Test Driving Novels, In This Case “Purity”

I enjoy reading short stories in The New Yorker and then commenting on them – if and when I think I have anything to say. But some New Yorker stories are not really stand-alone fiction. Rather, they are excerpts from forthcoming novels.

For instance, back in March, I wrote about “Sweetness,” a story by Toni Morrison that was taken from her novel “God Help the Child,”  published soon thereafter. In that case, I wasn’t focused on sampling the book, but rather on the story's take on racial prejudice. 

 

Jonathan Fanzen, often hailed as the latest Great American Novelist, recently published “Purity,” a sweeping, 563-page tale of personal angst, inter-personal strife and great events. Reviews have been generally positive, but clearly, this isn’t a book for everyone.

About a Teen: Life is Gross, Nothing New About Sexting

Justin Taylor is an adult male. His story “So You’re Just What, Gone?” – published in the May 18, 2015, New Yorker -- is about a 16-year old girl, told from her perspective. It’s written in a style known as “close third person,” which preserves the intimacy of the first person while giving the author more observational and descriptive freedom than would otherwise be the case.

The challenge, of course, is credibility. Charity is depicted as attractive and bright (Advanced Placement English), but immersed in the seamier aspects of life. Knowing them well, she copes with them competently. Do you recognize this person? Is this present day, middle class America presented akin to the manner in which  Dickens presented the seamier aspects of Victorian England through one of his characters?

How Lucky Was Harper Lee?

Thanks to a very high-profile controversy over the recent publication of "Go Set a Watchman," most fans of fiction have been well-reminded of the story of Harper Lee.

In 1957, she brought to the publishing house J. B. Lippincott a problematic manuscript that was read by an editor named Therese von Hohoff Torrey ( known as Tay Hohoff) who saw potential in Harper's writing and worked closely with the author over the next couple of years. The end result was "To Kill a Mockingbird," which won a Pulitzer Prize and has been for decades one of the best-known and most loved works of American literature.

Embrace My Brand, Get Hooked on a Feeling

Writing in the program notes, Seattle Opera General Director Aidan Lang said Georges Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers espouses the idea that honor and friendship should be held in the highest esteem, even to the extent of suppressing one’s own sexual fulfillment.

"But in an era of the gradual erosion of communal values, of the focus on the individual, of the ‘selfie,’ is it such a bad idea to be reminded of these redeeming human characteristics?” Lang asked.

I cite that because this blog has episodically taken a look at the impact electronic social media appears to be having on individuals and what that might mean for the future of fiction. Most recently, I addressed the topic in a post entitled “Literary Hand-Wringers,” which, among other things, noted a new book by MIT professor Sherry Turkle in which she argued that digital technology is eroding the ability of humans to feel empathy for others.

In that vein, the Oct. 25, 2015 edition of T, the New York Times style magazine carried an article called “Hooked on a Feeling,” with the subtitle “Thanks to social broadcasting networks, everyone and everything is its own brand. Now we want the one thing the Internet can’t buy: human emotion.”

“The empathy economy is booming. Facts are out, feelings are in,” the author, Michael Rock, declared. But not, it appears, on the basis of a return to direct, person-to-person interaction among humans. In fact, far from it.

“Branding is supposedly not about what something says, or what it means, but how it makes us feel. A brand is a promise. It’s the emotional payoff on an investment in a particular product, place or individual. … When we talk about a strong brand, it consistently delivers the emotion it promises,” Rock said.

The article then goes on to discuss the “mood board,” a tool long used by designers to help them come up with a certain look for, say, the interior of a room or a line of women's wear. A mood board usually consists of a collection of images that, taken together, supposedly conjures up feelings that are often hard to directly express in words alone – feelings clients will then supposedly experience when they live in the rooms in question or wear the clothes.  

How is this related to social media and human emotion?

Well, here’s one possibility. “Instagram,” Rock said, “turns every individual life into a social network mood board.”

I show you my feelings, and you show me yours, coded and subject to interpretation, of course, and not in a manner that might be uncomfortably intrusive.

“When everything is available all the time and we’re inundated with information in every way, shape and form, we are left with no choice but to favor what makes us feel,” Rock  concluded.

So here’s the new plot line:  will she or won’t she – hit the thumbs-up button and “like” the latest posting on her favorite social network so as to satisfy her emotional cravings? (As opposed to, say, enter into an in-the-flesh relationship with another person.) Sounds like a compelling read.

But wait a minute: wasn't that T Magazine article entitled "Hooked on a Feeling?" You know the song: "When you hold me in your arms so tight, you let me know everything's all right." Alas, that notion was written in 1968 and as for The Pearl Fishers, 1863. How can one relate to either of those when "it's all about me?" You want emotional contact with me? Embrace my brand, soak up the feelings.

 Communal values? How quaint.

Cold Little Bird, Inept Big Birds

Ben Marcus had a good idea for his story, “Cold Little Bird,” that appeared in the Oct. 19, 2015 edition of The New Yorker: the power a child can come to have over his or her parents, perhaps earlier in life than expected.

Rather than the more typical teenage rebel, Marcus paints a picture of a 10-year old boy who recoils from the need his parents, but particularly his father, feel for frequent physical contact.

What Makes a Work of Fiction a Classic?

As readers know, I tend to use the weekly “Bookends” feature of the Sunday New York Times book review section as fodder for this blog. The way the feature works is as follows: the editor poses a question and then two of various regular participants attempt to answer it, sometimes with opposing views, but often with just different slants.

This Sunday (Oct. 18, 2015), the question (slightly different online than in the print edition) was: “When we declare something a ‘classic’ we emphasize timelessness. But shouldn’t art speak to something current?”

Hand-Wringers, Conversation and the Future of Fiction

In a recent post, I wondered whether contemporary digital culture, and the short attention spans that seem to go with it, are a threat to serious fiction.  That, in the view of novelist Jonathan Franzen, puts me in the category of “literary hand-wringers.”  Well, all right, maybe just “hand-wringers.”

I came across the category in Franzen’s extensive review of “Reclaiming Conversation,” a new book by MIT professor Sherry Turkle, who is described as having close ties with the world of technology and thus launches her latest critique of the tech world’s impact on society with more credibility than might otherwise be the case.

"Slush Piles" and Self-Publishing

The Oct. 11, 2015, “Bookends” feature of the Sunday New York Times poses the question: “How does the reputation of an author shape your response to a book?”

The word “your” in that question refers to readers, but I think the same question can be asked of publishers and the response of one of the two commentators provides an answer as to why some authors, me included, decide to self-publish.

Is Quality Fiction a Victim of Declining Attention Spans?

I’ve written several posts in the past about Young Adult (YA) fiction, not because I have any interest in it per-se, but rather because it is apparently about the only genre where sales are actually increasing. And this is at least in part because it is popular with adults as well as with the target audience. 

What is behind the trend, one wonders? Is it yet another indicator of the failure of our much maligned education system? 

A Powerful Story of Quiet Desperation

“The Apartment," in the Aug. 31, 2015 issue of The New Yorker, is a powerful story of quiet desperation, set in Sweden, a country more “buttoned up” than America, author Jensen Beach says in one of the magazine’s regular author interviews.

Louise, married with a grown child and seemingly leading a comfortable middle-class life, is actually a hollowed-out alcoholic who hates her husband, her son and presumably just about everyone else. In the background, is the road not taken – an affair with an Iranian graduate student when she was at university. Instead of pursuing that, she opted for a conventional marriage with another Swede.

Certain Porous Boundaries

One of the themes of this blog has been the interaction between fiction and life – what I have from time to time referred to as the dotted line between fiction and non-fiction. 

Rather than attempt to address this issue in an essay, I’ve been posting some hopefully interesting and illuminating examples. Readers can make of them what they wish. 

In that vein, here are a couple of stories from the July 14, 2015, “New York Times” that attracted my attention. These artistic endeavors don’t involve writing, but the principle is arguably the same. 

The first story reported that Tania Bruguera, a New York-based Cuban artist, had been chosen to be the first artist-in-residence for Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Office of Immigrant Affairs – a year-long appointment. At the same time, the NYT said, the Museum of Modern Art announced that it had acquired a “politically charged” video Ms Bruguera had created called “Untitled (Havana 2000).” 

What interested me about these developments was that Ms Bruguera was described as an artist “whose work blurs and sometimes obliterates the line between socially conscious performance art and straight-ahead social work.”  

When the NYT story was published, Ms Brugura was in Cuba and uncertain when she might leave due to a dispute with the Cuban government over whether she will be free to return to that country if she departs with a passport that was recently returned to her. But she is hoping that the recent improvement in U.S.-Cuban relations will allow her to take up the NYC residency where she believes a melding of the artistic and the civic is “rife with possibility.” 

Art, which is arguably akin to fiction, can interact with real life is by showing people how to imagine their identity in creative ways, the artist believes, arguing that this is particularly important for immigrants who, as a result of their dislocation, may have lost their ability to dream. 

Artist residencies can bring new kinds of thinking to city programs, NYC cultural affairs commissioner Tom Finkelpearl told the NYT, adding “Tania is obviously at the forefront of this kind of art.” 

The other NYT story reported that Joe Gibbons, a filmmaker and performance artist who once taught art at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), had been sentenced to a year in prison for robbing a bank – an event he filmed with a pocket-sized pink and silver video camera. It was also apparently captured by bank video cameras. 

Mr. Gibbons “claimed it was an act of performance art coupled with dire financial straits,” the NYT said. The paper also noted that Gibbons’ MIT   profile “cites his predilection for exploring the boundaries between fact and fiction.” 

Gibbons is not a marginal figure. “His work, mainly film installations, has appeared four times in the Whitney Biennial and is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou in Paris,” the newspaper said. 

“While acknowledging that Mr. Gibbons had dubious legal standing, Ann Pellegrini, a professor of performance at New York University, called the case a classic example of ‘performance becoming performative,’ an act that questions ‘the relationship between actor, audience, and enactment,” the NYT article said. “In the robbery, the bank teller and the police unwittingly played their roles ‘without knowing that they were at the same time performing in Gibbon’s art performance of a bank robbery,’”  Pellegrini explained to The Times.

The newspaper article went on to quote art critic Ed Halter as saying that the robbery might only be part of a larger, future work.  “His [Gibbons’] work has always incorporated diary elements, and very often in a way that the viewer can’t quite be certain about what’s true and what’s not.” 

Perhaps the bank surveillance video of the Gibbons robbery will also eventually make it onto the art market, or be acquired by a major museum.

Where to Start When Writing a Novel?

One often hears that good stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. So it might seem logical that someone wishing to write one would start where the tale begins and march forward to the conclusion. But that’s not always the way it works.

The New York-based Center for Fiction recently interviewed Matthew Thomas, author of We Are Not Ourselves, which won the Center’s 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan prize for a first novel.

Among other things, Thomas was asked to identify the “entry point” – where he began writing – because the novel took over 10 years to complete and because it covers a great deal of ground.

“The very first thing I wrote in the novel was an in medias res [in the middle of things] moment -- a version of the section in the book where Eileen gives Ed a surprise party for his birthday. I had an idea of the sweep of the life of this character and this family, but I wanted to start somewhere in the middle. There's something useful about getting into the middle of something and looking around to see where you are,” Thomas explained.

Then he wrote Eileen’s back story before continuing forward.

Is The Food Industry Next in Line for "Disruption?"

The business section of the July 31, 2015, San Francisco Chronicle featured a story entitled “Food Industry Ripe for Disruption,” which brought to mind a short story in the June 22 New Yorker by Ben Marcus entitled “The Grow Light Blues.”

The story is about a rather sad individual named Carl who becomes badly disfigured after he agrees to be a guinea pig for a start-up named Mayflower, the maniacal CEO of which believes grow lights could be used to deliver nutrients to humans in place of conventional food -- while people are involved in other activities, such as using a computer.

“The Appearance of Real-Life Chaos”

What makes a good work of fiction? 

In the view of Richard Ridley, an author and contributor to Amazon's "CreateSpace," an important element is “the appearance of real-life chaos.”  Subplots, which give depth to characters, are also valuable in that they create familiar disorder, he maintained in a short advice-to-authors blog post entitled “The Resolution Matrix.”

In other words, human events rarely proceed in a predictable, straight-line fashion so to be credible, fiction shouldn’t either.

Ridley’s advice on that front is probably well taken, but his main message is somewhat curious.

Yet More on the Dotted Line

I've written earlier posts on the idea that there is a dotted line between fact and fiction, not because I want to suggest that non-fiction is fundamentally flawed. Like almost everything else in life, it has its shortcomings from time to time, but as a former journalist I'm inclined to believe what I read in credible publications unless I have strong reasons to suspect it isn't correct.

As someone who now dabbles in fiction, it is the other side of the line that is more interesting to me: how should fact be used in fiction?  I will have more to say about that in another positing, but for the moment, I want to call readers' attention to a quote in a recent "Bookends" feature in the Sunday "New York Times" Book Review section.

Fact and Fiction: More About The Dotted Line

The June 20, 2015, "New York Times" carried a lengthy obituary on James Salter, depicted as one of America's most under-appreciated recent novelists and writer of short stories.  The piece is interesting in a couple of respects, but I just want to touch on one of them here.

In an earlier post, I wrote about the dotted line between fact and fiction, which, as a commentator subsequently noted, is not necessarily a problem when fiction makes use of fact, but deceptive when something purporting to be non-fiction is actually made up.

When Love Fails to Heal, See a Psychiatrist

We often hear or read about the healing power of love. But it doesn't always work -- it can't overcome all obstacles -- and when that happens, perhaps one should consult a psychiatrist.

That appears to one message of "Sleep," a short story by Colm Toibin in the March 23, 2015, edition of "The New Yorker."

I know what you will do when morning comes. I wake before you do and I lie still. Sometimes I doze, but usually I am alert, with my eyes open. I don’t move. I don’t want to disturb you. I can hear your soft, calm breathing and I like that. And then at a certain point you turn toward me without opening your eyes; your hand reaches over, and you touch my shoulder or my back. And then all of you comes close to me. It is as though you were still sleeping—there is no sound from you, just a need, almost urgent but unconscious, to be close to someone. This is how the day begins when you are with me.

That's the opening paragraph of "Sleep." It's a very fine and powerful piece of writing that drew me in. Unfortunately, however, it isn't stylistically equaled by anything that follows, but that is beside the point here.

The Dotted Line Between Fact and Fiction

One may conventionally think of fiction as stories authors have invented -- out of the ether, as it were. But at times, not just inspiration, but certain details, come from life, viewed or experienced.

The first character one encounters in "Ulysses," -- 'stately, plump Buck Mulligan' -- is largely based on a man named Oliver St. John Gogarty, and to those who knew him, obviously so. Likewise, various other characters in James Joyce's epic can be linked to actual people. And Joyce clearly incorporated versions things that happened to him in his book.

In my novella, "Manhattan Morning," the final scene at an eatery in Grand Central Terminal is very close to an actual occurrence. After I had the experience, I thought it would work well as the final scene of a story, serving as a foil, mainly in the realm of values, to what had gone before. It is also a sympathetic and somewhat poignant portrait of a woman attempting to balance a demanding job and motherhood in a hectic world -- a good story.

I doubt that readers find such linkages distressing. But what about the reverse -- when something represented as fact turns out to be made up?

Fiction That Forecasts the Future

The lead article in the Book Review section of the Monday, May 17, 2015 "New York Times" took a look at two non-fiction offerings that purport to forecast the future.

In "The Rise of the Robots," Martin Ford argues that even the well-educated will soon face a jobless future as a result of increasingly sophisticated technology. Meanwhile, Craig Lambert, in "Shadow Work," notes that there will still be plenty of work that needs to be done -- much of it rather menial because, well, humans will still be humans. But no one will pay for it.

I mention these books not for their own sake, but rather because the NYT review reminded me that one of the roles of fiction is to look into the future.

"Here's To You Mrs. Dalloway"

"And here's to you, Mrs. Dalloway,
 Culture loves you more than you will know"

 

With apologies to Simon & Garfunkel, this bit of doggerel came to me when I read the Bookends feature of the "New York Times" weekly Book Review Section on April 19.

 

"A weekend is a much bigger character than Watergate."  That quote from Wilfred Sheed was used to kick off the usual "Bookends" offerings by two commentators, this time on the question of whether everyday life is better fodder for fiction than grand events.

 

The most interesting aspect of the unprovocative exchange of views was that both of the commentators, presumably independently, cited Virginia Woolf's novel "Mrs. Dalloway"  as a prime example of "everyday life" fiction. 

 

I think they got the right author, but the wrong book. In "Mrs. Dalloway," one of the main characters commits suicide and the prime minister of England is coming to the party Clarissa and her husband, a government official, are hosting that night. These are not everyday events.

 

In contrast, Woolf's equally well regarded novel "To the Lighthouse" is concerned entirely with the quotidian affairs of family and friends.

 

Do Moralists Make Bad Novelists?

Alison McCulloch, reviewing Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's collection of stories called "Invisible Love" in the Sunday, Jan. 4, 2015, edition of the New York Times, said Schmitt, in a writer's dairy appended to the stories, argued that moralists make bad novelists.

"When they try, they bring to their reproduction of reality a coldness, a clinical attitude, a dissection of living matter that reeks of the laboratory."

That got me wondering as to what extent my story "Manhattan Morning" deals with moral issues and what that might say about it.

The Question of Pleasure and "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn"

The "Bookends" page of the "New York Times" Sunday Book Review section has become one of my favorite reads.  The format is always the same: two guest contributors horse over a particular topic or question. On April 5, it was "When it comes to reading, is pleasure suspect?"

Here we need to pause for a moment and consider the question. Why might the concept of pleasure (happiness, delight, joy, satisfaction, gratification, contentment, amusement, etc.) be considered suspect at all? What does this say about our society? 

Quote of the Day: Never About One Thing

"A poem is never about one thing. .. . You want it to be as complicated as your feelings."

That from an article in the March 29 issue of the "New York Times Magazine," entitled "Galaxies Inside His Head" and subtitled "Race and Identity in the Poems of Terrance Hayes."

What Hayes appears to be suggesting is that he packs his poetry with multiple issues – and perhaps not in a linear fashion.

Like a good wine, complexity is critical.

That's one way of looking at the notion of "more than one thing."

But there is an alternative. Poems, and arguably stories, are chiefly about more than one thing because readers interpret the same work differently and not because of anything the author says.

"Sweetness," by Toni Morrison

The "New Yorker" published an interesting short story by Toni Morrison in its Feb. 9, 2015 edition -- a story that, while easily standing on its own, may be the first few pages of her new novel "God Help the Child," which is due for release in April. The story is called "Sweetness" and like a lot of good fiction, it is both well written and operates on more than one level.

 

There have been numerous calls for a fresh dialog on race in America in the wake of the Trayvon Martin, Ferguson and Eric Garner affairs and on one level, "Sweetness" could be viewed as part of the conversation. Color-based prejudice is not just a black and white problem, but appears to be deeply ingrained in human nature. Is that one reason the laws and regulations implemented, not always properly, in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement appear to have failed in certain important respects?  How then best to address the issue?