My Conversation with Joseph

This week I had a literary conversation with Joseph Montebello at the Gunn Memorial Library in Washington, CT. I was there to talk about Getting Oriented. Montebello was there as someone interested in supporting the library and its programs. The library arranged the evening as a service to patrons.

Montebello is host of "Between the Covers," a radio show of in-depth interviews with authors. He was Vice-President and Creative Director at HarperCollins Publishers, and founded his own imprint Harper Style. He is a contributing editor for Litchfield magazine. We sat in easy chairs in the front of the library meeting room and chatted spontaneously and unrehearsed for about an hour. He had read the book and prepared thoughtful, open-ended questions. For example: "When did you know you were going to be a writer?"

I knew I was going to be a writer when I was 14 years old. I wrote plays, poetry, and fiction in high school; short stories in the Army, two unpublished novels in college, and more fiction and poetry during all the time I was a trade magazine journalist. Getting Oriented is the fourth novel I've written.

"Which was your favorite character and why?" I had not thought about this. One answer, of course, is that this is like asking which is your favorite child. But I blurted out that Sol is my favorite. Although I did not plan to do so, Sol seems almost the mirror to Phil, my protagonist; he is someone who has also lost his way, but unlike Phil is apparently going to remain lost.

"Do you write every day and how does that work?" Yes, I write almost every day. My wife and I are both writers; we share an office in our house. We are usually at the desk shortly after nine in the morning and work until five or later. Not every day is equally productive, but being at the desk is a start.

"Having gone through the process of looking for an agent and a publisher, would you self-publish again?" Probably yes. I told Joseph that I had written query letters to perhaps 150 or more agents and some number, possibly as many as 30, had asked to see the first few chapters of the novel. They all rejected it with essentially the same message: We have decided that your manuscript is not right for our list. I suspect the problem is that the book does not fit neatly into a category—mystery, thriller, romance, whatever—and neither a publisher nor a bookstore would know where to display it.

"How did you come up with characters like The Mad Shopper?" I've led tours in Japan and I've now been on tours elsewhere and shared experiences with guides. The characters in my novel are creations, not people I've known. But there you find certain stereotypical clients on almost every tour, The Mad Shopper, The Picky Eater, The Enthusiastic Drinker among them.

I found the evening wonderfully stimulating and thought-provoking. I only hope that people who sat through the conversation had half as much fun as I had.

Newtown Reads One Book

As a writer, I have a vested interest in reading. The more reading the better, I say, and I walk around with a low-level concern about reading in this country. Between television, video games, and non-verbal activities on the internet (YouTube and Farmville, as two examples), I worry that people are reading less.

I was therefore delighted to join the committee that is organizing the third town-wide reading event. According to the Library of Congress website, "The 'One Book' movement began in 1998 when Nancy Pearl, executive director of the Washington Center for the Book in the Seattle Public Library, initiated "If All Seattle Read the Same Book." With funding from the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund and several local sponsors, she invited members of the public to read the novel The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks, and brought the author to Seattle for three days in December to discuss his book in a series of free public programs."

This will be the third time our library and town has held such an event. In 2003, the committee selected April Morning by Howard Fast and in 2005 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. The committee's challenge, of course, is to pick a book that is (a) in print, (b) available in paperback, and (c) reasonably priced. We are also looking for a book that will appeal to a variety of ages (14 to 84), will inspire a variety of supporting activities and discussion points, and will not piss off too many members of the community.

It seems to me that any book we pick is going to disturb someone. After all, as someone wrote about To Kill a Mockingbird in an Amazon review, "In my Junior English class this year I was forced to read this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. First, what was the PP committee thinking? Yes it was 1961, yes it was the Civil Rights Movement, yes a lot of people used WAY too much pot, but none of those arguments can explain why this obvious, saccharine mockery of a novel won anything, including publication rights. I kept thinking that 'it has to get better,' but it DOESN'T! The characters are flat and cariacatured—everyone does exactly what a Disney-style movie would like them to do. Because of this, there is no real definition to the characters and you can't care about them—believe me, I tried—under threat of death by English teacher. Also the symbolism is blatant beyond belief. She actually tells you directly what the symbols are and what they mean—defeating the whole purpose...."

Our committee has thrown out a long list of possible titles including The Namesake, Sailing Alone Around the World, The Book Thief, Lost in Place, Into Thin Air, Into the Wild, The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Girls of Tender Age, The Coldest Winter Ever, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, and a couple dozen more. Eventually, we'll winnow this down to a short list of five and ask the community to vote on a finalist.

Meanwhile, I have a whole list of what sound like interesting titles to look into. Stay tuned.

The Impossible Dead by Ian Rankin

This is the second novel in the Matthew Fox series; it's Rankin's 25th book. It goes down as smoothly as 25-year-old single malt Scotch.

Inspector Fox is an Edinburgh cop assigned to the Complaints, the cops who investigate other cops. The setup taps into the inevitable tension between the fallible human beings who are trying to bring criminals to justice and the rule of law. As the Romans said, "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" As a result, Fox and his two associates are barely tolerated other cops when they are assigned to look into a case of police misconduct.

The Impossible Dead begins as if Fox, Kaye, and Naysmith are on a fairly straightforward investigation to see whether a rogue cop's mates had known what he was up to and tried to protect him. The dialogue is sharp and natural:

"Forrester's the one we should be talking to," Kaye said suddenly, breaking off from his argument with Naysmith.
"Why?"
"Because her first name's Cheryl. My years of experience tells me that makes her a woman."
"And?"
"And if one of her colleagues was a sex pest, surely she'd have had an inkling. Surrounded by blokes circling the wagons when the rumors start flying . . . she's got to know something."

As anyone who has ever read a mystery knows, however, the straightforward investigation morphs into something far more serious and far more complex. It is a sign of Rankin's mastery that he is able to keep the story moving and his large cast of characters from bumping into each other or into the scenery.

He is also a master at giving just enough descriptive detail to convey place, character, and mood. Here is Fox interviewing the elderly widow of a dead politician:

"Fox took another sip of tea and placed the cup and saucer back on the tray. The room was silent for the best part of a minute. He got the feeling that when she was left alone, this was how she sat--calm and still and waiting for death, staring at her reflection in the window, the rest of world lost somewhere beyond. He was reminded of his father [in the elder care facility]: I don't sleep...I just lie here...."

I'm afraid I cannot sum up my feelings better than P.D. James, who is quoted on the book's jacket: "Rankin is a master at what, for me, is one of the important aspects of a crime novel: the integration of setting, plot, characters, and a theme which, for Rankin, is the moral dimension never far from his writing."

Unwilling Suspension of Disbelief

One of the things I think about as a writer of fiction is how to convince (or persuade) a reader that the story she is reading is—or could be—true. Of course, most readers of a book labeled "novel" realize that neither the characters nor the situation are "real." They are the author's creation. Still, if the author is skillful enough, we are willing to accept that this could have happened; these people might have lived and talked and acted the way the author presents them.

This is true even when the characters inhabit a world we know does not exist: Narnia, the Mars of Martian Chronicles, a post-apocalyptic America. We are willing to accept the impossible (time travel, faster-than-light drive, magic) for the pleasure of the story, the characters, the writing, the conceit, or all four.

I've just seen Woody Allen's latest film, "Midnight in Paris." It hinges on the possibility of time travel. A hack Hollywood writer is in Paris with his fiance and her parents. One evening, alone and tipsy, he is invited at midnight into an ancient Peugeot and finds himself in the 1920s hobnobbing with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and more. Indeed, with virtually ever famous artist and writer who was working in Paris in the 20s. It happens more than once when he is entirely sober, so the experience is not the result of alcohol. This I can accept.

At one point, apparently browsing the Seine-side used book kiosks, the writer finds a diary of the 1920s written in French by a woman he has actually met; she mentions him by name in her diary. The American writer, who speaks no French, finds a young, good-looking French woman to translate the significant passage aloud. This I cannot accept. It raises too many questions for me. He doesn't have any French; how does he find the book? How does he convince a stranger to read it to him?

I am not sure why I am willing to accept that an American Hollywood screenwriter of 2011 can be transported back to Paris of the 1920s, but I cannot accept that the American can find a specific French book when he speaks no French. Does anyone else have this problem with books or movies? Does anyone have a theory why this should be so? Comments are welcome.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

How good are our memories of long past events? Certainly we recall where we were when we heard the Challenger blew up or the Twin Towers were attacked. We probably recall our first car, first job, first sexual experience. But how good are our memories for the details? The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, how accurate are they? I suspect, based on a limited sample (myself), not very.

And what happens when we discover the stories we tell ourselves are not only not true, but reveal just how thoughtless, insensitive, cruel, and viscous we actually were (and may still be)? That's what happens to Tony Webster, the narrator of Julian Barnes brilliant Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The Sense of an Ending.

Tony, divorced, in comfortable retirement, tells his own story. He seems reasonable, thoughtful. Looking back to his school days he says, "we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when that moment came, our lives—and time itself—would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible."

Tony has school chums, becomes involved with a young woman Veronica, spends one weekend at her house with her family, breaks up with her, and lives another forty or so placid, comfortable years. One day he receives a solicitors' letter informing him that Veronica's mother, deceased, has left him 500 pounds and two documents. Tony cannot imagine why she would have done such a thing and wants to look at the documents, one of them the diary of a school chum who killed himself years earlier. In trying to find out why (why the legacy, why the diary, why won't Veronica give it up), Tony learns far more than wanted to know.

This is a short book. I read it in an evening. I found it particularly engaging because I am now writing a novel in which two adult children are trying to understand their dead father and make sense of their memories of him. I found it both moving and wise. As Barnes writes: "We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it who said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent...."

IQ84 by Haruki Murakami

Spoiler Alert: If you have any plans to read 1Q84, do not read further. Come back when you've read the book.

The thing is so massive that this is going to a collection of random thoughts.

1) The basic story is simple. Two Japanese 10-year-olds, after a silent communication in elementary school, fall in love and twenty years later manage, after many complications meet to consummate the love they've maintained through all the years.

2) The young woman, Aomame, murders abusive husbands in a way that is undetectable after a cursory postmortem. She shows no guilt, remorse, or qualms about the murders. She seems, in that sense, to be perfectly amoral.

3) The young man, Tengo, is an aspiring novelist. He's big and strong and women find him attractive, but he seems to be almost indifferent to them (except for their breasts). He has a married lover, ten years his senior, who visits him periodically for her—and his—sexual release. Midway through the novel, the lover's husband calls Tengo to tell him the lover won't be coming around any more. Tengo takes the news in stride, makes no effort to learn more, and we never discover what happened or how the husband learned of the affair.

4) In the first chapter, Aomame, on her way to murder an abusive husband, walks down an emergency exit from a Tokyo expressway and finds she is in an alternate world, one in which the Japanese police carry weapons, there are two moons, and there's a joint Soviet/US effort to build a base on the moon. In this world, it is no longer 1984 but 1Q84. After some half-hearted efforts to learn more, Aomame accepts the new world and continues her life much as before.

5) A policewoman friend Aomame makes is murdered during rough sex in a Tokyo hotel. The murderer is never found.

6) Tengo has intercourse with a 17-year-old girl, Fuka-Eri. She is not worried about getting pregnant; she has not started menstruation. Aomame, on the other side of Tokyo and who, at this point, has not reconnected with Tengo does become pregnant. Aomame, although she has not seen or heard from Tengo for 20 years and has not had sex with anyone in the period in which she became pregnant, realizes she is carrying his child.

7) Virtually all of the cultural references are western: music (Leos Janacek, Miles Davis), movies ("Thomas Crown Affair,"), books (Aomame holed up after murdering the leader of a religious group, reads "In Search of Lost Time"). All of the action takes place in Japan, in Tokyo and elsewhere.

8) The book left me with too many unanswered questions. I'm willing to accept a world in which a man can have sex with one woman and another—his true love—becomes pregnant. I can accept a world in which Little People come out of a dead goat's mouth and build an Air Chrysalis. But I want to know what happened to the married lover. I want to know what happened to Fuka-Eri, who is a major character but who simply walks off stage and disappears. I want to know more about the religious sect, a key institution in the book, their beliefs and why a best-selling novel is such a threat to them.

9) I think the book needs an editor. Although how do you tell an author who reportedly sells a million copies of the book in the first few weeks it's published in Japan he needs editing? But people continually echo what someone has just said. They muse interminably about unanswered and unanswerable questions. They ask rhetorical questions. They think in long italic sections.

10) Finally, having slogged through all 925 pages, I'd like to have something for the effort. This may well be my failure, my inability to see themes or to read into the text the deeper meanings Murakami has imbedded. Is it a good idea to murder abusive men that the law can't touch? Are there alternative realities we can slip into like a train switched onto another track? Is the emotion you felt as a 10-year-old strong enough to sustain without any contact for 20 years? (I had a lot of trouble with that idea, but I'm probably in a minority.) Can a novelist create an alternate reality in which other people can enter and live?

Maybe that's what Murakami is doing.

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

I've finally read Zadie Smith's first novel, White Teeth, an extraordinary book right out of the gate. One of the questions I asked myself repeatedly was: "How does she know so much about this?" According to Wikipedia (sorry, there's virtually no information about her in my edition of the book; I have to use something): "Zadie Smith was born as Sadie Smith in 1975 in the northwest London borough of Brent, a largely working-class area, to a Jamaican mother and a British father. Her parents divorced when she was a teenager. When she was 14, she changed her name to 'Zadie.'

"White Teeth was introduced to the publishing world in 1997, long before it was completed. On the basis of a partial manuscript an auction among different publishers for the rights started, with Hamish Hamilton being successful. Smith completed White Teeth during her final year at Cambridge. Published in 2000, the novel became a bestseller immediately. It was praised internationally and won a number of awards, including the 2000 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, the 2000 Whitbread Book Award in category best first novel, the Guardian First Book Award, the Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize, and the Betty Trask Award. Time magazine included the novel in its Time 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005."

<sup>I suspect some of these judges were knocked out the way I was by the fact that it was written by a 25-year-old (and begun by a 22-year old). How does someone so young know so much? I had a sense that Smith had recorded everything she'd ever heard, ever seen and used it in the book--all 448 pages of it. I had no sense that this is a young person's book (teenage angst or a Bildungsroman); the adults are as well-realized as the young people.

The plot is complex. It follows the experiences of three families from three cultures (British, Jamaican, Banglideshi) over three generations. If you want to check it out and the book's themes, click on the link in the paragraph above.

Smith does something I didn't think you could get away with today—writing dialogue in dialect. "I don' tink dere's any maybes about it, young lady. An' I'm sure I don' know why you come 'pon de bus, when it take three hours to arrive an' leave you waitin' in de col' and den' when you get pon it de windows are open anyway an' you freeze half to death." There's not a lot of dialect, it does fit the situation, and I don't see how Smith could have distinguished her characters as well without it.

The book is rich in character, incident, and story. Indeed, I can imagine someone complaining there are too many characters to keep straight. That would be their problem. I found the cast fascinating and believable. Indeed, in its complexity and richness, I thought of Dickens. A 20th Century Dickens with all of the tensions, beliefs, and color of the 20th Century.</sup>