Posts Tagged ‘The Silence of the Lambs’
Out of the silence
Eight years ago, I wrote in one of my very first posts on this blog: “I still hope that [Thomas] Harris comes back and writes another amazing novel. I really do. Even Hannibal, for all its problems, has remarkable moments…All the same, it’s been four years since we saw a new book from Harris, a notoriously slow and methodical writer, and there hasn’t been a whisper of another project. And the pressure to write another Hannibal Lecter novel must be tremendous. But I hope he resists it. Because an ambitious new thriller by Harris without Lecter would be the literary event of the year, maybe the decade.” Looking back, this seems slightly hyperbolical, but I stand by my statement. There was a time when I would have argued that Harris was the best popular novelist in America, based on a remarkably modest body of work. He’s written just five novels, one of which is best forgotten, and his most recent effort of any value is nearly two decades old. Yet between Black Sunday, Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and the most worthwhile parts of Hannibal alone, he’s responsible for more memorable ideas, scenes, and characters than any other bestselling writer I can name, apart perhaps from his longtime admirer Stephen King. No author in my lifetime has done more to break down the barriers between literary and mainstream fiction, based on little more than a dark imagination and an unsurpassed level of technical proficiency. During the years when I was working mostly as a suspense novelist, I read his novels endlessly, and it’s possible that I owe more to his example than to any other writer in any genre.
As a result, I greeted yesterday’s announcement of a new Harris novel, which is scheduled to be released the week before my next birthday, with more than usual excitement. The title and even the basic premise have yet to be revealed, a lack of information reflected in the most comprehensive article that we have on it so far, in the form of a paragraph from the Associated Press:
The Silence of the Lambs author Thomas Harris has a new novel out in May, his first in more than a decade. But don’t expect a return for Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Grand Central Publishing announced Wednesday that Harris will release his first “stand-alone thriller” since his debut, Black Sunday, in 1975. No other details were provided, although the publisher confirmed to the Associated Press that Lecter wasn’t in it. Harris, 78, has released just five previous novels. Four of them feature the flesh-eating Lecter, including The Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon.
There isn’t much there, apart from the confirmation that Lecter won’t be involved, which is newsworthy in itself. Lecter is one of the great creations in all of popular fiction—perhaps the most indelible since Sherlock Holmes. Like Holmes, though, he eventually became a millstone around his creator’s neck. Harris has spent the last half of his career in a losing battle to reconcile Lecter’s star status with the uncompromising version of the character that had been established in the first two novels. It all but destroyed his gifts as a reporter and observer, since the later books were built around what he must have known was a lie. And the prospect of his emancipation is very exciting.
But what really struck me about that article is the realization, which I could have figured out for myself if I had bothered to do the math, that Harris is seventy-eight years old. That’s just one year younger than Philip Roth was when he announced his retirement. These two writers are rarely mentioned in the same sentence, but they have affinities that aren’t entirely obvious. They’re roughly of the same generation, with preternatural abilities of observation and description, and both saw writing as a sort of torture. Stephen King has written of Harris “writhing on the floor in agonies of frustration,” since “the very act of writing is a kind of torment,” and while Roth was more prolific, he found the act of creation to be comparably grueling, as he once told The Paris Review:
Beginning a book is unpleasant…I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there’s a paragraph that’s alive. Okay, I say to myself, that’s your beginning, start there; that’s the first paragraph of the book. I’ll go over the first six months of work and underline in red a paragraph, a sentence, sometimes no more than a phrase, that has some life in it, and then I’ll type all these out on one page. Usually it doesn’t come to more than one page, but if I’m lucky, that’s the start of page one. I look for the liveliness to set the tone. After the awful beginning come the months of freewheeling play, and after the play come the crises, turning against your material and hating the book.
And after he retired, he posted a note on his computer that gave him strength when he looked at it each day: “The struggle with writing is over.”
Few writers remain productive toward the end of their eighth decade, and those who do, like John Updike, are usually those for whom it was easier to keep writing than to stop. If Harris found it painful in his forties, it can hardly be any less agonizing now, and the burden of expectation must be very great. We don’t know what inspired him to return to fiction after all this time, but I can venture a few guesses. Harris signed a lucrative contract over a decade ago, and he might have felt a sense of obligation to fulfill it, although both he and his publisher can live quite comfortably off his backlist. I once guessed that after he outsourced his most famous creation to Bryan Fuller, he’d feel free to write a book of his own, which might be part of the answer. But the best clue of all, perhaps, comes straight from Lecter himself, who advises Clarice Starling to consult Marcus Aurelius in her search for Buffalo Bill:
When you show the odd flash of contextual intelligence, I forget your generation can’t read, Clarice. The Emperor counsels simplicity. First principles. Of each particular thing, ask: What is in it in itself, in its own constitution? What is its causal nature?
When Starling, not unreasonably, asks him to cut to the chase, Lecter rewords the question: “What does he do, the man you want?” And while we know less about Harris than just about any other novelist alive, including Thomas Pynchon, we know exactly what he does. He writes, often brilliantly, and so much of what clouded his talent—Lecter’s seduction of Starling, the revisionist fanfic of Hannibal Rising—was merely, as Lecter might say, “incidental.” And I hope we’ll have one more chance to see his true nature again.
The art of the bad review
Note: I’m taking a few days off for the holidays, so I’ll be republishing some of my favorite pieces from earlier in this blog’s run. This post originally appeared, in a slightly different form, on September 7, 2016.
Every few years, whenever my spirits need a boost, I go back and read the famous smackdown that Martin Amis delivered to the novel Hannibal by Thomas Harris, just for the simple pleasure of it. It’s one of the great savage reviews of all time, and it checks off most of the boxes that this sort of shellacking requires. Amis begins by listing the hyperbolic claims made by other reviewers—“A momentous achievement,” “A plausible candidate for the Pulitzer Prize”—and then skewering them systematically. But he also goes after the novel, significantly, from a position of respect, calling himself “a Harris fan from way back.” Writing of the earlier books in the series, he says that Harris has achieved what every popular novelist hopes to accomplish: “He has created a parallel world, a terrible antiterra, airless and arcane but internally coherent.” When Amis quotes approvingly from the previous installments, it can only make Hannibal look worse by comparison, although Harris doesn’t do himself any favors. As Amis writes:
[Lecter] has no need of “need”: Given the choice, he—and Harris—prefer to say “require”…Out buying weapons—or, rather, out “purchasing” weapons—he tells the knife salesman, “I only require one.” Why, I haven’t felt such a frisson of sheer class since I last heard room service say “How may I assist you?’” And when Lecter is guilty of forgetfulness he says “Bother”—not “Shit” or “Fuck” like the rest of us. It’s all in the details.
Amis’s review falls squarely in the main line of epic takedowns that began with Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.” This is a piece that was probably ruined for a lot of readers by being assigned in high school, but it deserves a fresh look: it’s one of the funniest and most valuable essays about writing that we have, and I revisit it on a regular basis. Like Amis, Twain begins by quoting some of the puffier encomiums offered by other critics: “[Cooper’s] five tales reveal an extraordinary fullness of invention…The craft of the woodsman, the tricks of the trapper, all the delicate art of the forest were familiar to Cooper from his youth up.” (Twain proposes the following rule in response: “Crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as ‘the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest’ by either the author or the people in the tale.”) Both Twain and Amis are eager to go after their subjects with a broadsword, but they’re also alert to the nuances of language. For Amis, it’s the subtle shading of pretension that creeps in when Harris writes “purchases” instead of “buys”; for Twain, it’s the distinction between “verbal” and “oral,” “precision” and “facility,” “phenomena” and “marvels,” “necessary” and “predetermined.” His eighteen rules of writing, deduced in negative fashion from Cooper’s novels, are still among the best ever assembled. He notes that one of the main requirements of storytelling is “that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.” Which, when you think about it, is even more relevant in Harris’s case—although that’s a subject for another post.
I’ve learned a lot from these two essays, as I have with other bad reviews that have stuck in my head over the years. In general, a literary critic should err on the side of generosity, especially when it comes to his or her contemporaries, and a negative review of a first novel that nobody is likely to read is an expense of spirit in a waste of shame. But occasionally, a bad review can be just as valuable and memorable as any other form of criticism. I may not agree with James Wood’s feelings about John le Carré, but I’ll never forget how he sums up a passage from Smiley’s People as “a clever coffin of dead conventions.” Once a year or so, I’ll find myself remembering John Updike’s review of Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full, which notes the author’s obsession with muscular male bodies—“the latissimi dorsi,” “the trapezius muscles”—and catalogs his onomatopoetics, which are even harder to take seriously when you have to type them all out:
“Brannnnng! Brannnnng! Brannnnng!,” “Woooo-eeeeeee! Hegh-heggghhhhhh,” “Ahhhhhhhhhhh ahhhhhhhhhhhh ahhhhhhhhhhh,” “Su-puerflyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!,” “eye eye eye eye eye eye eye eye eye,” Scrack scrack scrack scraccckkk scraccccck,” “glug glug glug glugglugglug,” “Awriiighhhhhhhht!”
And half of my notions as a writer seem to have been shaped by a single essay by Norman Mailer, “Some Children of the Goddess,” in which he takes careful aim at most of his rivals from the early sixties. William Styron’s Set This House on Fire is “the magnum opus of a fat spoiled rich boy who could write like an angel about landscape and like an adolescent about people”; J.D. Salinger’s four novellas about the Glass family “seem to have been written for high-school girls”; and Updike himself writes “the sort of prose which would be admired in a writing course overseen by a fussy old nance.”
So what makes a certain kind of negative review linger in the memory for longer than the book it describes? It often involves one major writer taking aim at another, which is already more interesting than the sniping of a critic who knows the craft only from the outside. In most cases, it picks on a target worthy of the writer’s efforts. And there’s usually an undercurrent of wounded love: the best negative reviews, like the one David Foster Wallace delivered on Updike’s Toward the End of Time, or Renata Adler’s demolition of Pauline Kael, reflect a real disillusionment with a former idol. (Notice, too, how so many of the same names keep recurring, as if Mailer and Updike and Wolfe formed a closed circle that runs forever, in a perpetual motion machine of mixed feelings.) Even when there’s no love lost between the critic and his quarry, as with Twain and Cooper, there’s a sense of anger at the betrayal of storytelling by someone who should know better. To return to poor Thomas Harris, I’ll never forget the New Yorker review by Anthony Lane that juxtaposed a hard, clean excerpt from The Silence of the Lambs:
“Lieutenant, it looks like he’s got two six-shot .38s. We heard three rounds fired and the dump pouches on the gunbelts are still full, so he may just have nine left. Advise SWAT it’s +Ps jacketed hollowpoints. This guy favors the face.”
With this one from Hannibal Rising:
“I see you and the cricket sings in concert with my heart.”
“My heart hops at the sight of you, who taught my heart to sing.”
Lane reasonably responds: “What the hell is going on here?” And that’s what all these reviews have in common—an attempt by one smart, principled writer to figure out what the hell is going on with another.
Revenge of the nerds
“Those cops know who you are,” [Starling] said. “They look at you to see how to act.” She stood steady, shrugged her shoulders, opened her palms. There it was, it was true.
—Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs
Over the last six months, a pattern of behavior within the technology world has been coming into focus. It arguably began with Susan J. Fowler, a software engineer who published a post on her personal blog with the pointedly neutral title “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber,” which, with its account of sexism, harassment, and the dismissal of her concerns, set off a chain of events that culminated in the resignation of Uber founder Travis Kalanick. More recently, we’ve seen similar reports about the venture capital firm Binary Capital, the investment incubator 500 Startups, and now the electric car company Tesla. Even at a glance, we can draw a few obvious conclusions. The first is that most companies still have no idea how to deal with these accusations. By now, it should be abundantly clear that the only acceptable response to such allegations is to say that you’re taking them seriously. Instead, we get the likes of Binary’s original statement, which said that the partner in question “has in the past occasionally dated or flirted with women he met in a professional capacity.” (The firm quickly reversed itself, and it’s now being rewarded with the possibility that it may simply cease to exist.) Another inference is that the number of cases will only grow, as more women come forward to share their stories. And a third takeaway is that most of these companies have certain qualities in common. They’re founded and run by intelligent, ambitious men who may not have had a lot of romantic success early in life, but who now find themselves in a position of power over women. It’s a dynamic not unlike that of, say, a graduate department in philosophy. And it’s worth wondering if we’re fated to hear similar stories whenever male overachievers with poor social skills become gatekeepers in industries where women are at a numerical disadvantage.
As it happens, an experiment along those lines has been ongoing for over ninety years, in a closed setting with ample documentation. It’s the science fiction fandom. Most of the evidence is anecdotal, but this doesn’t make it any less compelling. In the anthology The Hugo Winners, which was published in 1962, for instance, Isaac Asimov wrote of Anne McCaffrey: “She’s a woman in a man’s world and it doesn’t bother her a bit.” He explained:
Science fiction is far less a man’s world than it used to be as far as the readers are concerned. Walk into any convention these days and the number of shrill young girls fluttering before you (if you are Harlan Ellison) or backing cautiously away (if you are me) is either frightening or fascinating, depending on your point of view. (I am the fascinated type.)
The writers, however, are still masculine by a heavy majority. What’s more, they are a particularly sticky kind of male, used to dealing with males, and a little perturbed at having to accept a woman on an equal basis.
Asimov concluded: “It’s not so surprising. Science is a heavily masculine activity (in our society, anyway); so science fiction writing is, or should be. Isn’t that the way it goes?” But Anne McCaffrey, with her “Junoesque measurements and utter self-confidence,” was doing just fine. He added: “I have the most disarming way of goggling at Junoesque measurements which convinces any woman possessing them that I have good taste.” As an illustration, he told an amusing story of how McCaffrey beat him in a singing competition, prompting him to point at her chest and protest: “It’s not fair. She has spare lungs!” How could any woman possibly feel out of place?
You could excuse this by saying that Asimov is joking, using the bantering tone that he employs in all of his essays about the fandom, but that’s problematic in itself. Asimov consciously mastered an informal style that made readers feel as if he were confiding in them, telling his publisher, who had expressed doubts about his approach: “They will feel themselves inside the world of science fiction.” And they did. At a time when the genre was rapidly expanding into the mass culture, he made it seem as close and intimate as it had been in the thirties. But he also gave hints to fans about how they were supposed to talk about themselves, and sometimes it wasn’t particularly funny. (It also had a way of excluding anyone who wasn’t in on the joke, as in Asimov’s infamous quip to Samuel R. Delany.) This wasn’t a new development, either. A quarter of a century earlier, as an unknown fan in the letters column of Astounding, Asimov had written: “When we want science fiction, we don’t want swooning dames…Come on, men, make yourself heard in favor of less love mixed with our science.” Later, he doubled down on his position: “Let me point out that women never affected the world directly. They always grabbed hold of some poor, innocent man, worked their insidious wiles on him…and then affected history through him.” He concluded that he should probably stop before he inspired a “vendetta” of all the female fans in the country: “There must be at least twenty of them!” If this was a joke, it persisted for decades, and he wasn’t the only one. When you look back at those letters, their suspicion or bemusement toward women practically oozes off the page, and you get a sense of how hard it must have been for “a female woman”—as one identifies herself in 1931—to enter that world. There was a debate about whether women even belonged, and Asimov cheerfully participated: “The great philosophers and the great religious leaders of the world—the ones who taught truth and virtue, kindliness and justice—were all, all men.”
This doesn’t even get to Asimov’s own behavior with women, which deserves a full post in itself, although I’m frankly not ready to tackle that yet. And while I don’t mean to pick on Asimov on particular, maybe, in a way, I do. In The Hugo Winners, Asimov describes himself as “a ‘Women’s Lib’ from long before there was one,” and his political views were unimpeachably progressive. (I’m sure you could say much the same thing about the founders and employees of most of the firms mentioned above.) He was also the most visible ambassador of a subculture that continues to have a troubling track record with women and minorities, in ways both explicit and implicit, and he wasn’t just symptomatic of its attitudes, but one of its shapers. Fans looked to Asimov for cues about how to behave, because he was exactly what they wanted to become—a shy, lonely kid who grew up to be famous and beloved. And we don’t need to look far for parallels. In an internal email sent two days after the termination of the woman who says that she was fired in retaliation for her claims, Elon Musk wrote:
If you are part of a less represented group, you don’t get a free pass on being a jerk yourself. We have had a few cases at Tesla where someone in a less represented group was actually given a job or promoted over more qualified highly represented candidates and then decided to sue Tesla for millions of dollars because they felt they weren’t promoted enough. That is obviously not cool.
It certainly isn’t. And although Tesla has said that “this email in fact did not reference Ms. Vandermeyden or her case,” it doesn’t matter. The assumption that the presence of “jerks” among less represented groups—who allegedly benefit from special treatment “over more highly qualified represented candidates”—is pervasive enough to be singled out like this sends a message in itself. Musk is a hero to many young men inside and outside his company, just as Asimov, whose books he deeply admires, was to his fans. Many are bright but socially confused, and they’re looking to be told how to act. And as Clarice Starling once said under similar circumstances: “It matters, Mr. Crawford.”
Writing the vegetables
In the huge interview with Empire that I recommended earlier this week, Christopher McQuarrie shares a story from the editing of Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation. McQuarrie and Tom Cruise had assembled a rough cut of the entire movie, and it wasn’t playing well. To be fair, it never does, especially when it includes a lot of unfinished visual effects, but what they were seeing left them particularly depressed, and after watching the first half, they walked outside to get some air and brace themselves for the rest. (McQuarrie refers to it as a “Cut me, Mick” moment, and anyone who has dreaded going back to a troubled project can probably relate.) McQuarrie describes what happened next:
We went back in and sat down and Eddie [Hamilton] had cut together a big chunk of the second half of the movie. And we got to the moment—no music in it, nothing, total rough cut—and [Ilsa] said: “Come away with me.” Tom and I looked at each other, and we’re like, “Do you feel that? That kind of worked! That was actually good!” And then there was the scene in the safe house when they’re all fighting with each other, and that was working. All of a sudden, we were looking at it and going, “You know, all the vegetables of the movie are actually tracking. They’re actually playing really well. It’s all the action that’s not worked out yet.”
McQuarrie quickly moves on, but the notion of a story’s “vegetables”—the scenes that exist to get from one high point to another—stuck with me, along with the idea that you can evaluate a work in progress by keeping an eye on those interstitial scenes.
On some level, this seems to run contrary to one of the central tenets of storytelling, which is that if you nail the big moments and don’t actively screw anything up, the rest will take care of itself. (As Howard Hawks put it: “A good movie is three great scenes and no bad scenes.”) And in practice, viewers or readers will forgive almost anything if a story delivers when it counts. But the vegetables are important, too—to facilitate the climaxes, as worthwhile scenes in themselves, and as a kind of index of the whole. I’ve noted elsewhere that the famous moments that we remember rely on the surrounding material to have an impact. Revealingly, such scenes rarely, if ever, come at the very beginning, which is when writers feel the most pressure to start off with a bang—which only indicates the extent to which they depend on context and preparation. That pattern holds throughout the story. A novel or movie that consists of just one high point after another is likely to be exhausting, while one that conceives itself as a delivery system for awesome moments may fall flat whenever something amazing isn’t happening. To some extent, this is a matter of personal taste. I gave up on Game of Thrones in part because of its tendency to sag between character deaths, while I never got tired of Mad Men, which was made up of countless tiny but riveting choices that gained power from their cumulative impact. The most reasonable approach, unless you’re Matthew Weiner, is a deliberate balance in which the quieter scenes enable the more conventionally exciting sequences. The vegetables may not be the main attraction, but they play the same role in a story that aromatics like onions and garlic have in cooking. They add flavor and bind the rest together.
The vegetables can also be tasty in themselves. A few weeks ago, I finally saw Hamilton onstage, and my big takeaway was how good the second act is—it’s just one great song after another. Yet on paper, it also consists mostly of vegetables, with characters talking about politics or setting up information that will pay off later on. You can see this clearly in “Take a Break,” a purely functional song that exists solely to establish the fact that Hamilton is away from his family, but is so lovingly written and performed that it becomes a showstopper. Even better is “The Election of 1800,” which just moves the political pieces around, but thrills me to no end. (I love it in part because it reminds me of Evita, which is nothing but vegetables, but so cleverly delivered that we don’t even notice. And neither musical could exist, at least not at this level of success, if they hadn’t found solutions to the problem of treating politics in song.) You may not notice such functional scenes on your first encounter, or even your tenth, but the more you listen to a soundtrack or watch a movie, the more they stand out. They’re often the ones that I end up revisiting the most, in part because they can’t take our attention for granted, so they have to exist at a high level of craft. I’ve read the novel The Silence of the Lambs maybe ten times, but the one chapter that I never tire of reading is the one in which Clarice Starling searches the storage unit that might hold the key to an unsolved murder. It really only exists to get the plot to the next stage, but Harris enriches it with countless lovely touches, like how the resourceful Clarice fixes a stuck lock with a few drops of oil from a dipstick, or how she uses the jack from her car to lever up the rusty door. And you really start to appreciate this sort of scene when you notice its total absence from Hannibal Rising.
For a writer, the best thing about vegetables, as well as a potential pitfall, is that you can always find ways of improving them, which isn’t always true of the big moments. Novelists may not be in the same position as filmmakers who have to wait for special effects to be rendered, but if you’ve ever written a novel, you know that you eventually stop seeing the scenes that made you want to write it in the first place. You’ve read them so many times that they become invisible, and it can be hard to look past your preconceptions to see what’s actually on the page. With purely functional scenes, it’s easy to retain your detachment, and you can keep tinkering with them even when you lack the energy to tackle larger issues. Ideally, the vegetables can even serve as a gauge of quality, as they did with McQuarrie and Cruise: if the small stuff is working, there’s reason to hope that the big stuff is, too. But proportionality also matters, and endless fiddling on minor details can blind you to a scene’s true importance. (Martin Scorsese threatened to take his name off Raging Bull because he couldn’t hear a background character ordering a Cutty Sark in a bar.) Fretting too much over the vegetables can turn into procrastination, or a form of avoidance. As Carl Richards of the New York Times points out, it’s when you’re looking for excuses to avoid moving to the next stage that you seize onto finicky little items: “What color should the logo be?” “I can’t find an agent.” “It could use another round of edits.” “I’m not sure what font to use.” That’s when the vegetables tend to call to you the most. The best approach is to utilize this impulse to polish the small parts until they shine, while keeping it under control so that you don’t lose sight of the overall picture. Vegetables in a story are good for you. But you don’t want to neglect the meat.
The art of the bad review
Yesterday, while writing about the pitfalls of quotation in book reviews, I mentioned the famous smackdown that Martin Amis delivered to the novel Hannibal by Thomas Harris. When I went back to look up the lines I wanted to quote, I found myself reading the whole thing over again, just for the simple pleasure of it. It’s one of the great critical slams of all time, and it checks off most of the boxes that this kind of shellacking requires. Amis begins by listing a few hyperbolic claims made by other reviewers—“A momentous achievement,” “A plausible candidate for the Pulitzer Prize”—and then skewers them systematically. He comes at the novel, significantly, from a position of real respect: Amis calls himself “a Harris fan from way back.” Writing of the earlier books in the series, he says that Harris has achieved what every popular novelist hopes to accomplish: “He has created a parallel world, a terrible antiterra, airless and arcane but internally coherent.” When Amis quotes approvingly from these previous installments, it can only make Hannibal look worse by comparison, although Harris doesn’t do himself any favors:
[Lecter] has no need of “need”: Given the choice, he—and Harris—prefer to say “require”…Out buying weapons—or, rather, out “purchasing” weapons—he tells the knife salesman, “I only require one.” Why, I haven’t felt such a frisson of sheer class since I last heard room service say “How may I assist you?’” And when Lecter is guilty of forgetfulness he says “Bother”—not “Shit” or “Fuck” like the rest of us. It’s all in the details.
Reading the review again, I realized that it falls squarely in the main line of epic takedowns that begins with Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.” This is a piece that was probably ruined for a lot of readers by being assigned to them in high school, but it deserves a fresh look: it really is one of the funniest and most valuable essays about writing we have, and I revisit it every couple of years. Like Amis, Twain begins by quoting some of his target’s puffier critical encomiums: “The five tales reveal an extraordinary fullness of invention…The craft of the woodsman, the tricks of the trapper, all the delicate art of the forest were familiar to Cooper from his youth up.” (In response, Twain proposes the following rule: “That crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as ‘the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest’ by either the author or the people in the tale.”) Both Twain and Amis are eager to go after their subjects with a broadsword, but they’re also alert to the nuances of language. For Amis, it’s the subtle shading of pretension that creeps in when Harris writes “purchases” instead of “buys”; for Twain, it’s the distinction between “verbal” and “oral,” “precision” and “facility,” “phenomena” and “marvels,” “necessary” and “predetermined.” His eighteen rules of writing, deduced in negative fashion from Cooper’s novels, are still among the best ever assembled. He notes that one of the main requirements of storytelling is “that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.” Which, when you think about it, is even more relevant in Harris’s case—although that’s a subject for another post.
I’ve learned a lot from these two essays, and it made me reflect on the bad reviews that have stuck in my head over the years. In general, a literary critic should err on the side of generosity, especially when it comes to his or her contemporaries, and a negative review of a first novel that nobody is likely to read is an expense of spirit in a waste of shame. But occasionally, a bad review can be just as valuable and memorable as any other form of criticism. I may not agree with James Wood’s feelings about John le Carré, but I’ll never forget how he sums up a passage from Smiley’s People as “a clever coffin of dead conventions.” Once a year or so, I’ll find myself remembering John Updike’s review of Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full, which notes the author’s obsession with muscular male bodies—“the latissimi dorsi,” “the trapezius muscles”—and catalogs his onomatopoetics, which are even harder to take seriously when you have to type them all out:
“Brannnnng! Brannnnng! Brannnnng!,” “Woooo-eeeeeee! Hegh-heggghhhhhh,” “Ahhhhhhhhhhh ahhhhhhhhhhhh ahhhhhhhhhhh,” “Su-puerflyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!,” “eye eye eye eye eye eye eye eye eye,” Scrack scrack scrack scraccckkk scraccccck,” “glug glug glug glugglugglug,” “Awriiighhhhhhhht!”
And half of my notions as a writer seem to have been shaped by a single essay by Norman Mailer, “Some Children of the Goddess,” in which he takes careful aim at most of his rivals from the early sixties. William Styron’s Set This House on Fire is “the magnum opus of a fat spoiled rich boy who could write like an angel about landscape and like an adolescent about people”; J.D. Salinger’s four novellas about the Glass family “seem to have been written for high-school girls”; and Updike himself writes “the sort of prose which would be admired in a writing course overseen by a fussy old nance.”
So what makes a certain kind of negative review linger in the memory long after the book in question has been forgotten? It often involves one major writer taking aim at another, which is already more interesting than the sniping of a critic who knows the craft only from the outside. In most cases, it picks on a potential competitor, which is a target worthy of the writer’s efforts. And there’s usually an undercurrent of wounded love: the best negative reviews, like the one David Foster Wallace wrote on Updike’s Toward the End of Time, reflect a real disillusionment with a former idol. (Notice, too, how so many of the same names keep recurring, as if Mailer and Updike and Wolfe formed a closed circle that runs forever, like a perpetual motion machine of mixed feelings.) Even when there’s no love lost between the critic and his quarry, as with Twain and Cooper, there’s a sense of anger at the betrayal of storytelling by someone who should know better. To return to poor Thomas Harris, I’ll never forget the New Yorker review by Anthony Lane that juxtaposed a hard, clean excerpt from The Silence of the Lambs:
“Lieutenant, it looks like he’s got two six-shot .38s. We heard three rounds fired and the dump pouches on the gunbelts are still full, so he may just have nine left. Advise SWAT it’s +Ps jacketed hollowpoints. This guy favors the face.”
With this one from Hannibal Rising:
“I see you and the cricket sings in concert with my heart.”
“My heart hops at the sight of you, who taught my heart to sing.”
Lane reasonably responds: “What the hell is going on here?” And that’s what all these reviews have in common—an attempt by one smart, principled writer to figure out what the hell is going on with another.
Twenty-five years later: The Silence of the Lambs
At this point, it might seem like there’s nothing new to say—at least by me—about The Silence of the Lambs. I’ve discussed both the book and the movie here at length, and I’ve devoted countless posts to unpacking Hannibal Lecter’s most recent televised incarnation. Yet like all lasting works of art, and I’d argue that both the novel and the film qualify, The Silence of the Lambs continues to reveal new aspects when seen from different angles, especially now that exactly a quarter of a century has gone by since the movie’s release. Watching it again today, for instance, it’s hard not to be struck by how young Clarice Starling really is: Jodie Foster was just twenty-eight when the film was shot, and when I look at Starling from the perspective of my middle thirties, she comes off as simultaneously more vulnerable and more extraordinary. (I have an uneasy feeling that it’s close to the way Jack Crawford, not to mention Lecter, might have seen her at the time.) And it only highlights her affinities to Buffalo Bill’s chosen prey. This isn’t exactly a revelation: that sense of a dark sisterhood is a pivotal plot point in the original story. But it’s one thing to grasp this intellectually and quite another to go back and see how cannily the movie casts actresses as Bill’s victims who subtly suggest Foster’s own facial features, just a little wider. And it’s more clear than ever how Foster’s early fame, her passage into movies like Taxi Driver, her strange historical linkage to a stalker and failed assassin, and her closely guarded personal life gave her the tools and aura to evoke Starling’s odd mixture of toughness and fragility.
What’s also obvious now, unfortunately, is the extent to which Starling was—and remains—an anomaly in the genre. Starling, as embodied by Foster, has inspired countless female leads in thrillers in the decades since. (When I found myself obliged to create a similar character for my own novels, my thoughts began and ended with her.) Yet aside from Dana Scully, the results have been less than memorable. Starling has always been eclipsed by the shadow of the monster in the cell beside her, but in many ways, she was a harder character to crack, and the fact that she works so well in her written and cinematic incarnations is the result of an invisible, all but miraculous balancing act. None of the later efforts in the same direction have done as well. Christopher McQuarrie, while discussing the characters played by Emily Blunt in Edge of Tomorrow and Rebecca Ferguson in Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation, gets close to the heart of the challenge:
They’re not men. They’re women that are not trying to be men…To me, more than anything, Rebecca is mature, elegant, confident, and at peace. Her only vulnerability in the movie is she’s just as fucked as everybody else…Usually when you want to create vulnerability for a woman, it’s about giving her a neurosis—a fear or some emotional arc that, ultimately, gets the better of her, whether it’s a need for revenge or need for redemption. You know, “Her father was killed by a twister, so she has to defeat twisters no matter what,” and I wouldn’t have any of that either. It simply was: you’re here on your own terms and you’re in a shitty situation created by people in power above you. How do you escape this situation and maintain your dignity?
Which isn’t to say that Starling didn’t suffer from her share of father issues. But those last two sentences capture her appeal as well as any I’ve ever read.
Time also offers some surprising perspectives on Lecter himself, or at least the version of him we see here. The Silence of the Lambs, like Rocky, is one of those classic movies that has been diminished in certain respects by our knowledge of the sequels that followed it. Conventional wisdom holds that Anthony Hopkins’s take on Lecter became broader and more self-indulgent with every installment, and it’s fashionable to say that the best version of the character was really Brian Cox in Manhunter, or, more plausibly, Mads Mikkelsen on Hannibal. It’s a seductively contrarian argument, but it’s also inherently ridiculous. As great as the novel is, we probably wouldn’t be talking about Lecter or Thomas Harris or The Silence of the Lambs at all if it weren’t for Hopkins’s performance. And in many ways, it’s his facile, even superficial interpretation of the character that made the result so potent. Hopkins was discovered and mentored by Laurence Olivier, whom he understudied in August Strindberg’s Dance of Death, and it helps to view his approach to Lecter through the lens of the quote from Olivier that I cited here the other week: “I’m afraid I do work mostly from the outside in. I usually collect a lot of details, a lot of characteristics, and find a creature swimming about somewhere in the middle of them.” Hopkins’s creature is the finest example I know of a classically trained stage lion slumming it in a juicy genre part, and even if it wasn’t a particularly difficult performance once Hopkins figured out the voice, still—he figured out that voice.
And as soon as we acknowledge, or even embrace, the degree to which Lecter is a fantasy that barely survives twelve minutes onscreen, the more this approach seems like a perfectly valid solution to this dance of death. If Lecter seemed increasingly hammy and unconvincing in the movie versions of Hannibal and Red Dragon, that isn’t a failure on Hopkins’s part: making him the main attraction only brought out the artificiality and implausibility that had been there all along, and Hopkins just did what any smart actor would have done under the circumstances—take the money and try to salvage his own sense of fun. (As it happens, Ted Tally’s script for Red Dragon is surprisingly good, a thoughtful, inventive approach to tough material that was let down by the execution. If I had to choose, I’d say he did a better job on the page than Bryan Fuller ultimately did with the same story.) With the passage of time, it’s increasingly clear that Lecter falls apart even as you look at him, and that he’s a monster like the shark in Jaws or the dinosaurs that would follow two years later in Jurassic Park: they’re only convincing when glimpsed in flashes or in darkness, and half of the director’s art lies in knowing when to cut away. Put him front and center, as the sequels did, and the magic vanishes. Asking why Hopkins is so much more effective in The Silence of the Lambs than in the films that followed is like asking why the computer effects in Jurassic Park look better than their equivalents today: it isn’t about technology or technique, but about how the film deploys it to solve particular problems. Twelve minutes over twenty-five years is about as much scrutiny as Hopkins’s wonderful Lecter could sustain. And the rest, as they say, should have been silence.
“A kind of symbolic shorthand…”
Note: This post is the thirty-seventh installment in my author’s commentary for Eternal Empire, covering Chapter 36. You can read the previous installments here.
When we remember a story after the fact, our minds have a way of producing juxtapositions and connections that weren’t there before. Most fans, for instance, are aware that Kirk and Khan are never in the same place at the same time in Star Trek II, and their only real face-to-face confrontation, courtesy of a viewscreen, consists of a single scene. Still, they’re indelibly associated in our imaginations, certainly more so than the modern incarnations of the same two characters who shared so much screen time in a far less memorable movie. Similarly, in the movie version of L.A. Confidential, Jack Vincennes says just one line to Bud White—”White, you better put a leash on your partner before he kills somebody”—and Bud doesn’t even bother responding. Yet we rightly think of Vincennes and White as two points in the movie’s central triangle, even if they interact largely through the contrasting shapes that they assume in our heads. As I wrote in a post on Legolas and Frodo, who also interact only once over the course of three Lord of the Rings movies: “We think of a novel or movie as a linear work of art that moves from one event to the next, but when we remember the books or films we love the most, even those that follow a strict line of action, we have a way of seeing everything simultaneously, with each piece commenting on every other.” When the book is closed and put back on the shelf, all the pages overlap, and links appear between characters that aren’t really there when the story is experienced as a sequence.
You could also make the case that separating characters can paradoxically result in a closer relationship than if they were physically together. When two characters share a scene, they can’t help but be themselves; when they’re further apart, each one begins to seem like a commentary on the other. Closeness tends to emphasize dissimilarity, while distance stresses the qualities they share. Some movies do this deliberately—like Heat, which keeps Pacino and De Niro separated and invites us to draw the parallels—while others do it by accident. (In L.A. Confidential, it seems to have been a little of both: Vincennes and White simply wouldn’t have much to talk about, and trying to force them into a conversation would have subtly diminished both men.) Movies and books benefit from the way we’ve been taught to read them, in which we assume that two lines of action will eventually converge. It’s a narrative technique as old as the Odyssey, and it can be used to create anticipation and lend structure to the story even if it never quite pays off. The first season of Fargo devoted a lot of time to foreshadowing a confrontation between two characters, played by Allison Tolman and Billy Bob Thornton, that it ultimately didn’t feel like providing. This worked well enough as a strategy to unite a lot of disconnected action, but the second season, which has consisted of a series of immensely entertaining collisions between disparate characters, reminds us of how satisfying this kind of convergence can be if it’s allowed to play out for real.
And one of the unsung arts of storytelling lies in drawing out that distance as much as possible without losing the connection. One of the basic rules of visual design is that two elements in a composition, like two dots on a canvas, create a tension in the space between them that didn’t exist before. Elsewhere, I’ve written:
Two dots imply a line…No matter how far apart on the page the dots are placed, as long as they’re within the viewer’s visual field, they’re perceived in relation to one another, as well as to such larger elements as the edge of the paper. An impression of order or disorder—or stillness or dynamism—can be created by how close together they are, whether or not the implicit line runs parallel to the edges, or whether one dot is larger than the other. What was absolute becomes relative, and that shift carries our first big hint of design, or even story…In fiction, any kind of pairing or juxtaposition, whether it’s of two words, images, characters, or scenes, implies a logical relation, like a dream where two disconnected symbols occur together. We naturally look for affinity or causality, and for every line, we see a vector.
The tricky part is the placement. Put your dots too far apart, and they no longer seem related; too close together, and we tend to see them as a single unit. Much the same goes for characters, and it’s no accident that many of the fictional pairings we remember so vividly—like Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter, or Holmes and Moriarty—consist of two figures who spend most of their time apart, which only adds to the intensity when they meet at last.
I thought about this constantly when I was cracking the plot for Eternal Empire, in which Wolfe mostly keeps her distance from Maddy and Ilya, the two other points in the narrative triangle. Maddy and Ilya eventually converge in a satisfying way, but Wolfe isn’t brought into their story until the very end, and even then, their interactions are minimal. In the case of Maddy, they consist of a voice message and a long conversation in the last chapter of the book; with Ilya, Wolfe has little more than a charged exchange of glances. Yet I think that Wolfe still feels integrated into their stories, and if she does, it was because I devoted a fair amount of energy to maintaining that connection where I could. Wolfe spends a lot of time thinking about Maddy and following her movements, and even more so with Ilya—who also gets to send her a message in return. In Chapter 36, I introduce the concept of the “throw,” a symbolic shorthand used by thieves to send messages. An apple cut in half means that it’s time to divide the loot; a piece of bread wrapped in cloth means that the police are closing in. And when Wolfe finds a knot tied in a dishtowel at the crime scene in Hackney Wick, she realizes that Ilya is saying: I’m not responsible for what you’ve heard. As a narrative device that allows them to communicate under the eyes of Ilya’s enemies, it works nicely. But I also love the idea of a visual symbol that allows two people to speak over a distance, which is exactly what happens in many novels, if not always so explicitly. As Nabokov puts it so beautifully in his notes to Eugene Onegin, which I read while plotting out this trilogy: “There is a conspiracy of words signaling to one another, throughout the novel, from one part to another…”
The monster in the writers room
Note: Spoilers follow for the season finale of Hannibal.
When it comes to making predictions about television shows, my track record is decidedly mixed. I was long convinced, for instance, that Game of Thrones would figure out a way to keep Oberyn Martell around, just because he was such fun to watch, and to say I was wrong about this is something of an understatement. Let the record show, however, that I said here months ago that the third season of Hannibal would end with Will Graham getting a knife through his face:
In The Silence of the Lambs, Crawford says that Graham’s face “looks like damned Picasso drew it.” None of the prior cinematic versions of this story have dared to follow through on this climax, but I have a feeling, given the evidence, that Fuller would embrace it. Taking Hugh Dancy’s face away, or making it hard for it look at, would be the ultimate rupture between the series and its viewers. Given the show’s cancellation, it may well end up being the very last thing we see. It would be a grim note on which to end. But it’s nothing that this series hasn’t taught us to expect.
This wasn’t the hardest prediction in the world to make. One of the most distinctive aspects of Bryan Fuller’s take on the Lecter saga is his willingness to pursue elements of the original novels that other adaptations have avoided, and the denouement of Red Dragon—with Will lying alone, disfigured, and mute in the hospital—is a downer ending that no other version of this story has been willing to touch.
Of course, that wasn’t what we got here, either. Instead of Will in his hospital bed, brooding silently on the indifference of the natural world to murder, we got a hysterical ballet of death, with Will and Hannibal teaming up to dispatch Dolarhyde like the water buffalo at the end of Apocalypse Now, followed by an operatic plunge over the edge of a cliff, with our two star-crossed lovers locked literally in each other’s arms. And it was a worthy finale for a series that has seemed increasingly indifferent to anything but that unholy love story. The details of Lecter’s escape from prison are wildly implausible, and whatever plan they reflect is hilariously undercooked, even for someone like Jack Crawford, who increasingly seems like the world’s worst FBI agent in charge. Hannibal has never been particularly interested its procedural elements, and its final season took that contempt to its final, ludicrous extreme. In the novel Red Dragon, Will, despite his demons, is a competent, inspired investigator, and he’s on the verge of apprehending Dolaryhyde through his own smarts when his quarry turns the tables. In Fuller’s version, unless I missed something along the way, Will doesn’t make a single useful deduction or take any meaningful action that isn’t the result of being manipulated by Hannibal or Jack. He’s a puppet, and dangerously close to what TV Tropes has called a Woobie: a character whom we enjoy seeing tortured so we can wish the pain away.
None of this should be taken as a criticism of the show itself, in which any narrative shortcomings can hardly be separated from Fuller’s conscious decisions. But as enjoyable as the series has always been—and I’ve enjoyed it more than any network drama I’ve seen in at least a decade—it’s something less than an honest reckoning with its material. As a rule of thumb, the stories about Lecter, including Harris’s own novels, have been the most successful when they stick most closely to their roots as police procedurals. Harris started his career as a crime reporter, and his first three books, including Black Sunday, are masterpieces of the slow accumulation of convincing detail, spiced and enriched by a layer of gothic violence. When you remove that foundation of realistic suspense, you end up with a character who is dangerously uncontrollable: it’s Lecter, not Harris, who becomes the author of his own novel. In The Annotated Dracula, Leslie S. Klinger proposes a joke theory that the real author of that book is Dracula himself, who tracked down Bram Stoker and forced him to make certain changes to conceal the fact that he was alive and well and living in Transylvania. It’s an “explanation” that rings equally true of the novels Hannibal and Hannibal Rising, which read suspiciously as if Lecter were dictating elements of his own idealized autobiography to Harris. (As far as I know, nobody has seen or heard from Harris since Hannibal Rising came out almost a decade ago. Are we sure he’s all right?)
And there are times when Hannibal, the show, plays as if Lecter had gotten an executive producer credit sometime between the second and third seasons. If anything, this is a testament to his vividness: when properly acted and written, he dominates his stories to a greater extent than any fictional character since Sherlock Holmes. (In fact, the literary agent hypothesis—in which the credited writer of a series is alleged to be simply serving as a front—originated among fans of Conan Doyle, who often seemed bewildered by the secondary lives his characters assumed.) But there’s something unsettling about how Lecter inevitably takes on the role of a hero. My favorite stretch of Hannibal was the back half of the second season, which looked unflinchingly at Lecter’s true nature as a villain, cannibal, and destroyer of lives. When he left the entire supporting cast to bleed slowly to death at the end of “Mizumono,” it seemed impossible to regard him as an appealing figure ever again. And yet here we are, with an ending that came across as the ultimate act of fan service in a show that has never been shy about appealing to its dwindling circle of devotees. I can’t exactly blame it for this, especially because the slow dance of seduction between Will and Hannibal has always been a source of sick, irresistible fascination. But we’re as far ever from an adaptation that would force us to honestly confront why we’re so attached to a man who eats other people, or why we root for him to triumph over lesser monsters who make the mistake of not being so rich, cultured, or amusing. Lecter came into this season like a lion, but he went out, as always, like a lamb.
Eyes without a face
By now, Hannibal seems to be nearing its final stretch—its promised lifelines from Amazon or Netflix have failed to materialize—but it still retains its full ability to shock and amuse. The funniest thing about last night’s episode came at the very beginning: unlike every other installment of the show this season, it aired without a viewer discretion advisory warning us of the violent imagery to come. And if anyone really thought that this meant the show was going to soften its content for its move to Saturdays, it took about ten seconds for it to disabuse us of that notion. (If the commercials that aired with it are any indication, the network evidently assumes that most of its viewers now are well over the age of sixty, and have probably seen it all.) “Digestivo,” which marks the end of the Mason Verger arc, as remixed from the novel Hannibal, may be the most violent episode of broadcast television I’ve ever witnessed. My wife watched much of it from between her fingers, and while I had a good idea of what was coming, it was both bracing and horrifying to see Bryan Fuller go further than Ridley Scott or Thomas Harris himself ever dared. I was pretty sure, based on the source material, that I was going to see a moray eel going down Mason’s throat; what I didn’t anticipate was the prospect of him eating Lecter, piece by piece, using Will Graham’s transplanted face. It isn’t an image that I relished, exactly, but it deserves a slow clap from anyone who thought Fuller might lose his nerve toward the end.
Ultimately, of course, both Lecter and Will were spared, at least for now. Mason wakes up from surgery wearing someone else’s face, but it turns out to belong to Cordell, the world’s most sadistic nurse and transplant surgeon, and it quickly slides off to the floor. It’s an unbelievably gruesome sight, and it reminds us of how willing Hannibal has always been to capitalize on our deepest fears about disfigurement. Decades ago, Pauline Kael made a similar point while discussing the polarized critical and audience reaction to Irvin Kershner’s Eyes of Laura Mars:
The danger is to the eyes. If the killer had gone for the throat, probably the movie wouldn’t be so frightening and wouldn’t be considered immoral…Laura Mars violates our guardedness about our eyes. The most dreaded thing that can happen to what many regard as their most sensitive organs happens in this picture; like Un Chien Andalou, it attacks what we’re watching the movie with.
Hearing Kael refer to the eyes as our “most sensitive” organs reminds me a little of what Woody Allen said about the brain: “It’s my second-favorite organ.” And Hannibal isn’t above making us fear for what might happen below Lecter’s waist. (The most disturbing moment in the episode, at least for me, was Mason’s speech about the actual cannibal Armin Meiwes, which reminds us that real life can produce monsters as horrible as anything fiction could devise.) But the face, like the eyes, has a special status in our nightmares, and by targeting it, as Kael cannily notes, it’s as if the show is attacking us at the very place at which we’re joined to the narrative.
And so much of the power of visual storytelling is derived from the filmed human face that destroying it feels like an assault on the idea of emotional connection itself. I noted years ago that the later films of Tom Cruise, who is in many respects our most interesting movie star, play like a series of variations on the theme of masks and facial disfigurement. He wears a mask in Eyes Wide Shut and Vanilla Sky, the latter of which, along with Minority Report, all but erases his features, and even a franchise as escapist as the Mission: Impossible films is built on masks and their removal: the most delicious mislead in the entire series comes at the start of M:I-2, when Cruise peels away his face to reveal Dougray Scott beneath. Cruise returns to these images of masks and disfigurement so obsessively in his best films that it’s hard not to see it as a reflection of his ambivalence toward his own good looks. That’s what makes him so fascinating as a star: no actor, as Taffy Brodesser-Akner noted in The New York Times Magazine, has ever worked harder for our pleasure, but it’s all built around a core of secrecy and withholding. And the destruction of the most famous male face in the world, even in fantasy, seems designed to force us to think about the nature of our feelings about it. (Cruise, for what it’s worth, seems to have moved on: he allegedly turned down the lead in Iron Man because it would have required him to wear a mask for much of the movie.)
It’s a theme that Hannibal has mined from the beginning, and it’s right there in its sources. Mason Verger is defined by his lack of facial features, and it feels intuitively right that Lecter makes his improbable escape in The Silence of the Lambs by peeling off another man’s face and wearing it like a mask. Much of Hannibal, the show, has been devoted to the systematic removal of the masks that Lecter wears, or what multiple characters have called his “person suit”—a veiled nod to the literal person suit that Buffalo Bill will later construct. And there’s a strong possibility that the show, if it had been renewed, would have taken it even further. At the end of Red Dragon, which Hannibal is about to retell in loving detail, Will Graham all but loses his face:
[Dolarhyde] pinned Graham with his knees, raised the knife high and grunted as he brought it down. The blade missed Graham’s eye and crunched deep into his cheek.
And the damage was permanent: in The Silence of the Lambs, Crawford says that Graham’s face “looks like damned Picasso drew it.” None of the prior cinematic versions of this story have dared to follow through on this climax, but I have a feeling, given the evidence, that Fuller would embrace it. Taking Hugh Dancy’s face away, or making it hard for it look at, would be the ultimate rupture between the series and its viewers. Given the show’s cancellation, it may well end up being the very last thing we see. It would be a grim note on which to end. But it’s nothing that this series hasn’t taught us to expect.
Typhoid and swans
Last year, when Community was abruptly served its walking papers by NBC, I wrote the following on this blog:
Community has been canceled. It was a move that took a lot of us, including me, by surprise, and it was announced just as I’d absorbed the happy news that Hannibal was coming back for at least one more season…At a moment when the show seemed so confident of renewal that it ended the season with an episode that all but took it for granted, it’s gone.
Later in the same post, I noted: “Of course, the peculiar thing about watching a cult series these days is that you just never know what might happen.” Still, my overall tone was pessimistic, if not outright dismissive, about the hopes for its revival in some other form. Which just shows how much difference a year makes. Within minutes of yesterday’s announcement that Hannibal had indeed been canceled, speculation was already turning to which online or cable outlet would be picking it up for a fourth season. It made the cancellation seem less like a death sentence than like a suspenseful interlude as we wait to see the conditions under which the characters will survive—or pretty much what Hannibal itself does on a regular basis.
Of course, there’s no guarantee. Bryan Fuller, who never had a series run for even two years until now, seems to have had few illusions about the show’s prospects: the current season is burning through material so quickly, not just from Red Dragon but from Hannibal and Hannibal Rising, that it feels like Fuller is trying to cram as much as possible into his available window. Still, even the tangible possibility of the show getting picked up elsewhere represents a curious mental adjustment for viewers. In the old days, attempts to save threatened shows were the province of grassroots campaigns, with fans bombarding networks with letters, muffins, or bottles of tabasco sauce. Sometimes it worked; usually it didn’t. Now revivals that would have once seemed utterly out of the question are on the table, thanks not to fan enthusiasm but to a shifting media landscape, with players both new and old eager to produce quality content for an existing audience. Next year alone, we’re going to see continuations of both The X-Files and Twin Peaks with their casts and creative crews intact, including a new episode of the former by Darin Morgan, which is basically the full realization of all my fanboy dreams. And it means that just about anything seems possible. (The glaring exception, somewhat hilariously, remains Firefly, which has nothing going for it except a rabid fanbase and the patronage of the most powerful director in Hollywood.)
And as Lecter himself once said: “Typhoid and swans—it all comes from the same place.” In a way, this is all the bright side of the aversion to risk that characterizes so much entertainment these days. Hollywood is obsessed with sequels, reboots, and remakes for movies that were perfectly fine on their own, but television has enough shows that were canceled before their time to make a return to an old idea seem less like a sign of creative bankruptcy than a gift from the gods. It’s probably too much to ask a company with obligations to its shareholders—and executives praying not to get fired—to make much of a stand for great content for its own sake: we can only wait for those moments when their interests happen to align with what we care about, even if it’s by accident. That’s the funny thing about the entertainment industry. The same corporate mindset that thought people wanted to see The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is also responsible for bringing David Lynch back to the Black Lodge. On an individual level, it’s possible that development executives can differentiate between the two, but it all runs together on a balance sheet. And the primary difference between Twin Peaks and Spider-Man, aside from their cost, is their gestation period. It takes only a couple of years for a comic book franchise to start to look attractive again; with a cult television show, it’s probably closer to twenty. But even that timeline is starting to accelerate.
So how would a fourth season of Hannibal look? Fuller doesn’t have the rights to The Silence of the Lambs, which would be the logical next step in the series, but he’s hinted that he’s not particularly worried about this. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, he says: “There is a pocket in one of the novels of some really rich interesting character material that I’m inverting and twisting around.” He goes on to explain what he means, off the record, and the reporter tells us, in a coy parenthesis, “It is is indeed radical.” There’s no telling what he has in mind, but my own hunch is that it involves a throwaway line about Will’s fate after the events of Red Dragon:
Will Graham, the keenest hound ever to run in Crawford’s pack, was a legend at the Academy; he was also a drunk in Florida now with a face that was hard to look at, they said.
I’d love to see this version of the show, as much as I’d love to see Fuller’s take on Clarice Starling. Yet even if we never get it, there’s reason to be content. The Silence of the Lambs is already a great movie. Thanks to Fuller and his collaborators, we also have a more satisfying filmed version of the rest of the Lecter saga than we’ve ever had before. Taken together, it’s a body of work more than worthy of the novels that inspired it. That’s a tremendous achievement. And it happened despite, not because of, what fans loved about this show in the first place.
“And the shackles came open in his hands…”
Note: This post is the nineteenth installment in my author’s commentary for Eternal Empire, covering Chapter 20. You can read the previous installments here.
The Silence of the Lambs is one of the most expertly crafted adaptations of a novel ever made, with a fine script by Ted Tally, but there’s one plot point that few, if any, viewers could be expected to follow the first time around. It involves the handcuff key that Hannibal Lecter uses to escape from prison in Memphis. In the novel, this detail is hammered home, with an interior monologue from Lecter that all but winks at the reader (“Handcuffs and leg irons open with a handcuff key. Like mine.”) and an entire page about how he constructed it from a stolen ballpoint pen. The movie condenses it to four quick moments, easy to miss if you blink:
- When Chilton visits Lecter in his cell in Baltimore, he’s holding the pen. When he leaves it behind, the camera pushes in on it, followed by a cut to Lecter’s expressionless face.
- Much later, at the handoff at the airport in Memphis, Chilton can’t find his pen to sign the paperwork, and we push in again on Lecter’s eyes.
- In his Memphis holding cell, Lecter removes a short metal tube from inside his mouth. If we’re exceptionally observant, we’ll recognize it as a piece of the pen.
- Finally, we see him hide the tube between his fingers just before he’s handcuffed by Boyle and Pembry.
And that’s it. Another movie might have clarified the sequence by having the key discovered and identified in Lecter’s cell after he escapes—which, in fact, is what happens in the novel. Or it might have avoided any confusion by having Lecter free himself in some other way. The whole point of the sequence, after all, is that the guards aren’t as cautious as the staff at the asylum, and it would have been easy to show them doing something especially careless. Really, though, it works best as it is. Boyle and Pembry aren’t stupid; they just don’t fully appreciate the danger. By having the scene turn on Lecter’s considerable ingenuity, even if the details are hard to follow, the movie builds him up as an even more formidable figure than before. Lecter doesn’t benefit from being lucky: he’s just incredibly patient, ready to take advantage of an opportunity that presents itself after years in prison, and capable of manipulating the situation to his own advantage. There’s even a sense in which forcing us to put the pieces together after the fact makes the scene even more effective. In the moment, we may not be entirely sure how Lecter got out of his cuffs, but reconstructing the logic puts us briefly in his place, and we’re left with the distinct impression that nobody else alive could have pulled this off.
I wound up confronting a similar set of problems in Ilya Severin’s story, and they also turned, curiously, on an escape from shackles. Early in City of Exiles, we’re introduced to a minor character named Roman Brodsky, a fixer and former entry man from whom Ilya extracts some useful information. He also liberates a set of lock picks from Brodsky’s apartment. We don’t see these picks again until the very last page of the novel, when we realize that Ilya has smuggled them into prison in the binding of one of his books. As with Lecter’s key, the details of how they got there are somewhat opaque: a reader who bothers to flip backward in the novel will find a few hints along the way, but they’re so oblique as to be practically nonexistent. And when I introduced them again at the end, I didn’t have any particular purpose in mind. I only knew that I wanted the novel to close on a note of potential action for Ilya, while pointing toward his escape in the next book. I didn’t know what form it would take, but I assumed that a set of lock picks would be useful no matter what. (I know I’ve used this example before, but I always think of the moment at the end of Wrath of Khan when Spock lays his hand against McCoy’s unconscious face and says: “Remember.” At the time, the producers didn’t know what it meant, but they figured it would come in handy in the sequel.)
As it turns out, I was half right. Eternal Empire includes an elaborate prison break, starting in Chapter 20, as Ilya and Vasylenko are loaded into a van for a hearing in London. As soon as Ilya is shackled in his private cubicle, out of sight of the guards, he removes the picks from where they’ve been taped between his shoulders and gets to work on his leg irons. The funny thing is that when you look at his actions in the context of the overall scene, they aren’t strictly necessary. Like any good escape plan in fiction, there are a lot of components, including some help from the outside: within a handful of pages, the van is going to be hijacked by Vasylenko’s men. I make a point of noting that the guards don’t carry keys for the shackles—the prisoners are supposed to be freed by a different security team at the courthouse—but there’s no reason why one of their accomplices couldn’t have brought his own lockpicking kit along. Having Ilya carry the picks himself only introduces an extra set of risks. Yet it made narrative sense to do it this way, even if it wasn’t entirely logical. It allowed me to pay off the reveal at the end of the previous novel, which was already in print and couldn’t be ignored. And it allowed Ilya to play a more active role in his escape, rather than just sitting tight until someone came to release him. Like Lecter, Ilya can’t just be lucky; he also has to be smart. And if he’s going to escape from his chains, he has to free himself with his own hands…
The three kinds of surprise
In real life, most of us would be happy to deal with fewer surprises, but in fiction, they’re a delight. Or at least movies and television would like to believe. In practice, twist endings and plot developments that arrive out of left field can be exhausting and a little annoying, if they emerge less out of the logic of the story than from a mechanical decision to jerk us around. I’ve noted before that our obsession with big twists can easily backfire: if we’re conditioned to expect a major surprise, it prevents us from engaging with the narrative as it unfolds, since we’re constantly questioning every detail. (In many cases, the mere knowledge that there is a twist counts as a spoiler in itself.) And Hitchcock was smart enough to know that suspense is often preferable to surprise, which is why he restructured the plot of Vertigo to place its big reveal much earlier than it occurs in the original novel. Writers are anxious to prevent the audience from getting ahead of the story for even a second, but you can also generate a lot of tension if viewers can guess what might be coming just slightly before the characters do. Striking that balance requires intelligence and sensitivity, and it’s easier, in general, to just keep throwing curveballs, as shows like 24 did until it became a cliché.
Still, a good surprise can be enormously satisfying. If we start from first principles, building on the concept of the unexpected, we end up with three different categories:
1. When something happens that we don’t expect.
2. When we expect something to happen, but something else happens instead.
3. When we expect something to happen, but nothing happens.
And it’s easy to come up with canonical examples of all three. For the first, you can’t do much better than the shower scene in Psycho; for the second, you can point to something like the famous fake-out in The Silence of the Lambs, in which the intercutting of two scenes misleads us into thinking that an assault team is closing in on Buffalo Bill, when Clarice is really wandering into danger on her own; and for the third, you have the scene in The Cabin in the Woods when one of the characters is dared to make out with the wolf’s head on the wall, causing us to brace ourselves for a shock that never comes. And these examples work so elegantly because they use our knowledge of the medium against us. We “know” that the protagonist won’t be killed halfway through; we “know” that intercutting implies convergence; and we “know” when to be wary of a jump scare. And none of these surprises would be nearly as effective for a viewer—if one even exists—who could approach the story in complete naiveté.
But not every surprise is equally rewarding. A totally unexpected plot development can come dangerously close—like the rain of frogs in Magnolia—to feeling like a gimmick. The example I’ve cited from The Silence of the Lambs works beautifully on first viewing, but over time, it starts to seem more like a cheat. And there’s a fine line between deliberately setting up a plot thread without paying it off and simply abandoning it. I got to thinking about this after finishing the miniseries Fargo, which I loved, but which also has a way of picking up and dropping story points almost absentmindedly. In a long interview with The A.V. Club, showrunner Noah Hawley tries to explain his thought process, with a few small spoilers:
Okay, Gus is going to arrest Malvo in episode four, and he’s going to call Molly to tell her to come, but of course, she doesn’t get to go because her boss goes. What you want is the scene of Molly and Malvo, but you’re not getting it…
In episode ten when Gus tells her to stay put, and she just can’t, and she gets her keys and goes to the car and drives toward Lester, we are now expecting a certain event to happen. Therefore, when that doesn’t happen, there’s the unpredictable nature of what’s going to happen, and you’re coming into it with an assumption…
By giving Russell that handcuff key, people were going to expect him to be out there for the last two episodes and play some kind of role in the end game, which is never a bad thing, to set some expectations [that don’t pay off].
Fargo is an interesting test case because it positions itself, like the original movie, as based on true events, when in fact it’s totally fictional. In theory, this frees it up to indulge in loose ends, coincidences, and lack of conventional climaxes, since that’s what real life is like. But as much as I enjoyed Fargo, I’m not sure I really buy it. In many respects, the show is obsessively stylized and designed; it never really feels like a story that could take place anywhere but in the Coenverse. And there are times when Hawley seems to protest too much, pointing to the lack of a payoff as a subversion when it’s really more a matter of not following through. The test, as always, is a practical one. If the scene that the audience is denied is potentially more interesting than what actually happens, it’s worth asking if the writers are being honest with themselves: after all, it’s relatively easy to set up a situation and stop, while avoiding the hard work that comes with its resolution. A surprise can’t just be there to frustrate our expectations; it needs to top them, or to give us a development that we never knew we wanted. It’s hard to do this even once, and even harder to do it consistently. But if the element of surprise is here to stay—and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere—then it should surprise us, above all else, with how good it is.
“Wolfe lowered herself into the basement…”
Note: This post is the eighth installment in my author’s commentary for Eternal Empire, covering Chapter 9. You can read the previous installments here.
When you’ve read a novel or seen a movie so many times that you practically know every line, your perspective on its strengths and weaknesses inevitably differs from that of someone who only experiences it once. It’s a little like the difference between a tool that you use just occasionally and one that becomes a regular part of your working life. If the blade on a vegetable peeler is slightly dull, it’s only a minor annoyance if you peel potatoes a couple of times a month; if you’re peeling a hundred a day, it’s a tragedy. And you find yourself correspondingly grateful for features that a more casual user would never notice, like an eye gouger or a handle that fits comfortably in your hand. The hard part about buying tools intended for ongoing use is that you often don’t know what you need until you’ve lived with it for years, and a quick glance in the store won’t tell you much. Experience helps, as do reviews and advice from others, but there’s no substitute for an ongoing trial in the field, which is why a site like The Sweet Home revisits every product it recommends after a year of regular usage. And the same holds true for works of fiction, which don’t often reveal their quality until after an extended period of engagement. (Authors try to replicate this process by reading a manuscript repeatedly over a shorter length of time, the artistic equivalent of accelerated life testing in engineering.)
I’ve probably read The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris more often than any other work of popular fiction, and I’m frequently surprised by what parts hold up for me the best. If you’ve read the book or seen the movie just once, you tend to remember a few big set pieces—Lecter’s escape, his exchanges with Starling, the final showdown in the killer’s darkened basement—and with good reason: they’re all great scenes, and it’s unlikely we’d be talking about this story at all if Harris hadn’t conceived and executed those pivotal moments so expertly. As time goes on, though, the sequence that I find myself revisiting the most, especially with an eye to the writing, is the early scene when Starling explores the storage unit belonging to the late Benjamin Raspail. It covers about twelve pages in the paperback edition, and although it climaxes on the memorable image of a severed head in a specimen jar, for most of its length, it’s merely tense and methodical. Yet I honestly believe that this is some of the best writing that Harris, or just about anyone, has ever done in the field of suspense. And along with Frederick Forsyth’s loving account of testing the rifle in The Day of the Jackal, it’s the scene I read whenever I need to be reminded of why I fell in love with this genre in the first place.
So what makes the chapter live for me, when more conventionally dramatic moments in the novel have faded with time? As with most great scenes in fiction, it’s an instance of pleasure in craft unfolding in parallel with the action itself. Starling is excited, but very careful, and the chapter provides her with many small moments of delightful ingenuity—using oil from a dipstick to lubricate a stubborn lock, raising the rusted gate of the storage unit with the jack from her car—that put us permanently on her side, if we hadn’t already been won over by her competence and determination. We’re won over by Harris, too. In outline form, the scene could have been routine in a way that, say, Lecter’s jailbreak would never be; we’re pretty sure, given the buildup, that Starling is going to find something interesting, but it’s too early in the story for us to really be concerned for her safety. So what Harris does is build the chapter up detail by detail, never hurrying, leaving us confident that we’re in the hands of a writer who knows his stuff. The writing is effective but never showy, as it can sometimes be when Harris indulges himself, with a lot of nice turns of phrase (“The padlock jumped like a frog in her hand”). And you feel that Harris lavished even more care on this scene than usual, since it works only to the extent that it gives us our first real taste of Starling in action.
It was perhaps inevitable that I’d try writing an extended homage , which we find in Chapter 9 of Eternal Empire. Looking back, I’m not sure how conscious this was: I knew that the scene opened with a promising lead and ended with the discovery of a body, and I had a limited number of pages in which to pull it off. Following Harris was a case of taking a useful model and trying to stick to best practices, and while I can’t claim that this scene is the equal of its inspiration, it’s still one of my favorites. Like Starling, Wolfe has to solve a succession of small problems to end up where the story needs her to be, and I tried to make each step as logical as I could, although I didn’t have room to be too clever or complicated. This involved a few pieces of sleight of hand, all designed to make the contrivances go down a little more smoothly: Wolfe finds the address because of a page that’s missing from an old road atlas, which I thought was more acceptable than having it written down in plain sight, and once she’s down in the basement, I have her look in the wrong place first—finding a mouse’s nest—so it doesn’t feel that the body was waiting for her on a silver platter. The first draft was cut to the bone, just to keep things moving along, and the result, at least to my eye, is a nice tight string of beats. Whether or not it holds up on the twentieth reading is something I can’t really say. But I’ve read it a lot, maybe more than I wanted, and it works pretty well for me…
The adaptation game
Note: Every Friday, The A.V. Club, my favorite pop cultural site on the Internet, throws out a question to its staff members for discussion, and I’ve decided that I want to join in on the fun. This week’s question: “Have you ever had a movie (or other media) experience enhanced by a lack of familiarity with the source material?”
There was a time in my life when I took it as an article of faith that if I wanted to see a movie based on a novel, I had to read the book first. When I was working as a film critic in college, this policy made sense—I wanted my reviews to seem reasonably informed—so I devoured the likes of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Bridget Jones’s Diary mere days before seeing their adaptations in theaters. Later, I tackled the original material out of a vague sense of guilt or obligation, as I did with Watchmen, a comparison that did Zack Snyder’s movie version no favors. In almost every instance, though, it meant that I watched the resulting film through a kind of double exposure, constantly comparing the events on screen with their equivalents, or lack thereof, on the page. It’s how I imagine fans of Twilight or The Hunger Games regard the adaptations of their own favorite properties, the quality of which is often judged by how faithfully they follow their sources. And it wasn’t until recently that I gave up on the idea of trying to read every book before seeing the movie, in part because I have less free time, but also because my attitudes toward the issue have changed, hopefully for the better.
In fact, I’d like to propose a general rule: the priority of one version of a story over another is a fact, not a value judgment. This apples to remakes and homages as much as to more straightforward adaptations. After enough time has passed, the various approaches that different artists take to the same underlying narrative cease to feel like points on a timeline, and more like elements of a shared constellation of ideas. I saw The Silence of the Lambs long before reading Thomas Harris’s original novels, later added Manhunter to the mix, and have been having a hell of a good time going back to the books with the cast of Hannibal in mind. I don’t know how I’d feel about these characters and stories if I’d read each book as it came out and watched the adaptations later, but I’d like to think that I’d have ended up in more or less the same place, with each element sustaining and enriching every other. The same is true of a movie like L.A. Confidential, which is less a faithful translation of the book into film than a rearrangement of the pieces that James Ellroy provided, an “alternate life,” as the author himself puts it, for the men and women he had imagined. Would I feel the same way if I’d read the book first? Maybe—but only if enough time had passed to allow me to regard the movie in its own right.
Ultimately, I’ve come to think that out of all the ways of experiencing works of art with a common origin, the best option is to absorb them all, but to leave sufficient space between each encounter. I watched Infernal Affairs long before The Departed, but the earlier movie had faded almost entirely when I saw the remake, and now I find that I can switch back and forth between the two films in full appreciation of each one’s strengths. (The Departed is less a remake than an expansion of the tightly focused original: its bones are startlingly similar, but fleshed out with an hour’s worth of digressions and elaborations, all of which I love.) Occasionally, of course, the memory of one version is so strong that its alternate incarnations can’t compete, and this doesn’t always work to the benefit of the original. A few years ago, I tried to read Mario Puzo’s The Godfather for the first time, and I found that I just couldn’t finish it: Coppola’s movie is remarkably faithful, while elevating the material in almost every way, to the point where the novel itself seems oddly superfluous. This isn’t the case with The Silence of the Lambs, which I’m reading again now for maybe the tenth time with undiminished delight, but it’s a reminder of how unpredictable the relationship between the source and its adaptation can be.
And in retrospect, I’m grateful that I experienced certain works of art without any knowledge of the originals. I’ve enjoyed movies as different as The Name of the Rose and Lolita largely because I didn’t have a point of reference: the former because I didn’t know how much I was missing, the latter because I realized only later how much it owed to the book. And if you have the patience, it can be rewarding to delay the moment of comparison for as long as possible. I’ve loved Eyes Wide Shut ever since its initial release, fifteen years ago, when I saw it twice in a single day. A few months ago, I finally got around to reading Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, and I was struck by the extent to which Kubrick’s movie is nearly a point-for-point adaptation. (The only real interpolation is the character of Ziegler, played by Sydney Pollack, who looms in the memory like a significant figure, even though he only appears in a couple of scenes.) Kubrick was famously secretive about his movie’s plot, and having read the novel, I can see why: faithful or not, he wanted it to be seen free of expectations—although I have a hunch that the film might have been received a little more warmly if viewers had been given a chance to acclimate themselves to its origins. But that doesn’t make him wrong. Stories have to rise or fall on their own terms, and when it comes to evaluating how well a movie works, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
How I discovered my feminine side
Note: Since I’m taking a deserved break for Thanksgiving, I’m reposting a few popular posts this week from earlier in this blog’s run. This post was originally published, in a slightly different form, on December 18, 2012.
In some ways, this post shouldn’t be necessary. Honestly, there’s no good reason why a realistic novel with a large cast of characters shouldn’t include a roughly equal number of men and women, at least once we’ve accounted for issues of setting and plot. Yet it’s unquestionably the case that interesting female characters can be hard to find, especially in works by male authors. There’s still no better proof of this than the classic Bechdel Test, in which a movie or other narrative work has to meet three simple criteria in order to pass:
- It includes at least two women…
- Who have at least one conversation…
- About something other than a man or men.
It sounds pretty straightforward, but surprisingly few works of art pass the test. And while this isn’t meant to be taken as a measure of a story’s merit—there aren’t any women in Lawrence of Arabia for a reason—it’s still worth asking why narratives that fulfill all three requirements remain the exception, not the rule.
This is especially true in suspense, in which otherwise great authors, like Frederick Forsyth, either ignore women entirely or prove utterly incapable of writing convincing female characters. As far as my own work is concerned, The Icon Thief and City of Exiles both squeak by, but largely on a technicality: both have women in the lead, but only a couple of female supporting characters with whom my protagonists can have a qualifying conversation. Yet something unexpected happened with my third novel. Eternal Empire is the concluding book of a series that has introduced a number of important female characters over time, and two of the three leads are women from the previous novels, along with many smaller but crucial roles. As a result, I’ve found myself writing numerous chapters in which only women appear. This wasn’t a conscious choice, but simply the way the narrative evolved. And although it might seem odd to comment on it, it’s a measure of the relative lack of female characters in this kind of story that it struck me, after the fact, as surprising.
So how did I end up writing three novels with female protagonists? Part of the answer is that I’ve been enormously influenced by works of art in which unforgettable women appear. I don’t think I’d be writing this kind of book at all if it weren’t for Dana Scully, my favorite character on television, who, in turn, was clearly modeled on the great Clarice Starling. (It’s fitting, then, that Gillian Anderson has played such a prominent role on the Hannibal television series, thus bringing the wheel full circle.) It was also a test for myself as a writer. On some levels, men and women aren’t so different, at least not in a story like this: James Cameron has said that his preferred way of creating a compelling female character is to write for a man and simply change the name—which is how we got Ripley in Alien—and one of William Goldman’s favorite methods for brainstorming his way through a difficult story is to ask, “What if all the characters were women?” All the same, writing for a character whose experience is distinct from my own in certain fundamental ways forces me to think through even the smallest moments, testing them for plausibility, tone, and emotional truth.
Which is something I should be doing anyway, of course, but when I’m writing for a male lead, I’m more likely to overlook such problems, because I’m not subjecting the character to the same kind of scrutiny. When I recently went back to read my first, unpublished novel, for instance, I found that the lead character, a young man not unlike myself at the time, was serviceable, but a little colorless, probably because he was so easily assembled in my imagination that a lot of it failed to make it to the page. A character like Rachel Wolfe, by contrast, seems more real to me than most of my male protagonists, just because I’ve had to work on her more rigorously. In some ways, that’s the greatest possible benefit in writing characters of a different gender. It can’t be an accident that many of our finest novels, from Madame Bovary to Atonement, have been written by male novelists assuming a female point of view. Anything that requires a writer to look twice at things he, or she, might otherwise take for granted can only be a good thing. And in my fiction, as well as in my own life, I have some strong women to thank.
“She had entered an underground labyrinth…”
Note: This post is the fifty-third installment in my author’s commentary for City of Exiles, covering Chapter 52. You can read the earlier installments here.
The problem with writing the high points of any novel is that they’re always going to seem vaguely familiar. Authors have been working out solutions to the same handful of scenes—the chase, the game of cat and mouse, the final showdown—for centuries, and even in otherwise forgettable works, these are the moments we tend to remember. As a result, our heads are populated with images and tropes from countless previous thrillers, and after a while, they feel as if they’re ringing variations on the same themes. (This is why I find myself tuning out more and more during movie action sequences, especially the kind that rely on digital effects, as in the last act of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a movie I loved for its first hour before finding myself increasingly detached.) Every now and then, we’re presented with a set piece that gives us something we genuinely haven’t seen before: by now, it’s a cliché in its own right, but I still remember being exhilarated by the ending of the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple, with the villain in one room, the target in the other, and the shafts of light pouring through the bullet holes in the wall. And aside from that rare kind of inspiration, writers are left to express their personalities with little touches in big scenes.
In my own work, I’ve tried to make each action scene as distinctive as possible while still moving fluently within the beats of the genre. There’s a kind of pleasure in seeing a writer deploy familiar elements in an expert fashion, and I’m generally pleased by my efforts in that direction. Many rely on a single large idea or setting to force the action into a more unusual shape. The climax of The Icon Thief, in which Maddy breaks into the Étant Donnés installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art while being unknowingly stalked by a killer, still strikes me as a neat idea, and most of the story was designed to bring her, and us, to that exact moment. In Eternal Empire, which I feel has the best action writing of the entire series, the logic of each turning point was determined by a distinctive setting: the London riots, a wedding, a sinking yacht. And you can see a progression there, as I had to widen the net ever further to make the material seem fresh. After only three novels, it felt increasingly hard to stage scenes like this in ways I hadn’t done already, which is part of the reason I’ve tried to move in other directions in my writing. Stick long enough to any one mode, and you inevitably start to repeat yourself.
City of Exiles feels like a transitional novel in more ways than one. The action here is still relatively grounded: if some of the big sequences in Eternal Empire have a cast of hundreds, this story keeps it intimate and intense, even when the stakes are enormous. (Subconsciously, I may have also had the arc of the overall series in mind: I confined the most wrenching moment in the story to a private plane because I knew I had a megayacht on the horizon.) It was also my first chance to really play with the conventions of a certain kind of crime procedural. Law enforcement officers like Wolfe and Powell occupy an important supporting role in The Icon Thief, but that story was primarily about an ordinary woman who couldn’t be expected to carry a shootout or car chase. City of Exiles is in some respects a more conventional novel—although still undeniably peculiar—and it allowed me to indulge in correspondingly straightforward action. Much of the novel reflects the experiences of a writer who has suddenly been given a new set of toys, and I relished the chance to write about SWAT teams, surveillance, and the exchange of fire in close quarters between two antagonists who are equally armed, proficient, and desperate.
That’s particularly true of the climax, which occupies Chapter 57, the longest single chapter of the novel. Even if the reader isn’t clued in by the rhythms of the story itself or the dwindling number of pages, there are plenty of structural signs that we’re nearing the end: unlike most chapters, which stick to a single character’s perspective, it switches three times between points of view, moving from Karvonen to Wolfe and back again. I try to save this kind of crosscutting for extended action scenes that couldn’t be divided up without sacrificing momentum, and I’d like to think that the reader picks up on this—the scene starts fast and keeps going, as if we’re rushing headlong to a decisive moment. Since this is a novel with multiple echoes, intentional and otherwise, of The Silence of the Lambs, perhaps it’s inevitable that it would end in a similar way, and the chapter’s final page, in particular, owes a lot to Harris. But I still love the result, even now, when my feelings as the novel as a whole are still evolving. There are times when I think City of Exiles it the best novel in the series, and others when I suspect it may be the weakest. Certainly its seams show a little more than in its predecessor or successor. But whenever I think of it as my best, it’s because of scenes like this, with the familiar and the unexpected colliding in one last confrontation in the dark…
Hannibal rises
I’m generally a good sleeper, but I’ve found myself tossing and turning on Friday nights. When I close my eyes, I’ll often find myself replaying scenes of hellish beauty and power: bodies grafted into cherry trees, turned into beehives, arranged in murals in the shape of a human eye, sectioned into slices like an installation by Damien Hirst. I know, I know—I shouldn’t be watching Hannibal so close to bedtime. But I can’t stop. After a fascinating but uneven first season, Bryan Fuller’s eerie, poetic, incredibly gruesome meditation on the work of Thomas Harris has turned into the best network drama I’ve seen in a long time, and that’s the least of its accomplishments. The Silence of the Lambs stands alone as a perfect film, and there’s no doubt that much of our fascination with Lecter stems as much from Demme’s movie and Hopkins’s performance as from the original novels. But Hannibal comes close to surpassing its source material in density and imagination. In some ways, it’s a reflection of the difference between film, which only has two hours to immerse us in a story, and television, which can devote thirteen episodes per season to furnishing an entire world. I’ve spent as much time thinking about Hannibal Lecter as any other character in fiction, and it’s only now that I’m starting to realize that I never really knew him at all.
And I’m as surprised by this as anyone. When the pilot first aired, I had a lot of doubts, but with a week still remaining until the premiere of the new season of Mad Men, Hannibal currently stands unrivaled as the richest slice of narrative on television. It’s one of those rare shows in which every creative element rewards scrutiny and reflection. Visually, it’s astounding, with beautiful and baroque tableaux of death that would skirt implausibility, or even parody, if they weren’t designed to force us to see the world from Will Graham and Hannibal’s charged perspectives. The music, sound, and production design are all first rate, and the direction keeps getting better and better. Most of all, we have the writing, which encompasses psychological richness, intricate plotting, and black humor while staying to just the right side of pretentiousness; and the acting, from a quirky, lovingly assembled cast. I was initially skeptical of Mads Mikkelsen as Lecter—he just seemed too villainous to pass as one of the leading lights of Baltimore society—but he’s managed to create a nuanced, terrifying portrayal while still keeping most of his secrets. As Will Graham, Hugh Dancy squeezes surprising notes out of an almost unplayable character. And Laurence Fishburne’s work as Jack Crawford is the show’s subtlest and most rewarding performance, even if it strains credulity that he’d still be in the field after the horrors that have befallen his team. (I also can’t fail to mention Raul Esparza, who has turned Dr. Chilton, unbelievably, into a delight.)
At some point, I expect that I’ll go back to revisit the first season, which I was watching at the time with only one eye. In retrospect, though, it feels like nothing so much as a necessary prologue to what the show has finally become. The major weakness of the first season of Hannibal was the problem it faced in playing our prior knowledge of its central character against the version of him that it presented. We know going in that Lecter is a madman who kills and eats other people, and the series took this for granted, to the point where it sometimes seemed interested in developing everything else but the man with his name in the title. The Hannibal Lecter of the first season is more of a sketch than a fully formed figure, and the show leaned a little too heavily on our familiarity with its sources. Now, however, with a season’s worth of narrative in the bank, we’ve seen Hannibal commit unspeakable crimes, staged before our eyes with an unflinching panache that even Harris never dared. This is not a man, as we were once reassured, who eats only the rude: he’s killed people we care about, and he continues to weave a web of incredible cruelty around Will and Jack. As a result, he’s far scarier than the Hopkins incarnation, whose charm shifted the balance of the novels and made nonsense of Harris’s strong moral grounding. It’s impossible to root for this version of Hannibal, but we’re still tantalized by him, and we can’t wait to see what he’ll do next.
And it has the effect of retroactively enriching a series of books that I thought I had long since internalized. I’ve been rereading Red Dragon recently—it’s a novel that I seem to pick up every year or two and can’t put down until I’m done—and it’s remarkable how much more resonant it seems when I replay it with Dancy’s haunted face in mind. It’s unclear if Fuller and his creative team will have the chance to cover all three books, as they hope to do: given its modest ratings, it’s a miracle that the series has come even this far, and there are some complicated rights issues to be resolved with MGM before they can touch The Silence of the Lambs. A year ago, I would have been nervous at the prospect of a television show tackling this material at all. Now, though, I’m intensely curious to see what Fuller and the rest will do with it, especially because the way Hannibal has unfolded testifies to this show’s ability to execute a design that requires years for its full completion. If there’s one complaint that can be lodged against the character of Lecter, it’s that he’s too omniscient, too clever, too calculating, with a preternatural ability to stay one step ahead of his pursuers. (If nothing else, it’s unclear how he finds the time to style his victims in such striking ways, both in the field and in the kitchen.) But if every monster reflects its creator, we shouldn’t be surprised to find him at the heart of this methodical, painstaking, ruthlessly clever series. Because the only thing I can say for sure is that both Hannibal and his show have a plan.
“Every passing second reduced their chances…”
Note: This post is the twenty-fourth installment in my author’s commentary for City of Exiles, covering Chapter 23. You can read the earlier installments here.)
Ideally, a novel should be a continuous stream of narrative, but in practice, it moves in fits and starts. A story is ultimately a form of information delivery—even if that information concerns itself more with emotion and thematic development than with statements of fact—and a reader can only process so much of it at once. This is part of the reason why chapters and sections exist: like the pauses between movements in a symphony, they provide an opportunity for readers to gather themselves, while also affording hints of some larger structure. As a result, novels with a lot of action often consist of many short chapters. This is usually seen as a way of generating momentum, or padding the page count, but in fact, it’s the opposite: an eventful novel packed with incident would quickly grow exhausting if the scenes came one after another without a break. A chapter division, by its very nature, is a stalling tactic, a section of blank page where literally nothing is happening, and those intervals of calm provide a kind of structure that holds up the rest. Short chapters don’t create momentum, but they do allow it to exist.
The same thing applies to those frequent chapters, regrettable but necessary, that exist only to provide background material or to set up something for later. Paradoxically, thrillers, which are defined by action, require a lot of exposition to prop up the excitement to follow, and short chapters reassure the reader that even if the scene at hand isn’t particularly interesting, something better will be coming along soon. I’ve said before that many of the conventions that we see in genre fiction were originally developed to make exposition more bearable, and this goes as much for structure as anything else. Suspense novels exhibit this machinery in particularly stark ways, since they’re terrified of the pauses that their own logic requires. Even the novels that we remember as nonstop thrillers, like The Silence of the Lambs, consist of ten pages of information delivery for every page of action. And a smart, skillful writer can turn these liabilities into assets: if handled properly, the pauses that the narrative needs can do double duty, varying the pace of the story and allowing the reader to assimilate what has taken place so far.
The tricky part is finding the right balance, and a book starts to feel boring or repetitive, it’s usually because those elements are out of whack. It doesn’t help that these moments of consolidation often take place immediately after an internal climax. In a perfect world, you’d use the momentum provided by a pivotal moment to carry you through the next long sequence of chapters, but a climactic scene tends to raise additional questions that need to be addressed first. This is why second acts are so challenging. A second act, by definition, begins right after an event that opens up the scope of the story, and it generally means that the ground rules have changed. Unlike the first and third acts, then, which are drawn along by the gravitational pull of the story’s beginning and end, the second act needs to look in both directions at once, tidying up the remains of the threads can came before while moving ahead in the meantime. Elsewhere, I’ve laid out some of my own rules for making this transition less painful—mostly by cutting and rearranging it as much as possible—but really, it’s a matter of rereading what you have and trying to minimize any bumpiness.
Which isn’t to say that it always works. In all honesty, Chapter 23, which opens Part II of City of Exiles, strikes me as one of the sloppier sequences in the novel. It has a lot of ground to cover: Ilya has been arrested, so we need to establish his new situation, interrogate him, plant a few seeds that will pay off later for the subplots about the Dyatlov Pass and the vision of Ezekiel, nod in the direction of Powell’s feelings toward his prisoner, and give Wolfe a chance to identify the real killer in photos from the scene. It would have been nice to split this material over two or more chapters, but given the timeline of the novel, I really had to get it all in here, since we’re going to be moving on soon to Karvonen’s flight across Europe and Ilya’s arrival in prison. I tried to keep the result as short as possible, since I knew that I had some good stuff coming up, but the result feels both busy and overly compressed. If it works at all, it’s only because it was sandwiched between a pair of much better scenes, and it’s possible that I felt free to make this chapter a little messier than usual because its neighbors were relatively strong. Not every piece of the machine can stand on its own right, but it keeps the rest of it from breaking down…
My ten great books #9: The Silence of the Lambs
(Note: For the last two weeks, I’ve been counting down the ten works of fiction that have had the greatest influence on my life as an author and reader, in order of their first publication. For earlier entries in the series, please see here.)
What makes a novel worth reading more than once? In the case of a mystery or thriller, the answer isn’t always clear. After our first read, we know who did it and why, whether the hero will survive, and whether the villain will get away with it: we’ve seen every chase, every reveal, every twist of the plot. If enough time has passed, the details can get a little fuzzy, so it can be fun to revisit the mystery again—I’m not sure I could tell you who the killer was in The Three Coffins or Rim of the Pit, mostly because the culprit’s identity is secondary to more immediate pleasures. But after you’ve revisited a novel enough times, it can be hard to explain what keeps you coming back. I’ve read The Silence of the Lambs from cover to cover on perhaps ten occasions, and I’ve seen the unsurpassed movie version at least as many times, so it’s safe to say that it no longer holds many shocks or surprises. Yet I know I’ll keep reading it for as long as I enjoy popular fiction, and I suspect that it may eventually become the novel I’ll read more than any other. The reasons are hard to pin down, but they clearly don’t have much to do with the specifics of the story, as much as I still admire the ingenuity with which it unfolds. Rather, as with most great suspense novels, it’s more a question of detail, craft, and attitude, which the best works of Thomas Harris—which also include Black Sunday, Red Dragon, and even long sections of Hannibal—display to greater effect than any other novels of their kind. And The Silence of the Lambs remains the best of them all, the one book, along with Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, that epitomizes the heights of the genre in which I’ve unexpectedly found myself making a living.
Harris is first and foremost a master of detail, both in terms of lavish research—I’ve seen Red Dragon recommended to aspiring thriller writers simply as a primer on criminal investigation—and in small, telling moments of observation and character. The scene I’ve reread the most isn’t the first one that might come to mind: it’s the tense, beautifully rendered chapter in which Clarice Starling searches the storage garage that might hold the key to an unsolved murder. In the hands of another writer, the sequence might have been a routine nailbiter, but Harris enriches it with countless lovely touches: the way Clarice, resourceful as always, fixes a stuck lock with a few drops of oil from a dipstick, or how she uses the jack from her car to lever up the rusty door. (Chapter 9 of my novel Eternal Empire is basically an extended homage to this scene, as my own heroine Rachel Wolfe, who owes a great deal to both Clarice and Dana Scully, searches for evidence in the basement of a derelict house.) Plenty of thrillers are filled with such lore, of course, but Harris delivers the goods with a panache inseparable from his larger themes. The Silence of the Lambs is a relentlessly grim story, but it’s also a celebration of intelligence and competence even under the bleakest circumstances. In the figure of Hannibal Lecter, this tendency is taken to an almost inhuman degree: Lecter has nothing but his mind, and his ability to transcend his physical prison is what makes him so improbably seductive. (It’s also why he’s so much less interesting when he isn’t confined to his cell.) And I can’t help but take the story’s most vivid characters as reflections of the author himself. All novelists live by their wits, whether to escape their own prisons or to explore the world’s darker corners, and for a few—too few—great novels, Harris was one of the best explorers we had.
Alec Nevala-Lee 
“But we need to work together…”
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Note: This post is the fifty-ninth installment in my author’s commentary for Eternal Empire, covering Chapter 58. You can read the previous installments here.
I don’t have the numbers to back this up, but I have a hunch that most professional writers rarely go back to reread their own work. In an interview with The Paris Review, the novelist François Mauriac puts his finger on why revisiting a published story can be such an unpleasant experience:
The more you unpack this statement, the more insightful it becomes. Reading one of your published stories is like reading an old letter in several ways: it confronts you with the image of yourself when you were younger, it makes your mistakes more visible in hindsight, and it shows you how insidiously the present has turned into the dead past. It’s the fossilized remnant of a process that used to be alive, and as soon as a work of art is locked into its final form, you see all kinds of problems with it. This isn’t necessarily because you could do any better now, but because a story on the page always seems less interesting than it did in your head. When you’re experiencing the work of other writers, you rarely dwell on how else it might have been done, but when you’re reading your own stuff, it’s hard to think about anything else.
This kind of estrangement from a work to which you devoted so much time and energy is unbearably sad—or it would be, if the writer didn’t immediately move on to the next thing. And it explains why the rare story that you can enjoy for its own sake becomes so precious. Usually, it’s something that came fairly easily, as if you were simply transcribing a moment of inspiration that descended from somewhere higher up, or rose from the depths of the subconscious. Isaac Asimov called it “writing over my head,” saying: “I occasionally write better than I ordinarily do…When I reread one of these stories or passages, I find it hard to believe that I wrote it, and I wish ardently that I could write like that all the time.” (Asimov said that he cried whenever he reread the ending of his own story “The Ugly Little Boy.”) Alternatively, you can feel safely detached from one of your own works if you were operating as an artist for hire, without much of a personal stake in the result, but did your job at a high level of technical proficiency. Steven Spielberg has said that the only one of his movies that he can watch with his kids as if he hadn’t directed it, rather than remembering what it was like on the set each day, is Raiders of the Lost Ark. You can see why: it was George Lucas’s baby, and what Spielberg brought to the project was a matchless eye and a useful degree of distance from the material. And I’m not surprised that the result delights him as much as it does me.
When it comes to my own work, there’s almost nothing that I can read now for my own pleasure. Occasionally, like Mauriac, I’ll need to correct page proofs, and I always have to gather my courage a bit: you’re strictly limited in the number of changes you can make, and you can’t imperceptibly massage the text in the way you can when you’re fiddling with a draft in Word. Reviewing proofs shortly after you’ve finished a story is even wore than reading an old letter—it’s like encountering an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend soon after a breakup, when you realize that you’ll never be able to take back what happened. (Not every writer feels this way, and some, like James Joyce, notoriously rewrote entire sections of the manuscript in galley form. But I’ve always assumed that making extensive changes at this stage will only introduce unforeseen complications, so I try to restrict myself to altering a word or a punctuation mark here and there.) Even after my feelings have cooled and a story sits on the shelf like a dead thing, it’s hard for me to look at it again: it’s like being confronted with your irrevocable life choices all at once. And if I had to make a list of the bits and pieces of my fiction that I wouldn’t mind reading again, it represents a tiny slice of the whole: maybe “The Boneless One,” most of “Kawataro” and “The Whale God,” the second half of “Ernesto,” the closing summation in The Icon Thief, and the plane crash and tunnel chase in City of Exiles. That’s about it.
In most of these cases, I was writing over my head, either because I was following up on a good idea that seemed to come out of nowhere, or because I was able to subordinate myself to the mechanics of a plot that I’d already set in motion. And of all the pages I’ve published, Chapter 58 of Eternal Empire might be my favorite—which is to say, if you forced me to pick something to read again, it’s the one I’d probably chose. It isn’t the most complex or difficult thing I’ve written: once I knew that Wolfe and Ilya would team up to take down a dacha full of gangsters and save Maddy, it was mostly just a matter of not screwing it up. But I had a great time writing it, and I still have a good time reading the result. The confluence of names I mentioned above is part of the reason why: it’s one of the few occasions when I felt that I was writing fanfic for my own creations, not because I was indulging myself, but because it combined characters for a payoff that I never would have imagined when I wrote the first book in the series. It’s obviously indebted to scenes like the shootout at the Victory Motel in both the novel and the film versions of L.A. Confidential, and if Wolfe at the climax of City of Exiles slipped into the Clarice Starling of The Silence of the Lambs, she’s closer here to the Starling of Hannibal. It’s the finest moment for my favorite character in the trilogy, which is reason enough for me to like it. Throughout this entire author’s commentary, I’d been looking forward to writing about it, but now that I’m here, I find that I don’t have much to say except that I think it’s pretty damned good. And I’m going back to read it again now…
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Written by nevalalee
July 14, 2016 at 8:51 am
Posted in Books, Writing
Tagged with Eternal Empire commentary, François Mauriac, Hannibal, Isaac Asimov, L.A. Confidential, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Steven Spielberg, The Paris Review, The Silence of the Lambs