Chixulub's Manuscript as a Pickup Truck...
As I mentioned in my reply to J(ay) on yesterday's entirely too dark (even with an Electric Jesus Chixulub graphic) post, I heard part of an interview with John Irving on the radio this evening.
This was on my way from the office to visit Todd. To read more pages from the current rewrite of 'Wealth Effects.'
Reading aloud is a useful exercise, because it forces me to listen to the rhythm of my prose. Left to my own devices, I write convoluted sentences Evil Ash has rightly referred to as 'comma abuse.' I also have an affinity for gritty characters and a problem with giving them unlikely vocabularies. Read a redneck narrator aloud and inconsistencies in his argot become more apparent.
Irving has contemporary writers he likes, from what I heard, though they were guys I've never heard of. I've enjoyed the four books of his I've read: 'The World According to Garp,' 'A Widow for One Year,' 'The Fourth Hand,' and 'Cider House Rules.' But like Tom Wolfe, he's a commitment to huge page counts, and as much as I love to read, I'm not a fast read. I sub-vocalize everything.
Not that I move my lips or anything like that. But 'Kavalier & Clay,' 'Mason & Dixon,' 'Middlesex,' and so on, these days, I have to be pretty sure I'm in for something good before I'll tackle books of that size. I just won't bother with Pat Conroy, Stephen King, Tom Clancy, John Grisham, etc.
I don't share Irving's dislike of the 'modern' or 'post-modern' (whatever that is). He mentioned that a lack of plot and architecture is a problem in his view. But 'Underworld' is my favorite Don DeLillo book, and I haven't read him through but I'm 99% sure it's his longest work. It also lacks an overall 'plot' of the sort you'd find in 'A Tale of Two Cities' or 'The Cider House Rules.'
But Irving mentioned loving the 'sentences' of his favorite authors, and that's definitely part of the appeal for DeLillo as far as I'm concerned. 'Cosmopolis' has a more compact plot, but really what I love is his use of the language, especially his dialogue and the interior thoughts of his characters, in that case Eric Packer and Levin/Sheets.
But a lot of what makes 'Wealth Effects' a monster-in-a-box/wonder-boys type thing is I have all these back stories invented. I have the childhoods of these characters, their formative experiences, their parents, their school experiences from grade school to college, their work histories... Failed marriages, financial crises of their own engineering, fucked up families, entrapping jobs, etc.
Elmore Leonard (who I LOVE), really short-hands these back story elements. Sometimes I think that works, but other times I think the only reason I accept a crooked authority figure or a crook with a noble streak is that it's Elmore Leonard. His other books, characters, stories, etc., become the back story you'd find in a guy like Irving who writes fewer (but much longer) books.
I've struggled with the structure of 'Wealth Effects.' I originally had the proposal of the arson/bank robbery spree as the opening scene, but became disenchanted with that. Starting with the actual crime wave is another option, but where do you build from there? Without back story?
The draft I have been tormenting Todd (and his roomy) with doesn't even get the actual 'crime' in first 100 manuscript pages.
But from the outset, I've wanted it to not be a crime novel, per se. More a literary novel with crime, transgressive, social criticism and romantic elements. Today, I'm wondering if I'm even smart enough to read a book like what I am trying to craft, much less write the fucker.
And this morning, on the way to work, I heard a 'This I Believe' on NPR, by a woman who lost her gig teaching lit at a university in Iran for not wearing a veil, and for teaching some of Irving's literary heroes. Their goddamn tax-subsidized web site isn't coming up for me to link you to the item, and I'm late for the sheets, but I basically share her view that good literature makes you think, makes you empathize with people you might, on the surface, find outrageous, wrong-headed, subversive or criminal.
So what's my goal with 'Wealth Effects?' I want to make you dance with the infidels of middle-class values. I want my prose to shoot bullets at your feet that make you dance with these infidels...
4 comments:
I’ll try to hunt down audio of the Irving NPR thing. I have no like for him, but I’m curious who he praises,
As we’ve discussed before, I share your admiration for Elmore Leonard, I have not yet read the new one, kind of saving it for when I need a life-preserver thrown at me. For now the early work of Lionel Shriver (whom you will meet when the Post gets to you) is keeping me afloat.
As for back story/character development, while yes creating these case histories for characters is (sometimes) interesting and (sometimes) works, overall, for me, I just want to be told what I need to know. What is essential to the story. I think if I were to try to write something I would use a kind of template that a mystery writer would use. Excuse me – a GOOD mystery writer: only put in what needs to be in. Maybe write it if need be, but excise it out when the time comes.
Until then, I remain awaiting your bullets (mind the pigs, please) and the records you chose to spin for our dancing…
The latest Elmore Leonard I've read is 'Mr. Paradise,' though I know he has a new one out. He's great, though after twenty or so books his patterns start to reveal themselves. He's probably great in part because he never envisioned himself as writing 'literature.' From what little interview material I've seen, he has never seen himself as anything but a gritty genre-fiction writer. Lethem set out the same way, though obviously 'Fortress' was an attempt at being more 'literary.'
I've worked on trying to (in Chuck's parlance) 'unpack' so many things, and I think that's a useful thing. But there's some things I need to pack back together at this point.
I've been thinking about Don DeLillo a lot today. In 'Cosmopolis,' when Eric gets to the barber, and the barber offers him a choice of tap water or liqueur. He accepts the liqueur, and the barber is relieved because 'God forbid I should offer your father water!' So much of Eric's father, Eric's childhood, is encapsulated in that. Here's a guy with (until that evening) billions at his disposal, and his comfort zone, his 'going home' is to visit a barber who's down to one chair and drinking New York tap water. And the barber worships him not because he's a billionaire tycoon, but because of his Dad, a Hell's Kitchen tough guy.
But then some of my favorite books have huge digressions in them. And in the notion of a novel as interlocking short stories, that can definitely support a longer book. That doesn't mean you can be sloppier, if anything it ramps up the stakes for the author. Each of those stories has to be able to stand alone and carry the theme, advance the plot and add kick to the ultimate climax.
At least that's the way it seems to me...
I’m not as up on Delillo as maybe I should be. I read _White Noise_ around 20 years ago and it was…alright. Then I read _Libra_ when it came out and it was…alright. Nothing to make me want to look too much further. Then when _The Body Artist_ came out (2000?) I gave him another whirl and found it to be pretty bad. One of these days (maybe) I’ll try _Underworld_, as that’s seemingly bound to be his Masterwork. Although I am utterly convinced it does not take 800 (or whatever) pages to tell a bloody story. And this is what keeps me away from it.
I didn't enjoy 'The Body Artist.' Haven't read 'White Noise' yet, but probably will give it a try. I gather it was the book that put DeLillo on the map.
'Cosmopolis' I love, and structurally it has a lot in common with 'The Body Artist.' I like his literary style, his language, but 'Cosmopolis' is such a riot of mythology (Icarus, Alexander weeping that he has no more world's to conquer, even the tale of the frog and the scorpion...), plus he deconstructs the dot-com bust, makes good fun of the contradictions of New York, of financial giants, madness and redempton.
'Underworld' is long, but it's not really one story. He probably could have published it as three or four different books, selecting different sections and reworking some elements for 'plot' purposes. But it is a monster, the same thing that keeps me procrastinating on some of my 'to-read' stack....
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