Sarah Wrote That

Fever To Tell

In which James Wood attacks convention and defends the conventional, and Alice Munro offers a way out

Beginning creative writing students are always told to show don’t tell (because we all remember show and tell!).  If they veer into things like “he was tall” or “the wine was good,” or, shudder to think, “she was sad,” they’re told, show me this in a scene, or, use a gesture to convey this—“he bends to go through the doorway”; “the wine leaves a licorice taste on her tongue”; “she closed her notebook and held it there a minute, closed.”  Better, but after a while don’t we know what to expect?  Somewhere, aren’t some neurons going to sleep?

Read More

Fictional Divides

This week I’ve been reading Ander Monson’s Other Electricities and Alice Munro’s Selected Stories and thinking about which fiction gets classified as “traditional” or “experimental.”  No two writers are the same, so any “tradition” oversimplifies the very things it’s characterizing.  But there do seem to be writers who can be characterized as more interested in characters, plot and crafting scenes that a reader of Scott Fitzgerald or Flannery O’Connor would feel at home with, and writers more interested in pointing out—or playing with the idea—that such writing is artifice.

The one risks the reaction Zadie Smith has to Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland: haven’t we seen something like this before?  The other risks us saying, “so what?”  How many times do we need it said that narrative is artifice?

Roxanne Gay writes today on HTMLGiant in praise of the traditional story

told simply and without artifice, one where I turn the page and can’t wait to see what happens next, where the characters are interesting and well-developed and where I am invested emotionally.

Christopher Higgs replies:

For Adorno, and this is where I’d agree with him, conventional realism is bankrupt because:

1) It atrophies the imagination
2) Instead of challenging us to think critically, it works to reinforce our prejudices
3) It does not offer alternatives to the status quo, because it reinforces the structural paradigm of the status quo

Great pieces with lots of smart comments.

Other Electricities, Monson’s 2005 collection of linked stories, pleases me on that “can’t wait” level, but part of why I’ve wanted to keep reading has been the toe-curling goodness of how uniquely he gets me emotionally invested.  I tend to be wary of experimental work—I feel assumptions are being made about me, the reader, and my expectations—but Monson quickly won me over.  His formal experiments enable connections to characters, events and place that are direct because they don’t come in expected scenes or places in the (non-linear) time-line.  There are events, terrible, poignant events, but the story circles around its characters’ lives in a continual revelation.  In the best way, I feel lost in the book.

Alice Munro (more on her soon) might seem an odd comparison with Monson, and I don’t know if I would have thought of it if I hadn’t been reading them together.  But both eschew scene-based storytelling—Munro puts narration first, and scenes result from it—and both play with time with a daring that seems rare in either traditional or experimental fiction.  They have such a good sense of what details to give and when, I’ll sign on for where and whenever they want to take me.  They’ve demonstrated: they’re the storytellers.

“What are those times that stand out, clear patches in your life - what do they have to do with it? They aren’t exactly promises. Breathing spaces. Is that all?”

- Alice Munro

I’m reading her Selected Stories.  Also Robert Thacker’s 1998 essay:

[critics seize] Munro’s work most often at these very “clear patches”; that is, at those points of story at which her art is most evident, and most pointed. There is real consensus that it is never transparent, always elusive, with points of view and meanings compounding, patterns emerging out of other patterns.

Thacker’s comments on her approach to narrative are even cited on Wikipedia:

We are drawn to her writing by its verisimilitude—not of mimesis, so-called and… ‘realism’—but rather the feeling of being itself… of just being a human being.

But it’s my sense that she is still commonly described as a Chekhovian “realist.”  The more of her I read, the less “realism” seems to apply.

The Times’ 1983 Editor’s Recommendations of her Moons Of Jupiter has a similar thought in more book club friendly language:

Mrs. Munro’s literary performance has little to do with situation and everything to do with character. Shrewd, amused, self-aware, her women are risk- takers, plucky, independent, sexually vibrant. Their intelligence beckons to the reader, who likes them not only for the dangers they pass through but for their alertness to the pleasure of the passage.

The article also recommends a collection named Cathedral:

There are artists who reach the strange by staying with the ordinary. Raymond Carver, an American writer now in his mid-40’s, has been writing stories for some years that create this effect…. Cathedral, Mr. Carver’s third collection, after Will You Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, shows a gifted writer struggling for a larger scope of reference, a finer touch of nuance.

“A finer touch of nuance”; or getting rid of his editor.

"

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward. I feel that this is something that people may find they have to adjust to, but it’s a way of saying whatever it is that I want to say, and it sort of has to be done this way. Time is something that interests me a whole lot—past and present, and how the past appears as people change…

…I never remember being innocent. I always remember things being very complicated. Mostly I remember having a self as a child who was completely hidden from the world of adults and teachers and people around me.

"

Alice Munro, in a 2001 interview in The Atlantic, on the publication of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Michiko and Me and the Bourgeoisie

Lots of fiction goodness over at the Times.

Their choices for the ten best books of 2009 include Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It (reviewed by Curtis Sittenfeld).  One of the stories from the collection, “Travis, B.,” is available online courtesy of Penguin:

Chet Moran grew up in Logan, Montana, at a time when kids weren’t supposed to get polio anymore. In Logan, they still did, and he had it before he was two. He recovered, but his right hip never fit in the socket, and his mother always thought he would die young.

When he was fourteen, he started riding spoiled and un-broke horses, to prove to her that he was invincible. They bucked and kicked and piled up on him, again and again. He developed a theory that horses didn’t kick or shy because they were wild; they kicked and shied because for millions of years they’d had the instinct to move fast or be lion meat.

“You mean because they’re wild,” his father had said when Chet advanced this theory.

---

Michiko Kakutani is only half-impressed with Alice Munro’s latest collection, Too Much Happiness:

Read More