Category Archives: Book Reviews!

The Book Of Other People by Zadie Smith

For the most part, the character sketches in The Book of Other People, edited by Zadie Smith, portray characters who are stuck and the writers do not offer the reader hope of their redemption. There is more emphasis on flaw than compliment or possibility. This is fine, I suppose; there is a reality in that. I like prose that is well-written, regardless of the author’s tone or the mood of the piece. It is fascinating to read characters who are corrupt and without redemption, and there is value in looking at the darker side of human nature. This anthology, a collection of character sketches, varies markedly in style, from comic book to straight prose description, and demonstrates a multiplicity of ways to create character. I’ve struggled with writing this paper, though I did come away from this book with (if not an epiphany), at least a reaction from that part of my brain that mulls over the questions regarding the why of my writing life. I’d like to look closely at a few of the sketches, before I share that with you. Three pieces that speak to the differing possibilities for creating character can be found in a closer look at David Mitchell’s “Judith Castle”, George Saunders’ “Puppy”, and Dave Eggers “Theo”.
“Judith Castle” is a first person unreliable narrative that relies on stream of consciousness and interaction with minor characters to demonstrate that unreliability. In seeing how Judith thinks throughout, the big lie we learn she’s been telling herself in the end does not surprise us. We see example after example of how she ignores the truth and constructs her own reality, how she justifies her actions, examples of her distorted perception of herself. Oh, but we are moved by how pathetic she appears in the end sitting in the lobby of a man’s office, a man who faked his own death to evade her, who she has constructed this elaborate fantasy of true love about. She is finally revealed for how pathetic and blind she is. We see her vulnerability, wonder if she is even capable of the truth, consider how the knowledge of it might destroy her and are moved to pity. The entire story is in Judith Castle’s point of view, yet we are able to see through her self-deceptions and delusions.
In George Saunders’ “Puppy”, we are able to see the lack of ability to see herself clearly that Callie possesses. We see this because we see her and her home through the eyes of the Marie, who is the second narrative voice in the sketch. We see the filth she lives in. We see the awful image of her hyperactive son tied up in the back yard. The point of view is third person limited omniscient and switches between being in Marie’s point of view and Callie’s. When Callie asks “Who loves him more than anyone else in the world loved him” (179) ,referring to her son who is chained like a dog in the back yard, we see the complexity of the situation for having seen both what Callie sees and how she lives and what Marie sees and how she lives. They are both of them pathetic in their own ways. Neither character sees herself clearly. We see both of them from the perspective of self and other.
Theo, the main character of Dave Eggers’ “Theo” is an allegorical character, a mountain that wakes along with two other mountains. He is one of two males in the trio and is heart-broken when the she-mountain, Magdalena, does not choose him for a love, but chooses the third mountain, Soren, instead. Theo has no specific dialogue and is painted without much specificity in form or nature. The reader is left to imagine him as we may, which works, since the idea is that Theo could be any man (or woman for that matter), “One day he discovered he was not satisfied. He wanted the full attention of love. ..He walked over glaciers and through unknown craters, he bathed in cold black lakes, and he caught flocks of birds from the sky and ate them with something like hunger.” The word painting is broad and there is a fairytale quality in word choice. There is no actual dialogue; any conversations that occur are summarized.
There are twenty three sketches in the anthology, all offering some variation on character creation. The very first pages of my novel were in third person. It took me several months to realize that first person was going to make for a more powerful voice. The narrator has to be reliable, of course, since the story is an honest reflection on her own transformation. I’m happy with that.
How did this book stir my musings about the how and why of writing? In a philosophical way more than from a point of craft. I do want to create characters who are real, flawed, but I’ve had enough of bleak “realities” regarding the various characteristics that make us human. I am interested in writing books that emphasize our potential without ignoring the reality that life is struggle and we are

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Some past posts to keep you making time:
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

Man Walks Into A Room by Nicole Krauss

I chose to read Man Walks Into A Room by Nicole Krauss because History of Love had stirred me to writerly adoration and because the blurb I read promised a good story. A thirty-something college professor disappears and is discovered wandering the dessert. Turns out he has a tumor pressing on his brain that causes total amnesia. When the tumor is removed, he doesn’t regain his complete memory. Though he is thirty-six, he can’t remember anything past sometime during his twelfth year. I was not disappointed by the intellectual quandaries posed regarding memory and identity in this novel, and though the ending disappointed my romantic ideals, I understood it and it led to a way into discussing a relevant element of craft in this novel: the minor character and how time spent there can simultaneously develop the main character.
You see, as I’ve been writing the second draft of my novel, I’ve felt some guilt about not paying enough attention to some minor characters, particularly Eve’s mother, Eve’s friends Dani and Cindy, her Aunt Linda, and her son. It was in thinking about how in the end of Krauss’ novel the story seems to be as much about Samson’s wife Anna that I began to take notes about how to round out my own minor characters.
When Man Walks Into A Room opens, Anna is the loyal, loving wife who, though her husband can’t even remember meeting her anymore, still wants him. For much of the novel, Anna is present only as an image of desire that crosses Samson’s mind and that he doesn’t even know what to do with. Those moments, what he sees when he thinks of her and what she says when he calls her (or doesn’t say) connect the moments at the beginning and end of the story where she is present in the narrative, make up a character arc that parallels and deepens Samson’s own development.
The first time he calls Anna, after leaving her, from the research facility where he is a willing guineau pig, he calls her Annie instinctively.
“Where did I get that? Did I ever call you that?”
Silence. “No.”
“You don’t like it.”
“No, I do. It’s what my brother used to call me.” Samson couldn’t remember a brother, man who shared her eyes or mouth. That Anna had never mentioned her brother made Samson jealous, as if he were an old lover whose photograph she’d kept.” (Krauss 109)
At this point in the novel, Samson has left Anna. She is trying to move on with her life after being rejected by Samson, who doesn’t seem to want to know the people and events he forgot. It is ironic that it is Samson who, in a fear panic, reaches out to Anna. We don’t know exactly what is going through Anna’s mind in that “Silence” because the story is told from Samson’s point of view, but we empathize with her, we can imagine how difficult it must be to not be remembered by your own husband, to still have the memories in your head that he has lost.
Right before Samson gets the memory implanted, he reaches out to her yet again. In fact, every time he doubts or is afraid or alone, he thinks of Anna. This time, Anna speaks “clear and steady” (140) and after he’s told her that he missed her, asked if she missed him, then apologizes, she says, “It’s not a question of sorry. It happened and now we need to move on” (140). In this moment, he wants to remember her for the first time, wants to know if “he was the sort of person who took [her] elbow when cars passed on the street” (140), but he doesn’t ask and she says quietly that she has to go, then there is a long pause, after which she says, “Frank misses you” (140). Anna is present in the beginning of the novel and there is a three page epilogue at the end of the novel that is written in her perspective. For most of the story, though, she is an idea that Samson keeps returning to, trying to understand. This different but parallel suffering is just as important to make the theme of isolation meaningful as is the characterization of Samson, the main character.
Anna, Ray, Donald: they have intact memories and we only know the details about them Samson sees, and what do we find in? They are facing the same struggle Samson is. They are all trying to find ways to connect with others so as to ease their own isolation. Ray wants to transcend the limits of the mind and develop a way to transfer memories from one person to another in order to achieve true empathy. Ironically, Ray is a man deeply concerned with his own self-care. He maintains a diligent exercise schedule, eats the purest foods, and is vigilant about sleep. These seemingly meaningless details demonstrate his desperation. Is this multi-billion dollar science project fueled because he can’t reconcile himself to his own feelings of loneliness? It seems so, the way he lives like a robot, in a sterile, empty home.
So how can I use my acknowledgement of how the characters surrounding Samson make his struggle human, universal, more real to answer the discontent I’m feeling with how I’ve developed my own minor characters? As my book is a first person narrative, their heads are off limits (as in Krauss’ novel), so like in the case of Samson, it is through Eve’s eyes that we will see them. The answers to how to develop each minor character will vary and form was I write and revise. I have at least identified that in order to render Eve with more depth, she needs to consider a few people more closely, I (writer) need to give them a bit more space to speak, and in at least one case (Dani’s) the relationship needs to be reconciled..Minor characters will be a revision goal all its own, I think.

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March by Geraldine Brooks

The truth is, March was not one of the books I planned read for this mailing. It’s probably not a book I would have picked up at all on my own. My writer’s group chose it for March. To be honest, I have four papers to write for this mailing and since the last mailing I’ve read exactly four new books. March is one of them. This novel by Geraldine Brooks is written from the perspective of the father from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and attempts to some degree to characterize the famous Bronson Alcott (inventor of recess!) through the imagined character of Mr. March. Mr. March has joined the Union Forces to serve as a Chaplain to Civil War troops.
When I first realized that I would either need to write about March or read another book in a hurry (not my preferred method), a topic to write on did not come to me. As I read, I write notes in the margins of my books and in the front cover and then go back to peruse those notes when it’s time to write these critical papers. The notes in March were spare and lacking in epiphanies. What to do? Then, I remembered one topic that came up in our book group discussion and some emailing that followed about Brooks’ use of diction. The narrative and the letters March writes home are remarkably formal, proper, and restrained. One of our book group members is a librarian who during her internship years once did some transcribing of Civil War letters. After the meeting, she sent us a link to where we could read them online. Another group member replied saying how surprised he was by how the letters she transcribed really did seem to match the style of March’s letters home, his narrative: so careful and polite. This set me to thinking about how diction is to some degree part of the setting, something to be considered when writing. But, how does one consider diction? Thinking about word choice is a scholarly exercise; writing is a practice of imagination. Then I thought: A-ha! This is about voice. And this is about practice. And, A-ha! I see what works for me. And I will come back to this A-ha moment and explain, but first I’d like to look at some lines from March and some lines from my novel in order to better demonstrate what I mean.
The refined, polite diction in March is indicative of another time and the words with which March narrates and write letters home transport us to that place as much as the other descriptions Brooks’ uses to take us to a time and place unfamiliar, long past. In one letter home, Mr. March writes: “My pupils, the old and young, progress apace with their letters. They open their heads to me now, and are no longer reticent. Josiah, who still ails and has a wracking cough that breaks your heart to hear, has nevertheless become a regular chatterbox, so that I can hardly reconcile him with the sullen, silent boy who met my boat” (Brooks 145). Notice in the first sentence the two introductory clauses before the verb and antecedent. This way of taking time to get around to the point, this gentle, polite voice, fits the chaplain Mr. March, who is earnest and of strong moral intention. This meandering style also contrasts with our contemporary voice, which leans toward concision and the striking out of extraneous words. Brooks’ novel abounds with introductory clauses, parenthetical clauses, clauses that elaborate, and so on. Words like “ails”, “wracking”, “ letters”, are antiquated, set us in a time unlike our own. The wordiness of phrases like “nevertheless become a regular chatterbox”, “can hardly reconcile”, and “progress apace” have the same effect. In a later section of narration, March muses, “Are there any words in the English language more closely twinned than courage and cowardice?…Who is the brave man—he who feels no fear? If so, then bravery is but a polite term for a mind devoid of rationality and imagination” (Brooks 168). With this kind of rhetoric, it was really quite natural to find myself reading a scene in which Ralph Waldo Emerson moved among the guests. The polite precision of Brooks reads quite flawless to me. I found myself reading with surprising enjoyment, reclining, my feet propped up, a blanket in my lap, willing to follow this clear, gentle voice. Afterward, after I’d mulled over the story with my writer’s group, I found myself thinking about how she came to find that voice while she was in the imaginative practice of writing. Maybe she read some of those civil war letters. Maybe she steeped herself in Emerson and his contemporaries. Maybe she listened to some of their works on tape. However she did it, I am impressed and thinking about the process of writing from the angle of the voice that tells the story, a voice constructed of particular words.
How does this all relate to my own work? Well, I just finished a critique session with my writer’s group in which one of my peers said that my piece had “strong voice”. I like to think so. I like to think I’m creating the voice of a literate, reflective, forty-something woman who has a story to tell about uncommon struggle and how she not only survived, but transformed herself in time, through movement. Her voice ought to be confident, enthusiastic, and reflective, not necessarily all of those all of the time. The story should move between those aspects of Eve (protagonist) as she recounts the story of her life from a mature point of view. Developing this particular voice has been a focus in writing this novel, my first longer work written in first person. How have I done this? By slowing down and listening. By writing the entire current draft out by hand, then typing it in later. By speaking. Yes, when I write by hand, when I type in what I’ve written by hand, I speak the lines aloud to test the voice, to make sure that each word sounds like Eve, who is teaching me more than I imagined she would. Reading March prompted me to ponder voice in my work and how to achieve clarity of voice.

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On The Road

“But, no matter, the road is life” (211). In my copy of On The Road by Jack Kerouac, this line is not just underlined, but circled, no note next to it. What was I thinking at the time? Looking back now, I’m thinking of how Kerouac makes Sal Paradise’s first person narrative not just a compelling quest story because of the pure adventure of it, but a quest about the quest called life we are all on, looking for “IT” (127). Kerouac universalizes Sal’s story by making him more observer than actor, through the repetition of certain words and ideas, and through the lines that bloom out of Sal’s pen as he comes to insights that lead to the final answer for him, that IT isn’t knowing, because “nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old” (310) but that meaning [IT] comes through being present in each moment, in recognizing one’s place in nature as a small part of something larger and often incomprehensible, but beautiful:
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies…and tonight the stars’ll be out…the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in” (310).
Sal is really more cameraman than actor in his own story, showing us where he goes, who and what he sees. Often he will declare an emotion, I was angry, for instance, or “I felt like an arrow that could shoot out all the way” (27), but he moves on quickly, shows us the next thing. He’s an inexhaustible cameraman, moving from close in conversations between people he’s with, to gritty close in descriptions of closed spaces, to wide-angle views of the beautiful nature that surrounds it all:
It was a wonderful night. Central City is two miles high; at first you get drunk on the altitude, then you get tired, then there’s a fever in your soul. We approached the lights around the opera house down the narrow dark street; then we took a sharp right and hit some old saloons with swinging doors. Most of the tourists were in the opera. We started off with a few extra-size beers. There was a player piano. Beyond the back door was a view of mountainsides in the moonlight. I let out a yahoo. The night was on” (53).
This passage because so neatly contains how he both describes the scene and then widens his lens again to see the mountains, the sky, the stars, the wide world. Sal is often looking to the mountains.
Our main character observes more than he acts, follows more than not, and is, in a sense, the unassuming, every man. We see this also in frequent references to his soul personified, “my whole soul leaped to it the nearer we got to Frisco” (59). This tale is universal in a grand human sense (soul) and also in the sense of describing the culture of a nation. Kerouac uses symbolism throughout to create a story that is also a cultural exploration, such as an American flag accidentally raised upside down by Sal, and in how at the start of Sal’s journey he travels to his first destination fed on the iconic American pie. And speaking of American\ America, I didn’t go through the entire book and count the number of times that one or the other of those words occur, but it is strikingly often, and Kerouac just as often refers specifically to the names of cities and waterways, and other landmarks more than he needs to, to emphasize the context of this story, which is without question about an American Dream of sorts.
Sal’s story is also made universal in those lines that just bloom out of nowhere with insight and that are carefully placed amidst gritty, realistic description and dialogue, such as “Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live” (132) or “Isn’t it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father’s roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life” (105). Even the use of second person here helps to asks universal questions, blur the line that distinguishes Sal from Dean or Carlo or any other American man trying to find meaning, in spite of everything, including his father.
I am not sure in particular at this moment, how I can apply this to my current work, but I see a broad connection. I am also writing a first person narrative that is also a quest for meaning and that I hope has universal appeal as On The Road does.

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Franny and Zooey

The “Zooey” section of Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger begins thus:

The facts at hand presumable speak for themselves, but a trifle more vulgarly, I suspect, than facts even usually do. As a counterbalance, then, we begin with that everfresh and exciting odium: the author’s formal introduction. the one I have in mind not only is wordy and earnest beyond my wildest dreams but is, to boot, rather excruciatingly personal. If, with the right kind of luck, it comes off, it should be comparable in effect to a compulsory guided tour through the engine room,with myself, as guide, leading the way in an old one-piece Jantzen bathing suit (Salinger 47).
This narrator intrusion, my analysis of it, the purpose it seems to serve, and how thinking about it served my own writing are what I’m going to discuss here. Among all my observations about these two Glass stories looking at this one small section of “Zooey” will best serve my own writing now. In writing this, I believe I will do some much needed work around some struggles I am having with my own intrusive narrator. In fact, once I had the idea for this paper, I had to go back and make some changes to my own work that I didn’t want to lose in waiting.
This intrusive narrator, Buddy (Franny and Zooey’s older, writer brother), is playful, clever, and self-conscious. Wordy, indeed. In stating how what will follow will be wordy beyond his “wildest dreams”, he is wordy about being wordy. A guide in a one-piece bathing suit? That had me laughing out loud. He further tell us that it’s not a mystical story, but a love story, and that it’s not really a story but a “sort of prose home movie” (47) After this introduction, Buddy addresses the reader directly only one more time (in a foot note), and he appears in the story indirectly by the inclusion of a letter he wrote to Zooey and a scene in which Zooey pretends to be Buddy over the phone to Franny in an attempt to lift her out of her moment of crisis.
That is what this story seems to be about, Franny’s moment of crisis, which has much to do with the spiritual text she is carrying around with her. I must have read this narrator intrusion when I first read these stories as a teenager, but it went right over my head. I finished the book wanting to pass out copies to everyone I know as if the book itself were my own spiritual tome, like Franny’s pilgrim book. But, I’m listening to Buddy now, and as I think he meant it do be, I don’t entirely trust his point of view. I see that he is the one who chooses what, as the saying goes, lands on the cutting room floor in his prose home movie. This is made clear by Buddy’s intrusion, his mention that Franny, Zooey, and his mother, “the three featured players themselves” (47) object to including certain details. I see now how Buddy urges us to focus on the love stories “pure and complicated” that are happening between members of the Glass family.
I’m not sure I think Buddy’s intrusion is fully realized. I can’t say it doesn’t work, but it doesn’t come full circle. Why does our tour guide leave us after that? I guess, he wanted to thrust us into scenes, which he does admirably. So much of these stories hinge on dialogue and such specificity in description. Some of the scenes leave me envious (the restaurant scene with Lane in “Franny”, the bathroom scene with mom In “Zooey”), actually. I see why, though, as a teen, Buddy’s little intrusion impacted me only as clever and didn’t influence my interpretation of the story or stand out as crucial to the narrative. Yet, now I’m wondering if he intended it to be and how the story might have been different had our Buddy returned to bid his readers farewell in the end. I don’t know, but it has me thinking about my own intrusive narrator, a persona I am set on but not entirely satisfied with in her (Eve’s) current state of being.
When I first created Eve, I thought that it would be effective to sustain suspense about whether she would live or die (after being hit by a car) in the end, but later realized that putting energy in that direction really wasn’t consistent with what I wanted the story to be about. It was just gimmicky and done in large part to save a scene in the place I thought it should go. But, you see, I didn’t fully listen to this epiphany. I still for some reason felt compelled to make it foggy for the reader whether she still lived as she told the story, even had this line, about how maybe she was dead.
How can I explain how my thinking about the narrator “Zooey” helped me to come to something that was really just waiting in the back of my mind to be articulated, fully realized? I sat down to write this paper and instead opened the document that contains my book and changed the second chapter so that not only was it clear that Eve was alive, but I put her in a particular place, allowed her to articulate her purpose, and it feels good. I’m happier with the story now. I want an honest, reliable narrator for this first person story of a life, reflection on a life. It makes sense for the reader to know that she lives and even where she is now telling her story from and why.

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What Shine Read: 2009

I borrowed the idea of publishing this list from a friend who shared her list with me. I hope that others will do the same and we’ll all have lots of inspiration for what to read in 2010. Following is a list of books I read in 2009, some with comments, some not. Wishing you all a fabulous New Year! Now, what do I want to read next….hmmmmm….Any suggestions?

What I Read:
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss (LOVED it! Couldn’t put it down. Left me in a language-story induced daze)
Shortcuts by Raymond Carver (Writers Book Group Choice)
Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver
…some short stories by Thom Jones (Writers Book Group Choice)
The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver
The River Why by David James Duncan (Thanks to Chris Human for the suggestion!)
Last Night At The Lobster by Stewart O’Nan (Writers Book Group Choice)
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (Unbelievable!)(Writers Book Group Choice)
Journey of the Heart by John Wellwood (Thanks for the suggestion Lee Brooks!)
Postmodern American Fiction
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (Loved it! Passed it on to Erin McAdams, who also read it and loved it!)
The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer (Writers Book Group Choice)
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Blue Ridge by T.R. Pearson (Writers Book Group Choice)
Madam Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
A Writer’s Guide to San Francisco (Read to prepare for a spring break trip to the city!)
Runaway by Alice Munro
The Stories of John Cheever
Even Cowgirls Get The Blues by Tom Robbins (A re-read of an old fav!)
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (Writers Book Group Choice)
The Hours by Michael Cunningham (Writers Book Group Choice)
Moral Disorder by Margaret Atwood
Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
Amsterdam by Ian McEwan (Writers Book Group Choice)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Bicycles: Love Poems by Nikki Giovanni
Fire to Fire by Mark Doty
Dear Ghosts by Tess Gallagher
Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak (Read to me by Winston while waiting for the movie to start)
The Summer Before The Dark by Doris Lessing
Reading Like A Writer by Francine Prose (Writers Book Group Choice)
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (Writers Book Group Choice)
The Body Artist by Don Delillo (Thanks to Nate and Christina Hile for the suggestion!)
Franny and Zooey by J.D Salinger (finished yesterday, also a re-read) (Writers Book Group Choice)

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The Summer Before the Dark by Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is one of my favorite books ever. And so when it came to choosing books to read for this mailing and I came across The Summer Before The Dark on my shelf, it was an easy choice. It isn’t in first person, so it didn’t fit that criteria. But, it is a very close third, stream-of-consciousness at times, so it wasn’t way off the mark. Perusing it further, I learned that it was about a woman’s “odyssey into the perils of freedom” (cover description) and well, that definitely seemed to parallel the novel I’m working on.
The Summer Before The Dark was a painful read and I suppose that was intentional. The main character is pained, to the point of making herself physically ill thinking about her life, “A woman stood on her back step, arms folded, waiting. Thinking? She would not have said so. She was trying to catch hold of something, or to lay it bare” (1). The book opens with this brooding and continues brooding through the end when Kate Brown (protagonist) “let herself unobserved out of the flat, and made her way to the bus stop and so home” (247). Kate has spent a summer alone for the first time since she married and had four children that are now all grown. Maybe for the first time ever? She takes a job, runs off with a lover, falls ill, moves in with a young (and also brooding over her own life choices) woman.
Why not just write it in first person since the book is in her head most of the time and is entirely about her inner struggle? The narrator answers that question slyly in reference to why Kate tells her young roommate Maureen about the symbolic reoccurring dream she’s having: “There was a falseness. It was because she was evading something by putting it in the third person” (209). Kate is evading the fact that all her worrying about how others perceive her is “her self-chosen prison” (127). Kate is imprisoned by her own mind, by her own thinking, by her lack of confidence in herself. Lessing conveys that by showing us Kate in the third person, but giving us access to her thoughts in the moment.
Now, here is where I come to looking at the element of style that is most relevant to my current work. Kate (and Lessing—it’s all enmeshed) consistently makes statements as questions, demonstrating Kate’s lack of confidence and the fact that she is trying to move toward answers.
This technique of putting the character’s thoughts on the page in such a interrogative style would work just as well with a first person narrator (as in my novel). It also happens that I’m creating a character who is arriving at something, struggling, moving toward self-actualization. And, one area of weakness I see in my novel in its current draft is expanding my protagonist’s thinking about and reaction to the events described in an authentic and revealing way. Maybe I’ve done some of this already. It’s likely that if I were to go back over my manuscript, I might find some examples of this. After reading Lessing, though, I’m more aware of it as an intentional narrative choice. “Perhaps she had been insensitive?” (2); “They were indifferent to each other?” (75); “He did not like Jeffrey, but did like Kate in spite of her immorality?” (115); “It seemed as if they were waiting. For Kate to finish her dream?” (221) I’m envisioning that in my own work there will be a point at which the questioning stops: the point where the protagonist is hit by a car, perhaps?

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The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

`Before I delve into what I observed regarding craft in Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love and the applications of that novel to my own craft, I have to clear the air with some straight-up praise. I love this book! I read it eagerly, woke at three in the morning one Saturday to pick up the story where I left off when I’d fallen asleep at midnight. I underlined gratuitously, drew smiley faces in the margins and wrote things like: WOW, LOL, and Yes! But. This is a paper about craft, so let me see if I can boil down my infatuation with this book that like a new love seems to hold not a single flaw, to some element of style that holds uniqueness, importance.
I can get at this, I believe through a couple of lines from the book that seem to me to not just apply to the situation to which they refer, but to reveal something of the writer’s talent, that can be observed in her style. Zvi Litvinoff, when he comes upon his friend Leo Gursky’s (protatgonist) manuscript while nursing him to health, observes something that though he was “wrong in every way about”, resonates with me beyond just the story itself, “Where he [Gursky] saw a page of words, his friend saw the field of hesitations, black holes, the possibilities between words” (116). Within that manuscript, Gursky himself writes of the deceased writer Isaac Babel, “When he read a book he gave himself over entirely to commas and semicolons to the space after the period and before the capital letter of the next senetence” (114). It is within those spaces between word in Krauss’s novel where I found myself sighing, laughing, welling up with tears. Her language is joyful and I couldn’t help seeing the writer behind Gursky’s outburst, “The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!” (76). Extremely varied sentence lengths, the way she plays with punctuation and the space on the page, and the surprise at the end of the sentence are three of the elements that make this book an outburst of its own: What a language! What a world!
But. This sentence, one word with a period used throughout the novel to characterize Leo Gursky’s “butiful” (79) world, “I kept walking. I went into the drugstore and knocked over a display of KY Jelly. But. My heart wasn’t in it” (76). This word, this one sentence characterize Leo’s life. He wrote this great novel. But. He had to flee Poland and left it with a friend who he never saw again and who published it in his own name. He fell utterly in love. But. Her parents sent her to America and by the time he found her their son was five and she’d remarried and had a second son. He never knew his son. Looking at a picture of his son in the paper, Leo “wanted him to turn his eyes just to [him] just as he had to whoever had shaken him from his thoughts. But. He couldn’t” (77). Why? Because the photo is above an article announcing his son’s death. Krauss uses fragments and short sentences throughout her novel, often to call our attention to the scene, as in “A fly landed on his shriveled penis. He mumbled some words” (158), so intentionally, so interspersed with longer sentences. This same intention is evident in how she punctuates, uses space on the page.
Colons, semicolons, dashes, lists, italics, roman numeraled lists, bulleted lists, numbered lists, letters: Krauss keeps your eyes and mind popping with her skill and her willingness to roll around in all the tools available to her. What a language! What a life! The only words on one page (Gursky is trying to think of a title, “LAUGHING AND CRYING” (27). And then the next, “I studied it for a few minutes. It wasn’t right. I added another word”, followed by only these words on the next page, “LAUGHING & CRYING & WRITING”, and on for four more pages, creating a verisimilitude to how time passed as Leo tried to come up with a title for the story of his life. The sections in Alma’s point of view are broken up into numbered, titled subchapters. There is one subchapter at the end of a section titled, “23. OUTSIDE, IT WAS STILL COMING DOWN” (152). No words follow it. And that space on the page communicate so much about Alma’s being at a loss to understand her quirky brother (whose journal she’s just read). A third technique, but not the last that Krauss uses to express her delight of language and tell a story that has the capability to move a reader, to change a reader (as it did me) is her use of the surprise at the end of the sentence.
So many of Krauss’s sentences lead you to places you did not expect to go. About a goose that was supposedly the spirit of someone’s grandma, “It stayed for two weeks straight, honking in the rain, and when it left the grass was covered with turds” (99). Expressing how she often does how beauty and harsh reality are often intermingled. “She said all I had to do was sit naked on a metal stool in the middle of the room and then, if I felt like it, which she was hoping I would, dip my body into a vat of kosher cow’s blood and roll on the large white sheets of paper provided” (75). A sentence that expresses how sometimes overwhelming and ridiculous life can be. “Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a brutal loneliness” (129). Car is what I was thinking. And yet, loneliness broke my heart just the same, perhaps more so, since it’s much more difficult to understand in the scheme of human tragedy.
What a language! What a life! I can’t make a specific connection to my own work in looking at The History of Love, but I can say that inspired me with its intention. To be truthful, my first reaction was to just give up now, because I just couldn’t see me ever reaching this level of prose. After my ego settled down though, I too wanted to burst out in the coffee shop where I finished the book: What a language! What a life!

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Reading The History of Love…loving it!

“I got out of bed and went to the kitchen. I keep my manuscript in a box int he oven. I took it out, set it on the kitchen table, and rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter. For a long time I sat looking at the blank page. With two fingers I picked out a title: LAUGHING AND CRYING. I studied it for a few minutes. It wasn’t right. I added another word. LAUGHING & CRYING & WRITING. Then another: LAUGHING & CRYING & WRITING & WAITING. I crumpled it into a ball and dropped it on the floor. I put the water on to boil. Outside the rain had stopped. A pigeon cooed on the windowsill. It puffed up its body, marched back and forth, and took flight. Free as a bird, so to speak. I fed another page into the machine and typed: WORDS FOR EVERYTHING.” From The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

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The Bean Trees By Barbara Kingsolver

Year 2 of MFA. Critical Paper #3

I digress. I do. And, I like to. I have long loved writers who lead me through a story without predictability, who take tangents, who comment on and make connections to phenomena and ideas beyond the scene. I like to take a good metaphor and sit with it over coffee. So, when I began to follow the string of Barbara Kingsolver’s words through her novel The Bean Trees, my stomach growled. The beans on Mattie’s trees may be purple, but there is nothing purple about the prose in this book. Taylor is a straight-talking first person narrator who spends most of her words laying out the scene for us. Her comments are spare, but powerful, her comparisons modest and real. She describes the people in each scene vividly. All of this makes perfect sense. Taylor is strong, observant, and practical.
In this second draft of the novel I am working on now, one of my primary concerns is to expand each existing scene and to include more scenes, to create more space between commentary and digression, to make the scenes themselves more sustained, textured, and resonating.
The Bean Trees reads as a succession of scenes connected by a sentence or two here and there of the narrator’s commentary. I truly felt that the writer had stepped away from the text and let Taylor tell the tale. She doesn’t dwell or explain, she just says, oh that’s sort of funny or I thought that was dumb and moves on to the next scene. The readers are left to make significance or not of Taylor’s commentaries.
Here’s a short scene that involves most of the novel’s primary characters:
“Taylor, no! You mustn’t.” Lou Ann said.
“For heaven’s sake, Lou Ann. I’ve got on decent underwear.”
“No, what I mean is, you’re not supposed to go in for an hour after you eat. You’ll drown, both of you. It’s something about the food in your stomach that makes you sink.”
“I know I can depend on you, Lou Ann,” I said. “If we sink, you’ll pull us out. “ I held my nose and jumped in.
The water was so cold I couldn’t imagine why it hadn’t just stayed frozen up there on the snow-topped mountain. The two of us caught our breath and whooped and splashed the others until Lou Ann was threatening our lives. Mattie, more inclined to the direct approach, was throwing rocks the size of potatoes…
Estevan went from whooping to singing in Spanish, hamming it up in this amazing yodely voice. He dog-paddled over to Esperanza and rested his chin on the rock by her feet, still singing, his head moving up and down with the words. What kind of words, it was easy to guess: “My sweet nightingale, my rose, your eyes like the stars.” He was unbelievably handsome, with this smile that could crack your heart right down the middle.
But she was off on her own somewhere. From time to time she would gaze over to where the kids were asleep on the blue bedspread. And who could blame her, really? It was a sweet sight. With the cottonwood shade rippling over them they looked like a drawing from one of those old-fashioned children’s books that show babies in underwater scenes, blowing glassy bubbles and holding on to fishes’ tails. Dwayne Ray had on a huge white sailor hat and had nodded forward in his car seat, but Turtle’s mouth was open to the sky. Her hair was damp and plastered down in dark cords on her temples, showing more of her forehead than usual. Even from a distance I could see her eyes dancing around under eyelids as thin as white grape skins. Turtle always had desperate, active dreams. In sleep, it seemed, she was free to do all the things that during her waking life she could only watch. (94-95)
Notice the economic use of dialogue, the attention to character description, and the focus and attention on the setting. There is so much to be seen here beyond the scene. There is contrast between Taylor who wants to drink in freedom in large gulps and Lou Ann who is frozen by fear, and we see this as the two exist side by side in scene after scene. There is conflict in this contrast. How will these two continue to live together in peace? There is contrast between Estevan and Esperanza here and each time we see them. Estevan is content with the love they share. Esperanza is wanting something more. There is the presence of Turtle, who the reader just knows is going to come out of her shell one day (all based on physical description) and we are anxious to know who will emerge when she begins to talk, what might come of those “desperate, active dreams.”
Each detail in the scene is economical, has resonance beyond the scene. As I look back over the novel now, this is consistently true. Kingsolver has a clear thematic agenda in this book and it reads as awfully “political”on the issue of gender, but her writing is pure. She stays true to the story and its themes. Though I read the first half craving more literary antics, I did finish the book with some lessons from Taylor, who sees things, sees things quite clearly.

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Make Time.

Liz Shine: Author, Editor.

Category Archives: Book Reviews!

The Book Of Other People by Zadie Smith

Man Walks Into A Room by Nicole Krauss

March by Geraldine Brooks

On The Road

Franny and Zooey

What Shine Read: 2009

The Summer Before the Dark by Doris Lessing

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

Reading The History of Love…loving it!

The Bean Trees By Barbara Kingsolver