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.
