M. R. Bailey

A review of the mystery/suspense and thriller aisles this afternoon at Borders inspired six observations:

1. Deceased authors are publishing new novels (i.e., Robert Ludlum, Margaret Truman)
2. The Cold War is over, the War on Terror has evolved into traditional war, and espionage and conspiracy are bigger than ever
3. Protagonists in thrillers are best when they are deeply, irredeemably flawed
4. Women are gaining market share in the pantheon of mystery, suspense and thriller authors (i.e., Lisa Unger, Lisa Scottoline, Kathryn Fox)
5. The Mystery/Suspense market is growing
6. Successful writers in these genres ‘burn down the house’ and create palpable peril

In these categories, my reading has yet to venture beyond Ludlum, Clancy, Forsythe, Cruz Smith, and Patterson, so forgive me if my categorization of those other above-mentioned writers contains errors.  In this, I suspect I am like many of my fellow shoppers in the aisles, scanning titles, cover art, jacket copy and blurbs – drawn to personal favorites, interested in broadening my horizons, yet sufficiently conflicted about the burden on my budget and the quality of my reading that I am reticent about dropping $7-$12 on an unproven author.  LeCarré is a personal favorite.  He set the standard long ago in the spy novel genre and continues to craft writing that seems transparent, the writer’s holy grail.

Larry went officially missing from the world on the second Monday of October, at ten minutes past eleven, when he failed to deliver his opening lecture of the new academic year.

- OUR GAME (1995)

There is an entire novel in that single opening line.

In mystery, Martin Cruz Smith raises my expectations, not only for quality writing, but also for my own work.

Blair lit an oil lamp hanging on the wall. Its wan illumination reached to the glory of the room, an oil painting of Christ in a carpenter’s shop.  Jesus appeared delicate and unaccustomed to hard work, and in Blair’s opinion His expression was overly abstracted for a man handling a saw.

- ROSE (1996)

But I digress.  If there is a single thread that unites the work of all of the above, it has to be the last observation.  These writers burn the character’s house down, usually early in the book, and often more than once.

Graham Swift’s sixth novel, LAST ORDERS (1996), follows a day in the lives of the friends, spouse and children of Jack Arthur Dodds, butcher, recently deceased. Their day of remembrance is a metaphor for the ordinary, earnest yet flawed, occasionally misspent life.

Following Jack’s three men friends and his son as they carry his ashes to the sea at Margate to fulfill one final wish is as driven, surreal and overarchingly important as a salmon’s return up a twisted and turbulent river to its life starting point.  The why of it is never quite clear to subjects, just like real life.  Perhaps Jack’s friends, son and wife discover that nothing in life should go to waste, including one last opportunity to unite with friends and family in the only place that ever held any hope of romantic significance for him. Margate was his Shangri-La, his hope for his and Amy’s connection to each other, even at the end of an estranged lifetime.

Uncompromising in his use of ordinary thoughts and language by the ordinary people of Bermondsey, south London, Swift establishes his contract with the reader early and never lets him or her down.

It aint like your regular sort of day.

…begins Swift and continues with absolute, unblinking objectivity, and an unerring ear for the deceptive riches in ordinary thought and dialogue.  At first, the similarity of voice between the characters – Jack Arthur Dodds’ understated, reticent butcher; Vince Dodds, his cagey son; Amy, his wife who chose their mentally disabled daughter, June, over her husband; Ray Johnson, his unreliable mate; Lenny Tate, his resentful Army buddy; Vic Tucker, his funeral director; and Mandy, the stray taken in by Vince – made following the changes in voice difficult to follow. I kept referring back to the chapter titles to see who was carrying the story forward.  Soon, however, each character’s emotional process and relationship with the deceased rippled outward and overlapped other characters’ process and responses.  Before long, cross currents became waypoints and I grew compelled by the journey and the back stories.  Swift’s exploration of ordinary lives in this novel is extraordinarily skilled.

This quiet novel speaks volumes about the quiet lives of its ordinary middle-class south London characters. In doing so, it speaks to the rest of us.

Graham Swift’s interview in SALON

The Booker Prize, which is often a reliable guide to literary excellence, is what originally attracted me to LAST ORDERS.

Collectible First Novel

This story is unlikely.

So begins the first novel by C.S. Richardson, creative director at Random House Canada, award-winning book designer, and now, author. The story works on multiple levels, following the personal journeys of two individuals and discovering along with them the rare love they share. Having found each other, Ambrose Zephyr, 50-year-old advertising creative, and Zappora ‘Zipper’ Ashkenazi, fashion magazine columnist, are content in their narrow London terrace full of books when Ambrose learns that he is ill and has 30 days to live. Stunned and reeling, they depart from their home in Kensington Gardens and embark on an expedition ‘to the places he has most loved or has always longed to visit, from A to Z. Amsterdam to Zanzibar.’

Ambrose attempts to both escape his fate and accept whatever is to come next. Zipper discovers new depths of strength in herself as she overcomes her panic and creates ways to be there for him, witnessing his disintegration.

At the end Zipper is lost in the silence, the vacuum of deep space without the only man she ever loved.

She opens the journal that she purchased in Amsterdam on the first stop of their great expedition, takes in the emptiness and begins to write…

This story is unlikely.

THE END OF THE ALPHABET has some qualities of a classic.  It is visually captivating, surprises the reader by launching from a familiar premise yet takes flight into new situations, and is told in a discerning and disarming literary style.

The End of the Alphabet (2007), Doubleday, 119 pages

C.S. Richardson Blog

Why write something if it will not change your life?

Too high a standard?  Not a chance.

Care deeply about your characters, the questions that affect them, the relationships, ideals, and treasure they gamble, and your reader will care.  Writing a book takes time, a year or more, sometimes much more.  At the end of that time when you turn around and look back at what you’ve been doing all of that time, you want see your book in a window on Main Street, or your characters brought to life by actors on stage, or your screenplay moving people to laughter and tears in the cinema, right?

…if a story is important to you, it may be important to a lot of other people in the audience. And when you’re done writing the story, no matter what else happens, you’ve changed your life.

John Truby – The ANATOMY OF STORY (2007)

AMY BLOOM (J. Emilio Flores for NY Times)

AMY BLOOM (AWAY, Random House 2007) read her short story, Compassion and Mercy, at a Celebration of Writing seminar in Wesleyan University’s Memorial Chapel on Saturday afternoon while 200 yards away on Andrus Field, her alma mater’s football team hosted Williams College.  The significant audience that turned out to hear her revealed two things: there is always a choice to be made at Wesleyan between mind and body, and Bloom is a writer with with the kind of forceful presence that can compete with anything.  And she competed well, eliciting several laughs throughout her extended remarks. Her reading also produced the operative metaphor for one’s creative muse for the rest of the seminar: a raccoon.

On short story vs. novel writing

If I write forty pages and I’m not done… it’s going to be a novel.

Character-driven work

I tend to think extensively about a story before I work on it.  I think about the characters.  Eventually I ask, “who dies?”   Because in fiction you have to have things that are compelling.  Going to the grocery store is not compelling.  People dying is.  People going off to war is.

For Bloom, it’s always about the character’s story, finding ways to show who they are by how they react to events.

By the time you are an adult, events don’t make you who you are; they show who you are.

On writing for television

First, no one has to write for television. It’s not like they kidnap your children and hold them for ransom. They pay you.

And, if you have other things that you do, and you have the time and space in your life, then collaborating with very, very smart visual artists is positive and rewarding.  And they pay you.

It’s different for me. I’m an exotic. I’m older, I’m from the East, and I’m a novelist.

It’s funny. I always go out to Los Angeles and the second sentence out of my mouth is, ‘That’s okay. I’ll go back to Connecticut.’  It’s best [for a writer] if you can walk away.

The Windy Day by Rick Bass

Bass mirrors the rush of life emergent in this story, The Windy Day, from his collection about wild hearts grounded in Nature entitled, The Lives of Rocks.

The narrator and his four-month-pregnant wife, Elizabeth, set out for town during a wind storm to learn the gender of their fetus.  Every hundred yards, they must stop to clear the road of fallen timber.  The father-to-be narrator fires up the chain saw and cuts and cuts and rolls, then gets back into the truck and moves on until they must stop again and cut, cut, roll.  It takes them an entire day (read lifetime) to reach the main road to town.  As darkness falls, the father-to-be is ready to keep going; he feels he is making progress and is intent on beating the odds.  Elizabeth says no, they’ll try again tomorrow.

Our father-to-be looks around him and imagines 16 years into the future when he and his daughter will ride horses through these woods, jumping over these fallen logs, or hauling the logs with his sixteen year old son…

The Lives of Rocks

Voyager 2 – More like a blog post than I realized

The Voyager mission was designed to take advantage of a rare geometric arrangement of the outer planets in the late 1970s and the 1980s which allowed for a four-planet tour for a minimum of propellant and trip time. The flyby of each planet bends the spacecraft’s flight path and increases its velocity enough to deliver it to the next destination.

JPL Fact Sheet - California Institute of Technology

This technique of using the local planet’s gravity to accelerate the craft to the next planetary rendezvous is a little like viral theory.  The “gravity assist” technique, which was first demonstrated with NASA’s Mariner 10 Venus/Mercury mission in 1973-74, and shortened the flight time to Neptune from 30 years to 12 years, multiplies the forward momentum of the craft.  It also modifies the trajectory to expose the craft to new destinations.  A blog post that spreads from reader to reader and is re-blogged to new blogs builds its momentum forward to new destinations.

Whereas the astronomers and astrophysicists and other scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Cal Tech can calculate the effect of trajectory and successive ‘gravity assists,’ we bloggers still craft a message to unknown recipients, publish it to the Internet, hope someone reads it and either responds or relays it forward so that another can read it… and respond. Better than a message in a bottle cast to the outgoing tide, but not yet as scientific or successful as exploration of interstellar space.

A new weblog, familiar challenges

The desire to write, to think out loud, to write down a thought and launch it into the ether is a little like creating that golden disk containing voice and music recordings, bolting it to the fender of Voyager II, and hoping that some intelligent being somewhere in the far reaches of the Milky Way galaxy or beyond will come across it and pick up the thread.  Okay, writing a blog post is not very much like the $865 million effort required to launch Voyager and its message disk to interstellar space.  Yet you have to admit that both actions require a healthy dose of optimism.

Hello, from the children of planet Earth.

A group of us are working on a blog design that we hope will invite faculty, students, staff and alumni around the world to stop by, read, and respond. We hope that they will contribute their thoughts, comment and join in the conversation.

This is a challenge.  Design is a very personal, even intimate process. What one considers artful, another considers esoteric.  The elegance of one format is an obstacle to the urge for spontaneity in another.  Form either follows function or defeats it depending on your individual goals, which rarely come into focus until we see something and experience our reaction to it.  Fact is, until this moment in the collaborative act of creation, none of us have come to terms with our desires, wants and needs for this blog. Which is one of the benefits of process. Show me a creator of anything who gets it right the first time and I’ll show you a creator who aimed low.

When we previewed the blog design-in-progress for a group of smart and entrepreneurial students, it was met with clear interest, encouragement of its strengths, and helpful inquiries about ways to address its underlying potential for engaging the real-life needs of students, faculty, alumni and prospective students and their families.

Interactivity – can it be organized into  at-a-glance categories?  No one wants to scroll through a long page of disparate posts and comments to find something of interest.  We’re all busy.  Give us the top-ranking or most popular threads in politics, student life, music, news, and so forth.

In other words, edit content and format presentation.  Yes, this involves some processing of content in what was originally envisioned as an open, transparent, and unmoderated online dialog.  They acknowledged this.  They know their peers.  There will be the occasional ‘immature’ post, but that is life and it can be managed. More than anything, they were optimistic that the worldwide community of students, faculty and alumni would ultimately self-moderate.  I also believe that they will.  Recent research suggests that they have it right.

J.L. Carr captures a moment in time in England’s rural north.  The narrator is shell-shocked veteran, Tom Birkin, who tells of his weeks in Oxgodby in 1920 to restore a painting in the local church.  The Pastor is a bitter and misunderstood man; his wife is a caged beauty.  In a field nearby, another veteran named Charles Moon digs for the bones of a 500 year-old victim of this village’s ancestors.  Their summer in the almost surreal Oxgodby is the tale of restoration of wounded souls, how the answers we seek are so often within our reach, and crafted in English that is a delight to read and re-read.  I was reluctant to put this small book down.

J.L. Carr’s A Month In The Country is a quiet masterwork.

Booker Prize shortlist in 1980.

Note: This edition of the novel can be difficult to find.  First published in England in 1980, it has appeared in various small press editions since that time.  I recommend the illustrated Quince Tree Press edition.

It’s rare to return to a book a decade after reading it and find that it has grown, or more accurately, it has kept pace with my own evolution as a reader.  I am a more critical reader now, probably due to the flight of years. There are ever more books to read, yet less time in an increasingly busy chain of days.  Eleven years after reading GREAT HEART – The History of a Labrador Adventure I find I am once again transported by the story of Mina Hubbard’s fierce search for the truth about her husband’s death in Labrador’s unforgiving wilds.

I wrote an anonymous review of the book on Amazon in November, 1999, and upon returning last evening to see how the book is doing I discovered that my review is featured as the most helpful ‘positive’ review.  While I appreciate that other readers rated my comments as helpful, I was disappointed that other readers hadn’t long since eclipsed my own comments in support of this good book.

Here is what I said:

Using Leon and Mina Hubbard’s diaries, as well s those of their guides, Dillon Wallace and George Elson (great character!), Davidson and Rugge reconstruct the extraordinary story of a woman’s search for the truth behind her husband’s death in 1903.  They flesh out the facts, give form to the unspoken fears and desires hidden between the lines of desperate journal entries, and then skillfully breathe life into the tragic events.  A powerful docunovel in a class all its own.  Don’t miss it.

Others have been compelled by Great Heart. In 2000, author and freelance journalist, Alexandra J. Pratt attempted to retrace Mina Hubbard’s 1905  560-mile route by canoe through the sub-Arctic of  Canada’s Labrador, but a century of forest overgrowth defeated her team’s effort.  In 2002, Pratt published Lost Lands, Forgotten Stories, A Woman’s Journey into the Heart of Labrador.  I look forward to reading Ms. Pratt’s take on this story.