Scenes We'd Like to See #2

So Annie and her friend were walking their dogs along the beach at Dionis a few days ago. They decided to cut up to Tuppency links on their way back to town. That meant crossing some property lines, but on Nantucket in February that’s a tradition as firmly entrenched as the Vineyard-Nantucket football grudge-match and the high school parties at 30th Pole. If you live on-island one month a year, you’re not a local, and your right-of-way property rights are suspended during your absence. Most old time home-owners understand this, and they don’t care if you cross their driveway en route to the beach or the bike path, even in summer. Unfortunately this isn’t true of the nouveau riche owners of the trophy palace that adjoins the old golf course. The rumor is they’re Hollywood people. They have the estate guarded as if it were smack dab in the middle of a Brentwood crime wave, complete with key-pad alarms and security fencing. It’s hard to figure out just what these people are afraid of. But apparently the list includes two middle aged women, a yellow lab and a pug.

The owner sighted them and came to the window shrieking. “Get off my property! You’re trespassing! I’m calling the police,” and other equally neighborly but less printable salutations. Annie and her friend fled the area, and over the next couple of days a scene started forming in my vengeful and petty imagination.

Annie’s grandfather was a Commodore of the Yacht Club. Her family have been here since the mid 19th Century. She let her membership in the club lapse, but I couldn’t help thinking of an alternate world where Annie was not only still part of the organization but perhaps the head of the membership board. Wouldn’t it be lovely if this woman from Tuppency came, hat in hand, to the Yacht club -- longing to join, desperate for that final seal of approval from the Nantucket aristocracy.

What might Annie say to her in that fatal interview?

Actually, I’m sure Annie would be perfectly polite and then quietly cast her vote against the egregious woman, behind closed doors. And there’s no real interview anyway – just a big cocktail party where the potential newcomers are casually examined over drinks and canapés.

But this is my fantasy, not hers!

In my version there’s a star chamber with a tribunal of merciless Yankee WASPs and a suitably humbled interloper, standing under a harsh spotlight, trembling in her Dolce and Gabbana dress. And this is what she hears from my girlfriend, the avenging angel of the old Nantucket, the crusader of crumbling old houses and mud rooms full of scalloping waders and tilted kitchen floors with low ceilings:

"Why on earth should we allow you into this club? You have a nerve even asking! You represent the antithesis of everything this club stands for. You are actively destroying everything every member of the club loves about Nantucket. You tore down the geodesic dome house to build your trashy ostentatious eye-sore. That was a crazy place, eccentric and impractical, but it was a landmark and we loved it. It was a bulwark against the sub-zero refrigerator, Mexican tile, fan window, house gutting, money-poisoned tasteless status vultures like yourself. Well, you won that one, lady! The old woman who used to ride her bicycle to 'Sconset every day of the year, rain or shine, lost out and you leveled her house and put up your Grand Guignol Taj Mahal. Have you ever ridden a bike to 'Sconset? Have you ever walked in the moors? Don’t pretend you have because lying will just make things worse for you here. Nantucket isn’t a real place to you. It doesn’t have any history or tradition. It’s just a water view and five restaurants. It’s just a new stage for you to show-off on. Your cathedral ceiling is higher, your deck has a better grade of redwood, your house has more unused rooms and squanders more pristine acres than the house next door. You tramp through it like a kid in big boots, stomping through a fresh snowfall because you like to see your own tracks and its fun to make a mess. And then you have the gall to threaten people because they cross your sacred property line – people who have lived here for decades, who love and understand this place in a way you never will. As if it was even your property! You bought it and you can fence it in, but it will be here long after you’re gone, long after your greedy children sell the place to another load of self-satisfied millionaires. You’re the one who’s trespassing and you always will be. But not here. Not in this club. You’re never going to be allowed through these doors, even as a guest. So go back to your big air-conditioned, private, exclusive high-ceilinged mausoleum and gloat about your paint colors and hire someone cheap from off-island to decorate the guest wing. But never imagine for one second that anyone who really lives on Nantucket wants to hear about it. Because you have nothing in your life but the things you bought and the money you bought them with and that makes you boring and irritating and mostly just sad. All of which disqualifies you from membership in the Nantucket Yacht Club. And don’t try to steal any flatware or linens on the way out. We’ll be frisking you at the door.”

That’s in my world. In this world most of the people who belong to the Yacht club are new money ‘fork-lifters’ – people who don’t sail or even play tennis, and just come to eat and be seen by their fat-cat cronies. People just like the Tuppency lady. She’d probably be welcome these days. She’s probably already a member. She might even be on the membership committee.

But not on my blog.
On my blog she’s stumbling out in tears, selling that pretentious pile of a house and moving back to Brentwood. And not a moment too soon.

Book Excerpt #1

From Paranoid
The Bloomingdale’s Sequence



She woke up in the morning, knowing she needed a plan. There were two Secret Service agents posted in front of her building. That was the team she knew about. It was more than enough coverage under normal circumstances. But she was their best link to Tom, now. She would lead them to him, or they would be ready to pounce when he found her. Either way, they couldn’t afford to be short-handed. That meant there was going be at least one other team, maybe two or three other teams, involved with her surveillance today.
She had to find a way to lose them.
But that was Tom’s department, not hers. She walked over to the living room window and looked down at the street. They were there. She considered the short list of alternatives. She couldn’t out-run them, that was for sure. She couldn’t fight her way past them. Even threatening them with a gun would be foolish -- they would surely know how to disarm a nervous twenty-two year old girl. No, she had to out-think them somehow.
Something Jake said came back to her -- that business about going to ground on your home turf. Someplace you were comfortable and they weren’t, where you knew the lay of the land and they didn’t. At the time she hadn’t been able to think of any such location ... except perhaps her home town in Vermont -- especially her old high school. Now, if she could just lure the Secret Service up to Bennington! She knew all the ins and out of that old building better than anyone. She had sneaked around to make out and smoke cigarettes in hidden store rooms and abandoned stairways for years.
But there was no building on the NYU campus she knew that well.
It was kind of sad and weird to realize this, but she’d probably spent more time in Bloomingdale’s, between shopping and working there part time, than she had in any of the NYU buildings where she’d been getting her education. Of course, Bloomingdale’s was a kind of education itself: a virtual symposium in the reality of capitalist economics, human relations and stress management. Not to mention critical things like which designers got the biggest mark-ups. Her lips were sealed on that one -- but she was sticking with Donna Karan.
She wondered if Bonnie Traynor was still the third floor manager (She had been hoping for a promotion); if her gay friend Raoul was still giving our perfume samples in cosmetics on the main floor.
She had quit just before Christmas and she knew Bonnie had felt abandoned. She had felt a little lost herself. The place had become a kind of second home to her over the last couple of years and --
But that was it.
Bloomingdale’s.
If any place in the city was home turf, it had to be Bloomingdale’s. It was perfect: all she had to do was lose some guys in a Department store. Men were sure to be clueless there, anyway. They sort of went into zombie-mode, waiting for their wives to do whatever it was that women did in such places, instantly exhausted and miserable. Her Dad even had a word for it -- “Department Store Foot.” It was real. His feet would start aching after as little as fifteen minutes. All men suffered from it -- that’s why there were chairs and couches near the changing rooms. She smiled to herself -- if you thought American soldiers seemed lost in the Vietnamese jungle, wait until you saw the Secret Service stumbling through the Bloomingdale’s lingerie department!
She felt a rush of new energy.
This might even be fun.

She showered and dressed, had a dry handful of grape nuts and a glass of water. Then she went downstairs to greet the Secret Service. She saw them from the lobby -- One at the curb, leaning down to talk to the other, behind the wheel of a Chevy Nova parked in front of a fire hydrant. She shrugged -- they didn’t really need to be inconspicuous any more.
She stepped outside into the cool bright sunshine, crossed the pavement and tapped the agent on the shoulder.
“Hi,” she said. “How are you? Beautiful day, isn’t it? Listen ...I have some shopping to do, and I’m heading uptown. I thought, you know -- since you were going to be following me anyway? Maybe you could just give me a lift. Would that be okay?”
He stared at her and she gave him her most flirtatious smile.
“It would save me a cab fare. And we could get to know each other a little.”
“Uh, sure, I guess so. Let me just call it in.”
On the ride uptown she found out that his name was Tim Evarts. The driver was named Mike Dalnegro. Mike was new on the job; Tim was breaking him in, “Showing him the ropes,” as Tim put it.
Amy squinted at him. “I’ve never understood that phrase,” she said. “What are these ropes, exactly? And why does he have to be shown? Can’t he see them for himself? Is there something special about them? Are they like ... trick ropes, or something?”
Tim was non-plussed. “Uh ... I’m not sure, Ma’am.”
“Call me Amy. I’m younger than you are.”
“Okay ... Amy.”
“But I’m serious -- I mean ... how much rope do you actually use in the course of a given day?”
“Uhh ...none.”
“That’s what I’m saying. It’s bizarre. We use these phrases all the time and we have no idea what we’re saying.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Like -- dog eat dog. What is that about? Have you ever seen a dog eating another dog? My dog wouldn’t even eat kibble.”
“I know what you mean. ‘A tough road to hoe’ I never got that one.”
She laughed. “But that one’s easy -- it’s a tough row -- like in a garden, when you’re planting seeds. A hoe is a tool -- you sort of chop the ground with it. If the soil is rocky that would be a tough row to hoe.” She patted his knee. “Guess you haven’t spent much time in the country, Tim.”
“No, Ma’am.”
She gave up after that. Whatever else they had been trained for, these guys had never learned how to keep up their end of a conversation. Which was actually just as well -- she needed a little silence now, to think about her tactics.
They parked in front of another hydrant.
“Can you do that any time you want?“ Amy asked. “Because it would be worth joining the Secret Service just for that.”
“This is official government business, Ma’am.”
“Right.”
It was hopeless; but she wouldn’t be saddled with these stiffs much longer. As soon as she walked into the mirrored ground floor of Bloomingdale’s, with its perfumed air, muted clatter and dinging elevators, she began to feel good. This was possible. Raoul was at his old post, dispensing puffs of Obsession. Amy broke free from her escort to give the tall, impeccably dressed queer a hug. He liked the word queer; he said it described him perfectly. And he was odd, there was no doubt about it, one of those intensely affected homosexuals who seemed to be pickled in their own lisping precision. Then there were the body piercings and the tattoos, but Amy didn’t need to dwell on that stuff right now. She threw her arms around him and said quickly, into his ear, “Raoul, you may have to help me lose the two suits behind me.”
“Good to see you, too, sweetie.”
“Sorry, how are you?”
“Same as ever. Dispensing Obsession -- isn’t that perfect? I’m the poster boy.”
“Speaking of Obsession -- how’s Claude?”
“He got a restraining order last week.” Raoul sighed dramatically. “I just don’t know what to make of that.”
“Well, my guess is ... the first flush of romance is over.”
“Don’t be so negative -- I think he’s playing hard to get.”
“Yeah -- but you think pepper spray is a form of flirtation.”
Raoul laughed and held her shoulders to study her affectionately at arm’s length. “Oh, Amy,” he said. “You always call me on my bullshit. Why couldn’t you be a man? Oh, well -- with my luck, you’d be straight.”
She stepped back, took his hands and squeezed them.
“Maybe I’ll see you later,” she said.
“Be sure to stop in and see that cute little Billy in shipping. Remember him? The one you wouldn’t kiss under the mistletoe at the Christmas party? You said it was ‘used up’ and he believed you. I just loved that. Stupidity is so cute.”
She squeezed his hands once more and then she was moving past him towards the lingerie department.
“I’m buying some bras,” she said to Tim when he had jogged into place beside her. “You should get something nice for your wife -- or girlfriend, whatever.”
“Uh, I don’t think -- “
“I’ll have them put it on my charge, no problem. Shelley can help you.”
She had a bad moment, thinking Shelley wasn’t working, but then she saw the tall blond walking away from one of the fitting rooms. There was no one in the world better qualified to distract, stall and befuddle two strait-laced civil servants.
‘Strait-laced,’ she thought -- that’s another one. What the hell does ‘strait-laced’ mean? What are they lacing up? And what kind of person does it crooked? Her kind of person, she was willing to bet.
She caught Shelley’s eye and broke away from the two Secret Service agents.
“Amy,” she said.
“Shelley, hi.”
“Look at you! You are such a celebrity. Complete with Secret Service hunks. Just like it said in People Magazine. “Not that I read People Magazine -- but ... you know. When there’s someone you know, not that I even recognized you, you looked so weird in those pictures. Didn’t you have any control over that?”
“Not really, no. Listen, Shelley, I need to get rid of those Secret Service ... hunks. Show them some lingerie. Distract them.”
“You’re not in trouble are you?”
“Not yet.”
“Amy, I don’t know -- “
“Please. It’s for a good cause. And I’ll owe you one.”
“You already owe me, like -- twelve or something.”
“Please.”
Amy grabbed some bras and started for the changing rooms. The Secret Service guys were actually kind of hunky. Especially Tim. That might be enough for Shelley.
And it was. She turned to them and said, “Amy tells me you’re picking out bras for that special someone in your life. And you look like you could use some help.”
“Well,” Tim began.
“Are we talking about a wife or a girlfriend?”
“Uh, she’s my wife, but I --”
“What size is she? Would you say roughly ... my size?”
She arched her back; Tim looked down but she had Mike’s full attention. She handed each of them a filmy undergarment, smiling as they blushed. “Doesn’t that feel nice. Soft but sort of ... electric.”
“It’s -- I --”
“So ... is your wife a little smaller than me? I’m actually a little smaller, too. But I’m wearing the wonder bra. Do you know about the wonder bra?” She eased them behind a corner display of slips and nightgowns. “It sort of lifts and defines, but not in any obvious way ... it’s more like ... I don't know. I can’t describe it. Let me show you. I’m wearing one now.”
By the time she had the third button undone, Amy was long gone, sprinting for the street.
For one lovely moment she thought it was over; But, it was just as she had suspected -- there was another team waiting for her on Lexington Avenue.
She spun around in front of the revolving door and dashed back towards the escalators. She didn’t look back but she could hear them behind her, grunting and excusing themselves past shoppers and clerks. She looked around for Raoul, but she had come out on the opposite side of the cosmetics department. She reached the escalator and took the moving stairs two at a time until she was stopped by a clot of people. She edged past them as the Secret Service guys started up behind her.
“What’s your rush?”
“Kids today!”
“In a hurry -- going nowhere.”
She left the disapproving chorus behind. The next flight was clear. She needed to reach the dressing rooms near the DKNY section before the agents caught up with her. She grabbed a dress at random and slipped into the changing area just as they came in sight, bobbing their heads above the racks of clothes like dogs in high grass.
Amy caught her breath. The chase had winded her.
She hung the dress -- it really was awful, it had tassels -- on a hook in one of the cubicles. She was okay, they wouldn’t follow her in here. And this changing area was special: around the corner of the short, L-shaped corridor there was an employee-only security door. It led to the workers’ lounge and the freight elevators. It was supposed to be locked but most of the time it wasn’t.
She jiggled the handle for a few seconds, but it didn’t budge. Just her luck -- today of all days someone decided to follow the rules.
She was trapped here. Unless ...
She walked back out onto the floor and asked the salesgirl to help her. The Secret Service guys were there. One of them was talking into a cell phone.
Who was he talking to? How many more of them were there?
She got the girl into the dressing room hallway.
“The door back there leads to the lounge. You have a key. Open it.”
“Excuse me?”
“I need to get into the staff lounge and the door is locked.”
“Customers aren’t permitted in that area. That’s an employee only area.”
“I know that. I worked here for two years.” She grabbed the girl by the bicep and squeezed hard. “Just open it.”
“I’m sorry -- I’d have to talk to my supervisor -- “
“I have a gun. Don't make me use it.”
The girl’s eyes widened. Amy stared her down thinking it would probably be a good idea to actually have a gun at a moment like this. But the girl believed her. She unlocked the door. Before Amy let her go she said. “Don’t say a word to anyone. Or I’ll come back for you.”
The girl was on the verge of tears.
“I hate New York,” she blurted. “Everyone says ‘I love New York.’ Well, I hate it! People pretend stuff like this doesn’t happen but it does.”
Amy felt bad. “Sorry. I just needed the door unlocked. I don't really have a gun, if that makes you feel any better.”
“It makes me feel worse! I believe any crazy girl who says she has a gun! How am I supposed to survive here? I’m going back to Mahwah.”
Amy had lived in the city long enough to have developed a native contempt for New Jersey, with its smelly refineries, monotonous tract subdivisions and its blighted suburban mall mentality. But for the moment she kept her opinions to herself.
She gave the distraught girl a quick hug. “Maybe you should do that,” she said gently, then slipped through the door and away.
She ran down the corridor toward the freight elevators, but she could see that neither one was on this floor. She didn’t have time to wait. She burst through the door to the fire stairs and leapt down them. She got to street level, tore down a couple of right angled halls and ran out onto the loading docks.
She saw the pair of Secret Service guys -- of course they would be covering all the exits -- and Billy the shipping clerk at the same moment. Billy ... what was his last name? Raoul would know. Hardesty, that was it.
“Well, Billy Hardesty.” she said, walking up to him.
“Uh -- wow! Amy! I -- uh -- hi, how are you?”
“I’m a little rushed right now.”
“Too bad you missed the Christmas party this year -- I got some real fresh mistletoe. Hardly used at all -- the florist swore up and down on it.”
“I hope it worked.”
He gave her a thumbs up. Oh, well ... if he was really bright he’d probably have been doing something else by now. She moved a little closer to him and spoke softly.
“See those two guys coming toward us?”
“Uh -- what? Yeah ... I guess ... but --”
“If you help me get away from them, you won’t need that mistletoe.”
“Really? You mean it? Cool.”
“Thanks, Billy.”
“You go. I’ll handle them.”
She turned back inside, but paused to watch. The Secret Service guys were climbing onto the loading dock.
“Here fellas-- gimme a hand.”
Billy grabbed a big box and heaved it at one of the agents; before he could respond, Billy had slung another box at his partner. They were heavy boxes. Billy was strong. The impact knocked them off balance.
“Hey! Sorry!” Billy called out. He ran between them and seemed to lose his own balance. He tripped them up and as they fell his own arms flailed for a second; then his fists connected and they sagged to the pavement.
“Whoops! I think I knocked them out.”
Amy had come back outside. She was right behind him.
“Thanks, Billy,” she said, and when he turned around she went on her tiptoes to kiss him on the lips. She lingered for a moment, and moved back down a step, smiling up at him. “I’ve owed you that one for a long time.”
He stood there stunned with delight, but before he could think of an answer, she was gone.
Amy slipped back through another door near the pay telephones and moved at normal browsing speed through the store. For the moment she was in the clear. The trick was not to call attention to herself by rushing or pushing past people. This wasn’t a sale day at Filene’s -- it was an ordinary shopping day at Bloomingdale’s. No one was in a hurry. She was just one woman among hundreds-- it was perfect camouflage if she could control her need to run.
She was a few yards from Raoul’s position, almost at the doors, when he saw her and waved and called out “Amy!” to get her attention. That was all Tim Evarts and Mike Dalnegro needed. They had been quartering the store desperately -- they had grabbed three different women who looked like Amy and then released them with gruff apologies.
Team #2 was checking the third floor dressing rooms.
Team #3 had gone off the air. A team never went off the air, it made no sense. Tim knew he should check with team #2 and get them downstairs for back-up, but there was no time, Amy was on the move, almost at the street and anyway he could handle the situation alone. She had tricked them once but it hadn’t done her any good and it wasn’t going to happen again.
Amy slammed into Raoul so hard she almost knocked him over.
“Remember why they almost fired you last year?” she asked him.
“Well, of course I do. It was a moment of pure spontaneity. I have no regrets.“
“Well, have another moment, Raoul -- I have to stop these guys.“
“I’ll be fired for sure this time.”
“Good. You were talking about quitting this job a year ago. Take some time, get your modeling portfolio together. This is fate.” She knew he liked the idea of fate. The thought of life as a chain of meaningless coincidences demoralized him.
Mike and Tim were almost upon them. They had pushed some guy who pushed back. They had to badge him before they could move on. Raoul followed her eyes, saw the two big men shouldering their way through the last of the crowd. In a few seconds they’d be on open floor.
“You run along, sweetheart,” Raoul said. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Thanks.”
She squeezed his arm once and then dashed for the front doors.
Raoul blocked the path of the two Secret Service agents.
“Care to try Calvin Klein’s Obsession?” he asked sweetly.
Then he sprayed the perfume in their faces.
As he had learned the year before, it didn’t work as well as pepper spray and it didn’t work as well as mace.
But it worked well enough for him.
The men were on their knees, screaming and clawing at their eyes. Raoul bent down in a flurry of apologies. Another pair of agents who had been upstairs were bounding off the escalators toward the front doors. They veered towards their injured comrades as Amy pushed into the street.
Raoul felt a thrill of victory as he watched her vanish into the crowds on Lexington Avenue. He didn’t know exactly who these men were, but they looked like government men, with the short hair and gray suits and military demeanor that he had always hated. When America finally decided to round up all the fags, he was sure it would be one of these guys, formal and polite -- but with a gun in his hand -- who would come to his door.
Good luck, sweetheart, he thought as they hustled him away. You run like hell.
And thank God you wore flats.

Fixing a Sentence

I've been reading and re-reading the first sentence of the lead editorial in the 2/13 issue of our local school newspaper. It was written by the student Editor-in Chief, a senior who is no doubt headed for college next year.

No one worked on this sentence with her, which is too bad, because she had a sincere thought and was trying her best to express it. I've been struggling with her words myself, doing revision after revision. Perhaps the process might be of some academic interest: First, the sentence --

"It is unfortunate that it takes a tragedy to force one to slow down and realize what is most important to them, myself included."

It's heartfelt, but clumsy and hastily composed. So, how do you fix it? First of all, let's keep it personal -- the "one" and ''them" usages have to go ...
Thus:
"It's unfortunate that it took a tragedy to make me slow down and realize what was most important to me."

That's a start, but its still awkward. Too many "me"s!
The thought here is sad, but it's also ironic ... maybe we could bring that out, when we fix the 'me' repitition problem:

"The sad irony of the recent tragic suicides at our school is that it took someone else's untimely death to make me stop and appreciate the value of my own life."

Getting there. Still too wordy. Let's try again, move those adjectives around, expand it, generalize it:

"The tragic irony of the recent suicides at Nantucket High School is that it can take another person's untimely death to make us stop and appreciate the value of our own lives."

Nope. That didn't work. Now we've lost the personal again -- it's starting to feel stilted. That can happen sometimes on the way to the proper phrasing. Time to 'drop back and punt', as my old boss used to say. Maybe we should start with something more specific: the thought itself, and the particular moment that triggered it:

"Standing in the chilly drizzle at William Soverino's funeral last week, with the rain on my face the the community of my friends and teachers all around me, I was struck by a sad and ironic thought: it can sometimes take another person's untimely death to make us realize the value and beauty of our own lives."

That's better. It can probably still be improved but let's leave it there, for now.

I didn't attend the funeral; I don't know for sure if it was raining or not. The sentence still needs to be corrected for a respectful accuracy. The details are important, of course -- but it's the importance of details in general that we need to stress -- the concrete facts and specifics that anchor thoughts in reality and make feelings vivid. It may seem petty and even disrespectful to fiddle with words in the face of such a bitter-sweet epiphany. But it's just the opposite. There's no greater tribute you can pay to a thought or an emotion than the rigorous effort to express it well.

Untangling sentences like this is a struggle, but it's also fun. It's good exercise for the mind. It helps create the mental stamina and fitness we need, if we want to communicate clearly. In the end, it's like dragging yourself out of bed for an early morning run. When you're standing in the shower afterwards, buzzed with endorphins, you think to yourself: I should really do this more often.

Well, pick another sentence and go to work. It gets easier every time.

Scenes We'd Like to See #1

From the film
There Will Be Blood.
Many scenes in this one dimensional portrait of the monomanical capitalist as world-eating monster irked me. The ease with which Daniel Plainview (extravagantly over-played by Oscar-winner Daniel Day Lewis) intimidates, terrifies and bullies everyone he comes into contact with began to grate on me somewhere around the beginning of the third hour. One particular scene badly needed revision. It can stand in for the others.

Plainview is discussing selling his oilfields to Standard Oil. The representative of the company suggests that Plainview take the million dollars and retire. He could spend more time with his son. That was the wrong thing to say. “Don’t tell me how to raise my family,” he says. He follows that admonishment with this charming promise:
“I’ll find the room where you sleep and slit your throat."
In the movie the Standard Oilman backs down.
This is what happens in my version:
The Standard Oilman pulls out a massive Colt 45 “Peacemaker”, leaps across the table and clobbers Plainview with the barrel. Plainview staggers backward, blood gouting from a cut over his eye. The furious executive leaps on him, knocking him onto his back,driving a knee into his solar plexus and jamming the barrel of the gun into his throat.
He cocks it.
“You see this gun, my friend? I have it by my side in bed, every night. And I sleep lightly. I was a marksman with the roughriders. I’ve killed men before and if you ever come near me or my family I will blow your arrogant head off your shoulders with the greatest of pleasure. If you’ re too gutless to try, then I’ll settle for the bitter palliative of merely bankrupting you and destroying your business. Keep your oil wells, Plainview. You’re going to need them.”
Someone should have done that.
I wouldn’t have minded Eli Sunday kicking his ass, either.

Black Dogs and Red Wine

One evening in the late fall of 1967, my father took me to dinner at the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel. We discussed wine, among other things, and I remember asking him how he could tell the difference, not between jug wine and a good Pinot Noir, but between that Pinot and something really great. How could a bottle of wine be worth 300 dollars? Was it really ten times better than the thirty dollar bottle we were drinking with our meal? Could you taste that? Or was it just a racket? He responded in typical style, grandiose, generous, and didactic.

He ordered a bottle of Mouton Rothschild ’57.

The Sommelier was a little shocked, but recovered quickly. He bought the bottle and uncorked it. We let it breathe for a few minutes before the taste test. God knows what it cost my Dad; but if his purpose was to educate me about the finer things in life, the money was well spent. The two bottles had nothing in common but their name, the color of the liquid inside and the fruit from which they both (presumably) derived. The Pinot had sharp edges, and sour note somewhere inside it. Compared to the Mouton Rothschild it was harsh and raw. The other wine was deep and mellow, resonant and smooth, no edges anywhere. It was deep, cavernous; it seemed to echo off your taste buds. And it was sweet, but not in flavor exactly: it contained the sweetness of spring air after a hard winter; or a the caress of a warm hand on lonely skin, those moments of extremity where a fingertip circling your knuckle breaks a dam of ecstatic emotion, more intense than the sexual encounter that eventually follows.

In human terms, comparing those two wines would be like setting a teenaged football thug at a Manchester United soccer match next to the Dalai Lama: hardly members of the same species, proof that evolution continues but is not evenly distributed.

My Dad was watching my face as I sipped the nectar. He was amused, pleased. “Now you understand,” he said.
All I could do was nod.

That moment came back to me this morning, taking a break from my reading of Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children to pick up a copy of Black Dogs, By Ian McEwan. The former might be considered ‘popular literature’ , even ‘literary fiction’, far more serious and significant than the romances and thrillers that populate the sprawling floor of the local Borders store. Whether Claire Messud is really a better writer than the best of those genre writers is another question. What sets her apart from Ian McEwan interests me rather more this morning. Because she is not even close, no more than that well-made California table wine approached the authentic article in the cobwebbed bottle from the Plaza’s cellar.
But what is it? How do we measure this gulf?

Maybe it’s just sheer pleasure, the quiet ecstatic recognition of a unique sensibility, a mind that refreshes your own by simple contact, that enlarges your sense of the world and startles you into strings of tiny delighted revelations, popping like strings of forbidden Fourth of July firecrackers. Maybe it’s the sure-fingered dexterity of an original mind making the unexpected shape of each sentence. See for yourself.
Compare these paragraphs.

The first, from Messud:

What then were Julius’ accomplishments, those of which his father was so proud? The anxiety, surely, was that they were few, and fading. Known in college for his vicious wit, Julius had sashayed into New York – or, more precisely, into the offices of The Village Voice – with youthful certainty that attitude could carry him. And for a long time, it had: everyone in the downtown literary set knew who Julius was, and pointed him out to newcomers at parties. His devastating but elegant book reviews were often cited; his less devastating but no less elegant film and television reviews rather less so; but still: throughout his twenties, he lived a life of Wildean excess and insouciance that seemed an accomplishment in itself, the con temporary example of the enfant terrible. The insouciance, of course, masked endless and worrisome neuroses, to which Marina and Danielle were privy. He was a failure at intimacy, if not at sex (he had no shortage of partners; but they were shortly upon the scene). He was always broke (hence the threadbare cashmere), but it was vital, or so he maintained, that the secret of his penury not get about. “This is New York, guys. And people without money aren’t noble, they’re beggars.” He apparently did not suspect that everyone already knew. He was awar that at thirty he had stretched the limits of the charming wastrel, that some actual sustained endeavor might be in order were he not to fade,wisplike, away; from charming wastrel to needy, boring failure was but a few, to short, steps.

There is nothing desperately wrong with this passage. One could take exception to the flurry of sophisticated semi-clichés – ‘enfant terrible’,‘charming wastrel’ (which occurs twice, alas); “Wildean excess”. His wit and elegant book reviews are mentioned but the only actual quote from the man himself is a pedestrian one. His problem, skating on his poses with no actual posture to support the show, has a familiar ring to it: shades of Jay McInerney Brett Easton Ellis, to name only the generals in that particular army of disaffection.
Still, nice phrases and well-chosen details redeem the paragraph sporadically – “Actual sustained endeavor,” “threadbare cashmere” . But for every grace note there’s a clumsy misstep: “fade, wisplike, away”, “they were shortly upon the scene”. That last would normally be taken to mean “about to arrive” not “quickly departing.”
It adds up to ordinary, Nothing there quickens the blood.

Compare that to McEwan:

While I unwrapped the fruit and washed it at the handbasin and put it with the chocolate in the fridge and found a place, the place for the coffee, I conveyed messages from Jenny, love from the children. She asked after Bernard, but I had not seen him since my last visit. She arranged her hair with her fingers and settled the pillows around her. When I returned to the chair by the bed I found myself looking once more at the photograph on the locker. I too could have fallen in love with that round-faced beauty with the over-trained hair, the delighted, jaunty smile grazing the biceps of her loved one. It was the innocence that was so appealing, not only of the girl, or of the couple, but of the time itself; even the blurred shoulder and head of a suited passerby had a naïve, unknowing quality, as did a frog-eyed saloon car parked in a street of pre-modern emptiness. The innocent time! Tens of millions dead, Europe in ruins, the extermination camps still a news story, not yet our universal reference point of human depravity. It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. It’s ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turned out after all – who they married, the date of their death – with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us.

This seems to me to be everything Claire Messud’s paragraph is not. Dense with detail, engaged, alive and specific while Messud remains detached and abstract. While ordinary language clutters her prose, McEwan’s matter-of-fact eloquence binds the moment to the reflections it inspires: the smile that ‘grazed the bicep’ of the loved one, the ‘over-trained hair’, the ‘ironies of frozen narrative’.

But perhaps the real difference here is not so much what the writers accomplish but what they attempt. Messud wants to portray the looming career crisis of her unexceptional character. McEwan wants to get at something much bigger, the nature of loss and mortality and the strange allure of photography. When Messud succeeds, we have an incrementally sharper view of a one banal individual. McEwan manages something else, something thrilling, one of the crucial functions of narrative prose: with ruthless clarity of thought he expresses a thought every reader has felt looming at the edges of his mind in some inchoate form, but has never been able to formulate with any precision. He returns to us our own ideas and emotions, fully articulated.

This is fine wine compared to the Pinot Noir of ‘mainstream fiction’ ; but fortunately it costs no more to enjoy it. Books aren’t priced like wine: Jack Kerouac and Jackie Suzanne, James Patterson and Marcel Proust, Faulkner and Follett, all cost the same in the used paperback pile at the flea market. And that’s a lucky break for all of us.

Because once you’ve had a bottle of the good stuff, it’s hard to go back.

Confessions of a Polygamous Reader

My relationship to books has always been carnal. It’s a safe, secret promiscuity that allows me to live through a virtually unlimited array of relationships, impossible in real life. I’m not talking about the plots and characters in the various novels I’ve coupled with. I mean my turbulent and sometimes heartbreaking affairs with the books themselves: perhaps some essence of the author that transcends the story.
I remember my first childhood crushes, the puppy-love infatuation with the Hardy Boys books and the James Bond novels. I went steady with Albert Payson Terhune’s dog books for a while in grade school.
I suppose I lost my virginity to The Catcher in the Rye : that was the first authentic love affair. I’ve had many sordid little one-night stands since then – books by writers as diverse as Robert James Waller and Lee Child. For years every new Stephen King novel was a hotel room-thrashing drunken orgy, with the usual regrets the following morning.
I’ve betrayed books, dropping them for no reason (Sorry, Last Temptation of Christ. I guess I should have left a note), or falling for their more sensual and approachable younger sisters (I dumped Ulysses for Dubliners over the course of one messy weekend). Some books became obsessions, like Atonement; others, The Emperor’s Children comes to mind, barely kept my interest -- like a dull girl with great legs.
Then there are the books like Don Quixote, that I’ve pursued for years, fascinated but unrequited, always hoping for a new maturity (or a new translation) to give me another chance. I avoid the glamorous supermodels whose appeal just seems overrated – Cormac McCarthy, say or Toni Morrison; and I’ve never been on more than one date with the prim and prissy wasps like Updike and Cheever.
I’ve done serial monogamy, though, with writers as different as Mark Helprin, Jane Austen and William Faulkner. Those affairs ended. Jane was a little too into money and I’m never going to have the requisite ‘two thousand a year’ whatever that means in today’s money. Quite a lot; Darcy seems to live quite well. As for Bill, too many suspiring defunctive dawns and weirdo ‘but-constructions’ (“The house not paintless but despising paint and repudiating it.”); too much wisteria. And Mark … well, I dutifully bought his most recent book (Kind of like having a drink for old times’ sake) but I haven’t even opened it yet.
I’ve been married many times. Some are bad marriages, dysfunctional and co-dependent relationships with books I despise now, books I’m embarrassed to be seen in public with, but can’t seem escape. Books like Atlas Shrugged. But there are good marriages too, life-long unions with no possibility of divorce. I share with these books a deep intricate history of affection that only my death will ever untangle. We may not be lovers anymore, but a rich, knowing friendship as replaced and indeed transcended the heat of our first encounters. The Sun Also Rises is a book like this; as are The Great Gatsby and 1984.
So is The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the book I want to focus on here.
Examining the books that gave me the most pleasure, I realize that one crucial source of their allure is the use of point of view and the sleek, graceful movement (the sidelong glance, the fingertip caressing the throat), that leads from the outer world into the inner one.
John Fowles does a particularly audacious conjuring trick in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, writing a classic Victorian romance with the utter omniscience of a God-like Thomas Hardy, and undercutting it at the same time with a thoroughly modern sensibility, a product of Roland Bathes and Allain Robbe Grillet, which debunks the idea of an all-knowing author. Fowles closes chapter twelve of the novel with a question about his heroine, perfectly fitted to the tone of his pastiche: “Who is Sarah? Out of what shadows does she come?” Famously, he opens chapter thirteen with the bald-faced admission: “I don’t know. This story I’m telling is all imagination.” He proceeds to break the Victorian illusion totally, and then invites the reader back into the tale with this more complex view of both the book and books in general:

But this is preposterous? A character is either “real” or “imaginary”? If you think that, hypocrite lecteur. I cn only smile. You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it … fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on shelf -- your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in flight from the real reality. That is a basic definition of Homo sapiens
So if you think this unlucky (but it is Chapter Thirteen) digression has nothing to do with your Time, Progress, Society, Evolution and all those other capitalized ghosts in the night that are rattling their chains behind the scenes of this book … I will not argue. But I will suspect you.
I report then, only the outward facts …

And this he proceeds to do, effortlessly moving the reader from the abstract to the concrete, from the post modern heights of deconstructed narrative into the muddy particulars of the actual story he has just broken apart. It virtually flies back together. Only the way we read it has changed.
He performs this same magic with the point of view of the individual characters. He has such forces at his disposal that the ordinary ‘close third person’ author must surely cry that Fowles is cheating. But the Victorians wrote this way for a reason, and with the added fire-power of his twentieth-century perspective, Fowles can do almost anything … including offering two different endings and presenting himself (some version of himself) as another character, deciding the fates of his puppets with a coin toss.
He can ask, as he does on page 158 “But what of Sarah’s motives?” and then simply tell us. Sarah’s point of view is reported, never fully embraced: “She knew, or at least suspected, that there was a physical pleasure in love. Yet she was, I think, as innocent as makes no matter.” The author always hovers slightly above and to the left, giving us the guided tour of her emotions.
But perhaps there is some ghost of the ‘close third’ technique in the novel, after all, because Fowles comes much closer to Charles Smithson, his hero, than he ever does to the purposefully mysterious Sarah Woodruff. And it is in these descriptions of Charles’ state of mind, fired and sometimes overwhelmed by the beauty and savagery of the natural world that swarms around him, that Fowles fuses his technical skills with those profound emotions whose expression is their purpose and meaning.
I would urge any student of writing or life to simply read the transcendant chapter 29 of this extraordinary book. The set up is simple: Charles is hiking through the overgrown wilderness of the ‘undercliff’ towards a clandestine meeting with Sarah Woodruff, riddled with doubt and determination. Fowles has mastered his craft not merely to say these things, but to make us live them and feel them along with Charles, as he climbs through the forest toward his fate.
The chapter begins in an impeccably external mode, describing the weather and the town itself (More crowded early in the morning in those days) as Charles sets out from his hotel. We dip into Charles’ mind only briefly here, to highlight his gloomy state of mind. Then with this superb description of the woods at dawn, we can feel Fowles inching his way into the deepest recesses of his character’s spirit, penetrating it along with the ‘flood of warmth’ from the sun. By the time Charles is noting the religious presence of the trees we are all the way inside his point of view and even Fowles’ ubiquitous cultural references( Pisanello and Linnaeus in this case) no longer distance us, but rather mark the trail into dense grove of Charles’ ultimate revelation:

…It seemed strangely distinct, this undefiled dawn sun. It almost a smell, as of warm stone, a sharp dust of photons streaming down through space, Each grass blade was pearled with vapor. On the slopes above his path the trunks of the ashes and sycamores, a honey gold in the oblique sunlight, erected their dewy green vaults of young leaves; there was something mysteriously religious about them, but a religion before religion, a druid balm, a green sweetness over all … A fox crossed his path and strangely for a moment stared, as if Charles was the intruder; and then a little later, with an uncanny similarity, with the same divine assumption of possession, a roe deer looked up from its browsing; and stared in its small majesty before quietly turning tail and slipping away into the thickets. There is a painting by Pisanello in the National Gallery that catches exactly such a moment: St. Hubert inn an early Renaissance forest, confronted by birds and beasts. The saint is shocked, almost as if the victim of a practical joke, all his arrogance dowsed by a sudden drench of Natured profoundestsecret: the universal parity of existence.
It was not only these two animals that seemed fraught with significance. The trees were dense with singing birds – blackcaps, whitethroats, thrushes, blackbirds, the cooing of wood-pigeons, filling that windless dawn with the serenity of evening; yet without any of its sadness, its elegiac quality. Charles felt himself walking through the pages of a bestiary, and one of such beauty, such minute distinctness, that every leaf in it, each small bird, each song it uttered, came from a perfect world. He stopped for a moment, so struck was he by this sense of an exquisitely particular universe, in which each was appointed, each unique. A tiny wren perched on a bramble not ten feet from him and trilled its violent song. He saw its glittering black eyes, the red and yellow of its song-gaped throat – a midget ball of feathers that yet managed to make itself the Announcing Angel of evolution: I am what I am and thou shalt not pass my being now. He stood as Pisanello’s saint stood, astonished perhaps more at his own astonishment at this world’s existing so close so within reach of all that suffocating banality of ordinary day. In those few moments of defiant song, any ordinary hour or place – and therefore the vast infinity of all Charles’ previous hours and places – seemed vulgarized, coarsened, made garish. The appalling ennui of human reality lay cleft to the core; and the heart of all life pulsed there in the wren’s triumphant throat.

To present such a passage with a new and hard-won understanding of its mechanics, what is really happening inside the text, is like attending your tenth high school reunion and falling in love all over again with the brilliant girl who dumped you after the senior prom. Feeling those words under my fingers evokes slipping away for a stolen night at the local hotel, finally understanding what she was saying all those years ago, finally knowing what she wants. Do you wake up the next morning and propose? It’s not as foolish or hasty as it may seem.
Those are the kind of moments a great marriage is built on.

Inside Out

In Writing A Novel, his 1974 handbook for aspiring authors, John Braine dispenses a great deal of no-nonsense, working-class advice for carpentering a first book together. Unlike writers as otherwise diverse as E.M. Forster and Ernest Hemingway, he makes no claim (implicit or explicit) that his notions are universally applicable.

“The rules I lay down for the writing of a novel are the ones that suit me,” he says early on. “I don’t assert that my way of writing a novel is the best or only way; only that it works.” It’s hard to argue with that. He recommends writing a brief synopsis and then charging forward with the goal of a finished draft, however messy. Then you write another outline and start patching holes and making sense of the narrative. A novel should cover no more than a year. 100,000 words is the maximum length. And no digressions:

"A straightforward passage in time with no flashbacks is best. It is absolutely legitimate for your characters to remember what happened in the past; they’d be very odd if they didn’t. But they should talk about it or think about it; it mustn’t be presented in the same way as the main action of your novel. And it should be kept brief; go into the past for much over 500 words and the story comes to a dead stop."

Later in the book, he gives some typically blunt and practical advice on narrative viewpoint:

"I strongly recommend that your first novel should be in the first person. While you must never avoid what is difficult out of laziness, it doesn’t make sense not to take the easiest way if, provably, it works. And first person narrative works. It’s entirely natural to buttonhole the audience and tell them all the things that happened to you personally. The use of first person gives your tale veracity. You know all the details because you were there; you tell the story because it happened to you … another advantage of the first person: you depict the main character’s thoughts absolutely naturally. When someone is telling you a story in real life, you take it for granted he’ll tell you his thoughts."

It also allows you to shed, naturally and effortlessly, many of the encumbering complications and needless details that an omniscient narration is prey to, unless kept under rigorous control. For me, struggling with a new book, it was like solving the problem of an elaborately dressed character who mires the story in tedious costume descriptions by setting the tale in a nudist colony. Everything extraneous falls away by definition. You don’t have to ‘cut’ anything. It just isn’t there.

Of course this approach has limitations, especially in regard to story points and basic information that the reader needs to know, but which the narrator isn’t privy to. The form of a mystery is itself one solution to this structural difficulty, because the story is essentially about the hero finding out what both he and the reader want to discover. At its best the use of first person can both push the story forward and deepen it. Because of the continuous, unrestricted and completely organic access it gives us to a character’s mind, the writer is granted a sort of home-field advantage. We all live in our heads; setting a book there feels natural. And since literature is more concerned with character, with thought and feeling, than with straight action, first person provides an opportunity to strive for something beyond the basics of incident and anecdote.

A taciturn narrator can exclude the reader from much of his inner world and still provide a dark, vivid story. Writers as different as Jim Thompson, Dashiell Hammet and Charles Willeford accomplish this delicate balancing act with great skill. But for me there’s something missing, something withheld ( and perhaps insufficiently valued) in their work. I want a character to come clean, as Nick Carraway and Holden Caulfield do; ultimately, as Benjy and Quentin Compson do, hapless and unaware of our prying clairvoyance, as we eavesdrop on the unedited rush of their thoughts and feelings.

Such intimacy can create authentic literature, in any form or genre. But how? For a closer look at the formulas and measurements of this alchemy, I want to discuss briefly Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.

I found the book in a customer’s house recently and read with it a kind of academic innocence: a carnal, avid delight void of analysis or deconstruction. For the purposes of this post, I had to go back and read it again, with a very different purpose. The extraordinary thing, this time through, was how transparent the workings of the book were, like the “Visible Man” model kit I put together in fifth grade, whose clear plastic skin allowed you to see all the bones, muscles and organs of a functioning human anatomy.

It starts with the first sentence: “It was seven minutes after midnight.”

Immediately we sense the presence of what we might charitably call an overly-precise intelligence. It belongs to one John Francis Boone, a fifteen year old English schoolboy with Asperger’s Syndrome. He has just found a dead dog in his neighbor’s yard, with a garden fork stabbed through its neck. He determines to find out who killed it.

"So I am writing a murder mystery novel.
In a murder mystery novel, someone has to work out who the murderer is and then catch them. It is a puzzle. If it is a good puzzle, you can sometimes work out the answer before the end of the book.
"Siobhan said that the book should begin with something to grab people’s attention. That is why I started with the dog. I also started with the dog because it happened to me and I find it hard to imagine things which did not happen to me.

This paragraph effortlessly integrates the basic requirements of the mystery genre with the bizarre and exotic aspects of this boy’s illness, which shapes his thinking; and his heartbreaking struggle against that determinism. He goes to a school for ‘special’ kids, and the staff naturally assume that their charges will lead bleak, restricted lives without adventure or independence. John Boone proves them wrong. And literally sentence by sentence Haddon draws us from the outside world of events and actions into John’s inner world, through the smooth conduit of the boy’s hyper-active consciousness and his struggle to understand the people and emotions swirling around him. These three sentences, for instance:

“Then the police arrived. I like the police. They have uniforms and numbers and you know what they are meant to be doing.”

The police talk to him, and the external dialogue leads inside with the same verbal sleight-of-hand. Haddon is like a magician at a birthday party, keeping the kids gaping as he pushes a quarter through a table top.

“Why were you holding the dog?” he asked again
“I like dogs,” I said.
“Did you kill the dog?” he asked.
I said, “I did not kill the dog.”
“Is this your fork?” he asked.
I said, “No.”
“You seem very upset about this.”
He was asking too many questions and he was asking them too quickly. They were stacking up in my head like loaves in the factory where Uncle Terry works. The factory is a bakery and he operates the slicing machines. And sometimes a slicer is not working fast enough but the bread keeps coming and there is a blockage. I sometimes think of my mind as a machine, but not always a bread slicing machine. It makes it easier to explain to other people what is going on inside it.

The chapters are numbered by the ascending order of prime numbers. In alternate chapters he talks about on-going events and his inner life. Even this simple organizational system reveals something about him and his need for order and partition. And startlingly, even a discussion of prime numbers can veer inward and ambush the reader with moving glimpse of John’s world:

"Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers a are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them."

John solves the crime, halfway through the book, and it leads to other mysteries. It turns out his deceased mother isn’t really dead. She just moved out and John’s father told him that story to ‘spare him’. John finds out her address in London and travels from the suburbs into the city to find her. This odyssey takes up most of the last part of the novel and by the time it begins we are so deeply embedded in John’s perspective that a simple subway ride seems as thrilling as Odysseus’ navigation of the straits between Scylla and Charybdis.

My Dad divides writers by the chunks of prose they care about. Updike writes word-by-word; John Fowles writes sentence-by-sentence. Irwin Shaw writes paragraph by paragraph. And someone like Robert Ludlum or James Patterson writes chapter-by-chapter.
The lesson of Haddon’s book is that only a rigorous word-by-word attention to the fragile integument between a character’s mind and the world that impinges on it can evoke a fully realized world and turn a simple who-killed-the- poodle mystery story into a work of genuine literature.

And to me that means … I have my marching orders.

Difficult orders to follow, yes. But when I get discouraged, I think of e.e. cummings’ image of himself, perched on three chairs on a tightrope in heaven, looking down, thinking, “This man, this artist, this failure MUST PROCEED.”

And so I do.

Moody and Me

I’m trying to figure out exactly why I love Californication so much, and why the final episode of the season was so difficult to watch and so moving. I guess it comes down to David Duchovny’s character, Hank Moody. He’s not me, obviously, but I’ve rarely seen a character on television who so perfectly corresponds to the person I wanted to be, the person I thought I was once, the person I still want to be. Hank is a writer. He published a piece of literary fiction that crossed the border of popular taste and became a huge hit. My piece of literary fiction that might make the same journey has never been published. I couldn’t even get my own agent to read it (During the brief period when I had one); no other agent has even requested a partial, and if they even guessed the word count – a quarter of a million words or so – they’d chuck it into the trash, sight unseen.

Hank is still madly in love with his ex, Karen. She's not his ex-wife – they never got married, though they have a daughter together. I was madly in love with my ex for years … but she never ran out of a wedding, jumped in my car with my daughter and let me drive her away into the giddy prospect of a new future together. That’s fine – I’ve recovered from my post-marital infatuation and we remain good friends. Still, for years that was what I wanted most and I can't help the resonance Hank’s improbable victory sets up inside me. An hour after the show ended, I’m still swinging on my strings like a gong, hit with a big fuzzy mallet.

Hank is a father; he loves his daughter in much the same way that I love mine – absolute but casual, limitless but leisurely, dazzled but dogged, improvisational but improving. There is no treacle, no false sentiment in their relationship. She sees him whole and loves him anyway. But here I have Hank beaten. I have a son, too. And he has my sense of humor and my love of books, and the same heedless, passionate, faithful response to the opposite sex, the same willingness to be leveled by love.

That’s the only score on my side of the board. Hank does all the things I want to do: he takes on the jerk talking on the cell phone in the movie, hits on the homely counter girl in the all-night supermarket because he actually does love all women; he buys his daughter a 13,000 dollar guitar with his bonus money. Hank wrote the script for his book and when it was turned into a giant hit movie and a piece of crap, he got into a fist fight with the director. He squared things with his difficult father before the old man died.

I think we can call that one a draw.

When he slept with Mia, a sixteen year old sociopath who happened to be the daughter of the man Karen was about to marry; when he wrote a book about it and Mia stole it, he took it all like a man. He didn’t know a thing about her when she seduced him in that bookstore – including her age -- but he knows that’s no excuse, and his refusal to let the crazy affair go any further has fuelled all her schemes of adolescent revenge. Hank’s fucked up, but he has a good heart. He makes the people in his life laugh, and that includes me.

Things seem to be working out for Hank now, and though the next season will surely complicate his life, I can’t help rooting for my fictional alter-ego. He’d probably never watch a show about my life, the nightmare alternate universe where the book didn’t sell and love faded and cell phone shouters have their way. A different turn of the dice Hank, and you could have been the one painting houses, still waiting for that first big break as retirement age closes in.

But it didn’t work out that way.
You broke the bank, Hank, and I’m glad. It’s good to be able to celebrate someone else’s success, to live it vicariously without shame, because that’s the whole point. I’d probably envy and despise a real Hank Moody.But the fictional one is my brother.

And tonight I’m happy for both of us.

Playing in the Sandbox

Bookstores are ghettoized into genre sections for profit and convenience. People who read one police procedural or romance novel are likely to be interested in another; making it easier to find more books to buy makes sense for everyone. Meanwhile, the austere wall of novels labeled simply “Fiction” wraps around the perimeter of the store, surrounding and somehow looking down upon the separate shtetls of lesser work.

Newspaper book review sections are similarly divided. Science Fiction and Crime novels get their own page of capsule reviews in the New York Times on alternate Sundays. Other genres are beneath the paper-of-record’s notice. Literature gets the front page essays and the respect. The rare items of literature that cross over into general popularity – Cold Mountain or The Lovely Bones – stand as the Holy Grail of publishing. The rules are clear: literature is character driven, infused with original language, concerned with significant personal, cultural and political themes. Genre fiction is plot- driven, utilitarian in its prose, and concerned with little beyond what happens next.

Are these distinctions absolute? Or is there some space between the categories where a lively weed of narrative art might push its way into the light? Because the difficulty persists: much literary fiction is insufferably tedious, while genre fiction is actually fun to read. And that is the key word, the culprit, the dangerous, derided syllable at the heart of the conflict: fun.

Centuries of academic tradition have taught us that serious works of fiction are meant to be difficult. They refuse to pander. They don’t traffic in the vulgarities of mere entertainment. If a book fails to inflict a soul-sapping struggle, there’s something wrong with it. Up to a point, it’s true: some books reward the exhausting effort you put into them: Don Quixote, In Search of Lost Time, Ulysses. Much genre writing is bad, the cheapest kind of tooth-rotting candy for the mind. But even a cursory stroll through a used bookshop reveals hundreds of novels published as short a time ago as the nineteen forties and fifties, praised as great art (if the pull-quotes on their dust-jackets can be trusted), now unread, unknown, lost to an merciless oblivion among the cobwebs and dust bunnies. The tinny praise of another era haunts any writer with the immanence of his own demise: “The Black Antipodes surpasses even North to Tarbunda to stand as Edith Platt McCucheon’s masterpiece,” raves the Washington Post Book World from the balmy post-war summer of 1947. And you stand daunted, holding Edith Platt McCutcheon’s book in your hand, pondering extinction. For Ms. McCutcheon’s work is indeed extinct, vanished from the earth as absolutely the dwarf hippopotamus or the Irish Elk.

Mickey Spillane’s I, The Jury was also published in 1947.

No one called it a masterpiece; but it’s still in print.
The trick for me is finding the middle ground. Literature can be entertaining – the books themselves have been proving that from Persuasion and Anna Karenina to Atonement and The Corrections -- and those books are my Holy Grail: great literature that’s fun to read. But approaching the question from the other side is more difficult. Can genre fiction aspire to literature? Can a police procedural be written so well that becomes a work of art? The issue is central to me, because that’s what I’m striving for in my own writing. Mickey Spillane is no help to me in this quest: his books are hard-boiled unredeemed trash and that was just the way he liked it. “No one ever read a mystery to get to the middle,” he remarked once, in his usual blunt manner. He thought of his readers as customers and he gave them the product they wanted. Where I’m going I’ll have to leave him behind, along with his modern counterparts like James Patterson and John Grisham. They’re not trying to expand their genre, let alone escape it. I need more ambitious guides.

I chose two for this post: Michael Connelly and Michael Chabon.

Chabon, an unapologetic lover of pulp fiction and comic books (He dedicated The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Klay to Jack Kirby), has been poking and elbowing the boundary lines for years. His new book crosses over triumphantly and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is the paradigm for everything I want to accomplish with my own work. Such a transcendent leap requires three qualities from the writer: intention, commitment and talent.

Michael Connelly lacks the first two, and talent alone isn’t enough. In fact it’s moot. So he falls just short of the requirements, like a rocket that cannot quite achieve escape velocity. He inevitably plunges back to earth, but the taste of that gloriously thin air and the brief satellite view of our science-class globe, blue and green, alive and spinning in its own miasma of carbon and cloud, is worth the fatal parabola of the doomed attempt.

So, how does Connelly fail exactly?
And what does he achieve along the way?

We should start with the achievements Over fourteen novels he has developed and explored the character of LAPD homicide detective Hieronymous (Harry) Bosch to an extraordinary level of depth and refinement. Harry is as real, as troubled, as respectable and reckless as any character in literature. He can stand proud beside Konstantin Levin, Jay Gatsby and Alden Pyle. To my mind he dwarfs many of his detective colleagues. in complexity, torment and simple humanity. Porfiry Petrovitch, Sherlock Holmes and even Philip Marlowe all pale beside Bosch’s, tormented humanity. Tolstoy, Fitzgerald and Dostoevsky were obviously far greater writers, with scope, passion and vision far beyond Connelly’s; Graham Greene brought a much finer sensibility, an acid cynicism tempered by religious faith, that Connelly can’t touch. As for Conan Doyle and Raymond Chandler – they defined the two extremes of the crime fiction genre, one with the most memorable and often-copied sleuth in modern literature and the other with a moral vision and uniquely vivid prose style (“He was about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a piece of angel food”) that remain fresh and striking sixty years later.

But the fact remains: judging these characters apart from their authors’ reputations and even the books that contain them, seeing them on their own as troubling and confounding individuals, matching them up one on one, Bosch is the best in his class. And he makes a shockingly strong showing among the higher class of characters who would never expect to mingle with a hard-boiled hero. (Though I’m certain Levin would like him; and Gatsby would be shrewd enough to be nervous).

Bosch is an orphan, a tunnel rat in Viet Nam, an “institutional man”, the product of foster homes, the military and the police He’s a loner still in love with his ex-wife, a jazz buff who has Hopper’s Nighthawks hanging on his wall, a cop who treats his mission with an almost religious intensity. His motto: “Everyone matters or no one matters.” He speaks for the dead. He also takes no crap from anyone, which at the beginning of The Last Coyote, has gotten him into some serious trouble.

He’s under suspension for throwing his commanding officer through a plate glass window. Without badge or gun, trying to prove his sanity and stability to a police psychiatrist, Bosch starts to investigate the ‘cold case’ of his mother’s murder, thirty years before.
As it turns out, most of the major players in that long elapsed drama are still alive and Bosch’s investigation takes him into the middle of a current scandal involving the same people. The plot is inventive, twisting, unpredictable … and central, both to Connelly and Bosch. This is both the book’s strength -- and its weakness, at least when viewed as literature.

Plot seems to mark a novel, in the class structure of literature, like the wrong accent at an English race-track. But many great novels have plots, so it’s obviously not that simple. I think the real issue is where the plot stands in the axis of author, reader and character. If it weighs too heavily on all of those points, we can’t take the book seriously as literature. In Connelly’s case the plot is all-important to Bosch. But it’s equally vital to Connelly. It’s the pulse of his story. The reader, exposed to this, contagion gets swept along to the shocking finale … not the middle, as Spillane points out. Bosch as a character, fascinating and richly conceived, is incidental to this overwhelming momentum … except for those parts of him, his relentless curiosity and sense of outrage, which keep the pistons of the plot pumping. So the force of sheer narrative takes over and the other aspects of literature -- the interior life of the characters, the unique sensibility expressed in descriptions of the outside world, the vital connection to large social and political realities -- fall away. For example, the interior life (As Bosch contemplates actually opening the investigation into his mother’s death):

What had happened to his mother helped define everything he did after. And it was always there in the dark recesses of his mind. A promise to find out. A promise to avenge. It was never anything that had been spoken aloud or even thought about with much focus. For to do that was to plan and this was no part of a grand agenda. Still, he was crowded with the feeling that what he was doing was inevitable, something scheduled by an unseen hand long ago.

Or the exterior world, as he crashes party:

Bosch fastened his top button and pulled his tie back in place as he walked up the driveway. He passed a small army of men in red vests, and as he came all the way up past the limousines, a startling view of the lighted city came into view. He stopped and just looked for a moment. He could see from the moonlit Pacific in one direction to the towers of downtown in the other. The view alone was worth the price of the house, no matter how many millions that was.

This is perfectly good writing, sturdy and serviceable, doing its job under the the whip hand of a taskmaster plot. But it doesn’t soar. Bosch’s obsession and the view of Los Angeles are deployed, not enjoyed for their own sake. Bosch’s tormented connection to his mother’s death is a motivation; L.A. at night glimpsed from above is a setting, nothing more. And the world beyond Bosch’s purview – apart from being corrupt and treacherous – Connelly scarcely mentions.

When you compare The Last Coyote to The Yiddish Policemen’s Union these weaknesses stand out like the stress lines on a building’s foundation after an earthquake. Chabon shakes things up. His novel conforms to the conventions of the genre, but plot is central neither to him nor to Myer Landsman, his hero …. And thus, not to the reader either. Landsman is investigating the death of his neighbor in the flophouse where he’s living after his divorce. The story takes place in Sitka Alaska, in an alternative universe where Roosevelt set up a Jewish homeland in the far reaches of North America. It was a temporary arrangement, and its 60-year expiration date is fast approaching. The book unfolds in the shadow of the Reversion. This imaginary district is so vivid that, as Terrence Rafferty memorably pointed out in his New York Times review, “You need a down parka and a prayer shawl just to turn the page.” The bum next door turns out to be the proto-messiah. Powerful people in government and the rabbinate, in Sitka and Washington D.C. have been trying to use the hapless young man for devious and diabolical ends, plots which result, among other things, in the death of Landsman beloved sister and the destruction of the Mosque standing on the original site of the Temple of Jerusalem. It’s quite a tangle, but Chabon unties it with breezy aplomb, like a stoned boy scout showing off his merit badges.

The key to this effervescent disregard for the primary structural support of his mystery novel lies in an essay he wrote, introducing McSweeny’s “Astonishing Stories” issue:

Many of the finest “genre writers” working today derive their power and their entertainment value from a fruitful self-consciousness about the conventions of their chosen genre, a heightened awareness of its history, of the cycle of innovation, exhaustion and replenishment. When it comes to conventions, their central impulse is not to flout or follow them, but flouting or following, to play.

In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, this playfulness extends beyond the rules of story telling into every aspect of Chabon’s writing. Each moment, setting, thought and action are celebrated and presented as delightful little gems, quite apart from their utility to the larger narrative. It’s like Christmas morning: every sentence is like unwrapping another present.

Compare this aerial description (Landsman is approaching by plane) of a gracious rehab center in the wilds of southern Alaska to Connelly’s pragmatic glimpse of L.A. at night:

A badge of grass, a green brooch pinned at the collarbone of a mountain to a vast black cloak of trees. At the center of the clearing, a handful of buildings clad in brown shakes radiate from a circular fountain, linked by paths and separated by quilted patches of lawn and gravel. A pitch at the far end, chalked for soccer, ringed by an oval track. The place has the feel of a boarding school, a backwoods academy for wayward young wealth. Half a dozen men circle the track in shorts and hooded sweatshirts. Others sit or lie prone in the center of the field, stretching before exercise, leg and arms, angles on the ground. An alphabet of men scattered on a green page.

This beautiful prose seems to flood out of him like bird-song He can’t help it. Fat “applauds” in the fryolator; a woodpecker “rattles its cup of dice”.

And then this writing expands into the shimmering paragraphs that have always marked Chabon’s work as extraordinary This moment, for instance, as Landsman crashes a funeral. The northern Hasids are mourning the death of their Tzaddik Ha-Dor – the man who might have been the Messiah for their generation:

They smell of lamentation, these yids, long underwear, tobacco smoke on wet overcoats, mud. They’re praying like they’re going to faint, fainting like it’s a kind of observance. Weeping women cling to each other and break open their throats. They aren’t mourning Mendel Shpilman, they can’t be. It’s something else they feel has gone out of the world, the shadow of a shadow, the hope of a hope. This half-island they have come to love as home is being taken from them. They are like goldfish in a bag, about to be dumped back into the big black lake of Diaspora. But that’s too much to think about. So instead, they lament the loss of a lucky break they never got, a chance that was no chance at all, a king who was never going to come in the first place, even without a jacketed slug in the brainpan. Landsman puts his shoulder to them and mutters “Pardon me”

The urge to make this a 409 page post and just quote everything, rises up in me with a mad cackle. But I will control it. If I had to pick one passage( and I clearly do), this funeral description is a nicely representative choice: it shows Landsman’s mind working, the details of daily life in this mundane and inconceivable place … and then makes that effortless leap to the Diaspora which is (and always has been) Chabon’s central theme.

In fairness, let me say, Connelly is not even interested in such acrobatics, and should not be blamed for failing to do what he never attempted. But Connelly, much as I love his work, much as I have learned from it in frequent re-readings, is the straw man in this post, let’s face it. I set him up to knock him down, but I think I played fair because he is so good, and his work comes so close to being good enough.

But these posts are finally about me, my work, my craft, my goals and aspirations. Simply put, I want to do what Chabon does. I have the intention and the commitment. Whether I have the talent or not remains to be seen.

It’s a tough little sandbox up there in Sitka; only the best and smartest kids get to play.

Pink Crocs

I wear pink crocs.
My son got them originally, as part of a publicity give-away at party early June three years ago. They were too big for him. He didn’t like the color. I tried them on, just for fun -- and scarcely wore any other shoes until the next winter. The crocs were supernaturally comfortable, easy to slip on and off (excellent for those early morning dog walks); best of all, they were free.
But I had no idea what I was getting myself into. It turns out that a man wearing pink crocs transforms himself into a kind of cultural touchstone, a walking sociological laboratory for the study of gender politics and iconography. No one was neutral about my footwear that summer. Everyone weighed in: women for the most part thought they were sexy. I was ‘secure enough in my sexuality” to flaunt such a provocative wardrobe item. I had clearly “embraced” my “feminine side” and showed a refreshing indifference to ridicule. In fact, there was quite a bit of ridicule. Friends remarked lightly “You know how gay you look, right?” ; troglodytes jeered “Faggot!” at me as I walked past.
This instinctive twitch of homophobia, this tourrettes syndrome shout-out of socially approved bigotry reared up everywhere, like ant hills on a suburban lawn. A tenured professor at a major University accosted me one morning and said “Cute crocs,” in a cringe-worthy “gay” voice. “Oh yeah,” I said, deflecting the obvious intent of the remark, “They’re chick magnets. Women love them.”
“Boys, too, I bet,” he said with a little smirk.
I guess he’d figured out my dirty little secret. Good thing I’m not his teaching assistant.
The whole business is especially strange because I live on Nantucket where localized fashion embraces wearing pink pants – or ‘Nantucket Reds,” as they’re called. The pants, dyed red at the factory, soon fade to a color not unlike the tint of my crocs. This coincidence counts for nothing. Pink means gay. The blush brands anyone who wears it, and the disruptive controversy follows you like a poodle on a leash. I suppose if you actually were gay it would be a convenient marker, like the little pink triangles some lesbians sport on their pick-up trucks. So maybe people are just annoyed when you send out a confusing signal. And I soon realized that there’s no social stigma about gay-bashing; it’s a safe way to vent hostility and feel superior. A broad spectrum of society, from academics to day laborers, from Ecuadorian immigrants to New England matrons, from every race and religion, from every region and upbringing seem take gays as a suitable target. It’s politically correct; it’s Biblically approved. It’s fun for the whole family. Canny political operatives can leverage the specter of gay marriage to defeat an otherwise unassailable opponent. I knew intellectually that this prejudice was ubiquitous.
But I never felt it, until I wore the pink crocs. No gay man had ever said to me, “Walk a mile in my pink crocs … ” I did it, though, however inadvertently.
But now my situation is changing.
The first pair of crocs are wearing out. I’m going to have to buy new ones soon. Do I buy pink crocs and confirm my political position? Or do I buy ordinary grey ones and bow out? I decided to buy more pink crocs because I realized that I actually enjoy these new encounters. I relish the instant snap-shot I get when people respond in this visceral, unguarded way to the color of my sandals. It tells me more about them than they’d probably like me to know.
A tough-as-nails New York business woman can be startled into a moment of flirtation (“Now that’s a real man.”); the Professor with the AIDS ribbon on his car can turn out to be a creep.
And the tattooed carpenter in NY Giants sweatshirt can glance down with an admiring grin and say “Bold move, dude.”
The world is full of surprises when you wear pink crocs.
And that’s the best reason I can think of to keep wearing them.

X Marks the Spot: Hooks, Tags and Sinkers

When asked how her writing day had gone, Virginia Woolf once famously replied, “It went wonderfully. I got my characters off the couch, through the French doors and onto the veranda.”
The problems of narrative transition that Woolf grappled with – physical, mental and emotional – remain intransigent more than sixty years after her death. They’re relentless. Describing the intricate mental process by which a character figures out something important, changes his mind, or makes a decision is the most technically demanding task a writer is ever faced with. If you stumble or miscalculate, the reader becomes aware of you and your clumsy efforts, and the whole intricately coordinated performance falls apart. In fact, writing a book is just one transition after another, making things flow visually and physically, balancing action and thought and description in every paragraph.

There are many ways to organize this set of problems. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to divide transitions into two types: intra- and inter-textual. The former, which occur inside the ongoing action of a chapter, represent the biggest and most daunting set of challenges. The writer here is like a card sharp in a high stakes poker game, executing a sleight of hand whose central purpose is to go unnoticed. He doesn’t want to dazzle you with his prestidigitations. He doesn’t want your admiration or respect; he just wants to take your money as unobtrusively as possible.

In the case of the inter-textual transitions, which are my primary focus in this essay, the writer is more like an old fashioned stage magician, fanning the cards, inviting you to take one, pulling aces from behind your ear, building momentum on the bewildered curiosity of the crowd. These transitions end chapters or begin them – I call them hooks and tags. Mickey Spillane once remarked “The purpose of my first sentence is to get you to read the book. The purpose of my last sentence is to get you to read the next book.”

The purpose of a hook is to get you to read the current chapter; the purpose of a tag is to get you to read the next chapter. To a large extent, the type of hook and tag a writer uses determines the time signature of the story. The temptation to keep the tempo strictly allegro is powerful and insidious. And yet sometimes it’s actually more effective to slow things down. Umberto Eco endorses the value of ‘lingering’ in the third of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures, collected under the title Six Walks in the Fictional Woods.

"If, as we have noted, a text is a lazy machine that peals to the reader to do some of its work, why might a text linger, slow down, take its time? A fictional work, you would suppose, describes people performing actions, and the reader wants to know how these actions turn out. They tell me that in Hollywood, when a producer is listening to the story or plot of a film that is being proposed and finds there is too much detail, he calls out “Cut to the chase!” And this means: don’t waste time, drop the psychological subtleties, get to the climax… On the other hand … if something important is going to take place, we have to cultivate the art of lingering … Lingering doesn’t mean wasting time: frequently one stops to ponder before making a decision. One of the of slowing down techniques that n author can employ is one that allows the reader to take “inferential walks” … In any work of fiction the text emits signals of suspense, almost s if the discourse had slowed down or come to a halt, and as if the writer were suggesting, “Now you try carrying on…” When I spoke of “inferential walks” I meant, in the terms of our woodsy metaphor, imaginary walks outside the wood: readers, in order to predict how the story is going to go, turn to their own experience of life or their own knowledge of other stories… We mustn’t, however, make the mistake of thinking that signals of suspense are typical only of dime novels or of commercial films. The readerly process of making predictions constitutes a necessary aspect of reading …"

Hooks and tags encourage this process. They generally invoke the future, the direction or even the destination of the story, known to the writer but hidden from the reader. The intensity of these proleptic messages sets the narrative tone. The choice of that tone is one of the most critical and perplexing one that a writer faces. I find myself torn between the need for propulsive story telling and the desire to linger in Eco’s woods and attempt something like literature.

The recent revision of a chapter of my own book Owners is a good example. My intention was to introduce my character from the inside out, exploring his point of view, his past and his emotional state before starting the action. I was especially pleased that all the events of his apparently routine evening prefigured and even inventoried the plot developments to come. I privately thought of the chapter as the overture, in which all the major themes and motifs would be introduced. The reader would only grasp this later, when the story had been fully revealed. My conceit was that a second reading of the section would strike the reader a series of narrative blows: forehead slapping, oh-my-God-it-was-all-right-there-in-front-of me moments. The problem with this grand plan is that readers need some motivation to get through the book once, before they can revel in an encore.

The chapter struck most readers as exposition heavy and downright tedious. The first actual event, it was pointed out to me, was a fight in the Chicken Box bar, five or six pages into the story. Until then it was more or less of a snooze. I revised the chapter, cut much of the exposition, placing the fraction of it which I chose to preserve much later in the text, and decided to lay my cards on the table with a self-conscious and shameless hook:

"There was nothing special about the fourth of December: just another early winter night on Nantucket, or so it seemed. Much later it would occur to Police Chief Henry Kennis that it had been like the overture to a musical; a medley of tunes you scarcely noticed until you bought the cast album and really listened. Then you heard every theme and motif, every song played in advance. All the secrets and revelations, all the players and their plans were in the air that night, if he had known enough to listen. But of course he didn’t. Only weeks later, after the last chord was played, would he realize how pointed and prophetic the events of that night had been.
It began with a fight at the chicken box."

Now the primary action begins in the second paragraph and the reader is challenged to find the clues and talismans of the plot in the ordinary events of Henry’s night patrol. The reader is drawn in (I hope), but at some cost: I’ve set a stringent tempo. More importantly, my attempt to linger in Umberto Eco’s wood was a dispiriting failure.

It may be that each tale sets its own pace, that stories, like people, have their own natural rhythm and struggling against it causes the problem. Anyone who manages people for a living knows this. A landscaper wouldn’t let the hyper-active, impatient speed-freak weed the rose garden; and he’d keep the tortoise-like painstaking perfectionist away from the lawn mower; it’s just common sense. The detective story isn’t best served by a stream of consciousness narration; just as an IRA attack in Dublin would have done little to improve Ulysses.
I thought it might be interesting to look at group of writers along the spectrum of ambition and accomplishment to see how they deal with this issue. Marcel Proust, with his blithe certainty that we cannot wait to see what intrigues will unfold at the Guermantes’ soiree, and the his contract with the reader that agrees to put his thoughts and feelings about any incident far above the actual incident itself, chooses to end the first section of the fourth volume of In Search of Lost Time in this way:

"At all events, on that particular day, before my visit to the Duchesse, I was not thinking so far ahead and was distressed at having, by attending to the Jupien-Charlus conjunction, perhaps missed the fertilization of the flower by the bumble-bee."

Proust feels a haughty disdain for the rhetoric of enticement. He invites us to share it with him. And we do (Though perhaps we have a Dick Francis novel handy on the bed-side for our weaker moments).

A little further down the literary food chain, things aren’t quite so clear-cut.
In Scott Spencer’s Waking the Dead a mainstream literary novel from the mid eighties, aspiring politician Fielding Pierce becomes obsessed with his dead girlfriend, a political activist killed in a car bombing. He is more and more certain she is alive, a delusion that threatens to wreck his life, until it turns out to be the truth. Sarah faked her own death, and emerges from the political underground for one devastating encounter. She tells him that she tore her life in half; he says it’s okay, they can put it back together again. His endearing optimism means nothing to her. “I threw the other half away,” she tells him.

With an urgent warning to stop asking about her and drawing attention to her disappearance, she makes love with him once, kisses him goodbye and disappears again into something very much like death, at least from Fielding’s point of view: a severance just as permanent. It’s a sad book but a brilliant one. Any novel with lines like “Ambition is the ice on the lake of emotion” and “Like progressive parents slowly, gently taking a meat cleaver away from a wild child, Danny and Sarah gradually moved the conversation out of my reach.” deserves its claim to literature.

Spencer uses tags overtly, like this one at the end of chapter five, when Fielding is certain that Sarah has been watching him from the street, certain that it was her voice on the telephone that afternoon, refusing to talk to his girlfriend Juliet, who has figured him out and is in the process of storming out of the house in the middle of the night to get away from him:

"The light from the hall raced across the bedroom floor as Juliet opened the door and then with a slam I was in darkness again. I was in darkness and I was in pain and despite all I believed and could not believe, despite having no more expectations of the miraculous than any other ordinary modern soul, despite all the arguments of common sense and all the cautions of fear, I was waiting."

Moving into the realm of genre fiction, and starting at the top, I read P.D. James’s Innocent Blood. She is a fine and elegant writer who chooses to concern herself with crime and its ramifications. Murder is her subject rather as espionage is John LeCarre’s. Both transcend and elevate the narrow category in which they write, and add some class to their ghettoized sections of Borders or Barnes & Noble.

In this book, the father of a murdered child plots his revenge as the murderess is released from prison into the custody of her own daughter. The child had been adopted by well-to-do parents, but has become increasingly obsessed with knowing her mother and understanding her mother’s grim story. The two obsessions converge with devastating effect, and James pushes us along the road to that confrontation with bold strokes. These lines begin Book Three, An Act of Violence:

"And now he moved with a mounting sense of excitement away from his settled routine at Pimlico and into a new world, their world. And the act itself was no longer hidden in an unknown future; the time had come to prepare himself physically and mentally for the deed."

It’s subtle but effective. By this time James has only to hint at the future to fill us with anxiety; it’s like touching a bruise.

Moving further down the line, dangerously close to my own neighborhood, here is a good example of what I call a ‘sinker’ – a tag so overwrought that the writer just seems desperate and the essential sense of confidence these devices are designed to impart just sinks, like a leaky rowboat. This is from The Watchman, by Robert Crais, the first novel featuring his perennial side-kick tough guy Joe Pike – the end of chapter one:

"The first patrol car arrived in seven minutes; the paramedics three minutes later. Larkin thought it would end that night when the policemen finished their questions, but her nightmare had only begun.
In forty eight hours she would meet with agents from the Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s. In six days, the first attempt would be made on her life. In eleven days she would meet a man named Joe Pike.
Everything in her world was about to change. And it began that night."

Here the future is used as a blunt instrument and I feel pummeled by the clamoring dread and expectation. “seven minutes,” “three minutes later,” “had only begun”, “In forty eight hours”, “In six days”, “In eleven days” “Everything was about to change”,” it began that night”: bang, bang, bang: eight time references in seven sentences and they hit you like a wrecking ball. Can Crais really have this little faith in the interest and attention span of his readers? It’s like the local news: “Something you’re doing RIGHT NOW may be KILLING YOU! Details at eleven.”
It’s a long slide down from Proust’s bumble-bee.

It’s hard to know, or perhaps to admit, where one fits on this scale. But in fact I’m writing a mystery and the pace is built in to the form. Eco talks about a “model reader”, whom the text invites but also creates. The book informs its audience how they should read it, and what they should expect to feel. Some books are a walk in Eco’s forest, some are a meditation or a discourse.

My book is a treasure hunt. And I’m the guide. These people are following me for two connected reasons: they want the treasure and I know how to find it. Pointing out the lovely views or the unusual fauna en route is fine, up to a very limited point. They’re not following me because I have the guidebook.

They’re following me because I have the map.

They need constant reassurance. They’re greedy and impatient. That’s why the hooks and tags have to be there. They are the clearest way of saying: I know where I’m going and you don’t. Follow me or get lost. I have to constantly re-assert the tyranny of superior knowledge. Readers want to be docile and follow. But they have to trust the guy with the map.

I don’t really know where I’m going, of course; most writers don’t. That’s the real secret at the heart of the story. And the mysterious process by which we somehow find our destination anyway?

That’s the real treasure.