What's so funny?

If it makes you laugh, it will make the reader laugh. Trust yourself, especially about humor. Humor is the highest art form. Satire, irony, whatever you choose to call it. If you think it's funny, the reader will too.

Ellen Gilchrist, The Writing Life

Ellen Gilchrist

The above is what novelist Ellen Gilchrist says she tells the students in her creative writing classes. She is right, I think. But she is also wrong.

First, why is she wrong?

She's wrong because people laugh at different things. Many share my delight in P.G. Wodehouse. Many others don't. The same is true of any other humor writer you might mention. I wrote a few months ago about a novel (Nobody, Somebody, Anybody) that the book jacket described as "laugh-out loud funny" but which I did not find funny at all.

My late wife and I rarely laughed at the same things. We shared laughs when we watched Laurel and Hardy together, some situation comedies and some romantic comedies, but not much else. She never found anything funny about Abbott and Costello, Woody Allen or Mel Brooks. Her favorite comedian was Red Skelton, and in fact he may have been the only comedian she enjoyed. Yet I think she laughed much more than I ever did. She just laughed at things I didn't find amusing at all. Whenever I laughed,  she looked at me as if to say, "What so funny about that?"

So if something makes you laugh, it won't necessarily make a reader laugh.

But them why is Gilchrist also right? Because you can't write humor for someone other than yourself. If you write something that seems funny to you, it may not be funny to someone else; but if you write something that isn't funny to you, it almost certainly won't be funny to anyone else either. If you are going to try to write humor — and it's not easy for most writers — you have to write what seems funny to you and hope others will share your delight. It's the only way.

God, ghosts and sex

What is one to make of The Green Man, a novel by Kingsley Amis published in 1969? Is it a ghost story? A horror story? An adventure story? An erotic novel? A theological exploration into the possibility of life after death? A satire? A work of literary genius? Well, yes, to all of the above. But is it any good?

The title refers, at least at first, to a British country inn managed by Maurice Allington, our narrator. The inn is reputed to be haunted by a ghost from the 17th century, although there have been no sightings in recent decades — at least not until Maurice begins seeing things. He alone sees, in order, a red-headed woman, a man named Thomas Underhill (whose grave is near the inn) and a giant, violent creature whose limbs seem to be made of trees and other plants. This is the other Green Man.

Maurice drinks heavily, making his visions suspect when he shares them with others. That is until his teenage daughter begins seeing things, too, and he realizes she may be the true target of these visits from the spirit world.

As for sex, Maurice tries to organize an orgy, when he isn't busy running an inn and dealing with ghosts, but it doesn't quite go as planned. And as for theology, one of his nighttime visitors is Someone who answers his questions about life after death and promises to abide with him forever. For Maurice, this may be the scariest thing of all.

But is the novel any good? I had trouble putting it down, so I guess it must be, although as with Maurice and life after death, I have my doubts.

Murder on ice

Talk about cold cases ... In The Darkness Knows (2017), a fascinating mystery by Arnaldur Indridason, the well-preserved body of a man missing for 30 years is found in a melting glacier in Iceland. Konrad was the cop who led the investigation at the time. Now retired and restless, he is prompted by the discovery of the body to pursue his own independent investigation of what is now clearly a murder.

A witness at the time of Sigurvin's disappearance had said that a business associate named Hjaltalin had threatened to kill him, making Hjaltalin the prime suspect. Yet there was never sufficient evidence to charge him with anything, especially with no body, and Konrad had always had doubts about his guilt. Yet now the police are again focusing on Hjaltalin, who is dying of cancer.

The key to solving the case turns out to be another death, this of a man who may have been a witness to the original crime but, because he was a boy at the time, had never come forward. Later he may have talked about it too much, for he has been killed in a suspicious hit-and-run. If Konrad can solve this case, perhaps he can solve the much older one.

Subplots abound in this fine murder mystery, including an even colder case involving the murder of Konrad's own father, also a cop, but reputed to be a dirty one.

Arnaldur (I am following the Icelandic tradition of referring to people by their first names) has written a number of fine mysteries and thriller, and The Darkness Knows ranks among the best.

Lippman's lady

Laura Lippman says in an author's note that she did not intend Lady in the Lake (2019) to be a newspaper novel, but sometimes you really do write what you know, even if you are an experienced novelist. And Lippman was a newspaper reporter in Baltimore before she became a bestselling author, so she knows the territory very well.

Lady in the Lake may be one of the best and most unusual murder mysteries you will find — unusual because virtually every character, no matter how insignificant, becomes one of the many narrators. Yet always at the center of the story is Maddie Schwartz, a beautiful 37-year-old Jewish housewife who feels her life rushing by,  leaving all her potential behind her. Potential for what, exactly, she doesn't know because she has no obvious talent, other than wrapping most men around her finger. But she decides to leave her wealthy husband — and her teenage son — and strike out on her own.

The novel, set in 1966, has two murders that are unrelated except that they both happen in Baltimore and both draw Maddie to them. She finds the body of girl, then provides evidence leading to the murderer. And this she turns into a low-level newsroom position at a Baltimore paper. Struggling to become an actual reporter, she begins investigating another murder that nobody else either at the newspaper or the police department seems to care about.

That's because Cleo Sherwood, called "the lady in the lake," was black. But Maddie does care, partly because she hopes the story will launch her career but also because of a hot affair she is having with a black police officer, Ferdie. At that time in Baltimore black officers, like women approaching middle age working for newspapers, have little chance of advancement. They aren't even trusted with patrol cars. Yet Ferdie learns things that provide valuable tips for Maddie. The rest of her success depends on her own gumption and her refusal to take no for an answer.

The novel describes how an amateur reporter solves two murders without even trying — she's after stories, not killers — yet in Lippman's hands this hardly seems unlikely at all. It is, in fact, highly entertaining. The final reveal, however, does seem like a stretch, not that it will spoil the reader's enjoyment.

Words that catch the eye

I have written previously about the popularity of the words daughter and girl in the titles of novels, especially novels aimed at a female audience. Put either of those words in your title and you are almost guaranteed to catch some browser's eye in a bookstore.

But they are hardly the only words that appear again and again in titles. Paris is another, perhaps inspired by the popularity of Paula McClain's The Paris Wife. The French capital is practically synonymous with romance and intrigue, so setting a novel there, like putting a mystery in Victorian London, is always a good idea.

Now you can find The Lost Girls of Paris (how can that title fail?), The Paris Inheritance, The Paris Detective, Daughter of Paris (another twofer), The Paris Daughter (ditto), Lost Christmas in Paris, The Postmistress of Paris, The Last Restaurant in Paris, Peril in Paris, Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (an old book back in print because of the recent movie), Jacqueline in Paris, Night Flight to Paris, The Perfumist of Paris, The Paris Bookseller, The Paris Library, The Paris Apartment, The Last Dress from Paris, Until Leaves Fall in Paris, The Paris Architect, The Little Paris Bookshop, The Paris Network, The Paris Secret, Daughters of Paris (still another twofer), The Paris Affair, The Paris Package, Perestroika in Paris, Lost and Found in Paris, Paris Is Always a Good Idea, P.S. from Paris, Forgiving Paris, Keep Paris, Christmas in Paris, The Madwomen of Paris and so many, many more.

Above I mentioned The Paris Bookseller, The Paris Library and The Little Paris Bookshop, and these titles contain other words currently popular in novel titles: bookseller, library and bookshop. Many readers are drawn to these words. (I know I am.) People seem to enjoy romances and adventures set in bookshops and libraries.

Here are some titles you might find: The Bookshop, The Bookshop of Secrets, The Boardwalk Bookshop, The Bookshop by the Bay, How to Find Love in a Bookshop, Christmas at the Mysterious Bookshop, The Bookshop of Yesterdays, The Bookshop on the Corner, The Lost and Found Bookshop, The Bookshop on the Shore, The True Love Bookshop, The Last Bookshop in London, The English Bookshop, The Bookshop of Second Chances, The Banned Bookshop, The Christmas Bookshop, The Forgotten Bookshop in Paris, The Bookshop Murder, Murder in an Irish Bookshop, the Bookshop at Water's End, The Island Bookshop, The Mayfair Bookshop, The Beach Reads Bookshop, Bookshop by the Sea, The Printed Letter Bookshop, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore, etc.

Or these: The Midnight Library, The Littlest Library, The Woman in the Library, The Seaside Library, The Library of the Unwritten, The Last Chance Library, The Forbidden Library, The Lending Library, The Last Library, Summer Hours at the Robbers Library, The Library of Lost and Found, The Library of Legends and so on.

Bookseller is less popular in titles, but still you can find Confessions of a Curious Bookseller, The Bookseller, The Bookseller of Dachau, The Bookseller's Secret, The Bookseller's Promise, The Bookseller and the Earl, The Bookseller of Inverness, The Bookseller's Secret and Death of a Bookseller, among others.

The ideal title for a novel might very well be something like The Paris Bookseller's Daughter or The Girl in the Paris Library.

Writers tell their own stories

Both the title and the subtitle of The First Time I Got Paid for It: Writers' Tales from the Hollywood Trenches (2000) are suggestive and ambiguous. The subtitle informs us that neither the title nor the cover illustration reflect what the book is really about, yet what the subtitle suggests isn't quite accurate either.

The often entertaining (and often not) collection of brief memoirs edited by Peter Lefcourt and Laura J. Shapiro rarely describes how writers sold their first screenplays to the movies, and we can perhaps be glad of that. Most screenplays are collaborations, especially those involving beginners. Most such stories would probably sound pretty much alike.

Fortunately the 50-plus contributors interpreted the directions broadly, and the result is essays about a number of different kinds of "firsts."

Nat Mauldin, who would later write screenplays for Dr. Doolittle and The Preacher's Wife, tells of discovering he could write when he was called on to write an obituary for singer Ronnie VanZant, whom he had never heard of, that was well received.

Men in Black writer Ed Solomon remembers selling a joke to Jimmie Walker for $25 while in a comedy club, and enjoying the laughter when Walker performed the joke that very night.

Melville Shavelson tells of being sued by Mamie Eisenhower (his first lawsuit), who wanted to block the broadcast of a miniseries he wrote about Dwight Eisenhower's relationship with Kay Summersby, his driver, during World War II.

Anna Hamilton Phelan, who wrote Gorillas in the Mist, tells about getting her first agent. Gail Parent, who wrote comedy skits for Carol Burnett, describes what it was like earning the respect of male comedy writers. Charlie Hauck tells of getting his start after being encouraged by comedian Phyllis Diller. Peter Tolan, later to write Analyze This and The Larry Sanders Show, has an amusing tale about starring in a high school production of Bye Bye Birdie.

Screenwriters tend to be an anonymous lot, except to those few who bother to read credits. But a few contributors to this book have names that may ring a bell, including Alan Alda, Cameron Crowe, Delia Ephron, Larry Gilbert, Carl Reiner and William Goldman, who provides the foreword.

This is a mixed bag, but it contains enough entertaining show business stories to make reading it worthwhile.

Categories of readers

A few days ago I panned a book called Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops ("Bookshop rants," Oct. 28, 2022), in which the author targets mostly those who enter bookshops without actually buying anything. Now comes Jo Hoare's So You Think You're a Bookworm?, which tries the same kind of thing with people who actually read books.

Hoare's book is slightly more successful, and that has much to do with the amazing artwork of Paul Parker that decorates just about every page.

Like Shaun Bythell in the other book, Hoare tries to group people into various categories: The Binger, The Book Thief, The Scholar, The Faker, The Sci-Fi Lover, etc. Her humor is more often humorous, fortunately, and if you happen to be a target of that humor (as I am frequently), the hits prove painless, for unlike Bythell she is obviously just kidding.

In addition to these profiles, Hoare tosses in quizzes and lists of various kinds. For example, there's an amusing piece called "How to Upset a Book Lover" and another gem called "12 Thoughts All Bookworms Have When They Go Into a Bookstore."

Most of the humor falls flat, however, or seems forced. Still, there are all those illustrations to enjoy.

Break up the gray

The white space is a visual form of ventilation for the text.

Roy Peter Clark, Murder Your Darlings

The New York Times has often been called "the old gray lady" for a good reason. It's not as gray as it once was — photographs have appeared on the front page for years now— but it's still more gray than most newspapers. The Wall Street Journal, once equally gray, now even puts color photos on page one, and not all the headlines are the same size.

When I worked for a newspaper, we often mentioned "white space" when talking about page design. Break up large blocks of type with photos and other design elements. Give the reader's eye a break. Leave some small spaces entirely free of ink, especially on lifestyle covers.

Roy Peter Clark is thinking the same way above with respect to any kind of writing. Basically what he means is: Write shorter paragraphs. This is the newspaper way, but it works for other kinds of writing, as well.

Why did I start a new paragraph right here? To create white space. To break up what could be one long paragraph into shorter paragraphs that give the reader a little relief.

Long paragraphs, like long sentences or even a series of long words, can become tedious. Readers can easily lose their way, especially if distracted in the middle of a long paragraph. Even simple ideas seem more complex in long paragraphs, while shorter paragraphs seem to give readers more time to digest difficult ideas.

I like Clark's phrase "visual form of ventilation." White space on a page can be a breath of fresh air or simply a chance to take breath. Even the leading, or the space left between lines, helps with this. The more white space, the breezier it all seems. 

Imagine trying to read the old copy of the New York Times shown above. How many of us today would even attempt it?

Do what you must

Like it or not, sometimes you just have to do what you have to do. What Alma decides she has to do in her West Virginia town in 1924 is open a brothel. Julianna Baggott tells us the story, based on her own grandmother's experiences, in her profound 2003 novel The Madam.

When the novel opens, Alma and Henry, her husband, operate a boarding house for show people. Her tenants include an aged bear, part of an act. She also has three kids. She makes extra money working in a hosiery factory.

Then Henry stupidly buys a trunk found in a shipwreck off the Florida coast, believing it contains treasure. He and Alma leave the children behind — Irving to mind the house (now empty of tenants) and Lettie and Willard at a Catholic orphanage — and head for Florida. The trunk's contents are worthless, of course, and Henry, broken by the disappointment, sends Alma back alone.

She has already quit her job, which didn't pay much anyway, and the boarding house won't support her family, so Alma turns it into a brothel to pay her bills. Prostitution always remains only a prominent background for this story, which has more to do with Alma and her family, as well as a few other major characters. Dimwitted Willard remains in the orphanage, where the rigid routine suits him. Sensitive Irving is soon old enough to start trying to find his own way in the world. Lettie avoids becoming a prostitute, yet her teen romance with an abusive policeman makes the life of a prostitute seem almost idyllic.

By the novel's end, Alma discovers there is something else, even more disagreeable than opening a whorehouse, that she must do for the good of her family.

This story about making difficult choices is powerful stuff that probably generated some interesting book club discussions when the novel was new.

Flapper words

For several years now I have been celebrating the 100th birthdays of words used by Americans, at least according to Sol Steinmetz in his 2010 book There's a Word for It. I've noticed that many of the words seem to reflect the times in which they were coined, which certainly makes sense.

By 1922 the war had been over for a few years and Prohibition had yet to begin. The Roaring Twenties were in full swing, and so many of the words coined that year seem to reflect happy times. I'm thinking of words like beauty queen, beauty salon, bistro, chorine, downfield, duplex, gigolo, jayvee, motorboat, moviegoing, mudpack, off-tackle, oops, playset, Pollyannaish, prepper, putt-putt, rumba and tux. These are fun words, words that suggest gaiety and leisure.

Other words that first appeared in print that year suggest more serious topics, reflecting new technology and social change, among other things. These include bicarb, broadcaster, decommission, entrepreneurial, Formica, isolation, libidinal, millisecond, notarize, polyester, pre-puberty, sickle-cell anemia, sodbuster and transvestite.

Some words from 1922 may seem older than that. Sodbuster, for example. Haven't we heard that word in movie westerns set in an earlier time? Uncle Tom was first used in that year too, decades after Uncle Tom's Cabin was published. Other words, such as vacuum used as a verb and putt-putt, might sound newer to us.

Longing is belonging

Why do we like sad songs? Susan Cain began thinking about that question in college while listening to melancholy tunes by Leonard Cohen and others. Now in middle age she has written Bittersweet (2022) about how sad songs, sad stories and a deep longing for an ideal world connect us with each other.

Cain, whose book about introversion, Quiet, became a bestseller, once again probes her own experience to make sense of the experience of others, and vice versa. The central experience of her life may have been her relationship with her mother, who showered love on her during her early years, then became possessive, demanding and suspicious when she became a teenager. One day, while a Princeton student, she gave her mother her diaries to take home for her, perhaps knowing her mother would read them.

And so a bittersweet relationship developed, deep love counterbalanced by recrimination and conflict.

Other Princeton students always wore smiles and seemed to lead blissful, fulfilling lives with perfect parents and a perfect home. She eventually came to realize this wasn't true, and years later she returned to the university to prove it by surveying some of Princeton's "perfect" students. She describes this false front, which goes way beyond Princeton, as a "culture of enforced positivity." We wear smiles to hide what's really going on in our lives. When we pretend perfection, it only makes others resent us because they know they don't have perfect lives. When we let our pain and insecurities and doubts show, it brings others closer to us. Those sad songs and sad stories do much the same thing.

From Leonard Cohen to C.S. Lewis and from studies in psychology to the writings of most of the major religions,  Cain explores the wisdom of balancing bitter and sweet — "a time to weep and a time to laugh," as it says in Ecclesiastes.

I suddenly remember the wonderful comedy Lovers and Other Strangers released in 1970. One of the lines repeated several times in the film is, "You gotta take the good with the bad." Susan Cain would agree.

Padlocks and letters

British author Phaedra Patrick likes to build her stories around meaningful objects, such as the charm bracelet in her debut novel The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper. In The Secrets of Love Story Bridge (2020), there are two such objects — or three if you want to count the bridge.

Mitchell Fisher, still mourning the death of his girlfriend, is a former bridge designer whose downhill career has fallen to removing the padlocks that people fasten to a certain bridge. Instead of carving their initials on trees, lovers signify the permanence of their love with padlocks, before tossing the keys into the river. The city wants the padlocks gone, and that's now Mitchell's job.

One day he sees a woman in a yellow dress attach a padlock, then fall into the river. He jumps in after her. After he saves her life, he becomes a hero, but somehow the woman remains anonymous. His daughter's music teacher, Liza, thinks the mysterious woman is her missing sister, and she enlists Mitchell's help in finding her.

Meanwhile Mitchell starts getting dozens of letters, mostly praising his heroism. And letters become the second physical object guiding the story, but not just these letters from strangers. Mitchell still writes letters to his late girlfriend almost daily, while being afraid to open a letter she wrote to him shortly before her accidental death. And then there is the letter he writes to Liza at the novel's conclusion. Letters, in the end, mean much more than padlocks.

Perhaps because of all those various objects battling for significance, this Patrick novel lacks the curious charm of her others.

Fools for censorship

There is a distinct affinity between fools and censorship. It seems to be one of those breeding grounds where they rush in.

Heywood Campbell Brown

I have long believed that virtually everyone supports censorship, except that everyone favors drawing the line at a different point. Child pornography is one point that almost everyone can agree on. As a general rule, conservatives like to draw their line somewhere on matters relating to sex and/or religion. Liberals usually draw their line on political and social thought. Puritan-like, holier-than-thou attitudes can be found at both ends of the spectrum.

Amy Coney Barrett

Recently most of the push for censorship has been coming from the left. A number of authors, members of the press, publishers and people who work for publishing companies and even Barnes & Noble just sent an open letter to Random House urging the publisher to stop publication of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett's scheduled book, on which a $2 million advance has already been paid. 

The signers began their letter by claiming they "care deeply about freedom of speech," before demonstrating that they actually don't. "We are not calling for censorship," they wrote in a letter calling for censorship. Without having read Barrett's book, they advocate blocking its publication. And these are people whose very livelihoods depend on freedom of expression and the publication and sale of books not everyone will agree with.

The controversy over Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter sounds very similar. Critics claim to favor free expression of ideas while objecting to the wider spectrum of ideas that Musk's ownership may bring about. These may be the same people who argue that fair elections somehow threaten democracy.

The United States was founded with a fundamental belief in free speech and a free press. Courts may sometimes permit exceptions, such as child pornography and falsely yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater. Everything else must be allowed, including fools who claim to oppose censorship while advocating censorship.