Practice makes...

Two passing occurrences this week. One, Rhian and I were talking about our kids and their music lessons, and just how hard they should be expected to work on their instruments. I was on the side of greater lenience, mostly because that's how I learned music--after a few years of piano, I just fooled around until I figured stuff out. And Rhian said, "Well, you don't like practicing anything." It's true--I generally get just good enough to play something, then I record it, then I never play it again. I get bored practicing--I only like performing, and usually in front of a microphone, not an audience.

And then today I was listening to the radio and heard an interview with the legendary guitarist Jorma Kaukonen, and he was talking about trying to play a certain style of guitar that he once knew how to play quite well. And he said that he can no longer play this way unless he really practices for an hour, and even then he's still not so hot.

Okay, his not so hot is, to most people, virtuosic, I'm sure. But I suddenly realized how foreign this way of thinking is to me. Practicing for its own sake--it's true, I've always hated it. And I think this is why I ended up becoming a writer. The musician rehearses in private far more than he performs in public--indeed, most of his effort is not supposed to be heard. But the writer generally thinks whatever he's doing right this minute is going to be presented to the world.

Well, I do anyway, sort of. Rationally, I know that my first drafts are merely my first drafts. But when I write them, I am indeed performing to the audience. That audience, in my mind, is often just Rhian or Ed, my co-bloggers, but it's an audience. The difference is that this is a performance that can be refined over time, before anyone actually ever "hears" it. The practice and the performance are the same thing. As a writer, I only perform, and every performance matters.

And in the end, bits of every performance do make it into the final work; the work is a palimpsest of drafts, a secret patchwork. I suppose this is why I got back into music, after a break of many years--because audio recording technology now makes it easy to play like a writer, trying different things, and only keeping the best bits.

But writing will always be different from music performance in one particular way. Though everyone is born with the ability to understand and appreciate music, playing it is something that must be learned. The body has to be trained to do it. It's natural, but it is accessory to the necessities of living--you will do fine in life without it. Language, on the other hand, is necessary, a vital part of being human. Everyone learns how to do it without even trying. Writers are merely people who strive to make this ordinary thing extraordinary--to wield a familiar tool in a new way.

Ultimately, I am more impressed by musicians, perhaps especially because I've tried to be one, and know how hard it is to be a good one. Good writers work hard, of course, but I suspect they rarely feel like they're doing something special. Rather, they are doing what they do, and learning as they go. The feeling of virtuosity in performance, on the other hand, must be transcendent. Not that I'd know.

The enigma of others

Last night, Rhian and I watched a really excellent movie--the new Jonathan Demme picture, Rachel Getting Married. The film is a domestic drama starring Anne Hathaway as Kym, a drug addict returning home from rehab to attend her sister Rachel's wedding. The scenes that follow sketch out the family's eccentricities and dysfunctions, including a terrible tragedy in the past, for which Kym is responsible, and which has torn the family apart.

In conception, the movie is fairly conservative--this is the stuff of conventional drama, and the kind of thing actors like to enjoy surpassing with their performances. But Rachel Getting Married isn't a normal movie at all--it is, in fact, a literary work, more literary in ambition than most of the literary novels I've read in the past year.

What do I mean by this? I mean that what the movie is really about is, as Rhian put it afterward, the Mystery of Other People. It is concerned very little with plot, save for the open secret that drives it; rather, it is interested in what people are like and, more importantly, how much of what they say and do is against their nature. Rachel, the sister (played by Rosemarie DeWitt), is a wonderful character, by turns sweet and loving, and embittered and immature, and just when you think you know how she's going to react to something, she does something different. All the characters are like this, in fact, confounding our expectations, yet gradually adding to the picture of whom they really are, until what we end up with is a complex, interlocking plot strands, tiny mysteries, that we come to understand make up the fabric of life.

There are ways in which the movie is highly implausible, filled as it is with interracial harmony and unexplained affluence and good health, and yet it feels realer than anything I've seen lately. That's because it leaves everything unexplained. All the characters remain enigmatic; even the most pointed plot question--was Kym entirely to blame, or not?--remains unanswered.

This is what I like a book to do: make sense by not entirely making sense. Too many stories force characters to stay in character, to be what the writers have declared them to be, right up to the bitter end. Real personality, on the other hand, is elusive, protean. You can never really know anyone, and that is why they are so interesting, because you convince yourself over and over that they are knowable, that even you are knowable to yourself. And yet there are always, always surprises.

Hours or pages?

Even if you're really cooking on your work, you have to stop sometime. I haven't met anyone who can consistently write all day, or write, say, ten pages in a day. At some point, even when you are on a tear, the writing can go from excellent to moribund in an instant. The worst part is, you often can't tell when the transition takes place. When I was writing Mailman, my fourth novel (and the one I had the most fun writing), I would sometimes exceed my allotment, in the excitement of the moment. When it came time to pare down the monstrous thing I'd made, I could tell precisely where I went off the rails each day--it was as clear as cracks in the sidewalk.

Many writers don't have the luxury of being able to maintain a consistent schedule. But when I'm working on any kind of extended piece, especially a novel, I do my best to set aside the same time each day for writing. I'm a morning person--I do almost all my writing these days between 8am and 11am on the sofa, in my pajamas, with my HP laptop (running Ubuntu Jaunty of course) on a little lapdesk that Rhian had before we met, the underside of which is stuffed with little styrofoam pellets to create a comfortable contour for your legs. But it isn't the hours that form the parameters of my working day--it's the pages. I have to write four pages, period. If it's mostly dialogue, or short paragraphs, I finish quickly. If it's complex or sustained narrative, it takes longer. If I'm still excited after four, I might continue for one more, but I learned my lesson with Mailman. More likely, I run out of steam after two, and have to push myself. But the forced writing is usually better than the overrun writing. This is the Graham Greene method: quantity, not time.

Other writers go by the clock. They will write for a set number of minutes or hours. When Rhian was working on getting her chops back after a long break, she wrote ten minutes a day for a couple of weeks, no more. Eventually she was ready to expand. (I dunno how long she's going these days...she is very secretive about her writing habits). I understand the time-limit method, but my mind doesn't work that way--I have an amount of work I can do in a day, and it doesn't matter how long it takes. Four pages is, I've discovered, the amount of half-decent writing I can do, and I am not eager to mess with the formula.

What's your method, hours or pages? Or are you completely haphazard? And if so, how's that working out for ya?

The Signal

I've had kind of a mixed history with Ron Carlson's work--back when Rhian and I were in grad school, I loved his story collection Plan B For The Middle Class, which was funny and unsettling and diverse in approach. Carlson was kind of a poor man's John Barth, or a more accessible one, anyway.

I didn't exactly become disillusioned with Carlson--indeed, I think he kept up the quality over the years. But it seemed to me his stories were treading over familiar ground for a long time, and I never did get around to his novels. I figured I owed him another chance, and when I saw this new novel, I decided it was high time. The book is short, has an intriguing title and a cool cover, and I ended up reading it in a single night.

I must say, in spite of an opening sentence that reads like self-parody, it's quite good. It is, like my own recent novel, about a guy who goes into the woods and bad things happen, and it's written in blunt, precise prose, and moves very quickly. (The first sentence that I disliked is thoroughly anomalous.) Indeed, it's as straightforward a story as I've read in recent memory: a man named Mack has gone off the rails and ended up in jail; when he gets out, his ex-wife agrees to accompanying him on one last chaste backpacking trip, to say goodbye. But Mack is tangled up in some kind of shadowy criminal enterprise, the outlines of which even he can't see, and he is equipped with a waterproof military-grade BlackBerry which is supposed to help him find some mysterious electronic object in the woods for his sinister employer. We get the story of his life and marriage, cut through with various kinds of menace, which all turn out to be the same menace. And in the end, the book turns into a very fine meditation on masculine failure, combined with Jack-Londonesque adventure scenes, a bittersweet love story, and a moment of bizarre macabre high-tech weirdness that appears flown in from a Neal Stephenson novel.

I have to admit, I like the high-tech weirdness, even though it is completely extrinsic to the story. And the ending is satisfying--perhaps too satisfying, and certainly very dramatic. And I think that, after all these years, I like Ron Carlson again.

The empty mirror

When people criticize my novels, a common complaint is that I spend too much time explaining my characters with back story, memory, etc. I do indeed do a lot of that, though I never think of it as explanation. I think of it as something interesting that happened in the character's past, which I want to get to write about. Sometimes I can't bear to edit it out later, even if it comes to seem gratuitous.

I'll take this a step further, though, and suggest that maybe protagonists don't need to be developed all that much, period. Maybe all that matters is a voice for the reader to buttress with their own assumptions and imagined detail. Secondary characters, you need to develop better, because they aren't who the reader is identifying with. But the protagonist, quite often, is there to be filled up with parts of the reader's self. All the writer needs to do is hint, and the reader will supply natural psychological explanations based upon their own experiences and feelings.

Of course in some cases the back story is the point; in some cases the novel consists of the protagonist explaining himself, or trying to explain himself and failing (e.g., Kazuo Ishiguro). But for a lot of books, it just isn't necessary. Think of Chandler's Marlowe, or Denis Johnson's Fuckhead, or just about anybody in Flannery O'Connor.

Ultimately it's a matter of confidence in your writerly ability to evoke a personality. Like the Rembrandt drawing above ("The Single Greatest Drawing Ever Made," according to David Hockney) it's as much what the artist chooses to leave out as what he puts in.

Tricking yourself into working

Though writing is my profession, it often feels like my hobby, in that nobody really gives a crap whether I do it or not. Oh, I'd like to think there are some readers out there who are waiting for a new book or story. But they're probably not waiting all that eagerly. There is no urgency to it. If I get up tomorrow morning, and don't write a word, there will be no effect whatsoever on anyone on earth but myself. The act of writing is publicly invisible, as is the non-act of not writing.

So why not just work on your stamp collection or flower arrangement? The reason, presumably, is that writing is not just a hobby for most writers--it's a compulsion that is closely connected to one's sense of self-worth. And so to not do it is often more painful than doing it.

But it's hard to motivate oneself to do work that nobody is waiting for (hell, they don't even know what it is, specifically, that they are anticipating, and probably the writer doesn't, either), and is going to take forever to finish even if you do buckle down and do it this time. And of course you might end up erasing everything you do today anyway.

And so the writer has to generate some kind of artificial urgency. For me, it's an ongoing feeling of panic that, if I'm not creating something, I might as well be dead, or never have been born. Writing makes me feel real. This is irrational, but useful. Relaxing, conversely, makes me feel like I'm fading away to nothing.

Needless to say, this apparent advantage can quickly turn into a disadvantage--a person should be able to relax. I tried that this weekend--alone in the house, I did no writing for three days, and in fact didn't even try to, or think about trying to. And indeed, I felt a little like I was disappearing. But it wasn't a bad feeling, not entirely.

Tomorrow I have to ratchet up the imaginary urgency again, though, and I wonder what will happen to me if the illusion eventually fails me, and I stop panicking. Perhaps my career will be over. Or maybe, given room to actually think for a change, I'll write better.

So what twisted logic or internal emotional blackmail do you use to make a pile of pages?

Note: a little word of sad regret here at the death of Jay Bennett, former Wilco agitator and frantic multi-instrumentalist. It's never nice to see someone creative die so young.

Why I'm having trouble reading Sag Harbor

The new Colson Whitehead, that is, which I have looked forward to for some time. I haven't posted much here about Whitehead, but perhaps that's because he's such a staple of my literary imagination--I feel a real kinship to this writer, aesthetically speaking, and we are the same age and gender, and have a similar taste for the wacky conceit. I don't know him personally, but I feel right at home in his nerdy, off-the-cuff prose--he's the writer I think of when I think of whom my contemporaries might be.

I've written here before about his first novel, and so have a lot of other people, so I won't get into it here. Suffice to say it's a minor classic, and I teach it at Cornell often. It is famously about an elevator inspector with identity issues. My favorite of his books, though, is John Henry Days, the tale of a press junketeer with identity issues, and I liked but didn't love his last novel, Apex Hides The Hurt, which is about an advertising executive with identity issues.

The new book is a quasi-autobiographical meander through the Sag Harbor of Whitehead's childhood. It is a detail-packed recreation of the mid-1980's, complete with knockoff Members Only jackets, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, and bright white Fila sneakers, and let me say right off that I'm only 50 pages in, and I may not finish it. So this is not a review of the book. I guess what it is, is a review of Whitehead's apparent aim here--or rather, my discomfort with that aim, given how I feel about this writer. So yeah...this is a review of me, reading Whitehead.

I'm given to wonder if Whitehead worried that he was becoming a gimmick writer--that he trafficked a little too freely in the story of a black person reconsidering his/her identity against a backdrop of some not-quite-science-ficitonal alternate reality. Certainly Apex felt a little overly familiar. Maybe he felt as though it was time to write something real--a sentimental journey, about the creation of an imagination.

But the opening pages of Sag Harbor weren't doing it for me. The terrific prose is here, the instantly identifiable characters, the lavishly detailed setting. In a way, the Sag Harbor of the eighties is an alternate reality here, or it might as well be, for all the effort Whitehead is putting into making it real. And indeed, I feel very much in the book with him: it is his particular talent to be able to do this so skillfully, so thoroughly.

So what don't I like about it? Nothing really. Liking it isn't the problem. Reading this book is a little like hearing your brother tell some new friends a great story you've heard him tell before. You know all the details, you're delighted by your brother's ability to work his audience, and you feel a particular filial love for him as he does so. But you don't really need to hear it. You were there, and you've heard it all before.

Whitehead spends a lot of time (at least in the first 50) painstakingly recreating the objects, habits, and prejudices of the 80's, and I guess in the end this is what bothers me. Because he isn't inventing this world, he doesn't seem to know which details are important. And so we get paragraphs like this:

I'm talking frozen food here. Swanson, of course, was the standard, the elegant marriage of form and function. The four food groups[...]lay pristine in their separate foil compartments, which were in fact, presto, a serving dish[...]All hail Stouffer's! Pure royalty, their bright-orange packaging a beacon in refrigerator sections across the NY metro area. French Bread Pizzas--so continental!

And then we get Boil-In-Bag meals, Howard Johnson's fried clams, Chunky soup...and it's true, he gets it right on. I was there, man, pulling those french bread pizzas out of the toaster oven with him. But...I don't want to hear about my eighties. I want to hear about his eighties--an eighties I never saw before. He does that here, too--there is some good stuff about race on Long Island, the social heirarchy of the town, the street/suburb dichotomy, and it's a pleasure to read.

Ultimately, though, I think there's too much muck, too much window dressing, and because it's all real, he can't see that it isn't important. In his other novels, the conceit forces invention. It's not a crutch, it's a whip.

I do think this book will be a huge hit and will probably win a major award, which Whitehead will deserve, for being Whitehead. People are not usually awarded for their most brilliant inventions, but for the less inventive work that brought them a larger audience. This is that book for Whitehead, I think. But I, a hardcore Whiteheadian, will be waiting for the next one.

And yeah, yeah, I will finish this book. If it turns into something else along the way, I will update this post. Until then, though, have you read it? What do you think?

The dead page

I was reading a pretty decent mystery the other night when I came upon a completely dead page. In the book, a retired cop was being provisionally brought back onto the force to help solve a crime very similar to one that happened back when he was active. Up to this point, the book was all mood and character, but at this point it changed--it turned into a book about logistics. The scene in question consisted of the cop's former colleague reintroducing him to the rest of the investigation division, and explaining what he'd be doing. It was all information we already knew. But it would have been odd not to have a scene like this, and to merely summarize the scene in a few lines would have thrown off the rhythm of the book.

So what was the real solution to this problem? Answer: there wasn't one. The scene actually ruined the book for me, and I didn't finish it. It was absorbing enough, but the writer had taken a turn for the conventional and mundane, and there was no turning back.

Is it possible to write a mystery novel without scenes like this? Yes, it is. It's possible to write any kind of novel without scenes like this. But it's a challenge. I've faced this very dilemma many times--I come to a point where I have to impart vital information, and there's no way to do it that doesn't bore me. In the past, I used to just slog on when I came to these junctures, figuring there was nothing else I could do.

But increasingly I have been trying another tack--going back and finding where I went wrong. The path that led me to the dead page usually forked off from the main path just a few pages back. But sometimes it's a few chapters back. At least once it was eight months back, when I got the idea for the novel, and framed it in my mind in a certain flawed way. I was never able to get past page 50 or so of that one. Yet another novel with a flawed conception never even made it to the first sentence. I only wasted half a year of cogitation and note-taking.

You can write a book that's packed with logistics--thriller writers do it all the time. But the skills required to make such a book interesting are highly specialized, and I don't have them. For me, the dead page is most easily avoided by basing the structure of the book on character, voice, and mood. This expands my choices, and defines the narrative by something other than logistics. The problem with this, of course, is staying interesting to the reader. But the books I write, by definition, have a more limited readship than a mystery or thriller might. I have to find readers who are willing to go along with my plans.

The dead page, more broadly speaking, is the result of a lack of confidence, and a lack of engagement with the imagination. This is something all of us have to endure at some point or other. But during those times when obsessive attention to one's strangest desires is possible, dead pages are few and far between.

Who in the hell has time to pay obsessive attention to their strangest desires, though? This is why there are fewer writers than we'd like, and fewer books than we'd like from the writers we have.

The Momoir

Sometimes I imagine my sons, who are 9 and almost-12, sitting around in their dorm rooms during their first week of college. Everyone's trading life stories, and my kids say... what? What will their formative memories be, the things they take from the lives we made for them? Sometimes I worry that we haven't given them enough material. We're not alcoholics (yet) and we've never done cocaine, let alone in front of them, and never slapped them with wire hangers. There are no diagnoses in the picture, no boarding schools, no wars, no fame, and neither wealth nor poverty. We can be sort of crabby, and I'm pushy about them practicing their instruments, but other than that, the only source of drama around here is an aggressive rooster. Well, no doubt they'll come up with something, if, heaven forfend, they get the memoir bug. But please, please, let it not be a Momoir.

There are two kinds of momoir: the ones about one's mother, and the ones about being a mother. The ones about one's mother are usually unflattering, and the ones about being a mother are usually about difficult children. After all, if everything is nice and pleasant, there's not much to say (there are exceptions). I find them both horrifying, yet irresistible.

I can understand the urge to write about your mother if she's dead: you want to memorialize her. It makes sense. But why write about your mother if she's still alive? Plenty of memoirists -- Susanna Sonnenberg, Geoffrey and Tobias Wolff, and others mentioned in this New York Times Book Review essay -- have done it. I can only think of one reason: revenge. I disapprove. Don't hurt your mom! It is just bad karma.

Anyway, the trend -- which started, I guess, with Mommie Dearest -- has more or less run its course. Newer, and more shocking, are the memoirs about people's terrible, brilliant, troubled, or otherwise remarkable children. (There are also many memoirs about losing children, which are pretty damn near unbearable to read. Elizabeth McCracken's An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination is an exception, and is simply a beautiful book -- she lost her first son just before giving birth to him -- while Ann Hood's Comfort, which is about the death her five-year-old daughter, is too painful. It's excruciating. And I've thought about it almost every single day since I read it.) Debra Gwartney's Live Through This is possibly the most fascinating of these "troubled kid" books. Her two oldest daughters, at 14 and 15, ran away and lived on the streets for a time. Gwartney is unusually self-lacerating and spends much of the book blaming herself for the terrible relationship she had with her daughters, which puts the reader in an unusual position -- do we agree, and blame her? But what if it happens to us???

David Sheff's Beautiful Boy is another book about the mystery of a child's unhappiness in the face of his parents' efforts to give him a good, normal, upper-middle class life. (A Dadoir, I guess.) Sheff's son became a meth addict. It's really a horror story -- classic Stephen King. But interestingly, Sheff's son wrote his own memoir, and his book, Tweak, is both more sad and less scary. It gives the impression that he became a drug addict because he was really, really devastated about his parents' divorce and having to live several states away from his mom. Of course, I would read it that way.

Michael Greenberg's Hurry Down Sunshine is a memoir of his teenage daughter's first descent into mental illness, and it's unusually self-effacing, lovely, and saturated with love for her.

There are more of these memoirs to come: I just glanced through the galley of a book called something like Hell is Other Parents, by the mother of the child actor who plays the young Spock in the new Star Trek.

And what about mine? Or my sons'? Let us hope they are a long, perhaps infinite, way off.

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.)

JRL in Portland, OR and Seattle, WA this week

Readers: at the risk of semi-quashing Rhian's post, I want to tell you that I'll be reading at Powell's World of Books on Burnside tomorrow night, Wednesday the 29th, and at Elliot Bay the following evening. Details on my website. If you're in the area, stop and say hi!

OK, carry on...

Beauty and Talent

Is it really necessary to spend even a moment denying the connection between looks and talent? Apparently so, after this dumb article in the Sunday NYT. Making "snap judgments" based on appearance is perfectly natural, the author claims, because back when we were cave people, our very survival depended on our ability to rapidly put stuff into categories. What nonsense. What survival advantage is there in assuming a woman who doesn't pluck her eyebrows can't sing? The real purpose of the essay is to make us feel a little better about being shallow people who read the Sunday Styles section.

While I'm apparently the only person in the world not moved to tears by Susan Boyle (I mean, as happy as I am for her, is anyone really surprised that an unattractive person is actually talented? How often have we seen this cliche? It's always the froggy little guy in the college a capella group who steps up and wows everyone, or the zitty teen who's a piano whiz. Beautiful people don't need talent, because the world loves them anyway) and find the whole thing grossly manipulative, I'm fascinated by the story anyway. Most of the commentary on the phenomenon ignores the fact that this happened on a British show. The British have always loved underdogs, and as Americanized as their pop culture has become, the Susan Boyle episode has served to make them feel British again, i.e. better than Americans.

Which, okay, they are. When are we going to get our chubby, homely, 50ish woman on American Idol? Ha ha!

Anyway, it got me thinking about good-looking writers. Traditionally, writers have been a bad-looking bunch. Not only are the less physically gifted of us drawn to the bookish life, but that life -- indoors, surrounded by cigarettes, booze, and coffee -- has not done us any favors. Lately, however, you can be pretty sure that when you flip to the back flap of a new hardcover, you'll see a quite attractive person. Part of this is just the wondrous skills of photographers like Marion Ettlinger, who can make the frumpiest writer look acceptable (and who told me once that she photographs writers instead of, say, actors, because of the challenge). And these days, with ubiquitous orthodonture and good grooming, it's not hard to look okay. But it is no secret that editors ask agents what their writers look like. It is much easier to create a literary sensation if the writer is gorgeous.

It's all very depressing. I find it hard to accept that even readers are this superficial, that we won't buy a book written by an ugly person. Why is it, though? Why do so many people assume -- if they actually do -- that a beautiful author will create a beautiful work? Here's a theory: we interpret good looks as code for I want to please you. A pretty woman wants to please us, so her book will please us, too. She cares about our needs! An unattractive writer -- perhaps one who has committed the cardinal female sin of unplucked brows -- doesn't care what we think, so heck, who knows what we'll find in that book! Maybe something unpleasant.

JRL reading in Brooklyn tomorrow night

W6 readers: I will be reading Tuesday, April 21st--that's tomorrow night--at the Park Slope Community Bookstore, in Brooklyn, New York. The address is 143 Seventh Avenue, Brooklyn; the event starts at 7pm. Come on down and say hello--I'll be reading from my two new books, Castle and Pieces for the Left Hand.

Salle de bains livres

The time has come to transcend all boundaries of taste and list the books that are presently shelved in your bathroom. I have no idea how these get there, but once they're there, they stay for a long, long time.

The current W6HQ lineup:

George Pelecanos, The Night Gardener
Norman Doidge, M.D., The Brain That Changes Itself
Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations Of Screenwriting
Edgar Allen Poe, Stories and Poems
Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle
Lee Reich, Weedless Gardening
Diana Schwarzbein, M.D., The Schwarzbein Principle II: The Transition
Susan Jacoby, The Age Of American Unreason
Marc McCutcheon, The Writer's Guide To Everyday Life In The 1800's

I think Poe has the endurance record. The radiator has heated and cooled this book so many times over the past two years that it looks like a piece of lasagna.

Describe, please, your library of the toilet.

True Crime

I've been out of town for a few days, visiting with relatives. And though I have a copy of Kafka's The Castle in my suitcase (because about a dozen people, in inquiring about my new novel, have asked how direct the influence is, and I have had to say a dozen times, in total humiliation, that I have never read it), I've mostly spent my time reading true crime books.

Rhian loves true crime, and typically that's what she's reading when I'm reading police procedurals. But this time I'm all over it. Man, the writing is often quite bad. But these things are fascinating. The thing that really gets me about them is the utterly bizarre, unpredictable details. No matter how desperately the author wishes to adhere to the conventions of the genre, all these ridiculous elements of real life keep intruding.

I just read a few by Joe McGinniss--they're really not bad, by the low standards of the form. In one, we watch the aftermath of a husband's murder-for-hire of his wife, from the point of view of their three teenage sons. The kids' grandmother's friend moves in to become their unofficial guardian; she's a loony Bible-thumper who invites the accused gunman's wife to live with them, out of charity. Imagine--the wife of the guy who probably just killed your mom is there in the kitchen when you get up every morning.

Or, in another McGinniss book, a wealthy wife murders her wealthy husband during an affair with a home theater installer. While she rots in prison, the home theater installer marries a blond woman with "a silver sports car," as a Chinese news magazine reports. The article ends with this man mowing his lawn: "The sweating Michael took off his shirt and walked around with his fat belly bouncing around."

Bad crime fiction is all cliché--the bad writer doesn't have the skill to stray from the norm. But bad true crime, in all its coarseness, can't help but let life spill out all over the place, like Michael's fat bouncing belly. I'll take a good novel over a good true crime any day (with the possible exception of the stupendously awesome Black Dahlia Avenger), but when only the bad is available, give me the truth.