Fiction – Page 20 – Auxiliary Memory

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer is the new YA novel that all my adult lady bookworm friends are reading. At my office four women have already read it and two have even finished the two sequels, New Moon and Eclipse, and are anxiously awaiting for August 2nd to bring them Breaking Dawn. I am more than halfway done with Twilight, but I’m starting to wonder if I shouldn’t be reading it. This book has a disturbing philosophical motif that isn’t suited for males. To put it bluntly guys, so far this story comes across as a manifesto against sex and pro all those qualities women wished us men had but most of us don’t. Is this the beginning of a radical movement?

I feel like a spy reading a classified document meant for her eyes only. Can women really read our thoughts from looking at our eyes? Are women’s secret desire to have their true love stay all night in bed with them without trying a damn thing? Is attention, talk and protection all what women really want from men? If Twilight is a big time fantasy for girls, then boys, all those porn fantasies you spend every waking moment on, are on such a vastly different wavelength from the object of your desires that I think maybe you ought read Twilight, just to learn what the enemy is thinking while you are picturing them without their clothes. They are picturing you in clothes. Nice clothes. Outfits you don’t take off.

Strangely enough Twilight is about vampires and werewolves, which you’d think would be full of great action and thrilling violence, but no. These vampires all belong to my sister’s Please and Thank You Club. Like I said, I haven’t finished with the first book, but so far killing and stakes through the heart are absent. This is a far cry from Van Helsing, and it’s definitely not Buffy and Spike bringing down a house.

If J. K. Rowling had used a female as her lead character instead of Harry, would the Hermione Granger series have had as many readers, and would the working of the magic unfolded as it did for a male point of view? Is Stephenie Meyer different, a writer revealing feminine secrets unlike most female writers who play along with male fantasies, or does her explosive success represent a large segment that’s pro chastity?

I have to admit that Meyer’s take on vampirism is quite cool, if intellectual, but I’ve got to wonder if it’s just one giant metaphor for male desire, where Meyer ties lust and sex to violence and death. Edward Cullen becomes the ultimate beautiful male that must control his instinct to kill, which for the average guy is the instinct to get laid. Now I could be completely off base here, and Meyer will eventually come around to the traditional values of sex and violence that all us guys enjoy and love, but I’m worried how far she will delay gratification.

This is a fun way to review a book. I can’t spoil the ending because I don’t know it. I can tell you the book is gripping, full of tension between Bella and Edward, and that women love this story. I’m not used to reading teen girl fantasies, so it may not be as much fun as seeing into the girl’s locker room, but it might be like having a secret microphone planted there.

Jim

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton’s 1920 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Age of Innocence, is a story about how people never communicate their real feelings. Wharton suggests at the end of her book, set twenty-five years after the start, that the next generation is more open, but I’m not sure even a hundred years later, in our own times, if this is true. The love triangle of Newland Archer, his fiancée May Welland, and her older cousin, Ellen Olenska is shown through the viewpoint of Newland’s mind. Edith Wharton does an excellent job of taking on a male point-of-view, considering the cultural restrictions of her time, and her consideration for the minds of people from the 1870s.

The Age of Innocence is a story of culture and manners and their impact on people. Newland Archer knows what he’s suppose to do, and how other people are suppose to act, but within his own mind he wants to be different, and imagines that maybe other people do too, but his life is frustrated by the few clues he gets to verify his theories. He thinks he has the perfect young woman lined up to be his wife and then he meets a woman who has run away from her husband, a Count no less, abandoning wealth and position, to flaunt traditional behavior.

Countess Ellen Olenska is described as looking old at thirty, and no where near as beautiful as her younger cousin May, at twenty-two. Yet, Newland Archer finds himself more attracted to Ellen. Plenty of other men do too, and readers are never sure how many men are chasing Ellen, or how many are catching her. Many men want to make her their mistress, but we’re never told the details of the relationships because we only get to know what Archer knows. He gets conflicting information from Ellen and the people who know her. Archer is never sure what May is thinking, or Ellen. He often plays games, telling himself if this happens, he’ll do this, and it means that, but they never work out like he plans.

Archer wants to tell May, sorry old sport, but you’re as dull as your society, and then run away with Ellen. We know that even in Wharton’s time, 1920, men were doing that, and readers today probably have a very hard time understanding why Newland didn’t just chuck it all for love, but then I guess that’s why Edith called her novel the age of innocence about the 1870s. In our times, we act on our impulses but do we communicate why?

People today still don’t say what they’re thinking but instead communicate with a strategy like the old Battleship game, where players try to guess the location of hidden ships on a grid. Readers following along behind Newland Archer and watch his strategic plans and waits with him to see if his remarks hit anything in the minds of May and Ellen, and then ponders along with Archer about May and Ellen’s commands back and if they offer any clues to what they are thinking. Even to the end, what May knows about Archer’s feelings for Ellen is ambiguous to the reader, but Wharton lets us know that May is no dummy and is playing her own game with as much passion as Newland’s.

We know even less about what Countess Olenska is thinking. Is Archer someone special to her, or is he just one of many men that she plays along. And does Archer really want to know? Edith Wharton has written a beautiful masterpiece about the battle between the sexes. The ending is perfect. Reading this novel makes me, and I assume other readers, wonder why people don’t just say what they are thinking. My guess is we’re afraid of shattering our fantasies. Our expectations of other people are all built on fantasy, speculation and desires. If men knew what women were thinking it would be crushing blows to our egos and sexual fantasies. If women knew what men were thinking it would be the end of romance.

I think Wharton knew this. I’m guessing Countess Olenska knew this, and from the last scene I think Newland Archer knew this, and we’re given hints that even May eventually learned this truth. But we never know anything for sure, because Wharton knew that, too.

Jim

My Kind of Story

After consuming 2,000-3,000 books over the last half-century you’d think I’d know exactly what kind of books I love to read, but I’m ashamed to admit, I’ve been living on the trial and error method up to now. Before recent revelations, if I didn’t like a book it was a bad book, or a boring book, or if I wanted to be generous I could claim I wasn’t in the right mood for that book or whine that the book covered a topic out of my territory. If I loved a book, it was brilliant, insightful, well written, heartfelt, and perfect for me. What if I’m wrong? What if why I love or hate a story has nothing to do with those factors? What if it has nothing to do with genre? What if it has nothing to do with favorite writers? What if the books I love the most, the ones I read the fastest are due to a particular writing formula?

Recently I selected The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon for my June book in the 1% Well-Read challenge, but that book rubbed me the wrong way. Since the Pynchon book was about the 1960s I thought I’d try a different book about the same time period and see how another author handled the subject. I quickly found, Drop City by T. C. Boyle, also covered in the 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Both books open in California, but the Pynchon book came out in 1966 and appeared to be about 1964, and the Boyle book was published in 2003 and was about 1970. Drop City rubbed me the right way.

So, with two books about Californian counter-culture, why did one soar and the other crash and burn? You’d think the book written in the middle of the 1960s would feel more authentic, but actually the book written in 2003 hit an emotional bull’s eye with my old memories of the times. Well, for one thing, Pynchon was born in 1937, and Boyle was born in 1948, and I was born in 1951. In fact, the Pynchon book reminded me of another book from 1966, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, by Richard Farina, also born in 1937. I had the same kind of trouble with the Farina book, and for many of the same reasons I didn’t like the Pynchon novel. Both of those books felt overly intellectual and writerly, whereas the Boyle book felt like it was just a straight-forward tale about real people.

This first clue leads me to think I need to read writers who are like me in some way, because obviously I can’t always read writers my own age. I like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, but they definitely aren’t like me, and I don’t resonate with them emotionally. I admire their stories greatly, but I don’t have a personal bond with them like I do with modern stories. I don’t think it’s time that keeps us apart, but their storytelling techniques.

Great Expectations is one of my all time favorite books, but that’s more for abstract reasons, and I greatly admire it for creative and intellectual reasons. I’ve got to admit that I preferred the narrative of The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) by Michel Faber (1960), a novel set in Dickens’ time over straight Dickens storytelling. Modern writers have developed skills to get their readers closer to their characters. I don’t know is this is an illusion, and modern historical fiction is more appealing because the historical characters are just more modern themselves, or if Jane Austen used modern writing techniques we’d feel even closer to her two hundred year old characters.

My all time favorite books are books written by Robert A. Heinlein in the 1950s. I also have a strong affinity for Jack Kerouac and his books from the 1950s. These books I’ve read and reread. Some of my more recent favorites are The Life of Pi, The Lovely Bones, Harry Potter series, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, His Dark Materials, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Secret Live of Bees, Middlesex, The Wonder Boys, Positively 4th Street, Nobody’s Fool, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Poisonwood Bible, The Glass Castle, Truth and Beauty, The Sparrow, Cloud Atlas, The Memory of Running, The Time Traveler’s Wife, A Woman of the Iron People, Bellwether, and so on.

Maybe here’s enough clues to solve the puzzle. I think the books I cozy up to the fastest are first person narratives, or stories told in very limited third person. I don’t like intellectual authors, especially those who use third person omniscient to expound about life and reality. What I’m discovering is my kind of stories are about people, told in a very straight forward manner, and I greatly prefer the voice of the character over the voice of the author. Not only that, but I’m pretty hung-up on wanting the story to unfold in a linear fashion.

I’m starting to wonder: What if my kind of story depends on how the story is told rather than what it’s about? When I was in elementary school and begun getting into books I loved biographies and autobiographies first. Very linear people stories. If you examine the book list above, all the stories are focused on people and the narrator tells the story by sticking close to the main character’s POV. I liked Drop City better than The Crying of Lot 49 because Boyle got closer to his characters, but it wasn’t a super great book to me because he didn’t get close enough and there were too many of them.

When I listened to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao this week, I got extremely excited about the beginning when I was first learning about Oscar, and got very disappointed when the story turned away from him. I just started Year’s Best SF 13 edited by David Hartwell, and the first story, “Baby Doll,” was a hit because of the characters, and the third story, “The Last American,” was a dud because it was all ideas and no characterization. Intellectually I know “The Last American” is supposed to be a good story. I can see it’s creative parts. But it was painful for me to read because it had no character I could get behind.

I don’t think I’m seduced by every character driven story, because I’ve hated some stories with great personal writing because the POV character was too unlikable. I love stories where the POV character have a distinctive voice, like Chi-mo in King Dork or Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. I think one of the reasons why I love the work of David Sedaris is his distinctive voice – he wouldn’t be so funny if he wasn’t so unique.

Literary writers definitely have the skills I like, but they often write about boring people. The character details may show fantastic writing, but the personalities of the POV characters are often unappealing. Who really cares about average alcoholic writers living in academia and getting divorced? Well, Michael Chabon made Grady Tripp different in The Wonder Boys.

Drop City would have been a much better book to me if Boyle had followed a couple of his characters more closely. It’s still a damn good story, but it’s movie like in that all the characters seem equal distant. A lot of writers do this, that is, follow the techniques of the movies, jumping from character to character. You can only get so emotionally close to an ensemble. The Big Chill was a masterpiece of my generation, but it didn’t have the wrenching impact of Forrest Gump or Four Friends.

Other techniques I don’t like are flashbacks, convoluted plots and frames. In the MFA classes I’ve taken, many of the student writers loved putting stories in frames, and then jumping back into flashbacks two, three and even four layers deep. Sometimes they even use fantastic tricks to bring the modern narrator back into the past, as was done with Middlesex and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. To me, this hurts the story. I can understand how dazzling this writing trick is intellectually, but not emotionally.

Now that I know what kind of storytelling turns me on it should help me improve my batting average finding great books to read. On the other hand, it may not be that useful. I often select books because other people say they are great and I want to discover what these people have discovered. There are a lot of reasons to read Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, a book that is definitely not my kind of story. It is instructive about the nature of the early English novel and life in the 18th century England. Tom Jones can be a great novel but one I hate to read. So, should I read it?

Now that I’m more aware of what I like to read, should I only gorge on my kind of stories? If reading was only about entertainment, then yes. If reading is about pushing yourself into unknown territory, then no. It is interesting to know about my reading sweet tooth. Now I just have to learn how to recognize other reading flavors and how to savor them.

Jim

Pulp Fiction

Long ago, before Quentin Tarantino’s great film, before I was born in 1951, before television, there was pulp fiction. It was called pulp fiction because of the grade of paper the stories were printed on was called pulp, and a whole entertainment industry was built around selling magazines with short stories and serialized novels wrapped in crude color reproductions of what is now called pulp art.

When I was young I often met older science fiction fans that collected these magazines, but surely, most of the kids of the generation before me, who grew up loving to read pulp fiction, must be very old, if still living, and the pulp fiction generation surely must be dying out. Yet, over at Fantasy & Science Fiction they are running an article, “The New Nostalgia: The Classic Pulp Story Revival” by Dave Truesdale that chronicles how several small press publishers are keeping the pulp fiction tradition alive with quality hardbound reprints. This article is well worth reading on many levels because it renews memories of a few old authors and their best stories and informs about the sub-culture of the small press publishing.

Pulp fiction has also been kept alive by the legacy of comic books and their impact on the movies with all the classic super heroes being reinvented every year, and reoccurring pulp action films like the Indiana Jones series or the remake of King Kong. Comics are the direct descendants of pulp magazines that featured cruder art and stories for the younger readers on the same pulp paper. Pulp fiction was never literary but a few fine writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler came out of the tradition. Most of the prose was purple and all action, and aimed at the poorly educated, often featuring very politically incorrect attitudes about race, gender, ethnic groups, and foreigners. Society and the well bred looked down on the lowly pulp fiction fan.

Evidently, old pulp fiction is finding new younger readers through the popularity of action movies, reprints and inherited nostalgia. When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s much of the best pulp fiction, including mysteries, westerns, science fiction, adventure, spy, thrillers and other genres were reprinted as cheap paperbacks for 25 and 35 cents, but now the buy-in price are $40 deluxe volumes.

There was always a tremendous vitality to pulp fiction, which explained why titles included words like astounding, thrilling, amazing, wonder, adventure, fantastic, and that wink-wink keyword, spicy. Science fiction really is a child of pulp fiction, and I think many readers hated the change that the New Wave brought to the genre during the 1960s, where emerging writers tried to force science fiction out of the gutter and into the classroom where the revolutionaries wanted it to wear literary robes. Today science fiction is often represented in the minds of the public at large by Star Trek and Star Wars, but those stories owe a lot to two pulp fiction superstars: E. E. “Doc” Smith and Edward Hamilton.

If you want to sample classic science fiction pulp stories, and not spend too much money, I recommend tracking down copies of two anthologies: Before the Golden Age edited by Isaac Asimov and Adventures in Time and Space edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas. These books collect some of the best SF short stories from 1931-1945. You can find both at ABEBooks.com, but watch out, both fat original hardback anthologies were often reprinted as multi-volume paperback books, and it would be worth your while to use the advance search and specify hardback editions, thus saving you on total costs and postage. These two books will give you a great education about the foundation of science fiction.

The URLs linked to these titles also give you table of contents for the stories which if you are really hoarding your gasoline dollars might find on the web for free. Now, as you read the stories, consider these issues:

One, are they still fun to read? Are they as fun as reading Harry Potter or any of your other current favorite writers? Second, do the ideas seem stupid, in the light of modern knowledge? Third, do you notice why I call them politically incorrect? Fourth, can you tell the difference between pulp fiction writing and modern MFA writing (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao), or even modern genre writing (Charlie Stross and John Scalzi)? Fifth, are these stories worth preserving? Sixth, are they worth your reading time over reading newer stories?

All fiction from 1900-1950 is thinning out fast in our collective memories, and few stories from that era get reprinted. I’m not just talking about pulp fiction. If you can, find a copy of Best American Short Stories from before 1950 and some original pulp magazines. Most of the contents from either will never have seen print since the original publications. The small presses that are reprinting classic pulp fiction stories, are really just rescuing one story in a thousand, maybe one in ten thousand.

Looking at the periods 1800-1850 and 1850-1900, only the rarest of stories are still read by modern readers. Baby boomers can remember the famous books they read from 1950-2000, but how many of the following generations know about those best selling titles? My guess is the pulp fiction nostalgia is for the boomers who can remember reading pulp fiction from its first generation of reprints. I would imagine, out of all the genres only a handful of novels will become classics, like The Maltese Falcon, Tarzan of the Apes, Conan the Barbarian, and Riders of the Purple Sage. But how many kids under 16 discover these tales?

I occasionally enjoy reading an old pulp story and appreciate these small press publishers bringing back old favorites by Leigh Brackett, C. L. Moore, Robert E. Howard and Jack Williamson that I first discovered in used editions of Ace Doubles. I think my identity is partly based on pulp fiction, and I feel I help keep these old friends alive by continuing to read them. I know all of my generation and the stories we loved will soon pass on and be forgotten, but it’s pleasant to think a few of the stories will survive and future generations will enjoy them and wonder about their fans.

Jim

History versus Historical Fiction

I just finished listening to a new novel by Emma Bull called Territory. It’s a historical fantasy novel that takes place in Tombstone, Arizona during the legendary year of 1881. Now I have read many non-fiction books about Wyatt Earp, read many fictional accounts, and I have seen most of the major film stories about Wyatt Earp and the gunfight at the O.K. corral. Territory was entertaining enough that I wanted to stay plugged into my iPod every free moment last week. Part of this is due to my love of the Tombstone myth, and part due to a good story with good characters. The narrators were excellent.

Emma Bull seems to know most of the essential facts and speculation about the famous event, and she invents new theories about the how and why of the known facts, especially about the stagecoach holdup on March 15, 1881. What she does different is add fantasy elements to the story, and I don’t mean she makes up false accusations, but adds fantasy, as in magic, to the storyline. I love fictional accounts of real people, and I love a good fantasy story that uses famous people for characters, like Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld stories, which featured Mark Twain (Sam Clemens) and Sir Richard Burton. In Riverworld there was no attempt to recreate an actual historical event, whereas Territory does build a plot around “true” events, so in that regards it attempts to be realistic.

Emma Bull stays on the periphery of the most famous characters, dealing more with the Earp wives and Big Nose Kate, than with the Wyatt Earp & brothers, except for Doc Holliday, who is one of three point-of-view characters. The other two are fictional POV characters, Jesse Fox and Mrs. Mildred Benjamin. I think this was a good choice – too many of the Tombstone stories follow the Earps, and seeing history from the sidelines is a good vantage point.

Now I don’t know about the magic element. I suppose if you’re a fantasy writer you always feel compelled to throw fantasy elements into your writing recipe, but this story could stand strong and tall without magic. In fact, I think with more history and less fantasy it would have been a better novel of any type. Obviously, Ms. Bull mined Tombstone’s history for rich historical ore and found plenty to refine. Her addition of magic creates a non-historical plot thread but that hole in history is also later plugged by the same magic.

There are two types of historical novels – the authentic and the romantic. Now the romantic historical novel can be very realistic to its time, but it’s ultimate goal is to tell a fun story, often with made-up characters. Of course, the authentic historical novel seeks to recreate everything as realistic as possible, matching all known facts, and often focuses on real people from the past. Both are fantasies in essence, because non-fiction history is a kind of fantasy too. Even our own personal memories are fantasies. I think when science fiction readers got tired of space opera, many genre writers turned to fantasy, and in recent times, turned to blending historical fiction with science fiction and fantasy. Readers and movie fans often love a good costume drama, so I think this type of story is growing in popularity.

Territory is a lightweight romantic historical fantasy that entertains with quite a few good facts. Readers unfamiliar with the Tombstone myths of 1881 can still follow the story, but I’m not sure if they can really enjoy it like it should be read. Tombstone of 1881 was about law and order, Republicans versus Democrats, American West mythology, guns versus gun control, survival of the fittest, greed, revenge, murder, love, redemption, and every element of a great story. Shakespeare would have loved the material, and could have written a play more complex than Hamlet with the famous ambiguous characters of Tombstone. That’s why the story gets filmed so much and used for background for novels.

The most interesting speculation Emma Bull conjures regards the stage holdup and its motivation on Wyatt Earp for later events. Most of the glamorous stories about Wyatt Earp make him into a frontier hero, but if you dig deep you know that he was involved on both sides of the law. I wished that Emma Bull had jettisoned the fantasy elements to make more room for the story to be an authentic historical novel because she showed a lot of talent for that, and I also wish she had even added fifty-percent more to her word count. I think having Mildred Benjamin be a typesetter and cub reporter was enough of a fantasy element for this story. Her current approach to this classic western is what I would call Deadwood PG.

Overall, I enjoyed this story, but ended up wanting more. Of course, the additional words I want might bore the average reader, because I’d like to see a lot more history and facts painted into the story. Really great authentic historical fiction makes the reader feel like they are walking through the past. Every significant detail adds to the beauty of the work, and you feel like you are learning from first-hand experience. What really sets off the feeling of reality is the voice of the characters and narrator. Ms. Bull throws in quite a few archaic words and phrases from the time, but her characters have the tainted feel of the modern mind. It’s never obvious, but I kept asking myself would a person from 1881 think or say that.

Authentic voice is very hard to pull off. One way to test modern historical fiction for voice is to compare it to works of fiction written from the time period, but to go even deeper, you have to compare the modern sound to letters and diaries of the time. It’s not just the period vocabulary, but the popular phrases, topics of interests, the pop culture of the time, common philosophical opinions and so on. Territory doesn’t go very deep in this regard.

Unfortunately, there is no Pride and Prejudice or Sister Carrie quality novel written by someone who lived during the time in the old west. About the closest thing we have is Roughing It by Mark Twain, written about ten years earlier about his 1861-1867 trip out west seeking his fortune in a Nevada silver mining camp. Of course, this might be like learning about contemporary France from the essays of David Sedaris. Another source is Isabella Bird, who traveled through the Rocky Mountains in 1873 and wrote about her adventures in A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains.

The true western novel didn’t evolved until well after the west was tamed, and in many ways western fiction is often more fantasy fiction than historical fiction. If you really want to know about Tombstone you need to read non-fiction books like Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends by Allen Barra. The trouble is, reading one book is like eating one chocolate chip cookie. That’s the thing about history and historical fiction – you run the chance of getting bit by the what-really-happened bug. Emma Bull takes a particularly strange photo of Wyatt Earp that shows a sinister evil side. If you read wide enough you’ll find Wyatt Earp detractors who will back this view, but is it the correct take? You’ll have to read about six history books to get a decent idea.

Jim