True fiction

Writing novels based on real people and real events is nothing new. Writers do it all the time. Yet what Amy Stewart has done seems amazing to me. She has written an entire series of novels based on real people and real events.

Kopp Sisters on the March (2019) is the fifth novel in the series, which is now up to seven books, and she is still sticking mostly to the facts. In her Historical Notes at the end she explains which characters she invented and where she plays fast and loose with the truth. Conversations are, of course, invented. Yet amazingly most of the major characters are real and most of the significant events actually happened, even if not exactly as she describes.

Constance Kopp lost her groundbreaking job as a sheriff's deputy in Hackensack, N.J., after the election of a new sheriff, and now she is at a loss about what to do with her life. In 1917 there aren't that many opportunities for women in law enforcement. Along with her bossy sister, Norma, whose passion is homing pigeons, and her much younger sister, Fleurette (actually her daughter), whose passions are fashion and show business, Constance enrolls in a military-style training camp for women. With America's entry into the war in Europe becoming more and more likely, National Service Schools aim to train women for supporting roles, such as nursing.

When the camp's matron is injured, Constance takes charge with such authority that everyone accepts her as the proper leader. She begins to fashion her own training methods, which include self-defense and firearms skills.

Meanwhile the notorious Beulah Binford enrolls in the camp under a false name, hoping that nobody will realize she is the former prostitute involved in an infamous Richmond murder case.

Constance's story and Beulah's story take turns in Stewart's narrative until they merge and things really get interesting.

While not as exciting as some of the previous novels — there is no real mystery here — Kopp Sisters on the March entertains just the same.

Inside language

Falconry has its own language, as most human endeavors do. Helen Macdonald writes about it in her book H Is for Hawk.

Hawks don't wipe their beaks, she tells us. They feak. They don't defecate. Rather they mute. They rouse when they shake themselves. Their wings are sails. Their claws are pounces. Their tails are trains. The line  attached a bird in training is called a creance. And so on.

Jargon like this is used partly because it is useful. Those who train hawks and other raptors know exactly what they are talking about when they use such language. There is less room for misunderstanding.

But just as important, perhaps, is that jargon bestows exclusivity to those on the inside. There's something appealing about clubs and lodges with secret passwords and private rituals. Those on the inside know something that those on the outside do not know. They are special somehow.

The allure of the speakeasy was probably more than just the liquor. It was also knowing how to get in.

Macdonald says as much in her book. "Knowing your falconry terminology attested to your place in society," she writes. At one time one had to be a member of the highest social class to own a falcon or hawk. The terminology underscored class differences. Ordinary people didn't understand what you were talking about, and that was the point.

H is also for human

It would not be the usual naturalist's book about hawks. That would be bogus, he thinks. This would be real literature.

Helen Macdonald, H Is for Hawk

What Helen Macdonald says above is about T.H. White and his book The Goshawk. Yet what she writes about White and his book is also true of herself and her bestselling 2014 book H Is for Hawk. She, too, strives for literature, not the usual naturalist's book about hawks.

And she succeeds.

White's book is clearly a model for her own. She refers to it frequently, in practically every chapter. His clumsy attempts to train a goshawk were, she sees, an attempt to come to terms with his homosexuality in an unforgiving age and his taste for sadism, which was even less forgivable. Macdonald is dealing with her own problems, most significantly the death of her beloved father.

She has always loved raptors and now decides to acquire a goshawk, one of the most challenging of all British birds of prey. Taming it and training it requires isolation, something she welcomes in her grief.

"As the hawk became tamer I was growing wilder," she writes. When Mabel, as she names the bird, captures prey, Macdonald forces herself to do the actual killing or her goshawk would start eating the bird, squirrel or rabbit while it was still alive. She stuffs pieces of the dead animal into her jacket pocket to feed Mabel later.

The author thinks a lot about the similarities and contrasts between humans and animals."Hunting makes you animal, but the death of an animal makes you human," she writes. Near the end of her book she says, "Goshawks are things of death and blood and gore, but they are not excuses for atrocities. Their inhumanity is to be treasured because what they do has nothing to do with us at all."

Yet it has much to do with Helen Macdonald and the death in her family and a life that, like T.H. White before her, she is trying to make sense of.

Where are the celebrities?

We live in a celebrity-obsessed age with relatively few true celebrities. Were Dean Martin alive today, he couldn't host the celebrity roasts that were once so entertaining. Those who pass for celebrities today simply wouldn't be recognized by most people.

Rich Little

Joseph Epstein commented on this phenomenon in an excellent essay last weekend in The Wall Street Journal. He noted that a few decades ago, impressionists such as Rich Little were able to make a good living entertaining audiences with their impressions of Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Jack Benny, James Cagney and others. Today's impressionists do Donald Trump, Joe Biden and that's about it. Few other people are famous enough to be widely recognized in an impressionist's act.

The problem, if it is a problem, may be not too few celebrities but rather too many. Today it is simply too easy to become a celebrity, or at least a minor-league celebrity. At one time there were just three television networks, meaning that most people were watching the same few shows. And TV variety shows were popular,  bringing back the same relatively few stars to perform. People went to theaters and watched the same movies as everyone else.

Today there are so many entertainment options that relatively few performers stand out. The same edition of The Wall Street Journal had a Q & A with "Grammy-winning pop star" Meghan Trainor. I've never heard of her, and I am probably not alone. Spotify, Sirius and Pandora give me so many music options that I rarely hear today's pop music. At one time it was impossible to escape the latest hits. That's not true any longer.

So many people today have podcasts, YouTube videos, blogs, etc., that few stand out to the point that they are recognizable to the general population. Almost anyone can draw an audience and gain a few likes, but fame, when it does come, tends to be shallow and fleeting.

Epstein just barely mentions literature in his essay on the fall of celebrity, but literature has been impacted as well. I am old to remember when the names and faces of the poets Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg were widely known. Are there any such poets today? As for novelists, the same is true. We once had Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Robert Penn Warren and several others of that stature alive and writing at the same time. You didn't even have to read their books to know who they were. Is there anyone like that alive today?

Feeling smart

Acquiring a book is not the same thing as reading the book. That is obvious, of course. And yet, I confess, I sometimes feel smarter just by owning certain books.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher, expressed this thought very well. "To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them," he said. "As it is, the act of purchasing them is often mistaken for the assimilation and mastering of their content."

Is this why people used to purchase encyclopedia sets? Did just owning the books make them feel smarter? Medical books, how-to books of all kinds and even cookbooks can have the same effect. We have the knowledge close at hand, so why do we have to actually know it? It's so close that we feel we already know it.

Much has been said about how little young adults of today, including college graduates, actually know about history or much of anything else.  They may know little, yet they feel intelligent and well-informed because they have so much information at their fingertips. The knowledge is on their phones if they ever need it, so why store it in their brains?

To some extent, this makes sense. None of us can possibly know everything. Nor does any of us need to know everything. Yet we cannot speak intelligently about anything important unless we take the time to actually learn something about what we are talking about. And unless we know something, we lack the curiosity to learn more. We are gullible, willing to believe whatever those we admire tell us.

College students protest Israel while knowing little of Israel's history. Or its geography. Or the intentions of the countries that surround it. Voters believe ridiculous things because they don't take the trouble to learn the truth.

Just having the knowledge on our phones or in books on our shelf doesn't make us authorities on anything.

Masking and unveiling

E.B. White

Writing is both mask and unveiling.

E.B. White

So what did E.B. White, author of Charlotte's Web, mean by that?

Writers of fiction gradually reveal their stories, revealing the inner lives of their characters along the way. Unveiling is the author's job. Yet writers cannot unveil too much too soon. To create suspense and keep readers turning the pages, they must keep some things masked, at least until the time is right for the unmasking. Nobody would read an Agatha Christie novel if she had unmasked the killer in the first chapter. The Columbo television series famously revealed the killer early in each episode, but the mystery was how the detective would gather enough evidence to make an arrest in what seemed like the perfect crime. This unveiling never happened until the very end.

Fiction also reveals something about the author. Real events, real feelings and real people often show up in stories, yet they are usually disguised. Masks are worn.

Writers of nonfiction do their masking and unveiling in different ways. History writers must decide what to include and what not to include. Sometimes they have a particular ax to grind and and make such decisions accordingly. Political writers are even more likely to write in this manner, including what advances their argument, ignoring or downplaying what doesn't.

Those who write their autobiographies or memoirs must make such decisions on every page. The purpose of the book is unveiling, yet even so-called tell-all books probably don't really tell all. Sometimes they decide the mask is best kept in place.

Playing games

Amor Towles

Two months ago ("Clever foolishness," April 15, 2024) I mentioned the Sebastian Faulks novel A Fool's Alphabet in which the chapter titles are names of cities in alphabetical order, from Anzio to Zanica. I thought of that while reading A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles.

All of Towles's chapter titles not only begin with the letter A, but every word in the chapter titles begins with that letter. Thus we find chapters called:

An Actress, an Apparition, an Apiary

Arachne's Art

Ascending, Alighting

Adagio, Andante, Allegro

An Announcement

Antics, Antitheses, an Accident

Applause and Acclaim

Is there a point to all this? Like Faulks, Towles seems to be playing an intellectual game with himself. Can he think of appropriate chapter titles with certain characteristics? That Towles is fond of such games is demonstrated elsewhere in his novel. The count, his main character, plays mental games at every meal with the girl he is raising as his daughter. For example, they take turns naming things that come in groups of three, such as morning, noon and night or Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

Clearly Towles enjoys such games, and he encourages his readers to enjoy them, too.

Sad songs

His ah-ma was Liu Song, while Willow was just a facsimile — an actress with makeup and fancy gowns putting on a show.

Jamie Ford, Songs of Willow Frost

The Chinese-American author Jamie Ford has a mission to the tell the story of the Chinese people in America, and as readers of the bestselling Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet know, he does that very well. Those who loved the earlier novel will not be disappointed with Songs of Willow Frost (2014).

Twelve-year-old William has spent the last five years of his life in a Catholic orphanage in Seattle. It is 1934, the heart of the Depression, and like so many of the children in the orphanage, he is not actually an orphan. As a Chinese boy, he knows his chances of being adopted are practically nil, but what he really wants is to find his mother, his ah-ma.

Liu Song, who uses the stage name Willow Frost, is a beauty with a fine singing voice who has had small parts in movies in which she always cries and always dies. William has recognized her in one film he is allowed to watch, and when he learns she is coming to Seattle to appear in a show, he escapes the orphanage along with Charlotte, a blind girl, to try to find her. He wants to learn why she left him in that orphanage.

From then on the novel becomes mostly flashback, telling Willow's sad story. William's father is Willow's stepfather, who raped her after the death of her mother. She manages to  escape before he can learn she has had a son, but Seattle's Chinatown is only so big. She can keep her secret only for so long.

Her story added to William's story may leave readers crying right along with Willow, but Ford gives us an ending that brings out the sunshine.

A life spent in a hotel

When opening A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) by Amor Towles for the first time, one is likely to be thinking, "How can a novel about a man under house arrest in a Moscow hotel for decades possibility fill 462 pages? Can it really be as interesting as people say it is?"

It turns out the novel is so interesting a reader might wish it were even longer than it is. Covering so many years, the novel is necessarily episodic, and some episodes are more interesting than others. Yet there is a continuing story here with continuing characters, and almost everything comes together in the dramatic climax.

Count Alexander Rostov could have been shot for the crime of being an aristocrat after the Russian Revolution. Instead he is moved into a small room in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow and forbidden to leave the hotel for the rest of his life.

Like Towles's earlier book, Rules of Civility, this is a novel of manners. Being a true gentleman, the count accepts his fate with grace and style. He makes the most of a bad situation and enjoys a full life, eventually becoming the head waiter at the hotel's fine restaurant, where Communist Party leaders often come to dine in a style they deny their countrymen.

Three female characters play significant roles in the count's life. One is Nina, a precocious nine-year-old girl when he first meets her. She also lives in the hotel and manages to turn him into a playmate. She teaches him the secrets of the hotel.

Anna is a beautiful actress who becomes his temporary lover whenever she stays at the Metropol.

The third is Sofia, Nina's tiny daughter left in the count's care while Nina goes off to Sibera in search of her imprisoned husband. She expects to be back in a matter of days, but she never returns, and he raises Sofia in his small room until she becomes a beautiful young woman and a gifted pianist.

If there was ever a "stranger comes to town" novel, it is this one. Yet in time it also becomes a "hero takes a journey" novel, and that journey alone is worth the price of owning this wonderful novel.

Good for what ails you

Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.

Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley

This sounds foolish, of course. Or at least it does to anyone who does not feel the same way Jane Smiley does.

Yet there are many other people who feel better at the sight of a flower garden. Or a baby. Or a sunset. Or a football game on television. Or a beautiful woman. Or a work of art. Chances are, for most of us, there is something the very sight of which uplifts our mood or takes our mind off our troubles. It may even temporarily relieve physical discomfort.

It's not just sights. Certain smells and certain sounds can work the same kind of magic.

Smiley doesn't seem to be talking about any particular book. Almost any book will do. Yet I'm sure the effect doubles when certain books come into sight. Certain other books might give someone a negative feeling.

Books I can remember reading with pleasure always give me a lift when I see them, whether in a bookstore or on my own shelf. Books I am eager to read pack almost as much power. If you follow this blog, you probably feel the same way.

Catching the big one

Still, fishing and writing had a good deal in common. You had to wait and be prepared to catch what came your way. You had to know the difference between a shadow and the real thing.

Alice Hoffman, The Invisible Hour

The above lines are the thoughts of Nathaniel Hawthorne in the novel The Invisible Hour, but we can be sure they are also the thoughts of the author Alice Hoffman, who has written nearly 40 books.

So are writing and fishing really similar? Any metaphor can be taken too far. Asking writers what they use for bait might be one example of this. Still, Hoffman has put her finger on a couple of similarities.

First, she suggests that writing, like fishing, is both an active and a passive pursuit. Those who like to fish put effort into locating the right spot and gathering the right equipment. Then, assuming one is fishing with a rod and reel, one waits for a fish to bite. A writer can do the research and locate a quiet place to write, but then must hope the right idea or the right words to express that idea will come along.

And then there is the matter of recognizing the right idea or the right way of expressing that idea when it comes. Which fish are keepers and which are not? Even after as many novels as Hoffman has written, she probably goes through dry spells. Some days the fish just aren't biting. Other days she reels in one big one after another. Some ideas works. Others don't and must be tossed back.

In her novel, Hawthorne is a young man who wants to be a writer, but the big fish or the big idea continues to elude him. The Scarlet Letter is still far in the future. But he keeps his line in the water.

Conversations

She understood that when a book spoke to you, you wanted to speak back.

Alice Hoffman, The Invisible Hour

I like this idea of a book as a conversation. Sometimes it can be a one-way conversation, like when you are stuck with someone who won't stop talking long enough for you to get a word in. Yet when a book speaks to you, as Alice Hoffman suggests, you feel compelled to speak back, even if your contribution is only in your mind.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

In Hoffman's novel, her main character is smitten by The Scarlet Letter and gets the opportunity to go back in time to actually speak with the author, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Most of us aren't lucky to talk with the author, even an author who is still living, so we must find other ways to keep up our end of the conversation.

Underlining passages may be one way. When you underline words in a book, you make the statement that this is meaningful to you. It is something you would like to remember. Some people even go so far as to write their own comments in the margins of their books.

One of the secrets of book clubs, other than the appeal of getting together with like-minded people, is to express our views about the books we read.

The compulsion to speak back is the motivation for this blog. When I read a book, I usually want to talk about it. Chances are the author isn't around to speak with, nor are other people who have read the same book recently. And so I write about the books I have read.

And The Invisible Hour is a book I have been writing about for several days now. Obviously it is a book that spoke to me.