Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays is a short novel whose protagonist, Maria, is so out of touch with her own feelings that she does not even feel them at all. They’re there, she just never allows them to bubble up to her consciousness and therefore has no depth in her life. The novel begins and ends in Maria’s first-person point of view, but some other chapters are written from third person limited (focused on Maria) or from the point of view of other characters who focus their conversations on Maria. There are many subtle ways that Didion creates a persona that is believably shallow.
Maria’s flat-lined heart is suggested in her way of speaking and thinking. She thinks and speaks mostly in bare, unelaborated statements, “Just so. I am what I am. To look for “reasons” is beside the point” (3). She often asks questions punctuated by a period, as if she didn’t really care to get a response at all, “ ‘Who is it,’ she said” (25). This happens over and over again. And the other characters do this too, suggesting what we can’t ignore as the narrative unfolds: Maria is symbolic of a culture of flat-lined hearts. Dialogue is spare, often crude, always to the point and in many instances without speech tags. Chapter thirty-two consists of thirteen lines total, mostly dialogue of only a few words back and forth and only one speech tag. Among those lines is the line, “Maria said nothing” (95), which is a line that is repeated again and again throughout the novel and reveals Maria’s stubbornness in acknowledging any depth in life or conversation. She also doesn’t get or acknowledge jokes. She’s too numb even to allow herself to laugh. She thinks of her life as a movie or card game often, and in this way she just goes through the motions with a poker face. She does not want to delve into why her mind works the way it does, she just wants to will herself to play it as it lays.
This comes up at least a few times when her husband Carter tries to pull out of her what she’s thinking as he says directly here:
“I’m interested in the mechanics of this, Maria. I’m
interested in how your mind works. How exactly you
picked this doctor out, why this particular doctor.”
Maria folded her scarf and smoothed it carefully
over her bare knees. “He was near Saks,” she whispered
finally. “I was having my hair done at Saks.” (51)
Maria thinks, but she does not ever consider why she thinks what she does or what it signifies or means. She just vomits out the words that come to her mind in the way that she vomits up her pills and thinks nothing of it. In fact, the novel ends with her proclaiming, “I know what nothing means, and keep on playing” (214).
The only reason the reader knows that there is an emotional life inside her at all is through her dreams and some of the imagistic visions of the narrator, as in this passage of a dream she has after an abortion she doesn’t seem to want, but doesn’t resist being pushed into by Carter:

“The man in the white duck pants materialized and then the doctor,
in his rubber apron. At that point she would fight for consciousness
but she was never able to wake herself before the dream revealed its
inexorable intention, before the plumbing stopped up, before they all
fled and left her there, gray and bubbling up in every sink. Of course
she could not call a plumber, because she had known all along what
would be found in the pipes, what hacked pieces of human flesh” (97).
This passages symbolizes how she evades any depth in human relationships (like she won’t call the plumber in her dreams), seeks no help for her state of nothingness, because she does not want to deal with the hacked pieces of human flesh that would be found there: her despair, her suffering, her loss, her rage. She wills herself to play her life without acknowledging that it’s more than just another role she is playing, more than just another card game. Her nothingness is revealed in her way of speaking and her way of thinking—or rather, of not thinking much at all and speaking only the most necessary words, nothing extra.

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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

Okay, so Fight Scenes by Greg Bottoms was not my favorite book. I’m not quite sure if I can even explain it, but I think ultimately it comes down to the fact that the writing was too thin for my taste and though the book embraced realism, some things seemed contrived to me. What can I admire about the writing? The use of but not over use of pop-culture reference to ground this story in a particular time and the successful threading of a very important theme, the somewhat intentional repression of the emotional lives of boys in “Big July 4^th Sale—Buy American” American, a phrase that occurs twice in the story, once in the beginning, once near the end.

Pop culture references were not overdone, but they were there as a continual reminder that this was one year—1983—in the lives of two boys. MTV, my little ponies, 7-Eleven, Metallica, “Punk is over…”(23). These two boys, inundated by morally questionable media like when they are listening to the mom’s girlfriend’s stepson’s stepbrother’s satanic music, are at a loss for role models in their lives. They are boys in need, as the writer terms “at risk”. I’ve had writers at writer’s groups scratch out all direct references to pop culture saying that unless you have permission, you can’t put it in, as if it were some kind of copyright infringement. There are some stories that need this context and I’ve always thought that sounded like bologna, but since I haven’t until recently read a lot of contemporary fiction, I wondered if there was some truth to this new “rule” of fiction. It’s nice to see that, as I suspected, there are few “rules, though there are a lot of people out there trying to pin them down.

Bottoms successfully portrayed how the emotional lives of boys are stifled through this story of him and his friend over one summer and shows how that can happen in different ways. The narrator seems to come from a more stable family that values education and yet his father is too busy to get involved in his life in any other capacity than to scold or direct him and Mark’s dad who is crude and permissive: “He was a great dad, I thought for a time: the opposite my own, who was serious and busy, who wondered where I was while he was at work and told me when to be at home, who often asked me what he smelled on my breath” (10). The phrase thought for a time gets at the reality that ultimately the observant, sensitive narrator had to notice how the opposite was just as stifling, how Mark’s dad’s headlocks and urgings to be more manly were not so good after all, left him just as lonely.

His bare, realistic style is mostly successful. I felt like the writer, for the most part, was just trying to write things down as they happened, even when they were things he should be ashamed of, like participating in the exploitation of the slow boy who exposes his penis to the good girl on the playground because of their urging and plotting and insecurity. A couple things I felt were planted. Mark’s sneaking into his mother’s house to write the love poem across the photo on the fridge and the first meeting with Hazel, who behaves like a perfectly damaged, cruel girl whose daddy complex is too obvious, making it less believable. Maybe if she just wanted her dad to find her dead in the flowers, or just show boys his erotic magazines, but there are even more references to daddy than that.

What else? I liked how the dialogue was as crude and unfiltered as the characters, “ That bitch Sissy is a tease” (31). I liked that Hazel and her sister talked crude too. In my own experience as a twelve year old “at risk” kid, there was a whole lot of experimenting with ideas and language that doesn’t often make it onto the page because by then we’ve refined our language, become writers who like subtlety and fresh words. It’s too easy for our writing to become too clean, too perfect.

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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

Kathryn Davis’ A Thin Place was very hard for me to get into at first. I tried starting a few times when I was in places where there were plenty of distractions. Though normally I find it easy to concentrate in such conditions, I experienced something quite different in this case. It took a few quiet hours of solitude for me to finally hook into the rhythm of this novel. The story is about the complexity of human love, the relationships of humans to their physical world, and the beauty, sometimes seeming tragic, in the fact that living things are born and in turn, die. What interests me most about this book as a writer are the–what I’ll call–props that Davis uses to tell her story: the intercalary chapters, the diary entries, the police logs, and the horoscopes.
The occasional police logs give us a sense of the small town of Varenness with its reporting of things like loud music and cat missing and also subtly suggest, as some of the items like car crashes and drug deals are more serious, that perhaps we are leading up to something serious within the novel. The horoscopes reinforce the theme of man versus nature, on which topic, Davis seems to want to impress us with the idea that the divine right of human beings in the world is unlikely, even a dangerous idea that may eventually be our greatest flaw. Horoscopes suggest a kind of fate, that the stars (the natural world) are truly in control. This is reinforced again by the Gardner’s Almanac. But, what about the intercalary chapters? That is where I want to focus my thinking in this paper.
The intercalary chapters did not propel the plot forward. They were more poetic and experimental in style (one from the point of view of dogs, another from beavers). I enjoyed this book and can’t remember reading anything like it and a lot of that feeling comes from how the intercalary chapters added to the story. Those chapters tended to focus on the natural world, to show what was going on simultaneous, but no less important, to human affairs. As Davis concludes her first (erotic!) depiction of glaciers having their way with the world in her first intercalary chapter, “And even then, how beautiful! Rock cased in ice, the sun extracting greens and blues. Though to say everything was more beautiful without people, before people—even to go so far as to imagine after people—is obscene” (12), we know that there is far more to this story than the lives of the people in this small town, that this story has something to say about life and how we should be living it: as if we could die at any moment.
The idea I’ve come up with for National Novel Writing month will also attempt to use intercalary chapters to enhance the stories themes and develop character. This is a technique that I’ve often admired. Tom Robbins, one of my favorite writers, uses intercalary chapters, as does Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath, a book I love, love, love. Like Davis, I will experiment and employ a more poetic style in these chapters, but unlike Davis, they will all be centered around my primary character, who will narrate the entire story.

Buy my books here. 

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 to open—to get it out there—by saying that the protagonist of Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons reminded me, perhaps a little too much, of my own mother. The main character, the character from whose perspective we experience most of the story—Maggie—is the worst kind of optimist. The kind of optimist who can bend and twist reality in her mind like the most talented balloon artist can make flowers, poodles, and pikachu out of deflated rubber pouches. What appeals to me about both my strong reaction to Maggie and the way that Tyler portrays her are the implications for my own writing, because, to be honest, I’ve had great difficulty writing about my mother.

One detail that worked to make Maggie such a delightful character is the fact that Maggie is not, for the most part, self-conscious, but that she is self-conscious enough for us to find her redeeming. The reader sees clearly Maggie’s distorted view of her twenty-something son and how she lies to the people around her to try to bring them together, which, however well-intentioned, is still a lie, a manipulation. She just can’t help herself and we love her for it, because she does it for love. We also admire the easy way she interacts with strangers, how she cares about people, like the old man she ran off the road or the older man who she pretends to be serious for at the nursing home where she works. That image of her flying down the hall in a cart full of dirty laundry laughing symbolizes the way she glides through life. In order to do this, she doesn’t always see things as they are. We notice her flaws, but we love her, because she will don a wig and lurk in alleys to see her estranged granddaughter and it was her dress-up idea that drew Ira’s agoraphobic sister out into public. How does Tyler accomplish this liking of a character who in real life I think would drive me batty?

She dwells mostly on showing without judgment, leaving the reader to conclude what to think of Maggie. She reveals few and only the most redeeming aspects of Maggie’s inner life. We never see her doubt or despair, for instance. She reveals so much through dialogue. Maggie is not “closed-in, isolated” like Ira who regrets his lack of a college education because he is clearly a reflective, intelligent man. Maggie did not want to go to college. Her optimism could easily be mistaken for imbecility if it weren’t for her quick wit as when she picks up on the subtlety of Ira’s singing Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” and replies, “Perfectly sane people visit their grandchildren, Ira Moran” (13). Most importantly, Maggie doesn’t appear to even be aware that she might be different from other people, that her view of people and their relationship is greatly influenced by romantic optimism. She is; however, not without reflection on the world and her relationship to it, “Why did popular songs always focus on romantic love?…Then besides the songs their were the magazine stories and the novels and the movies, even the hair spray ads and the panty-hose ads. It struck Maggie as disproportionate. Misleading, in fact” (64). Maggie is capable of reflection, so we must ultimately conclude that her optimism is not an accident, but a choice about how to live her life. This is further emphasized by her criticism of Ira’s pragmatism. Tyler’s commentary free approach to Maggie is what makes her most powerful, the way she gives her body, and voice, and thoughts, but does not judge or comment, leaves her for us to look at and decide. I read in an interview with Tyler that if she actually knew someone like Maggie in her real life, she’d be completely frustrated by her. How interesting! No wonder she wrote her without comment. I think when I next sit down to write about my mother, I’ll have to try to do it something like this.

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