Friday, June 29, 2018

The math in literature

Math and literature don't mix. Or so we thought in high school. Or in college. Or five minutes ago. Ben Blatt proves differently in Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal about the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing.

Now that most books have been digitalized it has become a fairly easy process to study word usage over the centuries. This is how lexicographers now determine when individual words first appeared in print. Blatt applies the same techniques to literature and comes up with a number of fascinating discoveries.

Adverbs: The novels generally considered to rank among the best tend to have fewer adverbs than lesser books.

Exclamation points: James Joyce, often considered one of the best novelists, used lots of exclamation points. Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, also highly regarded, used very few.

Suddenly: Elmore Leonard said writers should never use the word suddenly. He didn't, at least after he included that as one of his rules of writing. Early in his career, however, he used that word frequently.

Cliches: Some writers employ numerous clichés in their work (James Patterson, for example) and others use few (Jane Austen), but all writers have their favorites. Tom Clancy: "by a whisker." Faulkner: "sooner or later." Donna Tartt: "too good to be true." Patterson: "believe it or not." Austen: "with all my heart."

As for Vladimir Nabokov and the color mauve, it seems that the author of Lolita tended to think and write in color, and of the many colors represented in his work, mauve was his favorite. Ray Bradbury, on the other hand, was inspired by the spice rack and by tastes in general. Words like spearmint, nutmeg, lemon, onion and vanilla show up frequently in his stories. But his favorite flavor was cinnamon.

Often a reader's response to Blatt's findings will be an insolent "so what?" He can make a big deal about very little. Still this is an informative book that reveals how each writer's style is his own, right down to individual word choices and even punctuation choices. If you are a writer thinking about writing a new series of books using a pseudonym, forget about it. Ben Blatt, or someone like him, will track you down.

It's all in the numbers.

Wednesday, June 27, 2018

'From Russia' still something to love

Robert Shaw and Sean Connery in From Russia with Love
One of my college professors reflected one day that From Russia with Love was the best of the James Bond films. This was early in the franchise and Goldfinger had only recently been released, so the pool of Bond movies to pick from was small. His only argument that I can remember was that each of the secret weapons packed into Bond's briefcase was put to good use.

Having just finished Ian Fleming's novel From Russia with Love, I can supply another reason why the movie with that title ranks with the best, not just up to Goldfinger but up till now: It follows the book.  Most James Bond movies use the titles and maybe a few characters from Fleming's novels, and not much else. Their plots are often outlandish, anything to justify lots of explosions, fights and special effects. I watched the film again while in the middle of the novel, and I was amazed how closely what's on the screen corresponds with what's on the page. And what's on the page is pretty darned good.

Sure there are places where the film strays from the novel, but usually for good reason. Bond doesn't make his entrance in the book until page 95 in my edition, more than one-third of the way into the story. That wouldn't do in a James Bond movie. The first part of the novel is taken up with the Russian plot to kill Bond and with Red Grant, the Brit turned Soviet assassin who is sent to do the deed. All this is dealt with quickly and changed somewhat in the movie. After all, people were going to buy tickets to see Sean Connery, not Robert Shaw.

In the book, a character is shot as he steps out of Marilyn Monroe's mouth in a giant billboard. In the movie he steps out of Anita Ekberg's mouth, Monroe having died the year before the movie was released. And in the book Bond doesn't have a briefcase full of weaponry. In fact there is a wonderful line near the end that reads, "If only his Service went in for those explosive toys!" It is as if Fleming had anticipated the film's gadgetry.

Perhaps the most striking difference between the two is the ending. Oh, yes, in both we have the confrontation  between Bond and Col. Klebb, that little woman with the switch-blade shoe. The result of that clash is quite different, however. Fleming leaves us with a cliffhanger that in 1957, when the book was published, must have made readers anxious for the next book in the series.



Monday, June 25, 2018

Something to prove

Billy Boyle's father is a pretty good police detective in Boston, and through his dad's influence Billy gets on the force and becomes a fledgling detective himself. Then the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, and Billy finds himself in the Army. Again thanks to family influence, he gains a quick appointment to lieutenant and a supposedly cushy and safe post under his Uncle Ike, none other than Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, in London. Then Billy learns Uncle Ike, seemingly under the impression the young man has more police experience than he actually does, appoints him his investigator. His first mission: find  a spy among the Norwegian officers planning an invasion to retake their country from the Nazis.

So begins Billy Boyle (2006), the first book in James R. Benn's series of World War II mysteries and a book that will make you want to seek out the others in the series.

The best thing about Billy Boyle is Billy Boyle, an intriguing and likable character who is unsure he actually possesses any of his father's investigative skills and who, expecting to sit out the war in relative safety, finds himself in an extremely dangerous situation, leading to his own personal invasion of Norway. If you were making a movie of this story 50 years ago, you would have wanted James Garner in the starring role.

Other characters in the novel, including British naval officer Daphne Seaton and Polish officer Piotr Kazimierz, prove interesting, as well. Both Daphne and Kaz are assigned to assist Billy in his investigation and prove invaluable, often doing better detective work than Billy himself.

The light tone with which Benn opens the novel soon turns dark, as both the war and the espionage plot (and later a murder) become deadly serious. Billy proves up to the task, although his abilities as a detective remain somewhat in doubt even as the story ends. The happy ending proves to be due as much luck as skill. So Billy still has something to prove, and to learn, in the other books in the series. These include A Blind Goddess and Blue Madonna.

Friday, June 22, 2018

Pleasure reading for a Russian summer

Two members of my team of medical providers were born and raised in Russia, and with one of them this week I got into a discussion about literature, obviously a more interesting subject to both of us than my reasons for coming to her office.

In Russia, she said, summer break for all students begins on June 1 and ends on Sept. 1. The dates don't vary from one school district to the next as they do in the United States. These three months aren't exactly free time, however, as students are given lists of 50 books to read over the summer. Most of the books were by Russian or European authors, she said, but there were a few American works among them. The book she most raved about surprised me: The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper. She commented that compared with War and Peace and Crime and Punishment, both required reading during the school year, Cooper's novel was pleasure reading, perhaps what Americans call a beach book.

The Last of the Mohicans has not been viewed as pleasure reading in the U.S. for a good long time, although once it was. Published in 1826, it was a runaway bestseller, not just in the U.S. but in Europe, as well. Perhaps few people read it today, at least outside Russia, but for much of the 19th century, it was considered all but mandatory reading, bigger than anything by Dan Brown or James Patterson today. It put American literature on the map, for up until that time the United States had few writers of note, nobody whose work was read on the other side of the Atlantic. Cooper changed that.

That's why Thomas C. Foster includes The Last of the Mohicans in his book Twenty-Five Books That Shaped America. Cooper was America's first professional writer, his books were that popular. "Someone had to go first, show that there was a life to be recorded here, that this place, this new set of possibilities, could inspire a new literature" Foster writes. "Cooper set the signpost on the road, and hearty travelers have been following it ever since."

That being said, Foster points out that Mohicans is actually a very poorly written book. Mark Twain said as much in his famous 1895 essay "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," and Foster agrees with him.  "If you love language, love narrative grace, love prose style, Cooper offends every part of your literary sensibility," he writes.

Still it's quite a story, as even a Russian school girl would attest.

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Half trade, half art

William Ralph Inge
"Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art," wrote William Ralph Inge, a British writer and priest who lived from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th. It's an interesting point and, I believe, a valid one.

The best literature does seem to spring from those writers struggling both to make a living and to make art. A James Patterson, whose thriller machine produces a new best-seller several times each year, makes lots of money but no books with literary value. Meanwhile, those writers who would rather starve than entertain readers may produce literature, but if hardly anyone reads it, so what?

There are exceptions. Charles Dickens had an expensive lifestyle and many mouths to feed, so writing books that drew many readers was his top priority, yet many of those books continue to be taught in literature classes. Meanwhile Emily Dickinson had no interest in either fame or fortune, yet her poetry continues to be read and discussed today.

Still I believe Inge was right that a compromise of trade and art works best for literature as a whole. Art should be accessible to the common people, not just the intellectual elite. Why have art museums if hardly anyone ever pays for admission? And why have bookshops full of books hardly anyone wants to read? And of what value is a museum full of velvet Elvis paintings or a bookshop full of James Patterson novels?

Many literary scholars regard William Faulkner as a better writer than Ernest Hemingway, but the public bought and read more Hemingway novels than Faulkner novels. Faulkner had to write screenplays to make a living, while Hemingway, ever the tradesman, supported himself with his writing. Which of them was better for American literature? I'd say Hemingway, and I think Inge would agree.

Monday, June 18, 2018

Cult fiction

(The Scarlet Letter) has never attracted cult followings in the way of On the Road or Tropic of Capricorn; that doesn't mean it's not influential.
Thomas C. Foster, Twenty-Five Books That Shaped America

We have some idea what is meant when we hear the phrase "cult movies." I picture midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the fans in costumes from the film saying favorite lines as they come on the screen. Or fans of The Big Lebowski, also in costume, devoting an entire weekend to watching the movie, bowling and drinking white Russians.

But what about cult novels? Is there such a thing? Thomas C. Foster mentions On the Road and Tropic of Capricorn, but have devoted fans of these books ever behaved in a like manner to fans of those movies?

In their 1998 book Cult Fiction: A Reader's Guide, Andrew Calcutt and Richard Shephard discuss Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller, the authors of the two "cult" books Foster mentions, as well as dozens of others. They define cult fiction as "literature from the margins and extremes." It is outside the mainstream, they say, and in one way or another is viewed as deviant. Most of the writers they mention fit this definition: Richard Brautigan, Hunter S. Thompson, Hubert Selby Jr., Ken Kesey and Jim Harrison, to name just a few. But other writers they include seem to me about as mainstream as can be: Nick Hornby, Joyce Carol Oates, Elmore Leonard, Dorothy Parker, Raymond Chandler, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ring Lardner, Flannery O'Connor, Robert Louis Stevenson and J.D. Salinger, for example.

I think Calcutt and Shephard are right to talk about cult fiction in terms of authors rather than individual books, but I am not so sure the fact that writers used drugs (like Thomas de Quincey) or were homosexual (like Truman Capote) necessarily makes them cult writers. Even the subject matter dealt with in their books doesn't define a cult writer unless there actually is, or has been, a cult. Elmore Leonard and Ring Lardner have had many fans over the years, myself included, but have they ever inspired anything that might be termed a cult?

Yet a few writers, none of them mentioned by Calcutt and Shephard, do strike me as being the focus of cult-like activity.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle
This cult surrounds not Doyle himself but his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes. Since 1934 when Christopher Morley started the group, the Baker Street Irregulars have met to discuss the "Sacred Writings," not of Doyle but of Dr. John Watson. These Holmes fans and scholars, having formed chapters around the world, talk about the stories with all the seriousness of a Bible study. Some may even dress as Holmes or in other costumes appropriate to the period.

In addition, Holmes is the subject of countless books, both nonfiction and pastiches, as well a nonstop series of movies and television programs based on the character. There is a room in the Toronto Public Library, which I have visited, that is devoted to Holmes, and rooms at 221B Baker Street in London, an address that is itself fictional, are visited each day by fans from around the world. I have been there as well.

Jane Austen

Like Sherlock Holmes, Austen's characters have inspired endless attention from her fans, mostly but not entirely women. Each year several new novels are written featuring these characters or characters patterned after them, including works in the mystery and horror genres. Many films have been made either based on Austen's books or inspired by them or by her life. Among these include The Jane Austen Book Club, Becoming Jane, Austenland, The Lizzie Bennett Diaries and even Clueless.

C.S. Lewis

In his case, it is not just his fiction, such as the Narnia Chronicles and his science fiction novels, but also his theological and academic works that continue to generate interest and a flow of books and articles. Annual festivals, such as the one held each fall in Petosky, Mich., give fans an opportunity to hear scholars talk about his work.

You might also be able to make a case for certain other writers, such as William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. The Harry Potter stories and The Lord of the Rings stories have generated cult-like behavior, but this may have more to do with the movies than the books themselves.

Movies generate cults more easily than books simply because they can be experienced as a group and because they are visual, better lending themselves to costumes and other imitative behavior. Cult fiction takes a different form, but as Sherlock Holmes, Jane Austen and C.S. Lewis have shown, it is possible.

Friday, June 15, 2018

In praise of the bookmobile

... the real reason for which the wheel was invented, the bookmobile. Literary salvation that rolled.
Thomas C. Foster, Twenty-Five Books That Shaped America

Last week, for the first time in 60 years, I stepped onto a bookmobile. I spotted it in the parking lot of the supermarket where I shop. During the summer, instead of making the rounds of area schools, our local bookmobile stops on a regular schedule at various businesses, parks, etc., in the county. Seeing it there in the parking lot, I knew I had to peek inside to rekindle fond bookmobile memories.

My first surprise was how spacious it was. Like Doctor Who's Tardis, it seemed bigger inside than outside. I'm sure bookmobiles are much larger than they were in my elementary school days, but it helped that other than two staffers and a mother and daughter, I had the vehicle to myself. I didn't have several classmates at may elbows also looking for choice books in the same cramped space. That may be my only unpleasant bookmobile memory.

The second surprise was that the modern bookmobile, at least during the summer, has materials for adults as well as children. None of the books interested me, but I did borrow a DVD (The Book of Henry).

A couple days after my bookmobile visit I came upon Thomas C. Foster's tribute to bookmobiles in Twenty-Five Books That Shaped America. Like me, Foster grew up in rural Ohio, just a few years behind. His reflections come in his chapter about The Cat in the Hat, a book that revolutionized elementary education in America. "Those earlier years," he writes, "were taken up with slight variations on 'See Spot. See Spot run.' I know not what course others may take, but those words still make me want to run." Then comes the sentence quoted above, where he praises the bookmobile for giving us kids growing up in the Fifties something interesting to read even before Dr. Seuss worked his magic. "From the bookmobile you could get stories," he says. "From the bookmobile you could eventually get Robert Louis Stevenson. From the bookmobile you could even occasionally get in trouble with your mother. From the primers you got Spot."

That's pretty much how I remember it. We had a small library in our rural school, and while I have fond memories of that, too, the advent of the bookmobile brought so many more reading options. And those bookmobile books were practically new, not like those school library books that had been on the same shelves for years. And each time the bookmobile came to our school it had a different selection of books. What excitement bookmobile day brought, once every two weeks if I remember correctly.

Eventually the bookmobile that came to our school began to offer less appealing choices. My reading tastes were maturing, while the books in the bookmobile stayed at the same level. When the weather was good enough, I started riding my bicycle or driving my dad's tractor into town to visit the public library, which was also the high school library, although I wouldn't be in high school for another year or two. There I walked past the juvenile books and went straight to the adult section. But the bookmobile had filled a need, fed a hunger, quenched a thirst during my elementary days. It was wonderful to relive those memories.

Wednesday, June 13, 2018

Shaping America one book at a time

One novel talks to another, which talks to another, which talks back to the first two and forward to the next, and so on, one generation of narrative succeeding another till the end of time.
Thomas C. Foster, Twenty-Five Books That Shaped America

Despite what the title suggests, Thomas C. Foster's book Twenty-Five Books That Shaped America has more to do with shaping American literature than with shaping America itself, although one can certainly make the case (and Foster does) that a nation is shaped by its literature.

To be sure, some of the books selected by Foster have had a direct impact on American culture. The Grapes of Wrath showed the haves what life was really like for the have-nots during the Great Depression. To Kill a Mockingbird changed, and continues to change, attitudes toward race in America, as well as attitudes toward those with mental or emotional disabilities. The Cat in the Hat changed American education, replacing Dick and Jane readers with books children actually enjoy reading and leading to Sesame Street in the bargain. Not all influences have been positive. Foster blames Walden for those misguided utopian cults that attempted to withdraw from society and be self-sufficient, as well as those individuals who have misread Thoreau and gone off into the wilderness without the skills or knowledge to survive.

Yet in most cases, Foster concentrates on how certain works of literature have profoundly influenced literature that came later. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin gave justification to all those subsequent creative, somewhat fictional memoirs. American mystery novels, especially those of the hard-boiled variety, continue to show the influence of The Maltese Falcon. The Sun Also Rises "taught America how to write." On the Road "reshaped the sound of modern prose." Virtually all American poetry, Foster writes, owes a debt to Leaves of Grass. A whole generation of black writers was influenced by Their Eyes Were Watching God. William Faulkner, in books like Go Down, Moses, inspired the work of Louise Erdich (Love Medicine), whose own work has in turn inspired other American Indian writers.

Sometimes, as with The Crying of Lot 49, it isn't clear why the book made his list. One could surely make a better case for The Carpetbaggers or anything by Stephen King, for doesn't a widely read book have greater impact than one few people have read? But Foster likes it, and this is his book.

Notice that Foster calls his book Twenty-Five Books That Shaped America, not The Twenty-Five Books That Most Shaped America. He says repeatedly that these are just the 25 books (actually more, since he includes two books by Robert Frost) he chose to write about. He could have mentioned others, and in fact he does at the end of the book. These others include the likes of The Red Badge of Courage, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Winesburg, Ohio, Babbitt, Native Son, The Catcher in the Rye and The House on Mango Street.

He invites readers to form their own list of influential books. "Set your own standard for excellence and greatness," he writes. "Don't take someone else's word for it. Not even mine."

Foster, author of those books with titles like How to Read Literature Like a Professor, has such a spritely writing style that most readers will enjoy even those chapters about books one has little interest in, like The Crying of Lot 49, for example.

Monday, June 11, 2018

Reading heartbeats

Had I come here to find my father, to understand him, or to try him?
Jan-Philipp Sendker, The Art of Hearing Heartbreaks

Any parent searching for a runaway child might face these three choices. Is simply finding the child enough, or is there an overwhelming need to punish or, in better parents, a wish to understand the reasons for running away in the first place? Jan-Philipp Sendker's novel The Art of Hearing Heartbeats finds the same questions facing an adult child searching for a runaway parent.

Julia's mother has no interest in tracking down her missing husband, a successful New York City businessman. But the discovery of an old letter from someone named Mi Mi in Burma (now known as Myanmar) suggests the old man may have returned to his native country. Traveling alone, Julia sets off for Burma to find him.

In the village where her father was born, she meets a strange man named U Ba who seems to know all about her father and about her as well. He promises to take her to her father, but first there is a story to tell.

This story, which takes up most of the novel, tells of a boy named Tin Win who is abandoned by his superstitious mother because he is born on an unlucky day, a self-fulfilling prophecy if there ever was one. He is raised by a neighbor. Having gone blind, the boy compensates by developing his sense of hearing so that he his capable of reading heartbeats the way other people read faces. What's more, he can pick out one particular heartbeat in a crowd of people. (The novelist makes frequent references to heartbeats in all sorts of contexts.)

The heartbeat Tin Win loves best belongs to Mi Mi, a girl with a handicap of her own. She was born with misshapen feet and has never been able to walk. They fall in love and move about the village together, she on his strong back while using her own eyes to guide him. They are separated by a wealthy uncle who, thinking he is doing Tin Win a favor, has the cataracts removed from his eyes, sends him to school and then overseas for his business. Eventually Tin Win winds up in New York, changes his named, marries another woman, all the while longing for the girl of his youth.

Have I told the whole story? Not hardly, for Sendker, a German journalist who spent time in Asia, has some surprises I haven't touched on. Even in translation, the beauty of his writing comes through, and even if the pace of the narrative is a bit slow, most readers won't mind.

Friday, June 8, 2018

Story vs. plot

What is the difference between plot and story? Is there a difference? To many of us, they mean the same thing, or virtually the same thing. I don't think I had ever considered the distinction until I read Ursula K. LeGuin's essay "The Narrative Gift as a Moral Conundrum" in her book No Time to Spare.

LeGuin sees the difference between story and plot as follows:

"Plot, to me, is variation or complication of the movement of story." This reminds me of the oft-repeated phrase "the plot thickens." This is what we might say, or think, when watching Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds and those birds start attacking humans or when watching Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot when Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon witness a mob massacre and start running for their lives. To LeGuin, this isn't a matter of the plot thickening but rather of the plot starting. The story began several minutes earlier in each film. Now the plot kicks in.

"Story goes. Plot elaborates the going." The story obviously doesn't stop when the plot begins. It just gets more interesting. That's why most readers can be easily bored by novels (or movies) with no noticeable plot. "When is something going to happen?" we wonder. That something happening is the plot.

"Plot ... turns the story into a cobweb, a waltz, a vast symphonic structure in time." More than just a complication or an elaboration of the story, the plot, says LeGuin, is a thing of beauty, a work of art. I don't think she is suggesting that every plot is a work of art, but even a routine plot makes even a routine story better.

Does every story need a plot? Some novels, including some that are highly regarded in literary circles, don't have them, or at least not that you would notice. Thomas C. Foster writes in his book Twenty-Five Books That Shaped America that Jack Kerouac's On the Road has "no plot worth mentioning." LeGuin herself cites Virginia Woolf's The Mark on the Wall as an example of a story without a plot.

One kind of story that doesn't require a plot to be interesting is a life story, someone's biography or memoir. LeGuin is critical of those writers who try to insert a plot into a person's life "unless the subject obligingly provided one by living it," she says. One person who did have a life with a plot, it seems to me, was Beatrix Potter, who after a long struggle was able to use the wealth she earned from her illustrated children's books to escape a domineering mother and find happiness at her own place in the country.

Most of us live lives without plots, but we prefer that novels and movies have them.

Wednesday, June 6, 2018

The origin of Winnie-the-Pooh

A.A. Milne didn't intend to use his son as a stepping-stone to fame and fortune. So writes Ann Thwaite in Goodbye Christopher Robin, the basis for a recent movie with the same title.

For one thing, Milne already had fame and fortune. He was, in the early 1920s, the most successful playwright in Great Britain. He had also written novels, including The Red House Mystery, and had been a popular writer for Punch. He didn't need either Christopher Robin or Winnie-the-Pooh to make his mark in the world.

For another, while Christopher Robin may have been his little boy's real name, it isn't what Milne or anyone else called him. He was called Billy Moon, or just Billy or, more often, just Moon. At the time the "Christopher Robin" of the poems and stories almost seemed like somebody else, an invented character.

This latter point seems a stretch. Other characters, including Winnie-the-Pooh himself, were clearly based on his son's toys. He and his wife even went shopping for new toys for their son, Kanga and Roo, to give Milne more characters to work with. E.H. Shepard came to the nursery to see both Christopher Robin and his toys before doing his drawings for the books. So how could Milne have imagined the character of Christopher Robin was anyone other than his own son?

But the young author never expected his poetry for children (When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six) and his Winnie-the-Pooh books to become as popular as they did or to cast everything else he wrote into the shadows. Besides, at the time both Milne's wife and his little boy loved the books and the attention they brought. Only later, as Christopher Robin grew into manhood and struggled to find his own place in the world, did resentment grow and Milne fully realize his mistake.

The son later referred to the attention received through his father's books, both as a child and as an adult, as "empty fame." It had nothing to do with anything he did. Christopher Milne ran a bookshop and later wrote memoirs of his life as Winnie-the-Pooh's friend and A.A. Milne's son.

Thwaite quotes extensively from these books, as well as from A.A. Milne's letters and other sources. These long, usually dull, excerpts are her book's major weakness. They interrupt her narrative and suggest that she, or her publisher, felt padding was needed to make her book, barely 250 pages, longer. But fans of Winnie-the-Pooh, the people who will read Goodbye Christopher Robin, don't mind short books.

Monday, June 4, 2018

Search for a missing father

Celine Watkins is no Miss Marple, her age (68) and her ability to unravel mysteries being among the few similarities. The protagonist in Peter Heller's Celine is a tall, elegant, uppercrust woman who looks like she could be a former supermodel. Instead she's a private investigator specializing in reuniting families. It is a personal crusade for her, for she doesn't need the money. As a teenager she had a baby taken away from her. The whereabouts of her daughter is one mystery she has never been able to solve.

Now she is hired by Gabriela, whose father, a National Geographic photographer, disappeared in Yellowstone two decades earlier, supposedly the victim of a bear. But that explanation has always seemed fishy, and now Gabriela wants to learn the truth.

So Celine and Pete, her husband, head west to Yellowstone. This isn't ideal territory for Celine to operate in because of its high altitude. She was a heavy smoker for 30 years and suffers from emphysema. She carries oxygen with her for emergencies, of which there are plenty in the mountains.

The mystery deepens when it becomes apparent that a man, a former military sniper, is following them. If the missing man wasn't killed by a bear, did he run away to escape Gabriela's oppressive stepmother or, as the presence of the sniper suggests, is there something else going on?

Heller's frequent flashbacks filling in details about Celine's past soon get bothersome, interfering with the flow of the narrative. Still they give depth to the character and to the novel itself, so readers should just slow down and enjoy an unusual and exceptional mystery.

Friday, June 1, 2018

Not a horse race

Art is not a horse race. Literature is not the Olympics.
Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare

Ursula K. Le Guin
Most of us love lists, rankings and ratings. I know I do. Which candidate is leading in the polls? How is my team seeded in the NCAA basketball tournament? What was the best movie of 2017? What are the 50 greatest American novels ever written? At least with political candidates there are elections and with sports teams there are games to settle matters. In most other things, including movies and books, it is only a matter of opinion as to which is better, awards, prizes and surveys notwithstanding.

"Literature is not the Olympics," Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in a blog post included in No Time to Spare. The late writer rebeled against the notion of judging one piece of writing against another. The very idea of a Great American Novel repulsed her. How does one compare Moby-Dick to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or The Grapes of Wrath or, for that matter, any of Le Guin's own novels? We may each have our opinions about which is better, but even when opinions agree, they remain just opinions. (Come to think of it, the winners of a number of Olympic events, such as figure skating and diving, are determined by the opinions of judges. They, too, are more art than horse race.)

Novelist Russell Banks said something similar when I heard him speak in January in St. Petersburg, Fla. "Writing is not a competitive sport," he said. Yet some writers, in the manner of Ernest Hemingway, seem to think that it is. They compete for sales, prizes and critical acclaim. Other writers are viewed not as colleagues but competitors.

There is nothing wrong with opinions. We all are going to like certain books and certain writers more than others. Some books truly are better than other books, even if we can't always be sure which ones. Not all novels deserve to be taught in high school and college literature classes, but it's probably a good thing that there seems to be more variety today than there was when I was in school.

What Le Guin and Banks are saying is simply that individual opinions matter, but really not all that much. They are fun to talk about and argue about, yet still each work of literature stands on its own merits, appreciated more by some readers than by others, but so what? Unlike a horse race, there can never be a winner.