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

Edan Lepucki and Remembering Why I Love Reading (and Writing) Novellas

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If you're not yet like me - edan lepuckiReading Edan Lepucki’s If You’re Not Yet Like Me this weekend reminded me why I love reading novellas. Many of my favorite books are novellas (The Lover, Franny and Zooey, Cheri, The Awakening, A River Runs Through It). And though some stalwart presses (Melville House and Nouvella) are trying to keep novellas alive, most treat them like the bastard children of short stories.

In honor of Novella Month this June, let’s take a look at some reasons novellas rock.

Quick to Read

I love long books, but sometimes I need to know that I won’t get sucked into something that keeps me up until four in the morning. I read Lepucki’s entire book on a Saturday morning before my husband even woke up. It was engaging, I felt inspired, and I had the whole day left to mull it over.

Concise Writing

One of my favorite things about novellas is the adherence to (and fleshing out of) one theme. The narrator of If You’re Not Yet Like Me, Joellyn, is having some trouble finding the love of her life. Sure, her job probably sucks and her aunt may have cancer, but by focusing solely on Joellyn’s love life, Lepucki lets the reader fully experience the ups and downs of dating a nice guy without all the distractions we face in modern life.

Vivid Characters

Do you remember how many characters there were in Les Misérables? I don’t. You practically need a map to sort them all out. A novella usually has 2-5 characters and you can get deeply involved with each of them. Again, that narrowing of focus brings amazing detail to what is revealed, and a novella gives you the time to get to know those characters in a way you don’t have time to with a short story.

Size Matters

Whether you read on your back or your side, long books are heavy. Most of us spend all day on the computer—why make the carpal tunnel worse by reading tomes in bed? Plus, I love a book I can fit into my purse—it makes the bus ride so much more pleasant.

My first book, Polska, 1994, is a novella, but it didn’t start out that way. I found through revision how much I liked paring the story down to its essential elements. I liked taking out extraneous characters and finding the essential themes. It’s been awhile since I finished writing that book, and I’m grateful to Lepucki for helping me remember what I loved about writing it.

What are your favorite novellas?

Dorothy Allison Gets Under My Skin

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Skin - Dorothy AllisonThe world is conspiring to make me a feminist and I’m realizing how sadly overdue that evolution is. I had to become a writer before I could love myself as a woman, and I had to do both before I could become a feminist. This week Dorothy Allison taught me about all of these identities.

I found Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature by pure fate. I never read Bastard out of Carolina, but when I saw Skin at the used bookstore, the title spoke to a lot of things I’m thinking about. So I took it home and put it on the top of the to-read pile. I couldn’t wait to read it and it blew my mind.

“If you do not break out in that sweat of fear when you write, then you have not gone far enough.” – Dorothy Allison

I come from a house where the word feminist was used interchangeably (and as nastily) as dyke. Dorothy Allison is both a lesbian and a feminist, and I’m sorry to say that for many years both would have made me distance myself from her. Instead of chastening me for my ignorance, she writes her own frank assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the two identities as movements. She helped me realize I bristled at some aspects and judgments and not at the identities themselves.

My friend Liza (who is as reasonable and wise as Allison) wrote a brilliant post tying Juneteenth and the recent banning of State Rep. Lisa Brown for saying the word vagina. She advocates for equality of all people. How can we speak our truth when we can’t even name our body parts? Are we that repressed? Yes. We are.

I’m getting interested in the sex positive movement and the idea that whatever consenting adults choose to do is healthy. In the US, images of bodies are almost always sexualized and that makes it difficult to normalize our own. As a curious kid, I couldn’t look naturally at other bodies to see if what was happening to mine was normal (the drawings in sex ed answer so little). I had to resort to Playboy to see what other women looked like naked. Unfortunately those images taught me many other lessons that have been hard to shake.

Over the weekend, I visited Seattle’s Erotic Art Festival. I thought I would be surrounded by raunchy art that would leave me blushing and tittering behind my hand. Instead, I saw films and art that spoke to the simple, human sexuality in all of us. I started to wonder when I got so far away from the idea of myself as a sexual being. My next book is in some ways about the struggle to see myself that way.

“Writing is still revolutionary, writing is still about changing the world…You may not be happy as writers…but you will know who you are and you will change the world.” – Dorothy Allison

In one of her essays, Allison exhorts her reader, “Tell the truth. Write the story you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you there is magic in it, and if you show yourself naked for me, I’ll be naked for you. It will be our covenant.” I can’t think of better encouragement.

Pynchon’s Crazy Voice in The Crying of Lot 49

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In the The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon weaves together a series of unlikely events using the voice of a compelling narrator to form the story of a postal conspiracy. From the first sentence of the novel as the narrator takes the protagonist Oedipa from Tupperware party to being the executrix of the estate of a real estate mogul, the novel is full of wild and unexpected turns. These turns might be difficult for a reader to navigate if it weren’t for the extraordinary voice of the narrator.

The voice is whimsical and often strays off topic. For example, just after Oedipa hears about her role in the Inverarity will, the narrator muses:

[s]he tried to think back to whether anything unusual had happened around then. Through the rest of the afternoon, through her trip to the market in downtown Kinneret-Among-The-Pines to buy ricotta and listen to Muzak (today she came through the bead-curtained entrance around bar 4 of the Fort Wayne Settecento Ensemble’s variorium recording of the Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto, Boyd Beaver, soloist); then through the sunned gathering of her marjoram and sweet basil from the herb garden” (10).

The reader is given all sorts of extraneous details, but because the details are so interesting and unusual and because the narration always loops back to the topic at hand (in this case, Oedipa thinking about whether anything unusual had happened), I was interested in learning more and was not lost in the narration. I was however carried away by it. The voice of the narrator was like someone telling a story who has so much detail they want to pack in but they are trying to keep in mind the forward thrust of the story. Because the novel becomes a sort of mystery, I wanted to re-read portions of the novel and see if this extraneous information was in fact pertinent or led somewhere. The voice of the narrator was interesting enough to make me think everything he said had meaning and import.

I have read breathless narrators before, the type who are trying to keep up with the pace of the story and the effect is “and then, and then, and then…”, but this narrator was in control of the story and was going to let it unfold at his pace. The effect was intoxicating. Despite the odd character names and the implausibility of the events, I was willing to follow this story through orgiastic sex scenes and nights spent following a bum just to see where on Earth he was going with the story.

It’s an interesting effect to have a narrator who is so in control of what’s happening. Control may be the wrong word, because it doesn’t seem as though he is orchestrating it. Rather it seems as though he alone knows what is going on. This novel would have been a mess with a less omniscient narrator because Oedipa has no idea what is going on. The reader would be immersed in her confusion and would have difficulty following the threads of the mystery. In fact, it is the juxtaposition of this compelling, competent narrator with Oedipa’s confusion that gives the reader the freedom to follow the narrative. It could and does go anywhere, but the coolness of the narrator gives the novel a semblance of order and perhaps even predestination. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the narrator in this novel is God, although narrators can take on a certain deific quality, but the narrator does provide order to the universe of this novel.

I did not use an omniscient narrator in Polska, 1994, but I can see from this novel how important it is for the voice that is doing the storytelling to be compelling. I considered using a cooler retrospective voice for the part of my novel where Magda is leading up to her regrets and then transitioning to in-the-moment narration for the remainder of the book. By starting with the cooler voice, I would like to keep a reader’s confusion to a minimum as she comes to understand the world the way Magda sees it. The retrospective voice would have allowed Magda to draw some conclusions about her life and her experience and to let the reader understand her life through those conclusions. I ended up going with something that was more raw and immediate—something that spoke to her post-rape turmoil.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Crying of Lot 49 from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Jonathan Lethem and the Space of Time in The Fortress of Solitude

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In The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem explores the world of Gowanus (aka Boerum Hill) in Brooklyn through the eyes of Dylan Ebdus as he grows from a small boy to a middle-aged man. Throughout Dylan’s life, he has a relationship with Mingus, Arthur, and Robert, kids and then men from his neighborhood. Lethem crafts Dylan as both a neighborhood insider and an outsider and uses this dual status as a means to examine his friends from up close and from afar.

In the beginning of the novel, Dylan is a young white boy in a predominantly ethnic and not yet gentrified neighborhood. He plays with all of the kids from the street and is a part of the neighborhood. This allows Dylan to remark on the way the neighborhood works from the inside. The reader learns about the declining economic fortunes of the neighborhood while Dylan and the kids on the street bounce “spaldeens” off of the abandoned house—about racial tension as Dylan is repeatedly “yoked” of his pocket change by black kids, one of whom is Robert.

When a new kid, Mingus, moves onto the block and befriends Dylan, Dylan is initiated into a new world. Mingus is black and more street smart than Dylan and this friendship helps Dylan see deeper into a world he doesn’t fully understand. He begins to understand the nature of being yoked, although he is never able to avoid it fully throughout his life. Lethem has positioned Dylan so as to have access to Mingus’s world, and by making Mingus’s father a cokehead, Lethem creates Dylan’s first conscious interaction with the world of drugs. Lethem is initiating the reader into this world at the same time.

The structure and interactions Lethem has created for Dylan’s life continue to strike this balance between insider and outsider as Dylan is the only white kid in his school and then ends up helping the new white kid, Arthur, meet Mingus which leads to Arthur becoming more a part of the neighborhood fabric than Dylan.

Then Lethem removes Dylan from the neighborhood by first making him a Fresh Air Fund kid who spends the summer in Vermont and then having him attend Stuyvesant in Manhattan. Suddenly Dylan is no longer teetering on the verge of being a part of the neighborhood; he is removed and is in the position of observer. This allows Lethem to look through Dylan at the kids from Gowanus from the outside even though he still lives there. When Dylan’s new and old worlds cross in a drug buy where Robert appears with a gun, Dylan gains a new perspective on his associates. Although his relationship with Robert was always difficult, the sight of Dylan’s date running in fear after having wet her pants forces him to see how truly scary Robert and Robert’s lifestyle are from the outside. At this point the reader is also forced to reassess the normalcy of Dylan’s life. Structurally, Lethem has been indoctrinating the reader and Dylan into the norms of Gowanus, but at this point he is splashing the reader and Dylan with cold water and forcing them to reassess all of their assumptions.

Dylan continues to separate from his friends and is accepted at a college in Vermont. While working his summer job to pay for school, he runs into Arthur again. Because the story had shifted to Dylan’s school life in Manhattan, the reader is able to view Arthur from a new distance as Dylan does: “Arthur Lomb had gained his height at last….His eyes were red and small and wrinkled like those of some fetal animal, a blind mole rate or cauled calf.” The formerly bookish Arthur who encouraged Dylan to try for Stuyvesant had become a drug fiend who could barely graduate high school and is now collecting the funds to purchase a kilo of cocaine for resale. Not only are Dylan and the reader looking at a shift that happened while Dylan was busy in Manhattan, but we are also looking at a cautionary tale and Dylan’s alter ego. The danger seems more evident and I was relieved Dylan was off to college.

Of course, Dylan is not able to brush off his past as easily as that and when he encounters Mingus, Robert, and Arthur later in life, Mingus and Robert are in prison and Arthur owns several businesses in Boerum Hill, but rather than being a successful entrepreneur, it seems like Arthur is a boy who couldn’t get away from the neighborhood, even when the neighborhood got away from him.

I like the way Jonathan Lethem started these boys out at a young age and brought them together in a time and place when they couldn’t question their fate—they were just living. As I was reading Dylan’s encounters and re-encounters with his cohort, I was thinking about my character Magda and the skaters in Polska, 1994. Magda meets up with the skaters and becomes a part of their group before she even knows what she is doing, but she has a natural in into the group—Olek. I wanted her to sort of fall into the group the way that Dylan fell in with his, although the age is different. Then she pulls away and starts dating Jacek and this is when she can gain perspective on the skaters. After Jacek, she falls into the group again but less because of Olek this time and more because she is forgetting herself. As she steps away from the group and finds herself, I she sees them in a different light as she seeks her truth and her strength. Lethem’s structure of pulling these people apart across time and space and then putting them back together allows for the reinterpretation that is so interesting.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Fortress of Solitude from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Henry Miller: Origins and Originality in Tropic of Cancer

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Reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, I felt like I was returning to the source. There were so many things I recognized in it from other books and other writers that I wondered if Miller was their originator or if he too got them from someone else.  From the “crazy little gesture” of the Polish-Irish-English con artist that smacks of Milan Kundera’s obsession with Agnes in Immortality to the phrase “apropos of nothing at all,” Miller left me wanting to consult some grand, comprehensive encyclopedia of intertextuality to see where these ideas were coming from and who else he had influenced and who had influenced him or how much of it had come out of the atmosphere of collective inspiration.

Miller’s stripped-down language and raw reportage made me feel like I was inside the story and experiencing it with him. After leaving Serge’s flophouse, the narrator describes being at a concert: “It’s as though I had no clothes on and every pore of my body was a window and all the windows open and the light flooding my gizzards.” The narrator goes on like that for almost a page with everyday words twisted into this extraordinary description.  As a reader I felt like I was an alien encountering my first concert and I loved it. It was strange but wholly evocative. Miller wasn’t writing about what happened at the concert but rather what it felt like to be at the concert. I wish I could do that.

Earlier in the novel Miller describes a dinner party at Tania’s and the effect is the same although his method is different. The paragraph contains no quotation marks but Miller is clearly capturing snippets of conversation: “Halitosis. Gaudy socks. And croutons in the pea soup, if you please.  We always have pea soup Friday nights. Won’t you try a little red wine?” The paragraph goes on and on and continues with, “My next play will involve a pluralistic conception of the universe. Revolving drums with calcium lights.” Miller ties together all these short crisp sentences that are at once related to the scene but unrelated to one another so as a reader I felt like I was trapped inside a cocktail party where all the conversation was distilled and thrown at simultaneously. It is manic and dizzying and I loved it.

Miller also has a way of sketching a character with only a few short images. In reference to Olga he writes, “She weighs almost as much as a camel-backed locomotive; she drips with perspiration, has halitosis, and still wears her Circassian wig that looks like excelsior.” It’s incredible. He could have just said she was fat and had bad breath and an afro, but the way he wrote it engages the reader. The oddness of the Circassian reference threw me off balance a little and made me want to draw more of a mental image of this woman. I felt like I would recognize her anywhere.

Miller’s wild descriptions also mirror the wild bohemian lifestyle he was writing about. Even if he hadn’t written about drinking, I felt intoxicated reading these passages. There is a freedom and wildness in these descriptions that I envy. Miller manages to convey both the sense of what is going on and also the feeling of it all happening.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Tropic of Cancer from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.