I am currently enrolled in the low residency MFA in creative writing at the University of Alaska Anchorage in fiction. That's right, fiction. I'm trying to write a novel. So, from time to time I'll post book reviews ( written from a writer's perspective, as in what can be learned about writing from reading them), essays, and maybe even some stories, if I can get up enough nerve to share them. This part of the website notebook is for writers, people who want to be writers and readers. Please excuse the messy formating, I'm learning this web publishing thing. New pieces will be added at the top, so you won't have to scroll down. Also, the dates on the reviews are when they were written, not posted.
The Necklace and Other Tales
Guy de Maupassant
Compiled and newly translated by Joachim Neugroschel
Introduction by Adam Gopnik
The Modern Library, Random House, New York, N.Y. 2003
These classic stories, originally published in French in the 1880’s and translated here by Joachim Neugroschel with a wit and style that, according to Adam Gopnik’s introduction “is fine and wonderfully idiomatic,” are so good they feel almost contemporary. They also seem so organic and natural that they read more like a news story than the carefully crafted dramas with the twist at the end that they all are.
Maupassant’s formula is simple: he sets the stage with the who, what, when and where, and once that is done (in some stories it only takes a paragraph or two, in others a page or two) the tale begins. It is told in such a straightforward and detached voice that it is easy to see how he influenced Hemingway. The period details and almost gossipy tone (a prostitute named Butterball whose “enormous breasts” spill out of her dress also exudes a “freshness so delightful and so appetizing she remained popular”) have influenced novelists from Henry James to Elizabeth Berg.
They are all mostly told by a kind of all knowing narrator, and all of them are interesting enough, and economical enough, that they captivate a reader. Maupassant doesn’t write the sections readers skip (to paraphrase Walter Mosley).
He also writes a lot about extramarital sex, which is important since he is from an era that today we associate with prudent morals. Turns out there was a lot of free love before the 1960s.
None of these stories grabbed me, none would be the kind I’d press on a friend with a “you have to read this.” They are, I think, dated in that way, and almost too pat for a modern audience. At the same time, I’m glad I’ve read them, because they provided several important lessons, especially how to layout a story clearly, and briefly, and the need for characters to want something they don’t always get. As a lover of happy endings these stories provide powerful reasons to end with a surprise rather than always tie everything up with a pink bow.
I think it is important to read roots literature, if for no other reason than to be able to discuss a contemporary tale, film, or even news article, that is indebted to the past, to be able to say, “oh yes. It is just like “The Necklace,” Maupassant’s story, remember? Where the woman borrows that diamond necklace for the party, then loses it, and spends years in poverty paying back the jeweler for the copy she returned, only to run into the owner in the street one day, and break down in an angry tirade about how it ruined her life, and then is told that the necklace she borrowed was “paste” – fake. Yes, that’s a great story, like the comb and the watch, remember that one?”
Heather Lende, October 7, 2009 Haines, Alaska.
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Sailing Alone Around the Room
Billy Collins, Random House, N.Y., New York, 2002 172p.
I chose to review a poetry collection because I’m trying to write tighter and use the best words carefully, and I’m still grappling with issues of point of view and fact versus fiction. I’m not sure poems are fiction or fact, but I do know that good ones are true. It seems to me that a great poet, a regular guy kind of great poet, like Billy Collins is, has a lot to teach a prose writer.
There are 94 poems here, and each is really a very short story, or a very short essay. Poetry is all about using language beautifully and skillfully to explain beautiful, enlightening, or heartfelt thoughts. My favorite poets are much in the Collins style, (Jane Kenyon, Mary Oliver, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson) like them, he is a master of turning daily occurrences, everyday actions, situations, or observations, into art, and often more--something holy. He is, as the New York Times Book Review declared, a writer of poems that are “brainy, observant” and full of “spit-shined moments,” like this line in a poem called “Questions About Angels,” “If an angel fell off a cloud would he leave a hole in a river?”
Collins is often funny like that, or as in the poem, “I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey’s Version of ‘Three Blind Mice’” which begins, “And I start wondering how they came to be blind. If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sisters, and think of the poor mother brooding over her sightless triplets.”
In that poem, and in many others, Collins uses the title to say something, so that the first line, as we say in journalism, advances the story. This is smart, and conservative, as no words go to waste.
I think this can be done with some short stories, perhaps with all, and will work harder to choose words and phrases for titles. (Grace Paley does this well.) As a columnist, and an obituary writer, my headlines are written by someone else, so I tend not to think of the importance of titles.
Poets, like Billy Collins, cannot afford to throw away words like that. The opening line, “First, her tippet made of tulle” would take some time, some space, and some explanation on his part, to “get”, without the title above it, “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes.” Likewise, “The one in the upper left hand corner is giving me a look” would not make the immediate sense it does if it wasn’t written directly underneath the title, “Victoria’s Secret.” Right away we know the narrator is talking about a catalog he never names in the entire poem.
The other thing about these poems, is that while Billy Collins, or I suppose technically the narrator that is in command of these lines, is sometimes glib, sometimes a wise guy, and teeters close to pompous, he only does so, it seems, so that you’ll like him more when he’s not as cocky. Just when you think he may be too clever, may be not quite sincere, he shifts gears. “The Death of a Hat” begins in a chatty, casual way, “Once every man wore a hat.” And continues with sassy and pithy lines about ballparks and straw hats, and hatbands embroidered in gold and steamship passengers, and even hat check girls, and then changes, two thirds of the way through, with the simple revelation “My father wore one to work everyday.” The point of view shifts there too, the narrator has a father, a father that is dead, a father that he loved, and so the poem ends much differently than it began, “And now my father, after a life of work, wears a hat of earth, and on top of that, a lighter one of cloud and sky—a hat of wind.”
I finished that poem with a sigh the first time I read it, and do each time. It is a short story, a novel, a comedy and a tragedy, a whole generation, a whole life, in just 13 stanzas on two pages with a lot of blank space.
There is much a writing student can learn from Billy Collins. Choose words carefully, write down only what is essential, have a good title, be funny, be smart, and don’t be afraid to open your heart to spill out what matters most. Share secrets.
Heather Lende, January 2009
That Old Cape Cod Magic
Richard Russo
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, N.Y. 2009, 261 p.
From the perspective of a writer, this is a simple novel. It is told only in the close third person from the point of view of Griffin, a college professor and sometime screenwriter. It takes place in two parts, “Cape Cod, (first wedding)” and Coastal Maine (second wedding)” the parenthesis are Russo’s. The two wedding weekends are a year apart. The first is of a friend of Griffin’s only child, Laura, who is also a bridesmaid. Griffin and his wife Joy had wed on the Cape, and he and his parents vacationed there each summer when he was a child. His father has died recently and Griffin plans to scatter his ashes while they are there. He has them in the trunk of his car. The second wedding is Laura’s and by then Griffin and his wife have separated and he is living with an old friend in L.A. The book though is not about weddings. It is about marriage, Griffin and Joy’s and Griffin’s parents and to some extent Joy’s parents and even Laura and her young lover, Andy. It is about families, and a specific family.
It works on several levels. The narrator is likable and funny, and his charm and good nature are balanced by his parent’s wackiness and rudeness – as Griffin recalls his childhood they provide the kind of darker point of view that makes a good novel a great one. While Griffin is warm and optimistic, sweet and likable, his parents—introduced primarily through his memories-- although his mother is on the telephone frequently in the first wedding, she too has died by the second wedding-- are not, and the scenes of their early family life and especially summers on Cape Cod, break through Griffin’s story continuously. By the second half, his mother has died, but she is now speaking to him in italics. Do we believe it? You bet.
As a writer, I admire Russo’s intimacy, his likable-ness, his easy honesty with a guy like Griffin. But that is hard to learn. There are people who can write down a story, even move you with their words, and then there are great writers, who do it apparently effortlessly, whose instincts are all just right, who make you put the open book against your chest and sigh. I’m not sure that can be taught, but the details Russo chooses, and the way he chooses to have them unfold here, provide some good lessons.
Obviously, the two wedding structure helps. There are few characters, and only two settings and a likable narrator who guides the reader through them. This is not Lonesome Dove, or for that matter Russo’s epics The Bridge of Sighs or Empire Falls, but the it resonates long after the last page.
I found myself scribbling in the margins “on purpose?” As a reader, I answered no way, but as a writer I know that’s not true. It takes a lot of work to write a story this well.
In flashbacks throughout the novel Griffin’s parents, professors at a second rate college in the “Mid-fucking-west” as they say, argue. They fight over everything, money, him, especially their jobs, and each summer they vacation in a shabby or better (depending on their finances) Cape Cod rental, which they place in two categories “can’t afford it” and “wouldn’t have it as a gift.” The only time they seemed to be in love with each other is on the annual trek to Cape Cod. Since the arguments they have are all about money and professional disappointments, they are believable, and predictable and they help explain much about Griffin’s very different life. (Teacher at a first rate New England college, lovely home and happy marriage.) They also provide both comedy and tragedy on a much grander scale than our narrator’s rather blessed life. Then, nearly two thirds of the way through the novel, well into the second wedding, where Griffin meets back up with his now estranged wife, and has a girlfriend in tow, Russo has Griffin ( as a child, in another memory sequence) overhear his father confess to an affair, and his mother say “I thought we agreed we weren’t going to do this anymore.”
That’s what critics and writing teachers mean by layers. The first layer held just fine, the couple’s chronic ( and often funny) arguments and their unhappiness over money and prestige would stand up in any creative writing workshop scrutiny, but this second layer is what makes a great novelist. There were affairs. They were unfaithful. Now Griffin is being unfaithful. When I read this I was jolted, as the child Griffin was, then, like him, I realized that, of course, this was the root of his parent’s dischord. It made perfect sense. It was, as Anne Lamott writes, that part of the plot that is both surprising and completely right.
One thing Russo does throughout the novel is repeat himself, the phrase “can’t afford it and wouldn’t have it as a gift” takes on all kinds of meanings, depending on when and where it is said and who says it.
I have one complaint with the story and that is the ending. In a novel about quirky, but essentially ordinary people, the sudden slapstick fall into the bushes and fight at the second wedding read like the screenplay of a Steve Martin “Father of the Bride” romantic comedy. I didn’t buy it and put the book down for the day after reading it. Luckily, I picked it up again, so I know that in the end, Griffin and Joy reunite. I like happy endings, and this one, though painful to reach, didn’t disappoint. “Is there anything left, Joy, or did I kill it?” Griffin asks her on the last full page, on the way home wedding number two, from his cell phone, and Russo writes: “ She didn’t answer immediately, and he understood that long, painful beat of silence was what he had been dreading far more than the final verdict. ‘You came close,” she finally admitted, sniffling. “But no. You killed only the part that could be killed.”
Heather Lende, Sept. 22 2009 Haines Alaska.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
By Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, The Dial Press, 2008, 278 pages.
I hadn’t planned on reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society for inspiration or scholarship. I read it for fun after a friend recommended it. But the farther along I got, the more I enjoyed it, and more importantly, the more I learned, about story telling, novel format, voice, characterization, and point of view.
The novel takes place in England right after the end of WW II and is written as a series of letters from Juliet Ashton, a columnist and author, (so right away, as both, I had a connection) and the people of Guernsey, as well as her friends and colleagues.
Julia is looking for the subject of her next book when she receives a letter from Guernsey farmer Dawsey Adams inquiring where he might find more books by Charles Lamb. He had gotten Julia’s name and address from the flyleaf of a secondhand novel.
Through their correspondence, we learn of the Literary and Potato Peel Society, a book club formed during the German occupation of the tiny Island community as an alibi to keep its members from arrest by the Germans. The Army quickly used up the island’s resources, its livestock, crops, firewood, even fish and game, leaving the inhabitants (and the occupiers) to subsist on potatoes and for a treat they made potato peel pie.
That’s the background, what interested me more was the simple device of using letters to tell a story. This can be gimmicky and annoying (Annie Proulx’s Postcards was a difficult read for me). I’m not sure I will ever use it, but I will try writing letters to and from fictional characters for practice, to insure a clear point of view, something I struggle with. The restricted time frame of letters also helped me to see how to clear clutter and get to the point of the story.
Another feature of the format is that each character gets to introduce himself or herself to Julia, the extremely likable narrator. There are gaps in the correspondence, from days to weeks to months, but it doesn’t matter, because good letters are newsy and chatty. News translates into plot, and chat into character and detail.
For example, Julia’s letter to her friend Sophie on her arrival on Guernsey to meet the people she plans to write about begins: “There is so much to tell you…the voyage from Weymouth was ghastly, with the mail boat groaning and threatening to break into pieces.” It closes with her putting to bed a war orphan being cared for by the Literary and Potato Peel Society members, “I must have passed some test I didn’t know was being given,” Julia writes, “ she wanted to hear a story about a ferret. She liked vermin, did I? Would I kiss a rat on the lips? I said ‘Never’ and apparently that won her favor- I was plainly a coward, but not a hypocrite.”
The style and Julia’s voice both carry the novel so confidently that I stayed up past midnight to finish it. It is a rare writer, or in this case two writers, who can teach so much about an historic time and place, and at the same make a reader care about the fictional people that inhabit it.
One more thing that I liked, and found hopeful for my own writing, is that each letter is a very small story, but all together they create a very big one, and it unfolds quietly and gently. The letters do not begin with punchy first lines: “Dear Mrs. Maugery, Thank you for your letter. I am very glad to answer your questions,” or end with wise conclusions: “This is all I have to say. I wish you well in your book writing. Yours truly, Micah Daniels.”
There is something thrilling about reading other people’s mail, especially well-read people who write well. I’d like my own work to be as compelling and intimate.
Heather Lende
November 5, 2008
Jesus Out To Sea
By James Lee Burke, Simon and Schuster, New York 2007, 240 pages
The best thing about James Lee Burke’s short story collection, Jesus Out To Sea is the title. The second best thing is the title story, a passionate, angry fable of New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina told through the eyes of a small-time musician and part-time bookie, who ends up riding out the storm on the roof of a house in the 9th Ward until it is pushed loose from its foundation by the floodwaters. As he and his friend float on their backs to their deaths, the narrator remembers the pre-storm Crescent City, “New Orleans was a poem, man, a song in your heart that never died.” Then he wonders why nobody came to rescue them just as a life-sized carving of Jesus on the cross that used to be in the neighborhood church drifts alongside them. He asks the wooden Jesus why they were abandoned, and then says, “He looks at me a long time, like maybe I’m a real slow learner.”
James Lee Burke has written over two-dozen novels, most of them set in or near New Orleans. They are marketed as detective stories, but the reason I read them, and why I read the shorter versions in this book in a day, is because they are good stories full of terrific characters, beautiful prose, a sense of place, and the honest voice of his likeable, flawed, and often violent narrators who all have a playground sense of justice.
Burke writes almost exclusively in the first person, or a very close third person, and the 11 stories here are true to that form. Rather than manipulate different points of view to shape a story, Burke works like an actor, becoming his characters. He seems to easily slip under another man’s skin, from a cop, to a rancher, to a murderer, and even a child. He gives voice to women too. These stories all have strong political and social themes- you name it, Burke writes about, or more accurately, his characters experience or care about it- child abuse, domestic violence, family, poverty, religion, drugs, alcohol, racism, war, corruption, crime, and the environment. He is no fan of President Bush or FEMA either.
So much can, and does go wrong in his fictional world that his characters have a greater appreciation for the interludes of calm. These little moments of peace, and relief, are usually outside. Burke uses nature to both pace his plots and like an emotional palate cleanser. Observations on the weather also serve as transitions from one event to the next.
In “Texas City, 1947” just before an oil rig blows up killing the narrator’s father he writes: “ It was hot that night, and dry lightening leaped from the horizon to the top of the blue-black vault of sky over the gulf.” In “Winter Light”, set in Montana, which after Louisiana is his favorite locale, a rancher waits to shoot a poacher as “ a heavy white mist moved across the valley floor until the trees on the hills disappeared inside it.”
Both these stories have been re-written into chapters of other novels. Richard Russo did this with a story from The Whore’s Child too. It is encouraging to see how both writers, whose strength is the novel, have used a short story as a kind of first draft.
Heather Lende, October 25, 2008
I love Our Town, and 18 years ago I even played the Stage Manager, as a woman, in a Lynn Canal Community Players production in Haines. Melina Shields was Emily, and Ted Gregg played the milk man. I believe the then police chief played himself. JoAnn Ross Cunningham directed it. Maybe we should do it again?
Our Town
A Play in Three Acts
Thornton Wilder, Coward-McCann, Inc. 1938, 102 p.
Published in Cooperation with Samuel French Inc., New York, N.Y.
This is a deceptively simple play about life and death in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire. The first act takes place on one day, May 7, 1901. In it we are introduced to the town, its history and characters, and the Webb and Gibbs families. The second act is three years later and we see the marriage of Emily Gibbs and George Webb. The third act, in the summer of 1913, takes place in the cemetery, where Emily is being buried after dying in childbirth with her second child.
As the Stage Manager, and narrator and main character, says, dryly, “M marries N. Millions of them. The cottage, the go-cart, the Sunday afternoon drives in the Ford—the first rheumatism—the grandchildren—the second rheumatism—the death-bed--- the reading of the will—Once in a thousand times it’s interesting.”
Considering the 600,000 inhabitants of Alaska, that means there are at least 600 interesting stories yet to be told. Which may not be why that information was shared. While the Stage Manager’s comments often poke fun at the very premise of Wilder’s play, which is that a few people in a small town, long ago, can teach us so much about the meaning of life, he doesn’t really mean it. As both narrator and our conscience, the Stage Manager is appropriately as skeptical as we are about too much sentimentality. At the same time, he confirms what we know in our hearts is true. When he puts a copy of the play in a time capsule, along with the local paper, a New York Times, the Bible, Constitution, and Shakespeare’s plays he says, “ Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about ‘m is the names of kings and some copies of wheat contracts and the sales of slaves. Yes, every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from work and the smoke went up the chimney—same as here.” There is as much wisdom to be gained from the life story of a small-town newspaper editor as there is from a monarch.
I know that. I also agree with the Stage Manager when he says “ we all know that something is eternal, and it ain’t houses, and it ain’t names and it ain’t earth and it ain’t even the stars—everybody in their bones knows that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.”
But it is the way Wilder conveys all this that most interested me as a writer. Our Town is a play, but it is much more than the sum of its scenes. It is the perfect example of the interdependence of summary and scene. Wilder combines a strong narrator, an omniscient storyteller, with short, specific and complimentary scenes which both emphasize the Stage Manager’s perspective, and take it one step further, allowing us to learn, and feel for ourselves, what he is telling us.
For instance, the Stage Manager tells us (bluntly) the way and year some of the characters have died when he introduces us to them-- Mrs. Gibbs of pneumonia and the paperboy Joe Crowell in World War I-- Then the playwright shows us an ordinary scene, a chat with Mr. Webb and Joe about the weather and Mrs. Gibbs making her children breakfast. The impact of both the telling the end of their lives and the showing us an ordinary moment in them, is extremely effective.
From the first lines the audience (and the reader) are told and then shown, or shown and then told, exactly what Emily’s spirit means in the third act when she shouts, “It (life) goes so fast, we don’t have time to look at it,” and, “do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?”
What saves Our Town from bubbling over liked canned soup for the soul and making a sticky mess, is the matter of fact way the material is presented. The Stage Manager does not say more than he needs to, and the scenes are short and specific. There is that, and the details are quirky, spot on, and often funny. Fictional Grover’s Corners is even placed on the map, “ just over the line from Massachusetts; latitude 42 degrees. 40 minutes, longitude 70 degrees, 37 minutes.” It makes a reader, or a watcher, want to know where they are too. It makes a writer want to be sure to know where her locales—real or imagined—are. Wilder makes us think hard about what it means to live and work in one small specific place and what it means to be a human being on planet earth. It is more than a neat trick. It is the magic of great writing.
Heather Lende, Feb. 1, 2009
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
By Grace Paley, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1974, 198 pages.
The seventeen stories in this collection are all entertaining and enlightening, a few were confusing, but the most illuminating, for my purposes, came late, on page 161. “A Conversation With my Father” may be as close as I’ll get to hearing Paley herself talk about writing. In it, a writer is visiting with her ailing, 86 year old father, who is giving her deathbed advice and makes a last request: “I would like you to write a simple story, just once more…the kind you used to write. Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next.”
The daughter, a writer and our narrator, replies: “ ‘Yes, why not? That’s possible.’ I want to please him, though I don’t remember writing that way.” She goes on to say, “if he means the kind that begins: ‘There was a woman…’ followed by plot, that absolute line between two points which I’ve always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away.” She echoes Ron Carlson when she writes, “everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.”
She proceeds to show and tell the reader exactly what she means, by talking with her father while writing a story and explaining to him how (and why) she does it. The father plays the part of any reader and she could be any writer. Well, not just any writer, but a writer that aspires to create art, a writer like Grace Paley.
It is a meat and potatoes give and take. She writes a one-paragraph story about a woman and her junkie son, and how the woman becomes a drug addict too, in order to understand him better. The boy gives up drugs, and then leaves his addicted mother all alone, “she grieved” Paley’s writer writes, “We all visited her.”
Her father argues that’s not what he meant at all, she has left too much out: the woman’s looks, her hair, her “stock” and, “what about the boy’s father?”
She says the child was born out of wedlock, and he says “doesn’t anyone have the time to run down to City Hall before they jump into bed?”
She says, “in real life yes. In my stories no.”
They go one like this, building a real story from the paragraph; she filling in the gaps for her father. However, in the end the son still leaves.
“I suppose that means she was left like that, his mother, alone.” The father says. But here the daughter tells us what good writing, and a good story is really about: hope.
“Well, it’s not necessarily the end Pa,” she says explaining that the mother character could still change, long after the story, that she’s still young. The old man is failing, and he reaches for his nitroglycerine as his daughter tells him what could happen next. The mother did change, she says, her son never came back, but she recovered, and got a job in a street clinic helping other young people, but it is too late. Her father has had enough. The story must be over sometime he says, it can’t go on forever.
Then he turns to his daughter, who clearly loves him very much, and delivers the last word:
“How long will it be?” he asked. Tragedy! You too. When will it look you in the face?” It reads like a slap, and ends the story with a surprise, giving it an even deeper resonance.
Heather Lende, November 16, 2008
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Herb’s Pajamas
Abigail Thomas, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, N.C. 1998, 199p.
“Herb’s Pajamas,” the title story in this eighteen story collection mostly about a few people that live in a New York apartment building but don’t really know each other, is laugh out-loud funny and sweet enough to be real. “Here’s the dilemma, there’s a dead husband outside the apartment and he wasn’t mine,” Belle, the heroine of this story, tells us. Then she phones her neighbor Edith, who is the main character in the bulk of the other stories here, (and now one of my favorite people in all of fiction) to help her move Belle’s boyfriend Rudy back to his wife’s apartment. He is wearing Belle’s other friend, or maybe late husband, Herb’s pajamas, or at least the top. Underneath, Rudy may not have anything on, which leads Edith, a fifty three year old virgin to say, “he isn’t dressed Belle,” and, “I can’t touch him Belle, you know, I have never even seen that thing.”
“Edith’s Wardrobe” which is kind of a collected novella, with short pieces titled “Hats”, “Shoes”, “Negligee,” “Fur Coat,” and so forth, is so good I’m not sure why the forty-five page too long story that begins this collection, “Walter’s Book” was included or the other long tale about a teenage runaway, “Bunny’s Sister” was. I am partial to Algonquin, since they published my first book, and are publishing my second, but I’d have encouraged the author to give us all Edith, all the time.
No offense to fictional Walter and his book, or the troubled young Bunny, but Edith is such good company. So is Abigail Thomas, the writer that brings her to us. In “Gloves” Edith’s famous mother has just died. Edith lives with her. Ms. Thomas writes, “The nurse left Edith alone with her mother’s body. Edith looked from her mother’s face to the ceiling. She waved at the ceiling because she had read that a dying person looks down at the bed. ‘Good-bye Mother,’ Edith said to the ceiling.” Next Edith takes a bath, “gingerly lowering her large white body into the tub. What a lot of Edith there seemed to be.” It gets even better, “She made gloves out of the soapsuds, short crunchy ones that covered only her hands, then long creamy white evening gloves that extended to her elbows and above, reaching almost her armpits.”
When Edith gets stuck in a chair in a movie theater lobby after her skirt rips open in “Leopard-Skin Skirt” we learn that where “Edith should have encountered skirt, Edith now felt only Edith.” And then, “Thank god she believed in decent underwear.” As Emerson would say, the proper response to that is applause.
My problem with analyzing the structure, or language or even the connective tissue of these stories is that I had too much fun reading them to pull back and take notes. I forgot anyone had actually agonized over form, plots, words, and details.
The Edith stories are mostly summary, or at least summary from Edith’s point of view, but I can’t find fault with that. There are enough terrific details mixed in so organically that you hardly notice them, and I mean that as a compliment. I love the way Edith thinks so much. I also love how close we got to Edith without the “I”. One thing I can attribute this too is the Edith-like voice of the narrator and how the author uses Edith’s name in an almost Bob Dole-talking-about-himself-in-the-third-person way. I’m not sure I can use that style though, or even if that is the secret to these successful tales. Edith comes alive thanks to Ms. Thomas’s steady hand. With a less compassionate writer at the keyboard the same observations might be mean or appear slapstick.
The Edith stories make Herb’s Pajamas the best of kind of book. The kind where the reader doesn’t notice how good the writing is, because she loves the main character and her little and big adventures so much. The only problem with it is you have to either read it alone, or in a room with people who don’t mind being interrupted frequently, as you say, “listen to this,” before reading an entire short story out loud.
Heather Lende, 2- 24-09
Friend of My Youth
Alice Munro, Penguin Books Canada, Toronto Ontario, 1991 274p.
I have had Friend of My Youth, Alice Munro’s collection of ten short stories, for fifteen years. My mother gave it to me in the package of inexpensive literary paperbacks she sent each Christmas, along with a big check. My mother was in some ways frugal and in other ways generous. She was a great reader who used libraries. She was also disappointed with the Haines library’s collection of literary fiction and non-fiction, so she supplemented it for me with packages of used paperbacks. She mailed me her old copies the New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. She was a fan of Alice Munro, and was thrilled when I told her I’d visited Munro’s bookstore in Victoria, the one I’m pretty sure that she owned with her first husband. My mother had a master’s degree in Spanish literature, which she earned when she had three small children at home. She died before I began my own master’s in creative writing program, but she had a lot to do with the motivation behind it. This is all a long way of saying that I understand why Munro dedicated these stories to the memory of her mother.
It also may explain why I didn’t take to Munro in my own youth, why it took me fifteen years to read every story in this collection and why I did so with mixed feelings. I loved them, and I was sorry I hadn’t read them sooner, so that my mother and I could have talked about them. She would have liked that.
Alice Munro was a mature writer when she wrote this collection, and while appreciating her writing may not take maturity, it sure helps. This time, when I picked up these stories because I thought they would be good for me, and because I was intellectually hungry after reading Arsonist’s Guide, (I realize that may sound snooty, but I’ve learned a lot this first year of my MFA, and it shows in a heightened appreciation of literature.)
What can be learned Munro? Lots. In the title story, she teaches us how and why to write. The narrator opens remembering her dead mother washing dishes, and with one detail, the “battered cream colored dish pan with the red rim” tells us all we need to know in order to imagine the rest of the rural kitchen. She effortlessly transforms a story her mother told her into fodder for fiction— taking that flight of fancy that begins with “what if?” Munro is also economical and generous with her details. While it may seem like a contradiction in terms, it is not. To read these stories is to enter into a relationship with the writer. Munro reveals just enough for an imaginative reader to fill in the rest. (Just as her narrator does with her mother’s stories.)
While Munro is wise, she not an old fuddy-dud. Her narrator is almost hip (and not at all judgmental) in “Five Points” the story of Brenda and Neil’s affair. The main characters meet in a shabby house trailer and drink vodka and orange juice. Brenda’s husband is disabled, Neil is kind of a jerk, and yet Munro is just as empathetic toward Brenda, as the loving daughter is with her mother in the first story.
Nearly every tale here includes two or more stories happening in the past and present that intersect. Munro doesn’t waste words for transitions between them when blank space will suffice.
She is a careful observer of human nature. In “Hold Me Fast, Don’t Let Me Pass,” her description of the way three single adults, all between fifty and sixty or so, interact in a small Scottish hotel dining room, is spot on. “Dudley ate at one little table, Hazel at another …Antoinette served them. She offered the vegetables in silver serving dishes with rather difficult implements.” Can’t you picture it? The awkward grip and spill of it? The full silences? The ache to relate somehow, but the polite respect for each other’s privacy? Munro not only uses blank spaces on her pages, she uses them in her scenes, allowing us to connect the dots.
All of the stories here have lyrical titles, however none of them begin with a punchy or captivating “lede” as we say in the newspaper business. I have a tendency to ease into my own columns, essays, and stories this way too, and have been working on changing that. After reading Munro, I’m not sure that I should. At the same time, I think that may be why her stories didn’t “hook” me when I was younger. Then, an Updike opener, like “Shark!” would grab me, and a Munro opener, like “Bugs said so long to the disappearing land” would not have. Then, I would not have read beyond the first page of “Goodness and Mercy” to discover, with a smile, “Bugs real name, of course, was June.” I suspect that if this story were in a workshop in a graduate writing class, everyone would say that is where it should begin.
What I like the most about Alice Munro is that she doesn’t do that. She assumes you have the time and inclination for a good read, that you aren’t reading one of her stories in order to get to the end.
Heather Lende, April 4, 2009
The Matter is Life
J. California Cooper, Doubleday, New York, N.Y. 1991, 227p.
My favorite lines in this collection of African American women’s stories are in the one page “Author’s Note” before the book begins. (Which is not say to say there are not many great lines and observations in the rest of this charming, funny, disturbing, and enlightening book.) But I am surprised and sorry that such great lines were kept out of the body of the book, since several of the characters could have voiced them. It seems to me that a writer writes fiction in order to be able to show and tell the truths that mean the most to him or her.
Which is why these words are too good to be buried in a one page foreword tucked between the Acknowledgements and Table of Contents that many readers might skip completely: “Some people say it takes courage to face the matter of death. Then we are all courageous. Facing death, inevitably, to the end of our lives. Every day. I believe it takes more courage to face life. To survive the everyday matters of mind body and heart…everyone wants to matter. Everyone wants know what the matter is…the matter is life.”
The Matter is Life is a collection of eight short stories, with the last and longest one, “The Doras”, being almost a novella. They are all told in an African American voice, and accent –with plenty of slang words like chile, ‘cept, biggun, kinda, gotta, smilin, buildin, and darlin. The heroines who share their wit and wisdom with us (all are narrated by women, and most are in the first person) are funny, wise, fearless, and opinionated. Some are more likable than others. The overall effect is sorta charmin at first, but very soon the voices gain real power, and their stories are important moral fables about the African American experience, and the human family experience.
Good writing transcends race, gender, and socio-economic conditions. What I learned in reading J. California Cooper’s stories out loud is that a writer can be very specific with language, place, and story, and yet readers with no first hand knowledge of any of that-- of dialect, the homes and streets, the climate, food, the rituals- are completely engaged, and more importantly, learn a few good things about the way other people live, that hopefully will lead to both an understanding of a different culture, and an understanding of how similar we all are when it comes to, as Cooper says in her pre-story “Author’s Note”, “everyday matters of mind, body and heart.” (This still bugs me, that it was pulled out of the book like this. But maybe that’s just me.)
Anyway, I read the first story, “The Big Day”, about a large church funeral told from the point of view of an elderly black widow living with her extended family, to an elderly Tlingit Indian widow living with her extended family. My old friend, though she has never been to a black church, or probably even met a black woman face to face, loved it. She laughed at the descriptions of getting dressed, and especially the slowness of old age, “I ain’t ready” was Cooper’s narrator’s refrain through out, and my friend nodded her head with agreement every time she heard it. (This reading also inspired a story of my own this month.)
Any writer can learn a lot from the tremendous confidence Cooper has in her frank narrators. The direct simplicity of Cooper’s prose prove that no story is ordinary, or worldview trivial, if the subject matter really is Life, with a capital L.
Heather Lende, January 2009
The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday
Alexander McCall Smith
Anchor Books Random House, Inc. New York, N.Y. 2009 240p.
Alexander McCall Smith, a Scottish doctor who is professor emeritus of medical law at the University of Edinburgh and who serves on national and international bio-ethics boards, has, in his retirement, written (at last count) 22 novels and one short story collection. They are all international bestsellers. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series is practically a media franchise. Soon there will be a spice collection and line of African inspired bed and bath prints at K-Mart. (Just kidding, maybe.)
His Isabel Dalhousie series, of which this is the fifth, centers on the life of its title character, a forty-two-year-old philosopher and ethicist who is independently wealthy. She and a handsome twenty-nine year old bassoonist have an infant son, Charlie, and she edits an applied ethics scholarly review, which she owns. She also pitches in at her niece Cat’s coffee shop, whipping up cappuccino and baking cookies. Her housekeeper Grace keeps the antique furniture polished and the baby cared for. In her spare time Isabel solves mysteries and thinks a lot about life’s big questions. After she discovered that Eddie, a poor boy who works in the coffee shop lied to her about the reason he borrowed money from her, she thinks: “Truth was built into the world; it informed the laws of physics; truth was the world. And if we lied, we disrupted, destabilized that essential truth; a lie was wrong simply because it was that which is not.”
Isabel is a very different sort of mass-market heroine. She attends the opera, quotes Auden and Aristotle and appreciates fine art. She is reserved, often keeping her most personal thoughts (including the love she feels for her younger beau) from the people around her. As for her sleuthing, she is in the mold of McCall Smith’s more famous detective, Mma Ramotswe of Botswana. She solves relatively simple moral and ethical crimes with common sense, and rather than request legal action, delivers her own prescription for restitution and penance.
I picked this book up in the Seattle airport, and finished it by the time we landed in Sitka, three hours later, and I was sorry. When my husband woke up in the seat next to me and asked if it was any good I said “I want to write a book like this”—one that is smart, very local (Edinburgh is a character in this novel) very good, and also relatively simple and plain but sells millions. He liked the millions part. I could live without that if I got a good review in the New York Times, but honestly, what writer doesn’t have those kinds of dreamy dreams?
That night, in my Juneau motel, (my husband flew home to Haines, I had a diagnostic mammogram scheduled for the next morning. There is a lump in my armpit.) I opened my laptop and got back to my novel. The novel I’m supposed to be writing about Shelly Adams and her husband C.C. Waterbury. I wasn’t inspired. I deleted the entire chapter two. The part about Craig, Shelly and C.C.’s son, and his high school graduation speech, he was the salutatorian. It was interesting, but went nowhere. What, I wondered, is the matter with this un-hatched egg of a novel? Why can’t I make it grow strong bones, a reliable heart and pinfeathers for its wings?
I thought of Muddy Saturday, and Isabel Dalhousie, and Shelly and C.C. and how easy it is for me to write non-fiction, to sit down, as I am now, and explain myself with words and sentences, how, when I’m doing this I don’t think in scenes or summary, or fret about point of view, or wonder if I should take a break to let you know what the motel room looks like. (It’s the big Extended Stay by the Juneau airport. There’s a studio kitchen along the back wall, the window, a white vinyl slider, looks out on the roof of an airport storage shed. The carpet is green, the hall smells like cigarettes but there are “no smoking” signs everywhere. The brown, tan and green bedspread is faux tapestry covered foam rubber, the furniture faux dark cherry laminate. A TV set dominates one wall, in a faux armoire. The watercolors, (three) are of sunflowers, and the frames are screwed to the wall. I am at a two-foot square table not made for holding except a purse and the newspaper.) The most interesting thing that has happened since I got here was a talk with the young motel van driver about why he moved to Juneau from a nearby village and how he hopes to get a job in a new gold mine there.
So I looked at C.C. and Shelly, and the characters in The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday and figured out what mine were missing that McCall Smith’s had. ( Or for that matter Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Malone and Guy de Maupassant’s Butterball) It was, as my children would say, a “no brainer.” The van driver had everything necessary for a novel. He wanted something. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote, fictional characters must all want something, even if it’s only a glass of water, and they either get it or they don’t and this changes them, and the reader. Successful fiction has to be more than descriptions of the way the light hits the bowl of oranges on the sideboard, or rain drums a steel porch roof; more than witty dialogue, more than believable, flawed but sympathetic characters. It has to tell a story, something has to happen in a certain time frame for certain reasons. The novel is to a good creative writer what a baseball game is to a good shortstop. It is not enough that he can catch, throw and hit. It’s not enough to write well. He has to play the game. He has to contribute something bigger than the sum of its parts.
For McCall Smith, the proverbial baseball game is how Isabel solves the mystery of a doctor’s medical ethics disgrace. He apparently gave a patient an untested new prescription he believed in very much, and the man died, then he covered it up and was caught, not jailed, just shamed. I didn’t really care if Isabel solved it or not though, since it wasn’t all that gripping and it didn’t involve people close to her, she ( and we) met the doctor’s wife at dinner party in the opening scenes of the novel, but it gave McCall Smith a structure (a game plan) in which to plop down all the rest of the enlightening and thought provoking things that happen to Isabel, and her family and friends in Edinburgh.
Those sub-wants (I have decided to replace plot with want) are what drives McCall Smith’s fiction and my favorite parts of the novel. Isabel wants Jamie to marry her, Jamie wants to be a successful bassoonist, Cat wants true love, Eddie wants to get out of his house and break the cycle of poverty in his family. The housekeeper, Grace, wants to keep baby Charlie, healthy and clean and safe. The fox in the garden wants to be left alone. I could go on, but every single person or animal we meet in this story wants something. Even the customers in the coffee shop-- they don’t come in because they want to have a part in a book and are delightfully eccentric. They want a scone and an espresso.
As stories, the pieces I have written about Shelly are good. They can be stronger technically, but they linger, I like her, and think about her when I’m not writing. That’s nice, but it does not make a novel. I have been writing about C.C. and Shelly in a fog, I keep asking myself what happens, what has happened, what’s the point? Character driven fiction may be fine for Ron Carlson, but it might as well be quicksand for me. Intuitively, I have been weighting character (and detail, place, relationships) over what the characters want.
The good news is that the thing I wanted most yesterday—the lump in my armpit not to be breast cancer, isn’t. It’s just an irritated lymph node. I am very happy that I will now live (hopefully) to see my first grandchild born in the same hospital that I just left as a new woman, in January. This week I’ll finish putting the garden away and write every morning from eight until noon. I hope it snows soon, because I’ll be inside a lot, at my desk, as I begin really writing that novel. And for now anyway, every person in it will have at least one want in each chapter. If I start with the smaller ones, I have a feeling they will grow into something greater, in a good way.
Heather Lende
October 13, Haines, Alaska.
I read everything I can by Alice Hoffman, she's one of my favorites-- this is a good collection to start with.
Blackbird House
By Alice Hoffman, Doubleday, 2004, 225 pages
Alice Hoffman’s Blackbird House is a collection of twelve short stories about a house on Cape Cod, and the people that live in it, from colonial days to the present.
While there are plenty of details about the apple wood floors, planting sweet peas, and making turnip chutney, these stories are not the kind you’d find in House & Garden. The ghosts of young boys, lonely women, and a white blackbird haunt Hoffman’s lush lean tales. They stay with you long after you read them.
The sentiment at the end of the first story, “The Edge Of The World,” sums up the book’s mood. A man presumed lost at sea with his father and younger brother, returns years later to the title’s house, his childhood home, where his mother went mad from grief. Hoffman writes, “He thought about how love could move you, in ways you wouldn’t have imagined, one foot in front of the other, even when you thought you had nothing left inside. He smelled lilacs after a while, and the scent of wild onions. There were the sweet peas, right in front of him, already in bloom…”
The same redemptive quality of a historic family place, grounded in both the land and lives of the people that inhabit it, is also expressed in one of the later stories, “India,” which showcases Hoffman’s wit. It’s about a pair of 1969 back-to-the-landers whose children prefer the neighbor’s wall-to-wall carpet and TV dinners to their hand planed floorboards and homegrown vegetables. Blackbirds sing when the hippie couple first sees the old farmhouse, Hoffman writes, with “…a wave of sound, black and blue and sweet. Like a bruise that was healing, nothing but peace and harmony.” Blackbird House is a lot like reading a bruise that is healing and while it is black and blue, it is also sweet.
As to what this reader learned about writing from reading it, there are several things. The interwoven stories make a satisfying novel. Even though the connective tissue, especially when it comes to the passing of time, is thin, it works.
One way Hoffman manages this is with the words she chooses and by shifting points of view. In the first and oldest story, it pre-dates the American Revolution; the narrator is the most formal and distant, and begins this way, “It was said that boys should go on their first sea voyage at the age of ten, but surely this notion was never put forth by anyone’s mother.”
The last and most recent story begins with this chatty confession, “To turn thirty was awful enough. To turn thirty after a divorce, with no child, and no career…was downright dreadful.”
Hoffman also infuses Blackbird House with the senses, especially smell. Every scene has a kind of perfume: sweet grass, mint, pine. Her storms even smell like vanilla. She also uses repetition -of scents as well as images and characters- to link the stories through time. Again and again we see and hear blackbirds, smell sweet peas and turnips, and encounter troubled children and strong women.
What most impressed this fledgling fiction writer, was how few words and scenes Hoffman used to reveal so much.
Blackbird House is so spare that the stories sometimes left this reader wanting more information, and more than once she had to re-read a story. She is still not completely sure what happened to some characters, but that is a minor complaint.
Blackbird House changes the way you see the world. After reading it no old home will ever be just a house again.
Heather Lende
Haines, Alaska
August 7,2008
