Read The Inheritance of Loss by Kirin Desai

I finished The Inheritance of Loss last night, which I enjoyed a lot. It got me to wondering about the author, and here are some interesting things I read in interviews with her.

As you said, you had an unconventional method for writing Hullabaloo; this being your first book, do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

KD: There are all kinds of theories that you get told in writing workshops--"Write what you know," and that sort of thing, which I don't believe at all. I think one of the great joys of writing is to try and explore what you don't know, that's exciting to me. There are all kinds of little things--show, don't tell--I just wouldn't pay attention to any of that really. I don't think you can write according to a set of rules and laws; every writer is so different. I can't imagine how they come up with these rules--they're really ludicrous. You can't learn to write in that fashion. What inspired me really was reading, reading a lot and learning from other writers. Learning how they are going about something--I was very aware of that when I was writing this book. Every book that I read at the same time I'd think, "Hmm--how do they do this?" Looking at it in that way, from a technical point of view, which we don't usually do as a reader. But really I think that's for me what was important; I was training myself to look at my work with a critical eye.

Her basic point here--that the most important part of learning to write is learning to read--I absolutely agree with. It's something I talk about with my freshman comp students all the time. In that field, it's called "reading rhetorically." The other thing I tell them is that all the rules for writing that they get told are really rules for re-writing--that when you are writing you should act as if there are no rules, and then in the revision stages you channel the ghost of English Teacher Past.

Contrary to the impression Desai gives here, I do think it's important for the end product to show rather than tell. But if what she means is that you should ignore that rule while writing and then come back with a critical eye to see what works (presumably discovering that failing to show doesn't work), then I'm with her.

What did you think you wanted to say when you first set out to write The Inheritance of Loss? Do you think you managed to convey all you wanted to?

. . . . As for whether I'm content with the book -- I always have the feeling that something got away. Where is that thing -– the sublime novel? What would it feel like to hold that in my hands? Whenever I come across it as a reader, I read trembling. Like any art form, when it's great, the person experiencing it exists in a form of grace. I hunger for that feeling as a writer as well as a reader.

Are you satisfied with the way your work has developed, as a writer? Do you see yourself continuing to write more in future?

I think this book is better than the last, but certainly I don't think it's perfect. It's the hardest thing to write a perfect book. Yet, of course, as a reader, I hunger for it. It's a constant desire and I know I'll write another book for that reason.

Writing, for me, means humility. It's a process that involves fear and doubt, especially if you're writing honestly. I imagine businessmen feel smug at least twice a day. Writers? The moments are rare.

All of these comments jumped out at me, because they so accurately describe my experience.

Plainsong by Kent Haruf

I read Plainsong by Kent Haruf over the last couple days, and I recommend it. (I finished it after midnight after turning off Dick Clark, so it's the first book on my 2008 list. That's the OCD I was referring to earlier.) It's a very interesting experiment in form that feels like there's nothing unusual about it but adds up in layers to something larger. The whole thing is strongly implied in the title and in the explanation of the title at the beginning and then is made clear by the title of the last chapter.

Books I Read This Year To Help Me Write My Novel

When I was in college and for many years after I kept a list of all the books I read. For several years I lost the habit and renewed it earlier this year. The rule was always that it had to be a book that I read cover to cover, so books that I don't finish are usually not on the list. I figure I start about four times as many books as I finish--it's not uncommon for me to get a hundred pages or more into a book and give up on it, which I do with a lot of regret because I can be pretty OCD about adding titles to my list. I also have a lot of anxiety about how slow a reader I am--about half as fast as my wife.

But I'm good about making time for reading, so even with my slow pace and my tendency to abandon a lot of books part way through, I'm able to finish more than one book/week. I'm looking at my 2007 list now, and I have 65 titles on it, and I expect to add one more.

I'm not going to list them all, but I thought it would interesting to list all of them that had something to do with my thinking about my own novel, which I started working on April 22. These are books that I turned to for models, guidance, instruction, inspiration, moral support, research and relief.

1. The Runaway -- Alice Munro*
2. Writing In General and The Short Story In Particular -- L. Rust Hills*
3. A Farewell To Arms -- Ernest Hemingway
4. The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers
5. For Whom The Bell Tolls -- Ernest Hemingway
6. To Kill A Mockingbird -- Harper Lee
7. The Blues Eye -- Toni Morrison
8. This Year You Will Write Your Novel -- Walter Mosley
9. Kafka On the Shore-- Haruki Murakami
10. On Writing and Publishing -- Mark Twain
11. Why Does He Do That? -- Lundy Bancroft
12. Speak -- Laurie Halse Anderson
13. The Pesthouse -- Jim Crace
14. Suite Francaise -- Irene Nemirovsky*
15. The Singular Mark Twain -- Fred Kaplan*
16. Reading Like A Writer -- Francine Prose
17. Journal of a Novel -- John Steinbeck (recommended for aspiring writers and hard-core fans.)
    
18. On Writing and Publishing -- Mark Twain
19. In Country -- Bobbie Ann Mason*
20. Living By Fiction -- Annie Dillard
21. Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interview (a few from each volume, probably adding up to about the equivalent of two volumes)*
22. The Echo Maker -- Richard Powers*
23. Winter Numbers: Poems -- Marilyn Hacker*
24. Style: 10 Lessons In Clarity and Grace -- Joseph Williams (recommended for any working writer)
    
25. Conversations With Toni Morrison -- ed. by Danilee Taylor-Guthrie*
26. The Great Gatsby -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
27. Kissing God Goodbye: Poems, 1991-1997 -- June Jordan
28. A Light In August -- William Faulkner
29. Waiting -- Ha Jin*
30. Fathers and Sons -- Ivan Turgenev
31. A Peculiar Grace -- Jeffrey Lent
32. Fire In the Blood -- Irene Nemirovsky
33. The Book of Daniel -- E. L. Doctorow*
34. On the Road: The Original Scroll -- Jack Kerouac*
35. Run -- Ann Patchett
36. The View From Castle Rock -- Alice Munro
37. Madame Bovary -- Gustave Flaubert

In addition, preceding and during that period, I read other books about writing (Thirteen Ways of Looking At a Novel*), books related to my travels in Vietnam, books on economics (Three Billions New Capitalists, The World Is Flat), books on WWII History (Joe Keegan, Joseph Persico) and several volumes of biography inspired by my driving tour of American historical sites last summer (Lincoln, John Brown, Lewis and Clark).

*I'm marking with an asterisk lesser-known books that I recommend to most readers interested in good writing (regardless of whether or not you are working on a novel.) I'm not bothering to mark the classics/canonical books that most people are already familiar with.

Toni Morrison on Point of View II

Picking up on my last post about looking at things from the bad guy’s P.O.V., the example of the that clearest to me is the Cholly chapter in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and that whole book, along with Beloved, are what I turned to for technical models for my narrative P.O.V.

I started out knowing that I wanted my narration to be in the third person. Partly I didn’t want to limit myself to the P.O.V. of my main character all the way through. Especially since it’s a coming of age story, so my youthful character would not be very sophisticated or a mature judge of his circumstances. I wanted to be able to say more than the character could.

Also, I didn’t want to invite comparison with other coming-of-age stories with strong first-person narrators like Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird and Huck Finn. Any story about youth told in the first person always gets summarized by some readers as either a modern Holden Caulfield or Scout or Huck Finn and I didn’t want to have that hanging over my head as I drafted.

As for second person narration, I’ve always thought that felt gimmicky and unnatural. It puts up a stylistic barrier between the story and the listener. In theory, it's a more immersive experience for the reader, but in reality I think it has the opposite effect, forcing the reader to translate through the technique.

So when I first started, I went looking for examples of coming-of-age novels in the third-person, and they are actually pretty hard to find. (If you can suggest any, let me know.) My wife suggested The Bluest Eye, but if you start reading it from the first chapter, you’ll see that her memory was technically mistaken. It starts in first person, but from the P.O.V. of someone other than the main character of Pecola. It’s sort of how Nick Carraway reports on Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby—the on-the-scene observer who is not himself central to the action. (Except that he actually is when it comes to the thematic conflict vs. the exterior conflict—I’ll parse that another day.)

But I nevertheless re-read The Bluest Eye all the way through and saw that the P.O.V. jumps around. It’s in first person a lot of the time, though with different narrators, and it's in third person omniscient a couple times and third person limited sometimes, especially in the Cholly chapter. That turned out to be a chapter that inspired me quite a lot. If you look over the Cholly chapter, you’ll see that it gets in so close to looking through his eyes and limiting the information to what he knows and how he feels about it, that it almost feels like first person, but it’s third-person limited.

That was also instructive because I knew I was going to have a technical problem similar to the one that chapter was dealing with—a character who does monstrous things but who if I presented as monstrous would come off as flat and unrealistic and incredible. With Cholly, Morrison "causes readers some dismay" (to use her own analysis--see yesterday's post) by making him understandable and comprehensible. She treats him as human, which is necessary to the art if he isn’t going to be just a tool to move the plot along. It certainly is dismaying and raises the stakes for the reader of all the conflict that follow. (That's key probably to any great narrative art and part of what I admire in Morrison's novels--when not only can the reader see something at stake for the characters but can feel something at stake for themselves.)

In the case of my own book, it would certainly be more comfortable for me to treat my monstrous character as simply a monster but the credibility of the tale would break down there, and the Cholly chapter showed me a way to create what I needed to.

But where Morrison used the third person limited in that select spot, I felt her way of getting in so close that it felt like the first person would be good for my entire story. Instead of shifting the P.O.V. and the technique, I would stick with that technique and switch from one character to another as needed in different sections or chapters.

Just about decided on that, I turned to Beloved to study how she handled P.O.V. there. I looked at the scene where the full detail of how Beloved dies is revealed to the reader—the family working the yard, the horses coming up the lane, the mad dash to the shed. If you look at that scene, you’ll see that same technique of third person narration getting in real close on the shoulder of the characters so that it feels like first person.

Except in this case, instead of it changing from chapter to chapter, the P.O.V. changes from paragraph to paragraph. We spend a few frames on Stamp Paid’s shoulder, then on Baby Suggs’, then on the slave masters, then on the nephew’s, then the white man coming up from town in his carriage and so on. In each paragraph we only see it from the perspective and limited understanding of each character and in that way get the whole story. It’s masterful. It’s the most impactful and complex—and dismaying—presentation of horror that I know of in a novel.

I've imitated that style a lot at the most emotionally intense points in my draft and overall the P.O.V. would be described as third-person limited, mostly from the perspective of the main character and occasionally, for the duration of a chapter, switching to other key characters.

Toni Morrison on Point of View I

This is from one of my favorite books about literature, Conversations With Toni Morrison (Edited by Danille Taylor-Guthrie; University Press of Mississippi)

Q: Do you love all your characters?
A: Always!
Q: Do you identify with any of them?
A: No, that would not be a good position to take . . . . I love them and I cherish them, and I love their company as long as I am with them. The point is to try to see the world from their eyes, and I think that is probably what causes readers some dismay. I like to do what I thinks actors do on stage. My work is to become those characters in a limited way, to see that they see, not what I see. I need to see how they see the world. Each one speaks his or her own language, has an individual set of metaphors, and notices certain things differently from other people.

My biggest direct influence when it came to P.O.V. was Toni Morrison, and I'll write about that at more length later. This quote, which I found after I had already get well started, isn't obviously about P.O.V. in that it doesn't say anything about first-person, third-person, omniscience, etc. But it is about P.O.V. in the sense that it reminds me that all the technical parts of a book are integrated. Whatever technical approach I take to the issue of P.O.V.--third person limited, for example--it won't matter if I don't really perceive my characters as fully human.

This can be so difficult to do with the bad guys in a story. (Though I suppose the danger is just as great with the good guys.) The temptation is to treat them like monsters--to have them serve the purpose of antagonizing your protagonist. But if they aren't fully human in their own right and don't have real, credible reasons for their behavior, then you have melodrama instead of literature.

One way I forced myself to do that is to have some chapters that are specifically from the antagonists P.O.V. In my case it's like when Gruendel speaks for himself in John Gardner's novel. It's not always necessary to narrate from the bad guy's P.O.V., but Toni Morrison's point here is that it's always necessary to be able to.

Alice Munroe's "The View From Castle Rock"

Alice Munroe is a genius, I think. I only know her most recent books, so I should read some of her earlier stories before I spout off, but for me she symbolizes the kind of writer who achieves terrific literary expertise late in life. Runaway, which I read earlier this year just before I started working on my own book, communicates so much maturity--finely honed expertise, wisdom based on experience, patience and confidence.

And those stories are packed. They do tons and tons of work in so little space. They remind me of the physical sensation of science experiments as a child when the teacher would have me pick up two objects that looked similar in shape and color. One would be made of lead and the other of cast aluminum. If you pick up the aluminum first, misjudging its weight your arm jerks into the air suddenly. Accustomed to the weight of the piece of cast aluminum, the lead wold feel surprisingly heavy. The point was to distinguish between volume and mass, each of them having equal volume but a different mass. The sense of anticipating helped drive the point home. Alice Munroe's stories are like that--you start out reading them anticipating the cast aluminum and discover they have a lot more mass to them than that.

I just got done reading her most recent book, The View From Castle Rock. What's interesting to me about this book is the form. It's so unusual a form that I think the people who wrote the book jacket didn't really get it and ended up misleading. Again I was anticipating something a lot different.

For one thing, the jacket describes it as stories, and since she's known a short story writer, I figured it was another collection of short stories. Not at all--it's a single complete narrative in two parts.

What's interesting about the form is that it is a mixture of documentary/history, invented history and personal memoir, and which parts are invented and which parts are true don't follow any traditional compact between writer and reader. It all adds up to the a kind of family history. It starts with Scots so many generations back that they are at the transition from folklore with fairies and haunted woods to the kind of written records where the names of relatives can be found. Where no record exists, Munroe fills in the gaps with vivid narrative speculations. At the generations pass and her ancestors immigrate to "America"--eastern Canada, Illinois and Ontario--the surviving written record begins to accumulate, but the reader can't tell if these are actual or if they are also Munroe's inventions. Effectively warned not to take any direct report for granted, by the time the action moves into the narrator's lifetime and what she witnesses it's impossible to tell in what sense this is memoir or still "stories" in the usual sense of the word.

One of the points, I assume, is that they are all stories regardless of their accuracy or regardless of how much they are based on invention versus memory.

So, for purely technical reasons, the book is interesting for that experiment in form.

Reading novels while I’m writing

John Updike said, “I want to read only what will help me unpack my own bag.”

That makes sense to me. I feel very touchy about what I read, and I’ve had an uncharacteristic tendency in the last several months of picking up lots of books and not finishing them. All the surfaces in my house are stacked with books I’ve pulled off of shelves, started in hopes of finding coaching or companionship and then abandoned. I’m looking for books that address the same technical problems that I’m having or that give me a sense of how to keep going without fear. One example was Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker, which I got caught up in and finished while I was drafting. It’s in the third person, which I was lad to have a chance to study in action, and I enjoyed looking at how it handled the characterization of a small-city environment, which I also am doing.

Books like that are hard to find—thus all the Paris Review interviews I’ve been reading. Still I need to keep my mind busy between my morning writing sessions. Early in the process I had some luck distracting myself with some totally unrelated history books and biographies, but I’ve been feeling impatient with them lately.

I had a period when I started reading poetry some, which in a way felt more dangerous. You hear some authors talk about how they don’t want to be “influenced” while they’re writing, and poetry it seems to me is more likely to do that anything, to put a certain tempo or stylistic consciousness into my sentences. I’m intrigued by that but cautious. I don’t want to risk any kind of disruption. Perhaps it will come in handy during the revision/editing process.

Recent reading--Jeffrey Lent, Irene Nemerov and E.L. Doctorow

I went a couple months without much inclination to read fiction, but I'm back in the groove lately. Last week I read a new novel by Jeffrey Lent titled A Peculiar Grace. I think I picked it up originally on the basis of a positive review that I can't remember and because it's in third person and somewhat "contemplative." I guess I mean anything that isn't a shoot-em-up is a book with a certain amount of navel gazing in it. This book shows how gross a generalization that is. It does a really good job of being contemplative but also having a lot of real action in it--human behaviors that are both credible and surprising and suspenseful.

Mostly, anyway. I can think of decisions that the character made "all of a sudden" that I didn't feel like were earned. It boils down to the essential challenge in contemporary literary fiction where an omniscient narrator doesn't spell out every thought and feeling of the character. Has the narrator given enough detail that the reader infer a motivation that hasn't been explicitly stated? In a lot of contemporary fiction, I think, there's a certain laziness of thinking where the writer relies on a sense of apparent mystery to permit plot maneuvers that are not actually set up and earned.

There's a little of that in A Peculiar Grace I think. I don't know why the narrator decides "all of a sudden" to run off to upstate New York. I don't know why he ends up getting it on with the girl--I believed him when he said it wasn't that kind of relationship.

No doubt, this is because I'm a dumbass reader. Anyway, I was usually eager to find out what happens next and the fact that a lot of the plot was moved along between episodes by the contemplation in the main character's mind as he worked or went about his business was interesting to me, because that's so hard to pull off.

I read Irene Nemerovsky's Fire In the Blood last week. Her books collected in Suite Francais have been very popular in the last year and half, and I read those earlier this year also. I'm not sure what to say about them, so I think I'll let them sit for awhile. I'm conflicted about them--there's a lot that's very good--fascinating, and high-quality in the craft. And there's a lot that's unsatisfying about the perspective.

I started re-reading E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel the other day. I love everything by Doctorow and read this several years ago. It's a fictionalized account of what the elder child of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg might have been several years later. I picked it up again because--I thought--it's in the third person and it's about a young boy. Now that I'm into it I'm seeing what I had forgotten, which is that it's only partly in third person and about a young boy. It's actually an unusual experiment that switches back and forth between first and third person, Daniel narrating his life and then sometimes talking about himself as if he were someone else. And it spans many years.

I'm actually in the mood to go read it some more right now.

More moral support from Jane Smiley

Here are a couple things Jane Smiley says in Thirteen Ways that have helped me keep going:

“You have not been asked or groomed to write a novel. You have not gone to novel-writing school, . . . Chances are, no one wants you to write your novel—if they say they do, they are just meaning that you should get it over with . . . . The people you know actually dread reading the novel you are about to write—they don’t want to read about themselves, they don’t want to be bored, and they fear embarrassment for everyone. You are, therefore, free.

“The Only way to suspend [your own disbelief] is to keep adding sentences to the ones you have
already written. Sheer length persuades, at least to some degree, because it builds and object in the mind.”

“Boredom is only a symptom, and boredom with the material that at first inspired you to write a novel can mean any number of things, but it never means that your material is inherently unintineresting.”

She then goes on to offer several possible diagnoses for the symptom of boredom—not knowing enough about characters, confusion about plot, fear of failure—and some prescriptions to self administer. I strongly recommend reading this section of the book.

Books that help me

Jane Smiley’s Thirteen Way of Looking At a Novel, especially Chapter 10, “A Novel of Your Own (I).” Every time I need moral support, I go back and re-read that chapter.

I use this book almost like a reference tool. It’s 12 chapters on different aspects of reading or writing novels, and then a section with short commentaries on each of 100 novels that she read during a one-year period. I’m frequently looking in the index to see what she thought of a particular book and then getting tempted to reread one of her chapters about the art of the novel or morality in the novel, etc.

She references her own work a lot and it’s interesting to hear how ambivalent or indifferent she is about a couple of my favorites such as The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton and A Thousand Acres, which is one of my favorite 20^th century novels.

The last chapter is a case study of writing her book Good Faith. It’s an interesting detailed breakdown of what it’s like for an experienced writer when a novel seems blocked and how she found the way out of it.