Fiction Writers Review

Get Writing: The Backwards Telescope

Celeste Ng — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:00:37 +0000

When I was in high school, I took a playwriting class, and we’d sit there–all of us sixteen, seventeen, eighteen–reading our work aloud around the table. Our teacher, who was about thirty, would give us pointers: that speech is clunky; this character hasn’t said anything for ten minutes. But sometimes he wouldn’t say a word: he would look at us, hold his palm in front of his face for a moment, then let it drop to the table, as if he were offering us an invisible treat.

We didn’t really understand this Zen gesture at the time, but I can translate it now: it meant we were too close to the subject we were writing about. When something is right in front of your face—be it your palm or how your boyfriend broke up with you last week—it’s too close to really see. It’s nothing but a shadowy blur. Only when there’s some distance between you and it can you see it in a useful way.

The same is true in stories. Sometimes, in the quest for immediacy, we put our characters too close to the events they’re experiencing. And their lack of perspective can make the reader lose perspective as well.

So here’s the exercise: Write in the voice of your character 30 years later, describing the events of the story that is being told in the present. How does the character feel about these events now? How important was this day in the context of his/her life?

What you come up with may end up as the seed for your story to grow in a new point of view, as a moment of flash-forward for your character, or an Alice Munro-eque ending that leaps decades to join the character well in the future. But even if what you write never makes it into the story at all, looking back at the story—through the wrong end of the telescope, as it were—will offer you insight into the character and new perspective on the events you’re trying to tell.

Missed some of our Get Writing exercises? Check out the whole set in our archives.

Metaphysical Description, Or How Many Potatoes Make How Much Vodka?

Michael Byers — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:00:02 +0000

While it is hard enough to describe something effectively in fiction¹—how a thing smells, moves, looks—sometimes it is useful to further describe how exactly a thing seems or appears to be, above and beyond any discernible physical characteristics. The ineffable sense of how things are often makes up the best and most memorable aspect of a piece of writing, but it can be among the hardest things to get right. It is useful for writers to remember that often this aspect of seeming and appearing will be conveyed through metaphor; and often the seeming and appearing will touch in some way on the meaning of what is being observed—or will include a mention of a character’s feelings about, or engagement with, the thing observed.

Note that the description of the ineffable sense of a thing will almost always be preceded by a more basic, sometimes quite extended, physical description. The writer in this case takes on the role of Dr. Frankenstein. With Igor’s help, the writer assembles legs, arms, torso, neck, head, and brain. The writer arranges all this stuff on the table, sews it together. But it is still dead (if vivid) matter. Then the writer applies the electricity—describes the mysterious, often quasi-metaphorical sense of a thing—and the thing opens its eyes and comes to life.

For example, in Alice Munro’s 1979 story “The Beggar Maid”, we find Rose, a scholarship student, just entering college. She is compelled to attend a meeting with other scholarship students, and, arriving with an unprepossessing companion at the room where the meeting is held, Rose hesitates outside the door.

There was a little window in the door. They could look through at the other scholarship winners already assembled and waiting. It seemed to Rose that she saw four or five girls of the same stooped and matronly type as the girl who was beside her, and several bright-eyed, self-satisfied babyish-looking boys. It seemed to be the rule that girl scholarship winners looked about forty and boys about twelve. It was not possible, of course, that they all looked like this. It was not possible that in one glance through the windows of the door Rose could detect traces of eczema, stained underarms, dandruff, moldy deposits on the teeth and crusty flakes in the corners of the eyes. That was only what she thought. But there was a pall over them, she was not mistaken, there was a true terrible pall of eagerness and docility.

Notice how Rose’s observation of this long exact list of gross-out sufferings—”eczema, stained underarms, dandruff, moldy deposits on the teeth and crusty flakes in the corners of the eyes”—is implicitly disowned twice (we are told that this is only how “it seemed”) and very explicitly disowned three times: “It was not possible, of course….It was not possible….That was only what she thought.” (And notice further that Rose’s disowning of the list in no way erases the impression the list has made on us.)

But no, Munro is onto something with these disavowals—because it’s true, these physical complaints are not what Rose has seen, not exactly. What she has seen is something else, something further, an impression of something, that she cannot really point to. She has seen “a pall”—literally, “something that covers, shrouds, or overspreads, esp. with darkness or gloom.” But where is the pall? Where is it in the room? Is it hovering “over them”, up near the light fixtures?²

We understand from Munro’s unusual insistence that we are not meant to take this as just a metaphor: “But there was a pall over them, she was not mistaken, there was a true terrible pall of eagerness and docility.” But what is this, really? What is being described here? Nothing less than the sense of how things are, a sudden, almost mystical understanding of the truth about these people. And with this description, zap, the world of the room takes on meaning, and life. The Frankenstein Effect, at its finest.

Munro is a past master at this (and a million other things). In her story “Dance of the Happy Shades” (1961), a group of mentally disabled children arrive at a much anticipated piano recital. The narrator senses something going on:

It is while I am at the piano, playing the minuet from Berenice, that the final arrival, unlooked-for by anybody but Miss Marsalles, takes place. It must seem at first that there has been some mistake. Out of the corner of my eye I see a whole procession of children, eight or ten in all, with a red-haired woman in something like a uniform, mounting the front step. They look like a group of children from a private school on an excursion of some kind (there is that drabness and sameness about their clothes) but their progress is too scrambling and disorderly for that. Or this is the impression I have; I cannot really look. Is it the wrong house, are they really on their way to the doctor for shots, or to Vacation Bible Classes? No, Miss Marsalles has got up with a happy whisper of apology; she has gone to meet them. Behind my back there is a sound of people squeezing together, of folding chairs being opened, there is an inappropriate, curiously unplaceable giggle.

And above or behind all this cautious flurry of arrival there is a peculiarly concentrated silence. Something has happened, something unforeseen, perhaps something disastrous; you can feel such things behind your back.

You can’t, of course—not really—but then again, yes you can. The many tiny details have added up to something impalpable and profound, something that goes beyond description—something that has, almost literally, entered the air of the room.

Almost literally is the point here. On the verge of literalness.

Note that not every description calls for a metaphysical component. Usually this sort of technique is most useful when a character is observing a complicated scenario—an airport concourse, a crammed bookshelf, a busy restaurant—in which a number of objects or people are involved, and where it is useful to convey both a sense of particularity and an overall impression of things. But always when you see a writer deploying the terms

an air of

an atmosphere of

a sense of

an impression of

and other similar shortcuts, you ought to feel the hair rising on the back of your neck, because Dr. Frankenstein is warming up his generator. And things are about to get metaphysical.

The P:V Ratio

If a metaphysical understanding is to be in some fashion arrived at through the medium of the world, then we may note that different authors derive this metaphysical understanding differently. Some writers prefer to assemble more world on the table before applying the electricity that represents a greater understanding.

We may therefore find it suitable to change our underlying metaphor, leaving behind all these dripping body parts our assistant has so obligingly harvested, and propose instead a more congenial potatoes-to-vodka ratio, where some writers prefer to assemble more potatoes (or “world”) and others fewer, to arrive at a given amount of distilled spirit (or “understanding”).

In this new potatoes-to-vodka model, the potatoes, of course, are the physical matter of a story—shoes, ceilings, arguments, sentences, eyebrows, wind, cat hair, Coca-Cola, and jump ropes³, while vodka is the metaphysical understanding derived from these physical things. We may call this a writer’s p:v ratio, representing the efficiency with which a writer typically makes use of the world.

In the following selections, potatoes are set in bold and spirit, in italics.

Alice Munro will, as always, provide a useful—and in this case usefully typical—example. In “Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage”, a middle-aged, unattractive woman shops for a fancy dress, thinking (at this point falsely) that she is going to be married in it. She enters the shop:

Along one wall was a rack of evening dresses, all fit for belles of the ball with their net and taffeta, their dreamy colors. And beyond them, in a glass case so no profane fingers could get at them, half a dozen wedding gowns, pure white froth or vanilla satin or ivory lace, embroidered in silver beads or seed pearls. Tiny bodies, scalloped necklines, lavish skirts. Even when she was younger she could never have contemplated such extravagance, not just in the matter of money but in expectations, in the preposterous hope of transformation, and bliss.

Here the metaphysical understanding has plainly been reached by means of the physical observation. The potatoes of the shop provide a sort of ballast to the abstracted thought, but also provide the means by which to arrive at it. A reasonable amount of world (the rack, the net and taffeta, et cetera) produces in a character a reasonable amount of mind-stuff.

Munro is unique in her ability but not in her technique; most writers’ habits in this regard at least superficially resemble Munro’s, deploying a moderate amount of stuff to arrive at a moderate amount of spirit. And perhaps it is this moderation that allows us to qualify a writer as “realistic”—most of us seem to experience the world at something like this measured pace, after all, as we move through our days both beset by sensory input and at the same time subject to the addled and improvisatory workings of our own brains.⁴ In a similar vein, John Updike observes before he transcends, in “The Afterlife”:

A broad-faced strawberry blonde, she had always worn sweaters and plaid pleated skirts and low-heeled shoes for her birding walks, and here this same outfitseemed a shade more chic and less aggressively “sensible” than it had at home. Her pleasant plain looks, rather lost in the old crowd of heavily groomed suburban wives, had bloomed in this climate; her manner, as she showed them the house and their room upstairs, seemed to Carter somehow blushing, bridal.⁵

If this balance between world and mind allows us to locate Munro and Updike in the solid realistic mainstream of contemporary fiction, what of some others? What happens if you prefer fewer potatoes? What if you prefer more? What if you’re not interested in describing spirit at all? Or what if you’re more interested in meaning than in matter, like some spats-wearing evangelist, waving your hands in the air in hopes of producing something from nothing? Clearly this requires an inadequate, seat-of-the-pants survey.

Tweaking the P:V Ratio

Some writers, of course, prefer to avoid the explicit statement of spirit entirely. Hemingway and his ilk have a very high ratio of potatoes-to-vodka, with Hemingway’s followers arranged around him in a haphazard spatter array. To take a familiar example, Raymond Carver’s “Why Don’t You Dance” lives almost entirely in the present, physical moment; a man, now without his wife (we gather she has left because of his drinking, among other reasons), puts his household belongings out in his yard and driveway, arranging them for sale just as they have been arranged in the house. A young couple comes along; the girl dances with the man, and is evidently affected by his plight. The story is told in simple, factual terms, with little or no reference to thoughts, feelings, or epiphanic realizations. The story’s final section, in its entirety, goes:

Weeks later, she said: “The guy was about middle-aged. All his things right there in his yard. No lie. We got real pissed and danced. In the driveway. Oh, my God. Don’t laugh. He played us these records. Look at this record-player. The old guy gave it to us. And all these crappy records. Will you look at this shit?”

She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying.

Potatoes? Vodka? It is debatable. The girl is feeling something, of course, as the story suggests, but she can’t express it, possibly because she hasn’t got the equipment to do so. And because she can’t express it, we don’t get an explicit statement of it either. It’s possible to read the whole story as a pile of potatoes, with that last 26-word paragraph serving as the equivalent of the story’s spirit. The story’s last paragraph is in fact the mental result, finally, of a worldly encounter. At any rate, the ratio of potatoes to vodka here is very high, if indeed there is any vodka to divide by.

By contrast, a writer may be particularly interested in spirit—literally so in the case of, for example, James Baldwin, whose stories and novels tend to avoid physical description while dwelling more on abstract concerns. In his story “The Outing”, three boys are on the make in various ways during a church retreat. Then they enter the meeting room:

During his testimony Johnny and Roy and David had stood quietly beside the door, not daring to enter while he spoke. The moment he sat down they moved quickly, together, to the front of the high hall and knelt down beside their seats to pray. The aspect of each of them underwent always, in this company, a striking, even an exciting change; as though their youth, barely begun, were already put away; and the animal, so vividly restless and undiscovered, so tense with power, ready to spring had already stalked and trapped and offered, a perpetual blood-sacrifice, on the altar of the Lord.

We sense here that, as is often the case for Baldwin, conflict is played out in an almost literal sense on the field of the personality, where such matters as identity and the fate of one’s soul are best and most frankly considered. The rendering of the Baldwin’s physical world is often minimal, as though such surface concerns are too trivial to consider.⁶

With these opposing practices in mind, we must now consider a minor and possibly self-evident corollary aspect of this idea, that of scale.

Scale

The scale under consideration here is the differing P:V ratio we find in stories versus novels. We know that novels tend to be richer in their effects than stories; specifically, we find that novelists tend to describe much more matter than a story writer will, but will derive from this matter roughly the same amount of spirit (or sometimes slightly more).⁷ In other words, novelists pile up more potatoes as a matter of course, but don’t derive giant gushing fountains of vodka. Longer descriptions leading to bigger heaps of stuff, but not a concomitant increase in the amount of understanding derived. You can only understand so much at once, after all.

In Couples, John Updike describes Harold little-Smith’s house; Harold has just learned that his wife may be having an affair. This has the effect of rendering his house “more transparent”, and the description that follows is limpid to the extreme, if sometimes verging on the purple. The house is:

…a flat-roofed redwood modern oriented along a little sheltered ridge overlooking the marsh to the south. The foyer was floored in flagstones; on the right an open stairway went down to a basement level where the three children (Jonathan, Julia, Henrietta) slept and the laundry was done and the cars were parked. Above this, on the main level, were the kitchen, the dining room, the master bedroom, a polished hall where hung reproductions of etchings by Rembrandt, Durer, Piranesi, and Picasso. To the left of the foyer a dramatically long living room opened up, with a shaggy cerulean rug and two facing white sofas and symmetrical hi-fi speakers and a Baldwin grand and at the far end an elevated fireplace with a great copper hood. The house bespoke money in the service of taste. In the summer evenings he would drive back from the station through the livelong light hovering above the tawny marshes, flooded or dry according to the tides, and find his little wife, her black hair freshly combed and parted, waiting on the longer of the sofas, which was not precisely white but rather a rough Iranian wool bleached to the pallor of sand mixed with ash. A record, Glenn Gould or Dinu Lupatti playing Bach or Schumann, would be sending forth clear vines of sound from the invisible root within the hi-fi closet. A pitcher of martinis would have been mixed and held chilled within the refrigerator toward this precious moment of his daily homecoming….

The description in the original goes on at about this length again, and includes such additional stuff as a chewed sponge ball, Jonathan in bathing trunks, the liquid branches of the lawn sprinkler, and so on. The overwhelming feeling is of an assembling stillness and a slant-lit suburban glamour—a hushed, beautiful hesitation—until at last:

Marcia would pour two verdant martinis into glasses that would suddenly sweat…and his entire household, even the stray milk butterfly perched on the copper fireplace hood, felt about to spring into bliss, like a tightly wound music box.

Here possibly we may see that a writer’s natural habits align better with one form than with another; in his best work Updike the novelist seems to be much more confident that his gist will come across than does Updike the short-story writer. There is far less—relatively speaking—summarizing and explaining, as though Updike feels confident that surely, given all the matter he has presented to us, we will be able to see what he means.

Turn the ratio down somewhat to discover Ian McEwan at work in Atonement, gathering his many finely described potatoes in order to derive, on behalf of Briony, a rather considerable draft of spirit:

…in a prized varnished cabinet, a secret drawer was opened by pushing against the grain of a cleverly turned dovetail joint, and here she kept a diary locked by a clasp, and a notebook written in a code of her own invention. In a toy safe opened by six secret numbers she stored letters and postcards. An old tin petty cash box was hidden under a removable floorboard beneath her bed. In the box were treasures that dated back four years, to her ninth birthday when she began collecting: a mutant double acorn, fool’s gold, a rainmaking spell bought at a funfair, a squirrel’s skull as light as a leaf.

But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organized world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel. Her effective status as an only child, as well as the relative isolation of the Tallis house, kept her, at least during the long summer holidays, from girlish intrigues with friends. Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know. None of this was particularly an affliction; or rather, it appeared so only in retrospect, once a solution had been found.

And observe Henry James, masterfully interweaving matter with spirit through the mind of the young and impressionable Isabel Archer, suggesting that to the greatest and most knowing practitioners, mind and matter are really inseparable aspects of a fundamental unity. Notice how difficult it sometimes is, in the following example, to decide which side of things a sentence or a phrase is addressing, and how, for James, matters of custom and perception can be seen to blend:

The foundation of her knowledge was really laid in the idleness of her grandmother’s house, where, as most of the other inmates were not reading people, she had uncontrolled use of a library full of books with frontispieces, which she used to climb upon a chair to take down. When she had found one to her taste—she was guided in the selection chiefly by the frontispiece—she carried it into a mysterious apartment which lay beyond the library and which was called, traditionally, no one knew why, the office. Whose office it had been and at what period it had flourished, she never learned; it was enough for her that it contained an echo and a pleasant musty smell and that it was a chamber of disgrace for old pieces of furniture whose infirmities were not always apparent (so that the disgrace seemed unmerited and rendered them victims of injustice) and with which, in the manner of children, she had established relations almost human, certainly dramatic. There was an old haircloth sofa in especial, to which she had confided a hundred childish sorrows. The place owed much of its mysterious melancholy to the fact that it was properly entered from the second door of the house, the door that had been condemned, and that it was secured by bolts which a particularly slender girl found it impossible to slide. She knew that this silent, motionless portal opened into the street; if the sidelights had not been filled with green paper she might have looked out upon the little brown stoop and the well-worn brick pavement. But she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side—a place which became to the child’s imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or terror.

As a further and final aside, and related to the example of James, it is worth noting that as the efficiency of narrative distillation increases, and as the ratio of world-to-mind approaches the perfect balance of 1:1, peculiar things can begin to happen. John Cheever’s novels and stories live fruitfully at this stylistic event-horizon, the authorial eye shuttling so swiftly between world and mind that the boundary between the two begins to fade away. In “The Ocean”, one of Cheever’s prototypically imperiled householders fears he is being poisoned by his wife:

I mixed a Martini and went into the living room. I was not in any danger from which I could not readily escape. I could go to the country club for supper. Why I hesitated to do this seems, in retrospect, to have been because of the blue walls of the room in which I stood. It was a handsome room, its long windows looking out onto a lawn, some trees, and the sky. The orderliness of the room seemed to impose some orderliness on my own conduct—as if by absenting myself from the table I would in some way offend the order of things. If I went to the club for supper I would be yielding to my suspicions and damaging my hopefulness, and I was determined to remain hopeful.

Cheever’s rough 1:1 p:v ratio seems to go some way toward producing his trademark sound—a sort of tremulous, searching flight, as a claustrophobic eye shuttles ceaselessly between world and mind in search of an elusive certainty. The feeling becomes one of weird immersion and a kind of synesthesia; the character experiences the world, has an immediate mental reaction, and is then at once experiencing the world again. Fitting perhaps that we find the fraught and frenzied Cheever here, seeing and feeling, seeing and feeling, helpless to prevent his marvelously fruitful mind from making something of everything.⁸

The Visual Aid

Finally, with all these dubious propositions behind us, we can suggest that every writer might be plotted on a p:v graph, giving rise to the highly dubious Figure 1:

Surely we have gone too far with this, and certainly it is entirely wrong to put novelists and short-story writers together, rather as though we have tried somehow to pen up tigers with barracuda, but it is interesting to note the opposing and intersecting groupings, one of which we may very generally see is composed of Worriers—writers less at home in the world, and who have taken the self, or some version of the self, as the subject—while the other is composed of Composed Describers, writers who have taken the world as their subject and, generally speaking, written about society. That this is a byproduct of the individual personalities in question seems plain. We should also note that the very greatest tend to find themselves at rather the far points on the graph, outliers here as elsewhere, and that certain stylistically versatile folks can be imagined to be plotted in more than one place (Welty’s various moods, Updike’s, Faulkner’s come to mind), rather as though they have both a city house and a country one.

But what are we to do with this, then, as writers of prose? Probably we ought to note the relative scarcity of successful examples on the left side of the chart, whose few denizens have managed, like those extremophile bacteria who manage to flourish on ocean-bottom vents or in sulfuric acid pools in the depths of limestone caves, to survive in difficult environments, deriving great hogsheads of spirit from mere armfuls of potatoes. We ought to observe the cluster of sturdy realists trading remarks around the 10:2 mark, with the anomalous Coetzee somehow standing there too, all cool and gray and saying absolutely nothing whatsoever to anybody, and we may further admiringly note the high, plush posts of the great novelists, who manage to furnish their work with not only a great amplitude of matter but also of insight. We will leave it to the poets and especially to those lucky vessels who feel themselves recipients of divine inspiration to aspire to the ratio of 100:100, wherein the great unimaginable gigantitude of the world is, leaf-by-leaf, quantum-by-quantum, infused with the fullness of a supernaturally omnipresent understanding. We here are only prose writers, and we have deadlines to meet, so something like “just enough, not too much” will have to do. A little vodka is good for you, let us be satisfied to say, and too much ain’t.

Notes

1. Person, place, object, situation, idea—they’re all hard.

2. I see pall people.

3. Nouns are especially weighty. Descriptions are usually made of nouns and adjectives. But actions and lines of dialog must also be recognized as potato-esque in their effects, too, and a very good description will usually contain some element of action. Notice where your attention tends to catch and where it tends to slide in this description of Gabriel, from “The Dead”:

He was a stout tallish young man. The high colour of his cheeks pushed upwards even to his forehead where it scattered itself in a few formless patches of pale red; and on his hairless face there scintillated restlessly the polished lenses and the bright gilt rims of the glasses which screened his delicate and restless eyes. His glossy black hair was parted in the middle and brushed in a long curve behind his ears where it curled slightly beneath the groove left by his hat.

When he had flicked lustre into his shoes he stood up and pulled his waistcoat down more tightly on his plump body. Then he took a coin rapidly from his pocket.

Observe Joyce’s well-intentioned attempts to ‘actionize’ the description: “pushed upwards,” “scattered itself,” “scintillated restlessly,” “screened.” But these are tricks, and not very successful. The mind’s eye is most engaged when Gabriel is actually doing something—”he pulled his waistcoat down more tightly on his plump body.” And it is least engaged where he is simply being something—”He was a stout tallish young man.” We see what is done more easily than we see what simply is. In this our eye is amphibian, registering change, becoming blind to stasis.

4. This is, it may be argued, the fundamental work of narrative art: the description of the metronomic interaction between the private mind and the constantly impinging world.

5. Updike’s reliance on seemed here and throughout his mighty oeuvre suggests his general preoccupation with the truth that lurks behind appearances, with making sure that everything be understood; and if it is this impulse that gives rise to his occasional overweening anxiety that we get the point of something, it strikes me as a fitting impulse. Very tall, he was terribly gawky as a child, with a gigantic nose, debilitating eczema, a comical stutter, and to top it all off a world-class mind. No one looking at him could have guessed what he really was. No wonder that the Rabbit books feature a man who, on the surface, is mostly unremarkable—a former high school basketball star, a printing press operator, a car salesman, a middling husband and father—and yet who has perhaps the most florid, nuanced internal life of any character ever composed. Related to this, surely, is Updike’s chronic affection for adverbs, those gravitational devices that control the flight of a verb even after it has been set loose. What other author would give us a character who “steered sullenly”? A life that is “majestically rooted”? Why else would he describe a hoard of treasure as “surreptitiously hidden”? Because of a mostly generous desire to make sure we get what he’s saying. That we get him, really, the kid with the big nose and the hideous skin, who also happens to be, as he might say, transcendently alight.

6. This is complicated by the fact that Baldwin’s characters also often struggle against their own bodies in various ways.

7. This is true even when the novelist and the short story writer are one and the same person; Doctorow the novelist has a much higher P:V ratio than Doctorow the short-story writer.

8. That Cheever was subject to the workings of his peculiar brain seems obvious; it has always struck me that the hysterical, sensory-enhanced well-being expressed in so much of Cheever’s work resembles the feeling that accompanies an epileptic’s ‘aura’, wherein the universe seems infused with mysterious meaning. Late in his life, with his brain ruined by booze, Cheever in fact had two epileptic seizures; it is my unsupportable crackpot belief that he had been experiencing mild seizures all his life, and that his habitual drinking may have been, in some small part, a means by which he attempted to reproduce the lovely feelings that unpredictably descended upon him, and which must have seemed, undiagnosed as they would have been, messages from a greater, senselessly benign power. Poor, mean, helpless, brilliant Cheever.

Book of the Week: Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain, by Lucia Perillo

Jeremiah Chamberlin — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:21:39 +0000

This week’s feature is Lucia Perillo’s debut story collection, Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain (W.W. Norton). She is also the author of six books of poetry, most recently On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), and a collection of essays, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing (Trinity University Press, 2007). Her fifth book of poems, Inseminating the Elephant (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2000 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.

In her recent reviewlet of this collection, Alison Espach writes:

Perhaps the collection is best described in my favorite story, “Doctor Vick’s,” when Perillo writes, “You know the only true world is the one you carry inside you.” These stories are compelling journeys because they are so true.

We’re giving away a copy of Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain next week to three of our Twitter followers. To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

Book-of-the-Week Winners: This Will be Difficult to Explain

Jeremiah Chamberlin — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:03:20 +0000

Last week we featured Johanna Skibsrud’s collection This Will be Difficult to Explain, and we’re pleased to announce the winners:

Kathy Jambor (@kathyjambor)
Genevieve Chan (@gcanceko)
Laura Hauther (@trebuchet)

Congrats! To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address:

winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com

If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!

Thanks to all of you who are fans. We appreciate your support. Let us know your favorite new books out there!

Stories We Love: American Masculine

Shawn Andrew Mitchell — Tue, 15 May 2012 13:00:58 +0000

Fresh from a relationship with a feminist scholar, I was on guard against Shann Ray’s American Masculine before I even cracked its spine. With a title like that, I thought, you’d better have a gay man in Chelsea, a drag queen in Flint, a straight man watching a hired man wash his yacht, a man living out of the back of a Volvo in a Wal-Mart parking lot, a Hispanic man washing dishes, a Hispanic man climbing the corporate ladder; you’d better provide one heckova Whitmanian catalog of Masculinity in the U.S. of A. My suspicions only deepened as I read the first few stories. In them men were rough, troubled, distant, and heteronormative. Women were the epitome of light, everything good that men reached toward.

But then a curious thing happened: the beating heart of these stories won. I took a breath and relaxed into Ray’s paternal, semi-omniscient arms.

Because it’s not fair to judge a collection by its title. Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior didn’t start out so winkingly alliterative and evaluative. Her publisher suggested that name.

And it’s not fair to judge a collection based on what the author didn’t intend. (See John Updike’s 6 Rules for Reviewing, dear curmudgeon.)

What Ray appears to want to do—and what Ray does—is give us wise, caring, broadly-scoped stories that roam time as freely as they range across the Western landscape in which they’re set, deeply spiritual stories with room for grand characterization—“the malice inside him like the outline of an animal in the dark,” sweeping views—“everything but the land was solitary and small under a wide, wide sky,” and muscular descriptions—“down to the tracks, the wheels, the black pump of the smoking engine, the yell of the machine.” Ray drives into rough terrain with honesty, and delivers intense portraits of what it means to try to be a man in the country, the city, an insurance office, a rodeo.

I love these stories more each time I read them.

Read Shann Ray’s “The Great Divide” from The Better of McSweeney’s, Vol. 2

First Looks, May 2012: The Last Hundred Days and The Innocents

Erika Dreifus — Mon, 14 May 2012 13:00:48 +0000

Hello again, FWR friends. Welcome to the latest installment of our “First Looks” series, which highlights soon-to-be released books that have piqued my interest as a reader-who-writes. We publish “First Looks” here on the FWR blog around the 15th of each month, and as always, I’d love to hear your comments and your recommendations of forthcoming titles. Please drop me a line anytime: erika(at)fictionwritersreview(dot)com, and thanks in advance.

This month’s First Looks picks take us in a decidedly international direction. Let’s begin with The Last Hundred Days, Patrick McGuinness’s debut novel, which was longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize and is publishing in the U.S. next week. Especially for those of you—I know you’re out there!—who are too young to remember much about the Cold War and Eastern-bloc dictatorships, this novel will introduce you not only to a foreign city (Bucharest), but also to some not-so-ancient history (the novel takes place during the last months of the Ceausescu regime in 1989). Beyond that, McGuinness is another new novelist coming from a poetry background, and I’m always interested in the products of that cross-genre training.

Next, early June will bring the U.S. release of another debut novel: Francesca Segal’s The Innocents. Billed as a recasting of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence—but set within a modern-day London Jewish community—this one hits many of my readerly and writerly interests: reworkings of classics I’ve loved, Jewish literature, and the international accent.

P.S. In keeping with the internationalist focus: If you missed my recent reviewlet covering Anne Korkeakivi’s debut novel The Unexpected Guest (set mainly in Paris), now is a perfectly fine moment to read it.

Further Reading and Resources:

Watch and listen: Patrick McGuinness recently visited Villanova University and read from his work there.
Courtesy of The Man Booker Prize: a Reader’s Guide (PDF) for The Last Hundred Days.
Listen to Francesca Segal read from The Innocents.
Read Francesca Segal’s Granta essay, “In My Father’s Footsteps,” about her father, author Erich Segal.

Serving the Story: An Interview with Richard Bausch

Emily Besh — Mon, 14 May 2012 13:00:46 +0000

Richard Bausch, © Mark Weber

Richard Bausch is an exacting writer. With precise language that lends a breathtaking verisimilitude to his fiction, Bausch lays the groundwork in which settings and characters—their smallest actions and passing conversations—seem not only memorable, but inevitable. Immersed in his books, you see with new clarity.

I recently had the privilege of joining him in the Moss Workshop at the University of Memphis, a model he began more than sixteen years ago. Just in time, too. He has recently accepted a position with the faculty at Chapman University in California, a post he assumes in August.

Bausch is colorful, uncensored, and opinionated—unruly, even—like someone who would (and did) leave his car idling by railroad tracks to jump a passing train. He often wears a baseball cap pulled low over his brow, beneath which his eyes have a mischievous gleam. He’s willing, always, to try his hand at something new: the guitar, say, or stand-up comedy. He loves theater and film, often tossing out a quick quote or recounting a salient scene. Through eleven published novels and eight collections of short stories, Bausch has proven to be not only prolific but consistently excellent, a writer whose discipline equals his passion.

Bausch’s dexterity with short stories elevates the form. His straightforward, minimalistic style doesn’t pull shazaam endings, or plot pyrotechnics. But a story like the O’Henry-winning “What Feels Like the World” chokes me with emotion every time. Using simple, direct dialogue, Bausch fixes his stories’ terrain in the mind. It’s as if he turns your head and says “There. Now look.”

Interview

Emily Besh: Who ignited your desire to write, and when did you begin to identify yourself as a writer?

Richard Bausch: I had a teacher named Helen Garson when I was in my first year of college, who looked at me after reading something I’d written and said, “You’re a Southern writer by definition with all this family stuff in here, and you’re going to be a great one, I can tell.” I lived on that for a long time—through a lot of bad times. I ended up teaching with her for twenty years, and sending my own students to her. And she got a signed copy of every book as it came out, and with every one she wrote me a lovely letter, appreciating what she found in it. A great teacher.

And there was another, Lorraine Brown, who one day when I said I didn’t think I had it in me to write one more scholarly paper, smiled at me and said, “All right then, write me a verse play, like Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea.” That was the Yeats we were reading. She was another great one.

As to when I truly began to identify myself as a writer, it must have been when I sold the first novel. I remember going to the door and pushing it wide open and standing in it with my legs slightly apart, like a man expecting a high wind, and cupped my hands to the sides of my mouth and shouted “Listen up everybody! I’m a novelist!”

When I was a lot younger than that, I went around a lot with the suspicion that I might be a writer, afraid to think about it too directly, and feeling presumptuous and pretentious for the thought.

And of course the doubt is always heavy and never goes away, nor does the tentativeness about it ALL.

You give subtle attention to seemingly minor moments in your narratives. How often do you find yourself saying “too much,” rather than “not enough?”

I seldom question or edit much as I’m writing. During the process of thinking about it all and trying to revise and be sharp, I go back and forth, sometimes feeling it is too much (usually in this case it is more about showing off my own skill, or giving forth the best and most flattering sense of my tender soul and my ‘bag of sorrows,’ as Frederick Busch put it once—than contributing to the reader’s visceral feeling of the events I’m describing)—sometimes feeling it is too much, and sometimes feeling it is not enough, anemic because I’ve gone past it without looking at it coldly and as a stranger might. I want there to be enough for the reader to care what happens; and I want the words to disappear, in a way, so the reader is not so much aware that he is reading. It is indeed a fine line, but when you go through it 75 times, it gets a little clearer. You’re better able to tell the difference between the anemic or slipshod, and the self-indulgent or excessive for its own sake. Everything should be subservient to the story, including all my opinions and all my attitudes and all my ambitions, too.

You hit the literary world running—your first two novels published back-to-back. Could you tell us about that? With eleven novels and eight collections of short stories, it doesn’t seem like you’ve slowed down much.

It went like this: I sold my first novel, Real Presence, under the title, The Vineyard Keeper in early April of 1979. I was 33 years old, about to turn 34. James Dickey, having read the book, called me and suggested the title Real Presence. I didn’t like it at first, but can see now that it is the only possible title for that book. Later that summer, after experiencing the heady validation of selling the first one, and on the good advise of my pal Susan Richards Shreve, who already had two books out, I began a second novel.

I was calling that one I Don’t Care If I Never Get Back, because it began with a kid obsessed with baseball. I finished that one in early January, under the title Take Me Back. Just as I delivered that novel, news came in that Real Presence would be a Book of The Month Club Alternate Selection. And then in early June, after the book came out, it was reviewed in Time. Take Me Back was sold and in galleys before Real Presence appeared. And when in May a year later Take Me Back came out, Jane Smiley said to a mutual friend, “Maybe he’s dying, and trying to get them all out before it happens.” That’s Jane’s humor, and I laughed when I heard it.

Anyway, because the second one came so quickly, I got it into my head that I had it figured out now, and would be delivering a novel roughly every four months. Take Me Back got nominated for the PEN/Faulkner award, with a citation written by Walker Percy. I got to know him at the awards ceremony. And pretty soon I was walking around trying to write a philosophical novel a la Mr. Percy, and it was my wife, Karen, who finally called me on it, after two years of misery and four different manuscripts that I never let out of the house.

Now I don’t know what the average is, and am not inclined to use the math necessary to figure it. I do know that I have never gone longer than three years without publishing a book since 1980. And if I can finish the present novel and deliver it and have it accepted, I will publish it in 2013, probably, which keeps to the never-more-than three years pattern.

How does the germ of a story begin? Does the process still surprise you?

They come in different ways and with different matters trailing along in them. I carried “What Feels Like The World” around—the floor of it: a man and his overweight daughter, and the sorrow parents feel watching their children go into a building where they can have no immediate effect on what happens to them in there—I carried that around for a year or so, because each day for a long while I’d seen this heavy man with his overweight daughter walking up to the door of my kids’ school. There was a special bond between them. And then carrying that around as I was, that image and that sense of the helpless love I knew he felt in the circumstance, his heavy darling walking up to the door and in, where, children being as they are, she would suffer all that they both knew she would suffer the whole day long, and it was in their faces, too.

Carrying that around as I was, I happened to be at a gymnastics demonstration at that very school, where about nine of the seventy kids ran around the vaulting horse instead of going over it. (I think the heavy girl was in an earlier class, or was absent.) But of course there were other heavy kids and watching them go around the vaulting horse, I had an image of this man, this father of the heavy girl throwing a fit in the hallway of the school about his child, saying “What the hell. Everybody can do SOMETHING, can’t they? Why put her through this humiliation?” I had that picture of him shouting down the hallway of the school, and I knew then that I would write the story. Or, a story. Something to do with that helpless feeling the parent suffers when his child has to go through the badness of that kind of situation.

When I got to the end, I read the last paragraphs to my wife, who said, “You can’t leave it there.” I read the end to some friends, all of whom said, “No, you can’t leave it there. The reader will want to know.”

So I tried like hell to render the rest of the scene, and I did it both ways. [The first], where I wrote her sailing over the vaulting horse, felt like cheating, like treacley television Hollywood cotton candy reality existing only to pander to the already asleep. The second way, where she failed to get over, felt like cheating it another way, rubbing a smart reader’s nose in it purely for the self-indulgent pleasure I could get out of what I could do with English sentences to make him squirm and hurt past the experience. So I left the end as it was and sold it to The Atlantic a couple of weeks later. And it won an O. Henry Award and I still get people who want to know if she gets over that vaulting horse.

It was after it had been in the magazine, and sometime just before it appeared in my first book of stories, that I was visiting a class my friend the poet Roland Flint was teaching and he pointed out what the story was really about: “It is soaked in grief,” he said. “And of course grief, the thing you can’t get over, is that vaulting horse.” I did not know this in the writing of it and this is why I talk so much about trying to let go of what you think and just feel your way through it like a child making that drawing, seeing it directly and without attitudes or opinions or, really, beliefs, either.

I never sketch out any plot, and will only make a note as to the next minute or so in the life of a character or some idea of where he/she’ll go in the next couple of pages, if I have some sense that I won’t be able to call it up when I sit down again. If the story does not surprise me, I do not trust it, and will usually not let it go until it does surprise me. The surprises are all the fun of it. And if you trust them enough you’ll write a lot of stuff that will please you every time you look at it for the surprises it gave you. Somehow they always stay fresh.

When you return to a scene, how do you go about adding to depth and texture?

There is a simple answer to this one, though it is difficult as hell in practice. In re-writing, along with paying attention to the writing, the sentences line by line, I also try to see if I am involving all the senses, how it feels on the skin, texture, smells, sounds, sight. All of it. And then in looking at what is said I try to make sure that every line of dialogue is doing more than one thing. That is, carrying the story forward, giving character, leaking in history and the matters that are at issue, the what’s-wrong, as it were, but keeping all this artifice from being visible to the reader. Then having worked all that, and gone over and over it, I go over it still again, looking at the writing again, the words and lines. I want all the artifice to disappear; I want everything to disappear except these people in their trouble, whatever it is. And it is always some kind of trouble because that is the province of the human story, and news of the spirit in narrative can only arrive through the abrasions of conflict. Conflict, which scrapes the barnacles from the soul and lays it bare.

What do you grow against? The classics?

Oh, yes, of course the classics—and books, books, books, all the time. Right now I’m reading Tolstoy—War And Peace for the fifth time, Anna Karenina, for the third; Kawabata—Thousand Cranes; Shakespeare—over these last five months, King Lear six or seven times, listening and reading; Romeo and Juliet four times, listening and reading; As You Like It twice, Macbeth three or four times; Hamlet four or five times; Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar; Graham Greene—The Power And The Glory for the third time; Eudora Welty—Delta Wedding; Percival Everett – Assumption; Alix Ohlin—Signs And Wonders; Trollope—The Eustace Diamonds for the first time (and I’ve been reading it for a year); and Philip Roth—Indignation, and I just finished Nemesis and Everyman.

In the workshop you once said it would be a “sin” for us not to write. Could you elaborate?

We live in a culture that sees trying to write as some sort of indulgence of the ego, when not a plain presumption. But if you have talent for it, you are morally obligated to do it, and all one need do is look at that passage in the Bible about the ten talents: it’s where we get the word. The very word implies responsibility.

I had a dear friend, gone now, the poet Roland Flint, who called me one night crying, because he’d had this thing happen on his way home from school: he saw a little toddler on the island between two lanes of traffic. Stopped to keep him from wandering into the road. Held his hand and walked him across the street, thinking all the while about his son, Ethan, who was run over by a car and killed before his eyes twelve years earlier. The toddler’s parents came running from a house in the opposite direction of where Roland was walking the child, and the father got down on one knee and yelled at the child. “Don’t EVER go out of the house without Mommy and Daddy.” And Roland had to say, “I think he’s very frightened now.” And the parents stood there, the mother holding the child, now, and Roland went on to say, “I must tell you, I lost my son in this way, twelve years ago.” The parents said they were sorry and went on to their house and in, and Roland went, crying, back to his car, got in, drove home, wrote about the event in his journal, then wrote a poem about it, still crying, and finally called me.

He said, “To think that I could cheapen Ethan’s death by writing a goddamned poem about it. To think that I could use it in that way.” And I listened, and told him I loved him and understood, and we hung up. But then I thought about it and I called him back. “Roland, you’re supposed to write the poem. You’re morally obligated to do it. You must do it. For Ethan, and for all those people out there who don’t have the words, who’ve gone through this very thing. It’s what you’re absolutely supposed to do now.”

And he wrote his poem, “Stubborn.” And had it printed in a large picture frame, and inscribed it to me like this: “I wondered who I’d sign this first copy to, but of course should have known all along it would have to go to the Bausch who made me write it.”

It was one of my proudest possessions for all the years I was in that house in Virginia, and as far as I know, it is still on the wall there.

But that’s what it really means: the ten talents and us, who have this talent.

Further Links & Resources

Follow Richard Bausch’s Ten Commandments for writers.
Get Baush’s latest book, the collection Something Is Out There. [Amazon. Powell's. Indiebound.]
Read Roland Flint’s poem “Stubborn” (scroll down to the second poem on the page).

[Reviewlet] Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain, by Lucia Perillo

Alison Espach — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:00:42 +0000

I used to believe one could not sit down and read an entire short-story collection the way one could an entire novel in one sitting. Perhaps because, like poetry, the short form of fiction can be dense, and the collected short form often strikes the same—albeit beautiful—note. But Lucia Perillo’s Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain is a collection of wonders that readers will devour with immediacy.

As a Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet and MacArthur Fellow, it’s no surprise Perillo’s writing is stunning in its precision and imagery. Perillo takes us on tours of the seaside, the country, and the urban with a never-been-used-before lens. All the while, narrative doesn’t take a backseat to description. Yes, her characters are quite often stuck—in country houses, in addiction, in love, in geriatric homes—but they’re never standing still, and that distinction is what gives this collection an undeniable urgency. Perhaps these stories would not easily sell on premise alone (woman becomes deeply obsessed with her vacuum cleaner) but they are better, more surprising for it.

Perillo’s prose leads us down an unwritten path, as we discover the secret worlds of her characters and their enemies: their obsessions, their boredom, their fantasies of revenge, and their hearts. The prose is so unabashedly honest that you will follow these characters wherever they’re headed: a mother who spies on her son through the woods, a sister whose main goal in life is to stay fourteen forever, a woman recovering from alcohol abuse and seventeen Bad Boys, a wife who fantasizes about the life of the French President while stuck in a cabin (stuck in this marriage, in this life) with her husband.

Perhaps the collection is best described in my favorite story, “Doctor Vick’s,” when Perillo writes, “You know the only true world is the one you carry inside you.” These stories are compelling journeys because they are so true.

Extras

Get a copy of Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain at Amazon, IndieBound, or Powell’s.
Read Lucia Perillo’s poem “This Red T-Shirt” – published in The New Yorker, May 10, 2010.

Thoughts on shorts: Wells Tower

Celeste Ng — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:00:39 +0000

“I think the best stories start from something tiny. [...] A short story can easily destroy itself through metastasis. I think if you start a story with more than two scenes in mind, you may be doomed. At least you have a hell of a lot of work ahead of you. If I start off trying to get at this one little moment, that’s all I want to do. And then I have to build the world that makes that moment happen.”

~ Wells Tower

Further Reading:

Read more about Wells Tower on Fiction Writers Review
Looking for something to read? Check out the Stories We Love
Need inspiration? Try our Get Writing exercises

Stories We Love: “A Change of Fashion”

Carolyn Gan — Thu, 10 May 2012 13:00:05 +0000

Yesterday, I saw a woman wearing a garment that straddled the line between shorts and panties. Her outfit was revealing, and it made me ask questions like, “how far will fashion go?” and “what was she thinking?” Perhaps author Steven Millhauser had a similar experience at some point, and that led him to write “A Change of Fashion,” a short story that originally appeared in Harper’s Magazine, May 2006.

What would happen if next season’s fashions did not favor a slightly shorter hemline or a higher heel, but hiddenness? What if dresses took on shapes larger than Victorian hoop skirts and less revealing than burkas? In Millhauser’s story, concealing is the new revealing. Fashion is freed “from its long dependence on the female shape,” as women no longer feel the obligation “to invite a bold male gaze.” Women favor dresses that disguise the body, conceal the face, and, in later incarnations, can serve their purpose at a lawn party without the wearer having to wear them at all.

Teenage girls in particular . . . embraced the [style] . . . for they could plunge down, far down, into layers of costume that sheltered them from sight, while rivers of twisting cloth allowed them to bring forth forbidden longings.

Like much of Millhauser’s shorter works, this piece of fiction is allegorical above all else. There is no dialogue. We don’t know much about the quizzical and sole character, Hyperion. It doesn’t matter. Like Millhauser, the reader delights in following the idea to its outright conclusion.

Read Millhauser’s “Getting Closer,” first published by The New Yorker (January 3, 2011).