Lonely in Alaska

The human body was eighty percent water; that meant she was literally made of tears,

Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

There are an abundance of tears shed in Kristin Hannah's 2018 novel The Great Alone. Many more will flow from the reader by the end of this heart-rending story.

Leni is just 13 in 1974 when the story opens. Her father, Ernt, may have been a wonderful man before he went to Vietnam and became a prisoner of war, but now he is short-tempered and violently jealous when another man even looks at his beautiful wife, Cora. She pays the price in beatings, yet can't stop loving him.

When a fellow veteran leaves Ernt a piece of land in Alaska, he believes this will change his family's fortunes significantly. It does, but in the wrong direction. The long, dark Alaska winters make Ernt even more paranoid, more jealous, more isolated.

Meanwhile Leni, while walking on eggshells in her own home, falls in love with Matthew, the only boy her age in her class at school. Unfortunately for her, Matthew happens to be the son of Tom, the town's wealthiest man and the one at whom Ernt directs most of his anger and jealousy — for which Cora always pays the price.

"The Great Alone," poet Robert Service's phrase to describe Alaska, takes on added meaning as Leni and her family becomes more and more isolated. And then it gets worse.

Yet Hannah manages to give us a conclusion brimming with togetherness, love ... and tears.

The last word revisited

Will Schwalbe

Back in 2019, I wrote an essay for this blog ("The last word," May 27, 2019) about a comment made by Will Schwalbe in Books for a Living. Schwalbe says he was told by someone that to discover what a book is about, simply read the last word in the book.

I put this whimsical shortcut to the test and found that nearly 50 percent of the time that is actually true. The last word in a book often does, in fact, tell you what the book is about, more or less. Of course, you may have to read the entire book to interpret that word in a significant way.

I decided to revisit this notion with a few books I have read over the past year..

Take, for instance, Madam, Debby Applegate's biography of Polly Adler, the famous New York madam in the 1930s and 1940s. What should be the last word but "desires." Yep, that's what the book is about, although of course it is also about much more.

The last word in Sy Montgomery's Of Time and Turtles is "eternity" — or endless time or timelessness. Turtles move so slowly and live so long that time must seem endless to them.

I was smitten by Olaf Olafsson's novel Touch last year. It's about an elderly man who cannot forget a Japanese girl he fell in love with decades before. He flies from Iceland to Japan to try to find her again. The last word in the novel is "her." The last two words are "touch her."

The final word in the Amor Towles novel A Gentleman in Moscow is, appropriately enough, "waited." The novel tells of an aristocratic man sentenced by the Soviets to spend the rest of his life in a Moscow hotel — in effect, waiting.

In Somebody's Fool by Richard Russo, the last word is "else." Again, one must read the book for this word to gain significance, but the novel is about making choices, changing directions, trying something new, something else.

I have not mentioned the majority of books I have read in recent months in which the last word suggests nothing at all about the book itself. Still it is fun to discover just how often the last word actually does tell us something about what comes before.

Seeking the ideal

Years ago I wrote a newspaper column, unpopular with some female readers, in which I suggested that a woman's taste for romance novels and romantic movies is comparable to a man's taste for pinups and centerfolds. It is all about the pursuit of the ideal.

That is, women favor love stories in which the male figure looks, talks and acts like the man of their dreams. Similarly, a man browsing through the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition (or something more explicit) is looking for the woman of his dreams.

In real life, most men and women have to settle for something less than their ideal. Not every man can marry the homecoming queen or a swimsuit model. Not every woman can marry the quarterback or a handsome millionaire over six-foot tall. In a happy marriage, this less-than-ideal spouse turns out to be the perfect choice. (But that doesn't mean happily married women don't still read and watch love stories and happily married men don't still sneak peeks at the swimsuit edition.)

So I was interested in an article called The Perfect (Fictional) Boyfriend by Kiran Josen in Oh Reader magazine. 

Focusing on romance novels, Josen agrees that such books provide models of high-standard men. "Crafting the perfect fictional male love interest is a science, and no one does it better than romance writers," she says. "They're meticulous as they carefully select the right elements to bring their creation to life. A bit of charm, verbal foreplay, a crooked grin, a T-shirt that hugs the biceps just right, a slight scent of cedar wood."

What Josen notices is that a woman's ideal has changed over the years, a change reflected in romance novels. A few years ago, during the Fifty Shades of Grey era, female readers seemed to want lusty men who seduced women quickly. It was all about the sex. She has noticed "a shift toward books that I would call 'rom-com with big feelings.'"

She goes on, "Nowadays, I'm drawn to novels that show a more normal supportive kind of love. Because the things I value in a relationship now are more practical, I think my reading reflects that." Her observation is that in more recent romance novels, the ideal man has become less idealized and more like actual men. If that is true, it's got to be a good thing.

Meanwhile, men are still dreaming of that perfect face and perfect figure, while in most cases settling for something less.

After the prom

Love triangles are nothing new in fiction, but Laura Lippman gives us a love quadrangle in her compelling  2023 novel Prom Mom.

The title is a pejorative nickname given in 1997 to Amber after she is found in a hotel room with a dead baby. She is a high school girl on prom night whom no one suspects is pregnant. Joe, her date that night, had abandoned her in that room after discovering that the girl he truly loved might still love him. Amber spends time in prison for the death of her baby, then leaves Baltimore for places where she is unknown.

In 2019 she returns, however, and begins life anew as an art dealer. By now Joe is a successful real estate agent happily married to Meredith, a plastic surgeon. Despite his happy marriage, Joe has an affair with Jordan, who becomes clingy and demanding when he tries to break up their relationship.

Then Joe and Amber become reunited, and old sparks get rekindled. Thus he has two affairs going on at the same time. Significantly complicating matters, the Covid pandemic strikes, severely wounding the commercial real estate business, Joe's speciality.

Losing his fortune, unable to get untangled from Jordan and afraid his marriage to Meredith is endangered, Joe turns to Amber for help, just as he did back in high school when he needed tutoring to get into college.

Lippman pours on the surprises at the end of her novel. Some of them seem a stretch, but getting to this point makes good reading.

Which side sells the book?

The front

In her book Blurb Your Enthusiasm, Louise Wilder recalls that when some British bookstores reopened during the last stages of Covid, books were displayed "with their back covers facing outwards, so that they could be read without customers having to touch them."

I don't recall seeing that practice at the few Florida bookstores I visited during that period. But it makes me wonder: If you could display only the front or the back of a book, which practice would be better for sales?  We do, in fact, often judge books by their covers, but is it the front cover or the back cover that makes the sell?

The front cover usually tells us little more than the title and the author, but often that is enough for us. We all choose books written by authors we know, and often I purchase books simply because I love the titles. I recently visited a friend and, of course, examined the books on her coffee table. Almost every one of them had an engaging title, such as The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. When I commented on this, she confessed that she, too, is drawn to books with striking titles.

Cover illustrations also help sell books. Some books I enjoy owning simply because of their cover art.

The back

You can usually, though not always, find the title and the author on the back cover, but if they are there they may be difficult to find. We normally look to the back cover of a paperback to read what the book is about. On the back we can usually find a brief synopsis of the story, if it is a novel. If it's nonfiction, we can get the gist of the subject matter. For a hardcover book, you have to read the book flap inside the front cover, which you can't do without touching the book.

Wilder writes book blurbs for a living, and most of these are found on the back. I rarely read them, but some shoppers probably do.

Most people today carry phones, on which they can, if necessary, quickly discover what a book is about and even read reviews if they choose. Thus, back covers are not absolutely necessary for most book shoppers. The front covers are mostly about drawing our attention to books we didn't know existed, more time-consuming on a web search, or to books we happen to be looking for. We may or may not even look at the back cover.

So in my view, American bookstores were smarter during the pandemic. They showed us the front covers.

Let the text cool off

One of the things I most disliked about being a newspaper reporter was often having to finish a story in the last minutes before deadline.

At that time ours was an afternoon paper, meaning the deadline for reporters was around 11 a.m. I would come in at 8, finish up any stories begun the day before, then head over to city hall to make my rounds. If I turned up a good story, I would either phone it in to the rewrite desk or, more often, rush back to the newsroom to get my story written before deadline.

The problem was not just having to write under deadline pressure, but also not having the time to review my story before turning it in. To be sure, there were copy editors to catch most of my errors, yet I always felt my work would have been better if I could have let it set for at least a couple of hours, then come back to it with something like fresh eyes.

Roy Peter Clark

Writing coach Roy Peter Clark calls this letting the text cool off. A few days is even better than a few hours. The longer the period of time before finishing a piece of writing and reading it again, the more likely you are to find not just factual errors and spelling errors, but also awkward phrasing, awkward sentences, missing words, repeated words and so on.

When you have just finished writing something, whatever it may be, you know what it is supposed to say, so you are less likely to notice that that is not what it actually says. A cooling-off period gives you the chance to look at your work fresh, almost as if it were written by somebody else and you don't know what to expect.

"The cooler the text, the more clear-eyed the revision," Clark says.

Later in my career I turned to writing editorials and columns, where I could usually work ahead, finish a draft hours before deadline and then come back to it with new eyes. I liked that much better.

Turtle time

Sy Montgomery, whose book about octopuses (The Soul of the Octopus) so enchanted me, does it again in Of Time and Turtles (2023).

Montgomery, who has also written about apes, hummingbirds, pigs and other animals, immerses herself in her subject and those who study it professionally for months at a time before writing her books. This time she embeds herself with the Turtle Rescue League, a small group dedicated to saving the lives of turtles.

Slow-moving turtles often need to cross roads and highways to get to their nesting sites or wherever, and many are struck by cars each day. Others are used for target practice by hunters and archers. Those in the rescue league don't give up on these injured turtles, even those who don't appear to have any chance at recovery. Turtles move slowly even in their healing process. They can heal, but it takes time. And time is something turtles have in abundance. They can live a long time and are in no hurry.

The author tells remarkable stories, such as about turtles who seem to be dead, yet come back to life. She describes the trial-and-error attempts to build a wheelchair for a turtle, whose inured back legs take a long time to heal. She goes on a long night-time rescue mission to save turtles caught in freezing weather.

All this takes place during the Covid pandemic and during the 2020 election, both of which become part of Montgomery's story, although sometimes just distractions. Turtle time, as she calls it, also leads her to philosophical meditations on time itself.