Imagining Ourselves Into Other People's Experiences

Quote of the day: "In fiction, we imagine ourselves into other people’s experiences."

That comes at very end of an interview of Sunil Yapa, author of "Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist," a recent novel about the 1999 World Trade Organization protests and riots in Seattle. He was interviewed by Bethanne Patrick.

The quote is interesting and perceptive because it helps explain why people like or dislike certain novels. If one doesn't find a character with whom one wishes to identify for one reason or another, books are often not that interesting.

That can be true no matter how well characters are "developed."

The Immediately Shocking, The Immediately Charming

"Does anything less than the immediately shocking or charming get attention?" asks Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review in a recent New York Times "Critic's Take" column.

Not if one spends much time on Facebook or some other form of electronic social media. Topics hurtle past and those who post them have learned they had better not require much thought on the part of viewers. What's up front has to be sufficient to generate a "like" or perhaps a three-word comment. Few viewers will bother to read any further.

The Independent Lives of Fictional Characters

I think it is natural that when people read a book, they wonder to what extent writers have cast themselves, family members, friends or acquaintances as characters, perhaps with an agenda in mind.

Some friends who have read my novella, "Manhattan Morning", have expressed surprise to discover that neither I nor anyone else they know appears therein. The main characters -- Dan, Marcy, Gloria and Rev. Saddleford -- are inventions I set in motion and who then, to at least some degree, took on lives of their own during the writing process.

Dead Doormen, Caricature and Helen Ellis

One way to illuminate the truth of something is to enlarge its most pertinent features out of proportion. We are all familiar with caricature in art, often with respect to political figures or celebrities. For example, Richard Nixon was rarely caricatured without having considerable emphasis placed on his trademark five o'clock shadow, suggesting an ever-present dark side to his character and a certain degree of shiftiness.

All too true.

Caricature is also a form of literature and when deployed, an author exaggerates or over-simplifies certain aspects of a character or a situation to entertain readers or to make a point. If the point is to ridicule the subject, the technique is akin to satire.

Death of a Shapeshifter: David Bowie

David Bowie, identified first and foremost in his New York Times obituary as "infinitely changeable" died on Sunday, Jan. 10, 2016. He was 69 years old.

"In concerts and videos, Mr. Bowie’s costumes and imagery traversed styles, eras and continents, from German Expressionism to commedia dell’arte to Japanese kimonos to space suits," the newspaper said. It called him "a constantly morphing persona" and "a person of relentless reinvention."

Why mention this is a bog about fiction?

New Yorker Fiction: Life is a Downer

If one reads fiction in The New Yorker regularly, as I have over the past couple of years, it is hard to escape coming to the conclusion that life is fundamentally a downer and often disgustingly so.

One of the latest such depictions is "The Beach Boy" from the magazine's Jan. 4, 2016, edition in which a Manhattan dermatologist who initially appears to be leading a reasonably satisfactory, comfortable middle class married life falls to pieces and ends up drunk on a tropical beach, attempting unsuccessfully to get the attention of a male prostitute he thinks could tell him something, surely degrading, about his former wife.

His former wife? Oh, I almost forgot. In an extremely well-wrought and imaginative plot twist, she dropped dead. Just like that.  This development was required it appears, to expose John, the dermatologist, as the pathetic creature he really had been all along.

George Orwell: Frighteningly Prescient With More To Come

A May 2015 post entitled "Fiction of the Future" was the first in which I discussed the idea that one purpose of literature is to look ahead and try to imagine what might come of us, unconstrained by prevailing limits of scientific or other relevant knowledge. Therein, I cited George Orwell's 1940 novel "Nighteen Eighty-Four" as probably the most famous title within this genre.

Thanks to a service called "LitHub Daily," I just read a thoroughly researched, exceptionally chilling article by Stephen Rohde that shows how very prescient Orwell was.  Entitled "Big Brother Is Watching You: Is America at Risk of Becoming Orwell’s Nightmare?" and published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, this rather lengthy piece is highly recommended.

There is little more to say about the subject now, but I suspect I will return to the topic in the future.