A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

The End of the Story: My Love/Hate Relationship with Lydia Davis

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This week Lydia Davis won the Man Booker International Prize and the world rejoiced–especially the world of short fiction (and short, short fiction) writers. Davis is a must-read in writing classes of all stripes. Although I’ve read a story or two of hers, it was her endearingly unrehearsed acceptance speech in which she defends translation (plus a bonus day off from work) that inspired me to finally open one of her books.

Beginning at The End of the Story

Lydia Davis The End of the Story CoverThe first novel by Lydia Davis, The End of the Story, is both a book about the end of a love affair and a book about writing a book. The first sentence folded into itself wonderfully, “The last time I saw him, though I did not know it would be the last…” The next couple of pages were spare and striking, but eerily familiar, like I’d read them before. It turns out that I had, and in fact Davis repurposed many of her shorts to compile this novel. I find that odd. Although I believe each writer has his or her obsessions and we write about the same themes over and over (sometimes even when we try not to), I like to think that each piece of work has a natural form that we are trying to shape the work into. This vague reworking of previous material seems like treating your own writing like “found” writing and I can’t imagine having the distance from my pieces to do that. But I also believe that Davis is in complete control of her tools, so I kept reading…

The Haze of Memory

“I’m not sure whether we walked on dirt or asphalt, what we passed, or how he walked next to me, whether awkwardly or gracefully, quickly or slowly, close to me or a few feet away.” – Lydia Davis

One of the most interesting things Davis does in this book is describe a shifting space of memory where she at once enumerates possibilities and signifies that the details themselves are unimportant. It’s accurate to the experience of memory, but I’m not sure it served the narrative for me because the details were so hazy that I had trouble engaging with the story.

Narrative Monologues

“I am inefficient in the way I work on the novel and that inefficiency infects other things I try to do… I still become confused and forget what I was doing when I left off the day before. I have to write instructions to myself on little cards with an arrow in front of each. I look for the arrow, read the instruction, follow it…” – Lydia Davis

Interspersed with the story of a love affair from the past is the story of the narrator today as she writes the book about the love story. It could be an interesting device, but the prose is too accurate for my taste to the experience of day-to-day life. By that I mean that it feels unedited and it took some serious patience to endure the writing blow by blows. Worse yet were the sections about what’s happening in the present time that has no relation to the love story and no relation to writing about the love story. One passage goes into the types of grasses that grew in a meadow before it was turned into a townhouse. It could be poetic if I really wanted to compare her relationship to that meadow, but there are no parallels between the two except that both changed with time. I wanted to edit this all out so badly, but it had to be there for a reason… right?

Part of me hoped that it would develop into a full-blown metafiction, but instead it reads like a roman à clef, and not a very artful one at that. Technically, Davis is drawing attention to the book as a work of art (so you could call it a metafiction), but her writing about writing is more pained than pointed.

Turning Words into Images

“No address of his was good for very long and the paper in my address book where his address is written is thin and soft from being erased so often.” – Lydia Davis

Like Grace Paley, Davis has a way with detail. But Davis’ language is less concise than Paley’s (in the above quote, I would have deleted the whole first clause) and Davis often draws attention to a random object that isn’t otherwise significant in the story. This happens late in the story when the characters are quite broken up and the narrator mentions the grey hair on the sink that a house guest left. In a book where I was searching for something to hold onto, this treatment of significant detail was further disorienting and I couldn’t tell (and at times ceased to care) what was supposed to be important.

Scene vs. Summary

One of the things many readers have remarked on about this book is that there’s no dialogue. More importantly, there are barely any scenes. Usually in a novel, the writer summarizes wide swathes of narrative to move you quickly through unimportant moments and then starts adding in detail and slowing down time to indicate that you’re coming up on something important–a scene–a critical moment in the development of the plot. But just as significant details are thrown around willy nilly, Davis doesn’t develop scenes in the book. Everything is related from a distance that was one more reason I found it difficult to engage with the story.

Am I Just Jealous?

Yes. Although I’ve read this book (originally published in 1995), it is strikingly similar to the first draft of my second book–a draft I hated for its self-consciousness, its lack of story, and my failure to step outside of myself when writing it. Though The End of the Story has gotten mixed reviews and many say it’s simply not their favorite of her books, I couldn’t help but feel if I had presented my book as it was to anyone, I would have been lambasted for the things I’ve mentioned above.

But then again, maybe I’m not jealous, because before I even knew of this book, I chose to begin rewriting my book into something I’d like to read. Maybe Davis’ writing is too close to my own and I can’t love it (especially in this form) because I can’t step far enough away from it to see the art of what she’s done versus how I would have done it. Maybe I need to give her writing some space before approaching it again. Promise not to wait until she wins the Nobel.

If you want to decide for yourself whether I’m being too harsh, pick up a copy of The End of the Story from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Coming Home with Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp

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truman-capote-the-grass-harp-coverMaybe the reason you can’t go home again is that you can never see all of what it was—you could only glimpse one angle of it and as you age you see another and then another, but the place you grew up and the people you grew up with are amalgams of all the ways you see them over time. That’s how I felt when reading The Grass Harp by Truman Capote before, during, and after a trip to my hometown, Moscow, Idaho.

How the Fates Wanted Me to Read Capote

My bedside table right now is stacked with thick books that are “good for me” so I’m lucky if I read ten pages a night. Which is frustrating for someone who likes to read a book in a sitting. One night I couldn’t take it anymore and went crawling through my to-read stacks for something slender, something enriching that wouldn’t be so hard. Toward the top of one of the middle stacks, I found this aged paperback, a book I like to believe was once part of my grandmother’s library, and I took it to bed. The novella and stories made for a slow read and I didn’t care because I loved every word.

The other reason I was fitful when I picked up this book was that it was just a few days before I was going home to Idaho for the first time in over five years. It was complicated. My mother and I hadn’t spoken for months because of something she’d said, but I knew I was long overdue on a visit. As Capote’s story unfolded, I saw some familiar characters. Verena was wealthy and in charge, but “the earning of it had not made her an easy woman.” Although Dolly “folded like the petals of a shy-lady fern,” it is her strength that ultimately leads to Collin, Catherine, Dolly to move into a tree. Still hiding in the branches of my own tree, I could empathize with Dolly.

The book is full of amazing (and true-to-life) descriptions of the people and situations of a small town likely culled from Capote’s childhood in Alabama. I spent my first afternoon back home at the Renaissance Fair revisiting moments from my childhood. Although I recognized almost no one, the types of people hadn’t changed. I called my mother that afternoon and we sat prettily in her lovely house, not talking at all about the troubles between us.

The next morning I read about how Dolly and Verena make their peace. I learned a little about family and what brings us together. I learned that they are not always the people we’d choose to be around, but that we are bound together nonetheless and how important that can be. I had a beautiful brunch with my mom and tried to be kind to her, even as we continued to not talk about our differences. She told me stories about her family and I listened. I told her what I’d been up to during all the months of silence. In her southern way, she talked around points to get at the heart of them and I realized this was familiar from Capote and that when things get really difficult, I write and speak this way too. When we said goodbye, she sobbed and sobbed and I drove helplessly away.

Capote and the City

My first morning back in Seattle, I read the story “Master Misery” which is about a young girl struggling to make it in the city who sells her dreams, literally, to an old man. It wasn’t an auspicious return, but, like most of the stories at the end of this book, is imaginative and metaphoric and wonderful to read.

You Said it’s a Slow Read?

Generally, “slow read” is a pejorative, but in Capote’s case, the book forced me to read slowly because every word was important. The sentences themselves were clean and simple, but there was a richness underneath them that I wanted to swallow whole and digest. So much for getting through a book.

“When was it that first I heard of the grass harp? Long before the autumn we lived in the China tree; an earlier autumn, then; and of course it was Dolly who told me, no one else would have known to call it that, a grass harp.”

That’s the first paragraph. You can see a little of what slowed me down, the inversion of the words “first” and “I” from how most of us would say it. The long, winding structure of the second sentence. But there is a richness there. I want desperately to know who is this Dolly with such wisdom. Is living in a China tree a metaphor? And what is the grass harp? TELLMENOW.

Capote subtly twists language in other ways that made me pay attention, and I loved him for it. Writing “brief case” instead of briefcase made me appreciate for the first time where the word came from. “Sunmotes lilted” was another phrase that made me swoon because the verb choice was so unusual and so perfect. But the phrase that made all the slow, close, attentive reading worth it was “Wind surpised, pealed the leaves, parted night clouds; showers of starlight were let loose.” I circled and underlined “pealed” and wondered how many copy editors had changed it to peeled, not understanding how this simple switch of vowels gave music to the language and the scene. It made me want to read the book all over again.

Coming Home to Capote the Writer

“I believe a story can be wrecked by a faulty line in a sentence.” – Capote

After falling so hard for The Grass Harp, I went back to Capote’s Paris Review interview. I’ve read all the interviews and have all the books (including when they were collected as Writers at Work), and Capote’s sticks has to be the one I underlined and annotated more than any other. Although it’s obvious from his writing how much control he has over his tools, I loved how his views on writing mirrored my own.

“Finding the right form for your story is simply to realize the most natural way of telling the story. The test of whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of his story is just this: After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final?” – Capote

Few people would disagree that Capote is part of the literary canon, but I had forgotten how good he is. I remember In Cold Blood for the savageness of the murders rather than the writing, I remember Breakfast at Tiffany’s for Audrey Hepburn’s charming portrayal, and my vision of Capote the man is sparring with Dorothy Parker at some fabulous Manhattan cocktail party that I will never get to attend. But Capote was a writer and a damned good one. And despite the New York connections, he was from a small town like I am. The Grass Harp made me see appreciate him as a writer and appreciate where I come from. I scribbled down notes during and after the visit and I think someday soon that place where I came from will make it into my fiction or poetry.

My mom is having surgery this morning, again. It’s supposed to be routine, but none of her procedure ever has been. And yet all that spit and vinegar that makes her “not an easy woman” also must be part of the reason she’s alive after all of it and she will continue to live for a good long time. I am grateful for that. I am grateful that my grandmother gave me this book and guided me to read it when I did. I am grateful that Capote helped me find the voices of my own “grass harp, gathering, telling, a harp of voices remembering a story.”

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Grass Harp from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Bernard Malamud Sums Up a Life in The Assistant

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Bernard Malamud recounts a few years in the life of a shopkeeper and his family in The Assistant. Morris Bober is a poor immigrant who runs a grocery in New York that was once successful. Morris’s money troubles are the ground condition of the novel and Malamud concisely and completely uses the details of the first few pages to set up the hardship Morris under he is running his store.

Working Against the Elements

The novel opens with a wind that “already clawed” as Morris pulls in heavy cases of milk before dawn. The action is simple, he is opening his store, but already the reader sees how early he is at work and the reader feels the unpleasantness with Morris as the wind “flung his apron into his face.” His first customer of the day offers complaints and three pennies before he can even turn on the heat in the store.

Hungry and Bored

Morris continues to set up the store “chewing on a roll, not tasting what he was eating” as he waits for his next anticipated customer to come in and spend his customary twenty-seven cents. The reader sees Morris in stasis. He is subsisting (on the roll) but he has no sentient pleasure (the taste). Most of all, this second mention of a dollar (or rather a cents) figure sets up the expectation for the reader that each of these meager pennies counts for Morris. He is hungry for the cash, not the roll.

A Sympathetic Character

Then a little girl comes in asking for credit. The reader already feels with Morris what a hardship this is. At first he refuses her, but she cries and he give in. Morris is not an unkind man. When he records the debt, he has to fudge the figures for his wife. This is the first mention of Morris’s family and why he might be working so hard. It also sets up a constraint in that despite how valuable each penny is, it is more valuable to him to not upset his wife than it is to collect the correct amount. Malamud writes, “His peace—the little he lived with—was worth forty-two cents.”

No Escape

Sitting at the counter, Morris observes how “the store looked like a long dark tunnel.” There is no escape from this store or from his life except the final escape. In fact throughout the book, Morris looks at many possible ways to escape the store, but because of his honor and his obligations (along with some bad luck) the only way he eventually escapes the store is through the long dark tunnel into the light.

Swimming with Sharks

Morris continues to wait for his twenty-seven cent customer who is also his tenant, but the tenant has gone to another store for his groceries. Competition recurs throughout the book as the perceived success of the competition shapes Morris’s relationship with his assistant and constrains Morris’s lifestyle. The threat of other stores holds Morris’s livelihood in by a thread and it likewise holds the store by a thread.

Morris considers selling in these first few pages as he does again and again throughout the book, but he always comes to the same conclusion, “[B]ut who would buy?” The reader can feel the dreariness of this world closing in. There is no escape from the misery of this store or this life.

The Smallest of Rewards

The section ends as two customers come in and buy sixty-three cents and then forty-one cents of goods from Morris. “He had earned his first cash dollar for the day.” Because Malamud has detailed the long list of activities Morris has done before this moment and gone over the many threats to the sparse living he makes, the smack of the sum total of one dollar in receipts for the day is stunning. I felt how hard and long Morris had to work for that one dollar, and the drudgery leading up to that revelation said more about Morris and his life than I imagined it could. Although inflation has changed the value of a dollar since the fifties when this book was written, the figure of one dollar remains iconic.

Because Malamud made Morris a good man and a hard-working man, I wanted to sympathize with him. I felt wrapped up in his plight. I worried that there was no escape. And because he set it all up in these first few pages, I was able to carry all of these concerns throughout the book. I have heard it said many times that the seeds of the novel are in the first few pages or in the first chapter, but I haven’t noticed it so acutely before. The beauty of how Malamud sets up the book is that it is very simple and straight forward. It doesn’t feel set up; it feels like a story unfolding. It feels like the start of a day and it doesn’t feel explained, but everything the reader needs to know is there. The story is shaped in those first few pages.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Assistant from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Heidi Julavits Rounds Out Peripheral Characters in The Vanishers

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Round, well-described characters are more interesting to readers. Knowing a character’s motivations and background helps a reader empathize with them and therefore engage with the story. But it’s easy to overdo detail, so many writers choose to focus detail on their central characters and write their peripheral characters as flat. They serve to move the story forward but don’t have too many needs of their own. In The Vanishers, Heidi Julavits achieves that perfect balance of characters who you can believe have off-page lives while not allowing those lives to distract from the narrative.

The book is about a motherless psychic, Julia, who may or not be under psychic attack from her mentor. The story is complicated and fascinating and involves a French feminist filmmaker who filmed women’s deaths (or not), a twisted mentor relationship, and Julia’s quest to find the truth about her mother’s death. I couldn’t say more without revealing some of the intricacies of the book, but I can tell you about Blanche, Julia’s stepmother who doesn’t feature prominently and is still essential to the feeling of the book.

Characterizing Blanche

Blanche is easily recognized as peripheral to Julia’s quest for information about her mother because she didn’t enter the family until much later. There isn’t even a hint in the book that Blanche might have been involved, which is nice, because that would have been distracting. While Julia is explicit about her stepmother’s role in her life, Julavits implies a lot through the brief description of this character. Blanche exists firmly in the post-crisis world. But instead of having Julia’s father pine for his dead wife, the presence of Blanche says as much about his decision to move on with his life as Blanche’s character does.

When Blanche arrived, our years preceding her arrival appeared, by contrast, a weary slog, a tiptoe, a blueness. And yet, with Blanche, there were boundaries. Blanche had never had children because she’d never wanted children. As much as she loved me, she did not desire to be my mother, in deference to my real one, yes, but also in deference to her own inclination to provide, for the needy, the occasional break from their lonely routine. She was the hired help, a hospice worker by trade, beloved by her patients and their families. She existed for me, too, as a temporary caretaker whose generosity was limitless because the job was not.

In one paragraph, Julavits sums up the entirety of this character, which is brilliant. But she also provides a negative of Julia’s mother. It’s a lot of work to do with one character who barely features in the rest of the book, but, as they say, every detail should be significant, and Julavits made the most of this character as she does with others like Miranda, Professor Yuen, and Patricia Ward.

Other Characterization Resources

There are many ways to build life into sideline characters. Dickens used names to shape his characters as with the benevolent Cheeryble Brothers in Nicholas Nickleby. Flaubert used class symbols to indicate a character’s place in the social strata. One of my favorite examples of characterization is how rumors of Jay Gatsby shape our impressions of that illusive figure.

While revising (and sometimes while writing this blog), I enjoy revisiting Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose who helped me understand Flaubert’s somewhat outdated class symbols. If you’re looking for a boost while revising work for characterization, dialogue, significant detail, and so much more, check it out.

What issues do you wrestle with in your writing? Drop a note in the comments and I’ll try to find a book that speaks to it so we can all learn to be better and better writers.

If this review made you want to stock up on books, pick up a copy of The Vanishers, Nicholas Nickleby, The Great Gatsby, or Reading Like a Writer from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Arlene Kim’s What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?

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Arlene Kim - What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoesPoet Arlene Kim rocked my literary heart at Richard Hugo House’s Lit Series earlier this year with an erasure poem displayed entirely in slides. This haunting response to the abuse of girls changed my conception of poetry. I bought her book, What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?, immediately and have carried it with me every day since.

Although the video of that evening’s performance is locked somewhere in a vault and I cannot share it with you, I can share this book and what it taught me about poetry. If you’re a returning reader to this blog, you know that I’m fascinated with poetry, but I am only recently learning to write it. So when I read a book like Kim’s, I am reading as much for what I can learn from it as I am for the beauty of language.

What Poetry Sounds Like

I’ve been reading Robert Pinsky’s The Sounds of Poetry lately. In fact, it was his discussion of the way tension carries across a line that taught me to better hear poetry. Kim utilizes that tension incredibly well. In “Hollow Tongue” she writes, “The dead can speak / any language, I’d imagine,” and I became enraptured with the way the line breaks. I’ve run it over and over my tongue just to capture the way, as Pinsky has taught me, the line slows the sentence down and the sentence speeds the line up.

Another favorite selection I’ve been studying for line breaks is “Paper Suns,” where Kim writes, “My love. I tended him / after he fell. His charred wing stumps, / his elegy of scabbed feathers. Only then”. The line breaks give an extra charge to a poem already full of rich language and evocative imagery.

The Many Shapes of a Poem

My knowledge of forms of poetry is limited. What I can tell you is that Kim considers the entire page when she writes her poems.

The first poem in the collection, “Rot,” is a series of conventional paragraphs spread across multiple pages whereas “Wind,” also a poem set in paragraph form, gusts across the pages it covers with shifting margins and alignments. “Spool, Book, Coin” is written in very short lines that, according to the endnotes, mimic the wavering walk of a child. The way each of the poems in this book is laid out is so carefully considered and unique to each instance, that I wanted to (and will in the coming days) study them over and over to learn precisely how the layout and syllable counts affect my read of each poem.

Recurring Imagery

There are many images that Kim returns to again and again throughout the book including the woods, hair, and birds. It was the Biblical apple, though, that caught my attention. This was in part because it’s a relatively accessible image and occurs very early in the book, but it was also so lusciously invoked that I wanted to think about it over and over. “Rot” starts, “Begin / An apple. Experts agree that it starts with an apple.” The language was so simple and yet I was so firmly entrenched in Eden. I wondered how she did that and if I had somehow too firmly committed to one interpretation. The poem goes on in the next section:

A tempting red apple sits on the table. The person sees red, sees just the skin of the apple—not the flesh, or the seeds, or the table, or even the room. And certainly not the story. Not yet. The apple is of color. The person is of color. The apple has the property of redness. The person has the property of color.” – Arlene Kim, “Rot”

And so the poem isn’t just about sex and temptation but it’s about surfaces and the way we become beguiled and misled by them. There are many, many things happening beneath the surfaces of Kim’s poems and I look forward to discovering more as I read them. I was grateful for the notes she provides at the end of the book, but the poems are strong enough to do without them if you choose.

Now that I’m getting over my obsession with getting poetry “right” (damn you undergrad English courses), I’m really starting to enjoy reading poems. My favorite prose is usually about the language of a piece and concision anyway, and who spends more time crafting language than poets?

I recommend Arlene Kim’s What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes? for poetry newbies like me and also for my more educated poet friends. I learn from you, so please share your thoughts about the craft of this book with me in the comments below. And if I ever find that video of the erasure poem on the web, I’ll post it here.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes? from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.