A week at the lake

Many extended families gather along a lake or a seashore for a few days each summer. It's usually fun for everyone involved, but is there enough in such a family vacation for a novel? Stewart O'Nan thought so, and in 2002 he published Wish You Were Here, not just a novel about a week at the lake but a 517-page novel.

The family is the Maxwells, the subject of other O'Nan novels. Henry and Emily Maxwell have taken their family to their cottage along Chautauqua Lake in western New York for many years. Now Henry has died, and Emily gathers her family for one last week at the lake before she sells the cottage. Family members include Arlene, Henry's never-married sister; Kenneth, Emily's son, his wife Lise and their two children, Ella and Sam; and Margaret, Emily's daughter, and her children, Sarah and Justin.

This week at the lake never develops much more of a plot than any other family's week at the lake. Early in the week Kenneth stops for gas soon after a young female attendant at the gas station disappears, presumably kidnapped, and this thread weaves through the novel now and then, but it never turns into a crime novel. The closest O'Nan comes to an actual plot is that nobody in the family wants to lose the beloved cottaged, but only Emily can afford to pay the taxes, and she doesn't want the responsibility. Yet that is hardly enough to sustain 500 pages.

But we keep reading. There is something compelling about a family's attempts during a mostly rainy week to find things to do that will keep everyone amused. It is all familiar somehow, much like our own lakeside family reunions.

The author offers the point of view of each of the nine characters, switching from one to another. Each person is loving part of the family, yet we see that each is secretly petty, selfish and even somewhat vindictive. Unacknowledged conflicts rage beneath the surface, sort of like in most families. Only the two boys are young enough to allow their true feelings to come out in the open. Disciplining them amounts to teaching them to hold those feelings inside like the adults do.

The novel, while never riveting, nevertheless proves interesting enough to keep the pages turning. The missing woman does not turn up, and other problems remain unresolved as well. Emily is still lonely. Kenneth still can't make a decent living from his first love, photography. Margaret, just divorced, still wants to drown her depression in drink. Lise still thinks her husband has more to say to his sister than to her. Ella still has a crush on her prettier cousin. And so on. Family vacations usually don't solve problems. They just give us a break from them, or in some cases just bring them out into the open.

For many years my own extended family spent weeks each summer in a cottage along Chautauqua Lake, so O'Nan's many references to places along the lake — such as the Lenhart Hotel, the Bemus Point ferry, the Book Barn, the casino, etc. — made this novel especially appealing to me. It made me wish I were there.

Faceless writers

How many authors would you recognize if you saw them on the street? Probably not very many. Stephen King has a distinctive face, so you it might look familiar if you saw him across a room. James Patterson is sometimes seen promoting his books on television, so his face might ring a bell. Yet most writers, even those who have written bestsellers and have their photographs on each copy, can usually blend into a crowd, even if that crowd includes fans of their books.

This relative anonymity is fine with some authors, even if others may wish for a bit more celebrity. On a recent morning at breakfast I read in Kenneth Slawenski's J.D. Salinger about that Salinger's distaste for his photo on the back of The Catcher in the Rye. He soon had the photo removed from subsequent editions of the novel, and he once commented, "The poor boob who lets himself in for it (publishing a book) might as well walk down Madison Avenue with his pants down." Of course, it was the unexpected popularity of his novel that was most responsible for his unwanted celebrity. The photograph just made him easier to recognize on the street. Probably very few people actually did recognize him on the street by his photo, but the ultra sensitive Salinger wanted to reduce the chances.

One might think that because authors make more public appearances than they once did — thanks to book signings, book festivals and the like — that their faces would become more familiar. Yet relatively few people actually attend these events, just as relatively few people read their books. Nick Hornby in Housekeeping vs. the Dirt mentions that 43 percent of Americans  and 40 percent of Britons never read books, so why would they even care what James Patterson or Nick Hornby looks like?

Writing is in more ways than one an ideal fit for introverts. Not only can they comfortably work alone for long hours to produce their books, but they can achieve considerable success in their field, even to the point of winning awards and writing bestsellers, while staying in the shadows.

Salinger had to go into seclusion to escape public attention. Most writers can just lead normal lives. Even their own neighbors may not know — or even care — what they do for a living.

Keeping it positive

Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, published in 2006, is another in a series of collections of Nick Hornby's delightful columns printed monthly, or almost monthly, in Believer. That his column does not appear every month is something of a running joke in these columns, which ran from February 2005 to June/July 2006. From time to time Hornby comments about being suspended by the magazine's editors for making negative comments about the books he reviews. They supposedly tolerate only positive reviews. Yet Hornby's comments about the magazine, his editors and himself are often so fanciful that one doesn't  always know what should be believed. Only when writing about books and literature in general does his commentary seem sincere and trustworthy.

At the top of each column Hornby lists both the books bought that month (although he also includes books given to him) and the books read that month. Then he writes about the books he read in a stew of an essay that mixes in other commentary, as well.

He reads quite a variety of books, mostly in the middle range between the high-brow and low-brow extremes and mostly contemporary books. Yet he does comment on Voltaire's Candide, G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday and Robert Warren's All the King's Men, each a classic from years gone by. Naturally the commentary that most interests me is that about books I've read and appreciated, such as Jess Walter's Citizen Vince, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, Michael Frayn's Spies and The Trick of It and Tom Perrotta's Little Children. He likes them, too, and one believes that his positive reviews are not just the result of some edict from Believer editors.

Hornby's book also includes a few brief excerpts from books he reviews that may entice readers to try them even if his reviews do not.

Hornby is himself a novelist, the author of such books as About a Boy and A Long Way Down.

If you think books reviews have to be stuffy, read Hornby's columns and think again.

No rules

When we were kids in school, language studies were mostly about learning rules — rules for grammar, rules for spelling, rules for pronunciation, even rules for what were and weren't actual words. There seemed to be a right and wrong way of saying and writing everything. For the rest of our lives we may feel a bit guilty, or at least embarrassed, whenever we are caught breaking one of these rules.

Yet the language experts, those with more expertise than our elementary school teachers, insist that what we were taught in school were not so much rules as customs. We were being taught to speak and write like the educated adults in our community. It was something like being taught which fork to use for the salad. Steven Pinker suggests as much when he writes in The Stuff of Thought, "Designating a sentence as 'ungrammatical' simply means that native speakers tend to avoid the sentence, cringe when they hear it, and judge it as sounding odd." Sounding odd is not quite the same thing as being wrong.

As we got older we learned — to our amusement or horror, as the case may be — that ain't is listed in dictionaries, that words used in different parts of the country can mean something different than what we are used to and that the English people, who should certainly know how to to use the English language, don't sound like the people we grew up with. We also became more aware that the "rules" we learned are often inconsistent and sometimes make little sense. A noun is made plural by adding an s. So house becomes houses, yet mouse becomes mice (at least when you are talking about the animal).

Language is always evolving, which is why Shakespearean English sounds so strange to us, even though in Shakespeare's own time it was quite ordinary English. Imagine if language "rules" from that period of history were still enforced today. (William Shakespeare didn't even spell his own name the way we spell it today.) What seems like a rule is simply a custom that has come to be observed by the majority of people in a particular area. Language customs change with time just as other kinds of customs do.

Happy birthday, bozo

T-shirt — the word, not the shirt itself — is now a century old. That’s one of the curiosities to be found in Sol Steinmetz’s book There’s a Word for It. New English words enter the language each year, and Steinmetz attempts to list words according to the first year they appeared in print. (Words, of course, may have been spoken long before they were printed in a surviving document, but there is no way to know when a word was first spoken.)

Each year I try to celebrate those words that, according to Steinmetz, have reached the century mark. I always find this interesting, and often surprising. Some words turn out to be much older — or younger — than you might think.

Adventurist is one word that sounds a century old. Now it seems dated. Today we would probably say adventurer instead. Palooka is another word that sounds like something from the 1920s. The same with ritzy.

Yet words like homophobia and craftsperson suggest a more recent, politically correct time. And then there’s jihadi, a word you might have sworn originated within the past 30 or 40 years. 

Other words from 1920 include backsplash, bongo, bozo, columnist, daiquiri, deflationary, leotard, martial art, miscue, mock-up, nonviolence, off-the-rack, paranormal, periodontist, proton, rabbit-punch, tempura, upgrade, wimp, wow and yippee.

Back to Kellerman

I was one of the original Faye Kellerman fans, starting with her first novels, The Ritual Bath and Sacred and Profane, and continuing through a half dozen or more Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus adventures. Then somehow I strayed away, pursuing other mystery series. It has been a pleasure returning to Kellerman with her 2007 novel, The Burnt House.

The crash of a commuter plane into an apartment building kills everyone aboard and several residents and triggers not one but two murder investigations. That the two murders are somehow related seems like a stretch, but otherwise this is a first-rate police procedural.

The airline can't seem to decide whether a flight attendant named Roseanne Dresden was aboard the doomed flight or not. She was not assigned to the flight and did not have a ticket, but she may have gotten aboard anyway. Her husband, Ivan, says she was aboard and wants to collect her insurance money. Her father, however, insists she was not aboard and that Ivan killed her, using the crash as a cover.

One unidentified body is found at the crash scene, but it is not Roseanne's. Rather it is that of a young woman who was apparently murdered in the 1970s.

Lieutenant Peter  Decker and his team have their hands full with one murder and one missing person to deal with, and these two parallel investigations are absorbing to follow. There is little for Rina to do this time, other than to be a sweet Jewish wife and mother. Decker works such long hours that he doesn't even get home much. Rina does come through at the end, however, to resolve one last remaining problem.

All in all, The Burnt House is a fine murder mystery, leaving me eager to read some of the other unread Kellerman novels that have been piling up.

Ursula Le Guin's confession

Jealousy sticks its nasty yellow-green snout mostly into my life as a writer. I'm jealous of other writers who soar to success on wings of praise, I'm contemptuously angry at them, at the people who praise them — if I don't like their writing.

Ursula Le Guin, No Time to Spare

That one writer should be jealous of another writer's success is no surprise. Aren't most people jealous of those who achieve what they themselves yearn to achieve — like, for example, the fellow actor who wins the Oscar, the teammate who hits the game-winning homer, the prettier girl who goes to the prom with the captain of the football team?

But two things do surprise me about what Ursula Le Guin writes in an essay called "About Anger," published in her book No Time to Spare. One is that she admits it. Most of us just put on a brave face and say something magnanimous in public, whatever our true feelings. Then we nurse our wounds in private or with those closest to us.

Le Guin tells us how she really feels. "I snarl at what I see as the unending overestimation of James Joyce," she writes. "The enshrinement of Philip Roth infuriates me." (I happen to agree with her on both of these points, though without the anger.)

The other things that surprises me is her final phrase: "... if I don't like their writing." Her jealousy, in other words, applies only to those writers she considers overrated and undeserving of their sales, their awards, their respect in the literary world. "I can read endless appreciations of Virginia Woolf," she says. "A good article about Jose Saramago makes my day."

Thus what she terms jealousy actually seems less like jealousy than critical discernment. Aren't we all a bit disgruntled when a trashy novel reaches the top of the best-seller list while a novel we love and consider much better doesn't even make the top 50? Don't we hate it when a movie that bored us wins an Oscar, while the makers of our favorite film must pretend it was an honor just to be nominated?

So Ursula Le Guin makes a confession here, but it seems to me that her sin may be something less than the jealousy she confesses.

A mystery that rings true

Published in 1992, Wednesday's Child came relatively early in Peter Robinson's terrific series of Inspector Banks novels, a series still going strong.

As usual Banks and his team of investigators have two major crimes — perhaps related, perhaps not — to deal with at the same time. (How the English village of Eastvale can have so many major crimes is a mystery itself, on a par with the many murders that occur in Jane Marple's quaint village of St. Mary Mead.) A young couple pose as social workers and take away a woman's seven-year-old daughter, Gemma, supposedly because of suspected child abuse. Then the body of a man knifed to death is found.

At this point early in the series, Alan Banks is still just the No. 2 man among Eastvale investigators. In charge, though nearing retirement, is Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe, who for personal reasons decides to take charge of the kidnapping case, leaving the murder to Banks. Readers follow both investigations step by step, waiting to see if the two paths connect.

Except for the abundance of evil in Eastvale, these books suggest realism throughout: believable characters, believable crimes, believable detective work and finally a believable outcome. Unusual for the series, Wednesday's Child includes both a chase and a shootout, yet even these seem real.

This novel will satisfy all those Robinson fans who, like me, get to it late.

Misunderstood

All that darkness was in the service of eternal brightness. All that violence was in the service of peace and serenity.

Jonathan Rogers, The Terrible Speed of Mercy

Few 20th century writers, or at least those writers taken seriously by literary scholars and taught in college classrooms, have been as committed to conveying the Christian understanding of grace and redemption as Flannery O'Connor. Yet her stories are so dark, so violent, so grotesque that few readers readily grasp what they are really about.

O'Connor, a devout Catholic who tried to attend Mass every day, made no secret about what her goals were in her fiction, yet most of those who read her novels and short stories see something else in them. She hated reading reviews of her books because reviewers so rarely understood them.

Brad Gooch wrote an excellent biography in 2009, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor, so perhaps another biography wasn't necessary so soon after, yet the much shorter The Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O'Connor by Jonathan Rogers (2012) serves a different end. Rogers, while giving a good summary of her life and making good use of Gooch's book in the process, has another goal in mind. He seeks to discover what made O'Connor tick, what she believed and how those beliefs shaped her fiction.

"My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for," O'Conner once wrote in a letter. These, in fact, may have been the people who liked her stories best. Christians, especially those who were her neighbors in Milledgeville, Ga., either didn't read her books or didn't like them if they did. They were proud of her literary accomplishments but just wished she would write a different kind of fiction, something a bit nicer.

Rogers writes, "For O'Connor, the real horror was never violence or deformity, but damnation." Even her morally worst characters usually find sudden grace by the end of her stories, that "terrible speed of mercy" brought home.

O'Connor suffered from lupus for much of her short life. She was just 39 when she died. She left behind two novels and numerous short stories that will be read, and perhaps occasionally understood, for years to come.

The people we know best

A great part of the appeal of reading fiction is the discovery that the reader knows much more of the inner life of the characters in the book than of his or her own family members or friends.

Paul Theroux, Figures in a Landscape

Paul Theroux

This statement by Paul Theroux may seem startling at first. Can it possibly be true that I know Huckleberry Finn or Scout Finch better than I know my own child? How can I possibly know more about the people in that mystery I'm reading than I know about my best friends? They aren't even real people, but just fictional characters.

Yet of course it is true. The key is that phrase Theroux uses, "inner life," referring to thoughts, feelings and secrets. In the real world, the only inner life we can know anything about is our own. There are, of course, those people who seem always ready to share their thoughts, feelings and secrets with us, whether we are interested in them or not. Once they do, however, these revelations cease to be "inner life," and there will always be some thoughts, feelings and secrets that remain unrevealed.

Reading fiction is like reading minds. The reader quickly learns things about fictional characters that could never be known about a friend or relative. In real life we often don't understand why people do the things they do. In fiction we do because authors tell us. This insight does not transfer from page to screen, a big reason why movies are rarely as good as the books from which they were adapted. Showing an actor's face is about all a director can do to reveal what is going on in a character's mind, which is about all we have in the case of the people in our own lives. In real life we read faces, voices, actions and words and from this must deduce what a person is actually thinking. An author writing in third person can simply tell us.

Consider these opening lines from novels:

"Her first name was India — she was never able to get used to it." — Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell Jr.

"Hale knew they meant to murder him before he had been in Brighton three hours." — Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

"Harmony is driving home, eastward out of Las Vegas, her spirits high, her head a clutter of memories." — The Desert Rose by Larry McMurtry

"As Benedict Stone huffed his way to work, the sweet smell of the cherry scones in Bake My Day made him forget for a moment that his wife, Estelle, had packed her purple suitcase and moved out of their home." — Rise & Shine, Benedict Stone by Phaedra Patrick

In each case the words sound like fiction, not fact, and the giveaway is the inner life the lines reveal. Maybe someone writes lines like these in a biography, but not likely. The novelists take us inside a character's mind. India has never gotten used to her name. Hale knows someone wants to murder him. Harmony is happily pondering a clutter of memories. Benedict Stone momentarily forgets that his wife has left him. Were these real people, our friends perhaps or even members of our own family, we might never know these things about them.

All this makes reading pleasurable, even if those fictional people in our books can never really replace the real people in our lives.

A world without blue

Was Homer colorblind? With that question linguist Guy Deutscher begins his fascinating 2010 book Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages.

That question perplexed scientists for many years, In the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer describes the sea as "wine-looking," the same description he assigns to oxen. And he describes honey as green. But it wasn't just Homer. The Old Testament, in the original Hebrew, describes gold as being green. So was everyone colorblind back then?

The explanation, says Deutscher, is not that Homer and other ancient writers were colorblind but that they simply did not have words for all the colors. Even now languages used by people in isolated parts of the world often do not have words for blue and yellow. Every language has a word for red, he writes. Blood is red. Red dye is relatively easy to make. Red is an important color to everyone. Green, too, is an important color because so much of the natural world is green. The sky is blue, but not much else. Nobody in those cultures had blue eyes. And just as English-speaking people may describe both navy blue and baby blue as blue, so some languages have used the word green to cover a broad range of the color spectrum, including what we would call yellow or gold.

Although still a controversial idea, the author argues in the second half of his book that our language can affect how we think. Those who speak languages, such as Spanish and Italian, that assign a gender to each word — something English did until the 11th century — tend to give masculine or feminine characteristics to inanimate objects, studies suggest.

Deutscher, who is originally from Australia, discusses one nearly extinct Aborigine language, one of several found in the world, that has no words for left or right. Instead they use compass directions to reference everything, such as their north hand (which becomes their south hand when they turn around) or the jug on the east side of the table. Even when taken to a strange place by a roundabout way, they somehow know instantly in which direction everything is. And they can remember these directions when they share memories later. Yet when these people learn English, they have no trouble learning left and right. In their own language, however, they always think in terms of directions.

The research Deutscher discusses may not be conclusive, but it is suggestive. The language we speak may influence how we view the world. If we had no word for blue, what color would a clear sky be?

Behind a modern movie classic

The story of the film The Shawshank Redemption may not be as dramatic as the story in the film, but it comes close. Mark Dawidsiak tells about it in The Shawshank Redemption Revealed: How One Story Keeps Hope Alive (2019).

It was director Frank Darabont's first movie. With the exception of Rob Reiner's Stand by Me, adaptations of Stephen King stories had not been well received by either audiences or critics. The actors wanted for the lead roles were not available. The movie, when it was released in 1994, was a box office disappointment and was left in the dust by Forrest Gump when the awards were handed out. Yet today, more than 25 years after its release, movie fans, many of whom confess to watching it several times a year, rank it among the very best of all time, well above Forrest Gump.

The film became a success when it was released on home video and when television networks found that their ratings shot up whenever they showed it. 

Meanwhile Mansfield, Ohio, a city of about 50,000 people midway between Cleveland and Columbus, suddenly became a popular destination for tourists from around the world because that is where most of The Shawshank Redemption was filmed. The former Ohio State Reformatory, completed in 1900 and closed in 1990, had been scheduled for demolition, but that was postponed so Darabont could make his movie there. It had previously been used as a set for Harry and Walter Go to New York and Tango and Cash, but now that all prisoners had been moved to a new prison next to OSR, the entire property was available to the director. Afterward the striking old prison, sometimes called Dracula's Castle, attracted so many visitors that it was saved from demolition.

So popular has the movie become over the years that Dawidsiak had no trouble finding people eager to talk about it, including its usually reticent star Tim Robbins. He also talked with the other major star, Morgan Freeman, Darabont, Stephen King, other members of the cast and crew and many Ohio people who worked as extras or were otherwise involved in making the movie. He also spoke with many of those who have traveled many miles, in some cases halfway around the world, to sit on the bench where Brooks (James Whitmore) sat to feed pigeons and to walk down the country road where Red (Freeman) walked.

In fact, Dawidziak does a marvelous job of covering just about every aspect of the film. His book is filled with photographs, including stills from the movie and shots taken by Becky Dawidziak, his daughter.

As a personal note, I will mention that Mansfield is where I worked as a journalist for more than 40 years. As a rookie reporter I was given a sobering tour of OSR while it was a high-security prison. One of my colleagues, reporter Lou Whitmire, plays a newspaper reporter in the film. (This wasn't the only case of typecasting. Former OSR guards also appeared as Shawshank guards.) My son, then a college student, worked that summer in a prison uniform, an extra in the background of several scenes.

Truth in ambiguity

Ambiguity is not necessarily a bad thing.

I wrote a few days ago about the need for clarity in our speech and writing (See Misunderstandings, Oct. 28). Yet often people who are quite capable of clarity deliberately choose ambiguity. It is quite possible to tell a truth that amounts to a lie, something politicians, cheating spouses and teenagers become quite skilled at. Ambiguous statements are a useful tool toward this end.

Robert Frost

Yet there can also be truth in ambiguity. It is this truth that is the goal of fine literature. Our best poets and novelists are rarely crystal clear about what their works mean. What was Robert Frost getting at when he wrote those last lines in "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"? "The woods are lovely, dark and deep,/But I have promises to keep,/And miles to go before I sleep,/And miles to go before I sleep." Is this simply a description of an event, or is there something deeper going on? Frost leaves it ambiguous and lets each reader decide what it means. Readers can — and have — interpreted these lines very differently. Or the lines can be appreciated just for the beauty of the language, never mind what they mean.

So it goes with most works of literature, prose as well as poetry. Often the more ambiguity, the more respected the novel or poem. Unfortunately, this allows some writers to write works that suggest great depth but which are actually nonsense.

Ambiguity is also one of the strengths of the United States Constitution. Had it been more specific, it would have had to be much longer. It might also have become obsolete years ago. Its ambiguity allows for changing interpretations as times change. That's why the Supreme Court exists — to tell us, for example, what the right of free expression guarenteed by the First Amendment mean in the age of the Internet and Twitter and what the right to bear arms means in the age of semi-automatic weapons.

And then there is Scripture. The appeal for many people of Eugene Peterson's The Message and other modern translations and paraphrases of the Bible is that they clarify what the most confusing passages actually mean. But clarifying Scripture can actually be misleading because one meaning is chosen over other possible meanings. Much of Scripture, such as the teachings and parables of Jesus, seems to be deliberately ambiguous, not to obscure meaning but to allow a range of interpretation by different people at different times in different places. Every sermon preached on the prodigal son is not the same sermon, and that seems like a strength, not a weakness.