The enemy of novelists?

Novelists are often portrayed by their natural enemies, biographers, as throughly in the grip of unconscious impulses or addictions or social pressures, or other forces that produce the novels, or produce what the novels really are (as opposed to what the novelists themselves thought they were).

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

There's lot to unpack in that convoluted Jane Smiley sentence, so let's take a stab at it.

The essential point may be her assertion that biographers are the "natural enemies" of novelists. Is this really true? I think of Tim Page, whose impressive biography of Dawn Powell led to a temporary revival of her work. Her books were all republished thanks to Page. There are other examples of biographers whose work revived interest in novelists.

Yet Smiley nevertheless has a valid point. A biographer's job when writing about a novelist is to not only tell us about that writer's life but also to tell us how that life became reflected in the novelist's work. Sometimes biographers go too far.

Of course, one's life is often reflected in one's writing. So many novels, especially first novels, are autobiographical. And these are often the best work the writer ever does. And the society in which a novelist is raised — Larry McMurtry on a Texas ranch, for example — often proves vital in the novels later written.

Yet biographers can give the sense that the novels are all but inevitable, that novelists are little more than conduits that lack free will. Biographers can also give the impression that their interpretation of novels is the correct one, even if novelists themselves say differently.

The beauty of great novels is that they can be interpreted differently by different people. The biographer is not always right. But then neither is the novelist.

Wear the old coat

Austin Phelps

Austin Phelps was a 19th century Congregational minister and educator who, among other noteworthy comments, said, "Wear the old coat and buy the new book."

One's priorities are reflected in how one spends money. Some people with modest incomes dress spectacularly. Someone else with the same income might drive a fancy car or live in a beautifully furnished apartment. Another travels overseas regularly. None of them can afford all these things at the same time, but they make a choice according to their priorities. Thus, the person who drives a luxury car may live in a dumpy house. The one who wears the latest fashions may drive a 30-year-old wreck.

Relatively few of us can afford to own everything we might want. Thus we have to make choices. In the view of Austin Phelps, that choice should be books. I tend to agree.

I may shop for clothing twice a year, if I have to. I got to a bookstore at least twice a month.

I have not always been this way. When I had a wife and child to support, my priorities were different. I once put a high priority on travel. I used to have to dress for my job. Today I live alone and am old enough that my needs and priorities are few. Spending my money on books, even books I doubt I will ever have time to read, does not seem wasteful to me. A new coat, however? Who needs it?

Bad choices, good results

If one makes bad decisions that somehow lead to a wonderful result — such as a bad marriage that results in a good child — were they actually bad decisions?

Leif Enger's 2008 novel So Brave, Young, and Handsome leads the reader to think such thoughts. The title comes from The Cowboy's Lament, which places that dilemma in this couplet: "For we loved our comrade, so brave, young, and handsome/We all loved our comrade, although he'd done wrong."

Enger's novel is narrated by a frustrated writer, Monte Becket, who after one successful novel seems unable to write anything of value. He, his wife and son become fascinated by a boat-building neighbor named Glendon. When Glendon decides to go West to try to find his Mexican wife, whom he abandoned years before, Becket decides to go with him, a decision his wife, Susannah, somehow approves of.

Along the way, Becket learns that abandoning his wife is the least of Glendon's sins. He is also a train robber and murderer being pursued by an aging, former Pinkerton agent named Siringo, who never gives up.

Instead of returning to his family in Minnesota, Becket decides to stick with Glendon, even when this makes himself a fugitive pursued by Siringo.

The consequences of Becket's decisions go from bad to worse, yet somehow it all works out in the end. And Becket, who tells his wild story, proves he can still write after all.

Back in the hills

I'd never seen a Tussie's pants worn out at the knees. They wore out on the seat first ...

Jesse Stuart, Taps for Private Tussie

I first read Jesse Stuart's Taps for Private Tussie (1943) when I was in high school. I just finished reading it for the third time, each reading from the original edition with those wonderful Thomas Hart Benton illustrations. The novel doesn't get old.

Narrated by a boy named Sid, whose parentage remains a mystery until the end, the story tells of what happens to a hill family after Kim Tussie's widow, Aunt Vittie, receives a check from the government along with Kim's remains following a World War II battle.

Members of the Tussie family, especially the men, are allergic to work. They prefer to drink, dance, sleep and subsist on relief checks. As the story opens they are living in a schoolhouse that bas been left vacant for the summer.

Vittie proves generous with her money, however, and soon the family is living in a 16-room mansion with more food than they can imagine. Tussies from miles around hear about their good fortune and move in with them. One of these is Uncle George, Grandpa's brother, whose slick words and lively fiddle music steal Vittie's heart, angering Uncle Mott, Kim's brother, who wants Vittie for himself.

Soon enough the money runs out and the bad feelings that had been kept below the surface boil to the top.

Meanwhile, Sid has belatedly started attending school and discovers that he is a good student with what is perhaps a different world view than others in his family, however much he love them all.

Stuart is all but ignored by readers today, but in his day he was an important American writer, and Taps for Private Tussie is his masterpiece.

Saving the world

Weddings have long been a favorite way to wrap up film comedies, Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, television series or whatever. But thrillers?

Joel C. Rosenberg brings not just The Beijing Betrayal (2025) but his entire series of Marcus Ryker thrillers to a climax not just with a wedding but with a wedding that takes up several chapters. I don't think I have ever seen a fictional wedding that is described in such detail. I kept expecting terrorists to show up at any second. But no. It's just a wedding.

Ryker finally gets to marry Annie, his CIA sweetheart, and after six world-saving adventures, they deserve it.

Ryker, also with the CIA, expects the president to fire him at the beginning of the novel after his previous mission ends in embarrassment. But he is given one more chance to kill an aging terrorist, who has teamed with China to poison Americans as a diversion so that China can attack Taiwan. 

As in previous novels in the series, Rosenberg keeps the adrenaline running. Even transitional chapters, needed to set up the next bit of action, are brief and tension-filled.

One hopes nobody in China reads this novel. It might give them ideas.

The transgression of reading

The greater the clams a social system makes on an individual, the graver the transgression of reading will be,

Heather Cass White, Books Promiscuously Read

Joyce Carol Oates

Heather Cass White's comment above seemed relevant to me before reading Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates. Afterward they are all the more relevant.

The novel tells of a high school student who is punished for being smart. For reading books. For asking questions. For thinking independently. The story may be set in the future, but as White suggests, something similar could happen at any time, past, present or future. Social systems, political systems, religious systems can all, at their extreme, seek to control information.

This happened during the COVID epidemic. It happened in Hollywood during the Hays era. It happens at so many colleges and universities today where diversity and inclusiveness are celebrated, at least until someone says something or reads something that might be considered conservative.  It happens when Amazon makes certain books difficult to purchase. Reading, especially the reading of fiction, is frowned upon by many parents.

White cites an example in Jane Austen's novel, Northanger Abbey, where one woman interrupts another, "'And what are you reading, Miss —?'" The other replies, "'Oh, it is only a novel!'" She then "lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame."

In Austen's story, the prejudice against reading a novel is at least subtle. Nobody is seizing the book or burning it or preventing its circulation.

Reading, White says, can be viewed as a "crime" in two ways. First, it is an independent act — one person voluntarily reading something, whatever it might be. Second, "it removes that self from circulation, from its possible use as the property of others."

Systems, at their extreme, want to own you. They want to control you. They want to dictate what you read and, therefore, what you think.

Through time with Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is one of our most prolific novelists, a prolificacy revealed not just in the number of her novels but in their variety. With Hazards of Time Travel in 2018, she even turned to science fiction and did it better than most sci-fi writers.

Her narrator is a high school senior named Adriane Strohl, who lives in a time, not far in the future, when becoming class valedictorian can be viewed by an oppressive government as an act of rebellion. You aren't allowed to ask questions or to think independently. You must conform or else. Adriane doesn't even get to give her valedictorian speech before she faces the "or else."

She is exiled, transported back to 1959 where she finds herself a coed named Mary Ellen Enright at a Wisconsin college. You might think she would enjoy the relative freedom of 1959. Everyone else is worried about the threat of nuclear war with the USSR, but coming from the future, she knows that never happened. Yet she misses her parents and friends. And she is puzzled by the technological simplicity of this age. She must learn how to use a typewriter. She must turn pages to read a book. Telephones are plugged into the wall and are just for talking.

Then she falls in love with a professor, Ira Wolfman, whom she learns is also an exile from her own time. Both believe they are being monitored by the powers-that-be in the future, but can they escape?

Oates takes us in directions we may not expect, all while warning her readers not so much about the hazards of time travel as the hazards of expanding technology and artificial intelligence. She makes 1959 sound pretty good.