Wordmanship
Monday, April 22, 2024
Mostly funny stuff
Friday, April 19, 2024
Fowler play
Connie May Fowler |
Some mistakes turn out to be blessings, and this was one of them. I enjoyed Connie May's novel as much as I have Karen Joy's.
But adding to the confusion, there is also Therese Anne.
Therese Anne Fowler is the author of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, A Well-Behaved Woman and other novels. I have not read any of her books, but this Fowler may actually have sold more books than the other two. I don't really know about that, but her books seem easier to find. I do know that when one gets to the F's in the fiction section of a bookstore or library, one needs to be careful about those Fowlers.
There is also an Earlene Fowler, but fortunately she does not use her middle name, and her books are usually shelved with the mysteries.
Wednesday, April 17, 2024
Flying away
Set in Florida in the 1960s, during the Johnson administration, the story is told by Bird, a little girl whose actual name is Avocet. Her mother wanted to name her daughters after birds, and her older sister got Phoebe. Avocet, being so unusual, was soon replaced with the nickname Bird. And bird imagery flies in and out of the novel, including its title.
In Bird's family, her father often beats her mother after both have spent a night drinking, and then her mother beats her two daughters. These beatings are often brutal and graphic, such as a coffee mug struck hard into Phoebe's face and Bird being whipped with a belt, the buckle end striking her bare back repeatedly. Their mother confesses that her father beat her as a child.
Following Bird's father's death — was it suicide or murder? — their mother takes the girls to Tampa and moves into an old motel. She works in the office to pay for their cramped quarters, while buying food and alcohol with government checks. Every night Bird's mother resumes her drinking, while her two daughters walk on eggshells.
Miss Zora, an old and mysterious black woman, also lives on the property. Bird's mother dislikes her and tries to get the motel owner to evict her, but Bird forms a deep relationship with this woman who, despite her apparent wisdom, has lost contact with her own daughter. White authors often have difficulty creating authentic black characters, choosing to bestow on them moral perfection and often mystical powers. They can have similar difficulties with Indian characters in western novels. Fowler comes close to this, but in the end she makes Miss Zora a realistic, imperfect and vulnerable human being.
Bird and Phoebe dream of flying away from their abusive home, yet they love their mother deeply, just as their mother loves them when her anger is under control. Fowler finds a way to make love provide the answer to this terrible situation.
Monday, April 15, 2024
Clever foolishness
Sebastian Faulks |
I wish I would have known about this novel years ago when I wrote a newspaper column about novels with unusual chapter arrangements. There is one novel, for example, that consists only of first chapters. The first-person narrator begins her story and then, dissatisfied, begins it again and again, each time at a different point. Eventually the entire story is told without her ever getting past the first chapter.
And there is one author whose novels never have a chapter 13.
My favorite part of the Faulks novel is where a character refers to the Fool's Alphabet, a series of puns. There are different versions of this, and it is sometimes called the Cockney Alphabet. Reciting it with a Cockney accent, or simply by saying it quickly out loud, can help in catching the puns. Here are some examples.
A for 'orses
C for yourself (or C for miles, in some versions)
G for police
L for leather
M for sis
Q for a ticket
S for Williams (or, if you prefer, S for you, you can take a hike)
X for breakfast
Several of the puns I have yet to figure out, but those that I have, including those above, are very clever, clearly not the work of a fool.
Friday, April 12, 2024
Read it again
If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.
François Mauriac, French novelist
François Mauriac |
Yet I have heard or read about individuals who read certain books, such as Middlemarch or Pride and Prejudice, repeatedly, sometimes as often as once a year. I admire these people. They may not be able to read as many new books as they might wish, but they have managed to find one book that speaks to them deeply and says something new and different each time they return to it. That seems wonderful to me, and as François Mauriac says, the book they choose to reread tells us something about them.
I have read a number of books more than once, and a few three times — J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King and Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt come to mind —but taking the time to be dedicated to one particular novel over a lifetime seems like a luxury to me.
My passion for Charles Dickens has come rather late in life, but I think now that Our Mutual Friend or Little Dorrit would be excellent books to devote a lifetime to. They are so long and deep and detailed that it might take a lifetime to fully appreciate them. One reading clearly is inadequate. This helps explain the devotion some have toward Middlemarch. I read George Eliot's novel once and felt like I could only begin to understand all that was going on.
Of course, if one is going to focus on a single book, especially at my stage of life, it would be much easier to choose something shorter. Maybe it's time to pick up Franny and Zooey again. What does that say about me?
Wednesday, April 10, 2024
Mind the middle
Mickey Spillane |
Mickey Spillane
When reviewing Hans Brinker by Mary Mapes Dodge the other day, I complained about the Dutch travelogue the author inserted into the middle of her story, which seemed to me to be mostly padding intended to make her novel for children longer than it needed to be. True, Dodge does introduce some characters in this part of the novel and creates some subplots. Even so it is the dullest part of the book and over the years has probably caused many readers to put down the novel and never pick it up again.
So many novels are like this, even if not to the extreme of Dodge's book. Most novels start out exciting, or at least interesting, to get the reader hooked. And they conclude with a flourish, as love, truth or whatever prevails and questions are answered and loose ends are tied up.
But then there is that middle part where the story slows down. The novelist fills in the background, telling us what happened before the opening chapter. We find out more about the characters and are introduced to new ones. Sometimes all this is necessary, yet often it seems like padding, sort of like Dodge's travelogue. Even mysteries and thrillers often have dead spots in the middle where nothing much seems happen.
Novelist Siri Hustvedt said, "Novels often sag under their own weight halfway through." Readers are reading for resolution of the plot, while writers are struggling to achieve 300 pages or 400 pages or whatever the desired length may be.
Ideally the author can let tension build during this central part of a novel, rather than hit a pause button on the plot. Of novels I have read recently, I would rate William Kent Krueger's The River We Remember highly this regard. The author brings in backstory without seriously slowing down the momentum of the main story. In a very different kind of novel, Thrity Umrigar does something similar in The Space Between Us.
And so it can be done. Too many authors fail to do it well.
Monday, April 8, 2024
Good story buried in detail
Mary Mapes Dodge |