Jonathan Woods and The Hard-Boiled Tradition

In the third in a series of posts on 2014 books entered for The Story Prize, Jonathan Woods, author of Phone Call from Hell and Other Tales of the Damned (New Pulp Press) talks genre.

The post-modern romp, Flaubert’s Parrot, which appeared on the literary scene in 1984, made Julian Barnes’ reputation. But his two best books, published in 1980 and 1981 under the nom de plume Dan Kavanagh, are Duffy and Fiddle City. I have read each multiple times. They are crime novels.

Both books feature the bisexual ex London cop, turned purveyor of private investigator services, named Duffy. An odd duck with a gold stud in his ear, he knows his way around the seedier parts of London like the back of his hand.

Tawdry, violent, funny, politically incorrect, eccentric, sexy, well-plotted, entertaining, smart, clever, and a telling commentary on the dark side. These are the attributes of Duffy and Fiddle City. What more could you want from a book? Yet, as was recently suggested in an article in The Guardian, the Man Booker prize-winning author is ambivalent about claiming ownership of them, even as they are again in print after a long hiatus.

a.k.a. Julian Barnes

Is this just one more example of a “literary” type fearful of being categorized as a genre writer? A mere entertainer?

I can’t speak directly to Mr. Barnes views. “Never met the bloke,” as Duffy might say.

But a quick jog down two centuries of American writers shows Mr. Barnes’ reserve in acknowledging his charmingly off-center private eye creation to be misplaced.

Edgar Allan Poe, one of the cornerstones of American literature, invented the detective story with his renown novella, “Murder in the Rue Morgue.” The subject matter of Poe’s most famous tales reads like crime fiction 101: madness, axe murders, evil eyes, revenge, sexual obsession, giant apes tearing people limb from limb.

James M. Cain invented the noir sensibility in his two masterpieces, The Postman Always Rings Twice, published in 1934, and Double Indemnity, published two years later. In both stories lust and obsession lead inevitably to madness and murder. Classic noir follows an ordinary person whose life suddenly tumbles out of control, bound straight to hell. Noir explores the dark aspects of the human psyche and the haphazardness and irrationality of our existence. In it are the roots of existential philosophy, which sees the world as absurd and without meaning, where bad luck and trouble can happen to anyone, anywhere, without notice.

It is well acknowledged that Camus was influenced by Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice when he wrote his most famous work, The Stranger, published in 1942. As Matthew Ward, who produced a new Americanized translation of The Stranger in 1988, said:

Camus admitted using an "American method," particularly in the first half of the book. He mentioned Hemingway, Dos Passos, Faulkner and James M. Cain as influences. My feeling is that The Stranger is more like Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice than Camus cared to admit.

Next up is Raymond Chandler, who, together with Dashiell Hammett, is credited with inventing the American hard-boiled detective story. Chandler is one of the great literary stylists of American writing in the first half of the 20th Century. His The Big Sleep is ranked #26 in Time magazine’s list of the 100 Greatest Novels in English since 1923 (the year Time started publication). Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century lists The Big Sleep as #96.

The sensibility of noir, hard-boiled and detective fiction has inexorably insinuated itself into post-WWII American writing. Flannery O’Connor mixed murder with Catholicism in the rural South in unforgettable stories like “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Chester Himes chronicled the American Black experience of the 1950s and 1960s in his hilarious, violent and sexy Harlem crime novels starring the Black cops Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones. An endless stream of lurid tales of sexual obsession and murder flowed from the pen of Patricia Highsmith, whom Graham Greene described as a "writer who has created a world of her own—a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger.” And who can forget Norman Mailer’s murderous midnight prowl of the 1960s: An American Dream.

Just as greed, lust, murder and mayhem still sell newspapers, crimes and punishment remain the subject matter of our best living writers. From the darkly ironic tales of drug smugglers, modern knights-errant, and psychopaths wrought by Robert Stone in such novels as Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise, to the pulp fiction of No Country for Old Men and The Counselor by the inimitable Cormac McCarthy, to the ambiguous and stylized noir of the young writer Laura van den Berg in her collection The Isle of Youth, crime fiction is alive and well in literary America.

So step forward Mr. Barnes and acknowledge your finest work.

Long live writers with cojones. Literary labels be damned.

Jacob M. Appel and the Door to Eternal Life

In the second in a series of posts on 2014 books entered for The Story Prize, Jacob M. Appel, author of Scouting for the Reaper (Black Lawrence Press) discusses literary immortality.

Let’s start with the bad news first: I’m dying. That’s something I’ve learned in my medical career*—always start with the worst. No patient wants to hear: “Your blood pressure looks good, your cholesterol is down, and I’m glad to see you’re keeping the weight off….Oh, and by the way, you have brain tumor.” Fortunately, in my case, the bad news isn’t imminently grim. I don’t have a rare disease likely to kill me tomorrow, or even a more common disease likely to kill me next Thursday; I haven’t been diagnosed with any disease at all, in fact, although in the spirit of full disclosure, my gums could be in better shape. And yet, there is no shaking the inevitable: One of these days, whether in five years or fifty, I will find myself as dead as Jacob Marley and Custer’s cavalry and the campaign to bring the Dodgers back to Brooklyn. (I mean no offense to anyone who is dying imminently of a rare disease—but if you are, and you’re spending your final hours reading my musings on the Internet, I strongly urge you to reconsider your priorities.)

And now the good news: You’re dying too. So we have something in common. (If you happen to be a single female who bears a striking resemblance to Sophia Loren at twenty-five, I’d like to emphasize that last part: We do have something in common.) The stark reality is that no matter how many books a person publishes, no matter how many O. Henry Prizes a writer wins, the understated fellow with the scythe corrals every last one of us in the end.

We all know this truth—although deep down, myself included, we don’t really accept it. We still believe that somehow we will prove the outlier, the one exception. In smaller ways, while leading our lives of often vocal desperation, we cling to other false hopes: that a long-lost uncle will bequeath us a mining fortune, that a girl we adored in high school will track us down in mid-life to profess her devotion, that our piddling yarns will win a prize.

Wilt the Stilt: In your dreams

So now for the better news: Fiction is both the great equalizer and the door to eternal life. Walter Mitty has nothing on me when I’m seated before my computer. At four in the morning, in my bathrobe, I can play hopscotch with the Kaiser, and free Sacco and Vanzetti, and lure Scarlett away from Rhett—although this final triumph has copyright implications. Last night, I singlehandedly overthrew the brutal dictatorships in Equatorial Guinea and Eritrea simultaneously. Jimmy Carter may have committed adultery in his heart many times, but on the printed page, my love life rivals Wilt Chamberlain’s. That cute girl I adored in high school can take a number. My uncle, who in real life wouldn’t loan me a spare mask during a sarin attack, has already transferred his fictional billions into my Swiss accounts. The magic of writing fiction is that it enables a poor sop like yours truly to reimagine the world as I’d like it to be. And there’s not a damn thing anybody else—not by boss or my landlord or even a battalion of federal marshals—can do about it. Give me a crayon and an index card, and my days are no longer numbered.

Writers don’t want immortality after death. We want it while we’re alive. Who doesn’t fantasize of showing up at one’s own funeral and announcing, “I told you so”? Or at least complaining about the beer selection. Living in a fictional world of my own creation—even if only for a few moments each morning, before I have to trade my bathrobe for my white coat—is the closest I can ever come to eternal life on earth.

Now for the best news of all: You can share my immortality. You can read my collection, Scouting for the Reaper, and live vicariously through me as I live vicariously through somebody else. And then someday I might see you on the subway, reading my stories, and I might live vicariously through you as you live vicariously through my characters. And if you bear a striking resemblance to Sophia Loren at twenty-five, I’ll likely return home and write a story about you, and in that story, I’ll have the courage to say hello, and my uncle will leave us a mining fortune, and we’ll live happily ever after. Forever.

* Editor's note: The author is also a physician

Lee Upton Breaks the Ice

In the first in a series of posts on 2014 books entered for The Story Prize, Lee Upton, author of The Tao of Humiliation (BOA Editions) offers her approach to avoiding writer's block.

What’s the worst idea for a story you’ve ever had?
Halloween decorations come alive and kill.

What fiction that someone else has written do you wish you had written?
So much fiction by Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark seems miraculous to me: Murdoch for the wild richness of her plots and the way her sentences distill sensation; and Spark for her ability to be both witty and harrowing at once.

What else (beyond books and writing) informs or inspires your work?
The Tao of Humiliation is inspired by humiliation. It didn’t require research. I remember moments when I have felt deeply humiliated, but then, in some instances, peace descended, as if all my defenses, including my illusion of control, dropped. The humor in my fiction arises because the circumstances that characters face are humiliating. I like the sort of humor that lets us see our fears magnified and forgiven. My characters are often vulnerable people who seek strength in all the wrong places. Yet sometimes their very vulnerability is a form of strength that they gradually recognize and claim. Here’s a list of what else, besides humiliation, inspires my work:

• Abandoned houses
• Orchards
• Actors
• The ocean—and rivers, lakes, creeks, and ponds
• My encounters as an eleven-year-old with pictorial representations of the Greek gods and goddesses as forms of early sex education
• Mermaids
• The great themes: freedom and solitude and yearning—and violence as it is resisted

The literal approach

Where do you do most of your work?

Years ago I had to learn to write in various situations and places: in a department store lounge, on buses. I still rove a good deal—from my study to the couch to the bed to the kitchen table and back to my study and then to the couch again. It’s like circuit training.

What do you do when you’re stuck or have “writer’s block”?

I avoid being blocked by working on multiple projects. But I can get stuck in the middle of a project or realize I’ve prematurely closed off the exits in a story. When that happens I return to the beginning of the story to see what I’ve missed. I also think very hard about setting. Sometimes I try another point of view or add a character or combine characters or extend a scene. What especially helps: to consider what the primary character’s obsessions might be. What is the secret the character is denying? And how can I show more compassion for all my characters?

Stories probably should be as suspenseful for the writer as for the reader. When they’re not, it’s because they’re telling us something we already know in a way that we’ve already told it to ourselves. Sometimes being more ambitious helps. Trying a plot turn that seems impossible and bound to fail can create new excitement about the story’s potential. That sort of excitement may be the great icebreaking ship that plows through the heavy polar sheet of a stuck story.

Should literature help people live their lives—or is that asking for too much?

I’ve always asked too much from literature, and it has, nevertheless, helped me live my life by crushing my sudden attacks of despair. So far.

What writing advice do you have?

The best advice I ever received about writing: Relax.
And the best advice I give myself: Endure and be grateful.

Interrogating the Story: George Saunders Gives Voice to His Work at Rutgers-Newark

By Nick Fuller Googins
Newark, NJ, April 15, 2014

Ventriloquist: Saunders reading at Rutgers-Newark
(photo by John Keene)

I learned something new about George Saunders when he visited Rutgers last week: In addition to his fearsome fiction-writing powers and his killer beard and his reputation as a really nice guy, he also has a preternatural knack for voices.

Don’t confuse “voices” with “voice,” as in, the unique tone and expression of a narrator or character. That Saunders knows “voice” goes without saying. I mean voic-es, plural, as in, the precise spoken-aloud voice of a bumbling teenage gentleman suitor. (“Let us go stand on the moon. Or, uh, in the moon. In the moonlight.”) Or the precious, cartoony voice of a baby deer trembling in the woods. (“Is my mom killed?”) Or the aristocratic, slightly-snobby voice of an apologetic hunter who has just killed poor trembling-baby-deer’s mom. (“If I could will life back into this fawn, I would do so, in hopes you might defer one tender kiss upon our elderly forehead.”)

Saunders willed life into all these voices and more on April 15th at Rutgers University’s Paul Robeson Gallery, where he capped off this season’s Writers at Newark Reading Series along with poet Matthea Harvey. Before reading from “Victory Lap”—the opening story in his Story-Prize-winning collection, Tenth of December—Saunders explained that the story is written in what he calls “third-person ventriloquism,” or, “third-person close, but you drop into the character’s diction as quickly as possible.” With that, he dropped in, broadcasting straight from the wandering mind of Alison Pope, an egregiously optimistic girl about to turn fifteen:

There was so much she didn’t know! Like how to change the oil. Or even check the oil. How to open the hood. How to bake brownies. That was embarrassing, actually, being a girl and all. And what was a mortgage? Did it come with the house? When you breast-fed, did you have to like push the milk out?

Alison, in the first section of “Victory Lap,” does nothing more than dance downstairs  (“hop over thin metal thingie separating hallway tile from living-room rug. Curtsy to self in entryway mirror…”) and into the kitchen for a handful of Cheez Doodles. Yet, through his “ventriloquism,” Saunders grants us immediate access to the inner-most reaches of Alison’s being without the need for lengthy passages of exposition or psychological description. He introduces Alison, as he does most of his characters, by sharing their thoughts with us, in real-time. And when those thoughts include an awkward gentleman suitor, a trembling baby deer, a snobby aristocratic hunter, and so on—all voiced by Saunders—they are not only delightful insights into a character’s psyche, but insanely funny as well. Saunders’s reading often felt more like a performance, and in this way he thwarted my attempt to capture a clean audio recording. I guess that’s something else I learned: One does not simply expect a George Saunders reading not to be laced with continual and uncontrollable laughter.

Hardly surprising, then, to hear that Saunders partially gauges the success of a story by measuring the amount of fun he has while writing. This came in response to a Rutgers MFA student who asked about the stuff that doesn’t work. How does George Saunders know, when writing a new piece, if it’s time to walk away, try something new?

“One useful barometer,” Saunders said, “is whether it’s fun. Is it fun and do you feel confident at any given minute? What happens to me is that if it gets less fun and I feel less confident, my thinking, conceptual mind comes in, and I’ll say, ‘Oh! This is about patriarchy!’ and then suddenly—in my case—you’re deciding from a dumber place than if you were just trying to follow the joy and confidence of it. I’ll often find myself getting locked up in a story and trying to think it out, and if I can catch myself that’s a good place to go to something else.”

The author's well-worn copy

To help get his point across, he paraphrased Norman Mailer: “You should never have sex if it’s not fun.” (“Maybe that’s kind of obvious,” Saunders added. “Why you’d want to take Mailer’s advice on sex, I don’t know.”)

He had similar advice for a question regarding endings. How does George Saunders know when to wrap up a story?

“Most of my writing process is rereading what I’ve already done and trying to react honestly to it: Am I liking it or not? Is it positive or negative? In a sense, finishing a story is trying to be able to get through it on a given day with that needle staying in the positive range. And being honest—if the needle comes down, don’t panic, just turn to the story and go, ‘Is there a problem?’ and the story will go, ‘Yeah, there is, I kinda suck on page three.’” (Saunders, evidently, plays ventriloquist not only for the characters in his stories, but also for his stories themselves. This particular story was whiney and mopey with a hint of self-indulgent defeatism). After honest evaluation—Saunders cautions—if your story really does admit to sucking on page three, it is important to avoid panic mode. Better to continue the interrogation.

“You’ll say, ‘What’s the matter?’ and your story will go, ‘I’m boring.’ So then you try to address it, and eventually you think it through to where you’re all right, until it’s polished off to the very last paragraph. And by then your subconscious is so deeply enriched in it that there probably is an ending.”

He added, later, “I thought the best definition of an ending is, stopping without sucking.”

As for the ending of “Victory Lap,” Saunders left us hanging, stopping after the first two sections of the story. It was a well-chosen moment that most definitely did not suck: radiant Alison Pope in serious and immediate danger. Some of us in the audience may have loudly groaned.

“It all turns out fine!” Saunders said, returning to the podium. He couldn’t help himself. He’s too nice a guy. “Don’t worry!”

“Thank You For Having Me” (You’re Welcome!): Lorrie Moore at Powell’s

By Molly Reid

Portland, Ore., April 11, 2014

Moore: Reading from Bark at Powell's

I’m obviously not the only one who goes a little fangirl for Lorrie Moore. The reading room at Powell’s Books was packed, people standing in the back and along the aisles, clutching their copies of Self-Help and A Gate at the Stairs, excitedly twittering like all the birds of America (see what I did there?).

Lorrie Moore read from Bark, her first story collection in fifteen years. Moore has written several lovely novels, but, for many, she is one of the reigning queens of the contemporary short story. (In a talk she gave years ago for Literary Arts’ Portland Arts and Lectures series, in response to a question about how she knows whether something is a short story or a novel, she likened it to knowing whether an animal is a dog or a cat: “If you throw the ball, and the creature goes eagerly after it and then brings it back to you, wanting to continue for eternity or for as long as you can stand it, whichever comes first, you’ve got a novel. If you throw the ball and the creature doesn’t budge but just looks at you as if you are out of your mind, you may have a short story – or you may just have a cat.”)

With humor that’s often described as mordant or sardonic, but feels more soft hearted than that, she handles the serious matters of life with lyric precision, offering up your very heart disguised as somebody else’s, or something else—a joke, a visit to a dead friend come to life, a dog named Cat.

Bark is what animals do in fear, in anger, in loneliness. It’s a laugh, a cough. A warning. Bark is also the protective layer, able to peel off and heal, sometimes grown rough and scabby over oozes of sap. In the last story of the collection, which she read from, the narrator tells her daughter that she saw a PBS show “that said only the outer bark of the brain — and it does look like bark — is gray. Apparently the other half of the brain has a lot of white matter. For connectivity.” In typical Lorrie Moore fashion, these multiple meanings echo and branch and contradict themselves throughout the stories of this collection. Her characters are a little older, if not wiser, have become more layered, have grown a bit more spiritually gnarled.

The title of the story she read at Powell’s, “Thank You for Having Me,” comes from one of the characters, a farmer who is playing music at his ex-wife’s wedding in Wisconsin, singing songs like, “I Want You Back,” and “I Will Always Love You.” But this character is somehow not pathetic or pitiful, or not only: 

Except he didn’t seem to want her back. He was smiling and nodding at everyone and seemed happy to be part of this send-off. He was the entertainment. He wore a T-shirt that read, THANK YOU FOR HAVING ME. This seemed remarkably sanguine and useful as well as a little beautiful. 

This is typical of the kind of dance performed in the story between humor and pathos, the push-pull of play and heart Lorrie Moore is known for.

This story doesn’t, actually, have much of a plot, at least not in the traditional sense. The only real event is that some bikers roll in and the head biker (wearing a football helmet with plush puppy dog ears glued to each side) gives a little speech about life, shooting a gun in the air. However, the bikers quickly realize they’re at the wrong wedding and speed off before anything really happens. Most of the story consists of the narrator, a woman living in the wake of her own heartbreak, a husband who left, talking to various characters, to the bride’s ex-husband, to her sassy daughter, and musing about life, and death. But the reason it works so well is simple: The writing is so f-ing funny. Every few lines, the audience erupted in laughter, and Moore knew exactly how to read with those interruptions, is obviously used to pausing as her audience continually loses control. She read: 

Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You didn’t have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell of the bike: I was drinking my wine too quickly. 

She read: 

The bridesmaids were in pastels: one the light peach of baby aspirin; one the seafoam green of low-dose clonazepam; the other the pale daffodil of the next lowest dose of clonazepam. What a good idea to have the look of Big Pharma at your wedding. Why hadn’t I thought of that? 

These lines are funny on the page, but Lorrie Moore delivers them with such sharp smoky intimacy, they feel brand-new, and even funnier.   

 

“Most of the humor I’m interested in has to do with awkwardness,” Moore says in a 2001 Paris Review interview, “the makeshift theater that springs up between people at really awkward times—times of collision, emergency, surrealism, aftermath, disorientation.” This is what prevents Moore’s stories from seeming like just a string of one-liners, wordplay, amusing musings—of which there are many. Most of the stories in this new collection have very serious backdrops: divorce, war, death, torture, psychosis. Two of them—"Referential" and “Wings”—re-imagine tales by Nabokov and James. They trace the moments right before and after loss, the language play and humor inextricable from this loss, what floats to the surface when reason and safety fall away.

The story she read at Powell’s is the last story in the collection, and it feels more optimistic than the rest of the stories. Though death and loss still lurk, it takes place at that staple of comedy, a wedding. After all the heartbreak and sorrow, Moore tips the balance a bit, and ends her story, and her collection, on a hopeful note: 

I needed my breath for dancing, so I tried not to laugh. Instead I fixed my face into a grin, and, ah, for a second the sun came out to light up the side of the red and spinning barn. 

The red and spinning barn! (I just wanted to try that out, another thing Lorrie Moore can get away with and I can’t: the exclamation mark).

In the Q&A after the reading, Moore politely and thoroughly answered the audience’s questions, even the ones that seemed to me blurted unformed and absent of reason. But she had some good advice, delivered with the same kind of crackerjack humor and poise as her stories: “This is why it’s called art. There’s an element of artifice to it. You don’t write every single thing someone says. You write down the essential thing, and you get people bouncing off each other in interesting ways, and if it’s not interesting, don’t put it in,” she said about dialogue. And: “The difference between someone who is a writer and who’s not a writer is that they’re just writing things down,” in response to a question about whether there was anything in particular that influenced her to become a writer. 

I mean it when I say that’s some of the best advice about writing I’ve ever heard. If I could remember just these two things, if all writers could, what a world it would be: If it’s not interesting don’t put it in. Writers write things down.      

Video: The Story Prize Event on March 5, Andrea Barrett, Rebecca Lee, and George Saunders

In case you missed The Story Prize event on March 5 at The New School, here's the video. That night, the three finalists—Andrea Barrett, Rebecca Lee, and George Saunders—read from and discussed their work on-stage. And at the culmination of the event, we announced the winner for books published in 2013: George Saunders' Tenth of December. 

What the Judges Had to Say About Rebecca Lee's Bobcat

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were Stephen Enniss, Antonya Nelson, and Rob Spillman. We include the citations in congratulatory letters we present to each finalist, along with their checks ($20,000 to the winner, $5,000 to the other two finalists). To protect the confidentiality of the judges' votes and the integrity of the process, we don't attribute citations to any particular judge.

Here's what the judges said about Rebecca Lee's Bobcat:

“The pleasures of Rebecca Lee’s writing are many—from beautifully crafted sentences to sublime lyricism to biting wit. Simultaneously romantic and cynical, funny and serious, clever and honest—the stories in Bobcat somehow manage several delicate balancing acts with seeming ease. I can’t remember taking greater pleasure in reading a short story collection, and I felt truly bereft when it was over.”