Mystery Surprise

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

I’ve never much liked mystery novels.  I get either helplessly confused by the third chapter (Smiley’s People) or impatient that no one else figured out early on that of course the wife did it (Presumed Innocent). In fourth and fifth grade, I collected Nancy Drews, mostly to try to understand the intriguing world of teenagers, for which Nancy’s life, with her little blue roadster and her boyfriend named Ned, did little to prepare me.

Tattered-jacketed copies of The Key to Rebecca and The Russia House sit on my bookshelf, as do biographies of the Romanovs and Winston Churchill.  Books I’ll keep (if probably never read) because they remind me of my dad, who loved a good thriller as well as historical biography.  I’ve loved reading Patrick McGrath’s Spider and Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley more for their unreliable narrator and creepily precise characterizations and gorgeous writing, but I don’t consider either one a true mystery.  In both, we know who done it.  The thrill (as in Henry James’ Turn of the Screw) lies in watching just how, and why.

So I still feel a little surprised when I name Ruth Rendell (who also writes as Barbara Vine) and Donna Leon as two of my happiest reading discoveries in the past few years. I discovered Rendell while working as a production editor at Crown Publishing Group almost twenty years ago. Reading for pleasure rather than consistency of serial commas or proper placement of em-dashes was an occasional perk of the job.  With Rendell’s manuscript, every word sucked me in, and I couldn’t put it down.

I left Crown and didn’t pick up a mystery again until 2009 when, on vacation with friends, I saw Rendell’s name on the spine of a fat paperback on a bookshelf.  I picked up The Keys to the Street and have read fifteen of her books since.  Not a record-breaking number, but for me—who was absent the day they handed out the gene for tracking clues—a surprise.  Some of Rendell’s books can start to feel formulaic—the loner with a nervous tic, the yuppie arriviste couple, the plain Jane who gets taken in by the psychopathic charmer—but at her best, she’ll thrill you.  And not with “mystery” as much as through keen psychological insight and a dark sensibility about human nature.  In several of her books, no crime is committed, unless you broaden the definition beyond the legal.  If you haven’t read anything by her yet, try The Crocodile Bird or The Water’s Lovely or the aforementioned Keys to the Street.

Curious, perhaps, but loving Rendell has not had the effect of turning me to other mystery writers.  And then, a month ago,  a colleague at work loaned my husband Death and Judgment by Donna Leon.  Leon, an American who lives in Venice, has written a series of murder mysteries featuring Police Commissioner Guido Brunetti.  Having recently visited Venice, I had fun recognizing locations – hey, the bad guy lives one canal over from our hotel! – but I kept reading because I liked hanging out with Guido, his wife Paola (who seems always to be cooking), and their children, and because I grew more and more to admire Guido’s moral code.  He always finds the culprit, who—in the three I’ve read so far—turns out to be a well-connected group of powerful politicians, businesspeople, and Mafia.  Perhaps that’s why Leon doesn’t allow her books to be translated into Italian.

I read once that Jane Smiley wrote Duplicate Keys, a mystery, to teach herself about plot. I tried reading that one, too, and found it impenetrable.  If I learn something about craft from reading mysteries, great.  But for now, the surprise of discovery alone sends me to the library for the next one.

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Beside the Point?

Posted on January 27, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

A couple weeks ago (OK, three, which is ancient history in social media time), an essay appeared in the New York Times Book Review called “Why Authors Tweet.”  In it, Anne Trubek seems to poke fun at Jeffrey Eugenides as well as other social-media-shy writers for opting out of Twitter, Facebook, and the like.

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” the great and powerful Oz says, but that’s of course exactly where we want to look.  Toto pulls back the curtain, and the mysterious and powerful is rendered quotidian, ordinary—a little traveling showman with his smoke-and-mirrors machine.

I’m as curious as the next person to see what’s back there.  And as a writer, I’m part exhibitionist, a craver of attention.  But I’m more than a bit ambivalent about Trubek’s portrait of what she terms “the historically specific idea of what it means to be a writer.”  You know, the romantic hero in billowing shirt penning alone in his garret, crumpled sheets of paper (or parchment) littering the floor.  What writer hasn’t gone to the movies only to groan at Winona Ryder (as Louisa May Alcott) penning “The End” on her last page and tying up Little Women with a ribbon:  one draft, all done!  Or at Michael Douglas’s shelter-porn writers’ office in the finale of Wonder Boys.  Or – well, you get the picture.

This “historically specific” idea is a stereotype, a broad-stroke cartoon.  I’m not sure whose history it’s specific to, even.  We recognize it as a trope, a shorthand, an easy way out.  Not as reality–Jeffrey Eugenides’ reality, or anyone else’s I can think of.

So when Trubek aligns Eugenides’ comment (on his publisher-created FB page) that “it’s better…for readers not to communicate too directly with an author because the author is, strangely enough, beside the point”  with “the pretension of hermetic distance,” she seems to miss the, well, point.

What about personal preference?  Maybe Eugenides just plain doesn’t want to do Twitter or FB.  Or chat & tweet with his readers.  Does that make him pretentious?  Salman Rushdie and Gary Schteyngart embrace the playfulness and humor of tweeting—and followers flock to them.  Why not?  Rushdie and Shteyngart are good at being playful and clever in 140 characters as well as in hundreds of pages, and they deserve every follower.  (Though I couldn’t help wonder if, in Shteyngart’s case–he’s been tweeting since Dec 1–the novelty may soon wear off.)

Schteyngart and Rushdie don’t pull away the whole curtain; of course not. Who would?  They choose, as artfully as in their fiction, what to reveal online as well as on page, or in person.  So if a writer chooses NOT to interact (playfully or not) in social media, does it follow that he or she is some kind of cranky Luddite, slamming the door on fun and community?

For those of us who are still figuring out this social media thing, from content to whether or not we even want to participate, who are still carving out what feels right, who post about an essay published three weeks ago, who don’t have tens of thousands of followers—please don’t lock us in the garret.  We like our fun, too.

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Retreat

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

I just got home from the convent.

A writer’s retreat, actually:  three nights in a small room (bed, desk, chair, sink, icon) at a spiritual center run by Dominican Sisters, a thirty-minute drive north.  Outside the door to my room, a long hallway that reminded me of the hotel in The Shining.  But no REDRUM on the walls, no boy pedaling his tricycle.  Just a long series of rooms identical to mine, uninhabited.  (The retreat center was expecting an arrival today, of some seventy-five people from a Presbyterian church, but during the week, my friend and fellow writer Audrey were the only guests there.)

The room may have been simple, but it wasn’t a cell.  The bed had a floral bedspread, which I replaced with my Costa Rican woven blanket, my only touch of home.  Quiet is the rule upstairs, so I turned off the sound on my laptop, silenced my cell phone, listened to nothing but the trickle of water in the fountain beneath my window and the sound of my own keys tapping.  I wrote at a desk with the surface space of a large TV tray, on a chair that looked like something you’d find in a turn-of-the-century (last century, that is) schoolhouse.  I got up only to pee or eat.

That was the point.  I love my big desk, but it’s covered with unpaid bills, notes to myself, museum membership solicitations, a Rolodex reminder of my former life in New York, and piles of papers that don’t seem to belong anywhere else.  I work there five days a week, but during the two days I’ve been here I come to see a whole new meaning for “work.”  On retreat, I wrote all day.

I’ve been telling myself for years that I do this at home, but I never have.  It’s just not possible.  It should be – or maybe not.  Maybe we need to go somewhere completely anonymous, somewhere quiet.  Not every day, but from time to time.  I’ve gone on residency before for four weeks—to Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in the Blue Ridge foothills, and Ragdale Foundation just outside Chicago.  I never thought three days would be nearly enough.

I was wrong.  I wrote two new scenes, conflated four others, tightened, and—most exciting of all—saw my characters do things I hadn’t expected.  Not four weeks’ worth, but damn good for three days.

I’m home now.  I’ve returned three calls, spent some time with the cat, packed my gym bag.  Electricians are working downstairs; someone’s doing something with a jackhammer outside my window.  I’m refreshed, re-invigorated.

Not every three days goes well, home or away.  I was lucky, this time, or the stars were aligned, or whatever. I don’t want to explain it, or jinx it.  I just want to say how good it feels.

And you?  What writing retreats have you discovered, near or far?

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Let It Shine

Posted on January 6, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

There will be no post next week, January 13.  I’ll be back January 20.

Epiphany.  That’s what today is, on the church calendar:  the Feast of the Epiphany.  Twelfth night.  The magi—three wise men—showed up to pay homage to the babe in the manger and, the story goes, recognized him as the son of God.  That’s what, to practicing Christians, “epiphany” marks:  the manifestation of the divine.

James Joyce used the word to refer to a literary technique, most famously in Dubliners (“a series of fifteen epiphanies,” he called the stories). Joyce’s epiphanies mark those moments where a story transcends its events and gives us something more—insight, lyricism, beauty.  Often actual, physical light is involved, and you frequently find the word “never” or a character “seeing” something.  Consider the end of “Araby,” when darkness represents a boy’s fall from innocence, or the last line in Frank O’Connor’s “Guests of the Nation”:  And anything that  happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again.  Other literary epiphanies are less overtly tagged or subjective, and instead give an action sufficient to reveal change.

When I started teaching fiction writing, during grad school, I gravitated toward these and other stories with clear, dramatic endings.  From Aristotle to Hollywood, satisfying storytelling has been defined as reliant upon change, whether in character or situation. An alarm clock going off and indicating that the whole thing has been a dream is not a successful change.  Both the Church and Joyce use “epiphany” to mean revelation, manifestation.  A true epiphany has power and transcendence.  Instead of shutting the story (and the meaning) down, it opens everything up.

Which leads me to a quick, unproven theory:  Worthwhile epiphany comes from a character’s action, insight, or thought, not from an outside agent (like a lightning bolt or alarm clock or car crash).

Here are a few I’ve admired. OK, several.  I could spend all day at the bookshelves, finding more.  I’d love to hear others–which would you add?

Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.  (James Joyce, “Araby”)

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.  (James Joyce, “The Dead”)

“I had Barbara,” she said, and began to move ahead of Mrs. Slade toward the stairway.  (Edith Wharton, “Roman Fever”)

…I cannot let go of him now, because if I did, all our happiness and my subsequent pain—I cannot vouch for his—will all have been nothing, and nothing is a dreadful thing to hold on to.  (Edna O’Brien, “The Love Object”)

I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.  (Denis Johnson, “Beverly Home”)

Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt and softly chant, They is, they is, they is.  (Tobias Wolff, “Bullet in the Brain”)

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Don’t ask, don’t tell

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Lindsey Crittenden

Note: there will be no post next Friday, 12/30.  Check back 1/6/12. Happy New Year!

The question comes up at parties, over dinner with new friends, next to a chatty traveler on an airplane. The inevitable ice-breaker— What do you do?—has made me want to say “Taxidermy” or “marine research,” to make up an alternate identity and avoid the question that always follows when I say that I write.  Write about what?

I once made the mistake, at a luncheon of academic types, of saying “childhood” and “loss.”  I cringe now, remembering.  Not that fiction can’t be about big themes, childhood and loss among them, but for a writer to define her own work that way?  I might as well have said Life or Truth or Beauty.  Chalk it up to grad school; I was drafting my aesthetic statement, a required part of every master’s thesis, at the time.

But now, if someone asks me what my fiction is about, after I try to change the subject, I describe the characters instead. A girl in 1969 who doesn’t want the astronauts to land on the moon.  A woman getting crank calls from her married lover’s daughter.  A drug addict who follows a stranger on the street, thinking that she’s his sister.  A woman who kidnaps her own son and moves to a new town to start over.

It’s much, much easier to do this, by the way, for work that is finished and much harder for work that is still being formed.  In fact, I think it’s even dangerous to define work that’s still being formed, sort of akin to the Jewish custom of not bringing any new baby furniture into the house until the baby is born healthy and safe.

Recently I was asked why my novel features a kidnapping.  Had I thought about what that might say about my own life?  No, nor did I particularly want to.  Talking about my work jinxes the creative process, silences the intuition.  Thinking too much about what my fiction means makes me squirm.  Once it’s written and looking for a home, then I’ll have to formulate a marketing pitch, but not yet.

One of my happiest moments as a writer happened during a workshop.  In the story, “Away from Trees,” a young archeologist who is mourning her brother’s sudden death visits a ghost town in the Eastern Sierra, where the town’s only building made of brick is the court house.  Her dead brother’s name is Court.  I did not plan that connection. I didn’t even realize it, until someone said, “I love the way the only building not falling apart is the courthouse.  Such an important symbol the writer planted.”  But I hadn’t–at least not consciously.

Wallace Stegner wrote that the guts of any significant fiction is an anguished question.  If we knew the answer, we wouldn’t need to write the thing in the first place.  And yet, of course, once we’ve started writing any piece of fiction, we have some idea of what it’s “about.”  To pretend otherwise is disingenuous, false.  But I’m writing today to celebrate the not knowing, the questions, the anguish.

I’m working on the umpteenth revision of a novel.  I’ve kept every earlier draft, so many I can’t even keep track of which came when.  (How hard could it have been to have jotted a date on the first page? But I didn’t.)  I’ve had long periods away—but I’ve always come back, I suppose, because that inchoate question still hounds me.  As a reviser, I tend to overvalue the small detail, the turn of phrase, the re-arranged syntax.  This time, I’m looking more at the larger issues:  What is this scene accomplishing?  What’s changed in these ten pages?  Where’s the urgency here?

What about you?  Does asking the anguished question help or hinder?  What has jinxed or helped your intuition?

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