tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-64975203788756494062024-03-08T17:37:04.083-05:00James W. Hall's BlogBlog of best-selling novelist James W. HallJames W. Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04163328832095859541noreply@blogger.comBlogger426125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6497520378875649406.post-81681686685273941062015-06-30T09:48:00.000-04:002015-06-30T16:54:28.549-04:00"Maybe Dats Your Pwoblem Too"<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDvuVEUFSzkGq_HHAnxyeLyzbTcCwbqiOjeVA8sS8C7odwm7njMi7Q5GhQOPEwB54bJCNYi5L1-vixn3Bx80T_NpwouvAnQx4xEjBqfkW1fZmkTsEEGswFdzWzKFdPCYIAY7m_VK2Me8Av/s1600-h/spiderman-in-web-0013.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5157878385287247986" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDvuVEUFSzkGq_HHAnxyeLyzbTcCwbqiOjeVA8sS8C7odwm7njMi7Q5GhQOPEwB54bJCNYi5L1-vixn3Bx80T_NpwouvAnQx4xEjBqfkW1fZmkTsEEGswFdzWzKFdPCYIAY7m_VK2Me8Av/s400/spiderman-in-web-0013.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
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Since “Maybe Dats Your Pwoblem Too” a poem I wrote about Spiderman, shows up in a lot of anthologies and text books and therefore becomes assignment material for students of many ages, I frequently get emails requesting more information on the poem. So I’ve prepared the following to answer some basic questions about that poem. Feel free to post comments or further questions either at the end of this post, or in the guest book section of this site. <br />
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First, you should realize that just because a writer says something about their own work, that doesn't automatically mean their interpretation is better than yours. Some writers have far too much pride in their own view of their work and don't trust alternative views. But the truth is, a good reader can see stuff in my poem that I didn't see. So feel free to take the following with several grains of salt.<br />
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One question that gets asked frequently is: “What was I thinking/feeling as I began writing that poem?”<br />
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Well, here goes. After six years of college teaching, I'd just gotten tenure at the university where I teach in Miami and I knew, given the difficult job market, that it was going to be very hard to find a different job somewhere else, so more than likely I'd probably be right there teaching the same courses at that same university and having the same routines many years later. So I just better accept where I was and try to make the best of it. (I was right. This is my 36th year of teaching at Florida International University.) <br />
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At the time the thought was kind of depressing. I was also struggling with the whole idea of being a writer. It's a tough profession--especially as a poet. A lot of rejection all the time. Maybe fifty poems rejected for every one accepted. That wears on you. Kind of like Spiderman getting caught in a web of his own making.<br />
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I can't remember why exactly I chose Spiderman. I guess I was thinking that as a kid I'd always dreamed of being a writer--and that I'd thought that being one would be like being a superhero of some kind. So I started to wonder if maybe even superheroes got bored with their routines, and their personalities just like normal people did. Voila, the poem began to take shape. <br />
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When this poem was written, back in 1979 or so, I hadn't read a Spiderman comic in years, so some of what I describe in the poem is factually wrong. I've mixed him up with Batman a little, for one thing. You could describe these "errors" as "poetic license" or you could just say I didn't know what I was talking about. Personally, I don't think that makes a big difference, but there are some readers who disagree.<br />
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The speech impediment (which might be considered politically incorrect these days) simply started out as a technique to try to be funny, but it turned into more than that. As I wrote in that Elmer Fudd kind of voice, I found places in the poem where the words actually meant something different in the new speech (my heart beat at a different wate (weight) I was also thinking that even superheroesmust be flawed in some way. They LOOK like they have wonderful lives—just as writers do---but that's all from the outside. But when you get close and really inspect them, and hear how they talk, wow, they're just like the rest of us, pimples, warts and all.<br />
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Of course "buining" one's suit is the punchline of the poem. It's a hard thing to do--recreate yourself, reinvent yourself. Become someone different, someone new. Throw away one identity (and mask) and put on another. We all struggle with that in some way or another. We want to change, to grow, to abandon one set of personality features for better ones. That's why people go to school, to church, to the shrink, and it's one of the reasons why we write. To reinvent ourselves. <br />
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But it's a very hard thing to do. Old habits die hard. <br />
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So that's it: A quickie analysis. But I'd be willing to entertain alternate views. There's just no right answer to what a particular poem or story "is about." I'm not the expert (as I said above) just because I wrote the poem. A careful reader can often spot things, or come up with theories that are more revealing, or make more sense than what a writer thinks.<br />
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It's one of the frustrating and wonderful things about studying and teaching literature. There are no perfectly right answers. There are answers that are righter than others, or answers that are more elegantly argued. But interpreting poems is much like figuring out people. What's on the surface is not always real. And what's below the surface is never easy to be one hundred percent sure of. That's what makes the whole enterprise of reading literature so much fun, and teaching it such a challenge and joy.<br />
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Spiderman as just an ordinary guy.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdXYhd65L4q0I4jPAnUtvVYKHMGoUr1Yk_GjLObsXnN9eMmPQsY4r3iUnXs6_gfwznMX9buL-VUWYZ93M8Ry-8Lf5ABxfGJjbOydbP49aAZr7TzCw-Hv9TnOwMwCP1jZ-uWk8twHYgg5wp/s1600-h/spiderman3.gif" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5157877629373003874" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdXYhd65L4q0I4jPAnUtvVYKHMGoUr1Yk_GjLObsXnN9eMmPQsY4r3iUnXs6_gfwznMX9buL-VUWYZ93M8Ry-8Lf5ABxfGJjbOydbP49aAZr7TzCw-Hv9TnOwMwCP1jZ-uWk8twHYgg5wp/s320/spiderman3.gif" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; margin: 0 10px 10px 0;" /></a><br />
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Here's the poem itself:<br />
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All my pwoblems<br />
who knows, maybe evwybody's pwoblems<br />
is due to da fact, due to da awful twuth<br />
dat I am SPIDERMAN.<br />
I know. I know. All da dumb jokes:<br />
No flies on you, ha ha,<br />
and da ones about what do I do wit all<br />
doze extwa legs in bed. Well, dat's funny yeah.<br />
But you twy being<br />
SPIDERMAN for a month or two. Go ahead.<br />
<br />
You get doze cwazy calls fwom da<br />
Gubbener askin you to twap some booglar who's<br />
only twying to wip off color T.V. sets.<br />
Now, what do I cawre about T.V. sets?<br />
But I pull on da suit, da stinkin suit,<br />
wit da sucker cups on da fingers,<br />
and get my wopes and wittle bundle of<br />
equipment and den I go flying like cwazy<br />
acwoss da town fwom woof top to woof top.<br />
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Till der he is. Some poor dumb color T.V. slob<br />
and I fall on him and we westle a widdle <br />
until I get him all woped. So big deal.<br />
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You tink when you SPIDERMAN<br />
der's sometin big going to happen to you.<br />
Well, I tell you what. It don't happen dat way.<br />
Nuttin happens. Gubbener calls, I go.<br />
Bwing him to powice, Gubbener calls again,<br />
like dat over and over.<br />
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I tink I twy sometin diffunt. I tink I twy<br />
sometin excitin like wacing cawrs. Sometin to make<br />
my heart beat at a difwent wate.<br />
But den you just can't quit being sometin like<br />
SPIDERMAN.<br />
You SPIDERMAN for life. Fowever. I can't even<br />
buin my suit. It won't buin. It's fwame wesistent.<br />
So maybe dat's youwr pwoblem too, who knows.<br />
Maybe dat's da whole pwoblem wif evwytin.<br />
Nobody can buin der suits, dey all fwame wesistent.<br />
Who knows?James W. Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04163328832095859541noreply@blogger.com47tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6497520378875649406.post-75566376275582251092015-06-28T13:56:00.000-04:002015-06-28T14:01:01.659-04:00<b><br /></b>
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<b>Thorn and What's Next</b><br />
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I started writing about Thorn over thirty years ago and I still find him a challenge. He's ornery and unpredictable, and sometimes that makes it hard for me to embrace him fully. I'm a little ambivalent about him in general and always have been. <br />
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On the one hand he's living close to nature and is very observant of the world around him, the spectacular Keys vistas as well as the collection of characters from the harmless oddballs to the sinister and everyone in between. Those are features that I admire in him and respect the way he navigates a fairly wild collection of people. After all he's a hermit and basically anti-social, but the requirements of the thrillers is that I must throw a set of people in his way and see how he reacts or interacts with them. On the other hand he's a bit negative and gloomy about the world he's observing and that gloom sometimes threatens to overwhelm him.<br />
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Given all that, I decided about a year ago that it was time to take a break from Thorn. Maybe for just a year or two, or maybe for longer. I'm still undecided.<br />
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However, in the meantime I've been working on something new. A new direction, a new set of characters, a new genre.<br />
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The new one, which is tentatively titled The Last Bloom, is an international thriller. The scope is much broader with settings in Africa and Europe as well as Miami. The character, a young woman, is more outgoing and more worldly than Thorn. I'm hoping she's complex enough to sustain a series of novels. She has unusual skills and a complicated family dynamic and a large knowledge of people and places around the world. She's a traveller, an artist and a keen observer of people.<br />
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The Last Bloom centers around the international trade in cacao beans and the business of chocolate. More on this later. <br />
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Now that the website has been updated and is about to be more thoroughly revised, I wanted to resume blogging.<br />
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I've been active on Facebook and Twitter in the last couple of years but I've seriously neglected this platform. That's about to change.<br />
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</script>James W. Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04163328832095859541noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6497520378875649406.post-31530753067796502882013-12-22T08:28:00.001-05:002013-12-22T08:33:28.454-05:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Thanks to all those who came out during the book tour. It was good to see each of you. I know your time is precious, especially at this holiday season.</div>
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After two weeks on the road listening to your comments and questions, and talking about Thorn, I'm tired but revitalized. Knowing there are so many devoted readers out there is such a humbling pleasure.</div>
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Below is a promo page my wonderful agent, Ann Rittenberg, put together. </div>
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<strong><em>Publishers Weekly</em> (starred review):</strong><br />
Moral ambiguity seasons the violent action in Edgar-winner Hall's
outstanding 13th thriller featuring laconic loner Thorn (after 2011's <em>Dead Last</em>).
Thorn, who lives in the undeveloped backwoods of Key Largo and loathes
the kind of hyperdevelopment that's ruining Florida, is roused from his
isolation to extricate his grown son, Flynn Moss, whose existence he
only recently became aware of, from the Earth Liberation Front, a group
of ecological terrorists who are planning to shut down a nearby atomic
power plant. Thorn actually is sympathetic with ELF's goals--but he
doesn't trust them. Meanwhile, FBI agent Frank Sheffield begins
uncovering a plot to create a nuclear disaster that could annihilate
Miami, while a beautiful female Homeland Security agent and a cocksure
psycho who likes to play with electricity are working their own schemes.
Hall shifts among the skillfully drawn characters, each uncertain of
which ends justify extreme means, as the action races toward a literally
explosive climax at the nuclear plant. The result is both thoughtful
and white-knuckle tense.<br />
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<strong><i>Booklist</i>:</strong><br />
Hall is one of those rare thriller writers who can build character as
he ratchets tension, who can do no-holds-barred action scenes with
panache and, in the midst of bedlam, never lose sight of nuance. All
those skills are on display here, as Hall assembles a full-bodied
supporting cast whose stories hold our interest as much as Thorn's
attempt to save his son without helping to bring about a South Florida
version of Chernobyl. A fine thriller on every level.<br />
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<strong>Alan Cheuse, NPR:</strong><br />
James W. Hall makes a plot that wrings the most suspense and emotion
out of this material, from the effect on Thorn's private life to the
danger lurking for all Miami and South Florida.<br />
What else can I say without spoiling the book for you? The novel's finale will have most readers holding on for dear life.<br />
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<em><strong>Library Journal:</strong></em><br />
Like fellow Floridian Carl Hiassen, Hall displays a love of his home
state's landscape with criticism of the greed that threatens it, plus a
fondness for unpredictable characters. Like an Arthurian knight, his
protagonist ventures out of his small world just long enough to put
things right in a larger one. Luckily for readers, there will be no
shortage of opportunities requiring Thorn's next appearance.<br />
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<em><strong>BookPage:</strong></em><br />
<em>Going Dark</em> has cinematic action all the way through and a couple of fine surprises saved for the final few pages. Nicely done, indeed.<br />
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<em><strong>Kirkus Reviews:</strong></em><br />
With its nicely observed characters and lively dialogue—and terrific sex scenes—it keeps readers turning the pages.<br />
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<em><strong>Naples Florida Weekly:</strong></em><br />
There is no more delightful companion for a habitual reader than a new book by James W. Hall.<br />
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<em><strong>Tampa Bay Times:</strong></em><br />
<em>Going Dark</em>, the 13th in the series, is one of his very best, a breathless thrill ride with a brain — and heart.<br />
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<em><strong>Charlotte Observer:</strong></em><br />
For those who enjoy a good steely-jawed mystery man, here's a new
Thorn novel from James W. Hall. If you've ever daydreamed of living off
the land in a beachfront shack, Thorn's life might be a nice getaway for
you.<br />
If you like your mysteries macho and enjoy some Florida scenery into the bargain, this one's for you.<br />
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<em><strong>South Florida Sun-Sentinel:</strong></em><br />
In <em>Going Dark,</em> Hall continues his high standards for gripping, action-packed plots that revolve around Florida's intricate ecology and beauty.<br />
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<em><strong>Florida Times-Union:</strong></em><br />
Another first-class page-turner from the master of mystery.<br />
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<em><strong>Sacramento Bee:</strong></em><br />
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High adventure in the sun – what's not to like?</div>
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So this is the fourth and final pre-publication review of Going Dark. A pretty good one like the others have been. Not starred or boxed, as the Publisher's Weekly one was, but still all in all, one I'm happy with mainly because Kirkus has been so hard on my books in the past. They have a reputation for being pretty grumpy and often mean-spirited in their reviews. </div>
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Also, they singled out one aspect of writing that I work very hard on. Love scenes.</div>
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Ta-da.</div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;">In Hall's 13th Thorn novel, the go-it-alone Key Largo PI undergoes a
crash course in parenthood when he discovers the grown son he barely knows
belongs to an environmental activist group with terrorism on its agenda.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;">In targeting the Turkey Point nuclear power plant near the Florida Keys,
the Earth Liberation Front originally had planned on a nonviolent action. But
extremists in the group now have a spectacular demolition in mind, having
acquired a superpowerful explosive. Taken prisoner by ELF on the remote island
where they're preparing the attack, Thorn is unable to talk his son, Flynn,
into escaping with him. But to be around the boy in order to protect him, he
convinces ELF that he supports their efforts. It helps that one of the group's
leaders is a woman for whom Thorn was a surrogate father when she was a
troubled teen. Meanwhile, having been alerted to ELF's presence by the logo
they left inside the plant's supposedly impenetrable security system,
authorities, including FBI man Frank Sheffield, plan a
"force-by-force" exercise in which agents take on the plant's
security forces with simulated weaponry. In the end, real shots are fired,
Thorn's sidekick, Sugarman, gets more of the action than he bargained for, and
betrayals are revealed—the great sex Frank has with a psychologically scarred
Homeland Security agent from his past proves to be skin-deep. <b>As ever, Hall is in colorful command of his
South Florida setting, occasionally editorializing on the harm developers are
doing to it. Compared to other mystery writers, he plays things refreshingly
low key, but he's always in control, thriving on the setup as much as the
payoff.<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><b>The plot of </b><i style="font-weight: bold;">Going
Dark </i><b>doesn't have the zip of some of Hall's other Thorn books, but
with its nicely observed characters and lively dialogue—</b><span style="color: red;">and terrific sex
scenes</span><b>—it keeps readers turning the pages.<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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So, aside from a totally unnecessary quibble ("doesn't have the zip"), this completes the always fretful pre-publication period in fine style. </div>
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A lot of writers say they don't read reviews of their work, which strikes me as a noble exercise in self-restraint, but also strikes me as a little odd, or perhaps I should say, downright crazy.</div>
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I've learned a lot from reading reviews of my books. As I have also learned a lot from reading reviews on Goodreads and Amazon (which are now merging into the same thing, sort of). I can get a sense from reading lots of reviews about just how successful or unsuccessful I've been at doing what I set out to do. This is, after all, a performance art. We writers are a bit like stage performers and in that sense we can learn from the enthusiasm or lack thereof of the applause. When are our lines working? When are they not? </div>
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I used to believe that audience reaction was irrelevant. Critics be damned. I thought I was arm-wrestling with the literary gods, and if some poor soul couldn't see the value of what I was writing, then that poor soul was ignorant and not worthy of my attention. </div>
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I used to be a callow fool. </div>
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Naturally, swinging too far in the other direction, being utterly dependent on feedback, is also damaging to a writer. </div>
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I've always liked the metaphor of singing in the shower. We sing in the shower because the acoustics are good and the roar of the water seems to smooth out the frailties of our voice. But if a writer is simply singing in the shower, succumbing to self-deception by simply writing what pleases him without concern for what anyone walking by the bathroom might think (who is that screeching in there?), then the whole process of writing is no longer art, but a masturbatory exercise. You do it to please yourself alone. The world beyond your bathroom door be damned.</div>
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So finding the balance for me is important. I care about reviews, but I have to be philosophical too. Good ones are nice and they validate (for a brief moment) the work I've put into the book, and bad ones tug at my sense of self-worth and sometimes invite me to look honestly at what I've done or failed to do. But when I get back to work, writing the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next exchange of dialog, well, the reviews, good or bad, are a distant memory and have very little if any lasting effect.</div>
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Still it was a nice day to see: "terrific sex scenes."</div>
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James W. Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04163328832095859541noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6497520378875649406.post-10399180776602185232013-10-15T05:25:00.000-04:002013-10-15T05:25:13.228-04:00Another Nice Review<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEEopqreHuYEzA8aAmskDYJPk8Ck6Bt5I_HXdMrosXHXZ9pzNw5KY87WtSgeHnW1yDMSxpurw15IFXBRyrJQ6ED-UsQ25fh5_woq6yjnwVBxcGyn81D05pIxUc5iYzWFERve-nEKxK6ihd/s1600/booklist_logo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="188" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEEopqreHuYEzA8aAmskDYJPk8Ck6Bt5I_HXdMrosXHXZ9pzNw5KY87WtSgeHnW1yDMSxpurw15IFXBRyrJQ6ED-UsQ25fh5_woq6yjnwVBxcGyn81D05pIxUc5iYzWFERve-nEKxK6ihd/s640/booklist_logo.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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Booklist is one of those periodicals that librarians (bless their hearts) read and thus, the book reviews often help them select new purchases. Ordinary book readers usually are unaware of Booklist's importance in the publishing business, but it carries considerable weight among booksellers, editors, publishers, and other book reviewers. The folks at Booklist have always been fans of my novels (showing more enthusiasm for some books than others). </div>
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What I always value in a review is a smooth and efficient retelling of the storyline (without spoilers) and an appreciation for some of the other intangibles in the prose that I work so hard on creating.</div>
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This review has both.</div>
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Thorn is a hermetic, fly-tying loner whose attempts to carve
a separate peace for himself on Key Largo are only intermittently
successful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Inevitably, he’s drawn into
somebody else’s fight, or, in a kind of reverse serendipity, simply walks into
a mess that needs fixing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And when Thorn
gets to fixing something, he doesn’t stop until the job’s done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ah, but the collateral damage, there’s the
rub.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Too often Thorn’s knight-errantry
puts those he loves in danger.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This time
it’s a little different.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The problem is
Thorn’s newly discovered son (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dead Last</i>,
2011), who has joined forces with a band of ecoterrorists who have designs on
Florida’s largest nuclear-power plant. (The plan is supposed to be nonviolent,
but a cell within the cell has other ideas.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Thorn’s only hope of extricating his son is to join up with the
terrorists, which raises the bar on possible collateral damage to a new
high.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Hall is one of those rare thriller writers who can build character as
he ratchets tension, who can do no-holds-barred action scenes with panache and,
in the midst of bedlam, never loses sight of nuance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All those skills are on display here, as Hall
assembles a full-bodied supporting cast whose stories hold our interest as much
as Thorn’s attempt to save his son without helping to bring about a South
Florida version of Chernobyl.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A fine
thriller on every level.</b></div>
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--Bill Ott, Booklist, November 1, 2013</div>
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</script>James W. Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04163328832095859541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6497520378875649406.post-38921870401325047882013-10-07T11:28:00.001-04:002013-10-07T11:28:31.353-04:00ReviewsLike it or not, getting reviewed is part of the deal when you're a writer. A year's worth of work (and sometimes much more) summarized, praised, dismissed, or castigated in a couple of paragraphs.<br />
<br />
I remember at the beginning of my career with <u>Under Cover of Daylight</u> I got dozens of great reviews, including a standalone in the New York Times with my photograph, a half a page of space and it was written by Charlie Willeford, and I thought in my naivete that this was normal and expected and no big deal.<br />
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Well, it was a big deal, and my publishing career zoomed off the launching pad in a wonderfully lucky trajectory. Now I see just how lucky those early reviews were. They gave my publisher confidence to increase the advertising budget and to place full page ads in the New York Times and elsewhere. As a result that novel sold many times more copies than the average first novel does.<br />
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And I got a big dose of undeserved pridefulness. The years have cut me down to size. Under Cover was a good book, and one I'm proud of, but there were dozens and dozens of other books as good that were published at the same time but didn't get the reviews I got, and some of those writers suffered as a result, their careers probably affected by the lack of early attention. <br />
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I appreciate all the reviews now, good and bad. I'm always interested in seeing how someone writes about something I've worked so hard on. I've gotten some really wonderfully well-written savagely negative reviews and some ho-hum good ones in the 30 years since <u>Under Cover</u>.<br />
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I remember complaining once to Elmore Leonard that I'd just gotten a bad review on one of the novels and he used that wise old adage: 'Did they spell your name right?' Implying of course that any publicity is good publicity. Later on at that same lunch he mentioned a journalist he was scheduled to do an interview with in a couple of days and he said he wasn't sure he wanted to talk to the guy because he'd once called Dutch "the most over-rated crime writer in America." He remembered more of the quote, and knew it word for word. <br />
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So yes, any press (or blog post, or Amazon or Goodreads post, etc.) is good press, but even someone of Dutch Leonard's stature was hurt by some reviewer's zinger.<br />
<br />
With that in mind, (and much more that I don't have time to recount right now), I offer the following review, the first to appear on <u>Going Dark</u>, the novel that's coming in December. It's a good one. And damn, I'm grateful. And they did spell my name right too.<br />
<br />
Publisher's Weekly<br />
<br />
Starred Review *<br />
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<b>Moral ambiguity seasons the violent action in Edgar-winner Hall’s
outstanding 13th thriller featuring laconic loner Thorn (after 2011’s
Dead Last). Thorn, who lives in the undeveloped backwoods of Key Largo
and loathes the kind of hyperdevelopment that’s ruining Florida, is
roused from his isolation to extricate his grown son, Flynn Moss, whose
existence he only recently became aware of, from the Earth Liberation
Front, a group of ecological terrorists who are planning to shut down a
nearby atomic power plant. Thorn actually is sympathetic with ELF’s
goals—but he doesn’t trust them. Meanwhile, FBI agent Frank Sheffield
begins uncovering a plot to create a nuclear disaster that could
annihilate Miami, while a beautiful female Homeland Security agent and a
cocksure psycho who likes to play with electricity are working their
own schemes. Hall shifts among the skillfully drawn characters, each
uncertain of which ends justify extreme means, as the action races
toward a literally explosive climax at the nuclear plant. The result is
both thoughtful and white-knuckle tense. </b><br />
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</script>James W. Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04163328832095859541noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6497520378875649406.post-3634722121755341212013-09-22T06:32:00.002-04:002013-09-22T07:08:41.927-04:00Zombies<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoG-6F5Xin9TLw0Rzg3-Wmr_0fJTfrxdH0CMj4ZP16DHUTnZIK_yTAzzg8Yu1nj9gvEGKMdqvFKV2qoeYZ6Mmz7EjBI3P52DyVCjrPFpFXmWMBwa6FiBSHk646YGAnCNKe-hi5_PhxeHvm/s1600/zombies.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="201" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoG-6F5Xin9TLw0Rzg3-Wmr_0fJTfrxdH0CMj4ZP16DHUTnZIK_yTAzzg8Yu1nj9gvEGKMdqvFKV2qoeYZ6Mmz7EjBI3P52DyVCjrPFpFXmWMBwa6FiBSHk646YGAnCNKe-hi5_PhxeHvm/s320/zombies.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Watched World War Z a couple of nights ago. I'm not a zombie aficionado, but the film got me wondering about why there's such a resurgence of interest in zombies.<br />
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Here's an excellent article that considers the <a href="http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/The-Meaning-of-Zombies">Meaning of Zombies. </a><br />
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I think there's something in the air these days, maybe as a result of the 2008 financial crisis, plus 9/11 that puts the Apocalypse on our psychic radar more prominently than any time I remember since the Cuban missile crisis.<br />
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Back then my father built a bomb shelter in our basement. I grew up in a small Kentucky town less than twenty miles from Ft. Campbell where the 101st Airborne is based. So we considered ourselves to be a target, at least within the blast zone of the approaching atomic war.<br />
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<b>Duck and Cover</b> <br />
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I remember the sense of dread I felt for years about that bomb shelter in our basement. The dread was not about nuclear winter or the destruction and death of the world as I knew it, but I dreaded sitting in a small room for any great length of time with my mother. Yikes.<br />
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What would we talk about during those long hours as we ate canned peaches and beans? What about the toilet?<br />
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When the Cuban missile crisis ended, the bomb shelter was not dismantled. My father left it in place, only a few feet away from where I'd created a small space to work on building my customized model cars. I specialized in building 32 Ford hotrods.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhRGVFgavgQiCuyfwUgOKiA0TqebddMrBzrISCUXh4cewdpjrBpZCTKOS0QwdOTbUpQ-TITdXt3ANlmB0e7gJEU1Yd1DiSnp7fkd7MmySWxgmOntyY6toMODSQN9xvRTt1IBZBeygRWx8Q/s1600/32_roadster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhRGVFgavgQiCuyfwUgOKiA0TqebddMrBzrISCUXh4cewdpjrBpZCTKOS0QwdOTbUpQ-TITdXt3ANlmB0e7gJEU1Yd1DiSnp7fkd7MmySWxgmOntyY6toMODSQN9xvRTt1IBZBeygRWx8Q/s320/32_roadster.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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In my model car workshop, I built many versions of this car, using pieces of corduroy fabric to imitate rolled and pleated upholstery, and sanded away all the door joints and added blowers and lake pipes to the engine and after doing many many layers of spray paint to imitate the candy apple reds that struck my hotrod fancy back then, I would take those beautiful plastic model cars way out into the backyard and put a cherry bomb inside them and blow them up.<br />
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Someone get that poor kid a shrink.<br />
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My writing room where I now work is also in a basement (for the half year I'm in Carolina), and I often think of that old basement in Kentucky where I created stuff with such care then destroyed it.<br />
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The fear of the Apocalypse that my generation felt was real. Nuclear war was very possible. And my parents had already witnessed the Great Depression and World War II and thus they were primed to believe that another End of the World scenario was a credible threat. <br />
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So when I watch a zombie movie like World War Z, it's easy to get back in touch with all those fears, especially now that they are reawakened by a general sense of dread about climate change, terrorist attacks, financial disaster, cyber attacks, and a host of other dangers that seem all too likely to occur.<br />
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These days I try not to blow up the things I've worked so hard to create. But when I think of that kid who lit the fuses of those cherry bombs, I can't help thinking that one thing he was trying to do back then was to keep those beautiful creations out of the hands of the zombies who were lurking just beyond the horizon.<br />
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</script>James W. Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04163328832095859541noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6497520378875649406.post-37594954211197100622013-09-21T14:42:00.005-04:002013-09-21T14:42:59.794-04:00Elmore Leonard<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpYEHUfZ8JvRwrDK_ECL79PtvR9meBLlEEY7IKci3wP-WSyUKCyAKY132Z-0DCr77vt0-TFGOWcsKf5hCVcX1s5Uwal6Rhs72lRmNhfNtjdgfdzacF4LAu-ZR5s3yMXDMj-igm6XGrHp75/s1600/DutchCourt.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpYEHUfZ8JvRwrDK_ECL79PtvR9meBLlEEY7IKci3wP-WSyUKCyAKY132Z-0DCr77vt0-TFGOWcsKf5hCVcX1s5Uwal6Rhs72lRmNhfNtjdgfdzacF4LAu-ZR5s3yMXDMj-igm6XGrHp75/s400/DutchCourt.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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I took this photo earlier this month while attending Elmore Leonard's funeral.</div>
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This is the tennis court in the backyard of his home. The net is down. The court is covered in black mold. It seems like a fitting image for the way I felt during my couple of days in Detroit.</div>
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The funeral itself took place at the Holy Name Catholic church that Elmore attended most of his life. A beautiful and moving ceremony. Here's the front and back of the program. And two photos which I think capture wonderfully two of the sides of Elmore. Serious, thoughtful, wise. And twinkling with humor.</div>
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I was staying in a Holiday Inn not far from the funeral home in Troy, Michigan, about 15 miles from Detroit itself. My trusty GPS had steered me from the beautiful new airport (this city is bankrupt?) to my hotel and then it had successfully located the funeral home the afternoon I arrived.</div>
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At the funeral home visitation, I spoke with Dutch's family and with Greg Sutter, a wonderful man, a friend, and Dutch's researcher for many years. The casket was open, a fact I had not fully prepared myself for. But the guy looked good, even dead, a little more serious than in the photo just above (taken by his good friend Mike Lupica, a terrific guy). He didn't have his usual twinkle, but who would under those circumstances.</div>
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The next day was the funeral service. I punched in the address and left the motel very early just in case. 630 Harmon Street. I drove south on the interstate for about twenty minutes, back into the city of Detroit and exited, as instructed by my British speaking GPS lady, on Caniff Street. Well, the potholes got deeper every block I went and the neighborhood got grimmer.</div>
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I told myself, well, Dutch just hung in there with his childhood church long after the neighborhood went bad. Just like him not to be distressed by such a scary area. Then the street seemed to narrow, guys in baggy clothes started staring at me, started drifting toward my car, started blocking the way, and I said, well, maybe not.</div>
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And U-turned and headed back to the interstate. Well, the church was on 630 Harmon Street after all, but that Harmon Street was in Birmingham not Detroit, as I had wrongly told my GPS.</div>
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Birmingham is to Detroit as Coral Gables is to Overtown. A beautiful, graceful town well north of the potholes and crack houses.</div>
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It felt like a moment from one of Dutch's novels. In fact, Caniff Street figured prominently in City Primeval, a novel I just finished re-reading. Two people were gunned down there.</div>
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<b>INSPIRING</b></div>
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The service was wonderful. His sons, Peter and Bill spoke humorously and touchingly about their dad. The man was a great dad, just as I would've imagined. The granddaughters sang. A violinist played a beautiful rendition of "A Little Help From My Friends." But several of us commented afterwards that the most surprising and most emotional moment came at the end of the service when an officer from the United States Navy led two of his associates through the Military Honors drill. Taps was played, the flag was folded, Dutch's military service was described. Another from the greatest generation fades from view.</div>
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Dutch was incredibly generous to me. He entered my life before my first novel was published and he figured prominently throughout my literary career, assisting me in ways that were above and beyond the call. His novels, of course, were also deeply influential on shaping my own style, perhaps too much so at the beginning of my career, a fact he noted once with a wry wink. </div>
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I've had a couple of literary fathers. Dutch was one. </div>
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I hope someone cleans the black mold off that tennis court soon and strings up the net.</div>
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Okay, okay. It's been months, seems like even longer, since I was here last, but I've decided to get back to work and use my blog again. See how it works out. <br />
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I'm going to be focusing on things that relate to my writing life, publication, reviews, book tour. The creative process. <br />
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</script>James W. Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04163328832095859541noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6497520378875649406.post-6220538881109160972012-11-16T10:00:00.000-05:002012-11-16T11:31:45.336-05:00Literachoor and the Culture Wars<style>
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<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .5in; text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Literachoor and the Culture
Wars</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">“It is natural for us to seek a Standard of
Taste; a rule, by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at
least, a decision, afforded, confirming one sentiment, and condemning another.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 7;"> </span></span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">David Hume, 1757</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
assaying of value in literary matters which used to be left exclusively to
academics, influential critics, reviewers and well known writers of Mr. Lane’s
and Mr. Vidal’s stature, these days occurs in forums of every sort.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From monthly book groups meeting in living
rooms around the country, to Amazon.com and book blogs, it’s a rough and tumble
world of critical evaluation and argument.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Everyone is now entitled to
their own electronic opinion and may post their thoughts on innumerable websites
frequented by fervent readers of every stripe. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At no time during the forty years I’ve been
immersed in the literary world have I seen so much democracy at work, so much
earnest public debate over aesthetic matters. While academic literary criticism
continues to circle off into ever more lofty and airless regions, actual
readers are enthusiastically climbing aboard their soapboxes to tout their
favorite novel, or express their disappointment in a writer’s latest
effort.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And on many occasions these
discussions and reader reviews show as much insight and passion for a writers’
body of work as many professional reviewers demonstrate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Good for them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Good for all of us.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Although
value-driven arguments can be exhilarating and enlightening, ultimately, like
it or not, a book succeeds or fails in the marketplace for many reasons other
than merit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To try to claim a relationship, inverse or
direct, between a book’s success and its worthiness is ultimately futile.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One reason, of course, is that the very idea
of worthiness is itself so subjective as to disintegrate into fine powder if we
stare at it too hard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Try as critics might to
assign some defining empiricism to their judgments, all discussions of artistic
value are fatally slippery.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is <u>thinking</u>
more worthy than <u>feeling</u>, as Mr. Lane suggests?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is impenetrable complexity more worthy than
accessible simplicity?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Brooding tragedy
more worthy than light-hearted comedy?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Is lush, elegant prose more admirable than its plain transparent
cousin?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is a convoluted plot better than
a simple one?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What about
characters?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are stock characters really
inferior to those so complex that it takes a thousand densely packed pages to
plumb their depths?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are Lamborghinis
better than Fords?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We can have our preferences
but there simply is no universal truth in matters such as these. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">So how does the critic who
slams the bestseller list as demonstrative of the lowest rank of cultural taste
explain the presence on past year-end lists of such card-carrying luminaries as
Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Anne Porter, Mary McCarthy, Ernest
Hemingway, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, William Styron,
Philip Roth, John Fowles, Pat Conroy, E.L. Doctorow, Chaim Potok, Toni
Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>John
Irving, Amy Tan, and John Updike?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">For me the answer to that
question seems simple enough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>American
readers have stubbornly democratic tastes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We are looking for entertaining stories and characters who arouse their
passions, and to satisfy these desires, we are willing to embrace a broad range
of novels, from high culture to low.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As
James Surowiecki puts it in <u>The Wisdom of Crowds</u>, “ …chasing the expert
is a mistake, and a costly one at that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We should stop hunting and ask the crowd (which, of course, includes the
geniuses as well as everyone else) instead.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Chances are, it knows.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Dollars vs.
Respectability</span></u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Leslie Fiedler, one of
America’s celebrated literary critics, noted a classic remark by Melville on
this point.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Dollars damn me…all my
books are botches.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fiedler goes on to say
that “implicit in (Melville’s) melancholy cry from the heart is a belief, as
strong and pertinacious as any myth by which we live, that the authentic writer
is neither drawn to nor confirmed in his vocation by the hope of marketplace
success, the dream of becoming rich and famous, but can only be seduced by
lucre, led to betray or prostitute his talent.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">A little later in the same
essay, Fiedler neatly summarizes the playing field of modern literary
warfare.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“For a century and a half,
those writers who aspired to critical acclaim and an eternal place in libraries
have therefore felt compelled to struggle not just for their livelihood but for
their very existence against the authors of ‘bestsellers’ who they secretly
envy and publicly despise.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Speaking of envy, a few years back when
Stephen King was honored with the National Book Foundation’s lifetime
achievement award for fiction, more than one defender of the literary canon
roared in protest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No less than that
high-culture lion Harold Bloom called King’s award “another low in the shocking
process of dumbing down our cultural life.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Book editors around the country weighed in, almost all on the side of
the high culture values it is their sworn duty to uphold.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the <u>Washington Post</u>, Linton Weeks
posed the argument this way: “The issue: what to make of the gap in our culture
between bestselling and well-written literature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The popular and the proper.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The slew and the few.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">King tossed gasoline onto
this bonfire in his remarks at the award ceremony.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“For far too long the so-called popular
writers of this country and the so-called literary writers have stared at each
other with animosity and a willful lack of understanding.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is the way it has always been.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But giving an award like this to a guy like
me suggests that in the future, things don’t have to be the way they’ve always
been.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bridges can be built between the
so-called popular fiction and the so-called literary fiction.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Well, I hope this book will
serve as some small attempt at the construction of that bridge, but I predict
that passing freely back and forth between the land of good taste and the
province of low brow will always expose one to such cultural snipers as Vidal,
Lane and Bloom and literature professors like my own younger self.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">It’s clear enough that
Stephen King is not alone among popular writers in yearning for a literary
prize or two to set atop their mountains of cash, or at the very least a front
page <u>NY Times Book Review</u> as some validation of their worth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And while their highbrow cousins might never
admit it publicly, I suspect their hankering is just as strong, only the prize
they dream of is something closer to a hefty movie deal.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">The math of publishing, like
that of the music and film businesses, gives us an insight into the dependence
of the American entertainment industry on the blockbuster.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Roughly ten percent of the books on any
publisher’s list pay for the other ninety percent which either break even or
lose money.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Given this calculus, Stephen
King and his trash-writing colleagues deserve more than a few silver
chalices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s books like theirs that keep
the industry afloat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Stephen King and
his kind are the lifeblood of publishing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Simple as that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Much of what we take as the
given state of affairs in the book world, including the very existence of the
Sunday <u>New York Times Book Review</u> and the well-stocked superstores and
Amazon.com and the lofty jobs of book reviewers and publishing giants would be
shockingly altered, if they managed to survive at all, without those ten
percent of the books which flood the marketplace with tidal waves of cash.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">It’s more than a little odd for
an industry that depends so much on its most popular producers, to treat them
with such disdain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Linton Weeks’ <u>Washington
Post</u> piece on the Stephen King affair, he claims that great novels “…change
lives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They challenge our notions and
afflict our comfort at the time they were written and for untellable time to
come.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They cut through time and space,
to the hearts and souls of readers.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
other words great books challenge us and are immortal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">To declare that anyone could
possibly know a book to be immortal rather than simply of faddish interest is
to claim a prescience no mortal can possess.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Yes, as Robert Frost observed, on a strictly personal level we can often
sense when we read a work of literature that we’ve taken “a mortal wound” and
that book or poem will linger with us as long as we live.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">But who can say that <u>Peyton
Place</u>, or <u>Gone with the Wind</u> don’t meet both those criteria for a
great many people?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Did Grace Metalious’s
shocking expose of the sexual underbelly and hypocrisy of a small New England
town not challenge its readers?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You bet
it did.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it damn well placed itself
squarely at center stage for at least a good long time in our cultural history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As did <u>Gone with the Wind</u> and a host
of other popular books.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Though it might
fly in the faces of the high priests of literary culture, my money is on <u>Gone
With the Wind</u> over <u>Humboldt’s Gift</u> in the race to last another
century or two, because of its hold on so many readers’ imaginations.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Raunch
Lovers</span></u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">When Stephen King says “this
is the way it has always been,” he’s exactly right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The tension between popular literature and
the high culture has existed since the very birth of the English novel in the
eighteenth century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Though Daniel Defoe (<u>Moll
Flanders</u>, <u>Robinson Crusoe</u>) is now regarded as one of the major
progenitors of the novel form, in his age he was scorned by the guardians of
good taste.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jonathon Swift was one of
many who regarded him with contempt:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6497520378875649406" name="reputation">One of those Authors (the Fellow that was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">pilloryed</i>, I have forgot his Name) is indeed so grave, sententious,
dogmatical a Rogue, that there is no enduring him</a>.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Planted in the beginnings of
the novel form are the seeds of the current contentious rivalry between high
culture and low.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then as now, a large
part of what fueled that rivalry was simple class prejudice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Defoe was not a gentleman born, but he
aspired to become a gentleman by other means.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>His novels appealed to a class of readers who, like Defoe, were eager to
improve themselves through the accumulation of wealth and possessions and
insider knowledge, in short to learn the ways and imitate the habits of their
so-called betters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">His eager audience read his
roguish tales not just for titillation, but because his stories pointed a
hopeful way forward.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many of those early
novels were Horatio Algeresque how-to portrayals of lower class heroes and
heroines who prevailed over poverty and the enormous obstacles placed in their
path by an elite culture indifferent to their problems and contemptuous of
their dreams. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Writing in <u>The Guardian</u>
in 1713 about the increase in the reading audience that novels were bringing
about, Richard Steele sounds a little like his snobbish descendants three
centuries later:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“…this unsettled way of
reading…which naturally seduces us into as undetermined a manner of
thinking…That assemblage of words which is called a style becomes utterly
annihilated… The common defense of these people is, that <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">they have no design in reading but for pleasure</b>, (my emphasis)
which I think should rather arise from reflection and remembrance of what one
had read, than from the transient satisfaction of what one does, and we should
be pleased proportionately as we are profited.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">These new readers had no
other purpose but to seek a pleasurable reading experience!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ye, gads, can the apocalypse be far behind? </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">From the outset a great many
novels were raunchy and rebellious, nose-thumbing tales written and read by
nose-thumbing, raunch-loving middlebrow citizens.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although to compress two centuries of
literary history into a single sentence is to invite ridicule, it’s safe to say
that the schism between the literary novel and the popular one began at the day
of the novel’s birth and has continued to widen as academics and scholars and
book critics, eager to assert their own usefulness, inserted themselves into
the process.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">These days a harmless tale
like <u>Huckleberry Finn</u> that nearly every twelve year old boy or girl in
previous generations read with utter fascination and complete understanding,
has been hijacked by the academic establishment and rendered into a sanctioned
classic that requires professional exegesis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>God save us from the critics who turn simple pleasure into intellectual
labor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">When millions of readers, whether
they are formally educated or not, have expressed their separate opinions by
buying and delighting in a particular novel, there is some larger wisdom at
work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seems self-evident that it
would behoove a lover of literature to lower his guard, temporarily put away
his Harold Bloom, and ask one simple question.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What is it about this or that enormously popular book that inspires such
widespread fervor and devotion?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">So You Want
to Write a Bestseller</span></u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Some might wonder if this
book is intended to be a primer for writers who might wishwishing to take a
swing at writing a blockbuster themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>To that I can only say that this book is more about why we read them
than how to write them. However, it’s obvious that reading and studying books
in careful detail—books like the one she wishes to write—should be a central
feature of any writer’s apprenticeship.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
naturally, if an apprentice in any field wanted to succeed commercially, why
wouldn’t they spend at least a little time studying the most commercially
successful products of their age?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Of course there will always
be those fussy folk who fret that if they pay even the slightest attention to
John Grisham or Stephen King or William Peter Blatty their palates would be sullied,
tongues befouled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Good gracious, their
taste buds might never recover.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To those good people I suggest that this book
may not be for you.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">It is not my purpose to make
a case about the “worth” or “artistic value” of the novels under discussion
here. Nor is this book an attempt to erase the line between high art and
low.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If anything I’d simply like to argue
that that line is now and always has been a whole lot hazier than my highbrow
friends would like to admit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">As Louis Menand, critic at
large for the <u>New Yorker</u>, put it in a 2009 article on that
metafictionist Donald Barthelme:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">“What killed the distinction (between high culture and low) wasn’t
defining pop art up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was defining
high art down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was the recognition
that serious art, too, is produced and consumed in a marketplace.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The point of Warhol’s Campbell’s soup-can
paintings was not that a soup can is like a work of art. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was that a work of art is like a soup
can:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>they are both commodities.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Robert Kincaid, the
sensitive Marlboro Man hero of <u>The Bridges of Madison County</u> agrees
whole-heartedly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He finds it to be the
same sad slog in his profession, the photography biz. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">“That’s the problem in earning a living through an art form.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You’re always dealing with markets, and
markets—mass markets—are designed to suit average tastes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s where the numbers are.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s the reality, I guess.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But, as I said, it can become pretty
confining.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">It’s amusing to find a
card-carrying literary critic in such firm accord with a character from a
schlocky novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whether it’s high
culture or low, whether it’s in good taste or bad, highly refined or vulgar,
like it or not, it’s all for sale.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><br clear="all" style="mso-special-character: line-break; page-break-before: always;" />
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</script>James W. Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04163328832095859541noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6497520378875649406.post-63275108209897379152012-11-13T05:18:00.002-05:002012-11-13T05:18:52.647-05:00Deleted Chapter from Hit Lit: Snobbery, or Schmaltz versus James Joyce<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq0YR3d-Cy4XV6n_tRNqES_f4ZEH3HtvVEENPWYxkfUbXHbdFbtElwd9CFOWJjTwmQH5JNTAlqlmv9T-gtjxdMpZvPqsuSodkINBjSDLVbsvtTgPlWCMLFqo9OWOoDyfTlJgUJmsfEx8XD/s1600/matzo+ball.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq0YR3d-Cy4XV6n_tRNqES_f4ZEH3HtvVEENPWYxkfUbXHbdFbtElwd9CFOWJjTwmQH5JNTAlqlmv9T-gtjxdMpZvPqsuSodkINBjSDLVbsvtTgPlWCMLFqo9OWOoDyfTlJgUJmsfEx8XD/s320/matzo+ball.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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--</style><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u> </u></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Another chapter I wrote for <b>Hit Lit</b> was deemed too confrontational. I admit this chapter which juxtaposes passages from contemporaneous reviews of the bestsellers I was analyzing with reviews of the big literary novel of the day, may strike some as pugnacious. That's true. I feel pretty strongly about this stuff and am willing to fight for my position. I think that's one of the things which makes books like <b>Hit Lit</b> worth reading. They provoke thought. They take a position. They spoil for a fight. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">I regret that this chapter didn't make it into the finished book. </span><br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u>Unputdownable
Schmaltz</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>“In the room the
women come and go talking of Michelangelo.”</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 4;"> </span></i>T.S.
Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Popular novels are “embarrassing to pick up
and impossible to put down.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are schmaltzy,
full of cliches, down-to-earth, simple-minded, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>written in accessible prose, all the things
that readers love and book reviewers despise.</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Book reviewers are
on the front lines of the literary culture wars.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Empowered by their positions at big city
newspapers and national magazines, these under-appreciated warriors bravely
endure the bombardment of crappy books that rain down on their lonely outposts
every day.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The job of these professional critics is to praise
the worthy and condemn the undeserving, to advance the literary principles they
hold dear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It is in the words of <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>these reliable defenders of high culture
values that I open our investigation of bestsellers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By understanding specifically what the stakes
and standards are, we can begin to map out the territory we will explore in the
pages to come.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u>Rhapsodies of Beauty</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
1936 <u>Gone
With The Wind</u> vs. <u>The Big Money</u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
In 1936 Margaret Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for <u>Gone With The Wind</u>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Did that mean recognition and literary
acceptance from the elites?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not
exactly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
It was an honor that many literati regarded as cheap pandering to the
rabble, an act of aesthetic gutlessness by the selection committee meant to
avoid controversy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As if to prove it, the
American Writer’s Congress which awarded the other major literary prize of that
era, was not cowed by popular opinion when they bitch-slapped Scarlett lovers
everywhere by awarding the best book of the year prize to John Dos Passos for
his modernist treatise, <u>The Big Money</u>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>final vote of the awards
committee? Mitchell: 1. Dos Passos, 350. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
That year John Dos Passos was the darling of the high culture critics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like other reviewers, Edward T. Wheeler,
writing in Commonweal hailed “Dos Passos' sense of form and artistic sureness
which <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">tips its hat to Joyce, Pound, and
Eliot</b>, and gives much satisfaction.” </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
(Bold emphasis is mine here and throughout this chapter.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Comparing an author to Joyce, Pound and
Eliot, that triumvirate of Modernists, is a way of saluting a writer for
employing, among other things, disjointed stream-of-consciousness narratives
and long, elaborate sentences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(<u>Absalom,
Absalom!</u> which was also published in 1936, and is generally regarded as
William Faulkner’s masterpiece, had the distinction of winning a Guiness World
Record for containing literature’s longest sentence of 1300 words.) </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
“The Modernists introduced us to the idea that reading could be work, and
not common labor but the work of an intellectual elite, a highly trained coterie
of professional aesthetic interpreters,” says Lev Grossman, writing in the Wall
Street Journal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He goes on to quote one
of the modernist mottoes of an early publisher of Joyce: "Make no
compromise with the public taste."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>A kind of ‘let them eat cake’ slogan of snobbish contempt.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Any reference to James Joyce in a book
review should be a warning flag for the attentive reader:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Alert, Alert, Serious Literature Ahead.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For it is Joyce, more than any other novelist,
who clarified the differences between the literary high road and the mass
culture low.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>About <u>Ulysses</u>, <span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Edmund Wilson famously wrote
in the New Republic: "In the last pages of the book, Joyce soars to such <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">rhapsodies of beauty</b> as have probably
never been equaled in English prose fiction."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those rhapsodies have served as a yardstick
for novels ever since.</span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
So when Dos Passos was praised for his Modernist daring, the reviewer was commending
his willingness to ditch ordinary storytelling and character-making, all that
malarkey that would appeal to a casual reader-for-pleasure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
It worked just fine for Dos Passos, although some social critics have argued
that Modernism had a nefarious agenda which was to purposefully exclude the
masses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
"The
intellectuals could not, of course, actually prevent the masses from attaining
literacy. But they could prevent them reading literature by making it too
difficult for them to understand—and this is what they did. The early twentieth
century saw a determined effort, on the part of the European intelligentsia, to
exclude the masses from culture. In England this movement has become known as Modernism.
--John Carey, <u>The Intellectuals and the Masses</u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Favoring technical virtuosity over
story and character is business as usual when it comes to dismissing popular
novels, as these snippets from reviews of <u>Gone With The Wind</u> make
brutally clear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Each of these critics<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"> takes pains to declare that
GWTW isn’t a “great novel” just a good one, before giving the only praise they
can muster.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>"<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">I would never, never say that she has
written a great novel, but in the midst of triteness and sentimentality her
book has a simple-minded courage…” </b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>New
Republic - Malcolm Cowley</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">"<u>Gone With The Wind</u> <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">is by no means a great novel</b>. But it is
a long while since the American reading public has been offered such a
bounteous feast of excellent storytelling...."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>New York Times Book Review</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>All right. So great novels require hard
work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are stories which use
difficult-to-follow narrative devices and elaborate sentences, and rhapsodies
of beauty (that is, they’re sort of poetic).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And books that are not so great are simple and full of emotion and
include lots of familiar characters and other familiar stuff.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In other words, they’re too fun and easy to
be any good.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
Okay, so, let’s leave Scarlett and Dos Passos to battle it out for their
piece of posterity, and skip ahead twenty years to mid-twentieth century.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u>Joyce Again</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
1956, <u>Peyton
Place</u> vs. <u>The Recognitions</u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In 1956, the year <u>Peyton Place</u>
titillated America, William Gaddis published his first novel, <u>The Recognitions</u>
to bountiful praise. <u>Time</u> magazine’s reviewer raved, at one point
invoking that embodiment of high culture values when he described the book as “<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">aswim in erudition</b>, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">semi-Joycean in language</b>…” </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
There’s our boy, James, again.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>By contrast, <u>Peyton Place</u> was
hammered by reviewers, most of whom were shocked, shocked I tell you, by its
immorality and obscenity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unsurprisingly,
Catholic World was beside itself with contempt for this lurid book.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“This
novel is one of the cheapest, most blatant attempts in years to present the
most <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">noxiously commonplace</b> in ideas
and behavior in the</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
loose and ill-worn guise of
realistic art.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
‘Noxiously commonplace’ might be decoded to mean that the novel is not about
the uplifting and the spiritual, or those values that Ms. Katukani found so
worthy in the Gaddis novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The low road
is common, while the high road, well, it’s for those traveling in the big
leather seats up-front.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
The New York Herald Tribune chimed in with a harsh assessment of <u>Peyton
Place</u> that probably was intended to be a crushing blow, but which
undoubtedly sent tantalized readers running to the stores:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“…sex
is the dominant accent of the book and Mrs. Metalious, in her</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
effort to be realistic, spares
neither detail or language in high-lighting her scenes in bed, car or on the
beach. Invariable, even in moments which should be tender and understanding,
she injects an offensively crude note. In fact the book reads like a <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">tabloid version of life</b> in a small
town.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Okay, so <u>Peyton Place</u> wasn’t
“aswim in erudition.” Agreed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Grace
Metalious had attempted no literary cartwheels to please the swanky folks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She apparently had more mundane goals in
mind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Julian Messner is one of the few
critics who got it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In his Time magazine
review he writes that Metalious “captures a real sense of the tempo, texture
and tensions in the social anatomy of a small town. Her ear for local speech is
unflinching down to the last four-letter word, and her characters have a sort
of <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">rawboned vitality that may produce
low animal moans in many a critic's throat.</b>” </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In other words, it was just the sort of
writing that had been appealing to novel readers for a couple of
centuries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hardcore reality, not
erudition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Close to the earth, not up in
the clouds.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u>Impossibly Rich, Monstrously Long</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
1960<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><u>To Kill a Mockingbird</u> vs. <u>The Sot
Weed Factor</u>, John Barth</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
In 1960 Time Magazine picked John Barth’s novels as one of its All Time 100
Best Novels, largely for its technical virtuosity—a novel about novel writing:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
“A feast. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Dense, funny, endlessly inventive (and, OK,
yes, long-winded</b>) this satire of the 18th-century picaresque novel—think
Fielding's Tom Jones or Sterne's Tristram Shandy —is also an earnest picture of
the pitfalls awaiting innocence as it makes its unsteady way in the world…
Barth's <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">language is impossibly rich, a
wickedly funny take on old English rhetoric</b> and American self-appraisals.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<u>The New York Times</u> agreed that like any good literary novel, this was
definitely not some lightweight page-turner:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
“John Barth’s
The Sot-Weed Factor is a brilliantly specialized performance, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">so monstrously long that reading it seemed
nearly as laborious as writing it</b>…”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">For reasons that elude me, book critics have often showered praise on
books for the amazing triumph of being lengthy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Saul Bellow’s celebrated novel, <u>The Adventures of Augie March</u>,
was praised by a New York Times reviewer in this head-scratching manner: </span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">“Individual episodes are superb. Peculiar conversations are
delightful. They justify, it seems to me, the effort required to read the more
than a quarter of a million words of this inchoate novel…</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;"></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6497520378875649406" style="mso-comment-date: 20100730T1410; mso-comment-reference: RHI_1;"><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt;">“…so loose and formless is Mr. Bellow’s book that <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">it would make no noticeable difference if
100,000 words were cut from it or if 100,000 words were added</b> to it.”</span></a><span class="MsoCommentReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 8.0pt;"><a class="msocomanchor" href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6497520378875649406#_msocom_1" id="_anchor_1" name="_msoanchor_1">[RHI1]</a><span style="mso-special-character: comment;"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Also appearing in 1960, the lean,
pruned down story of Scout and Atticus and Jem got a slightly different
treatment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Garnering modestly positive
reviews, <u>To Kill A Mockingbird</u> didn’t sit well with some of the high
priests of its day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A few critics
rebuked Harper Lee for her un-Joycean style, and the even more vile sin of
being influenced by Hollywood.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“The praise that Miss Lee deserves must
be qualified somewhat by noting that oftentimes the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">narrator's expository style has a processed, homogenized, impersonal
flatness quite out of keeping with the narrator's gay, impulsive approach to
life in youth</b>. Also, some of the scenes suggest that <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Miss Lee is cocking at least one eye toward Hollywood</b>...”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Frank H. Lyell, The New York Times Book
Review</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
The National Book Award that year went to Conrad Richter for <u>The Waters
of Kronos</u>, a novel which garnered kudos for its “<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">portentous prose and insistent symbolism</b>.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
So, mark that down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>According to high
culture mavens, a convoluted plot, a self-conscious narrator, and an intricate
style are virtues, while a clean and simple style is of questionable
merit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And any indication that a
novelist might be operating under the influence of Hollywood is cause for censure.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u>Cerebral Musings</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
1966<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><u>Valley of the Dolls</u> vs. <u>The Crying
of Lot 49</u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
In 1966, the same year Jacqueline Sussan published <u>Valley of the Dolls</u>,
Thomas Pynchon released his shortest and most accessible novel, <u>The Crying
of Lot 49</u>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His previous novel, <u>V</u>,
had seen him welcomed into the high culture fold with this now familiar nod to
our friend James Joyce.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
“The masterpiece of the new manner, a book called simply V. is an <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">epic of planned irrelevance that Joyce
would surely have respected</b>.” (Time, March 15, 1963)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<u>The Crying of Lot 49</u> was met with similar delight, and was again
awarded the keys to the literary kingdom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>A <u>Time</u> magazine reviewer admired it greatly. “With its slapstick
paranoia and its heartbreaking <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">metaphysical
soliloquies</b>, <u>Lot 49</u> takes place in the tragicomic universe that is instantly
recognizable as Pynchon-land.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
Meanwhile <u>Valley of the Dolls</u>, was treated to a series of hatchet
jobs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gloria Steinem, writing in Book
Week, made a standard put-down, associating the book with Hollywood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this case, Ms. Steinem connects <u>Valley
of the Dolls</u> with the lowest circle of that hellish town.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
"For the
reader who has put away comic books but isn't ready for editorials in The Daily
News, "Valley of the Dolls" may bridge an awkward gap… Most of the
dialog is less classic-bad than television-bad, and Sussan, a former TV
actress, churns it out like a pro.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
What was true in the mid-sixties is still true today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Plucked from various twenty-first century
reviews of books that the New York Times considered the most notable novels of
the year are phrases that closely echo the code words of praise for Pynchon’s
early novels.</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Without naming
titles, here are some key descriptors of a couple of heralded books of
2005:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“This <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">graceful and dreamily cerebral novel</b>…”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another novel won this rave: “her <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">ruminations on beauty and cruelty have
clarity and an uncanny bite</b>.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>That
the highbrow critic gives such laudatory treatment to works that contain
dreamy, graceful, cerebral ruminations, suggests a favoritism toward fiction
strong on narcissistic intellectualism and not too interested in a hard-driving
plot or a passionate emotional sensibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>A well-structured, exciting narrative that contains realistic characters
who inspire strong emotional responses is red-tagged as lowbrow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As if somehow these feats of writing are so
easily accomplished they are beneath the lofty abilities of the dreamy
cerebralists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Though I must
say, in the forty years I taught fiction writing to hundreds of talented
writers, it became abundantly clear that tapping out metaphysical soliloquies
and dreamy cerebral ruminations is the easiest and least demanding skill to
master, while crafting a tight, forward-moving plot full of engaging characters
proves considerably more of a challenge.</span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Disembodied
Howling</span></u></b></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">1969, <u>The Godfather</u> vs. <u>Steps</u></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">In 1969 Jerzy
Kosinski won the National Book Award for his short, intense novel, <u>Steps,</u>
a book composed of brief fragmentary scenes loosely connected into a series of
mini-chapters.</span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Years later,
David Foster Wallace, a twenty-first century novelist with impeccable literary
credentials, wrote that <u>Steps</u> was a "collection of unbelievably
creepy little allegorical tableaux done in a <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">terse elegant voice</b> that's like nothing else anywhere ever…" </span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">In a 1974 article
admiring Kosi</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">n</span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">ski’s novel, Samuel Coale described the narrator of Steps
as “a <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">disembodied voice howling</b> in
some surrealistic wilderness."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
Harpers Magazine praised Kosinski’s writing as having “the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">linguistic bravado</b> of Conrad and Nabokov…a master of pungent and
disciplined English prose.” </span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This
emphasis on uniqueness of style, and on the inventive use of voice are more
arrows in the quiver of high culture warriors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>A novel that relies on prose that is merely transparently simple or even
primitive in its construction can never fully partake in the feasting that goes
on at the literary head table.</span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Such
primitivism is the hallmark of Mario Puzo’s prose, and to many readers this
seems entirely suitable for a book about such primitive folks as the
Corleones.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But in 1969, the critics were
not giving any blue ribbons to Puzo as a stylist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Critic Wilfrid Sheed was typical of the
prevailing view when he described the prose of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><u>The Godfather</u> as "speed writing clichés." </span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In fact, even in reviews meant to praise
<u>The Godfather</u> critics often used patronizing language of the most
obvious sort.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Dick Schaap’s
New York Times review was particularly condescending.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Though thankfully he doesn’t mention James
Joyce, Schaap does raise the issue of Hollywood when he instructs potential
readers how to prepare themselves for confronting <u>The Godfather</u>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt;">“Allow for a touch of corniness here. Allow for a bit of
over-dramatization there. Allow for an almost total absence of humor. Still
Puzo has written a solid story that you can read without discomfort at one long
sitting. Pick a night <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">with nothing good
on television</b>, and you'll come out far ahead.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Puzo
was under no illusions about his capabilities as a stylist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was aware he was not capable of “linguist
bravado” or a “terse elegant voice.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Though he was prideful enough to believe he could have improved the
writing, given a second chance. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"If
I'd known so many people were going to read it," Puzo told Larry King,
"I'd have written it better." </span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>To
millions of readers, however, Puzo’s style is just right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As primitive as a cave painting and just as
powerful.</span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Twilight
Zone</span></u></b></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">1971, <u>The Exorcist</u> vs. <u>Mr.
Sammler’s Planet</u> </span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Gorgeous
sentences and stylistic grace are also central in the praise for <u>Mr.
Sammler’s Planet</u>, Saul Bellow’s 1971 National Book Award winning novel.</span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Irvin Stock in
Commentary Magazine, equates the musicality of the sentences with the very
thought processes of the main character, a technique that sounds a whole lot
like Joycean stream-of-consciousness.</span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt;">“Bellow has a gift, reminiscent of Wordsworth, for
evoking in his very <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">sentence rhythms, as
well as in his words, the experience of thought</b>, the drama of its emergence
out of the life of the whole man.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Also lauding the
novel, Joyce Carol Oates uses the imagery of someone who’s trapped in a
revolving door and decides she likes it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>For her, the ending was “so powerful that it forces us to immediately
reread the entire novel, because we have been altered in the process of reading
it and are now, at its conclusion, ready to begin reading it.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And when she’s finished the second
reading?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It makes me dizzy just thinking
about it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Anatole Broyard
doesn’t actually use the words, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">dreamy,
cerebral ruminations </b>in his <u>New York Times</u> review, but he comes darn
close.</span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt;">“Arthur Sammler is old enough to be <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">metaphysical</b>. Beyond desire, beyond competition, with nothing
further to gain or prove, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">he lives in
that</b> <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">twilight zone of the human
condition where philosophy, poetry and parody shade into each other.”</b></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Also inhabiting
a twilight zone is Reagan MacNeil, the girl child at the center of <u>The
Exorcist</u>, though her twilight is<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>anything but dreamy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This novel
of demonic possession didn’t impress most reviewers with its stylistic virtues:
</span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
“<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Faulkner, Blatty is not</b>…I consumed <u>The Exorcist</u> as if it
were a bottomless bag of popcorn.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a
page-turner <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">par excellence.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I variously believed, discredited and
respected <u>The Exorcist</u>.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>--Webster Schott, Life </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
It’s funny to
watch certified high culture reviewers like Mr. Schott squirming when torn
between admiration and disdain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Poor guy
can’t believe he liked this book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">A reviewer for the Los Angeles Times who found the novel “immensely
satisfying” also called it “worthy of Poe.”</span> </div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">While I’m sure
some might view this as validation of <u>The Exorcist</u>, the fact is,
dropping Edgar Allan Poe’s name is a far cry from invoking James Joyce’s. As
the first American master of the ghastly, ghostly and gory, Poe has long been
treated as an embarrassing sideshow in the American literary canon, a kind of
crazy uncle who is tolerated but goes largely ignored.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Despite his literary merits and historical
significance, Poe, the horror meister, is usually quarantined well away from
the respectable districts, lest his telltale creepiness contaminate the faint-hearted
sophisticates.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Mentioning his name
in a book review is at best a back-handed compliment and at worst an overt
signal to the literarily-minded that the work being judged is for the
adolescent down-market audience.</span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">R.Z. Sheppard,
the Time magazine reviewer, wasn’t at all coy in his disemboweling of <u>The
Exorcist.</u></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt;">“<u>The Exorcist</u>… has nothing to do with literature.
It is a <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">pretentious, tasteless,
abominably written</b>, redundant pastiche of superficial theology, comic-book
psychology, Grade C movie dialogue and Grade Z scatology. In short, <u>The Exorcist</u>
will be a bestseller and almost certainly a drive-in movie.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Well, he got two things right.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u>Nightmares</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
1984, <u>The Hunt for Red October</u>
vs. <u>Machine Dreams</u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
1984 we have the reviews of two first novels to compare, one considered
thrillingly complex, the other a simple-minded thriller.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both feature nightmare scenarios, though the
nightmares in <u>Machine Dreams</u> are psychological not thermonuclear.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Michiko
Kukatani focuses on Jayne Anne Phillips’ “keen <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">love of language</b>, and (her) rare talent for illuminating the secret
core of ordinary lives.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Sensitized by now
to reviewer-speak, it’s easy to see this star-on-the-forehead approach to
matters of stylistic gracefulness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ms.
Kukatani goes on to admire other technical virtuosities of the narrative structure,
using phrases that remind me of those uppity fashion designers on the TV series
“Project Runway” who laud the needlework on some otherwise daffy ensemble.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
“Though sections of ''Machine
Dreams'' easily lift out and function as short stories, they have been stitched
together seamlessly into a beautifully patterned novel that possesses the
density of a highly ambitious work of art…”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Art wasn’t on
President Ronald Reagan’s mind when he read Tom Clancy’s first novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or so he said at a televised news conference
when he announced that he enjoyed the book, calling it "unputdownable"
and a "perfect yarn."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Without that
endorsement, this fledgling novelist published by a press that had never
ventured into fictional waters before might have languished in obscurity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But his publisher, Naval Institute Press of
Annapolis, which made its name printing works like <u>Dictionary of Naval
Abbreviations</u>, was no doubt overjoyed by Ronald Reagan’s promo on its
behalf, though surely unprepared for the tidal wave of orders that ensued.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Hardly any reviews
of <u>The Hunt for Red October</u> appeared prior to the president’s rave. But
eventually the critics came around, if only to have a chance to fire off
zingers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Could reviewers
actually be so shameless as to be motivated by a desire to skewer?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You betcha, said David Shaw, writing in the
Los Angeles Times in the mid-eighties. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">“…book review editors… tend to be
intellectuals--or, if not intellectuals, at least far more interested in
Serious Literature, both fiction and nonfiction, than in the kinds of books
that usually dominate the best-seller lists.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">In a three part
investigative article, Mr. Shaw exposed the inner workings of the book review
business of that era.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Though I suspect
most of it is still true.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some of his disclosures
are remarkable confessions of the lip-smacking snobbery at work in the
journalistic wing of the book business.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">“Most book review editors <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">don't even bother to publish reviews of
popular genre books--romances, Westerns, science fiction</b>--and, except for
the most highly touted titles, most publish only periodic roundups of mysteries
and other genre fiction.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">“<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">These
books tend to be formulaic</b>, book review editors say, and there is little
for a reviewer to write that would differentiate one from another. The same is
true, they say, of much popular fiction; that's why some papers give these
books only the briefest of reviews.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">“Even when one of these books is reviewed in
full, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">there is a tendency for both the
review editor and the reviewer to use the review as an opportunity to compose
snide, clever put-downs that make incontrovertibly clear the intellectual and
moral superiority of the reviewer</b> (and the publication) to the author (and
his book).”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Unputdownable</span></u></b><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">1991, <u>The Firm</u> vs <u>Mating</u></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The year John Grisham’s second novel appeared, the National
Book Award committee passed him by and instead anointed Norman Rush for his
first novel <u>Mating</u>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The reviews
for <u>Mating</u> were overwhelmingly positive, and overwhelmingly similar in
emphasizing the intellectuality of the novel.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">“A complex and moving love story... breathtaking
in its cunningly intertwined <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">intellectual
sweep</b> and brio.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chicago Tribune</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Or this from the
New York Times:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">“…one of the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">wisest and wittiest fictional meditations</b> ever written on the
subject of mating… presented in <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">an
allusive, freewheeling first-person narrative of impressive intelligence. </b>The
reader's education is tested and expanded by the fast and self-conscious
company of the narrator and her beloved, people whose <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">mordant wordplay</b> is sly and pleasantly unobtrusive.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Perhaps the reader
of literary fiction finds “fictional meditations” or novels of “intellectual
sweep” to be compelling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But <u>compelling</u>
doesn’t seem to be a code word that book reviewers commonly associate with
literary novels.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nor is <u>page-turner</u>
or <u>unputdownable</u>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Presumably this
is because the style and poetic language of literary novels requires a more
leisurely and disciplined pace, more focus, more care.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The New York Times said as much when praising
an Editor’s Choice selection:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">“One should <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">read this first novel as slowly as poetry</b>, and for the same reason:
The language is so precise, so distilled and so beautiful one does not want to
miss any pleasure it might yield up to patience.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Mark Twain once
addressed the compellingness issue when he quipped about the dreadfully serious
novels of Henry James:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">“Once you've put one of his books down, you
simply can't pick it up again.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">That’s funny, yes,
but this page-turner issue is more complicated than it might first appear, for
clearly there are those for whom Henry James is unputdownable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s why they read—to go slow, to savor
every subtle pleasure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To smooth out the
brain waves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">My classes in
bestsellers often mingled literature Ph.D. students with candidates for an MFA
in creative writing—sometimes a contentious mix.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The literature students, who were likely to
revere the novels of James Joyce and Henry James and others in the literary
canon, often found themselves at odds with their more commercially-minded
classmates over aesthetic matters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To
them a novel that was a “fast read” was somehow suspicious.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Though before the semester was over, even the
most hardcore of the literary purists had usually found one or two bestsellers
on the list that blindsided them, swept them away and shook their faith in
their literary presumptions, leaving them with a new ambivalence.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Their ambivalence
was similar to the mixed feelings I experienced when I first started reading
bestsellers for my original course.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
was expecting to experience the tedium of wretched prose and trite and
hackneyed melodrama, but found myself ignoring all those issues as the stories
gripped me and sent me on a breathless thrill ride through their pages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Claudia Rossett, a
book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, once admitted to a similar
experience in a review of a Jackie Collins potboiler.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’d started the book fully armed to do a
little trash-bashing but found herself instead describing the book as
“embarrassing to pick up and impossible to put down.” </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Ambivalence didn’t confuse Marilyn Stasio, the mystery
reviewer for the New York Times, when she was evaluating John Grisham’s <u>The
Firm</u>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And c<u>ompelling</u> wasn’t
on her list of adjectives, though putdowns were flying.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Mr. Grisham, a criminal
defense attorney, writes with such relish about the firm's devious legal
practices that his novel might be taken as a how-to manual for ambitious
tax-law students. Of more concern, though, are the pernicious values that
motivate Mitch's<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> preposterous heroics</b>
in eluding both the mob and the Feds<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">. If
this money-grubbing worm is what passes for a hero in today's legal profession,
we'll stick with Portia.</b>”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">(Personal aside:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Coincidentally,
in that same multi-book review in which Marilyn Stasio dings Grisham, she had
nice things to say about my third novel, including this: “…his prose runs as
clean and fast as Gulf Stream waters…”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Which I offer as a testament to the fact that there’s no automatic
connection between positive reviews and becoming a household name.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Peter
Prescott in Newsweek was greatly impressed with <u>The Firm</u><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">’s </b>unputdownability:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“It also offers an <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">irresistible plot</b>. A plot that <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">seizes
a reader</b> on the opening page and propels him through 400 more is much rarer
in commercial fiction than is generally supposed.” </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
While the fastness
or slowness of a book may be more of a reflection of a reader’s subjective
experience than an actual count of the minutes and hours required to finish the
book, <u>speed</u> is clearly a term of endearment for readers of popular
novels while it has dubious merit to those on the other side of the aisle.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u>Corn</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
1992, <u>Bridges of Madison County</u> vs. <u>A Thousand
Acres</u> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>These
two novels, both set along the back roads and cornfields of Iowa, received
markedly different treatment by reviewers.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><u>A
Thousand Acres</u> scored gold medals all round. "Brilliant…A thrilling
work of art” they sang out in Chicago, and New York pronounced it “powerful and
poignant” while Boston thought it was a “full commanding novel” and Washington
considered it “written beautifully.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>By
far the most consistent form of praise the book received was for Jane Smiley’s
artful reworking of Shakespeare’s King Lear, her use of the play as structural
underpinning for her plot and the source of her cast of characters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Overtly
inviting comparisons to Shakespeare might seem a risky strategy, but most
reviewers believed this audacious experiment was successful.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Ron
Carlson, reviewing the book for the New York Times, nimbly side-steps the
question of whether the novel relied too much on Lear.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
“I was reluctant, in writing about
the novel, to invoke "King Lear" (and it will be invoked, believe me)
because I didn't want this story to sound like an exercise, like some clever,
layered construct. What <u>A Thousand Acres</u> does is to remind us again of
why "King Lear" has lasted.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Is that praise or its
opposite?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m not quite sure.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
And it really
doesn’t matter, does it?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The effect is
the same.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The “hook” as they say in
Hollywood has been set.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once the book
was tagged as “Lear in the cornfields” this talking point was firmly
established thereafter. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
The reviewer for
the Chicago Tribune went so far as to say that reading Smiley’s novel might
enhance one’s experience with Shakespeare.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
“You will never again read
"King Lear" in the same way after finishing Jane Smiley's stark and
scarifying new novel, which retells Lear's story from his daughters' point of
view. It turns each premise of the play inside out, yet it too examines, with
near-Shakespearean depth, the existential horrors that crawl out into the light
when the rock of family solidarity is shattered.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
As the reviewer
points out, it wasn’t necessary to know a thing about Lear in order to be
gripped by this tale, but still, the not-so-secret-code at work here is that a
reader who picks up this novel will be encountering to some degree or another
one of the great masters of English literature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
It’s hard to top
that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not even a tip of the hat to James
Joyce or Moby Dick can quite compare.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>No
book reviewer in the land was about to suggest that Robert James Waller’s
tearjerker was connected in any way to William Shakespeare.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Corniness in the cornfield, maybe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some serious leering, but no Lear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Pauli
Carnes in the LA Times thought the novel was “yuppie women's porno” and ends
her piece with this badda-bing: "<u>The Bridges of Madison County</u> is
not beautiful and touching. It is the story of life wasted.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And
here are a few even harsher comeuppances:</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span>“…<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">a
Hallmark card</b> for all those who have loved and lost: a <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">mushy memorial</b> to a brief encounter in the Midwest.”</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span>“…a fantasy that only a man could have written.
Like its hero, it presents itself as God's gift to women even as it furthers
their subjugation.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">3.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span>"…like a Coke that's been opened a while
ago: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">sweet but flat</b>."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">4.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span>“an <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">insipid,
fatuous, mealy-mouthed third-rate soap opera</b> with a semi-fascist point of
view.”</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">5.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span>“The erotic and spiritual charge that they
generate is equivalent to 10,000 volts, and the time given to express it is
four days and three nights. Divide them by fate, and add the torches they carry
ever after. How many gallons of <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">schmaltz</b>
do you end up with?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
What is it about
schmaltz that pisses off so many highbrow people, and activates the tear ducts of so many
others?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The word <u>schmaltz</u> derives
from Yiddish roots, meaning rendered or melted chicken fat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anyone familiar with the wonders of high
density fat can appreciate the Yiddish idiom of “falling into the schmaltz pot”
which translates roughly to having something awesome happen to you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like winning the Lotto or being born with a
thick, beautiful head of hair.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
In the Thirties
the word turned derogatory, and began its new life as a descriptor for things
which were sentimental, maudlin or florid.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We have Vanity Fair to thank for that, because the first recorded use of
<u>schmaltz</u> as a disparaging adjective was in that magazine in 1935, when a
writer described a certain kind of jazz music as “schmaltzy.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In other words, the gooey, oh so rich and
tasty, oh so artery-clogging thing which is so bad for you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
And there you have
it. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>One
major fault line between low culture and high is schmaltz.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The lovers of comfort food versus fussy
eaters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those who like a good wallow in
the schmaltz pot versus the purists who prefer the leafiest greens and leanest
cuts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The gluttonous gulpers of the
heavy-on-the-fat buffet vs. the connoisseurs of haute cuisine. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u>Postmodern</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
2003, <u>The Da Vinci Code</u> vs <u>Middlesex</u> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Finally
let’s take a look at two books that share one major thematic concern:
gender.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One nabbed the Pulitzer Prize
and the Oprah’s Book Club stamp of approval, the other walked away with bags of
cash.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Unlike
the sex of his protagonist, most of the reviews for Jeffrey Eugenidies’
gender-bending family saga and coming of age novel were unmixed.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Lisa
Zeidner in the Washington Post believed <u>Middlesex</u> provided "… not
only incest à la Ada and a Lolita-style road trip, but <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">enough dense detail to keep fans of close reading manically busy</b>.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Warning
for schmaltz-lovers:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This cuisine is
very haute and must be vigilantly chewed.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>More
praise came from Daniel Mendelsohn of The New York Times who liked the book for
its "<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">dense narrative, interwoven
with sardonic, fashionably postmodern commentary.</b>"</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Need
I decode this?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Haven’t we seen these
cryptograms before?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Prepare to go slow, savor the language.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And watch out, gentle reader, because this is
second generation modernism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So if you
didn’t grasp the aesthetics on the first go-round you might want to do a little
catching up before you take this on.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Marta
Salij of the Detroit Free Press liked the book's portrayal of Detroit so much
she alluded to one of our favorite benchmark writers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Finally “Detroit has its great
novel. What Dublin got from <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">James
Joyce—a sprawling, ambitious, loving, exasperated and playful chronicle</b> of
all its good and bad parts—Detroit has from native son Eugenides in these 500
pages."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Dan Brown’s reviews ranged from scathing to extremely
scathing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>New Yorker writer Anthony Lane, whose article on bestsellers
I quoted from earlier, blows away the novel in this giddy one-liner:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“…if a person of sound
mind begins reading the book at ten o’clock in the morning, at what time will
he or she come to the realization that it is <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">unmitigated junk</b>? The answer, in my case, was 10:00.03, shortly
after I read the opening sentence…”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Laura Miller, writing for Salon, invoked another food image,
a dairy product that’s notoriously high in saturated fat. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span>"<u>The Da
Vinci Code</u>" is indeed a <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">cheesy
thriller</b>, with all the familiar qualities of the genre at its worst: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">characters so thin they're practically
transparent, ludicrous dialogue, and prose that's 100 percent cliché…</b> the
plot is simply one long chase sequence...”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Cheesy
junk food, fit for the unfit, the slobs, the couch potatoes.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Though no reviewer invoked the name of
James Joyce, there was one notable exception to the Brown-bashing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Janet Maslin, reviewer of pop culture texts
for the New York Times, found Mr. Brown to be on the side of the angels, and
his work to be a “gleefully <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">erudite</b>
suspense novel…”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
There again is one of our code words, a term usually reserved for the high
culture brand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Surely this use of
“erudite” confused the issue for some, suggesting this novel was haute
cuisine-ish when it was, in truth, closer to gourmet popcorn.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It’s possible that some of the
multitudes who bought the novel, did find the book to be “aswim in
erudition.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, based on the
sampling I pulled from the Amazon.com ‘customer reviews’ it appears that many
felt they got less bang for their buck than they were promised.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Customer reviewers were almost evenly split
between fans and haters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of the 4,000
readers who took the time to write reviews and award stars (from one to five),
the five star reviews were less than half the total.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While those who could not find it in their
heart to give <u>The Da Vinci Code</u> more than one or two stars was almost an
equal number.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For almost every reader
who found the book “incredibly exciting” there was another who considered it “a
swindle” or “abysmal.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Okay, okay.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Enough of deciphering the not so hidden biases of reviews.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
You’ll have to take my word that I have not cherry-picked the comparison
books or the quoted material in this section.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>To test my arguments, I invite skeptical readers to scan this week’s
book review in almost any city newspaper or national magazine and see if you
don’t find many of the same code words of praise embedded in the analyses of
books considered literary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And the same
dismissive critiques of any book whose story moves too quickly and whose
characters are too hot and juicy and too perfect for the silver screen.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The fact that reviewers consistently take a dim view of some
of the very books that attract millions of readers is proof of the ongoing
culture wars that have long been waged in the arts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That the masses want to read a book that
grabs them by the lapels and doesn’t let go, even if it might be populated by
stereotypes and written in prose that is clichéd and trite, gives us a good
starting place for a study of what makes the biggest bestsellers of all time succeed
on a grand scale.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Schmaltzy, clichéd, trite, melodramatic, one-dimensional,
transparent, cheesy, sentimental.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yes,
yes, all twelve of these books are to some degree guilty as charged.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">But there are other
fascinating factors these twelve novels share, features that are not so obvious
on first glance, and which in the long run helped the books transcend their
‘faults.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those are the issues I’ll be
addressing in the following eleven chapters, starting with a look at a few
techniques used by each of our twelve bestsellers, devices that had much to do
with making these particular novels fly off the shelves and the pages fly by
and helped send each of these novels flying higher into the stratosphere of
sales than all others.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><br clear="all" style="mso-special-character: line-break; page-break-before: always;" />
</span>
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</script>James W. Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04163328832095859541noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6497520378875649406.post-57296238328623375272012-11-12T11:46:00.002-05:002012-11-12T11:46:23.065-05:00SHITTY NOVELS<b>Hit Lit: some deleted parts.</b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">In the five years I spent working on <b>Hit Lit</b>, I had many false starts, and very many drafts. I was fortunate to have an absolutely fabulous editor at Random House who understood the book very well and was extremely enthusiastic. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The idea I had originally was to use the book as an opportunity to make a case against snobbery, and for popular fiction.
My tone was somewhat confrontational, definitely provocative, and finally it was determined to be too off-putting to the kinds of readers that Random House wanted for <b>Hit Lit</b>.
They thought the book should present a positive portrait of the 12 bestsellers I was focusing on. It should be about the reasons why so many people LOVE these books, not why so many people MOCK THEM OR PUT THEM DOWN. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I thought I could do both things in the same book, and I fought to hold on to that original premise for a long time. However, in the end, I was convinced to cut those sections (a quarter of the book) and to soften my tone elsewhere. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">My first version of Hit Lit was far edgier than it turned out to be. Far more likely to have stirred controversy than it did. The final version was softer and more generic than I had originally wanted it to be, but I fully understood the editorial and marketing issues involved in my publisher's point of view. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> In any case, now that the book is published, I thought it might be fun to use my blog (from which I have been absent for many months) to use as a repository for some of those sections in <b>Hit Lit</b> which I spent a great deal of time on originally, and then spent a great deal of time defending, then spent a great deal of time cutting out. Cutting, by the way, is not as easy as holding down the delete key. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">So, in the next few days (or weeks), I plan to post those deleted sections here. For those who liked the book or thought it was lacking, this exercise might prove illuminating.</span><br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Shitty Novels</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">“’Best
selling’ should not be an accolade so much as a warning.”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Fay Weldon, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The Times</b>, 2007</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-outline-level: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Every
decade or so it happens. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The editor of
some prestigious journal decides it’s time again to hire an erudite hitman to
write a few thousand caustic words about our nation’s deplorable reading
habits—a little Philistine bashing, using the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York Times</i> Fiction Bestseller List as the target.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wonder if Gore Vidal is busy?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Well, in
1973, Mr. Vidal wasn’t otherwise occupied, though I’m sure the writers of the
ten novels unlucky enough to be the most popular works of fiction on that
particular week’s <u>New York Times</u> bestseller list probably wished he had
been.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>When I
was researching my first course in bestsellers, looking for my precursors in
this strange new field, I came across Mr. Vidal’s juicy essay, and was thrilled
to find myself in perfect agreement with everything in it, including his caustic
tone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He seemed to nail the stance I wanted
to take in my course, a gleeful superiority and brutal snarkiness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Using
the <u>New York Times</u> list of January 7, 1973, Mr. Vidal let loose his
vituperative wit with giddy exuberance and proceeded to disembowel all but one
of the ten books that were riding high at that moment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Shit has its own integrity,” his essay began
and, after establishing in that very first word his own chief descriptor for
the material before him, Mr. Vidal moved to his two major points, the first
being that “no one ever lost a penny underestimating the intelligence of the
American public.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This
crucial conviction of the literary snob has at least three natural corollaries
which go like this: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If a book is
popular, it can’t be any good.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And its
twin sister:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If a book is truly good, it
couldn’t possibly be popular.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
third:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the unlikely event that a good
book does wind up on the bestseller list, it’s an aberration that either
indicates some glimmer of “taste” in the untrained reading public, or perhaps
more likely, suggests that thousands upon thousands of shoppers bought that
specific literary tome mistakenly.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
belief that popularity and literary value are mutually exclusive so solidly
underlies the high culture world view that it forms the invisible and
unshakeable foundation of a vast set of prejudices and inviolable
assumptions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For instance, if literary
value and widespread popularity do indeed have an inverse relationship, then
the bulk of readers in America must be brain-dead drudges who regularly waste
their money and time on vapid trash, while the smart guys must be perched on
the sublime peaks of Olympus savoring the really good stuff. <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Vidal’s other main point in
the 1973 exercise in scorn was to suggest a “corrupt connection” between
popular novels and Hollywood films.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“The
bad movies we made twenty years ago are now regarded in altogether too many
circles as important aspects of what the new illiterates want to believe is the
only significant art form of the twentieth century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An entire generation has been brought up to
admire the product of that era.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like so
many dinosaur droppings, the old Hollywood films have petrified into something
rich, strange, numinous—golden.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
other words, shit imitates shit.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>He goes
on to refine this thesis by dismissing thirty years of Hollywood films in one
flashy sentence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I think it is
necessary to make these remarks about the movies of the thirties, forties and
fifties as a preface to the ten best-selling novels under review since most of
these books reflect to some degree the films each author saw in his formative
years, while at least seven of the novels appear to me to be deliberate
attempts not so much to re-create new film product as to suggest old movies
that will make the reader (and publisher and reprinter and, to come full
circle, film-maker) recall past success and respond accordingly.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Though
Vidal’s assertion that these authors were shaped by movies they viewed in their
“formative years” is questionable and impossible to prove, the connection
between bestselling novels and Hollywood is indeed fertile territory for
discussion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a subject I will return
to later.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But first, let’s finish with
Mr. Vidal’s amusing essay.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">It’s all great fun to watch
trashy novels getting trashed, and Mr. Vidal was certainly the right man for
the job.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is the master of the
dismissive one-liner and wields a charming snideness that must have been
exactly what the editor at the <u>New York Review of Books</u> had in mind when
he put a contract out on those ten bestselling novels.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Some
twenty-one years later, in June of 1994, Anthony Lane, the film critic for the <u>New
Yorker</u> again tackled the fiction bestseller list in a pithy and rollicking tone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Commenting on Vidal’s earlier essay, Mr. Lane
strikes a rakish pose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Two decades
after the Vidal survey, has anything changed?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Well, Solzhenitsyn has gone back to Russia, Mary Renault has died, and
Frederick Forsyth is no longer in the top ten.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He is, in fact, at No. 14, with a novel unwisely named <u>The Fist of
God</u>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When he devised the title, it
must have sounded crunchy and apocalyptic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Now it sounds like a club down in the West Village that you can’t get
into without a dog collar.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Perhaps
softened up by his long exposure to Hollywood films, Mr. Lane is more embracing
of popular culture in general than Mr. Vidal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Where Vidal scoffs, Anthony Lane assumes a bemused tone, while still
maintaining a finely calibrated distance from his subject matter as though he
were turning the pages of these questionable novels with tweezers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“There
are sound reasons for musing on this stuff,” he asserts at the outset, sounding
like a gastroenterologist about to discuss human excrement. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>His case
for studying the bestseller list is, at best, conflicted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the one hand he asserts the importance of
the exercise. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“It is easy to brush aside
best-seller charts as the products of hype and habit, but they are a real
presence in the land of letters, generating as much interest as they
reflect.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And if they do, to an extent,
represent the lowest common denominator of the print culture, this only
strengthens our need to pay attention, since where else is that culture common
at all?” </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>On the
other hand, he claims cagily that “the ideal diet consists of trash and
classics: all that has survived, and all that has no reason to survive—books
you can read without thinking, and books you have to read if you want to think
at all.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">That one man’s trash might
be another man’s classic, or that the trash of today can become the classic of
tomorrow (and vice versa), never troubles Mr. Lane’s line of reasoning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Books you can read without thinking” is his
shorthand designation for popular novels, though the fallacies embedded in that
definition are boggling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For instance,
what role does the non-thinking part of the reading experience play in Mr.
Lane’s value system?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is, what about
human passion—those noble Aristotelian emotions, pity and fear?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Do cerebral matters always trump matters of
the heart?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Yet so sure is he of the correctness
of the eternal gold standard he’s using to measure the worth of any literary
work, without further ado he blithely embarks on his own mission of ridicule
and urbane disparagement.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Michael
Crichton, John Grisham, Clive Cussler, Mary Higgins Clark and Allan Folsolm all
wilt under his scornful inspection, while Caleb Carr manages to win this
grudging praise, “No. 7 poses a problem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><u>The Alienist</u>, by Caleb Carr, is a good book<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A really good book, swift and dense—popular
entertainment that brushes important questions with its fingertips.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That a book can be “really good” and “popular
entertainment” seems to unsettle Mr. Lane and makes him wonder if perhaps
people simply buy their books off the bestseller list and read a book like <u>The
Alienist</u> without noticing or appreciating its refined sensibility, or its
combination of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“the scholarly and the
macabre…”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Ah, yes, there’s Gore Vidal position again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If a good book somehow becomes popular, the
highbrow critic must explain away that success or else his pejoratives about
bestsellers in general are called into question.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Lane
saves his best zingers for <u>The Bridges of Madison County</u><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>whose vocabulary he attacks as being as bland
as the songs of Karen Carpenter and its author as an “unyielding
sentimentalist.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His parting swipe is
truly inspired.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“The victorious sales of
<u>The Bridges of Madison County</u> make it a more depressing index to the
state of America than Beavis, Butt-head, and Snoop Doggy Dogg put
together.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I got my copy at an airport,
behind a guy who was buying <u>Playboy’s Book of Lingerie</u>, and I think he
had the better deal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He certainly looked
happy with his purchase, whereas I had to ask for a paper bag.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This book is worse than embarrassing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a crock of leavings.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What was
<u>shit</u> to Vidal is <u>leavings</u> to Lane.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To both of them this has all been an exercise
in slumming.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Plug your nose and try to
keep your IQ from sinking as you slog ahead through the dreary pages of verbal
excrement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Do your unstated duty and
find one or two books on the list that are not quite as insufferable as the
rest, but even those must be damned with the faintest praise.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As I had
already discovered early on in my academic career, intellectual condescension
can be a heady and addictive sensation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Setting oneself above the culture at large feeds the ego and in turn
breeds a very special satisfaction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Certainly that’s the excitement I felt as I started that first course in
bestsellers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even now I can recapture
that self-righteous itch as I reread Vidal’s essay and Lane’s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These are two very smart, very funny men
capable of world class putdowns.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Though
my own smug satisfaction toward bestsellers has mostly evaporated over the last
few decades, I remain sympathetic to Mr. Vidal’s and Mr. Lane’s arguments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s not my purpose in these pages to
deconstruct their positions or mock their mockery.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They’re right, of course.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">It’s perfectly valid to
point out that in American culture a clear demarcation exists between the high
road of literary righteousness and the low road of popular success.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And, it’s true, it is the cultural critic’s
job to draw and redraw that line from time to time in the brightest Magic
Marker available.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For lovers of books,
though, it is also a very normal reaction to root passionately for one side or
the other of this great divide.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">But why?</span>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> </span>James W. Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04163328832095859541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6497520378875649406.post-33205072216537667912012-04-07T10:53:00.017-04:002012-04-07T11:54:59.312-04:00Facebook<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp9CdleCu2bmdULz8lOkRF8BEUHBpsycFVcTsQH60U86L1H1_eAj6lpApIj11RNbxOQ-L_j8nGe2vggs8E1CCvWXB71kU4QncB9ori0YzYqL9XeEuUCwAxuJe9e6aL5HX9BUDNp4RxSE6p/s1600/Picture+1.png"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 273px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp9CdleCu2bmdULz8lOkRF8BEUHBpsycFVcTsQH60U86L1H1_eAj6lpApIj11RNbxOQ-L_j8nGe2vggs8E1CCvWXB71kU4QncB9ori0YzYqL9XeEuUCwAxuJe9e6aL5HX9BUDNp4RxSE6p/s400/Picture+1.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5728679261440117682" /></a><br />I find myself spending more time posting on Facebook and Twitter these days than updating my blog.<br /><br />So if you want a more up to the minute version of my writing life, thoughts, or a place to leave comments that are more likely to be replied to quickly, join my Facebook page <span style="font-weight:bold;"><a href="http://www.facebook.com/home.php">here</a></span>. <br /><br />Or you can stop by the Hit Lit page on Facebook by going <span style="font-weight:bold;"><a href="http://www.facebook.com/whatmakesabestseller">here</a></span>. Lots of blog-like postings there and discussions and so on.<br /><br />Or you can follow me on Twitter: <span style="font-weight:bold;">@<a href="https://twitter.com/#!/jameswhall">jameswhall</a></span><br /><br />I'm not abandoning this blog thing because it still feels comfortable and unique. More like journal entries to myself than Facebook is. I know Facebook is public and get feedback pretty quick on postings there. But this format allows me a little more time to think aloud.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">How Hit Lit is Different Than Anything I've Ever Done<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span><br /><br />1. It has an index. I know that may not sound like much. But for some reason I feel like I've written a grown-up book now. <br /><br />2. Usually it takes me a year or a year and a half to write a novel. It took twenty years to research, five years to write <span style="font-weight:bold;">Hit Lit</span>. This one was a long and winding road. I taught the bestseller class to undergrads half a dozen times, and to grad students, both MFA writing creative majors and literature grad students working for their Ph.D. In all those classes, we looked at a lot of bestsellers. Frequently we began the course by choosing our reading list on the first night by picking books directly from the New York Times list. <br /><br />Then came five years of trying to figure out how to create a book out of a carton full of notes. One of the hardest struggles during this phase was trying to find the right voice. I didn't want it to sound academic or stuffy. I hope I succeeded at that. <br /><br />3. There is no story, no dialog, no sex or violence, no lyrical descriptions of nature. <br /><br />4. Once I decided on the twelve novels I would analyze and the twelve recurring features I would discuss, I had to decide how to structure the book. Should each chapter be about a different bestseller, or should each chapter be about a feature? I chose the latter, but a good case can be made for either one.<br /><br />5. I had to take a stand. In the novels, my characters are usually on all sides of the issues. I try to let characters make the best case for their viewpoint. My own viewpoint might leak through, but it's indirect in the fiction. In <span style="font-weight:bold;">Hit Lit</span> I decided (with some serious nudging from my editor) to celebrate these twelve novels rather than make fun of their weaknesses. It was the right decision, I think. I cut away about a hundred pages from an early version that was mostly devoted to making a case against "high culture snobbery." Those hundred pages were acid and biting and snarky. I was mocking the mockers of bestsellers. Most of that is gone. There are traces of my discomfort with certain novels on the list, but for the most part I tried to stay positive about the inherent value of these books. Maybe they're not literary masterpieces, but they're awfully damn good at doing several pretty important things. Like telling a rousing yarn with gripping and emotionally engaging characters.<br /><br />6. I've always come up with my own titles. Not this time. Some genius (and I mean this honestly) came up with the idea of spelling out the title with the spines of the books themselves. <span style="font-weight:bold;">Hit Lit</span> was the result of a graphic decision. And it was brilliant.<br /><br />7. I've never promoted a book this way before. In the past, with novels, I've gone on the road and given talks or readings at bookstores and libraries. Times are changing, so maybe this difference is strictly a function of a new marketing world, or maybe this book is the reason things are so different this time in the way publicity and marketing works. The campaign for <span style="font-weight:bold;">Hit Lit</span> is "media driven" not "event driven." Social media being one of the most prominent ways the word is spread. In the 30 years I've been in the book biz, this is the first time I haven't spent a few weeks on the road promoting it. Maybe it's because I'm getting grumpy in my old age, but I don't mind the change. Except I do miss seeing some of my favorite bookseller friends and the many fans who have become regulars at my events. But hotels, and travel. No, I don't miss that at all.<br /><br />8. I've never had a trade paperback as the original release. That too might be a function of a changing marketplace. But it seems like the right way to have published this particular book.<br /><br />9. This is my first time any of my books has had a bright red cover. And not a single dead body in sight.<br /><br />10. <span style="font-weight:bold;">Hit Lit</span> is the first book I've written which I know will never be optioned for film.James W. Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04163328832095859541noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6497520378875649406.post-28897075142994032492012-03-27T07:31:00.003-04:002012-03-27T08:52:03.481-04:00Finished Books<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCuwAJdOFUrpwZOVISmuGYrOCG85YbfeQbghS4Y0bg0ngjy0qNpqfUowlhbzsD8b_kxsiOo_bRl4uvRKWDPxuOkJ7Iiz2O8bQ8cVV2GFRm_K3zf9G0WfcoJpwp2LK4RmlWFPNJIan1Rnc6/s1600/photo%25288%2529.JPG"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 299px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCuwAJdOFUrpwZOVISmuGYrOCG85YbfeQbghS4Y0bg0ngjy0qNpqfUowlhbzsD8b_kxsiOo_bRl4uvRKWDPxuOkJ7Iiz2O8bQ8cVV2GFRm_K3zf9G0WfcoJpwp2LK4RmlWFPNJIan1Rnc6/s400/photo%25288%2529.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5724558734926743458" /></a><br />Starting to get some nice early reviews on Book Blogs here and there.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.wordupnerdup.com/2012/03/27/review-hit-lit-by-james-w-hall/">Here's one.</a><br /><br /><a href="http://the-book-garden.blogspot.com/2012/03/review-hit-lit-james-hall.html">And here's another.</a><br /><br />I got the finished books recently and I'm still smiling. This is the first book I've ever written that has an index. I know that may not sound like much, but it pleases me no end. I feel like a grown-up now. <br /><br />Writing <span style="font-weight:bold;">Hit Lit</span> was the most exhilarating and difficult challenge I've ever taken on. First there was the fact that this was new territory for me. No scenes, no dialog, no action, no character descriptions or descriptions of weather. No narrative.<br /><br />I had to invent the structure from thin air. Figure out a way to take 20 years of notes and literally piles and piles of books that I'd notated and analyzed and reduce them to some coherent and lucid form. And I had to discover a voice.<br /><br />A voice for non-fiction! It took me literally months of trial and error to find the sound I wanted. A tone that was not pedantic or professorial but that could communicate some fairly academic premises. Above all I didn't want the book to sound like a goddamn text book.<br /><br />For assistance with that struggle, I reread some of the pieces I'd written for the Sun-Sentinel Sunshine Magazine many years ago, and that are collected in <span style="font-weight:bold;">Hot Damn</span>!<br /><br />The tone in most of those pieces was wry and self-deprecating. Not an easy voice to sustain for a couple of hundred pages. So struggling with that, and trying to find the form of the book were the hardest early challenges.<br /><br />But then came the actual arguments, the explications of texts, the logical and orderly progression of my thesis. I'm not, by nature, a logical and orderly person. I never use an outline. I find them limiting and counter-productive. They stifle me rather than liberate me. So I fumbled through the dark for months, and those months became years. <br /><br />I finally got a hundred pages in and turned in that section to the publisher to show that I was indeed trying to write this book they'd already given me some money for. I spoke to her on the phone and she basically said: start over.<br /><br />I was so crushed, I put the book aside and didn't get back to it for a couple more years. I thought about it a lot and worked on it in my daydreams, but I didn't write anything until one day my agent called to say that the publisher wanted to know what had happened to the book on bestsellers.<br /><br />Whoops.<br /><br />So I got back to it in earnest and wrote and wrote and tried to hone the shape and adjust the tone and keep the whole thing moving affably and smoothly forward.<br /><br />I turned in a draft about a year ago, and the publisher assigned me a young lady as my editor. Millicent Bennett is her name. I'll always remember her first email to me after she'd read an early draft. It was the most intelligent, most carefully considered, most impressive piece of editing I'd ever read. She wanted me to reshape certain parts of the book. She particularly wanted me to reconsider the harshness of my tone in certain places.<br /><br />I had gotten a little carried away in attacking what I considered a snobbish sensibility that looks down on bestsellers and mocks them mercilessly. I had mocked the mockers. It was funny but it was also a bit bitter. It took me months to accept that Millicent was right.<br /><br />I cut away the bitterness, the counter-attacks. I eliminated some of my most bristling defense of the low-road commercial fiction that I was analyzing. Little by little Millicent helped me see that I'd written two books. One was angry at snobbery, the other was gleeful and positive about the benefits of bestsellers. She wanted me to disentangle the two books. She wanted the book to be about my love of reading, and how bestsellers helped me rediscover that after years of academic study.<br /><br />That feat required cutting away about a hundred pages of text. A job that Millicent assisted me with through every paragraph, every sentence, right down to shaping phrases and choosing better words.<br /><br />I realized that in twenty-five years I had never been edited before in any way that resembled this. Millicent and I were literally teaming up to write my book.<br /><br />Just as I finished the final draft, she left the publishing house. Editors do that. I didn't feel betrayed. She'd finished her work with me. My book was done. But I was sad to lose the interaction, the back and forth intellectual engagement. This is one smart woman.<br /><br />How lucky I was at every stage in the process of creating <span style="font-weight:bold;">Hit Li</span>t. More on this later. For the story of the book's inception is one of coincidence and absolute luck.<br /><br />But the writing of the book was like no other creative enterprise I've ever experienced. I'd like the book to do well in the marketplace, of course, but I can't imagine a better experience in that regard than the one I've already had.James W. Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04163328832095859541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6497520378875649406.post-48449404108485858122012-03-15T09:27:00.002-04:002012-03-15T09:27:51.129-04:00Okay, so I'm trying to learn how to use Pinterest. It's pretty cool.<br /><br /><div style='padding-bottom: 2px; line-height: 0px'><a href='http://pinterest.com/pin/152348399864696271/' target='_blank'><img src='http://assets5.pinimg.com/upload/152348399864696271_OBHTDiJj_c.jpg' border='0' width='554' height ='415'/></a></div><div style='float: left; padding-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px;'><p style='font-size: 10px; color: #76838b;'>Source: <a style='text-decoration: underline; font-size: 10px; color: #76838b;' href=''>Uploaded by user</a> via <a style='text-decoration: underline; font-size: 10px; color: #76838b;' href='http://pinterest.com/jameswhall/' target='_blank'>james</a> on <a style='text-decoration: underline; color: #76838b;' href='http://pinterest.com' target='_blank'>Pinterest</a></p></div>James W. Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04163328832095859541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6497520378875649406.post-85134019164021493802012-02-08T09:17:00.009-05:002012-02-09T10:58:58.505-05:00A few fan photos<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm2YprfBnTb-7tGaNnEYoio2KzKaETopmM71UtDzOy8gMYgBYCWmK9jEIXwyvu2nHVtd65iYjnq0FoxZwK3R6y_xKWSb9pma5Oc34nzfXoypbUC1U920l7BzslHMiYpVoAf-W_qxIf539b/s1600/IMG_4188a.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm2YprfBnTb-7tGaNnEYoio2KzKaETopmM71UtDzOy8gMYgBYCWmK9jEIXwyvu2nHVtd65iYjnq0FoxZwK3R6y_xKWSb9pma5Oc34nzfXoypbUC1U920l7BzslHMiYpVoAf-W_qxIf539b/s400/IMG_4188a.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5707165548267079778" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2od3iZUwNgoZv2tyJNir4gBhyzIqq7mB4K92bDhfyXU3OQK3wE7chYE_Fkn8zzaSwOk28VDP7j1wRsrkRitMj6MuKhh5dNkDtXSr3lFZuxpTGk33NTFjMGUMGk0SGFspSXAfkDrMWLUXp/s1600/Dan+Taylor.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2od3iZUwNgoZv2tyJNir4gBhyzIqq7mB4K92bDhfyXU3OQK3wE7chYE_Fkn8zzaSwOk28VDP7j1wRsrkRitMj6MuKhh5dNkDtXSr3lFZuxpTGk33NTFjMGUMGk0SGFspSXAfkDrMWLUXp/s400/Dan+Taylor.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5706791612317821522" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioJU_VsQTpLHBALNXDeQP421TnoBwrW5CCN9x-Fb40vpyAO_4O4S69_RLiyMoxIIQEV_XQlC498nmc7tUUr5Z5i2NfB6k941mLRixzMQRysIDsshDx4_yLYAdraFxTwgov2M7cvSVVtxj3/s1600/photo%25285%2529.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioJU_VsQTpLHBALNXDeQP421TnoBwrW5CCN9x-Fb40vpyAO_4O4S69_RLiyMoxIIQEV_XQlC498nmc7tUUr5Z5i2NfB6k941mLRixzMQRysIDsshDx4_yLYAdraFxTwgov2M7cvSVVtxj3/s400/photo%25285%2529.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5706791374565820002" /></a><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPJX19lGCiP108FJNrAaw3YA2hRLsVzgxiSRiM7-nJOxNYikFx2G2NIZGVOW9WcMYAfLF4Cu1RPpygBU5svBRWJ3lq6Mssdx5rvjz65bgJUtPKmIfsRBAY-209imDDahC487jywj9QuVGx/s1600/benrehder.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPJX19lGCiP108FJNrAaw3YA2hRLsVzgxiSRiM7-nJOxNYikFx2G2NIZGVOW9WcMYAfLF4Cu1RPpygBU5svBRWJ3lq6Mssdx5rvjz65bgJUtPKmIfsRBAY-209imDDahC487jywj9QuVGx/s400/benrehder.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5706769363379747282" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTUJF9WTo7MA-GH1FrT839RRvjRGn_vrMex1xKDwoJSzATOe_Md-3LMp-amR95MKDdE0UdOx8O2mfWxnUTTNjuh57opCeUArMMTZwBDZftjiW3W-0cvBY7wVpxukqg72_XcRT0TjdKHzoa/s1600/Canada.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 378px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTUJF9WTo7MA-GH1FrT839RRvjRGn_vrMex1xKDwoJSzATOe_Md-3LMp-amR95MKDdE0UdOx8O2mfWxnUTTNjuh57opCeUArMMTZwBDZftjiW3W-0cvBY7wVpxukqg72_XcRT0TjdKHzoa/s400/Canada.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5706769261618480530" /></a><br /><br /><br />Here are a few photos of readers of Dead Last. Send yours to me via the website, and get a free Dead Last hat. Where are all my women fans!!! I know you're out there.James W. Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04163328832095859541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6497520378875649406.post-87045176058330036182012-01-07T14:43:00.010-05:002012-01-07T15:12:46.845-05:00DribblingMore reviews come dribbling in. Good, good, and good.<br /><br />Interesting how so much of everything, including book reviewing, has shifted to cyberspace. I suppose the upside of that is longevity. If a review is good, that is. It'll stick around forever, or as long as electrons still have a say in it. Of course, the bad reviews stick around forever too.<br /><br />I've been struck on this book (literally) by how many nasty comments have been made by reader/reviewers on Amazon and elsewhere. Sometimes I've taken a moment or two to read some of the other reviews written by particularly mean-spirited readers of my book. (At least they say they've read it.) Often it turns out that this reviewer either: a)has never reviewed a book before (which is a bit strange and slightly suspicious) or b) has never given anything above 1 star to 90 percent of the books reviewed, except for books featuring Navy SEALS or Zombies or cat detectives.<br /><br />But the professional reviewers, by and large, have been very kind and thoughtful with DEAD LAST, as these reviews show.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.crimebookbeat.com/">Crime Book Beat rates the books</a> with a complicated numerical value system. Weird, but I must say I'm happy to land in the 80's.<br /><br />Then there's <a href="http://www.bookreporter.com/reviews/dead-last">BookReporter</a> which has been around for a while and is a solid and reliable source of book reviews.<br /><br />And finally I found <a href="http://www.nightsandweekends.com/articles/11/NW1100534.php">Nights and Weekends</a>, a site I've not come across before, but one which obviously has sterling good taste in books.<br /><br />Though it's tempting to sit at my computer all day and Google my name to see what new reviews have come in, I've actually taken good long breaks away from my Mac. For instance, this week I went shooting at the gun range with my very reliable .357 Smith and Wesson. Last time I shot at a Bin Laden target and filled him with holes, but that target has mercifully been retired. This time I shot Zombies. The target was ten yards away, and as you can see, I never hit the lovely but endangered young lady once.<br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmnw3G8y5Gw5cs381veHRkgD0h8zFe4BC50L8ZkrAY1qAPlNTYlYgO7Uzih-3-LwY6AIpQK6gglpYr4Yem266RsxUdIhrYVcsJFGHMXMGCcv9aPi5u2v5MHxQH8ZFrX0yD-wzJeyB9Qtrx/s1600/zombie.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 299px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmnw3G8y5Gw5cs381veHRkgD0h8zFe4BC50L8ZkrAY1qAPlNTYlYgO7Uzih-3-LwY6AIpQK6gglpYr4Yem266RsxUdIhrYVcsJFGHMXMGCcv9aPi5u2v5MHxQH8ZFrX0yD-wzJeyB9Qtrx/s400/zombie.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5694984950284593490" /></a>James W. Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04163328832095859541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6497520378875649406.post-51446065523942980632012-01-05T11:57:00.002-05:002012-01-05T12:00:10.200-05:00At the Gun Range<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn5_1b_k7RKbqON10SISURyYkpIA7lz1YWK-W_X1bmXJrZ-I9IUpxxliNPZ6e5yzYLhRujefSZk-Z-w4Zu1RoAXyEHyKIaTv_5bWD3J8hJxcbT0Dg3tpzWTQyvZxLykzOBoPuvf8X1alSn/s1600/photo%25285%2529.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 299px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn5_1b_k7RKbqON10SISURyYkpIA7lz1YWK-W_X1bmXJrZ-I9IUpxxliNPZ6e5yzYLhRujefSZk-Z-w4Zu1RoAXyEHyKIaTv_5bWD3J8hJxcbT0Dg3tpzWTQyvZxLykzOBoPuvf8X1alSn/s400/photo%25285%2529.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5694193722635724674" /></a><br />Spent a relaxing hour at the gun range this morning. Tuning up my aim on a silly target. But it does give me some confidence I can defend my loved ones if the time came. This is with my .357 Smith and Wesson from 7-10 yards. Didn't hit the innocent lady once.James W. Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04163328832095859541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6497520378875649406.post-64982927271485252622011-11-29T05:27:00.025-05:002011-11-29T05:45:36.091-05:00Books and Books: Twenty-five Years and It Never Gets Old<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDGWp296OzNA_JeI3nyg2LKN5qCfNtuocKZ5VhgSiHGWCu2_5KmcmK8WiCiS8t05VspDqvaI_P3AmWs21KQZj_ZLkTRfYgAtX8L2U4AYT6n1XiF2eTNyHggOhFiIV-6a0xonDveUFPxY_3/s1600/Jim-explaning-a-character-November282011_4908.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDGWp296OzNA_JeI3nyg2LKN5qCfNtuocKZ5VhgSiHGWCu2_5KmcmK8WiCiS8t05VspDqvaI_P3AmWs21KQZj_ZLkTRfYgAtX8L2U4AYT6n1XiF2eTNyHggOhFiIV-6a0xonDveUFPxY_3/s400/Jim-explaning-a-character-November282011_4908.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5680363636447678146" /></a><br />Mitch Kaplan gave me a wonderful introduction last night. There is, as Mitch discovered, another James W. Hall, a former military guy who turned spy against the US, and is now serving time in prison. Apparently some websites on the Internet have conflated the spy and me. Pretty funny.<br /><br />Mitch reminded the audience that he's been in the independent book business for 30 plus years and he and I have been doing this song and dance for most of those. Thank god for that.<br /><br />The photos of the event were taken by my friend Michael Stern. <a href="http://sternphotos.com/">Sternphotos.com.</a> Check out his amazing website. He's a great nature photographer, specializing in Florida. But occasionally he'll come indoors and snap the wildlife running around in the stacks.<br /><br />This is Mitch Kaplan and me sharing the podium.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpVe9jDSpimmDXUbdTPL158Rk2Zf_s4YscxyItmOuKA7753MDXRIpFTXXru-dnsG68yJ2ioqFuMcCIbORWl7kDpda0b0QNa1-bDDvy8XSj-MAJ9CqnjDlwxmF4CJ1YbJjjYTjxTFmmzJpN/s1600/Jim-Hall-and-Mitch-Kaplan-November282011_4843.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpVe9jDSpimmDXUbdTPL158Rk2Zf_s4YscxyItmOuKA7753MDXRIpFTXXru-dnsG68yJ2ioqFuMcCIbORWl7kDpda0b0QNa1-bDDvy8XSj-MAJ9CqnjDlwxmF4CJ1YbJjjYTjxTFmmzJpN/s400/Jim-Hall-and-Mitch-Kaplan-November282011_4843.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5680363977429233234" /></a><br /><br />And here I am promoting my short story collection. Available for your Kindle or Nook.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlnS6Cu00PMAg2d8dDVvce9XTDzGZj3kdXz3diqG7ppyEE-T-c6pQBiRaKMi9xflfVR50vNaQEm-mzOO1PgZov8gnKYpRll2fzdwuXjx8Lm1HQlDiQlMK2jfKIHPW5fPkop-TrhnaycCqu/s1600/Jim-Hall-Over-Exposed-November282011_4915.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 267px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlnS6Cu00PMAg2d8dDVvce9XTDzGZj3kdXz3diqG7ppyEE-T-c6pQBiRaKMi9xflfVR50vNaQEm-mzOO1PgZov8gnKYpRll2fzdwuXjx8Lm1HQlDiQlMK2jfKIHPW5fPkop-TrhnaycCqu/s400/Jim-Hall-Over-Exposed-November282011_4915.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5680364230842668178" /></a><br /><br />Here are some interesting readers getting their books signed. I've got great fans. So smart, so funny. They don't let me get away with much.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieMPFY1mMQosJVvGlKglUpJEzmXV0qP2hLmXX8zPXkuxmnbBB4Fgs0xgbfIIbZLZzhy6atBwtnkhSs4nLtXfrnfHRxFdU8h24w_xp7_hba_IaTzhvV_gpPZGKE8syFwKfBC8hmq6sBF6wX/s1600/Jim-November282011_4959.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 267px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieMPFY1mMQosJVvGlKglUpJEzmXV0qP2hLmXX8zPXkuxmnbBB4Fgs0xgbfIIbZLZzhy6atBwtnkhSs4nLtXfrnfHRxFdU8h24w_xp7_hba_IaTzhvV_gpPZGKE8syFwKfBC8hmq6sBF6wX/s400/Jim-November282011_4959.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5680365054856404898" /></a><br /><br /><br />Here's some of the audience. This shot taken by Evelyn, my lovely wife, who had one of the funniest lines of the night.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpMMZGDSHEsRLglvO3_F3YlPZxXrOPkz7BrUZmyqqsA_r0pBaWoZ2PXmjS3-k4RK4s5qQUo62lrSDNDkvOtCuqQKSwu46J2wpzDkvDA4HuIWTwrXCbbnWs1H9Bzb9CS7IZW10oRPbCC1YR/s1600/photo%25285%2529.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 299px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpMMZGDSHEsRLglvO3_F3YlPZxXrOPkz7BrUZmyqqsA_r0pBaWoZ2PXmjS3-k4RK4s5qQUo62lrSDNDkvOtCuqQKSwu46J2wpzDkvDA4HuIWTwrXCbbnWs1H9Bzb9CS7IZW10oRPbCC1YR/s400/photo%25285%2529.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5680365626062994402" /></a><br /><br />Another shot by Evelyn. Taken on the iPhone, so it's kind of blurry. So many friends, and neighbors came out on a Monday night to share a couple of hours with us. It was a great party.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX3xLVk3Ezv2iKdb27Y4zdbCsiFa9nAOwaSz8XFxXuCOfSb8gnulha20lbYnxc9bBLPuyKItPJBc3N1Y8NCzt9kKpVHdd3ZZ8gP9dPpMYzh3O01l8HNt4zq5XRXginbzF5TpABZ5XMNO-N/s1600/crowd.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 299px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX3xLVk3Ezv2iKdb27Y4zdbCsiFa9nAOwaSz8XFxXuCOfSb8gnulha20lbYnxc9bBLPuyKItPJBc3N1Y8NCzt9kKpVHdd3ZZ8gP9dPpMYzh3O01l8HNt4zq5XRXginbzF5TpABZ5XMNO-N/s400/crowd.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5680366314477677458" /></a>James W. Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04163328832095859541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6497520378875649406.post-47745772773653887482011-11-24T12:07:00.004-05:002011-11-24T13:05:54.934-05:00Couldn't Have Written A Better Review MyselfFLORIDA WRITERS<br />James W. Hall is dead-on with Thorn’s latest case<br /><br />WEEK OF NOVEMBER 24-30, 2011 www.FloridaWeekly.com FLORIDA WEEKLY<br /><br />■ “Dead Last,” by James W. Hall.<br /><br />Minotaur Books. 304 pages. $25.99.<br />A new book by James W. Hall is something to put away for a special treat: something to look forward to. But inevitably, I push other things aside so that I can dig into what will no doubt be a most pleasurable experience. I’m addicted to following the exploits of Thorn, a character at once unique and everyman-ish, spontaneous and guarded, outrageous and surprisingly disciplined. <br /><br />The Thorn we meet in “Dead Last” is processing grief. Cancer has taken the woman he loves. Mr. Hall’s description of Thorn’s ritualized mourning, which includes burning many of his personal possessions, is dead-on accurate. Thorn is a man who carries little material baggage. Watching him strip even further down to essentials, a kind of excessive and half-mad cleansing, reveals his nature with dramatic economy. <br /><br />As ever, Thorn’s fate presents him with a case to solve and a wrong to right. Uh, better change those nouns to plural. <br /><br />How’s this for a plot premise? A Miami-based television cast and crew staffs a low-rated cable series named “Miami Ops.” A running plot line involves a serial killer who, outfitted in zentai suit (a skin-tight garment that covers the entire body) selects victims from hints picked up in newspaper obituaries. The killer deduces locations, weapons and other details from the obituaries as well. <br /><br />The spandex-clad perpetrator is cunning and ruthless, but the series is about to be dropped by the network. The scriptwriter, Sawyer Moss, knows a lot about obituary writing because his mother, April, is the obituary writer for the Miami Herald. Sawyer’s twin brother, Flynn, is one of the show’s stars. The other is Dee Dee Dollimore, a gorgeous actress hungry for fame who is Sawyer’s girlfriend. Dee Dee’s father (and former abuser), Gus, runs the show. <br /><br />Now the series seems to have inspired a copycat — a real serial killer who imitates the methodology of “Miami Ops.”<br /><br />One of April’s obituaries is about Rusty Stabler, Thorn’s deceased wife. Details in the obit lead the real-life killer to murder Rusty’s aunt, who lives in a small town in Oklahoma. Since Thorn is mentioned in the obituary, it doesn’t take long for the Starkville, Okla., sheriff, a very young woman named Buddha Hilton, to visit Miami, tear Thorn away from his beloved Key Largo and involve him in her investigation. <br /><br />Buddha is a fascinating minor character. Only 19, she is a self-made professional with skill, courage and shrewd perceptions. Like Dee Dee a victim of parental abuse as a young girl, Buddha would seem to have a bright future. She accomplishes much in a short period of time to further her investigation into crimes that become part of an FBI case worked by Thorn’s sometimes buddy Frank Sheffield.<br /><br />However, Buddha’s future is cut short by the zentai killer. Thorn now has one more death to avenge, and his own life is in jeopardy. There is an unsettling glee among some of the “Miami Ops” gang that the copycat news might just spike the ratings and save the series. Is one of them behind these killings? <br /><br />“Dead Last” is gorgeously complicated by the network of relationships the author designs. Perhaps the most important is that Thorn and April have to sort out the meaning of their youthful one night fling so many years ago. Awkwardly reacquainted by their involvement in this investigation, they cautiously try to make sense of it and of each other. That old and brief attraction haunts them and eventually provides the reader with an astonishing revelation.<br /><br />“Dead Last” provides an abundance of violent action, excruciating suspense, brilliant characterization (check out April’s mother, Garvey) and precise and evocative delineations of Miami neighborhoods. It also offers a vivid exploration of the psychotic elements let loose in contemporary society as reflected in, perhaps nourished by, today’s morally hazardous popular culture. Thorn is by now a monument: solid and substantial, a bit tarnished and a convenient target for low-flying birds. <br /><br />And Mr. Hall is in the vanguard of those who have erased the line between literary fiction and genre fiction.<br /><br />Want more James W. Hall? “Over Exposure,” a new collection of his fine short fiction, is available as a Kindle<br />eBook for a mere $3.99. ■<br /><br />philJASON pkjason@comcast.netJames W. Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04163328832095859541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6497520378875649406.post-88970205662452372972011-11-24T05:42:00.006-05:002011-11-24T06:02:42.656-05:00Murder on the BeachThe book tour kicked off officially with a stop at Murder on the Beach in Delray Beach, Florida. A wonderful mystery store just off the main thoroughfare in Delray. The town itself has been booming in the past few years. A wonderful array of restaurants, boutiques, art shops and cool sidewalk ambiance. Like South Beach for baby boomers. A little more restrained, but hip.<br /><br />Had a good turnout, including James O. Born and Wallace Stroby, two fine writers and friends who took the time from very busy schedules to show their support. Nice guys.<br /><br />And the book goddesses at the store were wonderful, serving wine and snacks. Signed a lot of books for their online orders and then did my talk and answered questions. Some good questions from the audience. One in particular: who were my influences?<br /><br />Here's what I said:<br /><br />I was influenced in the beginning by a set of writers, all inspiring me in different ways.<br /><br />John D. MacDonald<br />His love of Florida and his defense of the state against the assault of developers and scam artists. Though oddly for one who loved Florida so deeply, his ability to capture the feel of the place itself was pretty limited.<br /><br />James Lee Burke<br />Burke's poetic and lyrical creation of Louisiana, the climate, the flora and fauna, and the landscape in general was at the beginning and is now a major influence.<br /><br />Ross MacDonald<br />Lew Archer, his series sleuth, almost always solved crimes that were rooted in the past. Frequently 20 years is the time frame. Something bad happened twenty years ago and it's still reverberating into a current crime. That format was the basis for my first novel and remains one of the elements I use a lot.<br /><br />Elmore Leonard<br />His books sound like talk, not writing. They are so natural, so seemingly effortless in the their movement forward, and so "cool" in their tone that they challenge me to write with less ornament, less artificiality in the prose. Finding the balance between Leonard and Burke stylistically is a real challenge.<br /><br />Robert Parker<br />Early and late Parker is full of snappy, great dialog that drives much of the experience. I love the way Spenser talks, and though Leonard's dialog is also powerful, it is Parker's I ty to emulate.<br /><br />So it was a good evening. And there was also cake! Brought by Ken Van Durand who drove all the way down from Orlando to deliver it. Here is Ken standing next to me with the cake in hand.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLscwfq2Ds2gRGM8GNb8r8ApeD7cpt5XnjB31Jn9xR72nOm965R45s5GOjD3qhbPiMI5lH97boWx6ALYWUbPTvw0hTJWx_fSkC09i6Dk0ZuQn5xXjQzBYmiLIi0a8Dm6dyog2c93BVjSXC/s1600/KVD%2526Jim+Hall.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLscwfq2Ds2gRGM8GNb8r8ApeD7cpt5XnjB31Jn9xR72nOm965R45s5GOjD3qhbPiMI5lH97boWx6ALYWUbPTvw0hTJWx_fSkC09i6Dk0ZuQn5xXjQzBYmiLIi0a8Dm6dyog2c93BVjSXC/s400/KVD%2526Jim+Hall.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5678514218529380370" /></a><br /><br />If you weren't able to attend and want a signed copy of DEAD LAST, I'm sure Joanne and the book goddesses of Murder on the Beach will be happy to send you one.<br /><br />Here's <a href="http://www.murderonthebeach.com/">their home on the web</a>.<br /><br />And here's <a href="http://kenvandurand.blogspot.com/2011_11_01_archive.html">Ken Van Durand's site</a>, with his own view of the evening.James W. Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04163328832095859541noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6497520378875649406.post-59710934896996008442011-11-23T11:19:00.008-05:002011-11-23T11:32:32.748-05:00Thankful<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZo5Zo7stAr6uuFSndWKwQyJqOmUQcd4AkIHwDJZQLeiIlB4oDJiadNt3w_ZtPRkrcQydn7MrZb9ti-d5ogcDudp8eL4dQdUAdlDzJux1x2SUutXNQC62LVAWjGkOJ3Jk0_-wbJ8yVTGBe/s1600/peter.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 166px; height: 205px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZo5Zo7stAr6uuFSndWKwQyJqOmUQcd4AkIHwDJZQLeiIlB4oDJiadNt3w_ZtPRkrcQydn7MrZb9ti-d5ogcDudp8eL4dQdUAdlDzJux1x2SUutXNQC62LVAWjGkOJ3Jk0_-wbJ8yVTGBe/s400/peter.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5678229979150322354" /></a><br /><br />I'm thankful for my teachers. Most of all I'm thankful for Peter Meinke who was such a great inspiration to me (and many many others over the years), and such a great model for a hardworking and uncompromising writer. Poet, fiction writer, essayist and man for all seasons, and one who can always hold his liquor better than anyone I ever knew, growing funnier as the night went on. His poems are funny too. They became the models that I imitated early on. Funny and rich with emotion and complex while always being accessible. A marvelous blend of talents. <br /><br />He taught me how to write, and showed by example how to live an academic life, one that is steeped in language and books and the arts.<br /><br />And he's still kicking serious ass, <a href="http://cltampa.com/tampa/thank-your-teachers/Content?oid=2724326#.Ts0cp0qY4UU">as you can see here.</a><br /><br />Or <a href="http://www.iwu.edu/~jplath/meinke.html">check out this interview</a>.<br /><br />Here's <a href="http://www.petermeinke.com/">his website</a>. <br /><br /><br /><br /> Advice to My Son by J. Peter Meinke<br /> (b.1932)<br /><br /> The trick is, to live your days<br /> as if each one may be your last<br /> (for they go fast, and young men lose their lives<br /> in strange and unimaginable ways)<br /> but at the same time, plan long range<br /> (for they go slow; if you survive<br /> the shattered windshield and the bursting shell<br /> you will arrive<br /> at our approximation here below<br /> of heaven or hell).<br /><br /> To be specific, between the peony and the rose<br /> plant squash and spinach, turnips and tomatoes;<br /> beauty is nectar<br /> and nectar, in a desert, saves–<br /> but the stomach craves stronger sustaenance<br /> than the honied vine.<br /> Therefore, marry a pretty girl<br /> after seeing her mother;<br /> Show your soul to one man,<br /> work with another;<br /> and always serve bread with your wine.<br /> But son, always serve wine.<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSZAlcQTgrLoVqYpVVmj5vAOdUvDn4ce5Vbqe1jjfJ5_B5m2WFztwXNEgjeLayKUPs4k8tftCPY-rK5Ffoea4bbsgfBTwcdA9tSH3wsXDH-LQGGJ1qsWH09edueAfuY696aeSfrOR3i1YX/s1600/Author_PeterMeinke.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 187px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSZAlcQTgrLoVqYpVVmj5vAOdUvDn4ce5Vbqe1jjfJ5_B5m2WFztwXNEgjeLayKUPs4k8tftCPY-rK5Ffoea4bbsgfBTwcdA9tSH3wsXDH-LQGGJ1qsWH09edueAfuY696aeSfrOR3i1YX/s400/Author_PeterMeinke.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5678229735634199730" /></a>James W. Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04163328832095859541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6497520378875649406.post-31347065487324699352011-11-23T05:21:00.004-05:002011-11-23T05:32:26.839-05:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0beylwrUXQNXLc0xUbxVwkkZDTcc3gEQ2VbU9HNDFnmGSG8KvdyZo8nfqv60hheeBFtsoJeOuYAV1snKncGTmTlBQBkmUvlbocyJZmzfcWsSjyCoyrKOigIpulp-Xw3zbZKyfFE_CybTk/s1600/Mitch.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 316px; height: 244px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0beylwrUXQNXLc0xUbxVwkkZDTcc3gEQ2VbU9HNDFnmGSG8KvdyZo8nfqv60hheeBFtsoJeOuYAV1snKncGTmTlBQBkmUvlbocyJZmzfcWsSjyCoyrKOigIpulp-Xw3zbZKyfFE_CybTk/s400/Mitch.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5678137169698370386" /></a><br />There's a new anthology of short stories that includes one of mine, a story called "Good Forever." Quite a weird story in a collection that features noirish or oddball stories about Christmas. Title is BLUE CHRISTMAS and you can <a href="http://www.booksandbooks.com/book/9780983937814">find the link here</a>.<br /><br />It's Books and Books' new publishing venture. Mitch Kaplan, the great bookseller here in Coral Gables is now a publisher.James W. Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04163328832095859541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6497520378875649406.post-32215386181872688972011-11-21T04:53:00.005-05:002011-11-21T05:01:39.026-05:00AdsAs frequent visitors to my blog might notice, I've added advertisements lately. It's just an experiment to see how annoying they are. And to find out if they make me rich.<br /><br />So far they haven't done the latter. But I'm curious if anyone has a reaction to them. Do they feel out of place? Do you just skim past them? What's your reaction?<br /><br />I can remove them at any time, but it seemed like something I should at least know about.<br /><br />And you might also notice that my Webmaster is redoing the site. I think it looks pretty cool so far. She's made some interesting changes to invigorate the pages and make things more active. <br /><br />Soon my Facebook posts and Twitter feed will go live. You can join me in the meantime by going to my <a href="http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=734149947">Facebook page</a> or Twitter account: jameswhall for <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/your_activity">Twitter</a><br /><br />Staying active in those social media places, plus adding to the Blog regularly does take a little time away from my writing. It's also very unThorn-like, but I'm trying to be a Modern Guy. Plus it's kind of fun interacting with readers and others that way.<br /><br />Your thoughts on that?James W. Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04163328832095859541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6497520378875649406.post-28211544320242833402011-11-20T14:03:00.002-05:002011-11-21T04:53:14.152-05:00Only two more weeks to get a super deal on the ebook of Under Cover of Daylight for Kindle. You can find it <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=br_lf_m_1000706171_pglink_3?ie=UTF8&plgroup=1&docId=1000706171&plpage=3">HERE</a>.James W. Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04163328832095859541noreply@blogger.com0