MINI BOOK REVIEW: Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose (Yes, That's Really Her Name)

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I can pinpoint the moment when I more or less gave up on "serious" American fiction.  Probably about 15 years ago.  The book was Susan Minot's Evening.

The book was hugely praised, as had been her previous short stories and novels.  Raves from all quarters.

I overcame my negative reaction to the photograph of the author on the back cover -- I'd purchased it in hardcover -- which struck me as self-satisfied and somehow unserious for an author of serious fiction:



All right, it's unfair.  But I didn't judge the book by its cover.  I bought it and I started to read it.

In fairness to Ms. Minot, I had been souring on serious American fiction for a long time.  By "serious" fiction, I mean fiction that aspires to be literature, to be art.  This would exclude most modern crime and "best-seller" romantic fiction, although some would call (for example) what Elmore Leonard does "literature," and I would not entirely disagree with them.  Chandler, Hammett, Macdonald, absolutely.   I'm talking about fiction that explores fundamental human issues like love, freedom, power, sexuality, family, memory, God, gods, truth, beauty, and what to do with one's damned life.  I had been reading American literature, past and present, for a long time, before I had to start reading law texts and since I was able to stop, and there was a time when I loved much of what I selected. 

But sometime in the early-to-mid Nineties, I started hitting some clinkers.  Novels and short stories both.  I blamed the academy, notably the Iowa Writers Workshop, whose graduates were turning out dull, solipsistic fiction about extremely uninteresting humans.  And of course there was that old villain, the New York Literary Establishment, a bunch of people who all went to the same parties and who reinforced one another's judgments about the Bright Young Things that were emerging amongst the baby boomers.

So maybe I was unfair when I stopped reading Evening about a third of the way into it.  I thought I might be able to pinpoint the page.  Sometimes when I put a book aside, which is not often, I'll leave a bookmark in there, thinking I might come back to it.  I just went to my library -- nope, apparently I did not think it could be salvaged.

My memory of it is vague.  A woman was dying.  There were recollections of love affairs, betrayal of friends and lovers, I think.  There was not an appealing or affirmative character in the bunch.  Mostly women, as I recall.  Nothing wrong with that; they just weren't interesting or likable women.  Their thoughts were pedestrian, their urges dully sexual.   (I admire many female authors:  Willa Cather, Grace Paley, Flannery O'Connor, Jayne Anne Phillips, to name a few.)   I think there was a sister or best friend involved somehow.  I don't remember what I thought of the writing, but I can tell you that during this period, the Minimalists (Ann Beattie and the like) had seriously infiltrated American fiction, misunderstanding the appeal of Hemingway and writing in prose so plain that it had the unintentional effect of revealing with great clarity that the authors had little of interest to convey.  This book was like that.

So I stopped buying new serious fiction.  My next read?  Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, and that was that -- I began devouring crime fiction and never really went back.  (Two marvelous exceptions:  Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest -- both leading candidates for Great American Novel -- really, Martin Amis has so nominated Augie March.)  And I started reading poetry. 

I was in a bookstore at Logan Airport recently and my eye rested on Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer.  If there is one thing I like as much as reading fiction, it's reading about writing fiction.  I probably have forty books about writing reposing in my library. 

I loved it.  It consists of very close readings of excerpts of word use, sentences, paragraphs, narrative, dialogue, and other literary devices mostly taken from classical literature -- interestingly, comparatively few examples from modern English-language fiction.  Her readings were convincing and themselves delightful reading.   It made me remember the pleasure I took (and still take) from great writing, from careful prose no less evocative for being careful. 

It also made me remember that I had a book sitting on my shelf that had been a Christmas gift two years ago from a reader whose intelligence, taste, and judgment I trusted:  Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, winner of the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award and lavishly reviewed everywhere.  Oprah and Obama both raved about it.  Although you may remember Franzen from his dustup with Oprah when he declined to cooperate with Oprah's selection of his previous smash hit, The Corrections, for her Book Club.  Apparently, she had no hard feelings.

It's next on my list.

I'll give you a report.

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N.B.:  I just checked Susan Minot's Wikipedia entry.  Evening was published in 1998.  She published one other novel (Rapture, 2002), and that was it. 

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The Romance of the Sentence

I can’t draw. I can’t fix things. I can’t act. My singing talent, best described as “modest” – actually, that’s generous -- has been committed to CD. Don’t ask me to sculpt anything. The artistry of my photography is pretty much limited to bounce flash and primitive Photoshop 3 operations. If SEAL Team 6 broke in one night and said “your life or an engaging fictional plot,” I wouldn’t be here to write these lines.

But one thing I can do, is type. For this I have to thank my mother’s genes and Mrs. Humphrey’s eighth grade typing class, where I was the champ on a manual Remington with metal caps over the keys so you couldn't see the letters, even beating the kids who got the few IBM Selectrics, the iPads of their day.  (Fingernail polish hid the letters on the Selectric keys.)

You thought I was going to say, “One thing I can do, is write.” That is, of course, the animating conceit of this site and of much of my life, but when one’s public output is limited to blog entries, Christmas letters, and summary judgment briefs, one is reluctant to call oneself a “writer.”

I try to write well. My keyboard speedfingers are something of an enemy to this endeavor, as I’m able to dump pretty swiftly onto the page the contents of my head. The results frequently mirror the disorder of what is to be found there.

But once in awhile, I commit to binary code a nice sentence.

Writers are obsessed by sentences. Plots and ideas abound; words, easy. But assembling the latter to advance the former in a way that is pleasing and persuasive to the reader – brother, you gotta have sentences, and some of them gotta sing.

It didn’t start with the modern master, Hemingway, whose spare constructions are beautiful to the ear and nourishing to the inner eye. But his sentences brought the art to the attention of a larger public. Teachers of writing programs tear their hair out at the crummy sentences their charges urp out. Some of it is a lack of knowledge of syntax and punctuation. But a lot of it is simply the lack of an ear for the music of which the English language -- the palette of Shakespeare, the scribes of the King James Bible, Henry James, the Brontës, Austen, Eliot, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Chandler, and their descendants – is capable. I've written here of my admiration for Merrilil Gilfillan, whose sentences, both spare and flowing, are exquisite.

Stanley Fish, an extremely controversial literary critic and university administrator -- he is colorfully attacked by both the left and right, which probably means he’s on to something -- has written a very fine little book about sentences called How to Write a Sentence -- and How to Read One.  I think we can put his political notoriety aside; I did not detect an ideological agenda here.

The title is a little misleading. After you finish it, you will not have learned very much about how to write sentences. He makes a stab at taking the reader through a few simple exercises, but his heart isn’t in it. What he really wants to do is bring to the reader’s attention the importance of the sentence, to describe the different types of sentence, and to provide numerous examples of good ones from literature and non-fiction.

You will learn more about how to read one.  As I made my way through this slim volume, I recalled pleasures from my own reading. I recalled a crime novel by one of the better writers in that genre, T. Jefferson Parker, and encountering a paragraph stringing together some of finest sentences I have ever read – and their subject matter was probably rather lurid, given the subject matter. And there are those sentences like the first sentences of Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (in translation), that never quite leave you: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” And I just now remembered another one; I had to go to my library to find it because I have long forgotten the novel and its author (although strangely, when I went to the stacks, I pulled it right out). It is the first sentence from a novel called Now You See It (1991) by Cornelia Nixon, and goes: “In the summer of 1949, in eastern Colorado, far from the nearest metric wrench, our car died and sunk in a sea of sheep.”

What is it about the sentence? Do we break up our communications in this way because it mirrors our need to take a breath during speech? Or is it something more fundamental – does it reflect the way we think, in discrete bundles of information and reasoning? As I composed this essay, it occurred to me that there may be no particular reason that thinking, and speech, and writing – which is to say, understanding and perception -- could not be seamless, freed from the tyranny of subject-verb-object. But it’s the way we’re put together, and the sentence is likely with us to stay. Even the extremely long sentence as practiced by the likes of Faulkner, James, the late David Foster Wallace must be broken up into separately comprehensible clauses to allow us to get from one end to t’other.

Here’s my formula for a great sentence: (1) It must stand on its own as pleasing to the inner ear, with pauses (or not), vocabulary, word choice (not the same thing), and grammar suitable to the nugget of information it is designed to communicate. (2) It must have some intrinsic interest. It need not be something surprising, as in the two examples above, but it should provoke at least some slight recognition that there is something different here to which heed must be paid. This second requirement is not found in every single sentence, because sometimes one has to advance the narrative without even a hint of razzle-dazzle: “He drove the boulevard looking for a McDonald’s.” Perhaps this is just another way of saying that not every sentence has to be great. Sometimes you just have to say something  simply and quickly to get to the more interesting stuff.

And (3), the fine sentence must be a part of the rhythm of the other sentences in the narrative. One great line does not make a great song, and the great line will sink if it is disharmonious with its fellows. (I think of Pauline Kael’s film reviews as examples of melodic writing.) Perhaps Professor Fish will favor us with a volume on “How to Write a Paragraph.”

I leave you with one of my favorite quotes about writing, from Russian short-story writer Isaac Babel, who was tortured and murdered in Stalin's Great Purge:

"No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place."

Isaac Babel, practicing what he preached.

I'd Like You to Meet Merrill Gilfillan

An elderly man likes to paint the Missouri River.  Over and over again.

"It might sound at first like an old man's fatuous surrender.  But Henry is a gifted tonalist, neither a dabbler nor a dupe, and his decision was a masterful sharpening of focus and a concentration of energy worthy of a desert mammal.  He loves awakening each day to find the Missouri still there, dependable as a dog.  He loves its bulldozer sureness, its interchangeable gulls and random flotsam, and most of all the colors it begs from the Dakota sky.  And every evening finds him there, accordingly, painting from a fertile trance where adoration flirts with and bleeds into dotage, singing out loud to himself on the breezy shore -- 'I Remember You,' or 'The Light Shines Bright Tonight Along the Wabash.'"

Did  you like that?

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One day some years ago I was performing one of my favorite activities.  Wandering from bookstore to bookstore -- yes, there more than two of them in those prehistoric times -- and picking up the random book I'd never heard of to see if there was anything providence had placed in my path to discover.  I can see the store in my mind's eye, but the name escapes me.  It's long gone.  On a table near the front door my scan was arrested by a short stack of slender volumes, a book of short stories by someone I'd never heard of.  Its cover was dominated by an unusual shade of blue. 

It was called Sworn Before Cranes, by Merrill Gilfillan.  I judge books by their covers all the time.   The treasures I've stumbled on make the dogs worthwhile.  A book with a title like that, and with that unearthly blue ruling over the cover landscape, deserved my patronage.  I might have glanced at the end flaps to see what it was about, but I was already on my way to the cash register.

I cannot find an image of that cover anywhere on the Internet.

It doesn't sound like much.  A collection of stories, if they can be called that, centered in the upper Midwest, many of them concerning that uneasy boundary between Native American and white, set in small towns that one is tempted to describe as "dying," except that they don't quite ever die.  They survive because men and women survive. 

The stories are almost always plotless.  They are more in the nature of fictional observations of the comings and goings -- some of them dramatic, some not -- of the people of these small towns in the Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska.  Some are set in the past, some are contemporary.

All wrapped in the most precise and gorgeous prose I had ever read. 

I don't find it showy or consciously-arty or look at me.   To me the lush locutions are simply the result of the artist's search for a new way to say -- that is, a new way to see.  The constructions are vigorous, not mushy or sentimental.  And they're just plain beautiful to the ears, which is a value independent of content.

Merrill Gilfillan has written numerous volumes of poetry, some wonderful books of essays (Magpie Rising and Chokecherry Places among them) but in the way of short stories -- perhaps I should say short fiction -- only Sworn Before Cranes  and Grasshopper Falls (from which the above passage was taken, "One Summer by the River").

One of the pleasures of doing this page is being able to bring attention to some of my idiosyncratic passions.   Gilfillan's stuff won't be to everyone's taste, and I hope that does not sound snobbish.  If you're looking for plot, or a family saga, or romance, or surprise endings, you won't find them in his work.  What you will find is true art, making things up to tell the truth about human beings, which is to say, about our very condition.  And you will find some of the loveliest English you will ever read.  

So rather than recommend it or issue a caution, I gave you a little slice to begin this article.  And did you like it? 

Thanks for indulging me this stroll down one of the vanishing lovely backroads of American writing.

(Sworn Before Cranes is pretty much only available on eBay and from used book sellers. Grasshopper Falls is more widely available, as are the essays and poetry.)

A Pulpy, Corny Classic

A Stone for Danny Fisher by Harold Robbins

In 1986 when I lived in Chicago I took a short story writing course with Asa Baber through Northwestern's night school.  Baber was an author (Tranquility Base, Land of a Million Elephants) and wrote the "Men" column for Playboy for many years.  Around fifteen students, and every last mother one of them a miserable writer, including yours truly, to judge from my aggregate published output to date of nothing.  (We pretend writers all thank Jah for Blogger.)  One night one of the smarmy young pretend writers in the class was making a dismissive reference to Harold Robbins, comparing him unfavorably to -- I don't remember, some writerly ideal like Mailer or Updike or the like, accompanied by the nodding agreement of the class.   I had never read a Harold Robbins novel, but I spoke up, probably rather more sharply than I should have, to note that Harold Robbins actually finished writing books, wrote books that attracted the attention of real editors, and were read by millions of real readers, many of whom may not have had the elevated tastes of these kids (who probably hadn't read Updike or Mailer since college), but who were not being fooled into reading something they didn't enjoy.  That shut 'em up.

In the intervening two-and-a-half decades, I still hadn't read a Harold Robbins novel.  I don't know how I came across A Stone for Danny Fisher, but I think I read somewhere that as Robbins's first novel (published in 1951), it had about it some of the grit and drive that may have dissipated somewhat in his later potboilers (The Betsy, Heat of Passion, The Carpetbaggers).  I am very glad I picked it up.

The cover tells some of the story:  A hot mid-twentieth-century chick with one of those hot mid-twentieth-century hot-chick hairdos and really hot mid-twentieth-century hot-chick foundational undergarments, a fleabag room, and boxing.  What's not to like?

The book has all these things, but quite a bit more.  It is about a boy growing into manhood in Brooklyn during the Depression.  He suffers from economic deprivation, limited prospects, and the curse of anti-Semitism.   He overcomes them to a point, but the logic of the life he has chosen soon drives him to become a very different kind of person.  He struggles with the demands of his new life, which is in sharp contrast to the joy he takes in the woman he loves.  

If you're thinking about picking this up, let me be clear about a couple of things.  First, this is a story you've heard before.  As you read, you will find yourself predicting what happens next, and you will frequently be correct.  To adopt the boxing metaphor, Robbins telegraphs his punches.

Second, this is not sophisticated writing.  It is sometimes childishly simple.  Lots of adverbs.  (Most good writers profess to hate adverbs (I almost said "unanimously" hate adverbs.))  I'm flipping through the book right now, let's see  .  .  .  you'll find sentences like: "Slowly the beating of her heart quieted."  "Her hand reached up wonderingly and touched her hair."  "The dark rolled around me in gentle swirling clouds."

But -- and this must have been what I was sensing in 1986 -- there is something to hold your attention on every page.  Something that keeps you moving through the dialogue and exposition.   These simple and sometimes corny words tell the reader what is happening.   They don't tell you how smart the author is, they don't trick you with pointless plot devices, they just set forth the dramatic facts of the life of a young man the reader comes soon to care about.  It's a story.  Robbins doesn't apologize for it or dress it up.  He just flat tells it.

Folks, that's writing.