Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, Deconstructed. Part One: How Edna Lustig raised her son to be a radical feminist.

By the time I reached ten years of age, my reputation around Lustig’s—my parent’s ladies’ clothing store on the corner of Front Street and Watchung in bustling, post-War Plainfield, New Jersey—was firmly established. I was “Edna’s boy,” not a pejorative term as it might be used to describe a servant in India; rather, a useful description of my social standing, and one I was proud of, whether I was vacuuming the carpets in the two-story retail establishment, or downstairs in the back room, folding store boxes.

Yes, of course, I was also “Phil’s boy.” I recall my father instructing me that every garment sold at Lustig’s must be lovingly folded and wrapped in white tissue paper, then placed in a “Lustig’s box,” which displayed our family name which appeared like elegant handwriting alongside the silhouette of a stylishly-dressed lady walking a tiny poodle with a poofed tail.

The point of my parent’s business was not lost on me. It was predicated on treating customers with respect, deference, even loving care. That was always our mission at Lustig’s. It made no sense to me why anyone would purchase high quality clothing for someone he or she didn’t love, even in the case of a woman purchasing the clothing for herself. Wasn’t that done out of self-love? To me that seemed perfectly reasonable.

One sign of true love I know is one’s willingness to let someone go any moment he or she wishes to be free. Love always withers in an atmosphere of oppression. I never understood the appeal of controlling others. As a child I learned, “We love with open hands” by example from those around me—my father, my mother, my relatives. I never once heard anyone ever sermonize on the subject. My Jewish religion taught me there was no problem or challenge that could not and should not be addressed by education. Every person should be revered by being encouraged to rise to the highest echelon possible in this life.

Every one of these attitudes, beliefs and life lessons was mirrored by my Jewish religion that I grew up in; however, starting off, I had no need for religion because Edna Lustig was my teacher, in a way, my rabbi. In the Jewish religion, another word for teacher can be “rabbi;” and, after all, I was “Edna’s boy.”

Did I grow up to be a radical feminist? Not particularly, I’d say, even if I claimed to be that in the title. Now at my advanced age, I remain someone who’s never been above cleaning a toilet, mopping a floor, or cooking a dinner. There is absolutely no reason why home keeping chores can’t and shouldn’t be fairly split among those who make the mess and eat the food.

I don’t consider myself worthy of a medal or of any particular distinction. By this point I would hope all men are striving for new attitudes about cooking, making art, sewing, loving others and maintaining loving friendships with other men. By the way, it was my grandmother Celia who first taught me to sew.

As much as I give my mother, Edna Lustig, credit for helping me form these attitudes, in the end, I believe each of us learns from each relationship what each of us chooses to learn. Well, at least, now you know what I chose to learn from being “Edna’s boy.”

It looks as though I set out to write an appreciation of Bonnie Garmus’ Lessons in Chemistry, but given what that novel is and how effectively it arouses the animus of women and people like me held down too long; and at the same time, given how effectively Lessons in Chemistry skewers typical male attitudes of that former era (the 1950s) and the one we live in now, I thought it necessary this month to make clear where I stand on these matters. Next month? Deconstructing Lessons in Chemistry, Part II.

One of my favorite ads from the 1960s appeared in the New York City subways when Congresswoman Bella Abzug was running for re-election to the U.S. Congress. The visual was a photo of the Congresswoman speaking from a podium equipped with hundreds of microphones. The ad headline? “This woman’s place is in The House.”

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.

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.