So, book club started the year with FIFTH BUSINESS, by Robertson Davies, this first of his Deptford trilogy. I read it in two days, enjoying the flawed narrator and the epistolary structure. This reads like a mature writer’s work, with hard-edged wisdom amid the old-fashioned storytelling.
But I have never thought that traits that are strong in childhood disappear; they may go underground or they may be transmuted into something else, but they do not vanish; very often they make a vigorous appearance after the meridian of life had been passed. It is this, and not senility, that is the real second childhood. … As we neared our sixties the cloaks we had wrapped about our essential selves were wearing thin.
(THE DEPTFORD TRILOGY, 1970, Penguin 1990, p. 233)
And Davies gets off so many great lines:
A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain—in short, a man. (p. 3)
But before Paul’s birth, he had loved her because she was the blood of his heart; now he seemed to love her on principle. (p. 38)
After the marathon reading, and a great discussion during book club, I find the lure of the next two books in the series, THE MANTICORE and WORLD OF WONDERS, nearly irresistable. Especially intriguing is the idea that the next book has a different narrator, so we readers will see old scenes (and the first narrator) in different lights. What luxury!
But my new year’s resolve has not yet slaked, and I know first I must finish the second half of NORTH AND SOUTH, by Elizabeth Gaskell. The story is set very close to the time I set my latest work-in-progress, and she uses the same great reportorial eye and style she did in MARY BARTON, which is set earlier. I’d gleaned great ideas and details and modes of speech from the first half of N&S, but somehow had stalled out on reading it. I blamed holiday travel and a fierce dive into first revisions (for story) on my WIP, but opening it again, I remember the real reason. She is just too good.
“You think it strange. Why?”
“I don’t know—I suppose because, on the very face of it, I see two classes dependent on each other in every possible way, yet each evidently regarding the interests of the other as opposed to their own: I never lived in a place before where there were two sets of people always running each other down.” (NORTH AND SOUTH, 1855, Norton Critical Edition 2005, p. 109)
Gaskell also shows raw emotions expressed through action, as in the so-painful scene where Margaret turns down Mr. Thornton’s offer of marriage (pp. 174-8). And, the part that makes my head spin, she’s writing contemporary, not historical, fiction.
The darkness of January descends: I can’t match this historical accuracy, this raw emotion, I shouldn’t even try. I should write about my own time; after all, the themes I’m working are resonant now. But my attempts at contemporary have been clumsy, and I’m so slow that neither of the two contemporary manuscripts I’ve finished works for plot now: In one, the woman is a reporter in a style that was true when I was a reporter, all of five years ago, but isn’t true now; in the other, written four years ago, the protagonist invents a new app on the computer that somebody real invented two years ago. But if I want to say anything “real,” and be believed, I should do it in my own time.
I know the counter-arguments, and I have good reasons for writing historical (like I do want to write about Peterloo), but in the darkest days of the year, these arguments feel ephemeral. And there’s a snowstorm, so I have to shovel. And N&S sits unread.
And then my company announces it is closing its only office in town and laying off nearly all of us. So I flee.
I land in the last Kurt Wallander book by Henning Mankell I haven’t read, BEFORE THE FROST. This too, is an alternate-view story: Wallander as seen and felt from his daughter Linda’s point of view. She describes his hair-trigger anger, and we see it reflected in her own expressions of anger. I especially enjoyed how she resolves her childhood impressions of him with how she sees him working as a detective, and how she tries to resolve her choice to become a police officer with what has come before. Other father-daughter relationships in the book trace other trajectories. As always, I wonder how much I miss because this is translated.
Done with that, and still skirting N&S (which continues to travel back and forth to work in the messenger-bag), I glom onto AMERICAN GODS by Neil Gaiman. He’s been in the news, and in love, and I remember he does that hyper-real detail thing even in the stories that carry a lot of fantasy, as well as solid storytelling, and the book has been on my shelf forever and is recommended by the spouse (who says read ANANSI BOYS right away after). And, like Davies, this story wonders at why people want marvels, how they create their own marvels, and how people who feed them their marvels fare. Fun read, watching the stories told and re-told, and seeing how a longer form can carry a lot of short-story structure (like history passages that don’t slow the main narrative drive), you just have to remember to wrap it up better at the end.
So I’m cruising along and bam—on p. 99—he uses the word “manticore,” which is, you’ll remember, book 2 of the Deptford trilogy. It’s a Sign, so I seek out our copy of the trilogy, but spouse is deep into it and won’t give it up and aren’t I supposed to be reading N&S? Fine. I return to AG, and enjoy the “that’s my life!” references to the northern midwest (pasties, yoopers, those sports-team signs) as well as references to the potential that “It’s a Wonderful Life” could be a depressant and – hello – references to brain science:
She chewed a hangnail. “I read some book about brains,” she said. “My roommate had it and she kept waving it around. It was like, how five thousand years ago the lobes of the brain fused and before that people thought that when the right lobe of the brain said anything it was the voice of some god telling them what to do. It’s just brains.”
…
“I bet it’s like the space aliens,” she said. “These days, people see space aliens. Back then they saw gods. Maybe the space aliens come from the right side of the brain.”
“I don’t think the gods ever gave rectal probes,” said Shadow.
(AMERICAN GODS, Harper 2001, p. 133)
Soon enough, I’m through the book and dashed if it isn’t another snowpocalypse outside, saving me the trouble of immediately deciding which follow-up book to read (N&S is now under a pillow on the living room couch). This morning, no newspaper delivery so we’re reading books at breakfast, and the spouse shouts and chortles several times as he finishes WORLD OF WONDERS. “You must read this now,” he says, “so I can talk about it.”
But first, just one little chapter of N&S.
After I clear some more snow.
How the writing is going: Stuck in pre-revision molasses, but better to slowly look at everything now than rush like last time and discover my “fixes” messed up the plot. Ran through all the pages looking for plot points that don’t pay off, then noting characters that have too much or too little weight. This week I look at locations and setting.
Next book-club book: HOUSEKEEPING, by Marilynne Robinson
