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Seeming. Waiting. Not Asking. And Other Loaded Words: Colm Toibin's Mothers and Sons

I sometimes think that, if I didn't know better,
I would dismiss Chekov because his prose wasn’t interesting enough. 

I was reading Colm Toibin’s Mothers and Sons and I was missing the kind of memorable phrasing I like when I realized that I was overlooking the psychological complexity of his stories. Especially in “The Name of The Game,” the conflicts don’t resolve so much as they mutate. But the prose itself also has its spare beauties and subtle purposes. In “The Use of Reason,” the clenched voice mimic’s a criminal’s chilled mind. In “The Name of the Game,” the verbs seem to reflect the repression of the characters.  Consider this passage: 

“She opened the supermarket as usual at nine-thirty and took in the supplies of bread. The girls left early to go and spend the day with school friends, but Gerard haunted the storeroom and refused to go out. Catherine came at ten; both she and Nancy stationed themselves at at the cash registers as though nothing strange were happening. Saturday was late opening and the busiest day. When the hammering and the drilling became intense, Catherine did not ask her any questions. She seemed too sleepy to observe that anything was going on. All morning. Nancy waited for someone who came in the shop to seek an explanation of the work next door, but no one did.” 

And the prose also reflects the repression of the scene: “hammering and drilling” that no one will even acknowledge.   

Sticks and Stones

A very good interview with Robert Stone, which captures the humility that graced Prime Green. About Ken Kesey’s characterization of him as paranoid: “I think I was one of the first people from New York that Kesey ever met.”

Stone talks a very clean prose; it’s interesting that when he becomes more ambitious, he sometimes becomes more tangled.  But prose should reach higher than conversation. Otherwise, what's the point of all that damn revision.

Semi-Precious

I was looking forward to reading Robert Stone’s Prime Green: Remembering The Sixties because, in my limited reading of him, Stone has struck me as less self-aggrandizing than his peers.  His humanity and humility are evident here, too.  He could have stuck with Cedar Bar Regular/Stegner Fellow/Merry Prankster/Novelist In London and Paris/Hollywood Screenwriter During The Manson Killings/Journalist In Vietnam but he also describes his stints as an enlisted Navy man, encyclopedia salesman, factory worker, and writer for a National Enquirer knock off.  He composed the headline, "Skydiver Devoured By Starving Birds."  This is after he won the Stegner.   

This personal modesty infuses the prose. A factory break room was “equipped with coin machines that contained things that could be swallowed.”

But there are some tangled sentences here, too: Of a summer in Paris:  “The weeks we had spent there were not many but they served as our introduction to what remained of the city that people like us had so long daydreamed about.”  As a result, Prime Green reads like the next-to-last draft of a masterpiece.   

After Finishing Robert Stone's Prime Green: Remembering The Sixties

Writing about Robert Stone is challenging because it's so hard to come up with puns on "Robert." 

Imaginary Fiends

Link: Pan's Labyrinth | Official Movie Site | Picturehouse. A sign near the ticket booth at the Uptown theatre warned that Pan's Labyrinth is not a children's movie. Halfway through the movie, i joked to E: I think it's rated PG-50. Take your kids and the cost of the movie would include months of light bills (they're not sleeping in the dark for a while) and maybe therapist's bills. And the reason the film is not for children is that is so completely captures the dark side of childish wonder and imagination– and the fabulistic horrors of the vestiges of the Spanish civil war.

What About Alice Suggests About Writing

Calvin Trillin has published 25 books. I own 21 of them and I read another–An Education in Georgia– in the Wilson Library when I was supposed to be studying tax law.  Yet I’ve never given his prose much thought until this weekend when, after finishing About Alice, I looked at my memoir and saw how precious some of my writing was. I cared more about the phrase than the thought. I paid to much attention to trivial things. I realized something: Trillin’s writing is memorable without being remarkable. 

I’ll quote the first paragraph and a half of About Alice:

“There was one condolence letter that made me laugh. Naturally, a lot of them made me cry. Some of those, oddly enough, were from people who had never met Alice. They had become familiar with her as a character in books and magazine pieces I’d written–light books and magazine pieces about traveling or eating or family life. Virtually all these letters began in the same way with a phrase like “Even though I never really knew Alice . . .. “ I was certain of what Alice’s response would have been. “They’re right about that,” she would have said. “They never knew me.”

I once wrote that tales of writers’ families tend to have a relation to real life that can be expressed in terms of standard network television fare, on a spectrum that goes from sitcoms to Lifetime movies.  Now that I think of it, maybe they were more like Saturday morning cartoons. Alice played the role of the Mom–the voice of reason, the sensible person who kept everything on an even keel despite the antics of her marginally goody husband.”

The relentless copy editor in me wants to start with that first sentence and shorten it to “One condolence letter made me laugh.”  And maybe that’s better, but I suspect not. Read the passage above out loud and you get the sense that those extra words save the sentence from a gimmicky abruptness. You get the sense that this is an adult talking to other adults; you feel the pauses and qualifications that are a part of grown-up thinking. Without making a big deal out of it, Trillin addresses the distinction between the person in the world and the character in the book. You also get the sense that he understands that, despite the healthy push toward the vivid image, a memoir is not a movie, but a conversation.   

About Calvin

Very, very busy and still brimming with thoughts about The Echo Maker. But wanted to note Calvin Trillin's graceful farewell to his wife, About Alice.  Trillin proves again that insight and kindness and generosity are compatible in memoir.  And that memoir might best be concerned, among other things, with lives well lived. 

Who Was That Ski-Masked Man?

While taking the hound around this morning, I ran into someone who asked, "Would that be the greyhound known as Albert?" and we exchanged pleasantries.  As Al and I were scurrying on our way–it was five below here–it occurred to me that we'd probably greeted a reader either of this blog or Cool On The Hill.  Pictured above, Al, in even colder weather and even more humiliating garb, protesting that he is not a babushka and that he doesn't understand why he should wait in line for tracts and bread.

Rain Taxi Auction: Check out these books

Link: R A I N T A X I Review of Books.

Uppity Verbs: Richard Powers' Sentences

One of the things I like about the Powers is the sometimes daring precision of the language. 

Of a man trapped in an upturned car:

“He might have lain there all night, coffined against the windshield . . . “

Of a woman having her first cigarette in years: 

“A cloud of indescribable relief escaped into her lungs and then inked into her  limbs.” 

As someone who’s been accused of overwriting–of trying too hard–I’m interested in this kind of writing. I prefer it to writing which doesn’t try hard enough.  But at exactly what point does ambition become overreaching? The rule, I suppose is: are you picking that word to be different or to be precise? But I think it also has to do with context. I know in earlier drafts of my memoir, I overloaded paragraphs with metaphors because I was so eager to explain something, so people didn’t so much read my paragraphs as solve them, like so many quadratic equations.