Always there, never there

You will have to face the fact that, as a writer, you will be a difficult if not a maddening person to live with.

John Mortimer, Where There's a Will

Why are writers so hard to live with? Because they are always there — and because they are never there.

Some writers may go to a coffee shop or a library to write, but most of them write at home. If there's a spouse who works outside the home, this may never be a problem. But some spouses are home most of the time, and there may be children. Everyone must keep quiet because the writer is working. And this writer does not want to be disturbed during working hours, usually the morning, whether by phone calls, a ringing doorbell, children at play, a clogged drain that needs immediate attention or whatever else may be going on.

Hilda and Horace Rumpole in the TV series

So the writer in the family may be there, yet inaccessible. Close by, yet distant.

And when the writer is not actually writing? John Mortimer says this in his book Where There's a Will: "The writer is seldom entirely involved in any situation. Some part of him is standing aside, the detached observer." Writers, or at least writers of fiction, are more interested in being observers than participants. They are always looking for material. How do people talk? How do people act in certain situations? What interesting development might prove useful in a novel?

"This is deeply frustrating to those in need of a fully committed love affair, or even a completely meaningful quarrel," he writes.

Mortimer, author of the Rumpole stories, may not be entirely joking when saying that when his wife is angry about about something, he is not so much listening to what she is saying as "memorizing her dialogue so that I may give extracts from it to Hilda Rumpole in one of her many disagreements with her fictional husband."

Uncommon intimacies

There is something about the depths of the connection through books, be they bonds of curiosity, literature, or ideas, that elicits uncommon and edifying intimacies.

Jeff Deutsch, In Praise of Good Bookstores

We are trained to be quiet in libraries, or at least we used to be. People read in libraries. People write. People whisper. Books themselves have a way of soaking up sound. Their very appearance encourages us to keep it down.

So does this "code of silence" that traditionally is found in libraries also apply in bookstores? It does to some extent, Jeff Deutsch says in his book In Praise of Good Bookstores. Bookstore workers rarely speak to customers unless spoken to first. They rarely ask, "Can I help you find something?" One rarely hears shouting or loud conversations in a bookstore. Even children seem to be less rowdy there.

Browsing is serious business to someone in a bookstore. The less interruption, the better.

Yet there is at least one welcome exception to this code of silence: conversation about the books themselves.

William Kent Krueger

A couple months ago I stood in line to purchase a William Kent Krueger novel when I noticed that the woman ahead of me held a different novel by the same author. I commented on this, and the two of us entered into a brief but delightful conversation about William Kent Krueger.

Many people have had such conversations with complete strangers in bookstores. It is something like conversing with the stranger next to you at a baseball game or during an intermission at a concert. The very fact that you are together at the same place doing the same thing gives you something in common. Most readers love talking about the books they've read, and finding someone with similar tastes can quickly lead to engaging conversation.

Deutsch calls such conversations "uncommon and edifying intimacies." I'll buy that.

Breaking the silence

How do you make a best-selling novel out of a story in which the main character, other than the narrator, remains silent? Alex Michaelides found a way in The Silent Patient (2019).

Alicia Berenson, a gifted artist, is arrested for murdering her husband by shooting him in the face while he was tied to a chair. Questions remain, like how did she manage to tie him to the chair before shooting him? But she refuses to answer them or to say anything at all. For years.

Theo Faber is a 42-year-old psychotherapist determined to find answers, if not from Alicia then from others who knew her before the killing. Thus the novel becomes part psychological thriller and part murder mystery.

Theo has personal problems of his own. He discovers that his beautiful wife is secretly meeting with another man. Rather than confronting her, he follows her, as well as the man she is having the affair with. He contemplates murder. Here the otherwise original novel becomes cliche — the psychotherapist may be as crazy as the patient.

Things begin to come into focus when a silent Alicia hands Theo her secret diary, and at last she begins to speak. But Michaelides holds the final surprises for the exciting climax.

This is a nearly first-rate novel that deserves its best-selling status.

Telling all

Some memoirs and autobiographies are described as "tell-all" books, suggesting that they reveal the dirty secrets of the author and those of the people he or she has known. Yet Ralph Keyes in his book The Courage to Write says this: "Even though novelists and short story writers ostensibly deal in fantasy, they are the most self-exposed authors of all."

I doubt that this is always true. Sometimes fiction really is fiction. This is usually the case with lower-grade fiction, formula fiction, genre fiction. Such stories have more to do with plot than characters and more to do with actions than emotions. Yet even these books reveal what the author's fantasies are about — hot romance, gun-blazing adventure, travel to imaginary worlds, etc. 

But mainly what Keyes is talking about is more literary fiction where writers tell stories that are supposedly fiction yet are based on their own experiences and feelings. "To create authentic feelings in their characters, they must first call up their own," Keyes writes.

Pat Conroy

And so often the characters and situations in fiction reflect real people and real situations. This is especially true of first novels, which are so often autobiographical. Harper Lee told us about herself in To Kill a Mockingbird. J.D. Salinger told us about himself in The Catcher in the Rye. And so on. Names and places are changed, yet the truth remains.

When Pat Conroy wrote The Great Santini, supposedly a work of fiction, Keyes tells us that Conroy's own family and others close to him knew very well that he was actually writing about his own abusive father. This fictional story was his own true story, a tell-all book in the form of a novel.

What lies at the bottom

People think that the ocean is made up of waves and things that float on top. But they forget — the ocean is also what lies at the bottom, all the broken things stuck in the sand. That, too, is the ocean.

Thrity Umrigar, The Secrets Between Us

Class divisions lay at the core of Thirty Umrigar's powerful novel The Space Between Us. Those divisions in modern India have eased somewhat in the sequel, The Secrets Between Us (2018), yet as the title suggests people remain separated, partly by the secrets they try to keep hidden and the pride that prevents them from speaking about them.

After being forced to leave her longtime position as a servant for an upperclass woman in the earlier novel, Bhima now works for two other women and still lives in a slum while trying to save enough money to pay for her granddaughter's college education.

Through a series of circumstances, she finds herself forming a business partnership with a bitter woman named Parvati, even older than she is. Though impoverished, Parvati turns out to be educated and has a good business sense. Bhima is illiterate, but is more able-bodied. Together they begin making money selling vegetables in the open market.

Parvati's secret is that she was sold into prostitution by her father when she was a little girl. Once a great beauty, she was the pride of the brothel, where she kept the books, as well. Eventually she married a police officer, one of her most faithful clients. He turned brutal, however, and his death left her in poverty. "...Without my secrets I am nothing," she says at one point.

As for Bhima, her secret was told in the previous novel. Her husband and son abandoned her years before. She raised their daughter, who died of AIDS, living the granddaughter, Maya, in her care. The reasons behind her firing in the other novel are also a secret she wants to keep hidden.

Gradually these very different women reveal their secrets to each other and begin to draw close, no space at all between them.

Umrigar draws her characters beautifully, making them real and their actions understandable. The novel's last line may be one of the most moving you will ever read: "Although it is dusk, in Bhima's heart it is dawn." I have revealed the ending, but you won't cry until you have read the rest.

Home decorating

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.

Henry Ward Beecher

During COVID, most interviews shown on television and even some news commentary took place in homes, usually in front of a bookcase. In part, this was done to give an impression about how smart and well-read the person talking was. In some cases, the books were those written by that person. But more importantly, a bookcase just made a good background. It looked good on camera.

Similarly, many photographs taken of people in their homes are posed in front of bookcases. This is especially true of authors and scholars, but it's something that works well for anyone. In fact, it even works for nonreaders.

Many people who rarely read books choose to decorate their homes and/or offices with books. Some books seem to be sold expressly for this purpose. How many people actually read those finely bound classics that seem to be meant more to be seen than read? Barnes and Noble still sells attractive, relatively inexpensive classics now out of copyright. Whether read or not, such books certainly make a good impression. The eyes of clients and guests are always drawn to these displays.

Needless to say, books dominate the walls of my own home, and I wish even more of my walls were covered by books, even though I do love the few pieces of art I have hanging there instead. But my books — those I've read or hope to read — are there to pleasure no one else but me.

Life at the bottom

I stuck with Patrick deWitt's first novel, Ablutions (2009) to the end because I love his later novels like French Exit and The Sisters Brothers, but it is a disappointing and disgusting book. The author tells us more than we want to know about humanity at its worst.

The novel — deWitt calls it "notes for a novel" because it consists of short glimpses of characters and events rather than a straight narrative — tells of the regulars at a Hollywood bar. Most of these people have either hit bottom, are on their way down or still wrongly believe they are on the way up. They all drink too much and take too many drugs. This includes our unnamed narrator, who gets free drinks as part of his compensation for working there.

Their drinking, drug taking and sex acts in the back room are described in detail. The narrator's wife leaves him for another man. He begins stealing money from the bar. His life goes from bad to worse.

Yet the novel is a confession, of sorts. The title is a religious term referring to "washing one's body or part of it," a cleansing. And that is sort of what the reader wants to do after reading it.

No excuses

A writer never has an excuse for not working.

John Mortimer, Where There's a Will

I developed an ulcer and other digestive problems during my years as a newspaper reporter and editorial writer. Even weekends were not free from worry. Then I became a copy editor, trying to improve the work of other writers, and I rested more easily. My work never went home with me.

John Mortimer

So I know very well what John Mortimer, a lawyer and an author, is talking about in the comment quoted above. Writers can always work. No excuses. A pen and paper are almost always nearby. Writers can carry notebooks when they travel. Writing can be done in the mind, as well, and even in dreams. Some of my best ideas still come to me in the shower.

And so writers have no excuse for not working. Ever.

And this, Mortimer observes, can lead to guilt. "It's true that guilt follows a writer wherever he goes, an unnecessarily faithful dog, always yapping at his heels," he says. Get to work. Get to work. Get to work. The yapping goes on and on.

Writers experiencing writer's block must feel doubly guilty. Their ideas won't come no matter how hard they try to produce something worthwhile.

Talking with the dead

There is a small town in western New York where spiritualists gather each summer to communicate with the dead. They have been doing this for well over a century. Just driving through the town, as I once did, can be a bit spooky, although that may have been my imagination.

Christine Wicker was a religion reporter for the Dallas Morning News when she first visited Lily Dale. She ended up returning summer after summer, getting to know many of the spiritualists who live there or visit there. The result was her 2003 book Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town that Talks to the Dead.

Many well-known people have visited Lily Dale over the years, from Mae West (a believer) to Harry Houdini (a doubter). Wicker first went to Lily Dale as a doubter, then found herself shifting back and forth from one camp to the other. She calls it "the Lily Dale bounce." Something strange happens that makes you think spirits may actually be communicating with living people, but then something happens (or doesn't happen) that makes you think the whole thing is hooey.

Wicker bounces back and forth throughout her book. Training to become a medium herself, she discovers she has a gift for reading the pasts of other people, a gift that leaves her when she leaves Lily Dale. She sees tables dance and mediums say amazing things that have no logical explanation, while she finds that so much of what these mediums say is utter foolishness.

Even the mediums themselves doubt much of what they hear in Lily Dale. They themselves are skeptics, she finds, and they take swift action against obvious frauds.

Wicker comes to like these people. She believes that they believe. And sometimes, she admits, she does, too.

Reading Wicker's book makes me wish I had stopped on my way through Lily Dale and had a conversation or two — preferably with the living.

Toughen up

Writers and artists must learn to withstand mockery, abuse and misunderstanding as an essential part of their careers.

John Mortimer, Where There's a Will

John Steinbeck

A few months back ("That's wonderful," Nov. 3, 2023) I wrote about how John Steinbeck's wife said the writer always asked her to read his novels and comment, but what he really wanted to hear, she said, was, "That's wonderful." And that is what we all want to hear, no matter what we do.

But as John Mortimer observes in Where There's a Will, what we want is not what we usually get, especially if we choose a career which, in effect, begs for a public response. He mentions writers and artists, but actors also fit into that category. If you want people to pay money for what you offer, those people have every right to tell you, "That's crap."

I have been reviewing books for most of my life, and I think I have more often written something closer to "that's wonderful" than "that's crap." One reason is that if I hate a book, I usually have the luxury of being able to put it aside and pick up something better. But I am also a softy. I don't take as much pleasure in saying "that's crap" as some critics do, although I sometimes do say it. Honesty is as important as kindness.

Yet writers and other creative people must, as Mortimer suggests, toughen up so that they can withstand the criticism that comes with the territory and keep going. Steinbeck sometimes got bad reviews, whatever his wife said about his books, but he kept writing.

Seeing things

There is no redhead by the side of the road in Anne Tyler's 2020 novel Redhead by the Side of the Road. It is just a red fire hydrant that the nearsighted Micah Mortimer sees as a woman when he goes running every morning without his glasses.

Yet his vision doesn't really seem to be that bad. On one of his runs near the end of the novel, Micah slows down when he sees a feeble old man open his car door "with one crabbed hand" before getting inside. He can see a "crabbed hand" but not a fire hydrant? But no, Tyler makes it clear that the redhead has more to do with Micah's imagination than his vision. He converts "inanimate objects into human beings" because of his loneliness. He wishes there were a redhead by the side of the road.

Nearing 40, Micah lives alone in Baltimore and manages a one-man computer repair business out of his home. His life is orderly to the point of running at a certain time each morning and cleaning his kitchen a certain of the week.

He has had a series of short-lived love affairs, including one with a teacher named Cass, which ends early in the novel for reasons he fails to understand.

Then Brink, a college boy, shows up at his door believing Micah might be his real father. He is the son of Lorna, Micah's college girlfriend. Micah knows Brink cannot be his son because he and Lorna never had sex together, but Brink reconnects him briefly with Lorna. She explains her version of why they broke up nearly two decades earlier. And that leads Micah to take control of his life, although Tyler's ending may actually suggest just the opposite. Is he taking control or surrendering? And is there a difference?

Much shorter than a typical Anne Tyler novel, Redhead is irresistible.

Eating while reading

There is nothing more luxurious than eating while you read — unless it be reading while you eat.

Edith Nesbit, British writer

Just a few days ago, although I have already forgotten where I saw it, I read someone say that reading and eating don't mix. Books are precious, while food is messy. To her, don't eat and read was comparable to don't drink and drive.

E. Nesbit

Edith Nesbit, who wrote children's books under the name E. Nesbit, perhaps to hide the fact that she was a woman, obviously thought differently. To her, combining the two is the height of luxury.

If you saw the food stains on some of my books, you would know whose side I come down on.

Usually I choose older books, usually books with previous owners,  to read at mealtime. My current breakfast book is a library discard, for example. Yet I don't always follow this rule. Recently I read William Kent Krueger's The River We Remember, a clothbound novel I bought new, at my breakfast bar. I believe it somehow escaped unmarked.

Now that I am widowed and living alone, I eat most of my meals in the company of books. Relationships can sometimes get messy, and so it goes with me and my book companions. But perhaps it is this casual, relaxed relationship that can make eating while reading, or reading while eating, such a luxury.

Besides, I can read a lot of extra books this way.

Tipping point

Emma Donoghue's powerful 2000 novel Slammerkin shows how delicately balanced a life can be — balanced between happiness and despair, success and failure, good and evil, a feeling of belonging and a feeling of abandonment.

The title of the novel, set in mid-18th century England, is an old word with two meanings: a loose gown or a loose woman. Both meanings become important to Donoghue's plot.

Mary is bright 14-year-old girl in London who, unlike so many girls, is getting an education. She gets pregnant after being raped, however, and is thrown out of the house by her mother. To survive, she turns to prostitution, then has an abortion. She quickly becomes settled into her new life, tutored by a new friend named Doll, who is just a few years older. Soon enough, we are told, she "couldn't remember what innocence looked like."

Due to a series of circumstances that put her life in danger, Mary flees to Monmouth, getting a job as a maid with Mrs. Jones, her mother's childhood friend. She tells the woman her mother is dead. Mrs. Jones makes gowns for upperclass women, and Mary turns out to be a talented seamstress and a big help to the business run by Mrs. Jones and her husband.

Mary misses her old life on the streets of London, yet loves being loved and accepted by this family. They begin to feel like they could be her own family. "She could almost believe she was a virgin again," we are told. Yet still thinking about returning to London, she turns to occasional prostitution and accumulates a bag of coins. This money proves her undoing.

The novel is based loosely on real people and real events. Always fascinating, the story packs an emotional wallop.