Foreign Crime Roundup

It's time once again to review the latest in foreign crime novels--as Rhian mentioned, we're at the shore, and so I had Amazon (sorry, independent bookstore supporters--if you can find somebody else who can get my the British books I crave, I will switch in a heartbeat) send me a few new ones for perusal on the beach.

(And let me say first that I am not actually reading these on the beach. I love the ocean, but I hate the beach--my skin is the color of an oak desk even in January and I don't need a tan. So it's off to the beach for swimming, and back to the air-conditioned rental for books.)

Anyway, I'm reading four new novels, two of which I'll discuss in this post--Hakan Nesser's The Return and The New Ruth Rendell, Not In The Flesh. The Rendell first--this book is the latest Chief Inspector Wexford mystery, and I am sad to say that, while it's pretty entertaining, it does not quite measure up to her best. The supporting cast of this long-running series has become rather cartoonish in this installment, and--in a very, very un-Rendellian mistake--an obvious clue appears halfway through that gives it all away. There are other Wexford books in which this seems to happen, but it's always a trick--the real answer is tucked away somewhere you would never have thought to look. This time, however, it's the real thing, and is something of a disappointment, though I'd pick middling Rendell over a lot of crime writers' best, any day. In addition, I'm not saying Rendell has lost her touch--the last Barbara Vine book was one of my favorites ever. If it's Wexford you want, though, go check out Kissing The Gunner's Daughter or Road Rage.

More satisfying is the Nesser, which I'd had no particular expectation for--the first of this Swede's novels to be translated, Borkmann's Point, was pretty decent, but not among my favorite recent Scandanavian mysteries. This new one is terrific, though. Inspector Van Veeteren, the series' gruff protagonist, is in the hospital having a length of intestine removed, and takes it upon himself to solve the crime from his bed. A man convicted of two murders is released from prison and is soon murdered himself; the subsequent investigation uncovers information that leads Van Veeteren to suspect that the man might be innocent of the first two killings. The book is smart, philosophical, and dryly written, and I was utterly blindsided by the shocking ending.

I just cracked the new Arnaldur Indridason, and have the latest Karin Fossum on deck--the latter is one of my favorite writers currently and I've saved her for last. I'll post about them in the coming days.

The Letters of Gus Flaubert

I'll confess right now: I'm writing this from the Jersey Shore (potential bad guys: don't even think of breaking into our house and stealing our stuff. We have a house sitter and fourteen attack chickens) and it's a lot easier to stare into the misty distance or eat clams than to try and come up with something vaguely literary to say. But in addition to a stack of true crime paperbacks, I brought my copy of the letters of Flaubert (Vol. 1 seems only available used, but Vol. 2 is still in print). I love the letters of Flannery O'Connor and those of Virginia Woolf, but there's something about Flaubert's that affirms my feelings about being a writer and reminds why I want to keep doing it, in spite of how rough (or in my case, non-existent) the progress is. So forgive me if I use this post to share some of my favorite excerpts (all from the first volume -- I left the second at home).

Here's a good bit, from a letter to his lover, a poet named Louise Colet:

"Since my humor is particularly bad today (and frankly my heart is heavy with it), I'll drain it to the last drop. You talk about your "days of pride," when "people seek you out, flatter you," etc. Come! Those are days of weakness, days you should blush for. I'll tell you which are your days of pride. When you're home at night in your oldest dressing gown, with {baby} Henriette getting on your nerves, the fire smoking and money worries and other troubles looming large, and you get ready for bed with heavy heart and weary mind; when you walk restlessly up and down your room, telling yourself there isn't a soul you can count on, that you have been abandoned by all; and then -- somewhere underneath your dejection as a woman you feel the stirring of the muse, deep within you something begins to sing, to sing something joyous and solemn, like a hymn, a challenge flung in the face of life, a surge of confidence in your own strength, the flaring-up of works to come. The days when that happens to you are your days of pride."

Flaubert would not appreciate our culture's melding of literature and marketing. When his friend suggested he would achieve greater success if he moved to Paris and took part in the literary scene there, he said,

"I am aiming at something better -- to please myself. Success seems to me a result, not the goal ... I have conceived a manner of writing and a nobility of language that I want to attain. When I think that I have harvested my fruit I shan't refuse to sell it, nor shall I forbid hand-clapping if it is good. In the meantime I do not wish to fleece the public. That's all there is to it."

Writing was difficult for him, and he took it absolutely seriously. But his prose is unlabored and full of humor. He said,

"I like clear, sharp sentences, sentences which stand erect, erect while running -- almost an impossibility. The ideal of prose has reached an unheard-of degree of difficulty: there must be no more archaisms, cliches; contemporary ideas must be expressed using the appropriate crude terms; everything must be as clear as Voltaire, as abrim with substance as Montaigne, as vigorous as La Bruyere, and always streaming with color."

Awfully inspiring in these days of compulsory cynicism.

Daniil Kharms's "So It Is In Life"

This week's New Yorker story is a series of vignettes--if you could call them that--by an obscure early-twentieth-century Russian writer whose prose has not appeared in English before. Reading them, I wondered how many people like this guy are out there, waiting to be translated and appreciated by a worldwide audience. According to the introduction to these pieces (translated by Matvei Yankelevich, Simona Schneider, and Eugene Ostaeshevsky), Daniil Kharms was a founder of an avant-garde Russian artists' group called OBERIU, was arrested for anti-Soviet activities in 1931, was exiled, arrested again, and died in a prison mental hospital in 1942.

The most obvious comparison is to Babel, both in his lithe, unpredictable prose style and life history--but the stories remind me most of one of my favorite collections, Thomas Bernhard's The Voice Imitator, which I brutally plundered for a similar book of my own. They have the same wry, bitter detachment, though Kharms's pieces are most noteworthy for their unusual habit of veering off onto some tangent and ending there. A fairly static story about a sick man who whiles away his time, listlessly, in his quiet apartment, suddenly shifts when the man realizes he has forgotten some important word, perhaps beginning with "M" and perhaps beginning with "R." The piece ends:

I was making coffee and singing to myself all the words that started with "R." Oh, what a tremendous number of words I made up beginning with the letter "R"! Perhaps among them was that one word, but I didn't recognize it, taking to be the same as all the others.

Then again, perhaps that word didn't come up.

Come to think of it, that ending is pure Lydia Davis--another W6 favorite. There's a colleciton of this stuff coming out in the fall, and these excerpts suggest that it might well be a new classic in the literature of the non-sequitur. Bring it!

Barbara Gowdy's "Helpless"

I have alluded, a couple of times I think, to the awesomeness of Barbara Gowdy on this blog, but I based my opinion on only one novel--the audacious, utterly unexpected masterpiece The White Bone. This is a book about elephants. Just elephants. All the characters are elephants, thinking elephantine thoughts. It sounds like the stupidest book in the world, but it is amazing.

So a few weeks back I found her latest novel, Helpless, at the bookstore Rhian works at, and I bought it even though it's about a nine-year-old being kidnapped by a pedophile. I put off reading it for a long while, then started it last night at last, before going to bed.

I didn't sleep much, and I didn't do much today except read the thing. It is freaking marvelous, and Gowdy is now officially one of my favorite living writers. The book is written in a roving third person, and we are privy to the thoughts of the girl, Rachel, who is kidnapped; her mother, Celia; the kidnapper, Ron; and Ron's girlfriend, Nancy. All of them--and I mean all of them--are fully drawn, and the villains, Ron and Nancy, are stunningly sympathetic. Throughout, you are rooting for a happy ending, but you're rooting less for the bad guys to be caught than for the bad guys to think better of being bad. You want them to win, by allowing their better selves to emerge. There is no question of Gowdy supporting their actions, but she embraces their humanness as completely as she does that of Rachel and her mother--more, in fact, because Ron and Nancy are the standout figures here, absolutely convincing, and fascinating to watch. Ron's battle against his sickness is moving and harrowing; even more maddening is Nancy's struggle to beat through the wall of her clumsiness and gullibility. The book is about people who want to do the right thing, when they have already failed to do it and have rendered it almost impossible to do. It is a sad, gripping story.

Those who read my posts know I love crime novels, but this book--a literary outing through and through--is a better crime novel than any crime novel I've read in a long time. With only the faintest semblance of plot, it strikes you with the force of a flat-out, nail-biting white knuckler.

The funny thing is, if this were an American novel (Gowdy is Canadian), it might well become "controversial," presuming as it does that a pedophile is a human being, a kind of presumption that is not looked upon kindly here. I'm reminded a bit of the recent film The Woodsman (not a Canadian production as far as I know, so maybe my theory's shot), a movie in which Kevin Bacon plays a sympathetic pedophile. The movie's good, but it's not as good as this book--what seems like wishful thinking on the film's part is presented in Gowdy's novel as unalienable truth.

Anyway, I had avoided reading Gowdy's other stuff in the wake of The White Bone, for fear that I wouldn't like it quite as much. Helpless has broken the back of that irrational fear.

Sven Birkerts is Wrong

Ed of Ed Rants comments on an anti-blog essay by Sven Birkerts published in a recent Boston Globe. It is worth taking a look at.

Birkert's essay strikes one as more Barbarians-at-the-gates hand-wringing from someone safely ensconced inside the gates, thank you, who is not ready to give up his comfy place. (I confess a long and conflicted mental relationship with Sven Birkerts, who has always championed print media and could fairly be described as a Luddite. I, too, am something of a Luddite. I don't have a cell phone -- in fact, until recently, JRL and I had one of those old dial things. Never had a dishwasher. I love, love, LOVE books as objects, and will never buy an e-Book, and my dearest wish is to own a letterpress -- okay, Luddite cred established. But the feeling his work gives me is annoyed and conflicted. It's too late at night to explore this, especially since I started this post last night, but suffice it to say that although I find his basic argument to be true -- Print IS Good -- I find him to be not quite smart and well-argued enough.)

Birkert's essay says that, after a tentative exploration of the blogosphere, Sven is not not convinced that all this amateur reviewing is really a good thing -- that the days when a few select newspapers and magazines had a lock on opinion were better. The recent decision of several larger papers to ditch their book review sections seems to have brought this on. But this is where Birkerts errs -- bloggers are not the enemy. The enemy, Sven, are the robber baron owners of newspapers and media conglomerates who have killed off the world of print criticism.

(I admit that it's hard for me to get too worked up about the loss of the book review pages in newspapers (as much as I loved getting newspaper reviews of my novel sent via fax (hahahaha -- fax!)) when a more dire problem is the complete and total suckification of newspapers and mass media in general.)

And if Sven were sitting at my side right now, we could find many, many very intelligently written reviews of his work on the internet, and he knows it. Probably some dumb ones, too -- but Birkerts might be surprised to discover that most people who read all the way through one of his books are actually quite sharp. In any case, it really isn't the content of internet blogging that pisses Sven off. It's the format, and specifically, the lack of a Gatekeeper.

This is what the blog-dissers keep coming back to: there is no Authority on the internet to make sure that what it written on it is smart and wise. There is a lot of blah-blah-blah in Birkerts's essay, but the gist is this: without smart, educated wise men deciding what gets published and what doesn't, how can we know What Is Good?

I'll tell you, Sven: we know what is good by reading, reading, reading and reading some more. We actually don't need Charles McGrath telling us what to read. The internet gives us easy access to an enormous amount of opinion, and you know what? That is good. Fifty opinions might not be better than one, carefully-vetted, well-paid, possibly biased opinion, but it certainly gives one more to think about. The NYTimes is not keeping culture alive by paying writers to review their best friends or their prep-school enemies. Yes, it publishes some awfully good criticism, but if the NYTBR were to dry and blow away tomorrow, those excellent reviews would find another venue. The mediocre ones, too.

What the vaunted Authorities do is keep some ideas from being heard. An editor's main job these days is rejecting, is shutting up. The internet is shutting up no one, not even Michiko Kakutani (though who knows, maybe in the future, Rupert Murdoch will be) but is instead allowing all kinds of other folk to speak, too. Honestly, Sven, look in your heart! Is that bad?

(A better argument for Birkerts would be: too much. How can we have a dialogue about the latest critical review of whomever when there are 10,000 articles, and everyone has read a different one? I'd argue that, for our culture, it's already too late. Even writers talk more about movies than books, because there's a better chance that someone in the room has seen the same movie as you than has read the same book. Of course, on the internet, it's easy to find some to discuss whatever minor review you've read...)

If Birkerts really did look in his heart, he'd know that what he's freaked out about is his own irrelevence. He shouldn't be. Print and the internet can, and do, coexist. Though newspapers may well die off -- and soon -- print magazines will hang around a bit longer, and books will last throughout my lifetime, at least. Because people like them.

But even if books stopped being printed, it wouldn't be that bad. It would make me cry, for sure. Because I love books. But: books are just paper. In the end, what matters are human ideas and thoughts and dreams and arguments. They're never going away.

Fun Home Revisited

I just wanted the opportunity to weigh in on Fun Home, which I bought last week and Rhian swiped (and posted about!) before I got a chance to read. I read it, and I have to agree with Rhian, it's fantastic.

I always thought DTWOF was a pretty good strip--Bechdel's drawing style has always appealed to me, and her characters are strong. But the strip was always a little too relentlessly contemporary for my taste, tending to focus more on the intersection of character and politics than that of character and memory. The latter being the milieu I hold most dear.

Wow, the book certainly gave me what I wanted. It's brilliant--the perfect blend of reminiscence, analysis, erudition and inspiration. Plus there's lots of stuff about Proust and Joyce in it, not to mention some hot and heavy lovin'.

There is one drawing of Bechdel's family sprawled out in their museumesque living room, sloppily going about their lives--playing with cars and Tinkertoys, watching TV, and so on. Her detached, aesthete father is scrunched up between the fainting couch and the bookcase with a big bucket of fried chicken in his lap, and I find this image amazingly moving--the kind of perfect character detail that literary fiction is supposed to be providing for our culture, but hasn't bothered to for some time. At the same time I was reading the new Acme Novelty Library and the latest from Paul Hornschemeier, and while they're both good (particularly the Ware, whose Jimmy Corrigan is one of the greatest examples of the form ever), Bechdel has them both beat. Fun Home is pretty much perfect, right down to the last panel.

Why I Will Never Do Another Reading

Yesterday I forgot to post because I spent the day whipping Casa W6 into shape before a post-reading dinner party we held for our friend Jeffrey Frank, whose Trudy Hopedale was published this month. It was a great, fun reading, but it reminded me of my vow to never read out loud to people on folding chairs ever again. (Jeff said he had made the same vow, but broke it. Not me!)

Mostly it's because I get really, really nervous, and the anxious fallout from such an event more than cancels out whatever pleasure I might get from it. Forget it! But it's also because I don't really like most readings. I love going to friends' readings because I love my friends, and it's incredibly fun to see how the friend I know shows up in the work when they read it out loud. (Not so for spouse readings, which are generally too close for comfort.)

But I still subscribe to the idea that literature is a private pleasure. I know, I know -- I'm supposed to appreciate the storyteller-around-the-campfire thing, and I do. (Looking forward to the annual Jersey Shore trip with JRL's anecdote-laden family.) That's something different, though. A novel or a short story written by a person alone in a small room is meant to be read by a person alone, possibly in a small room, or else in a library carrel or in a park or on the bus. But definitely alone. A book is written from one mouth to one ear. That's an illusion, because there are thousands (or millions) of copies of each book printed. But when you read it, it's you and the writer, alone in a perfect intimate space. No laughing at the wrong places, no espresso machine cranking up, no surprising accent or mannerisms. Just the work.

Books About Music, Music About Books

No post yesterday, because we lost phone, internet, and power for a spell. Looks like a phone pole got struck by lightning--NYSEG came out and fixed it pronto, but the window of bloggertunity had closed. The break did allow me to do some reading, though, and listen to some music--and the reading was about music, and the music was about reading.

The book is Joe Boyd's new memoir, White Bicycles. Boyd was the manager and producer of a lot of great acts over the years--I first learned his name, when I was teenager, from the liner notes of R.E.M. and 10,000 Maniacs records, but before that he was responsible for launching the careers of such great artists as Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, and The Incredible String Band. Boyd has a wry, knowing tone and a deep understanding of the complexities of musical culture, and he seems to have had run-ins with every great musician on two continents over the past fifty years. I haven't finished reading it yet, but two standout anecdotes are his "rediscovery" of Lonnie Johnson, resulting in the bluesman's first gig in eight years; and the story of how Walter Annenberg and Dick Clark drove black music off of "Bandstand." Great stuff--and how many books do you know of that have been blurbed by Brian Eno?

The music about books is the CD anthology Zoe sent us, Ballads of the Book, which pairs Scottish bands with lyrics by Scottish writers. The project is reminiscent of One Ring Zero's As Smart As We Are, and is as entertaining--there are words here by Ian Rankin, A. L. Kennedy (there she is again!), and Ali Smith...but it's the singer, not the song, and the standout tracks are those where the performers seemed to find something in the lyrics that isn't obvious on the page. To my surprise, I am digging the more sentimental material--like Norman Blake's setting of John Burnside's "Girl," and Karine Polwart's of Edwin Morgan's "The Good Years." Go figure.

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

My friend Norah told me to read this months ago, but it was still in hardcover so I didn't. Now that it's in paperback I thought I'd give it a try. It's terrifyingly good -- terrifying because it's a graphic novel, and, er, I can't draw. During the last couple years I've had the unnerving sense that far more exciting things are happening in the world of graphic novels than in regular fiction. Cartoonists have found ways to express truth, beauty, and surprise that make traditional, non-visual narratives seem flat. Worst of all: any fool can type up a page of prose, but only handful of us can draw. I ain't one of them, and that hurts.

I called "Fun Home" a "graphic novel," but actually it's a graphic memoir. Bechdel, of "Dykes To Watch Out For," (I have to admit that the title of that comic always bugged me -- why "watch out for"? Are they going to become famous, or just, like a mean dog, bite me on the thigh?) writes and draws about her childhood in small town Pennsylvania and her coming of age as a lesbian, and the simultaneous realization that her father -- who died in a suspicious, possibly suicidal, accident -- was probably gay too. Bechdel's art is less "arty" and self-conscious than that of Daniel Clowes, and more like Marjane Satrapi's -- frank and straight-forward and wordy. I particularly enjoyed the glimpses of Bechdel's college life. Hey -- isn't that my alma mater?

She has a fun blog, too.

A. L. Kennedy's "Wasps"

Who'd've thought I'd be blogging twice in a week about A. L. Kennedy? She's this week's New Yorker fiction writer, though, and thus the subject of the latest post in my Magazine Reading Project.

This is actually quite handy, because I wondered, in the previous post, if the things that bothered me about Kennedy's first collection were the result of youth, or of something inherent to her work. I complained about the narrative stasis that seemed a hallmark of her stories, and about her tendency to rely too heavily on victimhood as a topic. And indeed, this new story, at least in those respects, is just like her early ones--a cuckolded mother of two stays cuckolded, and does nothing about it, and everything remains the same.

However, Kennedy has gotten a lot better at it, and I like the story a lot. I felt a little funny complaining last time, because I know that a story doesn't require strong narrative drive to be good; nor does its protagonist have to "change" or experience "redemption." Here, though, Kennedy's immersion in the details of the character's life--and her superior ability to choose and refine those details--makes the piece worth reading. Of particular power is her portrayal of the protagonist's sons, who at the ages of 7 and 4 have learned to channel their anger at their absent father upon each other. There is a great moment where the older boy "washed his own hands very thoroughly, theatrically, with the air of a weary surgeon. As she watched, the weight of an older brother's responsibilities and trials hardened his jaw enough for him to look very much like his father."

The really excellent bit here, however, is a scene in which the father subtly, quietly, transfers the blame for his absence and infidelity onto the younger boy. "That's why I go away, Jimbo," he says. "For you."

Ouch. In the wake of this scene, the father leaves again, and the mother again lets him, and once again I longed for something other than stasis, true to life as stasis might be. But there's no accounting for taste, and no denying that, judging by this story, anyhow, Kennedy has gotten really good. It's a better piece of writing than anything in her first book. Here's hoping somebody someday says the same thing about me.

Waiting for Books By...

So, yeah, I should have published my second book like five years ago. I try to make myself feel better by thinking about other, much much better writers who are also mysteriously silent. Hey, I'm sure all of these people will come out with something awesome very soon, and maybe I will, too. Right?

Lorrie Moore hasn't published a book since the incredible Birds of America, in 1998. I wouldn't want to have to follow that book up. In fact, if I were Lorrie Moore, I might just quit altogether. I'm pretty sure I've seen a few stories of hers since then, but maybe not enough for a collection. Perhaps she's working on a novel. A big long one?

And how about Bruce Duffy? His The World As I Found It, as I think I mentioned here, is possibly my favorite novel ever. It came out in 1987. He published a coming of age novel maybe ten years later, and now: silence. I'd kill to read another book like TWAIFI -- well, not a person, but I'd kill something.

Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint came out in 2004, not long ago at all, but he used to publish quite regularly in Harpers and other mags and I don't think I've heard a peep from him in a very long time. Last I heard he'd moved to a small town in New England and established a newspaper repository to preserve hard copies of newspapers that libraries are copying digitally and pulping -- an admirable endeavor that JRL and I heartily support. I wonder if his silence has anything to do with the state of the union. Checkpoint is a Bush-era Vox, a kind of cri de coeur that revealed genuine anguish. I loved his long, obsessive essays, and I do miss watching his mind work.

Jo Ann Beard is a wonderful writer and terrific person. I met her once, on my own front porch, where she brought an elaborate dessert in a box, but then she moved out of town before I ever got to know her. Her work is the same way -- a real delight that I want more of. I can't imagine it's easy to follow up a memoir, especially one like Boys of My Youth, but it would be a shame if we never got to hear from her again.

A Defense of the Comma Splice

If you spend any time on internet messageboards--the subject of the forum is immaterial--there is always one very uptight hypergrammarian in the bunch, who cannot bear the relaxed diction that is the rule online. I can hardly blame such people--I used to be like that, too. I remember, back in the day, the way "alright" used to drive me up the wall (perhaps that's why it took me a lot longer to appreciate The Who than it did The Beatles and The Stones).

But, I dunno, maybe it's that I'm older, or that I've gotten accustomed to internet discourse, but grammar errors just don't bother me so much anymore. In the newspaper, sure--but in casual correspondence and fiction, no. Increasingly I regard grammar and punctuation as arenas of artistic achievement, open to broad usage and interpretation. And the one issue I've come around furthest on is the comma splice.

To wit, a sentence like this...

She stood up, she brushed herself off, the audience applauded.

...which is technically incorrect. The proper punctuation would be...

She stood up; she brushed herself off; the audience applauded.

...because you're supposed to separate independent clauses with semicolons, not commas, as any high school English teacher will tell you, and probably has, in red Flair pen.

But one legitimate use of the comma is to separate items in a list, and in my view, an independent clause could be considered an item. So what we have in the first example is a list of clauses (or, specifically, of actions and events) separated by commas. Now, this may seem like a stretch, but it allows the writer to acccentuate the separateness of those events without losing the impression of brisk narrative flow. In other words, in sentence #1, these three things occur in a kind of rolling fashion--we perceive them as one event with three parts, rather than merely as three related events, as the second sentence would suggest. The words are the same, the connotation is different. Depending on the context--who the woman in the sentence is, what she's doing, who is watching--a writer might want to choose one over the other.

I suppose I support anything that allows the writer a greater range of expression. With this greater range, of course, comes greater difficulty, since you're undermining the foundations of written language--you have to be more skillful at creating a believeable, sustainable universe for the reader, without relying as much on the basics. But the tradeoff is worth it, in my view.

So there you go. Comma splice good. Take that, Miss Peachtree!

Harry Potter Hell

So I'm finally up for air after the bookselling insanity that is Harry Potter. I missed most of our party because I was too busy reading tarot cards (damn, I had fun: possible career change in my future? Must consult the cards...) but I was up bright and early to sell books. Harry Potter books, of course. ONLY Harry Potter. Okay, one woman came in and bought a collection of Leonard Cohen's poetry, but that's about it.

It was a lot of fun to watch people's faces as they came in the store. People were very excited. No one wanted a bag: "I'm going to start reading right now!" I've never seen such a thing.

I read the first two books (or three? They run together) out loud to my son, but when he stopped wanting to hear them, I stopped reading them. I edited my reading heavily, because he was pretty young at the time, and the books are violent and scary. They're also Hollywoodish, in my opinion -- the violence feels gratuitous and the characters are not so great. However, the world Rowling describes is quite interesting and undeniably entertaining.

The Harry Potter mega-phenomenon owes only a little bit to the quality of the books, and much more to people's desire to be part of something big and fun and literary and positive. And I think, on the whole, it IS positive. It's not such a good thing that the publishing industry is encouraged to put all its dollars into a few big hits rather than many small hits. It would be nice if all that dough was spread around a bit. However, I'm a sucker for the sight of a kid reading a big, thick book. I can't help but think that those kids whose faces lit up as I passed them the book over the counter -- the ones who started reading before they left the store -- are going to remember the excitement they felt when they opened that book. And there were a LOT of kids in the store yesterday, in spite of the fact that B&N undercut us by like fifteen bucks. Those kids are going to have good associations with books and book stores for the rest of their lives, and that is a truly excellent thing.

A. L. Kennedy

So I'd been asking W6 frequent commenter Zoe what's good out of Scotland, and a few weeks later what should show up in my mailbox but a puffy airmail envelope marked Scotland Cultural Delivery. Inside were a couple of books and a CD compilation of Scottish bands singing about books. The CD I'll get to another time, but I just read one of the books--A. L. Kennedy's first collection, Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains.

I had heard of Kennedy but hadn't read her. I'm glad I did--she's good. Her narrative style is deceptive--these stories seem to ramble aimlessly, before they suddenly reveal themselves to have been headed straight for their target all along. A few of them ("Translations" springs to mind) leave out so much information that you wonder for a long time what the hell you're even reading--but they always add up to something, however convinced you are that they won't.

One thing that irks me, though--and I'm speaking here only of this collection, which remember is her first--is how unrelievedly victim-oriented these narratives are. The first four stories, for instance, feature, respectively, a disease victim, a rape victim, an infidelity victim, and another rape victim. I certainly regard this kind of material as legitimate fodder for fiction--who wouldn't?--but I found myself longing, by the end of the book, for the characters to do something about their plight. I'm not talking about happy endings, or pluck, or "redemption," Lord help us, but agency. It's a truism that abuse begets misery, and while I don't expect or desire literary characters to find clever and satisfying ways around their unhappiness, I certainly would like to see them give it a shot, and fail interestingly. Ultimately I find these stories a little static--in each one, the tone is glum, and you sit back and wait to see what the dark secret is, and then it's revealed, and then you're glum too.

Like I said, though--it's good anyway. Kennedy isn't going in for the lurid, smeary lyricism that afflicts a lot of writers of "serious" material; her stuff sounds like something worth reading.

Who's read her books since? There are a bunch. Personally, I would be mortified to be judged on some random blog by a dude who's only read my first book, so weigh in on the comments if you're a fan (or not).

(And Zoe--thanks again for the package!)

Rejection

I'm posting a little early today because tonight I'll be reading tarot at our bookstore's Harry Potter party. If you're in the area, stop by the Bookery and let me tell you your (fake) future! I've never done it before, but I'm sure I have a knack for it.

Anyway, I wanted to mention Literary Rejections on Display, an awesome blog. It reminded me why I got into this business in the first place: my love of rejection. I mean, it must be, when you think about how much failure and misery and rejection I've collected over the years. By middle school, at least, I was assiduously reading Writer's Market and collecting addresses and names of editors. My first rejection was from Cricket magazine; almost thirty years later (!!) I can't look at the cover of that mag without a pang of humiliation and regret. My first rejection with writing on it was from Seventeen -- I still have that one.

But mysteriously, perhaps because of all the moving I've done, I can't find a single other rejection note. God knows I've collected plenty. I hope one turns up because I'd like to submit to LRoD. Chances are I threw them all out in a depressive blackout or something.

I've always been vaguely disappointed at how wishy-washy rejection notes are these days. Writers of old always had some stunningly cruel rejection to hang on the wall, but I've never received anything worse than bland dismissal and dishonest good wishes. Editors today are savvy enough to cover their buns -- the writer they reject today has every chance of garnering a million-dollar advance elsewhere, and that writer has a long memory. Or maybe editors are just nicer these days.

There's probably a direct relationship between how sturdy a writer is in the face of rejection and his or her likelihood of overcoming it. I'm not particularly sturdy myself -- I recall many weep-fests alone in my room when I was sending my book around to indifferent agents -- but for some reason I keep popping up to take more blows. I think it's because I feel like I owe something to that incredibly misguided twelve-year-old who read Writer's Market like the Bible. That can't be the world's best reason for writing. Oh, well: you work with what you got.