Franzen – The Corrections

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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CorrectionsClueless People Behaving Badly

The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen. New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2001

This saga of Midwest family life put Franzen on the map, as did its selection for Oprah’s Book Club (the kiss of death), which he controversially declined at the last minute for fear of alienating male readers. But I think it alienates anyone with an ounce of intellect, regardless of gender.

The story (or saga, for there is no story, really), is about an ordinary, middle-class family in contemporary Ohio. The pathetic, small-minded, egocentric, undersocialized, developmentally arrested, morally questionable lives of family members are explored in a quasi-humorous way by a judgmental, omniscient narrator, who seems to take the tone, “Aren’t ordinary human foibles a hoot?” Well, no, Mr. Narrator, they’re merely pathetic, small-minded, etc., and boring.

Patriarch Al is retired from the railroad and does some amateur chemical engineering in his basement, but now suffers quickly advancing dementia. Matriarch Enid has no discernible skills, talents, education or interests, has apparently never held a job, and devotes her full time and energy to maintaining the common manipulative motherly delusion that she is the center of the universe.

The book has no chapters, but is divided into large sections, one for each of the three children, and one devoted to Enid and Al. So this 600 page novel is a compilation of four novellas, linked by family relationships over the course of about a year.

The Failure is Chip’s section. He is a college professor at a small New England school where he struggles to get his awful screenplay finished for a New York publisher. (How he gets the time of day from a New York publisher is a detail I must have missed). He succumbs to the charms of a sexy female student who offers him an ecstasy-like drug, Mexican A, leading to a weeks-long sex-fest, for which Chip is busted when the student goes public, and he is disgraced and fired from the college, just as in Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace, but I’m sure that’s only a coincidence.  He tells his parents he is a writer in New York, but actually he is broke, borrowing from his sister to scrape by as a bum. His publisher’s editor connects him to an online writing job in Lithuania. What could be funnier than Lithuania?

Brother Gary’s section is called The More He Thought About It, the Angrier He Got. He lives in Philadelphia, I think, is a banker with a rich wife and some kids. He and his wife have nothing but acerbic contempt for each other. She constantly reminds him that he is depressed, and he accuses her of manipulative lying. Gary acts like his father, and his portrayal of his wife echoes his mother. He tries to “manage” his parents, bullying his father to sell his implausible invention, a new Prozac-like drug, Correcktall. Al refuses. Gary badgers his mother to sell the house and move into assisted living. She refuses.

The section, At Sea, belongs to Al and Enid, as they take a cruise from New York to somewhere Caribbean, I think it was.  Cruise ships are an easy satirical target and Franzen goes positively DeLillo to demonstrate that, but without much insight, his observations fall flat. On the cruise, Enid gets an anti-anxiety drug from the ship’s quack doctor, a drug whose description is similar to Mexican A. Al falls overboard and nearly drowns but is rescued. What a scream.

The Generator is the name of a section of the book, and a restaurant that Denise works in as a high profile chef. The restaurant is owned by rich friend, Brian, and his wealthy wife, Robin.  Denise is severely neurotic (like her mother) and sexually dysphoric. She had married and divorced a chef and now seduces Brian, then Robin. In flashback, we learn that in college she also seduced another married man. Anyway, having seduced Robin, Denise becomes jealous of Brian and seduces him again, but Robin walks in on them. Could happen to anyone, really.

The convergence of these stories occurs in the section One Last Christmas, where the siblings gather at the parents’ house in Ohio for predictable cruel and histrionic infighting – a typical family Christmas in lowbrow America? Al has a gun in his basement shop, but don’t worry, that’s a red herring. And he ultimately did not take the Prozac-like Correcktall that he partly invented. Enid scores another stash of Mexican A, but has second thoughts and flushes it, so no worries there. The carefully laid-in theme of mind-altering drugs thus amounts to nothing. Al has is by now reduced to an incoherent pissing and pooping machine. Hilarious, or merely tragic? In this section Franzen lets the reader know (twice), in case the reader is particularly dim-witted, that this story is supposed to be a tragedy rewritten as farce. That’s true of the book’s publication also.

While characterization and plain old story-telling are sorely lacking in this novel, there are pockets of excellent wordsmithing.  Franzen is particularly good at presenting long lists of well-selected objects or situations that effect sharp phenomenological observation. He is good at the unexpected but telling detail. So there is craftsmanship here, but it just doesn’t add up to anything. The human condition he apparently intends to illuminate is one that Woody Allen only needed one line to capture: “My brother thought he was a chicken, but we were nice to him because we needed the eggs.” 

McCann – Let the Great World Spin

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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Let Great World SpinHigh-Wire Act

McCann, Colum. (2009). Let the Great World Spin. New York: Random House.

This set of stories describes the lives of ordinary people in New York City in 1974. As the stories unfold, the lives of the dozen or so characters intersect in chance ways.

John and Ciaran Corrigan are young brothers recently arrived from Dublin. John is an impoverished Jesuit priest who doesn’t preach but acts kindly and non-judgmentally toward hookers and addicts in the Bronx. He lets the hookers use his bathroom to clean up during the day. His secular brother struggles to understand that lifestyle and what effect it could possibly have, since no hooker or drug dealer ever changes their behavior or attitude as a result of John’s actions.

The main hookers are Tillie and her teenage daughter, Jazzlyn, both heroin addicts. They ply their trade under the freeway, in view of the Corrigan apartment. They’re nice people, seeming to accept their life of squalor and hopelessness. Jazzlyn has twins at an early age.

Brian and Lara are drug-crazed artists who hit Corrigan’s van on the freeway, causing the death of John and Jazzlyn. They leave the scene of the accident, but Lara has an attack of conscience and goes back to find the Corrigan apartment, where she meets Ciaran, and improbably, forms a romantic relationship with him.

Claire and her husband Solomon live on Park Avenue. They lost a son in the Vietnam war and Claire has joined a group of grieving women who lost children. Most of the women are middle class, some are black and poor. When it is Claire’s turn to host the meeting in her fancy apartment, there are class and racial tensions. One of the women, Gloria, happens to live in the same building as the Corrigan apartment.

Another thin thread to tie the stories together is the famous 1974 stunt in which an acrobat walked across a wire  strung between the World Trade Center towers. All the characters are aware of that feat and can talk about it with each other.

This approach to novel-writing is open to criticism. Adding a few not-very-believable crosslinks among a set of short stories does not automatically make a novel, which, traditionally, should tell a story that illuminates some artistic truth. So the overall structure of McCann’s novel is disappointing.

However, the modern novel can be anything it wants to be, and McCann substantially overcomes the structural limitations of his form to ask how a person should live. In this book, every character has renounced personal responsibility for his or her fate.

We get the message there is nothing anybody can do to manage their destiny, so perhaps human kindness is the only bottom line, the kindness shown by John Corrigan on the mean streets, but also the tiny moments of love and kindness, no matter how confused or hopeless life seems otherwise. The book was written after the 9-11 attacks on the Twin Towers and among survivors of that event there was perhaps a similar feeling that compassion is the best response to outrageous fortune.

McCann’s writing miraculously captures the harsh details of life at ground level and the same time, invokes high-minded gestures like a wire-walker a quarter mile above the ground. His use of time-compression and dilation stand out especially. The stories never sag. His observational phenomenology is often breathtaking. It’s satisfying to read such good writing, regardless of what the overall story is trying to say.

On the down side, McCann has the distracting quirk of starting every chapter with indefinite pronouns so it takes five pages to discover who the characters are and which one has the point of view. I can’t think of any novelistic reason to do that, and it is very annoying. Another difficulty is that several scenes are seriously over-written, cloyingly sentimental or grotesquely and not-believably graphic. Dialog tends to be perfunctory and non-revelatory. And there is the fiction that strangers in a city of ten million have only one or two degrees of separation as if they lived in a small town. 

Despite these flaws, the quality of the writing is such a high-wire act of its own that the novel is a pleasure from cover to cover.

Bell – The Artful Edit

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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Editing as Creative as Writingartful-edit-susan-bell_medium

Bell, Susan (2007). The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself. New York: W.W. Norton.

Bell has been a book editor for decades and in this well-written and well-edited volume, provides instruction and explanation about the art of editing, for writers who want (need) to edit their own manuscripts, and that would include all writers.

She starts with the big picture, how to evaluate whether your story hangs together, whether you have a structure that works, whether your manuscript accomplishes what you had intended for it.  She also covers micro-editing, or line-editing, with emphasis on selecting the right words, cutting redundancies, and revising for rhythm and sonority. Many of these techniques and admonitions are well-known to writers but it is helpful nonetheless to have them reviewed so articulately.

There are several features that make the book uniquely valuable however, chief among them, its ongoing discussion of editor Max Perkins’ work with F. Scott Fitzgerald in creating The Great Gatsby. There is a summary of that iconic novel, then specific examples, both at the macro and micro levels of edit, of how Fitzgerald revised the manuscript under Perkins’ guidance. Many before and after passages are given and these are extremely illuminating. Similar examples are given for other writers, from John Hawkes to John O’Hara, but the Fitzgerald examples are best.

There are also exercises and checklists at the end of chapters that writers can use in evaluating their own work, and these actually seem useful, unlike the typical brain-dead homework offered in many instructional writing books. At the end of chapters we also find several paragraphs of comments and advice about self-editing, from writers such as Tracy Kidder, Michael Ondaatje and Ann Patchett. These are quite illuminating.

But wait, there’s more! Bell also provides some expositional material on the practice and profession of editing, including a history, consideration of how editors (other than oneself) can be helpful or harmful, and some fascinating reports on self-editing from a photographer and a cinema sound editor. The message seems to be that all artistic products need to be edited and the process is fundamentally creative in nature, regardless of medium.

Unfortunately, the book is not indexed, limiting its value for reference, but there is a good bibliography. I benefited most from the discussion of Gatsby, but the book’s many other features are worthwhile. The biggest problem in self-editing, it seems to me, is getting “distance” on the work. Bell offers some suggestions for accomplishing that, but it is still the biggest problem.

Lau & Redlawsk: How Voters Decide

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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How Voters DecideAdams, W. A. (2007). Does Campaign Information Affect Your Vote?   [Review of the book, How Voters Decide: Information Processing During Election Campaigns]. PsycCRITIQUES—Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, (May 30, 2007, Vol. 52, Release 22, Article 17).Retrieved May 30, 2007 from the PsycCRITIQUES database (http://www.psycinfo.com/psyccritiques/).

An awful lot of money and the leadership of the United States are at stake in a presidential election, and the outcome depends on fickle voters like you and me.  How do we make our choice?  Candidates for elective office, their consultants, and campaign strategists would give anything to know exactly what it takes to win those precious votes.  Political scientists Richard Lau and David Redlawsk offer empirical advice.  They watched over 600 people make their choice for President of the U.S. in a series of mock elections simulated on a computer.  The main finding?  Lots of campaign information does not help you make a better choice and may even confuse you.  Better to ignore most of it.  All you need are a few heuristics.  It’s a startling finding, but I found the experiments, while ingenious, not very realistic, so I question the validity of the findings.  Still, a fascinating read.

Lowry – Under the Volcano

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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Under_the_volcanoDrunk Guy Dies in Mexico

Lowry, Malcolm. (1947). Under the Volcano. New York: Harper & Row.

It’s intimidating to read an iconic novel like this, one universally acclaimed as a “towering achievement in 20th century literature,” and so forth. It’s as if your mind must be made up before you begin. Nevertheless, except for the hyperbolic cover blurbs, I was ignorant of the book and its author (and also of the 1984 film by John Huston), and after reading, my opinion is mixed.

The book portrays the mind of Geoffry Firmin, a self-destructive alcoholic, on a single day, the Day of the Dead, in a small town near Mexico City. He is the British Consul there and the time is 1938, just prior to the outbreak of WWII. Civilization is on the brink of destruction and so is Firmin.

Much is made of Lowry’s use of such metaphors. For example, the novel dwells repeatedly on the only movie playing in town, “The Hands of Orlac,” a 1935 horror picture of woman (named Yvonne, same as Firmin’s ex-wife!) who seeks help for her brother whose hands have been injured. A mad surgeon replaces the hands with those of a carnival knife-thrower, with the result that the brother cannot help but kill everyone around him with knives. Nevertheless, Yvonne inexplicably continues to love her deranged brother through it all. The self-destructive knives represent Firmin’s self-destructive alcoholism, get it?

Another main character in the novel is the landscape. The town is dwarfed by two smoldering volcanoes, and a deep, hellish canyon runs through the center. This represents the relationship between Firmin and Yvonne. The scenery is portrayed in fine detail, and one does have a strong sense (all five senses) of place. That is a writerly achievement, although for a modern reader, page after page of expositional description is not as thrilling as it might have been in an age before mass media’s granting of universal access to every corner of the planet.

As Firmin drinks his life away, he is joined by Yvonne, who had left him because of his drunkenness. While absent, she sent dozens of passionate and sentimental pleas to rekindle their love and start over. But he never read any of them. She arrives, and she and Firmin declare their passionate love for each other, but neither seems to mean it. Firmin is always drunk, so you can’t believe a word he says, but we get the sense that he is afraid. That’s why he didn’t read the letters. Yvonne, for her part, seems to want the past and a future with Firmin, but not the present. This dynamic is the heart of the novel.

There is no plot. The characters walk around, drink, smoke, take bus rides, visit festivals and bars. Eventually Firmin is killed in a bar fight. The point of the novel is not what happens, or doesn’t happen, but rather, their streams of consciousness, especially Firmin’s. His consciousness is interesting because he is erudite and voluble, so waxes poetic on multiple topics from classical literature to contemporary politics, but he is uninteresting because he is always drunk. Long sequences portraying his hallucinations and wild associations are writerly tour-de-force, but ultimately meaningless ravings. What Firmin does not do is confront his motivation and feelings for Yvonne, and he avoids thinking about the meaning and consequence of his addiction. All he would have to do is choose love. Why can’t he act? He is afraid of life, and of himself, but we never get a clear picture of what tyrannizes him. Maybe he doesn’t know, but then, why should we care either, why should Yvonne, why should anyone?

Much is made of the fact that the novel is quasi-autobiographical and that Lowry suffered (and died) from alcoholism, but such facts do not justify or explain the novel, which must stand on its own feet as an artistic product. I guess we can assume, at least, that Firmin’s alcoholic mentality resembles one person’s actual experience.

Lowry’s language is creative and poetic throughout, and that is a pleasure, but since the novel lacks overall dramatic drive or characterological development, the endless pages of lyrical description, for me, quickly devolved to mere wordsmithing. The long, extended stream of consciousness descriptions were mildly interesting, but I would rather get to know a character through action, dialog, and circumstance, rather than by access to detailed contents of consciousness, which, in this case, were idiosyncratic, mundane, and un-illuminating.

Eugenides – Middlesex

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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MiddlesexA Study in Narratology

Eugenides, Jeffrey. (2002). Middlesex. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.

This Pulitzer Prize winner is actually two novels in one, which accounts for its 530 pages. Either story might have made a good novel. Concatenating them suggests, but does not quite achieve, a satisfying multi-generational epic.

In the first story, we meet a Greek peasant family in Eastern Turkey around 1920. A young couple, Lefty and Desi, migrate west to Smyrna (modern Izmir) on the Mediterranean, where they live until the Turks recapture the town and burn everything. The couple escapes to America, where they end up in Detroit and start a family. Lefty makes a living as a rum runner, driving over the ice to and from Canada. It’s a reasonably entertaining family saga with historical detail.

The second story is about the couple’s second child, Calliope, who is born with the anatomy of a female but with XY male chromosomes. That doesn’t matter much until female puberty fails to kick in at age 13 and everyone is confused. Finally, 435 pages into the novel, a doctor makes a diagnosis: Callie is a hermaphrodite. The medical details are fully described but then developmental confusion becomes crisis: what should be done? The doctor recommends Callie should take hormone therapy and continue as the female she has always been, but she decides she feels like a male inside, so she runs away, cuts her hair, and becomes Cal. Eventually, Cal returns to the family home on Middlesex avenue (get it?) and all is well.

The transgender story is intrinsically interesting, Eugenides’ compressed, almost perfunctory account of it is disappointing. You would think such a dramatic mental change would be played out in detail. Fewer than 100 pages are dedicated to the transition, when it could have been a whole novel in itself. The transgender story is almost an afterthought to the tepid immigrant story.

The whole book is presented as Callie/Cal’s memoir, in first person, except it isn’t quite that because the narration begins with Callie’s grandparents falling in love, two generations before her birth. So it is an omniscient narrator pretending to be a first-person memoirist, an interesting innovation, since up until now, there has been no such thing as first-person omniscient.

Furthermore, this narrator is self-referential: Of the grandparents’ ordeals, the heretofore third-person narrator interjects, “Of course, a narrator in my position (prefetal at the time) can’t be entirely sure about any of this.”

At other places in the book the narrator unexpectedly becomes third-person past, third-person present, third-person close, second-person, and traditional first-person limited. The changes among these voices is expert and almost seamless. There are some mind-boggling exercises in narratology in this novel that any writing instructor would circle in red pencil. Yet Eugenides weaves them excitingly. 

Another interesting writing technique is deft use of symbols. Callie’s grandmother raises silkworms in Turkey, and detailed description is offered of the worm and its cocoon, a parallel perhaps to Callie’s exceptionally long “crocus” as she calls it, which is usually concealed within her labia. The allusions are subtle, not exactly Ahab’s whale. They sometimes seem like the writer showing off rather than a literary device that adds much value.

Eugenides uses other worthwhile literary techniques, including humor that ranges from the subtle and wry to farce and pun. There is some excellent phenomenological description and some convincing streams of consciousness. There is a touch of magical realism toward the end. So while the book comes up short of expectations for story, it compensates by being written in an interesting way.

Rachman – The Imperfectionists

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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Imperfectionists-pbk-388x600An Imperfect Exercise

Rachman, Tom. (2010). The Imperfectionists. New York: Random House/Dial.

This New York Times “Notable Book” has an interesting marketing angle. Its cover and first few inside pages contain hyperbolic praise from newspaper book reviewers, while the book itself is a sympathetic treatment of  people who work at a newspaper. It reminds me of that documentary film about product placement in movies, financed entirely by product placements.

Marketing strategy aside, The Imperfectionists is an interesting read on its own merits. It comprises a dozen or so short chapters, each of which vignettes a character who works at a contemporary English-language newspaper published in Rome. There are chapters about the copy editor, the fact-checker, the editor-in-chief, the publisher, various reporters, and so on. The relatively independent vignettes are loosely tied together by interactions among the characters, such as office romances, hiring and firing decisions, and by the gradual decline of the newspaper as circulation falls off (oddly, no mention is made of advertising sales or revenue.)

Short, three-page chapters in italics are interspersed, to let the omniscient, third-person narrator tell what happens to the newspaper and its ownership over time, independent of the characters’ exertions.

There is no real dramatic tension in the larger newspaper story. Over several generations of publishers, the paper inexorably declines and is eventually shuttered. No surprise there. But the individual character stories are well written, especially in the first third of the book. In each chapter, the main character has a particular psychological vulnerability, a desperate need that drives the character in everything he or she does, but the character is not fully aware of that need, and in fact may have a completely different, even delusional self-assessment, which results in interesting, conflicted behavior. It is the classic Aristotelian hamartia.

For example, one character is a formerly successful free-lance reporter for the paper in Cairo, but hasn’t sold a story in years and is seriously broke as old age approaches. He still thinks of himself as an important success, but can only manage lame features, not hard news any more. Also, he is extremely lonely, and estranged from his adult son, and desperately wants to reconnect with him. He pretends he can look out for the son, teach him the ropes, and so on, while the son, for his part, realizes the father needs help. The complexities of that relationship are expertly drawn and expressed.

Other vignettes involve unrequited love, unrecognized character disorders, self-blinding arrogance, incredible naivety, and many other human imperfections. Each main character has a fundamental flaw that makes his or her life interesting to read about. Most are not quite unreliable characters, but rather, simply “imperfect” ones. This trick of characterization is one that every writer needs to learn, and there could be no better illustration of its effectiveness than this book. The writing is excellent, the diction is high, the humor droll, and the characters well-rendered.

Unfortunately, every chapter trots out this one-trick pony, and after five or six shows, the exercise gets stale. In addition, the best vignettes are the first half-dozen, and after that, many of the characters’ “imperfections” are so obvious and rendered with such a heavy hand that the characters become two-dimensional, implausible, and uninteresting. It is as if the author ran out of interesting characterological imperfections to explore, or did not take the time to explore them fully. But overall, I think the first third of the book is worth the cover price.

Hanson & Roberts – Tales From the Script

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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tales_from_the_scriptHorror Stories from Hollywood

Hanson, Peter & Herman, Paul Robert (Eds.) (2010) Tales From the Script: 50 Hollywood Screenwriters Share Their Stories. New York: Harper Collins.

I’m not a screenwriter or even an aspiring one, but I picked this book up because I enjoy movies and I thought it might help me understand what goes on behind the scenes. It did. The title is apt: most of these anecdotes fall into the category of “horror stories.” It’s about scripts rejected, discarded, ruined, stolen and rewritten, and screenwriters, the same, plus doublecrossed, outwitted, betrayed, and and rarely, successful. It’s a mean life, and if I learned one thing from it, it is that I would never want that job.

These short anecdotes come from a huge cross-section of screenwriters and Hollywood insiders but they all express the thrill, the drug-like high, of getting a script made into a movie, no matter how crummy it might be. And three-quarters of the movies mentioned, I never heard of (and I watch a lot of movies), and among the ones I had heard of, 90% were mediocre or ridiculous. There are only a handful of comments from writers of high quality movies, like The Sting, Ray, and so forth. I found it interesting that getting a script made is the holy grail, not achievement of any artistic quality. This is a kind of writing like no other.

The book reinforces my suspicion that making movies in Hollywood is all about return on investment and nothing about quality; and that the process for selection of scripts to be produced is essentially random, or it occurs by personal networking, never by qualitative analysis. Scriptwriting is by no means a meritocracy. The same is true, I guess for most popular and literary fiction.  Still, it’s a harsh reality.  Also, almost no movie has a single screenwriter anymore. It is all done by committee, which is usually obvious on the screen, and the reasons for that are fascinating.

The book itself is entertaining and an easy read. Entries are 100 to 500 words and are personal anecdotes, “war stories,” as it were. Reading it, one gets a sense of how the moviemaking process works, at least from the point of view of the writer. Recommended for any masochist who thinks they might be interested in writing movies.

Hawkes – Death, Sleep, & the Traveler

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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Death Sleep Traveler-HawkesSex Without Feeling

Hawkes, John (1974). Death, Sleep, & the Traveler. New York: New Directions.

I ran across several references to Hawkes’ novels as “literary mysteries,” and I’m interested in that, so I took a look at two of his short novels (typically under 200 pages). The Beetle Leg (1951), a sort of western, was so stultifying I couldn’t finish it. But this one, Death, Sleep, & the Traveler (1974), held my interest, maybe because it is mainly about sex.

Main character Allert (accent on the first syllable) is a large, overweight, middle-aged Dutchman who lives with his younger, beautiful wife, Ursula. What attraction she sees in him is unknown. Their neighbor, Peter, a psychiatrist and trim, younger man, is attracted to Ursula, and Allert likes to watch the two of them have sex, on the living room floor. He has no particular feelings about it. But for Peter, Allert and Ursula having sex seems to make him jealous. Ursula is indifferent to everything.

The sexual scenes are explicit, but indirect, described modestly, using euphemisms for body parts and so on, so it is not pornography. The focus is on the psychologies of the three characters. And what is that psychology? I would say, “numb.” Allert and Ursula especially, seem disconnected, almost zombie-like. They have no lives beyond their hypersexuality, and they don’t even care about that.

Ursula says to Peter, “For you and me,” Ursula said quickly, though in a mild and somewhat unthinking voice, “…pornography would be intolerable. You and I do not filter life through fantasy. But it is otherwise with Allert. You cannot tear him away from a picture of a bare arm, let alone an entire and explicit scene of eroticism” (p. 150).

Notice that Ursula speaks only in a mild and unthinking voice, whatever that is. Even when she expresses a rare opinion about anything, she is distant, bloodless, not entirely present even to herself. Her idea seems to be that sex is just meaningless sex, so pornography is a pointless fantasy.

But she is right about Allert, who is the first-person narrator of the novel. Via his musings, we know that he does find sex in some way exciting and fascinating, though exactly why, or in what way, we never quite learn. Certainly it is not through any lens of possessiveness, for he has not a shred of jealousy in him. He too, seems numb, to sex, and to life itself, but perhaps slightly less so than Ursula, since he is at least interested in sex.

Allert muses, “To me, it has always been curious that Peter, who never married, should have lived a life that was unconditionally monogamous, thanks to the power of Ursula’s dark allure and her strength of mind, whereas I, who became married to Ursula…have lived my life as sexually free as the arctic wind. …But during all this time I have thought of myself as moderate, slow-paced, sensible, overly large, aging. But ordinary, always ordinary…Ursula must have thought of me as a Dutch husband who had been lobotomized – but imperfectly” (pp 134-135).

Sexually free as the arctic wind!  Free, but forever cold, not passionate, blowing over a bleak terrain. All three of the main characters have this detached attitude toward sex, attitudes that would not be shared by most readers, and that’s what makes them interesting.

As the perfunctory story develops, Ursula becomes bored with Allert and vows to leave him. Allert goes alone on a cruise, and on-board, strikes up a sexual relationship with a much younger woman, a girl really, and that develops into another three-way with an obnoxious ship’s officer.  But somehow, we gather through comments and snippets, the young girl apparently went overboard and died. Allert was implicated in her death, and questioned, but exonerated. The death occurs entirely off page, and we never learn what actually happened. So much for the murder mystery plot.

Time is cut up so severely, the present mixed with the past, that it is next to impossible to discern any narrative thread. Allert’s dreams are also intercut, along with brief images and aphorisms, to create a woozy, kaleidoscopic feeling, which seems to be how the characters experience the world and their own lives. The book is well written, with elevated and thoughtful language that maintains that dream-like quality. Allert, the narrator, seems barely present, and his voice has a disembodied, otherworldly tone, and that is artistically an excellent choice by the author. Hawkes’ also folds in a dose of Freudian ideas and symbols, which were influential in America during that time, but without adding any new insight.

So I enjoyed the book a lot for what it is, almost a sample of prose poetry. but I am still on the lookout for a “literary mystery.”

Butler – Dream Your Way Inside

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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Countrymen of BonesDream Your Way Inside

Butler, Robert Olen. (1983). Countrymen of Bones. New York: Holt.

There are two protagonists in this story set in the New Mexico desert at the end of World War II. Darrell is an archeologist digging up the skeleton of an ancient king. Lloyd works nearby at the Manhattan project, preparing to test the first atomic bomb. They both fall in love with a dark-eyed beauty, Anna. Lloyd has the upper hand, you would think, since he is with the bomb people and can order Darrell to clear out of the desert, keeping Anna for himself. It doesn’t quite work out that way.

I was interested in reading something by Butler, who won the Pulitzer Prize ten years after this novel, because I had read his book of advice on how to write fiction, “From Where You Dream.” This review is as much about that book as about Countryment of Bones, which left me cold. In the how-to book, Butler said an author should imagine himself or herself into the interior of each character by going into a dreamlike trance. By that method, he said, you can create realistic, compelling characters. I wanted to see how he did that in practice.

In Countrymen, the narrator (third-person, ranging from omniscient to close), tells the reader what the characters are feeling, sensing, and thinking, just as Butler advised. There are a lot of statements like, “He felt angry now…,” “Lloyd wanted…,” “Darrell felt himself tremble and wanted to touch Betty…”

Fiction writers are forever advised to force characters to make choices that reveal feelings, thoughts, impressions. Butler does that, but he also describes the character’s interior as if it were landscape. Why does he think it’s better to report that Darrell wanted to touch Betty, rather than have Darrell reach out toward Betty’s smooth white shoulder but hesitate then pull his hand back without touching her? By both methods, we know Darrell wanted to touch Betty.

With Butler’s method, there are no descriptions for the sake of description. Instead, all descriptions are the musings of a motivated character who has a point of view and a reason for noticing the scenery. That infuses the scenery with the emotionality and intentionality of the character and avoids “dead” description. The technique is sometimes called “the objective correlative.” For example, instead of “Two soldiers were carrying a large box,” we have, “Lloyd could see that two soldiers were carrying a large box.” In the first case, they are just abstract soldiers in an abstract scene. In the second case, we are seeing the soldiers through Lloyd’s eyes. Is that better? Maybe it is more intimate. The story is about the characters, after all. Why leave the characters for even an instant?

On the other hand, it can be odd when the technique is carried out relentlessly. Why say that “Darrell felt himself tremble?” How is that different from “Darrell trembled?” Insisting on Darrell’s point of view actually creates distance from the character. A person does not “feel themselves tremble.” They just tremble. So Butler’s technique, when used assiduously, produces clunky results sometimes.

Butler also commits the deadly sin of  “head-hopping.” That’s where the narrative point of view (POV) jumps between characters within the same scene. The rule in modern fiction is that each scene is narrated from only one characters’ POV. Butler breaks the rule with skill. The abrupt shifts in POV were jarring to me, but maybe not to most readers.

I have started using Butler’s technique of dream-trancing to imagine myself into the interiors of my characters, but once I have that interior, I try to show it through action, in the traditional way, rather than have the narrator tell it, as Butler does in this book. I think that works better. Of course, he has a Pulitzer Prize and I don’t.