Year 2 of MFA. Critical Paper #2

Until around page forty or so, I was feeling concerned that I’d picked The River Why by David James Duncan to read for this mailing. The tone eluded me at first: dry, ironic humor and overly formal vocabulary juxtaposed with utter silliness. Once I could hear the voice, I started to laugh and after page forty, I followed the story with eagerness and delight. The philosophical outlook underlying the narrative resonated with me in the same way that Tom Robbins’ work resonates with me. So, it was no surprise that Duncan made at least five or six (according to my count) direct allusions to Robbins’ work and at least once used the work erudite, a fetish word for Robbins. Okay, so I liked the book, but what did it have to offer me as a student-writer? Truth? Not a darn thing for the project I’m currently working on. I mean, perhaps I could find something if I were desperate and if it weren’t for the fact that a close look at this book has so much to offer me in revision of my other complete novel that is currently getting cold on a back burner. I’d rather write about that, and then put this paper in that same ignored pot for the time being. I do intend to heat that story up again.
You see, my novel, Fair Days, involves some quirky characters in a small town and centers around one of those characters, a twenty-four year old man named Travis who is romantic and eccentric and happily makes his living pumping gas at his parents’ gas station. The novel is meant, like The River Why, to explore some philosophical questions, but similar to the playful, light-hearted, no-bones about the fact that this is a story way that Duncan employs. At present the novel is in a third person limited point of view and though I do at times directly address the reader, the narrator in Fair Days is not a distinct persona. After reading The River Why, I think this is something I’d like to change when I turn the knob on that burner and get to work on a new draft.
Duncan writes in first person. His main character, Gus, tells his life story. His vocabulary is over-the-top, but the character claims not to care about anything other than fishing and to have not appreciated anything they tried to teach him in school, which makes the diction seem tongue-in-cheek and playful. If you’re so down-to earth, why put on airs, right? There is a style of exaggeration in the narrative that fits well with the fishing motif. He is persistent in his ironic humor and his capturing scenes that are slightly absurd or incongruous. Gus so light-heartedly takes us through this narrative that though we are not surprised with the transformation of Gus in the end, we are delighted, we are curious to see just how Gus came to be and who and what and why.
I do not know that I want to use first person in Fair Days, but I will write a couple of pages that way and see what I think. I do know that I want to create a persona for that narrator, whether or not that voice is someone directly involved in the narrative (a main character) or someone watching them (a minor character). Like in The River Why I want the voice to be the story too. I want that voice to transmit the humor, the incongruity, the philosophical thread that drives the story, and the purpose. I always wanted this, but I see now a way to get it better. That voice has got to be a character too. I have not yet achieved that kind of voice in Fair Days.
When Gus says to us, “And anyone who things I brag in stating that I understand fish-thought is obviously ignorant of the way in which fish think. Believe me, it’s nothing to brag about” (13), we already know from his diction, his sense of humor, his keen perception of his family dynamic, that he has something to communicate, that he is no fish-brain. In spite of the fact that he tells us, “In school I often amazed cohorts and teachers by displaying a degree of ignorance seldom attained by students whose minds were unscathed by amnesia or retardation” (18), we hear a wise man and keep reading, eager to know where his story is going to lead us. And when his “ideal schedule” doesn’t work out for him, “I proceeded to fish all day, every day, first light to last. All my life I’d longed for such a marathon—and I haven’t one happy memory of it. All I recall is stream after stream, fish after fish, cast after cast, and nothing in my head but the low cunning required to hoodwink my mindless quarry” (75), we aren’t surprised and we’re laughing with him, asking the ultimate story question: then what happened?
Reading The River Why inspired me to look at my own story with fresh eyes (fish-eyes?) and see that it’s the type of story that needs a good storyteller that is revealed, not concealed, to lead the reader through the story, because it is meant to be musing, clever, and whimsical.

Buy my books here. 

Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
Find free resources and information here.
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

Year 2 of MFA. Critical Paper #1

So what lessons can I take away from Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night At The Lobster as a writer studying other writers to become a better writer? I couldn’t sympathize with the main character. In fact, I found him annoying. I didn’t feel like the no-plot plot worked. So, what is there to draw from? I’m mulling over this. In fact, it’s making me a little crazy, because I have to get this paper written, after all. And then I remember. I remember the hope and wonder I’d felt as I read the first three pages, thinking that this was going to be a really great book. So, I look at those pages. What do I see? I see a lot. How O’Nan creates mood through imagery in these opening passages and in truth, throughout the entire novel, is wow—super cool.
Mall traffic on a gray winter’s day, stalled. Midmorning and the streetlights are still on, weakly. Scattered flakes drift down like ash, but for now the roads are dry. It’s the holidays—a garbage truck stopped at the light has a big wreath wired to its grille, complete with a red velvet bow. The turning lane waits for the green arrow above to blink on, and a line of salted cars takes a left into the mall entrance, splitting as the sniff for parking spots.
One goes on alone across the far vastness of the lot, where a bulldozed mound of old snow towers like a dirty iceberg. A white shitbox of a buick, the kind a grandmother might leave behind, the driver’s door missing a strip of molding. The Regal keeps to the designated lane along the edge, stopping at the stop sign, though there’s nothing out here but empty spaces, and off in a distant corner, as if anchoring the lot, the Regal’s destination, a dark stick-framed box with its own segregated parking and unlit sign facing the highway—a Red Lobster. (1)
The dominant color of the scene is gray. Even the white is a dirty white (grayish). The one color that stands out in this is a blinking green arrow and a red velvet bow, highlight the fact that things are just not all that gay for some on this particular Christmas holiday. Words like stalled, weakly, drift, waits, stopped, empty, and distant contribute to the lifeless feel of this scene. And it is truly lifeless! There are cars, a few, moving slow, but their drivers are not mentioned. , these cars seem to move on their own, without feeling or intention. The one lifelike description of the cars that move into and around this mall parking lot is contained in the line “splitting as they sniffed for parking spots”, which is a very basic, small-brained function of life. The Red Lobster, the place where the rest of the story will take place is described as a “dark stick-framed box”. How stifled! How bleak! A garbage truck ironically adorned with a brightly colored bow, a “shitbox of a buick”, things are broken, creaping along the edges, moving in dull, lifeless patterns.
This level of description is consistent throughout. I was drawn in to the description of the restaurant. It reminded me of the many jobs I’ve had in the food service industry. O’Nan got so many details right. The coddling mother, the spoiled child, the retired teacher ( a regular there), the retiree sitting at the head of a large party of guests—all these people– these scenes–added to the bleakness, the pointless routine, the unconscious way we can go about our lives, “From here it’s all checklist. He turns up the house lights, turns on the fake-stained glass lamps over the tables in all four sections…Window by window he gently tugs on the cords and lets in the gray light of day” (29). Within each scene, as in this one, the question seems to be, where is the hope? where is the light? So, in the end, I think I can take much from this book, though I didn’t love the story. You see, in this second draft I’m working on, I’m interested in expanding scenes. It seems to me that my first draft is rather skeletal at times. I wrote the first time through terrified that there would be no end when I got to the end, and so wrote just the bones of the story down. So, as I’m working on this second draft, I want to keep these questions in mind. What mood does this scene convey and why? How does is this scene important beyond just what happens—how does it contribute to a larger theme?

Buy my books here. 

Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
Find free resources and information here.
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

Black Swan Green
A year in the life of Jason Taylor: thirteen, British, equally naïve and gifted with insight, and a stammerer. Love this book! Honest. Well-crafted. Full of popular culture references from the early eighties. On page 211, Holly Deblin (who later becomes Jason’s first kiss), gives him some advice that sums up what the step Jason must ultimately take to grow beyond what he struggles with in this book, “You’re not a maggot. Don’t let dickheads decide what you are” (211).
The novel is told from Jason’s point of view with lots of interior monologue that demonstrates his naivete (he’s only 13!), his keen power of observation and insight into life and relationships, and his common struggle to be the person he most wants to be. The book is funny, poignant, and full of delightful comparisons that lift the words off the page, creating powerful images and associations.
There is a fitting allusion to Lord of the Flies in which Jason has to read aloud, thus exposing his stammer to all and humiliating him. The author does not shy from just how cruel children can be to each other without unrealistically demonizing the bully. The story seeks to empower the individual against society, a theme that is clearly laid out by the poem Jason finds on his English teacher’s desk when going to retrieve his whistle,”Don’t laugh at what you don’t find funny./ Don’t support and opinion you don’t hold./ The independent befriend the independent./ Adolescence dies in its fourth year. You live to be eighty” (213).
I am awed by how well this book is written, how real Jason Taylor felt to me. As a parent of a bright, sometimes shy thirteen-year-old boy, my question now is: How can I get him to read this book? I want to buy copies by the dozens and pass them out in the hallway at the high school where I teach. There are lots of stories about bullies. This is the most intelligent, real, and empowering treatment of the subject I’ve ever come across.

A few good lines:

“It’s easier to change your eyeballs than to change your nickname” (16).
“Who decides which defects are funny and which ones tragic? Nobody laughs at blind people or makes iron lung jokes” (36).
“A cow of an awkward pause mooed” (52).
“Hate smells of burnt dead fireworks” (74).
“Stewy air stroked Dawn Madden’s white chocolate throat” (83).
“The earth’s a door, if you press your ear against it” (91).
“The last days of freedom rattle like a nearly empty box of Tic Tacs” (191).

So many more…

Buy my books here. 

Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
Find free resources and information here.
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

While fall turned to an unprecedented winter here in Washington, and then a wet, violent spring, and only now the promise of summer is in the air, I read and considered many books from the angle of the writer: How does this work contribute to the great body of literature that fuels and defines the art of writing?
I’ve tried to remain objective, non-judgmental, a scholar-observer because I know that I have been blessed with a unique opportunity to grow and learn through the support and demands of this MFA program. The book I chose to read for my final—and 24th!—critical reading assignment was Norton’s Postmodern American Fiction. Though it is long and the selections are so varied that at times I felt jostled, I do believe that the reading of this collection brought some ideas together that will carry me into this second year of MFA work and strengthened my identity as a writer.
As I read the bold and varied selection in this anthology, I found myself being more judgmental. Brautigan (who I loved at sixteen!) is clever and I like reading him, but Vonnegut has more moral sense, which is ultimately more admirable. The Paley story “Pale Pink Roast” was literary dessert, full of immaculate language and powerful subtext, but Silko’s selection from Ceremony felt more human, less intentionally artful. The editor’s in the introduction to the excerpt from Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, quoted him as saying, “I’m not interested in imitating a style or structure I’ve used before. I’ll never write another book like Trout Fishing in America. I dismantled that old machine when I finished with it and left the pieces lying around in the backyard to rust in the rain” (38).
This insistence on innovation seems to be the way of things in the “high art” of writing in the post-modern era! To be always breaking old frames for fiction. To take risks. To scramble the narrative. To incorporate other art forms: digital, visual, performance—anything goes! While this is liberating, I think it is easy for a writer to lose heart and perspective, to innovate for the sake of innovation, not because it will make the work more meaningful. Mark Leyner’s “Tooth Imprints On A Corn Dog” details the activity of a writer trying to write a poem he’s been commissioned to write in twenty four hours, “1,000 lines of free verse in the poete maudit tradition of Arthur Rimbaud, but infused with the ebullience and joie de vivre that made ABBA so popular in the 1970’s” (242). This is so clearly absurd. The writer (in the story) so vain and self-indulgent that I wanted to shake him and ask: But what is the god damn point? And what is the point?
Why have I aspired to write more and better since I was eight years old? Why am I (when I’m poor to begin with) racking up more student loan debt in order to earn my MFA in fiction writing? And this program requires a lot of work! More than I realized it would. I’m accustomed to hard work, but this year has tested the limits of what I am capable of taking on—for sure! In reading the works in this anthology, an answer to these questions rose to the surface: to communicate and to make meaning for myself—to contribute a verse.
I’m curious, but not romanced by literary dogma. And though I’d like to see my work in print—I won’t lie—that’s not a driving force for me at all. In fact, I find the whole business of it tedious and frustrating. I do; however, feel privileged to live during a time in which such a rich and varied tradition of literature exists.
What I’ve gained from all I read this year is an appreciation for the individual work itself. A desire and an intention. A desire to cultivate patience in my writing, to slow down the sentence building, because this is an area where I can improve. An intention to allow form to shape from the piece itself, which includes a willingness to experiment with and change ideas I have going into a piece of writing about how the story will be told for the sake of the story itself. To always return back to the breath of the story—the life force—the central idea.

Buy my books here. 

Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
Find free resources and information here.
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

Food is the center of our lives. It’s necessary for survival, and a source of personal pleasure and communion. Of course our relationship to food is complex. In my own life, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with food. Every family gathering I’ve ever attended has had food at its center. Usually, lots of food. Food laid out on countertops and banquet tables for people to come and go and serve themselves. And come and go we always do. Yet, amidst all this eating what is often very good food, there is the inevitable buzz of food talk. What’s the newest diet fad? Who’s tried it and failed? Who succeeded? And while no one has dared to comment when in the course of my tumultuous life I have added pounds to my frame, the shedding of pounds never fails to gain attention and approval. Obesity is my family’s disease and they are obsessed with food. It has taken much of my life—and still sometimes I need reminding—to reconcile my own relationship to food. I’ve binged and purged. Eaten next to nothing for days. Used exercise as punishment. This may be why though Zadie Smith’s On Beauty captured my attention on many levels, I was most intrigued by how she uses food as a metaphor for life.

In Smith’s novel, Rembrandt scholar Howard Belsey discovers late in his life (he is nearly sixty) that it is not the examined life after all that is most worthwhile, but the shared life. Food is one way she traces this theme to the last pages of the book.

We all must eat sometime. And in On Beauty much is revealed about each character through their relationship to food.

Kiki Belsey, who is the Black Madonna of this novel—the heroine—the character who best knows how to commune in life, says to Howard Belsey (her husband) early on, “Your life is just an orgy of deprivation” (13). She’s right, too. And it’s no wonder we never see him eat. In fact, we see him literally (but, with humor) shun the idea of cooking, a pre-requisite to eating, an act that celebrates the idea of eating for more than just survival, but also for comfort, community, and pleasure. It’s Howard’s notable sense of humor that makes his transformation at the end more believable. Laughter is communal too. What’s the satisfaction of a joke without someone to tell it to? As the Belsey’s are preparing for their anniversary party he “was dressed in his traditional ‘cooking’ costume. This outfit—a kind of protest against the very concept of cooking—Howard constructed by donning all the discarded cook-wear clothes Kiki had purchased over the years and never used” (84). Howard’s pleasures are self-centered. His smoking. His book that doesn’t seem to get written but isolates him from his family. His rigid academic theories, which also isolate him and even lead to a kind of tyranny wherein Kiki isn’t allowed to hang the kind of paintings she likes in her house. Portraits offend his—oh, so developed and informed artistic sensibilities (another symbol of the lack of communion in his life—no faces). His affairs.

The intellectual Howard fails to see what he has to learn from his not so academic wife Kiki. Kiki is not an intellectual, but she knows how to share her life. And that? That is beauty. She is a nurse, a devoted mother and wife, and a woman who builds community around her. The way she befriends Carlene Kipps, in spite of their obvious differences of opinion and their husbands’ rivalry, demonstrates Kiki’s ability to find beauty in life, in others—making her, as the physically beautiful troublemaker Victoria notes—stunningly beautiful. The second time she goes to visit Carlene Kipps she brings a pie, something she is accustomed to doing, known for, “I need a homey, warm, chunky, fruit-based, wintery kind of a pie…I need a down home pie” (161-162). Kiki is the least self-centered character in the book, trying to create home wherever she goes.

Jerome, who praises the fact that the Kippses eat together and tells his siblings he can’t understand how they can live at home with Howard because it is such a “denial of joy” (236), gets it. Levi, most like his mother, gets it too. We see this in a slightly humorous way when he brings a handful of instant Asian food to offer his new friend Choo when he drops by his place unannounced. He’s learned from Kiki that when you pay people a visit, you bring something to commune with them over. Jerome and Levi have learned from Kiki that communion is what living is about. But Zora—Oh Zora! —does not dare to eat a peach and instead “prepare[s] a face to meet the faces that she me[e]ts”(209). She eats guiltily and has not yet come to see her own beautiful self or the beauty in sharing herself. She’s more like Howard.

Communion is what we are here for, how we really survive as a species, and food symbolizes communion. Smith shows the beauty of successful communion and the suffering caused by our inability to connect. In the scene where the Belsey children meet up with each other in a moment of happy coincidence, we see how, despite their differences, there is love between them to be shared. The moment is lovely: “Just before Thanksgiving a lovely thing happened” (233). Later in the scene Smith addressed directly the power of communion, “People talk about the happy quiet that exists between two lovers, but this was too great, sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating” (235). Another scene that shows the connection that can happen between people over a meal is introduced early on, “And not the two of them [Howard and Levi] began to choreograph a breakfast in speechless harmony: passing the box of cereal from one to the other, exchanging implements, filling their bowls and sharing their milk from a pink china jug with a sun-yellow rim” (8). This communion is a beautiful dance, a connection without need for speech or explanations.

Then there is Howard’s failed communion with his estranged father, his fruitless search for biscuits, the weak tea, and the ensuing search for instant coffee. Also, the failed communion between Kiki and Howard and one of the few times they are able to breach that gap over dessert liquor. This inability to commune in life, to learn to like the tomato is Howard’s conflict. Victoria Kipps tells Howard, “Your class is all about never ever saying I like the tomato…Your tomatoes have got nothing to do with love or truth” (312). She says this as a compliment, but we recognize it as the elucidation of his greatest flaw.

Howard needs to learn to like the tomato. And happily, in the end, we sense that he does, in how honorably he shoulders his separation and Kiki’s independence, in how he pauses just to look at the last painting of his slide show in the lecture he gives at the end of the book, in how it renders him speechless in Kiki’s presence, and in how he discovers cooking. Not just any cooking, either. He undertakes the task of using the apples from the tree in their backyard that in the past (and beginning of the book) had just fallen to the ground to rot, “Outside smelled of tree sap ad swollen brown apples, of which maybe a hundred were scattered over the lawn. It had been like this every August for ten years, but only this year did Howard realize something might be done to improve the situation. Apple cobbler, apple crumble, candied apples, chocolate apples, fruit salad…Howard had surprised himself” (435). I was also delighted and surprised! Delighted and surprised to find that in spite of Smith’s honest presentation of the lines that divide us—there are many—there is beauty in this world. There are reasons to come together and celebrate each other.

What does this matter to my writing? Even my current project? Smith weaves this theme of food throughout the story without coming off as heavy-handed or even addressing it directly at all. The communion just happens or doesn’t. I have this short story I’ve been working on that is about what I wrote about in the first paragraph of this essay: food, family, and self. Looking at what Smith has done here has given me some ideas about how to do this without directly addressing food as subject, which at this point, is how the story begins. Also, looking at what she’s done reminds me of how everything counts, every detail of a story should have a function in the greater goal of the narrative—to impart meaning—which is something I’ve been working on a lot lately. I’m getting better at cutting out lines that although perhaps well phrased, don’t serve the story.

Buy my books here. 

Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
Find free resources and information here.
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

“He sulks, or is it lonely sadness in that profile? She is distanced and distressed. Love engraves a profile definitely as the mint does on a coin. She is ashamed of her parents; he thinks she is ashamed of him. Neither know either, about the other” (38). Language, race, gender, class, and the essence of Ibrahim and Julie’s separate identities are the factors that engrave the profile on their love in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup. A love that Julie, in the end, –thank God—does not choose over her own understanding of truth, over her own fulfillment.
Gordimer’s style heightens the reality that however their bodies might have found a common geography, this upper class, liberal white woman and this poor immigrant Muslim man who meet in South Africa (her home) cannot understand each other, contain differences that may have nothing to do with the countries or families they come from. Hazy dialogue, blending of feeling, action, and dialogue and her often terse descriptions are three elements of style that help to bring this message to the surface. She does not use quotation marks or speech tags and though she sometimes sets off speech with dashes, she often doesn’t separate the spoken parts from the rest of the narrative, as in this passage where Julie floats the possibility that they consider having the children his mother wants from them, “Are you crazy? And the moment spoken, he feels its cruelty stab back at him. He throws the razor onto the towel, holds his breath and plunges his face into the steaming water. When he lifts his head, she has taken up the razor and offers the towel. As he dries his face, it’s as if the whole exchange has evaporated” (169). Exchange? There is nothing to set off the words spoken, no acknowledgement of her reaction, of how she might be impacted. He doesn’t even experience the potential cruelty of his tone and words as something done to her—it “stabs back at him”. He spends the entire exchange looking in the mirror or with his face submerged in water, doesn’t even acknowledge her minor act of tenderness in offering him the towel and razor. While Julie is willing literally and figuratively to go to another country for their love, they just cannot see each other clearly, a fact that is recognizable in how their interactions are so often reported in sketch detail.
Apart during those days, at weekends they often drove into ‘the veld’, as they became accustomed to hear her calling the countryside, whether it was grasslands or mountains. There they walked, lay watching the clouds, the swoop of birds, were amused, as lovers are, by the difference in their exchanged perceptions of what each took for granted. (33-34)
Grasslands or mountains? Indiscriminate birds. “As lovers are”. Abrahim and Julie are sketched rather than fleshed out which not only demonstrates the unbridgeable space between them, but also the universal quality of their struggle as man and woman carrying their unique identities in a world of boundaries, where we want love. Julie’s struggle to find her own identity as a woman is the crux of this story. She is a woman who “dream[s] in green” (213), who finds delight in the simple act of walking through the desert in the morning to bring back fritters for all. I was so afraid that Gordimer was going to destroy Julie, that this was going to be another story about a woman who loves too much to survive this life with her identity intact.
In the last pages of the novel, Ibrahim still thinks love is that “weakness that is not for him” (266) and as a luxury only the privileged can afford. When Julie brings the two plane tickets that will take them to his home to him, he sees her as a naïve child. He always sees her as a child, naïve. From the beginning, he underestimates her because of her privilege, accuses her of not taking things seriously enough, of seeing her life as a camping trip, an adventure. He judges her for not taking advantage of her family connections more. He uses those same connections to obtain visas he seeks to get them to yet another new country—America.
She moves to the desert for him. She loves him without condition or reserve. She hands him the razor and the towel. She interacts on a more human level with the women in his household than he is capable of. Embraces the children. Learns to cook their food. And all the while, he still doesn’t see her, doesn’t even seem to like her, submits to her love only because he sees her body like another country and he is always looking for another country than his own. Thinking of how his Uncle and mother set to keep him there, he sleeps with Julie, “the trap that was set to snap on him by the family, his mother the beloved—his body swelled with the blood of accusation and rage, a distress that gave him an erection, and that with a confusion of shame and desire, using her, could only be assuaged in wild love-making which she took for something else, so little did she know” (200-201). It was way before this point that I was hoping that somehow they would be separated, that the separation would be her choice.
Though Julie loves Abrahim, in the end she decides not to go to America and to his shock and rage, decides to stay in his home, in his country, in the desert, where she is content, where “all drifts together and there is no onlooker” (172).
It is ironic that in the end it is Julie who seems wisest, strongest. It is also ironic that in spite of his pushing her to connect with her family for selfish reasons, she finds a home within his through teaching and sacrifice. The title is ironic too because ultimately this book is not so much about “the pickup” as it is about Julie. Julie, who, as I put this book back on the shelf, will stay in my mind as an example of someone who knows the line between sacrifice and submission in love. I was afraid this wouldn’t happen. She spent too much of the novel sacrificing, against the backdrop of what we knew, having access to Abrahim’s thoughts. That he thought himself superior to her in wisdom and wasn’t capable of seeing her, as he didn’t see her the first day, “I don’t think I really looked at her. That day” (94). In the end she chooses to stay in his home, where she has found friendship, family, and the fulfillment that comes from teaching children.
I was amazed by how Gordimer blended thought, action and dialogue, sometimes even in one sentence, how she blended the vague and the specific, the analytical and the descriptive, the precise and the vague. Amazed by how all of this ultimately increased the impact of how the gulf between Julie and Abrahim had to do with so much more than the circumstances of their births.

Buy my books here. 

Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
Find free resources and information here.
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

I have affection for masterful use of repetition. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I grew up in a musical and religious household, that I learned early on the power of a chorus to move you on a deeper level of consciousness. Even as I shed the religion of my childhood, I clung to music, trading in devotional tunes for the secular, The King James Bible for Leaves of Grass. I was thinking about this very thing the other day as I sat in Washington Square in San Francisco. I had just visited the Beat Museum and purchased a think paperback copy of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”. I was reading the poem again for the first time in years, noticing more than ever the influence of repetitious Whitman. And now I’m thinking of this moment again as I narrow down my list of topics to analyze regarding Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Her use of repetition as a means to deliver her visual and thematic message is lyrical, worth examination.
In an interview titled, “The Art of Fiction”, Morrison described her work in Song of Solomon as “painterly”. In the first chapter, we can certainly see how the repeated use of color engages us visually in the bizarre suicide that opens the novel and introduces the issue of race. Every page of the first ten pages contains numerous literal (as in “yellow house” (3) ) and figurative (as in “sunshine cake” (10) ) references to the colors red, yellow, and blue. The impact is that it indeed feels like a painting. In her description of the only two patients of the only black doctor in town every admitted to Mercy Hospital, “both white” (5), Morrison begins a repetition of color that will continue throughout the entire novel. The repeated labeling of black and white makes race an issue that the reader can’t ignore.
In her narrative and in the songs included in her narrative, Morrison repeats the ideas and images that are at the heart of her narrative. “O Sugarman done fly away” (6), the rose-petal lady sings as Robert Smith leaps to his death wearing big blue wings. When Milkman experiences transformation in the end of the novel it’s the song of his ancestors that helps him, “Solomon done fly / Solomon done gone / Solomon cut across the sky / Solomon gone home”. Flight and wings are repeated throughout the novel in the songs and in the narrative. Even on a sentence level, Morrison uses parallel structure to “sing” her story, “The women’s hands were empty. No pocketbook, no change purse, no wallet, no keys, no small paper bag, no comb, no handkerchief. They carried nothing” (260). Black, white, gold, mercy, justice, deserve: in passage after passage, Morrison repeats words as a kind of chant below the narrative, deepening the overall impact of the story.
Nowhere is this chanting more evident than in Milkman’s transformation from Macon Dead Jr. to a man overflowing with gratitude for life, as in this scene when he comes home to his lover, Sweet:
“He couldn’t get back to Shalimar fast enough, and when he did
get there, dusty and dirty from the run, he leaped into the car and
drove to Sweet’s house. He almost broke her door down from the
incredible high that had begun as soon as he slammed the Byrd
woman’s door…’I want to swim!’ he shouted. ‘Come on, let’s go
swimming. I’m dirty and I want waaaaaater!’
Sweet smiled and said she’d give him a bath.
‘Bath! You think I’d put myself in that tight little porcelain box? I
need the sea! The whole goddam sea!’ Laughing, hollering, he ran
over to her and picked her up at the knees and ran around the room
with her over his shoulder. ‘The sea! I have to swim in the sea. Don’t
give me no itty bitty teeny tiny tub, girl. In need the whole entire
complete deep blue sea!’” (327).

Alliteration, internal rhyme, and the repetition of swim and sea make this passage like a sermon, moving you with sound and rhythm as much as meaning.
Often I attempt such rhythmic communication in my writing. It’s not easily to pull off consistently. It doesn’t always get the reception you’d want, particularly in a culture of readers who’ve been taught that the repeated occurrence of words in what they write is redundant and who are saturated in punchy, straight-forward prose. Oh, but I love it when a writer lapses into a musical mix of words that elaborate on the moment, that sound good and repeat. Morrison’s Song of Solomon is both painterly and song-like and as we know, painting and song are powerful ways to deliver meaning, to move, if movement is what you’re after.

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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

Paul, the main character in Blue Ridge by T.R. Pearson is not a likeable guy. He is ambivalent from the get go and does not seem to have a shred of moral sensibility. Considering this, one might think that the novel would either trace his transformation or his fall. It does neither of these things. Paul goes on an adventure that is full of possibility for growth or change or corruption, but he comes through unmoved, cold as he ever was. So, why did I fly through the book, unable to put it down? Why did I laugh so often? Why is it worth reading Paul’s story at all? At least in part, it’s because of the humor and the sophistication of the writing
Blue Ridge is a self-conscious, laid-back mystery. Though the novel embraces the clichés of the genre, the ironic imagery Pearson uses throughout communicates a self-awareness that adds a touch of satire to the story. When the detective first arrives at Paul Tatum’s office to inform him of his estranged son’s death and asks him to identify the body he is described in a manner that reveals the author’s awareness of the stereotypical police officer, “He was of the standard police build and type. Strapping, I’ll call it, and square-headed, with high-school football in his background and probably a little juvenile thuggery” (7). The phrase “I’ll call it” draws attention to the clichéd description and mocks the scene with its self-awareness. Then when Paul arrives at his dead son’s apartment, his description of the scene cranks up the idea of “gritty” to a ridiculous volume, “I could see a man across the way through his apartment window. He was standing before his television in his under shorts, was massaging his scrotum as he swilled translucent skim milk from a gallon jug” (63). Descriptions such as this one are prevalent, turning grit to absurdity, adding an element of ridicule and dark humor. Another example of such overplaying occurs when the ironically named Kit Carson and Paul’s’ cousin Ray take the bones they’ve uncovered in the wilderness and are investigating to be analyzed by a doctor. The doctor’s office and appearance are described in a way that play with the idea of stereotype, turn it on it’s head by making the scene ridiculous and unconventional, “the pictures on the wall. A cartoon goose with an ice pack on its head, a cartoon house cat with its paw in a sling, a rosy pink cartoon pig with a thermometer shoved up its bunghole” (81). Bunghole! Cartoon animals! And then, the doctor walks in with red sneakers, smoking a cigarette. The way the narrative shifts in this way between the consciously mundane to the absurd add irony and self-consciousness to the narrative, elevating the work beyond cliché by embracing the cliché.
Another way that Pearson tips his cap to the intellectual sensibilities of the reader is his elevated diction. As Ray looks around the town he is to work in he doesn’t just say there is a charm to it, he “declare[s] aloud that it was freighted plainly with promise” (15). The narrator describes an advice columnist he went to for help as a “ceaseless scold with a gossamer New Age turn of phrase, a Californian, that is to say, by psychiatric disposition” (25). Turn of phrase indeed! This is a very complicated and sophisticated description. And Pearson employs this kind of wordsmithing throughout the book. In fact, this is the case whether we are in the point-of view of Ray or Paul. Phrases like “a noxious and intolerable blend of chemistry and decay” (44), “fairly comprehensive faint” (45), and “working at the moment through tenacious psychological misgivings about guns” (198), create an understatement in overstatement. The language is overstated and refined, even about events that should topple refinement because they are so unrefined. The “fairly comprehensive faint”, for instance, occurred when the detectives revealed a body to Paul that was supposed to be his son. A decaying, headless body. Fairly comprehensive does not quite seem to cut it, you know? His jaw drops and he hits the tile, knocking himself out. Pearson’s elevated diction adds irony to the story and engages the reader in the sentences as well as the story. Fairly comprehensive! I’ll say.
Paul describes his son’s girlfriend Lizzie critically, indicates that everything she does seems to be a role she is playing. She is an actress, so it fits. He specifically describes her advances toward him as “her brand of dramaturgical love” (88). As it happens, “dramaturgical” is just the word I would use for the style of Blue Ridge and its inclusion in the story seems to be yet another nod to Pearson’s conscious tweaking and crafting of this not to so typical, typical detective story. He doesn’t shy away from making his story entertaining. The writing is excessive and showy, revealing the writer behind the tale. It seems to me that Pearson took great risk in writing Blue Ridge, and that, I respect. It’s a cleverly crafted book, with an uncomplicated and predictable plot, and without a character you can really get behind. It depends on being crafty, rather than profound. Showy, rather than real.

Buy my books here. 

Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
Find free resources and information here.
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

When I came across the description of Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert as a “seminal work of realism”, I was a little surprised. It’s true I hadn’t finished cooking my thoughts on the book, but I wasn’t thinking anything along those lines. On closer examination, I could see that yes, much of the narrative is startlingly realistic. What I had been thinking a lot about though was point of view and how purely Flaubert draws his scenes through the eyes of the point of view character, usually Emma Bovary. While the author sets the dialogue and events down without judgment, his descriptions of the natural world reflect the character’s inner lives. And initially I was thinking of how unrealistic this was—that the trees, the birds, and the winds all respond to the fluctuations of the character’s feelings. But on closer examination, I couldn’t ignore that the rest of the story is put down in a detailed and realistic style.
Up to the near end of the book—Emma Bovary’s death—the story is told without narrator comment, unflinchingly, “Emma’s head was turned toward her right shoulder. The corner of her mouth, which remained open, was like a black hole at the bottom of her face; both thumbs were bent inwards toward the palms;”. The incredible detail Flaubert uses in this story, demonstrates that without a doubt there is something worth thinking about in this story of love, infidelity, and unfulfilled desire. He is showing us his characters so clearly, indicating that they are indeed worth a close examination. At the very start of the story, we are given this description of Charles Bovary’s hat:
It was headgear of composite nature, combining elements
of the busby, the lancer cap, the round hat, the otter skin cap
and the cotton night cap—one of those wretched whose mute
ugliness had great depths of expression, like an idiot’s face.
Egg-shaped and stiffened by whalebone, it began with three
rounded bands, followed by alternating diamond-shaped
patches of velvet and rabbit fur separated by a red stripe, and
finally there was a kind of bad terminating in a cardboard-lined
polygon by a long, extremely thin cord, forming a kind of tassel.
The cap was new; its visor was shiny. (2)
We know from this very first scene that Charles Bovary is a character we should pay attention to, and though he is in fact rather simple and boring, it’s clear that he’s a character crucial to the story, that we need to pay attention to.
The narrator does not take time to divulge to us what he thinks of Charles Bovary’s simplicity or Madame Bovary’s extravagances, excesses, and infidelity. But, the time he spends describing them urges—look, look, there’s something worth seeing here.
There seems sometimes a kind of dishonesty in the “honesty” of realism, because the truth is that we know the judgment is there even when the writer chooses not to share, which raises questions about whether “realism” is even possible when it comes to imaginative art.
And imaginative art indeed! Flaubert’s way of becoming his character’s in his descriptions of the natural world add depth to an otherwise realistic style. A nod and a wink perhaps to the reader in these moments of excess that reveal the writer behind the words, as in, “…her heart leapt. The flames in the fireplace cast a joyful, flickering light on the ceiling;” (89), or “She was now suffering through her love, and she felt her soul slipping away at the memory of it, just as a wounded man, as he lies dying, feels his life flowing out through the bleeding gash. Night was falling and the crows were flying overhead” (271).
This pairing of the realistic and imaginative is appropriate for a story about a young woman consumed by her own passionate nature. This makes me think of Hemingway’s purely realistic story “A Soldier’s Home” and something I recently read in an interview with Toni Morrison about how when she’s writing she doesn’t think about genre classifications, she lets the writing decide its form. And this is one great benefit of being a writer today. Over time, and with experimentation and entire literary movements: there are so many models to pull inspiration from, so many distinctions of form and style. I think this can be crippling too if one tries to either be too pure of form or too purposefully experimental. The work really should decide the form. And so it seems it was with Madame Bovary. Flaubert’s friends urged him to write something in the style of realism, and he did. It is no accident that he chose a story about a woman whose romantic nature is her undoing and who he is noted as saying was a fictional representation of himself. His was a romance with words and attention to them, a belief in stories driven by the artistry of the language, not the unfolding of events. As Madame Bovary did, he wanted the best of things that could be read in books. Perhaps if Madame Bovary had turned to writing instead of real people (men with whom she married and had affairs), she could have found the contentment she so passionately sought.

Buy my books here. 

Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
Find free resources and information here.
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