the fame trap. thoughts on the responsiblities of artists and their fans, after viewing "Amy"

Every representation of a person's life is just that—a representation. A curation. A summary. An interpretation.

I know that. I went to see "Amy," the deeply moving documentary about the great singer, Amy Winehouse, fully aware that what I was about to witness was a life encoded by footage and recall, and not a life itself.

Still. There are some incontestable things about this British singer with a genius touch and a tortured relationship with her own talent. First (incontestable): she could sing. Second (I think it's clear): she wasn't always sure of who to trust. Third: she died too young of alcohol poisoning in a body winnowed to near nothing by too many drugs and an eating disorder.

Fourth: Winehouse never originally wanted to be famous, never thought she would be famous, never imagined herself capable of fame. She is there, in the footage, saying so. But fame became hers, fame became her, and she had to live, and die, with the consequences.

There is a dividing line between those who make things in order to be known or seen, and those whose loyalties lie with the things themselves—the songs, the films, the stories. There are those who craft themselves into a brand—who orchestrate aggrandizements, who leverage opportunities, who seek out "friendships" that will advance them, who overstay their welcome, who build cliques that further not their art but their careers, who ricochet with gossip. And there are those who (I think, in the book world, of Alice McDermott, Marilynne Robinson, and Michael Ondaatje) seek out private quiet. Yes, they cede to interviews and talks and touring when their books are released. But they also vanish from public view, and consumption, just as soon as they're able.

Fame—a seething hope for it—is not what propels them.

Watching "Amy," one wants to turn back time. To give the artist her creative space. To let her walk the streets without the blinding pop of cameras. One wants to give her what matters most—room for the everyday and the ordinary. Supremely talented, unwittingly destined, Amy Winehouse suffered. She made choices, certainly. She faced a wall of personal demons. But the media that stalked her and the fans who turned hold some responsibility for what happened.

Artists have the responsibility to do their work for the right reasons. They have responsibility to the work itself—to not sell out, to not write to trends, to not step on others in their quest for something.

But fans have responsibilities, too. To give the artists room to make, to risk, to sometimes fail. To love artists for who they are and what they do and not for whether or not, in this bracket of time, they appear to be potentially famous. To see artists as people who would be better off, who would be healthier, given some time to live with dignity instead of trailing endless glitter.

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All the Light We Cannot See: Anthony Doerr (Reflections)

In Alaska, a new friend asks me what I am reading and I say Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See. I show her the book's first page, and she says, "Read it to me. Out loud." I demur. She insists. I read. In the belly of the boat while the glacial mountains float by. "Leaflets," I say, reading the chapter title. Then:

At dusk they pour from the sky. They blow across the ramparts, turn cartwheels over rooftops, flutter into the ravines between houses. Entire streets swirl with them, flashing white against the cobbles. Urgent message to the inhabitants of this town, they say. Depart immediately to open country.

The tide climbs. The moon hangs small and yellow and gibbous. On the rooftops of beachfront hotels to the east, and in the gardens behind them, a half-dozen American artillery units drop incendiary rounds into the mouths of mortars.

I hear my own breath catch. I look up into Kristi's face. She isn't sure, quite, about the passage I've read, wants to know why it has enchanted me. I read phrases out loud again, verbs, that word incendiary webbed into the lush lyric of the cartwheels, the flutter. How can you speak about what you love? How can you convey the genius of Anthony Doerr, who has never been more genius than this new novel of his—541 pages long, ten years in the making, and it reads too fast, you could read it in a day, you cannot read it in a day, for there will be nothing like it again or soon. Doerr is like Ondaatje, Doerr is like McCann, Doerr is like McDermott, Doerr is like Hagy, Doerr is a writer, pure.

And this new book—about a blind girl in France and a smart boy in Germany and the war that brings them together but only after terrible journeys and terrible losses and only for a moment—this new book is wrenching and glorious. Wrenching first. Glorious because of its deep and tender soul. Because Doerr embraces life even in the midst of dying. Because Doerr inclines toward science as he writes his art, which is to say that he inclines toward the curious mysteries of our world. Snails. A massive diamond. Electromagnetic waves. The cell that divides and divides again, until it is a human, howling.

I love this book. I believe in it, wholeheartedly. I believe in Doerr. Why do books still wear labels—YA or A, historical or contemporary, literary or not? Banish them. Now. Anyone who loved The Book Thief will be astonished and grateful for this book. Anyone who swoons over an Ondaatje sentence will recognize the power here. Anyone who wishes to return to France or Germany at the time of a devastating war will be returned in a fresh way, an eyes wide-open way.

Anyone who reads will emerge brokenhearted but also grateful that Doerr doesn't just break our hearts. In surprising and redeeming ways, he heals them, too.

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reflecting on urgent historical fiction in this weekend's Chicago Tribune

What makes for urgent historical fiction? Having pondered the issue while writing my own backward-glancing novels, I decided to tackle the question for Printers Row/Chicago Tribune and see what some careful consideration might teach me.

I'm grateful, as always, for the privilege of time and space in that wonderful publication.

My piece, which reflects on all historical fiction (which is to say no boundaries between Adult and Young Adult) begins like this:

“There is no real anonymity in history,” Colum McCann writes in the acknowledgments of TransAtlantic, his gorgeous time traveler of a book.

No anonymity. No facelessness. No oblivion.

           

Life is specific, and so is history. It’s emergent, conditional, personal, and absurd.

Why, then, does so much historical fiction land like a brick, with a thud? Why does it hint of authorial Look what I know, See how I found out? Why do so many writers of historical fiction seem to prefer the long way around the heart of the story? Why ignore the truth that the best historical fiction is as insistent as now?

And continues here.

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The Goldfinch/Donna Tartt: Reflections

As the last few days unfolded—through Christmas gifting and hostessing, through cooking and cleaning, through stripping an old kitchen bare in anticipation of remodeling, through the quiet pile up of real work with ticking deadlines—finishing Donna Tartt's 775-page The Goldfinch became a point of pride. I'd never read Tartt before, as I've written here previously, and I'm naturally inclined toward the kind of compact, complex, emotionally engaging, linguistically inventive novels that writers like Alice McDermott, Michael Ondaatje, Colum McCann, and my friend Alyson Hagy (among many others) write. But I'd bought The Goldfinch and I wanted to read The Goldfinch. I fought to find the time.

The plot can be boiled down to a few sentences: A boy, Theo, loses his mother in a museum explosion and hurries off, in the numb aftermath, with one of the world's most treasured paintings under his arm. A rich Manhattan family will take Theo in. Next a dear antiques refurbisher/dealer (the book's most wonderful character, in my opinion). Next Theo will move with his wayward, gambling father to Las Vegas, fall in with a wild friend and all manner of drugs and disrepair, then return to Manhattan, the implications of that missing painting escalating through it all. Old characters will turn up in new places. Addiction and dealers, sordid transactions and unenviable mistakes will consume much of Theo's time, and much of the tale.

It's a story Tartt takes her time telling—sometimes with the slow ease of old-fashioned nineteenth century novels, sometimes with the hurry of a caper film, always with great attention to every detail. Tartt knows antiques and paintings, drugs and obliteration, snaggletoothed, double-dealing friends who have just enough "good" in them to redeem their presence in Theo's life, and in the reader's. She can write brilliantly and she is, above all else, patient, never hurrying (to say the least) to complete a scene or to get to the next bout of stolen-painting-induced action.

She writes, with expert atmospherics, like this:

Through the dusty windows I saw Straffordshire dogs and majolica cats, dusty crystal, tarnished silver, antique chairs and settees upholstered in sallow old brocade, an elaborate falence birdcage, miniature marble obelisks atop a marble-topped pedestal table and a pair of alabaster cockatoos. It was just the kind of shop my mother would have liked—packed tightly, a bit dilapidated, with stacks of old books on the floor.

As the novel progressed, I felt, at times, more keenly aware of Tartt's strategies (as a sentence maker, as a storyteller) than I perhaps wanted to feel. I also felt wearied away by the deep seediness of the majority of the characters, save for Hobie and Pippa, the antiques dealer and his young charge, and Theo's absent mother. Theo can barely rescue himself from the tortured person that he is, from all the bad that he reeks and reaps. There are, in all these many pages, few instances of light. At times all the rot began to weigh me down, no matter how immaculately Tartt evoked it:

But depression wasn't the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil.

Still, Tartt rises, symphonically, at the end. Asks the big moral questions about how much control any of us really have about who we are, what we want, how we see the world, how we navigate through it. Indeed, I found the final pages of the book—after the caper elements of the plot had long been put to rest—to be the most thrilling in the book, the mark of all that greatness for which Tartt is justifiably famous.

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In today's Wall Street Journal Speakeasy, I'm talking about photographs in memoir.

Several weeks ago, I tore most of my memoirs off the shelf to research an idea I had about those who use photographs to amplify their memoirs. Dorothy Allison, Patti Smith, Michael Ondaatje, David Carr, Orhan Pamuk, Calvin Trillin—the list is long, and it made me happy to sit for a while and work the details out.

That essay runs today in the Wall Street Journal blog, Speakeasy. Many thanks to Beth Parker at Gotham for helping me find its right home.

This essay, on photographs, is part of a series of essays I've lately been writing about the memoir form. Today, in the The Millions, for example, I write about the conversational in memoir. Last week, I wrote in The Pennsylvania Gazette about the students I love.

Thank you, Beth Parker of Gotham, for finding a home for me at Speakeasy, and thank you Speakeasy.

More of my thoughts on the memoir form can be found on this dedicated Handling page.

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Reflecting on Here/There Memoirs in Today's Publishing Perspectives

Today in Publishing Perspectives, a digital magazine about the international world of books, I'm reflecting on a sub-species of memoir I like to think of as Cross-Border memoirs, or Here/There memoirs.

I kick the piece off with thoughts about the great Michael Ondaatje's indispensable Running in the Family, then move on—toward Edwidge Danticat, Anthony Shadid, and Sophia Al-Maria.

The heart of the piece is here, below. The whole can be found here. So many thanks to Ed Nawotka for giving me room to think out loud.

More about memoirs I love, memoir exercises, and Handling the Truth can be found here.

All memoirists travel across the accordion folds of synapses and time. Border-crossing memoirists additionally move back and forth across space — past signposts, over deckled landmasses, into new weather, toward the science of geomorphology. Their points of view are duality inflected. Their vocabularies are exotic and hued. Their ideas about home are perforated and embellished by contrasts, contradictions, and corporeal compromise.

Finally, on a related (sort of matter), I will be in Alexandria, VA, this weekend at Hooray for Books, with the phenomenal Debbie Levy, whose work crosses many borders. We begin at 3:30. Readers and writers are both welcome. We're going to be talking about international books, and about truth and fiction and the line between. Many thanks to Serena, who is helping to spread the word, here. 

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Transatlantic/Colum McCann: Reflections

Art. Yes. That's what Colum McCann produces, every single time. Read all his work. Read his short stories. You'll run out of ink underlining the extraordinary images, the soul-giant gestures, the coined terms, the Irishisms. You'll feel as if the clock of time just wedged itself apart, showed you its gears.

Transatlantic, the new novel, is no different. In fact, I feel this book transcends McCann's National Book Award winner, Let the Great World Spin. There is greater structural integrity, more generational reverb. Most reviewers seem to be talking about the elements of the book—the distinct chapters and historic characters that wend their way through the pages. A 1919 airplane flight. A glimpse of Frederick Douglass, the freeman, in 1845 Ireland. George Mitchell at the height of the Good Friday peace talks in 1998. I believe, however, that the genius lies in the seaming—in all that these chapters actually share, which is to say the generations of women who bind these historic crossings and events. Real people and imagined people populate this book in nearly equal measure. Both have been deeply imagined.

Look, for example, at these three paragraphs. The first two describe an historic character, one of the 1919 pilots. The second describes a McCann creation. History and possibility don't collide here, stiffly. They need one another:

At night Brown spends a lot of his time downstairs in the lobby of the hotel, sending messages to Kathleen. He is timid with the telegraph, aware that others may read his words. There's a formality to him. A tightness.

He is slow on the stairs for a man in his thirties, the walking stick striking hard against the wood floor. Three brandies rolling through him.

An odd disturbance of light falls across the bannister and he catches sight of Lottie Ehrlich in the ornate wooden mirror at the top of the stairs. The young girl is, for a moment, ghostly, her figure emerging into the mirror, then growing clearer, taller, redheaded. She wears a dressing gown and nightdress and slippers. They are both a little startled by the other.

Yesterday I wrote about the sound of McCann's sentences, the legacy he shares with Michael Ondaatje. Today I want to answer the NYTBR reviewer, Erica Wagner, who, in her very lovely review of the book asks why the final chapter of Transatlantic must be written in first person. I suggest (though I'll never actually know) that it all has to do with the book's final sentence. Which could not have been written any other way, and which left me weeping early this morning.

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Michael Ondaatje, Colum McCann: the words between them

At Herbsaint Restaurant, on St. Charles, in New Orleans, I turned to look at the wall to my left, and there these musicians were. "That's Buddy Bolden," I said to my husband. And because Coming Through Slaughter is one of those rare books that I've convinced my husband to read, he knew what I was talking about. He knew that Buddy, the horn player, stood at the center of Michael Ondaatje's first novel. He knew that Ondaatje had captured the sound of the man's New Orleans crack up, during a parade down Canal. He knew that few writers thrill me the way Ondaatje does, that I've studied Ondaatje, that once Ondaatje wrote me a postcard in response to a long letter I'd written, and that once my agent, Amy Rennert, gave me a signed copy of Ondaatje's brilliant memoir, Running in the Family, a book I teach at Penn.

Ondaatje's postcard and that signed book two prized possessions.

Meet Buddy Bolden, in the early pages of Coming Through Slaughter:

He puts the towel of steam over a face. Leaving holes for the mouth and the nose. Bolden walks off and talks with someone. A minute of hot meditation for the customer. After school, the kids come and watch the men being shaved. Applaud and whistle when each cut is finished. Place bets on whose face might be under the soap.

Now meet Emily, a character in Colum McCann's expansive and predictably wonderful new novel, Transatlantic. McCann, another of my very favorite writers, a man I once met at the Philadelphia Free Library, my friend Aideen at my side. A man whose friendship with Ondaatje is legendary; acknowledged in the back of McCann's books, Ondaatje is also here, on McCann's website, in conversation.

In this scene from Transatlantic, it's just ahead of the stock market crash. Emily is an American writer born of an Irish mother who is taking a trip with her photographer daughter. She's one of several characters from several time periods who cross back and forth, across the ocean, between Europe and the United States, on the high wire of hope and time, in pursuit of freedom, a word with two syllables and many meanings.

The elaborate search for a word, like the turning of a chain handle on a well. Dropping the bucket down the mineshaft of the mind. Taking up empty bucket after empty bucket until, finally, at an unexpected moment, it caught hard and had a sudden weight and she raised the word, then delved down into the emptiness once more.

Michael Ondaatje and Colum McCann hear the word—and scribe the world—with the same meter. I can't read one without thinking of, or hearing, the other. Those spliced sentences. Those hushed sounds. Those surprising images. Ondaatje and McCann are come-closer writers. Come closer and pause. They are two men whose books are risks ribbed together by pierce and poem. Their sentences smoosh, then stand erect. They whisper, then they startle. They cut each other off and the joinery shocks us, as much as the flow of syllables.

What wouldn't you give to learn from either one? And then to forge your own sound, your own meter.

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Summer Reading 2012: Responses to a Questionnaire

Back in mid-April, while living those few glorious days beside the ocean's gentle roar, I was asked some questions about my hoped-for summer reading.  Two months have passed, and some of my predictions for myself have held true. Some predictions are still waiting to be fulfilled.  Some books were in fact what I hoped they would be.  Some (or, to be specific, one) severely disappointed.  

This beautiful girl lives, by the way, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  She's one of my teaching aides for the upcoming VAST Teacher Institute.

But here is who I was or thought I'd be, in mid-April, when contemplating these questions by the sea.

What are you reading this summer?

I have an exquisite pile of books waiting for me—Cheryl Strayed’s WILD, Katherine Boo’s BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS, Adam Gopnik’s WINTER, Loren Eiseley’s ALL THE STRANGE HOURS, and the GRANTA BOOK OF THE IRISH SHORT STORY (edited by Anne Enright and including such gems as the Colum McCann class “Everything in This Country Must”).  I like to mix it up—new and old, memoir and fiction.

What was your favorite summer vacation?

Favorite is a hard word for me.  Love is easier.  I loved my family’s summers at the Jersey shore when I was a kid and my father taught me how to dig for the clams with our toes.  I loved Prague and Seville with my husband and son.  And last summer I fell head over heels for Berlin.  Anybody would.

What’s your favorite book about summer?

Harper Lee’s TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD isn’t about summer, per se.  But all of its most lush and important parts happen within and under the summer heat.

What was your favorite summer reading book as a kid?

How boring, how obvious, how true to admit that it was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s THE GREAT GATSBY that enchanted me, again and again, as I sat collecting sun on my face with a piece of tin.

What is your favorite beach read?

I never read on the beach.  I walk and look for dolphins.  I read at night, when my body is still.

What’s the last book you devoured on a long flight?

The last time I was on a long flight I re-read BOOK OF CLOUDS by Chloe Aridjis.  I was glad I did.  I took off from Heathrow.  I landed in Philadelphia.  And in between I’d lived Berlin.

What’s your go-to book to read when you know you only have a few uninterrupted moments of peace?

I read Gerald Stern’s poems.  They fix my migraines.

What’s a great book about discovery or travel to read on a long road trip over several days?

Steinbeck often works.

What would you re-read?

I will be re-reading Alyson Hagy’s BOLETO when it comes out in May from Graywolf.  I read it in galleys, my Christmas Day present to myself.  I was literally jumping off the couch to read phrases to anyone who’d listen.

What are you stealing from your kids’ shelf?

I wish my kid would steal from my shelves!  I have even offered enticements, but he’s refused. In any case, two of my most loved books of all time — THE BOOK THIEF (Markus Zusak) and CARVER (Marilyn Nelson) — were published for younger readers.  Which is to say, they were published for the best parts of all of us.

What book transports you to another time or place?

Anything Michael Ondaatje writes, but let’s stick with his memoir, RUNNING IN THE FAMILY, which takes readers to Ceylon (Sri Lanka).  All right.  I can’t stick with just one.  Let’s add his remarkable COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER, the fictionalized life of Buddy Bolden.  That one takes you straight to the wild songs of New Orleans.

Who is your favorite character/hero/heroine?

Hana from Ondaatje’s THE ENGLISH PATIENT.  I fell in love with her.

What’s a classic summer book?

Don’t all girls read THE SECRET GARDEN (Frances Hodgson Burnett) in summer?

What’s a book that truly taught you something?

Marilynne Robinson’s HOUSEKEEPING taught me that it was okay to be fierce with language.  I’ve read it several times.

What’s a first line from a novel that you’ll always remember?

The first line of Colum McCann’s novel DANCER, about the life of Rudolf Nureyev.  It goes on for two pages. The first bit ends in a colon.  What was flung onstage during his first season in Paris: ......

What’s a book that thrilled you/surprised you/scared the living daylights out of you?

A WOMAN IN BERLIN: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary.  Published anonymously, this heartbreaking and still somehow gorgeous diary recounts the life of one particular German woman in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russians.  It scared me to death.  

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Do e-books free us from distractions? Responding to Tim Parks

This morning Shelf Awareness serves up this quote of the day, and it stops me.  I think I might just move on, but I can't.

Because Parks' assertion that reading the e-book frees us from "everything extraneous and distracting" ... "to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves" in no way jibes with my experience.  Yes, I have downloaded dozens of books onto my iPad.  Sadly, I've left many of them stranded.  Unable to scribble in the margins, dog-ear the pages, underline emphatically—unable, in other words, to engage in a physical way with the text—I grew distracted, disinterested, bored.  Yes, Michael Ondaatje will always keep me reading.  And so will the work of my friend Kelly Simmons, and the words of Julie Otsuka, Leah Hager Cohen, A.S. King, Timothy Schaffert, Paula Fox, and Justin Torres—though I wish I owned all of that work on paper.  But here on my iPad—stranded, unfinished—sit Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones, Andrew Winer's The Marriage Artist, Margaret Drabble's complete short stories, and many other tales. These are, most likely, extremely good books, and yet, I find myself incapable of focusing on them in their e-format.  I need to interact—physically—with the texts before me.  I can't do that, in the ways I'd like to do that, with a screen.

I am also, as a footnote, intrigued by Tim Parks' final lines, when he speaks of moving on from illustrated children's books.  With the rise of the graphic novel and the increasing insertion of images back into teen books (and I suspect we'll see that illustration encroachment continue), I wonder if we have really moved away from illustrated texts.  I wonder, too, if we should. Art is not just for juveniles, after all.

Here is the quote at length, as excerpted by Shelf Awareness.

"The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children's books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups."

--Tim Parks in his post headlined "E-books Can't Burn" at the New York Review of Books blog

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On Short Novels, The Sense of an Ending, and Julian Barnes

The pages of my copy of The Sense of an Ending, the gripping new novel by Julian Barnes, had not been cut.  I had to slip my finger in between each one as I lay reading at the close of a snowy weekend.  This pleased me greatly.  The feel of the paper against my skin.  The sound of a story unfolding.

I am always confused by critics of the short novel—by those who refer to the shorter novel as something lesser than.  I remember a conversation with Alice McDermott (Charming Billy, That Night, At Weddings and Wakes), in which she spoke of writing the kind of stories she herself liked to read—shorter and more compact novels, densified worlds, intimate places, landscapes of measured, studied sentences.

Yes.  Me, too.  The short novel may or may not be about plot, may or may not be commercial (whatever that is).  But when it is handled with the intelligence of an Alice McDermott or a Julian Barnes or a Julia Otsuka or a Kate Chopin or a Michael Ondaatje (Coming Through Slaughter) or a Chloe Aridjis or a Kathryn Davis or an Anne Enright, for example, I personally think there is nothing finer.  Brilliant short novels have the impact of poems.  They are, most often, shorter precisely because the writer has taken the time to banish the extraneous and diluting, the self-aggrandizing or -indulgent.  There is a story to be told.  There is its core and there are those things essential to its core.  The brilliant writer of shorter novels holds that line, maintains his or her focus, goes blessedly deep, does not skip from this event to that—indeed, does not concentrate on "events" at all.  Character and meaning, language and symbol, the ripe stuff.  Brilliant short novels concentrate, primarily, on that.

I know many who would disagree, and that's the beauty of this literary community—the possibility of conversation, dissension.  (And of course I have many beloved books on my shelf that run past 300 pages, though I will admit that I don't have many favorites that run past 400.)  But I hope no one will disagree with me about this new book by Julian Barnes.  From the first sentence to the last I hardly exhaled.  The entire book was of such a piece that I felt certain that Barnes himself was sitting here, telling this story about a man, Tony Webster, resorting the memories of his youth.  Webster had thought himself a regular-enough student with a regular-enough first love affair.  He had gotten on with his life and lived it reasonably well.  But when he learns that he has been remembered in a will in an odd and oddly disturbing way, and when, over time, he is presented with evidence of who he really was as a young man, he is staggered in the way that we all are staggered when presented with contradictions of our own fine self-opinion.

Barnes, whose Nothing to Be Frightened Of, is a fine and teachable book of nonfiction, puts his philosophical genius on full display in this novel, his great capacity for going deep.  One example of many:

And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse—a feeling somewhat between self-pity and self-hatred—about my whole life.  All of it.  I had lost the friends of my youth.  I had lost the love of my wife.  I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained.  I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded—and how pitiful that was.

He also demonstrates his talent for plotting (yes, short novels have plots, too—it's just not what drives them), for surprise, for mystery, even.  The Sense of an Ending is a rich story, a riveting one.  If you haven't yet encountered Barnes, I suggest you start with this.

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The Cat's Table/Michael Ondaatje: Reflections

What is it that I want from a Michael Ondaatje novel?  What is it that I get?  Why, in a week of grave disappointments and disillusionment, did I feel that little could save me from my own dark sink except for this man and his words?

Does he write perfect novels?  No, perhaps not; wouldn't that be a bore?  Does he write atmospheric, human ones—books that, with their slow spill of language, their lush So So So, their abutted chapters and strange place names, their oddities of plant life, their sacred spectral skies, swoon beneath the reader's eye?  Yes.  He does.  Has Ondaatje himself always been there, right beneath the lines—so close you can hear him breathing?  God, yes and absolutely.  Michael Ondaatje is that rare, rare thing:  a writer crushingly alive. 

I don't care if he gets the plots right.  I don't care what the plots are.  I will let someone else tell you about the voyage that is his brand-new book, The Cat's Eye.  How it is a first-person story with a narrator named Michael who comes from a place called Ceylon.  How it is fiction nonetheless, a story about three boys, 11 of age or so, who spend 21 days on a boat called the Oronsay.  They eat at the Cat's Table, where the lesser among the passengers sit.  They make trouble of their own and find the trouble others make.  It awakens them.  It crushes and folds and shapes them. It lives with them, later—close to the surface or buried deep.  There are mysteries involved.

Let others tell you this.

All I want is to say that, yes, Michael Ondaatje saves me.  It is the way he conducts his portrait-making.  The simple. The exotic. The yearned after.

What was I in those days? I recall no outside imprint, and therefore no perception of myself. If I had to invent one photograph of myself from childhood, it would be of a barefoot boy in shorts and a cotton shirt, with a couple of friends from the village, running along the mildewed wall that separated the house and garden in Boralesgamuwa from the traffic on the High Level Road. Or it would be of me alone, waiting for them, looking away from the house of the dusty street.

It's the way he captures, in all he writes, the power of the word:

I would visit that smoky room if the day was dull, and he would at some point begin reading to me. It was the anonymity of the stories and the poems that went deepest into me. And the curl of a rhyme was something new. I had not thought to believe he was actually quoting something written with care, in some far country, centuries earlier. He had lived in Colombo all his life, and his manner and accent were a product of the island....

It is the way he teaches that we can all rise again. That we can reshape ourselves and be reshaped.  We can be reborn:

...because in a breaker's yard you discover anything can have a new life, be reborn as part of a car or railway carriage, or a shovel blade.  You take that older life and you link it to a stranger.

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we miss you already

I wake in the dark as I do.  I stumble downstairs.  I turn this machine on, get to work several hours before my clients pull up at their own desks.  Trying to get ahead of the stories, the new drafts, the revised drafts, the rethinking, the queries, the revisioning back toward revisions.  I work, and then I stop.  I watch Steve Jobs talking, here on my screen.  Live each day as if it is your last.  Stay hungry.  Stay foolish.  I ask myself:  What do I really want to do with this hour?  This hour that, by rights, belongs to me.

I want, as I said yesterday, to read.  I want to stop banging so hard against this keyboard.  I want to be quiet and quietly led into the world of another's making.  I want magic.

I want, I realized, to go spend some time with Michael Ondaatje, who made me believe in the power of a certain kind of book.  Michael Ondaatje who, more than any other writer I have ever read, changed the way I think about books.  I am going to go download The Cat's Table now.  I will read for two hours, maybe three.  Not in this room.  Not at this desk.  My arms at rest.  My mind elsewhere.

Rest in peace, Steve Jobs.  Thank you, Steve Jobs.  I type these words into my Mac, the first computer brand I ever owned, the only computer brand I ever owned.  I'll go read on your iPad2.  I'll sit quietly with magic and think of you.

We're looking up at you.  We miss you already.

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I Want

I have about a half hour of typing in me each day before the arm goes numb (except for the last finger, which simply hurts like heck).  But I have ten daily hours, at least, of corporate work (yesterday was 14) and sometimes I write blog posts, and sometimes (though less so these days) emails, and every now and then I write a sentence or two of a novel.  I go around saying ouch ouch ouch ouch.  I'm just an old creak.  That's what I am.

What I would really like to do is sit back and read the work of others.  Just, like, sit here and read.  Monday evening, ahead of an event downtown, I slipped inside the cozy sleeve of a bookstore and swooned.  Oh, there they were, be still my heart—all those books that I have been craving (real books, real paper).  The Charles Frazier.  The Alexandra Fuller.  The Erin Morgenstern.  The Diana Abu Jaber.  The Chad Harbach.  I came home with the Harbach, only because the new Michael Ondaatje wouldn't be released until the next day.  (They had it in the store, I know they did, but the crafty lady at the front desk made like they didn't.)  

Oh, I want to read.  Oh, what writer doesn't.  Oh, yes.  My life is blessed.  But.  I just really want to sit and read.  I want to use this blog to celebrate the work of others.  I want to get the balance right.

Let me close by celebrating Miss Sarah Laurence, a multiply talented writer, critic, painter, photographer (and mom) who, despite being in the middle of writing a few books herself, took the time to read You Are My Only and to write so intelligently about it.  I won't hijack any of her words.  I'll just send you here.  Talk about balance, Sarah.  It's just so perfect.

Thank you.

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American Music/Jane Mendelsohn: Reflections

Sometimes all I want to do is run up and down the street, and then to the mall and through the mall, and then to the beach and across the whole of the coastal shore, and then through an airport (among all those airport-bookstore-book toting readers) and then across an ocean to proclaim, I have just read the perfect book. 

I have read a book that held me, moved me, stirred me, awed me, restored and redeemed me—I have read that book.  It's called American Music, and by all rights I should have heard about this book since it was released in June; it's been O blessed and New York Times Book Review reviewed, and this is an author (Jane Mendelsohn) with whom many are already familiar, thanks to her debut novel, I was Amelia Earhart.  But I didn't know about American Music; I just found it in a bookstore and because I loved Earhart, I brought Music home, after the most cursory glance at the jacket.  Mendelsohn is that good.

No. In Music, she is that great.  I don't even want to try to explain this book, how it works.  I can't imagine wasting a second explaining (all right, the briefest bit of explaining) how the story involves a 21-year-old physical therapist, Honor, and the young Iraq War veteran she begins to treat—her hands on his flesh, her strength in his muscles releasing stories from generations past that both can see and hear, that not he, not she understand for the longest time.  Did that just make any sense?  It doesn't perhaps, it's not possible, perhaps, but it is utterly convincing and powerful and so well made and by the end it does not matter, because all the fragments of the stories released tell a real and aching larger story, and because every single line of this book is something approximating perfect.  You know I love Michael Ondaatje and Colum McCann.  Mendelsohn joins that league of writer here, her Honor like Ondaatje's Hannah, her understanding of jazz music and the birth of cymbals and swing on a par with McCann's mastery of gypsy poets, say, or Nureyev ballet.

She pulled down the sheet and touched his back.  He listened closely to the music.  He heard the scrape of the recording and the piano like rain and the voice lifted above the music like a kite jerking and soaring above the trees.  

I said that I don't want to explain.  I simply want you to go out and buy this book—buy it and read it and see what literature can be, how a webbing intelligence electrifies and haunts and utterly defines the mood of a day, no matter how hot it is outside, how swampy.

As I write these words, thunder rolls in from some place north.  A storm brewing.  A prelude to your reading of Music.

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Running in the Family

"My Grandmother died in the blue arms of a jacaranda tree. She could read thunder."

— Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family

I read Running in the Family for the fourth time, in preparation for a class conversation on Monday. I come across the lines I remember loving and the lines that strike me as being brand new. This line here is an old favorite—the surprising synesthesia, the resurrection of the grandmother, the utterly indelible attributes. People are known for many things. We pile up our store of anecdotes. At the end of life, what will define you? What would it be to be the one memorialized by a gift for reading thunder?

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English 145

Yesterday the brave souls of English 145 at Penn lobbed Natalia Ginzburg, Paul West, and Annie Dillard around the room—declaiming, declaring, rebutting, suggesting, insisting on asynchronous points of view.

West, via his essay "Remembrance of Things Proust," emerged variously as brilliant, smug, teacherly, full of his own conceits, and ultimately vulnerable. Ginzburg, with her classic "My Craft," riled the suspicious among us with her declaration that, "When we are happy our imagination is stronger; when we are unhappy, memory acts with greater force." In "To Fashion a Text," Dillard won the hard-to-win with her words, "What impels the writer is a deep love for and respect for language, for literary forms, for books. It's a privilege to muck about in sentences all morning. It's a challenge to bring off a powerful effect, or to tell the truth about something. You don't do it from willpower; you do it from an abiding passion for the field... Willpower is a weak idea; love is strong."

We took a break. We caught our breath. We leaned in toward the end of the day. We sat for a moment with Larry Woiwode, his words: "All experience is simultaneous, stilled and sealed in itself, and we manage daily by imagining we move from minute to minute, somehow always ahead. Our multiple selves collide at every second of intersection, one or the other vying for supremacy, the scars of the past flooding through the present texture of our personality, and maturity is knowing how to govern the best combination of them."

Finally we agreed to read Ondaatje's Running in the Family, perhaps my favorite memoir of all time. It's not just story. It's not just language. It's the making of memoir, revealed.

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The Elegance of the Hedgehog/A Review

Many years ago, on a rainy day, I walked through a bookstore and discovered Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. I hadn't heard of it before—I should have, but I hadn't. I brought it home and made that book my own personal discovery. My touchstone. My measure. My source of redemption when the world seemed too scarred or dark.

The same thing happened yesterday, when I finally found time to read The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Sure, indeed, tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) had discovered this second novel by Muriel Barbery before I did—but I hadn't spoken to a soul about it, I hadn't read reviews of it, I hadn't stumbled upon a blogger's commentary, and so it wasn't on any of my must-buy lists. It was simply there, face up, at a bookstore, and I had the urge to bring it home.

Yesterday I read this story of the autodidact concierge who lives the clandestine life of an undiscovered intellectual in Paris. She has a best friend who comes to visit. She befriends a brilliant, beauty-seeking twelve-year-old named Paloma. And then a distinguished Japanese man moves into her building and asserts the possibility of being truly known, truly seen.

I was sitting by a screened-in door as I read this book. The day was perfect. The phone rang and I did not answer. Emails pinged; I left them unattended. The book, which moves slowly, sumptuously, across the terrain of ideas and time, takes such an unexpected turn at the end that I found myself crying. Just sitting there in the breeze, sobbing. For the beauty of the story. For the courage of Barbery. For the very idea that so many people out there have already embraced this story of ideas and heart.

Read it, if you can.

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Experimental Fictions

For those of you who have never gone to a Rahna Reiko Rizzuto reading or enrolled in one of her classes, she's a knock-out green-eyed Italian/Irish-Japanese astrophysics-trained novelist/memoirist who was born in Honolulu and has made the world her home (and left the world with, among other things, Why She Left Us, the novel that won an American Book Award). She's also one of my dearest friends, and every now and then a package will arrive with Reiko's writing scrawled across the front. Saturday that happened. Inside was a book by Christian Peet, a story told through postcards titled Big American Trip. Yes. A story told through postcards. Angry, odd, fantastic comminiques that all add up to a singular voice that may be male, may be female, may be fiction, may be not.

Addressed to the Sweet Grass County Chamber of Commerce & Visitors Center in Big Timber, MT, for example, these words: "I do not wish that the world would go by. I do not wish to watch the world leave."

Reading through Trip yesterday afternoon, I thought of all the other deliberately odd books that have won my heart—the out-of-the-boxers that made me want to write a book like Flow, a river's autobiography, and that inspire the work I'm doing now. Carole Maso's Ava, for example—the final words of a dying woman, the unpieced fragments of a life. Michael Ondaatje's pseudo-biography of Buddy Bolden, Coming through Slaughter. John Berger's novel in unchronological letters, From A to X. Markus Zusak's Death-narrated The Book Thief. Richard Flanagan's Death of a River Guide. Chloe Aridjis's Book of Clouds. Alexansdar Hemon's The Lazarus Project. Forest Gander's As a Friend.

These books don't hew to the sound bite. These books dare. I've got an entire shelf of them here. I like sitting among them, breaking rules.

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The Preemptive Howl

These claims, only, can be made for this day: I gave it over to dreaming. To preparing even more for the young writers' workshop I'll be teaching tomorrow, though my agenda is jammed already—more to do, more to see, more to talk about than the girls and I could possibly squeeze into one day.

And yet, how can we call tomorrow a success if we don't also speak of Rebecca Solnit's way of seeing, for example, the color blue? The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. How can we not retrieve Jean-Dominique Bauby from the brink? The last time I saw my father, I shaved him. It was the week of my stroke. How can we talk about beginnings and voice if we do not begin with Ondaatje? Drought since December. How can we claim to move toward the authentic and raw, if we do not tantrum with C.K. Williams, if we do not share his "preemptive howl"? And did you really think it would be possible for me to face a group of aspiring teen writers without reading aloud, with them, from The Book Thief? An original book and a popular book. You see, I'll tell them. It can be done.

And then I'll remind them of what Natalia Ginzburg had to say. I'll warn them, so I can warn myself: There is a danger of cheating with words that don't really come from within, that we have fished up from outside at random and skillfully pieced together, for we do become cunning. There is a danger in becoming cunning, in cheating. It is a very difficult craft, as you can see, but the most wonderful in the world.

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