Silly questions

Have Google and Siri put reference librarians out of work? Apparently not, for public libraries still seem to have them on their staff, but I suspect their responsibilities may have changed. They may spend more time leading book discussions and planning library promotions than answering questions like, "Is the Easter bunny male or female?"

Snoopy's siblings

Sorting through some old papers recently I came upon a list of actual questions posed to reference librarians in Mansfield, Ohio, a number of years ago. The Easter bunny query is just one of them. Here are some others.

How do you draw an earthquake?

Is Hawaii a country?

How much does the state of Alabama weigh?

What are the names of Snoopy's seven brothers and sisters?

When is National Have a Bad Day?

I need information on how to embalm at home.

Does O come before R?

I need the amendments to the 10 commandments.

I'm trying to locate the book I had out before. It's fiction and has a peach-colored cover.

How would you answer such questions? Better yet, how would Siri answer them? Let's find out.

Siri quickly provided a list of Snoopy's siblings. Hawaii, it turns out, is in the United States of America. An explanation of the embalming process was provided, but Siri did not caution against trying this at home. Siri told me what an earthquake is but did not provide any drawings or photographs to show what one looks like. As for what Alabama weighs, all I got was web sites about Alabama's weigh stations and its division of weights and measures.

And as for the gender of the Easter bunny, there were differing answers, although most suggested it is female because it lays eggs. Hey Siri, do bunnies lay eggs?

I think actual reference librarians might do a better job, or at least understand the questions better, but one thing you can say for Siri is that it doesn't giggle after you hang up (as far as we know) and your stupid questions will never wind up in the newspaper.

 

Twisting with Laura Lippman

Twists are something we expect in a mystery novel. If there isn't at least one major twist, readers will be disappointed. Yet Laura Lippman has a way of making an entire novel something of a twist. It just isn't constructed in the way typical mysteries are constructed. Certainly that is the case in After I'm Gone (2014).

Felix Brewer loves both his beautiful wife and his beautiful mistress, not to mention his three beautiful daughters. Yet he leaves them all when he feels the law closing in because of his shady business dealings. He is not heard from again.

Years later the body of Julie, the mistress, is found murdered. Years after that, Roberto "Sandy" Sanchez, a retired Baltimore cop who still works cold cases, decides to look into Julie's murder.

Lippmann skips back and forth through time, tracking the lives of Bambi, the wife, and the three daughters, not to mention Felix's best friends, his lawyer and his bail bondsman. For much of the way the novel seems not to be a murder mystery but rather the story of a lonely woman, slowly aging, who still misses her wayward husband and struggles to survive and provide for her family, sometimes with assistance from that lawyer friend. Meanwhile Sandy tries to uncover any evidence that will shed light on what really happened to Julie.

This is a fine, twisty novel that will satisfy Lippman's many fans and create new ones. Those fans may especially enjoy the walk-on part played by Tess Moynaghan, the private investigator in a series of Lippman mysteries.

People need bestsellers

The social quality of literature is still visible in the popularity of bestsellers. Publishers get away with making boring, baloney-mill novels into bestsellers via mere PR, because people need bestsellers. It is not a literary need. It is a social need. We want books everybody is reading (and nobody finishes) so we can talk about them.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter

Ursula K. Le Guin

Bestsellers are inevitable. As long as books are being sold, some books are going to sell more copies than other books. Ursula K. Le Guin's complaint, expressed in an essay called "Staying Awake" first published in Harper's, seems to be about the phoniness of the bestseller process.

Publishers try to decide ahead of time which books should be bestsellers, and these are the books they invest money in for big ad campaigns. Some promotions describe books as bestsellers even before they are available in stores. Some books become instant bestsellers because previous books by the same author were bestsellers. Titles, cover illustrations, cover blurbs and prominent bookstore displays can also help create bestsellers out of what Le Guin calls "boring, baloney-mill novels."

Our own idea of what is boring may differ from hers, yet the point remains that the best-selling books are not necessarily the best books.

The term "bestseller" is quite imprecise. To readers, it probably suggests a book in the top ten on the New York Times bestseller list, yet books are routinely described as bestsellers when they are much farther down the list. Books can become bestsellers with the sale of surprisingly few copies.

Ideally becoming a bestseller should reflect quality as well as quantity. That it does not is part of Le Guin's complaint. Her own books — including Words Are My Matter, her last one — probably did not sell as many copies as she thought they deserved.

Yet quality is not a major factor for most consumers. Or perhaps more accurately, just as each of us has a different idea of what's boring, so we each have a different idea of what is good. Or what is good enough. More people drive Fords than Lincolns. More eat at McDonalds than sit-down restaurants with tablecloths. Bad books usually cost just as much as good books, but even so most readers favor books they can easily read and easily understand without having to think too much about them.

And, as Le Guin points out, people like books they can talk about. Literature, as she says, has a social function. People like reading books that "everybody else" is reading. Some of us may try to impress by having a Camus or a Faulkner under our arm, but more of us would rather be seen, at least by our friends, carrying The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave. Actually finishing any of these books hardly matters, as long as we make the desired impression. That can be worth the price of a new book.

Extraordinary things

Men did such things as this in dreams: approached a dark house filled with treasure, sank into a sea of true love, traveled with wolves and wonders on a warm night.

Alice Hoffman, The Museum of Extraordinary Things

The magic in her use of language has always been practical for Alice Hoffman, as demonstrated by the above line from The Museum of Extraordinary Things (2014). It makes so many of her books irresistible.

Coralie has grown up in The Museum of Extraordinary Things on Coney Island early in the 20th century. Born with webbed fingers and with an ability to hold her breath for long periods of time, she becomes one of the "freaks" put on display by her father, Professor Sardie.

Sadie searches during the off-season for new freaks and oddities. Sometimes he manufactures his own, as when he finds the body of a girl that he hopes to turn into a mermaid, after using Coralie to create mermaid sightings in the river.

As she gets older the girl begins to discover her father's secrets, and they are not pretty. Eventually she develops secrets of her own, as when on one of her river swims she spies a young man on the shore and falls instantly in love.

Eddie, too, has a troubled relationship with his father. He works partly as a photographer and partly as a finder of missing persons. His estranged father surprises him by recommending him to a man searching for his daughter, missing since a tragic factory fire. Was she lost in the fire or not? If she's dead, where is her body?

His search, of course, leads him to the museum and to Coralie, while Hoffman's novel turns briefly from a love story into a murder mystery. At the dramatic end to the story, there's another tragic fire that destroys many of the Coney Island amusements. Both fires really happened, even though the rest of the novel is fiction.

My only complaint about this fine book is that nearly half of it is printed in italics, not comfortable to read in large portions. Still it is not all that hard to read and does not seriously hamper the overall appeal of this novel of extraordinary things.

Original relationships

Richard Russo

In an essay in The Destiny Thief with the same title as this one, "Original Relationships," novelist Richard Russo recalls hearing that phrase mentioned by one of his grad school professors, who was speaking of the importance of forming one's own opinion about something before listening to what the experts say about it.

That means reading a book or a story or a poem before your professor lectures on it. Or before you read a review or go to your book club. Watch a movie before reading what the critics say about it. See a work of art in a museum before listening to other opinions about it.

Why? Russo tells us what his professor told him: "When you're told what to look for ... you'll likely find it, and having found it, you'll be less likely to notice what you otherwise might have."

There's wisdom there, it seems to me. This gives value to your own opinions, your own taste, your own convictions, your own first impressions. It can be unsettling, of course, when experts express strong opinions counter to your own. To read harsh criticism of a book you treasure or praise for a book you despise reflects not just on that book but on you yourself. It suggests you are just not smart enough or tasteful enough to see how bad it is or how good it is.

Yet experts routinely disagree among themselves. If one critic dislikes a book, there is likely to be another who loves it. One of them probably agrees with you. Your opinion matters, too. It can later be informed by other views. It may even be changed. Yet your original opinion, or your original relationship, matters. Why did you think that way? Were you necessarily wrong? What did you notice that others, even if they are experts, didn't?

It is always a mistake, I believe, to allow our opinions to be shaped entirely by others. That can mean not reading only best sellers, not listening only to "popular" music or not adopting the same political views as others in your circle. Your opinions also matter. Remember your original opinions and convictions. Were they really so wrong?

For some reason this has made me think of my father. Toward the end of their long lives, my mother criticized him constantly to his face and to anyone else around. He could do nothing right. One could tell this hurt him, but Dad never said anything about it. Instead he started telling more stories about their dating days and the early years of their marriage. He told these stories with a smile on his face and with tears in his eyes. He was remembering their original relationship.

Original relationships are important, no matter what happens after that.

When writers fight

One thing I've noticed about the many book fairs, reading festivals and other literary events I have attended is how well authors get along, how quick they are to compliment each other's books and how happy they seem to be in each other's company. Yet writers do quarrel, as Myrick Land tells us in The Fine Art of Literary Mayhem, and when they do their quarrels tend to be both petty and nasty.

Published in 1962 and updated in 1983, the book covers feuds involving such notables as Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis and Norman Mailer. Literary quarrels have a lot to do with jealousy, pride, insecurity and pure pettiness. Hemingway eventually turned against those writers, including Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson, who helped him early in his career. Johnson just seemed argumentative, ready to fight with anyone. Sometimes, as when James and H.G. Wells went at it, it was little more than a radical difference in literary styles.

In many cases, feuding writers were once friends. In some cases the friendships rekindled later in life. D.H. Lawrence maintained an on-again/off-again relationship with Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry for many years. He had a messiah complex, according to Land, and expected his followers to follow him anywhere, even to other continents. Mansfield and Murry were willing to accept this arrangement only for so long. They would soon leave with bad feelings, but then eventually return to the Lawrence fold.

Most literary feuds might be avoided if only writers would refrain from reviewing or otherwise commenting negatively on books by other writers. As at literary events, compliments, sincere or not, keep the peace. Yet prominent authors are in demand as critics by literary periodicals, and most authors need the extra income. Critics sometimes do have to criticize if their opinions are to carry the ring of truth, but even mild criticism can create bad feelings. Writers, like everyone else, have tender egos, and it hurts especially to be wounded by a fellow writer.

Sometimes, as with Hemingway and Mailer, creating bad feelings seems to have been the objective. In his book Advertisements for Myself, Mailer made it a point to insult several of his contemporaries (and, in his mind, competitors), including Saul Bellow, J.D. Salinger, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, James Jones and William Styron. Several of them fired back.

The subtitle of Land's book reads A Lively Account of Famous Writers and Their Feuds. Some of the 13 chapters are, indeed, lively. Others are deadly dull. My advice: Read those chapters about the authors who most interest you; ignore the rest.

The return of censorship

For people who grew up in the West in the present century, censorship is almost an alien and antique concept.

Stuart Kells, The Library

The Library by Stuart Kells was published in 2017, when the above line from that book was mostly true. In just four years, however, censorship, broadly defined, has become commonplace. Comments outside the party line are now being routinely labeled as misinformation or disinformation and banned from Facebook, YouTube and other platforms. Donald Trump was banned from Twitter last year while he was still president of the United States. On Google, where in 2017 you could find just about anything, you may now be unable to find a full range of opinions (or even facts) about critical race theory, COVID vaccine, COVID treatments and other subjects.

One can argue, as I have myself, that true censorship is something done by the government, not private individuals or companies. Yet at present the tech companies are acting in step with the government in Washington, doing its bidding and enforcing its version of truth. Just this week the White House admitted it is instructing Facebook about what comments about the vaccine should be labeled as misinformation.

Banned Books Week, a left-leaning organization whose 2021 theme is "Books Unite Us, Censorship Divides Us," has historically considered as "banned" those books on school reading lists that are just objected to by parents, as if it wishes to censor the right of parents to object to books their own children are expected to read. One wonders whether conservative books that Amazon refuses to sell will be included on the 2021 list.

I have long maintained that everybody, or nearly everybody, favors censorship of some sort. It is just a matter of where one draws the line. It would be difficult to find anyone on either the right or the left who will admit to being against censoring child pornography.

Those on the right have through history been too quick to censor materials perceived as immoral or heretical. In 1972, Kells reports, a circuit court judge banned Slaughterhouse-Five from public schools for being depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar and anti-Christian. Those on the left are more likely to favor censorship of political and social ideas or even language they dislike. They are the ones who object to Huckleberry Finn for Mark Twain's use of the n-word. The recent destruction of statues across America looks like an attempt to censor history and culture.

One cannot turn back the clock or the calendar. Even so, 2017 sounds pretty good right now. If we cannot return there, perhaps we can at least return to the noble conviction that freedom of thought and freedom of expression are good ideas — for everyone.

Sherlock Hawthorne

The Sentence Is Death (2019), the second Daniel Hawthorne mystery by Anthony Horowitz, proves the first one, The Word Is Murder, was no fluke.

As before, this novel reads like autobiography. Horowitz himself is a key character, the Watson to Hawthorne's Holmes. Hawthorne is an ex-cop, kicked off the force because he was suspected of pushing a child-porn suspect down a flight of stairs. Yet this very disagreeable man is just too smart, too good at solving unsolvable murders to ignore. So he gets hired to help with difficult cases. He then drafts a reluctant Horowitz, a noted writer of mysteries that include some featuring Sherlock Holmes, to write about his brilliant deductions.

This time the case involves a divorce attorney killed with a bottle of wine after the wife of a man he had defended in a divorce case had apparently threatened to hit him over the head with a bottle of wine. Of course, open-and-shut cases are not so open and shut in mystery novels, and before long there are several other possible suspects and a number of other possible motives.

Horowitz keeps things hopping, maintaining the mystery until the end without overcomplicating things. Not every mystery writer can do this this well. Yet perhaps his greatest achievement is fitting this fictional story so seamlessly into his own life.

Mixed up metaphors

Ross Macdonald

I'm sure I was not the only person who began reading Ross Macdonald mysteries because of an article by William Goldman on the cover of the New York Times Book Review in 1969. Goldman called Macdonald's Lew Archer books "the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American."

Just the fact that murder mysteries were being discussed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review seemed notable, but putting MacDonald ahead of the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett made this notable indeed. And so I began reading The Goodbye Look, The Drowning Pool, The Far Side of the Dollar and other Lew Archer adventures. I don't remember particularly enjoying them. I found them confusing. But then I've found Chandler confusing as well. If the Times said Ross Macdonald was the best, perhaps it was so. Or so I thought at the time.

After a time, however, I put my Ross Macdonald novels aside, some still unread, and haven't read one in decades.

I was caught by surprise recently when I came upon an article by Bill Delaney called "Ross Macdonald's Literary Offenses" in a 1986 issue of The Armchair Detective. (Yes, I do read, and sometimes reread, very old magazines.) Delaney rips apart Macdonald about as thoroughly as anyone has ripped apart another writer since Mark Twain famously did the same to James Fenimore Cooper.

Focusing mainly on The Moving Target, the first Lew Archer novel published in 1949, Delaney ridicules sentence after sentence, metaphor after metaphor, pointing out every bit of twisted logic he finds. He wonders why a woman would hire Archer to find her missing husband when he has been gone less than 24 hours and has a history of being gone for days at a time. And why would any private investigator show up at the house in a cab with a suitcase in his hand? Does he expect his client to put him up for the night? Or give him a ride back into town?

"The plot is just too stupid for words," Delaney writes. And, "I see no point in searching for higher meanings in a man who could hardly write a straight sentence."

So could this be true? Could Ross Macdonald really have fooled William Goldman, the New York Times and those thousands of readers, myself included, who made his books bestsellers? I decided to do 10 minutes worth of research.

Here's a metaphor I found on the first page of The Goodbye Look, which has Goldman's quote, cited above, on its cover: "The heavy dark lines accenting her eyes made her look like a prisoner peering out through bars." That's a line you might just skim over, but stop to think about it and you see it makes little sense. Makeup that looks like prison bars? On a young woman who makes her living as a model?

From the first page of Black Money there's this: "A few dry bathers were lying around as if the yellow eye of the sun had hypnotized them." This suggests these sunbathers were looking directly into the sun. Could they have been that stupid?

Early in The Far Side of the Dollar I found, "His smile was brilliant, but it faded like an optical illusion." At first this metaphor sounds as brilliant as that smile, but the brilliance fades when you stop to think about it. How, exactly, can a real smile be anything like an optical illusion? Sure optical illusions sometimes fade, but smiles always fade eventually.

If insane metaphors are that easy to find in Macdonald's work, I am inclined to believe Bill Delaney was right.

Great Britain, clockwise

All the great coastal towns of England were a mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous.

Paul Theroux, The Kingdom by the Sea

The ridiculous, not the sublime, was what most interested Paul Theroux during his excursion clockwise around the coast of Great Britain in the summer of 1982, and he found plenty of it. He wrote about his trip in The Kingdom by the Sea (1983), a book now dated yet still fascinating.

Even though many of the coastal towns have traditionally been tourist draws, even in 1982 most of them were already a bit seedy, living in the past. Theroux saw himself not as a tourist but as an observer, pretending to be "in publishing" without actually disclosing that he was a writer. His recording of conversations, whether he was a part of them or not, should have given him away, however. These conversations, many of them hilarious, form the heart of his book. The Falklands War was in progress at this time, and many of the conversations are about the progress of the war.

The author's observations are often priceless, as when he says, "It was hard to distinguish hotels in England from prisons or hospitals — most of them were run with the same indifference or cruelty, and were equally uncomfortable." And he observes that one of "travel's pleasures was turning your back" on unpleasant people and moving on, "never having to explain."

He traveled much of the way around the island from one town to another by train, yet already in 1982 rail service was spotty, many once busy lines having been abandoned. Often he had to go by bus, although he found bus travel in England no better than that he had experienced in Third World countries. Sometimes he went by boat, necessary when he went to Northern Ireland. For shorter trips he enjoyed walking.

At several points in his book he wonders why people along the coast, and not just the tourists, spend so much time staring out to the sea, as if there were something strange about this. Yet why would tourists go to the beach and place their chairs facing inland? At the end of his book Theroux comments that "instead of looking out to sea, I had looked inland."

Coastal towns are naturally different from most other towns, made so by the sea itself, the gulls, the breeze, the smells, the tourists and the kinds of attractions that draw tourists. Yet his book tends to be more about people than anything else. He seems quick to generalize about these people, concluding that those in one village are this way and those in another are that way, and so forth. I was reminded of an old cartoon  about a returned traveler who says something like, "People in Bolivia walk in single file. At least the two I saw did."

Knowing everything

One thing I'm pretty sure of is that the more confident and generous a writer becomes, the more he will be drawn to omniscience, often out of frustration with more limiting points of view.

Richard Russo, The Destiny Thief

Richard Russo

Novelist Richard Russo taught creative writing for several years, as many writers do to make ends meet. One thing he noticed about his student writers was that most of them wrote their stories using a first-person narrative. Among his objectives as a writing teacher, as he saw it, was to help young writers see that omniscience was usually the best way to tell a story.

A first-person narrator knows only what that person knows, making it challenging to describe what happens in the story when that person isn't around. Readers can learn only what one character is doing, what one character is thinking, what one character is feeling.

Many first novels are told in the first person. Some of these become classics, such as The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby — but many fail, at least in part, because first-person narration limits the author's ability to tell a complete story.

Able writers can overcome this disadvantage, or even turn a handicap into an asset. Ann Patchett uses first person masterfully in The Dutch House, a novel I reviewed here on Monday. Danny, the narrator, doesn't know everything about his own family, but this allows important details about the past to be revealed to Danny little by little by other characters. So much of importance happened in the past, even before Danny was born, that he doesn't so much tell the whole story as have it be gradually told to him. In this way Patchett avoids those annoying flashbacks, so common in novels with omniscient points of view, that might have disclosed too much of the story too soon.

In The Museum of Extraordinary Things, a novel I will be writing about here soon, Alice Hoffman uses first-person narration in the first half of each chapter, then switches to omniscience in the second half, giving her the best of both of these ways of telling a story.

Wallace Stegner has a first-person narrator in Angle of Repose, a man writing a book about his grandmother. But this man tries to use omniscience to write his grandmother's story, hitting a wall when he realizes he doesn't really know what happened to her at a key point in her story. Other authors let each of their main characters tell the story from their own point of view in alternating chapters. Thus skilled writers find ways to use first person without totally sacrificing omniscience. 

Yet Russo favors omniscience for his own novels and recommends it for other writers, especially beginning writers. He says this in an essay found in The Destiny Thief called "What Frogs Think: A Defense of Omniscience." He concludes by printing a short excerpt from Cannery Row in which John Steinbeck does, in fact, tell his readers what frogs think. He couldn't have done that had he written his book in first person, unless he told it from the point of view of a frog. And that would have been a very different story.

A haunted house

But when you think about saints, I don't imagine any of them made their families happy.

Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

Ann Patchett's wonderful 2019 novel The Dutch House is dominated by a house and by a missing mother who abandoned her children because of that house.

Danny, the narrator, and his older sister, Maeve, grew up in the spacious house in the Philadelphia area built by a wealthy couple with the name of VanHoebeek, whose large portraits dominate the interior. Their father bought the house for their mother, Elna, who hated it. A would-be nun whom their father took from the convent to marry, Elna had humble tastes and a desire to serve the poor. She couldn't stand living in a mansion and so left her family behind and went to India.

The novel actually begins when their father brings Andrea into the house. She's a woman more in love with the Dutch House than with their father, and it's not clear that he loves her either. Yet he cannot resist her strong will, and they soon marry, she moving her two young daughters into the house. Maeve and Danny soon feel second-class, a feeling confirmed when their father dies prematurely and Andrea kicks them both out with little more than the clothes on their backs.

The novel covers decades. The only thing their father's will leaves for his own children is an education trust to be shared with Andrea's children. Maeve insists that Danny pursue a medical degree, even though he wants to become a real estate tycoon and a landlord like his father. But going to medical school will use up most of the trust, their only way of striking back against Andrea.

Maeve becomes a valued employee in a frozen vegetable company, while Danny eventually goes into real estate as he always wanted and starts his own family. Meanwhile the two siblings frequently park in from of the Dutch House to remember the past and think evil thoughts about their stepmother and, at least as far as Danny is concerned, about their mother.

Then Elna reenters their life at a crucial time, the saint returning home when she is most needed.

Patchett's novel is irresistible from the first page. You might be tempted to call the house her main character, except that all her human characters, including the servants in the Dutch House, are so real, so interesting that they make this great house a minor character in comparison.

The writing life

Richard Russo, among my favorite authors, proves to be no less entertaining in his essays than in his novels. His The Destiny Thief (2018) should interest other hardcore Russo fans, as well as anyone else intrigued by how writers write.

In the title essay, Russo recalls being in a fiction workshop at the University of Arizona as a young man. His instructor told him he would never make it as a novelist and should stick with a career in teaching. A classmate, meanwhile, was hailed as a future star in the literary world. Instead that classmate never rose out of obscurity, while Russo won a Pulitzer for Empire Falls. He, probably like the other man, feels as if he somehow stole the other's destiny.

(I recently found something I wrote while in college about my creative writing instructor, Walter Tevis — author of The Hustler and The Queen's Gambit — telling me that, although talented, I would never make it as a fiction writer, but that because of my personality I would never make it in journalism either. He was right about the first, wrong about the second.)

Russo's way of mixing the comic with the serious helps explain why his novels are so endearing to many, and he explains his attitude toward humor in "The Gravestone and the Commode." At one time, he writes, he had one of each in his backyard. "The best humor has always resided in the chamber next to the one occupied by suffering," he writes. "There's a door adjoining these rooms that's never completely closed."

Two essays focus on other writers. In one he writes about the difficulty of separating Mark Twain's fiction from his nonfiction because Twain put so much truth in his stories and so much invention in his supposedly true accounts. In another he describes The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens as "a jailbreak of the writer's imagination." It was during the writing of this book that Dickens let himself go to become the kind of writer he was destined to be.

Russo discusses in several of these essays the influence of his usually absent father on his life and on his fiction. His father was the model for perhaps his best-loved character, Sully in Nobody's Fool and Everybody's Fool, as well as for other characters in other books.

Good writing has at least as much to do with hard work over a long period of time as natural talent, the author tells us. His father was a union man. Union members pay their dues.