Of Ann Patchett and Ralph Lauren.

In the title of this month's essay, I juxtapose the name of a well-known, bestselling novelist (who recently published her ninth novel entitled Tom Lake) with that of a super-celebrity fashion designer whose business is easily worth billions. What could those two names have in common? My assertion: They both use branding to pull off their success. Yes, Ann Patchett, the darling of the literary world, used branding techniques to drive her latest novel to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List.

In the case of Ralph Lauren, his organization might photograph a model wearing the designer's dress or blazer in an exclusive setting, aboard a yacht, or at a social club in Manhattan. The photo's background puts establishment Americana on display. We interpret it as not only upscale, but also authentically American. Why not add in a historic American flag from the War of 1812, or a yacht-racing trophy won in the early 1900s. That's how Lauren achieves a double rub-off effect. His brand is buoyed up as it captures both the essence of upscale and the essence of Americana at the same time.

But that's a fashion ad. How could a renowned, best-selling novelist such as Ann Patchett use the rub-off effect in her novel?

How many of you know of a theatrical play entitled Our Town by Thornton Wilder first produced in 1938? A show of hands, please? Our Town is not only one of the best loved, and utterly heart-rendering American plays ever written; it also captures the essence of growing up in rural New England. For generations, it's been produced so often by so many high school and university drama groups and studied by so many American literature and drama students, that Our Town and the characters in the play and many of the events that happen in it are iconic. I contend that the play content is written on the DNA of what it means to be American.

I readily admit this has nothing to do with Texas, and everything to do with capturing a prototypical "back East, establishment" America. Not to be forgotten: Over the last forty years, the Lauren organization has also extensively mined the imagery of The Old West. For decades, until cigarette advertising was outlawed, one could hardly tell the difference between a Marlboro ad and a Ralph Lauren jeans ad.

Our Town captures the essence of everything honest, true, New England, and by extension, American values.

Ann Patchett's newest novel, Tom Lake, uses the play Our Town as chief analog, metaphor, and prop. It's the backdrop of her novel as much as a quaint New England harbor setting, or a rodeo might be used as the cultural backdrop of a Ralph Lauren ad. There's a second marketing icon being served up that is also extrmerly appealing: Tapping into the world of wannabe famous and journeyman actors playing summer stock in regional theaters across our United States.

In addition, in Tom Lake, we have our first-person narrator weaving a tale that everyone would recognize from our recent past: It takes place during Covid lock-down, when her three grown daughters return home to pick the family cherry orchard harvest in Upper Peninsula Michigan. During Covid, agricultural workers (read: migrant workers) were extremely scarce, so the story angle of daughters coming home to save the cherry harvest is both plausible and appealing.

The opening pages of the novel gives us the first-person narrator's account of how at about fifteen years of age, she was selected to help organize the auditions for a local theatrical group's production of Our Town.

In the opening pages of the novel, we learn—it's very funny—not only were most of the auditions horribly bad, but their poor quality convinced our fourteen year old narrator to try out for the part of Emily. She is immediately given the role.

Ann Patchett weaves her tale around two different productions of Our Town that our cherry-orchard-owning mother played in. She tells her daughters her story of playing opposite this not-quite-famous actor in summer stock theater years later as they're all harvesting cherries. By the way, not only did she immediately win the part in the community theater production in New Hampshire; she then goes on to be recommended by the director for summer stock production in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and also for a Hollywood film that—after a lot of back and forth—eventually is made and released. She was not intended to be the star of that film, but due to her looks and talent, and much to the chagrin of the intended Hollywood star, she steals the movie. Early buzz about the movie? Everybody in Hollywood can't stop talking about the performance she put in.

That's how Tom Lake becomes an Our Town writ large: A regional, summer stock production staged in "The Tom Lake Region" of Michigan, our Emily in Our Town  begins an affair with an at-the-time newbie actor who goes on to become a very famous Hollywood movie star. Well, somehow, from the way our story-telling mom tells the story to her daughters who are still harvesting their blessed cherries during Covid, one of the daughters gets the idea that perhaps her father was this big movie star and not her actual father.

It's all so crazy, all so unlikely, yet I must confess, I love it. I eat it up. Every bit of it. I can't get enough. Even the part about a mother going on to her grown daughters about the soon-to-be famous actor boyfriend she was sleeping with that summer. Like the mother's cherry-picking daughters who can't stop listening, we readers of this novel can't stop reading...or picking out favorite cherries of our own to gorge on.

Tom Lake wallows in celebrity. The novel dwells in our unshakable fascination with celebrity along with our love of Our Town, and Yankee-New England rural stereotypes (never mind that most of it takes place in rural Michigan). It tugs at our American heartstrings.

And that's how Tom Lake sucks you in--innocuously, innocently--and makes you want to believe. Hey! I might as well have been daydreaming over a Ralph Lauren Polo advertisement, except that reading Tom Lake is far more engaging. And that's how Tom Lake uses marketing positioning and the rub-off effect to maximize delicious story-telling.

By the way, this is not the first time Ann Patchett has referenced other artworks in her novels so she can discuss the magical aspects of how art works on us and opens us up to meaningful experiences.

I've only read one of Ann's other novels, Commonwealth. In Tom Lake, I can attest, the art analog is so much more convincing because Our Town is such a beloved, authentic, and rich American play; because celebrity is a never-ending source of fascination for us all; and because the daughters coming home to rescue the cherry harvest tugs at our heartstrings.

"Please Forgive Me."

Can you imagine living in a world where no one ever says to anyone else, "I was wrong to treat you that way. I'm truly sorry. Please forgive me."

I can. In fact, as much as I may not like to admit it, that world comes uncomfortably close to describing the one in which we currently live, where obvious bad actors invariably plead, "Not Guilty, Your Honor!" and never bother to comprehend the depth of suffering they might have caused others even when they're clearly guilty as sin.

In Lucian Childs' Dreaming Home, we're presented with a series of linked short stories that play out in this all-too familiar world. Although bad actors are rarely made to take responsibility for the suffering they inflict on others, we, as readers of Childs' smart, talented and evocative stories, come to love his characters' noble, sensitive, and beautiful traits. No, we don't get to escape the hatred, violence and sadness they endure; but, by reading Childs' fiction we learn that these Dreaming Home characters are made of far nobler stuff than we might have at first thought.

In the opening story a twelve-year-old girl by the name of Tiana exposes her older brother, Kyle, the principal protagonist, to their father's fury by showing him Kyle's notebook filled with sketches he's copied from a male pornography magazine.

In the second story, the father, a Vietnam Vet with PTSD—also a confirmed fundamentalist homophobe—has enrolled Kyle in a program supposedly designed to "cure" him of his homosexuality through a rigorous program of scripture study. Yet, some of the religious leaders in the program are practicing homosexuals who have been known to rape members.

This sounds brutal, right? It's not; it's anything but brutal because in the case of the first story Childs chooses to tell it not from Tiana's or Kyle's point of view, but from the P-O-V of Tiana's friend Rachel who's a typical twelve year old, therefore allowing the first story, which is entitled "Rachel" to open on this note: "We were having a Natalie Cole spring that April, my best friend Tiana and me. Practically wore the grooves off "Unpredictable." And we were in junior high. Finally. I was in Math Club, AP Algebra. I turned twelve on the sixteenth and had my first kiss. Everything was totally groovy."

In the second story, "The Boys in the Ministry," the horror of Kyle being held captive in an ultimately corrupt and abusive religious program is artfully transformed into extremely droll and entertaining fare when the story is told entirely in first-person-plural, a narrative "we" which takes in all the "boys" in this institution, which makes for a fun read.

Here's a description of the welcoming committee greeting newly arrived "boys:" "We thread our fingers into our belt loops. Hips cocked, glaring straight ahead, we plant ourselves on the sidewalk like our brothers and fathers would, feeling tough and perfectly righteous…"A muscle twitches in Brother Stalwart's manly face. He straight-arms his Bible out in front of him, creating a mighty heterosexual force field. "Stand strong in your truth, brothers. For we are one with them now."

Each story follows the development of Kyle as he goes from his twenties in one story to this thirties in the next. In each story, I can attest Lucian Childs pulls off an impressive feat of imagining, not only making each story intensely readable, but, in the process, delivering a life story with every bit of the emotional power one would usually expect to only find between the covers of a novel.

"Time After Time" in the novel, Cutting for Stone.

Listening to "Time After Time" sung by Cindy Lauper with brilliant lyrics by Robert Hyman, I'm aware that time in fiction can go all stretchy on you, and, if you're not careful, go off in many directions at once—backwards, forwards, even sideways. In addition, the stories that take place over time can, like a hamster yearning to be free, make a run for it. In the end, you might sit back and let them run because watching free-range stories play themselves out is way more fun than keeping them caged up. What good could come from trying to control them?

So witness the passage of time in Abraham Verghese's novel Cutting for Stone. The prologue looks back over a fifty-four-year-old life with the perspective of Marion born just yesterday, insisting, as a naïve surgeon he operate on a patient who's chances of living through the surgery are infinitesimally small. Marion's father Dr. Stone is present. "My father put his hand on my shoulder. He spoke to me gently, as if to a junior colleague rather than to his son. 'Marion, remember the Eleventh Commandment," he said. "Thou shall not operate on the day of a patient's death."

And then the author continues, as if chanting a poem, "I remember his [Dr. Stone's] words on full-moon nights in Addis Ababa when knives are flashing and rocks and bullets are flying, and when I feel as if I am standing in an abattoir and not in Operating Theater 3, my skin flecked with the grist and blood of strangers. I remember. But you don't always know the answers before you operate. One operates in the now… Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel."

So, in chapter one, Marion, whose voice narrates the entire work starts by recounting his mother's arduous voyage aboard a typhoid-plagued boat to Aden, then telescopes the next twenty years of his mother's life to a single paragraph. Notice how much is compressed in just a few words: "For the longest time all I knew was this: after an unknown period of time that could have been months or even a year, my mother, aged nineteen, somehow escaped Yemen, then crossed the Gulf of Aden, then went overland perhaps to a walled and ancient city of Harrar in Ethiopia, or perhaps to Djibouti, then from there by train she entered Ethiopia via Dire Dawa and then on to Addis Ababa."

Then, a few paragraphs later, Verghese skips over many additional years, and then picks up with, "In the ensuing seven years…Sister Mary Joseph Praise rarely spoke about her voyage, and never about her time in Aden." The next paragraph begins with, "Sister Mary Joseph Praise began the task of the rest of her days when she entered Operating Theater 3." At that moment neither Nun Sister Mary Joseph Praise, nor we, the readers, know that the Nun is seven month's pregnant and that in the next hour or so a horrible tragedy will unfold:

Dr. Stone, the surgeon who is acting obstetrician that day, will botch the delivery of his own twin children, Marion and Shiva, leading directly to the death of their mother, Nun Sister Mary Joseph Praise.

Hema, Missing Hospital's actual obstetrician, delayed returning from a trip home to visit her family in India, will return just in time to save the life of the second-born child, Shiva, but not in time to save Sister Mary Joseph Praise.

Meanwhile, everyone in the tight medical community of Missing Hospital will have no doubt who got the Sister pregnant. Missing is a mis-translation of the institution's actual name, Mission Hospital.

Finally, after Hema arrives back at Missing and relieves Dr. Stone of his obstetrician duties. Dr. Stone, the culprit, disappears without a word. During the course of the novel his name is mentioned from time to time, but he never makes an appearance. He's a totally absent father who, by virtue of not being there, has a strong presence throughout the rest of the novel.

Now Part Two of the novel begins. We're up to page one hundred-thirty-five. All those pages—the first ten chapters—have been used to describe the passage of a handful of hours, admittedly a day with extraordinary operatic drama on a level with Der Ring des Nibelungen. Time is seen—and we experience it—as if under a microscope.

Time in the remainder of the novel Cutting for Stone, from Chapter Eleven all the way up to Chapter Forty-two, which takes us from page 135 all the way to the final page, 657, is treated in a radically different manner. The way the final 500+ pages tell the story remind me of great fictional biographies from the past such as David Copperfield or Great Expectations. We see two newborn twins as they attract a mother and father (Hema becomes the adoptive mother and Dr. Abhi Ghosh, another Missing surgeon, becomes the boys' adoptive father.) Suddenly, time goes from being seen under a microscope to being seen more through a telescope.

I'm writing about the malleability of time in fiction, especially in Cutting for Stone, to point out how a writer can tell a single story while switching back and forth between a microscope and a telescope to serve the needs of a story, focusing on the most important parts, without wasting a word. I'm very familiar with this because I let time go "all stretchy" in my novel, Charging the Jaguar. The first number of chapters of my novel cover a few hours' time. After that opening, time passes more conventionally. But more about that later.

As with the song, "Time After Time," and it's most famous lyrical couplet, "If you fall, I will catch you," we learn to trust a narrator, such as Marion in "Cutting for Stone" when that narrator is always there for us, the readers, supporting us just as the author, Verghese, does as he zooms through decades in a single sentence and then takes ten chapters to tell what happens in the next few hours. In fiction,if you can convince your reader you'll always be there for her and never leave her confused about what's going on, you can have that reader following you avidly for more than six hundred pages.

The Cat With the Wandering Eye

Ellie, the cat with the wandering eye,

And the lingering thought, blinked,

Ventured out, and, in a flying leap, left us

And her companion, Homer,

Who stays at home and writes

Imaginary epic poems,

To visit the shadows somewhere,

To show us—all of us—her tail,

To show us she could pass through,

The door, one down from the door to Shangri-La,

To become the cat who never was,

Until she wasn't where you thought she was.

Rather, Ellie leaped into

The wanderlust to become,

The cat who left on holiday,

Ventured out to travel

From downtown to uptown,

Perhaps to catch a mouse,

But caught, instead,

The McKinney Avenue Trolley,

The car named "Daisy,"

That had come to us all the way,

From Buenos Aires,

Which, as luck would have it,

Was filled with tango-dancing cats

Packed in like oily sardines,

On their way, hither and non,

To visit aunts and cousins

Who lived in boxes and other rentals,

Elsewhere in the city.

Ellie deplaned just in time,

When the bicycle bell

Ching-a-linged like an iPhone

at Klyde Warren Park,

And there paid her visit,

To Miss Vera and Mr. B.,

Two cousins of perfection,

Loved ones who also shed,

Little objects of their affection.

Now, If only she would return to relate,

The true nature of worlds beyond doors,

Neighborhoods beyond Milky Ways,

Where one wears nothing at all,

And the wanderlust wishes for fall.

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 ground even though gigantic walls of water were being held back on either side of her slender trail by immensely powerful forces. She refused to be distracted by all the babbling on both sides 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 false impression they're 'real' or that they're close to non-fiction because they have plenty of characters, plenty of complicated relationships, plenty of people making poor decisions that, in the end, turn out poorly. Plenty of drama, in other words.

My novel? she mighjt have thought. No backflips. Everything spare. I refuse to hide the notion that my novels are what they 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 kept extremely vague and indefinite. Purposely so.

The only action that occurs: While she's in the hospital Lucy's mother comes to visit. 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 vague '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. Could it be your mother has already passed, and is visiting you from the Dead? That is certainly what occurs to me. In any case, 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 immense walls of water.

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

Cutting for Abraham Verghese.

This is my appreciation of three-time best-selling novelist Abraham Verghese who, in 2009, then largely unknown, published a novel entitled Cutting for Stone, which relates the birth and life story of twins Marion and Shiva Stone who are the off-spring of surgical assistant and nun, Mary Joseph Praise, and the arrogant British surgeon, Dr. Thomas Stone who for many years had worked together as doctor-surgical assistant in Operating Theater #3 at Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The actual name of the hospital is Mission Hospital, but a series of typographical errors and mistaken transcriptions led to its name "going missing" if you will. Thus, Missing Hospital is not a typographical error. In the novel, it is the name of the institution.

Not only was the nun and mother-to-be (Mary Joseph Praise) totally unaware she was eight months' pregnant when she went into labor and was wheeled into Operating Theater #3 at Missing Hospital, the twins' father-to-be, the same Dr. Thomas Stone who happened to be attending at the time, thoroughly botched the delivery resulting in the mother's death.

The twins' savior was Missing Hospital obstetrician Dr. Kalpana Hemlatha whose nickname is Hema. As the story began, she had been visiting her family back in India and was returning to Addis. Earlier that day she had survived a harrowing puddle-jumper emergency landing, to finally land at Addis Ababa Airport in the nick of time to arrive in Missing Operating Theater #3, and save the twins and—in the process—to become their savior, their guardian angel, and, most importantly the twins' adoptive mother.

As Hema arrives and rescues the children, the father, Dr. Stone, leaves. From then on, no one in the story has any idea exactly what happened to the arrogant and usually dependable Dr. Stone. When Hema relieves Dr. Stone in Operating Theater #3, he disappears. Goes missing. Have you noticed? A lot is missing in this novel.

Here's a paragraph that treats Dr. Stone's feelings at that moment: "Stone wanted to run away, but not from the children or from responsibility. It was the mystery, the impossibility of their existence that made him turn his back on the infants. He could only think of [their mother] Sister Mary Joseph Praise. He could only think of how she'd concealed this pregnancy…"

Well, excuse me, but that makes it sound as if this pregnancy was all the nun's fault. Nevertheless, Dr. Stone goes missing, no doubt all the while insisting on the impossibility of the children's existence. Isn't that classic denial?

What I've just described to you is everything that happens during Part One of Cutting for Stone, the first 131 pages of the novel.

One additional thought: The entire novel is narrated by the voice of Marion, the second-born twin. The first page of the novel, The Prologue, entitled "The Coming," opens, "After eight months spent in the obscurity of our mother's womb, my brother, Shiva and I came into the world in the late afternoon of…"

When John Irving was my writing instructor at the University of Iowa, he made it very clear to all of us: A novelist knows it's time to kill off a character as soon as it's clear to the writer that the character has exhausted his or her purpose in the story. If I had been better informed at the time, I would have spoken up in that class, yes, raised my arm and said, "Hey, that's no different from when a Mafioso don decides to knock off one of his soldiers—no further purpose in the family story."

I want you to know, despite all my superior education in the illusive arts of storytelling, when I reached page 131 in Cutting for Stone I was beside myself with grief. I was tearing up. Crying. Well, to be accurate, bawling. Why? I wanted the reclusive Dr. Stone and Hema to own up to what they had brought into to this world, and together take responsibility as parents of their newborn children. Of course that would have made a sentimental, mushy novel. It just shows you what happens when a novelist like me reads a beautifully crafted novel like that. My brain turns to mush because, while reading it, I wasn't a novelist; I was a reader. And that's what we readers do—excessively. We misunderstand, and then we are enlightened by our novelist who acts as our guide taking us on a quest to uncover the real story.

What did Abraham Verghese, the novelist have in mind when, as of page 131 of his 658-page novel, Dr. Stone went missing, and Mary Joseph Praise (page 127) "lay lifeless and unburdened of the two lives she had carried, as if that had been her sole earthly purpose." Abraham Verghese never had any intention of "getting the parents" together. His purpose has to do with artistically replicating what so often happens in real life.

How often have you read novels about missing fathers and the search for missing fathers? In real life, that condition is epidemic and traumatic. It often turns children into artists and launches them on a never-ending quest for what might have been but never was. And how many novels have you read or heard about that begin when a parent figure is dead or has just died? How about the opening of Hamlet, where since the King of Denmark has died, his ghostly presence haunts his castle's ramparts nightly, upsetting the night sentries. How about the opening of Albert Camus' The Outsider: "My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know."

Just as Abraham is Cutting for Stone in his novel, I'm cutting for Abraham's deeper artistic intentions in his novel, which I'll cover later this month, in my next EWA. (It was my honor to meet Dr. Verghese at Iowa in 2011.)

A Gentleman in Moscow Is Waiting to Meet You.

Many years ago I learned from John Irving that if you want to convert readers into avid fans who will slog through hundreds of pages with you, arrange to have something horrible happen to the principal protagonist early on—something that's no fault of his own. Despite character flaws, that inciting incident gives us, the reader, a stake in the story. It makes us care because our hero is obviously innocent. But why? I think it's because we detect grace, or at least the potential for grace, even if it comes only thanks to a writer's cruelest plot-turn. John Irving had a penchant for having characters lose body parts through no fault of their own. Charles Dickens, long before him, preferred treating, well-meaning, smart children cruelly. And then there was Barbara Kingsolver's recent reworking of David Copperfield, entitled, Demon Copperhead, demonstrating that today's opioid-addicted times are no less cruel than those of the Victorian era. Her novel also proves that our modern-day zeal for social justice is no less intense.

In A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles, on the first page of his novel has a Bolshevik tribunal in Moscow on June 21, 1922 sentence one Count Alexander Rostov, a refined, educated, and truly gentle man, who has never worked a day in his life, to house arrest in the same elegant, upper-crust hotel in which he's been a resident-guest for many years.

The hotel in the novel is called The Metropol. It exists in real life. Just as in the novel, it's located a short walk from Red Square and The Kremlin.

Rostov's crime? Being an "unrepentant aristocrat." Well, as we meet the Count in the novel's opening pages, he's being escorted across the Red Square back to his hotel by two Russian soldiers. Only he's wholly unrepentant. He refuses to play the role of a just-sentenced prisoner who is now beginning to serve out his sentence.

"Drawing his shoulders back without breaking stride, the Count inhaled the [glorious, cool] air like one fresh from a swim."

We learn Rostov is descended from ten generations of Russian aristocrats, all of whom stood over six feet tall. As he walks along "his waxed mustaches spread like the wings of a gull."

"'Hello, my good man,' the Count called to Fyodor, the fruit merchant at the edge of the square. 'I see the blackberries have come in early this year.'"

And when the Count and the two Russian soldiers arrive back at the hotel, the count has the temerity to dismiss them saying, "Thank you, gentlemen for delivering me safely. I shall no longer be in need of your assistance."

It goes without saying, the two soldiers refuse to be dismissed.

This, in microcosm, is the delight of reading A Gentleman in Moscow, a novel that reverberates with chords of joy and freedom, almost as if the Count, through no fault of his own, consigned to living out his prison sentence in the most elegant of settings, is reborn, a person freed of sin, who is now free to serve others in every meaning of the word.

As with every Towles' novel, the narrative insists on being vibrant, energetic, and intensely observant, readable and celebratory.

If you ever need living proof that a great novelist can take on a subject most novelists would never touch because they'd find it pitifully boring… Or that a great novelist can breathe life into a story no others would touch so that it opens up into a fascinating love story of a gentleman and a Russian movie star; along with the story of a father and his young daughter; and also into the story of a writer exiled to Siberia who loses his soul but who connects with the true meaning of life through bread; and also—never to be forgotten—the story of a man who's never worked a day in his life but who displays such intelligence, competence, verve and wit; he inspires so much love and respect on the part of his associates that he's appointed head waiter of The Metropol's finest restaurant, so that, in the end, Count Rostov truly becomes a person of service to others above all else, so that, in the end, he works every day of his life.

I think it's high time you met A Gentleman in Moscow, don't you?

All thumbs with portraying emotions conventionally, Hernan Diaz's Innovative Workarounds Win Him the Pulitzer.

I felt fearful when I opened Diaz's newest novel Trust for the first time. Right after the title page there's a page called, "Contents" under which are four listings and the actual page numbers in the novel where each of those four sections begin.

The first is "BONDS" with a name under it, "Harold Vanner." We're told it starts on page 3, and in the actual novel that's where it begins, on the very next page.

Why is part of a novel called "BONDS?" Who is Harold Vanner? Those are questions the author expects us to ask.

Directly under that is a second all-caps listing, "MY LIFE" with another name,  "Andrew Bevel." That section begins on page 127. Sure enough that's where MY LIFE begins in Diaz's novel.

You might ask, "Why should that cause you to feel fearful. That's nothing more than a table of contents."

Ah, but novels never have "a table of contents." Never.

I was fearful because I immediately sensed Hernan Diaz was up to something revolutionary, experimental, innovative and very difficult to pull off. If somehow he were able to pull it off, I instinctively doubted if I could fully appreciate the implications and effects he was creating with his innovative story-telling methods.

This opening item called "BONDS" isn't a chapter—it's a mini-novel in its own right, except I think it's more helpful to call it a "proto-novel," sort-of-a-make-believe novel which is written in a specific style that differs from the writing styles used in the other sections. All four employ radically different styles. Somehow, mysteriously, as one reads all four proto-fictions, a story of intrigue and cruel, powerful psychological force takes form in our minds. We wonder if a perfectly sane character is being kept against her will in a sanatorium in a drugged state.  Make no mistake: The "author" of BONDS, "Harold Vanner" is discussed at length in the other three sections of Trust. So are the "authors" of the other three parts, especially Andrew Bevel.

MY LIFE by Andrew Bevel is supposedly comprised of the notes that an extremely wealthy individual, a bond trader on Wall Street, jots down about what he wishes a ghostwriter to cover in his memoir. The ghostwriter who Andrew Bevel hires for that ghostwriting job is Ida Portenza.

The fourth section is titled, "FUTURES" by Mildred Bevel. It's supposedly a diary kept by the wife of the bond trader, who may be keeping his wife at a sanitarium in a drugged state. We're not sure, but we're suspicious.

Every element in Diaz's novel is fiction, a product of the author's towering, soaring imagination.

I sense what he's up to: Diaz isn't able to portray emotions directly in his fictions. I could detect that by reading his proto-novels, and proto-memoirs. So how does he work around his deficiency? I think he invents a fresh, alternative method to induce you and me, the readers, to become involved in the story without him ever having to portray character emotions in a head-on, conventional way.

The characters aren't overly involved with their emotions, but I felt strong emotions as I read Trust when it came to what the characters were going through, the immense pressures being placed on their psyches, especially in the case of Ida Partenza, the proto-author of the third section which we're told is Ida's "found memoir." It might sound hokey, but it pulled me in. It worked like gangbusters. I became concerned for Ida's personal safety as a father might be concerned for the safety of his daughter, as I'll bet you will become, too, if you choose to read Trust.

Early on I stopped reading Trust for its conventional story; Diaz teaches us to read looking for and finding morsels of story, or links between and among the four proto-sections. Diaz creates tremendous intrigue and suspense in Trust by controlling these (for lack of a better descriptor) "story evidences."

I know this sounds strange, but when you read this novel—and in my opinion, although it takes a lot of energy to read, its lovely and elegant. It's worth reading. But, you'll see: Instead of reading a novel, as you delve into Trust, you'll find yourself examining, investigating, and scouring documents for clues. Diaz turns us into detectives who are way too emotionally close to a case, detectives who have long ago surrendered their objectivity.

Finally, for me, it all comes down to the title of the novel. So I ask you: What is the single thing a finely written novel has in common with a 30-year bond or a relatively safe currency like the U.S. dollar? It's the emotion of trust, the feeling that the bond, currency and novel will all pay off. (Thank God, after last weekend, we can continue to call the U.S. currency "safe" and "universally trusted." Well, sort of.)

As readers, we're always putting ourselves in the hands of novelists. We trust them to deliver a unique experience. You won't be disappointed when you read Trust. Just don't look for a conventional story told in a conventional manner. You won't find it. What you will find is a wonder to behold. For I do believe that Hernan Diaz, recognizing his severe artistic limitations (in regards to his writing about emotions head-on) discovered innovative workarounds which directly account for why, only weeks ago, his novel, Trust, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Trust by Hernan Diaz: The Novel That Can't Resist Rewriting Itself.

I read someplace: Great novels aren’t written; they’re rewritten. Well, there are four parts to Trust, and each part seems to want to revise the other three. Although the impulse to revise makes Trust a far better novel than it would otherwise be,I don't think they make Trust great.

The opening, entitled Bonds, purports to be a novel-within-a-novel written by a fictional novelist by the name of Harold Vanner. It tells the life story of a New York financier by the name of Benjamin Rask in the 1920s, and it reads like an excised version of The Great Gatsby without the stylistic flourishes and the obsessive pursuit of a woman’s love that’s at the heart of Fitzgerald’s novel, and what made it great.In addition, its won a number of awards and been a New York Times bestseller.

Rask is presented as almost the opposite of Gatsby, a Wall Street financier void of addictions, obsessions or pleasure-drives of any kind, which, as far as I’m concerned, means Rask isn’t a human being. Likewise, in keeping with his character's personality, Diaz’s writing style is surgical yet precise in how it makes cuts and revisions to the strong emotions one finds in Fitzgerald’s work. That does not make Trust sound so appealing, does it? And yet this novel never failed to keep my interest; I always wanted to know what would happen next.

The second part of Trust purports to be the memoir of an extremely wealthy entrepreneur, one Andrew Bevel, who’s assembled notes and fully-written portions of a memoir of his life. Like Vanner’s novel, it’s fiction. The second part comes across almost as if Diaz is saying, “Hey, if you weren’t wild about Bonds, try this memoir on for size.” It’s kind of dry. After all, it was supposedly written by a Wall Street financier who seems as void of addictions as Rask is in the first part.

Bevel’s memoir are left purposely incomplete. Could it be that Bevel doesn’t wish to bore us with all the details? Or has Bevel put all of us, his readers, on a need-to-know basis? There’s a good deal of ambiguity throughout which I have no doubt is intended.

Fact: in a novel entitled Trust, I don’t always trust the narrator. Yet in today’s world replete with fake news, conspiracy theories and failing California banks, how surprising is that?

I’ll leave out the spoilers and just say, from beginning to end, Trust is an always changing yet always fascinating conundrum.

Here’s a biographical fact about Trust’s author Hernan Diaz: Before turning to novels, he wrote a literary study of Jorge Luis Borges, his fellow Argentinian. Back in the 1970s when I used to binge on Borges’ stories, I was always engaged with the writing; yet, they often left me feeling I had been put through an intellectual exercise that ultimately went nowhere. Still I couldn’t put those stories down, not at first. Like a literary “trick of the eye,” they left me fascinated yet oddly unsure what I was looking at, or where I, the reader, fit into their larger scheme.

In the end, I decided Borges’ stories were a literary curiosity. I moved on.

I’m not ready to do the same with Diaz, even though the cold, clinical nature of his writing reminds me of Borges’ style. Trust left me wondering if Diaz was doing anything beyond spinning intellectual yarns designed to titillate? Or, as we say in the Lingua Franca of today: With this novel, was there ever any there there? Your guess is as good as mine.

When Does Drama Become Melodrama? And Why Should We Care?

Once upon a time, drama was good and melodrama wasn't. Plays by Tennessee Williams were good. Soap operas like General Hospital, going strong since 1963, were bad.

Then along came teenagers, who muddied the issue by inventing their own drama. If you've ever had a teenager, you know what I'm talking about.

The word "drama" was always meant to convey life as we knew it, or at least related to it. Dramas were stories that pulled us in, that turned books into page-turners.

Melodramas were dramas given to "extravagant theatricality," works where "plot and action predominate over characterization." (Webster.)

It started out simple, and I insist it's still simple: Dramas are meaningful to us as stories. Melodramas aren't. In the end, we get to decide which is which. It's all a matter of taste.

This question came up for me as I was reading a novel entitled Illuminations by one Mary Sharratt, published in 2012.

It tells the story of a real person, Hildegard von Bingen, who lived in what is today Germany in the 1100s, Medieval times. Even as a little girl, Hildegard had visions. Her family thought her visions were causing them bad luck, so naturally her parents arranged for her to be sent away to a remote monastery where she was walled in with another child who was thought to be insane. Yes, bricked in.

So, as you're reading this beautifully written book—I hope I'm not giving you the impression that I think anything otherwise—on one level you may read Illuminations as a historically accurate commentary on how they "disposed" of special children back then.

Both these children (both about seven years of age) who were walled into a two-room living quarters directly off the main sanctuary of a monastery with a chain-link fence (a Middle-Ages version of chicken wire?) were of noble birth. The one called Gutta, who was considered insane came from a wealthy family. Why would the monastery take care of these two children for a lifetime? Along with her child, Gutta's mother gave a sizable "dowry" to the male leaders of the monastery.

It's no spoiler if I report both girls grew up to eventually be canonized by the Catholic Church as saints. The servant girl—the one with the visions—is the real-life story of Hildegard von Bilgen who first was walled-in as a servant-prisoner, then was freed and became a nun, then was made leader of her own monastery, and was finally canonized. Books that she wrote during her lifetime, all based on her visions, still exist today.

It should come as no surprise: Hildegard came close to being burned at the stake for having the temerity to write books about her visions.

As I read the novel, I was amazed at how the novel sometimes veered wildly from drama to melodrama and back to drama again.

The early parts where Gutta and Hildegard are both walled in work best; we uniformly and roundly hate both families for treating their special children in this inhumane way. We read it as social commentary, and it has strong appeal.

As soon as Hildegard frees herself from imprisonment immediately after the noble woman she served dies of starvation, (I believe she had OCD and an eating disorder) many events ensue. I read some of them as melodrama.

Here's the challenge: Mary Sharratt is writing a novel that took place during The Age of Faith.You might say a novel written today that depicts current times is written during The Age of Tik-Tok.

I think the drama-melodrama extremes in the second half of the novel are based on where you believe God has intervened at each turn to keep Hildegard from being burned at the stake as a witch.

The Passover Holiday will soon be upon us. Do you read Moses parting the Red Sea so the Israelites could escape and then causing the waters to come rushing back together and drown Pharaoh's army as melodrama or drama? I guess that depends on whether you believe it or not. Well, to its credit, The Bible is written in third person.

This is important. It accounts for the development and acceptance of magical realism as a writing style worthy of winning its literary practitioners Nobel Prizes for Literature. No itty-bitty thing.

In the case of Illuminations, matters are made worse because the entire novel is written in first-person; that is, in the voice of Hildegard herself. In my view, the entire narrative becomes unhinged when Hildegard has no choice but to describe astounding events in her own voice, for example, how she freed herself from the head of the monastery, Cuno. He is her nemesis, and when Hildegard and her nuns sing a song composed and lyrics written by Hildegard, a visiting, higher-llevel church official overrules Cuno and declares her poetry and music to be God-inspired. He blesses it, in other words. Hildegard is saved and freed from being under the thumb of that horrid man. But all we have is Hildegard's plain "voice" or writing style to tell us very matter-of-factly that this has happened. All the potential tools a writer writing in third-person has at her disposal--poetry, image, metaphore, etc.--are short-circuited, rendered null-and-void. As a result of that, its plain style at major plot turning points, the novel starts feeling to me at that moment like the hero who unties the damsel in distress from the tracks (the villain has just tied her to) moments before the train happens to come along. I read it and the word "melodrama" comes to mind. Another reader—-someone who might vervently wish to believe this is what happened--might take the bait hook, line and sinker, and believe it.

In summation, perhaps my experience of the novel might be wholly different if throughout Illuminations we had a third-person narrator who we could trust to be reporting, as they said on the TV show, Dragnet, "The Facts, M'mam. Just the facts!" In this case, the reader's belief in the narrative would be enhanced, I would argue. What do you think?

Of Sharp Objects and Saints Banished for Seeing Visions.

As children we are often told stories we accept as truth until we "grow up" and "adjust" our understandings. My thesis is that a similar "growing up" process can happen as we read through a novel or watch a film or a streaming series: if it's any good, our understandings of what's going on in a story will "mature" and become more nuanced as we progress through the work.

Mary Sharratt's novel Illuminations takes place in Germany during Medieval times, in the 1100s. It fictionally recounts the life of Hildegard von Bingen who grows up in a German monastery and was canonized a saint in the Roman Catholic Church toward the end of her life.

As Illuminations opens, we read about a young woman, Jutta, daughter of a wealthy German family who has been banished by her family at an early age and sent into solitary confinement (able to speak to only one other person) due to her insanity.

Early on we see Hildegard's mother actively "selling" the full-time caregiver services of her tenth and youngest daughter to care for that same wealthy family's insane daughter, Jutta, for the rest of Hildegard's life. Her mother is essentially selling Hildegard into slavery for no cost to Jutta's mother. Why is she selling so hard to send her daughter into what was called at the time "anchorage" in a monastery—to totally be done with her? To never see her child ever again?

Hildegard has been having visions since she was a very young child. Everyone in her family, her parents and her nine other siblings, are convinced Hildegard's visions are bringing ill fortune on their family.

That is not what Hildegard is told, of course. She's told she should feel honored because as the tenth child in her family she is being "tithed" to the Catholic Church. The term indicates the family is giving up one-tenth of its wealth to the church, but of course that's just a cover story.

We know the very visions that caused the family to banish their daughter are the ones that many years later inspires a Pope to nominate Hildegard for sainthood.

If Hildegard's mother had not been such an effective salesperson, Hildegard might never have been canonized.

In Sharp Objects, starring Amy Adams, an HBO Limited Series directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, we see children being told a great many stories about why two teens were murdered in the fictional town of Wind Gap, MO. The series is based on a novel of the same name written by Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl, who we can always depend on to take us to very dark places.

Adams plays Camille Preaker an emotionally scarred, troubled big-city journalist who happens to come from Wind Gap. Her editor sends her back to her home town to cover the unsolved murders.

With Camille, the scars are both emotional and very real. As a younger woman she used to cut herself with razor blades—not just making cuts, but spelling out hateful words on her body, e.g., "whore." The wounds might be healed, but as our story opens, the words are spelled out in shocking scars. You will be driven to ask yourself how any young woman could be driven to such extreme acts of self-harm. You will not be given any pat answers.

As for who committed those two unsolved murders of teenagers? We, the viewers of the series, have our suspicions.

Camille's overbearing mother is played brilliantly by the great Patricia Clarkson. She counters every suspicion of culpability with plausible denial worthy of the finest CIA agent. Never mind that everyone in the community of Wind Gap knows her to be a perfect mother in every way. Years before, she presided over the loss of an older sister of Camille's. The child died of a freak child poisoning. That gives us pause.

The work is tantalizing. We wonder: Could this be a case of death by perfect mothering? Also the carving of words on Camille's skin? What's behind that? Let's say the story snakes into some pretty dark places. Yet, the actress Patricia Clarkson prances around all the lawmen in town and doesn't raise the slightest suspicion.

  

Her only stated concern with her journalist-daughter who's living with her and her strange husband and younger daughter in their house while Camille is covering the unsolved murders? Camille's writing must in no way embarrass her, nor in any way jeopardize her standing in the community. Now isn't that the sure sign of a perfect mother who selflessly puts the needs of the Wind Gap community ahead her own?

For those who haven't seen the series, I don't want to spoil it for you… completely. All I'll say: The real culprit is not who you think it is—and that's after the mother everyone thinks is the perfect mom is convicted of the crimes and sent to prison.

At every twist and turn in this demented tale, you think you're seeing things from a more mature point of view—closer to the story that will hold up under adult scrutiny—until you realize author Gillian Flynn has fooled you again.

And they say writers have a heart!

What Makes Hunger Games So Appetizing For So Many?

Food insecurity—given the effects of global climate change and inflation—is such a widespread challenge today, it's my contention if you wanted to achieve best-selling status among young adult ("YA") readers—you could not do better than have your novel star a 15-year-old young woman character who faces hunger every day of her life, and who acts illegally every day to feed her family by hunting small game in a forbidden forest. Why? Because being an illegal hunter so her family won't starve, when combined with her tremendous self-reliance and determination, garners Katniss, the star of The Hunger Games, instant hero status.

Notice, Suzanne Collins, named her novel The Hunger Games. She could have named her book The Fight-to-the-Finish Games or The Gladiator Games, but she didn't. She featured hunger first and foremost on the title page. Why?

My thesis is that by choosing to call her novel The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins had a bestseller on her hands from the title page on, because food—from eating disorders to food security—is on the minds of so many young people. Even those who never have to give a second thought as to where their next meal is coming from, instantly admire a person like Katniss who provides for her family by hunting every day even though she's only fifteen years old. I certainly would. Wouldn't you?

It's important to say, in Collins' fantasy country of Panem, there are a dozen districts, yet only one of the districts is filled with abjectly poor, truly hungry people—District 12, the one in which Katniss lives. It's the poorest district of them all. So, it's not exactly The Hunger Games for the other twenty-four participants, but it is for Katniss. The young man who becomes her partner, whose first name is Peeta, also comes from District 12, but happens to be the son of a baker, so he's never been truly hungry in his life. Plus, the other twenty-two players (two from each district) don't know every-day hunger the way our heroine does.

My point? For Katniss it's truly The Hunger Games far more than it is for any other participant, although it's true that withholding food is one of the strategies the "game makers" use to get the participants to want to fight and kill one another.

The second part of my thesis is that our hard-scrabble, hunt-to-feed heroine is only where Katniss' journey begins. What makes her so appealing is that she's an emotional chameleon, rapidly adapting to changing game requirements in order to win the advantage over her opponents. She shows tremendous resilience.

She makes a unbelievably rapid adjustment to consuming what to her just one week earlier would have seemed like a glutinous amount of food. She also adjusts to being noticed by everyone for having earned the highest score when she is interviewed by the judges. She adjusts rapidly as the other players begin to begrudgingly respect her cleverness. For example, she adjusts to her mentor, Heymitch's fall-down-drunk antics, and in the process actually persuades him to be her mentor. He helps her succeed.

In her little bubble, as part of "The Games" she "goes viral," but she adjusts to her hero status at the speed of light. I think that's one of the things about her that makes her so appealing to so many young readers. Of course she's largely a fantasy, but how could you not admire her for her curt, witty observations, and her spirit as she starts to come into her own.

When she allies herself with the clever Rue, she and Katniss are faced with having too much food other players could steal from them. When Rue asks, "…how would you get rid of it?" Katniss answers, "Burn it. Dump it in the lake. Soak it in fuel." I poke Rue in the belly just like I would Pym (Katniss's younger sister) "Eat it!" She giggles.  "Don't  worry, I'll think of something. Destroying things is so much easier than making them."

What wisdom from a 15-year-old!

I think what happens to us, the readers of this book, is that we change. We want Katniss to win so badly; as new aspects of her personality emerge and come into focus, we accept them as part and parcel of Katniss. We become seduced into believing that young lady, the lean and hungry one, as she was described as being in chapter one can be so much more. We lose sight of that Kitniss and accept her as we see her now, because that's how we want to see her. In other words, we fall in love, and our judgment becomes blurred.

Perhaps that's Katniss's formula for success in winning The Hunger Games, and it's also Suzanne Collins success formula for winning with her novel. We never once question how Katniss can possess a personality and an intelligence that absolutely flowers over the course of a mere two-hundred-seventy pages and a passage of time that extends no longer than two weeks. Because we want her to win that badly. Such is the magic of fiction when twenty-four people are all running for their lives, and you already know the two you want to be victorious. Why, Katniss and Peeta, of course! You start rooting for them, and the next thing you know, they win! And—get this!—they're hungry no more. What a happy ending.