Calder’s baggage

For most of the last week, I’ve been obsessively leafing through all of the multivolume biographies that I own, glancing over their endnotes, reading their acknowledgments, and marveling both at their sheer bulk and at the commitment of time that they require. You don’t need to be a psychologist to understand why. If all goes well, on Monday, I’ll be delivering a draft of Astounding to my editor. It’s a little anticlimactic—there’s plenty of rewriting to come, and I’m sending it out now mostly because that’s what it says in my contract. But it means, if nothing else, that I’m technically done, which I don’t take for granted. This project will have taken up three years of my life from initial conception to publication, which feels like a long time, although you don’t need to look far to find examples that dwarf it. (The champion here might be Muriel St. Clare Byrne, who spent fifty years on The Lisle Letters.) I would have happily worked for longer, and one of my readers rather deflatingly suggested, after reading a recent draft, that I ask my publisher for another year. But the more this kind of project drags out, the greater the chance that it won’t be finished at all, and on balance, I think it’s best for me to push ahead. The dust jacket of Robert A. Caro’s The Path to Power refers to it as “the first of the three volumes that will constitute The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” and we’re all still waiting patiently for number five to take us even as far as Vietnam. Much the same thing happened with John Richardson’s massive life of Picasso, which was originally supposed to be just one book, only to be touted later as an “exceedingly detailed yet readable three-volume life.” Richardson is currently at work on the fourth volume, which only follows Picasso up through World War II, with three decades still left to be covered. When recently asked if he thought he would ever get to a fifth, the author replied: “Listen, I’m ninety-one—I don’t think I have time for that.”

These days, such books are testing the limits of mortality, not just for authors and editors, but possibly for print media itself. When Caro published The Path to Power back in 1982, it would have been impossible to anticipate the changes in publishing that were looming on the horizon, and perhaps the arrival of another doorstopper about Lyndon Johnson every decade or so provides us with a sentimental connection to an earlier era of books. Yet the multivolume life seems more popular than ever, at least among major publishers. In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik issues a mild protest against “the multivolume biography of the single-volume life”:

In the nineteenth century, the big sets were usually reserved for the big politicians. Disraeli got seven volumes and Gladstone three, but the lives of the poets or the artists or even the scientists tended to be enfolded within the limits of a single volume. John Forster’s life of Dickens did take its time, and tomes, but Elizabeth Gaskell kept Charlotte Brontë within one set of covers, and Darwin got his life and letters presented in one compact volume, by his son. The modern mania for the multivolume biography of figures who seem in most ways “minor” may have begun with Michael Holroyd’s two volumes devoted to Lytton Strachey, who was wonderful and influential but a miniaturist perhaps best treated as such. Strachey, at least, talked a lot and had a vivid sex life. But we are now headed toward a third volume of the life of Bing Crosby, and already have two volumes on Dai Vernon, the master card magician (a master, yes, but of card magic). This season, the life of Alexander Calder, toymaker to the modernist muses, arrives in the first volume of what promises to be two.

Gopnik seems bemused by the contrast between the size of Jed Perl’s Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years: 1898-1940, which is seven hundred pages long, and the delicacy of the mobiles on which its subject’s reputation rests. And although he asks why we seem to be seeing more such efforts, which come off as oddly anachronistic at a time when publishing as a whole is struggling, he doesn’t really answer his own question. I can think of a few possible reasons. The most plausible explanation, I suspect, is that there’s an economic incentive to extending a life over multiple volumes, as long as the publisher is reasonably confident that an audience for it exists. If you’re the sort of person who would buy a huge biography of Alexander Calder at all, you’re probably going to buy two, and the relationship between the number of volumes and the rate of return—even after you account for time, production costs, and the loss of readers turned off by its size or lack of completion—might be narrowly positive. (You might think that these gains would be offset by the need to pay the author more money, but that probably isn’t the case. Looking at the acknowledgments for Richardson’s A Life of Picasso, it seems clear that his years of work were largely underwritten by outside sources, including nothing less than the John Richardson Fund for Picasso Research, set up by Sid and Mercedes Bass.) There’s a psychological side to this. As our online reading habits become divided into ever smaller particles of attention, perhaps we’re more drawn to these huge tomes as a sort of counterbalance, whether or not we have any intention of reading them. Publishing is as subject to the blockbuster mentality as any other art form, and it may well be that a book of fourteen hundred pages on Calder has a greater chance of reaching readers than one of three hundred pages would.

This kind of logic isn’t altogether unfamiliar in the art world, and Gopnik identifies a similar trend in Calder’s career, in which “the early sense of play gave way to dulled-down, chunk-of-metal-in-a-plaza heaviness.” Bigger can seem better for certain books as well, and biographers fill pages in the only way that they can. As Gopnik writes:

Calder’s is not a particularly dramatic life—he was neither much of a talker nor a prolific lover. In broad strokes, the career follows the customary arc of a modern artist, going from small, animated Parisian experiments, in the twenties, and ending with big, dull American commissions fifty years later—and though we are hungry to get him, we are not perhaps hungry to get him at quite this length. A dubious density of detailing—“In Paris, Calder had to wait an hour for his luggage, which he had checked through in London”—of the kind inevitable to such multivolume investigations may daunt even the reader who was eager at the start.

And that image of Calder waiting an hour for his luggage is one that every biographer should regard with dread. (It belongs on the same shelf as the line from Allan Folsom’s The Day After Tomorrow that Anthony Lane quoted to illustrate the accretion of procedural detail that deadens so many thrillers: “Two hundred European cities have bus links with Frankfurt.”) Not every big book suffers from this tendency—I don’t think that many readers wish that The Power Broker were shorter, even if its size discourages others from starting in the first place. And some lives do benefit from multiple books delivered over the course of many years. But they can also put readers in the position of waiting for more baggage—and when it comes at last, they’re the ones who get to decide whether or not it was worth it.

A visit to the chainmaker

In the landmark study The Symbolist Movement in Literature by the critic Arthur Symons, there’s a short chapter titled “A Note on Zola’s Method.” Even if you’ve never gotten around to reading Émile Zola—and I confess that I haven’t—it’s an essay that every writer should take to heart. After describing the research that Zola devoted to his novel L’Assommoir, Symons launches a brutal attack on the value of this kind of work:

[Zola] observes with immense persistence, but his observation, after all, is only that of the man in the street; it is simply carried into detail, deliberately…And so much of it all is purely unnecessary, has no interest in itself and no connection with the story: the precise details of Lorilleux’s chainmaking, bristling with technical terms…Goujet’s forge, and the machinery in the shed next door; and just how you cut out zinc with a large pair of scissors.

We’ve all read stories in which the writer feels obliged to include every last bit of research, and Symons’s judgment of this impulse is deservedly harsh:

To find out in a slang dictionary that a filthy idea can be expressed by an ingeniously filthy phrase…is not a great feat, or, on purely artistic grounds, altogether desirable. To go to a chainmaker and learn the trade name of the various kinds of chain which he manufactures, and of the instruments with which he manufactures them, is not an elaborate process, or one which can be said to pay you for the little trouble which it no doubt takes. And it is not well to be too certain after all that Zola is always perfectly accurate in his use of all this manifold knowledge.

And the most punishing comparison is yet to come: “My main contention is that Zola’s general use of words is, to be quite frank, somewhat ineffectual. He tries to do what Flaubert did, without Flaubert’s tools, and without the craftsman’s hand at the back of the tools. His fingers are too thick; they leave a blurred line. If you want merely weight, a certain kind of force, you get it; but no more.” It’s the difference, Symons observes, between the tedious accumulation of detail, in hopes that its sheer weight will somehow make the scene real, and the one perfect image that will ignite a reader’s imagination:

[Zola] cannot leave well alone; he cannot omit; he will not take the most obvious fact for granted…He tells us particularly that a room is composed of four walls, that a table stands on its four legs. And he does not appear to see the difference between doing that and doing as Flaubert does, namely, selecting precisely the detail out of all others which renders or consorts with the scene in hand, and giving that detail with an ingenious exactness.

By way of illustration, Symons quotes the moment in Madame Bovary in which Charles turns away at the exact moment that his first wife dies, which, he notes, “indicates to us, at the very opening of the book, just the character of the man about whom we are to read so much.” And he finishes with a devastating remark that deserves to be ranked alongside Mark Twain’s classic demolition of James Fenimore Cooper: “Zola would have taken at least two pages to say that, and, after all, he would not have said it.”

Flaubert, of course, is usually seen as the one shining example of a writer whose love of research enhanced his artistry, rather than diminishing it. In his takedown of a very different book, Allan Folsom’s thriller The Day After Tomorrow, the critic Anthony Lane cites one typical sentence—“Two hundred European cities have bus links with Frankfurt”—and adds:

When Flaubert studied ancient Carthage for Salammbô, or the particulars of medieval falconry for “The Legend of St. Julien Hospitalier,” he was furnishing and feathering a world that had already taken shape within his mind; when Allan Folsom looks at bus timetables, his book just gets a little longer.

Even Flaubert’s apparent mistakes, on closer examination, turn out to be controlled by an almost inhuman attentiveness. In his novel Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes quotes a line from the literary critic Enid Starkie: “Flaubert does not build up his characters, as did Balzac, by objective, external description; in fact, so careless is he of their outward appearance that on one occasion he gives Emma brown eyes; on another deep black eyes; and on another blue eyes.” When the narrator, who shouldn’t be confused with Barnes himself, goes back to the text, he finds that Flaubert, in fact, describes Emma’s eyes with meticulous precision. In their first appearance, he writes: “In so far as she was beautiful, this beauty lay in her eyes: although they were brown, they would appear black because of her lashes.” A little later on: “They were black when she was in shadow and dark blue in full daylight.” And just after her seduction, as Emma looks in the mirror: “Her eyes had never been so large, so black, nor contained such depth.” Barnes’s narrator concludes: “It would be interesting to compare the time spent by Flaubert making sure that his heroine had the rare and difficult eyes of a tragic adulteress with the time spent by Dr. Starkie in carelessly selling him short.”

This level of diligent observation is a universe apart from the mechanical gathering of detail, and there’s no question that writers should aim for one, not the other. But to some extent, we all pay visits to the chainmaker—that is, we conduct research aimed at furnishing our stories with material that we can’t get from personal experience. Sometimes we even get this information from books. (Tolstoy seems to have derived all of the information about the Freemasons in War and Peace from his reading, which scandalizes some critics, as if they’ve caught him in an embarrassing breach of etiquette.) If an author’s personality is strong enough, it can transmute it into something more. John Updike turned this into a calling card, moving methodically through a series of adulterous white male protagonists who were distinguished mostly by their different jobs. In U and I, Nicholson Baker tries to call this a flaw: “He gives each of his male characters a profession, and then he has him think in metaphors drawn from that profession. That’s not right.” But after approvingly quoting one of the metaphors that emerge from the process, Baker changes his mind:

Without Updike’s determination to get some measure of control over his constant instinct to fling outward with a simile by filtering his correspondences through the characters’ offstage fictional professions, he would probably not have come up with this nice little thing, dropped as it is into the middle of a paragraph.

I like that phrase “measure of control,” which gets at the real point of research. It isn’t to pad out the story, but to channel it along lines that wouldn’t have occurred to the author otherwise. Research can turn into a set of chains in itself. But after all the work is done, the writer should be able to say, like Dylan Thomas in “Fern Hill”: “I sang in my chains like the sea.”

“Karvonen headed for the platform…”

Note: This post is the twenty-seventh installment in my author’s commentary for City of Exiles, covering Chapter 26. You can read the earlier installments here.)

These days, we think of an “airport novel” as a thick little paperback sold at Hudson News, designed to give travelers in business class a few hours of diversion, a category in which my own books have occasionally been classified. In the past, though, it meant exactly what it said: a novel in which much of the action took place in airports. They emerged in the Mad Men era, when air travel was accessible for the first time to large swaths of the population, and even if you couldn’t afford a ticket on Pan Am, you could buy a book in which the glamour of modern transportation was evident on every page. If I were doing academic research on what it was like to travel in the sixties and seventies, I’d turn first to the likes of Arthur Hailey and Robert Ludlum, and it’s still true of thrillers today. Suspense novels engage in such loving descriptions of the railway terminals, airline lounges, and private planes that the characters use to get from one point to another that they double as a stealth advertisement for stylish travel. Hence the Falcon 2000EX corporate jet with its dual Pratt & Whitney engines that pops up randomly in The Da Vinci Code, or the line in Allan Folsom’s The Day After Tomorrow that Anthony Lane thought was the most boring sentence imaginable: “Two hundred European cities have bus links with Frankfurt.”

Why do thrillers love this sort of thing? In part, it’s just a particular example of the suspense novel’s usual fascination with hardware, which, as I’ve argued elsewhere, is both designed to appeal to readers who like a side of facts with their violence and to enhance the verisimilitude of an otherwise implausible story. But there’s also something especially attractive about transportation itself. Thrillers, especially those that center on the chase, are often about moving a character from point A to point B—ideally with his adversaries in hot pursuit—and the means by which he gets to his destination inevitably takes up a large part of the narrative. Here, as in so much else, the template was set by Frederick Forsyth in The Day of the Jackal, in which the antihero of the title spends much of his time ingeniously circumventing various forms of transit security. In thrillers, as I’ve said elsewhere, movement across geography often stands as a surrogate or metaphor for narrative motion, and the protagonist’s progress in physical space mirrors the act of turning the pages. Such stories are a sequence of arrivals and departures, and it’s no accident that so many of them, including The Icon Thief, began with a key character arriving at passport control.

When I was in London doing research for City of Exiles, I bought a ticket to Brussels, boarded the train, spent maybe three hours in Belgium, then came back in time to spend the night at my hotel room near King’s Cross. I wasn’t even particularly interested per se in Brussels: once I arrived, I spent a rainy afternoon doing little more than wandering around until it was time to head back again, although I did make a pilgrimage to the Royal Museums to see The Death of Marat, which had played an important role in the epilogue of the previous novel. What I really cared about was the terminal and the train itself. I knew that much of Part II would consist of Karvonen’s journey to Helsinki, and while I wasn’t able to take the entire trip myself, I wanted to at least be able to describe its beginning and end. Before leaving for London, I had mapped out his itinerary as best I could, using travel guides and online railway schedules, and I knew more or less where he’d be and when, although I wasn’t entirely sure what would happen there. That was one of the peculiar things about this trip: it took place before I’d even outlined most of the novel, so I had to single out specific locations, neighborhoods, and landmarks in hopes that I’d find a place for them later.

The total cost of the trip was about three hundred dollars, all for the sake of a page or two of detail, which counts as one of my priciest expenses per word of material. (Still, the champion here is probably what I dropped on Philippe Duboy’s ridiculous book Lequeu, which I bought for $125 in hopes of finding a few tidbits that I could use in The Icon Thief, only to end up not using a word of it.) But it was money well spent. My discoveries included such minutiae as the look of the Eurostar terminal at St. Pancras, the security and immigration procedures, and the seating arrangements on the train itself. Some of this was important to the plot—I wanted to see how hard it would be for Karvonen to get certain items past security, and whether or not his passport would be scanned on his departure—but for the most part, it served as a kind of background murmur of authenticity against which more interesting events would take place. None of this should be visible to the reader, but its absence would be noticed, at least subconsciously. If nothing else, it seemed necessary that I see it for myself, if only so I could forget about it when the time came to write the scene. In the overall scheme of the story, the train itself is much less important than where Karvonen is going. But it’s good that we travel with him at least part of the way…

“He checked the assembled device, then switched it on…”

(Note: This post is the seventeenth installment in my author’s commentary for The Icon Thief, covering Chapter 16. You can read the earlier installments here.)

Suspense novelists love information. The tradition of loading a thriller with arcane detail, especially involving exotic weaponry and the nuts and bolts of various cloak-and-dagger activities, goes back a long time, but probably reached its high point with The Day of the Jackal, the most memorable sections of which recount the acquisition, testing, and use of a deadly assassin’s rifle, as well as serving as a comprehensive manual of passport fraud. No one has ever done it better than Forsyth does here—including Forsyth himself—but we all keep trying. As I’ve mentioned before, this peculiar urge to combine the content of an action movie with the tone of a PowerPoint presentation can lead to unintentionally humorous accretions of detail, as in the famous line from Allan Folsom’s The Day After Tomorrow that critic Anthony Lane has called one of the most boring sentences ever written: “Two hundred European cities have bus links with Frankfurt.” And at its worst, as in many of Tom Clancy’s novels, the level of minutiae can render the underlying story unreadable.

So why do we do it? The obvious explanation is that showing your work in certain ways is designed to appeal to the traditional readers of big suspense novels—hence the emphasis on firearms, spycraft, and modes of transportation. (One could assemble a trainspotter’s guide to Europe entirely from the descriptions of continental railway stations in countless suspense novels, including mine.) At the same time, the fact that we see different kinds of arcana in books aimed at other audiences—think of the forensic expertise in the novels of Patricia Cornwell—makes me think that the impulse amounts to more than just a mere fascination with hardware. Information, in the thriller, functions as a kind of synecdoche for the overall plot: by describing functionally minor elements of the story with apparent expertise, the author subliminally persuades us that major aspects of the novel are equally accurate. The Day of the Jackal may be wildly implausible in its larger details, but we wouldn’t know it, because Forsyth describes that rifle so well.

This is all preface to explaining why I spend the better part of two pages in Chapter 16 of The Icon Thief describing how Ilya builds a handheld laser, MacGyver style, out of a flashlight and the diode from an optical drive. The details are accurate enough, as this sort of thing goes—you can watch someone build a similar device here—but on a structural level, the scene isn’t really necessary. I could have shown Ilya with the laser without any explanation, or, even better, dispensed with its construction in a sentence or two. Instead, I spend a fair amount of time on it, not so much to provide instructions on how to build a laser of your own, but because this kind of scene can be pleasurable for its own sake, and it adds to the verisimilitude of what I wanted to come off as a fairly realistic thriller, however outlandish it might be in other respects. (In fact, this is a good time to admit that I came up with the image of Ilya building the laser first, with only a general sense of how it would fit into the rest of the plot—and it went on, as we’ll see, to play an important role in the story at several crucial points.)

Perhaps most important of all, the scene tells us something about Ilya himself. This is the first time we’ve really seen him alone, and like his brief flashback later in the chapter to an exchange in Yekaterinberg, it reveals elements of his character that will pay off down the line: he’s smart, methodical, and capable of doing a lot with limited resources. It’s no accident that he builds his laser himself, with ordinary components: I don’t have much interest in spyware of the James Bond variety, but I’m very interested in seeing characters solve problems when they have almost nothing to work with, which is what Ilya does, on a number of levels, throughout the entire story. And I don’t think this impression would be conveyed nearly as well without the attention to detail we see in this scene. Information, in a thriller, can be a surprisingly useful tool for building characters, especially in a genre that tends to gravitate, for obvious reasons, toward individuals with a certain level of competence. The Jackal is his rifle, and Ilya, at least for the moment, is identified with the little gadget he builds here. And it’s going to come in handy soon…

“Two hundred European cities have bus links with Frankfurt”

Let’s say you’re reading a novel, perhaps a thriller, and while you wouldn’t say it’s a great book, you’re reasonably engaged by the plot and characters. The story is clocking along nicely, the author’s prose is clean and unobtrusive, and suddenly you’re brought up short by something like this:

He was sitting all alone in the enormous cabin of a Falcon 2000EX corporate jet as it bounced its way through turbulence. In the background, the dual Pratt & Whitney engines hummed evenly.

Hold on. What do those Pratt & Whitney engines have to do with anything? Is this a novel or an aircraft catalog? Well, it’s neither, at least not at the moment: rather, it’s an instance of a novelist being reluctant to part with a laboriously acquired piece of research. Suspense novelists are especially guilty of this sort of thing—the above example is from Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, admittedly not the most original target in the world—but it’s something that every writer needs to beware: the temptation to overload one’s fiction with factual detail, especially detail that was the result of a long and painful research process.

This tendency is easy to understand in historical and science fiction, in which so much energy has gone into researching a story set in another time and place, but it’s less obvious why it should also be so common in thrillers, which in other respects have become ever more streamlined. Anthony Lane, in an amusing article on the top ten books on the New York Times bestseller list of May 15, 1994, quotes a sentence from Allan Folsom’s thriller The Day After Tomorrow (the one about the Frankfurt bus lines), which he claims is the most boring clause in any of the books he’s read for his essay. He then says:

The odd thing about pedantry, however, is that it can’t be trusted. Many of the writers on this list are under the impression that if they do the factual spadework, the fiction will dig itself in and hunker down, solid and secure. The effect, unfortunately, is quite the opposite. It suggests that the writers are hanging on for grim life to what they know for fear of unleashing what they don’t know; they are frightened, in other words, of their own imagination…When Flaubert studied ancient Carthage for Salammbô, or the particulars of medieval falconry for “The Legend of St. Julien Hospitalier,” he was furnishing and feathering a world that had already taken shape within his mind; when Allan Folsom looks at bus timetables, his book just gets a little longer.

True enough. Lane is mistaken, though, when he blames this tendency, elsewhere in his article, on the work of James Michener, which consists of “gathering more research than any book could possibly need, then refusing to jettison a particle of it for the sake of dramatic form.” Michener is probably to blame for such excesses in historical fiction, but as far as thrillers are concerned, there’s another, more relevant culprit: Frederick Forsyth. Much of the pleasure of The Day of the Jackal (which Lane elsewhere claims to read once a year) comes from Forsyth’s expertise, real or cunningly feigned, in such matters as identity theft and the construction of an assassin’s rifle, which makes the less plausible elements of his novel all the more convincing. He’s so good at this, in fact, that legions of inferior writers have been seduced by his example. (Even Forsyth himself, in his later novels, isn’t entirely immune.)

Here, then, is the novelist’s dilemma: an appropriate amount of research will lure readers into the fictional dream, but too much will yank them out. So what’s a writer to do? The answer here, as in most other places, is that good habits of writing in general will trim away the worst of these particular excesses. For instance, Stephen King’s invaluable advice to cut all your drafts by ten percent applies twice as much to expository or factual passages. We haven’t discussed point of view yet, but by restricting each scene to the point of view of a particular character, you’re less likely to introduce extraneous information. And the endless labor of rereading, editing, and revision, once time has given you sufficient detachment from your own work, will gradually alert you to places where the research has begun to interfere with the underlying story.

There’s another place where excessive research can also be dangerous, and that’s in the writing process itself. Nearly every novel requires some degree of background material, but how much is too much? It’s always hard to say when research turns into procrastination, but here’s my own rule of thumb: two or three months of research is probably enough for the beginning of any project. Later on, you can always take a break to do more, and should certainly go back and check your facts once the novel is done, but any more than three months at the start, and you risk losing the momentum that encouraged you to write the novel in the first place. And once that momentum is gone, not even a Pratt & Whitney engine will get it back.