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.

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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

“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.

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Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
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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

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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Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
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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.

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Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
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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

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

Alice Munro’s Runaway consists of eight stories, all longer, all complex and compelling. Complexity is the point I’d like to focus on here. You see, Munro gives the reader abundant access to the feelings of her characters. What is interesting about his though is how and why she does this. She illustrates for us how things are not often what they appear to be, how we all too often submerge our feelings for fear, for comfort, for love, or because we just don’t know how to bring them to the surface or even what they truly are. She shows us that a feeling is often fleeting, that sometimes to protect our own hearts we tell ourselves we feel things that we don’t. She demonstrates the complexity of the human soul by showing us the incongruity of thought and action, of desire and response. Two stories that illustrate this and are connected in that they have the same main character (at different points in her life) are “Soon” and “Silence”.

Soon tells the story of Juliet going home to visit her sick mother and her aging schoolteacher father. Her daughter, Penelope, is less than two years old. She was born out of wedlock, which seems to bother her more conventional parents in their more conventional town, but to the educated, worldly, atheist Juliet, it’s not of much consequence. The opening line “Two profiles face each other” (88) signifies a major theme in this story that is born out in the way that the characters feelings and reactions are described throughout. The idea of how our own weaknesses and our perceptions of what is expected of us impact our ability to be our authentic selves. Penelope, the child, has not yet developed this, and so “tensed at the first sound of her grandmother’s voice, now yelped and turned away, and hid her face in Juliet’s neck” (90). Whereas Juliet “spoke admiringly as seemed to be expected”(91), “[pretended] to be mystified and amused” (93), and throughout is often embarrassed and sometimes mystified by her own feelings and reactions, as she is when she finds and reads the letter she wrote to her husband some years later, after her mother has passed, her father remarried: “When she read the letter, Juliet winced, as anybody does on discovering the preserved and disconcerting voice of some past fabricated self. She wondered at the sprightly cover-up, contrasting with the pain of her memories” (125). This story and the story that follows, in juxtaposing action and reaction, articulated feelings and submerged feelings, along with the occasional outburst as happened in Juliet’s argument with the minister about God’s existence, demonstrates that often thought and feeling are submerged too deeply to see.

“You don’t go on forever appearing on television” (150) marks the start of a new phase in Juliet’s life about half way through the story “Silence”. A phase when she has mostly given up hope of seeing her estranged daughter and has chosen a life less about appearing a particular way. She had been a television anchor, dependent on the love of her daughter. She becomes a poor scholar with a few good friends and though not without heartache, relatively happy, particularly compared to her early married life. This early life that “she claimed had broken her heart” (138), that “she now believed” (139) she had felt one way, that only “in her quieter states she knew that” (139), where she pretended to be who she thought she was supposed to be, as she did for her daughter when her father died, “Juliet’s manner was sprightly beyond anything intended—her behavior close to that of a good sport” (144).

We see the woman Juliet is, a woman who submerges her true thoughts and feelings for what others expect, because of who she thinks she ought to be, and to protect her own fragile heart through the incongruity between what she says, thinks, feels and does. In the end, she is not unhappy, but her life is safe, academic and relatively joyless. We know this because throughout the author knows more about Juliet than we do and lets us in on it. That technique works in this story because the point is that Juliet does not know herself very well at all. She is submerged. The author has to bring her to the surface for us.

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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

I was finishing up the last of the stories in The Stories of John Cheever the same week that I was to attend court to see a judge convert my legal separation from my husband to a divorce. The appropriateness of reading Cheever at this particular point in my life was not lost on me. In fact, I decided and floated the suggestion to a few friends that Cheever should be required reading in order to get a marriage license. I said it laughingly. I was only partly kidding. The fact is that nearly every story in Cheever’s collection centers around one or more “couples”: The Crutchmans, The Bentleys, and the Sheridans, to name a few. It is clear that Cheever is interested in analyzing the modern relationship in modern society, that he is interested in our ability to coexist happily together in communities and in families without loosing our identities, our souls. When our interactions are based on notions of propriety and social expectation and not on personal conviction or compassion—this is a pervasive and profound sort of corruption. This social critique is primarily achieved through Cheever’s mocking, ironic tone. Looking at three stories— “O Youth and Beauty!”, “The Season of Divorce” and “The Worm in the Apple”– closely and the tone of each, will demonstrate more clearly how Cheever’s tone forms his social critique.

“ O Youth and Beauty!” begins the mocking even in the title that addresses two things that may be nice indeed, but that we know are destined to fade. The degree to which a story employs this mocking technique in Cheever’s collection is evident even from the first line. The longer, the looser the opening sentence, the less sympathy Cheever is likely to have for the characters, the more pathetic he’ll make them. The first sentence of this story is over three inches of tiny font long. The sheer length of the sentence overwhelms us with the scene. And in this case, it is a pathetic, predictable scene of aimless intoxication and mundane pastimes. The main character, a former track star who gets drunk at parties and hurdles over furniture, is ironically named “Cash”. The truth is “the Bentleys had many money worries” (250). The fact that Cash has two children and a lovely compassionate wife makes him all the more ridiculous when we see him so dejected over the fact that he can no longer hurdle because of a broken leg. The depth of his depression repels us. We might understand if he was just a little down and out, but he is so overwhelmed by this loss that it taints how he perceives everything around him, like the faded roses on the table that to him gave off a “putrid, compelling smell. He dropped the roses into the wastebasket, but not before they had reminded him of the spoiled meant, the whore, and the spider web” (254). His shallowness taints the way he sees the world, doesn’t allow him to see passed his own self-pity. Cash does not think of his wife or children at all. The thing he cares about most is his reputation, how he looks to others at parties, whether he is able to keep putting on a show, being the life of the party. Cash does not have depth in his relationships, he does not have personal convictions, all he does for his community is get drunk and jump over furniture. The shallowness of his character is so absurd that it mocks the importance of keeping society, suggests that in making that our goal we lose what makes us human and worthwhile. When Cheever describes the effect Louise’s make-up (worn to be presentable to society), which is a kind of mask symbolically, “she was a lovely woman, and all the cosmetics what she had struggled with seemed, like her veil, to be drawn transparently over a face where mature beauty and a capacity for wit and passion were undisguisable” (253). Cheever mocks in heaping exaggerated detail upon detail in the first sentence and throughout, in his ruthless naming and characterization of cash and in the imagery that he uses throughout, hinting all the while that, as in the roses and in his wife’s face, there is beauty to be found beyond the surface, unless, as in the case of Cash, the surface is as far as we ever go. We don’t blame his wife in the end when when he hands her the gun for the first time ever and commands her to signal another ridiculous, self-indulgent hurdling event, she shoots him dead. He’s dead already, really.

“The Season of Divorce” is also ironically titled. Rather than ending with a divorce, it ends with reconciliation, a realignment with the things that matter in life. Cheever’s mockery in this story is of a gentler sort, a way of saying hey, see how easy it is to lose track on the important things, to get so caught up in the mundane details of “proper”, domestic life. The critique is gentler also because Cheever wrote this story in the first person, from the perspective of the husband. The husband who writes of his wife Ethel that “he can’t even remember when [he] first met her” (161) and then proceeds to list the chores she does every day and his own schedule in the most straight-forward, emotionless way. Some things happens though when Mr. Trencher (a married man) falls in love with Ethel and starts watching her at the park where she takes the children every day, talking to her, and buying her flowers. Ethel begins to remember herself and the motivation and education she gave up to be in her marriage, “I couldn’t read a French newspaper without a dictionary today”(169). And the husband seeing the flowers on the table, her passionate outburst, and how she takes care of the children with him when they get sick, remembers why he loves his wife. For appearances sake, because it is what is expected of them they took on the roles that a man and wife are supposed to and go to parties of socialize with other couples like The Trenchers, but in the end this couple is able to rise above mere convention and assert their own individuality. Louise cries for the suffering in her own personal history and shares that with her husband after witnessing her husband stand up and fight for her with Trencher, yelling at him to “Get the hell out of here!” and throwing a potted plant at him. So, though in the end, they are back to the same old routine, him returning from work, Ethel peeling vegetables in the kitchen, they have won a victory of sorts by allowing themselves to surface above the routine of life in the demands of modern society.

“The Worm in the Apple” mocks the very thing that makes “society” so important. The public face that we put out to society is open to ridicule and Cheever suggests in this story that one ought to be ready to accept that ridicule, because there are plenty of people who will see the world like the narrator of this story does, looking for the darkness, the underbelly of everything. This story cheats our expectation all the way through as the narrator is constantly looking for “clouds on the horizon” for the worm in the apple (338) and never finds them. The family really is happy, not without some of the struggles that make us human, but they’re happy. Cheever lets us in at the very end wherein lies the worm, “one might wonder of the worm was not in the eye of the observer who, through timidity or moral cowardice, could not embrace the broad range of their natural enthusiasms and would not grant that while Larry played neither Bach or football well, his pleasure in both was genuine” (342).

In the end the line “his pleasure in both was genuine” gets at what it is in story after story about couples and families that Cheever mocks, sees as a corrupting influence on society. People who care more about how they look on the outside than what is genuinely worth striving for: love, beauty, and truth.

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 first read Even Cowgirls Get The Blues by Tom Robbins when I was sixteen. It was passed on to me by a friend I admired. It took only a few pages for Robbins to have me charmed, thinking that somehow in reading the book, I’d been invited into a club of people who really knew what we were doing. On this planet, I mean. In this human race. What’s more? I laughed and laughed, often at things that the prude adults in my life wouldn’t admit to even knowing about. I want to look at Robbins here particularly as a humorist. I admire certain humorist writers greatly: Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins, and Christopher Moore particularly. So, I posed this question: Just what is it about Robbins style that is so funny? Four things seem worth mentioning here: authorial presence, listing, range of diction, and seemingly random information or comparisons.

“You author has found love to be the full trip…” (79). “If he has confused you, the author apologizes…” (124). These are just two examples of the authorial intrusions throughout Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. And sometimes, he just pops in with some musing or information to shake us up. Robbins is known for these kinds of intrusions in his other novels as well. In Even Cowgirls Get the Blues it is even more fitting because in the end the author is in fact a character participating in the happily ever after of the story. It doesn’t seem so random to bring him since he has been telling us the story and making us laugh all along the way. The intrusions of the author add a light-hearted quality to the story. This author is who we meet first in the “Single Cell Preface” and we are cued in right away that he will not necessarily be serious and this invites us to laugh along as he says to the first amoeba, “wherever it may be, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues would like to say happy birthday. Happy birthday to you.” Literally, a life celebration, a playful, quirky affirmation of even—gasp–the crude, the taboo. And, we are invited to join in. His presence consistently reminds us that this book is meant to be playful.

Robbins varies his sentence structure as any masterful writer will do. He knows the power of the carefully placed concise sentence: “The Chink is right; life is essentially playful” (100). Oh, but he loves the list. Particularly the surprise at the end of an already quirky list. It sends us over the top with him, is part of the celebration we are participating in, “South Richmond was neighborhood of mouse holes, lace curtains, Sears catalogs, measles epidemics, baloney sandwiches—and men who knew more about the carburetor than they knew about the clitoris” (19). He frequently ends his lists with a word such as clitoris, an attention grabber, an assertion of freedom.

His free-wheeling, life-loving, romping tone is further enhanced by his unpredictable and shifting diction. Sometimes scholarly, sometimes crude, Robbins is in love with the delicious word. He moves from “hanky-panky” to “sedentary bivalve” without blinking. In fact it’s not just words that he treats as if all bets are off, but punctuation too. And this works in a novel in which all bets are in fact off, anything can happen and playfulness is the message.

Robbins is known for his metaphors. Even Cowgirls is no exception: “the sky was as tattered as a gypsy’s pajamas” (327), “a typewriter of birds banging out sonnets in the dogwood buds” (36), or “used the vaginal wrench to slowly, gently turn her husband’s objections down to a mere trickle” (26). He’s always popping them off and beginning chapters with seemingly random statements like “In the flippers of dolphins there are five skeletal fingers” (223), which he proceeds to tie it into the narrative in a kind of comparison.

Robbins personifies everything. He compares like there are no rules, no lines between things. It is this complete abandon that makes the writing work. He doesn’t just do one or two things that are out of the ordinary. The entire novel is extraordinary and unconventional. However, all of this is done with an affection for syntax, words, and punctuation. He uses them with wild abandon, but in creative, interesting, and correct ways. We know from the get-go that his purpose is to amuse and he follows through on that promise all the way to the end.

I think my novel Fair Days is in some ways an homage to writers like Robbins and Moore, though muted, more subtle. When I go back to it, maybe having spent some time thinking about this will serve to improve the writing that’s there. I would think so, but, who knows? Most everything else I’ve written is darker, more serious. But, man, do I love me some Robbins.

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