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.

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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 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.

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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

Carson McCuller’s The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter is bleak, suggesting that no matter how strong the desire for a love that is recognized by both individuals in a relationship, there exists an inherent isolation of the human heart and soul, the “lonely hunter”. A strong desire for love coupled with an incapacity for loving. One of life’s underlying paradoxes that leads to suffering and oppression of the spirit. Each character in the novel is suffering beautifully and in need of uplifting. We feel this powerfully and poignantly in reading the story. Our own hearts cannot help but become engaged, cry out in argument, in sympathy. McCullers compels us with a diverse and interesting cast of characters set in a small town who come together but remain desperately isolated from each other. Two stylistic devices McCullers uses to heighten this sense of isolation are short, concise descriptions of even how even the weather burdens the lives of these people and unbiased, detailed physical descriptions of characters in their most isolated moments.

“The sun wore Mick early…It was too hot even to drink coffee for breakfast” (33), “The rain continued, gray and bitter and cold” (160), “It was true that it like to never quit raining” (160): these are only a few of the examples of the vivid, unelaborated setting descriptions sprinkled throughout the novel that serve to deepen the sense of oppression in this small community. No matter whether the sun is out or it’s raining, it is described as being a hardship, a form of oppression.

Major events in the novel like deaths and arrests are told in summary detail. McCullers spends the most detail on the scenes that depict characters in their most isolated moments. “She hummed one of the tunes, and after a while in the hot, empty house by herself she felt the tears come in her eyes. Her throat got tight and rough and she couldn’t sing any more. Quickly she wrote the fellow’s name at the very top of the list—MOTSART” (39). This is one of many of the scenes where we see Mick struggle to get the music always running in her head down on paper or to hear it more clearly as she wanders in the dark streets alone at night. She is alone in this struggle, never gets the piano she desperately desires, and in the end, quits writing music at all. Just as Doctor Copeland is alone and suffering, he “sat in his dark kitchen alone…The red glow from the chinks of the stove shone on his face—in this light his heavy lips looked almost purple against his black skin, and his gray hair, tight against his skull like a cap of lamb’s wool, took on a bluish color too. He sat motionless in this position for a long time” (70). Biff Brannon who we are told hasn’t enjoyed music on years, whose wife dies and it seems to barely shake him, on one evening is describedthus, “At last he put away his mandolin and rocked slowly in the darkness. Death. Sometimes he could almost feel it in the room with him…What did he understand? Nothing. Where are we headed? Nowhere” (237). Each character, though they see each other daily and live in a small town lives primarily in isolation from the rest. McCullers adds irony to this in the presence of Singer, the town mute. Mick, Jake Blount, and Dr. Copeland all go to see the mute privately to “talk” to him about what’s bothering them. All believe with equal strength that Singer gets them, that he understands. The reader knows, from what he says to his friend Antonapolous when visiting him that he doesn’t really understand them at all, but they just keep talking. This false connection only serves to make the isolation of these characters more profound, more hopeless and pathetic.

In looking at McCullers extremely minimalist, uncommented on descriptions of the physical, I am reminded that physical descriptions can be so powerful, so connected to the big picture in a story. I also see how the way that something is described, like that the sun was shining and how it’s presented are part of tone. It’s not so much whether it rains or shines, but how it rains or shines. Knowing what your own attitude toward a story is and being consistent in that will make the writer stronger. The tone of a first draft can shift easily during a piece, particularly if you don’t have an outline going in to it. So, it seems that tone should be one of the first questions to ask in revision.

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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

One of the writers in my book group suggested The Hours by Michael Cunningham as our book for February. He’d read the book and admired its craft. Also, he is working on a screen play based on his novel and thought it might be interesting to read the novel and screenplay together. While I also could not help but admire certain elements of craft, I didn’t love the book—wasn’t moved by it. It’s worth noting that the four men in our group all liked the book significantly more than the two women. Both myself and the other woman writer thought that the seams showed too much, that there was a lack of emotional authenticity that made the story feel contrived. That aside, there was one element of craft I thought Cunningham pulled off with power and grace: juxtaposition, both within and between the three parallel stories.
Juxtaposition served not just to flesh out characters and relationships between characters, but to create the tension of subtext in the present situation. On pages 42-43 the placement of Laura’s thinking about Virginia Woolf and her own fascination with Woolf, “a woman of such brilliance, such strangeness, such immeasurable sorrow” (42) precedes a description of what a force of will it takes for her to begin her daily routine, interact with her family, “She conquers the desire to go quietly back upstairs, to her bed and book. She conquers her irritation at the sound of her husband’s voice” (43). This enables us to see the depth of her withdrawal, gives us a basis for comparison, makes it more than just a moment. Then, shortly after that the depth of her depression and withdrawal is further illustrated by the setting side by side of her son’s reaction to her and then her own reaction to her son’s affection. While he is “happy to see her, and more than happy…transported by love”, she “reaches into her pocket for a cigarette” (44), an unconscious gesture of anxiety. She is pregnant, with a loving husband and a small child and clearly, an unhappy woman. Then in Clarissa’s story on page 126 we see lots of really great detail about her history with Louis, Louis’s history with Richard, which makes the small talk conversation that occurs between Clarissa and Louis about where he is staying and who he is seeing all the more strained and weighted.
This happens again and again in the novel. Backstory just at the right time. Just when it’s going to bring us deeper into the present scene. Within the different stories, I do admire the way Cunningham presents details at the right time, so that they add to each other and play off each other and make the whole greater.
A similar tension and dimension exists in how scenes are juxtaposed between the three stories. First Clarissa has flowers to buy, then in the next chapter it’s Virginia Woolf buying flowers, then Laura is musing on the line in Mrs. Dalloway about buying flowers and admiring the beauty of the writing. What is Clarissa buying flowers for? For an award party for Richard that will never happen because he’ll kill himself. Richard, the same little boy that will help Laura bake a cake for his father and then will watch her dump the cake he participated in making into the trash bin because the flowers aren’t perfect. This juxtaposition of scenes about flowers leads the reader to ask deeper questions about the significance of the detail, wonder what the author is suggesting about life and beauty. A similar effect is created in the repetition and juxtaposition of the idea and images of fame and the line “What a lark! What a plunge!” to suggest that beyond and more important than the question of lasting fame is the hours (moments) of the lives we lead and who we love. The fact that Louis leaves Clarissa, furious with her not because of anything that actually passes between them, but by his own hurt feelings about not being the prominent figure in Richard’s book and what we know about his history is emphasized further by how as he’s leaving, the sun “explodes like a flashbulb in his face” What he’s really upset about isn’t his lament that there is “so little love in the world”, but his own bruised ego, his desire to be significant. Right after that we move to Mrs. Brown who is striving even in cake baking to “make something finer, more significant”. This same struggle is paralleled in Virginia’s striving to write well, as she descends into a depression that will lead to her suicide. In the juxtaposition of these same elements in parallel stories, the message comes through with greater resonance.
The placement of detail in The Hours seems always to have an echo and to be placed in such a way that that echo can be understood by the reader. I’ve definitely had trouble in the past with trying to put in too much detail all at once for the sake of filling in the reader. Cunningham’s The Hours offers a nice reminder to us that it is okay to withhold details, and in fact, it is quite powerful to ask this question: what else does it do for this scene besides inform the reader about the character or scene. How does it tie into something in the big picture? Can it wait?

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 had not yet decided whether to write two separate papers on Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America and Margaret Atwood’s Moral Disorder or to try to link them in some way. I thought I’d like to link them if I could, but wanted that link to surface naturally in my reading and thinking about each short story collection. I recognized early on that each collection had a center point that connected each story to the other. Moore’s stories all mentioned birds in some way. Atwood’s stories all focus on the same primary character. This wasn’t enough though. I kept reading and noting particularities of style. It was “Moral Disorder”, the title story of Atwood’s collection that offered to me the basis for the comparison I’ll make here.

In general, I found Moore and Atwood to differ greatly in style. And, Ibelieve that can be best discussed through two stories in particular: Moore’s “Real Estate” and “Moral Disorder”. Both stories explore the relationship of a couple who move into new homes. Both are fixer-uppers. Both stories are concerned with the relationship between life and death, about the struggles of romantic love, and about the idea of “home”. The particularities of style between the two writers make for a remarkable contrast between them.

The openings of each story beg comparison. “There’s never been such a lovely spring, Nell thought…” (116) begins Atwood’s story. Moore begins, “It must be, Ruth thought, that she was going to die in the spring” (178). And though Atwood acknowledges the violence in nature throughout, hers is primarily a story about the human push toward creating and sustaining life. Moore’s story, however, is about a woman who has lost her desire to sustain her own life and who in despair and desperation, takes the life of another.

Moore relies heavily on our thinking brain, employing irony, satire, and insight. She elaborates on and explains much of what the characters do and say and this is easily seen in taking a close look at the dialogue. Atwood relies on subtext rather than insight, and engages our seeing brain through metaphor and imagery. She does not process those sights for the reader.

Nature imagery appears in both stories. Moore’s main character Ruth is primarily concerned with ridding her house of its various infestations. She has no sense of green, growing things. She can’t even tell the difference between a violet and a weed. She’s dealing with “crows the size of suitcases”( Moore 193), “carpenter ants—like shiny pieces of a child’s game” (193), squirrels and raccoons in the attic. She hires an exterminator and a landscaper, she buys a gun to shoot crows and still the “geese, the crows, the squirrels, the raccoons, the bats, the ants, the kids: Ruth now went to the firing range with Carla as often as she could” (Moore 206). Moore gives us plenty of insight into how Ruth is processing all this: “What she was feeling was too strange, too contrary, too isolated for mere emotion. It had to be a premonition…a premonition of death” (177), and “she never knew anymore what was a good life and what was bad, what was desirable matter and what was antimatter, what was the thing itself and what was the death of the thing” (201). Throughout Moore’s story we are given insight after insight, showing us the depth of Ruth’s suffering and her suffering over her suffering: “Every house is a grave, thought Ruth” (191).

Atwood relies on what we see and reveals only the simplest thoughts and emotions directly to us. She writes that Nell thought this or Nell wanted that, but not too often and without the depth and elaboration Moore uses. Primarily, she relies on subtext, as in this description which comes right after the morning call of peacocks on her farm being described as “like babies being murdered” (124):

“Nell planted everything she could think of. Tomatoes,

peas, spinach, carrots, turnips, beets, winter and summer

squash, cucumbers, succhinis, onions, potatoes. She

wanted generosity, abundance, an overflowing of fecundity,

as in Renaissance paintings of fruitful goddesses—Demeter,

Pomona—in flowing robes with one breast bare and glowing

edibles tumbling out of their baskets” (125).

We are not given insight into the inner working of Nell’s mind aside from the most basic emotions, but we know that there is some deeper dissatisfaction in all the life-tending she does on the farm for her live in “spouse” and his sons. She wants something that she is not getting, but we don’t hear her think about it like we do with Ruth. This is also revealed in the subtext of dialogue, as in her response to her partner’s “He’s in love with you,” in reference to the pet lamb they have to kill. She says: “I’m glad somebody is” (306). It is through subtext that Atwood reveals the desires of her main character. What is not explained for the reader but is suggested through imagery, what is not spoken between characters. It isn’t until the last page of the story that Nell’s need is revealed. We know she needs something, like the peacock needs his mate, the hen needs to horde all those eggs. Nell wants to produce offspring and doesn’t feel supported in that. “You don’t want me to have any babies” (140), she says to Tig, her spouse, on the last page of the story. We still don’t hear her think about it. We just hear her finally articulate it.

If it was a baby that Moore’s Ruth had wanted we would have been told right away, along with why she wanted the child and what was in her way. Let’s look at two exchanges between the female main characters and their respective spouses:

“ ‘A move…yes. A move will be good. We’ve soiled the nest,

in many respects.” her husband had said, in the circuitous

syntax and ponderous Lousiana drawl, that, like so much else

about him, had once madder her misty with desire and now

drove her nuts with scorn”(Moore 183).

“ ‘There’s a hundred acres,’ said Tig.

‘The house is kind of dark,’ said Nell. ‘It’s not very

cheerful.’

‘We’ll clean the windows,’ said Tig…

Nell didn’t say it wasn’t the windows, not the wallpaper.

But paint would help” (Atwood 117).

Atwood writes of one conversation between Nell and Tig: “There was more to this conversation, but it wasn’t voiced” (130). This is the case throughout the story and this subtext—what is not revealed—is what shows us the depth of Nell’s desire. She becomes “overrun with vegetables” and still the desire remains (132).

Moore splits open Ruth’s mind for us, revealing what she thinks, what she wants, and even the how and why of it to show us just how dark her spirit has become in remaining in a loveless marriage for so long, in surviving cancer only to not live.

Moore engages our thinking minds with irony and satire. Ruth, pondering her daughter’s dance lessons thinks “she wasn’t supposed to have taken them seriously! They had been intended as middle-class irony and window dressing—you weren’t actually supposed to become a dancer” (Moore 188). In this way the author is poking fun of the pointless life Ruth leads and then adds to this by naming her daughter “Mitzy”. Child or dog? We see this tendency to poke fun at her mundane, meaningless life again and again, as when Ruth’s friend Carla is working on “both her inner thighs and her inner child” (Moore 180). This technique invites the reader to also pick apart Ruth’s life and try to understand what great tragedy of circumstance or character brought her to the point in the end where without hesitance she shoots a man who breaks into their home and demands at gunpoint that she and her husband sing for him, and that this makes her realize what’s been true all along: she wants to die.

Atwood engages our seeing brain, not exposing the inner working of her character’s mind, but showing us all the magnificent detail of her farm life, all it’s life and violence. We see the peacock whose mate gets eaten by a weasel and who then in rage kills several hens and tries to attack his own reflection in a window. She shows us Nell cleaning, doing laundry, tending her garden, making ice cream and cheese. She shows us how she nursed the lamb that eventually has to be slaughtered because the animal loved her too much and kept attacking Tig. We see how she enters the slaughterhouse and describes “a menstrual smell.” We know she is having a crisis of womanhood. We can guess at why, but we do not, even in the end, when it’s revealed in dialogue, get to hear Nell think about it.

Both authors explore the relationship between life and death, love and hate in stories that tap into the symbolism of spring. Both stories show the power of a woman’s desire to love and be loved. They are so different though in style and tone. Moore uses irony, exposing the absurdity of a cancer survivor’s living as a dead person in her “grave” house. Atwood uses imagery and metaphor to show Nell’s desire to create and sustain life, to reproduce, to immerse herself in the things in nature that grow and love.

So, what does this all matter from the perspective of writing itself? It matters that these peculiarities of style were with some variation, consistent throughout the entirety of both collections. I could make these same comparisons of style between any two stories in the collection. Moore uses insight and irony. Her characters are joyless. She italicizes. Atwood reveals through subtext, imagery and metaphor. She gets crafty with punctuation, ending statements with questions, for instance. It just happens that these two stories had a couple of other parallels that made them, in my view, the best candidates for that discussion. This makes me wonder how I would characterize my own style and to what degree I’ve even developed that style. Also, I have a book-length collection of stories with a thread that I think is too bare and perhaps visible only to me. I’m thinking, after reading these two collections, that there is a stronger thread there to emphasize. I’m also thinking about whether it might be useful to do an informal evaluation characterizing the style of my novel from chapter to chapter, just to see what I can see. Is it consistent with my other work? What are my tics and tendencies?

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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
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Washing the dishes
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Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

I was delighted by Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam. There wasn’t a time when I became impatient or bored with the story, or when I questioned the style of the writing. In spite of the fact that the two main characters were shallow, ego-driven men that it was impossible to sympathize with, I loved it! It made me think. It made me laugh. I often had to pause in utter sentence envy. McEwan’s matter-of-fact tone, sly word choice, and perfect timing, made this a book that I will have to read again, because I do feel like there is much to be learned here.

McEwan’s tone is matter-of-fact from the first sentence: “Two former lovers of Molly Lane stood waiting outside the crematorium chapel with their backs to the February chill” (3). It rarely strays from this straightforward reporting of events. The descriptions of physical actions are concise, without frills: “He stretched, shuddered, yawned” (108). The dialogue is entirely in fragments, without unnecessary words. This works because we aren’t supposed to read too much into the characters of Clive or Vernon. They are shallow. McEwan does linger on Clive a while at times, but only to express the absurdity of the man who supposes he is working for a higher purpose, but in reality, though he claims to loathe the “license of the free artistic spirit” (66) that would allow a person to get out of an obligation, his “higher purpose” leads him to ignore a woman in distress and to murder his best friend.

Clive is the “ridiculous man” that he accuses George of being when he visits him and he turns up fully clothed under his silk robe. His ego over his art has robbed him of his humanity and his intelligence. He can’t even recognize his own vanity: “A genius. Though he sounded it guiltily on his inner ear, he would not let the word reach his lips. He was not a vain man. A genius. It was a term that had suffered from inflationary overuse, but surely there was a certain level of achievement, a gold standard, that was nonnegotiable, beyond mere opinion” (143). Clive is a vain man. This is emphasized again as he lapses into the sleep of death and is “overcome by a sudden deep affection for himself as just the sort of person one should stick by” (182). The matter-of-fact way that McEwan leads us to Clive’s death leaves no room for sympathy. And why sympathize with a man so utterly absorbed in his self that he thinks no one else really misses his former lover Molly, no other artist is as “high” as he is, and no one else really gets the joy of a good hike like he does?

McEwan adds further fuel to what is really a satire, attacking the media (Vernon) and the “arts” (Clive) with his slyly indulgent word choice. His repetition of the phrase “higher calling” or “higher purpose” leave the reader asking the important question of what is the higher calling of media and art? He influences our opinion of the characters by loading his sentences with heavy words like “bloated”, “fervent”, and “misanthropy”. If one were to judge the physical weight of this book by the heaviness of the words and not the pages, it would rival a novel twice its length. His sentences are often concise, clipped, but they are not simple in word choice. This weightiness of words invites the reader to take what is so often absurd and ironic with a certain serious of mind, elevates the satire.

Irony and satire abound from the beginning, as in this description of Molly’s two former lovers (Clive and Vernon) standing in a rose a garden at her memorial that was “marked with a sign, THE GARDEN OF REMEMBERANCE. Each plant had been savagely cut back to within a few inches of the frozen ground, a practice Molly used to deplore. The patch of lawn was strewn with flattened cigarette butts, for this was a place where people came to stand and wait for the funeral party ahead of theirs to clear the building” (4). And yet, McEwan plays on our expectations in other ways too. He chooses to reveal and conceal information in ways that keep us turning pages. For instance, we know about the photos of Garmony for pages and pages before we “see” them. When we do see them, we see them through Clive’s eyes. We expect of course for Clive to have the same reaction as Vernon. He can’t stand Garmony for the same reasons as Vernon: his relationship with Mollly and his conservative politics. However, Clive surprises us. Contrary to what we expect, he sees Garmony’s humanity for the first time in gazing upon the photos of him wearing women’s clothing. Also, there is the fact that when we first look in on Garmony, it is surprisingly from his wife’s perspective and not his. McEwan’s choice of when and how to reveal certain details of the story were really quite breath taking and unpredictable.

Though I can’t say the characters moved me, I can say that the writing in Amsterdam did. The choice of words, the pace and time, and the confident delivery seemed without flaw. I will certainly have to read it again.

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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

The narrator of The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera is familiar to me. He’s that boy who broke my heart. The cool one who could mold and shape me with his impressive way of talking about meaningful things in beautiful words, but feared vulnerability so much that is made him quite cruel in the end.

For most of the book, I was lying on my belly, chin in my cupped hand, entranced by his familiar voice. But, in the last pages, I began to feel cheated, like the whole thing had been a sham. Of course, it had. He’d been intruding on his so-called story practically from the start, and on page 239, he comes right out and admits his fraud, musing, “…characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nut shell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about” (239). He never pretends that his characters are real, yet I loved it most of the way through. So, why was I so let down in the end?

What had compelled me about this visible narrator in the first place? I’ll tell you: that he is spinning some interesting ideas and that he is an interesting character in his own right. The boy who broke my heart. It is this narrator who we spend the first two chapters with, who has us mulling over the Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return and his own arguments against the idea. It isn’t until the third chapter that he even introduces Tereza and Tomas, the main characters, and even then he does it in the context of his own mind: “I have been thinking about Tomas for many years” (6). We take him to be a wise man because he knows so much about the motivations and inner working of his characters, always revealing the why fors and the how comes: “he feared the responsibility” (7); “she felt so weak, so debilitated by Tomas’ infidelities” (63); “For twenty years he had seen his mother…in his wife” (126). This narrator lures us with his knowledge of philosophy, and then sustains our interest with his insight into human psychology. He is articulate and well spoken. We believe there is something we can learn from him.

There must be some reason he dissects his characters for us so visibly, so without the usual invisibility of a narrator who is not an actor in the events of his story. There is, of course, and he tells us this too: “Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions is good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decisions: we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions” (241). This is right about the point where the little things that had bothered me about the book took center stage and instead of lying rapt reading, I sat up straight and turned the final pages with annoyance.

So, what left me feeling cheated about the book? It was this: the narrator’s perfection. He was too all knowing, didn’t leave any unexplained complexities in his characters, and didn’t leave anything for the reader to figure out. That, and that he didn’t even leave a single character living in the end. He killed them all.

The character arcs did not feel real to me. It bothered me that he knew the character’s dreams, that he knew them so vividly, that they were all so perfectly symbolic. The fact that both Tereza and Tomas at the end of their life change the very thing that drives them throughout the entire story feels contrived. These aren’t real characters after all. They are “basic human possibilities”. Am I to believe that they are capable of that kind of transformation? Tereza gives up her jealousy. Tomas gives up his “missions”. I get it in an academic sense, but I don’t believe it is really all that possible.

The story is just too tidy. The characters are dissected and diagrammed, and then they die. This is true even of Franz and Sabina, the minor characters. And in the end it has to come back to what the narrator said from the outset. And to me, it just doesn’t feel like a very human possibility. So, while this narrator entranced me, in the end I realized what I had wanted all along. His vulnerability. I wanted the narrator to change, to arrive at an epiphany. Perhaps to make his characters real. He didn’t. While it did not break my heart that this was so, I wound up feeling like this supposedly wise man was really sort of dishonest and cruel, that all along all he had in mind was the philosophical tenet that he’d already revealed a hundred pages before the story ended.

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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 tend to read with my head more than my heart. I like to see how ideas develop through story and how writers put words together in interesting ways. It’s a rare book that moves me to tears. It’s not that I’m impervious to melancholy moods. I just usually experience the sadness more intellectually than emotionally. So, when I read the first story in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter Of Maladies and found myself teary-eyed in the end, I had to wonder at this. As I read, I continued to feel a more emotional connection to the stories than I am accustomed to. Sure, this in part has to do with the subject matter, but what I’d like to explore here is how the author’s use of varying sentence structures contribute to this affect, how they are akin to a kind of background music, playing on feeling in that way that songs do.
Lahiri’s prose often follows one of two kinds of rhythms. Beginning with a concise statement and unraveling details and commas from there, as in this paragraph beginning from “Sexy”: “It shamed her now. now, when she and Dev made love, Miranda closed her eyes and saw deserts and elephants, and marble pavilions floating on lakes beneath a full moon” (96). Or, starting with rolling sentences and then ending with a concise statement, as in this paragraph from the same story: “By February, Laxmi’s cousin’s husband still hadn’t some to his senses. He had returned to Montreal, argued bitterly with his wife for two weeks, packed two suitcases, and flown back to London. He wanted a divorce” (99). This luring and delivering rhythm suits the fact that Lahiri is deeply concerned with the inner emotional lives of her characters and how that impacts them and the people around them. The way she delivers dialogue compliments this rhythm.
If you look at the way she delivers dialogue in “Temporary Matters”, you can see this clearly. There are never more than a few lines of dialogue at a time. In between comes the mise en scene, described so sparingly, but so specifically to suggest that those details are symbolic to what is happening with and between the characters, as in this passage where Shoba and Shukumar are finally talking, sharing things that they’ve never told each other after barely interacting for what appears to be at least several months, perhaps years:
“Your turn,” she said, stopping his thoughts.
At the end of their street Shukumar heard sounds of a drill and the electricians shouting over it. He looked at the darkened facades of the houses lining the street. Candles glowed in the windows of one. In spite of the warmth, smoke rose from the chimney. (17)
The reminder here of the light/dark imagery that throughout the story symbolizes how the character conceal and then reveal their inner lives to each other, added to the chaos of the drills and the shouting foreshadow what is to come for these characters in finally divulging their secrets. They will ultimately have to admit the biggest secret of all: they have fallen out of love with each other.
The entire collection taken as a whole has a similar kind of rhythm. One could consider each story before the last as being a rolling sentence. They all have open endings. The final story in the collection, however, is so clean, so wrapped up:
I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home,
and certainly I am not the first. Still there are times I am
bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten,
each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary
as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination. (198)
And in these last few lines, the reader cannot help but feel the connection between all the stories, that they are individual songs connected by their interests in singing the inner lives of ordinary men and women.

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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

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.

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