An Open Letter to a Fellow Master: Anna Karenina, Part 1

Often when I hear about a new movie version of a classic novel, I can’t help but suppress a small shudder.  Not because I am such a purist as to think a movie and a book can ever be compared—the experience is so different that each must be treated as its own artistic form—but because a movie inevitably treads on the precious space a novel occupies in my imagination.  I have read Jane Eyre more times than any other book, and my mental images of the rooms, the characters, the scenes prove preserved from one reading to the next.  I don’t like it when a movie so intrudes that I can’t remember as clearly my own imagined version of a particular protagonist or setting.

The Signet Classic edition from which
I have always read and which I bought
for 25 cents at a library booksale in 2001.

I especially didn’t like the choice to cast Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennett in the 2005 Pride and Prejudice, although in that case, I felt the choice was so far off that Knightley’s performance didn’t threaten to supplant my imagined Elizabeth, who is plainer and an overall more homespun sort.  But now Keira Knightley has been cast as another 19^th-century heroine, and this time around, I think the choice has the potential to be spot-on: Knightley as Anna Karenina in the movie version that premiers this November in the U.S. (it starts today in the UK). 

Anna must be exceptionally beautiful, graceful, and dark-haired; Knightley can claim all three adjectives.  Also, I have yet to see a satisfying version of Anna Karenina, but the novel is certainly cinematic in scope and movement, and I believe a good film version could be made.  This just might be it.

So where the 2005 Pride and Prejudice and the recent new Jane Eyre movie felt like obligations to watch, I am really looking forward to Anna Karenina.  And so is a good friend of mine, a fellow alumna of the George Mason MFA program.  In fact, she suggested we read Anna Karenina together before the movie comes out, for me a refresher, for her a first-time reading.  The book is divided into 8 parts of roughly 100 pages each, and we plan to read a part a week.  As I prepared my remarks to my friend, I realized that my blog readers might enjoy reading along with us, and also that with reading, thinking, and writing time devoted to this endeavor, I may not have much to share on the blog if I don’t share my thoughts on AK.  So what follows are portions of my letter responding to my friend.  Where possible, I have edited to make this readable for Elizabethan Lit followers, but the occasional “you” is inevitable, and I hope you will forgive the address to my fellow master of fine arts.  Without further ado, here are portions of my comments on part 1:

Trust Me This Time: Reflections on Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

I have a confession: In many of my recent book review blog posts, I have been more complimentary than critical.  This was an intentional choice, informed largely by the contemporary nature of the books I've been reading.  I confess that until the last several months, I have tended to read contemporary literature rather ungenerously—that is, I read contemporary novels as if I’m workshopping them, which is to say that I am more alert to flaws than to strengths.  At Squaw Valley, I realized this habit is not unique to me: two writers in two different afternoon panel discussions used the word “ambivalent” to describe how they feel towards contemporary literature.

Such ambivalence is harmful in that it can make us miss the real achievements in front of us.  On a larger scale, if such ambivalence continues, it could have the very negative effect of creating an expectation for perfection (you can read more about this here).  In other words, if novelists begin making choices on the basis of avoiding flaws, their manuscripts will very quickly fall flat.

All of this has been in the back of my mind lately, but I’m bringing it to the fore now because I realized, in sitting down to write about Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, that indulging in too many compliments amounts to crying wolf.  That is to say, I know I’ve been complimentary lately, but this time you really must believe me: Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand is, in fact, an outstanding book.

The Sentence...starring You!

A view at the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop

On the last day of workshop at Squaw Valley, novelist Mark Childress gave us an interesting icebreaker: write a sentence introducing yourself as though you were a fictional character.  Of course, by that point in the week, my workshop group knew one another well, but the faculty rotates daily, and so Mark was new to us and we to him (you can read my pre-SV impressions of him here).  That was one of my favorite aspects of Squaw Valley—the opportunity to hear thoughts from writers, editors, and agents in workshop and to experience different workshop styles within the single week.

It’s a challenge to put yourself in a sentence.  Some went for straight biography; others more for the feeling of a fictional opening.  Nobody went for “Call me __NAME__.”  Still, it's great fun to hear how people you know would describe themselves.  My sentence went like this:

People liked to call her old-fashioned, but she wasn’t yet 30 and liked to check her email as much as anyone else, even when she knew there would be nothing more than a graduate listserv update that no longer applied to her.

What would yours look like?  Please feel free to post your own introduction as a fictional character in the comments below.

And while you’re cooking up your sentence, here are a few more introductory sentences—my own impressions of writers I met at Squaw Valley whose books, also listed, are now on my reading list. You might pick up a title or two for your own reading list.  And if it sounds like I left Squaw Valley a little starstruck, well...I did.

Sands Hall: Catching Heaven

Sharp in intellect and appearance, bright with an actress’s flair for pleasing, she took the stage not to read or to mimic but to play the acoustic guitar slung casually round her neck.

Ramona Ausubel: No One Is Here Except For All of Us

Her face shone with a hope and youth that the Israelites she wrote about must once have felt, themselves a young, yet chosen, nation.

Gregory Spatz: Fiddler’s Dream

He wondered what to do—write novels or make music?—but his talent answered for him: do both.  “And,” Lady Talent continued, “see to it that you add a good dose of bluegrass to each.”

Varley O’Connor: The Master’s Muse

Now dictating discussion, now disappearing from it, now speaking, now listening, she took the workshop in hand and turned with it like a dancer supply shifting her weight.  

Victoria Patterson: Drift

Of all the clever things it came to her to say, for her mind worked easily and her humor was lively, she peered from beneath the shade of her ballcap as if peering back from the cool solace of publication and said simply, “Young author, take heart.”

On Community, Narrators, and Magic

Dear Neglected Readers,

My week with the Squaw Valley Community of Writers was not only one of the busiest weeks of my life but one of the best.  I came back with so many new ideas—among them, ways to revise the beginning of my first novel—that I have been fully occupied with them since returning home.  I know it sounds like an excuse for neglecting my faithful blog readers (you’ve told me you’re out there!), but I hope the upcoming series of Squaw Valley-inspired entries will more than make up for the wait.

That's me, second from the left, enjoying the community
of writers.

It’s been three years since I’ve been out of an MFA program and devoting myself to my novels, which means that it’s been three years of working in isolation.  There are certainly things to be said for isolation, but there’s every bit as much to say for community, and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers is not a misnomer.  Faculty and participants alike were friendly and open to conversation, and although writers are a famously introverted bunch, the shared love of literature and the eagerness for fellowship erased the usual hardships of socializing.  But I found that one of the most valuable aspects of community turned out to be a rather self-centered one: Looking at what others are doing and hearing what they are thinking helped me sharpen my understanding of what I am doing and thinking. 

Perhaps the most important point I came away with was a sense of what I wish to develop as a strength in my writing: the third-person narrator.  This is not an especially popular or wise aspect to try to develop.  For one thing, contemporary publishing loves to emphasize “voice”—in fact, when literary agent Jeff Kleinman led my workshop group, he identified the two most important aspects of writing that gets published as 1) voice and 2) premise.  I’ve read countless interviews with editors who say they look for “voice,” and while third-person can have a strong sense of voice, the concept is more often taken advantage of in first-person.  Another disadvantage to the third-person narrator is that contemporary readers tend to balk at the idea that there might be a controlling consciousness behind what they’re reading.  They think the author should be absolutely invisible—and they’re right.  But often a strong third-person narrator is confused with authorial presence when it shouldn’t be, and that’s where the difficulty lies.  What I saw in workshopping the first chapter of my second novel was that the third-person narrator I tend to use is a strong one, and one that people are quick to fault as being outside the character’s head.  Workshops and perhaps readers generally tend to believe that if a third-person perspective pulls away from the character’s immediate point of view or voice, it must be a mistake.  I realize this is shaky territory—you’re probably thinking, “Oh, Elizabeth is just explaining away her weakness by trying to turn it into a strength,” but without a sample of my fiction in front of you, you’ll just have to trust that I am working with intention and awareness.

And indeed, my workshop instructor, Sands Hall, trusted in exactly that, and because she asked the class to accept my narrator as intentional, I got the best workshop feedback I’ve ever gotten.  For once, it wasn’t unhelpfully nitpicking how to get rid of my narrator whom I don’t want to get rid of; it was instead taking the narrator as a given and trying to help me see where the remaining weaknesses (and there are always weaknesses) are in my use of an outside narrator.

I believe in narrators because I love them in nineteenth century literature.  What would Vanity Fair be without its narrator?  What would Dickens’ works be without license to look in from above with a satirical and moral view?  Or Austen’s?  Sure, it can be clunky—I can’t defend George Eliot’s long interruption in Adam Bede where she goes off on a long tangent about the relationship between art and morality—but done right, there is nothing more satisfying than a strong narratorial presence.  I agree with Thomas Hardy’s idea that the novelist should intentionally shape his material, that fitting his impression of the world and his imagination—in short, his personal philosophy—with events and characters is what makes art, not solely striving after representation.  Call it cerebral.  Call it old-fashioned.  It’s what I want to do, and Squaw Valley helped me see how I can turn this relatively rare proclivity into a strength. 

Let me make the case for narrators another way.  After Squaw Valley, my husband flew out to meet me and we spent a week traveling California.  On our last night, we had the great privilege of passing the evening at The Magic Castle in Hollywood, a club exclusive to magicians and their guests.  (Luckily, my cousin John Macko is a magician; check out his website here.)  We got to see five magic shows over the course of the evening in venues as intimate as 10 people gathered at a bar to an auditorium of a still-modest 50 or 60 seats.  The first magician of the evening, David Sousa, came out on stage with a handful of metal rings, which he proceeded to make interlock and fall free again without ever appearing to alter their complete metal ring state.  The tricks were fascinating and drew many ooo’s and aahhh’s from the audience, but the effects would have lost something major if the magician hadn’t spent the entire show giving the audience significant looks.  He would hold up an intact ring, and his face would clearly communicate, “Look at this.  Notice this.  See how this is a plain old ring.”  Next his expression would become a little mischievous as, with quick hands, he suddenly made the intact ring join with another intact ring. 

I loved his silent facial expressions, by turns sincere, insinuating, roguish, satisfied.  I loved his communication with the audience.  Had he been obscured from view and only his hands visible as he performed the tricks, the tricks would have been the same tricks.  But the audience would have undoubtedly missed things, misinterpreted where to look, and too easily forgotten the original state of the rings. 

Many contemporary readers seem to want only the tricks.  But for my money, I’d rather see the magician, take my cues from his winks and nudges, and enjoy the full effect.

Down in History: Reflections on Victoria Vinton's The Jungle Law

Rudyard Kipling

Soapbox.  Axe to grind.  Whatever you want to call it, everyone has something that makes them heated.  As I write this, it’s difficult to avoid clichés—blow steam, get under the skin, fly in the ointment.  Perhaps it’s no surprise that we have so much tired language relating to issues of great frustration because life is full of them. 

My big gripe is with fiction that uses a character from another author’s creative work.  There’s a whole slew of these novels, ranging from Jean Rhys’s well-regarded (by many) Wide Sargasso Sea to the dreamy escapades of Darcy-craving Austen fans.  No matter the craft and intention behind such novels, I categorically reject this practice of stealing others’ creative property, and when my writer friends seem baffled or say it’s not “stealing”, I have only to ask them how they would feel if someone else took one of their characters and appropriated that character to a re-telling.  That invariably makes them realize that using somebody else’s creation to one’s own ends is at best a questionable practice.  I should point out that a book like John Gardner’s Grendel bothers me less (in fact, I admire it), since Beowulf belongs to an entire culture and is not the product of a single author with an individual intent.  Even the re-casting of premises or conflicts doesn’t bother me the way using another author’s character does.

And so it would seem that turning an actual, historical person into a fictional character is also a questionable practice, but once again, I’m more lenient here.  However mythologized they may be, historical figures once existed and hence are property of this world which fiction—good fiction—probes and reflects.  I appreciate the separation between fiction and nonfiction; hence, a book like The DaVinci Code does not give me fits the way it made many confused souls think that there might be factual truth in a genre and form that has little, if anything, to do with factual truth.  So too do I recognize that a fictional rendering of an historical person is exactly that—fiction, an imagined version of something that has been, or might have been, a certain way.

I found myself open to and interested in Victoria Vinton’s scenario in The Jungle Law, a novel which brings to life the period of time Rudyard Kipling lived in Vermont.  Told in close third-person sections that go into the mind of Kipling himself, Kipling’s wife, the neighbor boy Joe, Joe’s mother Addie, and Joe’s father Jack, the novel explores the effect Kipling’s imaginative and cultured lifestyle has on this agrarian family as they struggle to make ends meet.  The novel is strongest in the scenes where Joe directly interacts with Kipling, by turns baffled at Kipling’s way of speaking (Joe’s coarse pride makes him suspect Kipling might be making fun of him, when in fact the reader can see that Kipling is merely being playful and kind) and intrigued by Kipling’s actions (Kipling has a bicycle, which he encourages Joe to try riding).  Unfortunately, these direct, scenic encounters are few; Vinton chooses instead to let Kipling’s presence be felt in the mind and quiet reflections of the characters.

Still, Vinton hits on the emotional truth of the situation: that the dreamers in our midst, the ones who dispense with the regimented business of the world because they give credence to what is interesting, charming, and deeply felt, may suffer dismissive behavior from others, and yet those dismissive others are powerfully enriched and enlarged by their contact with such dreamers.

The New York Times review of The Jungle Law recognizes the book’s choice to portray Kipling as this open-minded dreamer, though the reviewer feels “it’s important to know [Vinton’s version] is not the whole story.”  The reviewer, Mark Kamine, calls attention to Kipling’s real-life, “monumentally offensive” poem “The White Man’s Burden.”  Fair enough.  In fact, Kamine’s review does a nice job of delicately reminding readers that fictional portrayals should not affect our overall understanding of an historical figure’s actual achievements.  His review seems a tacit nod to the danger of popular portrayals like The Brownings of Wimpole Street, an overly sentimental 1934 film which did impact critical reception of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry.

As with last Tuesday’s book, The Jungle Law’s ties to my preparatory reading for the Squaw Valley Workshop may be difficult to trace.  And, just as The Golden Mean’s editor will be at the workshop, so too will The Jungle Law’s editor, Anika Streitfeld, be in attendance.  I’m looking forward to catching a glimpse of women whose work takes place primarily behind the scenes.

Taking the Plunge: My First Experience with Kindle

I admit, it felt almost miraculous.  There I was in the living room surfing the Internet.  I learned about a novel called The Golden Mean that sounded interesting (see last Tuesday’s post).  I looked it up in the library catalogue; I found that the library had it available in ebook form; and no more than two minutes later, I was reading it on my husband’s Kindle.  Bam!  The slowest part of the process was typing in my library card’s barcode.

I specify that the Kindle is my husband’s because I haven’t yet made that leap from books to ebooks (and because the Kindle was, after all, a 30^th birthday gift to him from his parents).  A year ago, I asked for a Kindle for Christmas and then quickly unasked before it was too late.  No Kindle for me, and I felt relieved not to have caved.  But now, after several weeks of watching Nat with his nose in a Kindle, I wanted to try it too and see what the reading experience was like.

At first, the mere fact that I was reading on a Kindle was distracting.  I kept seeing the neat font of “kindle” at the top of the device and quickly looking away as if trying to avoid eye contact with an authority to whom I was betraying an innocent friend.  Okay, okay, I’m being melodramatic, but in case you couldn’t tell already, books hold such a deep, important, sentimental, and life-focusing significance to me that even the objects matter, not just their texts.  I can’t explain it, really, and in fact, I know it to be irrational—the cheap Bantam classics paperback is not what makes Jane Eyre great.  Maybe that’s part of why I resist e-readers: they just make too much sense.  Of course it would be wonderful to be liberated from the weight of traveling with too many books, which is invariably the case for me, thinking I can easily polish off five, seven, maybe more in a week’s vacation when in fact I’m lucky to get through one or two.  Of course books are horrendous to move and almost impossible to keep dusted.  But I digress. 

As I continued to read on the Kindle, I quickly got over the distracted feeling, although it was very strange not to know what page I was on, not to have a sense of the weight and heft in front of and behind where I was at any given moment.  Instead, I had to try to conceptualize where I was in the book based on the percentage the Kindle told me I had read.  Other than that, reading was, well, reading.  I also have to praise the highlighter feature: just put your finger on the screen, drag it across the text you want to highlight, and that’s it.  You can even type a note.

I’m sure I sound like a luddite.  I’m sure many of you already know what it’s like to read on a Kindle and are probably just humoring me if you’ve read this far.  I will extol one more virtue of the e-reader before I conclude, and that is how nice it is not to have to fight to hold a book open.  I like to read while eating lunch; no more balancing salt and pepper shakers on either page to get the thing to stay open.

So my first Kindle experience was, on the whole, a good one.  But am I a convert?  Let’s put it this way.  One night, while I was reading on the Kindle, Nat said he was going upstairs for awhile and, kissing my still-reading head, told me to enjoy my book.  “It’s not a book,” I replied without intentionally forming the response.  It just came to me.  True, it was probably the quick retort of my long-held and deeply entrenched love of Books and of Tradition.  But it might also have been something of the feeling I get when the writing group I left behind in Northern Virginia imports me to our monthly meetings via webcam.  I’m here in Ohio; they’re there in Alexandria, Virginia, but we can look at each other and talk to each other as good as if I were there.  And yet, I’m not there, and we know that, and not one of us would say we prefer the content of my thoughts and speech to the wonderful fact of being physically in one another’s presence.

I’d love to know what you all think.  Please post your e-reader or non-e-reader experiences in the comments section below…

Ancient Eyes: Reflections on Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean

“Scholars will note,” writes Annabel Lyon in the Acknowledgements section of her novel The Golden Mean, “that I have omitted the philosopher Theophrastus, a follower of Aristotle, who is thought to have accompanied him to Macedonia.”  She goes on, equally formal: “Scholars will note, too, that I have delayed Speusippus’s death for the sake of narrative convenience.”  And then: “Scholars will turn purple over my sending Aristotle to Chaeronea.”

As a novelist myself, I would probably be disappointed if a blogger quoted from my Acknowledgements page, but I started here because the tone is unmistakably Lyon—at once attentive to details of the ancient world but not without a humor that is often funny, frequently witty, and always indelibly in the voice.

The Golden Mean follows Aristotle’s years spent tutoring Alexander the Great.  The premise alone is delicious in the number of great historical figures it implicates.  But where many might shy away from humanizing such larger-than-life men, Lyon not only confidently and clearly re-imagines the ancients, but she does so in the first-person voice of Aristotle himself.  Aristotle comes across as earthy, curious, well-meaning, and plagued by a sadness the great philosopher himself doesn’t understand.  Lyon gives Aristotle these qualities with a light, confident touch that is truly appealing—facts are never belabored; the characters populating Aristotle’s life are vivid and varied; the audacity of going inside the mind of an ancient is never acknowledged but simply done and done well. 

Although I devoured historical fiction in my adolescence (Ann Rinaldi was my favorite), I rarely read it now.  I confess to a bias, inspired partially by the manifesto of the titular character in  Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, that I distrust a writer who cannot see the nobleness of her own time and must instead turn to portraying other eras.  I suppose I’ll sound like a narcissist, and a rather pretentious one at that, when I say that I read literature to gaze in the mirror it holds up to life, but the books that feel like they truly matter, the ones with ballast, are those in a realist mode that treat the world contemporary to that book’s author.  While I can’t say The Golden Mean fits this bill, I nonetheless recommend it as a thoroughly and persuasively imagined romp that, at its best, contains a thought-provoking richness.  For example, the Golden Mean is Aristotle’s idea that perfection lies between extremes, and Lyon works this philosophy to good thematic effect. Above all, I didn’t sense that Lyon turned to the ancient world because she can’t see nobleness in our own time but because she sees in the ancients a vibrant humanity. 

If you read and enjoy The Golden Mean as I did, you may want to check out the novel Lyon herself calls “excellent”: Mary Renault’s novel Fire From Heaven, which takes the same premise of Aristotle tutoring Alexander the Great but tells it from Alexander’s perspective.  I have yet to read it, but Lyon’s emphasis on the Golden Mean inspires me to want to read an imagined account from Alexander’s perspective so that I might find a Golden Mean of fictions that this famous mentorship has spawned.

Those of you following my preparatory reading for Squaw Valley may wonder why I chose a book by Annabel Lyon, who is not on the faculty of the impending workshop.  The answer lies in Lyon’s editor, Diana Coglianese, who is on the faculty and whose resume of working with literary fiction writers makes me eager to meet her. Less than two weeks left until the workshop starts!  Time to get back to my reading…