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.)