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.”

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.

The excerpt opinion

“It’s the rare writer who cannot have sentences lifted from his work,” Norman Mailer once wrote. What he meant is that if a reviewer is eager to find something to mock, dismiss, or pick apart, any interesting book will provide plenty of ammunition. On a simple level of craft, it’s hard for most authors to sustain a high pitch of technical proficiency in every line, and if you want to make a novelist seem boring or ordinary, you can just focus on the sentences that fall between the high points. In his famously savage takedown of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal, Martin Amis quotes another reviewer who raved: “There is not a single ugly or dead sentence.” Amis then acidly observes:

Hannibal is a genre novel, and all genre novels contain dead sentences—unless you feel the throb of life in such periods as “Tommaso put the lid back on the cooler” or “Eric Pickford answered” or “Pazzi worked like a man possessed” or “Margot laughed in spite of herself” or “Bob Sneed broke the silence.”

Amis knows that this is a cheap shot, and he glories in it. But it isn’t so different from what critics do when they list the awful sentences from a current bestseller or nominate lines for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. I laugh at this along with anyone else, but I also wince a little, because there are few authors alive who aren’t vulnerable to that sort of treatment. As G.K. Chesterton pointed out: “You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.”

This is even more true of authors who take considerable stylistic or thematic risks, which usually result in individual sentences that seem crazy or, worse, silly. The fear of seeming ridiculous is what prevents a lot of writers from taking chances, and it isn’t always unjustified. An ambitious novel opens itself up to savaging from all sides, precisely because it provides so much material that can be turned against the author when taken out of context. And it doesn’t need to be malicious, either: even objective or actively sympathetic critics can be seduced by the ease with which a writer can be excerpted to make a case. I’ve become increasingly daunted by the prospect of distilling the work of Robert A. Heinlein, for example, because his career was so long, varied, and often intentionally provocative that you can find sentences to support any argument about him that you want to make. (It doesn’t help that his politics evolved drastically over time, and they probably would have undergone several more transformations if he had lived for longer.) This isn’t to say that his opinions aren’t a fair target for criticism, but any reasonable understanding of who Heinlein was and what he believed—which I’m still trying to sort out for myself—can’t be conveyed by a handful of cherry-picked quotations. Literary biography is useful primarily to the extent that it can lay out a writer’s life in an orderly fashion, providing a frame that tells us something about the work that we wouldn’t know by encountering it out of order. But even that involves a process of selection, as does everything else about a biography. The biographer’s project isn’t essentially different from that of a working critic or reviewer: it just takes place on a larger scale.

And it’s worth noting that prolific critics themselves are particularly susceptible to this kind of treatment. When Renata Adler described Pauline Kael’s output as “not simply, jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless,” any devotee of Kael’s work had to disagree—but it was also impossible to deny that there was plenty of evidence for the prosecution. If you’re determined to hate Roger Ebert, you just have to search for the reviews in which his opinions, written on deadline, weren’t sufficiently in line with the conclusions reached by posterity, as when he unforgivably gave only three stars to The Godfather Part II. And there isn’t a single page in the work of David Thomson, who is probably the most interesting movie critic who ever lived, that couldn’t be mined for outrageous, idiotic, or infuriating statements. I still remember a review on The A.V. Club of How to Watch a Movie that quoted lines like this:

Tell me a story, we beg as children, while wanting so many other things. Story will put off sleep (or extinction) and the child’s organism hardly trusts the habit of waking yet.

And this:

You came into this book under deceptive promises (mine) and false hopes (yours). You believed we might make decisive progress in the matter of how to watch a movie. So be it, but this was a ruse to make you look at life.

The reviewer quoted these sentences as examples of the book’s deficiencies, and they were duly excoriated in the comments. But anyone who has really read Thomson knows that such statements are part of the package, and removing them would also deny most of what makes him so fun, perverse, and valuable.

So what’s a responsible reviewer to do? We could start, maybe, by quoting longer or complete sections, rather than sentences in isolation, and by providing more context when we offer up just a line or two. We can also respect an author’s feelings, explicit or otherwise, about what sections are actually important. In the passage I mentioned at the beginning of this post, which is about John Updike, Mailer goes on to quote a few sentences from Rabbit, Run, and he adds:

The first quotation is taken from the first five sentences of the book, the second is on the next-to-last page, and the third is nothing less than the last three sentences of the novel. The beginning and end of a novel are usually worked over. They are the index to taste in the writer.

That’s a pretty good rule, and it ensures that the critic is discussing something reasonably close to what the writer intended to say. Best of all, we can approach the problem of excerpting with a kind of joy in the hunt: the search for the slice of a work that will stand as a synecdoche of the whole. In the book U & I, which is also about Updike, Nicholson Baker writes about the “standardized ID phrase” and “the aphoristic consensus” and “the jingle we will have to fight past at some point in the future” to see a writer clearly again, just as fans of Joyce have to do their best to forget about “the ineluctable modality of the visible” and “yes I said yes I will Yes.” For a living author, that repository of familiar quotations is constantly in flux, and reviewers might approach their work with a greater sense of responsibility if they realized that they were playing a part in creating it—one tiny excerpt at a time.

“In the lights of the cameras…”

Note: This post is the fifty-seventh installment in my author’s commentary for Eternal Empire, covering Chapter 56. You can read the previous installments here.

Few creative choices are so central to the writing process as the selection of a point of view, but it’s often a haphazard, instinctive decision. Unless you’re working in an overtly experimental mode, you’re usually stuck with the first or third person, which isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. It helps to visualize your set of options as a scatter plot, with the dots growing denser around two blobs that we call the first- and third-person point of view—although the boundaries are fuzzy, and there’s a wide range of possibilities within each category. When a writer begins a story, he or she usually selects a point of view from the start, but it’s only in the act of writing itself that the style settles into a particular spot on the spectrum, which can be further refined at the revision stage. The first person is slightly more limited in scope, which is why an author like Henry James, who called it “the darkest abyss of romance,” could claim that it was inherently unsuited to the novel. But it clearly has its uses, and there are even signs that genre readers have come to prefer it. It opens up delicious possibilities for unreliable narrators, who threaten to become a cliché in themselves, and the intimacy that it creates, even if it’s an illusion, can encourage a greater identification with the protagonist. (Hence the fact that the Nancy Drew series switched from the third person to the first about a decade ago, which feels like a sign of the times.)

I made the choice long ago to write my fiction in the third person, and it has remained pretty much in place for everything I’ve published, for both short stories and novels. (The one exception is my story “Ernesto,” which is set to be reprinted soon by Lightspeed: I gave it a first-person narrator as an homage to Holmes and Watson and to discourage me from attempting a bad imitation of Hemingway.) By design, it’s a detached style: I never dip into interior monologue, and even strong emotions are described as objectively as possible. For the most part, I’m comfortable with this decision, although I’m also conscious of its limitations. As far as I can recall, I arrived at it as a form of constraint to keep certain unwanted tendencies in check: these novels are violent and sometimes implausible, and I developed a slightly chilly voice that I thought would prevent the action from becoming unduly hysterical or going out of control.  I wanted it to be objective, like a camera, so that the reader would be moved or excited by events, rather than by the manner in which they were related. Looking back, though, I sometimes wish that I’d modified my approach to give me the option of going deeper into the protagonist’s thoughts when necessary, as Thomas Harris sometimes does. By keeping my characters at arm’s length, I’ve limited the kinds of stories I can tell, and while I don’t mind staying within that range, it also means that I didn’t devote time to developing skills that might be useful now.

That said, I still prefer the third person over the first, and I especially like how it can be imperceptibly nudged in one direction or another to suit the demands of the story. This comes in handy when you’re writing what amounts, in places, to a mystery novel. When you’re working in the first person, it can be hard to conceal information from the reader without it feeling like a gimmick or a cheat—although a few authors, like Agatha Christie, have pulled it off brilliantly. The third person allows you to pull back or zoom in as necessary to manage the reader’s access to the plot, and when you’re working in an omniscient mode that allows you to move between characters at will, you can even cut away entirely. These tricks have been baked into the third person as we’ve come to accept it, so a reader, ideally, will accept such shifts without thinking. (It’s possible to take this kind of switching too far, of course, which is why I try to stick with a single point of view per chapter, and I’m never entirely happy with my attempts to cycle between characters within a single scene.) When an author’s style is inherently objective, we aren’t likely to notice if it retreats or advances a little, any more than it registers when a movie cuts from a medium long shot to a medium shot. And if I’ve remained faithful to that style, it’s largely because it’s more flexible than it seems, and its gradations don’t tend to call attention to themselves.

There’s a good functional example of this in Chapter 56 of Eternal Empire. The first two pages are unusual in that they’re effectively told from nobody’s point of view: they relate a series of events—the explosion of the shadow boat, the movements of reporters, the arrival of the evacuees on shore, and the withdrawal of three unidentified figures to a distant part of the quay—as if recounting them in a news dispatch. (In fact, this is literally what is happening: a big chunk of the section is described as if it were being seen by a viewer on a newscast. If I repeatedly mention the camera crews, it’s to provide an artificial viewpoint through which to narrate the action. The lack of a central character is disguised because a camera has taken its place, which isn’t a tactic that can be extended indefinitely, but it works well enough to get me to the second page.) The reason is obvious: I don’t want to reveal that the three men who have detached themselves from the crowd are Orlov, Ilya, and Tarkovsky, whose fate up to this point has been left up in the air. This wouldn’t work at all in the first person, and if it works here, it’s because I’ve established a style that allows, when the plot calls for it, for the removal of the characters entirely. Very little of this was conscious, but it was all built on a choice of tone that I made two novels earlier, on the hunch that it would lend itself to the kind of story I wanted to tell. A paragraph or two later, we’re back in Ilya’s head. And if I’ve pulled it off properly, the reader should never notice that we left it at all…

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.

A brand apart

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 topic: “What individual instances of product placement in movies and television have you found most effective?”

One of the small but consistently troublesome issues that every writer faces is what to do about brand names. We’re surrounded by brands wherever we look, and we casually think and talk about them all the time. In fiction, though, the mention of a specific brand often causes a slight blip in the narrative: we find ourself asking if the character in question would really be using that product, or why the author introduced it at all, and if it isn’t handled well, it can take us out of the story. Which isn’t to say that such references don’t have their uses. John Gardner puts it well in The Art of Fiction:

The writer, if it suits him, should also know and occasionally use brand names, since they help to characterize. The people who drive Toyotas are not the same people who drive BMWs, and people who brush with Crest are different from those who use Pepsodent or, on the other hand, one of the health-food brands made of eggplant. (In super-realist fiction, brand names are more important than the characters they describe.)

And sometimes the clever deployment of brands can be another weapon in the writer’s arsenal, although it usually only works when the author already possesses a formidable descriptive vocabulary. Nicholson Baker is a master of this, and it doesn’t get any better than Updike in Rabbit is Rich:

In the bathroom Harry sees that Ronnie uses shaving cream, Gillette Foamy, out of a pressure can, the kind that’s eating up the ozone so our children will fry. And that new kind of razor with the narrow single-edge blade that snaps in and out with a click on the television commercials. Harry can’t see the point, it’s just more waste, he still uses a rusty old two-edge safety razor he bought for $1.99 about seven years ago, and lathers himself with an old imitation badger-bristle on whatever bar of soap is handy…

For the rest of us, though, I’d say that brand names are one of those places where fiction has to retreat slightly from reality in order to preserve the illusion. Just as dialogue in fiction tends to be more direct and concise than it would be in real life, characters should probably refer to specific brands a little less often than they really would. (This is particularly true when it comes to rapidly changing technology, which can date a story immediately.)

In movies and television, a prominently featured brand sets off a different train of thought: we stop paying attention to the story and wonder if we’re looking at deliberate product placement—if there’s even any question at all. Even a show as densely packed as The Vampire Diaries regularly takes a minute to serve up a commercial for the likes of AT&T MiFi, and shows like Community have turned paid brand integration into entire self-mocking subplots, while still accepting the sponsor’s money, which feels like a textbook example of having it both ways. Tony Pace of Subway explains their strategy in simple terms: “We are kind of looking to be an invited guest with a speaking role.” Which is exactly what happened on Community—and since it was reasonably funny, and it allowed the show to skate along for another couple of episodes, I didn’t really care. When it’s handled poorly, though, this ironic, winking form of product placement can be even more grating than the conventional kind. It flatters us into thinking that we’re all in on the joke, although it isn’t hard to imagine cases where corporate sponsorship, embedded so deeply into a show’s fabric, wouldn’t be so cute and innocuous. Even under the best of circumstances, it’s a fake version of irreverence, done on a company’s terms. And if there’s a joke here, it’s probably on us.

Paid or not, product placement works, at least on me, although often in peculiar forms. I drank Heineken for years because of Blue Velvet, and looking around my house, I see all kinds of products or items that I bought to recapture a moment from pop culture, whether it’s the Pantone mug that reminds me of a Magnetic Fields song or the Spyderco knife that carries the Hannibal seal of approval. (I’ve complained elsewhere about the use of snobbish brand names in Thomas Harris, but it’s a beautiful little object, even if I don’t expect to use it exactly as Lecter does.) If it’s kept within bounds, it’s a mostly harmless way of establishing a connection between us and something we love, but it always ends up feeling a little empty. Which may be why brand names sit so uncomfortably in fiction. Brands or corporations use many of the same strategies as art to generate an emotional response, except the former is constantly on message, unambiguous, and designed to further a specific end. It’s no accident that there are so many affinities between advertising and propaganda. A good work of art, by contrast, is ambiguous, open to multiple interpretations, and asks nothing of us aside from an investment of time—which is the opposite of what a brand wants. Fiction and brands are always going to live together, either because they’ve been paid to do so or because it’s an accurate reflection of our world. But we’re more than just consumers. And art, at its best, should remind us of this.

The Monster of Florence

Like most great acts of trickery, narrative and otherwise, the television series Hannibal hinges on a feat of sleight of hand. At first glance, its source material could hardly seem more clear, since it’s there each week in the opening credits: “Based on the characters from the book Red Dragon by Thomas Harris.” Yet the more I watch it—and this is my favorite network drama in years—the more I’m convinced that its real influences lie elsewhere. Once you get past its florid title and grotesque gallery of murderers, the novel Red Dragon is essentially a realistic thriller, with some of the most detailed and convincing procedural elements that the genre ever produced. (I’ve seen books on writing that recommend studying it as a sourcebook on forensic technique.) It’s no wonder that Michael Mann, our most obsessive cinematic chronicler of men at work, was drawn to it: Manhunter, which puts its director’s name directly in the title, remains the most faithful filmed version of this story that we have. Bryan Fuller’s interests, to put it mildly, are somewhat different. There’s hardly a credible moment of forensic analysis or laboratory procedure anywhere to be found on this show: the investigative team is there primarily to provide subtle comic relief, and most of the crimes are solved, literally, by an act of Will.

Because the title of this show, after all, isn’t Red Dragon, but Hannibal. And as the series has unfolded, it has become manifestly clear that its real thematic touchstone is the novel of the same name, along with its notorious adaptation by Ridley Scott. In itself, this is a daring choice: neither the novel nor the movie Hannibal ranks high among anyone’s favorites, unless you’re Stephen King or David Thomson, and even if you like aspects of both, as I do, it’s hard not to see it as the point when Harris’s tendency toward the overwrought and gruesome overwhelmed his keen instincts as a crime reporter. Yet it’s those very excesses that seem to fascinate Fuller. The show’s lineup of serial killers of the week has grown increasingly baroque, to the point where Francis Dolarhyde, who merely slaughtered two families in their homes, might find it hard to make an impression. Characters from the novel Hannibal, like Mason Verger and his sister Margot, are given big roles, and the show’s visual aesthetic—all dripping blood and dark, candied surfaces—has more in common with the later Harris than the stark, clean lines of the early books. And the fact that the new season draws liberally on Lecter’s adventures in Florence signals that it intends to dive even deeper into those gothic trenches.

Yet Hannibal, the show, pulls it off, when the book and movie mostly didn’t. And this is thanks largely to its clarity of purpose regarding the character of Lecter himself. Harris’s last two books suffer from his growing identification with Lecter, along with a curious misreading of his appeal. As Martin Amis was among the first to point out, Hannibal frees Lecter only to turn him into an arch consumer with a taste for expensive brand names, rather than the severe, poised monster he was at his best. Here’s his airline meal on the plane ride home:

An elegant yellow box trimmed with brown from Fauchon, the Paris caterer. It is tied with two ribbons of silk gauze in complementary colors. Dr. Lecter has provisioned himself with wonderfully aromatic truffled pâté de foie gras, and Anatolian figs still weeping from their severed stems. He has a half-bottle of a St. Estephe he favors. The silk bow yields with a whisper…

This kind of thing can go on and on—and it does. In his cell, Lecter seems like a being of infinite possibility; in Florence, he’s a fop and snob whose choices are designed to tickle the most superficial of bourgeois instincts, a primate of the Ponte Vecchio.

And while the series doesn’t shy away from showing us Lecter’s decadent lifestyle, it benefits from a more reasoned understanding of his evil. Lecter, for once, is the villain here: we’ve seen him destroy lives and inflict pain to an extent that the books themselves never acknowledged. By ridding itself of Harris’s ambivalence toward his own creation, the show is better equipped to walk its fine line between real dread and campy decadence. One of the pleasures of Hannibal is how close it always seems to crossing over into parody, and it’s deliciously aware of this. The dialogue is so mannered that you feel you could put together an algorithm to generate it on demand: “Morality doesn’t exist. Only morale.” But by keeping itself at arm’s length from its title character, which it regards like a beautiful but deadly wasp in a jar, it allows us to delight in Lecter’s extravagances while not asking us to buy into his values. The result is one of the weirdest, perversely singular shows around: for a series that seems perpetually on the cusp of cancellation, last night’s season premiere was almost willfully uninviting to new viewers. Whether the show can maintain that balance for much longer remains to be seen, and even as it stands, it’s doubtful if it would work at all for an audience that hadn’t been taught how to watch it. For now, though, it’s great, gut-wrenching fun, even if it only pulls it off by the skin of its teeth.

“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…

“A shadow fell across the threshold…”

Note: This post is the ninth installment in my author’s commentary for Eternal Empire, covering Chapter 8. You can read the previous installments here.

Yesterday, I stumbled across an interview that the screenwriter Damon Lindelof gave to Vulture two years ago on the subject of the modern blockbuster. I’m not exactly a fan of Lindelof’s work: his two most recent film credits are on the scripts for Prometheus and Star Trek Into Darkness, both of which I found disappointing, although I retain high hopes for Tomorrowland. Yet as this interview clearly indicates, he’s a smart, articulate guy with a real knack for a certain kind of storytelling. This shouldn’t come as a surprise: I have no trouble believing that the majority of working screenwriters in Hollywood score somewhere in the top percentile for talent and perseverance, and if the results of their efforts are often mediocre, it’s because film production is contingent on so many other factors. Any screenplay that actually gets produced has stood out, by definition, from a horde of countless other pitches and spec scripts, and the initial draft is usually just fine. It’s the development process that kills it, as well as the elephantine logic of modern studio filmmaking. As Lindelof notes: “Once you spend more than $100 million on a movie, you have to save the world. And when you start there…you are very limited in terms of how you execute that.”

This might not seem like an issue for writers working in more modest formats, like the novel, but we often find ourselves operating under similar conditions. During the interview, Lindelof is asked to pitch out a version of the John Henry story that would pass muster at a major studio, and he’s very funny in speculating as to how a hypothetical executive would react:

Well, I think the first thing that would happen is you would say the fundamental, most important part of the story is that [John Henry] dies…And all the studio execs would say, ‘Absolutely. That’s what we love about this story.’ Two drafts later somebody would say, ‘Does he have to die?’”

Lindelof goes on to spitball a version that hits all of Hollywood’s favorite beats, including a personal backstory—John Henry was boyhood friends with the inventor of the steam-tunneling machine, whose father owned the plantation where he was a slave—and a love triangle. And just when you think he can’t push it any further, he does, describing what would happen to the script with its third or fourth writer. By the end, John Henry is close to a superhero, complete with a mystical mentor, destined to restore nothing less than the balance of the universe.

It’s all pretty amusing, especially because it’s true: Lindelof’s pitch ends up sounding eerily plausible. But it made me reflect on how all writers rig the game whenever they can. (As Somerset Maugham, who was the opposite of Lindelof in most respects, once said: “The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so, and by the manipulation of his plot he can engage the reader’s attention so that he does not perceive what violence has been done him.”) Lindelof’s pitches grow increasingly wild, but they all have one thing in common: with each pass, characters are nudged away from humanity and closer to purely functional roles, there to serve a story point or arouse a specific reaction from the audience. In the first draft, the inventor of the machine is Henry’s best friend; in the second, he’s “mustache-twirling, he represents everything that we hate.” It’s all very obvious, but it would probably work. And even if we’re only writing to please ourselves, or a handful of readers, we find ourselves engaging in much the same process, pushing characters to occupy a position in the narrative less out of reasoned characterization than because of what the story demands.

There’s a small example from Eternal Empire that embarrasses me a little, although I can’t say it doesn’t do its job. In Chapter 8, we’re introduced to Sasha, an inmate at Belmarsh Prison with a gratuitously despicable backstory: he did unspeakable things to his wife and her lover before murdering them. Why? A few chapters later, Ilya is going to have to kill him for no particular reason, and I wanted him to seem like someone who at least had it coming. (We see much the same logic at work in the late novels of Thomas Harris, who preserves Hannibal Lecter’s status as an antihero by insisting—contrary to much evidence from the earlier books—that he eats only the rude. Hannibal, in particular, presses this idea to the point of absurdity: if a character is introduced early on as a raging asshole, we know that he’s probably going to get eaten.) I’m not especially proud of this; it feels like I’m stacking the cards so that the reader will accept Sasha’s death and move on, rather than lingering on its implications. For the sake of the overall story, it was important that we not get too distracted by it, and while I didn’t give Sasha a mustache to twirl, I might as well have. And although the result works as intended, especially given the limited space at its disposal, I can’t help but feel that Ilya, and I, could have done a bit better…

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.

“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…

“Most of the assembly was already done…”

Note: This post is the forty-second installment in my author’s commentary for City of Exiles, covering Chapter 41. You can read the earlier installments here. 

Hardware, as I’ve noted before, lies at the heart of a certain kind of thriller, and a lot of suspense novels seem to have written solely to showcase a particularly seductive bit of weaponry. (Two that come to mind, out of many possible examples, are Ken Follett’s The Hammer of Eden and Frederick Forsyth’s The Fourth Protocol, not to mention the Tom Clancy novel of your choice.) At times, the thriller comes startlingly close to science fiction in its fascination with technology, often in the form of gadgets and devices that don’t yet exist, at least not for the likes of us. In the Bond books and movies, hardware serves as another form of escapism, a sort of consumerist fantasy with Q as a combination of personal shopper and bespoke tailor. And even in superficially more realistic stories, technology feeds into the fantasy in a subtler way. An author’s familiarity with the details of guns or other tools of the trade grounds the more extravagant inventions of the plot, and we’re supposed to assume that if our writer knows what kind of holster would go best with a Walther PPK, he’s equally knowledgable about elements of spycraft and backroom politics that we have no way of verifying independently.

Of course, like all good narrative tricks, this one has its pitfalls, especially when the writer loses sight of the original intention. At its best, hardware can clarify and deepen a certain type of character: the heroes and villains of international suspense tend to be hypercompetent at what they do, even if they’re flawed in other ways, and we learn a little more about them as they go about handling their complicated equipment. All too often, though, technical details turn into an end in themselves, and we end up watching a name on the page take us through the fictional equivalent of a user’s manual. As with most descriptive or decorative elements, the amount a reader can tolerate is directly correlated to its apparent importance. When hardware isn’t essential to a particular plot point, the writer can, and should, get away with an evocative detail or two: an author like Thomas Harris, for instance, is a master at using bits of jargon or terminology to flesh out a passing moment. (“Lieutenant, it looks like he’s got two six-shot .38s. We heard three rounds fired and the dump pouches on the gun belts are still full, so he may just have nine left. Advise SWAT it’s +Ps jacketed hollowpoints. This guy favors the face.”)

When we’re dealing with an item of hardware that plays a more central role, we can indulge ourselves a bit more, and if we’ve handled it properly, the details enhance the story that follows: the object becomes a supporting actor in itself, and the action benefits in the same way in which a touch of backstory can enrich an important character. The ultimate example here is the rifle in The Day of the Jackal, which is more memorable than many of the human players involved—although it’s worth noting that we only care because it’s the weapon designed to assassinate Charles DeGaulle. On a more modest level, this also applies to the lethal device in City of Exiles. For most of the story, it’s a MacGuffin, designed only to push the characters from one violent appointment to the next, but as the climax nears, it becomes necessary to see exactly how it works. In Chapter 41, I devote a fair amount of time to describing how Karvonen puts it together, with particular emphasis on the cell phone detonator he constructs. All in all, it takes up about two pages at at point where the book has just over a hundred pages left to run, and I wouldn’t have sacrificed so much space to it if the effect hadn’t seemed worth it.

And there are a few distinct threads here. On the most basic level, I’d like to think that it creates a sense of anticipation: with every step in the process, we start to get a better idea of what this device is designed to do, even if the full details are withheld until the decisive moment. It gives us one last look at Karvonen as we’ve known him before, a careful craftsman, a few chapters before his plans start to spiral out of control. And it gives the reader just enough information to make the workings of this slightly implausible gadget more convincing. If I emphasize the detonator, rather than the heart of the weapon itself, it’s both because I didn’t feel entirely at home with the technical specs—which, thankfully, are hard to track down—and because I didn’t want or need to actually provide the reader with a handbook on building a particularly unpleasant device. In the end, Karvonen observes that the weapon isn’t exactly a thing of beauty, with three separate devices cobbled together with tape, but it works well enough for the task at hand. Which is more or less how I approached it in the writing process. It isn’t perfect, but it gets the job done. And we’re about to find out its true purpose…

“Begin with the cell…”

Note: This post is the thirty-first installment in my author’s commentary for City of Exiles, covering Chapter 30. You can read the earlier installments here.)

Earlier this week, I exchanged a few emails with a friend of mine who had kindly agreed to look over the first hundred pages of the novel I’m currently writing. He’s a very smart guy who has been active in mystery circles for twenty years and counting, with many books to his name, several teleplays, and most notably his own publishing imprint that beautifully reissues classic works of crime fiction, as well as new novels in the same vein. I wanted his advice because I’d been struggling a little with my rough draft, and I knew I could count on him for some strong opinions, without any sugarcoating, which he certainly delivered. And his notes on the manuscript were prefaced with an odd admission: he didn’t really care for thrillers. He loves mystery fiction—that is, novels in which the solution of a problem in the past is more important than the question of how to prevent a crime in the future—but when it comes to suspense novels, which are all about momentum, his attention starts to stray, whether they’re by Meltzer, Collins, or Baldacci. And as someone who tends to prefer thrillers to mysteries, it made me wonder yet again why I’d been drawn to this particular genre, and why I’ve always felt that it played best to my own strengths and interests.

The reason I like the thriller form, I’ve concluded, is its inherent flexibility. It’s designed to keep the reader turning pages, and as a result, it follows certain conventions: a gripping beginning, a problem set before the protagonist in the first chapter, a steadily rising line of intensity, and scenes of action or violence laid in at various points like the dance numbers in a musical. Within that structure, however, the author is free to write about whatever he likes, and in practice, it can accommodate more variety and complexity than novels in other categories. I’m the kind of writer who likes to take up and put down fresh subjects on a regular basis—I’m much happier writing a novel every nine or twelve months than laboring over it for years—and the thriller, supplemented here and there by short science fiction, is the mode in which I’ve found the most freedom. Mystery tends to hew more closely to an established formula, but thrillers come in all shapes and sizes. (I’ve made the case before that many works of ostensibly literary fiction, such as the novels of Ian McEwan, are actually thrillers elevated by exceptional levels of language and characterization.) And even in the confines of one story, the skeleton that the thriller provides allows for surprising digressions.

One of the reasons I enjoyed writing City of Exiles, for instance, was that while it was essentially an espionage novel with elements of procedural and conspiracy fiction, it also had room for a prison novel in miniature, once Ilya is sent up to Belmarsh. The prison narrative is a genre of its own, with great examples in every kind of media, and while I couldn’t see myself devoting an entire book to it, I relished the chance to explore this kind of story within five or six chapters of the larger plot. Not surprisingly, when it came time to write these sections, I took inspiration both from works of nonfiction—notably Jeffrey Archer’s memoirs—and from books and movies that had explored prison stories in interesting ways. This was long before Orange is the New Black, which is a curious beast of its own, but I did take time to watch Nicholas Winding Refn’s Bronson and Jacques Audiard’s brilliant A Prophet, the latter of which deeply influenced the look and feel of these scenes. And while the demands of the plot meant that I couldn’t linger on this material longer than necessary, I enjoyed the opportunity it presented to imbed this sequence, like its own short subject, in a novel of greater scope.

Chapter 30, in particular, is basically an homage to prison novels in general. You’ve got the detailed and homely description of Ilya’s cell and routine, his encounter with a potential informant in the exercise yard, his interactions with guards, and his meeting with Vasylenko, his former mentor, who is installed in the adjacent block. And while this material is hopefully interesting in itself, it also plays a role in the rhythm of the scenes that surround it. Thrillers, like many good novels, are often constructed according to principles of contrast: good and evil, of course, but also liberty and constraint, order and chaos, innocence and guilt, with each half of the pair heightening the other. Ilya’s story at the prison works because it stands in contrast to the motion and invisibility that have defined his character in the past, and which continue to define the figure of Karvonen, who is moving unimpeded toward his appointment in Helsinki. I’ll admit that I was also thinking at times of Hannibal Lecter, a figure of infinite possibility who gains much of his interest, at least in Thomas Harris’s original novels, from his confinement within four walls. And if that inspiration isn’t already clear, it’s going to become more obvious in a page or two, when Ilya receives his first visitor…

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.

I love you, you’re perfect, now change

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: “What creator just can’t put out work fast enough for you?”

Over the past few days, I’ve been revisiting David Thomson’s Nicole Kidman, one of the weirdest and most unappreciated books of the last decade. On its release, it was widely panned by reviewers and readers alike—it current boasts a pathetic two stars on Amazon—but it’s actually a fascinating work, assuming that you can manage to rid yourself of the notion that it’s a book about Kidman at all. It’s really more about Thomson, or, more accurately, about a deliberately unsettling Charles Kinbote figure who happens to share Thomson’s name, as well as a meditation on how we relate to movies and movie stars. Hence the numerous digressions, the sometimes unsettling fantasies, and Thomson’s habit of imagining roles for Kidman that she couldn’t possibly have played. He also practices a form of counterfactual criticism in which he critiques a movie by inventing an altogether different story that he would have liked to see instead. The book includes extended, elaborate pitches for alternate versions of To Die For and Malice, as well as a take on Eyes Wide Shut in which every female role would be played by Kidman herself. The result is both fascinating and deeply annoying. Even when coming from our most interesting film critic, saying that the only way to fix a movie would be to have the filmmakers go back in time and do another story entirely isn’t particularly helpful.

Yet I’m convinced that Thomson, a very intelligent man who has written novels of his own, is perfectly aware of this, and that his book is really a veiled commentary on how we try to retroactively transmute works of art—and their creators—into the forms that we’d prefer. We’ve all had the experience of watching a film or television show with an engaging supporting character and saying: “I wish the story were about this guy!” Similarly, a movie will often suggest promising detours and directions that sadly aren’t taken, and it’s easy after the fact to observe, for instance, that Argo would have been a more interesting movie if it had probed more deeply into the relationship between reality and cinematic fantasy. Of course, this willfully ignores how works of art, both good and bad, are made. If a writer simply proceeded according to a rational plan, or had the ability to look at his work objectively when he was finished, it might be possible to scrap years of work to tease out the implications of one subordinate thread. In practice, it isn’t that simple. No matter how good the plan is, artists often find themselves proceeding by intuition, groping in the dark, and the story they end up with is both one they’ve chosen and one that was thrust upon them. And this doesn’t even take into account the contingencies and compromises that time, budget, or commercial considerations impose on any work in the real world.

Which is all just to say that a solution that may seem obvious to us when we’re watching a story in the comfort of our own living rooms may be anything but obvious to an artist in the weeds. (The reaction to the finale of How I Met Your Mother is only the most recent example of the gap between the creator’s intentions and the audience’s feelings about how the story should have gone.) Yet we still often feel, as fans, that we know better, and this applies to the overall shape of an artist’s career as much as anything else. We want George R.R. Martin to focus on A Song of Ice and Fire instead of wasting his time on Wild Cards, or for Thomas Harris to get off Hannibal Lecter already and give us the great thriller we just know he could write. A long silence or a random side project seems like an affront, or an abdication. Really, though, we have no idea of the real reason. A writer may not be like J.D. Salinger, who evidently wrote every day and locked the manuscripts up in his safe, but what looks like a break is often filled with immense invisible activity: failed attempts, abortive deals, creative dead ends, promising byways, or the general messiness of life. And just as a story is shaped by factors that may never even occur to us as we smugly point out how it should have been, so an artist’s life—which is a work in progress in itself—has a logic that can’t be seen from the outside.

Take David Lynch. For much of the late eighties and early nineties, he occupied a cultural position that no one has managed to fill since. While remaining as prickly, surreal, and inexplicable as ever, he delivered a television series that became a national obsession, lent his name to an entire subcategory of storytelling, and appeared on the cover of Time. His influence has been enormous—you can see it on shows as different as Hannibal and Mad Men—and he still has countless fans. (Years ago, when I tried to attend his reading of Catching the Big Fish at the landmark Barnes & Noble in Union Square, I was turned away because the store was full, which hasn’t happened to me before or since.) But it’s been eight years since his last movie, which in itself reflected a plunge into even greater interiority, freed by digital video and unencumbered by studio constraints. Do I want him to make another movie? Obviously. Would I want it to be more like Blue Velvet than Inland Empire? Yes. But I’m also aware that all the things I love about Lynch are inseparable from the man himself, and that his work has always emerged from unexpected and unpromising places. This still doesn’t stop me from fantasizing about the next turn his career could take, or wondering what Inland Empire would have been if it were an hour shorter. It’s a fun parlor game. But we shouldn’t confuse it with playing the game for real.

“The police already have your picture…”

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

In his invaluable book Writing Popular Fiction—now out of print, although used copies are readily available online—Dean Koontz notes that there are three reliable methods of producing suspense: the chase, the race against time, and the anticipation of a violent event. Obviously, there’s some overlap here, and many of the best suspense novels, like The Day of the Jackal or the early works of Thomas Harris, deploy all three at once. And it’s also worth taking a closer look at these formulas to see what they have in common. All are about anticipation, or about giving the reader a clearly defined end point toward which the events of the story are converging. As such, they also serve to organize the intervening narrative material, which is arguably their most valuable function. Exposition, character development, atmosphere, theme, and all of the less tangible elements of fiction acquire greater shape and urgency when delivered via the throughline of a plot with a specific destination. In practice, this throughline can take the form of any concrete objective on the part of the protagonist, which is an essential part of most stories, but these three building blocks of suspense have the advantage of having been tested by time.

As with any good device, though, there’s the danger of taking anticipation too far. Narrative of any sort amounts to a balancing act between the reader’s interest in what is happening now, what will happen next, and the real meaning of what has happened already. What we call structure is essentially a series of strategies for modulating between these focal points, allowing the reader to look ahead to the next development while still paying attention to the events on the current page. We’ve all had the experience of reading a thriller that kept us turning pages until the end, only to leave us curiously unsatisfied, mostly because we were so eager to get to the climax that we barely saw the words in front of us. Even experienced writers can fall into this trap. In Ian McEwan’s Solar, there’s a moment in which the lead character seems to have suffered a grievous injury to the most delicate part of his anatomy. McEwan, cunning as he is, delays the revelation of what exactly happened for several pages, and while our sheer curiosity moves us forward at a fast clip, I have a feeling that most male readers only take in those paragraphs with one eye, impatient for the author to get back to the point. It’s a disservice to the story itself, and it’s one instance in which McEwan may have been a little too clever for his own good.

Of the three major suspense strategies, I’ve found that the chase is the most versatile and useful, at least when it comes to extended chunks of plot. The race against time has become a cliché in itself, and I’m getting tired of thrillers that arbitrarily give the heroes forty-eight hours to stop the bad guys simply to give the action a little more juice. (Used more subtly, as in Red Dragon, in which Will Graham needs to track the killer down before the next full moon, it can still be very effective.) Anticipation of a violent event can be great for a story’s third act, but over the course of an entire novel, it can grow monotonous, which is which most thrillers offer up a sequence of escalating crises for the protagonist to confront. The chase, by contrast, is infinitely flexible, encompassing a wide range of locations, confrontations, and complications. It can take the form of the hunt for an unknown killer or an actual pursuit across an immense expanse of geography, and unlike the other two formulas, it designates a clear interpersonal conflict between the hunter and the hunted—as well as the possibility that the two players will occasionally exchange roles. And it’s no accident that City of Exiles, which in some ways has the most straightforward and propulsive plot of any of my novels, takes the form of an extended chase, especially in its second half.

Chapter 24 is where the chase begins in earnest, with Karvonen on the run from the killings at the Olympia Exhibition Centre, his face known to the authorities and police. For the rest of Part II, he’s going to be on the move, drawing ever closer to his appointment in Helsinki, and from a novelist’s point of view, this kind of narrative structure is a dream come true—it offers a clear objective, a series of intermediate steps, a lot of interesting locations and paraphernalia, and the sense that there’s a destination on the horizon. (You could write an entire essay on how geographical and narrative movement are really one, which is why the road movie provides such a convenient structure for telling an otherwise episodic story.) Here, Karvonen gets in touch with his handler, retrieves a few useful items from his apartment, and destroys some incriminating evidence, keeping his eye out all the while for both the police and his employers. It may not seem like much, but in a novel where motivations are often deliberately complex and the true significance of the action may not become clear for hundreds of pages, this kind of thing is glorious, and it provides some necessary moments of clarity within an increasingly convoluted plot. Karvonen may be the novel’s most engaging character, because with him, we always know where we stand. And although we aren’t sure where he’s going yet, or why, we know it can’t be good…

The mismeasure of man

I like to think of myself as a fairly rational guy, so it might come as a surprise to discover that I deeply dislike the metric system. Yes, it makes units easier to convert, and I understand why it’s more useful and less prone to error in science and engineering. In everyday life, though, it’s sorely lacking, and it forces people to move from a system of measurement that emerged over millennia of common experience to one whose units are essentially arbitrary. The imperial measures are reflections of the human body: an inch is the first joint of the thumb, a yard is either the length of an average pace or the distance from the nose to the tip of the forefinger, and a foot is, well, a foot. The result is intuitive, suited to ordinary needs, and lends itself to approximation, best guesses, and the rough and ready nature of daily life, which is governed literally by rules of thumb. And when the imperial units are discarded, it makes it all that much easier to ignore human scale in our buildings and surroundings, which leads in turn to the impersonal, alienating nature of so much modern architecture and design.

Anyway, that’s the end of that rant, and even if you don’t agree, I hope you’ll grant that there are reasons beyond simple laziness or inertia for wanting to preserve the inch, foot, and mile. (I’m aware that this is an unpopular stance: Reddit has a post this morning making fun of America’s “arbitrary retarded” system of measurement, and although the commenters have risen in defense of both the Fahrenheit scale and writing our dates with the month first, I don’t see a single voice in favor of imperial measures.) If the body has a head, as Gustav Eckstein famously said in his book of the same name, it’s equally true that the head has a body, and it’s inseparable from the way we interact with the world. When we forget this, we run the risk of making larger mistakes that have nothing to do with remembering the number of pints to a gallon. We accommodate ourselves to measurements we’ve imposed, rather than starting with the body and working our way out, and although it may seem chauvinistic for us as a species, it’s just a way of acknowledging that we all experience the world with human eyes and hands.

That’s true of how we write as well. Poetic meter is intimately connected to the rhythms of circulation and respiration, and even in prose, a sentence is generally the longest stretch of words we can say before taking a breath. If we divide pages into paragraphs, it’s partially to provide a logical structure, but it’s also because our eyes can’t deal with an uninterrupted wall of text. Chapters and other divisions within a story were originally the size of a scroll that could be comfortably held, and more recently, they’ve come to represent a unit that can be easily read within a particular stretch of time, whether it’s a single sitting or an evening of reading aloud. Constraints that arise out of necessity or convenience inevitably acquire syntactic meaning. If we think in sentences or paragraphs, it’s because the necessity of breathing between statements encouraged us to break up what we said into manageable chunks, which also creates a natural pause for consolidation or comprehension. (This may be part of the reason why I’m irrationally opposed to semicolons. We talk in commas, dashes, and periods, and the semicolon is the mark of a text that is only meant to be read.)

You could extend these analogies to most other forms of creative expression, from painting to music and finally to dance, which is the ultimate culmination of an approach to art that bases its assumptions on the form and capabilities of the human body. Within every medium, of course, there are artists who deliberately undermine and challenge our senses of scale, and when we’re confronted with an unnaturally long sentence—whether in an action scene in Thomas Harris or an introspective paragraph by Proust—it changes the way we engage with the material, either because we forget to breathe or because we need to breathe all the more. But this requires an understanding and appreciation of why those proportions are there in the first place, and even for those of us who are largely content to operate within these constraints, it helps to occasionally reacquaint ourselves with where they come from. That’s one reason why writers are often encouraged to read their work aloud: not only does it oblige us to slow down, to pay more attention to rhythm, and to experience our words using a range of senses, but it reconnects us to the fundamental way in which ideas and images are expressed, moment by moment, and one breath at a time.