dracula. I think it expresses a strong uncertainty about modernity. Hypnosis, newly discovered, figures prominently in the story (Charcot, one of Freud’s teachers, is cited). The men are proud of their machines, from phonograph to electric lights, to Winchester rifles. Yet there is a subtext that says modernity is extremely fragile, reflected in Count Dracula from the past threatening to overthrow it.

Darwin’s theory of evolution is not mentioned by name, but appears as a deep anxiety about who has a soul and who doesn’t. If we are descended from beasts, what sets us apart? It’s not surprising that wolves, bats, and rats loom large in the story.

Traditional gothic ambiguity is expressed about the past, with a fond nostalgia for a lost age of aristocracy, combined with deep fear of its savage, wild, untamed ways. Fear of female sexuality is obvious and profound in Dracula, embodied in Lucy, the main female vampire, angelic and pure when alive, who becomes wanton and voluptuous as the undead.

The achievements of the French Enlightenment and of rationality in general, are shown to be extremely fragile, liable at any time to be overcome by irrationality and loss of self. This theme is expressed in a deep ambiguity about sleep, which represents both loss of personal identity and the irrationality of dreams. Sleep is described as a trance, similar to the trance of hypnosis, where any kind of evil force might get you. Similarly, madness is a major theme. Much of the story is set in a doctor’s office inside a lunatic asylum, where fear of madness is a constant presence, the ultimate threat to the rational ego.

There are many other fascinating themes to be explored, including vitalism, class tensions, religion, immigration and xenophobia, the meaning of marriage, and so on. Whether Stoker explored these themes consciously or subconsciously, I don’t know, but it’s all in there, and it makes for a fascinating perspective on what educated Europeans were thinking a hundred years ago.

Can't Stop Writing…

Bill Adams, Ph.D.