Descriptiveness

I've just finished reading a lovely story on the New Yorker online by Yiyun Li, called "Alone". It's bleak and seems like it's going to be a depressing story but then it isn't, it's just full of emotional content, which is the best thing for a short story to be, in my opinion.

It did, however, have a quality that a lot of short stories that I've read recently (I've been reading a lot of them (mostly in Canadian lit quarterlies, but also in collections and online). It's something I might not have noticed if I weren't also writing fiction in an active way at the moment, which makes me read with a detective's eye in addition to my usual desire to appreciate.

Walter took her to a café at the back of a gift shop. Apart from an idle man halfheartedly flipping through a book of local attractions, there was no one in the front of the shop, where miniature carved boats and model fish aged unwanted on the shelves. At the back of the shop, dim but for a single lamp hanging from the ceiling, there were a few unvarnished wooden tables. An old man at the counter nodded in greeting when he saw Walter. It was three o'clock in the afternoon, the best time for those in the mountains to revel in the joys of hiking and fishing before the sunshine thinned to dusk, but in the shop time seemed to be stranded, day taking forever to turn into night. The browser picked up a snow globe and shook it; when his cell phone beeped he perked up and left abruptly.

It's well enough written and it's in keeping thematically - there's a lot of water in the story. But while the rest of the piece is gripping and unique, this whole paragraph seems meandering and also dull. The store isn't important enough to warrant this much attention. Even the caf/ is not particulary important. And that would be fine if the description was amazing and gave you not only a feeling of context but also that you were reading something that made you visualize in a way that you don't often, but the carved boats and model fish don't do that for me at all. I'm getting worked up about it not because I mind an average-quality paragraph in a great short story, but because I feel like the reason it's there is that there's an unnecessary emphasis in establishment short-story writing on lengthy description of surroundings. I'm guessing I'm in a minority in disliking this descriptiveness in itself, but I can't help it.

Some of it gets much much more distracting, like this passage in an excerpt from the memoir Happy, by Alex Lemon, published in a recent issue of Tin House (vol. 11 number 1 to be exact), wherein the protagonist teenage boy's brain surgery, for which his family has had to travel to Miami by plane, might be canceled because of a hurricane:

Ma and I walk the vacant streets. Yoo-hoo-colored water fills the ditches, and trash grips the fences. An empty Coca-Cola can tinkles across the sidewalk.

Independently, nothing is wrong with these sentences. But now I'm thinking about bottled beverages. Is that what we want? It can't be unintentional, can it? It really bugs me. The Yoo-hoo is fine, that actually is kind of a useful description, but then the coke can is in there just to be descriptively thorough, and isn't in any way helpful to me in creating the image, and, more importantly, totally jarred me out of my reading flow.

As I'm thinking about this I'm more and more thinking almost everyone would disagree with me (at least on the theory, if not on the coke can). Maybe it's a weakness in me. I skipped the descriptive passages in my first reading of The Hobbit (I was seven; I think I also skipped most of the songs). Incidentally, my dislike of Tolkien's mountain descriptions made me love The Princess Bride by William Goldman. I haven't read or even seen a copy of this book since I was maybe twelve so I'm not sure I should vouch for it this long after (I'm so often disappointed when I go back and read things I loved fifteen years ago), but at the time I thought it had a perfect way of dealing with descriptions - they're edited out of the new version of an older volume (which at the time I thought was real but have since decided was fictional; I'd really like to re-read that book).

Yeesh

Looking through an issue of Artforum at the library today, I came across an ad by a publishing house that was selling one of its books on some artist as "a search engine" for his work. What?

Enchantments

Last week I read The Enchantress of Florence, by Salman Rushdie (2008). It's a fantastical novel with a three-page bibliography. It's set 600 years ago or so, but doesn't qualify as a historical novel in my view, since it's the story of a story told by a liar, so it's got no reliable history in it. Still, Rushdie obviously took into account a lot of detail about Renaissance Florence in order to give the liar some detail to discuss, and similarly made sure to research Indian history in order to create a complex fantasy version of Akbar's kingdom. Anyhow, it was an easy read, almost a page-turner (unlike Midnight's Children which I liked a lot better but which I read much more slowly). It left me unsatisfied. I don't want to give away the ending at all, but for me there was something about the uncollapsed make-believe that left me feeling a little empty, unlike, say, Atonement or the movie The Usual Suspects, which bring you through a fantasy but close off, or complete, the fantasy, not leaving you feeling like the author got lost somewhere along the way. I might sound like I'm trying to stuff everyone into the same narrative framework, and maybe I am despite myself. There is something unsettling though, about a story that sets you up to be deceived and then in the end tells you you weren't being deceived at all, that this unbelievable mass of coincidences and self-serving (to the fictional story-teller) stories of the supernatural were in fact all ... maybe not true, but not worth exploring as stories. The way the story concludes is at odds with every clue and some explicit pieces that are given the reader along the way.

Kid Stuff

At my parents' yesterday, I found a library copy of Paula Fox's The Stone-Faced Boy sitting in the front hall on top of a clean-laundry basket (paused for a rest on its way upstairs), nestled into a pink bath towel. I lay back on the couch and read it, start to finish, in a little over an hour - no great feat since it's well under a hundred pages. I liked that it had that real novella character, more like a short story in the way you can down it in one gulp, but with the greater time for back-story and characterization details that a novel has.

The story itself I was less sure about for the first thirty or forty pages. The writing had nothing bad about it, nothing that bothered me and or made me want to re-write sentences, but it was also not particularly excitingly brilliant, and right at first I found the protagonist, that stone-faced boy, a little unbelievable. He has lost the ability to show any affect, in his face or his voice or actions. The affect is all there inside of him, rather simply described -- he wished he could laugh, he wished he could cry, and so on. But the defence mechanism has taken on a life of its own and he is quite desperate to get rid of it.

He felt like smiling. Surely, he could smile out here in the dark, where there was no one around to see him. He took off his mitten and touched his mouth. It was not smiling.

Then a reflection prompted me to start enjoying it with a particular emotionality. I was a very unhappy kid, as far back as I can remember, and certainly from when I started school and had to interact with lots of other little kids, who I found mostly scary and brutal. Now, I don't think too much about my day-to-day unhappiness when I was six, since it was twenty-three years ago and I fail to remember most of it anyhow. But I'm reminded of it in a kind of embittered way when I'm confronted with some images of childhood (like the really cute kids who run around in the elementary school playground outside my window - which, believe me, it makes me feel terrible to have any negative feelings about), because it can seem like almost everyone, whatever life held in store for later, remembers childhood as a time of joy and abandon. But here was the stone-faced boy, feeling quite a lot how I remember feeling, trapped, at the mercy of uncomprehending and merciless others, and fearful. It made me feel that companionship feeling when you find people who share characteristics you're embarrassed about having yourself. Even though it was twenty-three years ago.

And I kind of enjoyed its central symbol, though it's the kind of facile symbolism, like that lightning-struck tree in Wuthering Heights, that usually really bugs me. It's given to him by his great-aunt: a geode, a rock with a small crack in it through which he can see that the inside is hollowed out and filled with in-facing crystals.

I finished the book, like I said, in about an hour and a half, and the end gave me that nice satisfied feeling, and I turned the next page and read Paula Fox's little biography there. Turns out, she's mostly known for kids' books. She started with the kids' books, for which she got several big awards and stuff, and then wrote some adult books, of which it mentions two. Which made me wonder: which is this? When I think about it, everything about it would be suitable for a kid whose reading level is just a little advanced. And it has those hallmarks of kids' fiction: a boy with a quasi-magical problem or characteristic (his face won't move) and a simply expressed emotional issue (think Jacob Two-Two or Curious George), super simple symbolism, parents who are no help at all, a quest (I didn't tell you about it but it's there), and a warm fuzzy resolution.

Age, and genre, categorizations are artificial and useless when it comes to well-written books. I find it funny that people are very resistant to using the genre or age labels when it's a book that they think of as good literature: meaning people don't like it if you call The Chrysalids or 1984 fantasy/sci fi, or The Catcher in the Rye young adult lit, which it surely is. And it seems like the reason they don't like it is because they so believe in the labels (and therefore do not read sci fi, say, which makes 1984 definitionally not that). I'm not into that, but I suspect my response to The Stone-Faced Boy would have been different in some way if it had been presented to me as a kids' book but that's a weakness in me as a reader. Incidentally, someone in some marketing department somewhere decided it would be better for me not to know that up front: the cover is decidedly un-kid-like. It's a colourless close-up of a sculpted white clay eye, and kind of creepy if anything. I'm guessing there was once a very different cover.

So I'm shouting it from the rooftops: I read a kids' book yesterday and it was totally at my level.

Climbing a ladder to the moon

As faithful readers of this column will know, a little while ago someone posted a comment that I should read Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. Conveniently, this same person had once sent her brother a copy of the book, and since I live with her brother, the book was already on my bookshelf. And I'm very happy she did, because I loved the book. I was maybe particularly primed to like it because, also as previously mentioned in this blog, I like reading pop science and over the years have built up some knowledge of physics and astronomy, the little my mathematically-limited head will allow. Not that this book requires an independent interest in science. It looks at its subject - events in cosmogony, physics and early biology - in a completely poetic way.

The beauty of Cosmicomics is that it takes some concepts that are incredibly counterintuitive, like the Big Bang, or the curvature of space, and tells you about them in a very intuitive, kind of traditional, narrative way, from the perspective of someone who was there at the time (our narrator is old Qfwfq, who has managed to be present at many opportune moments in the history of the universe, even some mutually incompatible ones, which only shows some of his talents). Many writers make use of scientific concepts for literary ends, especially, I've found, quantum theory - like that terrible book I gave up on in my last post, and the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, but also some really good things, like the play Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. Cosmicomics is like none of those. It inhabits the beginning of the universe, the creation of the galaxies, the "fluid, shapeless nebula" that will later become the planets of the solar system, and gives you ways to think about concepts you've probably been told of before but were never able to square with your human perception of physics.

Each chapter begins with the statement of a scientific theory, and then moves into Qfwfq's telling of what it was like. The first chapter is a totally beautiful story about a group who rows their boat out to the moon at a time when the moon is close enough to the earth that you can get onto it by jumping off the top of a long ladder (the moon's gravitational force helps you at that last stage). Some of the chapters reminded me of Kipling's Just So Stories, for instance the one about the Big Bang where everyone present was occupying a single point in space until a woman several of them were in love with said she would make them some noodles if only she had some more room to roll out the dough. Some of the chapters also reminded me of the first two chapters of Genesis and of other creation myths, especially one in which Qfwfq and a friend are playing a game of marbles which turns, quite naturally, into a game of creating galaxies.

I was less captivated by the chapters about the dinosaur and the mollusk. It's a much more usual kind of thing, the literary anthropomorphism of animals. But the literary anthropomorphism of primordial goop requires a much rarer imagination and writing talent. That isn't to say that I didn't like those chapters. The entire book, quite aside from being an impressive feat, is beautiful and magical and light and airy and a really fun read.

When do you stop reading a bad book?

They were right: you can't judge a book by its cover. Or by its first page. I read a full ten pages of Infinite Jest before buying it. The next 990 (including 150 pages of endnotes) I read out of bloody-mindedness. Those ten pages were surely going to be redeemed. But they weren't, at least for me (I know that there are some who would zealously disagree). But in the case of this book, I'm not sure I'm going to repeat the same mistake of sinking more hours in when I'm 90% sure I'm not going to get back to liking this book (hm, it just occurs to me that this sounds a lot like what I was saying in the last post about Proust; I am a bit of a quitter by nature).

The book currently in question is called A Game With Sharpened Knives (by Neil Belton), a title which strikes me as hovering between just okay and kinda cheesy, but it didn't dissuade me. It's a historical novel about Erwin Schrodinger, who interests me (I like reading pop science). And I liked the first paragraph, which begins:

It was nine sharp. The secretary who had summoned him the day before had announced the hour of his appointment as though she were giving an order to open fire. After three weeks the most ordinary conversations had taken on a military snap, and manic urgency had become the new politeness.

That's okay, right? Funny, clear, actionful. And the next few pages are okay, all about how Schrodinger is forced to leave the university where he's teaching in Austria because the Nazis have just invaded and they don't like him. Anyhow, then the thing degenerates into just horrible long, confusing paragraphs in which theories are alluded to but never explained (it's hard to know but I think if you didn't already know quite a lot about the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, important parts of the book would make no sense at all).

And Schrodinger is depicted as this incredibly self-indulgent and lame boring guy.  I think part of the badness of the writing comes from Belton's need to explain every detail of Schrodinger's thought process, how he's scared, why he's scared, what he thinks about his wife, why he wants her to comfort him in this way and not that way. What he thinks about the people living across the street from him. I guess overwriting anything kills it. Schrodinger has a lot of affairs, which could make for interesting plot, but it's in a really childish and silly way and not sexy at all. He just goes on and on about how his libido can't be controlled. Anyhow, maybe Schrodinger was really boring, I don't know, but if he was, then you shouldn't write a novel about him. I've read 90 pages and I'm giving up.

My long journey in Proustland

I've just finished Part I Du côté de Guermantes and started Part II. Guermantes is the third volume of À la recherche du temps perdu which I've been reading for years now (not like two years, more like six or seven). It really feels interminable, and in the last year (by which I mean, during the time it took me to read Part I of my current volume) I started thinking maybe I wasn't into it anymore, or that at least I might switch to reading it in English (which would be less like hard work, more like entertainment). Du côté de chez Swann is one of the best things ever created on earth, but all this talk in the last few hundred pages about different levels of nobility and who is too good to show up at who's tea parties and so on, it was starting to feel like it wasn't my thing. Now though, it's back to the domestic scene, with his grandmother having fallen ill, and it's amazing again. He's really the best writer of prose ever.

At this rate, I'll be finished just before my fortieth birthday.

Lives and Deaths of the Rich and Literary

I've just finished Virginia Woolf's Nose: Essays on Biography, by Hermione Lee (2005). I read her biography of Virginia Woolf and liked it, so I thought I'd try this. It's a fun little book, not overly serious, about the pitfalls of biography writing, which mostly consist in being seduced by myths surrounding the subject, or just being generally melodramatic. She looks at a few death scenes and quotes some pretty funny passages in which the biographers guess at the interior monologue of the dying person, often trying to use words from the person's poetry or novels to describe their poignant feelings.

Lee writes interestingly on public perceptions of famous figures in different eras, looking particularly at the book The Hours and its film adaptation, which gave a popular, but distorted, image of Virginia Woolf's suicide and of her nose (which was made pretty ridiculous by its imitation in the form of a prosthetic on Nicole Kidman). She tells some good anecdotes and the book did make me think about how hard it must be to write biography, to create an orderly account of someone's life (usually dealing with large gaps of information) and to make it interesting without inventing meaning where none exists.