“A message here that she was supposed to see…”

Note: This post is the fifty-sixth installment in my author’s commentary for The Icon Thief, covering Chapter 55. You can read the earlier installments here.)

I’m proud of the novels and stories I’ve published, but if they all have one limitation, it’s that they aren’t comfortable with the idea of a story—or even a scene—in which nothing much happens. This isn’t to say that they’re packed exclusively with action: even Eternal Empire, which probably has more straightforward action scenes than the previous two novels combined, takes a little while to ramp up. But in most respects, there’s always something happening in these books. There are plot points to cover, information to convey to the reader, characters who need to get from point A to point B. The plots are invariably complicated, and most of them were cut down considerably from their original length, which means that each page carries more than its share of story. This is entirely intentional: I like dense, layered novels, and I enjoy seeing how far I can push complexity within the bounds of the genre I’ve chosen. But it’s still an approach that limits the kinds of stories I can tell or moods I can evoke. And although I’m well aware of this, I’m still some distance away from being comfortable with scaling it down.

In the entry on Yasujirō Ozu in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson diagnoses this tendency in a beautiful passage I’ve quoted here before:

[S]o many American films are pledged to the energy that “breaks out.” Our stories promote the hope of escape, of beginning again, of beneficial disruptions. One can see that energy—hopeful, and often damaging, but always romantic—in films as diverse as The Searchers, Citizen Kane, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Run of the Arrow, Rebel Without a Cause, Vertigo, Bonnie and Clyde, Greed, and The Fountainhead. No matter how such stories end, explosive energy is endorsed…Our films are spirals of wish fulfillment, pleas for envy, the hustle to get on with the pursuit of happiness.

Needless to say, that’s an impressive list of movies, and many of our best recent films—from the work of Christopher Nolan to Pixar—have been predicated on similar principles. Yet it’s often the stories that find time for silence and emptiness that linger the most in the reader’s imagination, and you’d have trouble finding a truly empty moment in any of my novels.

Well, maybe there’s one. In Chapter 55 of The Icon Thief, after Maddy arrives in Philadelphia, she walks across the bridge and heads for the museum on foot. It’s probably the least eventful chapter in the entire novel: there’s a tiny bit of plot, as she stops into a hardware store to pick up the items she’ll need to break into Étant Donnés, but for the most part, we’re alone with Maddy and her thoughts. And I like the result a lot. It’s based closely on my own visit to the city, in which I followed a route much like the one Maddy walks here, taking notes as I went. (Although the hardware store is a fictional one, introduced after I arrived at the museum and realized how difficult breaking into the installation would actually be.) It’s one of my favorite memories from writing this novel, especially for the moment when I paused outside the museum, taking in its layout, and noticed the same curious detail that Maddy does. The museum is laid out symmetrically, with identical east and west wings, with only one anomalous element: a single glass pane, with no corresponding window on the other side, that looks into the gallery devoted to Marcel Duchamp.

It’s the last really calm scene in the entire novel, as we prepare to enter its closing sequence of revelations and confrontations. Even here, though, the machinery of the plot isn’t entirely out of sight, and it’s likely that I felt justified in indulging in a quiet moment here because I knew—as does the reader—that Sharkovsky is waiting to follow Maddy into the museum as soon as she arrives. And the more I look at this chapter, the more it seems to hint at a way forward for the rest of my work. If the reader accepts the scene, it’s because the silence is charged with a form of anticipation, one that wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for the previous events of this very busy novel. Finding the right balance between activity and stillness is a narrative problem that I still haven’t cracked, for all my thoughts about craft, but for a few pages, I feel as if I got it right. At the time, of course, I wasn’t thinking in those terms: I just wanted to pause and focus on the location where the climactic action of the novel would take place, making sure that the reader, along with Maddy, noticed the window of the Marcel Duchamp gallery. We’ll be seeing that window again…

What would Rex Harrison do?

Earlier this month, in his rather unenthusiastic review of the new musical Nice Work if You Can Get It, Hilton Als wrote of star Matthew Broderick, who, for all his other talents, is manifestly not a dancer: “His dancing should be a physical equivalent of Rex Harrison’s speaking his songs in [My Fair Lady]: self-assured and brilliant in its use of the performer’s limitations.” It’s a nice comparison, and indeed, Rex Harrison is one of the most triumphant examples in the history of entertainment of a performer turning his limitations into something uniquely his own. (If I could go back in time to see only one musical, it would be the original Broadway production of My Fair Lady, starring Harrison and the young Julie Andrews.) And while most of us rightly strive to overcome our limitations, it can also be useful to find ways of turning them into advantages, or at least to find roles for which we’re naturally suited, shortcomings and all.

Years of writing have taught me that I have at least two major limitations as a novelist (although my readers can probably think of more). The first is that my style of writing is essentially serious. I don’t think it’s solemn, necessarily, and I’d like to think that my fiction shows some wit in its construction and execution. But I’m not a naturally funny writer, and I’m in awe of authors like P.G. Wodehouse, Douglas Adams, or even Joss Whedon, whose sense of humor is inseparable from their way of regarding the world. The Icon Thief contains maybe three jokes, and I’m inordinately proud of all of them, just because they don’t come naturally. This isn’t to say that I’m a humorless or dour person, but that being funny in print is really hard, and it’s a skill set that I don’t seem to have, at least not in fiction. And while I’d like to develop this quality, if only to increase my range of available subjects and moods, I expect that it’s always going to be pretty limited.

My other big limitation is that I only seem capable of writing stories in which something is always happening. The Icon Thief and its sequels are stuffed with plot and incident, largely because I’m not sure what I’d do if the action slowed down. In this, I’m probably influenced by the movies I love. In his essay on Yasujiro Ozu, David Thomson writes:

[S]o many American films are pledged to the energy that “breaks out.” Our stories promote the hope of escape, of beginning again, of beneficial disruptions. One can see that energy—hopeful, and often damaging, but always romantic—in films as diverse as The Searchers, Citizen Kane, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Run of the Arrow, Rebel Without a Cause, Vertigo, Bonnie and Clyde, Greed, and The Fountainhead. No matter how such stories end, explosive energy is endorsed…Our films are spirals of wish fulfillment, pleas for envy, the hustle to get on with the pursuit of happiness.

As a result, whenever I write a page in which nothing happens, I get nervous. This isn’t the worst problem for a mainstream novelist to have, but like my essential seriousness, it limits my ability to tell certain kinds of stories. (This may be why I’m so impressed by the work of, say, Nicholson Baker, who writes brilliantly funny novels in which almost nothing takes place.)

So what do I do? I do what Rex Harrison did: I look for material where my limitations can be mistaken for strengths. In short, I write suspense fiction, which tends to be forgiving of essential seriousness—it’s hard to find a funny line in any of Thomas Harris or Frederick Forsyth, for example—and for restless, compulsive action, all executed within a fairly narrow range of tone. When I write in other genres, like science fiction, I basically approach the story if I were still writing suspense, which, luckily, happens to be a fairly adaptable mode. And while I’ll always continue to push myself as a writer, and hope to eventually expand my tonal and emotional range, I’m glad that I’ve found at least one place where my limitations feel at home, and where they can occasionally flower forth into full song. For everything else, I’m content just to speak to the music.

Great Directors: Akira Kurosawa

Essential films: Seven Samurai, Ikiru, Throne of Blood, Rashomon, and many more.

By the end of his career, Kurosawa, as his detractors are quick to point out, was much less popular in Japan than he was in the West, and there’s a good case to be made that his mainstream success among American audiences—as opposed to the art house appeal of Ozu and Mizoguchi—was at least partially due to a sort of orientalist fascination with swords and samurais. “If an American director proved so content to film nothing but battles and their context,” David Thomson notes, “there would be eyebrows raised.” Perhaps. But Kurosawa’s very exoticism—in terms of subject matter, not filmmaking, which is as accessible as that of any director who ever lived—is what allowed Western audiences to embrace a kind of pure, exuberant storytelling that might have seemed unfashionable in their own language.

Because Kurosawa is the greatest storyteller in cinema, and no other director—not even Spielberg—has displayed such mastery of all elements of filmmaking in the service of unforgettable stories. The finest Kurosawa films are so simple in their broad outlines, and so complex in their particulars, that they appeal to the child in us while speaking to us directly as adults. Seven Samurai, as I’ve said elsewhere, has the best story in all of movies, a setup so classic and elegant that it’s startling to realize that it had never been done before, and yet its complexities are endless. The farmers, we find, may not be worthy of being saved, and there is more at stake here, in the lives of the seven men we come to know so well, than the fate of a single village. Striking action giving way to boundless depth: it’s in all of Kurosawa’s best movies, and it’s why they continue to speak to us on so many levels.

Tomorrow: Alfred Hitchcock and the supremacy of suspense.