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James Ellroy and Sexual Violence

May 22, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

Watching L.A. Confidential again last night, I started to reflect on my long history with James Ellroy. I was young when I first started reading him—maybe eleven or twelve—and The Black Dahlia was not my first of his books. When I started with Clandestine or Brown’s Requiem, the noir voice had me, a girl who had grown up on the movie The Big Sleep but never read Raymond Chandler, hooked. The Black Dahlia was the second book of his that I read and as a burgeoning woman, I wanted to be as beautiful and as desired as Betty Short. I was young enough and immortal enough that the extreme violence committed against her didn’t even phase me. Even after reading L.A. Confidential and several other books, I didn’t key into it or how it might be affecting me.

If you know anything about Ellroy, you know that his mother was brutally murdered and that his books, especially those early ones, are places where he is dealing with that trauma. Elizabeth Short’s death was not dissimilar to his mother’s and there is often at least one Bud White in each early James Ellroy novel trying to save the girl—any girl—from harm. I believe that the resulting works show a respect for women, even if it borders on unhealthy worship.

I was still very young and unsettled when I watched the premiere of L.A. Confidential in 1997 at SIFF. I still wanted to be one of the women that the foul-mouthed writer would worship, and I still thought murder, even brutal serial killer style murder, was interesting enough to take Bob Keppel’s class on Ted Bundy.

In the last few years, maybe as I’ve begun to see myself more as a mortal person not merely a sexual object, I’ve started to wonder about the sexual violence against women we expose ourselves to through various media. I used to enjoy Criminal Minds, but now I realize that (despite some smart detectives) the stories are populated with women as victims and the violence is often heinous and sexual. The last few years, the torture rape filled horror movies have ruined for me one of my favorite film genres. The only conversations I can have about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are about whether the sexual violence is for titillation and I’m still not convinced it isn’t.

Violence happens. I’m headed to Croatia soon and one of the things I can’t get out of my mind is the rape camps of the Bosnian War and that we can barely talk about it still. Humans are animals and at times that is far too evident. I don’t think we should ignore it, but I also don’t think we should normalize it. At the same time, it can be interesting to learn about those uncontrolled parts of ourselves.

I try not to read about rape (no more Stieg Larsson for me and I’ll skip The Kite Runner, thank you). I did write about rape in Polska, 1994 because I wanted to try to understand it. I’m glad I did, because through writing about Magda’s victimization, I was able to see myself as a whole person (rather than a victim) with power in my actions. My fear is that for many people scenes of sexual violence and torture are becoming sources of excitement rather than cautionary and we are teaching our children that women are victims not people. Even James Ellroy saw women as victim-objects to be saved.

I don’t have any answers, but the long-lasting effects of the victimization of women in media is something I will continue to think about.

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

The Poetic Narrative of Pablo Neruda’s Memoirs

May 18, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Pablo Neruda had a fascinating life and met all sorts of interesting people from Che Guevara to Federico García Lorca. But in reading his Memoirs, I felt like he was recounting all of these stories to me as opposed to letting me relive them with him. Although Neruda uses some dialogue, he rarely ventures into full-blown scene. The closest he gets are little vignettes like:

“A few hours later I was buying some apples in a fruit store when a horse-drawn carriage halted at the door. A tall, ungainly character dressed in black got out of it. He, too, was going to buy apples. On his shoulder he carried an all-green parrot, which immediately flew over to me and perched on my head without even looking where it was going.”

This section proceeds for three more paragraphs in ten lines as Neruda inquires about the man’s identity. The last paragraph is, “I didn’t know him and I never saw him again. But I accompanied him into the street with due respect, silently opened the carriage door for him and his basket of fruit to get in, and solemnly placed the bird and the sword in his hands.” It is interesting for certain, but it seems as though Neruda is ascribing meaning to the interaction that the reader does not necessarily have access to.

Neruda utilizes a lot of description in his summary and his language is quite poetic, but it is always presented to the reader rather than experienced. There are passages of pure narration that are quite pleasant, “I am writing in Isla Negra, on the coast, near Valparaíso. The powerful winds that whipped the shore have just blown themselves out. The ocean—rather than my watching it from my window, it watches me with a thousand eyes of foam…” At the end of many chapters he includes passages of commentary so descriptive and without chronology or incident that it may be a poem and seem better understood by the soul than the mind: “…How many works of art…There’s not enough room in the world for them anymore…They have to hang outside the rooms…How many books…”

The effect is that the reader is completely at Neruda’s mercy. When something historical or salient emerges, I expect scene and get summary. When he is musing on mundane details, Neruda comes closer to scene than anywhere else in the narrative. It is difficult to engage in a normal fashion with the book for this reason. But he did lead a fascinating life.

I find I am increasingly drawn to books with strong narrators, like Pynchon, Kundera, and Duras, who can weave a spell for me and let me surrender to the narrative. What this book shows me is that a strong narrator is not enough. The narrator has to let me into the world, to give me the keys as it were, otherwise I feel like I am watching Last Year at Marienbad—interesting, but I don’t necessarily understand it enough to engage with it. Most of Neruda’s writing is intelligible, but the lack of sensory detail in the vignettes kept me separate from the narrative. I want to be careful of this in my own work. I am learning it is alright to tend towards summary rather than scene, but if I do, then I have to be very careful about engaging the reader. Otherwise it becomes an oration, not a narration. Readers often pick up a memoir because of who wrote it. Fiction writers need to first build trust with a reader before the reader will follow them.

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

Three Things at Once: Charles Baxter’s Character Descriptions

May 17, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

In the stories in A Relative Stranger, Charles Baxter allows his characters to be seen through the eyes of other characters and what the observing character notices often tells as much about them as about the observed. All of this is brought together with brightly active language with connotations far beyond the few words spelled out on the page.

Prowlers

In “Prowlers,” Robinson, observes of his daughter: “[b]ehind her brown-rimmed glasses, her eyes are fierce. She looks like a twelve-year-old district attorney with a good case and witnesses.” He feels as though his daughter has put him on the defensive. She is young, “twelve,” but she is also insistent and he knows she has a point. She goes on to push him with questions about his wife who is downstairs flirting with his best friend. She is “fierce” in confronting the truth that he would rather avoid as he sits in his room writing about faith rather than insisting on faithfulness.

Westland

In “Westland,” Warren observes Earl’s new woman, Jody. He says: “she was pretty in the details, and when she looked at Earl, the lenses enlarged those eyes, so that their love was large and naked and obvious.” He doesn’t describe her eyes as doe-like, but the image is there all the same. Warren sees Jody as innocent, more innocent than Jaynee. Jody is not a classic beauty, but Warren finds her “obvious” devotion to Earl attractive but also simple. Warren with his background in therapy is observing a messy family dynamic between Earl, Jody, and Jaynee and he is simultaneously pulled in by the bareness of their relationships to one another and also repelled by the obvious dysfunction.

The Old Fascist in Retirement

When the old fascist in “The Old Fascist in Retirement” observes “that rare green scent of oak leaves that American women sometimes carried with them: the odor of innocence, the odor of what-if-everybody,” he is reacting as much to the woman’s culture as to her. The word “green” connotes freshness and his repetition of the word “odor” implies stench more than other words he could have used like “aroma” or “smell.” And his reference to “what if everybody” is a direct rebuke of the openness of American culture in contrast to his own. He later goes on to talk about the sense of history of the long-living oak tree.

The implication of meaning is also something I enjoyed in Grace Paley’s writing. I like the unexpectedness of some of Baxter’s phraseology. The viewing of one character through the eyes of another is something I enjoyed in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing. This colorful observation of one character by another gives the reader a rich view of both characters. I can learn from the economy of describing two characters at one time. One is described explicitly and the other implicitly through the author’s careful portrayal of what is important to that character. It allows a deeper understanding of the character. The grace with which Baxter introduces an abstract idea and then elucidates it just enough to get the reader’s mind moving around the possibilities implied by the words he has chosen is enviable.

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

Life in Greyscale: Ha Jin’s Saboteur in The Bridegroom

May 16, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

In Ha Jin’s collection of stories, The Bridegroom, the protagonists are powerless to effect any real change in their circumstance. At best they can hope for vengeance by spreading disease or peeing on purslanes. Ha creates this feeling of constraint and hopelessness in “Saboteur” by tightly controlling his delivery of words.

Through his use of short words within short sentences, Ha subjects the reader to a staccato feeling and gives the effect of tight control. “The rice and cucumber tasted good, and Mr. Chiu was eating unhurriedly.” His sentences rarely include more than two short clauses and he uses few words over three syllables. Even when sentences do run longer, the clauses are short as in the following: “During the two weeks’ vacation, he had been worried about his liver, because three months ago he had suffered from acute hepatitis; he was afraid he might have a relapse.” Ha presents the shortest sentences of all in his dialogue. For example, this exchange between Mr. Chiu and a policeman:

“See, you dumped tea on our feet.”
“You’re lying. You wet your shoes yourself.”
“Comrade Policeman, your duty is to keep order, but you purposely tortured us common citizens. Why violate the laws you are supposed to enforce?”

The policeman’s speech is even more clipped than Mr. Chiu’s. It portrays the policeman’s relationship to the authoritarian government. He has to say very little for his consequences to be understood. Mr. Chiu, on the other hand, in his longish sentence, is trying to assert his rights within the very system that is denying them. Though his sentences are longer, he is speaking the same terse language. Although the abruptness of Ha’s sentences could be a function of writing in a second language, they could also be carefully crafted to make the reader feel the tight constraints of the government and by consequence the society that the characters feel.

Contributing to the sparseness of Ha’s sentences is the fact that he uses few adjectives. The adjectives he does use are more often merely descriptive: sunny, stout, and wet. The most dramatic adjectives he presents are athletic, sallow, and spacious. I was left wondering if the setting was as truly unremarkable as he portrayed it, and I felt the disinterest of the characters in the world around them. Mr. Chiu had never been in Muji before, but he notices on no beauty or ugliness, only the activity of people. This led me to believe that the world Ha was writing about was one in which beauty, and by consequence joy, had no place. I felt the flatness of Mr. Chiu’s life.

In a world of arbitrary rule, Mr. Chiu was only able to seek justice through an act of subversion after the fact. Ha highlights the “after the fact” feeling by sending the reader this teletype: “Within a month over eight hundred people contracted acute hepatitis in Muji. Six died of the disease, including two children. Nobody knew how the epidemic had started.” It is a spit in the face, a final laugh for Mr. Chiu, but it is a punch line delivered after all the actors have left the stage. The bare presentation of the facts conveyed feels as unsatisfying as the act must have been for Mr. Chiu. There is revenge, but no justice, for Mr. Chiu.

My own characters are very different from Ha Jin’s. They have hope for a life beyond their circumstance and when they act, it is with the understanding that despite the odds, there are potential personal rewards. They exist in a world worth fighting for, and I’d like to think my sentences convey that sense of beauty and ugliness that come together as life. If I need to present a situation or a character that is tightly regimented, I can learn from Ha’s tight, short sentences, and if I need a world that feels flat and hopeless, I will consider paring adjectives down to the most essential.

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

Characterizing Chekhov’s “The Darling”

May 14, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA 1 Comment

In Anton Chekhov’s “The Darling” from the collection Stories, Olenka is a caregiver to the point that she subsumes her identity to mimic that of the one she cares for. By approaching the topic through description and explanatory sentences, Chekhov fully immerses the reader in the story.

Chekhov names the nature of Olenka’s character early in the story in the following passage: “She was always fond of some one [sic], and could not exist without loving.” He then mentions some of the family members she has loved. But prior to this, her husband, Ivan Petrovitch Kukin, (aka Vanitchka) has had a large blowup about the vulgarity of the patrons of the story. I was drawn into the drama of Kukin and didn’t see this first clue, the subtle unfurling of Olenka’s personality. When she first parrots his opinion, “‘But do you suppose the public understands that?’” I thought we were seeing an action she would habitually take, but I didn’t yet realize this was the key to her nature. It isn’t until Chekhov revealed that the actors referred to her as “Vanitchka and I” that I got the point.

All of the details of the story point to the revelation about Olenka that she becomes a mirror of the one she loves; and Chekhov says it plainly several times. But because he says it plainly and also demonstrates through the action of the characters (I would argue that he never goes into full-blown scenes), the reader is enveloped by Olenka and her nature, rather than being assaulted from one direction. If, for example, Chekhov had simply told the reader over and over what Olenka was like, it would have felt hollow. If he had shown us her nature through action only, we might not have gotten the point. It is precisely this marriage of exposition and explanation that makes the story so rich. And because his explanatory sentences are so simple and direct, they don’t feel like an assault to the reader’s understanding of the story. They feel like an insight not a direction.

Regarding Olenka’s second husband, Chekhov shows her consumed by his lumber business as she “dreamed of perfect mountains of planks and boards, and long strings of wagons, carting timber far away.” He then goes on the say, “Her husband’s ideas were hers.” The entire story is woven with the warp of exposition and the weft of explanation. When Olenka is alone and she fails to muster opinions, Chekhov gives a beautiful description of her wasting away. He also tells us, “she had no opinions of any sort.”

When she begins caring for the veterinarian’s son, Chekhov writes, “Now she had opinions of her own.” What is interesting is the opinions are still not on matters that pertain to her daily life, but rather to the boy’s schooling. Her devotion continues, even when the object is less willing.

It is a short story, eleven pages in the collection I read, but it is a full story. Because Chekhov focuses on this one aspect of Olenka’s character and because he approaches it from more than one angle, the reader is enveloped in a world that is all about Olenka’s assumption of her loved ones’ worries and opinions.

I often worry that I am over-explaining things, but this story showed me that it is possible to go into minute detail about something as long as it is fully explored and done through more than one method. Olenka’s nature was evidently important to express, Chekhov based an entire story on it. It will be important for me to selective about the things I highlight in this way (although I can choose to highlight more because I am working on a novel and not a short story), but if I don’t explain them and expose them, they may not be in the story in the way I want them to. Storytelling is seduction.

A note on the [sic]: obviously I am reading a work in translation, but the use of “some one” versus “someone” more than once in the story made me want to know if this would be as peculiar in Russian or if the translation was somewhat outdated. I couldn’t help but think that the translator was trying to convey the nuance of Chekhov’s phraseology by stressing the individual “one.” Of course, I have no evidence either direction, but it certainly enhanced my understanding of the story.

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