Review: The Road

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
8.5/10, a vivid, engaging portrayal of the father-son bond in a post-apocalyptic world

We never find out exactly what happened to the world of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road." It involved a lot of fire, destruction, and death, and was worldwide, so we assume it was some kind of war. But we don't spend a lot of time wondering about it, in contrast to many post-apocalyptic stories that dwell morbidly and obsessively on the way the world ends. To the nameless father in "The Road," what happened matters less than surviving what is left, and protecting his son from the million dangers in the new world. He doesn't even think much about the world as it used to be, except to ponder whether his son is better suited for this new world because he doesn't remember the old.

The world itself is painted in economical imagery, rarely spreading further than the immediate world around the man and boy. This gives a very close, intimate feel to the book, even though the pair trek over tens, if not hundreds, of miles over the course of the story. Most of the story is told from the man's point of view, as he struggles to bring his son to a safe place that he doesn't even believe exists. When they reach places that appear to be safe, he worries that they will inevitably attract "bad people," and they move on. It becomes clear over the course of the book that while he loves his son, he is also using his son as a crutch not to give up. He's unable to bring his son to any safe place because he doesn't believe that he himself can ever be safe--if he were, losing the drive to survive would allow the weight of what he's suffered to crush him. His son asks him at one point: "What's the bravest thing you ever did?" He replies, "Getting up this morning," and then instantly regrets saying it.

McCarthy's language is sparse, using punctuation reluctantly (no quotation marks, and only occasionally does he deign to use an apostrophe, filling his book with "dont" and "shouldnt" and "cant"). I spent more time than I probably should've getting used to the language and thinking about how he was writing and why he was writing that way. The lack of quotation marks especially seems to have an interesting effect on the text. I wonder if, by not setting apart what the people are saying, their words blend into the background and description and makes them stand out less from the story.

I liked the book, but I'm not sure what the message is. I think it was more about the father than the father-son bond. He loved his son, but almost more as if the son was a token that kept him alive and part of this world than as a person; when the son, growing up, wants to help, his father has to be sick or dying before he lets him do anything. The son is more trusting, not wanting to hurt people while the father lashes out at anyone he perceives as a threat. They are looking for the "good people," but the son worries that they are turning into bad people themselves--skulking, stealing, killing. There are undoubtedly worse people out there, but the father does some questionable things in the name of survival.

I have heard people praise this book rhapsodically; I have heard people curse it violently. I felt the need for neither. It was an enjoyable story, with enough meat in the story to provide fodder for discussion for a long time. McCarthy builds up a vivid world with very real characters and engages our emotions all the way through. His quirky use of language aside, this was a quick, good read, one I wouldn't hesitate to recommend. You know, to anyone interested in a shatteringly depressing post-apocalyptic nightmare.

Writer Support

Our travels took us to Minneapolis to visit friends, coincidentally at around the time Kelly McCullough, of the excellent Wyrdsmiths blog, was doing a reading and signing at Dreamhaven Books and Comics. We made a trip down there and arrived just in time to hear Kelly read from his latest book (which is due out this summer), the third in the "Webmage" series.

We enjoyed the reading a lot. Kelly's writing is snappy and fun, with a good sense of humor, and his world is a complex and entertaining one--sort of like Tim Powers meets Douglas Adams, if you can imagine that. I picked up both his books and will be reviewing them in this space as soon as I work through some of the rest of my stack.

I wanted to talk more about the community of writers and how important it is. Several of the people at the reading were clearly friends of Kelly and familiar with his work, and though I didn't confirm this, I suspect many of them were other Wyrdsmiths writers. The same was true at my book signing, and I think from what I've been reading of signings that it's not uncommon across the board, unless your first initials happen to be "J.K." and your last name "Rowling." And I think that speaks to the importance of having other writers in your circle, not just so that they can critique your work, but so that you have someone to commiserate with and celebrate with, someone to go to your book signings and someone whose book signings you can attend. Writing is a solitary act by its nature, but appreciating writing can be very communal, and in fact, that's how many books gain popularity. The "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" phenomenon took off because women in local book clubs were falling in love with the book and discussing it, not because it was promoted by the publisher--but that's another story.

The moral is, if you're a writer, go find other writers. This is one of those cases where I think online-only communities don't substitute for real life. Our New Fables workshop meets bi-weekly, and we only take new members who are local and enthusiastic enough to show up for most of the meetings. That community has been a big help. The best part of taking classes at Stanford was learning how workshops work so Kevin and I could put that workshop together, and meeting other people who shared an interest in writing to keep in touch with.

Who helps you write? How did you find your communities? Or do you not have one and need one?

Review: Music Through The Floor

Music Through The Floor, by Eric Puchner
8/10, a character-driven collection of short stories

When I started taking classes at Stanford's Continuing Studies, I got to take classes from a number of current and former Stegner Fellows. The Stegner Fellowship is Stanford's version of an MFA in Creative Writing, a two-year fellowship during which you receive a stipend to work on your own work and workshop the work of your fellow fellows. Only five people each year receive a fellowship out of 5,000 or so applicants, so it's pretty prestigious.

Eric Puchner and his wife, Katharine Noel, both received Stegner Fellowships and have both published books. I reviewed Katharine's novel, Halfway House, and after attending a reading in which her husband participated, I picked up his book of stories as well.

I have noted in the past that I have a bias toward character-based work. This collection might have been made for someone with that bias. Puchner's characters are quirky, fascinating, funny, and real. The language is good, and the plots work, for the most part. A few of the stories I found to have odd endings, which is another pet peeve of mine that I keep thinking I've posted about here but it turns out I haven't. What I mean in this case is that the stories ended, but I wasn't quite sure what was resolved.

The best in the collection, for my money, is "Essay #3: Leda and the Swan," a plaintive attempt by a high school student to explain the strange (and yet completely normal) turn her life has taken in the past year. Puchner's talent really shines in this one, with clever turns of language to show someone trying hard to use words she hasn't quite mastered, a story that reveals itself through the narrator's words without her quite understanding it, and a complex cast of characters all revealed expertly through the main character's voice. All of the other stories have memorable characters, and most of them have a good, distinctive voice.

Puchner has a novel coming out in January, which is the text he read from. I'll certainly go out and pick that one up. If you like quirky characters and subtle humor, finding strangeness in everyday life, or if you just enjoy reading good writing, this is a collection for you.

Review: Sarah Canary

Sarah Canary, by Karen Joy Fowler
8/10, wonderfully written frontier tale of a mysterious woman who is different things to different people

Karen Joy Fowler is gaining some fame this year thanks to the cinematization of "The Jane Austen Book Club," which I have not read. I did read "Sister Noon," and was impressed enough to pick up "Sarah Canary" when I found it in a used bookstore.

The book starts with the titular character (though she isn't called that yet) wandering into a Chinese laborer's camp in Washington at the end of the 19th century. She doesn't talk, only makes animal sounds and laughs, and doesn't seem to have the ability or interest to communicate. Chin, a young man in the camp, is given the responsibility of escorting the woman to safety.

Sarah Canary picks up her name in a lunatic asylum, where we meet more of a colorful cast of characters, including B.J., a young inmate whose tentative attempts to theorize penis envy to the scoffing doctor are very amusing. He, too, becomes fascinated with Sarah Canary and escapes in order to follow her and Chin.

Through frontier Washington, Sarah Canary wanders, collecting more fascinated people in her wake. To everyone, she is something different: to Chin, she is a spirit alternately meant to teach him or punish him; to B.J., she is just a woman with troubles like his own; to the freakshow owner, she is an attraction; to the feminist, she is a cause.

Fowler writes with a transparent love of her characters and the world they inhabit, and an eye for amusingly ridiculous situations. Although the story wanders between many of the different characters, it's a very satisfying read, and with a lovely use of language. The world of the frontier is an interesting one, in which the struggle between society's laws and individual expression is much more open than it is in our modern urban areas. Sarah Canary, wandering through this world as a mute embodiment of individuality who doesn't seem to reject society's laws so much as live completely apart from them, serves as a catalyst for people who are similarly trying to find that balance. I'm reminded of the old fairy tale in which some object was enchanted so that everyone who tried to steal it was stuck to it, and anyone who tried to help became stuck to them, resulting in a long chain of people being dragged around by this object's owner. So is Sarah Canary a magical object attracting a chain of people behind her, and their stories make this book a delightful, engaging read.

Catching up, and Travel

It has been a long time--over a month--since I posted here. Life, in its usual way, has tossed shiny things and distractions at me, and though I have been writing my fiction, and writing in other blogs about restaurants, sports, and our writing workshop, I haven't updated here. I have several books backed up to write reviews on, and some writing thoughts to share, but for the last two weeks, I've been traveling, and writing very little--at least, committing very little to permanence.

Driving to the midwest and back from California is a terrific experience. Because Mark's family is in Colorado, we've driven to and from Colorado on a couple occasions, but the only other time I've crossed the highways from Minnesota to California since 1978, it was behind a moving van packed full of my stuff. That's a story worth telling in its own right: the lake in Kansas that used to be a field, creeping over the highway; the black clouds and screaming headwinds of Oklahoma; the dry, empty flatlands of West Texas, dotted with crosses and prisons; the glow of Las Vegas visible from an hour away. But this was a leisure trip, visiting relatives in Colorado, friends and relatives in Minnesota, and various landmarks along the way.

It is always instructive to shake up your surroundings (perhaps not literally). Leaving the Bighorn National Forest in Wyoming, we saw some lovely little houses and wondered about the people living in them. We could never survive being a three-hour drive from the nearest place from which you could fly somewhere, but these people are clearly fine with it. They would look at our house, no doubt, and think that they could never live three hours from the beautiful empty spaces of the Central Valley and the mountains of the Sierra Range. The good people of North Dakota are like Minnesotans, only more so: their state capitol complex celebrates their "hardy pioneer stock." They expect the worst from the world, and they get it, every December through March, and they soldier on (true story: I met a woman from North Dakota while I was living in Minneapolis who said that she liked the Twin Cities for their mild winters). These are all characters, archetypes, personalities. In a book, I might say to myself, this person comes from North Dakota, and even if it's a fantasy world, I know what kind of person that is, what sort of world they grew up in, what their parents and peers were like. Maybe she is the kind of North Dakotan who moves away as soon as she reaches eighteen. Maybe she is the kind who was wrenched away from her home and still longs for it. Having been there, albeit briefly, I can imagine that background, and give her depth, even if none of it shows up in actual words on the page.

Book reviews soon to come. Sarah Canary, The Road, Music Through The Floor. Lovely stuff, all different.

Review: Pride

Pride, by William Wharton
8/10, a touching parallel story of a boy, a war veteran, and a caged lion

William Wharton's "Birdy" is one of my favorite books, and his "Franky Furbo" is another favorite. "Pride" falls short of both of these, though its depiction of growing up in Philly in the Depression is worth the cover price alone.

It's the story of young Dickie and young Sture, growing up half a continent and half a century apart. Dickie finds an abandoned kitten and raises her at home, even though food is dear, while his father struggles with the difficulties of the job he needs for the family to survive. Sture grows up a virtuoso at nearly everything he touches, even after being wounded in World War I, until he adopts a lion cub and meets a telephone operator who both complicate his life in different ways.

The two of them meet, late in the book, on the Jersey shore at Wildwood, though they interact very little. Both are at points of crisis in their lives, which come to a peak when Sture's lion escapes from his cage.

Like most of Wharton's stories, tragedy dogs the characters without ever overwhelming them. Sture's bright future has become a murky, clouded present, while Dickie's future occupies less of his thoughts than simply surviving the present. Both have family problems, the difference being that Sture is responsible for his family, while Dickie is a ten-year-old boy. However, also typical of Wharton's stories, there is hope for both of them.

The strong points of Wharton's writing have always been in the life he gives his characters, their rough edges and vibrant personalities. Even beaten down as he is later in life, Sture is drawn with enough passion that we feel the life simmering in him. 1930s Philly/Jersey come to life vividly in these pages, but mostly they come to life through the characters, Dickie's description of the smell of grease paper, or Sture's examination of the carnival act he bought, which has become not only his livelihood but his home.

It does take the story a little while to get going. It feels like most of the book is backstory leading up to the events at Wildwood. But you don't mind that, because the characters and the lives they lead are so enthralling that you're happy to lose yourself in their history. That makes "Pride" a worthwhile read, carries the book through the thin plot and gives it the kind of life that Wharton fans have come to expect, if perhaps not as vivid a life as some of his other works.

Writing what you want

I had a strange moment while writing last night, but it wasn't the first time. I was trying to work on one of my many projects, and I just got the nagging feeling that I didn't want to work on this story because I wanted to be working on something with a different tone. Problem was, I had no idea what that something was.

I ended up pulling up another project and getting absorbed in that. It wasn't quite what I was looking for, but it was good enough. How do you handle it when what you're writing isn't what you feel like writing? Start something new, push through it, or do you take it as a sign that what you're writing needs to sound different and incorporate what you're looking for into that?

Review: Breakfast of Champions

Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut
9/10, his trademark absurdist satire at its finest, or almost its finest.

I think every writer is tempted at one point or another to put himself (or herself) into his work. Once you reach a certain point in your writing career, you realize that this (a) has been done before; (b) is really hard to do well; (c) is fairly self-indulgent. Vonnegut, here, demonstrates a rare instance in which it is done well, and to excellent effect.

The nominal story of Breakfast of Champions is that of car salesman Dwayne Hoover, a recent widower who is afraid he is going insane, which is a perfectly reasonable fear, because he is. In this state, he meets science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, who gives him one of his books written as a letter from God to his only creation. Dwayne, in his insanity, takes the book as fact.

The story around the story is that of Vonnegut at his fiftieth birthday, remembering his father and looking at the world around him through his eyes and the eyes of his characters, bringing them together at the Midland Art Festival. He inserts himself as a character into the book, first as the narrator whose sardonic tone and opinion imbues every scene, and finally as an actual character in the narrative, seated in the cocktail lounge where Hoover and Trout have their fateful meeting.

There are several themes layered through "Breakfast of Champions," which I am not going to be able to cover in one review after my first reading. Still: I had a discussion with a friend who felt that a major theme of the book was ethics in writing, how you have a responsibility around what you write and what people make of your work. I feel that's one of the themes, but for me, the major theme was in ethics toward your fellow man. At one point in the book, Vonnegut says he has become tired of the tyranny of the author, focusing a narrative on one character and one setting, when all the world is just as important as that one character. To that end, he makes frequent use of the phrase "and so on," to indicate that life in all of his scenes goes on after the narrative has turned its eye from them (a semantic and syntactic echo of "Slaughterhouse Five"'s famous "So it goes"). He also talks about his characters and how although they are entirely his creations and do whatever he wants, when he is not paying attention to them, they do whatever they want.

This is all wrapped up in the question of whether human beings are completely free beings or just programmed machines. Vonnegut sidesteps the question; his message, finally, is that it doesn't matter. Another friend, in talking about predestination vs. free will, gave me a quote that I want to reproduce here: "Just because God knows what you are going to pick doesn't mean you don't get to pick it." Vonnegut's message is the same, and in the end, he says, what matters is how we behave toward each other, in everyday interactions, in the ideas we write and spread. Everybody's story is equally interesting; everybody's decisions are equally weighted. Even to an author, every character is important.

The narrative actually hangs together well, building tension legitimately as Trout and Hoover make their way to the fateful cocktail lounge. Vonnegut tells us they meet and what happens, giving us just enough to make us anticipate the meeting. And after the meeting, he has brought himself into the narrative and revealed his own personal dilemma, so we follow him to see what he will do. His revelation, near the end of the book, is a wonderful moment in a book filled with amusing, touching, strange, and wonderful moments, and when you put it down, you will pause to take stock of it all before flipping back to a favorite passage. It will be hard to resist the temptation to read the book again, but whether you do or not, you will think about it in cocktail lounges, car dealerships, truck cabs, midwestern towns, art festivals, basement apartments in the Bahamas ...

... and so on.

Review: Halfway House

Halfway House, by Katharine Noel
8/10, Engaging family drama centering around a New England girl's manic-depressive episodes

During the fabulist fiction workshop I took, our teacher took us to a reading from "Halfway House," by Katharine Noel, a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford who'd just gotten her book published. A year later, I took a workshop from her titled "Tension, Conflict, and the Unknown," which I have written about previously and which I found very valuable.

"Halfway House" showcases her considerable talent for dialogue, conflict, and description. Centering on a New England family, the Voorsters, it is rich in family drama and tension, conflict saturating each page. The story kicks off with Angie, a high school senior and swimming star, suffering a nervous breakdown of sorts; what really happens is that the manic phase of her bipolar disorder becomes too extreme for her to conceal. Convinced that she no longer needs to breathe, she dives into the pool in the middle of a race she isn't entered in, and stays there.

Her father, mother, and younger brother all get more or less equal time in the story as they try to adjust to the way in which Angie's illness affects their lives. Meanwhile, Angie herself tries to cope with not just her illness, but the ways in which it changes her relationship to her family and friends. The resulting tapestry is painful to read at times, but the journey of each character is rich and complex, as beautifully rendered as the New England setting. Noel's prose flows easily, building characters and images with equal skill.

Certainly, her characters will stay with me. In true New England fashion, they remain fairly isolated from each other, dealing with the crisis in their own ways and rarely talking to each other about it. In some cases, Angie's problems open wider cracks that already exist; in other cases, she allows them to find reserves of strength to handle their lives.

The breadth of the story makes it almost inevitable that there can't be a tidy resolution. The characters are so real that this has the air of a slice-of-life biography, in which the particular episode may be resolved, but their lives are so detailed that there is no way to wrap up everything without resorting to gimmicks. I thought Angie's story came to a good resolution, and her younger brother Luke's ended well enough, but I wanted to see a little more resolution from her parents. It would also have been nice to see more of how the family reacts to Angie's story ending--fittingly, her story ends the book, but left me with questions about how the others would react.

The only other quibble I had with the book was that there was no overarching tension. Angie's battle with her illness doesn't really reach a crescendo; it peaks and flattens, until it reaches a resolution that is completely believable, but slightly flat. From a screenwriting perspective, it doesn't feel like Angie goes through a final "battle"--and this, here, is very likely just my expectation as regards a character novel. I'm just trying to explain why I felt the beats of the story were slightly off.

That's no reason not to pick up the book. Just reading Noel's writing is a delight, and observing the skilful way in which she handles character growth, dialogue, and not only description, but interaction between the characters and their settings, would be enough if she hadn't also written an intriguing story about mental illness and its impact on sufferers and their families. I hope it doesn't take her eight years to write another book, as she said it did for her to write this one.

The Passing of Inspiration

I've written before that Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle In Time" is the first non-picture book I remember reading. With the recent news of her passing at age 88, I thought I'd say a few more words about her impact on my life and my work.

It's hard to pick a favorite from her works, even just the ones I read. "A Swiftly Tilting Planet" wins a lot of points for its time-travel and "threads of fate through time" concepts, both of which are favorites of mine. "A Ring of Endless Light" is a beautiful tale of growing up and coming to terms with death and love. Those two would be at the top of any list, but I can't leave out "A Wind In The Door," "The Young Unicorns," or "The Arm of the Starfish." In a field of simplistic stories, L'Engle never talked down to her readers, trusting them to handle theoretical science as easily as complex human emotions. Meg's anger at her father in "A Wrinkle In Time" is genuine, understandable, and loving; the relationship between children, teens, and adults, and the boundaries that separate them, was a recurring theme through L'Engle's books, and I would have to search for a long time to think of someone who handled them better.

She taught me that the fantastic could be as terrible as it was wonderful (IT and the Echthroi versus Mrs. Whatsit, Proginoskes, and Gaudior); that people are real, complicated beings capable and deserving of love; that there were secret doors all over the real world that it took nothing more than a story to open. She was my first exposure to urban fantasy (Susan Cooper the second) as a novel, with character arcs and themes and imagery. She made me want to tell stories of my own. Her books were also one of the first ones I discovered I had in common with friends, when we started reading science fiction in high school. That was a huge step, finding out that these worlds that I'd thought were mine alone (the rest of my family had little interest in them) were actually shared by other people who loved them as much as I did.

It is hard not to be sad at her passing, but we should not be. She lived a full life and was recognized in her lifetime for the brilliant work she did. While her books are being read (and I know few people who haven't read at least one), she will never really be gone. May our grandchildren's grandchildren still be able to open a copy of "A Wrinkle In Time" and discover her world as we all did: with wide eyes and unfettered joy.

Review of my book

There's a review of Common and Precious up on the Infinity Plus site. Elizabeth Barrette is a longtime friend of Sofawolf Press and a poet in her own right (full disclosure: one of her poems appears in Common and Precious). Anyway, she likes it!

A Milestone, A Reminder, An Experience

This is the 100th post of this blog. I think it's traditional to yammer on about how I never expected and looking back and some other measure of blah blah blah. Truth be told, I started this blog with the intention of getting to 100, and beyond. I regret that it took me this long, but I am pretty proud of every entry.

The reminder, as I return from nearly a week with no internet (what do they talk about there in the backwoods of Pennsylvania?), is that in order to write convincingly about life, you have to go out and experience it. Not necessarily firsthand--I have never been drunk (true), but years in a fraternity watching and talking to people who were have allowed me, I'm told, to paint a rather convincing firsthand account of someone getting drunk. For me, travel is essential to experience. There is a feel to anywhere that is not here that is subtly different from here, and although you might imagine it, you can't know it well enough to describe it to someone else unless you've been there.

For instance: Pittsburgh is a city in the midst of revitalization, but the surrounding areas crawl very slowly out of the past, walking backwards so they never lose sight of it. Innovations surprise them--a Home Depot? A Best Buy? Once they are safely visible in the past, they become accepted. But these towns, these hills do not seek out change in the way the Bay Area does, my home of Red Queens running as fast as they can to keep up with each other. I have the feeling that this is true in many rural areas, but agricultural rural areas have a different feel from industrial ones. The plains of Iowa and Illinois and Indiana have the slowness of the land, the sureness of the seasons and the patience of clouds. Pittsburgh's body is coal and its bones are steel, and it has the weight of industry, the permanence of metal, but also the inevitable decay of rust. In the center of the city, where the three rivers meet, old stone sits in the shadow of new glass, the birth of an urban center in the new era. Steel and coal are still the life of the land, but their day is in the past, retreating every day.

I find it necessary to renew experiences from time to time. Memories can be tricky things, and sometimes we remember fondly things as better than they actually are. All of which is a roundabout excuse for me to talk about Dunkin' Donuts, specifically the Boston Cream variety.

There are no Dunkin' Donuts in California, though Krispy Kreme has made inroads. DD tried years ago but couldn't sustain a presence here. Having grown up in the Philly area, I have many fond memories of Dunkin' Donuts (at the age of sixteen, with a Cinderella license invalid after midnight, I drove to our Dunkin' Donuts at three in the morning to pick up supplies for an all-night party that was going on and found no fewer than three police cars in the parking lot; I stayed in the car and escaped arrest, I was sure, by sheer luck). In my recent trip, I passed through the Dallas airport, which is blessed with a small Dunkin' Donuts stand. Now, I eat donuts maybe twice a year. But the lure of a Dunkin' Donuts Boston Cream was too much to pass up. We brought it home, and...well, there is a unique smell when you open a Dunkin' Donuts bag. It's something in the icing, a sugary aroma combined with the wax of the bag that is immediately identifiable. After inhaling that, we ate the Boston Cream, and I am here to testify that it is every bit as good as my memory. The dough is perfectly sweet and soft, the custard creamy with a rich vanilla-egg flavor that the chocolate icing blends perfectly with. I don't even want to drink the milk I've poured because it would wash away the taste, and there's something particularly delicious about eating it here in California, hundreds of miles from the nearest of its kin. But eventually you have to, because the icing also makes you thirsty. And then the taste enters into the realm of memory.

What's your Boston Cream? What kind of details do you spice your writing with?

(There is, not surprisingly, more to read about Boston Cream/Kreme/Creme donuts...above image and one link from cake tourism blog)

Writing meme from Wyrdsmiths

Via Kelly McCullough over at Wyrdsmiths:

What do you find _______ about writing?

Hardest? Description. Every time I write out a description I worry that it's too long, or not long enough, or boring or stopping the action or whatever.

Easiest? Dreaming up the stories and watching them unfold in my head. The characters and situations all work together well in a good story.

Most fun? Translating the stories in my head to the written word, watching them take shape and sometimes a life of their own.

Most Tedious? Forcing myself to write when nothing's flowing, when I know I'm going to not get much done and will be revising most of what does get written anyway.

Coolest? The life that the stories and characters take on when the story's done--part of that being the reactions of other people upon reading them.

Least cool? The fact that 1/4 of Americans didn't read a single book last year.

Best? The joy of creation.

Worst? It's a pretty mild worst, but the fact that it takes so much time and that I don't have enough to do all the writing I wish I could...

Join in below, or comment with a link to your own post...

Review: The Final Solution

The Final Solution, by Michael Chabon
8.5/10, a lyrical Sherlock Holmes pastiche

After reading his award-winning epic "The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay," about a pair of childhood friends who draw a comic book and grow up to become important figures in the industry, I wanted to read more of his stuff, and only just got around to picking up a couple more books. This was the shorter one, so got read first.

Disclaimer: I love Sherlock Holmes and own all his stories. Chabon lets anyone who's familiar with the mythology know right away that this is Holmes: an old beekeeper retired to the country who analyzes the people he meets for clues about their habits, as sharp as in his heyday, if less active. But he never uses the name, whether out of copyright issues or for the purposes of the story, I'm not sure. Still, it's clear who the "old man" is, and within the story, his name is well known.

The story kicks off when he meets a young boy with a parrot on his shoulder. The boy is mute, but the parrot is not. The old man fails to make much sense of their story, but the encounter is significant, because the bird becomes the key element in a murder at the house where the boy lives. The year is 1944, and the war figures prominently in the story.

What is always a joy to read is Chabon's simple, lyrical descriptions, the kind that make you want to stop and read them out loud to someone. He gets under the skin of people and tells you how they tick, what makes them happy and what makes them afraid. In this way, he's rather the opposite of Holmes, who makes his deductions based on leavings and traces; Chabon shows us the insides of everyone. The old man, though the primary character, is not the only point-of-view character. We even spend a little time getting to know the parrot.

The story is simple, the characters complicated, the language beautiful. At the core of it, the story is about people finding a purpose. The old man ponders, in a lovely passage, that he is more afraid of dying without dignity than of dying on its own. When detecting, looking for clues, he feels death could come upon him then and he wouldn't mind, because detecting is his life's work. We see that same lack of purpose in the adoptive father of the mute boy, a vicar who does not feel very religious, as well as his wife, struggling to come to grips with the attitude of their natural son, and even in the parrot itself, who holds a surprising number of secrets in its little head.

If you are a Holmes fan, you will enjoy this; if you like good writing and characters, you will enjoy it. The story feels more organic than planned, but that didn't bother me at all, nor will it stop me from recommending this book.

Review: Brighten to Incandescence

Brighten to Incandescence, by Michael Bishop
7.5/10, great writing and ideas that aren't as engaging as they should be

My first exposure to Michael Bishop's writing was back in the late eighties, when the science fiction class I was taking studied "No Enemy But Time." It was a fascinating idea: a man going back in time to live with a family of early hominids. Problem was, I found my attention wandering, and partway through the book, he introduced a plot twist out of nowhere that I just didn't get. It won a Nebula, so what do I know, but there are so many other authors out there that I just never bothered to pick anything else up by him again, until this year.

He had a story online with intelligent rats ("O Happy Day")that was included in this collection. As I'm trying to collect authors for New Fables, it caught my eye. These are short stories, I thought, so I gave him another shot and bought the collection.

It's a mixed bag. To continue forward the topic of the last post, Bishop is definitely a Good Writer. He demonstrates in this collection an impressive range of ability in science fiction, from aliens to the dusty southwest to the near future. His imagination is seemingly boundless, taking the reader through different places and ideas in each story, building vivid worlds and scenarios and characters. He has a deft talent for description and dialogue particularly; his worlds feel textured and real, and his characters rarely, if ever, sound fake.

But it's the stories themselves that stop this from being a brilliant collection. Sometimes they take a really odd turn midstream, as when a story of courtship and romance becomes an odd stalker-thriller. Sometimes they just end when the idea is played out, without any change in the characters, leaving you wondering what you're supposed to get out of the story (the rat story was one of these). And in light of Eleanor Arnason's posting about male SF writers being violent and all about the technology, well, Bishop is certainly much more about society and ideas than about technology, but it seems that at least half these stories deal with murders, and the ones that don't deal with some kind of emotional violence.

"Murder on Lupozny Station" (co-written with Gerald Page) was probably my favorite in the volume, a story of a human-alien dyad, linked as starship pilots. Bishop gives us enough glimpses of the alien culture to make them feel real, and brings off a nice murder mystery in the process.

His afterword is worth reading. In it, he talks about each of the stories, and also about his collaborations. He feels that SF/fantasy is a more collaborative genre than some others (mystery is notoriously competitive and, forgive the term, backstabbing), and I've found that in my work as well. Even if collaborations don't always pan out, there is always someone willing to try them and they turn out to be a lot of fun.

I admire Bishop's writing and hesitantly recommend this volume. Because the stories are short, you can read one or many, depending on your time, and certainly the ideas themselves are worth exploring. I just wish he'd do a little more with his characters.

David Simon Does Not Care To Explain Himself To You

Via Nancy Nall, an excerpt from an interview with David Simon (payment required), creator of "The Wire" (apparently the best TV show I've never seen), in response to a question from Nick Hornby (!) about how he gets all his slang right:

DAVID SIMON: My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.

We go back to science fiction here, with the question of how much you have to explain your world. As always, a single success outshines a mountain of failures, so who knows how many writers are currently muttering "fuck the average reader" as they rummage through dumpsters or look out their parents' basement window over their pile of uncompromising, unsold manuscripts. But he makes a good point: your writing has a core audience. Don't worry about making everyone else happy. Make sure your core audience is excited and engaged with your story. If you do that, the people who don't know what your world is about will make the effort to learn.

Seth Godin puts it another way, to look at it from a marketing perspective: "In actuality, though, most markets aren't big enough for two blockbusters. The first one dominates the little market, which allows it to break through and capture the attention of the big market. The bestseller creates the problem (I haven't read that/tasted that/been there) and then solves that problem." Get your core audience excited enough, and chances are your work will start to reach outside it. Write to satisfy everyone and you'll never get enough people interested to reach all those people you wanted to satisfy.

Harry Potter (again)

One of the interesting memes in the wake of the release of the last "Harry Potter" book has been whether J.K. Rowling is a Good Writer. Many of my friends say no (some with the caveat that she's a great storyteller); they point to the worst section in the series, the first third/half of book five, in which the relentless dismantling of all the joy of the first four books is nearly unendurable, or they talk about the difficulty in reading "ALL CAPS" Harry. To be fair, there are times when Rowling seems downright uncomfortable with her writing, most often (as Cassie Clare pointed out) when writing about romance. The "monster coiling in Harry's belly" seemed like someone trying to describe a boy's awakening to puberty without (a) having gone through it, or (b) being explicit about it at all.

In Salon, Laura Miller (day pass or subscription required) says of Rowling that "the texture and color of her imaginary world is earthy (but not lusty), homely, grounded, irreverent, antic, perfectly suited to the audience of 10-year-olds she first devised it for 10 years ago. Her voice, tone and imagination are rooted in social comedy and observation, not in the metaphysical and transcendent..." This is the best analysis of her writing that I've read. I have little to add to it.

Stephen King, in a long article in this week's Entertainment Weekly, says "she was and is an incredibly gifted novelist." Novelist (a term Laura Miller also uses) simply means that she writes novels, stories about people, rather than Significant Works such as Paradise Lost, or your average Don DeLillo book. King, whatever you may think of his actual writing, knows a thing or two about the craft (his "On Writing" is one of the best books for writers I've read), and I would at this point trust him more to evaluate another writer than to pen a brilliant story.

At the core of it, it feels to me like all of the debate over whether Rowling is a Good Writer or not stems from a touch of professional jealousy, a desire to take down the hugely popular books or demean them because they are so popular. "Yes, well, of course the masses love her, but they don't know what good writing is." She is not Dorothy Parker, she is not Madeleine L'Engle; in the world of children's books, her nearest peer may be Andre Norton, who filled many hours of my childhood with delightful science fiction and fantasy stories that, at their core, were always about the people in them. She introduced me to many strange and wonderful characters (Eet remains one of my favorite sidekicks ever), told gripping and beautiful stories, and took me to faraway worlds. Whatever the quality of her prose, those are the marks of a good writer, and that is as true of the late Ms. Norton as it is of Ms. Rowling.

Harry Potter and the Fundamentalist Deconstruction

[No spoilers]

I haven't actually heard much about the Fundies' response to HP7. Perhaps they're just happy the whole thing is over with. But Lance Mannion has a great take on why they object to Harry Potter in the first place, and what Rowling's message in the books is. Excerpted:

When all is said and done, Rowling makes one very key point about magic.

It's not important.

Harry does not succeed because he is a great wizard. He is, as it happens, not particularly adept at being a wizard.

Magic isn't what saves the day. To say it does is like saying that the hero's gun saves the day in a Western.

Magic is just the technology of the wizarding world and Rowling makes it clear that putting one's faith in magic is a sign of stupidity (the folks at the Ministry) or inhumanity (Voldemort and his followers). To trust in a tool or a technology is to give up thinking for one's self or to give up one's soul and make a tool of one's self.

To make a belief system out of trusting in tools over people is an insanity.

It isn't hard to make the leap from that to the conclusion that Rowling isn't fond of any belief system that encourages people to put their trust not in their own selves but in the authority of the belief system and its ruling elders.

Dumbledore, the greatest wizard ever, performs very little magic over the course of the first six books, and he teaches Harry very few tricks.

His main, and almost his only lesson, for Harry?

Think, Harry! Think!

The whole article is a bit long, as Lance's sometimes are, but worth it, as they almost always are. And if you want more reading, his post is a followup to this post about why the fundamentalists hate Harry Potter. Which I admit I haven't read all of, yet, but the parts I did read look good.

Return from ComicCon / New book on sale

San Diego Comic-Con International is quite the event now, making national headlines and attracting Hollywood and its satellite industries (now including video game producers and toy companies). I love comics, and my favorite part of Comic-Con (apart from all the restaurants in San Diego) is walking around the independent publishers and small press tables to see what the individual creative spirits are up to this year.

This also awakens in me a yearly desire to Do A Comic, mainly because any story without a graphical component is largely ignored here. That desire gets worse when you spend the entire weekend sitting behind a table watching your novel be ignored while people coo over some (admittedly very good) graphic novels. At any rate, I've had a comic idea in mind for, oh, years now, and though I can't draw quickly or all that well, I can draw passably and in the past week I've fleshed out the world and plot of this comic considerably (in past years it had never really gotten beyond the layout for page 1, followed by "and then some stuff happens"). So we'll see how it goes--I will update more in this space as time goes on.

Speaking of projects that don't require me to draw, though, my literary journal New Fables is now on sale online from Sofawolf. This project grew out of a Fabulist Fiction class I took at Stanford, when some friends and I realized that "furry" stories with literary merit could be classified as fabulist, and when our classmates in that class really enjoyed our stories without questioning too much why they all involved talking animal people.

Neither of those stories are in this anthology, but in addition to my own contribution (which is set in a future Earth in between our time and the time of New Tibet, intended to be in the same world though nothing really establishes that), there are stories by Michael Payne, Kevin Frane (my former classmate), and Ryan Campbell. In addition, Phil Geusz and I wrote essays; Ryan, David Cowan, and Elizabeth Barrette contributed poems; and Sara Palmer and Heather Bruton added one-page illustrated stories. Ursula Husted drew a lovely cover for us, and the ever-talented Blotch and Jill C. also helped with interior illustrations.

I'm really proud of it. Please go check it out!

Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (NO SPOILERS)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling
9/10, book 7 in the famed series

It's good.