Devouring "The Hunger Games."

Long-time readers of my EWAs will remember the time when I was a bit late to a literary luncheon, and, as a result, was horrified to be seated at the fantasy-adventure table because there was no room at the literary-fiction table.

On that occasion I bravely wrapped myself in the cloak of a vampire yearning for a blood-fix, and discovered for myself the illicit joys of genre, which at the time I would have told you was akin to an upper-crust intellectual (like me) being arrested for literary dumpster diving.

I believe there is much to be learned about telling a story by dwelling in the land of genre which, by the way, is just East of Eden.

Hell, I spent years living a dystopian story; why shouldn't I spend hours reading one?

Really now, time-traveling back and forth between the U.S. in the 1950s and Scotland in the 1740s can get kind of boring, or, from a story-telling point of view much too easy to turn into a gimmick. That's a reference to The Outlander Series by Diana Gabaldon, by the way.

As I often say, "All fiction is about family—either the formation of a family or its disillusion, or both." It's all about love, in other words, that urge many of us have to spend our lives in company of some special person.

You'll never go wrong if each time you open a novel to page one—regardless of what genre it is—you ask yourself, "What is the family that is being formed or destroyed in this story—or the family that is being formed and then destroyed."

This time, instead of lateness to a literary luncheon, it was a book club I belong to that caused me take a literary sojourn into YA, i.e., young-adult fiction, by reading The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, and to open it to page one.

There we see a family, such as it is, being described. A young girl named Katnisss writing in the "first-person-I," , describing waking up in her bed to find that her younger sister, Prim, with whom she usually sleeps, has crawled in with their mother during the night. The fact that both the mother and her two children all sleep in one room—that's just the first of many hardships Katniss and her family endure. Food insecurity is another.

Later on in Chapter One we will once again see Prim protected, shielded if you will, only this time by her sister, Katniss.

We soon realize Katniss' family is floundering, barely getting by. The father was killed in a mining accident and this same mother, whose bed Pym has crawled into, recently returned to her two children after a considerable absence (she abandoned her family—no reason given). Now she's back. Katniss isn't very trusting her mother will remain with her and her sister.

Readers of the wonderful, weird, unsettling, and gripping short story by Shirley Jackson, "The Lottery" published in The New Yorker in 1948 will recognize the basic conceit of The Hunger Games. The day that's being described on page one of the novel is known as "the day of the reaping" when a boy and a girl from each District of the fictional and highly repressive police state, a country called Pym is selected to partake in a fight-to-the finish. There are 12 districts; thus, 24 young people fight until a single victor is left alive.

Without giving away any spoilers, let me set forth a few thoughts I had as I read the opening chapters:

The author, Suzanne Collins, wrote children's TV shows for many years; it shows in her writing, which is highly visual.

The book reads almost as though a movie is being described. The words we read are what the "camera" would see if it were a movie. It's possible the novel was written after the screenplay was written; not the other way around.

The story moves extremely fast. Collins has a marvelous way of having the point-of-view character quickly become the trusted narrator, as she describes her world. That kind of writing is called "exposition." If a writer gets bogged down in it—explaining too many details—it's a killer. It kills the story. It kills creativity. A novel burdened by exposition quickly turns deadly dull.

Collins escapes those drawbacks by telling her story fast using extremely easy-to-read language. She starts building narrative momentum on page one. Beginning writers have a terrible time doing this and also moving their characters around on a dramatic stage that is, after all, composed entirely of words. Collins is brilliant in both departments. One example: "I swing my legs off the bed and slide into my hunting boots. Supple leather that has molded to my feet." You immediately trust her. She's done this a million times. Another example: "I flatten out on my belly and slide under a two-foot stretch [of fence] that's been loose for years." She's a pro.

Katniss describes her family: Prim, the essence of young, untouched beauty, her "face as a raindrop, as lovely as a primrose for which she was named." And her mother: "In sleep my mother looks younger, still warn, but not so beaten-down," an extremely effective description. And notice—there's not even a trace of sentimentalism. Collins is using Katniss to build her character and earn your trust as your narrator at the same time. You sense Katniss is a reliable narrator; she's holding nothing back.

Next month: More about The Hunger Games: Its strengths and weaknesses.

Let Us Now Praise Elizabeth Strout.

She grew up in rural Maine, largely self-taught, and when she sat down to write the novel that made her famous she swept aside all the nonsense she had picked up in school—that all of us were taught—about what literature should be; and in that simple, single courageous act, she separated the Red Sea from Dry Land. She created for herself a narrow trail that led over rocky soil even though gigantic walls of water that were being held back on either side of her slender trail by immensely powerful forces. She refused to be distracted by all the water on either side of her. She followed her trail.

It was almost as though she said to herself most novels make readers work way too hard to make sense of them and appreciate them; my novel will be effortless to read.

And it was almost as if she said to herself: Most novels do backflips to give readers a phony impression they're 'real' or that they're close to non-fiction—plenty of characters, plenty of complicated relationships, plenty of people making poor decisions that turn out poorly. Plenty of drama, in other words.

My novel? No backflips. Everything will be spare. I will refuse to run away from the notion that my novels are fiction.

By the way, that's what makes most novels so complicated. Their authors are running around like scared rabbits trying to lie their way into Heaven; almost as if they're trying to run away from the truth that their novels are fiction by compulsively fabricating a bunch of lies. As if the reader has no idea what's going on. Give me a break!

And it's almost as if she said to herself, most novels try way too hard to get readers to feel the emotions of the characters. In my novel, emotions will ooze out between the words, but the words I use will never intellectualize what the character is feeling. The reader will know what character is feeling without having to be told in so many words.

I pledge never to waste even a single word intellectualizing emotions. My novel, and the story my novel tells, will feel completely comfortable with the fact that what is being told here is a story that lives inside a novel. I will not use a single sentence to try and convince the reader it's anything else.

My novel will quietly and patiently focus on its only principal character and honor her fully; for example, I will refuse to use words to describe the settings of my stories.

The settings of my novels will be so prosaic and so well known to the reader that no one will miss it when I don't waste a single word describing the setting.

In addition, my novel will refuse to use words to describe what my characters look like. Why? Because if it's a really good story, by the end, every good reader will be able to write a police bulletin description of what my main character looks like. So why waste words on descriptions which so easily could be at variance with what the reader is imagining in her mind.

This is how My name is Lucy Barton might have taken shape in Elizabeth Strout's mind:

"I know," thought Elizabeth, "I'll have my single character be a patient in a midtown Manhattan hospital that has a famous building right outside her hospital window, The Chrysler Building."

Everybody knows what a hospital room looks like, so I won't have to waste a single word describing it. Same goes for The Chrysler Building.

My character will be named Lucy Barton. She's come from rural Maine but now lives in Manhattan, just like me.

In the story, Lucy Barton's doctor has restricted her to her hospital room for a series of "tests." The facts are purposely kept extremely vague and indefinite.

The only action that occurs is this: While she's in the hospital Lucy's mother comes to visit her. Lucy hasn't seen her mom in years.

I ask you, Dear Reader of my ExcitingWriting essays: Imagine you've been admitted to a hospital for 'tests' and you suddenly have an uninvited visitor. It's your mother who you haven't seen for years.

What happens to your emotions? Is there anything that happens from there on out that isn't heavily laden with emotion? Of course not. Emotions ooze out in the spaces between every word.

Fittingly, the novel is mostly dialogue between Lucy and her mother.

This is the novel Elizabeth Strout wrote while she was walking down a narrow rocky trail in rural Maine while on either side of her powerful forces were holding back walls of water.

It's called My Name is Lucy Barton. It's only about 180 pages short. And it's effortless to read, but don't read it too fast. You might miss something interesting.

Why do literary readers flock to "certain" fiction novels?

Years ago I stopped in at a gay country-western bar and noticed all the couples out on the dance floor knew precisely who was leading and who was following. I could tell because they were all swirling each other around so gracefully. There was not one klutz anywhere in sight.

But how does each couple know who's going to lead and who's going to follow? I asked and then answered my question with what I took to be the wisdom of the ages: Well, like everything else, they just figure it out.

I've often wondered how it is Purple Martin birds know to flock to Martin bird "hotels?" Haven't you? Or, conversely, how a Purple Martin knows to refrain from checking in at a Howard Johnson's? I'll bet it's the same wisdom of the ages at play, you dig? For worms? Much?

One could likewise ask—I often do—how do "literary types" wind up reading literary novels. And how do murder mystery fans wind up reading murder mysteries? Likewise, why is it that fans of courtroom dramas wind up reading John Grisham novels?

The wisdom of the ages, no doubt. They just figure it out.

Faithful readers of these monthly ExcitingWriting Advisory essays know these questions I'm asking started out many moons ago with a promise to read a prototypical literary novel—I nominated Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles—and compared it to John Grisham's Sycamore Row, which was my stand-in for a genre novel, in this case the courtroom drama, Grisham's mainstay.

Among the pressing questions of timely import I wanted to answer: Why did I prefer literary novels? Was I too snooty to read a John Grisham novel? (Most definitely not!) Why did I refrain from "dancing" with “certain” novels? Well, I was done with that! Your fearless ExcitingWriter ventured out on the dance floor without a dance instructor anywhere in sight.

Cut to the chase: I've read both novels and... well... they're different.

Grisham's fiction is "external." Towles' fiction is "internal."

Grisham routinely depends on general population groups to tell us who he's talking about, using phrases like "long-haired type," or "pick-up truck driver crowd," or "the white-collar crowd."

Towles draws characters that cut against the grain, characters that question typical modes of how we think of the groups people typically fall in to. He's got the scion of an extremely wealthy family, Woolly, being completely ignorant of middle-class American life. Although the novel takes place in the 1950s, Woolly has never heard of Howard Johnson's, no less the place mats they use which are maps of the United States with Howard Johnson locations marked on them. Woolly loves those place mats. He loves listening to radio and TV commercials because he grew up never having heard them.

Towles has a character by the name of Emmett whose father was a failed Nebraska farmer but who's grandfathers' on both side were extraordinarily wealthy.

He's got another character, Duchess, a young man whose father was a traveling actor (Towles calls him a "has been") who would take his son with him on the road (He does one "bit" where he acts out famous Shakespearean quotes) until he wanted to go off with a young woman and dumped Duchess off at an orphanage.

He's got a grown-person character by the name of Ulysses, a black man who always insists on traveling alone until he meets a brilliant seven-year-old boy by the name of Billy who tells him the ancient Greek myth of Ulysses and assigns him a mission of wondering the world for another four years until he finds his long-lost wife and child.

In this Amor Towles novel nobody is a typical anything. I rather like that. It cuts against the grain. It's unexpected. I find parts of Lincoln Highway hilarious; other parts, intensely entertaining.

I'll cover two other stark differences in next month's EWA: 

Grisham goes for melodrama; Towles prefers drama.

Grisham likes pageantry; Towels is adventurous.

See you next month. I'm pulling the plug on this one.

Literary Fiction Is No Pretty Picture.

If you wish to write or read a novel that in the current literary environment will be championed as an icon of literary fiction, it had better be peopled by deeply flawed and disabled characters, e,g., idiot savants, people who fall somewhere on the autism spectrum disorder (ASD—"characters who don't come off quite right" or "can't relate"), people who are doomed to be the subject of witch hunts; people who are inarticulate yet unbelievably insightful; characters who others might in passing refer to as "too good for this world."

There are so many examples I could name. Here are a few:

· Boo, the reclusive neighbor in To Kill a Mockingbird who haunts the cemetery and does benevolent acts of kindness most of which can never be traced back to him.

· Benjy, a mute, mentally disabled character in The Sound and the Fury, who has no understanding of time, cause and effect, or ordinary morality, but who "can sense things…" like, for example, the existence of evil.

· The young-adult character Woolly and the boy character Billy in Amor Towles', Lincoln Highway. Both are incredibly smart and both are oddly handicapped when it comes to making their way in the ordinary world on their own; they are both dependent on the caretaking willingness of two other characters: In the case of Woolly, Duchess; and in the case of Billy, his brother, Emmett.

· In Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land, there are so many: For example, Seymour, who, while clearly modeled after a typical set of autistic child symptoms, truly "sees more" as he adopts an owl as "Trusty Friend;" Omeir who, due to his cleft pallet, is thought to be the cause of everything that goes wrong anywhere in his vicinity; also octogenarian Zeno Ninis who is never able to express his homosexual love for a British prisoner of war when they were both prisoners of war in North Korea during the Korean War, but who as an elderly man on the last day of his life lays down his life to save children who otherwise would have become victims of an active-shooter incident; by so doing, he turns himself into a hero.

In other words, literary fiction chooses to make stories out of the weak, the oppressed, the "road-kill," the brilliant yet unrecognized ones who will always be misunderstood and condemned by bullies for their weaknesses and shortcomings; the ones that the mob assembles for, and comes to collect in the middle of the night with torches blazing. Think of Frankenstein, for example. Coming back to life from the dead, is it possible Frankenstein might possess valuable insights people of ordinary intelligence and experience might not share?

I started thinking about all the novels that might be quite popular but which no one would ever think to call literary. They might contain plenty of idiosyncratic, misunderstood characters. What keeps us from thinking of John Grisham's Sycamore Row as a literary work? Well, it's genre, for one. It's a John Grisham novel—about a struggling lawyer trying to defend a last will and testament that is essentially indefensible, so that the sum and substance of the novel becomes, Just watch how he pulls this off!

While reflecting on this, I had a "vision," if you will:/p

Is it possible literary fiction desires to convert its readers into typical liberals who always root for the weak, the broken, the oppressed; those stripped of their rights; and the under-represented and under-appreciated while non-literary fiction does the opposite, converting readers to believe in the stalwart, the stout-hearted and the winners who must win again and again in best-selling novel after best-selling novel? After all, Jake Brigance (John Grisham's hero) always wins each case, right?

That's probably an oversimplification.

But think about this: At its heart, what is a literary genre all about? I say it's all about function over form in storytelling because it's driven by character; while non-literary fiction is all about form (e.g., genre) over function because it's propelled by reader expectations, for example, by a set of rules about how that genre of book must be written and must turn out in the end.

Detective mysteries, for example:

They'd better start off with a crime or there would be nothing for the detective to solve (and for we readers, too, because we as readers of the mystery love to play amateur sleuth). Detective mysteries had better end with the crime solved, or else the author will have broken the genre—gone off track. That might make an interesting literary fiction where the book starts off as a genre, but breaks the genre mid-stream, no? Or maybe it would simply be confusing to readers who expect one kind of entertainment and then wind up reading another.

Any thoughts?

Here's my theory of the day. And I'm sticking to it until the sun sets.

There are two kinds of novelists, the ones who like to point out how we're all alike, and the ones who like to point out how we're all different.

John Grisham definitely gets a kick out of showing us how we're all part of one herd called the human herd. In his novel, Sycamore Row, he predicates the appeal of his novel based on an all-out courtroom battle waged by relatives of a newly deceased multi-millionaire businessman who are determined to inherit his estate.

It's unfortunate that the wealthy character whose name is Seth Hubbard, didn't leave his estate to them in the latest version of his will which he wrote and dated the day before he died.

Seth's relatives, the relatively normal, upper-middle class, educated white Southerners, soon learn that they're about to inherit nothing.

The story revolves around their indignation and disappointment when they learn the single person who will be inheriting Seth Hubbard's entire estate is Seth Hubbard's former housekeeper, Lettie Lang.

If you've read John Grisham novels, you know many of them take place in the rural South, in a fictional place called Clanton, Mississippi. And I'll bet you can already guess that this former housekeeper who's about to inherit Seth Hubbard's entire estate is African-American. Don't be surprised when the white residents of Clanton get all bent out of shape by the prospect of having an African-American multimillionaire living among them.

Setting aside for a moment the well documented mores and customs of the rural South, I wonder why anyone would want to sign up to read a novel about relatively well-off white people motivated by greed acting badly. But you see? That's the appeal of reading a novelist who actively wants to posit that all people have the capacity to act equally as badly when visions of inherited sugarplums are yanked away just before they appear.

John Grisham relishes dramatizing a family that's about to take part in a "legal brawl" in hopes of inheriting millions. That's what you get reading an author who loves to point out how we're all alike. When I look at the human race as I think Grisham does, I have to admit, maybe we are alike: We're limited. We're ignorant. We're deficient. We fall short. We fail. We fight until we forget what we've been fighting for.

Now posit that kind of novel against the opposite kind where the author loves to point out how we're all different, let's say for the sake of argument, Anthony Doerr's Cloud Atlas or Amor Towel's Lincoln Highway. Although many would call both novels literary—and maybe they are—with every page we read in those stories, we find the characters themselves turning, by which I mean they're either revealing themselves or maturing, or at least changing as people before our eyes which gives those authors trmendous opportunity to have us as readers feel wonder, surprise or a sense of adventure with every turn of the page.

Well, that's my theory. When you start with human limitation (we're all alike) as your moral construct, the world looks like a far more bleak and colorless place. Sure there are entertaining high jinks. Sure there's courtroom drama. But I'd opt for wonder, surprise or adventure any day, wouldn't you?

Next month: More about Sycamore Row—what works and what doesn't

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The Magic of Amor Towles

If fiction at its best is, as one famous novelist once wrote, a continuous fictive dream, I nominate Amor Towles, most recently author of Lincoln Highway,as dream director extraordinaire.

It's not just that the story being told sounds like someone who is as guilty as sin trying to talk his/her way out of a traffic ticket; it's also that the events reel out one after another so inevitably, so plausibly, with a blush of childlike innocence, you want to laugh and forgive them their crazy schemes because they make us want to believe there's capacity for goodness at the core of their souls.

What I love about Lincoln Highway is this: It's literary adventure at its finest. At its heart, it's an action story with a heart; it's a stupendous one-of-a-kind adventure tale that involves the reader in pure story from the first page until the last.

The opening is notable because it's a homecoming, which usually occurs at the end of a story, so it immediately pulls you in—gives us, as readers, a new beginning, a new story to read, just as one of the characters who is being released from a juvenile detention facility, is being given a new beginning in life.

The experience of reading it? Well, it's like you jumping on a fast-moving freight train that then accelerates, pulling you along relentlessly 'til the end.

That's what I love about the book; at first it seems to take us from Nebraska to California, but then it turns and takes us magically from Nebraska to New York and reminds us of the richness of America in the 1950s when we were young and immortal and everything was possible, a time before cell phones, a time of freight trains and unbelievable wealth.

It suggested to me America's faded glory, how rich we were as a country, how rich we still are and how possible everything still is in relative terms—even in this summer of global climate change—how close we came and still could come; how great we could be again.

What Makes John Grisham's Bestselling Novels So Appealing?

Have I been avoiding reading John Grisham novels because I'm snooty, or because they're not literary enough? Or, is there some other reason? Most importantly, what have I been missing by not reading him?

That's the subject of this EWA plus the next few I'll be writing.

I'd like to understand, better than I do, why so many are attracted to reading novels by John Grisham while, by comparison, so few are attracted to reading novels by Elizabeth Strout, James McBride, Amor Towles, Marilynn Ronbinson, and Michael Chabon,just to name a few writers whose novels I've written about and whose work I've openly admired. In the case of Strout, Chabon and Robinson, I will be writing about them in the coming months.

The question is not how John Grisham is able to turn out one bestseller after another when compared to the other writers I meantioned. All of them are best-selling authors, universally admired by book reviewers. Rather, I'd like to understand why Grisham's hovels sell like hotcakes when compared to the other novelists.

This off the web: "According to the American Academy of Achievement, Grisham has written 28 consecutive number-one fiction bestsellers, and his books have sold 300 million copies worldwide. Along with Tom Clancy, and J.K. Rowling, Grisham is one of only three authors who have sold two million copies on a first printing."

By comparison, Amor Towles' The Lincoln Highway, which came out in October 2021 and his previous novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, published in 2019 "have collectively sold 4 million copies and have been translated into more than 30 languages."

In this EWA, let's compare and contrast the first 20 pages of Grisham's Sycamore Row to the first 20 pages of Amor Towles' The Lincoln Highway. What can we tell about the entire books just by looking at their opening pages?

The First 20 pages of Grisham's Sycamore Row.

The first chapter (6 pages) covers the apparent suicide scene of Seth Hubbard, a 70+ year old man who is found hanging from a noose that's been strung up on a Sycamore tree, with a ladder apparently kicked aside as Hubbard did away with himself.

The first chapter is written in the style of a police report—an extremely controlled, purposely non-expressive style of writing. Nothing is described that is not what it is, meaning a rope is a rope; a coiled noose is a coiled noose; a rainstorm is a rainstorm.

There is only one paragraph where the omniscient narrator (Grisham's voice) diverts from his police-report style to ask a series of questions: "Had there been an instant of doubt, of second-guessing? When his feet left the safety of the ladder, but with his hands still free, had Seth instinctively grabbed the rope above his head and fought desperately until he surrendered? No one would ever know, but it looked doubtful. Later evidence would reveal that Seth had been a man on a mission."

Chapter 2 is devoted to describing Jake Brigance awaking at 5:25 a.m., dressing, leaving home and driving to his office in the little town of Clanton, Mississippi. Jake is our star-power vehicle, the attorney-personality who ties all of Grisham's novels together. We're immediately sympathetic to the plight of this small-town Mississippi attorney who works such long hours yet earns so little yet, nevertheless, is so maligned by so many. (His house has been burned to the ground by the KKK, for example.)

We see him leaving his home, but before he leaves, he "tiptoed into Hanna's room, kissed her on the cheek and pulled the sheets up a bit higher." What a nice guy. You like Jake. You have to like the guy. Always on the side of right and justice. Who wouldn't like him?

We follow Jake while he unlocks and enters his law office in downtown Clanton, Mississippi. By then we learn Jake and his wife Carla have seriously considered moving away from Clanton, yet they haven't left.

Chapter 2 ends with this sentence: "At 7:00 a.m., on schedule, he sat behind his desk and took a sip of coffee. He looked at his calendar for the day and admitted to himself that it did not look promising or profitable."

With Chapter 3, we have Jake Brigance going through his morning mail and opening a large envelope from the same fellow, Seth Hubbard, who's suicide scene was described in chapter one. The envelope contains Hubbard's last will and testament. That brings us to the end of page 20.

After the first 20 pages, am I fascinated? Do I want to know what happens next? Yes.

It's an out-and-out mystery, you see, where you open with the crime scene, or, in this case, the suicide scene.

The first 20 pages of The Lincoln Highway.

By comparison, Amor Towles' novel opens quietly with our principal protagonist, Emmett Watson, being driven home by his prison warden, Warden Williams, after having served a non-contested manslaughter sentence in a juvenile penal institution. Never mind how unlikely that might be (A warden driving a newly released prisoner home, even if he is under-age.) We get to sit through the warden's pep-talk to Emmett about having served his time, and "paying his debt to society."

On page 5 Warden Williams delivers Emmett into the hands of a rancher, Mr. Ransome, and, less than a page later, into the hands of a banker, Mr. Obermeyer. We learn Emmett and Billy's father has passed away, and the bank is foreclosing on his farm. This scene takes place in the kitchen of the farm house.  The banker has left the electricity turned on in the house out of consideration to Emmett and Billy, with the understanding that they'll move out in a day or two.

In the rest of the opening 20 pages, we see Emmett walking the house where he grew up, knowing that although he was home now, he'll be leaving home with his brother a few days from now. We're treated to memories of the little town in Kansas where he grew up. We meet a neighbor friend, Sally, Mr. Ransome's wife, who brings tonight's dinner in the form of a casserole. Finally, on page 16, Emmett and Billy are left alone. Billy takes a stack of chocolate chip cookies wrapped in aluminum foil from his backpack; he gives his brother one and takes one for himself; and he pours two glasses of milk.

On page 18, "As Emmett smiled and took a sip of milk, he sized up his brother over the rim of the glass. He was about an inch taller and his hair was shorter…. He was happy to be sitting with him at the old kitchen table. He could tell Billy was happy to be sitting there too."

So far, it's not altogether clear what this novel will become. Then, at the end of page 20 the novel declares itself when Billy returns to his backpack and withdraws an envelope of "important papers" he had found in their now deceased father's metal box. "Billy tipped the envelope over the table and out slid nine postcards.

The last words on page 21: "They're postcards," Billy said. "To you and me. From Mom. Nearly eight years had passed since their mother had tucked the two of them in bed, kissed them goodnight…"

And the first words on page 21 are these: "…and walked out the door—and they hadn't heard a word from her since. No phone calls. No letters."

Here you have a sense, in a novel entitled The Lincoln Highway, that the young men are about to leave on a journey to explore their common past, searching for their long-lost mother. Of course, it's obvious to we readers that their mother may not want to be found.

By the time I write next month's EWA (July), I will have read one of the two novels. By the time I publish my August EWA, I will have read both.

We already know this much: Both novels are exciting mysteries. I'd like to figure out: Is my shying away from Grisham based on my shortcomings or his? I want to confront "popular taste" head on. Am I just being snooty? Or, is there something else—something genuine—that separates the 300-million seller from the 4-million seller? That question sure is something "to wrassle with," as we say in Texas.

Forbidden Desire

James McBride's writing class is now in session.

In the midst of a near riot over the distribution of free cheese in a dank basement in a housing project in South Brooklyn, the author of Deacon King Kong, sketches Potts' second visit to "The Cause." Potts an NYPD Sergeant arrives with a number of underlings and other police to investigate recent murders.

That's the surface story. The hypertext is that Potts, an Irish cop, is intensely drawn to Sister Ghee, a black resident of The Cause, yet there is only so far he can go; he's on official business, after all. Yet McBride makes no attempt to censor Pott's thoughts, and therein lies—at least for us, the readers of this brilliant novel—the sweet fruits of forbidden desire.

"Potts turned his attention to Sister Gee. Even on an early, bleak Saturday in that musty, crowded basement, she looked lovely as an Irish spring morning."

"She smiled thinly. She didn't seem happy to see him. 'Seems like you brought the whole force today,' she said."

Potts tells the other residents to speak to the other policemen while he asks Sister Gee, "'Can I speak to you outside?'"

"She followed Potts up the ramp and outside. When they were in the plaza, he turned to her, placed his hands in his pockets and frowned at the ground. She noticed he was wearing a double-breasted sergeant's jacket. He looked quite sharp, she thought, and also bothered. Finally, he looked at her."

Their dialogue—fast as lightning—reveal two people on the same wavelength:

"I will not say I told you so."

"Good."

"But as you know, there's been an incident."

"I heard."

"All of it?"

"No, just rumors. I don't believe in rumors."

The conversation goes back and forth. At certain points Sister Gee is using Potts to find out what happened at the crime scene, and, at other points, Potts is using Sister Gee to understand the background of what actually happened.

Right after she decides that Sportcoat, the principal protagonist, was having an affair with Sister Bibb, she protects her to Potts, telling him, "Sister Bibb wouldn't hurt a fly…"

Potts says, "It's called evidence. I have to ask."

"Potts stared at her. That smile, he thought, is like a rainbow. He tried to keep his voice even, official."

When we readers become aware that Sister Gee has been skirting the truth, misrepresenting, she thought to her herself, "I'll keep lying, just to fold into that big shoulder and see him smile and tell a joke in that heavy, pretty voice he got, the way he did that first day in church.

She smiled a sad, genuine one this time and felt her heart fall to earth as she said the words that brought light to his heart every time he heard them. "Come on back then. Hurry back, if you wanna…"

Potts forced himself to check his emotions. He was at work. People were dead… The best he could get out of it was standing right in front of him, as gorgeous and kind a woman as he'd ever seen.

"We better go back down lest they think we're out here ordering Chinese." He turned to head down the ramp until she touched his arm, stopping him. [They have a quick little exchange of dialogue about the murder that took place. We readers are hanging on the writer's every word, praying something will happen between the man and the woman. More than a little touch on the arm. As readers, I think it's fair to say, we're a little disappointed when nothing happens.

Then, after the cops have left, maybe it's the recent presence of Potts and his fellow cops that gives Sister Gee new insight into her situation and her neighbors and the human tragedies playing out all around her in the housing projects of South Brooklyn.

"Sister Gee stared at her neighbors as they surrounded her, and at that moment she saw them as she had never seen them before; they were crumbs, thimbles, flecks of sugar powder on a cookie, invisible, sporadic dots on the grid of promise…."

"She looked them over, the friends of her life, staring at her. They saw what she saw, they realized. She read it on their faces. They would never win. The game was fixed. The villains would succeed. The heroes would die. The sight of Beanie's mother howling at her son's coffin would haunt them…"

I'm thinking of the outrage expressed by the relatives of loved ones lost to the domestic terrorist/racist who struck just the Saturday before last at the supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y. To a person all the deceased were victims of a hate-crime, just as Beanie was.

The moment of insight James McBride is describing continues: "…all living the New York dream in the Cause Houses, within the sight of the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man's dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugar-cane field from the old country. And now heroin was here to make their children slaves again, to a useless white power."

The lesson is over. James McBride has just taught us how to make forbidden desire a part of an official investigation that solves nothing yet leaves us feeling achingly sad.

On Making a Moment Timeless.

Last month I described how James McBride, in his brilliant novel, Deacon King Kong, goes about creating unforgettable characters. The example I sighted was the case of The Elephant, a shady character who enables timely shipments of illicit goods, yet nevertheless cares for his mother's garden while wistfully lamenting how time has passed him by.

This month we examine another triumph of James McBride, as he takes an encounter between a white Irish New York City cop by the name of Potts. ("Just Potts. It's better than pans.") and "Sister Gee, a tall, handsome black woman of forty-eight…" and makes time stand still.

Their conversation crashes through racial stereotypes and turns intimate, at least in McBride's cosmic-comic sense as Sister Gee, a black maid gets to comment on her opinions about dirt.

"Then she [Sister Gee] turned to him [Police Officer Potts] and said, 'We was talking about something before now?'

"'Dirt,' Potts said.

"'Oh yes,' she said, sitting down again. He saw now she was not just handsome, but rather a cumulative beauty. She was a tall woman, middle-aged, whose face was not etched with the stern lines of church folks who've seen so much and done little about it but pray.

"Her face was firm and decisive, with smooth milky brown skin; the thick hair with a bit of gray, neatly parted; her slender proud frame clad in a modest flower-print dress. She sat erect in the pew; her poise was that of a straight-backed ballet dancer, yet her slim elbows dangling on the rail in front of her, jingling her keys lazily in one hand, eying the white cop, she had an ease and confidence he found slightly unsettling.

"After a moment, she leaned back and placed a slender brown arm on the top edge of the pew, the small movement graceful and supple. She moved, Potts thought, like a gazelle. He suddenly found himself struggling to think clearly."

That was admittedly a long quote, but notice the plain descriptive language used to describe this encounter between an older, white New York City policeman and an older churchgoing black woman from South Brooklyn.

I should tell you the scene does take place in the Five Ends Church near "The Cause" housing projects in south Brooklyn. Officer Potts and his partner, a younger police officer have entered the church as a choir rehearsal is ending in order to investigate and get the goods on an elderly perpetrator who shot a drug dealer. So when the woman leans back in the pew, it's not Officer Potts' ["better than pans"] imagination that she's in a pew. She actually is.

Notice that McBride places his "gazelle" and her admiring interrogator in a church where "no funny stuff" is supposed to happen. I'll bet you sense where this scene is going, with all the verboten sexual desire heaped on top of it; but I couldn't help but notice the calm and grace with which James McBride pulled it off.

Just before this point, Potts had made a reference about "cleaning up some dirt." He's talking of about a crime, but that reference allows Sister Gee, to discuss cleaning dirt as a way of life.

"You said some kind of dirt's harder to clean than others," she said. "Well, that's my job, Officer, I'm a house cleaner, see, I work in dirt. I chase dirt all day. Dirt don't like me."

That might have been quite enough about dirt for some writers, but not for James McBride. He has his character Sister Gee launch into a philosophical discourse on the subject.

"It [dirt] don't set there and say, 'I'm hiding. Come get me.' I go out and find it to clean it out. But I don't hate dirt for being dirt. You can't hate a thing for being what it is. Dirt makes me who I am. Whenever I try to rid the world of it, I'm making things a little harder for somebody. Same with you. The fellers you see, crooks and all, they ain't saying, 'Here I am. Come get me…' You and me has got the same job, in a way. We clean dirt…"

Potts found himself smiling, 'You oughta be a lawyer, he said."

The black house-cleaner talks about herself being a "country woman" from North Carolina. She asks Potts if he's "ever been to the South?" He tells her, "No, but my folks were from Ireland."

She asks him, "Is that an island?" which perhaps tells us she knows more than she's letting on, and he tells her, "It's a place where folks can stop and think. The ones with brains, anyway," which I find to be highly revealing to how the character feels about his forebears' native land.

This is McBride's launching pad, the place where this mutual exploration of two strangers from two remote worlds takes off just as his writing soars. Yet if you examine how he does it, he never varies from his basic stylistic strategy—one simple, declarative sentence piled on top of the next. On the face of it, you'd never think such a literary contraption could never get off the ground, no less fly but, in fact, as I already mentioned, it soars. That's why in my view no one else I know of comes close to McBride's writing accomplishments.

In the middle of all this McBride's writing makes a sharp left turn to a magical place. We're told, "Potts felt as if he were watching a dark, silent mountain suddenly blink to life, illuminated by a hundred lights from a small, quaint village that had lived on the mountainside for a hundred years, the village appearing out of nowhere, all the lights aglow at once."

I love that McBride allows himself these indulgences, insists on not editing out all those little detours; in this case he's describing a woman's face coming alive metaphorically as a village lighting up at night. It's ridiculous, of course. A writing/stylistic perfectionist (such as I used to be) would reject it, leave it on the cutting-room floor. It's awful indulgence. Intolerable! Strictly speaking it makes absolutely no sense, only, to my way of thinking, it's absolutely perfect in a highly flawed way. (I love it, in other words.) Then McBride tells us, "Every feature of her face glowed."

This commonplace meeting between a white policeman and a black woman has already been lifted out of the everyday. But McBride refuses to leave well enough alone. He now launches into outer space, into legendary literary orbit by writing what we're all thinking but wouldn't have the courage to write: "He found himself wanting to tell her every sorrow he ever knew, including the knowledge that the Ireland of the vacation folders wasn't Ireland, that the memory of his ancient grandmother from the old country walking down Silver Street, holding his hand when he was eight, clasping her last nickel in her palm, biting her lip as she hummed a sad song from her childhood of poverty and deprivation, wandering the Irish countryside, looking for home and food, would kick through his arteries and burst into his heart until he was a grown man:

The grass waves green above them; soft sleep is theirs for aye;

The hunt is over, and the cold; the hunger passed away….

Instead, he said simply, 'It wasn't so nice."

James McBride refuses to play "editor cop" in the name of succinctness or literary restraint, something for which I am deeply grateful. Instead, he "goes all in" on behalf of "indulgence" trying for even greater effects:

"She chuckled uneasily, surprised by his response and watched him blush. Suddenly she felt her heart flutter. A charged silence descended on the room. They both felt it, felt themselves being propelled along a great chasm, feeling the irresistible urge to reach out, to reach across. To stretch their hands from opposite sides of a large cavernous valley that was nearly impossible to cross…"

And then:

"She was silent now, the smile gone, looking away, the spell broken."

Just as the spell is broken, McBride's writing lesson is over. He has just taught us—those of us open to learning—how to turn an everyday, commonplace moment into a timeless meeting that, like a butterfly accidently flying too close to your nose, came and went before we had the slightest notion something important had just happened.

On Creating Unforgettable Characters.

In this month's EWA I honor author James McBride [Deacon King Kong, 2020, a great novel] for his ability to write unforgettable characters. Each time I open McBride's novel, I whisper to myself, "Class is now in session." You see, his writing speaks to me. It says, "This is how it's done."

Here's one way McBride does it in Deacon King Kong: He introduces us to Guido Elefante, The Elephant, a now middle-aged man raised by a mother who consistently refused to tell him anything about his father.

Guido is sought out by an older man who lets on that he knew this man's father many years earlier. Forgetting the words McBride used to set-up this situation, doesn't the barebones situation itself make you want to hear what this older man has to say about Guido's father? In my case it certainly does.

This is a scene in Chapter 5 of McBride's Deacon King Kong where an Irishman, Driscoll Sturgess, meets Guido for the first time. Here's a dialogue exchange:

"'Salvy Doyle told me you could be trusted.…'

Elefante was silent for a moment, then said, 'Salvy, last I heard, was pushing up worms in Staten Island someplace.'

The Irishman chuckled. "Not when he knew me. Or your father. We were friends."

"My father didn't have friends."

Notice how James McBride has his character say, "Or your father. We were friends" which makes it sound like an afterthought. It's not an afterthought to us. We want to know more. We want to lean it and listen to every word. But Guido doesn't care. He claims his father didn't have friends. Do you see the genius of how James McBride pulls us deeper into the scene and makes us care about Guido? Because Guido cares less, we care more. That's James McBride's genius.

So what has James McBride taught me? Or, what have I chosen to learn from him? If you want to make readers care more about your characters, sometimes, at least, consider telling your readers less, not more. Show what is known, but don't forget to show what the character doesn't know about him or herself, or what doesn't fully make sense to the character about his past. Don't forget your character's inconsistencies. There's mystery in all our pasts. It's what makes us human. If you steamroller the inconsistencies, all you've got left is a macadam surface. Not very interesting.

So, yes, if you like, show us your character as he's talking to himself. Let us, the readers, see the messy conundrums and inconsistencies of a person's life. Make no attempt whatsoever to clean them up. Life is messy. While reading a novel or watching a film we are all attracted to messy lives that don't quite add up.

For example, this passage while The Elephant is tending his mother's flower garden as he contemplates his life:

"He bent over and began digging. I'm the only forty-year-old bachelor in New York, he thought ruefully, whose mother collects flowers like junk—and then expects me to replant whatever crap she finds. But the fact is, he didn't mind. The work relaxed him, and the garden was her pride and joy… [Then he remembers his mother saying] "There's something going around Brooklyn," she declared. "Some kind of disease." The Elephant agreed, but not the kind of disease she was worried about.

Greed, he thought wryly as he dug into the earth. That's the disease. I got it myself."

And that's what James McBride taught me.

Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Tale of Three Different Tales

The best thing about Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land is also the very thing that makes it difficult to read and, and, after you’ve read it, to gestalt and remember it as a single work of art.

What’s the best thing? That it intertwines three stories that are united due to their characters’ relationship with an ancient text (which itself is a work of fiction) entitled Cloud Cuckoo Land.

One story takes place in the 1440s in Constantinople in the late Byzantine era, as Muslims are using gunpowder to destroy the walls that have protected this Christian city for more than a century.

Another story takes place in the more-or-less current day. A young boy, drawn into a violent online cult, murders a Korean War Hero who, now in his 80s, only wishes to volunteer his time to encourage children to read. As the Korean War Hero dies, a number of those children are performing Cloud Cuckoo Land in play form.

The third story takes place in the distant future. It’s science-fiction. The Earth has been ruined. A few settlers are launched, sent to colonize a distant planet.One family includes a young lady named Konstance.

Not surprisingly, different writing styles are used to tell the three stories.The Byzantine story calls on the writing of an action-adventure-romance, or an historical romance. At times, it feels as though it’s right out of The Count of Monte Cristo.The contemporary story uses a smart contemporary style; it’s snappy.

The sci-fi story uses a clipped style that cleanly describes what little there is to describe. For the most part it’s a very clean world out there in space.

Of all three stories, the one I became caught up with more than the other two was the Sci-Fi story, especially when a pandemic breaks out on board the spaceship which brings the presence of death so much closer than it was earlier. The young lady named Konstance is constantly visiting the library, spending her entire life looking back on what life was like on planet Earth, thinking how nice it was before everything was ruined. And I thought: Is that what we have to look forward to? I found it so sad.

I am of two opinions about this novel. It’s a bold experiment. In the end I don’t think it works. But in a larger sense, what I think about this book doesn’t matter that much. Anthony Doerr’s stylistic versatility, and his ability to write a great novel is unquestioned. Someday Cloud Cuckoo Land will be viewed as just his warmup act.

Anthony Doerr is a Cuckoo Dingbat Genius.

In this month's EWA I honor the genius of novelist and short story writer Anthony Doerr.

If you haven't heard of him, his novel All the Light We Cannot See (2014) won The Pulitzer Prize in 2015 and also the Carnegie Medal. He's won five O. Henry prizes, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize.

His second novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021), widely and enthusiastically praised by critics and readers alike, has five characters living in three distinct time periods:

1. An elderly male character named Zeno who loves education, teaching children, and reading stories and books and who happens to live in Boise, ID.

2. A confused young adult (early 20s) named Seymour, who is confronted with multiple challenges to growing up; he also lives in Boise.

3. Thirteen-year-old Anna who lives in Constantinople in the 15th century.

4. A young boy named Omeir who is part of the marauding troops who—after more than a century of the walls around Constantinople being impregnable—lay siege to break through them and sack the riches of Constantinople.

5. A young woman named Konstance who is a passenger on the interstellar ship, Argos. She is alone, in the middle of a very long journey.

Why combine all these separate stories between the covers of a single novel? In Doerr's latest, many of the characters are connected in so far as they read a single fictional work called Cloud Cuckoo Land

Quoting from the book's dust jacket copy: "Doerr's dazzling imagination transports us to worlds so dramatic and immersive we forget for a time our own. Dedicated to 'the librarians then, now, and in the years to come,' Cloud Cuckoo Land is a beautiful and redemptive novel about stewardship—of the book, of the Earth, of the human heart."

The experience of reading Cloud Cuckoo Land is jumpy and disjointed. With the turn of the page you jump from historical fiction in the mid 1400s taking place in Constantinople, to the spaceship Konstance is riding on, and from there to a world we recognize as our own (taking place in 2014; that part of the story plays out in Boise, Idaho.)

Why am I telling you all this?

The jumpy experience of reading Cloud Cockoo Land is the direct opposite of what I have long believed is the quintessential definition of a great novel… And yet there is no question that Cloud Cockoo Land is not only a great novel, but a brilliant one.

Brilliant refers to the novel's originality, combining those three stories from three different times into one story. That's highly original--brilliant.

Where did I get the impression that the definition of a great novel is a single story that takes place in a single time in a single location written from a single point of view?

I got it from the novelist John Gardner.

Background: In my view, it's the first rule of life: There are no rules. Or, let's put it the way I have most often heard it expressed: Rules are meant to be broken.

Back in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, John Gardner was a very popular literary novelist who wrote sad, lonely, and affecting novels largely about forgotten people.

In 1984, John Gardner wrote a short textbook called The Art of Fiction:Notes on Craft for Young Writers.

I would recommend The Art of Fiction to anyone contemplating becoming a fiction writer.

One rule Gardner emphasized, or as online author Barry Donaldson wrote in a piece he released on the web on June 12, 2020: "Gardner's most talked about bit of advice is that if the writing is to be any good, it must create a "vivid and continuous fictional dream," that remains uninterrupted in the reader's mind.

I remember that little book being a sensation when it came out. I read it again in 2002 when I took up writing fiction after a lay-off of many years. I always took that "vivid, continuous fictional dream" stricture as a sacrosanct rule both of films and novels. I've never had any reason to question its validity until now, since I began reading Doerr's Cloud Cockoo Land, which one would most fairly describe as a vivid, discontinuous fictional dream.

It looks to me as though Doerr has decisively broken Gardner's "continuous fictional dream" rule. But to what end? Did it lead Doerr to creating a better fiction?

 

More next month. By then I will have likely finished reading Doerr's latest.