I just began reading Mark Haddon’s The Red House. Haddon, you might remember, is the author of the highly acclaimed The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and the even more brilliant (in my opinion) A Spot of Bother. Haddon is, I believe, one of the best fiction writer’s out there today. I only got three sentences in to The Red House before I had to stop to read and reread and gush over a particular sentence, which is so finely crafted it almost makes me want to just give up writing because I will never be able to write anything this good.

“Seventy miles per hour, the train unzips the fields.”

Boo-yah!

Allow me, if you will, to unpack the beauty of this one sentence. There is, of course, the metaphor in here of a train, which, when combined with its tracks, looks like a zipper connecting the fields on either side. A stunningly apt metaphor, I think. Yes! That is exactly what trains look like.

But a metaphor is only as good as its connotations. What does the metaphor of a train as a zipper add to the text, you might ask. The image of a train as a zipper, unzipping (and not, it is important to note, rezipping) the world around it brings along subtle ideas of something burgeoning beneath the surface, something hidden that is about to be revealed. A pretty perfect opening to a novel, don’t you think?

But this sentence is brilliant for reasons beyond the fitting metaphor it couriers to the reader. This sentence is so elegant, so concise and economic in its language choices that the elegance of the metaphor can shine through. Many novice writers, or even decent but not brilliant ones, would have felt the need to expand the metaphor, to build on it or linger in it a bit longer to make sure the reader really gets it, notices how brilliant the metaphor’s creator is.

Another writer might have written, “The train looks like a zipper, its tracks the zipper’s treads. Quickly, it zooms across the tracks, unfurling the fields on either side,” or something along those lines. But what would that writer have added, for all those extra words? Fourteen extra words—more than twice the length of the original sentence—and no new meaning expressed. Yes, the reader is for sure going to notice the metaphor, but at what cost?

Beside the fact that it’s wordy, and unnecessary wordiness always feels self-indulgent to me, the new sentence is less subtle. Where the original sentence drops the metaphor on the reader and then lets the reader decode it and tease out the subtext, the new sentence tries to force the meaning on you: Look here! A metaphor about things becoming unfurled! That’s what’s going to happen in this novel! (That’s right, this other writer probably likes to use exclamation points.)

In spite of all these newly added words, the new sentence is also less exact. Where the original sentence just stated, explicitly and in four words, the exact speed the train is going, the new sentence rambles around the topic but never gets further than to tell us it’s going “quickly.” This other writer probably thinks the meandering sentences are more “poetic,” but really, they’re just verbose and imprecise.

And while we’re on the topic, should we point out that there are no adverbs in the original sentence? No. Of course there aren’t. Because expert writers rarely use adverbs. I know, I know. I used a lot of adverbs when I was first starting out too. I peppered my sentences with “quietly”s and “firmly”s and “sheepishly”s, and so on. There are a lot of reasons why novice writers overuse adverbs, and there are a lot of reasons why proficient writers don’t, but the main reason adverbs are rarely (I won’t say never, just rarely—and isn’t it funny that “rarely” is itself an adverb?) a good idea is exemplified in these new, sloppy sentences.

How quick is “quickly”? What does this adverb add that we wouldn’t have already assumed (aren’t trains usually driving quickly? And if you want to specify the speed, why not just offer the exact miles per hour?) The writer has included this adverb not because it adds anything to the text but because (most likely) he or she believes the sentence needs more words to read like the texts he or she studied in high school—you know, those canonical works, from back when writers got paid by the word. Those are the texts this writer believes he or she is meant to be emulating, not the ones that are actually, you know, GETTING PUBLISHED TODAY.

But enough ranting about bad writing. Let’s visit once more, shall we, the beauty of Haddon’s words? I’ll give you the sentences that come before and those that follow, and if you like them (and I know you will), I’ll remind you the book is called The Red House by Mark Haddon. Go read it for yourself. Following are the first six lines from the novel:

“Cooling towers and sewage farms. Finstock, Charlbury, Ascott-under-Wychwood. Seventy miles per hour, the train unzips the fields. Two gun-gray lines beside the river’s meander. Flashes of sun on the hammered metal. Something of steam about it, even now.”

BAM!

This summer, I read what is one of the best memoirs I’ve ever come across: Jen Hirt’s Under Glass:The Girl with a Thousand Christmas Trees. I’m prone to hyperbole, I know (people who’ve eaten Chinese food with me know that every crab rangoon I try is “the best” I’ve ever eaten), but this I say with no exaggeration: I LOVED this book.

I’ll tell you why, but first, a disclaimer: Jen is a friend of mine. That isn’t why I love the book, but it’s something you should know. I’ve worked with Jen at Penn State Harrisburg for a year now—she was on the hiring committee that offered me the job. Ever since I met her—actually, since I first read her Pushcart winning essay, “Lores of Last Unicorns,” which my brother had photocopied for me and passed along because, A) he worked with her (I didn’t yet), and B) I’d been obsessed with unicorns as a little girl and had owned and often poured over a particular book, the sequel of a book Jen talks about in detail in the essay—I’d been wanting to read her memoir, but it took me this long to finally get around to it.

I’m sure I was putting it off for a reason: it’s strange to read creative nonfiction by people you know. I suppose it shouldn’t be, with Facebook these days you can learn intimate details about people’s lives that they’ve never told you face to face. Still, a Facebook post is very immediate—they write it, you read it, they assume you read it, and all is well. With a published essay or book, the lines get muddier. Does she know I know these things about her past? Does she want me to know these things? What might have changed in the years between writing these details and their eventual publication?

As a result, I always feel awkward about bringing up that I’ve read a friend’s creative nonfiction. I want people to know I’ve read their books—I’m a firm believer that writers should support each other, and I make sure to buy and read the books written by people I know. Part of that support, too, means telling them the things I liked about their books. This is easy with poets and fellow fiction writers. Less easy, you see, with nonfiction.

So I suppose, on some level, this is my timid attempt at pouring out all my thoughts about this wonderful book, which made me feel so emotional by the end. Hirt’s prose (I’ll call her Hirt from this point forward—Jen is my friend and colleague; Hirt is the author of this amazing book, and though I know the two are the same, it’s difficult to reconcile them in my mind) is elegant and beautiful. I could pull pretty much any sentence out and display it as its own work of art—this is a writer who knows how to write!

Under Glass is at once both a memoir with a single narrative string and a collection of self-sufficient essays. It’s a style I’ve seen attempted but never quite pulled off in fiction. Books like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit fromthe Goon Squad and Tom Rachman’s TheImperfectionists are labeled as novels, though they’re comprised of individual short stories. The idea is that the individual parts work together to create an overall narrative, complete with beginning, middle, and end, as the cliché goes, but I’ve found that, though the individual stories might be excellent, and as a collection of linked stories, I love both of the example books (especially Rachman’s), I can’t get behind the “novel” label for them. The stories don’t work together to create a single narrative string, in my opinion.

But in Under Glass, the essays stand on their own, but they also work together to paint a full picture of both the history of this family business—from inception to destruction to rebirth as an online store with a new name—and Hirt’s connection to it. There is a definite beginning, middle, and end, an overall narrative arc, and ultimately these essays combine to create something much larger than a collection of linked creative nonfiction—there is a whole here that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the final essay, which describes Hirt’s grandmother Onalee’s unfinished journal. In her journal, Ony (ah-nee) chronicled the purchase and development of the swatch of land on which Hirt’s grandparents lived for most of their lives. Hirt describes the pages and pages of description of the different plants and trees Ony and her husband Hobart planted, the years of waiting to eventually have the money to build a house, the backyard swimming pool and greenhouse Hirt remembers from her childhood.

Through Ony’s journal, we can piece together the narrative of the family business, too, the ups and downs and eventual grand success of a thriving set of greenhouses. But Ony’s journal ends before the end of the narrative, and Hirt takes it upon herself to chronicle what followed: the demolition of the carefully planted and nurtured trees to make way for parking lots, businesses, the “city.” The controlled burning of the house, used as practice for the local firefighters. The Pier 1 and Famous Footwear that fill the space where the backyard greenhouse and house once lived, which calls to mind the CVS that now stands where the family business greenhouses once flourished.

This final essay, which would be powerful enough on its own, carries that much more force because of the essays that precede it. We know, by this point in the book, about Hirt’s childhood playing and working in the greenhouses. We know about the destruction of the greenhouses, just like we know about the destruction of Hirt’s parents’ marriage, Hirt’s mother’s health. We know that, as a young adult, Hirt found herself more concerned with the potted houseplant her neighbors had left on their porch to die than the vicious fights her neighbors themselves were having with each other (perhaps, the essays when read in conjunction suggest, because the plant is a problem Hirt knows how to handle). We know, too, about the reincarnation of the once named Strongsville Gardens and later, Hirt’s Greenhouse: Hirt’s Gardens, an online store that is, after it all, blossoming in the cutthroat world of e-commerce with Hirt’s brother, Matt, at the helm. We understand, then, the full meaning of Hirt’s final line: “Those woods are no longer here, but they are not too far away.”

I can’t do this book justice by just telling you about it. You should read it for yourself. Never have I so unreservedly wanted to recommend a book by a friend to everyone that knows how to read. Never have I been so in awe of the writing of someone I know. Read it! Read it! This book will not disappoint.

This past year at AWP, I spent the majority of my time perusing the booths and tables in the book fair. Though I actually tend to enjoy panel discussions and lectures—even though there’s rarely ever anything new said at this point in the game—my favorite part of AWP (not counting seeing old friends) is the book fair.

This year at the book fair, I took a slightly different approach than last year. Last year, my primary interest was as a submitter. I wanted to see the variety of places I might submit. While I bought quite a few books and journals, and I bought only ones I was truly interested in reading, I also only bought ones that were published by venues I was interested in submitting to. I wanted to get a better idea of what these particular editors liked.

I believe this is precisely what most people do at the AWP book fair. The journals and presses know it too. They plan for it. They have on the ready printouts with their submission guidelines; they advertise their upcoming contests on glossy postcards.

But when you really think about it, it’s kind of sad. Here you have this huge market, full of hundreds upon hundreds—surely thousands—of books for sale, many of which are difficult to find in brick and mortar stores, yet the people shopping in the market are interested mostly in selling their own wares. There’s this great disconnect between what the publishers want—to sell the customers their books or journals—and what the customers want—to get published.

This year, when I hit the book fair floor, I didn’t do it as a writer, but as a reader. I wasn’t looking for places to submit. I didn’t care about upcoming contests. I just wanted to spend my leftover Christmas money on some good books and journals; I wanted to find some great stuff to read. Some of the journals I bought I would never consider submitting to—like Kugelmass, which publishes entirely literary humor. I don’t write humor, but I thought I might enjoy reading it, so I picked up their latest issue. And I bought books not because I was considering submitting my novel to that press, but because, simply put, the book looked good.

In the coming months, I’m going to review some of the journals I came home with here, on my blog. I decided to do this partly because it will encourage me to actually read the journals all the way through. Also, though, I hope to share my experience reading them with you. If I find a great gem in the batch, I want you to know about that gem. Likewise, if I come across a journal that I don’t think is that great, I’ll tell you why and let you decide for yourself if you want to read it or submit there.

Tom McAllister, the nonfiction editor at Barrelhouse, blogged this week about the positive vs. negative criticism controversy. To gain a full understanding of the controversy, I recommend you read McAllister’s blog, if you haven’t already, as this is a multifaceted issue and I don’t have the space to really cover it in full detail here. McAllister is very even-handed and fair in his assessment of the issue. In fact, the next day, he posted an addendum to the initial post, clarifying his points and adding further ideas he’d thought about later.

I agree with McAllister and am impressed with his objectivity. Still, I disagree with the conclusion that we should all of us, every one, be posting negative reviews for the sake of honesty. I hope it doesn’t seem like I’m constructing a straw man here, but after reading McAllister’s blog, I believe he’s suggesting just that: that withholding comment is no different from lying. If you are not a book reviewer or critic, in my opinion there is no appropriate alternative to posting only positive comments about other writers’ work.

The problem arises from equating the work of book reviewers and critics to online posts writers make about other writers. The two are not the same. Book reviewers and critics are being tasked to give their evaluation of a book, regardless of whether they like it or not. People posting to social media sites are choosing to post about a book—nobody asked for their opinion, and, probably, nobody cares except the writer, if he or she sees the post, and possibly a small number of friends who value the poster’s judgment and taste.

Here’s what I think:

 

It’s important to distinguish between critics/book reviewers and people who are just posting on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. about their friends’ books (or just books they’ve read). I agree that book reviewers and critics should be willing to post negative reviews. If you’ve been assigned (or if you’ve volunteered) to review a specific book and it turns out you freakin’ hate it, it would be totally unethical to post a positive review of that book. It’s less obviously unethical to just not write the review at all, but personally, I agree with McAllister that negative reviews can be as useful as positive ones, and that professional reviewers should probably post both positive and negative reviews.

People who are just posting in the social media about books they’ve read, though—that’s completely different. Yes, everyone should still be honest. If a friend of yours writes a book and you hate it, you shouldn’t lie and post about how much you loved it on Facebook. I don’t agree, though, that you should post negative comments about the book. If a friend of mine reads Peter Never Came and hates it, fine; we can still be friends—but if he or she plasters the web with negative comments about my book for no reason, we’re through. Does that make me an asshole, as McAllister says? I don’t think so. I think it makes me human. I don’t feel compelled to ridicule my friends when they write things I don’t engage with, and I expect the same courtesy in return.

Does that mean that we end up with only gushing reviews on Facebook and Twitter, people posting about other people’s “brilliant” books? Yes, I guess it does. And I guess I’m okay with that, because as long as those people are being honest (again, I DO agree that it’s unethical to say you love something if you don’t), we can trust these positive reviews, even if the people posting them are personal friends of the authors.

Now, that doesn’t mean I think we should refrain from offering our honest feedback if a friend asks for it. If I ask someone for their opinion of something I wrote, I expect the truth. Likewise, if someone tells me they loved something I wrote, it does me NO GOOD if it turns out to have been a lie. I won’t learn anything, have a chance to improve, if everybody just claims everything I write is perfect as is.

But keep in mind we’re talking here about already published work. It’s too late, now, to do further revision, and the fact that it’s been published indicates that some editor somewhere likes it. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect; that doesn’t mean the writer can’t still gain something from criticism. But it’s the place of the book reviewer and critic to help the writer from there. If the writer asks for your help, then it’s your place too, but otherwise, let’s be honest, only a true asshole feels it’s his or her place to point out other people’s foibles.

Again, book reviewers and actual critics should feel free to tear any published piece apart—that’s their job—but a friend? No. If you read the published work of a friend and you don’t like it, I think you should follow your mama’s advice from grade school and keep your mouth shut unless otherwise requested.

I want to finally talk about Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, which I read a few weeks ago. This book, remember, was one of three finalists for the fiction Pulitzer this year—one of the few years in Pulitzer history that no fiction prize was awarded. I was particularly interested in reading this one because, while the other two books had surface level or publication related issues that may have prevented them from earning the prize, the only thing standing in the way of this book winning would have been content problems—problems with the book itself.

The short response is I liked the book. My long response, of course, involves a “but”: but I can understand why it didn’t win the Pulitzer.

First, some praise: the story is very compelling; the characters, though quirky to the point of not being believable, are likeable and interesting; and the plot really drives you forward, with some exciting and unexpected turns. I don’t want to give anything away—because I DO strongly recommend you read the book for yourself—but there are some dark and quite painful elements to this book, which is, at its core, the story of how two poor (as in financially) kids from the swamp come to learn what the real world is.

The book is divided into two separate threads: the story of Ava Bigtree, our thirteen-year-old first-person narrator, and that of her seventeen-year-old brother, Kiwi, who runs away to the mainland to get a job in the hopes of sending money home to his family and forestalling the impending foreclosure on their swamp. The book gets off to a plodding start, and my biggest complaint about it is that the first hundred or so pages do little more than establish who these characters are and what their pasts are like. It reminded me of the first hundred or so pages of the much criticized The Girlwith the Dragon Tattoo—which book, for the record, I actually liked. But the first hundred or so pages should have been trimmed. Same here. There’s no reason why these important, establishing details couldn’t have been worked into the story itself, instead of starting with a hundred pages of establishing stuff, then beginning the plot.

I also have problems with the quirkiness of the characters (particularly Ava and Kiwi’s sister, Ossie, who believes she is in contact with the undead). I’ve met a lot of people in my life, and I’ve never met people who are as over-the-top quirky as the characters in some of today’s popular books, movies, and TV shows. I just don’t think that kind of quirkiness is realistic.

And, as many of the reviewers on Amazon mentioned, the writing is very show-offy. Note that show-offy writing is not the same as beautiful writing. Some of the writing is beautiful, but much of it is so overly poetic that I kept being taken out of the story to either A) marvel at what a unique way of saying what she’s trying to say Russell has, or B) read and reread a sentence trying to figure out what the heck it means. Even when it was A, which seems like a good thing, you have to remember I was being pulled out of the story each time. It got tiresome. I couldn’t just get sucked in—isn’t that what we all hope for when we begin reading a novel?

But I want to repeat that I DID like the book. Once the plot really gets going—particularly once Ava’s plot really gets going, which doesn’t happen until around the halfway point of the book—I really cared about what was happening, and I felt moved, saddened, genuinely wounded at certain points in the narrative. I loved the ending, loved the way both Ava and Kiwi (and to a lesser degree, their sister Ossie) have been so irreversibly changed by the events that have taken place. Love the fact that I genuinely believe that Ava, our narrator, has grown up—in a sad, a very sad way—by the end. I also loved some of the imagery, loved the writing itself at points, when it wasn’t too over-the-top, and I do think Russell has a lot of talent; she’s a writer whose name I’ll definitely watch for from this point forward.

But I couldn’t help but compare Swamplandia! to last year’s fiction Pulitzer winner, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. I didn’t think A Visit from the Goon Squad was the best book I’d ever read or anything, but it was a good book with a lot of interesting, intricately woven themes. It’s structure was interesting too, and not necessarily in a gimmicky way (like, say, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which was good, but the peculiar structure really didn’t add much, so it ended up feeling like a cheap gimmick). Egan is a much better writer than Russell. At least, right now.

Russell, though, is at the very beginning of her career. I agree with Pulitzer fiction judge Michael Cunningham that Swamplandia! is impressive for a first novel, and I have no doubt Russell will just get better and better as she goes along. Russell, by the way, is my age—she’s exactly six months (to the day) younger than me, actually (I looked it up). Her first book came out when she was like 25—the year I entered into my MFA program. She’s already off to a great start in her career, and even if Swamplandia! wasn’t quite good enough to win the Pulitzer, it was a good book, and I won’t be a bit surprised if a Pulitzer is in Russell’s future—just not for this book.

I recently borrowed one of Steve Almond’s self-published books, This Won’t Take but a Minute, Honey, from a friend. Having read Almond’s two-part article on his experiences self-publishing in Poets & Writers a couple of years ago, I was very interested to actually read one of Almond’s self-published books (I haven’t, it should be noted, actually read any of his non-self-published books. This Won’t Take but a Minute, Honey was my first journey into Almond’s work, though I assure you it won’t be my last).

Divided into two parts, “Stories” and “Essays,” This Won’t Take but a Minute, Honey is essentially a manual for fiction writers that includes a series of flash fiction examples to illustrate the points he discusses under the “Essays” section.

While some of his points are overstatements, in my opinion (most notably, that “metaphors almost always suck,” which Almond himself seems to disagree with as not only does he admit to admiring the work of writers who use metaphors, but he himself uses plenty of metaphors in his own writing), overall, I agreed with and enjoyed reading Almond’s guidelines for good fiction writing. Perhaps because each “essay”—though they’re really not stand-alone essays but more like a series of brief chapters, each which builds on the chapters that came before—is so short, I flew right through the writing guide.

There are a few repeating points that Almond makes throughout the book, one of the most important of which is that you should “never confuse the reader.” Almond complains about writers who withhold information, who begin the story with dialogue without saying who is speaking, who use a lot of pronouns right off the bat, who jump around needlessly in time. Again, here I think he overstates some of his points, but in general he’s right—good fiction shouldn’t be confusing. I’m not of the mindset that non-linear chronology or pronouns are inherently confusing, but I see his point: sometimes they are, and they almost always are when handled by novice writers (the same is true of the metaphor issue, for that matter).

Almond offers some valuable insights into how to write well, and what I particularly appreciated about the book was his blatant disregard for what is often taught in advanced workshops. Almond seems to favor simplicity and plot over beautiful sentences and interesting ideas (in fact, Almond says, “I don’t want your stinkin’ ideas,” and points out that while good fiction does explore interesting ideas, “these ideas arise from—and are vitalized by—the emotional lives of the characters.”).

But my favorite point that Almond makes appears in his “essay” titled “As Close as We Get to Song,” in which Almond describes those writers—we all know at least one—who claim that writing is a heavenly experience, one that just carries them away in feelings of happiness and easy productivity. Good for them, but “for the rest of us, writing is basically flagellation, an undertaking that promises ecstatic release but mostly feels like torture.” Sure, sometimes I feel the other way, the heavenly, carried away on a cloud way. But often I feel the torture way, and it’s always reassuring to hear successful, published authors who feel the same.

I really enjoyed the book and think I’ll get a copy for myself, so I can refer back to it from time to time. But as much as I liked the book as a whole, I do have to say that it could have benefitted from a professional editor. As is often the case with self-published books, there were far more errors and typos than I would expect to find in a book published through a traditional publishing house (the most shocking was when Almond referred to “whip cream,” meaning “whipped cream.” No offense to Almond, but that’s the kind of mistake my freshman comp students make).

Ohio University, which is home to the graduate creative writing program local to my area, hosts an annual literary festival each spring. Last year the headliner was Tobias Wolff, and the year before, George Saunders. We’re talking big time names. There’s always a lot of excitement in the air during the festival, and since I know several people who are affiliated with the program, I get to hear a lot about the authors who come—what they were like during lunch and the genre specific colloquiums they run with the grad students.

This year, I had never even heard of most of the people coming. Amy Hempel, I was told, was sort of the headliner, but Susan Orlean is hugely famous too (having written, it turns out, The Orchid Thief, the book that’s being adapted into a screenplay in the film Adaptation), as are Denise Duhamel, Richard Rodriguez, and Terrance Hayes, this year’s obligatory sexy male poet, who I actually was previously aware of, but only because he had been a visiting writer at the University of Alaska Fairbanks when I was in the MFA program up there. 

Regardless of the fact that I was shamefully unfamiliar with this year’s amazing cast of writers prior to their coming, this year was, in my opinion, the best Lit Fest I’ve attended—and I say that even though I only, really, was able to go to Amy Hempel’s events (though I caught a little bit of Terrance Hayes and Denise Duhamel—completely missed Susan Orlean and Richard Rodriguez. Rodriguez, I hear, was absolutely REMARKABLE).

I’m not, as you probably know, a student at OU, but my friend Jolynn, who is going for her PhD in fiction there, got me into Amy Hempel’s fiction colloquium. During the colloquium I pretty much kept my mouth shut because I hadn’t read any of Hempel’s work and didn’t, as a result, know what to ask her. I kept my ears open, though, and very much enjoyed listening to her answer the questions the others asked about her writing process, her experiences publishing, and so on. She’s a real sweetheart, Amy Hempel, and incredibly friendly and down-to-Earth.

I picked up a copy of her first book, Reasons to Live (I know, great title!) and had her sign it for me, and I slowly worked my way through the stories last week. I say “slowly” and “worked” because, though these stories are incredibly short—most of them would definitely fall into the category of flash fiction—they are dense, and not in a bad way. They’re the kind of stories you have to sit and reflect on after you finish, the kind you read more than once just to make sure you caught everything, or because the ending sends you back to the beginning with a new filter through which to process the prose.

The most striking thing about Hempel’s writing is her close attention to the rhythm of each sentence. She said she focuses on the sentence, not the story as a whole, and you can definitely see this shining through in her stories. She, like me, is the sort of writer who begins with a line, a killer line that you just have to get down and that you know will inevitably lead to another line, and another. But, unlike me, she is able to feel her way through her language the way a poet can—in fact, many of her stories read as much like prose poems as they do like flash fiction.

She also knows exactly what not to include, how to give the reader just the bare minimum and let him or her put it all together from there. Hempel’s style of writing would be frustrating, I would argue, if she were a novelist. But she isn’t. She has never, she told us, had any interest in writing novels. She wouldn’t know how to go about it, she said. And as a short story writer—particularly a short-short story writer—her bare bones, sentence over story style works fantastically well.

Once, in a workshop, one of my UAF professors, David Crouse, mentioned that he could see his own writing as being on the same plane of existence as Rick Bass’s, but another writer—I can’t remember, now, which one—was on a different plane of existence altogether. He could admire what she was doing (I do remember it was a female writer), but knew he could never do it himself. That’s the way I feel about Amy Hempel. Hempel is, perhaps, the first writer who I felt that way about. Other writers whose work I admire I’ve admired in that, I-can-see-what-you’re-doing-and-I-think-I-can-learn-to-do-it-too sort of way. Not that I think I’m as good, say, as Rick Moody, but I feel like I can understand the mechanism behind Moody’s work, and if I keep at it and keep practicing, maybe someday I’ll be able to pull off what he can. Hempel’s work, though, is so unlike anything I would ever write, could ever write, that it really is like we exist on two completely different planes: I can see her from where I am, but as much as I keep walking forward, I’ll never reach her.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t learn from her.

I love this idea of focusing on the sentence. It’s, to be honest, a fairly foreign way of writing to me. From the workshops I’ve taken, with the varied and all fabulous workshop instructors I’ve studied under, I’ve grown accustomed to looking at story more than sentence. Character. Scene. All of these things tend to come before sentence. Focusing so much on each sentence is much more of a poet thing, I’ve always thought, but I think there’s a lot to be gained from picking a story apart the way you would a poem—paying careful attention to each individual word, each image, spending as much energy deciding what to leave out as what to put in.

Fellow UAF MFAer and good friend Shane Dayton recently made his MFA thesis, a novel called My Brother’s Keeper, available as an e-book on Amazon. I’m sure the decision to self-publish wasn’t made lightly, but after numerous personal, encouraging responses from editors and agents but still no book deal, I think Shane came to the conclusion that it was time to put the book out there and move on.
 
Personally, I was excited to finally get to read the book. Shane’s work was always among my favorite in workshop. His prose is somehow both gritty and lyrical at once, and his stories take on topics that a lot of other literary fiction writers don’t tackle. He doesn’t write about ailing marriages, about mundane situations causing great epiphanies. He’s not, like so many writers of our generation, trying to be Raymond Carver—I’m sorry, guys, Raymond Carver’s stuff is great, but you need to find your voice.

Shane’s work also never sacrifices plot to focus solely on the sentence. His sentences are good, but so are his actual stories, and My Brother’s Keeper is an excellent example. My Brother’s Keeper takes the reader into the mind of sixteen-year-old Gyle, a misfit with only three friends. Gyle is tired of being pushed around by the other kids at his high school, tired of being ignored by his father in favor of his athletic brother, and otherwise bored with his humdrum teenaged life. Gyle’s life is such that, as he puts it, “The days everyone ignored me were the easiest to get through.” It’s no surprise, then, that when Gyle meets Brent—a mysterious, Tyler Durdenesque boy who appears to be not much older than Gyle himself but who lives alone in a cabin in the woods—he is instantly drawn to the excitement and danger a friendship with Brent seems to offer.  

As Gyle begins to spend more time with Brent, it becomes clear that Brent views their relationship as that of a mentor to a protégé, yet Gyle, at first, is fine with this set-up. He admires Brent, even fears him, a little. Gyle wants to be strong and brave like Brent; he wants to be the sort of person who doesn’t get ignored. Slowly, Gyle finds himself changing in what he at first sees as positive ways, but as the story unfolds, Brent’s mental instability begins to rise to the surface, and Gyle begins to feel less comfortable with the new person Brent is pushing him to become.

When the story reaches its thrilling conclusion, all the loose ends are not neatly tied in a bow. The ends are frayed; they’re damaged and broken from the events of the story. The ending is complicated and messy and real. When asked, in the last scene, by one of his three friends if he is the person he was before this all began or the person she came to detest during the height of Gyle’s progression towards Brent-ness, Gyle doesn’t know what to say: “She wanted a quick answer, but I didn’t have one for her.” Finally, he tells her, “Neither,” but he can’t really elaborate further than that. I won’t give away the last line, but it’s beautiful and perfect and leaves you highly aware of just how changed Gyle is.

My Brother’s Keeper is a psychological thriller with the sensibilities of literary fiction. It’s darkly comic at points, intensely frightening at others, and it maintains the steady momentum of a plot driven novel, though not at the expense of character and sentence. It’s well worth the $2.99 Shane is charging for it, and I highly recommend it to anyone who really values story—plot—not just elegant writing.

A Tale of Two Movies

Yes, this week’s post has a title. I couldn’t resist. Even though it’s a bit dorksy.

Anyway, as you can probably tell from the (dorksy) title, I want to talk this week about a couple of movies I watched recently, both based on novels I had read previously. The Hunger Games, as everyone not living in a cave probably knows, is the first in an insanely popular (and startlingly good) trilogy by Suzanne Collins. The film adaptation hit the theaters a few weeks ago. The Ruins by Scott Smith is probably the best horror novel I’ve ever read. The movie version was released in 2008, but I only just got around to watching it (I picked it up used for $3 worth of trade at my local music/movie store, Haffa’s. The price should give you an idea of how popular the movie was.)

Both screenplays were at least partially written by the original book authors. Suzanne Collins is credited with three other screenwriters for The Hunger Games, and Scott Smith is listed as the sole screenwriter of The Ruins. It’s no surprise, then, that both movies remain pretty true to their respective books (although in both, the screenwriters had to change some small details to fit the film format).

Watching movie versions of books I love in such short succession of each other really got me thinking about the differences between novels and movies, and the problems that arise when the former is adapted in to the latter. It’s true of most movies based on novels that if you ask just about anyone who read the book and watched the movie both, they’ll tell you the book was better. This is not snooty or pretentious or a means of bragging about having read the book (though sometimes it comes across that way).

The truth is, this reaction is almost universal because when these novels were written, they were written for the literary format. The characters, plot points, etc. were all structured with the knowledge that the reader would likely spend a few days working his or her way through the story. The pace is much slower. In a movie, you have to somehow tell a complete story, develop your characters, establish tension, and so on, and you have to do it all in a couple of hours. The pace feels ridiculously fast in comparison, so the same sort of scope you can work with in a novel simply will not work for a movie, in my opinion. You have to zoom in, narrow your focus. It’s a lot more like a short story.

Case in point, look at The Hunger Games (SPOILER ALERT!): Because the movie stays so faithful to the book, a lot of ground is covered in a very short period of time. In some cases, a feeling of knowing and really caring about the characters is sacrificed. In the book, Katniss and Rue are together for several pages. We spend enough time with Rue to really feel that we know her, and her death is so, so painful as a result. In the movie, Katniss meets Rue, really meets her for the first time, then in the next scene they separate. When they reunite, Rue dies. They spend I would guess not much more than five minutes of screen time together because almost immediately after they meet, Rue dies. There’s no time there to build any kind of a connection with Rue. The movie relies on viewers either A) having read the book, so they already know and love Rue, or B) caring about Rue’s death solely because Rue is young and adorable.

In the book of The Ruins, the majority of the book is really about these kids going stir-crazy, trapped together atop the mound. That doesn’t mean the vine isn’t a genuine threat or that it isn’t scary, but what’s really scary is watching the mental states of these kids get slowly more and more unstable, until it becomes clear that the real danger is the one they’re posing to themselves. The movie stays close enough to the book to maintain some of that, but it’s impossible to really recreate the psychological twists and turns the book takes when we’re not able to climb inside the characters’ heads.

Both movies were good movies, don’t get me wrong. The Ruins in particular really caught me by surprise, I suppose because I went into it with fairly low expectations (although I should point out that the ending to the movie version of The Ruins is lame—I’m not sure why Smith changed it—and as freaky as the vine is in the book, you just can’t make a plant scary in a movie. At times, in fact, it looks sort of silly). But yes, if you asked me, I’d tell you the books were better. Waaaaaay better.

As much as I’m a movie lover and an advocate for the value of short fiction, I do love to get lost in a novel. I love the scope of novels; I love to spend days getting to know the characters, so I can really, really care about the things that happen to them. From a technical perspective, I still think short stories make better use of the craft elements taught in MFA programs. But from an emotional perspective, the longer form is better suited to make the reader really engage with the characters and their plights. There’s something that absolutely cannot be replaced about spending a few days slowly consuming—and in the best cases, being consumed by—a really good novel.

A friend of mine out here in Ohio, Kelly Kathleen Ferguson, published her first book a few months ago: My Life as Laura: How I Searched for Laura Ingalls Wilder and Found Myself. Kelly has agreed to let me interview her regarding her experience publishing the book, which I plan to post sometime in March. (She also talks a little bit about the process at the end of the book, if you’re interested.) 

In the meantime, I wanted to talk a little about how much I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed the book. It’s funny and poignant, sad at parts, but that plucky, you-can-get-through-this sort of sad. The book details Kelly’s exploits retracing the Ingalls family’s journey west, at the same time exploring Kelly’s relationship with a man she refers to as “My Manly” and her desire to figure out what it is she wants out of life.

Part of the reason I was so pleased that this book was so good was because I remember, a couple of years ago, talking to Kelly about the book while she was writing it. This was not long after I had met Kelly, not long after I found out that Kelly’s first fiction publication—that’s right, her very first—had appeared in no less than the Gettysburg Review. (That same story ended up being nominated for a Pushcart, and it got her noticed by an agent!)

I remember it very clearly: a small group of us were having lunch at Casa Nueva—a highly overrated restaurant in my town, which serves food that kind of, sort of, if you really squint your eyes and hold your nose, resembles Mexican food—and Kelly was talking about working on the book. She really should be home writing, she said, but she knew the second she got home she would probably just curl up on the couch with the cats and take a nap. She was joking around, of course, but the sentiment behind the joke rang true: sometimes she just didn’t feel like writing. She had to get this thing done, she told me, because she’d already lined up a publisher for it. Still, there were definitely days when she had to force herself to get to work.

Cut to a little over two years later: the book is out and it’s fabulous. The work she did definitely paid off, and based on the number of Amazon book reviews it’s already garnered (my book’s been out more than a year and only three people have reviewed it on Amazon), I think it’s selling pretty well. And as I was reading it, I couldn’t stop thinking about that day at Casa, how she hadn’t felt like writing. She hadn’t felt like writing, and yet when she sat down and forced herself to do it anyway, this lovely book is what resulted.

I find it all very reassuring, don’t you? ALL writers have to force it sometimes, even the really, really good ones like Kelly. Nobody walks around in a constant state of inspiration. Some days we stare at the blank screen for what feels like hours, willing the words to come. Others, we have trouble even getting that far. But it’s the writers who sit in front of that computer anyway who eventually produce excellent books like My Life as Laura. We should all take a page out of Kelly’s book.

Sorry, kitty, no nap for me today. I’ve got work to do.

Over the past week or so I read two very, very good books—Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby and Room by Emma Donoghue. Nick Hornby is one of my favorite writers—I’ve read all of his novels and loved every one. This was the second book I’ve read by Emma Donoghue, although I didn’t realize that until the end, when I was looking at the list of other books by her. It turns out she wrote one of my favorite short story collections of all time, Kissing the Witch, which reimagines classic fairy tales through a modern feminist perspective.

Both Juliet, Naked and Room were absolutely riveting, and Room is the best book I’ve read in a looooooong time. One thing that really struck me about both books was the fact that I was so engaged with the characters and plots that the writing itself just faded completely into the background—I hardly noticed it at all. This is not to say that the writing wasn’t good, on a language level. Both authors have an excellent grasp of voice, and we learn so much about the characters by the way they see and think about the world. Especially impressive is the writing in Room, which takes as its narrator a five-year-old boy who doesn’t understand very much about the world (think The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime but even younger and even more confused). Sounds like a difficult, maybe even impossible perspective to get in to, but Donoghue totally pulls it off. It is, in fact, the voice of the narrator that gives Room its emotional resonance. He’s so innocent, so young and sweet. He deserves better than this awful, awful world.

But it wasn’t really the beautiful, flawless sentences in both books that made them so impossible to put down, or at least, it was more than that. It was the combination of everything together: the stories themselves, the characters, and the perfect writing. I had to know what was going to happen next. Would Annie end up sleeping with Tucker? Would Jack and Ma escape Old Nick and leave Room forever behind? I’ve talked in the past about how novels often have their slow patches, and how usually, when I finish reading a novel, I feel as though it should have been significantly trimmed. Not so with either of these books. I was right there with the characters on every single page, and that’s the sort of thing that can only be accomplished by compelling plot and characters, not beautiful writing alone.

On the one hand, there was something mildly depressing about the books, as a writer. Because I could never be that good. Because I’m the sort of writer who gets by on lyrical prose; plot is the biggest thing I struggle with, and it probably always will be. Still, reading these books was a valuable reminder of why I became a writer to begin with. It wasn’t the old “I could do that too” mentality that writers sometimes talk about. I became a writer—I’m sure many of us did—because of books like these. Books so perfect I wouldn’t change a thing. Books I could never have written myself. Books that make the world a better place just by their mere existence.

Last week I read Jennifer Egan’s strange book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer for fiction this year. I say Goon Squad is strange because it’s marketed as a novel, though it’s clearly more a collection of stories than a novel, but it really isn’t a collection of short stories, either. It’s an odd little book that seems to defy categorization.

Egan’s book is not the first collection of linked stories, and it’s not even the first to call itself a novel. I can’t help but compare it to Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists, which I’d read just a couple of weeks before I read Goon Squad. Rachman’s book felt, to me, like a collection of linked short stories that the author (or publisher, who knows?) tried to force into the mold of  a novel by providing some (very dull and predictable) interludes between each chapter that told the overall story of the newspaper that (most of) these characters worked for. The stories themselves were incredibly good, but I thought the book would have been much better if Rachman had cut the interludes and published the book as a short story collection (but, of course, if he had done that, it never would have gotten published by a major press like it did; it never would have made the New York Times Bestseller List).

Goon Squad is different, though. While there is no overall story arc, and each chapter of the novel has a different main character and zooms in on a different part of the novel’s timeline—which, like in Rachman’s case, would normally scream story collection to me—each individual chapter doesn’t necessarily have a story arc, either. Some of them do. Some of the chapters definitely feel like self-contained short stories, with the beginning, middle, end, conflict, resolution, and character change that the term “story” usually implies. But most of the chapters feel more like snapshots of specific times in the characters’ lives (from teenage to early adulthood to middle age to old age). String them all together, the way Egan did, and you still don’t have an overall story, but look at them separately, and you don’t really seem to have individual stories, either (with some exceptions).

So how do we categorize A Visit from the Goon Squad then? Egan (or her publishers) chose to sell it as a novel, and maybe that was partially because most readers aren’t interested in short story collections and partially because something is possibly gained, some slow building of understanding of the book’s underlying themes, if you read the “stories” in the exact order they appear in the book. Call it a story collection, and people might skip around or not read certain stories at all, and ultimately, those people might miss out on the whole point of the book, which I’d guess can only really be discovered by reading every chapter and then thinking back on the connections between them.

Because that’s the thing about the book: there are very interesting themes at work here, which begin to reveal themselves the further you get into it. In the most obvious way, Goon Squad is about the passage of time, about growing up and growing older and becoming, in spite of yourself, all the things you never thought you would: a middle ager who is suddenly very concerned with her status at the country club and finds herself hanging out with republicans; an aging punk-rocker turned corporate, sell-out music producer; an eczematic failed novelist who becomes a celebrity journalist and, in the novel’s most disturbing chapter, attempts to rape (and contemplates murdering) a beautiful nineteen-year-old starlet during an interview.  

These characters are raw and, most of them, despicable, but they’re despicable in that way that all people are despicable when you really hold a microscope to them. They are, in other words, very real—vivid and well-developed, everything well-written characters should be. And ultimately the book is not meant to be a “story” or even “stories” about these characters; instead, the book shows us snippets of their lives at key moments and then pulls back and lets you see how they grew up, sold out, became fat and greedy and jaded, became bad people: thieves and would-be rapists and bad parents.

“Time,” as two different characters point out in two different chapters, “is a goon,” and it comes for us all in the end.

This book, then, is something entirely different: not a novel, not a short story collection, not exactly compelling as you’re reading it but extremely interesting once you finish and step back to ponder it all as a whole. That’s right, I found Goon Squad boring as I was slogging through it—it took me almost a full week to read this one, 275 page book—but once I read it, I was glad I did. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on here, and while a little more plot, a little tension, would have made the experience of reading the book more enjoyable, overall, Goon Squad was definitely an excellent work of literature, and I can understand why it won the Pulitzer.

I recently read Scott Smith’s first novel, A Simple Plan. I had already read, a few years ago, Smith’s second book, The Ruins, which I consider to be one of the best horror novels I’ve ever read. Smith is one of those interesting writers who doesn’t put books out very often—A Simple Plan came out in 1993, The Ruins, thirteen years later, and those are his only two so far—but when  he does, they are hugely successful. Both of his books have been made into movies (A Simple Plan I saw years ago, when it came out, and loved it. I haven’t seen the movie of The Ruins, although I heard it’s not very good, which is interesting because the screenplay was written by Smith himself).

What interests me most about Smith, though, is how seamlessly he weaves together genre-like plot with believable characters and beautiful writing (although the beautiful writing was less prevalent in A Simple Plan than I remember it being in The Ruins). Both books have very well developed characters, each who behave in the exact way these characters would if the story were real, regardless of the fact that the overall premise of each book is not really the stuff of real life.

It’s kind of amazing, if you really think about it, this ability Smith has to make sure the characters are always doing and saying things that are consistent with who they are, while still keeping the plot fantastically gripping. The problem with most highly plot driven stories, in my opinion, is that they tend to sacrifice believable characters for exciting plot points. The writer has mapped out, before he/she even began in many cases, exactly what should happen in this story. What will keep the reader turning the pages? What’s the most unexpected, electrifying way to keep the story moving? Then, the writer has to force the characters to do and say things that will make that next, pre-determined plot point happen. The result, of course, is that the characters aren’t doing or saying what they would if they were real people who actually found themselves in these bizarre circumstances.

But the alternative tends to require the sacrifice of a really stimulating plot. Well, this character would do this and not that in this situation, so unfortunately, the next plot point is going to be a bit dull.

Don’t get me wrong, I prefer stories that are more character driven. If your characters feel real and I totally buy everything they do and say, I don’t mind, so much, if the plot is fairly uneventful, as long as there is at least the bare bones of a plot somewhere in there (Raymond Carver is the perfect example of this style of writing). I don’t like it, though, when the plot is thrilling but the characters are bland and lifeless. That, to me, is the epitome of bad writing.

Smith, though, is able to have it both ways: his characters are believable and consistent, and yet turn after turn, the plot keeps you on your toes—in both books, the characters are dropping like flies, and there’s a lot of psychological suspense and unexpected plot twists. Yet at no point does a character do or say something that doesn’t ring true to who that person is.

Here’s my theory about what Smith does: I think he comes up with a wild premise (three men discover a crashed airplane with a dead body and millions of dollars inside; they decide not to report the plane and keep the money for themselves. Or a group of college kids on spring break in Mexico accidentally stumble into some ancient ruins; they become trapped there, and quickly discover that the ruins are home to a man-eating plant), and I think Smith knows how it’s all going to end, too, but beyond that, I believe that he has no idea what’s going to happen in between. How will these three men reach this conclusion? How will these kids escape or not escape (I won’t tell you which one in case you haven’t read it) these ruins? I believe that Smith himself doesn’t know when he starts writing; he just gets the characters to the starting point and then lets them do what they naturally would from that point forward.

If my theory is true, then why do Smith’s plots end up so compelling? That’s pretty much the way literary fiction writers go about writing, isn’t it? Probably these books’ success is largely based on the fact that Smith is just a good writer, plain and simple, but part of it, I think, comes from the way he’s going about it. His premises are bizarre and genre-esque, and his characters, very well drawn out. No matter what choices these characters make in these crazy situations, their choices are bound to lead to more interesting plot points, which will lead to more interesting choices. He doesn’t need to sit down and figure out the plot beforehand; a good plot is inevitable based on the way he set things up.

I don’t know, of course, if this is really what Smith is doing, but I really do think it is. It’s hard for me to imagine these characters remaining so true to themselves if Smith had planned the plot out in advance, and it’s hard for me to imagine the plot remaining so compelling if he hadn’t started with a high-concept premise and very strong characters. I think he’s just found the perfect balance between plot and characters, and ultimately, I would describe his stories as character driven, even though the plots are also very strong. Reading Smith’s work is enjoyable as a reader and inspirational as a writer. I can’t help but pick apart what I think he’s doing and learn from it in the hopes of improving my own work.

My husband, Damien, recently read The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown, which I had read for my book club last summer and spent, no doubt, more time than I ought to have complaining about its many faults to Damien after I read it. It’s a very poorly crafted book, to say the least, and since it’s the only Dan Brown book I’ve ever read (and probably ever will read), I find it’s mere existence kind of grating since there are so many good writers out there who aren’t getting the attention that writers like Dan Brown receive.

Damien, though, is an unapologetic Dan Brown fan, so I was anxious to hear his thoughts on The Lost Symbol. Would he think it was a good book, I wondered? Were what I was calling its weaknesses really just subjective things that I personally didn’t like while another well educated writer/reader could see those things as strengths? Or was, perhaps, this book not a good example of Brown’s abilities? Damien has read most of Brown’s books, and while he’s always the first to admit that Brown seems to have some sort of template that he just plugs names, locations, and other details into for each new book, Damien also firmly believes that they are enjoyable books and worth reading because of their entertainment value.

It was interesting watching Damien make his way through The Lost Symbol. He did notice many of the same lousy writing issues that I had, and joked around with me about the crappy sentence level stuff, or the ridiculously amateurish repetition—characters in the book are constantly doing “a double take,” or their “gaze” finds something, and they “chuckle” a lot. Damien also felt like the plot was predictable and kept stopping to tell me, “I hope I’m wrong, but I think X is going to happen, and if X happens, I’m going to be very disappointed with Dan Brown.” Indeed, in almost every case, X did happen, and Damien was accordingly disappointed.

When Damien finished the book, I asked him what he thought overall. He of course first had to point out how long winded the ending was, and how a couple hundred pages should probably have been cut from the entire book (both points which I agree with), but then he said something that kind of surprised me—I honestly think it’s kind of a brilliant observation. He said, “There’s a difference between thinking a book is good and liking a book. The Lost Symbol,” he admitted, “is not a good book. But I liked it anyway.”

This point really resonated with me in part because while Damien was reading The Lost Symbol, I read a couple of small press novels I’d picked up at AWP. Both books had been good, in that they were well written and carefully crafted, and they explored interesting ideas in subtle and new ways. Yet, I have to admit, I didn’t like them. I found them interesting, and I felt like I gained something as a writer from having read them and analyzed the techniques they were using, but I didn’t enjoy them as a reader. I didn’t get sucked into the plots. I didn’t really care about the characters or feel invested in what might happen to them. So when Damien pointed out that there’s a difference between liking a book and thinking it’s a good book, I had to agree.

This is an interesting realization as a writer. I suppose I would have assumed that these two things should go hand-in-hand—and certainly, sometimes they do, but not always. I think for many readers, maybe even most, what makes a book pleasurable to read is a very different set of things than what makes it a worthwhile piece of literature. It’s the same, I think, for most types of art. What makes a painting artistically worthwhile is a different set of criteria than what makes the average Joe want to hang a print of it on his or her wall—consider how commercially successful Thomas Kincade is, in spite of the fact that educated artsie types think he’s a hack. Thomas Kincade probably is a hack, but his paintings are still pretty, don’t you think? Dan Brown is a hack, too, but man, wasn’t that chapter that takes place in the pitch black pod intense?

I can’t picture anybody in their right mind (to be fair, I should say I can’t picture anybody who is very well educated about literature) considering Dan Brown a “good” writer, but I can and do understand people “liking” him. Damien’s right, the two attitudes are not the same, and even snooty types like me, who cringed my way through most of The Lost Symbol, can still recognize the value in a good mystery, a little adventure, just something to distract you from the real world for a while.

Last week, I read Stephen King’s newest book, Full Dark, No Stars. Those of you who know much about me know that I’m a hopeless Stephen King fan. Stephen King (along with J. D. Salinger—I read The Catcher in the Rye in middle school and I still remember thinking, “Oh, I didn’t know authors were allowed to write the way people actually talk!”) is one of the authors who really got me into reading when I was young. I checked out The Bachman Books from the library when I was a kid—it was probably the first book I ever checked out from the adult section—and I’ve been an avid fan ever since.

This is in spite of the fact that, the older I got and the more I studied literature and writing (a B.A. in English followed by an MFA in creative writing, and several publications and a published book behind me now), the more I began to understand why so many literary types—you know, not the average reading public, but the people with advanced English degrees and subscriptions to literary journals and Poets and Writers—consider Stephen King sort of a hack. I don’t think he’s a hack, mind you . . . but I understand why other people do.

He has published a lot of crap. For every one really good Stephen King book or story, there’s at least one that you wonder how it could have possibly been deemed publishable by the editors. Full Dark, No Stars, then, was kind of a gamble. Overall, I ended up really enjoying the book, with the definite exception of the horrible story, “Fair Extension,” which is so unoriginal and boring I feel almost irritated that the publisher wasted my time by allowing it to be in the book. Without it, the book would have been much better, and they could also, then, have called it a collection of novellas, since every story except that one is of novella length.

The three novellas, however, were pretty good. The first one, “1922,” was by far my least favorite of the novellas, but it definitely felt worth reading. “Big Driver” was my second favorite; it had me engaged enough throughout the story that I was willing to overlook the phoned-in, incredibly contrived, and poorly paced ending. But the final novella in the book, “A Good Marriage,” I really, really enjoyed. More on that in a minute.

In the Afterword—King’s obligatory note to the “Constant Reader”—King discusses, briefly, the difference between genre fiction and literary fiction, as he sees it (although he refers to genre fiction as “story-fiction,” an interesting shift in emphasis, I think). “I have no quarrel with literary fiction,” King says, “which usually concerns itself with extraordinary people in ordinary situations, but as both a reader and a writer, I’m much more interested by ordinary people in extraordinary situations.”

I don’t agree at all with King’s definition of literary fiction. In fact, I would argue that most genre fiction is about extraordinary people in extraordinary situations, while most literary fiction is about ordinary people in ordinary situations, although literary fiction has certainly been known to put ordinary people in extraordinary situations. What good literary fiction doesn’t do, in my opinion, is deal with unrealistic characters. King’s view of his own work, though—that he’s focusing on ordinary people, putting them into unusual situations, and then letting them react as real people would—does seem a fair assessment of what the better of his pieces are doing, although I believe that’s what separates Stephen King from other genre writers. Much of King’s work, I would argue, is actually literary fiction. Dark literary fiction, but literary fiction, nonetheless.

My favorite piece in Full Dark, No Stars is a good example of this. I would certainly not classify “A Good Marriage” as genre fiction, even though there are some very horror-like elements to it. But this story, at its core, is about a character, an ordinary woman who discovers a very dark secret about her husband, and is struggling with what to do about this new knowledge. The novella is not driven by events, but by the slow unfurling of her daily life following the discovery, as she battles with both her husband’s and her own inner demons. Seems pretty literary to me.

“A Good Marriage” actually reminded me of David Crouse’s literary fiction story, “Torture Me,” which is the final story in his award winning collection The Man Back There. Both stories deal with ordinary characters dealing with the same sort of “extraordinary situation”: a happily married man who is haunted by his own sadistic sexual desires, and who has been keeping those desires a secret from his wife. In “Torture Me,” the main character is the man himself, putting the readers uncomfortably close to understanding a person we would always have told ourselves we could never understand. In “A Good Marriage,” the main character is the wife, who discovers the secret and doesn’t really know, anymore, how to feel about the man she’s been married to and loved for twenty-seven years.

Now certainly, in “A Good Marriage,” the husband’s secret is far more grim and extreme than the main character’s secret in “Torture Me.” “Torture Me” could arguably fall into the category of ordinary people in ordinary situations; whereas “A Good Marriage” definitely does fall under the “ordinary people in extraordinary situations” umbrella, like King says. Still, I would probably group both in that same second category, and I would say that, while in “Torture Me,” we’re close to the husband and in “A Good Marriage,” we’re close to the wife, both stories are about character. Both stories focus not on events and extraordinary plot points, but on believable characters who are struggling in very believable ways with their believable lives.

Which is what makes both pieces literary fiction, as far as I’m concerned. My definition of literary fiction goes something like this: Literary fiction focuses on character. The characters have to feel real, and they have to react to their circumstances the way they would if these things actually happened; the plot, although it should be present and it should be compelling, is of secondary importance. In genre fiction, I believe, plot is more important than character, and when you make plot more important than character, the result is often that the characters are forced to follow along with the plot. The story ends up feeling contrived, and the characters’ actions feel phony.

Stephen King does write some genre fiction—those pieces that I think aren’t any good—but “A Good Marriage,” and many of his other stories and books, I would say, are character, not plot, based, and therefore should be classified as literary fiction (whether King likes it or not). And for the record, Full Dark, No Stars is worth a read, even if only for “A Good Marriage.”