Books that could have been better

Both were quickly dispensed with, so even though I realized early on that they weren't especially good, I didn't feel like I'd wasted my time.

On Conan Doyle, by Michael Dirda, does have the benefit of being well written. The book's major problem is how little of it is truly "about" Arthur Conan Doyle. The book tangentially discusses works by other writers Conan Doyle appreciated; this goes on much longer than seems reasonable for such a short book. A large chunk of the text is about people who enjoy Conan Doyle (the author among them) and where this takes them: into collecting (in various oft-redundant forms) his works; or in joining that select group, the Baker Street Irregulars. Dirda talks at length about meetings of the Irregulars and his own involvement with the group, finally providing for us the complete text of an essay he wrote for the organization's journal. By this time we've strayed far afield from writing "about" Conan Doyle. Though it's a slim volume, I skimmed when I felt the author filling space with things that weren't, in my mind, needed.

Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book, by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon, is an attempt to provide a chronology of comic books' presence on the American landscape, using Lee as the figure through which much of this development might be viewed, but the book isn't terribly satisfying and seems amateurish. I enjoyed the long historical view of how comics arrived and how they were perceived, both inside and outside the industry, and there's some fun anecdotal material that's a pleasure for those of us who came of age during "the Marvel Age of Comics"; however, when Lee absents himself from the writing of comics around 1970, the narrative loses track of how to proceed. The story lurches forward and back confusingly, circling around the same bracket of years again and again. Lee remains the focus even when he's clearly flailing (and failing) in various ventures. There's an arbitrariness to the book's structure—"A chapter break might look good here" appears to be a driving force in its construction—that suggests the writers couldn't find a coherent way to break up the material. Subjects are revisited, and actual lines are reproduced, sometimes more than once. The issue of "what did Lee actually do" threatens to swamp the entire project: To wit, did Lee come up with the ideas for the seminal Marvel characters? How much was contributed by artists Kirby and Ditko? How much control did Lee even have over the plots of the comics? Who wrote the dialogue? (Jack Kirby somewhat unbelievably says at one point that he wrote issues of the Fantastic Four.) The authors do take their time with this issue, since it goes to the question of Lee's credibility, and there's some excellent material both in that discussion and in the connected discussion of a creator's rights, but it's a book within a book, derailing what had seemed to be the book's project. The material about Lee that follows is interesting if you care about Stan Lee, but not so useful at saying something coherent about comic books.

Mr. Ripley and I

According to one contemporary reviewer of Patricia Highsmith's 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, the novel's early plot about Americans overseas is a nod to Henry James's The Ambassadors, but I think the truer reference is Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," whose homicidal narrator asks readers, "But why do you call me mad?" No, Tom Ripley, the anti-hero protagonist of Highsmith's book, never asks that of us, but the arm's-length perspective on the character, the way the omniscient narrator presents us with the facts of the plot as if, laid end to end, they'll explain themselves away through logic, provides a similar defense of a character for whom a moral defense is impossible.

The book's strengths are its weaknesses. For the first good piece of the novel, it seems to be a Waughian character study of someone stumbling (though less humorously) through interactions with people; that makes the story's turn (and it's a sudden turn, though the author has dropped hints that something is seriously wrong with Tom Ripley) effective, but, as a character study, it's thin, as we never delve deeeper—and, in fairness, there may be nowhere deeper to delve. Ripley, it seems, is a sociopath. The latter part of the book, though it  takes too long to tell its tale, is suspenseful, but the author maintains the suspense by constructing unrealistic occurrences which keep our protagonist safe long after his ruse should have been discovered. So: the character study makes you forget about the "mystery," which doesn't quite work; the mystery and suspense make you forget that, for a character study, it's less literary and thoughtful than it might have been.

I enjoyed the book; now I'm curious about her earlier success, Strangers on a Train.


Writing


My story "Unearthed," the next prequel in my "Old Man" sequence, will be published by Asimov's Science Fiction, home to the other Old Man tales. It should appear late this summer.

My Name is Red, by Orhan Pamuk

Like Eco's The Name of the Rose, Pamuk's novel, about 16th-century illustrators ("miniaturists") in Istanbul working on a semi-secret project for the Ottoman sultan, uses a murder mystery and art to explore how religious belief shapes one's view of the world and one's role in the world—and, most importantly, how we tell stories about ourselves and others. Told in (mostly brief) first-person chapters that, like Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, even include the voices of the dead, the novel starts with a murder motivated by fear and envy. Though the murderer speaks, he doesn't identify himself; later, when he's given chapters from an identified point of view, he taunts us, afterwards, by how cleverly he's managed, even when providing his name, to conceal himself. Often, narrators directly address the reader, and the novel itself becomes a parallel to the illustrated book being constructed for the Sultan: it, too, has multiple artists; these artists, too, both conceal and reveal; the characters within are sometimes historical and sometimes invented; and perhaps the novel's actual author, too, has painted his own portrait within these pages as some sly illustrator seems to have done.

The Muslim world of the time is in a period of transition: though artists have been trained to see the world "as Allah sees it," not as they see it, the new "Frankish" style has begun to infect them, the style which is distinctly personal, which draws attention to the artist, and which incorporates, rather than established templates of portrayal, actual portraiture by which one may recognize living human beings. The issues surrounding this change drive most of the drama in the novel, though the book has another major plot that's related to all this: the return of Black, our presumptive hero, to his native city, where he hopes to finally marry the possibly widowed cousin who was, when last he was here, too young to wed. This romance, too, takes place in terms of the traditions of Islamic art, as it was initially sparked by reference to a famous tale and illustration—that of the lovely (and beloved by two men) Shirin. The twin plots of murder and marriage intertwine suspensefully, even though Pamuk often allows his characters to digress on religious and artistic matters (repetitively, it must be said). The book requires some work, but it's narratively and intellectually engaging, a great novel that raises questions any artist can appreciate, especially in our own era when one can sense the possible fading of written narrative to be replaced by the visual and filmic.

Bright's Passage, by Josh Ritter

Oh, those people of many (public) talents. Behold Josh Ritter, singer-songwriter of some fame who also shows himself, in his debut novel, possessed of literary talent. Given that his songs run on densely descriptive narrative, it should come as no surprise that the man can craft a sentence; the novel, however, is a different beast than a song, requiring a more sustained interplay of setting, plot, and character and, typically, a more complete emotional arc (or circle). Ritter gets a good bit of this right, and though the book isn't entirely satisfactory, it is rich with joys and graces that, for me, made it worthwhile. Too, it's short, rather than some shaggy-dog-tale of a whopper that trails off into nothing, so even if the book feels incomplete, at least the process of reading it doesn't take enormous effort.

What works well about the novel: its triptych of timelines. See grieving Henry Bright arguing with his angelically possessed horse in the aftermath of his wife's death in childbirth; relive with him his trials in "the vasty fields of France" during the closing days of the Great War; enter at various points his home-centered past, both his childhood and his fragmented relationship with wife-to-be Rachel. Ritter keeps the chapters short and coherent, so it's no great matter to keep separate these time periods. Slowly, he unpacks the mysteries of home, angel, and marriage. The angel is never fully explained, but it makes sense enough at an aesthetic level; however, the relationship's logic is, in the end, left too unsettled, and so, thematically, the notion of some guiding spirit never feels satisfactory. The angel's instructions are arbitrary. Ritter seems to want it both ways: the angel is an exterior force that does some good; the angel is a projection of Henry's erratic responses to the world. As a consequence, Henry himself remains an unclear creation, not just unreliable but inadequate as a character. He doesn't do a great deal, it seems to me, but rather falters from event to event. Not that one can't have such a character, but his main virtue appears to be a capacity to survive things he has no right surviving. It's like a passive superpower. As a result, neither his suffering, nor the weight Ritter wants to impart to his journey, feels substantial.

I quite enjoyed the villain of the piece, but he's more of a pulp creation than anything believably imagined, Flem Snopes without the cleverness, a purposely evil who, like Henry, gathers his purpose to himself by accident rather than with much intention. A moment near the end suggests greater depth to the character, but by then it's too late.

Still, I enjoyed reading the novel and was enormously impressed by Ritter's ability to construct solidly imagined scenes with language that's effective and lovely.

Sent

Three days ago, I sent the "shopping agreement" for "Clockworks" to my friendly L.A. lawyer; the agreement allows a certain agent based in L.A. to show my story to various Hollywood folks in an attempt to get someone interested in making it into a movie (or a snack food. Either way).

Two days ago, I sent "You Have No Idea What I've Forgot" to Ryga, a Canadian journal with a social mission.

Yesterday, I sent "Unearthed" to Asimov's.

New story online

"My Story of Us Looking for My Comic Strip, by Franklin James Nemeth" appears in the online material for the current issue of Stone Canoe, produced by Syracuse University. The story appears here. This is not a "genre" story, but (arguably) literary fiction.

My daughter's poem, "Baptist," appears in the same issue. That's here.

There's a link to the print issue, but, at present, the link still takes you to the previous issue.

Finished?

I spent all day yesterday—far too many butt-hours (though, as I was sofa'd, they were soft hours)—making final corrections and emendations to "Unearthed." I've sent it to one more reader now that it's in what looks to be its final form; perhaps he'll see something I or others have missed. I do think it's the best work I've done. Looking forward to sending it out, having it accepted, and getting it into the hands of readers. (It's rare, this confidence, but I spent a long time on this, and I think the slow process benefited the work.)

Reading some poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Brutal. How'd I never read her till this year? Incredibly smart and (for her time) startlingly frank. Also just read the "King Lear" chapter of Frank Kermode's Shakespeare's Language. The chapter kind of tumbles from idea to idea, but it's rich with enthusiasm for the play, which I'm glad to report my students are enjoying. Every day spent with it is, for me, a day in awe.