Want to read a novel that grabs you, pulls you in, and won’t let you go, even after you’ve finished reading it? One in which the characters are rich and full and deserving of your empathy, the prose is evocative and crackles with tension and soothes with tenderness and carries you along in its rhythm, the plot is well crafted with believeable arcs and brims with unexpected twists and turns, and the setting is full of beautiful and compelling and colorful detail? Then please read The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Set in Barcelona from 1945 to 1966, with back-story to 1933, it is the coming of age story of Daniel Sempere, who is consumed with discovering all he can about a mysterious book, which bears the same title of this novel, and its even more mysterious author. This quest takes him through friendship and betrayal, love and violence, secrets kept and secrets revealed, leaps forward and dead ends, to reach an unexpected yet satisfying conclusion. It’s happy and sad, bawdy and lyrical. But mainly, in keeping with its title, it is breathtakingly ethereal. A must read.
The Marriage Plot: a Literary Paen to Male Supremacy or a Keen Observation of Social Reality?
I just finished reading Jeffrey Eugenides’s third novel, The Marriage Plot, and I discovered something new about his writing. Not “new” in his writing, but “new” in my understanding of it. I’m not sure why I missed it in his first two novels–maybe I was so dazzled by his powerful, evocative narrative style, or maybe (and more likely) it’s just one more example of me being slow on the uptake. Whatever the reason for the delay, the scales finally have fallen from my eyes and I clearly see the possibility that Jeffrey Eugenides’s writing in his new novel is sexist. It’s 1982 and we have Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell, all brainy and beautiful undergraduates of Brown University (Eugenides’s alma mater). Mitchell loves Madeleine but Madeleine loves Leonard. And, as befitting Eugenides’s signature literary theme, they are coping with the rigors of coming of age. Problem is, while Leonard and Mitchell cope actively, Madeleine copes re-actively. She reacts to Leonard’s emergent manic depression by changing her role as lover to that of caregiver; she accompanies him on his postgraduate fellowship to a genetics research lab at Cape Cod, spending most of her abundant free time trying to cope with his mood swings; she agrees to his marriage proposal; she stands by him as he becomes unglued on their honeymoon in Paris; when he loses his fellowship (big surprise), they move in with her parents in New Jersey; Madeleine shows some initiative when she accepts her realtor-friend’s offer of a plum apartment rental in Manhattan, but she has second thoughts as Leonard shows his depressive reluctance; and finally he leaves her, fleeing to his hometown of Portland, Oregon, where he retreats to a cabin in the woods with a male friend(?) Submerged in all this Leonard-drama is Madeleine’s acceptance at Columbia in their English-Lit graduate program, which takes second fiddle to saving her marriage. Re-enter Mitchell after returning from his postgraduate spiritual quest to Europe and India. He moves into Madeleine’s Parents’ New Jersey house and offers his shoulder for her to cry on, all the while trying to time his move, now that Leonard’s out of the picture. In the end, Madeleine shows him her senior thesis that has been published in a literary journal. It’s title is “The Marriage Plot,” and it’s a critical analysis of English Victorian novels, prominently Jane Austin’s. Mitchell asks her what if a female character in one of these novels is made an offer by one of her suitors to support her decision to go off on her own and follow her dreams, what would she say? Her answer: “Yes,” for both the character and herself. By then the reader would have expected Madeleine to have answered the same if Mitchell’s question would have been about marriage.
Now that we’ve examined the possible sexism in The Marriage Plot, let’s telescope back to his previous two novels to see if we can find the same pattern in them. Without going into the same depth as we employed with his latest novel, let’s just say in The Virgin Suicides, rather than trying to face their problems, a house-full of sisters decide to off themselves, and in Middle Sex, transsexual Cali opts to run away from the surgery planned by her parents to turn her into a fully functioning female and chooses to become less than fully functional Cal.
We are left with the question is Eugenides a sexist, misogynistic writer, or is he simply a chronicler of the sociocultural fact of female subordination. This latter possibility raises a further question: if he regrets having to show his readers the sad state of women in U.S. society, why doesn’t he choose to use his considerable writing skills to promote gender equality?
The Piano Teacher
Janice Y. K. Lee’s The Piano Teacher is a compelling visit to colonial Hong Kong, pre-WW II through WW II to post-WW II, and a rich mix of British ex-pat and local characters, including the English piano teacher, Claire Pendelton, and her student, ten-year-old Locket and her parents, beautiful and elegant Melody and powerful businessman Victor Chen; and jaded and restrained Will Truesdale and his lover, Eurasian social butterfly-scorpion, Trudy Liang. Lee alternates 1940′s chapters, dominated by Will and Trudy, with 1950′s ones focusing on Will and Claire. It is interesting to see how Will is lead along by Trudy but then leads along Claire. In between are the war years, with Will and most British residents being placed into Japanese internment camps; Trudy staying on the outside, where she falls into the clutches of a Japanese General; and a pregnant Melody moving to California to give birth while her husband operates in the shadow of the Japanese occupation. Up to this point the story moves along nicely, aided by Lee’s deft inclusion of tantalizing clues. But as we reach the end, the story begins to unravel as Lee abandons her ongoing narrative for a flashback of a key plot point, thus diminishing its dramatic impact, and leaves several clues hanging and more than a few questions unanswered. It’s as if she ran out of steam after pulling along so many plot lines; as we race to the finish, the road goes off a cliff. A novel that is 90% brilliant, however, is still a novel worth reading.
The Corrections vs. Freedom
Jonathan Franzen has outdone himself. He has impossibly written a better novel than The Corrections. Freedom surpasses The Corrections in both depth and breadth. In the former work, Franzen mines his characters deeply and to great effect, but in the latter, he proves himself the master of character development, delving even deeper into their minds and souls, with amazing texture and nuance. But the main improvement is in breadth of plot. In The Corrections, Franzen focuses on the members of one family, taking them from the Mid West to New York City and back again, while in Freedom, he again focuses on a single family, but takes them much farther on–to New York, New Jersey, Washington DC, West Virginia, and South America. He also connects them with a larger number of richly developed secondary characters. He draws compelling arcs for them, temping and challenging them in interesting ways. And he places them in a much broader context of changing cultural and political currents, ranging from the ’70s to 2009. He gives them the freedom to succeed or fail; to make mistakes and live with them or correct them; to lose their way and stay lost or find it again; to love, hate, and love again. The Corrections was a great novel; Freedom is a masterpiece.
Renewing My Texas Ties
Just got back from my annual 10-day visit to south Texas, my birthplace and where I lived until 1972 when I left to attend graduate school at the University of California, San Diego. I always try to return at least once a year to stay with one of my best buddies from high school, Davy, who recently moved from San Antonio to Corpus Christi, which is fine with me because it puts me much closer to my favorite place in the world, Padre Island, the site of Davy’s and my and four other friends’ treasure hunt in 1967 and the inspiration for both my novel, Searching Padre, and this blog, WritingWindandSand.
This summer, when I wasn’t gorging on great seafood and barbecue, chewing the fat with Davy over cigars and Titos (a local killer vodka) and tonic, watching some of our favorite movies and listening to music, I took his small pickup over to the island to spend time refilling my creative reservoir with images:
A Whisper of Surf on a Calm Summer Day
Foredune Anchored With Railroad Vines, Chord Grass, and Sea Oats
Sunset Painted Across the Western Horizon
Spoiled by Idiots Feeding Them, Gulls Gather For a Handout of Useless Cherry Pits From Me
. . .and with ideas:
A single brown pelican flies above the surf with steady and stately wing strokes, while two terns are positioned in front and two in back, their smaller white wings almost a blur, a WWII bomber with a squadron of fighter escorts heading to a mission.
The peridot water crests into curls of white froth as it glides onto the beach, a rich and magical summer brew.
Tall dark clouds line the eastern horizon, puffy sentinels guarding the riches of the Gulf of Mexico spreading out before them.
But, alas, I am back to the reality of teaching Introduction to Cultural Anthropology at Cal State Long Beach. A much less inspirational reality.
New Short Story
Today I sent out a new story, Transcendence. Brian and Lisa spend the night together on the Padre Island National Sea Shore on the Texas Gulf Coast, where they share a bottle of Tito’s Vodka and make love. The next morning Lisa goes for a walk while Brian stays at the car, each of them stewing in their fear and uncertainties about each other, which they begin to transcend with a mutual attraction drawn out of them by the beauty of the island, and as they connect, their happiness in each other is transcended by the beauty of the natural environment that helped create it.
What makes this story unique is not its plot line as much as the way I wrote it. It’s five pages of one sentence without any punctuation. How did I handle clauses and phrases that had to have punctuation to work properly? I dropped them down one line and indented them, then continued on with the story on the next line, flush left.
We’ll see.
New Short Story
I just sent out a new short story, “Running.” Pete Wilson is on his early morning run next to a bay in Corpus Christi, Texas when he hears a woman scream and sees a man run out of her house; he chases him and just as he’s getting close, the guy turns and shoots Pete. In the next instant, Pete is standing in a beautiful, cool green field and realizes he’s dead and is now a ghost, and he knows he has to help the police catch the serial rapist who murdered him before he can go on to whatever lies beyond the green field.
This is the first ghost story I’ve submitted and the first one of any kind written in second-person.
Nibble From an Agent
Just got a nibble from one of the agents I recently sent my query letter to. She emailed me and asked for the first 50 pages of my novel, Searching Padre. I sent them and a couple of days later, I received this reply:
“Thank you for sending me a portion of your manuscript. I enjoyed reading it.
While your pages are interesting and well-written, after careful consideration, I feel that your product is not right for my list at the current time.
I wish you the best in finding the right agent who can successfully champion your product.”
Well, after the promising nibble, this one got away. Maybe I’ll land the next one. Or the one after that. Or the one. . .
Fishing for Agents
I just sent out a bunch of query packages to agents for my novel, Searching Padre. I’ve sent it out before, but no bites. Since then I’ve revised the hell out of it, cutting around 200 pages, reorganizing the plot structure, tightening, tweaking, hopefully improving. I think it’s much improved, but I’ve learned that agents/editors and I don’t always think alike. What I do know is these days their thought process is informed by a business model, rather than by a literary one–judging a manuscript not by the quality of its writing but by its salability. But, as writers, all we can do is write what we want to write as well as we can write it. If we try to write only what we think will sell in today’s market, with no passion for that type of writing, we’re bound to fail.
What Was He/She Thinking?
There are several books that would be on my Favorite Books and Authors Posts 1 and 2 but for some kind of flaw.
Hilary Thayer Hamann–Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel. This novel is about as twice as long as it needs to be. This coming-of-age story on Long Island is beautifully written and delves deeply into the lives of the protagonist and her family and friends and could/should have ended with her graduation from high-school. But Ms. Hamann chooses to drag out the story, taking the protagonist to New York City in a seemingly never ending, dreary saga of dependency and failure and shallow accomplishments. Someone should have told her to quit already and pump up the NY city part to the level of the first one and try to get it published as a sequel. Because it’s now an anchor that pulls the beautiful first part down with it.
Jeff Lindsay–Dexter in the Dark. In this novel, Dexter’s “Dark Passenger,” which Lindsay has always presented as a metaphor for his penchant for offing bad people, suddenly becomes an alien creature that has possessed him and is controlling him. Robbed of his own volition, Dexter becomes an empty shell animated by the creature. In the next novel, the “Dark Passenger” is back to metaphor and Dexter has returned to being the man on a mission in his delightfully obsessive and meticulous fashion. Which leaves me to wonder if maybe it was Lindsay who was temporarily possessed.
Bernhard Schlink–The Reader. This novel about the romantic relationship between a 15 year-old boy and a 36 year-old woman, which includes the boy reading to her, because, as he later finds out, she’s illiterate, and her subsequent arrest and trial and imprisonment for war crimes is tarnished by Schlink’s last chapter, where he delivers a melodramatic apology for the Holocaust. Totally unnecessary–the story itself is more than a sufficient indictment.
Work in progress. Please visit again.
