Projection and Susan Choi

If I remember my high school psychology, "projection" describes the tendency to notice in others one's own faults, especially the faults one is most anxious not to have exposed. I suspect myself of this tendency sometimes in my response to other writers--whatever it is I'm worried about in my own book at the moment I seem to be hypersensitive to (or imagining) in the published work I'm reading.

That may be going on now during my reading of Susan Choi's books, especially her first, The Foreign Student, which I read over the last few days. Like I wrote before, I gobbled up her second book, American Woman, but the bloom started to come off toward the end of that, and I only got a little ways into her third book, A Person of Interest, before giving up on it.

I had a more favorable response when I got to The Foreign Student, but all the way through I noticed and was often puzzled by and sometimes annoyed by the same quality that nagged at me in the other books. And not coincidentally, it's the same quality that I strongly suspect I need to tackle in the next draft of my book. That's the tendency to include digressions that are at least unnecessary and possibly unhelpful or distracting.

In my own book, I need to decide about several scenes, first, is this necessary? The answer is probably always going to be no. And probably that should be the end of the thinking, and I should just cut it. But usually I'm trying to rationalize keeping it, so the next question is if the digression is at least helpful or pleasurable in some way--if it is worth the trade off of departing from the core story. How far a departure can I get away with?

The ultimate question should simply be "Does it work?" Leaving aside traditional narrative structures, does this break from form somehow still work? And with that question in mind, I'm trying to be open to what Choi's books actually do and not judge them by what I'm trying to do with mine. All of her present-action scenes are so vivid and engaging that I lap them up, and I long to be in them. I assume someone who writes that well is making deliberate decisions about the structure, and I try to be open to their choices.

But I just don't get why her first book is organized the way it is. It is titled The Foreign Student after all, and it opens from the POV of that student. The reader is presumably being promised his story, presumably about the time in his life implied in the title--when he is a foreign student. Some amount of background to explain the factors that influence his story makes sense. Some shift in POV isn't unheard of, if following those other characters gives some insight about the foreign student's character and story.

But probably half of the main character's story is flashback to before the present action. And the other half of the book is about another character--his love interest, Katherine. Much of that is also in flashback to decades before the present action and regarding the childhood origins of her relationships with other characters, only one of whom has any bearing on the main character and only in a minor way. I never understood why we had wandered off like that or what story we were following.

In the end I could see how it all "came together" in the sense that I could look back and i.d. how everything related. But I couldn't say how all the other stuff was necessary in retrospect and I definitely couldn't understand while I was reading it why it was necessary. I don't think it does "work." The digressions--if you can call them that when they make up so much of the book--don't serve the story. I could be engaged by individual episodes, but I could never feel like the stakes in a given story were getting higher and that things were getting more complicated, because I couldn't see how any of it related.

At the end of American Woman, when the narrative is driving toward the conclusion of the AW's story, we are interrupted to get backstory on other characters, from their POV, for the purposes of complicating the AW's story. In that case, I would say the whole novel works despite that. It feels like an annoying disruption of a narrative flow that I was really engaged in, and it felt like late in the game to introduce those complications. I think those complications (e.g. the father's painful history, which we can see in retrospect has indirectly three steps later influenced the behavior of the central character in the present action) ought to have been introduced earlier, in briefer form, and in a way that is integrated more fluidly with the present action.

Which is word-for-word almost exactly what my readers have been advising me to do with some particular episodes in my book. So I tend not to trust my own reading. Perhaps I'm projecting my problems onto her books. But I honestly don't think I am.

Waiting is the hardest part

Well, actually there are harder parts, but I don't like it anyway. I'm still badly wanting to start flipping through the print copy and making changes. I want to finish it!

But I resist, one, because for practical reasons it will mess things up to be making changes before hearing back from my readers. Two, I've come to believe that it's necessary to approach the thing fresh after a break every once in awhile. With a break, the rewrites, revisions, or edits or whatever are more on point--energy gets channeled into reading it critically instead of into convincing yourself that it's awesome. That critical distance is easy enough to accomplish when you're discouraged and procrastinating for a couple weeks, but sometimes you have to force yourself away, and now is a good time to do that.

I made some notes on that story that I poked around on during my last break over Christmas. I really like the story idea, but my heart's not in it. Can't stop dwelling on the novel.

Read about half of the Susan Choi book last night. Definitely liking this better than the third book, but . . . another time when I've finished it I'll write more on this question of digression. Theres a certain characteristic in story-telling--I wrote about it yesterday--that bothers me and that I could overlook in one book but less so in the other two.

Susan Choi, judging by covers, and indulgence

I finally read Susan Choi's second novel, American Woman, the other day and am kicking myself for waiting so long. It's fantastic.

And I know exactly what kept me from it--the cover. I think my wife bought and read this book when it first came out several years ago, and it's been banging around various "to be shelved/maybe read soon" piles ever since. My wife recommended it to me, and Choi's name kept coming up in other contexts that made me think I should be reading it . . . but every time I saw the book, I thought to myself, "This? It looks like a vanity pub." Somehow--something muddled in the photo and type choices--the design has been a perfect turn off. Or near-perfect. I did finally get going with it the other day, like I said, and burned out my eyes not sleeping one night while I read most of it. I'd be curious to know how sales were in paperback and if the publisher thought it underperformed. If so, I'd blame it on the design.

I picked up Choi's first and third books in hardcover at a used store the other day, and the newest one, A Person of Interest, has a really punchy and fun cover. I started it yesterday, but I'm loving this one a lot less. I'm only 30 pp. into it, and I should probably keep my mouth shut until I finish, but I don't think I'm going to.

My problem with it is exactly what two other reviewers praise in it--the attentiveness to the main character's psychology. My take on it is that it starts with a bang and then nothing else happens after that so far. All this character development needs to be integrated with the plot. It feels like homework.

The slow character development is a quality that Francine Prose praised in her review in the New York Times--she calls it a return to old-school literary pleasures. I agree that those qualities are pleasurable. Don't agree it's working here.

Another reviewer basically encourages the reader to stick with it with the promise that the character development stuff reveals itself to be important later. To me, that's a bad sign when you have to be coached to gut it out to the good parts. When I'm following a flow chart, I know it's not good to skip a box, but I didn't sign on for reading a flow chart. It's supposed to be engaging all the way along.

This is going to sound harsher than I mean it. I really admired American Woman, but I had a vague feeling that there was a certain amount of indulgence going in then in this kind of exploration of character. It was like putting the breaks on the story for a certain amount of time to pick over the gray matter for awhile. Sometimes that "certain amount of time" could be quite extended, and there were several points in the last quarter of the book where the spell was snapped and I thought we were reading something that served the writer more than it served the story. A Person of Interest seems to start off with that characteristic and extend it for much much longer, so it really feels indulgent.

Nevertheless, I'm going to read her first book, The Foreign Student, next. (Eagerly. I really did like American Woman.) In this case, I can't judge it by the cover at all! The dust jacket is missing from the copy I got the other day. That cloth spine with the gold-leaf stamp of the author, title and the HarperCollins colophone always looks good, though.