More with less, again

I've been obsessively thinking about that New York Times piece by Elmore Leonard that Pale Ramón posted in the comments a couple weeks back. In it, Leonard makes the case for spare prose, and offers up some basic rules to follow, summarizing it all with "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."

A lot of it is stuff you've heard before (don't use adverbs). But there are a couple of really surprising things in this list, and they are "avoid detailed descriptions of characters," and "don't go into great detail describing places and things." When you think about it, these constitute fairly radical advice. He's telling you not to describe stuff, pretty much at all. Whatever faults Leonard's books may have, a lack of vividness is not among them. So how does he do it?

It's all about the power of suggestion. The more readers are forced to invent on their own, the more invested they become in the story. The key is to sketch the right lines, so that the detailed picture forms itself in the reader's mind. I am reminded of David Hockney's "greatest drawing ever made," a simple sketch by Rembrandt that has perhaps the largest meaning-to-content ratio of anything I've ever looked at.

I've spent the past week trying to get students to put fewer words on the page--by coincidence, this seems to be the #1 problem in my classes so far this semester. And as I embark on another new possible novel project, I am beginning to envision a slim volume, sketched out with the faintest of lines. I just finished Don Delillo's highly spare and stylized new book, and while I don't adore it, it makes me very excited. To write this way requires a leap of faith, and a level of judiciousness that, to be honest, I have never actually attempted to achieve.

As long as I'm demanding it of my students, I might as well give it a try.

Final Thoughts on Don DeLillo's Falling Man

One of the most significant parts of my experience of 9-11 -- comfortably far away upstate -- was reading the little biographies of the victims in the Times. I tried to read all of them. Every single person seemed so interesting, and every life so complex and full, that the hugeness of the loss (3000 of those big rich lives) was made real.

So I couldn't help but wonder why DeLillo chose his main character, a numb, zombied-out businessman named Keith. All those potential characters, plus of course the imagination's limitless offerings, and he chooses this guy? Keith copes with the death of his friends and his own narrow escape from the towers by first returning to his ex-wife, then having an affair with another tower survivor, and then going to Las Vegas and playing poker. There is definitely something right about these ways of dealing with what happened to him (retreating to the past, seeking connection, then trying to exploit his good luck -- sounds like post 9-11 America all right) but it's not that interesting, mostly because he is just an empty suit.

I tried and tried to engage with this book, but I couldn't. I even found it hard to stop seeing the words on the page, to sink into the consciousness of the novel. It remained, stubbornly, an intellectual exercise. The writing, though of course brilliant at times (it is DeLillo!) is stylized and conscious of itself, and the dialogue is exactly like a David Mamet play. Everyone sounds the same.

In Michiko Kakutani's review of the book, she asks if maybe it's just an impossible literary task to "grapple convincingly with those actual events, without being eclipsed by the documentary testimony (from newspaper articles, television footage and still photographs) still freshly seared in readers’ minds." True enough. But is that the only problem? Because I can imagine a 9-11 novel succeeding as a specific character's interpretation of those events -- something incredibly personal and idiosyncratic. I couldn't write it (God forbid) but someone could, and maybe someone has. I'm still looking, though.

Don DeLillo in the New Yorker

I just read DeLillo's new story in the NYer, though it's really an excerpt from the new novel that's coming in July. Since I've read about half of Falling Man (and it's not among the books we've put in Self-Storage) it was pretty familiar. In fact, it was so familiar, I couldn't really enjoy it. In fact, I kind of hated it.

I'm a fan of Don DeLillo because I like White Noise and Libra and because he has his own thing he works hard at -- a vision. Also, he's just plain talented, and a person has to respect that. But I couldn't read Underworld because of the excerpt he published in Harper's, a story he called "Pafko at the Wall." It was about baseball, which was bad enough, but it was also incredibly self-conscious. Forget it! JRL told me Underworld was great but I didn't have the stomach for it.

It's weird, though: when I was reading the New Yorker story I kept thinking, Hm, people are going to think this is pretty hot stuff. Yep, that bit there, pretty amazing! But at the same time, the material was so tired. It could be that I just read Ken Kalfus's book, which is about a very similar subject (man is in one of the Towers, survives, and it changes his personal relationships) or it could just be in the air. Or... it could be that DeLillo's style and his reputation overwhelms his subject. I found myself thinking that I couldn't even tell if the story was good or not, because I have all this backlog of feeling about DeLillo, and about 9-11, and about New Yorker stories.

I hated the excerpt because of the telegraphic dialog, which is meant to sound like real people talking but actually sounds like fake affected literary people, and because of the easy real-life drama. And -- and here I'm crawling very carefully out on a limb -- because it feels like DeLillo has appointed himself Voice of the Nation. I'm sure he didn't mean this, but reading that story I felt like I was being told how to interpret that day in 2001, and somehow that feels wrong.

I haven't talked to anyone else who's read it yet so I'm curious what people think about it.

New Don DeLillo: Falling Man

It's probably too early to post about this book, since it isn't coming out until June, but it's what I've been reading as part of my 9-11 jag. My first thought upon seeing the galley -- the cover's a giant cloudscape, with the tops of the little WTC towers poking through, and that title -- was Wow, how much nerve does that take?! It's clear thatDeLillo's intention was to write the 9-11 book. Well, okay, who else?

Still. Claiming that image for the title of your book takes, well, balls of steel. It had better be good. It had better be the best possible book about 9-11, ever. And, well, I'm only half way through, so I'm withholding judgment.

It's interesting, though. Having lived vicariously through 9-11 the first time, and again when reading Ken Kalfus's book, and now with this book... I find it hard not to feel a little deja vuey. Both Kalfus's and DeLillo's books start with a similar character: a business man who survives the collapse of towers and whose secret experience there begins to alienate them from regular life. You can almost see the screenplay. Not that that's a bad thing.