Ideas out, ideas in

Both writer and reader experience the same basic pleasure — something in one form on the page takes another form in the mind. This is the essential pleasure of literature, ideas going into and out of words over and over and over, any time the readers opens a book, or the author takes up a pen.

Janes Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

Jane Smiley

What Jane Smiley writes about literature above would seem true about language in general — about communication in general. Ideas out. Ideas in.

Good communication is usually thought to be when the ideas coming in (to the readers or the listeners) are the same as those going out (from the writers or the speakers). Yet sometimes we misunderstand entirely. This seems to happen all the time in conversation. What I hear isn't what you said, or vice versa. Even the written word can be badly misunderstood, even though writers can take more time framing their words and readers can always reread to better understand what they are reading.

But I am intrigued by one phrase Smiley writes: "something in one form on the page takes another form in the mind." This suggests that the two ideas, what is written and what is read, are rarely identical, and that this can actually be a good thing. Words are read (or heard) by someone with a very different mind, a different perspective, different beliefs, a different history. These differences color almost every attempt at communication. When a writer describes a scene, for example, readers will each picture something in their minds that is not quite what the writer pictured.

This is not necessarily failed communication. It is what makes language so magical. What readers read may often be something deeper, more profound, than what was written. Readers can find ideas in books that never occurred to the authors themselves, which is what makes literary criticism so valuable. Ideas inspire new ideas.

The spoken word and especially the written word are vital not just because they express ideas but because they give birth to ideas. 

Fast action

Joel C. Rosenberg's The Beirut Protocol (2021) proves to be a fast-paced thriller that will satisfy most readers, especially those who prefer action to sex and bad language.

Rosenberg is a citizen of both the United States and Israel, and this dual allegiance is reflected in the novel. Two Americans and one young Israeli are kidnapped by terrorists along the border of Israel and Lebanon. One of these is Marcus Ryker, the hero of several Rosenberg novels. The other American is a young woman.

The terrorists, while pretending to be part of Hezbollah, are actually financed by a new, independent agent. Thus, everyone — the U.S., Israel, Iran, Hezbollah, etc. — is confused by what's going on.

The three captives are tortured, but reveal nothing. If the terrorists knew one of their captives was Marcus Ryker or that another was an Israeli, things would get even worse. Most the story is about how Ryker escapes and brings about the rescue of the other two.

A two-page cast of characters at the beginning of the novel makes life easier for readers, for there are many characters, most with difficult names for American readers.

He, she or they?

For many, many years, when writers, both male and female, needed a pronoun to refer to someone of undetermined sex, male pronouns were always used — he and him. All readers understood, without confusion.

Then at some point in the lifetimes of many of us, someone decided that this is sexist, and thus the confusion began. Some writers began writing only she and her in these instances, as if this were somehow fair or perhaps retribution for past mistakes. Whenever I encounter this, my first instinct is still to try to find the woman in the text I somehow missed.

Other writers alternate, using a masculine pronoun, then a feminine pronoun, then a masculine pronoun, etc. Jane Smily uses a variation of this method in her book 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. She uses feminine pronouns when referring to a reader, perhaps because most readers these days are, in fact, female. When writing about a writer, especially an imagined writer of an earlier age, she uses masculine pronouns, perhaps because most writers at that time were, in fact, male. Near the end of her book, she uses both masculine and feminine pronouns in the same paragraph. Talk about confusing.

William Shakespeare

Other writers try to  avoid confusion by using they in reference to just one person. I have read arguments for this usage, and I can even agree, up to a point. Even William Shakespeare used they when referring to a single individual. And yet I still find this confusing. How can one person be a they?

So why not write in such a way that they actually refers to multiple people? This is what I do in my own writing, and it works nearly every time. When Smiley refers to a reader in her book. she could have simply referred to readers instead. She could have written about writers in general rather than just one imagined writer. Almost any sentence can be rewritten in this way. The they pronoun includes everybody, and this way of writing satisfies those of us who are sticklers for singular/plural consistency..

On those rare occasions when I actually do need a singular pronoun, I go with the masculine one. If other writers can use she or her and get away with it, why can't I use he or him?

The action never stops

One plot isn't enough for today's novels. There have long been subplots, of course, but now it can be difficult to tell which is the main plot and which the subplot.

Shadows Reel (2021) by C.J. Box is one such novel. The plot that comes first and the one in which Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett is most involved must be the main plot, yet the other plot featuring his friend, Nate Romanowski, and in which Joe appears for the climax, occupies nearly as many pages.

In one plot, a Nazi photo album from World War II is dropped off at the library where Marybeth, Joe's wife, works. She takes it home with her, unaware that a pair of killers will stop at nothing to get their hands  on that album. It happens to be Thanksgiving week, when the Picketts' grown children are home. Also there is Nate's wife and daughter, spending Thanksgiving with the Picketts because Nate is off pursuing his stolen falcons.

Nate's part of the story takes him as far as Seattle and Portland, chasing the man who wants to sell the falcons to wealthy Arabs to help finance his plan to overthrow the country, using Antifa as his patsy.

With two plots at once, things never slow down in this novel. When there isn't action here, there is action there.

For those of us who enjoy Joe Pickett novels, this one does not disappoint.

Looking at the novel

Jane Smiley's ambitious doorstop of a book, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), seems like two books in one.

The first half addresses her title. She looks at the novel, in general, in 13 ways: its origins, its psychology, how it views history, how it approaches morality and so on. This is interesting stuff, and I will have much to say about her points in the weeks to come, and in fact I have already begun to do that.

The second half of her book consists of her reviews of the "100 novels" she mostly refers to in her first half. I put this phrase in quotation marks because she writes about many more than 100 novels. She writes about three P.G. Wodehouse novels as if they were one. Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time,  seven novels, is treated as one. I haven't done the math, but there may be 130 or 140 novels in all that she talks about in detail.

Many of these novels are ones you, like me, have never heard of, let alone read. Don Quixote is commonly regarded as the first novel, but Smiley puts it seventh on her chronological list. The oldest, The Tale of Genji, was written by an 11th century Japanese woman.

She doesn't choose the novels she necessarily considers the best. For example, she says she regards Our Mutual Friend as the best novel Charles Dickens ever wrote, as well as one of the best novels ever written, yet the Dickens novel she writes about here is A Tale of Two Cities. She includes Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, even though she regards as "a bad work of art."

Many of the novels on her list she has read multiple times. One wonders how she found the time, especially considering how many of her own novels she has written.

Whether one writes novels or just likes to read them, Jane Smiley offers much to ponder.

Happy birthday, twerp

Albert Einstein

Einsteinian became a word in 1925. It was, of course, in reference to Albert Einstein, the great physicist who even now, a hundred years later, is synonymous with brainy. Perhaps in his spirit, that seems to have been a good year for long words in general. Among words coined that year were arachnophobia, Australopithecus, compartmentalize, configurational, neonate, neurosurgeon, oncologist, puerilism, and readability.

Each year at this time I like to celebrate the 100th anniversary of words, according to There's a Word for It, a 2010 book by Sol Steinmetz.

Some product names became part of the language in 1925: Kleenex, Leica, Tootsie Roll and Wheaties. Perhaps because of Tootsie Rolls, we also got the word chewy that year.

The year had its share of new slang words: ball-hawking, coulda, cuppa, dis, dream team, fink, freebie, giddap, gimp, hightail, nudnik, twerp and whoops.

We also got cannoli, cosmic rays, guppy, knitwear, makeover, marathoner, middlebrow, motel, mothproof, needlepointer, pinboard, quiche, superstar, usherette and zipper that year.

Some of these words have already all but dropped out of the language, but many off them seem as fresh as they were a hundred years ago.

The beauty of trees

Few works of art are as beautiful as an old tree.

I live in a part of Florida where ancient trees, mostly oaks, can be found practically anywhere — surrounding my condo complex, on an adjacent golf course where I like to walk in the evening, on the grounds of a nearby church. They take my breath away.

And so I love Susan Tyler Hitchcock's Into the Forest: The Secret Language of Trees. Hitchcock writes beautifully about trees, yet her words are overpowered by the photographs that dominate this National Geographic book. One cannot turn a page without finding a gorgeous photograph — a Japanese maple, an ancient apple tree, fig trees in Australia, children climbing a tree, beech trees in Virginia, cypress trees in a Louisiana bayou and on and on.

One need not read a word to love this book. But anyone who does read the text will be rewarded. Hitchcock's essays are brief — to make room for all those photos — but they say a lot in few words. She tells of a tree estimated to be more than 5,000 years old. Its location is kept a secret to protect it. Trees still survive that were in Hiroshima when the city was otherwise destroyed by an atomic bomb. She describes "forest bathing" — simply walking through a forest slowly and breathing in the air.

Trees have value even beyond their beauty and the worth of the wood and fruit they produce. The author writes that just one red maple tree in Ohio removes 5,500 pounds of carbon emissions over 20 years. It saves 570 kilowatt-hours of electricity. Imagine what a forest can do.