Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. I liked this one more than The Newly Born Woman but I am a little embarrassed trying to come up with anything intelligent to say about it. So we are adopting a new rule here at Outside of Dog, which is that any time I have nothing to say about a book, I will just pick out a quote (preferably a quote about dogs) and you can decide for yourselves.

Here is your quote:

We need dogs to understand this strange, ambivalent relation we have to love — hatred. I don’t have a dog. I avoid having a dog. I have always been aware that I have avoided having dogs. A dog is a threat. What is threatening about dogs is their terrible love. You learn this the moment you see a particular dog. Some dogs are like human beings, full of hatred, but most dogs are bundles of love. This infinite, complete, and limitless giving of love is exhausting for a human being. We are a mixture of love and its contrary. Apparently there is no such mixture in a dog’s love. Poe wrote “The Black Cat” about this: a cat’s love that is so infinite the narrator comes to hate the cat.

Meeting a dog you suddenly see the abyss of love. Such limitless love doesn’t fit our economy. We cannot cope with such an open, superhuman relation.

On Becoming A Novelist. Those of you who have been around for a while will recall how I felt about the last Gardner book I read. This one wasn’t so bad. In fact, I found it rather encouraging, not even counting the outdated and overly-rosy view of the publishing industry Gardner presents.

Or rather, I would have found this book encouraging had I read it ten years ago. The section in which Gardner speaks frankly about all the time a writer needs for just mulling, and the uninterrupted blocks of time for writing and outlining and thinking, was my favorite part because it confirmed what I already knew (but felt a little guilty about): I don’t have time to write. The book made me think that maybe I could have been a writer, had I gone a different direction ten or fifteen years ago. Now, I can barely find the time to write a two-paragraph review of this book, much less finish start the short story I have to turn in on October 5.

Lots of very earnest and kind of stupid people will tell you that all you need to do is set aside half an hour every day to write. Those people usually mean that they watch half an hour less reality television when they are writing something. Those people are full of shit.

The Valleys of the Assassins. We are discussing this now in the book club, but the few of us who managed to finish it did not really like it. Almost all of us enjoyed the first story, but most people bogged down in the later stories, and those of us who made it to the end wound up hating Stark a little.

This is a travelogue, not a novel, and part of the problem is that Stark really can’t tell a story. Her material is interesting on its own — a British woman travels through remote parts of Persia alone in the 1920s and 1930s — but she seems committed to telling her stories in the dullest way she can. Every tale goes from expectation to anticlimax with no regard for keeping the reader’s interest: she’s hunting for treasure! Except there is no treasure and she doesn’t even really look for it. The hills are crawling with bandits! Except there are no bandits. She could be captured by the police! Except her passport is fine and the police are sort of bumbling and nothing really happens. A little boy will surely die! But he doesn’t die. Nobody dies, there is no treasure, nobody falls off a mountain. It’s not that kind of story.

Which is fine. What makes the book work, when it does work, is Stark’s humor and her openness to adventure and her general fondness for people. Her recountings of minor interactions with villagers are the best part of the story, and for the first hundred pages or so that’s enough to keep the book interesting. But there is no reflection, no sense of what she has learned or gained from these travels, and a constant sense of anticlimax, and eventually you just can’t wait for it to be over with. Because one anticlimactic moment can be funny or ironic; two dozen of them just make for a boring book.

And then we have the last section, the chapter about the throne of Solomon. This chapter is the biggest disappointment of the book, because up until then Stark has been remarkably likeable and remarkably free of the prejudices and privileged attitude you might expect from a British woman traveling in Persia during this time period. But in the final chapter, we see a different Stark: one who orders a famly out of their home so she can use it, one who balks at paying a small sum for her food to impoverished villagers, and one who you quite frankly wish would fall off the damn rock already.

I do recommend the first section of the book; Stark is funny and she notices all the right details, and the first chapter is entertaining and intriguing. Unfortunately the rest of the book doesn’t hold up.

Break Every Rule. I am filing this under “reviews” because that’s how I keep track of what I’ve finished, but I didn’t really plan review it. I’m not sure how I feel about the book and I’m not sure that my thoughts are interesting enough to share, although of course that has never stopped me before.

In my seminar discussion last night, most of the class loved the book. I didn’t. I wouldn’t say I hated it; Maso’s language is so beautiful that I couldn’t really hate it. But the book is all language, and it’s all about language, which makes sense because for Maso language is everything. I think that to the extent that this book provides any kind of writing advice, it’s really terrible advice. I cringed a little when the class was so enthusiastic about specific parts of the book, because those were the parts that reminded me most pointedly of the worst writing advice in the world, that bit from Red Smith: “Writing is easy. All you have to do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” That advice has produced more crappy writing than divorce has. In a lot of ways Maso’s wisdom here is the same sort of thing, just wrapped up in a chewy French feminist shell. Her focus is still on the writer’s urge to find a language for herself, without much concern about whether that language is ultimately going to engage anyone else.

And I’m not sure that sort of writing really does engage anyone else. Or, if it does engage, it does so not at the level of the body and the bones and the organs as Maso claims; instead, it’s all language wrapped in language and filtered through theory. Maso writes that she wishes to “sing in prose, to somehow get the urgency of bone and blood and hair, entire histories, into prose” (35). This statement itself is expressed with urgency and poetry, but still I wonder if this is all just so much bullshit. Enjambment, fragmentation, open spaces in the text – for the author these may be intended to open up levels of meaning, invite the reader in to the text, avoid authorial “totalitarianism” (I am paraphrasing Maso), but I suspect that more often the end result is an opaque, unreadable text, one that doesn’t open up meaning but instead obscures it, and ultimately represents not the language of the body but the language of language, a pure brain-space construction that communicates little and operates only as an outlet for the writer.

Maso also says this:

Language for me has always been a profoundly sensual experience. Language is emotion, language is feeling, language is body. It is not merely the sign for something, but rather also a thing in itself (116).

And I can buy the first two but I stop short at “language is body.” I think I am going to make my professor cry because every time someone talks about “writing the body,” my body practically explodes on the spot from the need to cry bullshit. I am perhaps not cut out for this.

I guess we’ll call this a mixed review. I didn’t really like the book and the class discussion was a little bit excruciating, plus I wound up discussing stupid Irigaray in my paper even though I took a blood oath to never do that after spring semester last year.

Then again, I also got to say “phallologocentric” and “bullshit” in the same paper, so yay for grad school. But I’m not opening any damn veins and I’m not reading any more Maso right now.

On Moral Fiction. This book pissed me off. Gardner says a lot of things in this book, a lot of them contradictory, a lot of them reactionary, and some of them just plain mind-boggling. I think perhaps I am not the target audience, but this book also feels like it was really dated at the time that it was written, although Gardner obviously thinks his ideas are timeless.

My main problem with his premise is that I just can’t accept his rigid definition of morality. I have problems with the whole idea of “morality” in the first place, and I understand that he is in part railing against a postmodern rejection of absolutes, but the problem is that some of the specific moral issues that he seems to accept as eternal and absolute – the “Yankee Christian virtues” he laments in the first chapter – seem neither absolute nor even particularly moral to my way of thinking, and I am simply not willing to accept on the basis of Gardner’s impersuasive arguments that my morality is in question based on my personal indifference to love of country and marital fidelity. To take two of his most irritating examples.

So Gardner’s arguments are flawed for me from the outset because I am not persuaded of the need for art to reflect his definition of morality, but, hey, maybe there is something else to glean from this book. That thought kept me from just quitting altogether and going back to The Tin Drum. But Gardner and I have another problem, which is that he thinks that “immoral” fiction presents the world in an uglier light than it deserves, whereas I tend to think that the post-modern novel has not yet been written which is uglier than some of the ugliest corners of reality.

In fact, Gardner’s whole premise here strikes me as one that could only be written by a child of extreme privilege, or by someone who had spent a great deal of time inside the shelter of the academy. Maybe I’m just cynical, but I can’t take seriously his apparent suggestion that ugliness in fiction is bad in part because it is somehow a dishonest portrayal. The worst excesses of Stephen King (I am thinking in particular of The Stand, with its fictional dictatorship in which dissidents are crucified) have nothing on the Khmer Rouge, the desaparecidos of El Salvador, or the Taliban at the peak of its power. (That is not to argue that The Stand is a good book, but my problems with King are aesthetic rather than moral. The book is not bad because the author revels in horror and ugliness; it is a bad book because King is about as subtle as nuclear bomb.)

To the extent that Gardner resonates with me at all, I still have to distill his arguments down from their lofty moral premise and put them into the realm of aesthetics. For instance, I give qualified approval to his disparagement of authors who are not deeply involved in their characters’ lives. But once again, for me this is an aesthetic objection, because books written with only superficial attention – or worse, outright unfairness – to character tend to be books that are facile, uninvolving, or trite.

I think in particular of two current writers who are often classed together, Jonathan Franzen (who I think is a very bad writer, and whom I would probably classify as “immoral” if I were inclined to buy into Gardner’s definitions) and Michael Chabon (whose work I almost invariably respect). Franzen’s The Corrections has been justly criticized for being unfair to its characters; the family at the center of the novel is presented as mostly unredeemable, petty, unloving, and simply mean-spirited. My objection to the novel was not that the characters were unlikeable – I don’t require likeable characters in my fiction – but that they seemed unjustifiably unlikeable; the text provided no rationale for their uniform nastiness, and I found myself inventing alternate stories for the characters in which their horrible behavior made some kind of internal sense. After I finished the novel I read Franzen’s book of essays, How to Be Alone, and one essay in particular solidified my feeling that Franzen had not treated his characters fairly. The essay was a nonfiction account of Franzen’s father’s death from Alzheimer’s, and it mirrored very closely the story in the book. Franzen’s characterization of his mother was likewise nearly as cold and merciless as his characterization of her counterpart in the novel, except that in the essay he reprinted a letter written not by him but by his mother. In her own words, Franzen’s mother comes across as a little pathetic but mostly desperately likeable, and after reading that I was actually angry with Franzen for washing this woman out into bland, one-dimensional unlikeability in his fictional portrayal. This is not to say that her self-portrayal was any more “true” than her son’s version; it simply convinced me that Franzen did not understand his character – or perhaps his mother – well enough to have earned the right to judge her as harshly as his novel seemed to judge her.

Chabon, by contrast, is occasionally too sentimental for my taste, but I never feel that he is unfair to his characters. On the contrary, his novels and in particular his short stories seem to emanate sympathy not only for his central characters but for any human figure who wanders onto the page. I appreciate this feeling of sympathy, because to me it is evidence that the author knows his characters, knows what makes them potentially small and petty and occasionally even bad, but knows them well enough to not take cheap shots and hold back the characterization that would complicate any simple moral judgments. Other writers who I think demonstrate similar sympathetic treatment of their characters include Salman Rushdie and David James Duncan, both of whom, like Chabon, write what I might deem to be “moral” fiction, but what I would prefer to simply call the good stuff. Zadie Smith, a writer whom I don’t quite love but who I think has potential, displays this authorial sympathy intermittently in White Teeth; I think she shows her relative immaturity, however, in losing the sympathetic eye with the upper-middle-class Jewish family that shows up late in the book. And possibly the most sympathetic author I can think of is William Faulkner, who wrote at times about terrible people doing terrible things, and sometimes judged his characters and invariably put them through hell, but never seemed to judge them unfairly or from a position of superiority. Always he seems to pull back with an air of “there but for the grace of God go I” absolution.

In the end, I am just not comfortable with Gardner’s employment of morality when it seems to me that these are aesthetic judgments that reflect the wisdom, the skill, the craftsmanship of the authors, or perhaps (using Franzen’s example) simply their emotional maturity and psychic distance from the stories they tell. I have not quite been brainwashed into postmodernism into believing that all morality is relative (although maybe it is; I haven’t made up my mind on that issue), but I know that Gardner’s sharp line-drawing seems to be based on a rigid sense of good-and-evil that I just can’t buy, and seems to reflect a world view that strikes me as naive and privileged.

In sum: Jen fu, don’t read this if you can avoid it.

Aspects of the Novel. This book broke my brain. I don’t mean that it was difficult to understand; on the contrary, it’s an easy read, and unlike Forster’s fiction, it didn’t even make me want to kill myself. But it changed the way I read. I used to just, you know, read, but now Forster has me peeking around for the man behind the curtain, trying to figure out the tricks.

In this brief series of lectures, published around 1920, Forster suggests an approach to novel-reading that is not quite scholarly but certainly not uninformed. By focusing on the authorial decision-making process behind the various novels he examines, he puts the reader into the mindset of looking at novels as the product of a particular craft, and thus every reading experience (not just the examples outlined in the book) becomes an examination of craft.

What impresses me most, though, is that Forster manages to dissect the novel down to its bare parts without taking any of the joy or surprise out of reading. Which is more than I can say for any of the novels he wrote; those definitely take the joy out of reading.