Scratching the surface

Sometimes, as a reader, you feel hopelessly unable to read everything you want to. You wonder how you’ll ever be able to get through everything on your To-Be-Read wishlist. You feel kind of like this guy:

It can be embarrassing, at age 35, to list out all famous the writers you’ve never read before. My list, the one below on the left, was just pulled off the top of my head- it’s not even exhaustive. But look at all those authors! Subtract a few short stories I might have read by that group, and I’d draw a complete blank on each one of them.

Now, it’s easy to throw your hands up in despair, but a quick perusal of “new” authors I’ve read over the last two years is pretty heartening. That’s what’s represented by the list below on the right. Look at all those  authors! It’s even longer than the list on the left. I’m tearing through them like they’re going out of style (as some of them undoubtedly are) and I’ve got Cervantes and Phillip Roth queued up and ready to move from left to right. It’s not unthinkable that in another couple years I can turn the majority of those on the left into so many notches on my readerly belt.

Looking at this side-by-side comparison, I’m feeling pretty good about making the most of the books I have left.

Some authors I'm embarrassed not to have read	Authors new to me since 2011
Saul Bellow	Herman Melville
Virginia Woolf	Charlotte Bronte
Jane Austen	Jack Kerouac
Leo Tolstoy	Edith Wharton
Theodor Dreiser	Henry James
Carson McCullers	Alice Munro
Flannery OConnor	Cormack McCarthy
Phillip Roth	John Steinbeck
Don Delilo	George Orwell
Alexander Dumas	Roberto Bolano
Jorge Luis Borges	Thomas Mann
Miguel Cervantes	William Faulkner
Gabriel Garcia Marquez	Wallace Stegner
Victor Hugo	Ivan Turgenev
Salman Rushdie	Marcel Proust
William Burroughs	Emily Bronte
Henry David Thoreau	George Eliot
Italo Calvino	Jeffrey Eugenides
Jack London	James Joyce
Haruki Murakami	E.M. Forster
William Gaddis	Eudora Welty
VS Naipaul	Joseph Heller
J.M. Coatzee	Sherwood Anderson
Jose Saramago	Fyodor Dostoevsky
John Updike	T.C. Boyle
David Foster Wallace	Isak Denisen
Ford Madox Ford	Thornton Wilder
Evelyn Waugh	Alan Paton
Henry Miller	Chaim Potok
Norman Mailer	Ricardo Guiraldes
Somerset Maugham	H. Rider Haggard
Sinclair Lewis	Karen Russel
Rudyard Kipling	Denis Johnson
Upton Sinclair	Jennifer Egan
Marylin Robinson	John Hersey
Margaret Atwood	Dana Spiotta
Willa Cather	Douglas Thayer
Michael Chabon	David Clark
Alexander Pushkin	Ben Lerner
Boris Pasternak	Boris Pahor
John Dos Passos	Roland Barthes
Thomas Wolfe	Ann Patchett
Tom Wolfe	Joan Didion
Gertrude Stein	David Gann
George Sand	Agatha Christie
Margaret Mitchell	Stephen King
Alice Walker	Orson Scott Card
Ralph Ellison	Clive Cussler
Erskine Caldwell	Erin Morgenstern
Allen Ginsberg	Steven Pressfield
Anne Bronte	C.J. Box
	Richard Skinner
	Stephen Hawking
	Carlos Ruiz Zafon

What Bugs Me Wednesday: Stream of Consciousness

You know what bugs me? Stream of Consciousness in fiction.

“And since sleep is is not, and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, Addy Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addy Bundren must be, and then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so, if I am not emptied yet, I am is.”

Call it innovative, call it avant guarde, call it whatever you want. But don’t tell me it gives the reader any clue what it’s like to be inside the character’s head. I’ve been  inside a head before. I’m inside mine every day. And it’s not disorienting or confusing in the least. Do things jump around a lot? Sure. Can an aroma or a song or a visual cue disrupt my thoughts and throw me twenty years into the past? Happens all the time. But there’s almost always some context, some thread I can follow in retrospect, something that ties the thoughts together into a fluid and flowing “stream” of consciousness.

But on the written page? That’s a different story altogether. When I have to wade through a confusing interior monologue in a book- I get the same feeling I get in my worst, mixed-up dreams. It’s a jolting confusion, like riding a rollercoaster in pitch blackness. It’s like those first couple seconds underwater when you turf it on waterskis- the noise of the churning water, the not knowing which way is up, being folded into some painful contortionists pose...

To be clear, I don’t think the concept  is a bad one. It could actually be very interesting if someone could pull it off (I’m told Henry James did it differently than most). But the execution  of it is all too often a festering, steaming pile of crap.

The way I see it you have two choices with Stream of Consciousness writing: you can choose to replicate the speed of thought, in which case unrelated sentence fragments are fired off almost as quickly as synapses fire in our brains (see example above) -or- you can actually replicate the cognitive journey of the character in question, in which case each new thought would flow by some logical connection to the next one, and each will leave the character with the feelings, memories, images and ideas associated with those thoughts- no matter how fast it occurs in real life. In other words you can go fast, or you can go deep. But you can’t do both.

If your goal is to demonstrate the physiological wonder of the human brain, and show how fast it moves between thoughts, then fine, go for option one above. Show us how random you can be. Awesome. But distant memories won’t be sorted from present action or from visualizations of future possibilities. Past and present, the real and the unreal, the hoped for and the feared…  we won’t know which is which. Your reader will just feel like they’re riding Space Mountain for the first time.

But if your goal is to convey what it’s really like to be inside the character’s head, your only real choice is to slow the passage of time and flesh out each impression as it surfaces- recreating the memories, painting the word pictures and describing the feelings they bring with them. Too long and boring? Doesn’t have to be. It’s done all the time for fight scenes. What would be an incomprehensible tangle of limbs, grunts, thoughts and pangs if paced in real-time, is slowed down and elongated so we can see each punch, each reaction and counterpunch, motivations, momentum, etc. But as long as writing is done with words, this choice between speed and depth will have to be made.

The reason for this is that the old adage that “a picture’s worth a thousand words” actually holds true. And unless you’re going to make a stab at getting some of those thousand words down on paper as each thought-picture appears to a character, then you can never give the reader the feel for what it’s like to be in the character’s head, and to see what’s going on. And yeah, to pretend otherwise, kinda bugs me. 

"An eater of broken meats"

Yesterday’s post may have left you with the impression that I didn’t enjoy King Lear  in the least. Not true. There’s lots to like. Take, for example, this string of insults that Kent throws at Oswald. It’s got to be one of the greatest, all-time put-downs:

KENT: Fellow, I know thee.

OSWALD: What dost thou know me for?

KENT: A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a

                base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,

                hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a

                lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson,

                glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue;

                one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a

                bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but

                the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar,

                and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I

                will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest

                the least syllable of thy addition.

What do Topper Harley and William Shakespeare have in common?

They can mow people down like no one else.

One of my goals for the year was to read something old school, so I picked up King Lear  by Shakespeare. It’s a play I never had to read in school, but it’s one that continues to get plenty of press. George Bernard Shaw declared that “no man will ever write a better tragedy than Lear.” Whether or not that’s true, I don’t think, after 400 years, that there’s much I can add in the way of interesting commentary. I’ll just say this:

A good death can spice up any story, and modern authors still use the loss of well-loved characters to execute kick-in-the-crotch endings all the time. But to my modern mind, a tragedy like Lear , where nearly all the principals lie dead or dying at the end of the tale, almost gives off a whiff of farce. 

As Cornwall, Oswald, Regan, Gloucester, Goneril, Edmund, Cordelia and Lear (and a few servants) all met their tragic ends towards the close of the final act, I couldn’t help being reminded of this body count scene from that great masterpiece of cinema, “Hot Shots: Part Deux.”

A Few More Flicks for Oscar Week

Some other book-to-film quick hits:

The Sound and the Fury, 1959

Starring Yule Brynner and Joanne Woodward, this may be one of the worst adaptations known to man. It’s been a long, long time since I waded through Faulkner’s masterpiece, but even after almost twenty years I could immediately see that the film version bears little resemblance to the book. Remember that Stream of Consciousness section told from the perspective of Benjy that you hated in high school? Good news! None of it made it onto the silver screen. The section about Quentin away at school? That’s not there either. The section about Dilsey, the black servant? Nope. The only portion of the book they even tried to cover was the drama between Jason and Quentin (Caddy’s daughter, not her brother.) And it’s a pretty boring movie to boot.

Tender is the Night, 1962

Jason Robards and Jennifer Jones play Dick and Nicole Diver in this so-so adaptation of Fitzgerald’s famous novel. The film gets kudos for following the main arc of the story, from meeting Rosemary Hoyt on the beach and the Divers’ many parties to the couple’s eventual break-up and the slow doling out of their backstory. But there was so much left out, that will really bother readers who wanted a faithful adaptation. And you don’t get a full sense of the “fall” of Dick Diver as his wife gains mental health and independence. That dynamic is what makes the story so interesting in the first place. Psychiatrist saves/marries his patient, then descends into a kind of madness himself.

Atlas Shrugged (Part I), 2011

I’ll say up front that I liked the idea of bringing this story into the modern day (as a reader I was always a little thrown by clunky terms like “inter-office communicator” that hadn’t yet been shortened to “intercom” when Ayn Rand wrote her book. But the fact railroads still remain the focus of Dagny’s struggle kind of defeats the purpose of modernizing it. I generally liked the casting of Taylor Schilling as Dagny and Grant Bowler as Hank Reardon (pictured above), but this thing is low-budget, and you can tell. It got slammed by critics, though I think that was bound to happen even if Martin Scorsese had been behind the project. It was generally pretty true to the first part of the book, and I’d probably check out parts II and III if I ever got the chance.

To Kill a Mockingbird, the movie

So, To Kill a Mockingbird.

I don’t think I’m alone in saying it’s one of my favorite books of all time. But amazingly, until last week, I had never seen the film. Now that that has been rectified, let’s talk about the movie.

As with “the Grapes of Wrath,” there were some key omissions in the film version: Calpernia is almost non-existent as a character, there is no visit to the all-black church where she and Tom Robinson’s family worship, there’s no uncle Jack, or Christmas at Finch’s Landing, there’s no house fire to give Boo Radley reason to cover a startled Scout with a blanket, no morphine rehab for Mrs. Dubose, and plenty of other edits that strip color and richness from the original. But while we may have lost some of the scope of Scout’s coming of age story on the cutting room floor, screenwriter Horton Foote still manages to hone in on the main drama of the court case, and the main theme of Innocence Lost. The angry mob is still shamed out of a lynching by Scout, Jem and Dill at the jail. We still get to see Atticus squeeze the trigger on the mad dog while the Sheriff soils his drawers. And there was still apparently enough of Atticus’s heroics and wisdom to nab a Best Actor nod for Gregory Peck.

All told the film won three Academy Awards (Peck for best actor, Horton Foote for best Adapted Screenplay, and it also won for Best Art Direction, in addition to being nominated in 5 other categories) and has gone down as one of the classics of American cinema. No doubt its appearance in 1962, just two years after the novel’s release and right in the throes of the Civil Rights Movement, was a huge factor in its lasting legacy and influence. It has come to epitomize the courtroom drama genre. (Plus, it gave us the film debut of Robert Duvall, who dyed his hair blond and stayed out of the sun for six weeks so he could play the reclusive bogeyman, Boo Radley.)

Is it a perfect adaptation? No, but it’s a darn, good flick, and it’s true to the heart of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer-winning masterpiece. Check it out:

The Grapes of Wrath, the movie

Here is a film that is generally true to the text, especially in the first half of the action, but there were a couple key differences that will make fans of the novel gasp. There was no devastating flood at the end, for example, and since it was the forties, no breastfeeding of emaciated old men in barns. The ‘second-half’ sequence of events was reshuffled slightly so that the book’s happy interlude of life in the government camp was bumped to the end of the movie- to manufacture a happy ending where Steinbeck provided none.

But there are certain touching scenes that are right out of Steinbeck’s masterpiece: the kindly truckers in a Route 66 roadside diner, who leave huge tips to compensate the owners for their own kindness to the Joads, the kids’ wonder at the flushing toilets in the government camp, and the handwritten note stuffed in a jar next to the grandfather’s hastily buried body, just to name a few. The casting and acting is first-rate (except maybe for the sideshow character of Casy, who comes off as a village idiot.) In short, there’s a lot to love for Steinbeck nation.

In fact, if you thought the book was too dark and overly political, you’ll probably love the film- it’s a classic. But if you’re a literary adaptation purist, some of the changes may not sit well with you obviously. It is a gorgeous film, however, and it’s worth checking out if only to see Jane Darwell’s Oscar-winning performance as Ma Joad. (Henry Fonda is no slouch as Tom, and John Ford also took home the Oscar for best Director.) Give it a watch.

At the Movies

Oscar week is upon us, and I’ll try to review some classic literary adaptations as the days go  by. In the meantime, here’s a look at some of our other “film-inspired” posts:

• You’ve heard of movies based on books, but what about movies based on poems?
• Or how about some screenplays that came before the book?
• There’s the time William Faulkner rewrote a work of Ernest Hemingway.
• Here’s our look at Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris.”
• And our review of HBO’s “Hemingway and Gellhorn.”
• There’s this clip of Proustian Memory from Pixar.
• A hollow literary adaptation is reviewed here.
• A Raymond Carver Short Story takes a turn on the big screen.
• And of course, the bookish winner of Best Animated Short from last year.

Ghosts of the living

"There is something memorable in the experience to be had by going into a fair ground that stands at the edge of a Middle Western town on a night after the annual fair has been held. The sensation is one never to be forgotten. On all sides are ghosts, not of the dead, but of living people. Here, during the day just passed, have come the people pouring in from the  town and the country around. Farmers with their wives and children and all the people from the hundreds of little frame houses have gathered within these board walls. Young girls have laughed and men with beards have talked of the affairs of their lives. The place has been filled to overflowing with life. It has itched and squirmed with life and now it is night and the life has all gone away. The silence is almost terrifying." 

-from Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

Review: Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

I should say up front that Winesburg, Ohio  was not a book that I was just dying to read. We’ve dealt with Sherwood Anderson’s influence here and here, and it was his influence on writers I have loved, more than anything else, that prompted me to check out his most famous book.

So what kind of book is it? Not a novel, that’s for sure. Not even a short story collection in the strictest sense- though each of the stories could technically stand on their own. It’s actually a short story cycle, where a number of stories work together like a mosaic to fill in a picture larger than themselves.

The common theme tying them all together seems to be the notion that meaningful connections with other people, even in a place as small as Winesburg, are a deceptive mirage you can never quite get to. A number of the stories focus on near -connections, typically occurring on long walks about the town (there is a bar in Winesburg, but not much else in the way of entertainment), but ultimately the characters are disappointed to find themselves bereft of the friendship and understanding that they so desperately craved. If I were to sum up the plight of Anderson’s characters in one word, I would say that they yearn .

Inserting obligatory "Yearning" link here.

Now, there are  some repeating characters we get to know a little better than others, especially the character of young George Willard, who serves as a kind of sounding board for the lost souls of his town, and whose decision to leave Winesburg in the last story gives the book its ending. But no matter the length, each story is a kind of simple character sketch, or a study in backstory- almost like a writing exercise. I was impressed with the eloquent way in which he puts their inner lives on display for the reader, as in this quick but precise description:

“In the big empty office the man and the woman sat looking at each other and they were a good deal alike. Their bodies were different, as were also the color of their eyes, the length of their noses, and the circumstances of their existence, but something inside them meant the same thing, wanted the same release, would have left the same impression on the memory of an onlooker.”

Each character’s got a history, and each finds himself in a dilemma, but there aren’t many happy resolutions or neatly tied-up endings. Every story simply adds another tile to the mosaic, which I why I would say that, in the end, the main character is probably Winesburg itself.

It’s worth checking out, as a “founding document” of modern American fiction, if nothing else.