No Gift Is Free, In Some Cultures More Than Others

(Nothing, the General muttered, is ever so expensive as what is offered for free.)

I heard this from a Japanese professor in Tokyo during a wonderful sashimi dinner where I was the guest as a visiting lecturer. The dinner was, for me, free. But the mild implication was that there was now a web of obligation in which I was caught. I haven’t yet had the chance to repay that hospitality. But what the professor said has always remained with me, as it’s probably true. At least in some cases.

The material above is from a "Goodreads" feature in which Viet Thanh Nguyen offers a bit of explication for his novel "The Sympathizer," set in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. 

The question of whether a gift of one sort or another is truly free is an issue I deal with near the end of my novella, "Manhattan Morning" and as you can see from reading the excerpt below, it is not surprising that this question apparently first arose in Nguyen's mind during a stay in Japan.

From "Manhattan Morning:"

The woman took a sip of the tea, put it down and pushed it slightly away.  Pretty dreadful, Dan thought.  Probably the water in the cup wasn’t piping hot and in any event, she clearly hadn’t let it steep long enough. 

She pulled her briefcase up and began prowling around in it.  Dan tried hard not to look.

      “Shit!”

 Dan couldn’t believe his ears. 

     “Oh, shit!” 

Fork in midair, he looked at her, hesitated slightly, and then asked what was wrong.

      “I can’t pay for my lunch.  I don’t have enough cash and I don’t have my credit card with me.  I must have left it at home this morning.  What a nightmare!” She was staring at the briefcase with a distraught look on her face. 

     “Don’t worry about it.  I’ll pay for it.  It looks like … what, about ten bucks? Including the tip? I mean it’s nothing.  I’d be happy to.” 

     “No, no, I can’t let you do that.” 

They looked at each other and Dan smiled. 

     “Come on, what’s ten dollars? I mean it’s just nothing.  And what’s the alternative? My guess is this place doesn’t run tabs and I can’t exactly see you washing dishes here.” 

She laughed. 

     “I guess not.  Well … I feel totally ridiculous … how could this happen? … How can I let a complete stranger buy my lunch? … Only if I can pay you back.  You have to promise.” 

     “Sure, but I don’t care if you forget.  Really, it’s a ridiculously small amount.”

      “It’s the principle.” 

Dan knew what she meant from his days in Japan.  If she didn’t pay him back, it would hang over her.  The Japanese often refused help from strangers, even in rather dire circumstances, and by the same token, people sometimes walked past a person in need, unwilling to help.  As soon as one did something for someone, a debt was incurred.  The problem was, there was never any way to pay it off exactly, to square the account.  So one tended to overpay so as not to have doubled the burden through what might be perceived as ingratitude.  But over payment simply shifted the obligation to the other side, presenting the same dilemma there.  The two parties were now linked like two small children on a seesaw that refused to balance in the middle. 

Americans were better able to shrug it off and move on, but in a way, once a person enters your life in this fashion, they never really leave.  Just a ghost in most cases, but people did make friends – even enemies – through such circumstances.  Dan suddenly felt sorry for his companion.  She seemed busy.  She didn’t need complications in her life. 

     “Here, write your name and address on this piece of paper,” the woman said, handing Dan one of the white tablets and a ballpoint pen.  She had turned over many pages before finding one that was blank. 

As Dan took the materials, the woman looked at him rather intently, afraid he might refuse?

      “Sure,” Dan said, and wrote it out.

(Martin, Fowler. Manhattan Morning: A Novella (pp. 111-113). Kindle Edition.)

About Michael Cunningham's NYT Essay on Virginia Woolf

 Michael Cunningham, author of "The Hours," a Pulitzer-Prize-winning book built upon Virginia Woolf's novel "Mrs. Dalloway" (itself named "The Hours" in draft form), has an essay in the Dec. 27, 2020, New York Times Book Review section entitled "How Virginia Woolf Revolutionized the Novel." 

One of the points he makes is that "Mrs. Dalloway," published in 1925, is set in a single day.  So was "Ulysses," published in 1922.

Another point he makes is that "a single, outwardly ordinary day in the life of a woman named Clarissa Dalloway, an outwardly very ordinary person, contains just about everything one needs to know about human life." 

That should come as no surprise.

In 1919, Woolf wrote an essay entitled "Modern Fiction" that was published in 1921. Within it, she says: "Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on a ordinary day. ... Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought of as big than what is commonly thought of as small."

The emphasis is mine and in part because such sentiments underlie my own first work of fiction, "Manhattan Morning," which is related to Woolf in another respect -- to her essay "Street Haunting" even though I didn't know of that work until after I had published my novella. 

Well, "Ulysses," too, traces the day of a very ordinary person, Leopold Bloom, on a arguably more ordinary day than that of Clarissa in one respect -- he's not hosting a party at which the Prime Minister is going to appear -- but less ordinary in another. Whereas Bloom knows his wife Molly is going to commit adultery that day, the closest Clarissa comes to that is feeling abandoned when her husband, Richard, an inconsequential member of Parliament, accepts a luncheon engagement with an elderly woman seeking advice on how to get a political letter published in The Times of London and then, feeling guilty about it, comes rushing home with flowers for his wife.

My only point: by the time "Mrs. Dalloway" appeared, the notion that a very significant novel could be written about an ordinary person on an ordinary day was not revolutionary. Indeed, some have argued Woolf was influenced in that respect by James Joyce's story, but I think her 1919 essay suggests otherwise.

Woolf praises Joyce, about whom she initially had mixed feelings, in "Modern Fiction," as a spiritual writer as opposed to what she viewed as the more materialist approaches of writers such as the hugely popular James Galsworthy. 

And there are indeed some significantly spiritual aspects to "Mrs. Dalloway" that go unmentioned by Cunningham in his NYT essay.  This is too big a subject to pursue here, but chief among the spiritual aspects of the book is just why Clarissa is giving her now famous party. It is not, as might easily be assumed, to help her husband's political career. 

One good point Cummingham makes is that "Mrs. Dalloway" is a book about choices, or, to put it another way, about life's Y-junctions: should one take the right branch or the left?  Would Clarissa's life have been better if she had married Peter Walsh, who has never been able to get her out of his mind, or pursued a same-sex relationship with Sally Seton?  Both turn up at her party -- uninvited in the case of Sally, now a mother of five boys and married to a wealthy industrialist. 

I suspect many of us in what are sometimes called our sunset years look back at our own Y-junctions and wonder what might have happened if we had gone left instead of right. Interestingly, Woolf in no way concludes her heroine's decisions in such respects were incorrect.

Cunningham goes on to say that the book's "most singular innovation" (not all that convincing in my humble opinion) is the manner in which it alternates the stories of Clarissa and a mentally disturbed World War I veteran named Septimus Smith. While they never meet in person, Smith in effect arrives at her party in the form of a doctor who saw him earlier in the day only to have Smith then commit suicide rather than accept what the doctor has prescribed. Clarissa is horrified by the news and is briefly dramatically impacted, but emerges apparently unchanged.  That, at any rate, is as far as we know because Woolf doesn't take the story any further than Clarissa seeing her guests out in very much the same fashion as she always has.

"Though seldom discussed as such, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is one of the great novels of World War I," Cunningham says,

Well, yes and no.  This is another big topic, but based on the available evidence, one can conclude that Woolf brought the war into the book only reluctantly. For instance, when she first wrote of the mentally disturbed Smith, in an unfinished short story, he wasn't a war veteran. Rather, he represented one side of her own bifurcated personality -- a powerful intellectual on one hand, and an episodically mentally and/or emotionally unbalanced person on the other. At one point, she very briefly depicted "Mrs. Dalloway" as an attempt to address that state of affairs.

Although Woolf lived through the war, she had no personal experience with its horrors. But she was mindful of a need to be relevant and especially after her second novel, "Night and Day," was criticized on that score. Her third novel, "Jacob's Room," can, and has, also been interpreted as being about WWI, but the evidence there is slim and indirect. It can also be interpreted as being about, or influenced by, the fate of her beloved brother, Thoby, who died of disease in 1906, or well before the war broke out.

Nonetheless, a work of art, once launched, becomes whatever the public thinks it is, a phenomenon that explains, in a closely related sense, how T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land" came to be viewed as a great poem about World War I even if there is little evidence that was what Eliot intended, and indeed, some evidence he intended something very different.

Blogging Is Akin To Broadcasting to Outer Space

 For some time now, humans have been broadcasting radio waves containing content of one sort or another into outer space, by means of signals strong enough to get through the ionosphere.  The idea is there might be civilizations out there somewhere that are sufficiently like ours that they can decipher the content and respond.

So far, to my knowledge, nothing particularly intelligible has come back. That's remarkably like this blog.

 I mention this because, for reasons totally unclear to me, visits to my blog, and the number of posts at least viewed, appear to be increasing in a rather notable fashion.  Not that anything has "gone viral."  Far, far, far from it and perhaps thankfully so. (That's probably not the best turn of phrase these days, anyway.)

 I say "apparently" because there is no way of knowing what to make of reported statistics on things like visits, views, clicks, impressions, etc.  For one thing, they seem to differ greatly depending upon where one goes to get measurements.  

Or maybe Google has decided to simply credit me with some favorable statistics to keep me going.  But since this blog has no ads, that doesn't make much sense. It's a mystery.

When I first started blogging -- not this one, but a blog called "The Wine Commentator" -- I received comments from readers from time to time.  And when I announced that I was closing it down, a surprising number of people who I had never heard from said they were sorry to see it go. Who knew?

But that was a while back, before Twitter (I'm not on Twitter or Facebook) became the way to go.

 Early on, when I briefly tried to promote my first novella, "Manhattan Morning," on Facebook because that was what self-publishers were supposed to do, and associated this blog with that effort, I did get a few comments from old friends. But I don't think I ever heard from anyone I didn't already know,

 A Facebook page did absolutely nothing for "Manhattan Morning," which is arguably now gaining some historical relevance, in obscurity, because of the way Manhattan and retail in general is changing as a result of the pandemic and a related accelerated shift to online shopping.  Who knows, perhaps "Manhattan Morning" will be "discovered" in that context -- before the culture from which it is in large part derived, literary Modernism, is totally "cancelled." 

"Manhattan was really like that???" 

If cancellation means I'm consigned to the same circle within some Dante-like inferno as James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and especially Virginia Woolf (among many others), so be it. Unlike "Ulysses," "Manhattan Morning" is so slim and the number of copies in circulation so small that when it is burned, it's unlikely to contribute significantly to climate change so I won't be charged with an additional offense.

 Who is going to bring all this about?  It's probably best not to be too specific about that.  Those interested, however, can read publications such as the New York Times art sections to get a feel for where things are going.

 Meanwhile I will continue to episodically blog out into what amounts to the great unknown.  I've been rather inactive in recent months, but now have a couple of topics I feel like working up -- and plenty of time stuck at home in which to do it. Crank up the transmitter.

 

Ferrante's "The Days of Abandonment" Can Feel Out of Date

Emily Temple, a senior editor at Literary Hub, just published a recommended list of relatively short contemporary works of fiction entitled "The 50 Best Contemporary Novels Under 200 Pages." Sadly, my novella, Manhattan Morning isn't among them.

But that isn't why I bring this up. Rather, one of the books on Temple's list is "The Days of Abandonment," by Elena Ferrante, the author of a series of novels known as the Neapolitan Quartet.

"This is the real Ferrante. I mean, look, I love the Neapolitan series as much as everybody ... but in my opinion, this short novel about a woman unraveling is her true masterpiece," Temple says.

I am not a woman and therefor probably relatively unqualified to make the following observations, but I read this book and its depiction of a woman's place in a marriage struck me as out of date.

This is the story of Olga whose husband leaves her for a younger woman after 15 years of marriage, a distressing upheaval no doubt, but one that is particularly shattering for Ferrante's heroine because she feels her very identity has been wiped out.  That's because, and this seems particularly odd for an educated woman in a feminist-sensitive Western world, Olga has given herself over to her husband in totality on the believe that this is what love, in the context of marriage, is all about.

At a couple of points in the story, Olga enumerates lists of things that she did for her husband, starting with getting him through university and supporting him in his work life to the point where she had "made him what he had become." 

In the process, "I had put aside my own aspirations to go along with his," she says, noting that she "had had no work, any sort of work, even writing. for at least five years," as she took care of the house, the children and the family finances including the income taxes.

"While I was taking care of the children, I was expecting from Mario [her husband] a moment that never arrived, the moment when I would again be as I had been before my pregnancies, young, slender, energetic, shamelessly certain I could make of myself a memorable person."

Instead, she at one point spends several evenings searching through old photographs "for signs of my autonomy."

As she disintegrates, Olga feels not only the loss of her identity and sexuality, she most fundamentally feels increasingly vulnerable and, in the end, instead of remaking herself as an independent woman, settles for safety above all else in a relationship with an older neighbor.

Asked in an interview (re-published in her book "Frantumaglia," or jumbled fragments) if she would call "The Days of Abandonment" a feminist novel, Ferrante replied yes, and no.

"Yes, because it's sustained by the female reaction to abandonment, from Medea and Dido on. No, because it doesn't aim at telling what is the theoretically and practically correct reaction of the contemporary woman faced with the loss of the beloved man nor does it brand male behaviors as vile," Ferrante said.

Mario, Olga's husband, simply fell in love with someone else.

What One Might Find on an Author's Website

The New York Times book review section had an interesting "Inside the List" column on the things one might find on an author's website -- beyond the expected stuff, such as biographical information,  a list of titles and various forms of promotional fodder.

The author of the column, Tina Jordan, checked out the websites of half a dozen very well-known authors, such as John Grisham and Ann Patchett, and discovered coffee for sale; letters to readers; music recommendations; news about dogs; movie reviews, and (no surprise) T-shirts for sale.

Which, of course, brings me to my own website -- www.fowlermartin.info -- where you will find, as you might expect, information on my two novellas ("Manhattan Morning" and "Gina/Diane)" plus the latest updates on my ongoing collaborative effort to have music composed for a proposed neo-baroque, one-act operetta called "Patricia," and a retrospective of an exhibition of prints by the British artist Patrick Caulfield.

Jordan mentions that Michael Connelly, an author of popular thrillers, has a photo gallery of real sites mentioned in his books.  So do I.  You can take a pictorial walking tour of the route of my protagonist, Dan, in "Manhattan Morning." Hmmm. Maybe I should offer T-shirts based on the cover of "Gina/Diane."

If you have read either of my books and have any thoughts about them, I would be delighted to post your comments on my website -- good, bad or indifferent.  Just reply to this blog and I will take it from there.

As for a performance of "Patricia," don't hold your breath -- yet.

Why Bother, One Wonders

I've just published a new, illustrated edition of my novella "Manhattan Morning" for Amazon's Kindle reader. It can be read on one of Amazon's physical devices or on a smartphone or computer where the Kindle reader app has been installed.

Now the question is, should I attempt to market this book?  I ask because without any marketing, the original version of "Manhattan Morning," still available without illustrations as a print-on-demand book, has, shall we say, remained "undiscovered."

It's an uphill battle and probably one that can't be won.  That's because most people read only or largely within certain genres these days and "Manhattan Morning" falls into one that is -- not to put too fine a point on it -- highly unpopular.

Writers write, an online portal that offers courses and advice to creative writers, business writers and bloggers has a list of the 17 most popular genres of fiction and, no surprise, "literary fiction," which is where "Manhattan Morning" would fall, is dead last.

Here's what writers write has to say about it:

"Literary Fiction. This genre focuses on the human condition and it is more concerned with the inner lives of characters and themes than plot. Literary fiction is difficult to sell and continues to decline in popularity."

I've also heard literary fiction -- the stuff that largely populates what is known as "the canon" -- described as a "niche category," read mostly perhaps by college students -- because they have to. Well, they certainly don't have to read "Manhattan Morning" and few if any will.

So what's REALLY popular these days? "Romance novels," which in contemporary form, are mostly written by women and heavily into explicit sex.  The most well-known, of course, is "Fifty Shades of Grey," which has old over 125 million copies worldwide.  Interestingly, it was first released as a self-published e-book.

The author is middle-aged woman named E.L. James and graphic sex is what the story, and its various sequels, are apparently all about.

According to an article entitled "The Business of the Romance Novel" published by JSTOR Daily, 

romance novels "despite their decided lack of cultural clout" are what's driving publishing these days.

"The average income for a romance writer has tripled in the digital age—an especially impressive feat in the age that finds writers of other genres struggling," the article said.

According to JSTOR, the romance sector had its ups and downs until 1972 when a woman named Kathleen E. Woodiwiss published a book considered to be the first modern "bodice ripper" -- "The Flame and the Flower." It had what was considered an overtly sexual cover and graphic, exotic sex scenes that occurred early in the book. Eventually it sold over 2.5 million copies.

And so it went from there. As we know, sex sells.

What about "Manhattan Morning?"  Does it have any sex and could it squeeze into the romance genre?  Yes, it does have sex -- possibly a bit exotic -- but not explicit.  No bodices are ripped much less anything more graphic than that. And it isn't written by a woman, which probably no doubt undermines its credibility when it comes to romance and what that means.

So I'm afraid it will have to languish as "literary fiction."  

I'll keep you posted as to the results of any marketing attempts. 

Fiction as Autobiography

Earlier this year, the New York Times Sunday Book Review ran a piece by Jami Attenberg entitled "It's My Fiction, Not My Life." I clipped it out when it ran and then lost it in a pile of papers.

Authors, Attenberg noted, are very frequently asked by readers how much of a story they have written is autobiographical. Some smile are willing to answer in one fashion or another, no matter how frequently they are asked. But many others are not so accommodating.

Pippa's dress; The Power of Attire; Manhattan Morning

A day or so ago, The New York Times felt compelled to publically agonize -- on page 2 of the printed edition -- over whether it should have covered the wedding of Pippa Middleton to James Mathews, which it described as "a private family event" as opposed to something of public significance.

Well, yes, the ceremony itself and ensuing festivities were for guests only, but the event wasn't entirely private. The new Mrs. Matthews was said by the paper to have "posed happily for waiting photographers" after the ceremony in her very charming, lace-bodiced wedding gown by British designer Giles Deacon.

When It Comes To What To Read, Are You a Sheep?

From time to time, I've told people that self-publishing a novel is one of the best ways to assure your anonymity in the ever-increasing surveillance society. Hardly anyone, it seems, makes their own decisions on what to read. Everyone wants to read what everyone else is already reading.

Further evidence of this all-too-human tendency -- essentially we are all sheep, hoping their is a leader around somewhere -- can be found in an article about declining book sales when best-seller lists are discontinued. It comes from an online publication called The Outline.

An Important Anniversary for Self Publishing

This is an important anniversary for self-publishing: the Hogarth Press is 100 years old.

In March 1917, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, then living at Hogarth House in the London suburb of Richmond, purchased a hand-operated printing press and with it, first published "Two Stories" in July of the same year -- Leonard's mostly forgotten "Three Jews" and Virginia Woolf's experimental, modernist work entitled "The Mark on the Wall."

Fiction and What Woment Wear

Some readers of my novella "Manhattan Morning" have wondered why my protagonist, Dan, spends so much of his time thinking about attire -- mostly female but not entirely -- as he walks around midtown.

His excuse in the book, if he needs one, is that his former wife worked in the fashion industry and that as a result, clothes were a constant topic of consideration and conversation. He has been conditioned to be observant.

Another Answer to the Reader of "Manhattan Morning"

In a recent post on Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, I mentioned American artist Marilyn Minter and now I am going to quote her again.

"Fashion is one of the engines of culture. You see who your tribe is by the way they present themselves -- and even if you're someone who doesn't care what you look like or don't put yourself together, that's a tribe!"

So she said in a recent New York Times interview.

I mention that because a reader of my novella, "Manhattan Morning," expressed surprise over what she said was a focus in my book on women's clothing styles.

An Answer to a Reader of "Manhattan Morning"

In my last post about comments from readers of "Manhattan Morning," someone asked several questions that I didn't then answer. 

Here's the answer to one of them: "where did the story come from and how much of it is autobiographical?"

Marriage as a Ménages à Trois

"Goodreads" just send out by email a February newsletter in which several authors suggest books to read within certain categories.

Katie Kitamura, author of the recent novel "A Separation," listed five of her favorite books on the topic of marriage.

Could I Be a Guest Lecturer For Kathleen Rooney's Course?

Perusing Literary Hub the other day, I was immediately attracted to a headline reading: "To Love New York City is to Walk New York City."

And, one might add, to write about one's walks.

After all, that's what my novella "Manhattan Morning" is all about.  My protagonist, Dan Morrison, with time on his hands, decides to walk from the Warwick Hotel at the corner of 6th Ave. and 54th St. down to just beyond Grand Central Terminal in order to buy a ticket for a bus that will take him to the airport the next morning. That's a distance of about 13 blocks.

As he walks, Dan is assailed by the sights and sounds of the city, which bring to mind a variety of topics thanks to a  process known as associative thinking. Ducking into St. Patrick's for a respite turns out to be anything but as the interior of a church brings to mind an incident Dan would like to put behind him, but still finds troubling.  Eventually, he has an unexpected encounter with a woman at lunch in Grand Central that gets him thinking about his future and his values.

You can read a free illustrated edition of "Manhattan Morning" by clicking on the name of the book.

The Literary Genre of Fiction Set In New York City

If my novella "Manhattan Morning" fits into a literary genre, it is probably that of fiction set in New York City.

I mention that because "The Shortlist" feature of last Sunday's New York Times book review section was entitled "New York Novels." Therein, author Helen Ellis took a look at five different stories set in The Big Apple.

Before continuing, I should mention that in an earlier post, I reviewed Ellis' short story "Dead Doormen," which -- no surprise -- is also set in Manhattan. The story is part of a book of her stories entitled "American Housewife."

The books Ellis reviews are stories about sexism on Wall Street; the notion that New York is a place where anyone can come to make it big; it's tough to survive in the city, especially with student debt; New York is where people go to make art, and if you do make art there, can you also be a mom?

To be fair, the books are about a lot more than just that and those interested can read Ellis' commentary by clicking on the phrase "New York Novels" in my second paragraph, above.

In contrast, "Manhattan Morning" is about none of those things. Rather, my protagonist is merely passing through Manhattan and, with nothing in particular to do for much of one day, he takes a walk from the Warwick Hotel to Grand Central Terminal, looking at and listening to what that part of the city has to offer. Many things come to his mind as a result of the stimuli, most significantly his relationships with several women.

But he also thinks about art in the context of how it connects and interacts with society: the aesthetics of utopia; as an expression of emptions; to enhance commerce with grandeur, and as an expression of love for one's family.

At the end, a surprise encounter with yet another woman, leaves the protagonist, Dan Morrison, contemplating his future with new eyes and re-examining his values.

Aspects of a NYT Article on Book Clubs For Men Only

The New York Times  has an article about book clubs for men only, which you can read in full by clicking on the hyperlink under those words.

I'm not going to address the ins and outs of that notion, which seems reasonable enough, but rather quickly mention two topics contained within the article because they relate to earlier posts on this blog.

The first club mentioned in the article is located in Marin, California, and it has what was described as a cardinal rule:  no books by women about women. While the members of the club were apparently thinking mostly of "chic lit" as something they aren't interested in reading, when it comes to popular fiction in general, they don't have too much to worry about. See my earlier post entitled "Male Characters Dominate Fiction."

No Prize For Literature

If you are thinking about self-publishing a work of fiction and troll the Internet to find out how best to do so, you are, at some point, likely to be advised NOT to identify your work as "literature." It's a kiss of death in the marketplace and, indeed, in the prevailing social climate.

The only exception may be college campuses, but even there, literature is mostly required reading for certain majors. And, yes, there are some book groups here and there that still read such works.

"High-Minded Sex:" An Interesting Tournament Outcome

Literary Hub, an online aggregator, today announced the winner of it's single-elimination tournament aimed at selecting the best example of "literary sex writing" from an initial round of 16 samples taken from four different historical eras.

A passage from James Baldwin's novel "Giovanni's Room" took the blue ribbon after all eight judges weighed in on final round, Lit Hub said, adding that the decision to select Baldwin over Jeanette Winterson was "almost unanimous."

Connecting the Dots ... and James Patterson's BookShots

With this post I am going to tie together some earlier topics and point out how they apply to James Patterson's new venture, called BookShots.

In a couple of  earlier posts, which interested readers can find here  and here, I discussed the phenomenon of declining attention spans in the digital and social media age. And then, in a more recent post that can be found here, I reported on a recent study that found, among other things, that a surprising number of people never finish the novels they purchase and, in many cases, don't read much of them.