On repeat

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves — that's the truth.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, One Hundred False Starts

F. Scott Fitzgerald

In the same article in a 1933 edition of the Saturday Evening Post, F. Scott Fitzgerald also wrote, "We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives — experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way before."

The experiences Fitzgerald describes so well usually happen in one's youth. Older people generally know better. Such things as falling in love, getting one's heart broken and mourning the loss of a loved one seem more profound and unique the first time they happen.

For most authors who strive to write literature, such experiences become the foundation for most of what they write. It helps explain why first novels are so often the best the authors ever write. Such novels as The Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace and To Kill a Mockingbird are about youthful characters who have life-shaping experiences. For Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, their most moving experiences occurred when they were in the middle of war-torn Europe during World War II, resulting in the novels Slaughterhouse-Five and Catch-22.

Because, as Fitzgerald points out, such experiences are limited, writers tend to quickly run out of profound things to write about. And, thus, they repeat themselves. Or sometimes, like J.D. Salinger and Harper Lee, they simply stop writing anything of consequence altogether.

Famous, yet unknown

I had to let her know that the reason she'd never heard of me was because I was famous.

Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks

The wonderful line above actually makes perfect sense.

Neal Stephenson tells of attending a writers' conference and being approached by a prominent literary novelist who had never heard of him. Making small talk, she asked where he taught. So many literary writers like herself teach at universities to supplement their incomes. When he said he didn't teach, she then asked what he did to support himself. He told her that he just wrote for a living, and she was shocked. How was it possible she had never heard of a writer who can make a living by writing?

The answer, of course, is that he is a popular writer, a famous writer. Many people buy his books, unlike the books of most literary writers like herself. He writes science fiction, a genre she totally ignores, but many people love. She sells books by the hundreds, or perhaps dozens. He sells books by the thousands and makes a decent living. She must teach so she can write on the side. He just writes.

Dante Alighieri

It has always been this way. Stephenson makes a distinction between what he calls Beowulf books and Dante books, suggesting just how long this division of literature has been going on. Dante, like so many great artists, depended on a wealthy patron for support. Beowulf is a collection of popular tales that didn't need a patron.

This division continues in the literary world to this day. Those who write for the masses, those who write best-sellers, can often support themselves, often very well, with their writing. The likes of C.J. Box, James Patterson, Harlen Coben, Danielle Steel and Stephen King do not need to take second jobs. Most readers recognize their names, but they might be strangers if they attended certain literary events.

Meanwhile, literary writers earn praise in literary journals and get reviews in The New York Times, but to feed their families they must teach creative writing somewhere, or perhaps take a job selling insurance or marry someone else with a job.

Disappearing islands

The Great Reclamation (20923) is hardly the most enticing title for a novel. And the paperback cover illustration doesn't help. Yet Rachel Heng's book makes good reading despite these disincentives.

The title refers to an ambitious postwar project in Singapore to expand the shoreline, giving  the growing population more land. Yet Heng's novel is actually about the people most affected by this, those who live along the shore and make their living by fishing.

Ah Boon is a boy who isn't cut out to be a fisherman. He is even afraid of water. Yet when he goes out into the sea one day with his father and older brother, they find islands that weren't there before. And in fact, they can't be found again without Ah Boon. These disappearing islands are home to countless fish that help his family and neighbors prosper.

Ah Boon's soulmate is a girl named Siok Mei. They promise to love each other forever. Trouble comes when they become involved in student protests as they get older. Siok Mei becomes fully committed to the Communists, while Ah Boon decides to go back home. She marries someone else. He does, too.

In time he joins the Gah Men, the government men who are pushing the reclamation project. He talks his family into moving into apartments. How does this project, the mysterious islands and Siok Mei come together at the crisis point of Ah Boon's life? Read the story to find out.

I don't think the supernatural aspect of the novel — those islands — really works. Too many questions remain unanswered. Why can only Ah Boon find them at first, yet others can find them later? What is their meaning? Why is this the only supernatural part of his life? Why place disappearing islands at the heart of what is otherwise a historical novel?

So, yes, Heng's novel is less than totally satisfying. Good, but not outstanding.

Expanding the definition

Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson has described science fiction as idea porn. He has a point. Those who devour sci-fi do so for ideas, not sex.

Stephenson has written a number of science fiction stories and is a widely recognized author in that genre, yet he also wrote the trilogy that included Quicksilver, The Confusion and The System of the World, all of which read more like historical novels about scientists, Isaac Newton among them. Yet these massive novels are full of cool ideas, and sci-fi fans loved them.

So many novels — literary novels, romance novels, mystery novels, etc. — are about the human condition in one way or another. They may be original, yet for the most part they lack original ideas. There's not much there to grab the attention of science fiction fans. As Stephenson puts it, "In arty lit, it's become uncool to try to come to grips with ideas per se."

Stephenson, in a lecture given at Gresham College in 2008 and published in his book Some Remarks, expands science fiction to include any fiction with original, mind-bending ideas.

Many thrillers qualify. He especially mentions The Da Vinci Code.

The novels of Matt Haig are not grouped with science fiction in bookstores. Yet they are filled with sci-fi-like ideas. In The Midnight Library, a woman relives different versions of her life in an attempt to find one in which she is happy. In The Humans, a being from space visits Earth and takes the body of a mathematician, discovering what human beings are like.

Things in Jars, a mystery by Jess Kidd but not normally classified with either mysteries or science fiction, is about a girl who may be a mermaid.

Spirit Crossing, a William Kent Kruger mystery, tells of a murder investigation aided by the spirits of victims.

I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger describes a future where bodies are floating in Lake Superior and a large medical ship uses captives as guinea pigs.

In Cassandra in Reverse, a novel by Holly Smale that I hope to read soon, a woman discovers she can go back in time and reverse her mistakes.

None of these books are considered science fiction in the usual sense, yet all qualify as Stephenson defines the term. So are such classics as Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Pinocchio and Lost Horizon. Where there's an original idea that produces wonder, there one can find science fiction.

Flabbergasting facts

Truth truly is stranger than fiction (which may help explain why so much fiction is based on truth). 1,342 Facts to Leave You Flabbergasted (2016) proves this to be true almost 1,342 times.

Other books in this series promise to blow your socks off, make your jaw drop, knock you sideways and leave you speechless. Most of these facts are, in fact, stunning.

Walruses suffer from dandruff.

Hens given alcohol lay half as many eggs.

Pope John Paul II drew his own comic books.

These facts are presented mostly in single, simple sentences, allowing a reader to be flabbergasted at a rate of four times per page. Yet many of these facts do raise questions, at least in my mind.

The oldest living turkey in Britain is called Dinner. As this book was published in 2016, chances are that turkey has already become dinner, making this no longer a fact.

Bad mood?

When Donald Trump is in a bad mood, he wears a red hat. How many times have you seen Trump with a big smile on his face while wearing a red MAGA hat?

The loudest word ever shouted was "Quiet!" by a primary-school teacher from Northern Ireland. Interesting, but how can anyone possibly know that was the loudest word every shouted?

Half of all museum specimens are thought to be wrongly labeled. The key word in that sentence is thought. I thought that was stupid. Does my thought make it a fact?

Jack London, Hugh Walpole and P.G. Wodehouse were all published by Wills & Boon. Perhaps in Great Britain, where this book was first published, this fact may be interesting. Few Americans who have never heard of Mills & Boon are likely to be flabbergasted.

Newborn babies have accents. Huh?

46% of Japan's population hide when someone rings the doorbell. How do you suppose that was determined so precisely?

More people are killed by teddy bears than by grizzly bears. I don't question that one at all. I'm just flabbergasted.

Single-owner books

When we can't share them directly, one-to-one, our common informational heritage is threatened.

David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading

David L. Ulin

David L. Ulin is talking about ebooks. Other problems with ebooks are more commonly discussed. A device doesn't feel as good in one's hands as an actual book. It is more difficult to go back and reread a memorable passage. It is too easy, depending upon the device, to be distracted by a game, email, texts or something else.

There are significant advantages, of course. One can take 20 ebooks on a cruise if one wants to without actually having to carry 20 books in one's luggage.

Yet Ulin puts his finger on one problem with ebooks we may not immediately think about: It has just one owner. The ebook belongs to whomever owns the device the ebook is downloaded to. It can't be loaned or given to anyone else. You can read it or ignore it, keep it or delete it, but that's about it.

If you own a car, you are free to sell it, let someone borrow it or give it away. That is not the case with ebooks.

As I have written previously, I do not ordinarily like to either borrow books or lend my own books to someone else (although I do give many of my books away). But for many other people, passing books around is standard operating procedure. If they enjoy a book, they want their friends to read it. And so they pass it around, from friend to friend. If it never returns to the owner, no harm done. The owner has already read it.

In Ulin's phrase, "our common informational heritage is threatened" when books cannot be given to others or borrowed from others.

Public libraries were based on the concept of many people reading the same book. That is a "common informational heritage." There are no ebook libraries. There are no used ebook stores. There are no secondhand ebooks.

Of course, friends can download the same ebook based on your recommendation, and book clubs can still discuss these books. Even so, it is not quite the same — and it's costly for everyone who wants to read the same book.

And so many books are not even available as ebooks.

I, for one, am glad ebooks have not become as popular as many of us once feared they would become.

Something for nothing

The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency doesn't get paid for some of its most rewarding cases, and that proves true again in A Song of Comfortable Chairs (2022), the 23rd book in this wonderful series by Alexander McCall Smith.

Precious Ramotswe, who runs the agency with Grace Makutsi in Gaborone, has a kind heart and a clever mind. When someone needs help and she has an idea as to how to help, she pitches in whether there is compensation at the end or not.

In this installment, there are two such problems that Precious seeks to solve in elaborate ways.

First, Grace's husband faces bankruptcy with the start of a rival furniture store that undercuts his prices, thanks to inside information. Precious comes up with a plan that turns her longtime friend, Mma Potokwane of the Orphan Farm, another woman of traditional build, into a model in an advertising campaign.

The second difficulty involves a friend of Grace's with a 14-year-old boy who resents his mother's new boyfriend. Precious plots to change the boy's mind, but then doesn't know if her plan worked or if Charlie, her part-time assistant detective, is the one who worked the magic.

It's all highly entertaining. McCall Smith even manages to turn Mma Makutsi into a more likable character by the end of this Botswanna adventure.

A moment of truth

David L. Ulin

This is what literature, at its best and most unrelenting, offers: a slicing through of all the noise and the ephemera, a cutting to the chase. There is something thrilling about it, this unburdening, the idea of getting at a truth so profound that, for a moment anyway, we become transcendent in the fullest sense.

David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading

I love David L. Ulin's description above about the value of literature, but I seem to be most struck by his phrase "for a moment anyway."

Great novels can last a long time, and great lines from great novels may be repeated over and over again, yet Ulin is right. The profound truths that can be found in the best novels do tend to be fleeting. They strike us with power in the context of the story we are reading, but can never be quite as powerful again. Readers become transcendent, as he puts it, only briefly. And then reality swallows us up again.

I find that I recall certain novels with great fondness without remembering the reason, or even remembering much about the story itself or any of the characters. Perhaps what I am really remembering so fondly is that moment or moments of transcendence, those passages that momentarily hit home so powerfully.

Ulin sees the temporariness of literature as its virtue. "Its futility is what makes it noble; nothing will come of this, no one will be saved, but it is worth your attention anyway." Some people, including both nonreaders and those who read nonfiction exclusively, view fiction as a waste of time. What's the point?

The point, or at least one of them, is that occasional moment of truth.

Reading rediscovered

In The Lost Art of Reading (2018), David L. Ulin meditates on that very subject: Is reading a lost art?

Ulin read everything and anything in his youth. He is surprised when his 15-year-old son, assigned by his teacher to read The Great Gatsby, tells him literature is dead. He decides to help his son by rereading the novel himself. When he finds it difficult staying focused on the book he once loved, he wonders if his son might be right.

With so many electronic devices and social media, keeping one's attention focused on a book, especially one hundreds of pages long, seems like an impossible challenge to many people today, especially those who are young. They would much rather watch the movie, except that fewer novels are being adapted for the screen these days. 

Shorter books may be better at holding one's attention long enough to read them, and Ulin keeps his book short — just 156 pages, plus an introduction. Yet even his book proves hard to focus on, though that may have more to do with his meandering style than anything else.

In the end, he rediscovers for himself the joy and the art of reading that at least a few of us still enjoy. The question remains, however: How does one teach this art to others?

The door to everything

One of the joys of teaching literature is the freedom it allows to talk about any subject, so long as there is a short story, novel, play, or poem that mentions it.

Donna Leon, Wandering through Life

Donna Leon

What Donna Leon writes about teaching literature — that it opens the door to all subjects — is also true when it comes to writing about literature. It is one reason I have been able to keep this blog going for so many years, with few interruptions.

Before starting a blog, while still working at a newspaper, I gave a lot of thought  to whether a blog was really a good idea. I didn't want to be one of those bloggers — probably the majority of them — who start with energy and enthusiasm but then burn out within a matter of months, or even weeks. Their posts come less and less often and finally dry up altogether. I didn't want to be one of those.

I chose language and literature as my subject matter because they were topics I knew something about. I had worked for a newspaper for many years and had reviewed books for many years. Better yet, they opened the door to every other topic in the universe. Anything that could be written about, I could write about. I would never run out of material.

And this has proven to be the case. Nearly half of my posts are short book reviews. Thus, each time I read a book I get material for a new post. And often, as in the case of Wandering through Life, they provide me with ideas for multiple posts.

Add to this the endless subjects that become available by reading those books, as well as by reading newspapers, magazines and even street signs and bumper stickers. I can write about the lives of writers. I can write about bookstores and the reading life. I can write about history, science, human relationships, crime and all the other subjects covered in books. I usually try to avoid politics in this blog, but even that hot topic sometimes becomes irresistible, as when I wrote about Steven Pinker's observations in The Stuff of Thought about how politicians bamboozle the public.

When Donna Leon taught literature classes she found it gave her the freedom to talk — and teach — about virtually anything, while still talking about literature.  I have enjoyed the same kind of freedom.

The other Booths

Villains have families, too. That's not something we often think about. When villains die in movies, it doesn't occur to us that they must have had someone who loved them. And it is much the same way with real-life villains.

This thought led Karen Joy Fowler to write her excellent 2022 novel Booth about not John Wilkes Booth but rather his family.

Fowler tells her story through the eyes of various members of the Booth family, but never John Wilkes, the handsome, unpredictable younger brother. It is Edwin, an older son in a family of actors, who becomes the family's central figure. It is he, not Junius or John, who matches their father's greatness on the stage.

It turns out that their father and mother had never actually married. It's a shock to all when his actual wife arrives from England and begins making demands. Then there is his alcoholism, a trait passed down to his elder sons. The daughters — Rosalie, the plain one, and Asia, the beauty — also feature prominently in the novel.

Although the Booths have slaves — set free but still working for the family — their sympathies lie with the North when war breaks out. That is, except for John, who has lived in Richmond, and Joe, an even younger brother, who was notable for being a deserter from both armies.

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln comes as as much of a shock to the Booths as to anyone else, and they all pay the price of notoriety. Edwin's acting career tanks; Junius spends time in prison for the crime of being John's brother.

At times you don't know whether you are reading fiction or history, and this uncertainty seems to be deliberate on Fowler's part. Little is actually known about Rosalie, one of the best drawn characters, and so she is almost entirely fictional. Others left letters or are mentioned more in historical records, and so their stories read more like history. All in all, it makes for an impressive book, not as good as some of Fowler's other novels, yet better than many books written by historians about this tragedy.