Diagnosing Faults in Fiction

Thomas McCormack on surface faults and internal faults in fiction:

         To see what fiction-editing craft might be, start by looking at the faults it’s intended to detect. There are two kinds: surface faults and internal faults. A surface fault is local, as immediately evident to the naked eye as a skin blemish. You can point at specific words that constitute it. Most surface faults do not produce delayed reactions.
         They include failures of diction, grace, freshness, materiality, credibility, pace, vividness, understandability, interest. These dermal components—blemishes and triumphs together—because they are on the surface, don’t require special craft to detect. They require diligence, solid training in English, a good sensibility. Given these qualities, any editor can tweeze, scrub, and buff, so that at least the skin of the script will be acceptable to the eye.

[…]

         The largest, the most basic faults, the internal failures, don’t betray themselves with one smoking phrase. They don’t, in general, lie on the surface of the novel. They can’t be recognized at once as faults. They may have no obvious fixed address in the manuscript; often, indeed, the problem is that something has been omitted entirely. And sometimes they are composites, an element becoming a flaw only because a succeeding element doesn’t consummate. This means you can’t possibly recognize it as a flaw when you first read it: A “promise”, tacitly made by the author to the reader early on, can be an enhancing enticement; but if it is thereafter ignored, not resolved either by fulfilment or surprising, justified reversal, it becomes a flaw in the book. What qualifies it as a flaw is that ultimately it leaves an unwanted negative feeling in the attentive reader. Irrelevance is in effect a failure of promise.
         Internal ailments in a novel can produce a wide variety of disappointed effects on the reader: a sense of the story’s having missed some unnameable opportunity, of its not meeting us at the station, of its lacking a life-supporting temperature, of inertness, of inconsequence, of meaninglessness to events, of something, somewhere in the book, gone profoundly awry.
         Their causes include faults in the original setup of situation and cast; the misuse of “accident”; inconsistency of objective; defects in the characters’ purpose, effort, action, promise, achievement, and interconnection. Since these causes don’t lie on the surface, they’re harder to identify, like a missing vitamin, an allergy, a secret spinal bend. The patient lives, but is listless and halt. And, woefully, the patient’s doctor often doesn’t see the condition as something wrong and remediable. We wish he had more snap, but that’s just the way he is. The diagnosis of these ailments requires more than dermatology. Identifying the bug, the chemical imbalance, the anatomical fault, can defy the most determined scrutiny if the examiner relies solely on intuition. What’s needed is an analysis that is canny, informed, fundamental, sensible, technical, systematic, and thorough. What’s needed is craft.

From Thomas McCormack, The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist (2006).

Abandoning a Resolution

It’s not quite the end of January and already I’m abandoning one of my New Year’s resolutions. I resolved to keep a more detailed reading journal, recording not just the dates I start and finish each book, but also what led me to pick it up in the first place, where it came from and so on. The idea was to track the ebb and flow of my reading, and to maintain a list of books abandoned as well as those finished.

Here’s what it reveals about my book acquisitions and reading activity this year so far:

I’ve checked 46 books out of the library, bought 16, and received 3 review copies from publishers. I’ve begun reading 23 books. Of those, I’ve finished 10, and abandoned 3 that didn’t sufficiently capture my interest. Ten are still in progress. In addition, I’ve read 5 short stories and 3 essays with no intention of reading in their entirety the books from which they came.

This mad circulation of books through my house and my hands didn’t feel overwhelming until I began to write it all down. I’m quite sure that I would find the sort of record I’ve been creating very interesting to contemplate after the fact. But, in the moment, maintaining it is proving exhausting. It’s detracting from my reading experience rather than enhancing it. So, I hereby release myself from this self-imposed obligation. My reading can once again meander at will free from constant surveillance.

Thomas Hardy as a Literary Tourist

I have confessed here before, and indeed demonstrated in posts about Robert Louis Stevenson and Muriel Spark, that I am a shameless literary tourist. Many years ago, I took a copy of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles with me on a trip to the south of England and had the pleasure of wandering about Hardy country as I read. Thus my memory of the novel is thoroughly steeped in the actual landscape as well as that so vividly conveyed therein by Hardy.

While reading Claire Tomalin’s biography of Hardy, I was charmed to learn that he shared my penchant for this sort of literary tourism at an early age. Here’s how eight-year-old Tom occupied himself on his first trip to London in 1849:

He had prepared for the trip by acquiring a map of the City and marking out the streets described by Harrison Ainsworth in Old St. Paul’s, a favourite book at the time, and he went out and traced the steps of the hero.

I’m three chapters in now and relishing this biography.

A Banner Season for Biographies

I’ve yet to experience a shortage of good biographies to feed my interest in the lives and work of the writers and other artists that I admire. Even against the backdrop of what I perceive as the perennially healthy state of this genre, however, it seems to me that we’re in the midst of a banner season for biographies. I’m thinking in particular of the recent and imminent publication of substantial new biographies by three titans of the genre: Claire Tomalin’s Thomas Hardy, Victoria Glendinning’s Leonard Woolf, and Hermione Lee’s Edith Wharton. Picture me gleefully rubbing my hands together at the prospect of immersing myself in these biographical riches.

I have not yet acquired a copy of Glendinning’s Leonard Woolf which was released in Canada a scant two months ago, and Lee’s Edith Wharton biography won’t be available here until the end of February. But my copy of Tomalin’s Thomas Hardy arrived in yesterday’s mail and I’m very happy to begin the odyssey with this one. I’ve only made it as far as the acknowledgments section and I’m already hooked. What, you may ask, is so compelling about a few preliminary pages of acknowledgements? Obviously my interest in Thomas Hardy and his work is what prompted me to pick up this book. But I’m also interested more broadly in the process of writing biography, of constructing life stories. And as I read through Tomalin’s acknowledgments section, it struck me as a marvellous glimpse into that process—from initial motivation, through laborious research, and into the writing and polishing of the final manuscript. It’s no more than a snapshot, of course, but revealing nonetheless. It has whetted my appetite nicely for the main event. I’m very much looking forward to spending some happy hours with this biography, and also to the binge of Hardy rereads which I fully expect it to provoke.

And, of course, I’m also looking forward to getting my hands on copies of Glendinning’s Leonard Woolf and Lee’s Edith Wharton.

An Apt Sensibility

Thomas McCormack on the importance of an apt editorial sensibility:

The right editor—as Pound was for Eliot—is right not because he has some sort of absolutely good taste, a special insight into literary Platonic forms. Nabokov, a reader of exuberant and joyful responsiveness, despised Faulkner, Mann, and Camus. Did Nabokov lack ‘good taste’? You can’t think so if you’ve heard his appreciations of Austen, Dickens, and Tolstoi. It doesn’t take ‘good taste’ to respond to Faulkner. It simply takes a sensibility that responds to Faulkner.

From Thomas McCormack, The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist (2006).

The Room that is the Book

If so, what are they doing to him? Nothing very terrible, finally—at least not in any absolute sense. They have trapped Blue into doing nothing, into being so inactive as to reduce his life to almost no life at all. Yes, says Blue to himself, that’s what it feels like: nothing at all. He feels like a man who has been condemned to sit in a room and go on reading a book for the rest of his life. This is strange enough—to be only half alive at best, seeing the world only through words, living only through the lives of others. But if the book were an interesting one, perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad. He could get caught up in the story, so to speak, and little by little begin to forget himself. But this book offers him nothing. There is no story, no plot, no action—nothing but a man sitting alone in a room and writing a book. That’s all there is, Blue realizes, and he no longer wants any part of it. But how to get out? How to get out of the room that is the book that will go on being written for as long as he stays in the room?

From Paul Auster, Ghosts (volume two in The New York Trilogy).

More Auster

In a comment on my post about Paul Auster’s The Red Notebook: True Stories, Isabella noted the blue notebook at the centre of Oracle Night, and also the mention of a number of notebooks in The New York Trilogy though she couldn’t recall offhand if any of the latter were red. I flipped back through the trilogy and found that at least three red notebooks make an appearance therein, most prominently Daniel Quinn’s red notebook in City of Glass:

     After he finished eating, Quinn wandered over to the stationery shelves. A shipment of new notebooks had come in, and the pile was impressive, a beautiful array of blues and greens and reds and yellows. He picked one up and saw that the pages had the narrow lines he preferred. Quinn did all his writing with a pen, using a typewriter only for final drafts, and he was always on the lookout for good spiral notebooks. Now that he had embarked on the Stillman case, he felt that a new notebook was in order. It would be helpful to have a separate place to record his thoughts, his observations and his questions. In that way, perhaps, things might not get out of control.
     He looked through the pile, trying to decide which one to pick. For reasons that were never made clear to him, he suddenly felt an irresistible urge for a particular red notebook at the bottom. He pulled it out and examined it, gingerly fanning the pages with his thumb. He was at a loss to explain to himself why he found it so appealing. It was a standard eight-and-a-half-by-eleven notebook with one hundred pages. But something about it seemed to call out to him—as if its unique destiny in the world was to hold the words that came from his pen. Almost embarrassed by the intensity of his feelings, Quinn tucked the red notebook under his arm, walked over to the cash register, and bought it.

After locating that passage, I continued to reread. When I once again encountered the fictional Paul Auster, I was seized with a sudden curiosity as to whether the real Paul Auster had ever written an essay on Don Quixote along the lines of that described by his fictional counterpart in the novel. I logged on to the online catalogue of the public library and found that there was a copy of Auster’s Collected Prose sitting on the shelf at a branch not too far away. I was in an instant gratification sort of mood, so I set off on foot to collect it myself rather than arranging to have it sent to my local branch.

This mission accomplished, I retired to a nearby coffee shop with the book. There was no Don Quixote essay included in the Collected Prose but there was much else of interest. I had a cup of tea and a leisurely read, pausing now and again to jot something down in my notebook which just happens to be red. I assure you that I didn’t acquire it under the influence of Auster’s The Red Notebook, as I hadn’t yet read that book when I bought the notebook. However, it is possible that the memory of Quinn’s notebook had a subliminal influence on my choice. Certainly my conviction when I bought it that it was exactly the right notebook for me at this moment in time echoed Quinn’s sentiments in the excerpt quoted above.

I admit that I felt a bit goofy sitting there with Auster’s Collected Prose and penning notes about it in a red notebook. But then it occurred to me that any denizens of the coffee shop well enough acquainted with Auster’s work to make the connection between the two would be apt to be sympathetic to a deliberate homage or, in the alternative, to relish an inadvertent link replete with overtones of Austerian coincidence.

From the coffee shop, I made my way to yet another branch of the library, this time on the trail of a copy of Oracle Night. So long as I was fixating on Auster and notebooks, how could I resist the Auster novel that explicitly centres on a notebook? By the end of the day, I’d criss-crossed a good swathe of the city, visiting three different branches of the public library and four bookstores (who says the reading life is a sedentary one?), and thereby acquired four more books by Auster and one about him.

I always find it an interesting exercise to immerse myself in the work of one author, to begin to track the evolution of the writing, and to make connections between the books however distant in time or disparate in genre. But it’s proving a particularly interesting exercise where Paul Auster is concerned because of the extent to which the connections are out in the open. He deliberately lets the seams show. And yet, I've begun to think that this obviousness may conceal more than it reveals, layering over deeper complexities that are worth pursuing. For the moment, I'm thoroughly enamoured with Auster's work. No doubt you will hear more from me about it in future posts.

John Irving on Researching a Novel

John Irving on researching a novel:

     For all his stature, Mr. Irving covers every inch of that meticulous, obsessive, painstaking research himself. He hunkered down in ob-gyn wards of hospitals, he says, when he was preparing Cider House Rules. He ensconced himself in tattoo parlours, many of them in Toronto and Nova Scotia, for his last novel, 2005's Until I Find You, a peripatetic quest for a father, which crisscrossed Canada on the back of its central character, Canadian actor Jack Burns.
     He would never think to let anyone do this type of research for him. "Writing is in the details," he offers.

For the rest of the article from which this excerpt comes, click here.

Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride on Film

A film adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride hits the small screen on Sunday night. The film versions of favourite novels rarely satisfy me, particularly when they take the sort of liberties with the plot that this one apparently does. Still, I doubt that I’ll be able to resist tuning in to check it out. To see a brief trailer, click here.

Catching Up With Paul Auster

I came to Paul Auster late. In fact Brooklyn Follies, published not much more than a year ago, was the first of his books that I read. I quite enjoyed it but it was a much more conventional novel that I’d been led to expect from Auster so I was a bit disappointed all the same. I have since gone on to read some of his earlier books. On the one hand, this has confirmed my perception that Brooklyn Follies is something of an aberration in Auster’s oeuvre. On the other, it has set Brooklyn Follies in context for me such that I feel I might have seen more in it had I not read it first.

My most recent Auster read was The Red Notebook, a collection of ostensibly true stories about a series of coincidences. Are they really true stories? However improbable most of them are, only the last in the series seems forced. Does it matter? They felt true enough while I was reading that one or two of them had me on the edge of weeping. All in all, an odd and lovely little book.

What does this have to do with Brooklyn Follies? Paul Auster’s Red Notebook reminds me strongly of Brooklyn Follies protagonist Nathan Glass’s Book of Human Follies in which he seeks to document "in the simplest, clearest language possible an account of every blunder, every pratfall, every embarrassment, every idiocy, every foible" that he or anyone else has committed or been subjected to from the beginning of time to the present. Of course the subject matter of Glass’s book of follies is very different from that of the tales collected in The Red Notebook, but nevertheless they strike me as parallel endeavours undertaken in a similar spirit. Although Auster himself does not make one of his trademark appearances in Brooklyn Follies, I began to think perhaps he had slyly inserted himself into the narrative all the same. And then there is a more obvious connection in the fact that coincidence, of the same sort documented and celebrated in The Red Notebook, plays such a central role in Brooklyn Follies. These are small things, but they lead me to think that I might have discerned more layers and greater nuance in Brooklyn Follies had I been acquainted with Auster’s previous work when I read it.

I may or may not revisit Brooklyn Follies with this in mind, but I will continue to catch up on all of the books that preceded it. Auster’s next book, Travels in the Scriptorium, is due to be released this month. I’ve heard that a number of characters from his previous novels reappear in it and I want to be able to recognize them when I see them. I don’t intend to be caught without context again.