Do we need back story?

I heard an interview on NPR this evening with the novelist Colm Toibin, in which he was asked an unusual question, unusual at least for the evening news. The reporter had heard that, in his fiction workshops, he opposed back story, and she wondered is this was true. I didn't hear his answer, as I was loudly frying up some garlic and onions. But the question got me thinking.

"Back story" is what fiction nerds call flashbacks--things that have happened before the events of a story or novel's main temporal territory, and which are delivered to us either in the form of a character's memory, or, in the case of a less close third person, a bit of narratorial trickery. Back story, for the experienced reader, is essentially invisible--we're accustomed to being yanked around in time, in a book. So it doesn't generally create confusion.

There are disadvantages to using it, though. One is that it breaks up the rhythm of the narrative. If that's what you're trying to do--write a disjointed story that mirrors the mind's own scope and reach--then fine. But if you're not, you might not get your desired result. Back story also puts the narrative at risk for accidentally explaining all the nuance and mystery out of itself. In my new novel, Castle, I actually took this risk, intruding upon a mostly linear narrative with a violent event from the narrator's past. My intention was to explore how the character's memory works, and the way events in the present cause him to think about things he'd rather avoid. But it's possible that some readers will think I'm being reductive--that the back story serves to "explain" all that comes later. This is a bad thing, in a novel, when present events are shown to be the direct result of past events--we know that real life is stranger than that, and more interesting.

I just read Denis Johnson's new novel, Nobody Move. It's a real cracker--the tight, spare prose style of Jesus' Son brought to bear on a fast-paced crime story. And while it's not completely linear, it relies very little on back story to move the narrative forward. We get all the details we need from the way the characters talk, feel, and behave. (One of these characters, a villain named Gambol, is a marvelously memorable creation, cruel, shrewd, and filled with unexpected joie de vivre.)

I always get excited about something when I am deep in the middle of doing something else--in this case, a long, flashback-soaked literary novel. But Johnson and Toibin have got me thinking about other ways to work. Maybe sometime next year I'll try a new tack--a "slim vol" that doesn't have much to say, and never looks back.

(And by the way, thanks to all of you who came to my readings in Portland and Seattle last week! Those are always good towns for a book tour, and this time around I had my best events yet.)

Tree of Smoke

Well! For a little while there, during the holidays, it seemed like I might never finish Denis Johnson's new book. Those first 200 pages require a certain degree of concentration which, in the throes of the holiday season, I was only barely up for. It was the writing that kept me going--the unexpected, and unexpectedly apt, knots of prose; the blackly comic character observations; the small, rich, bizarre bits of aliveness that surfaced in surprising places. The book lacked momentum, though--and while I would have been happy to read another 400 pages like that, my eventual praise might have been grudging.

Johnson is one of my favorite writers, but, although he's written more novels than anything else, his novels have always been the least satisfying (to this reader) of his books. His stories and poems were what really got my motor running--the novels were like abandoned farms out of which beautiful things sometimes implausibly sprung. I wanted to think he had a great one in him, but I wasn't confident that he did. Angels came close, and I liked the slight but shapely The Name of the World. Every time, though, it felt like he was trying, and failing, to break through some big old snowbank. The beginning of this book was good, but it begged the question--is this all going somewhere, or is it just a big mess?

And then the thing just caught fire, and all the paths began to converge, and I read the rest of the book in desperate hundred-page gulps. It's really good. There's even a plot, and it's a fairly simple one, in the end: F. X. Sands, a CIA agent, manages to put into motion, at the outset of the Vietnam War, a grand, brilliant, and ultimately pointless plan, by the force of nothing more than his gargantuan charisma--and ends up ruining a lot of people's lives. The book is populated by his followers and victims, very few of whom come out of the war--or the book--with anything resembling a viable life.

It's the details that are complicated, and this is why the first third of the novel is hard going. The characters are introduced, and their relationship to Sands; none of them know what he's up to, and none of them ever really will. What Johnson gives us is the map of their confusion, and for a time, their confusion is our confusion. But when the war reaches the characters--Sands has commandeered a mountaintop for reasons nobody quite understands, and it is forced to endure the Tet Offensive--we are suddenly reading a page-turner, a thriller. Sands' plan, what there ever was of it, unravels, and the momentum of the novel comes from its unraveling.

Johnson never seemed able to figure out a way to bring the deadpan, sideways motion of his stories into a novel, let alone a long one. The style was there, but the purpose seemed lost. Here, he's made it happen, and the novel is purposeful, elegant, beautifully balanced, yet as idiosyncratic and peculiar as anything he's written. The dialogue reads like an endlessly unfolding series of miracles--it's just masterful lit-verité, and a joy to read. The violence is very real and utterly unadorned. Madness (a common destination for many characters here) is rendered with aching plausibility and deep sadness. Also, the book is often hilarious, sometimes mere moments before it becomes horrifying. It's this great lurching thing that somehow manages to seem balletic and beautiful--a weird, lopsided masterpiece.

Johnson's coming to Cornell for the semester, by the way, and with any luck I'll get the opportunity to interview him for the podcast, when his reading comes around. Stay tuned for that. Meanwhile, read this perfectly flawed piece of work, it's great.

A Damned Good Sentence

That would be one among many in the new Denis Johnson, which I'm slogging my way through presently. Slogging not because it's bad--in fact, so far, it's awesome. But because there are tons of characters engaged in situations whose import is not yet clear, and I'm tired and usually a glass and a half of wine into my evening when I sit down to read it.

So. Here, a priest is on a ten-kilometer walk down a dirt road. It gets extremely windy. And then:

An infestation of tiny black beetles numerous as raindrops roamed the gusts and sailed past.

So there you have it. That is a great sentence. It isn't raining, see, but the beetles are creating a kind of rain. But he doesn't use a simile for it--"beetles fell like raindrops," or "beetles flew throught the air like rain"--instead, he says they're numerous as raindrops, thus telling you how many there are while putting the idea of rain into your head. That is a high-level bit of technique right there. Okay, and then the beetles, they're not just allowing the wind to carry them. They're trying to fly, right?--so he has to try to describe the way the beetles are flying, but really they are being blown more than they're flying, but they are still flying.

roamed the gusts

That is just perfect. They're good with this, the beetles--they're riding in the wind and flying around within it. It's all of a piece. They roamed the gusts and sailed past.

That's the kind of sentence that separates great writers from competent ones. It isn't fancy, it isn't "impressive," it isn't trying to prove anything. It is just saying this one particular thing as eloquently and efficiently as possible. It packs the words with more meaning than they look like they can hold. The book is full of sentences like that, which is why it's taking some time for me to get through it...it's very rich. But it's very, very good.

An aside, too: Rhian just emailed me this reminiscence of W6 hero Stanley Elkin by writer Abby Frucht. You might check it out.

Novel Excerpts

I must say that I dislike most mainstream magazines' reluctance to admit that the short story you are reading is actually a novel excerpt. Sometimes you can tell, and sometimes you can't, and sometimes you suspect that what you're reading is an excerpt, because the writer's bio says that a new novel is coming out; and sometimes you wonder if maybe the thing you are certain is a novel excerpt is in fact a short story which just happens to have been published with a novel fast on its heels.

Anyway, there's a new Denis Johnson story in the New Yorker, which is kind of a big deal. Has he published any at all since Jesus' Son? I certainly can't remember any. This one's called "1966," and it's pretty good, and I'm sure everyone else has already posted about it. But Johnson has a new novel coming out in September, and maybe it's really an excerpt.

The thing is, there is a quality that a lot of excerpts have--a kind of artful lopsidedness, a feeling of unseen events unfolding--that can be very appealing. In fact, this quality is something I think maybe I should strive for in short stories--this sense that there are other things happening, somewhere, but that only their shadows fall across the page. Such pieces look like something glanced out the window of a speeding car, like the woman I saw today on State Street having a loud argument with two companions, exerting herself, sweating and red, over an umbrella-style stroller containing an uncomfortable-looking baby.

Anyway, if the Johnson piece is a short story, it's better than if it's a novel excerpt, because he achieved that feeling without the absent novel. It's still enjoyable as an excerpt, though. I like this bit very much:

From his waistband he pulled a blue-steel .45 automatic and aimed it at the man, and the man dropped like a puppet with its strings cut and disappeared. Right at that time Houston heard an explosion. He tried to understand where this noise had come from, to find some explanation for it other than that Kinney had just shot this man in the chest.

...

The crazy bum said, "That's pretty nifty, man. I think you won that conversation."

I love how the sights arrive before the sounds, the way the two are separate things, like an excerpt and its parent novel.

What Makes A Good Story Collection?

Story collections are funny things. Unlike novels, they don't really benefit from any established structural or thematic models on which the writer can rely. They are generally whatever short stories the writer has written since the last collection. Sometimes this makes for a lovely, unified whole, as in the case of some Alice Munro collections (they're all terrific, IMHO, but a few seem more of a piece than others), or perhaps Salinger's Nine Stories, which I still love, perhaps for sentimental reasons.

Some collections are really disguised novels, like Munro's Lives of Girls and Women--which come to think of it used to be officially designated a collection, and is now designated a novel. Her collection The Beggar Maid is just as unified, though, with a recurring character, and that one's still called a collection. Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son is another collection with a recurring character, known only as "Fuckhead." I love that one--it still seems fresh and new to me, after fifteen years.

Anyway, I'm trying to put one together--or rather, I've been putting one together stealthily for ages. Since my novel-in-progress needs a break before I launch into the third draft (Rhian and our neighbor Bob had lots of suggestions), it seems like a good time to take the endeavor more seriously, and see if my agent can drum up come interest in these stories. I like the bunch, and think it reads pretty well, but what do I know? It's what I spent the last five years thinking about, in easily digestible chunks. It's kind of interesting to see what ideas keep occurring to me, after I've forgotten I already wrote about them--shlumpy men married to crazy women who are smarter than they are, is one of them; another is secret rooms. There are a lot of long drives to distant places undertaken on a whim, and the supernatural pops up in one story out of three.

Time will tell if there's even a market for collections anymore--that is, non-first-book collections. It seems like a story collection by an established, and not terribly great-selling, novelist is pretty low on the hipness scale these days. That's a shame, and not just because I've got a collection to sell--I love to see what crazy stuff has been on my favorite writers' minds, stuff they didn't deem worthy of an entire novel. Sometimes these are the best ideas of all.