Cause and Effect

Do you think that reading something not because it drew you in on its merits, but because you're acting in defiance of authorities intrinsically changes your relationship to the material?

The fact that someone else told me not to read something does not guarantee that I will read it. For one thing, there are a lot of lists of Really Bad Stuff and I don't have that kind of time. But in all honesty if I know that it is on a list it gets more scrutiny in terms of whether or not I will read it than it might otherwise. There are certainly books I've read and books on my to-be-read shelf that wouldn't otherwise draw my attention for one reason or another.

I think any reasonable person would see that seeking to ban something you hate is self-defeating. You're giving free publicity to those you oppose. Right? Or does the effort to ban or constrict access to a book or song so intrinsically change my experience of it that it's worth the effort?

If I read a book that's on some Really Bad List somewhere, the list all but guarantees that I will contemplate it on a level deeper than I would otherwise. Sometimes I find something I deeply loathe. (The key being that I found it, it wasn't kept from me because I might find it.)  And it troubles me slightly that the fact that it's on a List somewhere changes the way I feel about it, may alter on some level deeper than I'm aware of how I respond to it.

I suspect that I'm not alone in this. But is that good or bad? Does finding it on some We Hate This And You Shouldn't Read It list make it seem better than it is? Does it inhibit our critical faculties in some fashion because we, the rebellious readers, deeply WANT it to be good just because some annoying jerk told us they didn't think it was and they 'know better' than we do? So is banning a book a self-fulfilling prophecy or a self-defeating one? Or do the two cancel each other out?

I honestly think that the furor that surrounded A Catcher in the Rye was at least partially responsible for the cache that it's carried for the past fifty-odd years. Does the story of Holden Caulfield's 1950's Upper Westside, white, middle class ennui remain compelling without the history to the books fight to remain in print backing it up? Even after his idle and strangely asexual chitchat with prostitutes about "phonies" has lost its ability to shock us? I think it does, but I cannot be sure where the act of innate defiance that reading such a book entails begins and ends. So I asked my assembled friends on Facebook -- some of the brightest people I know from all parts of the country, all walks of life and every political leaning -- and now I ask you.

Is the prophecy self-fullfilling or is it self-defeating? What is the cumulative impact of challenging (verb form) books? Not to mention the cumulative effect on you, on society and on the writers of the books?

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Scott Walker Perkins writes literary thrillers and novels of suspense woven from the threads of history. His current novel is The Palimpsest and he is working on another tentatively titled 42 Lines.

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Rock the Vote

The votes have been tabulated, the finalists chosen, it's time for the runoff election! It's time to make your voice heard and the choices will not be easy. I'm speaking, of course, of the race for the best book to win the National Book Award for Fiction in the past 60 years. Should the honors go to an anthology? Was the chief among equals the stories John Cheever, Flannery O'connor, Eudora Welty or William Faulkner? Or should it go to a novel? The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison or Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon? The National Book Award Foundation wants to know what you think. Which of these giants towers just that much above the rest? I'm not going to endorse a candidate, though I've already voted. Dust off your bookshelves, dear readers and polish your erudition. Remember that every vote counts -- your vote counts -- and those who don't vote don't get to bitch about the results. (Well, they do, but we're going to ignore them when they do.) At the moment, Flannery O'connor is way out in front and Ralph Ellison is following hard on her heels. Incidentally, people periodically ask me for book recommendations -- check the National Book Awards website for a list of some of the greatest works to be committed to the page in the last six decades. Good reading!

Literary Newsday...

Saturday is newsday apparently... Lev Grossman - Time book critic and author of The Magicians and Codex - has an article in the Wall Street Journal arguing that the revolutions in literature are coming from the ranks of popular authors rather than trickling across the border from the avant garde. I don't necessarily agree with him on every point, but the overall thesis seems sound and well-argued. Well worth the read. Reading By the Numbers is a startling op/ed from the New York Times about the so-called "Renaissance Learning" software that assigns numerical values to books. Children in schools that use this software are required to read so many points' worth of books. The manner in which these points are assigned seems haphazard at best, for instance Hamlet is worth fewer points than the most recent Gossip Girl book. The whole thing is faintly appalling and hopefully the publicity can help get some things changed. If nothing else, the software designers really need to re-think how the frigging points are assigned because they seem to be missing the whole point of reading as a transformative experience rather than an exercise in cramming more words into our students' heads.

The Thing About Charlie...

I occasionally spend some time ghosting over on Book Blogs at the Ning. Even though book reviews aren't really my main 'thing', I like to see what the book reviewers are talking about and there's always something fun going on over there.

 Over the weekend, the subject of Dickens came up: Is he still relevant? 

Notwithstanding two recent books spun from the stuff of his final (and unfinished) novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, it's an open question. Dickens thus-far seems to have been skipped by the renaissance being enjoyed by other classic authors such as Jane Austen. So... does he need an infusion of post-modern zombies to bring back the readers? Or is he already just another zombie author refusing to shamble off to the churchyard and a peaceful afterlife confined to the shelves of English Lit professors, destined for a messy end on the killing fields of postmodern lit crit?

The main trouble with Charlie is that he was made victim of his own success. So many see elements central to his plots as cliche (Orphans? Wicked stepfathers? That is SO overdone!) but what Dickens did was not cliche -- it was made cliche by endless repetition from the pens, typewriters and laptops that followed him. It's a mental space that a reader needs to get themselves into before embarking upon any of the classics.

This is doubly-true of Dickens, whose plots and twists and characters have become so indelibly woven into modern fiction. His ideas and plots and characters have been endlessly plundered by nearly everyone because his voice was so persuasive that he set the bar that we're all trying to clear. Not long ago I was reading a music critic talk about the number of bands whose entire catalog and careers could be summarized as "Variations on one song from the Beatles' White Album". (I'll have to find the article so I can quote and attribute accurately). So too could many more authors and screenwriters be summed up as churning out endless variations on the source material drawn from Dickens. Some of it has been amazing, epic tales built upon a 'Dickensian' and some of it should remain nameless and fade from our minds. Regardless, the quality of imitation does not strain the strength of the source material.

In a time when optimism is oft times treated as though it were a contagious disease, perhaps the inveterate optimism of Dickens' characters can't catch hold upon the modern mind. Perhaps the moments of astonishingly-modern wit are too weighted with the passages of florid Victorian prose. I tend to disagree. Dickens' voice was so modern and his wit was so sharp that we can still hear ourselves in it.

Still don't think he's relevant? I think he's so relevant that the biggest publishing phenomenon ever doesn't make sense until you view it through his works. There has been no more profound reflection of this influence than Harry Potter. The boy wizard aside, this is a time of literature cast in the light of Hemingway, awash in the blood of a million murdered adverbs. Yet, despite Rowling's cinder-block sized tomes, often grandiose prose, and sweeping tales, even books that are meant to appeal to her audience are pared down and scaled back ever more as writers and publishers chases an allegedly dwindling attention span. Have our attentions really so dwindled, though that we're in need of a zombie incursion into the classics to renew the spark of literature that has aged? I had a love-hate relationship with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. And I fear however, that this is going to spawn a trend of duct-taping postmodern monsters into classic tales until it devolves into an Abbot & Costello movie.

In my opinion, P&P&Z only worked because of a brilliant blend of two gifted writers (Austen and Grahame-Smith) hundreds of years apart and it took off because the readers were primed by the Austen renaissance (and in case you've been living in a cave, zombies are kind of a thing right now).

Maybe it's for the better, this mashup culture. If nothing else, before we're ready to receive Little Dorrit Versus the Zombie Debtors of Doom, we'll need to reacquaint ourselves with Dorrit's creator.

However, I'm thinking of shopping around a story about a zombie antihero escaping a zombie-infected prep school to bum around New York for a day. He'll have a thing for ducks, wear a funky red hat and spend a lot of time trying to eat the brains of the prostitutes in he meets...  Just kidding, Mr. Salinger. Just kidding.

But I think you should write down the date and time you scoffed at the notion of Zombiecatcher In the Rye.  Because at this rate, it almost seems inevitable.

Murder Most Fictional

It's deep in the twentieth chapter. The bad guys are ascendant but the good guys are getting complacent. Too many characters have stepped out of their background roles and are threatening to take over the narrative.

You're just gonna have to kill someone.

I'm not a writer of murder mysteries per se, but in any bit of fiction featuring as much peril as the modern historical thriller demands, someone's going to die at some point. That said, I firmly believe that the only way to do this without making it trite or feel like you're manipulating your readers is to walk into it without knowing which characters will still be alive in the epilogue.

Look at it this way: If I don't know who will die when the time comes, I can't take those extra annoying steps to ingratiate him to the reader. My writing can only prosper thereby.

In my books, no one gets script immunity.

That being said I hate a lot about the presentation of death in modern fiction. Only in some few cases does it read as real. Not in terms of the death throes of the fallen or the medical steps undertaken to save them and God knows reality isn't spared on the autopsy table, but in terms of the reactions of the people who should be impacted by the passing of the fallen. Only when the death of the character and the effects upon the family and friends are the plot (Lovely Bones springs to mind) does the death of a character really seem to have the full force and effect of a real death upon real people.

Awhile back when Newsweek said that writers didn't kill enough people anymore, I was affronted on some level. This was partially because the genre shelves of your neighborhood bookstore have a bodycount that surpasses imagining for even the most motivated serial killer. I went back and reread that article and got something different from it. Not that writers don't kill enough people, but that we sell it short as a literary device and as a moment of common humanity. And on that point I tend to agree.

From the standpoint of a reader, one of the worst offenses any writer can commit is to undersell the real-life psychic impact of a death upon those who witnessed it and those impacted by it. There are so many books that screw that up that it almost qualifies as its own subgenre. Heroes drag a burly forearm across their misty eyes and then carry on as if nothing happened. At best the impact seems to last a couple of chapters before the next love scene or comic relief character "snaps them out of it" and all is well. Sometimes (in a series) it's implied that the characters do their grieving between books, which is at least acknowledging the humanity of the characters.

Killing a character is more than taking a trip to the library to read Guns & Ammo or a medical journal, or making a call to your friend the ER nurse. Death goes beyond the straight razor or handgun that does the deed, and makes deep changes in everyone it touches. Changes that go beyond snapping out of it because someone makes a smartass comment or two people fall into bed.

Not every book with a death in it would benefit from a widening circle of grief and pain, far from it. But to not pay attention to this aspect, to the experience of it is to pay no heed to the value of the fallen character or the humanity of those he left behind. . . but I guess that's why they call it fiction.

Random (Literary) Thoughts on a Monday Morning...

Pages to Type is out there in the trenches, sifting through the reports of the new Al Gore book and posthumous Michael Crichton tomes to bring to light the underreported nuggets of real gold which have been largely overlooked by the rest of the world. Little Cheese Today I bring you the story of publishing's greatest prize... Bookseller.com has closed the voting and tallied the votes and awarded the Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of 2008! The winner is... The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais Setting aside the fact that the book rings in at a whopping $795.00 at Amazon.com, (Holey swiss cheese, Batman!) the book is a critical look at cheese packaging in light of global environmental awareness et al. Which is nice. But what none of the stories I've read about this address is how much demand there really is for a 60 mg container of cheese? Unless my calculations are way off, that's .002116 ounces of cheese. It's not a typo either unless it originates on the cover of the book. So... is there a market for syringes of cheese that I don't know about? Kinda makes you want to read the book doesn't it? Yeah, ok, not really but I'd like someone to read it and report back. Any volunteers? Didn't think so. Rumors of my Retirement... The rumored retirement of the Mark Twain of Latin Literature, Gabriel Garcia Marquez are apparently greatly exaggerated. According to his hometown newspaper (by way of Reuters booknews), Gabo is too ornery to retire and and wants the worldwide press corps to get off the lawn!

...the author answered the phone call from El Tiempo, he said: 'Call me later. I'm busy writing." ~The money quote from Reuters

Where would literature be without our curmudgeons?

Would you like fries with your Twilight?

In a recent interview, Newsweek tried to deconstruct what made David Baldacci's books so damned buoyant despite the weight of negative opinions from the likes of the Newsweek and the New York Times.

"The suggestion that reading a thriller is a kind of civic obligation is questionable, to say the least, and there are plenty of people who dispute that reading potboilers encourages an engagement with more-demanding texts. [...] Baldacci offers a break—and people who care about books should care about him. Whether or not thrillers are crucial for democracy, they are certainly crucial for publishers. Where a more literary book might be considered a success if it sells 50,000 in hardcover, a novel by a writer like Baldacci can sell more than a million." www.newsweek.com/

This is an interesting article, not so much because it's about Baldacci but because even though the alleged premise of the article (as expressed in the subtitle) as a sort of populist defense of the thriller as a genre "David Baldacci's 16 books were all bestsellers. Why do people have such a problem with that?"

The interviewer makes a number of statements that make it clear she's not entirely on-board with her (assigned?) premise.

Baldacci isnt alone in ascending the bestseller lists while the literati stand aside in frustrated amaze. Literature maven Harold Bloom's dismay at the popularity of JK Rowling and her boy wizard is nearly legendary. Stephen King himself once infamously likened his books to the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large order of fries. Tasty and momentarily satisfying, but not good for you in the long run.

One gets the impression from some authors that they are embarassed at thier status as the MacDonalds of the bookworld. But what really tends to get me is the distancing of the literati from the very thing that is keeping the industry alive. As they stand aside and decry the blockbuster model that is keeping the presses rolling and the bookstores open, they live under the same tent that is held aloft by the Davinci Codes and Prisoner of Azkaban.

The backlash against genre writers lives in a world that has forgotten that Shakespeare was the equivalent of a sitcom writer for his age. A quill-for-hire who transcended his genre to ascend the heights of historical figures whose very existence will be forever debated. So many of the great classics of our time were salvaged from the slushpile of history by a mixture of lucky happenstance and an author who didn't care what the critics of his or her time had to say and kept plugging away at the quill or typewriter or computer keyboard.

Will future generations see Baldacci as the Dostoevsky of our time? Perhaps not. Will Stephanie Meyer be looked upon by our literary heirs as the unheralded Jane Austen of our age? Not bloody likely. Nor will JK Rowling for that matter, though she might be our JM Barrie or EB White.

I'm constantly reminded as I read articles like the one in Newsweek what the always-pithy GK Chesterton said in an essay about detective fiction:

"By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece."

I was working at the bookstore when the two biggest phenomena of recent eras began and ran their course. What is often forgotten is that JK Rowling's bestseller status was built upon word of mouth. Advanced Reading Copies were sent to booksellers and the story captured their imaginations. The strange little kids fantasy novel broke out as the booksellers recommended it over and over again to teacher and parent alike. I should have held onto my ARC of Sorceror's Stone. I still have my reader's copy of Davinci Code -- which is ironic since I enjoyed Rowling's little book and didn't so much care one way or the other about DC. Nevertheless, I was there when it came down the pipe and read it before most people.

My personal feelings about both books aside, it was almost amusing to watch as the esteem of the booksellers and literati who frequented my store waned in the face of growing commercial success. You can't be good and popular at the same time. That's just the way it is!

Both narratives have problems which I will discuss at another time. Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series has similar flaws in the execution of the ideas to the point where I would put them on a descending scale with Rowling at the top, Dan Brown in the middle and Meyer at the bottom. Yet all three caught the crest of the wave, defied the dismay of their critics and built empires bolstered by their many imitators.

Are they good? That's not for me to say. There are better out there, for certain. But that doesn't invalidate the opinions of the masses. I'm not about to argue for market-driven literary criticism, but the pooh-poohing that happens every time Baldacci, King, Brown, Rowling and Meyer put a new book in the stores ignores a very germane element of their stories that undercuts the criticism: They're obviously telling stories that resonate -- stories we want to hear. Manifest in their sales data and the adherence of their fans.

As he was lambasting Stephanie Meyer as a hack, even King took a moment to point out that the strength of her books is the resonance of the stories she tells. Davinci Code, Harry Potter, and pick-your-thriller by Baldacci (or anyone else) all have one thing in common... they are all crafted from archetypal stories that resonate from a time when such tales were told to stave off the darkness that edged in from the corners of the wilderness beyond our firelight. Some of them are the tales told by the children at a campfire in the backyard, but those stories are simply smaller echoes of the greater tales being related at the fires of the grownups.

In the Newsweek interview, Baldacci suggested that reading thrillers was a democratic institution, a blow struck for literacy. The Newsweek interviewer sniffed at the very idea, but he was right. He was right because the more we tell stories, the greater our hunger grows for more. Every book put into the hands of someone who might not otherwise be willing to read one is a victory for literacy. I don't care what imprint the book has on the spine or who the author is, when people are reading, literacy wins. And one way or another, a literate nation will take care of the industry that feeds its need.

This doesn't necessarily mean we will always throw the greatest literary heroes up the bookcharts, but the taller and stronger the tentpoles that bolster the industry, the better chance the unheralded geniuses have of getting into the tent at all.