Breaking the rules

Peter Heller

"I'll try," Beckett lied.

Peter Heller, Burn

I have a few pet peeves when I am reading fiction, and one of these is illustrated in the brief line above from Peter Heller's novel Burn.

Back in the 1960s when I attended Ohio University, I took several creative writing classes. Among the lessons remembered from those classes are these two:

1. It is better to show than to tell.

2. Avoid such phrases as "he boasted," "he implied," "he questioned," "he proclaimed," etc. There may be many words that indicate speech, but it is best to stick with "said." Ordinarily a fiction writer should avoid using the same word too often, but in this case using "said" again and again works best because the word becomes virtually invisible. It does the job without calling attention to itself. Again, you should show, not tell.

Heller, like so many writers, violates both of these rules with the word lied. To be fair, the above line comes near the end of the novel, and the author lacks much opportunity to demonstrate that Beckett is lying. Yet there must still be other ways to avoid telling us outright that Beckett is lying:

"Beckett said with an obvious lack of sincerity." "Beckett said in a distracted manner." "Beckett said. though Jess didn't believe him" "Becket said, putting up a brave front." "Beckett said without conviction."

Heller, in my view, could have revealed Beckett's lie in a more sophisticated manner than simply telling his readers that he is lying.

2025 superlatives

While others who write about books talk about the best books of the year in December, I prefer other superlatives. This allows me to mention more books, including those I didn't necessarily like. Keep in mind that I am writing about books I read in 2025, not necessarily those published in 2025.

Most Enchanting Book: How could one not be enchanted by Shelby Van Pelt's Remarkably Bright Creatures? An octopus in an aquarium helps unite a woman with the grandson didn't even know she had.

Most Important Book: David Toomey's Kingdom of Play seems important to me because he shows that human beings are not the only creatures in this world who like to play,

Most Daunting Book: I enjoyed reading Jane Smiley's 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. Even so, it took me forever to read because of its length, its complexity and that fact that it includes reviews of well over 100 novels, many of them obscure.

Wisest Book: These is wisdom to be found in Matt Haig's best-selling novel The Midnight Library. Haig explores the scientific theory that there may be alternative universes where each of us lives slightly different lives based on our choices. Perhaps our own universe may be the best one.

Most Familiar Book: The book Cinema '62 was not familiar to me, but its subject matter, movies released in 1962, certainly was. Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan make the case that 1962 was the best year for movies ever. It was also the year I began watching movies once or twice each week.

Most Incomprehensible Book: I'm glad I read John Baville's novel The Sea, but I confess I didn't really understand why the death of the narrator's beloved wife caused him to think about and write about other women.

Most Beautiful Book: The beauty of Small Things Like These lies partly in its brevity and simplicity. Clare Keegan sets her story in Ireland at a time when pregnant unmarried girls were not only forced to give up their babies but were also forced by nuns into virtual slavery.

Most Fearless Book: Kat Timpf says witty and fearless things on Gutfield! five nights a week. In You Can't Joke About That she insists there is absolutely nothing you cannot joke about.

Most Surprising Book: Imagine writing a book about the sounds of nature. Kathleen Dean Moore did that and produced the wonderful and surprising book Earth's Wild Music.

Most Unpleasant Book: Amy Helen Bell's Under Cover of Darkness take us back to wartime London when the crews of German bombers weren't the only ones killing people.

Most Luminous Book: I was captivated by Douglas Westerbeke's novel A Short Walk Through a Wide World about a woman who must keep moving to avoid becoming seriously ill.

Most Fun Book: Airplane! was a new kind of film comedy where the humor came from total seriousness. Surely You Can't be Serious by the same guys who made the movie takes us behind the scenes.

A game for readers (2025 edition)

Each year at this time I try to answer each of the following 12 questions as best I can using only the titles of books read that year. Here we go:

Describe yourself: The Great Alone

How do you feel?: Wandering Through Life

Describe where you currently live: The Sea (well, about a mile away)

If you could go anywhere, where would you go?: Into the Forest

Your favorite form of transportation: A Short Walk Through a Wide World

Your best friend is: The Innocent

You and your friends are: Remarkably Bright Creatures

What's the weather like where you are: The Weight of Winter (actually I'm in Florida)

What is the best advice you could give?: You Can't Joke About That

Thought for the day: You Are What You Watch

How would you like to die?: Under Cover of Darkness

What is your soul's present condition?: Spirit Crossing

Off the grid

Novelist Peter Heller is known for his superb outdoor adventures such as The Guide and The Last Ranger. He stays outdoors but takes off in a new direction in Burn (2024), a frightening view of the future.

Jess and Storey are longtime friends on a hunting trip in a secluded area of Maine, a state with many secluded areas. When they return to civilization they find that civilization seems to have evaporated. Town after town has been burned to the ground. Everyone seems to be trying to kill everyone else. The two men don't know one side from the other. Both sides seem to want to kill them.

Then they find a five-year-old girl and decide to try to return her to her parents, whatever the cost.

The novel often fails the believability test. Why would Maine, of all states, secede from the union? Why would either side want to destroy entire villages? Why would loving parents abandon their daughter? Once one puts such questions aside, the novel becomes compulsive reading.

'Authentic' novels

A redaction of a novel, by Hollywood or Broadway or Reader's Digest or a paraphrase or any other means, is known not to be a novel, not to be authentic. A novel can be dropped or outmoded or rediscovered by readers, but it can't be changed into something else ...

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

The comment above, made by Jane Smiley in her wonderful book 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, raises questions in my mind. Is what she says really true?

I don't think there is any question that a novel adapted for a movie or a stage play is no longer a novel. The story may be changed into a screenplay or a play, yet the novel itself still exists, unchanged. One can both read a novel and watch a movie adapted from that novel.

Reader's Digest seems more problematic. Is a condensed novel no longer a novel? Is it no longer the same novel? How about if the novel is condensed by the reader, who skips over descriptions or, as in the case of Moby-Dick, all those chapters about whaling that have little to do with the narrative? Do such readers fail to read "the novel" because, like Reader's Digest, they condensed what they read?

Does a novel translated into other languages, with totally different words, somehow cease to be "the novel?" How about if an editor cuts out large portions of a novel, such as happened with Thomas's Wolfe's work? Or what if a novelist changes something in a novel from one edition to another, as has sometimes occurred? Is one edition more "the novel" than another?

Novels, it seems to me, are "changed into something else" all the time — by editors, publishers, readers, translators, magazines that serialize them and even by the authors themselves. Scholars can make a career out of trying to determine which version of a novel is the authentic one.

The great river

A novelist is someone who has volunteered to be a representative of literature and to move it forward a generation. That is all.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

Jane Smiley's comment above begins to make sense after reading her earlier comment describing literature as "the great river of novels." Her book, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, represents Smiley's view of literature, from the earliest novels to some written not long before her book was published in 2005. She examines the whole river, so to speak.

In her view, anyone who writes a novel, good or bad, acts something like a small tributary. And so her metaphor comes clear. A novelist volunteers — nobody is forced — to write a novel, and by doing so adds to that great river and, as she says, helps "move it forward a generation." Even those who write novels set in an earlier generation are, perhaps without even meaning to, saying something about their own generation.

Even as fewer people seem to be reading novels, more people seem to be writing them. Years ago I made this observation about poetry — that more people seemed to write poems than read them. Now something similar seems to be happening with novels. There may be more novels being published today than ever before. Whether or not that is true, this great river keeps getting bigger and bigger, while fewer of us seem to be stopping to take a dip in that river.

When a woman soars

"Independence is freedom, and freedom is the only way for a woman to soar."

Spoken by Arlette in A Promise to Arlette by Serena Burdick

The above line found early in Serena Burdick's terrific 2025 novel A Promise to Arlette sounds like something contemporary feminists might say to one another, but this book covers a period from the 1930s to 1952. The novel disproves that line.

Ida Whipple is an American housewife with two children as the story opens in 1952. At a party a neighbor displays what purports to be a Man Ray photograph showing two nude women. Ida knows immediately that it is not actually a Man Ray photograph. She knows this because she is one of the women in the photograph.

That night Ida leaves her family, steals the photograph and heads across the country to California to try to find Man Ray. A few days later, after getting a clue about where she might be, Sidney, her husband, follows her to California, their two little girls in tow.

Most of the novel is a flashback. Ida seeks her independence by abandoning her family in England when in her teens and heading for Paris. Arlette becomes her new friend, a beautiful young Jewish woman who works for Peggy Guggenheim, the famous art patron and another Jew. When war breaks out and the Germans invade France, Peggy escapes, but Ida and Arlette remain in a chateau. When Arlette is captured, Ida assumes she has been taken to a camp and exterminated. Unable to leave France, she stays at the chateau under an assumed name. Then comes Sidney Whipple, an American paratrooper, who finds his way to that chateau and stays there, abandoning the war after falling in love with Ida.

What is the promise made to Arlette? Burdick saves the answer until near the end, giving the novel a powerful conclusion. Ida has twice abandoned her family, without ever truly finding independence or freedom. She soars, however, when the family she loves finds her.