Hostile Books

 We've all had them, the books we just couldn't pick up. For whatever reason, it's a book everyone says you have to read that you just can't get through. Sometimes, you give them another try. Why's this a bestseller? Why is this a classic? 

I've run into it with Russian novels. I've found them hard to read in print. Then a friend of mine, who knew a Russian speaker and an actual Russian, said they don't really translate well. So I listened to Crime and Punishment on audio. Made a huge difference.

But what of books you just couldn't finish no matter what? I went through a list of classics that included Don Quixote and The Magic Mountain. It also included a book that gets highly praised: Portrait of a Lady. 

The book begins with Henry James doing his own literary criticism. Um...Aren't you supposed to let other people do the critiques? But Henry just had to provide a few pages reviewing his own book. Okay, fair enough. Stephen King sticks this stuff at the end of his because who wants to read the author's self-indulgent prattle? So I skipped it and moved on to the novel proper.

I'm aware books written before 1900 have a slower pace than those written since World War II. Hemingway made his reputation trimming the fat from his prose almost to the point where you wish he'd put words back in. (That said, The Sun Also Rises, Farewell to Arms, and To Have and Have Not are masterpieces. Fight me.)

But Henry James spends twenty-five pages where bankers spend the whole time looking down on the common folk. By Page 10, I'm wondering why I'm supposed to be reading this. By Page 20, I hate everyone on the page so far. By Page 25, I throw the book across the room. 

But wait. This is a classic. Hey, I slogged through Moby Dick, and I'm glad I did. That story is imprinted on modern storytelling. It's in the DNA of two Star Trek movies. (First Contact is explicit about it when Lily yells at Picard. "Captain Ahab has to go fight his whale!")

So I did like I did with Crime and Punishment. I went audio. Now, I know there are people who think audio is cheating. Since they're wrong, I'm going to ignore that. Anyway, I made it a little farther before I realized the William James was the smarter brother. Without him, Freud's cigar would just be a cigar. (Wait...Freud did say that. Um...He'd have never invented his famous slip?) I not only hated the bankers, but the titular lady did nothing for me, either. I felt like my time was being wasted. 

I'd gone through this before. In high school, we had to read The Scarlet Letter. Also in high school, we read the Cliff's Notes to The Scarlet Letter because most of us hated that book. No Moby Dick. No Tom Sawyer, by America's greatest writer. We did somehow manage Tale of Two Cities. But The Scarlet Letter? By about halfway through the book, I was praying time travelers would gift the local indigenous tribe with a small thermonuclear device, maybe a neutron bomb. Now, let me qualify this by saying Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of America's greatest short story writers. That said, I don't like this one. But I love Stephen King, and I'm still angry about Cell.

 Currently, I have one book I've attempted to read over the years with little success on audio. When The Bonfire of the Vanities came out, I attempted to read it. Again, like The Scarlet Letter and Portrait of a Lady, I had to wade through characters I'd generally avoid in real life. Both times I attempted to read it, all I took away before I put the book down was that New York in 1985 was a miserable place to live. Wolfe's other famous book, The Right Stuff, had that can-do, go fever zeitgeist of the early space program. The Mercury Seven were fun to be around even at their worst. The only thing missing was Yuri Gagarin, who'd have fit right in with them.

I'm attempting Bonfire on audio. I think part of the problem is the inciting incident comes about 15% into the narrative. The paperback listed on Amazon is 702 words, so about 108 pages or so. The average novel is around 300 pages, so by page 100, we all know the characters and several major events have happened. It doesn't help the book as an early eighties Rolling Stone hip vibe, something I have even less patience with now than I did at the age of 20. I'm sticking with it, mainly because I listen to it in 100-page sips. I still don't like the people in this book, but eight years of Game of Thrones and five seasons of Succession have awakened my inner schadenfreude when these people manage to screw themselves.

 

YOU CAN'T GO HOME - Why I Write

If you ever listen to radio, I'm sure you've heard at least one song called "You Can't Go Home Again" from performers like Lari White, The Judds, Bon Jovi, Sugarland, The Statler Brothers, Miranda Lambert, and many others.

Chuck Cannon

One of those songs was written by Chuck Cannon, performer and writer with hits recorded by many of my country favorites including Toby Keith, Willie Nelson, and Ricky Van Shelton.  To me personally, Chuck bears the distinction of being the person who made me aware that I'm short. 

Let me explain that I come from a family in which the women tend to be 4'11", so when I grew up to be 5'3", I looked tall when with my female family members.  I felt tall. 

At a songwriters' meeting where Chuck Cannon was the featured speaker, he performed his original "You Can't Go Home Again."  The host wanted a picture of the guests and said, "Taller people in the back."

I stepped to the back row beside Chuck.  He gently took my shoulders and moved me to the front row, saying, "You belong up here."  Sure enough, when I received a copy of the photo, not only was the front row the place for me, I was the SHORTEST person there!

Bet you're wondering, "Now where is she going with this?  It should be related to writing and/or mystery, but then, perhaps that's the mystery...what's she writing about today?"

Could it be about short people, even short writers?  William Faulkner was only five feet, five inches tall--taller than I am, but not especially tall for a man. 

Could it be about Chuck Cannon?  He wrote many of my favorite songs, including "How Do You Like Me Now?"

Could it be about literary techniques?  We've recently had blogs about constrained writing and frame stories.  (Actually the stream of consciousness technique is related to the writer today's blog is about.  He's classified as writing his Bildungsroman novels in stream of consciousness technique.)

"Dixieland"

None of those are right.  Some of you liked reading about my awesome moments in music.  Today I'm writing about an awesome moment in my teenaged years involving the person who made me want to be a writer.

The photo to the right shows one of American literature's most famous landmarks.  In an epic, autobiographical novel, this rambling Victorian building was called "Dixieland," but in reality the author grew up there when it was called "Old Kentucky Home."  I read the book when I was about thirteen.  When I got a car and license at sixteen, I took myself to Asheville, North Carolina, to see the house. 

There was a small card on one of the bedroom door frames.  On it was printed, "This is the room where Ben died."  Now, I was a pretty flip teenager, and Ben was a character in the book, but standing at that door brought tears to my eyes.  I thought, "If just the memory of a fiction scene can make me cry, then words are powerful stuff!  I want to do that."

While in Asheville that trip and many times since then, I visited the graves of O. Henry and, within walking distance, the writer who impressed me so --- Thomas Wolfe.

Cover of the first
edition, published
in 1929

I'm not talking about Tom Wolfe, who wrote Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and feuded with John Updike, Norman Mailer, and Gore Vidal.  I'm speaking of North Carolina's Thomas Wolfe who wrote Look Homeward Angel, which has not been out of print since it was first published in 1929.

Classified as possibly the most autobiographical Bildungsroman (a specific type of coming of age novel) by an American novelist, Look Homeward Angel follows the life of protagonist Eugene Gant from birth to age nineteen.  While I loved visiting the Asheville places Wolfe had used and renamed in the book, the people of Asheville weren't happy with his frank and realistic reminiscences. In fact,  Look Homeward Angel was banned from Asheville's public libraries for seven years. Today, Wolfe has become one of Asheville's most famous citizens, and his boyhood home is a National Historic Landmark museum in his honor.

Thomas Wolfe, 1930-1938

As an early teenager, I simply assumed that the title Look Homeward Angel referred to a stone statue of an angel that both Eugene and Wolfe's fathers used as porch advertisements at family graveyard monument shops each owned. (I saw the angel in a cemetery in Hendersonville, NC.) Wolfe's first title was The Building of a Wall, which he changed to O Lost before renaming it Look Homeward Angel: A Story of a Buried Life.  The title comes from the John Milton poem Lycidas. 

"Look homeward angel now, and melt with ruth; 
And, O ye Dolphins, waft the hapless youth."
                                                            ---   John Milton


Asheville's reaction to Look Homeward Angel played a large part in Wolfe's next book--You Can't Go Home Again, that line so frequently used by songwriters.  (Chuck Cannon also has a song entitled "Look Homeward, Angel.")  I don't believe the inspiration for songs and other prose using Wolfe's titles came directly from Milton. Their influence is Thomas Wolfe.  Wouldn't each of us be filled with pride to have one or more of the titles of our writings inspire the work of so many other writers?

When young Thomas Wolfe gave his manuscript to Scribner's Maxwell Perkins, the editor insisted it be condensed to a more manageable publication size.  They cut sixty thousand words from Wolfe's manuscript before it was published at five hundred, forty-four pages. 

Why do I want to praise Thomas Wolfe to mystery writers?  In addition to being the writer who convinced me I wanted to write, I  believe good writing shares common features, whether literary or specific genre.  My words don't have the power of those of Thomas Wolfe, but I always aim to do for my readers what he did for me.  I want them to react with some kind of emotion.  I want to make them happy or sad or scared, but I always want to create feelings for Callie's fans.  (I cleaned up that last line.  At book-talks, I've been known to say I want my readers to laugh, cry, or wet their undies, but, as I've told you before, I'm trying to become more lady-like in my old age.)

The other reason is to give me the chance to share with you a quote from Thomas Wolfe in the event you have an editor who wants to cut some little darlings from your work:

U S Postage Thomas Wolfe
Memorial Stamp

"What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn , was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one wishes to publish."

                                                        --- Thomas Wolfe
                                                                                                     
How about you?  Is there a particular author, book, or event that made you want to be a writer?

Until we meet again... take care of you!