Posts Tagged ‘Ian McEwan’
Reading while writing
When Norman Mailer was working on The Naked and the Dead, still in his early twenties, he fell back on a trick that I suspect most novelists have utilized at one time or another. Here how he described it to his biographer Peter Manso:
I had four books on my desk all the time I was writing: Anna Karenina, Of Time and the River, U.S.A., and Studs Lonigan. And whenever I wanted to get in the mood to write I’d read one of them. The atmosphere of The Naked and the Dead, the overspirit, is Tolstoyan; the rococo comes out of Dos Passos; the fundamental, slogging style from Farrell; and the occasional overreach descriptions from Wolfe.
I haven’t looked into this in any systematic way, but I have a feeling that a lot of writers do much the same thing—they select a book by another author whom they admire, and when they start the day’s work, or feel their inspiration starting to flag, they read a few pages of it. If you’re like me, you try to move straight from the last sentence of your chosen model to your own writing, as if to carry over some of that lingering magic. And if you’re lucky, the push it provides will get you through another hour or so of work, at which point you do it again.
I’ve followed this routine ever since I started writing seriously, and it isn’t hard to figure out why it helps. One of the hardest things about writing is starting again after a break, and reading someone else’s pages has the same effect as the advice, often given to young writers, as retyping a paragraph of your work from the day before: like the running start before the long jump, it gives you just enough momentum to carry you past the hardest part. I’ve also developed a set of rather complicated rules about what I can and can’t allow myself to read while working. It needs to be something originally composed in English, since even the best translations lose something of the vitality of a novel in one’s native language. (Years ago, I saw one of Susan Sontag’s early novels described as being written in “translator’s prose,” and I’ve never forgotten it.) It has to be the work of a master stylist, but not so overwhelming or distinctive that the tics begin to overwhelm your own voice: I still vividly remember writing a few pages of a novel shortly after reading some Nabokov, and being humiliated when I went back to read the result the next day. I stay away from such writers for much the same reason that I avoid listening to music when I write these days. It’s all too easy to confuse the emotional effects produced by proximity to another work of art with the virtues of the writing itself. When you’re reading in parallel, you want a writer who bears you forward on the wave of his or her style without drowning you in it.
This also means that there are books that I can’t allow myself to read when I’m writing, out of fear that I’ll be contaminated by their influence, for better or for worse. Obviously, I avoid bad writers, but I also steer clear of great writers whom I’m afraid will infect my style. In practice, because I’m nearly always writing something, this means that I’ve avoided certain books for years. It took me a long time to read Cloud Atlas, for instance, because it seemed like exactly the kind of overwhelming stylistic experiment that could only have a damaging impact. Mailer makes a similar point:
I was very careful not to read things that would demoralize me. I knew that instinctively. There’s a navigator in us—I really do believe that—and I think this navigator knew I wanted to be a writer and had an absolute sense of what was good for me and what wasn’t. If somebody had said, “Go read Proust,” I’d say, “No, not now.”
Or as the great Sherlockian scholar Christopher Morley noted: “There is no harm in reading any number of unimportant books for pastime, but the significant books must be taken cautiously. You don’t want them to get in the way of what might perhaps be growing and brooding in yourself, taking its own time.”
And this search for books in English that have a great style, but not too much of it, has led to some curious patterns in my reading life. Usually, when I’m working on something and need a helping hand to get me over the rough patches, I go with Ian McEwan. I’m not sure that I’d describe him as my favorite living writer, but he’s arguably the one whose clean, lucid, observant prose comes closest to the ideal that I’d like to see in my own work. You can’t really go wrong with an imitation of McEwan, whereas there are other writers in the same vein, like Updike, who are more likely to lead you astray. With McEwan, at worst, you’ll end up with something boring, but it probably won’t be outright embarrassing. (It reminds me a little of what T.S. Eliot once said along similar lines: “If you follow Dante without talent, you will at worst be pedestrian and flat; if you follow Shakespeare or Pope without talent, you will make an utter fool of yourself.”) McEwan is the closest I’ve found to a foolproof choice, which is why I’m currently reading The Children Act, a few pages at a time, while I’m working up a new short story. James Salter and J.M. Coetzee are two other good options, and if I’m really stuck for inspiration, I’ll often fall back on an old favorite like Deliverance by James Dickey, or even Mailer himself, for early drafts when I’m pretty sure that I’ll have a chance to pare away any excesses of style. Every writer eventually develops his or her own personal list, and there aren’t any wrong answers. You just listen to your navigator. And maybe you don’t read Nabokov.
Brexit through the gift shop
Last week, as the world struggled to comprehend the scope of the Brexit disaster, I tweeted: “On the bright side, this is all going to make a great ironic counterpoint for the protagonist’s midlife crisis in the next Ian McEwan novel.” I was joking, of course, but the more I think about the idea, the more I like it. (It’s certainly better than the crack that I originally thought about making: “I can’t wait for Peter Morgan’s next play.”) If McEwan’s novels have one central theme, it’s how a single instant—whether it’s an impulsive decision or an act of random violence—can have unpredictable repercussions that continue to echo for years. In Atonement, Briony’s lie, which she invents on the spur of the moment, ruins at least three lives, and she atones for it only in her imagination. A similar web of unforeseeable consequences is bound to unfold from Brexit, which in itself was the result of a much less dramatic decision, apparently reached over pizza at the Chicago airport near my house, to hold a vote on exiting the European Union. What was conceived as a tactical move to stave off an internal political scuffle may lead to the final dissolution of the United Kingdom itself. Forget about McEwan: Frederick Forsyth wouldn’t have dared to use this as a plot point, although he’s probably kicking himself for not having thought of it first.
As it happens, McEwan recently made his own feelings clear, in an opinion piece written earlier this month for the Daily Mail. He wrote: “My fear is that a Brexit will set in train a general disentanglement, and Europe will confront in time all its old and terrifying ghosts…The ahistorical, spoiled children of the EU’s success are pushing us towards a dangerous unraveling.” These two sentences sound a lot like a rehearsal for potential titles: A General Disentanglement and A Dangerous Unraveling would both look great on a book cover, and either one would have worked fine for Enduring Love, which is about nothing less than a long disentanglement in the aftermath of a single bewildering event. McEwan’s favorite trick in recent years, in novels from Saturday to Solar, has been to use global events to comment sardonically on the main character’s inner life, as refracted through the protagonist’s skewed perception of the headlines, which he can’t help but see through the lens of his personal issues. It’s a technique that McEwan picked up from John Updike and the Rabbit series, one of which provides the epigraph to Solar, although the result is a little more studied in his hands than it is in the master’s. Brexit itself is the ultimate McEwan allegory: it’s the perfect parallel to a middle-aged affair, say, in which a moment of passionate folly is followed by a conscious uncoupling. If Brexit hadn’t existed, McEwan might have had to invent it.
Brexit is undeniably heartbreaking, and nothing good is likely to come of it, but there’s also a part of me that is anticipating the reaction from artists ranging from Zadie Smith to the Pet Shop Boys to Banksy. Even as the art market worries about the effect on auctions, this is a signal moment for artists in the United Kingdom, and the defining event for a generation of writers. There will be plenty of attempts to confront it directly, but its indirect impact is likely to be even more intriguing, as Norman Mailer noted about a different sort of trauma:
If you never write about 9/11 but were in the vicinity that day, you could conceivably, in time to come, describe a battle in a medieval war and provide a real sense of such a lost event. You could do a horror tale or an account of a plague. Or write about the sudden death of a beloved. Or a march of refugees…What won’t always work is to go at it directly. That kind of writing can be exhausted quickly. And the temptation to drive in head-on is, of course, immense—the event was so traumatic to so many.
We’re entering an era of indefinable uneasiness, which is an environment that inevitably produces memorable artistic reactions. It won’t exactly compensate us for the real economic and social dislocations that are bound to come, but two years of uncertainty and fear followed by a generation of malaise are ideal conditions for nurturing notable careers.
And there’s a genuine opportunity now for the reportage that the novel, in particular, does best: it can capture amorphous social forces and crystalize them in a conflict between a couple of characters, or, even better, in the conflict within one character’s heart. It may take years before the real causes and effects of the Brexit vote become clear, and the novel, with its ability to brood over a subject for long enough that the overall shape appears in a kind of time-lapse photography, is in a unique position to bring us the real news, even if it isn’t for a while. And David Cameron will probably inspire a few novels of his own. I can’t think of another example in recent history in which a seemingly trivial decision so utterly transformed a public figure’s legacy. Before Brexit, Cameron had served a relatively uneventful term of office that seemed destined to be forgotten within a decade or two; now he’s the man who gambled, lost, and threatened the stability of his own country toward the end of his monarch’s reign. (When I think of Queen Elizabeth, who just celebrated what was supposed to be a triumphant ninetieth birthday, I’m reminded of what Solon said to King Croesus: you don’t know whether a life was happy or not until it’s over.) It has stamped Cameron into the imagination of the public forever, even if it isn’t for the reasons he would have liked. We’re going to see works of art about this man’s inner life. Colin Firth just needs to put on about twenty pounds, and then we’ll be ready to go.
Malcolm in the Middle
Last week, the journalism blog Our Bad Media accused the author Malcolm Gladwell of lapses in reporting that it alleged fell just short of plagiarism. In multiple instances, Gladwell took details in his pieces for The New Yorker, without attribution, from sources that were the only possible places where such information could have been obtained. For instance, an anecdote about the construction of the Troy-Greenfield railroad was based closely an academic article by the historian John Sawyer, which isn’t readily available online, and which includes facts that appear nowhere else. Gladwell doesn’t mention Sawyer anywhere. And while it’s hard to make a case that any of this amounts to plagiarism in the strictest sense, it’s undeniably sloppy, as well as a disservice to readers who might want to learn more. In a statement responding to the allegations, New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote:
The issue is not really about Malcolm. And, to be clear, it isn’t about plagiarism. The issue is an ongoing editorial challenge known to writers and editors everywhere—to what extent should a piece of journalism, which doesn’t have the apparatus of academic footnotes, credit secondary sources? It’s an issue that can get complicated when there are many sources with overlapping information. There are cases where the details of an episode have passed into history and are widespread in the literature. There are cases that involve a unique source. We try to make judgments about source attribution with fairness and in good faith. But we don’t always get it right…We sometimes fall short, but our hope is always to give readers and sources the consideration they deserve.
Remnick’s response is interesting on a number of levels, but I’d like to focus on one aspect: the idea that after a certain point, details “have passed into history,” or, to quote Peter Canby, The New Yorker‘s own director of fact checking, a quote or idea can “escape its authorship” after it has been disseminated widely enough. In some cases, there’s no ambiguity over whether a fact has the status of public information; if we want to share a famous story about Immanuel Kant’s work habits, for instance, we don’t necessarily need to trace the quote back to where it first appeared. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have something like a quotation from a particular interview with a living person, which ought to be attributed to its original source, and which Gladwell has occasionally failed to do. And in the middle, we have a wild gray area of factual information that might be considered common property, but which has only appeared in a limited number of places. Evidently, there’s a threshold—or, if you like, a tipping point—at which a fact or quote has been cited enough to take on a life of its own, and the real question is when that moment takes place.
It’s especially complicated in genres like fiction and narrative nonfiction, which, as Remnick notes, lack the scholarly apparatus of more academic writing. A few years ago, Ian McEwan fell into an absurd controversy over details in Atonement that were largely derived from a memoir by the wartime nurse Lucilla Andrews. McEwan credits Andrews in his acknowledgments, and his use of such materials inspired a ringing defense from none other than Thomas Pynchon:
Unless we were actually there, we must turn to people who were, or to letters, contemporary reporting, the encyclopedia, the Internet, until, with luck, at some point, we can begin to make a few things of our own up. To discover in the course of research some engaging detail we know can be put into a story where it will do some good can hardly be classed as a felonious act—it is simply what we do.
You could argue, on a similar level, that assimilating information and presenting it in a readable form is simply what Gladwell does, too. Little if anything that Gladwell writes is based on original research; he’s a popularizer, and a brilliant one, who compiles ideas from other sources and presents them in an attractive package. The result shades into a form of creative writing, rather than straight journalism, and at that point, the attribution of sources indeed starts to feel like a judgment call.
But it also points to a limitation in the kind of writing that Gladwell does so well. As I’ve pointed out in my own discussion of the case of Jonah Lehrer, whose transgressions were significantly more troubling, there’s tremendous pressure on writers like Gladwell—a public figure and a brand name as much as a writer—to produce big ideas on a regular basis. At times, this leads him to spread himself a little too thin; a lot of his recent work consists of him reading a single book and delivering its insights with a Gladwellian twist. At his best, he adds real value as a synthesizer and interpreter, but he’s also been guilty of distorting the underlying material in his efforts to make it digestible. And a great deal of what makes his pieces so seductive lies in the fact that so much of the process has been erased: they come to us as seamless products, ready for a TED talk, that elide the messy work of consolidation and selection. If Gladwell was more open about his sources, he’d be more useful, but also less convincing. Which may be why the tension between disclosure and readability that Remnick describes is so problematic in his case. Gladwell really ought to show his work, but he’s made it this far precisely because he doesn’t.
“Something bad has happened…”
Note: This post is the thirty-third installment in my author’s commentary for City of Exiles, covering Chapter 32. You can read the earlier installments here.
Among novelists and screenwriters, there’s a piece of conventional wisdom that says that exposition should be buried in a place where the audience is least likely to notice it. In Save the Cat—which, for better or worse, has become the most influential screenwriting book ever published—the late Blake Snyder calls this principle The Pope in the Pool:
Mike Cheda told me about a script he once read called The Plot to Kill the Pope, by George Englund, which did a very smart thing. It’s basically a thriller. And the scene where we learn the details of the vital backstory goes like this: Representatives visit the Pope at the Vatican. And guess where the meeting takes place? The Vatican pool. There, the Pope, in his bathing suit, swims back and forth while the exposition unfolds. We, the audience, aren’t even listening, I’m guessing. We’re thinking: “I didn’t know the Vatican had a pool?!” And look, the Pope’s not wearing his Pope clothes, he’s…he’s…in his bathing suit!” And before you can say “Where’s my miter?” the scene’s over.
Snyder’s logic isn’t necessarily hard to understand. There are two assumptions here: 1) Exposition is deadly to drama. 2) It’s only there at all so the nitpicking spoilsports in the audience won’t be able to go back and point out obvious holes in the story. Better, then, to stick it someplace where the reader and viewer aren’t even listening, as Snyder puts it so bluntly. While I agree with the first point, the second is more problematic. If the story can be understood and appreciated without the audience registering certain pieces of information, it’s probably best to cut it altogether, rather than trying to camouflage it with a flashy piece of action in the foreground. And if the information is important, then it doesn’t make sense to hide it where it can’t be heard. In L.A. Confidential, which is one of my favorite movies and screenplays of all time, the entire plot is explained in fifteen seconds while Bud and Ed are dangling the district attorney out his office window. It’s a great scene, and it succeeds beautifully in burying the exposition, but it takes several viewings to even pay attention to what poor Ellis Lowe is saying.
You could argue, of course, that the details don’t matter, and that it’s more important to get Bud and Ed on their way to their final appointment at the Victory Motel. As with most writing tricks, though, this one is double-edged: it allows us to slip past purely expository elements of the story, but by hiding them away where they can’t even serve their basic functional role, they can seem all the more useless. A better solution is to convey exposition in a form where the information itself is delivered in a vivid fashion. I’ve said before that this explains the popularity of autopsy scenes, which are a reliable, if hoary, way of feeding the audience backstory that would be hard to take in any other setting. (Between CSI and Hannibal, Laurence Fishburne has practically made a second career out of nodding sagely in the morgue.) A rule of thumb I’ve found useful is that if expository dialogue could be transferred to a different location without any change—if, for instance, you could bring the pope out of the pool and stick him in St. Peter’s Church with every line intact—the words themselves should probably be rewritten. And readers these days are savvy enough to recognize when they’re being asked to wait patiently while the story lays pipe, even if they’re being distracted by a gunfight.
Another approach, which I use in Chapter 32 of City of Exiles, is to insert exposition at a point in the story when the reader is naturally curious about the resolution of some other development. At the end of the previous chapter, Wolfe’s car explodes as she’s driving out of Belmarsh, but I wait for one more scene, in which Powell has an important but essentially static conversation with Victor Chigorin, before circling back to clarify her fate. This kind of thing can’t be pushed too far, and I was careful to make the interstitial material as short as possible, but within limits, it works—although it carries certain pitfalls as well. In Ian McEwan’s Solar, there’s a moment in which the central character fears that he has broken the most delicate part of his male anatomy after relieving himself in subzero temperatures. McEwan waits a long time before enlightening us as to the extent of the damage, and while it’s true that the intervening pages fly by, I’d find it hard to tell you anything about what happens there. It ends up being wasted space, which outweighs any gain in momentum or satisfaction from the delayed punchline. It’s fine if you want to give us a pope in a pool, but it’s not fair to ask the reader to swim laps for no reason…
“Begin with the cell…”
Note: This post is the thirty-first installment in my author’s commentary for City of Exiles, covering Chapter 30. You can read the earlier installments here.)
Earlier this week, I exchanged a few emails with a friend of mine who had kindly agreed to look over the first hundred pages of the novel I’m currently writing. He’s a very smart guy who has been active in mystery circles for twenty years and counting, with many books to his name, several teleplays, and most notably his own publishing imprint that beautifully reissues classic works of crime fiction, as well as new novels in the same vein. I wanted his advice because I’d been struggling a little with my rough draft, and I knew I could count on him for some strong opinions, without any sugarcoating, which he certainly delivered. And his notes on the manuscript were prefaced with an odd admission: he didn’t really care for thrillers. He loves mystery fiction—that is, novels in which the solution of a problem in the past is more important than the question of how to prevent a crime in the future—but when it comes to suspense novels, which are all about momentum, his attention starts to stray, whether they’re by Meltzer, Collins, or Baldacci. And as someone who tends to prefer thrillers to mysteries, it made me wonder yet again why I’d been drawn to this particular genre, and why I’ve always felt that it played best to my own strengths and interests.
The reason I like the thriller form, I’ve concluded, is its inherent flexibility. It’s designed to keep the reader turning pages, and as a result, it follows certain conventions: a gripping beginning, a problem set before the protagonist in the first chapter, a steadily rising line of intensity, and scenes of action or violence laid in at various points like the dance numbers in a musical. Within that structure, however, the author is free to write about whatever he likes, and in practice, it can accommodate more variety and complexity than novels in other categories. I’m the kind of writer who likes to take up and put down fresh subjects on a regular basis—I’m much happier writing a novel every nine or twelve months than laboring over it for years—and the thriller, supplemented here and there by short science fiction, is the mode in which I’ve found the most freedom. Mystery tends to hew more closely to an established formula, but thrillers come in all shapes and sizes. (I’ve made the case before that many works of ostensibly literary fiction, such as the novels of Ian McEwan, are actually thrillers elevated by exceptional levels of language and characterization.) And even in the confines of one story, the skeleton that the thriller provides allows for surprising digressions.
One of the reasons I enjoyed writing City of Exiles, for instance, was that while it was essentially an espionage novel with elements of procedural and conspiracy fiction, it also had room for a prison novel in miniature, once Ilya is sent up to Belmarsh. The prison narrative is a genre of its own, with great examples in every kind of media, and while I couldn’t see myself devoting an entire book to it, I relished the chance to explore this kind of story within five or six chapters of the larger plot. Not surprisingly, when it came time to write these sections, I took inspiration both from works of nonfiction—notably Jeffrey Archer’s memoirs—and from books and movies that had explored prison stories in interesting ways. This was long before Orange is the New Black, which is a curious beast of its own, but I did take time to watch Nicholas Winding Refn’s Bronson and Jacques Audiard’s brilliant A Prophet, the latter of which deeply influenced the look and feel of these scenes. And while the demands of the plot meant that I couldn’t linger on this material longer than necessary, I enjoyed the opportunity it presented to imbed this sequence, like its own short subject, in a novel of greater scope.
Chapter 30, in particular, is basically an homage to prison novels in general. You’ve got the detailed and homely description of Ilya’s cell and routine, his encounter with a potential informant in the exercise yard, his interactions with guards, and his meeting with Vasylenko, his former mentor, who is installed in the adjacent block. And while this material is hopefully interesting in itself, it also plays a role in the rhythm of the scenes that surround it. Thrillers, like many good novels, are often constructed according to principles of contrast: good and evil, of course, but also liberty and constraint, order and chaos, innocence and guilt, with each half of the pair heightening the other. Ilya’s story at the prison works because it stands in contrast to the motion and invisibility that have defined his character in the past, and which continue to define the figure of Karvonen, who is moving unimpeded toward his appointment in Helsinki. I’ll admit that I was also thinking at times of Hannibal Lecter, a figure of infinite possibility who gains much of his interest, at least in Thomas Harris’s original novels, from his confinement within four walls. And if that inspiration isn’t already clear, it’s going to become more obvious in a page or two, when Ilya receives his first visitor…
“The police already have your picture…”
Note: This post is the twenty-fifth installment in my author’s commentary for City of Exiles, covering Chapter 24. You can read the earlier installments here.)
In his invaluable book Writing Popular Fiction—now out of print, although used copies are readily available online—Dean Koontz notes that there are three reliable methods of producing suspense: the chase, the race against time, and the anticipation of a violent event. Obviously, there’s some overlap here, and many of the best suspense novels, like The Day of the Jackal or the early works of Thomas Harris, deploy all three at once. And it’s also worth taking a closer look at these formulas to see what they have in common. All are about anticipation, or about giving the reader a clearly defined end point toward which the events of the story are converging. As such, they also serve to organize the intervening narrative material, which is arguably their most valuable function. Exposition, character development, atmosphere, theme, and all of the less tangible elements of fiction acquire greater shape and urgency when delivered via the throughline of a plot with a specific destination. In practice, this throughline can take the form of any concrete objective on the part of the protagonist, which is an essential part of most stories, but these three building blocks of suspense have the advantage of having been tested by time.
As with any good device, though, there’s the danger of taking anticipation too far. Narrative of any sort amounts to a balancing act between the reader’s interest in what is happening now, what will happen next, and the real meaning of what has happened already. What we call structure is essentially a series of strategies for modulating between these focal points, allowing the reader to look ahead to the next development while still paying attention to the events on the current page. We’ve all had the experience of reading a thriller that kept us turning pages until the end, only to leave us curiously unsatisfied, mostly because we were so eager to get to the climax that we barely saw the words in front of us. Even experienced writers can fall into this trap. In Ian McEwan’s Solar, there’s a moment in which the lead character seems to have suffered a grievous injury to the most delicate part of his anatomy. McEwan, cunning as he is, delays the revelation of what exactly happened for several pages, and while our sheer curiosity moves us forward at a fast clip, I have a feeling that most male readers only take in those paragraphs with one eye, impatient for the author to get back to the point. It’s a disservice to the story itself, and it’s one instance in which McEwan may have been a little too clever for his own good.
Of the three major suspense strategies, I’ve found that the chase is the most versatile and useful, at least when it comes to extended chunks of plot. The race against time has become a cliché in itself, and I’m getting tired of thrillers that arbitrarily give the heroes forty-eight hours to stop the bad guys simply to give the action a little more juice. (Used more subtly, as in Red Dragon, in which Will Graham needs to track the killer down before the next full moon, it can still be very effective.) Anticipation of a violent event can be great for a story’s third act, but over the course of an entire novel, it can grow monotonous, which is which most thrillers offer up a sequence of escalating crises for the protagonist to confront. The chase, by contrast, is infinitely flexible, encompassing a wide range of locations, confrontations, and complications. It can take the form of the hunt for an unknown killer or an actual pursuit across an immense expanse of geography, and unlike the other two formulas, it designates a clear interpersonal conflict between the hunter and the hunted—as well as the possibility that the two players will occasionally exchange roles. And it’s no accident that City of Exiles, which in some ways has the most straightforward and propulsive plot of any of my novels, takes the form of an extended chase, especially in its second half.
Chapter 24 is where the chase begins in earnest, with Karvonen on the run from the killings at the Olympia Exhibition Centre, his face known to the authorities and police. For the rest of Part II, he’s going to be on the move, drawing ever closer to his appointment in Helsinki, and from a novelist’s point of view, this kind of narrative structure is a dream come true—it offers a clear objective, a series of intermediate steps, a lot of interesting locations and paraphernalia, and the sense that there’s a destination on the horizon. (You could write an entire essay on how geographical and narrative movement are really one, which is why the road movie provides such a convenient structure for telling an otherwise episodic story.) Here, Karvonen gets in touch with his handler, retrieves a few useful items from his apartment, and destroys some incriminating evidence, keeping his eye out all the while for both the police and his employers. It may not seem like much, but in a novel where motivations are often deliberately complex and the true significance of the action may not become clear for hundreds of pages, this kind of thing is glorious, and it provides some necessary moments of clarity within an increasingly convoluted plot. Karvonen may be the novel’s most engaging character, because with him, we always know where we stand. And although we aren’t sure where he’s going yet, or why, we know it can’t be good…
Learning from the masters: Ian McEwan
If I were to recommend a single contemporary novelist as a good model for young writers to imitate, it would be Ian McEwan. Part of this is a matter of personal convenience: McEwan, in many ways, happens to represent the peak of the kind of writing toward which I’m constantly striving, and although I can’t come close to him at his best, I’d like to think of him as the platonic ideal of my own approach to fiction. (For the record, I only discovered McEwan after many elements of my own style were already locked in place; I never consciously emulated him, but I realized after the fact that he was better at what I was doing than I was.) Even if you’re writing in a different mode, there’s a lot that he can teach aspiring authors who are still trying to find their own voices. McEwan’s prose is stylish, elegant, but highly accessible: as T.S. Eliot said of Dante, if you imitate McEwan, you may end up with a boring sentence, but you won’t make a fool out of yourself. He understands the value of research, and he’s constantly expanding the range of experience about which he can credibly write. And while he’s not an intensely personal author, his books reflect a consistent set of questions to which he repeatedly returns—the nature of storytelling, the uneasy relationship between the body and the mind, and the contrast between the ideas by which we try to live and the messiness of human interaction.
He also loves plot, which gets close to the heart of why I find him so appealing. McEwan is a highly methodical writer, and his novels, even the seemingly loose series of events in Saturday, are intricately constructed. He’s an architect, not a gardener, but he’s also surprisingly humane and curious, which affords plenty of room for atmosphere and the careful exploration of character and situation as his stories proceed to their clockwork conclusions. In fact, as I’ve noted elsewhere, McEwan is essentially a suspense novelist who has been elevated into literary circles by virtue of sheer intelligence and craftsmanship. He understands that suspense is a tool designed to keep the reader engaged, and he uses that structure to carry us through complex novels of ideas that might not otherwise hold our attention. Suspense also provides him with a convenient matrix in which to tell stories about ordinary men and women placed in extraordinary situations, often involving violence, and to use the result to generate unexpected revelations of character. This is especially true of his earlier novels, like The Innocent, but you can see it all the way through his latest book, Sweet Tooth, which, among many other things, is a meditation on and subversion of the Cold War spy thriller. (Sharp readers will discern that the “David Cornwell” whom McEwan thanks in his acknowledgements is none other than John Le Carré.)
I just finished Sweet Tooth last week, and I think it’s his strongest work of any kind since Atonement. It may, in fact, be a better book overall, and much of it reads as a return—in a slightly lighter vein—to some of the themes and strategies of that earlier novel. Both Atonement and Sweet Tooth are founded on sustained acts of literary ventriloquism: Atonement moved easily between the perspectives of characters of a variety of ages, genders, and social classes, and Sweet Tooth is partially an exercise in inhabiting the mind and life of a young woman in London in the 1970s. Since I’ve written frequently from a female point of view, this kind of thing interests me greatly, and McEwan pulls it off in a fashion that is both impressive and slightly showy. The homely details are laid in with a degree of care that I’m not sure we’d see in a female novelist, and the entire time, we’re encouraged both to believe in Serena as a character and to marvel at McEwan’s virtuosity as a writer. In another book, this might be a serious flaw, and as much as I enjoyed Sweet Tooth throughout, I was always conscious of the stylistic feat it was performing, which wasn’t the case with Atonement. By the end, however, we realize that McEwan has been one step ahead of us the entire time, and in retrospect, the entire novel seems even more controlled and purposeful than we suspected.
That’s the mark of a great writer, and I’ll add one more quality to the mix: McEwan’s humanity. That may seem like an unlikely attribute for a writer whose early books tended to excessive darkness, and whose truest precursor may be the gleefully macabre short fiction of Roald Dahl. Like many of us, though, McEwan has become gentler with time, and instead of a failure of nerve, it reflects a progressively more sympathetic understanding of human life. Sweet Tooth gives McEwan the opportunity to revisit some of his own tricks with the benefit of an additional decade’s worth of experience, and within the confines of a genre that sometimes seems to have little more in mind than putting the reader through the wringer, his decisions—which I won’t spoil here—are immensely gratifying. There are ways in which the ending of Sweet Tooth doesn’t quite make sense, and it’s a little too ingenious for its own good. Still, it’s one that I’m happy to accept, both within the logic of the story and in the larger context of McEwan’s growth as an author. He’s so good at what he does that it’s easy to be jealous of him, but he’s also uncommonly generous at giving us the how as well as the what. This is what all fiction could be, if we had his patience, experience, and imagination, and if his most recent work is any indication, it’s only going to get better from here.
“At this hour of the morning, the prison was quiet…”
Note: This post is the ninth installment in my author’s commentary for City of Exiles, covering Chapter 8. You can read the earlier installments here.)
There’s an unspoken assumption among many readers and critics that a good author should base his work entirely on personal experience, either derived from his own life or those of people he knows, and that it’s a sign of weakness to be overly dependent on research. If it’s clear that a writer has relied heavily on secondary sources to tell a story, or, worse, if the nature of those sources is readily detectable, it’s sometimes treated as a sort of lapse, even as an embarrassment. It’s generally agreed, for instance, that Tolstoy’s material on the Freemasons in War and Peace was based on his reading, not on firsthand information: he wasn’t a Mason himself, and other Masons wouldn’t be likely to share any details with him directly, so the scenes depicting Pierre’s initiation—which are believed to be fundamentally accurate—were derived from a handful of books. I’ve read critics who treat this as an objective flaw in an otherwise unimpeachable masterpiece, as if the knowledge that Tolstoy had to do a bit of research undermines our impression of him as an omniscient sage of the human world. And this flies in the face of the fact that all of War and Peace is a monumental work of research and construction, since it contains so much that Tolstoy never could have witnessed himself.
And this applies as much, if not more so, to contemporary authors. Ian McEwan, for example, based large sections of Atonement on the memoirs of Lucilla Andrews, who served as a nurse during the London blitz. McEwan wasn’t shy about giving credit to Andrews—he mentions her in his acknowledgments—but when a few readers pointed out how certain details in his novel seemed to be taken directly from her work, there was a mild outcry, with some even calling it a form of plagiarism. I doubt that anyone would have raised the issue if McEwan had conducted interviews with Andrews directly, but the revelation that parts of his story were transparently indebted to another book made some readers uncomfortable. The plagiarism charge was ridiculous, of course, as none other than Thomas Pynchon, a monster of research himself, made clear in an open letter to his publisher:
Unless we were actually there, we must turn to people who were, or to letters, contemporary reporting, the encyclopedia, the Internet, until, with luck, at some point, we can begin to make a few things of our own up. To discover in the course of research some engaging detail we know can be put into a story where it will do some good can hardly be classed as a felonious act—it is simply what we do.
Pynchon’s assessment of research as a kind of period of consolidation until “we can begin to make a few things of our own up” is absolutely correct, and library research is part of nearly every ambitious novelist’s bag of tricks. Research, as I’ve noted elsewhere, is less about factual accuracy than about providing the material for dreams, a gathering of “engaging details” that can furnish and feather the fictional nest we’ve created. (That last phrase is Anthony Lane’s, discussing Gustave Flaubert’s own voluminous research for Salammbo.) That’s true of literary as well as popular fiction: Saul Bellow had never been to Africa when he wrote Henderson the Rain King, but he was able to draw on travel accounts, textbooks, his own experience as a student of anthropology, and above all his own peerless imagination to create a remarkably convincing story, as even Norman Mailer admitted: “I don’t know if any other American writer has done Africa so well.” And it’s particularly indispensable for a novelist working in a field like suspense, where so much of the narrative necessarily deals with aspects of human life—murder, crime, conspiracy—that few writers have the luxury or desire to experience directly.
This was particularly true of City of Exiles, which I knew from the start would include long sequences set in the British prison system. I didn’t have any expectation of spending much time there myself, so I was forced to fall back on a handful of useful secondary sources: the memoirs of Charles Bronson, best known these days as the subject of a movie starring Tom Hardy, and especially the diaries of the suspense novelist Jeffrey Archer, who was sent to prison for perjury. We first see the result in Chapter 8, in which Powell and Wolfe pay a visit to Belmarsh to see the imprisoned gangster Vasylenko. Most of the details here, like the corridor that changes from lavender to green to blue as you enter a secure area, or the description of the interview room, walled with glass on all four sides like a fish tank, were taken from Archer’s book, and I draw on it repeatedly for all of the prison material that follows. I’m not sure if admitting this counts as a breach in the contract between an author and his readers—a suspense novelist, after all, is often expected to know something about everything—but I don’t see any harm in acknowledging my sources. Without their help, I wouldn’t have been able to write this novel at all. And we’re going to be spending a lot of time behind bars…
Agnosticism and the working writer
Note: To celebrate the third anniversary of this blog, I’ll be spending the week reposting some of my favorite pieces from early in its run. This post originally appeared, in a somewhat different form, on June 6, 2011.
Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.
—Jorge Luis Borges, to the New York Times
Of all religious or philosophical convictions, agnosticism, at first glance, is the least interesting to defend. Like political moderates, agnostics get it from both sides, most of all from committed atheists, who tend to regard permanent agnosticism, in the words of Richard Dawkins, as “fence-sitting, intellectual cowardice.” And yet many of my heroes, from Montaigne to Robert Anton Wilson, have identified themselves with agnosticism as a way of life. (Wilson, in particular, called himself an agnostic mystic, which is what you get when an atheist takes a lot of psychedelic drugs.) And while a defense of the philosophical aspects of agnosticism is beyond the scope of this blog—for that, I can direct you to Thomas Huxley, or even to a recent posting by NPR’s Adam Frank, whose position is not far removed from my own—I think I can talk, very tentatively, about its pragmatic benefits, at least from a writer’s point of view.
I started thinking about this again after reading a blog post by Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin, who relates that she was recently talking about the mystical inclinations of W.B. Yeats when a self-proclaimed atheist piped up: “I always get sad for Yeats for his occult beliefs.” As Crispin discusses at length, such a statement is massively condescending, and also weirdly uninsightful. Say what you will about Yeats’s interest in occultism, but there’s no doubt that he found it spectacularly useful. It provided him with symbolic material and a means of engaging the unseen world that most poets are eventually called to explore. The result was a body of work of permanent importance, and one that wouldn’t exist, at least not in its present form, if his life had assumed a different shape. Was it irrational? Sure. But Wallace Stevens aside, strictly rational behavior rarely produces good poets.
I’ve probably said this before, but I’ll say it again: the life of any writer—and certainly that of a poet—is so difficult, so impractical on a cosmic scale, that there’s often a perverse kind of pragmatism in the details. A writer’s existence may look messy from the outside, but that mess is usually the result of an attempt to pick out what is useful from life and reject the rest, governed by one urgent question: Can I use this? If a writer didn’t take his tools wherever he found them, he wouldn’t survive, at least not as an artist. Which is why any kind of ideology, religious or otherwise, can be hard for a writer to maintain. Writers, especially novelists, tend to be dabblers, not so much out of dilettantism—although that can be a factor as well—as from an endless, obsessive gleaning, a rummaging in the world’s attic for useful material, in both art and life. And this process of feathering one’s nest tends to inform a writer’s work as well. What Christopher Hitchens says of Ian McEwan is true of many novelists:
I think that he did, at one stage in his life, dabble a bit in what’s loosely called “New Age,” but in the end it was the rigorous side that won out, and his novels are almost always patrolling some difficult frontier between the speculative and the unseen and the ways in which material reality reimposes itself.
Agnosticism is also useful for another reason, as Borges points out above: tolerance. A novelist needs to write with empathy about people very different from himself, and to vicariously live all kinds of lives, which is harder to do through the lens of an intractable philosophy. We read Dante and Tolstoy despite, not because of, their ideological convictions, and much of the fire of great art comes from the tension between those convictions and the artist’s reluctant understanding of the world. For a writer, dogma is, or should be, the enemy—including dogma about agnosticism itself. In the abstract, it can seem clinical, but in practice, it’s untidy and makeshift, like the rest of a writer’s life. It’s useful only when it exposes itself to a lot of influences and generates a lot of ideas, most unworkable, but some worthy of being pursued. Like democracy, it’s a compromise solution, the best of a bad lot. It doesn’t work all that well, but for a writer, at least for me, it comes closer to working than anything else.
In the novelist’s kitchen
I do a lot of cooking. Even before our daughter was born, my wife and I would make dinner at home at least four or five times a week, and now that Beatrix is here, I don’t think we’ve eaten out more than once or twice in the last few months. I’m not much of a chef, but over time, I’ve picked up a few simple tricks. I know how to use a wok and how to blanch and sauté vegetables, and I know that my best friend in the kitchen is the broiler. At this point, I can put a pretty good meal on the table in less than half an hour, which is a useful survival skill with a baby in the house. I don’t often cook from recipes, but I also don’t move far out of a fairly narrow comfort zone, and I’m at a point where I’d rather stick with what I know than try to figure out something new on a weeknight. (I’m also the kind of person who tends to eat the same breakfast and lunch every day, with the result that I’ve gotten very good at making exactly one kind of omelet.)
In short, I cook the way I write, and the more I think about it, the more I feel that writing and cooking have a lot in common. In both cases, we start out by following the rules very closely: a cook who dutifully measures out a necessary teaspoon of turmeric isn’t so different from a writer who checks his work for unnecessary adverbs and dangling participles with The Elements of Style at his side. And that’s a good, honorable approach. Later on, we start to work more by intuition, seasoning to taste, throwing things together, trusting in experience to know when to use sesame oil or oyster sauce, or when to cut a chapter or combine two characters into one. And then, much later, we begin to figure out how little we really know, and undertake a second apprenticeship that tells us why those practical tricks really work. On the cooking side, maybe we’ll subscribe to Cooks Illustrated, or read Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, or even venture into the enticing labyrinth of Modernist Cuisine. And more often than not, we’ll find that we’ve been doing everything wrong.
Of course, it’s one thing to tinker in the kitchen for your own pleasure, and quite another to become a professional. Here, too, there are many possible paths. You can attend a culinary academy—or an MFA program—or you can start out as a dishwasher and work your way up. Once you’ve started to cook for a living, you can focus on turning out simple dishes perfectly prepared, or you can push the entire art form into new directions, like Grant Achatz of Alinea, the David Foster Wallace of cuisine. You read reviews, listen to customers, and revise the menu accordingly, either by changing an entree here and there or throwing out the whole thing and starting from scratch. At the same time, you remain very interested in what other professionals in your field are doing, and if you feel a stab of jealousy when a friend wins a James Beard award, you use this to figure out what you could be doing better. And in the end, it all comes down to the experience you can offer a diner who sits down to eat something you’ve prepared for the first time.
If anything, I wish novelists were as open about their technique as chefs tend to be. Every celebrity chef ends up publishing a cookbook, and even the glossiest and least practical have some useful ideas. Very few writers have done the same, and it’s a great loss: The Paris Review interviews and a handful of decent books on writing fill some of the gap, but for the most part, writers seem content to stay in the kitchen. Personally, though, I’d love to see a big, fat coffee table book by, say, Ian McEwan—a novelist who serves up some of our best and bitterest dishes—with discarded drafts, failed recipes, and accounts of how he found the ingredients that worked. Because as clean and tight as a good novel can look, when you peek through the kitchen door, you’re bound to find a cutting board loaded with peelings and rinds, a sink full of dirty dishes, and a burned sauce or two, all for the sake of that one perfect plate. And as messy as the process can be, we’re all trying to achieve something like good taste.
The future of the thriller
I became a suspense novelist by accident. As I’ve mentioned before, when I first started writing in a serious way, I was drawn less by a genre than by a general idea of the stories I wanted to tell and of how I wanted to spend my time. I wanted to write books set in the present day, and to craft stories that would allow me to explore aspects of the world I didn’t know firsthand: for me, being a writer has always been an excuse to learn things, to read widely, to wander, and to put myself into places and situations far outside my own experience. I also love elaborate plots and layered structures, and I was particularly interested in the problem of momentum—of drawing the reader from first page to last in as seamless a way as possible. It was these factors, rather than an existing love of the form, that drew me to suspense, which sometimes seems like the last refuge in popular fiction of the qualities that matter to me the most: plot, ingenuity, detailed research, pacing, and an prolonged engagement with ideas and systems in the real world.
Suspense, of course, is a quality common to all fiction, popular and otherwise: John Updike has spoken of a novel’s “obligation to generate suspense,” and all good stories hinge on the reader’s anticipation of what will happen next, either in the story itself or, more subtly, in the artistic decisions that the author makes. What fascinates me about suspense as a category is how it surrounds its primary obligation to engage the reader with secondary qualities that have emerged, over time, as elements that audiences have come to expect. There’s the issue of violence, for instance, either explicit or implied, as well as the more important quality of anticipation. This goes hand in hand with a certain kind of verisimilitude, in which the author is expected to know the details of weapons and arms smuggling and other arcane facts that contribute less to the narrative itself than to its overall air of expertise. And thrillers tend to return to the same handful of cultures—law enforcement, organized crime, your choice of secret societies—that serve as a sort of scaffolding for a wide range of possible stories.
These were all things that I figured out after the fact, once I realized that suspense gave me the most useful set of tools for the kind of intricate, highly structured contemporary fiction I wanted to write. But since publishing The Icon Thief and City of Exiles and putting the finishing touches on Eternal Empire, I’ve started to think more clearly about the genre and its limitations, as well as its potential. On a superficial level, suspense seems like a category for grownups: it avoids the fantastic or paranormal in favor of stories that deliver what feels like real insight, or at least accurate research, about the world in which we live. Yet much suspense fiction is grounded not so much in reality as in a heightened version of it, which feeds us information in as artificial and calculated a way as any kind of worldbuilding. It differs from other genres primarily in that it takes pains to make its fictional world resemble the real one as much as possible, only more orderly and exciting. As a result, much of its interest comes from the way it pushes against the real world while still honoring the conventions of popular fiction.
And I still think the genre has enormous potential. The line between suspense and literary fiction is more porous than in most other categories: I’ve noted elsewhere that a writer like Ian McEwan is essentially a brilliant suspense novelist who is classified as a literary author because of his sheer talent, as well as his focus on everyday life. (You could say much the same about John le Carré, whose ascension was long delayed because of his commitment to the structures that I’ve mentioned above.) There’s still a tremendous amount of freedom in the form: within the obligation to deliver action and surprises, an author has enormous latitude to explore, think, and play. Ideally, the conventions of suspense serve as a sort of machine for sustaining the reader’s interest, and the future of the form lies with authors who can build beautiful clockwork toys—which is a tough problem in itself—while also realizing their potential to deliver challenging ideas and characters that would be harder to manage in a less structured story. It’s certainly the genre in which I’m personally happiest. And at its best, its possibilities are limitless.
The truth about literary fiction
Last month, the critic Arthur Krystal published a piece in The New Yorker titled “Easy Writers: Guilty Pleasures Without Guilt.” I’ve held off on talking about this essay until now because even after two readings, I’m not quite sure what Krystal’s point is—he seems to be saying that we think of certain novels as guilty pleasures, but we really shouldn’t, unless perhaps we should—and because Lev Grossman has already done such a fine job of responding in Time. Yet the fact that Krystal felt capable of weighing in on such an ancient debate makes me inclined to share a few of my own disorganized thoughts. (Krystal, incidentally, commits a basic gaffe when he writes: “Preferring Ken Follett’s On Wings of Eagles to Henry James’s Wings of the Dove is not a negligible bias.” This neglects the fact that the Follett book is actually a work of nonfiction that has no place in his discussion of the novel, guilty pleasure or otherwise.)
There are three points I’d like to make. First is the obvious fact, which nonetheless bears repeating, that while our very best novels are properly defined as literary fiction, simply stating that one book, or even a group of books, is “literary” and another is “genre” gives no indication of their relative quality. A literary novel like The Magic Mountain—which, incidentally, cares a great deal about story and suspense—clearly stands head and shoulders above most other novels of any kind, even as paperback smut stands more or less clearly at the bottom. But in the middle is a vast gray area of novels of varying quality, including very great genre fiction and rather trashy literary fiction, and a lot of books that fall somewhere between the two extremes. “Literary” and “genre” aren’t statements of quality, but of intent. And if, by literary fiction, we tend to mean contemporary realism, then we’re talking about a genre with its own formulas and rules, as James Wood has accurately, if smugly, pointed out.
My second point is that these classifications are unfairly skewed, because whenever a genre novelist shows signs of exceptional quality, we immediately promote him into the literary sphere, creating a kind of reverse survivorship bias. My favorite example is Ian McEwan, a great suspense novelist who has been embraced by the literary camp because of the quality of his prose and ideas. Atonement aside, most of McEwan’s books are essentially thrillers—they often end with a home invasion or a man wielding a knife—that happen to be written with impeccable style and intelligence. The same is true of Borges, who writes fantasy and mystery fiction on a higher level than any author in history. To say that they aren’t really part of the genre because they’re so good is to impoverish the genre label, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we automatically exclude all great writers from the category in which they belong, it’s no surprise that the category will start to look a little thin—but that’s only because we’ve defined it that way.
And my last point is that if literary fiction tends to receive certain kinds of recognition that genre fiction does not, this is less out of its inherent quality than a case of simple economics. If we agree that it’s a good thing, in general, to have a steady supply of both genre and literary novels, we need to find nonmonetary ways of encouraging the latter. Genre or mainstream fiction sells better, on the whole, than literary fiction, so a separate, noncommercial system of incentives needs to be set up for the literary side. These include prizes, fellowships, and reviews in prestigious publications. If these were portioned out equally to both sides, the attraction of the literary novel would disappear—which is why giving a National Book Foundation medal to Stephen King was perceived as such a threat. Literary novelists need to feel special, and to be treated as such, because otherwise, there wouldn’t be any at all. And if classifying all other books as guilty pleasures is what literary novels need to survive, well, that’s a price we should be willing to pay.
Why suspense matters
Over the past few days, I’ve invoked the example of Hitchcock more than once, and for good reason. As the likes of Truffaut and Cahiers du Cinéma understood in the fifties, and audiences across the world knew much earlier than that, the films of Alfred Hitchcock are central to our experience of the movies. His goal was as simple as possible—to play the audience like a piano—but his methods were endlessly complex. As a result, the great Hitchcock thrillers are like laboratories for the investigation of storytelling, in everything from plot construction to art direction to cinematography and editing, not to mention iconic performances from the actors he sometimes claimed to despise. And if the machinery is more visible here than it is in, say, Bergman, it’s because of the genre that Hitchcock perfected. Suspense is the most basic emotion that narrative cinema can evoke, and Hitchcock, as we all know, was its master.
What isn’t always acknowledged is how central suspense is to other forms of art, especially fiction. Years ago, in a review of Nabokov’s Glory, John Updike spoke of a novel’s “obligation to generate suspense,” and suspense remains, in some ways, the most fundamental of all genres: nine times out of ten, any good novel is, at heart, a novel of suspense, even if the suspense centers on emotion rather than external action. In his classic book Writing Popular Fiction, Dean Koontz observes that of all genres, suspense has the fewest overt requirements—simply the need to keep the reader intensely interested in what happens next—which implies that other genres can be understood as overlays on the suspense form. Science fiction is suspense in the future; mystery is suspense where the emphasis is less on stopping the killer than on figuring out who it is. And without a solid foundation of suspense, readers in any genre aren’t likely to keep turning the pages.
This is one reason why I turned to suspense when I began to write for a living, and currently find myself writing something close to pure thrillers. These weren’t necessarily the novels I read the most growing up, but for a relatively young writer still learning the tricks of the trade, it seemed like a good idea to begin with storytelling in its most general form. The lessons you learn from writing suspense—anticipation, momentum, converging structure, and especially clarity of action and motivation—can be applied to any sort of fiction you later choose to tackle. There’s simply no way to forget these things once you’ve internalized them. And while it’s often necessary to set them aside—one of the weaknesses of the suspense form, along with its underlying coldness, is the constant need for things to always be happening—they’re still the ultimate safety net, a sort of writer’s insurance policy when other tools fall short.
And they can lead you to surprising places. Back in the seventies, Koontz noted that most books marketed as mainstream fiction are really suspense novels in disguise, and that remains true today. A novelist like Ian McEwan is essentially an author of suspense, but one whose work has been elevated by intelligence and taste to the point where he can contend for a Booker Prize. Elsewhere, competition with other media has forced serious novelists to pace even ambitious literary novels like page-turners, as Jonathan Franzen says to Time: “It seems all the more imperative, nowadays, to fashion books that are compelling, because there is so much more distraction they have to resist.” I’d much rather read a big literary novel written by an author who understands suspense than one who hasn’t served the same apprenticeship, and for my part, I think it’s all but inevitable that I’ll try to make that leap one day. But not yet. Because if there’s anything I’ve learned from writing suspense, it’s that there are always more lessons to come.
Agnosticism and the working writer
Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.
—Jorge Luis Borges, to the New York Times
Of all religious or philosophical convictions, agnosticism, at first glance, is the least interesting to defend. Like political moderates, agnostics get it from both sides, most of all from committed atheists, who tend to regard permanent agnosticism, in the words of Richard Dawkins, as “fence-sitting, intellectual cowardice.” And yet many of my heroes, from Montaigne to Robert Anton Wilson, have identified themselves with agnosticism as a way of life. (Wilson, in particular, called himself an agnostic mystic, which is what you get when an atheist takes a lot of psychedelic drugs.) And while a defense of the philosophical aspects of agnosticism is beyond the scope of this blog—for that, I can direct you to Thomas Huxley, or even to a recent posting by NPR’s Adam Frank, whose position is not far removed from my own—I think I can talk, very tentatively, about its pragmatic benefits, at least from a writer’s point of view.
I started thinking about this again after reading a blog post by Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin, who relates that she was recently talking about the mystical inclinations of W.B. Yeats when a self-proclaimed atheist piped up: “I always get sad for Yeats for his occult beliefs.” As Crispin discusses at length, such a statement is massively condescending, and also weirdly uninsightful. Say what you will about Yeats’s interest in occultism, but there’s no doubt that he found it spectacularly useful. It provided him with symbolic material and a means of engaging the unseen world that most poets are eventually called to explore. The result was a body of work of permanent importance, and one that wouldn’t exist, at least not in its present form, if his life had assumed a different shape. Was it irrational? Sure. But Wallace Stevens aside, strictly rational behavior rarely produces good poets.
I’ve probably said this before, but I’ll say it again: the life of any writer—and certainly that of a poet—is so difficult, so impractical on a cosmic scale, that there’s often a perverse kind of pragmatism in the details. A writer’s existence may look messy from the outside, but that mess is usually the result of an attempt to pick out what is useful from life and reject the rest, governed by one urgent question: Can I use this? If a writer didn’t take his tools wherever he found them, he wouldn’t survive, at least not as an artist. Which is why any kind of ideology, religious or otherwise, can be hard for a writer to maintain. Writers, especially novelists, tend to be dabblers, not so much out of dilettantism—although that can be a factor as well—as from an endless, obsessive gleaning, a rummaging in the world’s attic for useful material, in both art and life. And this process of feathering one’s nest tends to inform a writer’s work as well. What Christopher Hitchens says of Ian McEwan is true of many novelists:
I think that he did, at one stage in his life, dabble a bit in what’s loosely called “New Age,” but in the end it was the rigorous side that won out, and his novels are almost always patrolling some difficult frontier between the speculative and the unseen and the ways in which material reality reimposes itself.
Agnosticism is also useful for another reason, as Borges points out above: tolerance. A novelist needs to write with empathy about people very different from himself, and to vicariously live all kinds of lives, which is harder to do through the lens of an intractable philosophy. We read Dante and Tolstoy despite, not because of, their ideological convictions, and much of the fire of great art comes from the tension between those convictions and the artist’s reluctant understanding of the world. For a writer, dogma is, or should be, the enemy—including dogma about agnosticism itself. In the abstract, it can seem clinical, but in practice, it’s untidy and makeshift, like the rest of a writer’s life. It’s useful only when it exposes itself to a lot of influences and generates a lot of ideas, most unworkable, but some worthy of being pursued. Like democracy, it’s a compromise solution, the best of a bad lot. It doesn’t work all that well, but for a writer, at least for me, it comes closer to working than anything else.
What I read when I’m writing
When Norman Mailer was writing The Naked and the Dead, the novel that made him famous at age twenty-five, he had a simple method for getting ready to work in the morning. Mailer says:
I had four books on my desk all the time I was writing: Anna Karenina, Of Time and the River, U.S.A., and Studs Lonigan. And whenever I wanted to get in the mood to write I’d read one of them. The atmosphere of The Naked and the Dead, the overspirit, is Tolstoyan; the rococo comes out of Dos Passos; the fundamental, slogging style from Farrell, and the occasional overrich descriptions from Wolfe.
And Mailer isn’t the only writer who kept a few favorite books on his desk. I imagine that many novelists have books that they keep at the ready for when they feel inspiration starting to flag. Sometimes it’s the same book over the course of an entire career; more often, I suspect, it varies from project to project. In my own case, I start each writing day by reading a few pages of a book that embodies the tone or voice I’m trying to achieve—as if something of the author’s talent will magically transmit itself—and return to it more than once as I continue to work. And rather to my surprise, when it comes to the novels I read while writing, I find myself sticking to a limited, strictly defined circle of books.
As I mentioned yesterday, I generally do a fast, rough draft of an entire chapter first thing in the morning, which usually takes a couple of hours. I’ve found from experience that the best books to read while I’m doing that messy initial version are rich, ripe, stylistically powerful books that encourage my own writing to be a little more florid—qualities that I pare down relentlessly in subsequent revisions, but which are often good to have in a first draft, where the point is to get as many ideas or images onto the page as possible. For me, the ideal author for this purpose is John Updike. Our styles as writers couldn’t be more different, but something in his ornate sentences just puts my brain to work. (It’s the Heist school of writing: I imagine a writer better than I am, then figure out what he would do.)
At the moment, then, I’m starting each morning with a few pages of Updike’s Terrorist. Later in the day, though, when I’m polishing what I’ve already written, I feel that it’s a mistake to read something so dense and mannered, because I run the risk of ending up with mere self-indulgence (a quality to which even Updike himself isn’t immune). For later drafts, it’s better to go with an author whose prose is a little more restrained, clean, and elegant—someone like Ian McEwan, say. While writing Kamera, I worked my way through Atonement, Amsterdam, Saturday, The Innocent, Black Dogs, and The Comfort of Strangers. Right now, since I’ve already read all the McEwan I own, I’m doing something similar with Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, which has the kind of spare, classical style that I’m hoping will restrain the worst of my impulses.
There’s a negative side to all this, too. While I’m writing, I avoid books that I think will noticeably infect my style, for better or worse. This includes bad books, of course, but also good novels where the author’s style clashes with mine. I also try to avoid books in translation, reasoning that it’s better to read books by great stylists who originally wrote in my own language. The problem? Since I’m always writing, my reading for the past few years has been extremely constrained. I haven’t read Cloud Atlas, for instance, because I’m afraid of being overly influenced by it, and because I don’t want to read anything in translation, I haven’t gotten around to Mario Vargas Llosa, among many others.
Obviously, this state of affairs can’t stand: as much as I like Updike and McEwan, I don’t want to be stuck with them for the rest of my life. And reading and being influenced by radically different authors is an important part of growing as a novelist. At some point, then, I’ll probably need to rethink this approach. (Although not until I finish this draft.)
The joys of plot
The joy is in the surprise. It can be as small as a felicitous coupling of noun and adjective. Or a whole new scene, or the sudden emergence of an unplanned character who simply grows out of a phrase. Literary criticism, which is bound to pursue meaning, can never really encompass the fact that some things are on the page because they gave the writer pleasure.
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about plot—what it is, how to construct it, and why it matters. I’ve spoken to other aspiring writers about this, and have been dealing with it constantly while assembling an outline for the sequel to Kamera (which, now that the proposal has been officially accepted, I can finally say will be called Midrash). Over the next few days, I’ll be looking at plot from various angles, both in fiction and in film. Today, however, I want to talk about something more fundamental: the joy of plot from the perspective of the writer, who gets to play the greatest game in the world.
First, though, I want to address a major misconception. There’s a common assumption, reinforced by many critics and writing instructors, that plot is somehow inferior to other aspects of fiction, notably character and theme. (I’m not going to talk about language here, if only because language should, ideally, arise organically from those other three aspects.) And it’s true that a novel driven solely by plot can feel thin or unsatisfying. But here’s the important point: in nine cases out of ten, a novel driven solely by character and theme will, in the end, prove unsatisfying as well, if it’s published at all. A good novel needs all three legs of the tripod. And a strong plot, more than anything else, is what draws the reader along to the final page.
So why do so many critics—James Wood, for instance—tend to dismiss plot? It’s rather mysterious, but my sense is that those who undervalue plot are often those with the least experience of writing a novel themselves. Personally, I don’t think that any major novelist can dismiss plot. Or would want to. Because the construction of plot is one of the great joys and compensations of the writer’s life. Part instinct, part luck, part planning and preparation, it’s the most challenging thing that an artist can do: a process of intellectual engagement, drawing on all sides of the brain and personality, that can span months or years. It’s a game, but also deadly serious. And when it works, it’s something that no writer would willingly relinquish. As McEwan says:
A writer whose morning is going well, whose sentences are forming well, is experiencing a calm and private joy. This joy itself then liberates a richness of thought that can prompt new surprises. Writers crave these moments, these sessions….Nothing else—cheerful launch party, packed readings, positive reviews—will come near it for satisfaction.
And why is plot so satisfying for the writer? My guess is that it’s the aspect of writing that comes closest to capturing the deepest pleasures of craft. The writer begins with a handful of isolated pieces—a character, a location, an incident—and gradually moves outward. He thinks, dreams, and does research, casting his net as wide as possible, hoping that a chance conversation or a stray sentence in another book will set him off in another promising direction. Once he has amassed enough material, he looks for patterns, connections, affinities. He orders the pieces one way, thinks it over, and reorders them again. This process continues, in various forms, long after the actual writing has begun. And any writer who has really experienced it, even once, would never give it up, much less disallow it to others.
Here’s the big secret: writers value plot because it’s one of the few things that make their lives bearable. Writing is hard work. The simple act of putting words on the page can be torture. And, indeed, if a plot isn’t working—if it refuses to harmonize with the characters or become logically coherent—it can be torture as well. But when the pieces do finally fit, it can feel like magic. At best, there’s something mysterious about the result, as if the universe and the writer were conspiring in secret. Such moments may occur only two or three times in the course of a given novel, and not until after the hard work of research and preparation has been done, but once they fall into place, the writer would rather die than leave them unrealized. Plot, in short, serves the same purpose for writers as for readers: it reassures them that something good is around the corner. And it’s what carries them along to the end.
But none of this would matter if the writer’s joy weren’t also contagious. Reading a novel with a perfect plot—the first half of McEwan’s Atonement, for instance, before the story deliberately blows itself up—gives me, as a reader, an intense kind of pleasure, one that exists on two levels. The first is a shared pleasure at the skill of the author, who has created a vivid, interesting, elegant structure, a narrative house that can stand on its own. The second is rather simpler: it’s the primal, almost childlike satisfaction at seeing the promises of a story kept. Such satisfaction, as I see it, deserves to be ranked at the very height of the reasons we read, or write, fiction in the first place. Without it, and without plot, I don’t think we’d have novels at all.
Alec Nevala-Lee 
“She had been presented with one setback after another…”
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Note: This post is the thirty-first installment in my author’s commentary for Eternal Empire, covering Chapter 30. You can read the previous installments here.
Aside from a handful of striking exceptions, a novel is a linear form of storytelling, designed to be read in sequence from first page to last. Yet writers are irresistibly drawn to metaphors from the visual arts to describe what they do, in part because they naturally think in terms of the shape of the work as a whole. As readers, when we refer to a novel as a tapestry or a mosaic, it’s less about our experience of it in the moment than the impression it creates over time. This shape is impossible to describe, but when we’re finished with the story, we can sort of hold it in our heads, at least temporarily. It reminds me a little of Borges’s definition of the divine mind:
One of the pleasures of a perfectly constructed work of fiction is that it allows us to feel, however briefly, what it might be like to see life as a whole. And although the picture grows dim once we’ve put down the book and picked up another, we’re often left with a sense of the book as a complex shape that somehow exists all at once.
It’s tempting to divide books into groups based on the visual metaphors that come most readily to mind. There are stories that feel like a seamless piece of fabric, which may be the oldest analogy for fiction that we have: the words text and textile emerge from the same root. Other stories gain most of their power from the juxtaposition of individual pieces. They remind us of a mosaic, or, in modern terms, a movie assembled from many distinct pieces of film, so that the combination of two shots creates information that neither one had in isolation. The choice between one strategy or another is often a function of length or point of view. A short novel told with a single strong voice will often feel like a continuous whole, as The Great Gatsby does, while a story that shifts between perspectives and styles, like one of Faulkner’s novels, seems more like a collection of pieces. And it’s especially interesting when one mode blurs into the other. Ian McEwan’s Atonement begins as a model of seamless storytelling, with a diverse cast of characters united by a smooth narrative voice, but it abruptly switches to the juxtaposition strategy halfway through. And sometimes a mosaic can be rendered so finely that it comes back around to fabric again. In his review of Catch-22, which is essentially a series of comic juxtapositions, Norman Mailer observed: “It reminds one of a Jackson Pollock painting eight feet high, twenty feet long. Like yard goods, one could cut it anywhere.”
My own work can be neatly categorized by length: my short stories do their best to unfold as a continuous stream of action, while my novels proceed by the method of juxtaposition, intercutting between three or more stories. I’ve spoken before of how deeply influenced I’ve been by the book and movie of L.A. Confidential, which cut so beautifully between multiple protagonists, and I’ve followed that model almost to a fault. From a writer’s point of view, this approach offers clear advantages, as well as equally obvious pitfalls. Each subplot should be compelling in itself, but they all gain an additional level of interest by being set against the others, and the ability to cut between stories allows you to achieve effects of rhythm or contrast that would be hard to achieve with a single narrative thread. At the same time, there’s a danger that the structure of the overall story—with its logic of intercutting—will produce scenes that don’t justify their existence on their own. You can see both extremes on television shows with big ensemble casts. Mad Men handled those changes beautifully: within each episode’s overarching plot, there were numerous self-contained scenes that could have been presented in any order, and much of their fun and power emerged from Matthew Weiner’s arrangement of those vignettes. Conversely, on Game of Thrones, there are countless scenes that seem to be there solely to remind us that a certain character exists. The show grasps the grammar of intercutting, but not the language, and it’s no accident that many of its best episodes were the ones that focused exclusively on one location.
And I haven’t been immune to the hazards of multiple plots, or the way they can impose themselves on the logic of the story. When I read Chapter 30 of Eternal Empire, for instance, I have trouble remembering why it seemed necessary. Nothing much happens here: Wolfe interrogates a suspect, but gets no useful information, and you could lift out the entire chapter without affecting the rest of the plot whatsoever. It’s been a long time since I wrote it, but I have the uneasy feeling that I inserted a chapter here solely for structural reasons—I needed a pause in Maddy and Ilya’s stories, and Wolfe hadn’t had a scene for a while, so I had to give her something to do without advancing the story past the point where the other subplots had to be. (I can almost see myself with a stack of notecards, shuffling and rearranging them only to realize that I needed a chapter here to avoid upsetting the structure elsewhere.) I did my best to inject the scene with whatever interest I could, mostly by making the interrogation scene as amusing as possible, but frankly, it doesn’t work. In the end, the best thing I can say about this chapter is that it’s short, and if I had the chance to write this novel all over again, I’d either find a way to cut it or, more likely, revise it to advance the story in a more meaningful way. There’s nothing wrong with having a chapter serve as a pause in the action, and if nothing else, the next stretch of chapters is pretty strong. But as it stands, this is less a real chapter than a blank space created by the places where the other parts meet. And I wish I’d come up with a slightly better piece…
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Written by nevalalee
September 3, 2015 at 10:09 am
Posted in Books, Writing
Tagged with Atonement, Catch-22, Eternal Empire commentary, Game of Thrones, Ian McEwan, Jorge Luis Borges, L.A. Confidential, Mad Men, Norman Mailer, The Great Gatsby, William Faulkner