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Meme of Rivals

I’m fascinated by Doris Kearns Goodwin’s study of Lincoln’s presidency, Team of Rivals.  But since I am trying to write a novel, a part of me also wants to get back to reading fiction so that I have some models and inspiration. 

That said, the book illuminates the motivations and consequences of human actions, and the warps and triumphs of human character, in ways that novelists should envy. Lincoln is a hero both saintly and strategic and also fallible. It is amazing to trace the incredibly complex process by which ideals get translated into reality. Lincoln understood popular opinion as a kind of character–flawed, sometimes base, but capable of growth.   

It is also interesting to note how the book is talked about in the press, where it is usually reduced to a prurient view of its title: oh goody, the cabinet might fight with each other. The phrase “team of rivals” is spoken in the tone of voice usually used to announce that there’s a fight going on behind the gym.

I’ve still got 100-some pages left in the book, but while there is infighting, Lincoln decided many questions himself, cancelled many cabinet meetings, and consulted his Secretaries of State and War while ignoring (but placating) lesser Secretaries. What Lincoln really seemed to want was a) high competence in the important tasks of fighting the war, funding the war, containing the war, and connecting the troops and their loved ones and b) a coalition which would keep both conservative Democrats and radical Republicans engaged. He was also strong to hear opposing views without being threatened by them. 

Lincoln and Seward, his closest confidante, understood that the highest matters of state–in this case, whether the state would survive, whether slaves would be freed–were shaped by the jealousies and flaws and vitalities of frail individual humans. The two men regularly escaped to the theater, which was then experiencing a golden age. They invited leading actors and actresses to their homes and quizzed them on their interpretations of characters.  They especially loved Shakespeare, perhaps because it so resembled their daily life.  

Extending the Grasp: The Art of Charles Baxter’s The Art of Subtext

“The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped . . . “

James Wood sounds this clarion call on the last page of How Fiction Works and like the most urgent of such calls, it was floating around in the culture before Wood sounded it.

Charles Baxter’s The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot was published before How Fiction Works but seems to start where Wood left off.  Not surprisingly, The Art of Subtext has a subtext: it feels like it’s really about how fiction might get the distinctive weirdness of contemporary life down on paper. It’s about the importance of listening to our narcissism, of noticing how the inarticulate create meaning, of locating the information actually conveyed by information overload,  of decoding faces in a culture both politically correct and cosmetically intense.  

Of course, Baxter acknowledges, “the topic I am dealing with is too large and too inclined to polemic, possibly, to be dealt with sensibly.” He is talking about the problem of describing faces in fiction in a time of photoshop and botox, but there is a similar ambition to his other concerns here. 

There is also a similar humility to his strategies: he uses telling personal anecdotes to start most chapters and studies particular scenes to ground and focus what could become abstract. So it’s actually meaningful when he does generalize: “ . . . the great fallacy of most written dialog in our time is that all the characters are listening.” 

The result is a rigor that goes far beyond rules. 

Born On Third: Dipping Into Nick Hornby's About A Boy

I flippin' love Nick Hornby. 

As I'm working on this new manuscript, I'm looking at some of my favorite novels for tone. And I realized looking at About A Boy what I also realized reading Amy's novel: first person doesn't have a monopoly on the casual, the personal, the idiosyncratic, the interestingly voiced: 

Will had never wanted to fall in love. When it had happened to friends, it had always struck him as a particularly unpleasant-seeming experience, what with all the loss of sleep and weight, and the unhappiness when it was unreciprocated, and the suspect, dippy happiness when it was working out. These were people who could not control themselves, or protect themselves, people who, if only temporarily, were no longer content to occupy their own space, people who could no longer rely on a new jacket, a bag of grass, and an afternoon rerun of the Rockford Files to make them complete.
 
I know this is Intro to Creative Writing, Special Really Stupid People Edition, but bear with me.

Retreat Is Acceptable

My friends have been posting (on facebook) photographs of the writers’ retreats they’ve been visiting in rural France and the truly sylvan parts of Pennsylvania. And I’ve been thinking, as yet another email threatening yet another deadline dinged in my inbox, “I could use some of that. I could use a lot of that.” My current life, wonderful in almost every way, is a writer’s assault.

I envy the productive silence of a retreat. But, unless I could bring Tony Kornheiser and Chelsea Handler with me, I would miss my excuses and distractions.

I also think retreats are more useful at some times in the writing process than others.  I may be kidding myself, but I often feel that I couldn’t ever really spend more than an hour a day generating brand new material. Is this just me?

But some combination of immersing myself in a partially finished manuscript, reading books I already love, and walking around breathing deeply and pounding my chest and mumbling “that’s the ticket!” (mumble/exclaim? think John Cleese) is, at some future point, say 150 pages from now, really cool to contemplate.   

That could be a while.      

Blog as Reading Notebook

I sometimes go on here about whether or not I should keep this blog. But I have realized that it has succeeded–for me, I'm not sure if anyone else cares–as a reading and viewing notebook. I read books more carefully if I'm going to comment on them publicly. In some ways, the way I'm approaching books won't be as meaningful to people, because I'm not reviewing them, I'm plundering their styles and strategies.  I'm reading Updike fiction–On The Farm–for the first time in a long time and it is really useful to note what he does well and less well. 

bel·low v. "to give a bull's loud roar"

I found the beautifully designed, electrically-bright new Paris Review Interviews in my stocking recently.  This, from Saul Bellow: "I could not, with such an instrument as I developed in the first two books, express a variety of things i knew intimately.  Those books, though useful, did not give me a form in which I felt comfortable."  Earlier: "When I began to wrote Augie March, I took off many of these restraints. I think I took off too many, and went too far . . . "

For the record, I liked The Dangling Man a lot and couldn't get through The Victim. I also have never read Herzog and am now asking myself why. 

Dollars and Sensibility: Jane Austen and the American Class Snuggle

Jane Austen writes well about class because she writes about the scaffolding of class: money. She devotes the first pages of Sense and Sensibility to answering the question my trusts and estates professor used to ask repeatedly: who gets the cookies? She describes the process by which greed is painted over as need, when the step brother rationalizes his stinginess toward his family. She bothers to consider the logistics of giving and accepting gifts, as a horse is offered by a suitor.  Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m not seeing a lot of talk of family money or its lack in modern American fiction, and I personally find it hard to write about those things.

I think the British are just more honest about class than we are. In America, we all like to think that we are essentially middle class. In some ways we are, but Jane Austen proves that even intramural class struggles are fraught. At the very least, there are the people at whom the buy-your-spouse-an-Audi-for Christmas commercials are targeted and the rest of us. There are people who enfeebled by money or embittered by its lack. But that's just the start of an complicated mess of delusion and nuance and irony. I’m not looking for agitprop but I would like to write in ways that reflected how money and its absence shape us.

Blogs and the Decline of the Private Journal: A Case Study of One

I have feared that blogging–I have to reiterate that I hate the word but using any other seems forced–would cut into time for what Leo Lerman calls "writing that illuminates," meaning fiction, personal essay, memoir, and other crafted personal writing. That has not proved to be true. I'm working on two books worth of material and started a new story this week.  I have rationalized that blogging simply takes the place  of the letters and  literary journalism which have always been a part of writers' lives.   That is also probably true.  But what I did not expect was that blogging would decimate my private journal writing. And that feels like a loss. Of course, a part of me thinks, "you're a middle-aged man; your self is not a work in progress as it was in your adolescence. The point of your life now is not to continue to sculpt a self but to be useful to others." And my essential self does feel solid. I basically know what I value and know what I want.  But just as it is with manuscripts, just when you think you're done, there's always another revision: a new set of possibilities, a new bucket of fears. When faced with these inevitable changes–parents failing, your own eventual obsolescence becoming less abstract–there is a kind of forgiveness, and thus a kind of freedom, that  only a truly private journal offers.. I miss that and I think I'll be making some time to get back to more private writing.   

It Isn't All About Meme: Our Far-Flung Inspirations

Moonlight Ambulette responded to my suggestion for a list of writerly strengths you admire with a thoughtful post. She also makes the point  that making a discrete list of practitioners we admire can be difficult. I know that my daily inspirations and nano-role-models arrive phrase by phrase, day be day. This week’s gleanings:

John Freeman in the Dallas Morning News via Powell's, on the appeal of Updike’s criticism:

“What makes Mr. Updike's essays worth reading and owning in hardback is the intimate, frighteningly articulate voice that holds them aloft.”

In the November 12 New Yorker review of No Country for Old Men, Anthony Lane asks why the Coen Brothers burdened Javier Bardem “with a helmetlike hair style that makes him look like the fifth Monkee."

This surprisingly precise image is unfortunately reduced on the web version to a “comical haircut. ”

A Meme of My Own: Writerly Strengths I Wish I Had

The your strengths as a writer meme  prompted the thought that, as an unpublished writer, the strengths I aspire to are more interesting than the strengths I can  claim.

The meme:  What five or ten writers’ strengths would you most like to appropriate?

I would like to swipe the ability . . .