Dear Thief/Samantha Harvey: Reflections on a brilliant novel

I'm not sure how many books have been added to my library courtesy of the great critic James Wood—which is only to say that I read his essays, and I believe him. But this weekend, thanks to this Wood review in The New Yorker—this welcome defense of the odd in literature—I bought Samantha Harvey's Dear Thief.

And swooned.

Those wanting a plot summary will have to do (here) with this single sentence: A woman, middle-aged, is writing a letter to the friend that she loved and hated and loves still, and still hates.

What matters, mostly, is the way that letter is written, the compression and elegance of time that it portrays, the unreliability of testimony and the sick power of delusion (self delusion, the delusion of others), and the sentences, one after another, so brilliant.

The voice.

The anti-instructions on writing, like this:

I have wondered about this kind of thing for the last hour, sitting here turning the piece of Roman jet in my hand and trying distractedly to think of ways of describing it. This is what writing does to you, it seems, it turns objects that used to be just things in your life into things that must be described, and at the same time makes them feel increasingly indescribable.

The statements of paradoxical fact (perfectly bound up with the novel, perfectly true within our own lives):

I wonder if not being able to see ourselves is one of the great paradoxes of being alive—knowing oneself intimately and also not at all. You turn to look at your own profile in the mirror and it is gone. It means we can harbour all kinds of illusions about ourselves that others can see through as clear as day. What I mean is that if you had been able to see yourself objectively that afternoon you might have realised that the game was lost, but instead I think you fancied yourself in some little role in which you were the heroic returner, the one much waited for, the one who would be forgiven by some obscure law of justice that grants immunity to the tragic.

The articulation of life:

We encroach on one another, be it painfully or pleasurably, we encroach and run into each other, and this is what we know fondly or otherwise as life. It is not life to think that to love somebody is never to be where they are and never to intrude upon them.

Obviously I need to say no more.

Just buy it.

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The odds are powerfully stacked against originality — and yet: read James Wood on Samantha Harvey

It's been a week of long and important correspondence with friends. Among the topics: How do we manage lives built (in part) of original ideas? Stories that haven't been previously told. Characters that don't come pre-packaged. Books that don't fit the cross "this famous book" with "that famous book" and you have this new easily tagged and marketed and therefore soon to be famous book.

We talk, we ponder, we encourage. We look for signs.

I found one this morning, reading James Wood (oh, bless James Wood) in The New Yorker, discussing, in an essay titled "Fly Away," the work of Samantha Harvey.

I'd like to share the opening paragraph:

The odds are powerfully stacked against Samantha Harvey's third novel, "Dear Thief" (Atavist): sometimes you feel that the author has enjoyed building a trembling wall of them. Her novel takes the form of a long letter, written by a woman in middle age, to her childhood friend, and so most of the narration languishes in the corridor of the second-person singular. The friend (the "thief" of the book's title) disappeared a decade and a half ago, and so the narrator does much reminiscing, with the danger that the novel drifts fairly often into the pressureless zones of retrospect. And the narrator's lost friend was a "character," a large personality remembered, with loathing and love, for her enigmatic singularity: so, most perilously, Harvey's novel must work to convince us that this vague "you" of the narrator's letter deserves her extravagant reputation and the time spent recalling her. The book is sometimes precious or whimsical, and can be frustratingly diaphonous. It has nerves of silk; it could probably do with more robustness, and a bit of comedy.

So it is odd, Wood tells us. So it veers. So it isn't what we "expect." And yet, the rest of this fantastic essay is devoted to the beauty and success of this novel "with no interest in conformity."

To which I say, Yes. Through which I decide, I am buying Samantha Harvey.

Thank goodness for James Wood and The New Yorker (which also celebrates the poetry of Olena Kalytiak Davis is in this issue). Thank goodness for publishers who believe that there are readers out here who are willing to venture into non-conformist territory. Thank goodness for editors who say, It's worth the risk. You are.

And thank goodness for my friends who believe, with me, in the odd and the new.

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who needs another dead novel?

Yesterday, a day of challenges and breakthroughs, I read just two things, briefly. The first was the James Wood essay in the October 20 New Yorker, "No time for lies," about the Australian novelist, Elizabeth Harrower.

I feel the need to share the entire first paragraph. If you are skimming, please read, at least, the last line.

The Australian novelist Elizabeth Harrower, who is eighty-six and lives in Sydney, has been decidedly opaque about why she withdrew her fifth novel, "In Certain Circles" (Text), some months prior to its publication, in 1971. Her mother, to whom she was very close, had died suddenly the year before. Harrower told Susan Wyndham, who interviewed her a few months ago in the Sydney Morning Herald, that she was absolutely "frozen" by the bereavement. She also claims to remember very little about her novel—"That sounds quite interesting, but I don't think I'll read it"—and adds that she has been "very good at closing doors and ending things.... What was going on in my head or my life at the time? Fortunately, whatever it was I've forgotten." Elsewhere, Harrower has cast doubt on the novel's quality: "It was well written because once you can write, you can write a good book. But there are a lot of dead novels out in the world that don't need to be written."

I don't know what these words do to you, but I am filled with melancholy as I read them. I am thinking about all the times we writers question our own work and purpose. How often we wonder if we are done in, or perhaps diluted. How greatly we fear this fate, of producing well-written dead novels. Bully for Elizabeth Harrower for being brave enough to name the fear. To care about the quality of the work she yields. To recognize that merely well written isn't good enough.

The second article I read yesterday was written by Alexandra Alter for The New York Times—an update on Anna Todd, the twenty-five-year-old erotica writer who "found inspiration in Harry Styles, the tousle-haired heartthrob from the British boy band One Direction." Todd shared her tale on Wattpad. Simon & Schuster has paid her a sweet six figures for the right to rebroadcast the Styles erotica under its Gallery imprint. The whole will be coming soon to a theater near you, thanks to Paramount Pictures.

Here is Todd, as reported by Alter, describing her process:

Then she found her calling — in the unlikely form of a baby-faced pop star. Ms. Todd started out as a reader on Wattpad in 2012, and quickly found herself spending several hours a day reading serialized fictional stories about One Direction. Last spring, she started writing her own story. “It took over my life,” she said.

With her husband’s support, Ms. Todd quit her job working at a makeup store counter to write full time. She updated “After” with a new chapter every day to meet readers’ demands and tapped out much of the book on her cellphone. She wrote for five hours a day and spent three hours trading messages with readers on Wattpad, Twitter and Instagram and drew on those comments to help her shape the story.

“The only way I know how to write is socially and getting immediate feedback on my phone,” she said.

One established, well-respected novelist pondering whether a book is alive enough, choosing to live quietly, without fanfare. A debut novelist tapping out a book on a phone based on a band, building a story according to Wattpad comments.

The bookends of my yesterday.

The ironies of publishing.

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Am I a bird? Montgomery News asks, while talking Dr. Radway and Handling the Truth

I was feeling particularly inept and incapable today—doing countless things of indeterminate value (save for the thirty minutes I spent reading James Wood and thinking about literary mimicry) and wondering whether I'd ever feel literary again. (Such wondering has become a running motif.)

Then Nicolette Milholin, the Book Bound Columnist for Montgomery News, sent me a story she had written about me and a few recent books. I read the first paragraph and burst out laughing, and then I had this thought: If I do nothing else today, I will have laughed.

Which counts for a lot of something.

So thank you so much Nicolette. Here's that first graf, below. And here's a link to the whole.

Say you want to be a writer, a published author, an acclaimed figure who just can’t help letting those words flow, a writer so prolific that your email signature rightly boasts “author of 16 books.” Where do you turn for guidance and inspiration? It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s Beth Kephart!

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every act of literary mimicry is ultimately transparent

I'll interrupt most anything I'm doing for a chance to read a James Wood essay. This morning I got up early to read "Sins of the Father: Do great novelists make bad parents?," the latest Wood contribution to The New Yorker.

Fascinating, all of it—how wouldn't it be? It's Wood on the memoirs written by the children of famous novelists—Janna Malamud Smith (on Bernard Malamud), Alexandra Styron (on William Styron), Susan Cheever (on John Cheever), and (the real focus of this essay) George Bellow on his father, Saul.

About the first three, Wood writes: "All three are vibrant storytellers, alert to scene and detail, almost sickeningly sensitive to the way that large male egos stage themselves; they know that, in some odd combination of respect and revenge, they are turning their fathers into novelistic characters."

About Bellow, Wood is not nearly as convinced. "It is less a memoir than a speaking wound," Wood writes, of Saul Bellow's Heart: A Son's Memoir. And then he proceeds to show us how.

But what really caught my eye in this essay were the words of Bellow himself. Wood has just noted how, "in the greatest novels, the ghost of the author's soul rustle into life." Then he quotes Bellow:

When you open a novel—and I mean of course the real thing—you enter into a state of intimacy with its writer. You hear a voice or, more significantly, an individual tone under the words. This tone you, the reader, will identify not so much by a name, the name of the author, as by a distinct and unique human quality. It seems to issue from the bosom, from a place beneath the breastbone. It is more musical than verbal, and it is the characteristic signature of a person, of a soul.

Yes, I think. Oh, yes. Every real writer is in possession of his or her own true voice—tones, patterns, structures, rhythms, ways of seeing that erupt from a life lived like no other life will ever be lived. I write, for example, the way I write because I skated once, and because I am a middle child (always), and because I traveled to certain places at certain times and saw things and felt things and they recur, and because I have fought and lost and fought and barely won. It's all in there, for good or for bad—and I'm not just talking about plot. The sentences loop. The images are elided. There are sudden stops and odd angles and gush, mid-course corrections. Some people cannot tolerate my way with words, and that is fine. But it is my way with words, and no matter how many different genres I write, no matter how many different locations I set my stories in, no matter how old I get, it is me, Beth Kephart—perhaps not a fully realized real writer yet, but one who works hard at the craft—at the keyboard.

So every writer is in possession of his or her own true voice. And every act of mimicry, correspondingly, is transparent—a short cut, a tool, an exercise in industry as opposed to an expression of something raw, dredged up, authentic. The imitating writer may believe she'll get away with this, that no one will notice, that it will be fine. But inevitably there are breaks and gaps and awkward gestures that out the act of shadow writing. The images and patterns have been borrowed. The work has not been forged.

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could you live your entire writing life unknown, or: Author invisible: the Elena Ferrante story

I don't care what time of night is, or how many days I've gone without sleep, or how many clients are knocking.  I stop to read James Wood. 

I was particularly interested in his story this week (New Yorker, January 21, 2103) on the writer "Elena Ferrante," an Italian who has never made herself, or her real name, known. She has, Wood tells us, made herself available to answer written questions.  She has indicated that she both translates and teaches.  But nobody knows what she looks like, she has appeared on no panel, she has been absent at awards dinners, there is no well-lit author pic, and perhaps she lives next door to you.  If she does, she hasn't bored you with her tales of fame.  She has, instead, borrowed your clothespins.

Her rationale was explained early in her career, in this note to her publisher, which Wood quotes like this in his piece:

I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.  If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won't.... I very much love those mysterious volumes, both ancient and modern, that have no definite author but have had and continue to have an intense life of their own.  They seem to me a sort of nighttime miracle, like the gifts of the Befana, which I waited for as a child.... True miracles are the ones whose makers will never be known.... Besides, isn't it true that promotion is expensive?  I will be the least expensive author of the publishing house.  I'll spare you even my presence.

I have sympathy for this woman who stands behind the Elena construct.  For while my graciously lit author photo lives on the internet and on book jackets, while I speak at times, teach in the spring, joke around on Facebook, appear on some panels, physically grant the winners of prizes I judge their awards, and blog daily here, I am not there, most of the time, with my books.  I don't tour.  I am not a personality—not spontaneously clever, not actually interesting, not possessed of an air-brushed allure.  I typically read from each of my books to a very small audience just once or a handful of times, and there are books that I have published that I have yet to actually read aloud to an audience of more than my son.  What I write, in other words, does by and large need to stand on its own. 

And sometimes it does.  And sometimes it doesn't.  So that much of what I am paying attention to, as I keep trekking forward in this journey, is this, specifically:  How to leave pages behind that do not need me.  How to make the work the most important thing of all.

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James Wood on Tom Wolfe's use (or not use) of meaningful detail

After a long day and an even longer week, I collapsed on the couch with my New Yorkers.  Does anyone else feel this way?  My New Yorkers.  I want to know what these writers know.  I want to write a single sentence like they (or some of them) write.  I want to give you what I read and think.  For now, here is this.  It's James Wood talking about Tom Wolfe's latest novel, Back to Blood.  Wood is reflecting on details that resonate, those that feel organic, and those that sour the prose with obvious, unlived research.  Listen in (for the whole, buy the October 15, 2012 issue):

The important details, the ones that make fiction's intimate palpability, cannot simply be scooped up off the sidewalk.  Tolstoy, praised as a realist by Tom Wolfe, took the germ of "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" from an actual story about a judge in a nearby town who had died of cancer; but one of the most beautiful moments in the novella surely came from Tolstoy's imagination—or, rather, from his patient loyalty to Ivan's invented reality.  I mean the moment when Ivan Ilyich, lying on his couch, in great distress and loneliness, remembers "the raw and wrinkly French prunes of his childhood, their special taste, and how his mouth watered when he got down to the stone."

Very occasionally in this novel, Wolfe gives evidence that he knows the difference between those French prunes and "Hotchkiss, Yale ... six-three."  At one point, Nestor, fleeing the opprobrium of his community, ends up at a favorite Cuban bakery, where he enjoys "a whiff of Ricky's pastelitos, 'little pies' of filo dough wrapped around ground beef, spiced ham, guava, or you name it.... He had loved pastelitos since he was a boy."  It's a rare passage without exclamation marks, and superficially it resembles Ivan and the prunes.  But the detail about the patelitos has the whiff not of pastry but of research.

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What is beautiful writing? A lesson from James Wood

I am in the midst of reading a book which many readers before me have termed "beautiful."  In places, I would agree—there is a lush knowing, a seductive tumble forward of palpable scenes and words.  In other passages, however, the book gets uncomfortably stuck; the characters don't read as real; the dialogue, especially, trembles with information as opposed to charm or persuasion; the teens (and this is an adult novel with a teen hook) are, in my opinion, false constructions—their conversation heavy handed with genericized slang.  I read on, but I stop and think.  Analyze what works and what doesn't, and (most importantly) why.

I took a break from reading that book to read an October 17 New Yorker piece titled "Sons and Lovers" by James Wood. The essay is ostensibly a review of Alan Hollinghurst's novel, The Stranger's Child.  But because this is James Wood, we're also treated to a lively linguistic lesson by the man who wrote a little book that I hope you writers all have at hand, How Fiction Works.  Love that book.  Need it.

In any case, back to the subject at hand, which is the word "beautiful" as it is applied to prose, and what James Wood has to say—with infinite brilliance—about that.  Here he is, at the essay's start.  Please read the whole.  It's worth it.

Most of the prose writers acclaimed for "writing beautifully" do no such thing; such praise is issued comprehensively, like the rain on the just and the unjust.  Mostly, what's admired as beautiful is ordinary; or sometimes it's too obviously beautiful, feebly fine—what Nabokov once called "weak blond prose."  The English novelist Alan Hollinghurst is one of the few contemporary writers who deserve the adverb.  His prose has the power of re-description, whereby we are made to notice something hitherto neglected.  Yet, unlike a good deal of modern writing, this re-description is not achieved only by inventing brilliant metaphors, or by flourishing some sparkling detail, or by laying down a line of clever commentary.  Instead, Hollinghurst works quietly, like a poet, goading all the words in his sentences—nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs—into a stealthy equality.

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The critics among us

A few weeks ago, as readers of this blog know, I sat down to read James Wood's How Fiction Works and reveled in its elucidations and provocations, its lusty, kinetic, uncompromising language, its call to writerly action:

Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or lifesameness, but what I must call lifeness:  life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry. 

I got the same charge early this morning reading "Why Criticism Matters," the cover story of this weekend's The New York Times Book Review, which yields the floor to literary critics Stephen Burn, Katie Roiphe, Pankaj Mishra, Adam Kirsch, Sam Anderson, and Elif Batuman, all of whom have been invited to report on "what it is they do, why they do it and why it is important."  Alas.

There is much value in the whole, much in the way of substance and fine thinking, a little necessary historicism, not too many bricks thrown at the obvious.  I am particularly fond, in this sequence of essays, of the emphasis that both Katie Roiphe and Adam Kirsch place on the essential eloquence of the literary critic—on the responsibility the critic bears to write well and meaningfully.  Here, for example, is Roiphe:

Now, maybe more than ever, in a cultural desert characterized by the vast, glimmering territory of the Internet, it is important for the critic to write gracefully. If she is going to separate excellent books from those merely posing as excellent, the brilliant from the flashy, the real talent from the hyped — if she is going to ferret out what is lazy and merely fashionable, if she is going to hold writers to the standards they have set for themselves in their best work, if she is going to be the ideal reader and in so doing prove that the ideal reader exists — then the critic has one important function: to write well.

By this I mean that critics must strive to write stylishly, to concentrate on the excellent sentence. There is so much noise and screen clutter, there are so many Amazon reviewers and bloggers clamoring for attention, so many opinions and bitter misspelled rages, so much fawning ungrammatical love spewed into the ether, that the role of the true critic is actually quite simple: to write on a different level, to pay attention to the elements of style. 

Kirsch concludes his essay like this:

Whether I am writing verse or prose, I try to believe that what matters is not exercising influence or force, but writing well — that is, truthfully and beautifully; and that maybe, if you seek truth and beauty, all the rest will be added unto you.

Perhaps I focused most intently on these passages because I keep discovering, at the age I have become, how little good writing is starting to matter to an alarming number of people—to those holding to the notion that grammatical errors (not witty errors, mind you, just plain mistakes) make writing more "hip," to the celebrants of books that are plied with all manner of (unintended) language abuses, to those who declaim against masterful books with sentences riddled with prepositional failures and astonishing noun-verb mismatches. We need standard bearers in times like this, intelligence on the page (and screen), and when I read Wood or Roiphe or Kirsch or the others featured in the Times today, I am elevated. These aren't blustering writers, or showy ones.  They are well-read critics with capacious minds who teach not just through the substance of their sentences, but by the very form of them.

I thought of myself as a critic once, writing for Salon.com, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Book, so many others.  I don't see myself as a critic any longer, forswearing reviews, on this blog, in favor of reflections, and still seeking to learn from the masters.

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How Fiction Works/James Wood

In the middle of the night you grab the book that's nearest at hand, while your neighbors' floodlights (yes, they are floodlights) pour into your living room—so star bright that, at three in the morning, you can actually read by the light of them.

In any case, the nearest book was How Fiction Works, by James Wood.  Am I the last writer alive to read this book?  Probably so.  But that doesn't dim my enthusiasm for the passages I find here, my sense of discovery.  I grow enamored, for example, of declarations such as this:

Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins with him.  There really is a time before Flaubert and a time after him.  Flaubert established, for good or ill, what most readers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible.  We hardly remark of good prose that it favors the telling and brilliant detail; that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary; that it judges good and bad neutrally; that it seeks out the truth, even at the cost of repelling us; and that the author's fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible.  You can find some of this in Defoe or Austen or Balzac, but not all of it until Flaubert. 

I'm not about to review this book.  I'm just going to sit with it, let it stir within me arguments for or against, let it guide me as I set out to write (as I fight to find the time to write) this new novel for adults.

Light on.

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Present Palpable Intimate

James Wood, the critic, in his New Yorker appraisal (July 5, 2010) of David Mitchell ("The Floating Library:  What can't the novelist David Mitchell do?") quotes Henry James:

"If Conrad's great master, Henry James, was right when he said that the novel should press down on "the present palpable intimate" (he used the triad to distinguish the role of the living novel from that of the historical novel), then Mitchell's new book...."

(read to find out)

The point for me, right now, is Present Palpable Intimate and whether or not it can be achieved in an historical novel.  I believe it can, or at least, in my own work, I have fought for that.  In Flow, in Dangerous Neighbors, in a work now in progress, the quest has been to scrub away the sepia, to make the then feel now, to make it essential and current. 


That, in any case, has been the quest.

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Does Literature Move Forward? (and more on names)

Yesterday, inspired by an Elif Batuman book and a James Wood essay in The New Yorker, I wrote about novel names. I absolutely adore those of you who shared your own perspective on this. Sarah and others wondered how I name my characters, and I will admit here that sound has so much to do with my decision making. Sophie suggests a particular kind of person to me—internally focused, quietly questing, curious. Riley, for me, is an artist. Tara is wise, winningly sarcastic, eager for the next thing. Like Melissa, I don't question a name once I find it, and I don't overly freight it with meaning. My own name, Beth, means House of God. That's a whole lot to live up to (I certainly haven't yet), and I've never named a character that.

In focusing on names in this blog yesterday, I did not have the opportunity to quote from the beginning of the Wood piece ("Keeping it Real: Conflict, convention, and Chang Rae-Lee's 'The Surrendered'") which also struck me as rich with conversational possibilities. Here it is. I'd love your thoughts:

Does literature progress, like medicine or engineering? Nabokov seems to have thought so, and pointed out that Tolstoy, unlike Homer, was able to describe childbirth in convincing detail. Yet you could argue the opposite view; after all, no novelist strikes the modern reader as more Homeric than Tolstoy.... Perhaps it is as absurd to talk about progress in literature as it is to talk about progress in electricity—both are natural resources awaiting different forms of activation....

Wood goes on to make some very interesting statements about the "lazy stock-in-trade of mainstream realist fiction," but it wouldn't be fair of me to quote him at greater length here (buying magazines helps continue the livelihood of magazines). I encourage you to take a look. I'm eager for your reactions.

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Novel Names, or Names in Novels

Twice this day, I've encountered critics reflecting on the names writers give to their characters—the authenticity or not, the too-frequent overdeterminedness of the enterprise, the leap of faith that is all bound up in naming.

In Elif Batuman's marvelously idiosyncratic memoir, The Possessed (ingeniously subtitled Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them and rather otherwise ingenious, all around), Batuman, writing of the "perfection" of Anna Karenina, celebrates, among the novel's other attributes, the fact that "Anna's lover and her husband had the same first name (Alexei). Anna's maid and daughter were both called Anna, and Anna's son and Levin's half brother were both Sergei. The repetition of names struck me as remarkable, surprising, and true to life."

Later, in surveying the contemporary American short-story scene, Batuman notes, "No contemporary American short-story writer would have had the stamina not to name (Chekhov's) lapdog. They were too caught up in trying to bootstrap from a proper name to a meaningful individual essence...."

At the end of the day, reading James Wood in The New Yorker on "Conflict, Convention, and Chang-Rae Lee's The Surrendered," I discovered this:

"And this does not even touch on the small change of fictional narrative: how strange it is, when you think about it, that thousands of novels are published every year in which characters all have different names (whereas, in real life, doesn't one always have at least three friends named John, and another three named Elizabeth?)...."

I present this then, to all of you. I wonder how it is that you go about selecting your characters' names, and what you believe in, and don't, when encountering the names of characters in the novels and stories you are reading.

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