Quote of the Day

I remember years ago watching the commercial folktale-tellers in a Cairo bazaar….Getting the audience, I remarked, depended not at all on preaching and philosophizing but very much on baser tricks of the trade: in short, on pleasing, wooing, luring the listeners into the palm of one’s hand.

—John Fowles

“You really want to keep going?”

(Note: This post is the twenty-fifth installment in my author’s commentary for The Icon Thief, covering Chapter 24. You can read the earlier installments here.)

As Sandra Bullock notes in Speed, “Relationships that start under intense circumstances, they never last.” All the same, they can be a lot of fun to watch. It’s surprisingly hard for works of art in any medium to tell convincing love stories, but it helps when they take place in the context of an exciting story, and it isn’t hard to see why: the symptoms of excitement and emotional infatuation are roughly the same, and when a movie sets our hearts racing for other reasons, it’s easy to transfer those feelings to the characters themselves. Roger Ebert points out that the best movie romances take place against a backdrop of adventure and suspense, and his own favorites include films like Casablanca, Notorious, and Gone With the Wind. In recent years, this kind of love story has fallen out of fashion, which is a shame. Although Titanic provides one gigantic counterexample, the fact remains that most romantic movies are set in a world that has been drained of danger, emotional or otherwise, and without that sense of vicarious risk, it’s hard for us to relate to the feelings unfolding onscreen.

The same point applies to novels as well. Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto is an effective love story largely because the stakes, outside the immediate circle of characters, are so high. Few books have affected me as deeply as The Magus by John Fowles, which embeds two extraordinarily complicated love stories within a web of mythology, intrigue, and betrayal—the novelistic equivalent of Hitchock’s achievement in Vertigo. And the stakes don’t need to arise from the story alone: they can be artistic and creative as well. My favorite movie romance, Chungking Express, is irresistible precisely because of the incredible artistic balancing act that Wong Kar-Wai performs before our eyes, and it’s impossible to separate the romantic longing of its two central stories from the director’s own intoxicating love of cinema. And it’s no accident that our most compelling depiction of sexual jealousy and obsession can be found in the pages of Marcel Proust, the most original and accomplished novelist of the last hundred years.

At first glance, this may not have much to do with The Icon Thief, which is a love story only in passing. Yet I don’t think I could have written convincingly about Maddy and Ethan’s relationship—which, as I’ve mentioned before, I’d been thinking about for years—without the structure of the thriller around it. Even before I had the rest of the plot, I wanted to tell a story about two very different people who enter into a relationship and are destroyed by the qualities of sympathy and imagination that drew them together in the first place, and the result works better in a thriller, at least in my hands, than it would in a more ordinary setting. Maddy and Ethan, like the tragic couple in real life who partially inspired their story, end up in a folie à deux, enabling one another in their delusions precisely because they’re so intelligent and so much on the same wavelength, until it tears them apart at the worst possible moment. And although I wouldn’t stress this point too much, it’s possible that their story lightly externalizes the kinds of ordinary, less dramatic heartbreaks that most of us feel at one time or another—which is why it can be so effective to see them enacted within the context of a thriller.

But that’s all in the future. Right now, in Chapter 24, we only see them drawing closer together, and it’s no accident that the initial flicker of romance occurs as they both enter into physical danger for the first time. I was careful to structure the action of this chapter—in which they illicitly explore Archvadze’s mansion and stumble across a heist in progress—to parallel the heightening of their more private feelings. They’re challenging and testing one another every step of the way, and as Maddy notes, if they were to stop the escalation, “the evening would conclude in some other way”—which I still think is the sexiest line I’ve ever written. And I don’t think I could have written this love story at all without the support of the surrounding thriller. Romance in my novels tends to be left implicit and offstage, partially because I think it’s more interesting that way, but also because I don’t always trust myself to write it the way it deserves. What I can do is write an exciting scene about two characters who begin to suspect that their feelings for one another may go deeper than mere friendship. And if I do it right, that’s all we need…

John Fowles on first drafts

I find it very difficult to write if I don’t know I shall have several days absolutely clear. All visits, all intrusions, all daily duties become irksome. This is during the first draft. I wrote the first draft of The Collector in under a month; sometimes ten thousand words a day. Of course a lot of it was poorly written and had to be endlessly amended and revised. First-draft and revision writing are so different they hardly seem to belong to the same activity. I never do any “research” until the first draft is finished; all that matters to begin with is the flow, the story, the narrating. Research material then is like swimming in a strait-jacket.

—John Fowles, “Notes on an Unfinished Novel“

The glorious cul-de-sac of Umberto Eco

[Umberto] Eco is a very good example of a writer who leads dozens of young writers into a literary cul-de-sac.

—Tom Wolfe

Perhaps because I just saw Sneakers again, I’ve been playing a lot with anagrams, especially for the titles of my own novels. Kamera, may it rest in peace, never had much of an anagram to its credit (A Maker is the best I could do), but one of the nice things about The Icon Thief is that its title provides a secret clue to the debt I owe one of my favorite writers. Hint: Eco thief.

Foucault’s Pendulum, by the Italian semiotician Umberto Eco, is probably the novel, for better or worse, that has influenced me more than any other. I say “for better or worse” because it’s far from clear that its influence has been a good thing. I first read Foucault’s Pendulum, along with The Name of the Rose, when I was thirteen years old, which was just the right age for me to be completely blown away by Eco’s intelligence, ingenuity, erudition, and above all his way of engaging a world of ideas through the mystery and conspiracy genres. When I was a teenager—and this hasn’t changed much—I wanted to know something about everything, and Eco, more than any other author I had read up to that point, had seemingly managed to weave the entire world into a single book. (It’s only as I’m writing this now that it strikes me as appropriate that his translator is named William Weaver.)

The trouble, of course, is that the vision of the world expressed in Foucault’s Pendulum isn’t nearly as complete as I had once believed. There are no truly persuasive characters in the novel—merely vehicles for astonishing conversations, which, as Salman Rushdie points out, are “entirely free of anything resembling a credible spoken word.” For Eco, it’s idea, idea, idea, which is great when you’re thirteen and craving intellectual structures, even satirical ones, but not so much when you’re thirty and trying to write real novels. It wasn’t until a year or two later, when I first began to read John Fowles, that I began to see how massive erudition could be conjoined with genuine plots, characters, prose, and formal invention. But the damage had already been done. For the rest of my life, I’d be more comfortable writing about ideas than human beings, and it’s only recently that I’ve begun to move gingerly in the other direction.

And yet even that isn’t the whole truth. The fact remains that Foucault’s Pendulum has given me more pleasure than just about any other novel. My original copy, which still sits on my bookshelf, is flaking and falling apart, but if there were a fire in my apartment right now, it’s one of the first ten things I would save from the flames. Eco turned me on to Borges (his master), the cabalists, and The Golden Bough. The Icon Thief, with its elaborate verbal conspiracies, would be unthinkable without his influence. And Eco himself remains the perfect intellectual. In some ways, I still wish I’d discovered him after Fowles—my entire inner life, not to mention my writing, would have been immeasurably different as a result. But it’s also possible that Eco simply encouraged an artistic tendency that was already there, and showed me its greatest possible realization, as well as its limitations. I don’t think I’ll ever move beyond him. But perhaps, very gradually, I can become something else.

The trouble with endings

Warning: This discussion, for obvious reasons, contains unavoidable spoilers.

What makes a great ending? There are as many different kinds of endings as there are works of art, of course, but as I look at my own favorites, I find that the best endings often don’t feel like endings at all. The most extreme version, the unresolved ending, has been used in books as dissimilar as Rabbit, Run and Smilla’s Sense of Snow, but the best example I know is from The Magus by John Fowles, a novel that I first read when I was fourteen (which, honestly, is about the right age). My feelings about the book itself have evolved over time, but the power of that final paragraph has never entirely departed:

She is silent, she will never speak, never forgive, never reach a hand, never leave this frozen present tense. All waits, suspended. Suspend the autumn trees, the autumn sky, anonymous people. A blackbird, poor fool, sings out of season from the willows by the lake. A flight of pigeons over the houses; fragments of freedom, hazard, an anagram made flesh. And somewhere the stinging smell of burning leaves.

Such a note of ambiguity can be tough to pull off, however, especially in mainstream fiction. Fowles, a master of the form even in his earliest novels, gets away with it; most novelists, including myself, probably can’t, at least not without annoying the reader. Yet the appeal of the unresolved ending raises an important point. Unless the writer is deliberately trying to emphasize the story’s artificiality, the best endings, like the best curtain lines, seem to promise something more: ideally, it should seem that the author has chosen the most appropriate moment to end the story, but that the story could also go on and on, like life itself.

It’s important, then, for the author to resist the temptation to tie a neat bow on the narrative. While writing a novel, most authors know that they aren’t supposed to editorialize or address the reader directly, that the meaning of the novel should be conveyed through action, and that the story’s themes, if any, should remain implicit in the narrative itself—and yet, very often, all these good habits go out the window on the final page, as if the pressure to explain exactly what the story means has become too great for the writer to resist. Deep down, every writer wants to end a novel like The Great Gatsby, as the themes of the story ascend to the universal:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

But Fitzgerald, like Fowles, was a master, and like many of the great masters, his example can be dangerous. For most writers, the rules for good writing are the same from first page to last: understatement, brevity, and objectivity are almost always preferable to their opposites. Indeed, the simpler ending is usually better, especially for a complex story. In film, there’s no better example than Chinatown, where Roman Polanski replaced Robert Towne’s original, more complex conclusion with, in Towne’s words, “a simple severing of the knot.”

For a thriller, in particular, the story needs to end as soon after the climax as possible. The denouement of The Day of the Jackal, the most perfectly constructed of all suspense novels, lasts for less than a page. In The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by contrast, the action falls for something like 170 pages—which is another reason why I’m not a huge fan of that book. Compare this to the conclusion of The Turn of the Screw, which resolves the action in the story’s final word, while also raising as many questions as it answers:

I caught him, yes, I held him—it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.

I can only end, as I often do, by quoting Mamet: “Turn the thing around in the last two minutes, and you can live quite nicely. Turn it around again in the last ten seconds and you can buy a house in Bel Air.” Or, if you’re a novelist, at least a nice place in Chinatown.