Bringing Secondary Characters to Life

In the midst of trying to solve a writing problem in my fiction, I tend to “go to the literature,” to quote Joan Didion. I used to do this when I was a far less confident writer though with mixed results, since I wasn’t always certain about what I was looking for. Presently I’m looking for ways of bringing a secondary character to life in my first person point of view novel.

After reading the first three chapters of a draft of this novel, my writing group honed in on the character of my protagonist’s wife. “We need more dialogue,” they resoundingly agreed. “We need to see her.” Something in my presentation of this character made her feel unformed to them.

Of the three or four books I turned to, one example that jumped out of a first person narrative showing a secondary character with some specificity was found in Matthew Klamm’s one and only book Sam the Cat and Other Stories, which I’d forgotten, or just put into the recesses of a cobwebbed memory. Right away I recalled Klamm’s deft handling of bringing a secondary character to life, which feels somewhat sleight of hand.

Klamm’s language is frank, blunt and naked. His dialogue is even more revealing. Yet it tends toward turning the narrator, typically first person, into something of a buffoon and a lumpish failure, what was once called, I believe, a milquetoast. This seems in the service of conveying his women (yes, plural) of the type a la Esquire magazine’s self-congratulating feature “Women We Love.” As if no such woman has any flaws worth noting, or these flaws are merely charming, so enraptured are they by her beauty. These effects are often achieved with dialogue, of course. Klamm’s writing excels in an easygoing talking style, as of a good friend telling you intimate details over a pint. This style might be used to make an unsympathetic narrator more sympathetic. Does it matter that these secondary characters are rather typecast? Probably. As successful as this is, I became suspicious that Klamm’s stories appeal to a specific demographic that I might be on the outs with. This might be half the problem with my own first person narrative--my readers are not entirely in synch with the narrator.

Thus I thought, rather than merely bringing in additional characters more to life with more dialogue, I would need to do a lot more to appeal to the demographic that isn’t agreeable with my first person character. But I also began to wonder about the ready advice, “Use more dialogue.”

Why am I so willing to conclude that dialogue is an easy way--or as it’s also frequently thought of--the main way, to bring a character to life? I suspect the idea is that in first person, dialogue is an opportunity to not have your narrator endlessly talking, after pages and pages. Dialogue can seem live, and in this way it brings whatever character is talking to life. I don’t disagree with this assessment. But I believe you can fall into these soft traps of a ready made solution without figuring out if it actually works.

Yet, even after writing several pages of more dialogue centric scenes in my novel, I didn’t necessarily feel any closer to bringing the protagonist’s wife to life.

What I recognized was that I needed now to approach this in a more organic way. I begin to ask questions: what am I trying to convey exactly? The problem for the narrator is that, after returning from a mountain climb, he’s become permanently disabled; in light of this, his wife has returned to help him after a separation. That specific plot point aside, I am trying to convey multiple problems in this novel, and this is just one facet.

Certainly dialogue will carry emotion and feelings, here. Because I need to have the narrator explain some of his situation, I don’t believe it is unexpected--or really wrong--to have him offer his interpretation of events--this is the purview of first person, after all.

With a novel, it is normal to have to juggle multiple objectives. This story with the wife is only a subplot within the larger narrative. The main narrative might be summarized as a man tries to understand his life after confronting a life altering injury. I don’t think every character has to have a curriculum vitae and a diagnostic workup. In fact, with first person, it might even be expected that secondary characters get short shrift, and that they may be presented with some degree of bias. I can’t make them full fledged in the 250 pages I have for the novel. I think my approach has been to give the secondary characters enough material to function in service of the larger plot.

This is the kind of problem I expect from handing out a first draft of a novel. The reading group’s bias comes in because they are not seeing the whole picture. Granted, it’s a delicate dance between keeping the reader interested and not making them despise a potentially unsympathetic narrator. As much as I want to hold my argument up as explanation, the reality is that anyone else who reads the novel might come to a similar conclusion. I discussed this attempt to appeal to everyone in the following blog post Cheese Pizza Effect.

Beyond these issues, I believe there is more at work here: the wife is thought to be two dimensional, or flat, as they say; god forbid that I should portray such a character--such an important character--as flat. And this is when I realized: this character is the one my writing group is most predisposed to. They are reacting to my narrator as I am to Matthew Klamm’s. The chorus becomes, “Well, nobody wants to read about them,” or, “The narrator needs to be more sympathetic.” I get their point, but I also think there is a place for a narrator who is occasionally reprehensible.

One of the lessons I’ve learned over the years of writing and revising is knowing how to pick and choose advice. When the tenor of this criticism is too strong, as I feel was the case with my group, I realize I have hit a nerve. I take this advice cautiously, usually. The group is getting a firsthand impression without having read the full novel. Do I try to make it more conducive to their expectations, knowing this might be the way an agent will read it, or do I stick to my resolve and not lose sight of my goals for the narrative? I recognize why readers might be reacting so vehemently to the narrator, and I will consider their suggestions, but it’s not the secondary character’s story, after all. 

Interested in reading more about the conundrums of writing fiction? Check out an earlier post: On having to explain one's work (or that dumbing down logic).

The Life of Reading

I recently finished volume four of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s beguiling and satisfying My Struggle. I was reluctant to get to the end, feeling the immense, possibly false affinity that I get as a reader, believing I’ve found a friend in the writer. (It didn’t help that I pitched him my novel when he was at City Arts and Lectures, and he graciously heard me out.) Eventually, I had to finish the book. But what I realized is that, while reading My Struggle, I had no desire to read anything else.

Now I’m in that strange predicament of looking for another book to whet my reading appetite, and am randomly reading five books at the same time because I cannot entirely give myself over to one as I sort of like them all a bit, and am still unsure where I stand with any one of them. I find myself in that space a lot, probably because there isn’t one book I am wrapped up in. In fact, I’d say I usually read several books at one time, as if a model of my mind and thought process. If a book is good enough, I’ll make the time to read.

I find it hard to just read any book--the time and usefulness trade off is too considerable for me--though I know a lot of people on Goodreads and such that seem to read a lot and varied and widely. I guess I just trust that everyone reads all of the books they claim to read as they indicate on social media, but perhaps this is a facade. I have a hard time not being honest about what I have or have not read (Ulysses: read; Infinite Jest: 4/5ths read; Magic Mountain: One third read; Moby Dick: read; The Brothers Karamazov: half read) Did I read enough of these novels, or do I intend to finish them some day? There’s something of a moral complacency I feel, as a serious writer and reader, by copping out as I must have, and probably will, on so much of my serious literary fiction reading. And then there is the question of which unread masterworks I still, one day, intend to read.

I don’t usually give up. In the case of many of those aforementioned books, I began reading them years ago, and it was years ago when I stopped reading them. My tendency is to find a reason to finish a book: guilt, having to review it (or wanting to), or simply because I like it. Maybe I would be more equipped to see them through to the end, now--or maybe not.

Much of the time I’m doing wide reading hoping one of the books will catch on, though because I’m reading fiction and non-fiction simultaneously, much of what I choose to read then is based on my mood. If these five books I’m considering now had the Knausgaard magic, I’d love them, too. The odd thing is that My Struggle is comprised of 450 page volumes, of which I’ve read four. I can’t quite get through any of the other long works I have had on my night table for awhile (Murakami’s 1Q84 and Vollmann’s Imperial, though I dip into them occasionally.)

I’ve also made a habit of reading toward reviewing, and so I gravitate toward books under 150 pages since I can probably read them reasonably fast. Also, if I am to review it, I will read it right away, even if this means forcing myself to finish it, which might mean that the book is a slog, and thus I probably shouldn’t review it. I usually won’t review it then if I can help it, because somewhere along the line I decided if I can’t say anything nice about a book, I shouldn’t say anything at all. I’m actually wondering if I should reconsider this approach.

When I solicited a number of name authors who I’ve had glancing acquaintance with (which might be considered low level stalking) to read my novel ImpossibleLives of Basher Thomas, in the hopes of getting them to blurb it, they all said one of three things. Either a.) they didn’t read other writers’ work for the purpose of blurbing; b.) they only read their students’ work; c.) they were too busy, etcetera. I got the distinct sense that, having not heard of me, or not remembering me, rather, they were afraid of reading execrable work. So they nip it in the bud. As it is, I happened to have read much of these writers’ work, so in some way, you’d think they might have been willing to humor me, but alas, no.

I’m not one to be given recommendations to, and in this I take heed when I try to recommend a book to someone. I’ll only recommend a book if asked, usually, and then I tend to pile on caveats. I somehow don’t want to be responsible for someone’s bad reading experience--though if that reading experience is good, I’ll gladly take credit. There are some people I naturally can suggest books to, possibly because I’ve had success getting them to read a book I recommended (and they, either truthfully or just playing along, loved it too.) The last book I recommended to so many people was David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Even with that book, I came to feel I suggested it to a few too many people who were not prepared to read a 500 page novel, and couldn’t appreciate the language and story, among dozens of other possible reasons why I liked it so much. There are some friends who have read so much and in such synchronicity with me and my reading, that I might take their recommendations--or used to--without question. Now I’m so selective that I just rely on my gut and a strong sniff test. There are some people who recommend heartily to me a book, going so far as to give me a copy, and rare is the occasion when I will actually crack the thing open and read it. There’s some guilt in not reading it, but not too much. I’m usually already busy reading several other books.

The Second Inaugural Meeting of the Karl Ove Knausgaard Society

A Review of My Struggle: Book Three: Boyhood by Karl Ove Knausgaard

When searching for an explanation for the popularity of Knausgaard’s My Struggle, the real answer lies in the writing. The usual questions arise about the veracity of a translation, but lacking anything else to judge by, all we have is the prose. The popularity and hype has now been doled out in spades. And if there is anything that can make skeptics, it’s this. Now critics start writing merely about the hype tsunami that inevitably occurs with a work like this, and it can become distracting, as in this piece. Beyond the writing about the hype itself, which is secondary, there is the reality of the reading.

In volume three, initially, I sensed a minor note of faltering, and wondered if this volume would not hold up. At times, I puzzled over an occasional strange observation that was either incredibly poetic, or that somehow lost its meaning in translation. These oddities are forgiven, because for the most part, the reading glides along like well sharpened skates across very cold ice.

The volume starts off with the earnest quest of young Karl Ove and his friends looking for a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Soon enough, we escape this and are into the life. You will keep yourself in check to remember, this is a writer documenting nearly every crude reality of teenage years. There’s a good deal of Knausgaard’s appealing to the reader about his holier than thou childish goodness. We make of this that it is the naive sincerity of youth, though this comes across as hollow, even a bit played out when you witness the young Karl Ove throwing a rock at a car not fifty pages prior to his self-exculpation at the hands of his mischievous classmates. Granted, this is the young protagonist, not the eminent adult and estimable father of the second volume. This is the flawed would be precocious teenage former class president Karl Ove. He doesn’t need to make arguments for the behavior of the young Karl Ove; we are perhaps meant to see it as a manifestation of the young Karl Ove’s point of view, but this is not always explicit in the writing.

At times, young Karl Ove can seem like a pitiful little Lord Fauntleroy. He cries at the slightest hint of unease. That the adult Knausgaard can so readily reveal these embarrassing qualities is perhaps a testament to the author’s insight into himself.

Much of what runs through this narrative explicates what was fully promised in volume one, but which sat like a viper sunning itself for 600 pages, was hardly given name or cause, and was largely absent in volume two. This absence was clever. By portraying his own difficulty with raising his children, we never see Knausgaard falter, never see him lay his troubles at the feet of his children--though he certainly voices some frustration--his love for them comes early, and is unconditional.

Knausgaard could be the first writer to give voice to fatherhood in the way he does. This is a kind of literature of fatherhood. It is somewhat a universal experience, universal enough, let’s say, that it’s interesting to note that it’s not really been done before.

What we learn, after two and a half volumes, after all of this, is that his own father is the source of the struggle. This is encapsulated efficiently in a page or two of volume three with the blunt: “My father terrified me.”

We are always grappling with our own parents. You dread the days when things will change unaccountably, and that’s the source of all the frictions, when things change. Then you become a parent and your own children become the source of the change. Knausgaard has tapped that. I’m not sure why more writers don’t other than because it is too personal of a subject, too fraught to feel comfortable writing about it.

So, at the mid-point of the series, there’s still the narrative drive, maybe lessened by a few degrees of torque; what is that drive, and how has he done it so we, as writers, are able to bottle it up and use it for ourselves?

Part of what I enjoy in Knausgaard is his meandering quality, as much as it can feel maddening, unfocused. It's what happens when (probably) you write six volumes of memoir. So you cannot bottle it up, you just write it. Maybe he really did write this material as if he believed no one was ever going to read it.  

I return to something I said in my last post: what is compelling in memoir is the sense that the writer is being brutally honest, writing from life; yet would we all, being brazenly honest, be able to achieve this level of readerly compulsion? There is a thoughtful narrative design at work. There’s something to be said for how the first two volumes essentially evade the subject or subtly reinforce it through the protagonist's experimentation with alcohol. I didn’t think it required that much acuity to discern what was up though I suspected I might be speculating when I wrote my review in Trop Magazine. (Though I realized, after the fact, the subtitle of volume one was “A Death in the Family”.)

An irony that this work points out is how those remembered are often the ones we would have least wanted to remember. Yet this is what makes for an interesting memoir.

Knausgaard gives us a window onto a life that we might idealize for its whiff of--if not exotic, maybe idyllic--childhood in clean, pine scented prose, laid across snowy vales, alongside those quiet boulders and crags the color of Wheat Thins, balanced seemingly precariously over blue waters, teeming with the glottal stops and the sea scents that remove it just enough from familiarity and highlight childhood’s joys possibly exempt from the American experience. It harkens to a kind of Currier and Ives nostalgia for a turn of the century small town. I felt that I had this similar childhood to Knausgaard in so many ways, but I would not see mine as so idyllic. Maybe this appeal to American sensibilities is a projection; the idealization of a Nordic world we have never known. Beyond the terror of the father, Karl Ove’s Norwegian childhood, notwithstanding the occasional fear of the unknown, is what anyone might have wished of their own childhood. The grim shades seem manageable; even Knausgaard admits how happy he was.

So what are we to make of this narrative? You take him on his word, and read for pure pleasure. I don’t fully know where he’s going, but I trust he’ll get us there.

The Li(n)e Between Truth and Invention in Fiction

In the recent biography Updike by Adam Begley, we learn that the celebrated writer ransacked his entire life for story material. He did it religiously, assiduously. In fact, he didn’t invent anything, he merely mined his own life. I found this both a surprise and a letdown. To read Updike’s stories however, the remarkable observation and acuity with detail perhaps make up for a deficiency in inventiveness.

What I’ve learned from reading Updike is that a fiction writer needs to have a painter’s eye for detail, and this can (or used to) be enough to carry a short story. Maybe my disappointment with Updike is that he hadn’t done more than this—he made fiction look so easy just using the basic tools of life experience--admittedly not a very exciting life, at that.

Contrast this to Alice Munro, in her last collection, Dear Life, she has an addendum onto the final four stories, that they are to be read as essentially biographical. For whatever reason, I have always assumed her stories are autobiographical. Why would I assume this for one writer, but not another?

Maybe there’s a lot to be said for a writer who can take the day to day of their life experiences for story material. If most people did this, I feel like we’d have incredibly boring stories. But as soon as you call it memoir, it changes the game (Just look at Knausgaard). Perhaps as a fiction writer, you are in one or the other camp.

Awhile back I must have decided I was in one camp—invention—versus that of using material from my life for fiction. Let’s call them inventors or lifers. I believe I’m incapable of writing a fiction from life, period. I just call it memoir. And because I’ve always coveted Updike’s writing, I assumed he had a natural way with invention.

Jim Shepard’s short story approach, as far as I can tell, is to research a subject that fascinates him, and imagine a story from that. It’s possible some of Shepard’s personal life creeps in to these stories, but really, how much? For example, the details of his recent 2013 Best American Short Stories story accumulate and deliver you somewhere that an Updike-ian story would and could not. So much in Shepard’s work is joyfully inventive, and I think it is in this kind of discovery that a writer makes, rather than the prosaic details of a less than fascinating life, that are what provide the transcendence that can elevate fiction. What’s convincing is the voice, and the fantastical elements within realism, or maybe it’s a transcendence of realism.

Stories that are invented need to be convincing, or some element of the writing has to lift it above mere narrative. Is what Updike pulled off the opposite of this–that his attention to detail makes the story convincing?

I find it interesting that almost all writing of anything of psychological depth is interrogated in terms of “did this really happen?” This might be a credit to the skills of the writer; isn’t there something to being able to transmute life into a story?

What is behind these arguments and discussions about whether a fictional story “really happened” or not, is that it might make the work more compelling. Because there is less at stake, the detail carries the story. Also, a key to a story written from life is its engagement with a gossip quality. Once we know it is based on life, there’s a curious desire to figure out who the characters are based on.

With invention, the writer is relying more on alchemy of a sort. Writing from life, the story is the material. Writing an invented scenario, the material is the story (is this a canard?). Maybe the language enters into the efficacy of the telling, but at some level, the narrative can’t involve distracting language. Is it possible to write a memoir to the level that transcends the language? This speculation could be entering the curious avenue of beliefs. Does Updike’s fiction now seem more compelling to know that all this stuff in his hundreds of stories actually happened in his life?

For me, there’s more of a charge out of writing from what I don’t know. I explored this extensively in an earlier post, “Against Personal Experience”. Something I did not say in that piece was that living life might tend to make you more aware of possibilities in your writing.

Updike would just recycle his experience through characters’ lives. I think, in fact, Updike would essentially rewrite the experience as a story, but he would not place the characters in Afghanistan, or have them drive trucks in Nebraska, for example.

This is not the same thing as invention, on the face of it. I will use the psychological elements of an interaction, but not the setting or scenario. So is it simply that writers are merely using these psychological elements in more or less invented situations? Is this distinction too unclear?

What these questions might actually be getting at is the authority of the writer, how writing seems to establish a benchmark on a detail or an incident from an actual life (or rather involving many lives). If the ancillary characters (based on real people) don’t see themselves as particularly involved or invested in that incident, as they may or may not be, they will feel slighted no matter what is said. The subjective encapsulation will never be enough, or it will be too much. In Updike’s fiction, generally, this seems to be the result; he often waited years to publish some of his more scandalous stories. He still wrote it, but what he wasn’t able to reveal he avoided publishing. If readers who are undeniable subjects of a story question it, it’s like questioning the version that is being told, since it is plainly, unavoidably, subjective.

Double Barrels: Political Humor and a Double Review

It's been a good few weeks for placing work. This week, my satire, "Kim Jong-un's Unread Spam Emails to Obama" is appearing in The Higgs Weldon, assuring that I'll never step foot in North Korea. Also, a double review of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle: Book One and Tao Lin's Taipei is to appear in Trop Magazine, assuring that I'll never undertake reviewing two books in one piece again without being paid an extremely exorbitant sum. Also, I've updated my website publications page.

One Star Reviews

The skeptic’s approach to selecting a novel to read from among those that have been hyped to death and promoted by their irrepressible publishers? Look at the one star reviews (on Amazon) first.

These reviews certainly provide a lot of wildly subjective takes. But you learn to read them, and must practice a subtle discernment to tap the sincere ones (if anyone giving a book in a review one star can be sincere), and if nothing else, the general consensus offers an honest and straightforward take. A smattering of one star reviews by a bunch of general readers tell me more about a book than a lofty drubbing by Michiko Kakutani.

My approach could apply to any novel, usually one I’m on the fence about. This is not counter-intuitive, as the novel in question may be from an author whose previous book did not excite me, which almost justifies in my mind the one star reviews I’m curious to read.[1]

I read one star reviews as a way of finding a book to read that I might ultimately come to love. I find I often want to read a novel because it has many one star reviews. In fact, because of my prurient curiosity, I’m probably more inclined to consider reading it if no one likes it. If it’s a book I’m certain I’m going to read anyway, good or bad reviews, I’ll likely only read the one star reviews hoping to glean some essential truth of the work. Here I will point out that when I refer to one star reviewed books, these are the ones in which the number of positive reviews (five stars) are relatively balanced by the number of negative reviews (one star) of the book. These books tend to be the ones that I really like, which must say something about my tastes. Maybe that I’m the text book demographic that follows the latest literary hype.

One star reviewed books tend to speak to me as a possibly misunderstood genius (Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke: 40 one stars, 40 five stars), intentionally interesting snobbery or unappreciated intellectualism (Norman Rush’s Mating: 19 one stars, 34 five stars--I recall that it had more one stars--maybe Norman Rush fans came to the cause), typically brilliant and air tight prose in the service of what-was-the-author-thinking (Philip Roth’s The Humbling: 12 one stars, 9 five stars), or not reaching the bar set by their hype (Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, which has an almost equal split: 306 one star, and 304 five star).

What would be very helpful for readers, though horrifying, I’m sure, for most writers--would be a search option for number of stars reviewed. Because if a book only has five star reviews, then it is safe to say no one is being honest about it, or no one is willing to speak of what might be wrong with it. I like a bit of flaw, a little weird, some character imperfection. I don’t think any book is perfect; I know no book is perfect. If the reviews are predominantly five star reviews, the book in question is most likely the literary equivalent of milquetoast. There are the books that have been around awhile with NO one star reviews. If I do read one of these only high count starred review novels, I read it with a strangely skewed, cautiously skeptical eye.

I’m not sure negative reviews matter. If anyone wants to read it, they will, no matter what critics say. I think now you could rarely find a novel that is so bad it’s received only one star reviews, and maybe a few sad two star reviews, and a paltry one or two three star reviews, but I could be wrong. There again, I’d say maybe the consensus is generally accurate. I’m sure some writers secretly fear this happening to their work. I suspect just this kind of speculation can make a writer with a lack of self-confidence pretty much never dare offer their work up for scrutiny.

This reminds me of the flap with those writers who were posting positive reviews under pseudonyms on all of their friends’ fledgling novels (Of course this behavior is not privy to just writers). As if the presence of the positive reviews would cancel the negative reviews. But those one star reviews are there for a reason, too. On the other hand, the more voices, good or bad, the more that people are talking about the book. In which case, the truth of the notion that there is no such thing as bad publicity. After all, you have to sort out the overly strident and bone-to-pick one stars from the frank, I-just-didn’t-love-it one stars. Though I do think the honest ones might sting a little.

And sometimes, no matter the reviews, I just don’t like the book. Or I love it. I read it, at least.

---

[1] This novel might be one that has been out long past its shelf life before I can expect it to go to paperback (when I’ll more willingly shell out to buy it and test my theory). And thus, in spite of negative reviews, the book must be selling well, or the publisher is trying to unload the extra copies they unwisely produced and recoup their losses. It seems that this is a tactic publishers use when the book isn’t any good.

Hate This Book!

Many of the people who write about books are probably engaged in writing their own, and/or would like to publish someday, and with the way things are now, why would one stomp on the hand that might feed them?

Jacob Silverman in Slate asks for more critical response from these book reviewers, though clearly, anyone who is a critic would have to be passionate enough about the work to understand the process by which it is created, and this explains the sympathetic and friendly strain in criticism. His argument seems to come down on how social media is really becoming too friendly for any real criticism. It’s easier to not dwell on a book you don’t like, and far more uplifting (as well as positive to one’s career, perhaps) to review one you do like. This is nuanced, I believe, what he’s asking for, but it’s not like every reviewer is thinking of unicorns and rainbows. Just look at B. R. Myers in The Atlantic. I don’t agree with everything he says, but much of it is right on, particularly this piece. 

On the other hand, what I like about this piece from Lev Grossman is that you can almost be certain which book he’s talking about, and it’s a shame that he doesn’t want to come right out and admit it, because the writer in question has so much apparent power in the industry, such that if Grossman did say something, he could imagine losing his position at Time, his publishing contract, his career. Might I add, nothing could be as bad as a book that came out last year with art in the title, but with art nowhere else in the book. 

Insistence On Persistence

This is maybe an echo on the last post, which I put out hastily, but with no elaboration. This is the elaboration.

Reading the Wallace Shawn interview in the latest Paris Review, I thought, it’s hard to imagine this writer would not be doing what he is and have become good at it, if he was merely pompous. Which is apparently what Wallace Shawn is accused of being, pompous.

Barring a stable set of readers, I realize I’m not going to appear to a random reader to have anything new to say--and maybe I’m not. But if my work touches one person, it must be worth the effort. Then again, you have to overcome a lot of skepticism to deign to believe you can add to the conversation.

That’s one of the first steps in being a writer, and maybe it’s too falsely achieved--that quality of believing you have something to say. We’d sometimes like to accuse others in the struggle that they should consider if they really have anything of worth to contribute, but we could heed Wallace Shawn here:

“. . . without writers, humanity might be trapped in a swamp of idiotic, unchanging provincial cliches. Yes, there are writers who merely reinforce people’s complacency, but a writer like Rachel Carson inspired the activism of millions, and writers like Lady Murasaki, Milton, and Joyce have recorded people’s brains! And for any writers to exist at all, there must surely be a tradition of writing. Maybe in order for one valuable writer to exist, there must be a hundred others who aren’t valuable at all, but it isn’t possible at any given moment for anyone to be sure who the valuable one is.”

(Wallace Shawn, The Paris Review, #201, The Art of Theatre No. 17)

Who am I to say whose efforts aren’t worthwhile--including myself?

I like to think there is something to persistence, on the other hand there’s the notion that if you repeatedly keep trying to do something and repeatedly fail at it, that this is the definition of crazy. I’d also sometimes like to believe that I don’t have a set tolerance level, that I’ll keep trying to achieve an elusive (seeming) goal without ever calling the attempt into question. But I’m guessing tenacity pays off. Every story or piece of writing didn’t exist at one time, and after it did, it maybe will have taken dozens of attempts to get it noticed (i.e., published). Writing, in this way, becomes the penultimate illustration of this theory. I’d already more or less given up on many stories (not with cause) simply because I spent years sending them out to no avail, and by some fluke I sent one out two or three years after I’d given up on it long enough to come back to it, take it off life support, and send it flying into the void again--for no discernible logic--not that I ever stopped believed in in said story. Another self-serving notion I cop to is that “it just wasn’t time,” or, “maybe next time,” which are really ways of persisting at something even though, clearly, there is no apparent justification for the hope.

Unless the fact of the story eventually finding a home is one.

The kicker of this is that I still try. I still doubt I should, or say I’ll give up, but as time passes, I write more that gets me excited again, and while sifting through the new pile, I find something buried in the old pile. I’ll think, this hasn’t been sent out in two years, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it (hubris has no place in the determination to get published)--in fact, I could just change it here and here, and I’ll send it out. To date, that’s how most of my published fiction got picked up. So even if I had to spend a lot of time going through the slog of postage, contest entry fees, grosses of 20 pound 96 bright paper and countless unenlightening trips to the office supply store, I can’t really say it wasn’t worth the effort.

So, maybe I’m feeling particularly resilient these days, or am trying to coddle myself into thinking I am this way. I just don’t know if I would get anywhere if I wasn’t at least paying lip service to this theme of indomitable persistence.

Not Just Another . . .

. . . 9/11 memoir, or is it? “The innocuous premise establishes There’s a Road to Everywhere Except Where You Came From, Bryan Charles’s atypical survivor memoir, is the classic struggle of a fledgling writer pursuing his dreams to New York City, and rife are the pains that accompany that pivotal confrontation with one’s future life of work. But there’s something more devastating in the memoir, told almost incidentally, in terse, and at times white-knuckle prose.” Read my full review in the latest Rain Taxi, available here.

Reading Geoff Dyer

The essays in Otherwise Known as the Human Condition often seem fired off with the effortlessness of a pool shark making clever bank shots. Elusively show-offy, though also using a self-effacing sleight of hand, Geoff Dyer has made his own genre of personal essay, keeping the reader engaged the same way as someone very interesting at a party. This is a writer’s trick, a necessity, and a boon, to be continuously interesting. It’s hard not to find Dyer’s voice appealing.

Dyer’s style feels sprung in one sitting--and that’s not bad, if anything, you feel envious for how easily he cuts loose. In Dyer’s work, there is a feeling of the pre-emptive, that he’s writing in this manner for when someone decides to scrutinize it. Having what appears as a “loose” style might be an excuse for avoiding explaining that one is in fact more rigorous than they seem. There's something appealing about Dyer's attitude, which is a kind of hands off, You can't hold me accountable for being so freewheeling. But there is a danger with the encomium, which is what Dyer resorts to most often in his essays: too much praise can smell sickeningly sweet.

Does the ability to write whatever one wants, as breezily as it seems to flow from the pen, then become in danger of sacrificing rigor and putting the ego on display? It feels like Dyer toes this line where a certain amount of reigning oneself in is necessary. Yet if your writing is consistently entertaining, you must have an innate understanding of how far you are willing to go before you embarrass yourself. Sure, it's simple, leave those parts out. But Dyer might be the writer he is for the ability to leave those parts in.

Dyer claims a boredom with the quotidian, which is only doubted by his apparent enthusiasm and engagement with his material: literature, music, photographs. The collection is divided into five essay categories to reflect this broad range of everyman, John Berger-esque interest.

Dyer’s assessment of The Great Gatsby, for example “[...] the writing in these pages is strikingly inept”, may be the opinion of many who have gone back to reread that acclaimed classic, but only Dyer gets away with saying it, perhaps because his tone is good-natured--besides, how can he pick a fight with the dead? Dyer’s interpretation requires him to re-read Fitzgerald and assess from different periods of his life of reading him. This almost doesn’t seem worth the trouble with many beloved classics, because after awhile one loses interest in revisiting writers they’ve already spent more than their fair share of time in the attempt to disprove prejudiced negative opinions. But you can be glad Dyer makes the effort. That Dyer returns to a historical fiction is intriguing, and it makes one realize that Fitzgerald, who hasn’t yet fallen out of the canon, is surely teetering on the edge.

When it comes to writing about music, primarily jazz, Dyer the enthusiast can drown out the music with his history of listening, perhaps without adding anything substantial to our understanding. When Dyer mentions the same obscure ECM jazz recordings (in three separate pieces in the collection!), and attempts to answer the question, "Is jazz dead?", the reader suspects enthusiasm has trumped authority. So heavily larded is Dyer’s playlist with Keith Jarrett, that he stretches his credibility to the point where the reader is numbed to the praise. Also, there are Dyer’s silly statements, witty though they may have been in the composition: "The history of jazz has been the history of people picking themselves off the floor." What that means, I'm not sure, and the tone is Dyer imitating Amis, which happens intermittently, here.

Though you can see why Dyer is drawn to the photographers William Gedney, and Miroslav Tichy, artists who improvised and never quite finished what they started or were committed to it long enough to be taken as masters of their art. Tichy seems to have become an artist in spite of his intentions, which have more to do with satisfying prurient urges (he took stalker-ish telephoto shots of women on home made cameras). And he has the outsider position of a Henry Darger, without the discipline. Gedney was always starting a writing project, though it seems it was ultimately easier to mess around behind the camera than to write.

As for his interest in photography, I impatiently read this section (“Visuals”) and wondered why it’s one quarter of the book, and why it’s the front end. My sense is that Dyer is so enthusiastically drawn to photographs and their explication, but without a slew of examples, it isn’t always clear what he’s talking about. And thus, some of Dyer’s pronouncements seem unearned, even overstated. It might be a great niche for Dyer to be a student of photography, but his airy interpretations, no matter how much they are accurate and true for the author, they don’t add to my knowledge or interest as a reader.

Dyer is preoccupied with Americanness and specifically, with the fixation of American writers on the novel; though as a writer of novels, and an outsider, British, he obviously, also has the fixation. Dyer highlights the particularly American phenomenon of how writers aren't taken seriously unless they are heavy hitting novelists. He also works this idea into a discussion of Iraq war memoirs and a perception of the damning strait-jacket of British class distinctions for prose writing. And his critical, yet somehow still praising, take on Susan Sontag, in response to the proclamation she made for herself as a "storyteller", boils down to what discerning readers of Sontag may think: "To put the matter crassly, Sontag couldn't tell a story to save her life." Dyer has a penchant for going after the dead.

You often hear these arguments from a less than successful novelist (Dyer) who has made a name for himself as an essayist (I hesitate to say, critic). The novel is held up for canonization in the history of letters because fiction is the ultimate entertainment--soothing medicine--to make readers forget the pain of reality. Or it allows them the comfort of wallowing, from a safe distance, in someone else’s misery. Writers want to be in that canon--or it's the fastest way, one viable way, into possible posterity. No matter that the works there are often merely popular long before they would ever be praised as literature. Dyer gets this point, and rails about it a few times, and then you can sense he recognizes that he's established his foothold at least in the current readership of non-fiction.

Spouting Edifying Brilliance

The work ethic is close to the one of craft. In the Midwest, where I’m from, it’s hard to escape the notion that you can't get anywhere unless you are willing to work hard at it. As much as I’d occasionally like to believe in innate genius, I no longer think there are so many of them walking around spouting edifying brilliance fully formed. If anything is lacking from the discussion of what makes for brilliant writers, it’s really about how hard they have had to work to get there. Craft, being tied to the notion of work and sweat, probably gets a sniff once in awhile from the unjustifiably entitled, and yet, at the risk of sounding utterly un-hip and downright backwater patriotic, I think hard work is one of the only true legacies of this country’s striving and success. (Granted, capitalism has thrived on this exploitation, but perhaps you get my drift.) Thus, it’s not surprising that an outsider would disdain this humble legacy that has helped foster the MFA program proliferation in the U.S. This is all a long way of saying that I really love and applaud Mark McGurl’s take down of Elif Batuman’s critique of his book, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing.

West of Here

My review of Jonathan Evison’s West of Here is due in the forthcoming issue of Rain Taxi: “Bearing the hallmarks of an epic yarn, the novel boasts frontier exploits, Native American mysticism, Bigfoot, and an environmental cause wound into its myriad character stories.” Further, the novel manages to ask if a group of industrious settlers can be a detriment to the well-being of their descendants. Sound like a stretch? Read my review of this engrossing and immensely entertaining epic.

The print issue of Rain Taxi (Vol. 16 No.2, Summer 2011 (#62)) is available now.

Cheese Pizza Effect

Nothing is more disheartening to a fiction writer than a rejection letter with a carefully worded reasoning that interprets the entirety of their three hundred and seventy-five page novel based on thirteen percent of it. And yet this is the norm in the industry.

There is often talk of how if As I Lay Dying were submitted to a publisher today, it would never be published. Of course the assumption is of this being a first novel by an unknown writer (it was in fact the sixth novel of the, in 1930, not yet well-known William Faulkner), and that the narrative is just too formula defying and experimental so that no publisher with a tenuous bottom line would touch it. This may be true, but would Faulkner have written As I Lay Dying today if he was also reading “How to Get Published” books?

A formulaic approach can ruin a narrative, yet so often we are told that the “partial” (usually the first 50 pages), unless it hits the benchmark items on an idealized fiction checklist, will fail to be picked up. See any “How to get published” or “How to land an agent” books out there, for example, and invariably these suggestions, as specious and broad as they may be, are touted as “keys” to a novel’s success. If you have a narrative that evades these rules, you may begin to doubt your inspiration--as non-formulaic and deeply satisfying as was the writing of your novel--and may try to second guess your first fifty pages, as that is likely the first and only impression most agents and editors will have of your work.

The problem with formulas is that, beyond an MFA or years of trial and error writing several novels, they don’t assume a writer can trust their own voice. One needs to learn their own rhythms and patterns, and what it is they like, or, more emphatically, what they love. Ideally, one is better off writing a lot so that they come to know their own predilections (know thyself) and discover their own formula--rather than ascribing to one from without. Practice, not formula.

Publishing may try to play it safe, but too many rules and guidelines ignore the subjectivity of the creative act. The inspiration. In design we called this phenomenon the cheese pizza effect: since there are too many options to satisfy everyone, play it safe and order only cheese. I could stretch the metaphor and say you’re either lucky, or maybe boring, if you actually prefer cheese pizza.

For short stories, I wrote about placing emphasis on the opening sentence so that an unwitting reader will want to read further. I think similar narrative strategies can apply to longer fiction, and some rationale is better than none, but re-thinking the first fifty pages of a narrative that works can feel like self-sabotage. Yet, after repeated rejection, how can you say what you have works? As Stephen Elliot in The Daily Rumpus (e-mail newsletter) says: “If you write every day for a long time you should get to the point where you know when your story is working and when it isn't. Not that something is perfect, or can't be improved upon, but certainly if it's good at not [. . .] Otherwise, what have you learned?”

There are plenty of novels out there that wouldn’t have been published but for the singular connection an editor or agent made to it, and few of these novels can be reduced to the items on a checklist. Drawing in a reader is not ultimately only about the success of the first fifty pages screaming out the triumphant success of the novel, though it’s hard not to think about the possibility in preparation for when someone finally does request the manuscript.

That powerful transaction of writer to reader, and reader to writer, is more important, and completely unquantifiable, and completely non-formulaic. There are no shortcuts. Write a good novel first, and you will have a better chance of getting the wheels rolling.

I think as writers we should assume that our ideal reader is out there, someone who is interested in the art that we create. A great percentage of what we do is to rake through hot coals to find a compelling idea because it inspires us; an idea does have to motivate one enough to invest the time. The practice of writing fiction can’t be about filling in a checklist. The pursuit of the craft is private and unique, one shouldn’t try to out-wit an industry. Just make art, not cheese pizza.

Memorable Nonfiction 2010

Reading feeds the desire to write, and writing in itself is often an extension of reading. This explains why I read novels above most other works. Since I read so few biographies, memoirs, essay collections, and letters, I’m more selective, though maybe I ask of these works the same thing I ask of novels: that they feed my thinking and get me motivated to write. Three non-fiction books stood out for me this year.

The best biographers give you the life complete, baggage and all, written with no distracting bones to pick with their subject. The biographer takes on the self-erasing task of subsuming themselves in the life story, and sifting through the expected mundanity in order to reveal the exceptional. This could be difficult to accomplish for anyone compelled by their subject and trying to interpret the life, yet a degree of fandom is essential, as well as restraint. One of the best literary biographies for having covered this ground, and yet not shying away from either critical assessment, or candid and sometimes difficult judgment, is Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life. Though I was mostly a casual reader of Cheever’s well-known short stories before I picked this bio up, I came to admire the conflicted writer who, at heart, made a unique and solitary venture of his fictional output over a long and sometimes troubled life. This reading sent me to Cheever’s overshadowed novels.

David Shield’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto had me riffing on its provocations. Like any good book of philosophy, this one forces a reader’s reaction. The numbered paragraphs are widely borrowed from attributed sources and compiled to construct a number of dubious arguments (the novel is dead, “sampling” is the future of literature, truth is more worthwhile than fiction). Nevertheless, the resulting compendium is provocative for the daring of the broad sampling ( a preponderance for several quotable essayists), often rewritten to make Shield’s points, which proves or at least validates that his de-contextualization experiment might just be a hybrid form of memoir-slash-manifesto. Though it also provides a convincing case that the novel is alive enough to provoke diatribes against it.

The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940, are almost too specific, direct and intimate, like catching one side of an eavesdropped conversation, that a guilty taste of voyeurism is unavoidable. What comes through the young Beckett’s missives is a hubristic certainty, a kind of unassailable arrogance, as well as an authority tempered by doubt and perseverance, as when he declaims to his cousin Morris Sinclair: “Here I strut about, I cannot and will not do otherwise, and have no idea if God helps me or not.” One would have been honored and maybe intimidated to have received from Beckett a multi-lingual letter laced with multiple literary references. But even a partially committed Beckett completist will be curious to thumb through this first of four projected volumes for prime examples of an endangered, if not yet extinct, form of writing from a modern master.

Boxing The Demons

The tradition of maligning short fiction could have begun with John Cheever, following one of his early and persistent influences, Hemingway, though Hemingway might not have made a distinction between novels and stories as greater and lesser forms. In Blake Bailey’s expansive biography Cheever: A Life, it is apparent that Cheever thought writing short stories for the New Yorker year after year was not a worthy path for a serious writer. Yet a handful of his stories seem to have changed the fiction terrain forever after. In the cult of fiction hegemony, it’s sometimes difficult to separate the writer from their mythology, making them superhuman. All the easier if they’re dead. The man who writes his every naked personal desire and whim in his copious journals (published posthumously), and produces an estimable body of work (the stories, numbering in the hundreds, and five novels), is surprisingly humanized when the veneer is stripped away.

It’s as if with Cheever, the themes--family, middle class livelihood, the desire for love, the lift of grace--never changed, and though he turned out sublime stories in “The Swimmer” and “Goodbye, My Brother,” knowing how long he struggled with the first novel, it was clear the major struggle, the ultimate performance, was going to be in a sustained work. The short story becomes a kind of trial run, a small performance.

Here, in Cheever’s first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, is Rosalie, the young boarder at the Wapshot’s house, ruminating on thoughts of her date’s “secretive life”:

The thought of the picnic hamper reminded her of his plain, white-haired mother, who would have sent along something of herself in the basket--watchful, never disapproving, but saddened by the pleasures of her only son. He had his way. His neat, bleak and ugly bedroom was the axis of their house and the rapport between this man and his parents was so intense and tacit that it seemed secretive to Rosalie. Every room was dominated by souvenirs of his growth; guns, golf clubs, trophies from schools and camps and on the piano some music he had practiced ten years ago. The cool house and his contrite parents were strange to Rosalie and she thought that his white shirt that morning smelled of the yellow varnished floors where he took up his secretive life with Ma and Pa.

The prose signals the inner life of a woman who herself has secrets, and has not yet arrived into full self-possession. Mildly glum and resigned, Rosalie sees herself, too, in what she observes. The reader senses Cheever’s compassionate understanding of his character and a desire to reveal her beating heart.

Cheever was committed to the novel as an art form. He was not merely distancing himself in a kind of performance, which short stories really can be, and many novels simply are. In a literary novel, one gets a sense of who the writer is; it’s as if one gets an insight on the ruthlessness of the writer’s psyche.

The writer's sensibility is ever dominant in the biography, but it’s not just honesty, and not only brutal honesty (which would aim to call others on their shit but not necessarily to face it within oneself--a quality popularly known as “self-denial”). This sharpened sense of the interior life of one’s characters comes from first hand knowledge.

Cheever, who fueled himself on gin, whisky, and an unusual amount of self-loathing coupled with a genuine dog-like (dogged?) loyalty to loved ones, is initially conveyed to have the charm of a genial drunk. A self-destructiveness in Cheever’s journey comes in, maybe as more of a passive self-annihilation, through alcoholism. I couldn’t help but think on many occasions, “What a sad, miserable life.” Yet his life had its joys, too.

A writer who cannot transform their torments, or cannot get far enough past the source to risk a possibility for some more contented life, is trapped perhaps by their own image and expectations. Cheever is frequently characterized as a narcissist--the tragedy in such a figure is that they are their own worst enemy. They can never fully lift themselves up; there is no solid source within. Life has to be reconstituted incessantly from the next ego stroke. This is the forest for the trees analogy: one cannot see the world from staring at their own life for so long. Yet the ability to draw from life seems to be a therapy, too.

In trying to understand what draws me to novels that have a gravity, perhaps honesty is the prevalent quality: emotional, psychological, and spiritual. Maybe it’s as accurate to say, this is the writerly aspiration, or should be; what one should want to project in the best of their work. It’s the built-in bull-shit detector not even simply to oneself, which is where Hemingway’s seems to have short circuited; Hemingway was perpetually boxing his demons (in both senses of the word). The result is often transparent: retarded self-defensiveness posing as confidence, otherwise known as machismo. For Cheever, boxing his demons was more like having this box in an attic room where he could occasionally look in on it with cautious surprise and curious wonder.

Cheever’s struggles were not just something he could write himself out of, nor like so many celebrated writers who have followed him, was he satisfied with intellectualizing the grist for his mill (which is, ironically, perhaps an effort at self-preservation). The Wapshot Chronicle reveals he had the wisdom to acknowledge this, while reinforcing the complexity that centered him. This flawed human being, however tragic, was able to get his hands around the heart.

Feast Of Excess

There is a notion that a novel has to be as healthy and bland as kale or else it isn’t literature. As if the unspoken rule is that it must only be sternly serious and if it happens to be enjoyable, then that must be an oversight on the writer’s part. This seems to be the root of a lot of the criticism of Ian Mc Ewan’s Solar, for what it is not.

That Mc Ewan’s novels are elaborately constructed marvels of prose and entertaining is a testament to his skill. (This could be lost on this NYTimes book reviewer.) If Solar does not reach the same high watermark that everyone was expecting after Atonement or On Chesil Beach, the writing is the epitome of Mc Ewan’s stylistic precision. Still, Mc Ewan is going for a laugh any time he describes a glutton’s eagerly anticipated meal:

“She took away the bowl with the three cold lozenges and set the main course down before him. Four wedges of skinless chicken breast interleaved with three minute steaks, the whole wrapped in bacon, with a honey and cheese topping, and served with twice-roasted jacket potatoes already impregnated with butter and cream cheese.”

Solar is an indulgent feast of satire.

Solar harkens back to the style of Amsterdam, operating in a comedic-tragic register which also recalls the bold mischief of Mc Ewan's early short stories. There, the characters are young and depraved, making sense of the world from a limited understanding of it. What those life lessons earn the protagonist of Solar, Michael Beard, is a deficit; forever after he will go to extremes to avoid humiliation at the hands of an associate, using whatever vengeance at his means, getting away with whatever he can. Youthful curiosity and glory is eventually replaced with the fading returns of post-middle-age survival. Beard isn’t a character easy to like, but he seems prototypically human, and it is as easy to laugh at him as it is to have hope for him in his failings.

Mc Ewan wallows in Beard’s excesses. This is the opposite of the life-saving and affirming protagonist in Saturday; Beard is a man who on the face of his accomplishments (Nobel Prize winning physicist) might be enviable, but is flailing with a dangerous lack of scruples. Maybe the degree to which a reader is willing to follow this reprehensible character is how much he or she recognizes the folly of human endeavor.

Self-consciousness drives Mc Ewan’s protagonists; he has consistently perfected the limited third person point of view, or, as James Wood has it, free indirect style. In particular, this consciousness allows Mc Ewan to confront moral quandary and force the character to interact with their world on a finite scale. The depth of this consciousness can be almost uncomfortably perverse and unbridled, backed up by the scientific mind that allows Mc Ewan to focus in on the protagonist’s whims with a dissecting knife. That this consciousness is rendered in more depth and literary-ness than the person having the experience would probably have is playing to the satire.

The rendering of Beard’s gluttony is anachronistic, almost indecent details applied to a novel of a lofty and timely subject (Global warming). The effect is ornate overstatement, words larded on because Mc Ewan can, that feels defiant--in a sense, he’s showing off--but it’s a sure-footed, often hilarious, touch.

Much of the narrative of Solar relies too readily on the withholding of information. In a more high minded work it might be considered manipulative, but this is light treatment of a heavy topic. The problem for Mc Ewan is taking a subject too earnestly and becoming heavy-handed, bogged down in technical jargon and plot machinations as he did in Saturday. In Solar, he applies his research to make the stakes relevant, though the reader may find that these stakes are largely misconstrued. Beard is the center of his own universe.

Solar begins tentatively, with a back-story summary, though this exposition provides signposts for the novel’s departures. If a novel is a journey, there are enough clues from Mc Ewan that the reader will be taken on an adventure. And ultimately, Solar achieves what a novel should, engaging the reader in a world that suspends in wonder, be that wonder at the skill of the writer, or at the anticipatory pleasure of what is to come. The repast can be a feast to binge on, or a satisfying meal to savor. It’s all good.

Reality Hunger's Discontent

The death warrant for the novel always seems to be a celebration. Literary forms grow and transform over time; undeniably, the novel may be the most open, enigmatic and constantly challenging of forms. Why would there be a need to pronounce the novel dead if it wasn’t in fact alive and well? One rarely hears novelists proclaiming the end of the memoir, or the end of poetry.

In fact, so often people have a vehement dislike for and anger towards “the novel”--to which I often think: what did the novel ever do to you? Because it is a difficult form that defeats. Maybe what ultimately defeats is a lack of commercial success.

The benchmark of commercial viability is difficult to come by. Only a few books make it to the darling list. One of the results of this is the attempt to invent a new form. Another is to go meta.

Because the form has existed for so long, so effectively, and in light of technology, it seems viable to question the novel’s means and methods are no longer relevant or somehow wanting. Experimental writers take this up as a badge of honor, subverting narrative in the “traditional” sense (The failure to play the commercial game is to buck tradition, to deny what a marketing machine expects and searches for).

To identify a benchmark as baseline is usually the best most writers can wish for; then, to remain undaunted in the long haul of writing a novel, to say nothing of writing one of originality, is a meager dream. This might explain the proliferation of that type of novel that people supposedly want to read, the block buster, which is usually anti-original, formulaic, genre work.

To imagine that anyone is so in love with “reality” or aching for it, we have reality TV programming. But don’t imagine that those reality narratives aren’t shaped into some from of drama in the editing room (to lesser or greater effect--I’m willing to bet that among the writers on those programs is a novelist or two).

Without the anointment of commercial success, and having failed to live up to the demands of the form, so called re-invention is necessary. This is also known as a good career move.

David Shield’s Reality Hunger appropriates samples, sound bites, other writer’s pithy phrases out of context, and re-contextualizes them. He is utilizing the plagiaristic taboo writ large. This is the nature of the web having its influence on publishing. As with blogs, there is so much work to reference and draw from, to lead the reader to more and more information. One has to get read. The present horizon of the mobile text (the ephemeral written word on the web) means the writer can’t count on anyone getting that far into any one particular book. Yet Reality Hunger is a book, not an online text.

Reality Hunger as a text is a great idea. The style is a gimmick that provokes, seizing on the controversial aspects of recent memoir scandal (the appropriating element), as well as wrecking the house on the way out the door (the death of the novel element). But I won’t call it art.

Providing an antidote to an imagined problem is a proven marketing ploy, its effectiveness is a foregone conclusion once the publisher rallies behind it. Whatever the form of Reality Hunger is, it will never replace the novel.