Tag Archives: novels

No royalties necessary, a bit of biscuit is fine

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Joe Woodward, at Poets and Writers, explores the narrated-by-critters genre, which (he notes) started with George Orwell’s Animal Farm and in the past few years has grown to include Timbuktu, by Paul Auster; Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, by Sigrid Nunez; and The Autobiography of Foudini M. Cat, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer.

Woodward then goes on to review this year’s newest additions, Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, Verlyn Klinkenborg (February, Knopf) and Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, Sam Savage (next month, Coffee House Press).

The article doesn’t mention Paul Gallico’s The Silent Miaow. But that was, strictly speaking, non-fiction, insofar as it was a how-to manual for stray cats. So the oversight is understandable.

More on plots

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Not to be confused with moron plots. We’ll leave that topic for another day.

This past weekend, I picked up a copy of Monkey Love, Brenda Scott Royce, Feb. 2006, Penguin, given the face-up treatment royale on the “new releases” table at my local bookstore chain.

So I’m reading it (because why not have four or five books going at once?) and as I’ve been thinking about plotting, I notice that in the first chapter (19 pages) no less than four major plotlines are introduced: a girlfriend’s unplanned pregnancy; another girlfriend’s professional shennanigans; the protagonist’s preparation for an upcoming stand-up comedy gig; and the protagonist’s first encounter with he-who-will-emerge-as-the-love-interest.

Advantages:

1. Fast pacing? You betcha. You can’t have that much going on in under 20 pages without having . . . a lot going on.

2. Major interest grabation. Take your pick, there’s so much happening here, you’re bound to want to know how at least some of it works out.

3. Comedic effect. A caught-in-the-headlights straight man is a comedy staple. Plot breaking out right and left is a useful device for propelling a hapless protagonist toward that lite, happy ending nirvana we’re all rooting for-o.*

Disadvantages:

1. There’s a thin line between “madcap” and frenetic.

2. Pacing isn’t pacing unless it’s modulated from time to time. When the balance tips too far toward “hard plot” and too far away from the protagonists interior life, things start to feel downright speedy after awhile.

So what’s the answer. Dunno. But if the pendulum has swung toward “plot ’til you’re punch-drunk” (and I’m by no means sure it has btw — I have exactly one data point upon which to base this) I hereby Predict it will Swing Back.

*The “o” is so that I won’t be using a preposition to end that sentence with-o

The peril of abstract spaces

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In the Toronto Star, Nicholas Hune-Brown surveys the way the ‘burbs have been depicted in literature and film, then veers off into his own, equally peculiar gloss.

He begins, reasonably enough, with this observation:

The North American suburbs of 2006 are a world away from the imagined suburbs of Cheever or Lewis. Traditional suburbs have grown and aged. Many of the once identical houses of Levittown and other subdivisions have now been customized and renovated. As developments on the urban fringe have become increasingly independent from their urban centres, the very existence of “suburbia” in the traditional sense has been questioned.

Fair enough. But Hune-Brown’s most earnest complaint is not that writers fall back on cliche when setting their narratives in the ‘burbs. It’s that they “ignore the real problems of suburban development,” that is, the “hideous” esthetic of the modern subdivision, segregation, and “sprawl.”

So. Hune-Brown would have writers jettison one set of the over-exposed abstractions, only to pick up another.

But that’s the wrong fix. I mean, think about it, a movie on the evils of sprawl? Characters adrift in emotional malaise because they they burn too much gas to get to work? And not only that, they have to drive past ugly 7-Elevens all the time, and don’t have ethnically-mixed neighbors?

“No ideas but in things.” William Carlos Williams. Anyone looking for artistic inspiration needs to start there. Not with abstractions, because beginning with an abstraction makes for lousy art, even if your abstraction is the political cause du jour.

Novels: an exercise in subjective judgment

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Yesterday’s Publisher’s Lunch reported on a bit of gotcha journalism by the London Times, “one of those periodic ambush articles”

in which the reporters make themselves feel wonderfully superior by submitting two Booker-winning novels from the 70s anonymously to 20 publishers and agents. (One is VS Naipaul’s IN A FREE STATE; the other is Stanley Middleton’s A FREE STATE.)

Surprise, surprise, none of the publishers offered the anonymous submitters a $1 million advance.

Publishers toss Booker winners into the reject pile.

What would be really interesting, though, would be to resubmit a couple of novels that didn’t quite make the Booker Prize grade and see if they could land a deal.

Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth had a nice run in the late 1800’s. How about submitting For Women’s Love?

Rothsay left the talkative hackman and passed on. [ed. No, Mrs. S. didn’t mean to suggest he died.]

A hand touched him on the arm.

He turned and saw old Scythia, clothed in a long, black coat of some thin stuff, with its hood drawn over her head.

Rothsay stared.

“Come, Rule! You have tested woman’s love to-day, and found it fail you; even as I tested man’s faith in the long ago, and found it wrong me! Come, Rule! You and I have had enough of falsehood and treachery! Let us shake the dust of civilization off our shoes! Come, Rule!”