Six Great Books

Farming on Paper

 

           

 

            Let me start with a confession: I did not have enough time to reread all of The Grapes of Wrath before the day of my scheduled contribution to the Classics Circuit blog tour celebrating the work of John Steinbeck.  This makes me feel sheepish, like a student who has not managed to do the assigned reading for a class.  On the other hand, it reminds me that we designate certain novels as “classics” partly because they are memorable enough to stay with us in the years after we read them.  And sometimes the experience of reading a book is as memorable as the book itself.

          I first picked up The Grapes of Wrath over twenty years ago during a two month stay on a small organic farm in the Tarn region of France.  It was a lonely time for me, a twenty year old American literature student who had stumbled into this unpaid internship while seeking a summer language immersion experience that would cover my living expenses.  Most of the French spoken in my midst was too rapid and heavily accented for me to understand.  Only thirteen year old Rodolphe, the oldest son of my host mother, had the patience to carry on long conversations with me as we planted seeds, weeded fields, fed chickens, gathered eggs, and transformed the cows’ milk into yogurt and cheese. 

          During the hottest part of the afternoon when everyone rested, I wrote letters on thin air mail paper and soon devoured the few books that had fit in my backpack.  Amidst the piles of Tin Tin and Asterix comic books the kids spend their afternoons reading, I found Les raisins de la colère.  Rodolphe and his mother were enthusiastic in their praise for Steinbeck’s most famous novel, which they explained was standard assigned reading for French students of a certain age.  Given that Rodolphe had learned from his superior history curriculum how to rattle off the acronyms of every agricultural and public works project FDR had initiated, I felt obliged to read this chronicle of American Depression era agricultural devastation.

          My purpose in learning French was to be able to read French literature in the original, so there was an inherent irony to the act of reading Les raisins de la colère in French translation.  When I went along that week to help out at the farm’s market booth in Toulouse, I found an English bookstore with an expensive copy of The Grapes of Wrath.  At my host mother’s suggestion, I read each chapter first in French and then in English.  This tested my comprehension and gave me an opportunity to see how the French translator had attempted to capture the Okie dialect in French slang.  My hunger for English—and relief at being able to comprehend fully what I had read—made me love Steinbeck’s spare yet elegant prose all the more.

          Reading about the struggles of the Joad family while living on a picturesque, but struggling small farm made the agricultural dimension of the story more meaningful to me.  In retrospect, it is interesting to consider how Steinbeck’s 1939 critique of what we now call “Big Ag” presents in fictional form many of the same arguments that Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and other recent nonfiction books have made about agriculture in America.  The Depression era Dust Bowl was a tragic example of how corporate farms that emphasize monoculture (single commodity crops such as corn) destroy land that traditional methods of crop rotation might have saved.  In one of the earliest chapters of The Grapes of Wrath, a man in a tractor drives out the starving sharecroppers by planting cotton in relentlessly even rows, damaging houses and uprooting the people who live in them.  Later, the Joads learn that those who own the abundant fruit of California’s orchards would rather see it rot than let migrants like them eat it for free.  Because there are so many desperately hungry migrants, those orchard owners have a guaranteed supply of workers who will work for almost nothing.  Steinbeck refers to such owners “farming on paper” as they record their profits without ever seeing their land—the opposite of the small farm model I feel fortunate to have experienced.

          There are many scenes in the novel that stand out, including the Joads' fascination with the modern plumbing in the federal resettlement camp where they find temporary refuge.  The camp's "ladies' committee" discovers an overuse of toilet paper, which they soon find to be the result of one family's starved children subsisting on a diet of green grapes and getting the runs.  However, the most memorable scene of The Grapes of Wrath is its last when Rosasharn, after giving birth to a stillborn baby and seeking refuge from a flood in a barn, sustains and comforts a sick old man with her breast milk.  We do not know if this milk will save him, but her act of generosity is a pure moment of hope in an otherwise pessimistic book.  Rereading that scene, I think Steinbeck was suggesting that however mechanized food production becomes, our need for food and the desire to share it makes us human.  And when we are hungry for stories to sustain us, reading makes us human too and books become as much a part of our individual and collective memory as the food we eat.  In giving us The Grapes of Wrath, which argues eloquently that food should be for people and not corporations, Steinbeck pulls off a good sort of "farming on paper."   

Readers Envy and a Writer's Life

I've been an avid reader all of my life. However, when I began to write my own novel, I could no longer just read. Something an author writes triggers a line or idea for my own novel and immediately I'm digging around for a scrap of paper to jot down a note for my manuscript. Reading has become a forensic exercise - I dissect how other authors communicate/structure action and emotion, how they pace the story and what devices they use to move it along. I have become a student of the craft of writing as much as I am a fan of literature. That push and pull, reader/writer- writer/reader, can make the continuity of reading a book a challenge.

There is also the guilt. Read something that's off of my novel's topic and I feel guilty because I should be writing/researching/editing/building a platform - anything and everything related to my book! It almost feels like I'm "cheating" on my manuscript. Sounds strange but writers know what I mean.  

Even with these distractions I must read, it is as necessary for me as breathing. I still quiz my friends about what they're reading, exchange books with my daughters, I pour over the NYT Book Review and source new reading material from places like NPR and the apps I found on Galley Cat that tell you what folks in the WWW. are reading. Life was simpler when I was just a reader.

But I am a writer. A writer  with a 400 page manuscript that I'm aggressively seeking an agent for. And, I've got two novels working their way out of my head and onto paper. Even with complications and compromises, nothing beats capturing your own characters and their stories on a page for readers to read or other writers to analyze. I may have reader's envy but I am ever so grateful to have a writer's life!

"Please, sir, I want some more."

Oliver Twist’s famous request for seconds on gruel at the workhouse is a fitting reminder of why Charles Dickens deserves to win the “Dueling Authors” bout between Dickens and Jane Austen The Classics Circuit is sponsoring from May 8 to 21.  I feel like a traitor to the cause of genteel femininity in denying Austen this honor.  Her novels have had such a powerful hold on me, inspiring me to strive for sensible virtue in the manner of heroines such as Elizabeth Bennet (Pride and Prejudice) and Marianne Dashwood (Sense and Sensibility).  Austen is an exemplar of the common dictum to “write what you know,” but the scope of her world is narrower than that of Dickens. 

The populist in me wants to honor Dickens's ability to reach a wide, multi-generational audience that included non-readers as well as readers.  Because his novels were first published in serial form (in monthly installments or “numbers”), they were affordable and accessible.  Whereas we imagine genteel ladies reading Austen to themselves on long, languid visits to some relative’s country home, we can imagine the only literate member of an extended family gathered around a fire in the only warm room of some humble abode reading the latest installment of Oliver Twist from the magazine Bentley’s Miscellany aloud at the end of a long workday.  And I can imagine some child as hungry for a story as Oliver was for gruel saying, “Please, sir, I want some more.”

As an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Cruz (home of The Dickens Project) two decades ago, I read Oliver Twist in a year-long seminar that aimed to approximate the experience of reading Dickens’s novels in their monthly numbers.  The difference was that we only had to wait a week to read the next installment, while Victorian readers had to wait a month.  We even had two older high school English teachers in the seminar, one of whom added to the atmosphere of coziness by knitting as we talked.  (Of course, we also imagined she was knitting some record of our conversations, like a benign version of the sinister revolutionary Madame Defarge, from A Tale of Two Cities, who knitted the names of aristocrats slated for murder.)  This seminar was a wonderful experience because of the sense of community that resulted from reading books at a prescribed pace and because of our collective excitement about what the next installment would bring. 

Dickens ended each installment of one to three chapters at a critical juncture—for example, just as Oliver is being offered up by the workhouse board to anyone who would take him off their hands for a reward of five pounds or just as Oliver is on the verge of fainting after his appearance before a magistrate for the thievery charge that brings him a sincere defender and benefactor, Mr. Brownlow.  Each installment leaves us wondering what will happen to Oliver next.  His vulnerability endears him to us and makes him an archetypal orphan victim (see my previous post, “Six Great Books about Orphans”).  His tendency to swoon at moments of stress (for example, in his final encounter with the criminal ringleader Fagin in jail the night before his execution) positions us as concerned bystanders who would break his fall or ply him with smelling salts if only we could. 

What fascinates me most about Dickens’s publication in monthly numbers is the fact that he made things up as he went along rather than simply finishing a novel and then dividing it up into installments.  This is so different from the experience of today’s novelists, who do not even consider submitting novels to agents until they are complete and as flawless as possible.  Our sense of audience is far more abstract, even if we know who we want our readers to be.  For writers with a tendency to procrastinate, the finality of a deadline and the knowledge that thousands of fans are waiting impatiently to know what happens next would be a tremendous motivation. 

Since the days of monthly numbers are over—aside from exceptions such as Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, which Rolling Stone published in twenty-seven installments from 1984 to 1985—the closest we can get to that kind of experience is to join a writing group.  Every two weeks or so, the members of Six Great Books gather around the fireside at Molly’s house, where we follow an informal workshop model to discuss each other’s submissions.  Now, as we await our turn to read the final chapter of Donna’s novel, Provenance, we are eager to know exactly what will come of the wonderful characters she has created.  Because we have lived with these characters for over two years, they seem like real people to us.  Like Dickens’s readers fretting over Oliver, we are still hungry and we want some more.

Six Great Books about Orphans

 

Orphans abound in literature, so it seems almost unfair to single out six great books about orphans.  In fact, one French literary critic, Marthe Robert, the author of Roman des origines, origines du roman, has argued that every novel is about orphanhood, at least in the figurative or imaginary sense.  Novels often focus on a protagonist struggling with an identity conflict that derives from being or feeling alone in the world.  I think one reason many readers have a particular fondness for nineteenth-century English literature is that authors of the period explored the phenomenon of orphanhood in all its narrative nuances. 

My first novel, Blind Girl’s Bluff, is the story of homeschooled Lucy, who loses her anarchist father and her sight when he suicide bombs a post office.  She considers herself an orphan in spite of having her biological mother, who left a farewell note in her diaper just months after her birth, as a reluctant guardian.  As Lucy makes her way in the world—attending (boarding) school for the first time, discovering a passion for painting—she contends with the legacy of her unconventional upbringing and with the dilemma of being an artist who cannot judge her own work.  My novel pays homage to all the wonderful tales of orphanhood that have inspired and entertained me.

If you love books about orphans, you have got to love these six great books:

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Isn’t this one everyone’s favorite?  It so poignantly captures the suffering of young Jane as her aunt and cousins abuse her and then subject her to the privations of an austere boarding school. As a governess, she overcomes a lifetime of invisibility by catching the eye of her moody employer Rochester, and manages to love him all the more when his terrible secret results in a fire that blinds him.  

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

The literary conventions of orphan novels owe much to the novels of Dickens, whose repertoire is full of endearing orphans.  We love Pip for his vulnerability—to the pleas for help of the escaped convict who later rewards him as a secret benefactor, to the sadistic manipulation of bitter Ms. Havisham, and to the vanity that makes him incur debts in pursuit of gentlemanliness.

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist may be literature’s most famous orphan since the Broadway adaptation of the story and movie immortalized his moment of asking for “more” at the workhouse.  In spite of Oliver’s “apprenticeship” as a pickpocket with the Artful Dodger and Fagin, we always understand him to be inherently good and noble.  Of course, the discovery that he was indeed of gentle birth is a common plot device in orphan tales.

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

This is a sad one about an orphan who does not overcome.  Turning the typical orphan rags to riches narrative on its head, the story of Lily Bart is about going from riches (not her own, but those of various benefactors) to rags.  She is a complex character who resists the identities people in her world attempt to impose on her, but her refusal to compromise in choosing a husband is her ultimate downfall.

 Plum & Jaggers by Susan Richards Shreve

 I need to prove that the orphan theme is alive and well, so here’s a more recent offering from 2000.  This one appealed to me because it explores much of the same territory as my novel, Blind Girl’s Bluff.  It focuses on four siblings who form a comedy troupe several years after losing their parents in a terrorist bombing.  Dark humor becomes a means of processing their grief and ultimately moving beyond it.

 Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson

 There are so many great children’s books about orphans that it was hard to choose a favorite.  Rather than focusing on a straightforward classic like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden or one of the recent neo-Victorian parodies like Lois Lowry’s The Willoughbys, I decided to highlight a book that pays homage to the classics while also engaging playfully with the literary conventions of orphan novels.  Exploitative relatives summon Maia to Brazil, where she discovers the wonders of the Amazon rain forest.

 What's your favorite orphan story?

Better an Unread Book than an Unworn Sock

     I try not to buy too many books for myself or my children.  Our bookshelves are full and we raid our local library every two weeks, checking out fifty books at a time.  This has something to do with being "green," but even more to do with being cheap, so please don't tell me to buy an e-reader instead!  As a wannabe first novelist, I feel like a hypocrite.  Why should I expect anyone to buy my (as yet unpublished) book if I don't consider their books worth buying--even when I desperately want to read them?  

    Here's a confession: in my last blog post, I referred to Mona Simpson's compelling novel, My Hollywood, but I have only read the first third.  It was a great read, and it made the two hours I had to kill at the Stamford, Connecticut Barnes and Noble store before catching a train so delightful.  Since my return from that trip the week after Labor Day, I have been on the DC Public Library waiting list for the book, starting off at number nine.  Since users can check out books for three weeks and renew for another three, it's not a surprise that the list goes slowly.  Just when I was thinking of asking for Simpson's book for Hanukkah (we celebrate Christmas too, but that's weeks later this year), I discovered today that I jumped up to number two on the list, apparently because the library system bought more copies.  Even if I haven't supported Simpson directly, I console myself with the knowledge that my hold request helped to convince the library of demand for her book.  And the patrons who let the book sit around on their nightstands for six weeks probably helped Simpson's cause even more. 

    I'm not too cheap to buy books for other people, especially when I want to impose my literary tastes on them.  Unfortunately, no one on my holiday gift-giving list seems right for My Hollywood, but I will keep in mind this plea on the blog of Chuck Sambucchino, the editor of The Guide to Literary Agents, encouraging us to make books our standard gift in order to support the publishing industry.  He advocates asking family and friends for lists of books and magazines they want, but many of us shy away from such a pragmatic approach.  The whole idea of gift-giving is that you are supposed to come up with great ideas on your own.  That's why aged aunts are famous for giving itchy, ugly socks and other items that no one wants or uses.  Nobody strives to be a clueless gift-giver, but if you just don't know what to buy someone and you want to save the publishing industry, then console yourself with the knowledge that an unread book is better than an unworn sock.

Back to School and Back to Writing

 

                 My summer was more about reading than writing.  Having completed my novel Blind Girl’s Bluff at the end of May, I relished the opportunity to immerse myself in other writers' books for a few months.  My favorites included Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, Rebecca Miller’s The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, and T.C. Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain.  The book my older daughter and I enjoyed together most was Maryrose Wood’s The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: the Mysterious Howling.  Now that the kids are back in school and the literary agents are back in their offices, I need to get serious about seeking representation for Blind Girl’s Bluff.  However, writing query letters is less gratifying than writing fiction, so I have begun my second book, tentatively titled Au Pair Tales.

                 While Blind Girl’s Bluff sprang entirely from my imagination—with plenty of inspiration from the long literary tradition of books about orphans and boarding schools—Au Pair Tales draws upon my experiences as a counselor for au pairs and host families in Washington, D.C.  This will be nothing like the chummy memoir, White House Nannies, in which nanny agency owner Barbara Kline tells the truth about how various political and media celebrities handle their child care needs.  Out of respect for the au pairs and host families I have known over the past six years, I promise not to tell the truth.  Instead, I will invent stories that capture the essence of what happens when working parents invite young women from other countries into their homes to care for their children.  In focusing on the perspective of my main character Eliza (who is not me but has my job), I also want to explore how part-time work-from-home moms position themselves with respect to what the media callously refer to as “the mommy wars,” pitting stay-at-home moms and working moms against each other and implying that every mother is inadequate in one way or another.

 

no country for over-explainers

have you read cormac mccarthy's no country for old men?  

i read it on a sleeper train to charleston south carolina.  helluva book, even having seen the movie five times. most notable thing about it?  every page i couldn't help but think, "masterful." masterfully simple.    

why does this matter?  

well, if you're a writer you know how easy it is to over-explain. we all do it. we fear our readers won't understand us.  we like to show off.  whatever the case, mccarthy is a pro at not doing it.  

here's a convo between Moss, a texas bumpkin who stole $2M from a dead mexican after a bum dope deal, and Wells, a hit man visiting him in the hospital. Wells talks first.   

~

What do you do, he said.

What?

What do you do.

I'm retired.

What did you do before you retired?

I'm a welder.

Acetylene?  Mig?  Tig?

Any of it.  If it can be welded I can weld it.

Cast iron?

Yes.

I don't mean braze.

I didn't say braze.  

Pot metal?

What did I say?

~  

now even if you don't give a hoot about welding, isn't it interesting how if you pick the right words for dialogue, the conversation stands alone.  without writerly explanations.

when i write dialogue, i find i've gotta go back numerous times to cut meaningless words and replace bland words with sharper words to ensure the dialogue drives itself--sans explanation.    

what about you?  what tricks do you use to keep your prose sharp?   

posted by: david bonck

Three Great Books Help A First Time Novelist

Found this informative and inspirational nugget on NPR,from their Three Books series, author Sarah Pekkanen recommends books with expert advice on writing the great novel. I've read two of the books and will be ordering the third today.  All three are on our What We're Reading list - click the covers to learn more about them. Sarah Pekkanen's debut novel will be published in 2010.