Why We Broke Up

book by Daniel Handler

annotation by Kate Maruyama

I was in a workshop in grad school and the workshop leader asked, “Why do you write?” She was asking for a grander summation of what we write for and the answer came more easily for me than I thought. I’m interested in and writing at love in all of its horrible and wonderful variations. I wrote romantic comedies for years, trying to get into the nitty gritty of that first blush, when things don’t work out, trying to get to the center of the horrible overwhelming awkwardness of dating and falling in love. My first novel is a romantic tragedy about trying to make love work when one of you is dead. My next about how making life choices despite love can screw things up—for generations.

So Why We Broke Up is totally up my alley. I’m not sure how Daniel Handler manages to fully capture the voice of a teenage girl—being a dude and all–but Min’s voice is genuine, immediate, awkward, terrified, clever, funny and fully herself. The book is in second person—only not. Second person irritates me for long patches, but Handler uses it as a launching point for our story. Ed, the object of Min’s love and the reason for her broken heart is the “you” in this story as Min recounts the relationship—ostensibly in a letter. But while Min addresses Ed directly, Handler is careful to reserve second person for dramatic effect and to flow back into Min’s first person account of things.

Min is delivering a box of memories collected from her relationship with Ed, the high school basketball co-captain. Each chapter begins with a picture of said object, illustrated beautifully, in vibrant color by Maira Kalman. Movie tickets, beer caps, rose petals are the detritus of a relationship clearly gone awry. I had a bit of burning covet over this device, as I’m enamored of the way physical objects can become milestones in emotional territory and I touched on it in a piece of flash fiction. But there’s covet and there’s “wow you really wrote the shit out of that.” Handler really wrote the shit out of that and with the bright and painted images given extra weight through the stories behind them, my hat is off.

Another device I totally covet, is Min’s world of old movie references. This was an affliction of my teenage years—okay, and my twenties—and maybe a little bit now. In the novel I’m revising, a woman in her twenties is plagued by the same tendency as Min—to transpose movie life onto real life, her affection for movie actors onto real people. But Handler took it one step further and creates a fictional world of old movies complete with titles, plots, stars and real-life tales. There is such singularity to each of Min’s movie references, sometimes deliberate, sometimes off-hand, that they have a truly authentic ring: “Lottie Carson sleeps in the igloo alone and Will Ringer, frost on the beard he’ll shave off for her, because she asks him to, because he loves her—he sleeps with the dogs.” (p.29.) In that one line, Handler creates not only a vivid old film, but Min’s mooning, breathless, girlish and romantic lens through which to view it. Handler could have taken real older movies and thinly disguised them, but that would have taken the reader off the page. Instead, he creates these hilarious and delightful fictional movies that broaden the fabulousness of his main character.

But the book goes beyond devices and is a terrific reminder that while we can litter our prose with clever asides, funny moments and vivid objects, the characters at the book’s center and the various ways in which they do and don’t get what they want are where the heart of a story lies.  This book has a strong beating heart and it is Min’s. She carries us from first infatuation, through awkward love, to social pressure and inevitable breakup in terrifying, exhilarating, mortifying and genuine moments. Every secondary character in her life, from her best friend and gourmet cook Al, to Ed’s wry and clever sister or his worldly slightly trashy ex-girlfriend is vivid and genuine. While these are high school characters we recognize enough for them to resonate, they are their own people on the page.

And while Min has these “quirky” (I hate that word, usually applied in a condescending way by people who find quirky “cute” or who say “interesting” when they really mean “weird”—but would doubtless be applied by one of Ed’s friends, and therefore fits) qualities, it is her raw, close emotion that makes her so real. Like any rapidly growing exposed-nerve teen she can become consumed by her own self-loathing doubt, “I’m not a romantic, I’m a half-wit. Only stupid people would think I’m smart. I’m not something anyone should know. I’m a lunatic wandering around for scraps, I’m like every single miserable moron I’ve scorned and pretended I didn’t recognize.” (337)

Handler creates such a balance of clever and real, hilarity and heartbreak that coveting can only get us so far. Time to get back to work.

The Family Fang

book by Kevin Wilson

annotation by Diane Sherlock

Facebook brought me to THE FAMILY FANG. I’ve been fortunate to experience the acquaintance and generosity of some well-known authors, including Nick Hornby. He posted that THE FAMILY FANG was his favorite book of 2011. Since my mentor, Rob Roberge, recommended I read Hornby as I was writing my own comic novel, WRESTLING ALLIGATORS, I was curious to read Hornby’s recommendation. I was not disappointed. THE FAMILY FANG is a lot of fun. It also illustrates one of Roberge’s maxims: funny and sad go together in order to make funny work. 

A short digression… in college, I attended a theater conference in Los Angeles and within it some performance art pieces (and I use that term loosely). I sat next to David Antin as he apologetically passed me a pile of rabbit droppings on a silver platter. That was one “performance” without a point and even the lack of point wasn’t the point – it was just bad. Anyway, I attended my share of odd performance art and avant-garde plays in New York and L.A. and met people like Caleb and Camille Fang, the performance artist parents of the novel. Wilson nails it.

Camille and Caleb use their children, Annie (Child A) and Buster (Child B), in their pieces. Examples: Annie on guitar, singing with Buster as they sit on the street beside a guitar case with the sign, “Our dog needs an operation. Please help us save him.” As the “piece” develops, a man heckles her, ending in shouts and a smashed guitar. That man is of course her father, unknown to the “audience.” There are also pieces featuring Buster in drag to win a beauty contest and one with the children complicit in a fake shoplifting. Some pieces are innocent, some are exploitive, and some are cruel.

For the parents, “art, if you loved it, was worth any amount of unhappiness and pain. If you had to hurt someone to achieve those ends, so be it. If the outcome was beautiful enough, strange enough, memorable enough, it did not matter. It was worth it.”  Everything is in service to Art. The parents are oblivious to the effect of their lifestyle on their children, but mirroring them are two children who are oblivious to the gifts (awe, wonder) their parents have provided them in the midst of the pain. It is no surprise that though Annie and Buster try to create lives for themselves, they fail and return home. This delights their parents. “We’re a family again,” their dad cries. “This is what the Fangs do. We make strange and memorable things.” Their mother adds, “We distort the world; we make it vibrate.”  

The cycle of art begins again, but then the parents vanish at a roadside stop, apparently the victims of foul play. Or are they? Is it art or did something actually happen to them? This mystery propels the reader forward as Wilson explores the limits of familial relationships. The questions surrounding their disappearance that he sets up so well – well enough that the reader can imagine the book going either way – is something I want to explore in my own writing. I haven’t used the reader’s participation and curiosity to the degree that Wilson has here. He not only keeps ratcheting up the stakes, but creates tension in his use of our revulsion over the performance pieces even as we are sucked into fascination over what will happen, with the parents’ elation, and the children’s emotions over the outcome, good or bad. He makes great use of the small telling details that enhance a good story, “Annie felt her fingers snap into fists…then she felt Buster’s own hand slowly uncurl her fingers until they were straight and steady.”

Fine details, vivid characters, an outrageous yet realistic premise that builds over the course of the narrative with increasing stakes add up to an entertaining book that resonates more deeply – and ends with more impact - than one might expect from a comedic novel. Funny and sad indeed.

 

 

The Tiger’s Wife

book by Téa Obreht

annotation by Talya Jankovits

I am not proud to admit this, but sometimes I get writer’s envy. When I got word of Téa Obreht, I almost fell over with jealousy. Born the same year I was and she was already published in places such as The New Yorker, Harper’s and The New York Times, as well as voted in for The New Yorker’s “20 under 40″ and The National Books Foundation’s “5 under 35″. Her novel, The Tiger’s Wife, is a New York Times bestseller, a 2011 National Book Award Finalist and the winner of the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction. So you better believe that I, with a handful of modest online publications (thank you Annotation Nation!) and a novel still four years in the making, watched my hands grow green when I picked up her novel. I tried to put petty jealousy aside when I began her book and instead set out to learn from a peer and figure out what she did that I need to do. Surprisingly, I also figured out what she did that I don’t want to do.

Without sounding condescending, (and really, how could I, she’s the one with a national bestseller, I’m the one still pulling out repetitive clichéed imagery from my novel) Obreht’s writing felt beyond her years. I was enthralled with her imagery, her description, moments of writing that made me keep glancing again at her very young looking photo in the back of the book, trying to convince myself that yes, this young woman really wrote these sentences. She captured the young, the old, the foreign, the magical and she delivered lovely word by word fresh imagery, rich metaphors and breathtaking descriptions. While recently revising my own novel, I cringed with shame when a generous reader pointed out that I had used “thin lips” about a half dozen times in a dozen pages. Language is vast and supple with variety and Obreht utilizes all of it in her novel. It was a good kick in the writer’s gut to remind me that language is endless and profoundly important, you don’t want to just write a story, you want to write a story well, and write well Obreht did. But that isn’t enough to earn you the kind of acclaim that The Tiger’s Wife earned Obreht, and I’m sorry to say but the buck stopped there for me.

Obreht is a storyteller, that’s for sure. She can tell a story in a post war-torn Balkan country, she can paint you a tiger’s wife and a deathless man and she can lead you to a small village with big superstitions and she can capture the persona of the young and the old, but despite her ability to captivate me in various chapters, I was constantly left with questions, holes and confusion. Where Obreht soared in writing, she slumped in plot. Chapter chunks seemed like short stories strung along with barely a thread connecting them. The main character, Nadia, is on a quest to understand her grandfather and his death but all Obreht did was lead me down a wild goose chase of story clumps that dizzied me and left me wondering exactly what the novel was about.

As a reader and a writer, the importance of plot to me is incomparable. My own novel stretches across time, jumps point of view and countries. Something I am very aware of is being sure that everything comes together, that I am writing a story in which I am posing questions that get answers, that everything is serving a driving purpose towards the ending, in other words,  that a novel is taking form. And no matter the novel, no matter the plot, be it linear or non-linear, but it in various POVs or one, there should always be a beginning, middle and end. There should always be continuity, regardless of structure. Even if plot plays second fiddle to language, it still needs to be addressed cohesively. Obreht had too many pages of opportunity to fix her plot blunders and it made me wonder about the value of editing, revision and clarity of mind. Putting writer’s envy aside, I was disappointed with what, at the outset, felt like a promising read.

Whether or not I’ll ever make the New York Times National Bestseller list, I do hope to achieve smaller and more doable accomplishments, such as completing a novel where I can attain the same level of language as Obreht, yet remember the importance of something as basic as the purpose of plot. In writing, it all matters.

Blueprints for Building Better Girls

book by Elissa Schappell

annotation by Kate Maruyama

In Blueprints for Building Better Girls, Elissa Schappell’s  characters all have something more going on than they are telling us. The stories are revealed in intimate detail, but in careful increments. Schappell is brilliant at ensconcing the reader in place, a teenage bedroom with Jacques Cousteau playing in the background, a drunken college campus, a quiet well-to do home, a starving artists’ view of New York City–then she starts peeling back the layers. By the end of each story, we are left as changed as the characters, with more to think about.

In “Aren’t You Dead Yet?” Our heroine Beth, later B, later Lizzie, is in a mutually destructive self-aggrandizing artistic relationship with Ray, a painter. In his discovery of Beth’s “earlier self,” Ray creates her as playwright, as artist, as someone important, but can’t cope with her growth. He leaves her, but haunts her in later years and when Beth, now Lizzie runs into him again, she tries writing their story into a play. The problem is that in her version of the story, Ray dies. He’s a likely candidate, as he is now a junkie waiting for a heart donor. But when Ray doesn’t die, our narrator is left choosing the story over the reality. Within this one short story, Schappel creates a many-layered nostalgia littered with objects and random bits of art. Nothing is placed in this story accidentally. A stolen tube of cadmium red, and a Navajo blanket—one of the only things Ray takes with him when he leaves Lizzie–turns up at the end. Schappel also portrays the layers of love as seen through different ages and varying degrees of nostalgia. Lizzie’s view of Ray goes from starstruck and smitten, to re-smitten and nostalgic, to barely tolerant. Lizzie grows up, but Ray stays the same.

I am constantly investigating the various stages of love in my stories and novels, and Schappel is deft with managing love in its stages, fickleness and wistfulness. She has inspired me to peel back at least one more layer in what’s going on in my stories, to try to have things happening on different levels. So often I am stuck in the moment in front of me; pulling wires to get each moment to resonate through the others will take some work.

In “Are You Comfortable?” Schappel gives us Charlotte, home from college, knee deep in her WASP life. When her mother tells us that she has mono, we are pretty sure something more is going on with this girl. Charlotte is instructed to take her once intimidating and intelligent grandfather out for lunch—only now he suffers from dementia. He is the only one to whom she can come clean; she tells him of her date rape and how it’s destroyed her. Schappell is so careful in setting up this story, that we are lost with Charlotte in her day and her inability to get motivated to do much of anything. Schappell recreates the malaise of depression and jams it up against an old folks’ home and a pip of an old man who used to be intimidating. Things slide sideways as a simple trip to the diner becomes a mess and by the time we are delivered to the reveal, it is devastating.

Schappel has a way with final lines. So much has been written about opening lines, but the final line of a short story, once it has dragged you through the wringer, is every bit as crucial, if not more so.  We are left with Charlotte’s grandfather’s non-reaction to her enormous reveal. Her grandfather: “Peering out at the woods, hands pressed against the glass, he watched as the sun, red and round as a rubber ball, dropped behind the trees.” It was an enormous thing for Charlotte to tell her grandfather—but did it do any good? We are left to mull things over.

Another story’s last line:

“I wonder, when we’re done, what will be left of us.”

And:

“They stayed like that, not moving at all, until the streetlights began to come on.”

It is what our readers are left with, in short stories, that creates that final note. And that is seriously something I need to work on. Schappel had me going through my short stories and seeing those last lines as a missed opportunity. She has a facility with that last moment or image. That fade to black.

The characters in her stories overlap each other’s lives in a lighter way than in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, but in a way that’s quite enjoyable and useful in each story where it happens. I didn’t recognize the repeats in character until halfway through, but they bump up against each other’s lives, each living on the periphery of another’s story. In “Out of the Blue and Into the Black,” Belinda is a friend of Charlotte’s and worried about her after her rape, but doesn’t quite get around to helping her–directly. The story itself creates the deep-feeling, yet reckless college life; Charlotte’s being in that story shows the careless hold our well-intentioned selves have on the big things that happen at that age. And Charlotte’s predicament and Belinda’s concern over it forces Belinda’s paramour, Andy, onto a path he may not have otherwise taken.

I am always so eager to get onto new characters and new situations, I hadn’t thought of connecting them or repeating them other than to take characters in my novels out for a walk, hoping to jar something I couldn’t in the novel I was working on. But with Blueprints and Goon Squad, it is tempting to go back and ask some questions of these characters from other periods in their lives.

There are few short story collections I can read all in a row. So often I need to take a breather, a step away. The short story is a tricky medium and collections are trickier. But Blueprints for Building Better Girls was not only completely enjoyable, it was an absorbing page-turner that I finished within the week.

Anagrams

book by Lorrie Moore

annotation by Marianne Woods Cirone

What would happen if you took a classroom full of talented, witty MFA students (okay, very talented students) and told them each to write a short story about three characters named  Gerard, Benna and Eleanor; a Renoir painting, a lounge at the Ramada Inn and a diner named ‘Hanks’?

The results would be likely to look like Anagrams by Lorrie Moore.  This book, which has been loosely called a novel, is closer to some of the permutations, or anagrams, if you will, that you would get from the writing assignment above.  This book is made up of various short stories about these same three characters:  Gerard, Benna and Eleanor, as well as Benna’s “imaginary” daughter, Georgie, which are told in different POVs and in different voices.   From first to third person point of view, from Gerard to Benna’s voice, Moore interweaves the various combinations available to tell the potential stories of these characters, offering a glimpse into the options that we have as writers when we approach a project with a given set of parameters.

In each of the stories, the relationships change, the character’s backgrounds and life choices change, yet there is enough consistency in the thread between the stories that they truly illustrate the vast array of possibilities which a writer has available when choosing to create her fictive world, even with a set of given parameters.  To the reader, the various situations and outcomes the book presents mimic  the world of life possibilities which we all at times ruminate over:  what would my life looked like if I had married him; if I hadn’t married him; what if he died; what if we had a child; if we didn’t?  Moore’s various stories play out varying scenarios across the lives of these three characters with different details, twists and relationships.

The thread of consistency which Moore offers is her sharp wit, her keen eye for detail and her borderline anguish over the constant small (and large) disappointments which life offers.  She ably interweaves a topic of grave seriousness, (e.g., a lump found in Benna’s breast) with laugh out loud humor:

“These are the words they used:  aspirate, mammogram, surgery, blockage, wait.  They first just wanted to wait and see if it was a temporary blockage of the milk ducts.

‘Milk duds?’ exclaimed Gerard.

‘Ducks,’ I shouted.  ‘Milk ducks!’

Moore’s rhythmic sentence structure contains the necessary cadence and use of metaphor that are necessary for good writing and excellent comic timing.  In one story, Benna’s best friend, Eleanor, just admits that she has slept with the man Benna is involved with:

“”Don’t you see, sisterhood has to be redefined,’ she [Eleanor] was saying.  ‘There are too few men in the world.  It’s a heterosexual depression out there.’

What I finally managed to say, looking at the Heimlich Maneuver poster, was, ‘So, this is sociobiology?’  She [Eleanor] smiled weakly, hopefully, and I started to laugh, and then we were both laughing; teary-eyed, our faces falling into our arms on the table, and that’s when I took the ketchup bottle and cracked it over her head.  And then I got up and wobbled out, my soul numb as a crossed leg, and Hank yelled something at me in Greek and rushed out from behind the counter over to Eleanor who was sobbing loudly and would probably need stitches.”

During this scene, Benna happens to be pregnant with Gerard’s baby (which she later aborts), and is also waiting to see the progression of a suspicious breast lump.  After the confrontation and the abortion, and the benign resolution of the breast lump drama, Benna offers a glimpse into the wisdom which will pull her through these experiences:

“But I believed in starting over.  There was finally, I knew, only rupture and hurt and falling short between all persons, but, Shirley, the best revenge was to turn your life into a small gathering of miracles.

If I could not be anchored and profound, I would try, at least, to be kind.”

Anagrams was written in 1986, when Moore was about 28 years old, and I so I wondered how her work and her voice had changed since that time.  Then, I remembered reading the short story, “People Like That are the Only People Here,” Moore’s semi-autobiographical short story about a young child’s bout with cancer, during my recent writing classes at the local community college (coincidentally, this type of educational institution was another topic which Moore addresses with great angst).

Moore has honed her skills of dealing with life’s seemingly random cruelties with sardonic wit as she addresses one of the most dreaded scenarios to face a human being:  a child experiencing a life-threatening illness and the apparent meaninglessness of it.    Upon review of this short story, I noted that Moore uses a distant third person, naming her characters by their roles rather than names:  the Mother, the Baby, the pediatrician, the nurse, the Radiologist, the Surgeon, the Husband (using capitalization as noted herein).  As the piece progresses, so do first names:  given to a couple nurses, then some of the other pediatric patients, their parents.   I see Moore’s distancing as both a means to emotionally disconnect from the rawness of the subject matter as well as a way of expanding the universality of the experience.

Both of these pieces by Moore show her incredible facility with language, her rare sense of timing, and her ability to explore the commonalities of human vulnerability.  While Moore seems to be wrestling with a deep underlying sense of disappointment with the events of  life that can never be understood, she demonstrates that these experiences can, at least, be profoundly be revealed—and processed– through the process of artistic expression which illustrates the human events that connect us all.

Erasure

book by Percival Everett

annotation by Stephanie Quinn Westphal

In his 2001 novel, Erasure, Percival Everett makes brilliant and sophisticated use of satire to examine questions of race, family and the vagaries of the publishing business in contemporary U.S. society. The author creates a compelling and conflicted protagonist, Thelonious Ellison (“Monk”), who functions as both the vehicle and the purveyor of the satire. The author uses his protagonist and his predicaments, the novel’s structure, and the parody Monk writes to convey different aspects of Everett’s incisive rage at the crippling nature of prejudice on individuals and society.

Everett embeds satire in the character of the protagonist himself. The novel is ostensibly the private journal of Monk, a highly intellectual professor and writer of fiction. Everett gives Monk a trenchant, mocking wit. When the professor presents his predicaments, the author simultaneously uses them to illustrate larger social problems he wants to mock in order to change. Monk does not match many of our society’s stereotypes. He lists his “failings” as follows: he’s relatively athletic, but not good at basketball; he listens to “Mahler, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Parker and Ry Cooder”; he’s good at math, but he can’t dance. As Monk puts it:

“Some people in the society in which I live, described as being black, tell me I’m not black enough. Some people whom the society calls white tell me the same thing.”

In particular, Monk is told he’s not black enough by editors, who have rejected his novels, and by reviewers, whom he has perplexed with his work. One reviewer compliments the excellence of one of Monk’s novels, but ends by saying,

“…but one is lost to understand what this reworking of Aeschylus’ The Persians has to do with the African American experience.”

It’s both funny and pathetically off point that this brilliant man is questioned because what he wants to write about isn’t considered “appropriate,” and Everett extracts every satirical gem from Monk’s perpetual “wrong in every context experience.” The professor’s quandary also illustrates an underlying irony of prejudice.

Everett also uses the novel’s structure to heighten the satire and ensnare the reader in the experience of prejudice itself. Everett employs the frame story structure in an audacious way. In the outer frame, Monk grapples with the issues of race and stereotyping which make it difficult for him to publish the sort of academic work and fiction he writes. Simultaneously, he is caring for his mother with Alzheimer’s, who is being “erased” by the disease, just as Monk’s individual self is being erased by society.

Enraged by the three million dollar sale of a novel called We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, Monk writes a parody. My Pafology, later renamed Fuck, is a hilarious, but deeply disturbing send up of what Monk calls “the shit that’s published” as authentic black writing and the public that gobbles it up. The inner frame is that story.

Everett takes the familiar device of the frame story structure, and uses it in an audaciously humorous way to expose and criticize the mostly unconscious prejudice and stereotyping most of us fall into despite our best efforts. Monk won’t sign his own name to Fuck and instead credits it to “Stagg R. Leigh.” When his agent asks if he’s serious about sending it out and it if should have an explanation, Monk replies,

“Send it straight,” I said. “If they can’t see it’s a parody, fuck them.”

Ironically, Fuck becomes a huge success, and Monk is embroiled in an ever more complicated scam in which he pretends to be the elusive, barely literate author, Stagg R. Leigh. The reading public can’t tell it’s a parody and gives the fictional Stagg R. Leigh the kind of fame and respect that continue to elude Monk. Readers of Erasure are put in the very uncomfortable, but edifying position of reading the inner story, Fuck. Everett holds this uncomfortable mirror up to us until we are forced to confront our own limitations and biases. We come to care for the inner story’s central character, Van Go, no matter how exaggerated a character he is. Everett employs this ancient story form, the frame story structure, to take his readers, laughing uneasily all the way, to a more profound and disturbing understanding of the pervasive and destructive nature of unconscious prejudice – and their own unwitting participation in its perpetuation.

It’s brilliant and effective satire, channeling Everett’s considerable rage into a biting and effective call for change. By employing his incisive anger as subtext, as the emotional through-line that underpins the story’s plot (and the novel within the novel), the author transmutes into a far more powerful and effective tool than if the rage had been simply stated.

The novel also stands out for the inventive, subversive way the author uses language in this story. Everett confidently claims a wide range of linguistic territory – from formal, academic diction to informal, colloquial speech. He moves in and out of these linguistic counties with elegance and savoir-faire. His approach in this novel also clearly illustrates the difference between the limited power of a polemic versus the far greater persuasive power of an experiential novel.

In fiction it is often hard to communicate raw, yet nuanced ideas about race, injustice, or persecution without offending or alienating the very audience the author wants to persuade. Erasure succeeds brilliantly because Everett embeds his sophisticated satire in a form that both amuses and challenges, enticing us to do what none of us really want to do: confront our own ignorance and unconscious prejudices. He never lets us off the hook, but he takes us on a wild, bracing ride before he catches us and kills our old, more primitive selves so that we can be reborn in a new state of greater awareness and enlightenment.

After reading Erasure, I am inspired to play with the frame story structure to see what can be achieved within that particular narrative form. Like Everett, I’d like to experiment with embedding one narrative inside another, especially if they’re told in distinctly––if not jarringly—different voices, points of view, and tones. What effects can be achieved through such juxtaposition? How would the strictures of this particular narrative form limit and torque the story? I’d like to figure out how to use this nesting structure to make my novel more potent and emotionally resonant for my readers. Finally, I’d like to steal Everett’s tactics for transmuting rage, through wit and raw intelligence, into biting satire with the capacity to take readers beyond understanding to actual change. How do you make your writing crack open someone else’s brain and heart so that they finish your novel bigger, better and more humble than they were before? Now that’s art.

 

 

Disquiet

book by Julia Leigh

annotation by Nancy Conyers

Disquiet, like Kate Jennings’ Snake, is a short novella that illustrates that what the author leaves out is as important as what she chooses to leave in.  Disquiet is only 121 pages and Leigh has chosen to tell her story through spare, yet vivid, details which allude to a plot and to a back story.  It forces the reader to pay as close attention to what is off the page as to what is on the page, and to do more work than in reading a conventional, longer novel where the writer does the work for the reader by filling in the plot.

Disquiet is the story of an Australian woman, Olivia, referred to as ‘the woman,’ and her two children, ‘boy’ and ‘girl,’ who flee Olivia’s abusive husband for her childhood home, a chateau somewhere in France.  When they arrive at the rambling chateau (which, itself, becomes a kind of character in Leigh’s book), Olivia’s mother is waiting for Olivia’s brother Marcus, and his wife Sophie, who are coming home from the hospital after Sophie has given birth to a stillborn baby(referred to as ‘the bundle.’)

In a few paragraphs, Leigh slips in small, razor sharp details that tell the larger story the reader is meant to figure out.  Olivia, speaking to Marcus about her marriage, “declared, simply, ‘I am murdered’” to describe her years of abuse (20).  Marcus, talking about Sophie trying to have a child, lets slip, in the middle of the conversation, “There was…another woman.  There is…another woman,” then goes right on speaking about the fertility treatments Sophie is going through (20).  Sophie will not give up the bundle and Leigh shows us Sophie’s mental state with this spare detail: “Sophie dipping her little finger into the soup and bringing it to the bundle, trying to feed it.” (23)

There is so much that is unspoken in Disquiet, but we, as readers, feel intensity from the way Leigh has chosen to portray her characters.  We feel their profound despair and unhappiness and the traumatic, horrid events of their lives in a disturbing, disquieting way.  This is a book that gnaws at us.  The gorgeousness of Leigh’s prose, coupled with the controlled sparseness of her details, stay with you long after you put the book down.

Leigh took nine years to write Disquiet after her first book, The Hunter, was published.  She began this book when she won a mentorship with Toni Morrison in 2002 from the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative.  When asked why she took so long to write the book, Leigh often paraphrases the poet Elizabeth Bishop who said that scientists and artist are alike in that they are prepared to waste effort.  Leigh told me at the Shanghai Literary Festival that, to her, wasted effort is an exploration and that when she sets out to write something, it is an exploration and she can’t be guaranteed of a result.

Disquiet is the perfect example of why we should explore as writers and allow ourselves the beauty of wasted effort that leads to discovery.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

book by Truman Capote

annotation by Kate Maruyama

I have been a Capote fan since my early twenties, when reading In Cold Blood inspired  me to read  his entire oeuvre from Other Voices Other Rooms straight through to the drug-addled Answered Prayers and, more recently, his rediscovered manuscript, the ostensible precursor to Breakfast at Tiffany’s: Summer Crossing.  Capote was a hard working  writer who cared a lot about sentences and craft and was a painstaking revisionist–something we all can remember as we gasp over good writing: it usually took a lot of drafts to get there. He had a way of maintaining his own sharp observational lens throughout an enormously long career, constantly re-evaluating his work and always attempting to become a better writer. His entire introduction to Music For Chameleons which was published after his most acclaimed book, In Cold Blood, is a disclaimer that he had been wrong all along, he had only just now, figured out how to write. His non-fiction character portraits in that book and in magazines became the model for the way to do it. I doubt any celebrity piece in Vanity Fair doesn’t owe a nod  to Capote’s ability with character observation: read the book’s “A Beautiful Child” or his piece on Elizabeth Taylor. He had a keen eye for the nuances of humanity and used them in his fiction and non-fiction until, sadly, drugs and alcohol clouded his ability.

I haven’t re-approached Breakfast at Tiffany’s for several years, not since re-examining In Cold Blood in graduate school or since reading Summer’s Crossing. But as the book’s fifty year anniversary is upon us, and, as I am struggling with a heroine in my novel-in-progress, I decided it was high time for a re-read.

I was surprised that descriptions of Manhattan, one of the few things that evidenced glimmers of brilliance in the troubled Summers Crossing (there was a reason the book was found in a box of trash left out on the curb), were spare in Tiffany’s. Instead of merely providing a tableau,  Capote brings up descriptions of New York to provide us with the heightened awareness a person feels when something extraordinary happens. We are so often told to describe our surroundings in fiction, we tend toward the standard long-shot here-we-are-and-here’s-what-it-looks-like introduction. But Capote opens his novel thus,

“I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment.”(1)  He goes on to describe the apartment itself.

It is not until, in the glow of getting his first story published, the narrator goes out on the town with Holly that we were given the scope of the island, “That Monday in October, 1943. A beautiful day with the buoyancy of a bird.” (45) and our narrator leads us on a grand montage from drinking Manhattans in a bar, down Fifth Avenue,  through a beautifully described Central Park finally landing in Woolworths.

Setting can create mood, foreboding and romance, but it is used so subtly here to give us a character’s sense of ebullience, that moment in life where, out of simple elation, we pay more attention to our surroundings.

Holly herself, made an icon by Audrey Hepburn’s captivating and breathless performance in the movie, is a great deal more complicated in the book. Lulamae Barnes was orphaned as a child and sexually molested in foster care; this is casually mentioned, “I’ve only had eleven lovers–not couning anything that happened before I was thirteen because, after all, that just doesn’t count. Eleven. Does that make me a whore?” (65) She is lured into marriage at fourteen in Texas to a widower with four children and manages to escape to New York to recreate herself as a fast-talking devil-may care socialite, Holly Golightly.

Capote has the eyes of his narrator to observe Holly’s goings on, but it is in her dialogue that we get to the heartbreaking poetry of a damaged person whose outrageous parties, most torrid love affairs or found fortunes won’t ever truly heal. In a toast to her long lost husband whom she sent back to Texas on a bus, she says, “Good luck: and believe me, dearest Doc—it’s better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.” (60)

When her brother Fred dies in the war, Holly has a vision that “the Fat Woman” has him, the Fat Woman being her version of Death. Holly loses a pregnancy with a Brazilian she was meant to marry, suffers a scandal, losing the promise of marriage along with the baby and our narrator tries to talk her out of fleeing to Brazil. She says, “And if you lived off my particular talents, Cookie, you’d understand the type of bankruptcy I’m describing. Uh, uh, I don’t just fancy a fade-out that finds me belly-bumping around Roseland with a pack of West Side Hillbillies. While the excellent Madame Trawler sashayes(sic) her twat in and out of Tiffany’s. I couldn’t take it. Give me the fat woman any day.” (80) Holly, despite her bravado, navigates life just this side of shattered.

The movie, needing to sell tickets, created a romance between our narrator and Holly, to round out a lovely ending. But in the book, this narrator’s love is not romantic, and describes something a great deal more particular and human : “For I was in love with her. Just as I’d once been in love with my mother’s elderly colored cook and a postman who let me follow him on his rounds and a whole family named McKendrick. That category of love generates jealousy, too.” (61) Capote so deftly describes a completely non-romantic infatuation that all of us have had flutter through our chests at least once.

Holly scrambles through life with more passion and lack of thinking than your average person and her nonstop clever dialogue and slapdash chic lifestyle makes her deeply appealing, but Capote maintains the difficulties our narrator has with Holly’s tremendous appeal and her myopic self-involvement. She is a complicated friend to have and more than once, he gives her up for lost.

Capote is not content with story clichés, nor character clichés.  This is no romantic love story, there is no simple solution. Holly is not your average tragedy waiting to happen. Holly is not the Heroine-Who-Cannot-Escape-Her-Past, nor is she the Live-Fast-Die-Young-Reckless femme fatale. She is not the girl, who, with a bit more polish, could have made a go of it in society, or in the movies. She is the corners and subtleties of fragile human existence and the simple scramble to get a toehold in this life.

Nor does she come to an untimely tragic end, or happy end. She is one of those larger personalities we encounter in life, one of those complicated, fragile friendships that never quite leave us. Our narrator eventually finds Cat, the feline Holly heartlessly threw out of a cab as she headed for the airport. Cat is well taken care of in a new home and the narrator tells us, “I wondered what his name was, for I was certain he had one now, certain he’d arrived somewhere he belonged. African hut or whatever, I hope Holly has, too.” (85) No further explanation, no solid answers. The novella ends.

As we struggle on with our individual characters, it’s important to remember that it is the original ones who last–the ones who don’t fulfill a role we’ve seen before, but go forward in whatever manner is consistent with their characters. Holly in all of her carefully wrought humanity and singular observations, in her brash decisions and cracking façade is an original. As I go back into a character with more depth, I need to remember that human stories don’t always have a predestined arc, that characters can grow, but stifle, too and that a simple human observation of an average day can overpower a character who follows a predictable more dramatic route.

The Art of Racing in the Rain

book by Garth Stein

annotation by Lee Stoops

“To live every day as if it had been stolen from death, that is how I would like to live…When I am a person, that is how I will live my life.”

~ Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain (160)

Enzo is a dog; a dog, like any other – without a dexterous tongue or opposable thumbs. But he witnesses his life with the mind and intentions of a person. He knows that dogs are the last incarnation of souls before they become human, and he is ready – eager, even – to move into his next incarnation. But, his soul, as a dog, has a purpose and a lot left to learn, as is evidenced by one of the most touching, charming contemporary stories. Sara Gruen, author of Water for Elephants, wrote of The Art of Racing in the Rain, “[This story] has everything: love, tragedy, redemption, danger, and – most especially – the canine narrator Enzo. This old soul of a dog has much to teach us about being human. I loved this book” (from “Praise for The Art of Racing in the Rain” preceding the text). Gruen’s list of included elements in the book is dead on, though it’s her noting of what Enzo’s soul has to teach us that really hits the nail on the head: much.

The story opens in Enzo’s voice letting us know that, while he can’t speak, he can communicate. And, by the end of the first chapter, his personality and perception of humanity is clear and engaging, and already offering some foresight into the story and its tone.

“I close my eyes and listen vaguely in a half sleep as he does the things he does before he sleeps each night. Brushing and squirting and splashing. So many things. People and their rituals. They cling to things so hard sometimes” (8).

Stein’s created a terrifically reliable narrator in Enzo. He is clear on what he knows, thinks, doesn’t know, or confuses him. The typical unreliable nature of a first-person (or, dog) account goes out the window as Enzo honestly shares his witness and role in the Swift family’s life. And he sets up his story by evaluating himself and his species. “I like to think I came from a determined gene pool” (11).  Stein’s given Enzo charge of the Swift family from just before its inception throughout an unimaginable tragedy. Denny, Enzo’s master, is a semi-professional racecar driver. Stein uses Denny’s character, his and Enzo’s bond,

“I laid my head on his leg and looked up at him.

“Sometimes I think you actually understand me,” he said. “It’s like there’s a person inside there. Like you know everything.”

I do, I said to myself. I do” (61).

and Enzo’s love of racing as a way to deliver metaphor after metaphor for life and the human (or dog) experience. “But I am a racer at heart, and a racer will never let something that has already happened affect what is happening now” (75).

Stein’s success in the story lies in the true voice of Enzo and his ability to honestly and emotionally recant his experience and understanding of his place and his (and the Swift family’s) life. Language (and lack of) is the means, not the barrier, for a soul that can’t talk. “The human language, as precise as it is with its thousands of words, can still be so wonderfully vague” (288). Throughout the narrative, Enzo’s character and voice drive the story; at breakneck speeds and recovery paces, the dog works the reader through some of the most poignant examples of what it is to live, and how to prepare for what comes next.

Perhaps Stein’s greatest achievement in The Art of Racing in the Rain is Enzo’s reconciling of life as a racecar driver at heart, especially life when it comes in unexpected and derailing ways:

“A driver must have faith. In his talent, judgment, the judgment of those around him…himself…

As the gravel trap rushes at him, the driver must make decisions that will impact his race, his future…What is to be done?

The driver must accept his fate. He must accept the fact that mistakes have been made. Misjudgments. Poor decisions. A confluence of circumstances has landed him in this position. A driver must accept it all and be willing to pay the price for it. He must go off-track.

…At this moment, a driver feels tremendous crisis. He must get back on the gas. He must get back on the track.

…A winner, a champion, will accept his fate. He will continue with his wheels in the dirt. He will do his best to maintain his line and gradually get himself back on the track when it is safe to do so. Yes, he loses a few places in the race. Yes, he is at a disadvantage. But he is still racing. He is still alive.

The race is long. It is better to drive within oneself and finish the race behind others that it is to drive to hard and crash” (290-291).

With an impassioned narrator, wit, and sensitivity, Stein manages a story arc that is both smooth and satisfying, heart-warming and heart-wrenching. And by the end of the story, the reader is left asking the same question Enzo is left asking: “Have I squandered my dogness? Have I forsaken my nature for my desires? Have I made a mistake by anticipating my future and shunning my present” (315)? The answer for Enzo is as elusive as it is for anyone. But it’s also not what matters most. What matters most is understanding and living the truth: “The car goes where they eyes go” (321).

Of course, writers must the same dogged pursuit of answering those questions, and Stein’s success for other writers is the example of giving the story direction that’s worth following. Stylistically and structural, the story is sound. But it’s in the creation of the story’s narrator, the voice of Enzo that Stein accomplished something to which all writer’s aspire – an authentic and original voice, a sympathetic heart, a truly created and wholly pure, wholly winning protagonist. For entertainment’s sake, it would be foolish for any reader to pass The Art of Racing in the Rain. For writers hoping to one day write that one, true, open-hearted character, there are few examples out there that demonstrate it as well, as uncontrived, and as warmly.

The Corrections

book by Jonathan Franzen

annotation by Talya Jankovits

It started off as a crush. I was feeling flustered and warm with each rich sentence, his detailed imagery, the way sound greeted me through my eyes and I discovered that a stack of bills could be made interesting. At the same time, I also found myself rolling my eyes and skimming eagerly to reach the next relevant scene or narrative. Jonathan Franzen’s The Correctionsis an exhausting work of fiction that left me both panting and out of breath with want for more as well as feeling condescended to and abused. I was in turmoil reading this novel; was I in love or was I being driven mad? I decided it was okay to feel both.

My Infatuation:
Franzen’s novel is a story without a story. A funny thing happened while reading. I kept wondering when it was all going to come together and at first I was disappointed to find out it never actually comes together but still works brilliantly. Franzen takes a family of five, two aging parents, and three adult children and reveals the stories of these characters’ lives through the ultimate, larger but mostly irrelevant story of a quickly ailing and demented father who meets his end by the final chapter of the book.

Recently, I am finding myself drawn to novels, short stories or creative pieces that don’t have an ultimate goal of selling you on some sort of convoluted and dizzying plot, but find the story in the mundane, the every day, life as we know it. (Granted there were some grand elements, but when you’re talking about a novel that is close to 600 pages, 40-80 pages of grandeur is really not much to talk about.) This fiction was not fiction at all. I felt as if somewhere, someone is living one of these lives. They were so real, so devastatingly flawed, a smorgasbord of richly textured humanity. I almost felt a part of this dysfunctional group of fictive genes.Franzen paid attention to the nuances that don’t usually get attention and made a novel of it, a particularly lengthy novel of it.

From the first sentence, I knew I was in for a writing treat. Franzen is so detailed that you can hardly go more than a few sentences without being greeted by a beautiful image, a clever metaphor or a breathtaking string of adjectives and nouns. Just after reading a few pages I wanted to run to my own novel and find ways to make it “prettier” to enhance my  images and descriptions, to pay attention to the sound of a screeching tire or the color of a mole on an elbow. I was so driven to write after reading that I did. I’m pretty sure that’s enough in it of itself to assert a bit of an infatuation. But infatuation is usually fickle.

My Contempt:
If I had to read one page more of this novel I would have thrown this book in the dishwasher, cleaned it up and made Franzen wash his mouth out with soap. About a quarter of the way through this book, I began to feel like I was out on a date with a gorgeous guy who was smart and funny, but by the time the appetizer arrives I realize he is dominating the conversation to hear himself talk about and assert his own cultured, well rounded intellect and opinion on just about anything. Franzen is a great writer, but at times I felt that entire scenes were inserted totally unnecessarily; I began to feel taken advantage of, as if Franzen created strikingly different characters only in order to assert himself in all things. The character of Chip seemed to be invented purely for Franzen’s philosophical appetite. I felt drained reading hypothetical conversations between Chip and his grad students that went on for pages discussing the ethical responsibilities in mass media commercialism. Greg was an opportunity to explore stocks and business (where I had to read through an entire conference on an imaginary drug with irrelevant characters participating in banter with the drug reps,) Denise was a field day for sexual appetite and food connoisseurship and Aurthur became less of a character and more of an excuse to explore scatological images. Reading this novel was like having my eyes held open and being force fed information. Now, either this actually happened – characters were created to feed Franzen’s frantic appetite for self assertion – or something went terribly wrong during editing.

I am currently in the revision stage of my novel and have gone through multiple drafts and something that comes up frequently is finding irrelevant scenes or lengthy narratives that don’t contribute to the characters, the plot or my readers need to relate to the characters and the plot. What frustrated me in Franzen’s novel is that I felt I was reading lengthy narrative that didn’t at all enhance the reading experience for me and left me feeling drained, so drained that all the beautiful writing I was so excited about at first began to fade before me and leave only the constant barrage of information. My lesson – don’t overload, everything in moderation. Even the luscious writing began to become too much.

My Compromise:
I thought annotating the novel would help me gain clarity on my perspective and writerly gains or losses, but I’m still as torn as before. There will be a second date – I will read Franzen again, to feed my need for glitzy, detailed writing but I will also remind myself during my revision process of the importance of staying honest to my characters and stories, small or great, and staying committed to making sure every page of my novel matters. Because at the end of a novel, its not how much you’ve written or how much you know, but how well you know what you write.