As difficult as writing fiction is, I'm thankful that I'm not a non-fiction writer. James Fox's White Mischief, which I recently finished, confirmed my sense that sustaining the reader's (or this reader's) interest over a the course of a long work of non-fiction is a task so thankless as to be not worth attempting. A plea: writers of non-fiction, can't you wrap it up in 20,000 words?
White Mischief is a journalistic-historical account of the murder of Josslyn Hay (a/k/a Earl of Erroll), an event which effectively ended the Happy Valley era for Kenya's white colonialists. The story ought to be interesting. All the characters, even those tangentially involved, were glamorous, scandalous, drug-and-sex addled adventurers, many of them fabulously wealthy, who did things about which people like to gossip: attempted suicide, attempted murder, abandoned their children, kept wild animals as pets, mistreated their servants, slept around.
In James Fox's hands, however, the story becomes . . . long. Because Fox devoted years to investigating the story, he wants to write about his investigation. The resulting meta-narrative detour introduces the reader to the boring, authorially self-involved, and irrelevant aspects of Fox's tale. Fox, unlike his Happy Valley subjects - sadly - seems not to have attempted suicide or murder, abondoned his child, kept a beast as a pet, mistreated his help staff, or indulged in promiscuous sex.
Fox does, however, admire the deceased writer and gourmand Cyril Connolly, who spent the later years of his life obsessed with the Joss Hay murder. While I can appreciate Fox's tribute to Connolly, his mentor and writing partner - and the source of Fox's own obsession with the case - only someone who knew Connolly personally could appreciate the lavish detail with which Fox recounts what Connolly ate and drank at their meetings. I, on the other hand, don't care.
Purely out of luck, as I was wondering, "How could Fox have told this story without the boring bits?" I began reading Mario Vargas Llosa's The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, and I had my answer. Vargas Llosa's book, like Fox's, is about unearthing the truth about a violent event that happened more than twenty years previously. Moreover, Vargas Llosa's book, like Fox's, is as much about the investigation of the event as it is about the event itself. Unlike Fox's book, however, Vargas Llosa's is fascinating.
Vargas Llosa uses a technique of seamlessly intersplicing his account of the investigation and the event itself. In Alejandro Mayta, a nameless novelist in 1983 interviews people with relevant information about Mayta, a Communist revolutionary in 1958 Peru. Vargas Llosa interweaves the testimony of each of these interviewees, along with a first person account of the interviews, with a third person narrative of the events that occurred 25 year previously. The first person account of the interviews is supposed to be "real," while the third person narrative is supposed to be "fiction." The technique works brilliantly, not merely to generate a page-turning story, but also to probe questions of consequence, like, "How can we ever know the truth about historic events?" and "Why is fiction sometimes a better vehicle for truth than non-fiction?"
To compare Vargas Llosa and Fox is unfair. Vargas Llosa consistently and prolifically produces books of astonishing skill; Fox is a hack. With Alejandro Mayta, Vargas Llosa wrote a po-mo novel; Fox's book is more of an extended feature article for a newspaper's Sunday magazine.
Still, however unfair, the comparison sharply reveals - to my mind - the superiority of fiction as a medium. Freedom from the bondage of facts releases the author from the tiresome task of shaping a page-turner out of life's petty story lines; instead, the author's challenge is to imagine a story line that's also a page turner. The former is a problem of organizing information; the latter is a problem of art. For the both (this) author and (this) reader, the choice of which book is more worthwhile is clear.
Almost two years ago, I saw Jostein Gaarder give a talk in Beijing. His general theme was the human propensity for stories: we learn information when it is situated in the context of a story. Gaarder plainly assimilated the principle without mastering its application. Sophie's World, which I've just read for the first time, isn't an example of a well-crafted story: it's more of a series of lecture notes for a high school philosophy class strung together with a "frame" that falls apart into an unsatisfying heap by book's end.
Nonetheless, Sophie's World delighted me in places. In particular, I was amused because I recalled Gaarder saying that he started out writing Sophie's World without knowing what would happen, and that he spent a lot of time taking long walks around Oslo, trying to figure out how to end the story he'd started. His resolution actually comes in the middle, not at the end, of the book -- SPOILER ALERT! I'm going to reveal the plot twist -- Gaarder makes Sophie and her philosophy teacher, Alberto, realize that they are nothing more than characters in a book that another man, Albert, is writing as a birthday present for his daughter, Hilde. The book's plot, such as it is, consists of a not-at-all convincing rebellion of characters against their author.
That said, I love the construct, and I wish Gaarder would've followed it through brilliantly. His basic insight -- that characters, no matter fictional, seem to have an existence apart from their creator -- immediately resonated with me. When I'm writing, I often feel like an archeologist, excavating a character that exists independently of me, and that my job is to extract him or her as completely and sensistively as I can. (In fact, Gaarder uses archeology as a metaphor to describe a process not dissimilar to novel writing -- psychotherapy, which he terms an "archeology of the soul." p. 426.)
But from what material am I excavating my characters? Reality? My imagination? Another dimension? I don't know -- probably all three -- but I do occasionally feel that my characters "keep me honest": I can't just make them do whatever I feel like having them do; they have individual integrity, and the range of plot possibilities available to them is determined by their personalities. I can't make Chastity in Portnoy's Daughter keep her adultery a secret; and I can't force Pip in The Swing of Beijing to call Tyler a loser when he ejaculates prematurely; and even I can't save Dean from his own rotten judgment in Waiting for Love Child (although I probably punish him too harshly).
I am startled every time I feel "push back" from my characters, but I respect "their" resistance because it's guidance on plot development. The feedback I get from my characters, however imagined (or nonsensical or irrational) that dialectic may be, steers the story on an organic (as opposed to formulaic or externally-determined) course that's consistent with the voice and feel of the created space my characters inhabit.
Like Gaarder, I don't know what's going to happen when I start writing. My literary mentor, D.M. Thomas, once wrote to me, "You don't have to know what the end of the journey is. As Pushkin writes in 'Autumn' -- 'We sail. Where shall we sail?...' You are Columbus." (That's why he's my literary mentor; the man knows what he's talking about!) In Portnoy's Daughter, the final chapter, the apotheosis of the story, didn't exist -- even in my most transitory thinking -- until D.M. Thomas told me to write it. In Waiting for Love Child, my notes for the plot said, "Reveal secret why Lan's parents don't talk to one another." What that secret was I didn't know until I wrote the chapter. In both these examples, what I eventually wrote turned out to be "clincher" passages for the plot and meaning of the book. And those passages function the way they do because I was guided by the characters, not vice versa; or, at least, I wasn't consciously, rationally or cerebrally guiding the story development.
Ultimately, that's my guess about where Gaarder went wrong: he experienced the phenomenon I've described, but he couldn't resist getting cerebral about it, and consequently the life he'd sparked on the page withered. (He's aware that interference by the cerebellum in reflexive, irrational, creative processes -- like dancing -- is fatal; see the tortoise and centipede story on page 437.) I can't blame Gaarder; philosophy is cerebral, overly so. Philosophy is no more conducive to good story telling than physics.
I'm not saying that a well-told novel about the history of philosophy is splitting the atom; but it's probably close.
Mario Vargas Llosa's novel, The Bad Girl, is a fabulous read, despite the sorry translation of the title. In Spanish, Vargas Llosa's Madame Bovary-inspired romp is called Travesuras de la Niña Mala, which roughly translates as "The Naughty Tricks of the Bad Girl." The Bad Girl isn't half as fun (or marketable) a title.
But the English-language title can't dampen the liveliness that Vargas Llosa infuses into Madame Bovary's plot and (especially) characterization. This vivacity derives from two factors. First, Vargas Llosa has empathy -- perhaps even too much -- for his Bad Girl and Ricardo, the stand-ins for Emma and Charles Bovary. Unlike Flaubert, who famously wrote, "Bovary bores me, Bovary irritates me, the vulgarity of the subject gives me bouts of nausea" (quoted in The New Yorker), Vargas Llosa is plainly aroused by his Bad Girl. Her travesuras are -- far from being boring, irritating and vulgar -- something close to the meaning of life. As for Ricardo, he's no pathetic medical-officer-masquerading-as-a-doctor, no joke-hat wearing, club-foot tormenting butt of the author's derision. To the contrary, Ricardo is fidelity personified, the yin to Bad Girl's yang, the oppositional force without which the Bad Girl's travesuras have no power.
Second, Vargas Llosa has the benefit of writing post-Freud. Characterization in the age of the psychotherapist is, quite naturally, psychological. Flaubert's characters, however, are psycholgoically flat. We see -- ad nauseum we see -- their actions, but we are not privy to any depth of thought, and so their actions pile up, page after page, without our caring (until the accretion suddenly collapses Emma's world in the last 50 pages, and we do care -- we are horrified -- at the speed and force of the tornado that spins her to death).
In places, Flaubert implies that the superficiality of his characters' thought is the very reason we should condemn them. Seeing "Amor nel cor" (love in my heart) on his seal, Rodolphe realizes that it's the wrong message to imprint on his "I'm dumping you" letter to Emma. "Oh well, who cares!" he concludes, before smoking three pipes and going to sleep (p. 189).
But Flaubert's psychologically bereft characterization is not entirely by design; it's also of necessity. Pre-Freud, people didn't think with the same self-awareness as they do now. Actions didn't demand the same kinds of explanations -- I did it because my parents were mean to me; I suffered in my youth -- as they do now. Vargas Llosa's Bad Girl therefore has a backstory that allows the reader, if inclined, to excuse her.
Of course, the Bad Girl's sob story is no excuse. Going from rags-to-riches is no exemption from the simple respect of human dignity that we owe others, regardles of their status. Nor does childhood hardship waive the duties of maturity. Vargas Llosa believes this (and punishes the Bad Girl accordingly), but he doesn't really feel it (I suspect -- his Bad Girl has him wrapped around her finger). Still, the richness of the Bad Girl's psychological development, however halting, and the excruciating psychological pain Ricardo suffers -- touchingly rendered -- make the story a page turner where Madame Bovary is (in parts) a soporific.
Thinking about Ian McEwan's The Child in Time, I cannot help but relate it to Michael Frayn's play, Copenhagen.
When I saw Copenhagen in 2002, at the Kennedy Center, it was much-buzzed as the play to see. I remember leaving the theater befuddled at the buzz: "boring" was the word I would've applied, followed by "repetitive."
The play three times enacts the famous walk that Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg took in 1941, during which they had a conversation -- the substance of which remains unknown -- which fundamentally altered their relations for the rest of their lives. At the time, I recognized fully that the repetitive enactment of the walk-and-conversation was a dramatization of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which is colloquially (though controversially, from a physicist's point of view) understood to mean that our understanding of any situation is always limited by our perspective; shift the perspective, and the content changes.
However boring Uncertainty might be to learn in the classroom, Copenhagen didn't make the case that dramatizing it improved the learning experience. On the contrary, I found the physics lesson to get in the way of Frayn's proper task: storytelling.
The number one priority in telling a story, so far as I'm concerned, is maintaining interest, entertaining the audience. This imperative is among the most difficult of the novelist's tasks. "Most novels incredibly boring. It's amazing how the form endures. Not being boring is quite a challenge." That's McEwan talking, quoted in a recent New Yorker piece (at p. 48).
But McEwan appears as vulnerable as the rest of us to recognizing principles that we don't apply in our own lives. The Child in Time makes the same blunder as Copenhagen (although, seeing that Copenhagen post-dates The Child in Time by a decade, perhaps it should be the other way around.) The entire plot line involving Thelma and Charles Darke, Thelma's long physics lectures, Charles' regression into childhood, as well as the lorry accident and Stephen's near-miss driving around it -- these some hundred pages or so are all peripheral to the story of Kate's disappearance, and Stephen's reuniting with Julia.
These irrelevancies are not in the book to advance plot. They're in the book to illustrate physics principles about the nature of time. McEwan is elaborating in prose on his intellectual love affair with physics. These passages are all cerebral masturbation. And, while admittedly they're more masterfully done than Frayn's tiresome redundancies, these diversions are as disruptive to McEwan's storytelling in The Child in Time as Uncertainty was to Frayn's in Copenhagen.
The irony, of course, is that nothing illustrates the importance of perspective to determining content, or the elasticity of time, better than a well-told story. With a page-turner in hand, the content of the world of the page is determined wholly by the author's perspective, and time flies.
In the past month, I've had may opportunities to feel fear. I've feared running out of money, of course; a constant fear in my hand-to-mouth existence these days. I've feared having an ulcer, the most recent manifestation of another underlying fear of mine: cancer; or, more generally, physical degeneration in disease. I've feared for my physical well-being and, specifically, being raped, another fairly stable baseline in my life, especially when I find myself (as I did recently) careening around Mumbai, at night, with a stranger at the wheel and no idea where he was taking me.
I don't enjoy feeling frightened, and I don't find much social support for the experience of fear. Just two weeks ago, I attended a training on maintaining security in disaster operations, where I was surrounded by men who were described (or who described themselves) as "impervious" to fear and who equated being "strong" with being fearless. I, on the other hand, was the person who cried during the hostage-taking simulation; no one congratulated me on being strong.
I therefore savored two passages in recent reading selections. In Gone with the Wind, Grandma Fontaine warns Scarlett,
Child, it's a very bad thing for a woman to face the worst that can happen to her, because after she's faced the worst she can't ever really fear anything again. And it's very bad for a woman not to be afraid of something. . . . [T]hat lack of fear has gotten me into a lot of trouble and cost me a lot of happiness. God intended women to be timid, frightened creatures and there's something unnatural about a woman who isn't afraid.
(p. 430.) While I'm the last person to believe that God intended me to be timid or frightened, Grandma Fontaine's warning -- that a lack of fear has gotten her into trouble and cost her happiness -- resonates. Danger, of course, is alluring, and once the deterrent fear wears away, the magnetic attraction of dangerous situations is less resistible. Nor have I observed great happiness among people who are war junkies; once hooked on the adrenaline rush of conflict situations (or disasters, or other high-stakes danger), enjoying the pleasures of ordinary life is a challenge. Most people I've seen "solve" this challenge with booze.
And, of course, women war/conflict/disaster junkies are especial outcasts. Whether I buy in to Grandma Fontaine's standards or not, most of the rest of society does; and I haven't met a man yet who wants a war/conflict/disaster junky for a wife.
But there are worse fates than being an outcast, and Isak Dinesen describes one in "The Dreamers," the sixth tale in Seven Gothic Tales:
Alas, [says the famed story teller, Mira Jama, who now can tell stories no more], as I have lived I have lost the capacity of fear. When you know what things are really like, you can make no poems about them. . . . I have become too familiar with life; it can no longer delude me into believing that one thing is much worse than the other. The day and the dark, an enemy and a friend--I know them to be about the same. How can you make others afraid when you have forgotten fear yourself?
(p. 274.) I had never before considered the relationship between fear and fiction, that the fearless hero is always the subject, and never the narrator. Isak Dinesen's insight seems right: fearlessness atrophies the imagination. (Indeed, Rhett often describes Scarlett -- who has become fearless -- as lacking imagination.) Also, an absence of fear diminishes compassion for those who do feel fear. (For example, the "impervious, strong" men with whom I was training couldn't relate to my fearful despair during the hostage simulation.) And without imagination and compassion, you can't tell a story.
Perhaps, then, I should be more respectful of my own fears, should bolster myself against shame in feeling them, and protect my fears from erosion by experience. Because to lose the capacity to tell stories -- the means by which I comprehend the world, process my experience, and comfort myself and others -- would be a true horror.
