Drama on both sides of the screen

Most of Cathie Pelletier's Beaming Sonny Home (1996) takes place where so many people live most of their lives — in front of the television. So stationary is the novel that one is surprised by how much movement there is in the story, how much happens, how much changes in 284 pages.

Mattie Gifford's three grown daughters invade her home in Mattagash, Maine, and flip on the TV because their brother, Sonny, has taken two female hostages, supposedly at gunpoint, and is holding them in a mobile home in Bangor that belongs to his estranged wife. Why he does this is a mystery — something to do do with his wife, something to do with his dog, something to do with starving children, something to do with John Lennon. Sonny just seems to be having a good time.

For three days the standoff is at the top of each newscast, and these four women, plus various neighbors, friends and other relatives watch to see what happens next. The supposed hostages seem happy to be where they are, Sonny being a charismatic young man whom every woman loves. That is, except for his three sisters, who have always resented that their mother loves him best. Mattie doesn't deny this, and even now during this crisis she wishes her daughters would just go to their own homes and leave her alone.

Her love for Sonny seems surprising. for he is so much like her late husband — handsome, always smiling, unambitious, irresistible to women and faithful to none. Sonny may be the same kind of man as his father, yet Mattie loves him more than anyone else, certainly more than she ever loved Lester.

Pelletier is so gifted with imagery that she almost overdoes it, tossing out a new metaphor before a reader can digest the last one. Among these images is a jigsaw puzzle Mattie is working on in which the eye of Jesus is missing. Only when she finds the missing eye and places it in the puzzle does this story come together — or fall apart, as the case may be.

Grand adventure

Years later when asked how he and other members of his party managed to be the first to take boats down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1869, John Wesley Powell replied simply, "I was lucky."

More than luck was involved, of course, yet Powell and the others certainly were lucky, as Edward Dolnick explains in his adventurous 2001 book Down the Great Unknown.

Consider that Powell himself, leader of the expedition, had but one arm, having lost the other in the Battle of Shiloh. Consider that their large wooden boats were totally unsuitable for running river rapids and and no less suitable for carrying around the worst of the rapids. Consider that the rowers faced backwards. Consider that none of the men wore lifejackets or helmets. Consider that, because they were the first, they had no idea what might be beyond the next curve in the river. Many others, including some in recent years, have died trying to go down this river. That Powell and the others succeeded in their first attempt had something to do with luck.

Most of the 10 men who started the 99-day, 1,000-mile river trip that started in Wyoming Territory were Civil War veterans. Having survived the war, they figured they could survive anything. They were all eager for adventure, although Powell himself was also in pursuit of science. He wanted to map the river and study geology along the way. Names he gave to rapids, canyons and other features along the way are still in use today.

Only six of the 10 completed the trip, the others bailing out along the way because of the hardships they endured. Powell was cautious, choosing to avoid the worst rapids whenever possible, but to his crew carrying those heavy boats long distances over rocks often seemed worse than taking their chances with the rapids.

Dolnick makes a nail-biting adventure story out of this river trip, describing what happened each day along the way. At the same time he tells us much about river rapids in general, about the Grand Canyon's history and geology and about others who have ventured down it. His book makes exciting and informative reading.

First craft, then art

"Art stands on the shoulders of craft." — Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett

Richard Russo quotes this bit of wisdom from novelist Ann Patchett in an essay called "Getting Good" in his book The Destiny Thief. The advice seems sounds, no matter what you are doing. It's actually just a fancy way of saying what we've all said at one time or another: You learn from your mistakes.

Russo goes as far as to say, "You come to understand that rejection, at least for a period of time, is indeed your friend." The early stories of J.D. Salinger were rejected regularly by magazines, including those magazines that would later welcome them. The same was true of Donald E. Westlake and most other writers who would later become successful. The "first novel" of many authors is actually their third or fourth, but just the first one accepted for publication. The earlier ones were rejected. They were just learning experiences.

The publication of Go Set a Watchman did no favors for its author, Harper Lee, for it was an early version of To Kill a Mockingbird. It just wasn't good enough, and so she put it aside and went back to work. When she had mastered the craft, she went on to produce art. It was unfair to later publish what was essentially a rough draft.

Russo's inclusion of the phrase "at least for a period of time" is important, for none of us can easily handle endless rejection. Something has to give. Most of us will move on to something else.

Among the saddest of literary stories is that of John Kennedy O'Toole, who in frustration at repeated rejection committed suicide at 31. Eleven years later, thanks to the efforts of his mother and novelist Walker Percy, A Confederacy of Dunces was finally published and went on to win a Pulitzer. What makes this story even more sad is that O'Toole had mastered his craft and produced art, yet still found only rejection. Percy himself admitted that when O'Toole's mother thrust the novel at him, he didn't want to read it and hoped it would be bad enough to discard after a paragraph or two.

It makes one wonder how much art might lie ignored at the bottom of publishers' slush piles.

Lazy movie studios

Roger Ebert

Hollywood studios turn so many notable novels into films at least in part because they're lazy. Anyway that was movie critic Roger Ebert's opinion.

In an article in a 2005 issue of Pages magazine, Ebert was quoted as saying, "But if a story's already gotten into hardcover, if someone in the very high-risk world of publishing has already shown a certain amount of faith in a story, then it must have some merit, right? I think that 'pre-approved' status is meaningful to a lot of studios and producers today. They might not ever actually read the book, you understand, but they're encouraged to hear that it was a book first."

If the book was a best-seller, that helps too. It already has title recognition. Those who loved the novel are likely to want to see it on the screen. Others know of the book but have never found time to actually read it. They want to see the movie version too.

Thousands of screenplays are written each year. Movie producers don't want to read all those screenplays anymore than they want to read all those novels, according to Ebert. But if a story became a published novel, it must have some merit, studio executives reason. Therefore it seems like a safer bet than an untested screenplay.

The problem is that while original screenplays are written to be made into movies, most novels are written just to be read as novels. Adapting a novel for the screen can be a huge challenge. Novels tell stories, while movies show stories, and it can be extremely difficult for a film director to show what novelists tell — what characters are thinking, for example.

Then there is the matter of style. A writer's style may be a big reason for a novel's success, but how does one put a literary style on the screen? A novel may be popular because of the way the words are put on the page. These words create mental images that a film director, who works with visual images, cannot possibly duplicate on the screen. A literary style is hardly the same thing as a visual style.

Directors usually find it impossible to fit an entire novel into a two-hour movie, meaning that characters and subplots must often be eliminated. Often the entire story must be drastically changed.

Consequently movies adapted from popular and classic novels regularly, though not always, disappoint audiences. Directors actually seem to have better success adapting more obscure novels which few people have read, allowing them to change the story at will without offending or disappointing anyone.

Behind Ike's silence

Ike and McCarthy by David A. Nichols is another in a series of books by various authors making the case that Dwight Eisenhower was a better president than most historians give him credit for.

The beginning of Eisenhower's presidency in 1953 coincided with the peak of Sen. Joe McCarthy's ruthless campaign to root out communists, real or imagined, from American government and culture. Now, perhaps because of Ike's Army background and McCarthy's own White House ambitions, he was attempting to unearth communists in the military. (This is sort of the opposite of what is going on in Washington today, where anti-communists in the military are the ones who are suspect.)

Eisenhower's silence on McCarthy angered many in government and in the press, making critics wonder whether Ike either supported the senator or was afraid of him. In fact, Nichols says, his public silence was a key part of his strategy. The president knew that to so much as mention McCarthy's name would serve to empower him, so he simply ignored him, at least publicly, and even avoided situations where he might have to shake the man's hand.

Behind the scenes, however, Ike plotted with his staff to bring McCarthy down, culminating in Senate hearings where McCarthy himself was the target. Eisenhower managed to schedule speeches out of Washington or play golf somewhere whenever McCarthy made headlines. He always tried to be unavailable for comment. By the end of Eisenhower's first term, McCarthyism was McCarthywasm, as the popular joke of the day went. 

This is an important book, yet a surprisingly dull one, except for some terrific opening pages where Nichols nicely sums up the whole story. After that he gets bogged down in endless details.

Funky word stories

Wilfred Funk

Wilfred Funk (1883-1965) was not one of the founders of Funk & Wagnalls but rather the son of one of them. His own claim to fame, however, was also related to books — he wrote more than a dozen of them — and words.

He once proposed a list of the most beautiful words in the English language. These include dawn, hush, lullaby, murmuring, tranquil, mist, luminous, chimes, golden and melody. We might all add our own words to the list, daffodil perhaps or rendezvous. Meaning seems to be as important as sound in making a word beautiful. Thus, weekend might be a beautiful word to some, or wine but not whine.

In 1937 he listed the 10 most overworked words: okay, terrific, lousy, definitely, racket, gal, honey, swell, contact and impact. Some of these words are still overworked today, although we might now want to find a spot on the list for such words as nice and actually, perhaps replacing racket and swell.

I have one of Funk's books before me now, Word Origins and Their Romantic Stories. This book was popular when it was published in 1950 and remains interesting today. Opening it to a random page, here are, in brief, some of Funk's "romantic stories." 

Gossamer, surely a contender for Funk's list of most beautiful words, means "goose-summer." Funk says summer is when geese are most likely to be plucked and when cobwebs are most likely to be seen in the breeze, and gossamer looks something like cobwebs. He doesn't actually make a connection between geese and spiders' webs. Perhaps gossamer just looks like a cobweb and is as soft as feathers.

We get the word lace, he says, from laqueus, a Latin word meaning noose. Huh? How romantic is that? The noose in question, however, seems to refer less to execution than to a snare, and I guess one purpose of a woman's lace is to entrap.

Garter comes from a French word meaning "the bend in the knee."

The word mirror stems from a Latin word meaning "admire." Don't you suppose good-looking people spend more time looking into mirrors than the rest of us do?

We get jade from a Spanish phrase meaning "stone of the side." That's because the gem was once thought to relieve a pain in the side.

I don't know how romantic these word-origin stories are, but the book can be fun to browse through, perhaps the next time you are in a funk.

Reading and daydreaming

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

In her book Ruined by Reading, Lynne Sharon Schwartz recalls a woman commenting on those people who can stare at the same page of a book or newspaper for 15 minutes or more: "Don't you know? They're not really reading. It's their way of daydreaming, but they have to have the paper in front of them to justify it."

That's something most of us probably learned to do in school. As long as we were staring at an open textbook, we could daydream about anything we wanted to — the last recess, the next recess, being a superhero, an imagined relationship with the boy or girl on the other side of the room, whatever. It's a trick we never forget. With reading matter in front of us, we can daydream, worry, remember, plan or even eavesdrop on somebody else's conversation, and everyone will just assume we are reading — as long as we remember to turn the page now and then.

Yet reading and daydreaming connect to each other in another way, as well. Ideas tend to inspire other ideas. How many inventions, discoveries, scientific theories, novels, sermons, business plans, etc., have resulted from somebody reading and then daydreaming about that writer's ideas to create new ones? How many young readers have daydreamed about storybook heroes, then gone on to careers inspired by those daydreams?

Not all daydreams come true, of course. Most don't. That's why we call them dreams. Yet daydreams can often lead to something worthwhile, even if nothing more than a pleasant way to pass the time until the class bell rings.