Writing Companion

My reading this month. Star rating from 1 (poor, don’t bother) to 5 (excellent).

Violette Leduc’s In the Prison of My Skin. **

Memoir/fiction blend and the fraught relationship between a girl and her mother. Some good descriptive passages but ultimately, there’s not much to the story. Leduc was encouraged by Simone de Beauvoir and her fans included Genet, etc.

John Mullan’s How Novels Work. *****

Excellent overview of writing techniques used in novels. Mullan has drawn upon ideas from his column in the Guardian to identify the workings of various novels. Great for writers, serious readers, and reading groups wanting to learn about a wide range of techniques in fiction. What’s covered: beginnings, narration, people, genres, voices, structure, details, style, devices, literariness, and endings. To enjoy the book, it helps to have read many of the books he uses as examples–but this background is not essential to understanding his main points.

Graciela Espana’s En espanol: Rapid success in Spanish for beginners. 2003 ***

I’ve been struggling in my weekly Spanish class, and have been augmenting the lessons with Spanish CD programs and books from the public library. This program is as better than some of the others I’ve tried. It has 3 CDs and the difficulty of the material increases gradually. So unlike the Bertlitz course in Mandarin that I still remember with horror. The first lesson was relatively easy, Mandarin for ‘Hello, my name is….’ and ‘How are you?’ So far so good. But by lesson four, the sentences were alone the lines of ‘I enjoy the evening fragrance of the daphne growing along the stone wall in the western garden.’

Jennifer Vandever’s The Bronte Project: A novel of passion, desire, and good PR. 2005. ***

Sarah is a struggling Phd student on an endless and frustrating search for some lost letters of Charlotte Bronte. Her personal life seems on track, given her impending marriage to Paul, another Phd student. Suddenly, Claire comes onto the academic scene, a savvy young woman who promotes herself by being outrageous. Rather than compete in an established, competitive academic field, she creates a new one–Diane Studies–where she can be the expert and set the rules. Even Sarah gets caught up in Claire’s exotic world when Claire links the life of Princess Diana to that of Charlotte Bronte. Eventually, Sarah’s unsatisfactory life at the edges of academe is turned upside down and she has to make some difficult choices about love. I wanted something light to read because I was in bed with a sore throat. As an ex-academic in Humanities, I enjoyed Vandever’s oh-so-true depiction of academics chasing whatever is popular and can lead to funding.

Vandever starts each chapter with a sentence or two from Charlotte Bronte’s surviving letters. It keeps the link to Charlotte Bronte to the fore, but it’s unclear whether there’s much of a connection between the quotes and the chapters. Still, it’s a pleasant read, the characters are very well drawn, and the ending is a little surprising.

Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine **

Last week, I was holidaying at Gabo Island, at the northern tip of Victoria. In between watching whales on their annual migration north, looking for the fairy penguins at night, and visiting the lighthouse, I rummaged through the bookcases in the Assistant Lighthouse Keeper’s cottage where I was staying.

I love looking through the books that have somehow found a safe harbour in a holiday cottage. Many of the books here had a strong nautical theme. For example, Lighthouses of Australia, Prisoners of the Sea, Windswept, Sailormen’s Ghosts, and Mysteries of the Bass Straits. I found a few Christian books, some romances, some puzzle and games books, and some classics. I enjoyed reading old issues of the New York Review of Books. But the best treasure was a 1976 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. It was a quarto sized, soft-cover magazine, printed on cheap yellowish paper–the traditional  ‘pulp fiction’. It was filled with short, enjoyable mystery stories. Now, back at home, I looked up the magazine and found that it’s still going.

The 1976 issue  included an interview with Isaac Asimov, plus news about trends in the genre. Reading the magazine felt very right for the situation I was in. My cottage had no TV or music, and no mobile phone reception, so the evenings were undisturbed except for the spooky sounds that fit with reading mysteries: a strong wind rattling the cottage’s windows, waves crashing on the red granite rocks, and fairy penguins making their eerie strangled whistles and squawks in the dark. As I sat in my art deco lounge chair in front of the space heater, a sherry at my elbow, it was the ideal site to read satisfying whodunits.

Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole. Hamish Hamilton, 2008. ***

I raced through Steve Toltz’s 711-page paperback doorstopper. The story revolves ultimately around Jasper, the narrator, and his relationship with his crazy father.  The fast-paced plot twists and turns, and the story is filled with as many one-liners as a comedian on speed.

While reading it, I enjoyed some of the author’s funny comments and insights, but eventually the mass of details started to obscure the plot. It’s a clever book, but not particularly deep. It reminds me a bit of books by Stephen Fry or Ben Elton–satires about current society but keeping well on the surface. A positive is that the fast pace of the book means the author flings off great comedy scenes and humorous riffs without turning them stodgy by forcing them to take on too much psychological weight. I enjoyed the first part, felt the middle of the book wandered a bit, and the end part is strong.  Steve is a young writer and this is his first novel. I was impressed that he managed to keep a huge story going, not only by having changing events but also having the characters change significantly as well.

I had a quick squiz at some reviews of this book, and nearly all are positive. A few compare him to John Irving in terms of sprawling and humorous family sagas.

(I met Steve at the Katoomba part of the Sydney Writers’ Festival this year and included in an earlier blog entry some of his comments.)

Darkly Dreaming Dexter. Jeff Lindsay. 2004. Narrated by Nick Landrum ****

A friend recommended the Dexter series so I borrowed a talking book of Darkly Dreaming Dexter from the library, to listen to in the car on a drive down the coast. I wasn’t sure about this after my friend said Lindsay has written a a great series about a sociopathic killer who tortures then kills people who deserve it. That just didn’t seem like my kind of read. However, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Dexter’s psychological makeup is explored with sensitivity and odd humour. Dexter understands that he is a monster, but a monster who has modeled himself to be as ‘human’ as possible. In doing so, he starts to find that maybe he’s not so inhuman after all. The plot got my attention. Some parts are a big grim, especially if you have a good imagination. The characters are well developed. The only part I didn’t like was the ending, which is ambiguous.

The experience of listening to a talking book reminded me of the huge difference between reading a book yourself and listening to a trained actor make all the characters come to life. I wonder if I’d given ‘Dexie’ such a sympathetic treatment if I had been reading the book silently to myself. And being sympathetic to Dexter helps you as a reader understand him.

I’ve started reading more broadly in fiction. First, I dipped a toe into Mills & Boon romances. More recently, I read for the first time a novel by Danielle Steel.

I’ll never waste my time reading another. I don’t want this blog to turn into Grumpy Old Writing Companion, but I was amazed at how padded the story was.

To give Ms Steel her due, she is incredibly successful as a novelist. Not only is she a financially independent writer (worth over $800 million a few years ago) but, according to Wikipedia:

• She has written over 70 novels in her 25-year career.
• Her novels have big print runs, are distributed internationally, and have been translated into 28 languages. By 2005, more than 530 million copies of her books had sold.
• She has earned a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for having her books on the New York Times Bestseller List for a record 381 consecutive weeks.

The novel I randomly picked, The Ranch, is her 39th, written in 1997. The plot is interesting enough. Three women in their 40s, who met when they were university students, now reunite for a fortnight (two weeks) at a dude ranch. All three come to the ranch during a major crisis in their lives. One woman’s third husband can’t handle her superstar status; the second woman’s marriage is falling apart after her son’s suicide; and the third woman has a major health issue.

What is unrealistic is that by the end of week one on the ranch, all three have fallen in love!

Putting the plot aside, what bored me most about the story was the padding, especially through repetition. For example, the story introduces Tanya, the superstar singer, who is very attractive, has long blonde hair, and looks younger than her age. Readers are told all this again, and again…and again. It’s the same for the other two main characters.

Why such padding? Does she think readers won’t buy her books unless she provides big doorstoppers, or what I call ‘books on steroids’? Is she thinking that her books are ‘airport reads’, where information has to be repeated because readers are distracted, e.g., Is my flight going ahead?, When is our meal being served? Does she think her readers lack the mental capacity to remember details?

The problem of writing down to her audience may have more to do with how Ms Steel produces her novels. The Wikipedia article states that she often releases several books in one year, and can be ‘researching one book while outlining another, then writing and editing additional books’. Whew!

Having won a huge audience who likes her work, Ms Steel can get away with poor writing. It’s similar to J.K. Rowling, whose later books in the Harry Potter series are incredibly padded. Australian Di Morrissey’s romance novels show the same problem. And when I started reading Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, I soon realised that I didn’t have to commit too many brain cells because the main bits of the plot and characters would be repeated ad nauseam.

I was interested to see that the author of the Wikipedia article agreed with my view of Ms Steel’s writing, saying that her books had been criticised for being ‘overly redundant and detailed….’ Because she so ‘explicitly [tells] the story to readers. . .’ readers ‘feel like they are on the outside looking in’ to the story rather than being immersed in it.

Some say you can’t argue with success. But I’d like to know exactly what her many fans find in her writing that makes them want to read more.

The setting for Sheridan Hay’s novel, The Secret of Lost Things (Fourth Estate, 2006) is a quirky bookshop. Her descriptions of the place and its staff remind me of the traditional bookshops, which unfortunately are fast vanishing. Unlike the mega chain bookstores, the traditional shops are often small in size but huge in variety, offering a cornucopia of choices. An additional pleasure is talking to the staff, who love books and whose knowledge goes beyond the current best-seller list.

Given that Hay’s fictional bookshop is in New York City, I wonder if she based it on the famous Strand Books in the same city.

The novel

The Secret of Lost Things is a coming-of-age story. Rosemary Savage, an 18-year-old innocent from Tasmania, Australia, goes unwillingly and alone to New York City after her mother dies. The first part of the book concerns the wrench she feels in being transplanted to a major city halfway around the world. But NYC slowly becomes home as she makes friends, gets her first flat, and also lands her first job, in a large bookshop. The Arcade has an odd collection of employees. There’s Pearl, an aspiring male opera singer waiting for gender-reassignment surgery. And Oscar, who is much less interested in people than in fabrics and collecting notes about everything. Arthur, an elderly gentleman who loves buying and selling the books he presides over in the rare book section. And Walter, whose albinism sets him apart from the others and both repulses and attracts Rosemary.

The second part of the novels turns into a mystery, the quest for a supposed lost manuscript by Herman Melville. As the Arcade becomes a hotbed of rivalries and betrayals, Rosemary must make some difficult choices about allegiance, love and freedom.

The real-life Arcade?
Was Hay’s fictional bookshop modelled on the huge and wonderfully overwhelming Strand Book Store? It opened in 1927. Now it has over 2.5 million books, which you can buy in person or online. It even sells books by the linear foot!

I visited it for the first time several years ago. For a bibliophile, it’s heaven. It reminded me that although online book shopping is fine when you want a particular book at a good price, what you lose is the opportunity to riffle through a book, reading a passage here and there, to see if you want to buy it. And what about the serendipity of browsing shelves and finding something you d0n’t even know you crave until you clap eyes on it?

Strand’s rare book section is amazing. To get there, I went up in a tiny lift, which brought me to a smallish room with high ceilings, its walls filled with valuable manuscripts and old books in glass-fronted bookcases. I could have stayed there forever, but it was clear that this was a place for business, i.e., the big sales to collectors that Hays talks about in her novel.

Back in the shop’s main section, I decided to search for an academic title about the Iroquois Theatre fire (Chicago, 1903). Fifteen minutes later and I was in the checkout queue, holding the very book that in Australia I had longed to examine. Although I could have ordered it via the Internet, it was a special pleasure to find it on a shelf in a real shop, seemingly waiting just for me.