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A trenchant and funny account of the writing and the attempt to publish a first novel in today's competitive, risk averse literary marketplace.
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Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It
Writing and Publishing
Not Fade Away
by
Ronald Gordon
How lucky was I to send my first novel to a smart, kindly reader, who himself
too the trouble to send it up the way; and how lucky I was too to begin my
career at a time when it was relatively easy to publish first novels. More than
one hundred were published by trade publishers in 1961, the year I published
Horseman [Pass By]. Publishers then still considered themselves to be
gentlemen and scholars, and they still thought it was important to publish
young writers, carrying them for a book or two until they matured and,
hopefully, produced a little revenue for the firm.
— Larry McMurtry, Literary Life (2009)
If you must use the term "literary fiction" when referring to a manuscript you
hope to sell, do so only in a whisper, when you're alone, in a soundproof room
in the middle of the Ukraine. During the wintertime. At two in the morning.
— Lenore Raven, Editor-for-hire (2005)
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 1
Prologue
The Problem
I consider myself a serious novelist, an artist, if only because I write with the speed of
Flaubert. The subject of this particular book, however, encompasses not only art, but
commerce and the conflict between the two in a literary marketplace dominated
increasingly, if not exclusively, by genre fiction. The truth is I am an artist not only
because I write with the speed of Flaubert. That is my blessing and my curse.
To write a first novel is one thing, and no small accomplishment, but to write a
saleable first novel is quite another. (To write a second novel, saleable or otherwise, is a
separate tale altogether.) So my concern here is as much with the marketing, or non-
marketing, as the writing of my first novel. It’s not a Howtu book; if anything, it’s a how-
not-to story. Kids, don’t try this at home.
In my case the marketing was a long—an eon being the most useful unit of measure—
and painful process, much more so than the actual writing of the novel, by which I mean,
say, the first three or four drafts. Along the way, I’ve accumulated more than a few scores
to settle, but that is not among my purposes here. Not that the prospect isn’t a tempting
one. But I’m bigger than that. Actually, I’m not, so I’ll no doubt yield to temptation—
later or sooner.
I’ve read a lot of fiction, good and bad and all stops in between. In this book I mention
a number of writers great or famous or both, but for illustrative purposes only. I do not
presume to equate myself with writers of the highest merit or stature, literary or
commercial, or to suggest that what works for them works no less effectively for me. My
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 2
views of what works or even what is at work are my own, informed by my reading but
neither systematic nor accredited. In other words, they are opinions.
I began by calling myself a serious novelist. But in the following pages I make use of
less serious or less literary fiction, which I read avidly and which has its own standards of
excellence. I exclude (for the most part) only the alluring category of “trash” reading,
which offers the same pleasures as junk movies. Standards exist and the pleasures are
genuine, but non-literary. I also frequently reference novels and movies interchangeably,
as if I recognized no distinction between them. I do, but in the commercial marketplace,
that distinction is becoming all but impossible to discern.
Some names have been changed, not to protect the innocent, but myself. Sorry, no
footnotes or bibliography. Sue me. Despite the name changes, someone will anyway.
It seems a simple proposition. You write a novel.
It looks like a novel, reads like a novel. Narrative, dialogue, description, not too many
adverbs ending in “ly.” (Cleverly, you’ve edited as you go, even in that first draft.) Oh,
and it’s got a plot too, a beginning, a middle, and an end. And solid characters as well as
action. A novel even Aristotle would love.
You try to sell it. If it’s any good, someone will buy it. Sooner or later. You think.
Think again.
It soon becomes a more complicated proposition. No one will buy the novel, or
attempt to sell it for you to someone who might buy it, without reading it. Seems
reasonable. You get the right person to read it. Your wife likes it. Some of your friends
like it. Not that you press the latter too hard, lest you discover they didn’t really read the
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 3
draft you gave them. Not all of it anyway. Your former English teacher loves it. You
know he’s read it, because he loves the adroit simile buried on page 237—this is long
before any darlings get murdered—but then he’s not exactly impartial. He turned you on
to the writer’s life, as lived by Fitzgerald and Hemingway, in eleventh grade.
It doesn’t take long for you to learn a few BIG TRUTHS about the marketplace.
FIRST, you’re seeking not a sale, but a “read.” SECOND, you’ll never get a read if you
send the manuscript directly to a publisher. The last such novel read, let alone published,
was probably Castle Rackrent. The underpaid reader with the M.F.A. in Creative Writing
from Brown and the eating disorder from Scarsdale (sorry, I held out as long as I could)
saw the name Maria Edgeworth and having been instructed to look for something “edgy,”
went for it. When Melville referred, in “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” to “dead letters,” he no
doubt had a slush pile in mind.
The real complications begin with BIG TRUTH NUMBER THREE. To be published
in the traditional manner, a novelist needs an agent. The good news: it’s easier—in theory
at least, like winning a powerball lottery—to get a read with an agent than with a
publisher. The bad news, a.k.a. Catch-22: to get an agent, the novelist needs to be a
published writer.
It’s like the conundrum many people face in first applying for credit. In order to obtain
credit, they have to establish credit; in order to establish credit, they have to have credit.
Maybe they get around this by having a co-signer the first time they borrow money, but I
realized very quickly that Joyce Carol Oates or Pat Conroy wasn’t going to co-sign my
novel, and I’m not sure I’d have wanted either of them to do so. It would be like your
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 4
parents still having a claim on you as an adult because they guarantee your first car loan.
(Their claims are, of course, complex and eternal, but that isn’t generally one of them.)
Maybe you establish credit by obtaining and using wisely a credit card with a very low
limit. In this application of the analogy, you sell a short story or two to a magazine. You
become a published writer. College literary magazine not allowed, but you’ve moved
way beyond that. After all, you’ve written a novel. The New Yorker or Harper’s will
grease the skids nicely.
The problem is, with magazines of that caliber, and lacking an agent, you’re back to
the slush pile. Better the “little” or literary magazines. Build a resume that will impress
agents. Perhaps win a prize. The little magazines that do pay don’t pay much, but money
isn’t the issue. Yet.
This can be an effective approach, but it rests on some questionable assumptions.
First: the author wants to write short stories. Second: he or she has an idea for a saleable
story or stories. Third, and most important: a short story is only a shorter form of a novel
rather than a different form, particularly at a length that would make it saleable. It isn’t.
In its compression, a short story resembles a sonnet, not an epic poem. Its effect is
immediate, not cumulative.
Split the difference, then. Publish a short story-length excerpt from the novel. This has
the additional advantage of providing a preview of the novel itself, of perhaps whetting
the appetites not only of agents and acquisitions editors, but of reviewers and readers.
Maybe make the agent’s job easier after he or she takes you on as a client.
Except that no one will publish any part of an unpublished novel by an unpublished
novelist. Maybe they would if the excerpt had the unity and concision of a short story.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 5
And what portion would that be? Chapter 1? What happens to the characters after that
chapter? If chapter 1“pays off” like a short story, it isn’t chapter 1. So what’s it doing in a
novel? Ditto any other chapter, especially the last. If it is has the set-up and payoff of a
short story, why’d you even write the novel?
Maybe it isn’t a novel, but a collection of short stories linked by time, place,
characters, or all three. Congratulations, you’ve written Dubliners! Try getting it
published in today’s marketplace without the name James Joyce attached to it. No one
wants a book with the word gnomon on page one and a last chapter called “The Dead.”
Maybe you should just write the screenplay first, the one you were going to write after
the novel was published and a success, the one that was going to make you real money no
matter what the novel did commercially and, not incidentally, win you an Academy
Award. Flipping things around isn’t exactly what you imagined, but it might lead to
publication of the novel. Assuming, of course, that the screenplay actually gets written,
that you can get a read for it, and representation, and a sale and, eventually, production.
Assuming, too, that it’s still your screenplay. And the Oscar—is it for original screenplay
or adapted screenplay? In either event, you’re now identified—indeed, branded—as a
screenwriter. And being a screenwriter when you want to be a novelist is like being
Pinocchio instead of a real boy. Someone else is always pulling the strings, and you’re
trying to survive in the belly of a beast. A place where even the dumbest starlets are smart
enough not to sleep with the writer.
These few examples don’t begin to exhaust the complications and the seeming
resolution of them that ensue with the writing of a first novel by an otherwise unknown,
unpublished writer. Welcome to the funhouse, an industry unto itself.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 6
Query letters, proposals, synopses, outlines, sample chapters; the weeks or months of
waiting for a reply, the form-letter rejections with the occasional gift of a single scrawled
and scathing comment or the damning-with-faint-praise that passes as kindness.
Howtu books: how to write a novel; how to write a query letter; how to find an agent,
an editor, a publisher. Regional publishers, vanity presses, book packages, e-publication,
paperback publication, self-publication.
Writers’ magazines, writers’ web sites, writers’ chat rooms; seminars and symposia on
writing, writing competitions. The special hell of workshops and writing groups, with
their perpetual clash of preening egoism and self-flagellating defensiveness. Literary
conferences and retreats, the middle-tier genre writers who star at them and the desperate
Wannabes who pay to dance attendance on these pseudo-celebrities, convinced that a
single clever question or fawning praise of Murder by Beef Bourguignon will somehow
end in publication of their nine-hundred-page historical novel, a fictionalized epic about
the heroic westward trek of pioneer ancestors from St. Paul to Minneapolis.
Unscrupulous agents, reading fees, phony contracts, spurious marketing mavens.
Above all, promises, promises, promises. For a price, Ugarti, a price. False leads, false
hopes, false advertising, false advice, false prophets dispensing false wisdom. (“Sell
everything and move to New York.”) Rejection disguised as opportunity, an endless
dance known as the Stringalong.
I’ve experienced them all. And then some. I was the biggest Wannabe that ever went
down the money pit into Wannabeland.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 7
PART I
________________________________________________________________________
Back Story
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 8
Chapter 1
The Autobiographical Element: Part I
When it comes to first novels, certain truisms apply:
Many, if not most, are coming-of-age stories.
Many, if not most, have first-person narration.
Many, if not most, make direct use of events and persons from the author’s own life.
Many, if not most of them, have young authors.
No less obvious are the factors that link these statements. In most cases, young writers
have experienced and observed little except their own lives; because they’re young, the
central experience of their lives is growing up and the forms of education it involves. These
are the only “certainties” they know. First-person narration serves both a technical and
substantive purpose. It is the “easiest” point of view for the apprentice novelist to manage,
and it gives a sense of legitimacy, however spurious, to the autobiographical material by
mooting the issue of narrative distance. It produces a sort of negative negative capability, the
equivalent of an algebraic positive. First-time novelists of any age may have a broader range
of experience but lack the artistic assurance to render it in any but a personal, “positive”
sense. The seasoned writer—Henry James in The Ambassadors, Joseph Conrad in Lord Jim
—uses personal experience no less frequently, but much more obliquely and effectively.
Only a gifted ironist could write a masterwork about his own “unlived life” (or the
complementary “The Beast in the Jungle” about the emotional withdrawal of the artist-
observer); only a supreme symbolist could transform the desertion of an oppressed Poland
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 9
into a leap from the Patna. It’s not incidental to point out that both books demonstrate a
sophisticated use of point of view. But the novice should probably abide by a simple precept:
Don’t fuck with omniscience.
To the first two of the four points listed above, I plead guilty. Not Fade Away is a coming-
of-age story with a first-person narrator. To the fourth I cannot, and to the third I do not.
I was over forty when I began Not Fade Away. The Buddy Holly connection was there
from the start, though the title wasn’t. The idea had been percolating in my mind at least
since 1971, when Don Maclean’s recording of “American Pie” was released. Before I ever
had a novel, I had an epigraph from MacLean’s lyrics (though the published novel doesn’t
have one): “Do you recall what was revealed/The day the music died?”
In fact, the original impetus to the novel occurred years before, not in an incident but an
image—that of a pretty, dark-haired, teenage girl sitting on her front lawn on a sunny spring
afternoon. I was a teenager myself, fifteen years old Andy Lerner’s age in the novel. She was
older than I, by a year or so. This was in Clai—uh, Houston, in 1962.
Some friends and I were riding around on a Sunday afternoon. You could still get a
driver’s license in Texas at fourteen, and most families of my acquaintance had more than
one car, cars and gas being cheap then, even in relative terms. It was another guy’s car that
Sunday, and we were driving through a neighborhood known to us as “the ghetto”—the area
off Stella Link Boulevard where many of Houston’s Jews lived.
We all knew each other, or of each other, or so it seemed. Houston was already a big,
booming city, with an even bigger boom just beginning, but there were only four
synagogues: two Reform, one Conservative, one Orthodox. For Southern Jews, assimilation
was an article of faith, so the Orthodox congregation didn’t count, and the Conservative one,
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 10
though a vigorous via media, was smaller than the two Reform congregations. In any case,
the heart of social life for most Jewish teenagers was not temple, but the Jewish Community
Center on Hermann Drive, where multiple chapters of the B’nai B’rith high school
fraternities and sororities, AZA and BBG, met and mingled.
After one meeting several, of us were riding around the ghetto, having already dropped
off somebody else. We stopped to talk to someone we knew out on his or her front lawn or
driveway on that pleasant afternoon, one of the last before the interminable, intolerable heat
began. I don’t remember anything else about the incident, not even whose car I was riding in.
Whomever we stopped to talk to, the girl was sitting out front of the house next door.
A pretty Jewish girl, with long dark hair, large, brown eyes, and a slim but womanly
figure. Sitting on the lush, green front lawn like a swan in repose—legs under her and full
skirt arranged not only decorously but artfully around them, bobby socks and suede penny
loafers peeking out from under it. Perfect calm, perfect composure, an attitude entirely
unaffected. A sixteen-year-old beauty, a girl with a reputation that belied her repose. I have
no idea how she’d acquired that reputation, or if it was true, or exactly what it meant, except
that of course it had to do with sex. I knew her only by name—and the reputation. That may
have been the last glimpse I had of her. My widowed mother married her longtime boyfriend
in June, and we moved to California.
I often wondered why that image remained with me. After writing the book, I think I
know. The girl represented not only erotic possibility, but its fulfillment. At the same time
her composure suggested some quality soft and nurturing. I recalled her at once when I
encountered the Beautiful Perfect Mother sitting on her front stoop in Park Slope in Paul
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 11
Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies (2006). All right, I know what you’re thinking. If you’re not,
you should be.
Or maybe not. Maybe just a pretty girl sitting on her front lawn, who somehow became
Judy Berman sitting at the soda fountain in Dexter’s Drugstore on June 1, 1959. I wish I
could say the girl on the lawn looked up and smiled at me, as Judy does at Andy, but she
didn’t. On the other hand, she didn’t need to. She only needed to be there.
So I never knew Judy Berman or had a relationship with her. I made her up. I created her,
fabricated her and everything that happens between her and Andy. The same is true of
virtually every incident in Not Fade Away. I usually tell people who’ve read the book that of
all the incidents and episodes in it, only one actually happened to me. That is true. Most
people think it’s the beating-up scene, and I get asked if I was ever similarly beaten almost as
much as I get asked whether Andy and Judy actually had sex or not. The answer to the latter
is, I don’t know. I wasn’t there. To the former question the answer is no. I wasn’t an
imposing physical specimen at fifteen, and was reminded of it frequently enough, but I could
run faster than Andy.
And yet, at an age when I had experienced much more than adolescence, I wrote a
coming-of-age novel set at the time when I was an adolescent in a barely disguised version of
the city where I spent most of my boyhood. Though the events didn’t happen to me, I drew
other characters—even Judy Berman—from people around me.
I merely did what every novelist does, young and old, novice and master. I’d also suggest
that coming-of-age novels are no more autobiographical than any other type of fiction. If
they seem to be, it’s because, almost by definition, they offer a less refined version of the
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 12
autobiographical element. I’d even guess that first-person narration is no more common to
them than to any other category or genre of fiction. It may simply be that first-person point of
view is particularly suitable to the coming-of-age story, as it is to detective stories and for the
same reason. Both genres deal with discovery, and in the first person the reader discovers
things only as the protagonist does. The problem with many first novels is not that they are
autobiographical coming-of-age narratives in the first-person, but that they are event-driven
and the events are recalled rather than fully imagined. Been there. Done that. So what?
When autobiographical first novels succeed, they do so because the author achieves
sufficient distance from the autobiography substantially to re-imagine his or her own life. To
paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, the writer always begins with reality but finally produces
something more interesting and significant than the original experience. In two supreme first
novels—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Swann’s Way (in Proust’s case, I
exclude the unfinished false start, Jean Santeuil)—the autobiographical features are barely
disguised at all. It isn’t what Philip Roth calls “the Facts” that matter, but what the writer
does with them.
Okay, Joyce and Proust, genius trumps everything, as it does for James and Conrad. (How
many of us can mine the anxiety of moving, in middle age, from one house to another to
produce “The Turn of the Screw?”) But if so, then we have to consider the rather ludicrous
notion that autobiographical novels, especially first novels, are either works of genius or
abject failures. In fact, there’s a broad middle ground occupied by works as various as Of
Human Bondage, The Way of All Flesh, Clayhanger, This Side of Paradise, and Other
Voices, Other Rooms.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 13
Sometimes, everything hangs on the autobiographical element, the two prime examples in
American fiction being Invisible Man and To Kill a Mockingbird. Neither writer ever again
produced or published much fiction, certainly nothing remotely comparable. The personal
coming-of-age story remains not only primal, but paramount, central to everything else the
novel is about. The reason in both examples may be similar, if not the same, having at least
something to do with the stunning nature of that first book’s success, culturally as well as
artistically, and its effect on an artistic temperament essentially self-effacing. As Harper Lee
said, “I never expected any sort of success with 'Mockingbird.' I was hoping for a quick and
merciful death at the hands of the reviewers but, at the same time, I sort of hoped someone
would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little,
as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as
the quick, merciful death I'd expected.”
Whether I fall into this same category—at least in regard to producing more fiction—only
time will determine. On the one hand, it wasn’t long after I began Not Fade Away that it
became the first book in a projected trilogy. I’m certain that I haven’t said all I want to say
about Andy Lerner or the time and place that formed him. On the other hand, the only thing
harder to write than a second novel is a second novel that’s the second novel in a trilogy. It’s
like the middle third of a marathon, the first you ever run. You’re thoroughly warmed up,
everything is working, but there’s so far yet to go and the looming threat of The Wall. But
the point is I didn’t choose my subject. My subject chose me. As Ralph Ellison said, “the
novelist is created by the novel.”
I would amend that proposition slightly, and not very elegantly: the novelist is created by
the need to write the novel, which re-creates the novelist.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 14
Every novelist’s “back story” contains a defining circumstance—an event or a series of
related events—that compels him or her to tell (and often to retell) a particular, primal story.
There’s no originality in this observation, with its “art as neurosis” underpinning; Edmund
Wilson wrote The Wound and the Bow seventy years ago. The circumstance is almost always
traumatic, or a response to trauma: Dickens’s experience in the blacking factory,
Hemingway’s war wound, Fitzgerald’s rejection by Ginevra King, Conrad’s flight from
Poland, Dostoyevsky’s near execution as a political prisoner, Hawthorne adding the “w” to
his surname to separate himself from the ancestor who was a judge in the Salem witch trials.
Not always traumatic, however—the move of Jane Austen’s family to Bath in 1801, or her
acceptance, then refusal the next day, of the single marriage proposal she ever received;
Evelyn Waugh’s conversion to Catholicism; Faulkner emulating Hawthorne to make Falkner
more “aristocratic.” One can extrapolate this hypothesis to something more general or
abstract—Proust’s invalidism, Proust’s homosexuality; Maugham’s stammer, Maugham’s
bisexuality, the expatriation of Lawrence and Joyce; Hawthorne’s obsession with guilt—but I
think it’s always something more specific.
At any rate, it has a more specific manifestation, whatever psychological foundations
underlie it, an autobiographical event trigger reflected in the fiction. For Joyce, the event
wasn’t expatriation in the abstract, but the departure from Dublin with Nora Barnacle in June,
1904, which stands in so many ways behind Bloomsday. Similarly, Proust’s invalidism can
be traced to his first serious asthma attack at age nine and subsequent recuperative stays in
Illiers, the Combray of his novel sequence which begins with Swann’s Way.
The value of this specificity is that it reveals not only the novelist’s need to write the
novel, but also the technical and substantive contours and harmony of the work itself.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 15
Memory, which forms both the structure and subject of In Search of Lost Time, “re-creates
the novelist” from the invalid-dilettante, Marcel Proust. Similarly, Hemingway’s wound, the
culmination and summation of his war experience, and possibly of his life, in a violent
instant of time, provided the creative spur to the best of the Nick Adam’s stories and
Hemingway’s two greatest novels.
To be sure, the success of a novel doesn’t at all depend on the reader’s knowledge of this
event trigger. One doesn’t have to know of Hemingway’s wound to appreciate The Sun Also
Rises, A Farewell to Arms, “In Another Country,” or “Big Two-Hearted River.” But it’s fair
to speculate that the Hemingway style and the “code” on which his reputation rests, and the
phrases associated with that code—“grace under pressure,” “moment of truth,” “a separate
peace”—owe much to the war wound. Would either Jake Barnes or Frederic Henry have
existed without that wound? And “Hemingway the legend,” the projection of the books upon
the life, is a telling, and ultimately tragic, example of the fiction “re-creating the novelist.”
Proust’s novel even had the effect of recreating Illiers, now known as Illiers-Combray, much
as Ulysses has changed Dublin.
As I noted at the start of this book, with none of these observations do I intend to
propound a literary or creative theory. That would require both a consistency and a depth of
inquiry that I have no interest in pursuing. For the authors I’ve mentioned, one can probably
supply additional or competing event triggers—the suicide of Hemingway’s father, for
instance, or the period of Hawthorne’s “owl’s nest” literary apprenticeship. (As for an
incestuous relationship with his sister? Ask Philip Roth.) Inevitably, however, one attaches
added importance to the earliest of the experiences. As a novelist’s life proceeds, subsequent
events tend to cast additional light upon rather than redefine or replace the initial event and to
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 16
be amplified by it in turn. Conrad’s journey to the Congo was doubtless as important a
trigger to his fiction as his flight from Poland, but the fictional treatment of both depends on
“betrayal.” The link between the two is Marlow, the teller of the tales of Jim and Kurtz,
Marlow the “re-creator.”
To many readers and critics, all of this is simply irrelevant, if not anathema. At best they
can do without the autobiographical element, which seems to confirm that novelists are, by
definition, people who never get over high school. At worst they see it as a mirror that
distorts the fiction or provides too circumscribed a reflection of it, the latter confirming that
novelists are by definition people who never get over high school. And I’m ignoring, for
example, the criticism of Heart of Darkness that devalues the novella for its perceived
attitudes toward Africans and women. Those issues are outside the context of the present
discussion, though granting the validity of such issues, one can’t help but observe that the
autobiographical element might shed some light on them. My view is that this element
functions as a lens that clarifies and amplifies the fiction. Charlie Marlow is not only the
teller of the tales; it’s a critical cliché that he is also the doppelganger, the “double,” of Jim
and Kurtz. And equally the double of Joseph Conrad, as Nick Carraway is the double of both
Jay Gatsby and Scott Fitzgerald. The re-created novelist exists in the combination of the
autobiographical trigger and the artistic perspective on it. Nor does the duality rely on first-
person point of view. The same relationship exists between Quentin Compson and Thomas
Sutpen and William Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom! and a variation on it in the “we”
narration of Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” And the single event trigger? If Faulkner added
the letter “u” to the family name for the reason I suggested earlier, it speaks volumes about
the tragedies enacted in the novel and the story.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 17
That Ralph Ellison made the statement about the novel creating the novelist underscores
both the importance and the limitation of focusing on the autobiographical element. As
suggested, it is most obvious and least sophisticated in first novels, its primacy the result of
“immaturity” in both the technical and experiential sense. Most novelists move on, finding
other, subtler ways to integrate the primary event trigger into a broader base of experience.
Note the difference in the treatment of Bath in Austen’s Persuasion (completed in 1816) as
opposed to Northanger Abbey (completed 1796-98). No doubt other event triggers occur as a
part of that increased experience and may even exist independently of the primary event. If
the trigger to Mansfield Park (begun in 1812) was Jane Austen’s 1809 move to Chawton,
where she was allowed to live as an unmarried poor relation in a cottage on her brother,
Edward’s, estate, that does not necessarily offer a commentary on her refusal of the 1802
marriage proposal. Yeah, sure.
That process did not occur with Ralph Ellison. Having been created as a novelist by that
first, autobiographical novel, he seems to have had no novelistic existence outside or beyond
it. He had been created but not re-created. Part of the re-creation involves writing the next
novel, something that visibility did not allow Ellison to do. More recently, indeed
contemporaneously, Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn, a novel of the Vietnam War by a Vietnam
vet, suggests a similar relationship between the novelist and his autobiographical material.
Reading the novel (whose Afterword notes that many of the character names are those of
actual fellow vets, one can’t help but doubt that Marlantes will ever produce more fiction,
certainly nothing on the same scale.
In my case, whatever the future holds, I could not have written the first novel that I did
without the need to tell that particular story. No vague sense of calling as a writer or specific
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 18
desire to write a novel ever led me to such sustained and disciplined effort. I had to discover
my subject, which was not the same thing as recounting my own life. I’d tried autobiography
before; I’d even tried a version of Judy Berman before—though she lived in Beverly Hills
and, well in advance of Steve Martin’s Shopgirl, worked at a fashionable store on Wilshire
Boulevard (Saks Fifth Avenue, where I worked in the late 1960s and met my first wife, Pat).
So, after many years and a few other false starts, what changed? A Ph.D. in English? A
divorce? A second marriage? Enough psychotherapy to put my therapist’s daughter through
Boston University? The excruciating, mind-numbing, soul-destroying boredom of working
year after year in corporate America? All of the above?
Well, partly it was the image of the girl on the lawn, which popped into my mind one
mind-numbing, soul-destroying day many, many years after the actual experience. But one
swallow does not a summer make, not even the summer of 1959. That was the germ, as
essential as the grit of sand in the oyster, but what turns that grit of sand into a pearl?
Andy Lerner’s father is dead; Andy never knew him. My own father died four months
after I was born. Seems like an event trigger to me. Except that I’d made previous attempts at
fatherless protagonists, as I had at Judy Bermans. But I hadn’t thought about the girl on the
lawn, the girl beautiful and nurturing, an “older woman” —The Beautiful Perfect Mother—in
association with a dead father. Oedipus is alive and living not in Colonnus, but Claiborne.
But is Not Fade Away just the wish fulfillment fantasy that finally created me as a
novelist? Maybe, but I don’t think so. One can have read a bit too much, as one can have had
much too much psychotherapy. To seek or experience a love that is both nurturing and sexual
is not to murder one’s father and marry one’s mother, even subconsciously and symbolically.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 19
To suggest that Judy is a substitute or replacement for Emily Lerner, that Andy feels
responsible in some way for his father’s death and guilty about sexual desire for his mother,
is to suggest not only that the novel is an expression of my own Oedipal conflict, but also
that my re-creation by the novel is a resolution of that conflict. Art as both neurosis and its
treatment. The Wound and the Band-Aid.
Was there an Oedipal, uh, “situation” in my family history? In a word, yes. Certain
features of the novel support this autobiographical connection—Marty’s paternal relationship
with Andy and their rivalry over Judy—but they have to be cherry-picked from it and
arranged on a separate plate. The question isn’t authorial intent, conscious or not; it’s not the
autobiographical element that distorts the work, but the manipulation of that element. (Just as
fiction often distorts autobiography.) Nor do readers respond to the book in this way, unless
I’m playing with the big boys, Sophocles and Shakespeare. That’ll be the day.
In other words, one has to go outside the novel itself and the relationship between novelist
and novel to develop this theory. That is the danger of the autobiographical element, but not
the limitation. It’s not enough to look at the book or the author as if each is distinct from the
other. It’s not even enough to look at the book and the author, as if the one created the other,
either in the literal way or the Ralph Ellison sense. One created the other, which re-created
the first. Brideshead Revisited, which is generally regarded as Evelyn Waugh’s most
“personal” novel (and is the only written in the first person), contains this Author’s Note: “I
am not I: thou are not he or she: they are not they.” In the same spirit, I am not Andy Lerner.
I am not even the Ronald Gordon who began the book, though I am the Ronald Gordon who
finished it and is now writing Yesterday’s Gone.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 20
The former me did, however, experience something that created the need to write the
novel. Think about what the novel is really about. Think about it in terms of the title. The
book is about loss, and its title is Not Fade Away. I didn’t get the title from Proust, or from
Waugh, but I might have.
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Chapter 2
A River Runs through It
Not Fade Away takes place in a large southeast Texas city during the summer of 1959.
Claiborne is a version of Houston so thinly disguised—not only in its location, but in many
of its particulars—as to be all but transparent. As more than one agent I queried asked me,
why disguise it at all?
Why did Arnold Bennett change the six inter-linked towns of the Staffordshire Potteries in
the English Midlands where he grew up into the Five Towns of his regional fiction? Bennett
said he did it for euphony, though that seems the least of the reasons for the change. Gopher
Prairie, the setting of Main Street, sounds less awkward than Sinclair Lewis’s own Sauk
Centre, Minnesota—and is much funnier as well. But my purpose was neither euphonious
nor satirical. The more pertinent question for me, given the southern setting, would probably
be, why did Faulkner change Oxford, Mississippi, to Jefferson? Or, more apposite to the
autobiographical element—especially given the author’s insistence on the primal importance
of that element in the writing of fiction—why did Mark Twain change Hannibal, Missouri, to
St. Petersburg?
For one thing, I needed a river rather than Buffalo Bayou, which divides Houston north
and south much as the La Salle River divides Claiborne. The dark-haired girl sitting on her
front lawn gradually assumed a place within a more panoramic image. I began to see a city, a
bustling southern city on a big river, a city that both was and wasn’t Houston.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 22
Partly, I wanted to provide local color. I saw a broader, more vibrant stream than the all
but stagnant bayou, with busy docks, brisk boat traffic, and the play of light and shadow on
the water. I saw bridges spanning the river, the Five Bridges that pay homage to Arnold
Bennett (the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation). Obviously, though, I was beginning not only
to replicate Houston, but to change it. For one thing, the La Salle River of the book flows all
the way to Fredonia Bay and Gulf Isle. No Ship Channel connects the city to Galveston Bay
or to Galveston itself. The existence of the La Salle may also, ultimately, be attributable to a
question I asked myself as a child: If Houston’s toniest neighborhood is called River Oaks,
where’s the river?
Twain, of course, already had a river, the river of American literature— “a strong, brown
god,” in T.S. Eliot’s phrase (Eliot the Englishman of “The Dry Salvages,” but born a
Missourian)—so Twain must have had another reason for renaming Hannibal. By the time he
came to write Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, he’d already produced the non-fictional
Life on the Mississippi. The first sentence of that book reads, “The Mississippi is well worth
writing about.” Understatement, indeed. The fourth chapter begins, “When I was a boy, there
was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the
Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman.” In that book Twain draws from the real
Hannibal all that it has to offer him, without ever mentioning it by name. It stands outside his
“one permanent ambition” except as “I said I never would come home again till I was a pilot
and could come in glory.” I’d suggest that for the novels he required a more imagined
version of his boyhood home.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 23
Most simply, such a change gives the novelist more freedom to invent. More significantly,
it helps provide the narrative distance from autobiographical material that I discussed in the
previous chapter. But what, exactly, does that distance mean, and what does it achieve?
Narrative distance in fiction, in my view, refers to any strategy or technique that
depersonalizes or objectifies personal material—experiences, attitudes, causes. That is the
significant difference between even the most autobiographical of fiction and the particular
strain of “memoir” that has long infected the literary marketplace. In the latter, by definition,
author and subject or “story” are one and rarely indivisible. The interest of the reader
depends on extra-literary factors: the author is a celebrity or a political figure or a criminal or
all three; the subject is addiction or sexual abuse or other disreputable activity. Not all of
these elements are required (though no publisher would turn down such a book), but at least
one of them is. The hook is the confessional nature of the narrative. It is neither
autobiography, per se, nor a my-life-with someone more or equally famous. The only
“distance” the author achieves is, “This is what I was (positive or negative), and this is what I
became (the opposite).” With the coda attached to all autobiography, but absolutely crucial to
the confessional memoir. As I remember it. The treatment may be subjective—the narrator
may be as “unreliable” as any fictional one and the perspective on the experience somewhere
between “this is what they did to me” to “this is what I did to me”—but it better not be
invented. Just ask James Frey of A Million Little Pieces infamy.
Fiction, including autobiographical first novels, aims for something else. At its best, of
course, it strives for art and for aesthetic beauty, but a reader’s interest or pleasure need not
necessarily depend on them. The action of the story may be exciting, the characters
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 24
provocative, the setting exotic, the time period fascinating, or all of the above, without being
art or even consistently well executed. Look no further than Gone with the Wind.
Such fiction sounds not like art at all, but escapism. And all fiction isn’t escapist—except
as it involves the opposite compact between reader and author that the confessional memoir
does. In a novel, the reader expects not reality reported—even through the filter of memory
—but reality heightened and transformed, even to the point of fantasy, the supernatural, or
science fiction.
Or, in the case of coming-of-age novels, wish fulfillment. If the confessional memoir
tends to be cautionary, the coming-of-age tale is celebratory. The protagonist of the former is
(usually) a victim—of greed, lust, ambition, or some other powerful desire, his or her own or
someone else’s. The protagonist of the coming-of-age story is a hero or heroine. As
“autobiography,” the coming-of-age novel allows the author to get right what had not been
got right in actual experience, to become the hero or heroine he or she had been unable to be.
(If Not Fade Away were really my autobiography, it would have to be called Young and
Stupid.)
A novelist achieves this transformation not by transcribing reality, but by letting
imagination work alchemically upon it. A novel isn’t “life as we know it,” but life as we
know it arranged in surprising and satisfying ways—technically, stylistically, thematically.
The presentation relies not on invention alone, but on the structure of inference and
implication that invention raises. This is a process altogether different from reporting
autobiographical experience. The greater the distance between the novelist and that
experience, the broader the imaginative canvas and the possibilities for art, beauty, and
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 25
meaning. To repeat, most first novelists do not possess either the skill or the range of
experience to accomplish this transformation beyond mere wish fulfillment.
James Joyce needed Dublin, because he needed the tragedy of Irish history to fuel his art.
Dublin as evidenced in Joyce’s fiction is more than the place where much of that history
occurred; it is also an objective correlative of the tragedy of those events. As Auden wrote of
Yeats, “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” As Yeats himself said of the 1916 Easter
Uprising, “a terrible beauty is born.” Joyce the novelist achieved sufficient narrative or
aesthetic distance both literally and temporally: he left Dublin as a young man and never
returned. Stephen Dedaelus serves as the imaginative link to Dublin not because he is James
Joyce, but because he is Joyce re-imagined and re-created as both artist and resident
Dubliner.
Which brings me back to Twain. One could posit a number of reasons for a novelist
changing the name of his home town, including the potential reaction of the real
townspeople, though Twain hardly seems the type to have worried about that. In any case, a
simple name change won’t work, as Thomas Wolfe discovered with Ashville/Altamont in
Look Homeward, Angel.
I think Twain replaced the name of Hannibal as way of elevating the fiction to the status
of myth—the archetypal New World tale of the “American Adam,” which begins with the
innocent hero born by the water and ends with him, in Huck’s words, “lighting out for the
territory.” This is at least part of what Hemingway meant when he said that all modern
American writing comes from Twain’s novel. Though the mythic strain had already begun
with Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, try reading one of them today rather than Huck Finn.
Hemingway may well have had the same turgid experience, a distaste for “Fennimore
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 26
Cooper’s Literary Offenses” that also connects him to Mark Twain. I’ve long thought Cooper
chose the collective name for the five Natty Bumppo novels both wishfully and defensively,
anticipating that they wouldn’t wear well.
Twain’s purpose, in any case, was the opposite of Joyce’s—to remove his hero from
history, from being “sivilized.” Thus, one could credit the replacement of Hannibal with St.
Petersburg to Twain’s mordant sense of humor, but it’s more than that. The change allows
him to have it both ways: to elevate reality or history to myth and to comment ironically on
the history.
Similarly, though Faulkner needed the tragedy of southern history as a creative spur, he
didn’t need a real, objective Oxford. He needed the fictional Yoknapatawpha county, because
he too was recreating history as myth—though Ike McCaslin is his Natty
Bumppo/Huckleberry Finn, there is no territory to light out for, only the snake in the Adamic
garden after the Fall to be acknowledged as “Oleh, grandfather!” in “Go Down, Moses”—
and Oxford becomes Jefferson.
It may be a minor or narrow truth, but it’s easier to create a fictional version of a small
town that really exists than a big city, Gopher Prairie rather than Zenith. (Lewis, however,
did pretty well until, like Wolfe, he blew it by trying to create a whole fictional state;
Winnemac works no better than Catawba.) One might argue that in American literature, the
treatment of real cities—New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New
Orleans and, increasingly, Miami—is itself mythic. There’s no need to disguise them in order
to heighten their reality.
But Houston, Texas? It’s a city no one knows. Most people mistake it for a southwestern
city, like Dallas or Austin or El Paso, rather than recognizing it as the quintessentially
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 27
southern city that it is, as much so as New Orleans or Biloxi or Mobile. I invented Claiborne
and the river not because Claiborne sounds better than Houston—it doesn’t, and Buffalo
Bayou offers tantalizing possibilities of the Gopher Prairie sort—but because I wanted to
locate Andy Lerner in the same fictional territory occupied by Natty Bumppo, Huck Finn,
and others like them. At one point in my own callow innocence as a writer, I considered
naming my protagonist slightly differently and opening the novel with the line: “Call me
Adam.” (Maybe there is a God, because I didn’t.)
I also wanted to “place” Andy in regard to Claiborne itself. Another function of the river
was to separate him from the rest of the city, to establish him in an older neighborhood with a
past, a history more mythic than factual, and to isolate him from the postwar social and
economic mainstream of even the tightly knit Jewish community. The real Houston
neighborhood north of Buffalo Bayou known as “the Heights” became Lawton Heights of the
novel, though with additional characteristics borrowed from the Montrose District
immediately south of the bayou.
I wanted to place Andy at an historical four-way stop—American, Southern, Texan,
Jewish—on that watery highway which extends from one end of American fiction to another,
from Lake Otsego and Walden Pond to the Big Two-Hearted River that feeds Twain’s
Mississippi, which flows past the green light on Daisy Buchanan’s dock into Ahab’s ocean.
This was an intersection that Houston couldn’t quite supply, either in its physical geography
or its mythic persona. In fact, it does not possess the latter. Houston is subsumed in the
powerful myth of Texas.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 28
I should at this point offer a definition. By “myth” I don’t mean a story that isn’t true or a
story no longer believed to be true. I mean just the opposite—a story that is truer than true,
truer than the facts, because the myth implies or elucidates a truth that trumps the facts.
A simple example: Writer/director Oliver Stone’s theory of the Kennedy assassination as
dramatized in the film JFK at best distorts or ignores the facts (as we know them) and at
worst invents and performs loopy paranoid riffs on those facts, but it feels true in exactly the
same way that the fictional The Manchurian Candidate (1962 version) does. It achieves an
emotional truth about political extremism and the way government works that the known
facts may powerfully suggest but do not prove. All stories are rooted in myth, and another
way of stating the problem of autobiography in fiction is to suggest that personal experience
needs to be placed within a mythic framework in order to be of interest or significance to
anyone else. And history is but another form of storytelling, as the movies discovered early
and often (see chapter 19 of this book).
Ironically, with the change from Houston to Claiborne, I created an historical problem for
myself. If Claiborne was nominally Houston, where was Houston? In a state with a city or
town named after anyone who figured in a unique and colorful history, however
mythologized that history, where was the place named after the state’s greatest hero? If
there’s a Sam Houston, where’s Houston? If there’s no Houston, because there’s no Sam,
then who was the Claiborne who gave his name to the state’s largest city? In short, what
happens to Texas history in the fictional world of Not Fade Away? Everything else about
Texas—except Gulf Isle, the imaginary Galveston connected by the imaginary river to the
imaginary Houston—exists outside the book.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 29
I had two choices. Either Sam Houston remained Sam Houston, or he became Sam
Claiborne. With the first option I basically tried to ignore the where-is-Houston-the-city?
problem. It never existed or, somewhere down the road, outside the frame or beyond the
proscenium, it coexists peacefully with Claiborne. With the second, I changed one critical
element of Texas history, but remained faithful to every other fact. This change would also
eliminate the problem of who was the eponymous Claiborne if I allowed Sam Houston to
exist in my fictional universe.
Neither solution really satisfied me, but I chose the first. Houston existed, but somewhat in
the sense of there being no there there. In this way, I took the pressure off Claiborne as
Houston, how the former deviates from or conceals the latter. Imagine the questions: “Mr.
Gordon, is the State Theater in Not Fade Away the Metropolitan or the Loew’s State or the
Majestic? North by Northwest played at the Loew’s in 1959, but Rio Bravo played at the
Majestic.” “If Lawton University is Rice University, why is it out in the Heights instead of on
South Main Street?”
Whom was Claiborne named after? I hadn’t figured that out yet. But who knows off the
top of his or her head the man whom Denver was named after? (Hint: he didn’t write “Rocky
Mountain High.”)
Still, I wasn’t completely satisfied, and I never gave up on a better solution. Finally, one
occurred to me. I like it because it “derives” from a particular historical fact—Sam’s
Houston’s opposition to southern secession, which led to his removal as Governor of Texas
in 1861. As part of the political blowback, the city’s name was changed from Houston to
Claiborne. You will learn more of Elisha Holman Claiborne, a fictional ally of Houston’s
arch rival Mirabeau B. Lamar, in Yesterday’s Gone and in the third novel, My Back Pages.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 30
History isn’t like omniscience. In fiction, you can fuck with it—up to a point.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 31
Chapter 3
There Was a Time
The title of this chapter comes from Wordsworth, the opening of his “Immortality Ode.” I
might instead have borrowed a title from Thomas Wolfe—Of Time and the River. I know, I
discussed the river first, but the allusion to Wolfe also applies. Fact is, I’ve been talking
about both time and place all along.
I never considered setting the book in any year but 1959. That year has enormous
significance for me, beginning with the death of Buddy Holly on February 3rd. Something
else died also that year—the Eisenhower era. John Kennedy won the presidential election of
1960 long before he officially announced his candidacy in January, 1960, but few people
realized it because of the cloud raised by the religious issue. I maintain that if JFK had been
Protestant, the election wouldn’t have been close. He wouldn’t have needed Joe Kennedy’s
money, or Sam Giancanna’s, or the dead vote in Illinois—not after the first TV debate with
Richard Nixon, anyway. The ostensible issue of Kennedy’s youth, by which everyone meant
his supposed inexperience, was another smokescreen. Kennedy won because he was young,
and Eisenhower had grown old. Nixon was an old man on the day he was born.
Despite being a precocious reader in 1959, I wasn’t a precocious thinker. Nevertheless, I
knew JFK was going to win the 1960 election. I may have known it as early as 1956, when I
watched the Democratic convention with—AUTOBIOGRAPHY ALERT!—my
grandmother, and Kennedy made a gracious concession speech after losing the vice-
presidential nomination in a floor vote. I knew it, intuitively, because I was young. It was the
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 32
older generation (an imprecise, but useful term), my grandmother included, that talked about
Kennedy’s Catholicism and remembered Al Smith in 1928, the older generation that said
Jack Kennedy wasn’t ready. Some people hold that the 1960s didn’t really begin until the
Kennedy assassination and, a few months later, the release of the Beatles film, A Hard Day’s
Night. It’s an interesting and telling juxtaposition, but I say the sixties began in 1959. (So
does the non-fiction writer, Fred Kaplan, in his recent book entitled, appropriately enough,
1959.) Judy Berman is a prototypical sixties girl.
It’s no accident that the one movie that she and Andy see together is North by Northwest.
That film, rather than Ben-Hur (the Oscar winner), Anatomy of a Murder, or The Diary of
Anne Frank is the best American film of 1959 (by a whisker over Rio Bravo, an eyelash over
Some Like It Hot). It is both a summation of fifties zeitgeist and style and a film whose
action, settings, and characterizations deal in prescient transitions. Some of these reflect the
current moment: train to air travel, the almost incidental information that the hero is twice-
divorced, the replacement of the tight, taxi-bound world of Manhattanite Roger Thornhill
—“I’ve never even been in Pittsburgh””—with the frenetic itinerary of the elusive George
Kaplan. Others are prophetic: the fluid, illusory nature of identity; the Cold War as political
theater and role-playing, the replacement of personal detachment and complacency with
empathy and commitment.
Not Fade Away is essentially a comic novel, but it not only begins and ends with the death
of a major character, it is pervaded by death. Death defines the back stories of Bernie Lerner
and Grandpa Ben Kaplan, and it pervades the references to certain public figures. As a year,
1959 plays tuneful variations on mortality, an air by turns tragic (Buddy Holly, Kay
Kendall), elegiac (Rio Bravo), mawkish (the Browns’ “Three Bells”) and grotesquely,
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 33
ironically comic (Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife”). It is the year the music died, the year
the country began to lose—what? Not its innocence. No country that fought a civil war over
slavery, created Jim Crow, practiced de facto genocide against a Native-American
population, interned its Japanese citizens during World War Two, and allowed the postwar
depredations of HUAC, McCarthyism, and J. Edgar Hoover could ever make such a claim.
Not innocence, then, but the youthful illusion of it.
That’s why JFK was a restorative, necessary to maintain the illusion. In his inaugural, the
young, vigorous president—chronically if not desperately ill, his viguh maintained by
cortisone, amphetamines and a compliant press—spoke both of a “New Frontier” and of “a
long twilight struggle.” The 1960s became more than the decade of youth. It became the
decade of youth afraid of being condemned to premature death. Never trust anyone over
thirty—the folks who brought you the Vietnam War.
But, though the music died, it didn’t fade away. The novel isn’t just about death. It is
about love and death and about the redemptive power of love and remembrance. Most
importantly, it is a novel not about 1959, but about remembering 1959. “Love is love. Not
fade away.”
The earliest drafts of the book made the retrospective cast of the narrative central and
explicit from the opening line. I am speaking of the very first opening line, first of many, but
literally the first line of the book that occurred to me. “The summer heat in Claiborne is
something you never forget.” And the brief initial section, which was all atmospheric scene-
setting, concluded: “Or so it seems in memory, at a great remove of time and distance.”
This was before I learned THE RULES. These include avoidance of any form of the verb
“to seem.” Another is that the end of the book should be in the beginning. My original
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 34
opening line seemed—oops! . . . I thought I was pretty close to the mark on that one with my
original first line. But another THE RULES is, start close to the action. Above all the reader
craves action and dialogue and won’t tolerate any leisurely openings carefully establishing
and delineating time and place. Fair enough—I think (though I’ll have more to say later
about that notion). In subsequent drafts the opening paragraph retained the retrospective
element, but gradually became no more than a few sentences, all of them built around and
leading up to “the lie that dwells at the heart of things.” The end in the beginning.
Only when it reached the “line edit” stage with a professional editor, the theoretical final
step prior to a marketing effort in some way less inept and dispiriting than my own, did some
of the retrospection disappear. In fact, it all did, though much of it I later restored.
Initial edits of the book were done by Lenore Raven, who also provided the epigraph to
this book. Lenore is a capable editor, and from her I learned much in terms of both substance
and technique. On my own I got many things flat out wrong. Like all of us, though, Lenore
has blind spots. She didn’t come right out and say that the reader is stupid, though she often
referred to a former boss who thought that. A tipping point occurred when Lenore brought
Rick Usher on board to assist with the line edit. He recommended more “immediacy.” In his
view, the retrospective narrative technique and detailed descriptions of time and place
distanced the reader from the story. Author distance, good. Reader distance, BAD!!!.
To my statement that I preferred the David Copperfield (retrospective) to the Holden
Caulfield (it’s happening now or last week or last month) approach, Lenore emailed back:
The retrospective framework removes the reader one backward step from the story.
Andy's summer already happened. Andy already lived through it. When we see him
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 35
get pummeled by Rodney, we don't have to worry about the severity of the beating,
because we already know Andy lived to tell the story. The adult narrator doesn't
appear to show signs of brain damage. So in a way, a turning point in your book, an
intense plot spike, loses much of its intensity. We really don't want to undermine
ourselves in that way. We don't want the reader distanced every time a chapter ends
or begins and the adult Andy shows up again.
I accepted this reasoning, if only because I had no desire to write the Great Unpublished
American Novel. The opening chapter became and remained, with some tweaking, the
published version. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that by giving up retrospection entirely
(although that wasn’t exactly what Lenore said), I was eliminating something crucial. It was
whatever had made me write the book and had made me the writer I was and am.
The logic of the “it’s-happening-now” approach eludes me. When is now? When would
Andy be recounting Rodney’s attack? As it’s happening? Probably not, no more than the
epistolary, eighteenth-century Clarissa Harlowe describes her rape by Lovelace in medias
res. (Okay, she was drugged.) So where is the line between now and then? The point is all
storytelling is retrospective. That’s why most fiction is written in the past tense, and why
most attempts at immediacy through a present tense narration achieve little more than to
annoy the reader. This reader, anyway.
More pertinently, does any reader ever doubt that Andy survived the bullying, or even that
he bested Rodney? It seemed to me—uh, appeared to me (it’s forbidden by THE RULES to
seem but apparently okay to appear)—that there might be as much interest, if not more, in
how Andy accomplished his revenge. That and what it cost him. The how might not demand
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 36
retrospection; any examination of the cost, however, is a retrospective process. As this book
is retrospective; you, the reader, know that Not Fade Away was published, so doesn’t your
interest lie in how I accomplished it and what it cost me? (Short answer: a lot.)
But, all fiction being inherently retrospective, how retrospective was my novel to be?
How far was it between 1959 and “now?” Andy could have realized the cost of his victory an
hour, a day, or a month later. Why separate him by many years from the events he narrates?
Consider loss of innocence in a coming-of-age story in terms of the “it’s-happening-now”
mode. The problem isn’t that the impact of the loss is undercut by the youth of the
protagonist, by limited experience and understanding. Certain types of loss become the more
affecting and significant because of youth, as in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. But it runs
counter to the celebratory nature of the coming-of-age tale, which rests on the resilience of
youth. In first-person narratives that are “happening now,” the reader must supply the
irrevocability of the loss. Otherwise, the narrative is incomplete. Look at the exception that
proves the rule, and you will see that Huck Finn’s tale is subtly retrospective. The passage of
time is another way of establishing narrative distance, of objectifying personal experience.
Samuel Clemens becomes Mark Twain, who writes the opening of the novel: “You don’t
know me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but
that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth mainly.
There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never
seen anybody but lied one time or another.”
Lenore was right enough. The elaborate retrospective framework might be an effective
literary conceit (in more ways than one), satisfying to a Ukrainian audience. But I’d never
have even a Ukrainian audience if the same strategy kept the book from being published.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 37
I decided to let my title do a lot of the retrospective work.
You’ll find that in this book there’s no chapter on selecting a title, and little discussion of
it. That I never considered any other title for long—no uncertainties or agonizing choices—
should tell you something. That should have told me something sooner than it did. Because I
finally did see what I meant, why it never occurred to me to call the novel Love Me Tender or
You Send Me or Yakkety-Yak. The book is about the music dying, but not fading away.
Yes, there is a complementary element. Andy Lerner begins as a sort of “Invisible Boy” in
his family and community, but refuses to fade away. The rising arc of the book is his
increasing visibility, the building of a strong identity and sense of self. The top of the arc is
the nearly simultaneous passing of algebra, the defeat of Rodney, and the winning of Judy.
Then a dying fall—the loss of Great-Grandpa Simon, the loss of Judy, the discovery not only
of the lie that dwells at the heart of things, but the lie. The death, in short, of innocence.
Another of THE RULES for aspiring novelists is that in a query letter you’re supposed to
be able to describe your book in a single, telling line, like a screenwriter pitching a script.
“Citizen Kane meets Mrs. Miniver.” Mine was “Woody Allen meets Harper Lee.” A better
though more pedestrian one might be “Knowledge gained is innocence lost.” The problem
with such a description (not to mention the need for one) is first that it’s a cliché and second
that, though it tells you something, it doesn’t tell you nearly enough. The significance and
ultimate power of the story, if they exist at all, are not in the experiencing of it, but in the
remembering of it, in the placing of it in a larger context—personal, historical, and mythic.
But, with one exception, none of it really happened to me. I took the autobiographical
element and recast it in terms of a retrospective view of Claiborne. Time and the river.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 38
Chapter 4
The Autobiographical Element: Part 2
I realize now that my father’s death was the great and primal loss of my life, not least
because of its close juxtaposition to my birth. On the other hand, I never knew him. I also
had a surrogate father in my godfather, Jack Lehmann, who took me to movies and ball
games and miniature golf, encouraged me in Boy Scouts, and listened to me kvetch about any
number of things. As a child, then, I seldom consciously felt the lack of a father.
The wound that I did experience, consciously and as a raw and painful constant was the
loss of Houston at the particular time I lost it. That was in 1962, not long after I saw the
pretty, dark-haired Jewish girl sitting on her front lawn.
Families move all the time. They always have and always will. I don’t know for sure why
it took me so long to get over it. I only did so, finally, by writing Not Fade Away.
What exactly did I lose, especially as I gained a great deal? As avid a moviegoer as Andy
Lerner, a devourer of fan magazines, in Los Angeles I lived not far from Beverly Hills,
where I could see real movie stars in the fashionable stores on Wilshire Boulevard. The TV
series Mr. Novak filmed exteriors at my high school. I got James Franciscus’s autograph.
James-fucking-Franciscus! Mr. Novak himself, and soon to become Youngblood Hawke,
Longstreet, Doc Elliott. My English teacher of several semesters, John Nicholson, became
another surrogate father and the most enduring friendship of my life. (Not Fade Away is
dedicated to him.) He introduced me to serious literature, encouraged me to write, and
listened to me kvetch about any number of things. In twelfth grade, my gym locker was next
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 39
to Sidney Wicks’s. I attended UCLA in the midst of the long championship run in basketball
that featured Sidney prominently, not to mention Lew Alcindor. Kareem, man! Fucking
Jabar! I used to see him in the Student Union. He was tall, taller even than Sidney.
L.A. Paradise of celebrity. I worked out at the Bruce Conner Gym on Little Santa Monica
and Boulevard near Westwood. Arthur O’ Connell and Richard Jaeckel did too. Nice guys,
Oscar nominees (proving the two categories aren’t mutually exclusive). Just before the 1967
Academy Awards, O’Connell confided to me that he’d voted for Steve McQueen in The
Sand Pebbles for Best Actor. John Kerr worked out there too—Lieutenant Cable from South
Pacific. Younger than springtime, gayer than laughter.
So Houston wasn’t Paradise Lost. For starters, it’s Houston. Heat, humidity, hurricanes,
bugs. Big bugs. More importantly, I had spent a large part of my boyhood being depressed,
ever more seriously depressed, and trying to hide it. You couldn’t be depressed in those days,
especially if you were a kid. You could be an introvert, a bookworm, a problem child, even a
juvenile delinquent, but you couldn’t be depressed. Depression was a MENTAL ILLNESS!!!
They gave you shock treatments. These sounded a lot like junior high, possibly even worse.
By the spring of 1962, I was recovering from a severe depression, which had lasted most
of the previous fall and winter. The oddest things would suddenly pull me out of such
episodes. Hearing Patti Page’s recording of “Cape Cod” for the first time, James Cagney
scaling the proscenium in Yankee Doodle Dandy, the “Clair de lune” theme in Letter from an
Unknown Woman, the last scene of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (the movie), a book fortuitously
chosen for a first reading—Pride and Prejudice or Nostromo. (I know. Nostromo?) Henry
Esmond diverted the only thoughts I ever had of suicide. One depression lifted when a friend
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 40
asked me if I’d seen the movie Cape Fear (the original version) and I replied, “I don’t have
to. I live there.”
In early ’62, driving might also have been a factor, and dating too. I was discovering that
girls liked me. My first date was to Spartacus, but at least it wasn’t with Spartacus.
Everything after that was an improvement. Cruising, dating, talking on the phone, going out
for pizza after parties and movies, making out to Johnny Mathis records. All of which I could
do, and did do, in Los Angeles as well. I also made visits back to Houston, including a couple
of extended stays in summer and a memorable wedding weekend. I kept my friends there. So
what was the big whup?
Well, I never wrote about Los Angeles, not well or successfully. The same applies (so far)
to anything contemporary.
Here’s what I found out long before I became a writer, and perhaps the only sense in
which the phrase you can’t go home again is objectively true. I lost more than a place when I
left Houston. Put it another way, I didn’t really lose the place at all. I lost a time, a moment
made briefer even than it had to be by the move to Los Angeles.
In that spring of 1962, for me, everything was in place, everything was possible, and it all
coalesced around the image of a pretty young girl sitting on her front lawn. Maybe if she’d
moved to Los Angeles as well, I wouldn’t have lost everything. She didn’t, and I did.
Maybe things would have been different if I’d fixed instead on the Chevy Impala, a Super
Sport with bucket seats parked in her driveway. But that was just the point. I’d had enough of
autoeroticism. I wanted the real thing. I wanted the Golden Girl.
Love and sex and the whole damn thing, forever associated with a particular place and
moment in time. But not the entire explanation for my sense of irrevocable loss. Young as I
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 41
was, something was lost only because I thought it was lost. I was in another country, but the
wench wasn’t dead. Not for the first time, or the last, I was overreacting. Or depressed.
But depressions pass, even without shock treatments. With the right antidepressant drug,
they even go away entirely. I was, however, free of severe cyclical depression for a long time
before I began to write Not Fade Away.
I thought it was lost because it was lost. It should have been different.
To get right what had not been got right.
The girl looks up, our eyes meet, and I act on that look.
Or she doesn’t look up, and I act anyway.
To become the hero one hadn’t been able to be.
But you can’t go home again. Except that you can. It took me a long time to discover that.
What is home if not the central station of the past, the true north of memory? There we
return like faithful pilgrims to a sacred spring, eager to bathe anew in early innocence and
certitude, only to sink once more into the lie that dwells at the heart of things.
Though we yearn for the eternal, reclaimable Eden, we are born into time and history.
That is the connection between personal experience and our experience as a people. We all
live, and always have lived, on Matthew Arnold’s “darkling plain . . . Where ignorant armies
clash by night.” On the shore of Ahab’s ocean lies Dover Beach.
We light the darkness by telling stories to convince ourselves otherwise. And at the center
of those stories we place heroes, be they Hector and Achilles, Moses and Jesus, King Arthur,
Sir Lancelot, and Don Quixote, the Ancient Mariner, David Copperfield, Sherlock Holmes,
Huck Finn, Jay Gatsby, Holden Caulfield, or Atticus Finch. To whatever extent we
extrapolate from these stories or take them literally, they at once provide and comment upon
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 42
ideals and codes of conduct, mores and manners, and the vagaries of human psychology and
behavior. They are the myths by which we live, at once truer than true and subject to constant
questioning and revision. A commonplace synonym of “to lie,” of course, is “to tell a story.”
I became a novelist only when my subject tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Here I
am.” I had lost the Eden that wasn’t Eden. I could redeem that loss only by remembering it,
by understanding it for what it was, and by placing it in a larger framework. Andy says at the
end of Not Fade Away, “Weeks and months would pass before I arrived at even a minimal
acceptance of what I learned that night in the garage.” For his creator, the process and the
period of time it involved were exponential. I had to accept that the past was my subject and
that for me, it lay in Houston. Houston compelled me to write Not Fade Away. Houston,
despite its imperfections and because of them, has a history. Los Angeles does too, but it is
subsumed in the movies. It has not novelists, but screenwriters. Like the term, the occupation
is a contradiction in terms.
Interestingly, there was another event trigger in my life and work. I mentioned a wedding
I attended in Houston. I was twenty-two, the wedding that of my first cousin.
As a groomsman, I was paired with a bridesmaid from Manhattan, a cousin of the bride.
We hit it off, but it proved to be transitory, weekend sort of thing. I pointed out to her that the
hotel where the rehearsal dinner and wedding were held was the same hotel where, in 1954,
my Great-Aunt Evelyn had jumped to her death from the ninth floor. A chronically depressed
aunt, who had had shock treatments. What a bummer. It’s not, like, a family trait, is it, Ron?
Clearly, this “relationship” wasn’t going anywhere. We never did get together in New
York, as we promised each other we would. Nevertheless, that weekend made an impression
on me. It was the first thing I ever wrote about in a sustained fashion. A short story that
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 43
became a novella that became a novel. And a screenplay. All set in Los Angeles, the heroine
the shopgirl at Saks.
The autobiographical experience had occurred in Houston, but I couldn’t connect it to
Houston. I hadn’t yet learned to connect it to, for instance, the great-aunt who leaped to her
death from the ninth floor of the Warwick Hotel.
None of those earlier efforts was all that good, and not only because they were early. (To
be fair to myself, they weren’t all that bad either.) You can’t lose what you’ve never had. So
I didn’t really become a writer until I invented a story of love won and lost and the
redemptive power not only of the love, but of its loss. The deaths that occur in Not Fade
Away and the triumph over a schoolyard bully are complementary. Death doesn’t mean the
loss of love, but the loss of love is a kind of death. So is depression. Let those who will
interpret the psychological underpinnings of the book as they like. For me Andy’s triumph
over relentless bullying expresses my triumph over the relentless bullying of depression.
We can love what is dead only by remembering it. The dead live on only in the memories
of the living. They die, but they do not fade away. As Philip Roth says in Everyman, “The
flesh melts away, but the bones endure.” Certainly, though, the advantage is to the living,
brief as it may be. Like Trollope’s Johnny Eames, who is somehow a better man because Lily
Dale will not marry him, Andy becomes a better man because he and Judy go their separate
ways. But how do we know that? Andy only suggests the future on the last page of the book.
I’ve talked for longer than I intended about autobiographical fiction and coming-of-age
novels without invoking the term bildungsroman. Not Fade Away is not a bildungsroman.
The Andy Lerner trilogy is. More than that, it’s a kunstlerroman. Look it up. I had to.
The second book is called Yesterday’s Gone, the third My Back Pages. Stay tuned.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 44
PART II
________________________________________________________________________
First Draft
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 45
Chapter 5
Starting from San Francisco
I spent four years on the first draft of Not Fade Away. It ran to eight-hundred-fifty-three typed
pages of double-spaced, twelve-point Times New Roman text. As I said at the outset of this
book, I write with the speed of Flaubert. On the other hand, considering that writing was not my
day job—one reason for my Flaubert-like pace—I didn’t consider that bad progress.
In my naiveté I didn’t regard it as a first draft—at least not in the first-of-many, and-then-
many-more sense. I wasn’t, however, completely naïve or, for that matter, colossally conceited. I
knew the book needed to be shorter. How many eight-hundred-fifty-page first novels do you see
in the bookstores? I just thought the process of making it shorter would be different. More about
that in Part III of this book.
Sometimes I think my back story could begin here. It’s possible I finally became a novelist
when I bought a personal computer. It isn’t that word processing and windowing technology
make writing easier; they make rewriting easier. More about that later as well.
In addition to a computer, the most important “tool” I employed in that first draft was my own
memory. I retained almost total recall of my own summer of 1959 and the months immediately
surrounding it, from the death of Buddy Holly in February to JFK’s official announcement of his
presidential candidacy on January 2, 1960. That detailed recall persists to this day, though I have
no precise memory of what I was doing last year on today’s date. (So, you ask, if what happened
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 46
to Andy Lerner in 1959 didn’t happen to you, what did happen to you in 1959? The truth is, I
have no idea. Puberty, perhaps.)
The point for the present discussion is that I did little formal research for the book beyond
basic fact-checking and verification of my memory. What was the price in 1959 of a quart of
Borden’s milk or a loaf of Rainbo bread? Which film was released first, The Diary of Anne
Frank or North by Northwest? When did Nixon’s “kitchen debate” with Khrushchev occur in
relation to the two Major League All-Star games played that summer? For “background,” I
immersed myself in the cultural, political, sports, and show biz trivia of the period beyond what I
already recalled. I’m pretty good, but it’s probably just as well I didn’t remember that Lawrence
Welk and Alice Lon feuded over the amount of leg she was exposing on Welk’s TV show.
All this information I derived, in the period just before the advent of Internet search engines,
from microfilm copies of the daily Houston Post (now defunct) in the Rice University library. In
those days I made at least one trip a year from San Francisco to Houston—at Thanksgiving to
visit my second wife’s family in San Antonio, with often a night in Austin as well. Debby
worked in the Texas legislature in the 1970s, and the bar at the Driskill Hotel is a favorite haunt
of ours. The booted, string-tied, fat-jowled pols still ogle the leggy cocktail waitresses, stick $50
tips in their décolleté, and paw the buxom, big-haired legislative assistants, except that they (the
pols) are mostly Republicans now rather than the Democrats of the Dolph (pronounced “Doff”)
Briscoe era. At any rate, over the period of writing the first draft of Not Fade Away, I basically
read The Houston Post for all of 1959 and took long-hand notes on yellow legal pads.
I also jotted down particulars about scenes I was going to write or great, magical lines that
occurred to me. (Virtually every one of them now resides in the requisite “Murder Your
Darlings” file.) Such planning notes did not, however, run to many pages. I still have no idea
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 47
how to “outline” a novel or what such an outline might look like. I’ve never seen a sample of
such a document, even in all the Howtu-write-a-novel books.
What I have seen is the “outline” for A Fable, which William Faulkner scrawled in pencil on
two walls of his office at Rowan Oak, his Mississippi home. But “outline” is a misnomer. What
Faulkner actually created is a high-level plot from the temporal structure, the “timeline” of his
novel. The term outline is similarly misapplied to the notes F. Scott Fitzgerald left for the
uncompleted portion of The Last Tycoon. They are just that—notes—not a detailed plot structure
or synopsis.
Though the Howtu guides recommend them, I suspect so-called outlines don’t really exist.
Or, if they do, I doubt any general consensus exists as to their form. Is an outline form or
content? Do chapter notes fill the bill? Chapter-by-chapter synopses? Some other form of
summary akin to a movie treatment or storyboard? I’m of the opinion that notes of the Fitzgerald
sort are really what most people mean when they refer to the “outline” of a novel. Or an outline
is whatever a particular novelist thinks or says it is.
If a standard template did exist, I doubt anyone would use it—not for a first draft, anyway. I,
for one, had only a general idea where I was going when I began and for much of the journey.
Maybe, in a figurative sense, I knew I wanted to go from San Francisco to the East Coast, but I
didn’t know for a long time whether my destination was Maine, Florida, or somewhere in
between. How could I? I hadn’t written the book yet. Once I got to Salt Lake City, I still didn’t
know if I’d turn left or right at St. Louis or defer that decision until I reached Cincinnati.
I have another indispensable file called “Hooey.” It could be called “Bullshit,” but that name
is already taken by an even larger file. In the “Hooey” file, along with outlines, I place so-called
“character biographies,” as well as any chart or diagram that attempts to provide a template of
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 48
plot or character development or both. The “Hooey” file might also be called the “Syd Field”
file, after the screenplay maven (for screenwriter Wannabes) and tireless self-promoter, who
insists that the vast majority of Hollywood screenplays conform to a single structural paradigm.
Well, sure, Syd; you’ve made a fat living off the notion.
Other novelists may disagree, and I have no problem with that. It’s not that these tools don’t
work for me. I regard them as an utter waste of time, part of the “make work” that the Howtu-
write/Howtu-publish industry fobs off on literary Wannabes.
My reasons are simple and the journey analogy more than glib. It’s impossible to know the
intricacies of plot or story ahead of time, because character drives plot or action. It’s impossible
to write a meaningful character biography ahead of time, because characters don’t do what the
author thinks they should do. Characters do what they want to do. (Okay, I get it—what the
author’s unconscious tells them to do.) They resolutely refuse to conform to a predetermined or
premeditated mold and therefore render it useless. I had no idea when I planned to have an
algebra tutor for Andy that she would turn out to be as time-stopped as Miss Havisham. Miss
Beecham told me who she was.
This may sound disingenuous, but I mean it seriously, at least in regard to my own method or
process. (Hey, I’m a SERIOUS NOVELIST.) What possible good would it do me to know that
Miss Prescott, Andy’s junior high algebra teacher, graduated from Tulane or TCU in 1953? Or
that Coach Homer Dingle grew up in a small East Texas town—Lufkin or Livingston or
Nacogdoches?
What I’m not talking about here is “back story.” I’m referring to the notion that if the novelist
provides a complete set of biographical details about every character before starting a novel, he
or she has “created” those characters or knows everything about them. Back story, on the other
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 49
hand, and in relation to character development, refers to what happened to a character before any
of the action of the novel occurs. But back story doesn’t exist until the novel begins. For that
reason it is both inevitable and essential to the story; a full-blown character biography is not.
Miss Prescott’s back story is not that she graduated from Tulane or TCU in 1953. It’s not that
she’s young, attractive and sexy—those are physical details, described either directly or
indirectly. Her back story is that she’s been teaching algebra at John Bradburn Junior High in
Claiborne for several years. The end. It isn’t extensive because it doesn’t need to be. Coach
Dingle’s back story is much the same, with the important addition that he’s been both Andy’s
and Marty Lerner’s gym teacher.
The other teacher in the book, Miss Beecham, has a more extensive back story, one that
includes familiarity with several generations of Andy’s family. Its elements emerge as initial
exposition or as the novel unfolds—Andy learns, for instance, that Miss Beecham was born in
Gulf Isle—or such details may only be implied. Given the photograph of the dashing young man
in her living room, Miss Beecham was probably disappointed in love. But she is who she is
because of Gulf Isle. Miss Prescott and Coach Dingle don’t require the same specificity. The
latter could be from any small town in Texas or the South or anywhere in rural America.
Back story is organic; it adjusts a character’s “biography” not only to his or her importance or
function in the story, but also to the novelist’s creative process. The character biography is
extraneous, if not irrelevant, to that process, serving less to dress the characters in their proper
clothes than to constrain the novelist with a straitjacket. To know that Rodney Dawson had been
bullying Andy throughout ninth-grade was all I, or the reader, needed to know about Rodney. To
stipulate that the bullying began because Rodney transferred from another junior high for ninth
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 50
grade or that he comes from a broken home or that his father is a “hitter” is unnecessary
information.
Similarly, a “timeline” for the action of a novel is useful in a way that a plot outline is not. I
may not have known my exact destination when I began the novel, but I knew the length of the
journey. I knew that the action of the book would occur within a single summer. (Very briefly,
something between five hours and five days, my working title was Summer. Edith Wharton,
however, had beaten me to it.) Why did I know this? Because of the heat—and the air
conditioning. I also knew that the arc of the story—the arc of any coming-of-age tale—involved
transformation. I recalled a line from Bel Kaufmann’s Up the Down Staircase, when two high
school girls are talking about another girl on the first day of school. One says, “She changed her
name over the summer.” Of course, I realized. That’s what happens in the summers of childhood
and only in the summer. Jewish girls always had their nose jobs in summer.
I don’t intend that last remark as snottily (in any sense) or as gratuitously as it sounds. Andy
Lerner needs the equivalent of a summer nose job. That is to say, his transformation must be
both swift and startling. It must surprise in the way a heretofore plain girl turning up as a beauty
on the first day of tenth or eleventh grade is a surprise. It had, therefore, to be accomplished
more or less “out of sight.”
So my structural principle was temporal rather than spatial. I believe, in fact, that any novel
(except, perhaps, War and Peace) exists primarily in time rather than space. Were a novel set
within a single locked and windowless room, time would elapse even if the novel lasted only as
long as the air supply. Indeed, the spatial dimensions of the novel would inevitably expand
because of what was going on in the minds of the characters. Memory and imagination are
essentially temporal activities. They defy spatial barriers.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 51
Define a novel’s temporal boundaries and the story arc defines itself, because it must conform
to those boundaries. To return to the journey analogy, if the timeline runs from May 24th to
September 12th of the same year and the novelist starts from the West Coast in May, he or she
must reach the East Coast in September. It does not mean that the novel ends wherever the
novelist happens to be on September twelfth. Nor does it mean that the end date can be extended
beyond September twelfth for as long as it takes the novelist to reach the East Coast. A timeline
imposes a discipline that a plot outline lacks, even if it merely confirms what the novelist already
knows intuitively about the story he or she wants to tell. An outline is potentially open-ended and
may involve multiple plot lines. A single timeline will not only encompass, but organize and
integrate, any number of plot lines. If it doesn’t, something else is wrong.
I’m not suggesting that a timeline can supply the plot of a novel—again, it’s probably making
explicit something the novelist already knows—any more than a novelist can outline a plot if he
doesn’t have at least some idea what it is. But plots can be bare-bones simple. Put five people in
locked and windowless room and see what happens and why. It’s not much of a plot, but a plot it
is. Try constructing an outline for it. Construct a timeline, however, and things begin to happen.
Five people in a locked and windowless room for an hour or a day offers different
possibilities than if the timeline is a month or a year or eternity. That the action must rise and fall
more quickly within a shorter timeline suggests that the issues driving the action will be
different. Not food and water or sex or aging or the physical and psychological effects of
prolonged enclosure and isolation, but a more immediate dynamic among the characters—a
physical threat such as lack of oxygen, a serious injury or acute illness, murderous intent,
blackmail, vengeance. At least some of the characters probably already have to know one
another, while a longer timeline probably involves characters getting to know one another. The
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 52
shorter timeline suggests a more “realistic” treatment, an extremely long one fantasy or science
fiction or the oxymoronic (or just plain moronic) “magical realism.”
I had a plot for my novel. More specifically, I had five plot lines involving Andy.
Love (Melanie, Judy)
Education (Miss Beecham, Coach Dingle, Miss Prescott)
Revenge (Rodney Dawson, Tommy Gilley, Malcolm Bonner)
Family (Emily, Marty, Grandma Celia, Great-Grandpa Simon, Hattie Mae, Lester Todman)
Friendship (Norman, Todd, Perry, Darlene)
I was fortunate enough to think of plot from the outset in terms of character. I didn’t have to
impose characters on a plot already worked out in detail. Obviously, too, the characters cross plot
lines, as one would both expect and desire. Hattie Mae, Miss Beecham, Coach Dingle, and
Darlene become a truer family than Andy’s own, Norman and Todd become better brothers to
Andy than Marty, and Norman has an essential function in both the love and revenge plots. From
Judy, of course, Andy lerns—oops!—learns a great deal.
Once I’d defined the start and end points on my timeline, I knew a good deal more as well. I
knew that the incidents setting my plot in motion had to occur quickly, because I needed the
maximum time available to make Andy’s transformation believable. I couldn’t, for instance,
have Andy get beat up in mid-August or even early July. The incidents needed to be extreme—
not only the beating, but the humiliation at the dance, the death of a beloved grandmother, the
intrusion of Great-Grandpa Simon into Andy’s daily life, and the partial loss of Hattie Mae
because of the family’s straitened finances. I had to pile things on at the front end of all five plot
lines, and the “turning point” for Andy had to address all of them. No later than the midpoint of
my timeline (mid-July), I had to confirm the turning point by showing some meaningful,
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 53
dramatic, equally integrated progress on my plot lines—initial rather than final success. Once I’d
dramatized tangible success, specific events on the timeline determined the pace at which the
plot lines were resolved through late July and August: the end of summer school, the Labor Day
dance at Lakeview; the start of the new school year. Finally, I knew that having Grandma’s
Celia’s death occur very early in the book, I must close it with Great-Grandpa Simon’s.
A timeline, however detailed, doesn’t replace invention, any more than a character biography
creates character or a plot outline ensures an interesting, effective plot. But the timeline told me
something that those other two tools couldn’t. It told me that the structure of a novel, my novel at
any rate, was temporally determined. (As was Faulkner’s A Fable. Study his outline yourself,
and you will see that it is actually a timeline covering the seven days of the novel’s action.)
The timeline’s duration, as well as the points or milestones along it, made it possible for me to
discover the details of plot and character more readily by confirming that the story I needed to
tell depended on immersion—in a specific moment, a particular season, a unique opportunity—
rather than attenuation. It confirmed the image of the pretty young girl sitting on her front lawn.
If the timeline covered a school year rather than a summer between school years, I’d be working
with a different structure even if I created the same characters and utilized the same plot lines. It
wouldn’t be the pretty young Jewish girl sitting on her front lawn on a golden afternoon, but
some elaboration that the image didn’t allow. That was the joy and the pain of it.
In this context, Pat Conroy’s most recent novel, South of Broad (2009), provides an
interesting comparison with Not Fade Away. In chapter 18 of the former, more than halfway
through the book, narrator Leo King recounts his confrontation with a school bully on the first
day of senior year in 1969. “At Peninsula High, Wormy was the Tyrannosaurus rex of the classic
Southern redneck. He had beaten me up often and taken pleasure in doing so. Last year he had
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 54
broken my nose.” Later, during the same incident: “But that summer had done something to me.
I had grown three inches and had spent months lifting weights at the Citadel, running Ike up
stadium stairs, and working my bicycle hard on my morning paper route.”
What I find interesting is that in a novel whose timeline encompasses twenty years, Pat
Conroy packs much of the plot of my novel into a couple of paragraphs. Different timeline,
different emphases, and different elaboration of the action. Back story also figures in the
comparison. Conroy provides Wormy Ledbetter’s back story in the first sentence I quoted. He
doesn’t really need to provide the longer explanation of Wormy’s attitude and behavior that Leo
gives his mother, who happens to be the high school principal—certainly not in such detail.
Conroy may or may not get away with it, but except that the roles are reversed, it’s warmed-over
Atticus Finch lecturing Scout about young Walter Cunningham.
Like most really effective tools, starting with the wheel, the timeline is also pretty simple. For
one thing, it is essentially and necessarily fixed; it always begins where the novel begins, and its
boundaries are as immovable. A flashback, for example, that relates something that occurred
before the starting point of the timeline neither expands nor violates the timeline. My first draft
included brief scenes of Andy’s earlier experiences with Coach Dingle (1957-59), of Marty
teaching Andy to drive in the fall of 1958, and of Rodney bullying Andy during ninth grade, but
none of these tampered with the timeline of May 24th to September 12th, 1959. Why? The
explanation is as simple as the tool itself. These scenes were remembered.
E.M. Forster’s well-known comparison of Story and Plot in Aspects of the Novel (1927)
proves useful in this context. He defines Story as “And then . . .,” meaning the chronological
sequence of events in a narrative—the action, isolated from any question except “what
happens?” Plot is the arrangement and integration of the action with other novelistic elements in
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response to the question “what happens and why?” Plot, therefore, relies on causality, and the
action may or may not be strictly chronological.
Now consider the two published versions of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, the
flashback version and the sequential version. (I don’t recall how Malcolm Cowley referred to
them when he published the latter in 1951 or how Fitzgerald scholars have referred to them
since.) In the original, flashback version, the timeline begins after World War I, but reverts to
wartime for the novel’s middle portion. In the Cowley version, which represents Fitzgerald’s
rearrangement in response to negative criticism of the original, the timeline begins with the war.
The question is, does it matter? The answer: yes, it does.
To oversimplify a bit, one timeline provides Story, the other Plot. More accurately, perhaps,
the right timeline always provides a novelist with Plot as well as Story. I believe that Fitzgerald
was correct in saying that “the true beginning” of the book is the young Dr. Diver in Switzerland,
but mistaken in revising to a sequential timeline. The original doesn’t dispense with the war; it
introduces in its proper place within the tighter timeline. Fitzgerald achieves a tragic affect not
through the attenuated rise and fall of Dick Diver but by juxtaposing them through retrospection.
In the novel’s structure (if not the mind of Dr. Diver), the past exists as memory, after that time
has been lost—irrevocably. Marcel has his madeleine, Dick Diver his Nicole.
So what less fanciful conclusions might be drawn? Clearly, a great novelist’s initial instinct
was better than his contemporary critics understood. That being said, a timeline may provide a
plot, but it doesn’t dictate the particulars. What of the early, perhaps misguided emphasis on
Rosemary Hoyt? The revised timeline eliminates it. But how better to portray the charm and
grace of the Divers than through the eyes of an innocent American girl, new to Europe? (Daisy
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Miller, anyone? Isabel Archer?) How better to comment ironically on the illusory nature of the
Divers’ “charmed” existence than by making Rosemary an ingénue in the movies?
One might more generally conclude that Plot ineluctably involves retrospection, hence
memory. For Story, which is sequential, these are all but moot. A reverse formulation might be
that once retrospection occurs in the timeline, the latter more nearly encapsulates Plot than Story.
In this sense, one form of retrospection—the flashback—exists solely to provide causality. Story,
or “pure action,” has more in common with myth than with sophisticated novelistic technique.
Narcissus, a comely youth, stops to drink from a pool of water and then pines away for love of
the beautiful image he sees in it. From this source we derive, culturally if not clinically, the term
narcissism. Expand that story slightly, however, as in Narcissus unknowingly sees his own
reflection and pines away because he is unable to grasp it . . ., and you have a plot, a causal
connection not only to Echo—the nymph whose love for him he spurned— to the meaning
implicit in the story itself. The question immediately arises as to why, having merely paused to
satisfy his thirst, Narcissus becomes entranced by his own image. And the why invites a
flashback. And Echo was a water nymph—irony, get it?
Now consider a modern story that has the simplicity of myth: the movie Groundhog Day. The
timeline runs three days: February 1st, February 2nd, February 3rd. But fully ninety percent of the
action occurs on the second day. The twist is that Day 2, Groundhog Day, is repeated . . . and
repeated . . . and repeated . . . until the Bill Murray character “gets it right.” The director, Harold
Ramis, believes it’s about ten years’ of repetition or “eternal recurrence” until the protagonist,
Phil Connors, finally transcends “the limitations of his contempt” for others. But the timeline of
the piece remains three days. Story becomes Plot only when Day 2 is repeated, and as it is further
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 57
repeated, it becomes a retrospective accumulation based on Phil Connors’ memory of the
previous instances of Day 2. Without that memory, there would be no sense of repetition.
What Aristotle saw when he examined mythic stories was a foundation of pure action, which
his Poetics celebrates, “for it is by their actions that men are happy or sad.” That is certainly true
of Oedipus Rex. Parricide and its consequences are nothing if not active. Oedipus wants to find
the source of the plague on Thebes, only to discover that he is the source. Though the “timeline”
of the play adheres to the Aristotelian unities, the working out of the action necessitates a return
to the past. Bring on Tiresias and the shepherd.
For me, prose fiction is almost by definition a retrospective art. In contrast to most movies
(and, somewhat less obviously, genre fiction), the best fiction is built on Plot rather than Story.
For that reason, though in a different sense than Forster intended it in his discussion of Arnold
Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale, time “is installed as the lord of creation.” That is why present
tense narrative is such a cumbersome and irritating device. That is why narrative complexity so
often involves the impact of the past upon the present. That is why a timeline is perhaps the most
useful item in the novelist’s toolbox.
Unfortunately, for all its virtues, the timeline isn’t a perfect tool. As my eight-hundred-fifty
page first draft amply demonstrated, it doesn’t control a novel’s length. Those remembered
scenes added words and pages.
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Chapter 6
Too Many Words, So Little Time
In my younger and more vulnerable years I thought people liked to read as much as I did.
Maybe not as compulsively and omnivorously as I, but for the same reason—for the pleasure it
afforded. Whether the pleasure was intellectual, aesthetic, emotional, or a combination of these
and other factors was not a question that occurred to me. I just assumed, without quite
articulating it, that everyone got some sort of kick out of reading, especially fiction. I go back to
the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew.
Then, as a teenager, over the course of a few weeks, I saw my cousin (the same cousin whose
wedding I later attended) attempt to read a James Bond novel. It wasn’t easy to watch another
human being suffer at close range. I thought the effort might kill him. It didn’t, but he’s never
been the same. Nor, I suspect, has he ever read another book.
My cousin wanted to read the Bond books because he liked the movies with Sean Connery.
But for him the struggle wasn’t worth it. People want to be told stories, but they don’t
necessarily want to read them. This is a failure not of intelligence, or not necessarily so, but of
imagination. A novel is the product not only of the novelist’s imagination, but of the reader’s as
well. Movies, on the other hand, supply most of the “imaginative” elements without requiring
much of anything in that line from the viewer. As a bonus, they supply movie stars (or, these
days, Matthew McConnaghey) in lieu of character development.
Are the readers of novels therefore more imaginative than moviegoers? They are while they’re
reading, because they must be. Novelists, if they want to be published, must write not only to
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 59
“express themselves” or to “create beauty,” but to connect with an audience. After all, they’re
not poets. The bad news is that a novel, even a published one, doesn’t exist if no one reads it.
The good news: it only takes one reader. Publishers, of course, not to mention literary agents,
booksellers, and the novelist himself or herself, prefer more.
One thing I’ve learned, however, is that the potential audience for most novels is small. Very
small. Smaller by far than that for non-fiction, even the confessional memoirs that resemble
fiction, which are in turn a long way sales-wise from diet and self-help books. This shrinking
readership applies even to the most successful commercial fiction.
The popularity gap between prose fiction and movies is even wider. The readers of a
publishing phenomenon like The Da Vinci Code are vastly outnumbered by those who’ve seen
the film version. Though millions of children and adults have read the Harry Potter books,
millions more see the movies. The movie audience only began with those readers. For the world
at large, the book is what they’re stuck with until the movie comes out.
The problem with the first draft of Not Fade Away, apart from its length, was that I wrote it
for the smallest possible audience. I wrote it for myself. I wasn’t, however, unique in doing so.
The first draft of any novel is written for the author.
I’m speaking of a complete, coherent draft, not the initial spew just to get words on paper.
With a first novel, the initial draft reflects the author’s vision unimpeded and unimpaired by the
needs and realities of the marketplace. It is at once the purest and the coarsest expression of the
novelist’s need to write the novel.
This phenomenon is an elaboration of the autobiographical element and illustrates again the
need for narrative distance. In the earliest stage of writing, the author is not only failing to
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achieve any distance from personal experience, but also from any potential audience. The author
is confusing him- or herself with them, his or her perspective on the material with theirs. I would
want to read this book, so everyone else will too.
No, not everyone. Not even most readers. Not even most readers of fiction. In fact, hardly
anyone. You would want to read this version of this book because YOU wrote it.
The first draft of my first novel wasn’t much too long only because I had things to learn about
selection, pacing, and “overwriting.” (For many readers, over-writing is like art and
pornography; they can’t define it, but they know it when they see it.) It wasn’t too long because
I’d failed to separate myself sufficiently from event-driven autobiography. It was too long
because I was sating my own imagination at the expense of the reader’s. In a novel of memory, I
was remembering everything—not savoring the madeleine, but gorging on a whole layer cake.
Selection, pacing, and the avoidance of overwriting adjust the novelist’s need to write the novel
to the reader’s need to participate in the imaginative world of that novel. Length ceases to be a
problem. The reader will put up with any length if you engage his or her imagination.
First drafts don’t make the necessary adjustment—almost by definition. I understand
veneration of the published version of On the Road; the novel has a serious claim to continuing
attention. But to regard the “scroll” version of the novel, that single roll of paper spooling into
the typewriter without paragraphs or chapter breaks, as anything other than a curiosity strikes me
as nonsense. In fact, until the scroll version was actually published, it had for me the status of a
literary urban legend. Come on, I’d think—hit the road, Jack!
* * *
Eight-hundred-fifty-three typewritten, double-spaced pages are about two hundred twenty
thousand words. That isn’t War and Peace or even Gone with the Wind, but it’s a lot of words.
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Bleak House or Our Mutual Friend, Vanity Fair or Middlemarch or Ulysses. I had taken my time
to tell my tale of a single summer, as had Joyce to tell his tale of a single summer day.
Unfortunately, all comparisons ended there.
That I knew what I was doing in that first draft proved to be my undoing. I practiced the
immersion I have mentioned. The lush descriptions matched the lushness of the landscape I was
describing. The leisurely pacing matched the languor of the summer days and nights over which
the action unfolded; the set-piece scenes extended by dialogue reflected the southern fondness
for talk—a conversational style rooted in story-telling.
Chapter 1, for example, the night Grandma Celia comes to dinner for the last time, initially
spanned the first three chapters. The first chapter included, besides the opening meditation on the
heat I’ve already mentioned, a description of Lawton Heights. In addition to more extended
versions of the dinner table scene and the time in the living room before dinner, those chapters
provided a scene going back several years to describe how Marty used to scare Andy in his
darkened bedroom late at night, as well as several detailed references to Marty’s teen-age
peccadilloes. These flashbacks established the tension between Andy’s envy of Marty and his
skepticism about the value of his brother’s behavior. With the flashbacks, the opening evening
occupied twenty-six typed pages.
This opening established the dominant narrative mode. Chapter 2, the first dance at Lakeview
Country Club, when Andy ends up without a partner for the last dance, was originally embedded
between the two parts of the chapter following Grandma Celia’s funeral (before and after Judy
appears). That first Lakeview chapter occurred not next in time after chapter 1, but as a
memory/flashback, with only an earlier hint of the disaster in the original version of chapter 3
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(chapter 4 as it was then). I repeated this technique throughout the original draft, both within and
between chapters.
With these nested flashbacks the structure of the book mirrored the theme of memory and
emphasized its importance. This structure became an indication of how Andy viewed his world
and related to it. The arc of the story could express Andy’s growing awareness of the past and its
power. The full significance of an event often lay not in its occurrence, but in the recollection of
it in juxtaposition to a “current” event.
The same strategy applied to the physical world and descriptions of it. The unstable weather
in a (deleted) chapter following Grandma Celia’s funeral took Andy back to an earlier stormy
night when he was staying at her house, during which she recounted her experience in the Big
Hurricane of 1900 in Gulf Isle. Thus, at all points in the narrative and in the narrative technique,
the past impinged upon the present. In a novel with more than a few characters dead or dying and
relegated to the past, the past was alive.
Pretty impressive, no? I liked it. My wife liked it. But then, my wife and I are one, so I still
hadn’t expanded my readership.
The downside was the emphasis on memory, which is at once digressive and a filtering device.
As Lenore Raven and Rick Usher pointed out, retrospection tends to distance the reader from the
action. Moreover, my own particular technique curdled the action by matching its pace to the
slow pace and languid heat of the southeast Texas summer.
To speak of this technique as a failing is not a value judgment, but a practical reflection of the
literary marketplace and of a movie-made, sound bite-ridden culture. The novelist has to grab
each reader by the balls or the—whatever—and pull that reader into the story. Not only that,
though the reader may love novels, he or she is a fickle and potentially promiscuous lover.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 63
Seduction isn’t enough, nor is a quick bang, no matter how satisfying; the novelist has to give
that lover a reason to stay. According to the conventional wisdom, each chapter must provide the
equivalent of mind-blowing sex.
I wasn’t doing well at that. Or, rather, I was too eager to please. I’m going to switch
metaphors here, before gender equal time becomes a serious issue or impediment to saying what
I mean. So let’s say that I saw as much pleasure in the journey as in reaching the destination
prematurely and without sufficient anticipation.
To that end I provided numerous diversions and side trips, sometimes doubling back to points
of interest previously missed—never suspecting that the reader might use these occasions as an
opportunity for abandoning the journey. The narrative was not only determinedly retrospective,
but relentlessly allusive. Obviously, any reader willing to give a novel called Not Fade Away a
shot, probably takes up the book with some inkling of what lies ahead in this regard—at least in
terms of music. But music was for me only one of many allusive elements, along with literature,
history, movies, and television.
Consider two passages from the first draft, since deleted. The first is from the sequence
dealing with Andy and his friends going over to Todd Berman’s house every night during Todd’s
convalescence from appendicitis. Lester Todman, Emily Lerner’s latest boyfriend, insists on
driving Andy to Todd’s one night.
And, if not exactly a gab fest, it was a memorable enough ride. As I'd recently eliminated
Mabel Beecham from the role of Mr. Murdstone, Lester might well have presented himself as
an appropriate choice in a much more literal sense, and I might have regarded this as our
Brooks of Sheffield episode. Not that he looked at all like Basil Rathbone. In those years, as
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 64
I've already suggested, he was too much a dead ringer for one of your gray flannel suit,
executive suite, power-and-the-prize types ever to be mistaken for anything else. But in
blandly brooking no protest from that “young lady” my mother, he had settled the affair of
the air conditioner in just the sort of firm, masterful way that might in less favorable
circumstances become recognizably Murdstonish; more to the point, so far from having to
recollect who I was each time we met, he now seemed determined to cultivate me, but with a
certain sly wariness, as of something held back. Nevertheless, if any such comparison ever
occurred to me, I failed to pursue it very far—not least, I'd have to add, because I was the one
who knew about Brooks of Sheffield.
In addition to which, Mr. Murdstone knew where he was going. Lester, on the other hand,
having asked for and nodded attentively to detailed directions, proceeded to ignore them just
as diligently. Either that or the Chrysler had a mind of its own, like Nellybelle the jeep,
however few and slight the other resemblances between the two vehicles. It took, in fact,
much less imagination to see Lester as a spiffy, buttoned-down version of Pat Brady than as a
Victorian stepfather. Then again, maybe Lester’s car had an automatic pilot and he had
simply filed an incorrect flight plan. Taking in the Imperial's luminescent instrument panel,
an array of dials and switches and levers worthy of a Boeing 707, and a radio that would
probably have picked up Alan Freed in Cleveland, I thought it a distinct possibility.
In order of occurrence here are the allusions:
Mr. Murdstone – a major character in David Copperfield.
Brooks of Sheffield – Mr. Murdstone’s way of alluding to David, so that he may talk
about his own designs on David’s mother to a friend when David is present.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 65
“As I’d recently eliminated Mabel Beecham” – refers to an earlier allusion to David
Copperfield, when Mr. Murdstone attempts to “tutor” David in sums.
Basil Rathbone – played Mr. Murdstone in 1935 movie version of the novel.
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Executive Suite, The Power and the Prize – all novels
and/or films of the 1950s, iconic boardroom dramas of the era.
Nellybelle – the all-but-human jeep in the Roy Rogers TV show of the 1950s.
Pat Brady – Roy’s comic sidekick in the TV show.
Alan Freed – archetypal rock-and-roll disc jockey based in Cleveland.
Some elements of the second passage, which occurred at the gathering following Grandma
Celia’s funeral, made it to the final version. In this passage, note the use of the present tense to
heighten the “immediacy” of Andy’s disconnection before Judy arrives.
I see Mother talking earnestly now to Lionel Kahn, of Leopold, Loeb, Tregoff & Kahn,
the law firm where she works. He is the thirty-third degree Mason and the same Lionel Kahn
who will go on to become a Watergate Special Prosecutor. Marty is over being charming to
Great-Aunt Esther, probably because when he made a point of speaking to her at my bar
mitzvah reception, she sent him a check for ten bucks. Odette Levy, who lost a brother in
World War Two and a son in Korea, is chatting quietly with Alicia Cohen, who would lose a
grandson to the Armies of the Night. Nearby, Cyril Cohen and Bernard Weinberg are
speculating about when, if ever, Claiborne will get a Major League baseball franchise and
about the feasibility of an indoor stadium. (Bernard's daughter Allison has been Melanie
Epstein's best friend since third grade and is said to have French-kissed at age twelve with
Todd Berman while everyone else was doing the "Hokey-Pokey" at Speedway Sam's Roller
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 66
Rink; in ten years she would be Allison Wonderland, living from crash pad to crash pad in
Haight-Ashbury, and in twenty Allison Hoffman, a media consultant in New York.) I hear
Lester telling Cornel Greenberg the bank president that Catholicism is an albatross around
Kennedy's neck, a monkey on his back, and a sword of Damocles over his head and that he
can never get the nomination, much less be elected. Symington all the way, says Lester the
Missourian, citing the recent declaration from Independence.
I still regard these passages as effective stylistic displays, though they succeed in different
ways. In the second excerpt, the allusiveness is political-historical or in service to it (the mythic
sword of Damocles, the literary “albatross,” and Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night) and
frames current history not in terms of the past, but the future, in support of the retrospective
mode. It also juxtaposes personal or family history with public history. I want to put the name of
Lionel Kahn’s law firm on hold for a moment.
The first is a more subtle and sophisticated passage; the pun on Brooks of Sheffield in the
phrase “blandly brooking no protest” legitimizes the Murdstone comparison while recognizing
its limitations in terms of Lester’s character. The passage evinces my increasing confidence as
that first draft proceeded.
Ah, but the questions raised, the problems presented, by those same passages. The least,
though most obvious of these is, what is it reasonable to expect the reader to know?
And what kind of reader? Some allusiveness is just a matter of what’s out there in the cultural
ether. This applies to more than just the contemporary. It’s not unreasonable to assume that most
readers have at least heard of David Copperfield (the novel as well as the magician), even if
Andy’s references to the novel in earlier chapters didn’t anticipate this passage. Same for Mr.
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Murdstone. Brooks of Sheffield, however, approaches the arcane, as does Basil Rathbone for
anyone under fifty years old. Turner Classic Movies makes the three fifties movie allusions
somewhat more viable, but a reader probably has to have lived during that decade to recognize
Nellybelle and Pat Brady. The same applies to Alan Freed. (The references to a Chrysler
Imperial and a Boeing 707 jetliner are not allusions, but period details.)
Lack of recognition as a generational factor may also apply to the Armies of the Night
reference in the second passage. Be that as it may, few readers, even those alive at the time, are
likely to recall that Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri challenged Kennedy for the 1960
Democratic nomination. And another pun, “the declaration from Independence,” demands not
only that the reader know Harry Truman was from Independence, Missouri (to which he had
retired after his presidency), but that he had recently come out publicly in support of Symington
for the nomination.
I was working at cross-purposes. On the one hand, I wasn’t allowing the reader sufficient
freedom to fill in the contours of my fictional world. I didn’t recognize that details are important
as much for what they suggest as what they openly reveal. On the other, when I used allusiveness
to invite the reader’s participation, I risked pissing him or her off if the reference wasn’t only
allusive, but elusive. No reader appreciates not “getting it.” Readers might recognize Leopold
and Loeb from one of the twentieth century’s most famous murder trials, but who recalls the
Carole Tregoff-Bernard Finch murder case of the nineteen-fifties.
A truism, if not a cliché, of authorship is, “write what you know.” One essential thing to know
is the potential reader. In short, of whom was the readership of Not Fade Away likely to consist?
Who was my “audience?”
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If I had the right readers, most of these issues wouldn’t matter. Even the length might not
matter. So I made what I suspect is a common mistake. I identified my audience in terms of the
product rather than the potential consumer. I compounded my mistake by using the Ukrainian
phrase for the product I’d created: literary fiction.
Now, there is nothing wrong with a first novel of that nature by an unknown writer except
that no effective literary agent, and therefore no commercial publisher, will touch it.
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Chapter 7
Taxonomy
It might be a good idea to define the term. In English rather than Ukrainian.
Again I’ll begin with a negative proposition. Literary fiction isn’t a genre. Detective stories
are, as are spy thrillers, romance and western novels, fantasy and horror tales, science fiction,
and “chick lit.” Genres are defined by their conventions and their target or core audience. Genre
fiction is a ritual of expectations based on familiarity, so much so that genres beget sub-genres.
Police procedurals operate differently than the lone gumshoe branch of detective fiction,
beginning with point of view. The former are so often third-person narratives, and the latter first-
person, that the pattern seems invariable. Genre fiction emphasizes what happens; mystery
solved, murderer identified, vampire dispatched by a stake through the heart, Death Star
destroyed, mole in the CIA exposed (remember, this is fiction).
Like genre fiction, literary fiction describes the what, but even more it involves the how and
why. Making use of its own conventions, often testing or adding to them, it doesn’t so much defy
genre conventions as ignore them (or, occasionally, debunk them). Character, style, and theme
assume the same importance as plot or take precedence over it. Primacy goes not to reader
expectations, but to authorial imperative, creating a tension that determines the relationship
between author and reader. Literary fiction may require more work on the part of the author—
because it lacks the element of formula and predictability and the conventions these engender.
As James Wood points out in his small gem of a book, How Fiction Works (2008), serious
fiction makes use of different “registers,” which he defines as “a kind of diction, which is
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 70
nothing more than a distinctive way of saying something.” Literary fiction is all about saying
something distinctively; genre fiction is all about saying the same thing in the same way over and
over and over again. That is the definition both of its success and of reader expectations, they
being one and the same. The name of the game is predictability. Whatever the distinctiveness of
literary fiction requires of the author in the way of stylistic and thematic complexity, that
distinctiveness inevitably requires more effort from the reader than does genre fiction.
Therein lies the rub. As a reflection of the marketplace, literary and otherwise, not to mention
human nature, the problem is simply stated. Most people expect to be paid for work; they don’t
expect to pay—in this case, to buy a book—and then do the work.
This fact seems to contradict a couple of my earlier arguments. Why allow room for the
reader’s imagination to work if the reader doesn’t want to work? Lenore’s Law regarding reader
intelligence must have a corollary, or perhaps can be more accurately stated: All readers are
lazy. They’re not more imaginative than moviegoers, but equally unimaginative. Literary fiction
is to commercial fiction as independent film (formerly “art-house,” which was a more telling
phrase) is to mainstream movies. At best, to reiterate another point, the market is small. Very
small. Very, very small.
So the question for me became, was the market large enough to justify publication of a first
novel that because of its length and its technique was clearly literary fiction? The answer, should
anyone be in any doubt, was a resounding no. As in, not a prayer. As in, don’t make me laugh.
Not that the prospect was entirely bleak. A coming-of-age novel may or may not be literary
fiction. If coming-of-age is a genre, and it is, its conventions neither prescribe nor inhibit a
serious approach. Sometimes coming-of-age is simply a matter of getting laid. It doesn’t have to
be about love and death and time and memory. That it doesn’t clarifies the true distinction, which
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 71
is not between literary fiction and genre fiction as writing, but literary fiction and genre as
marketable product. (See chapter 21 for more discussion of the problems these distinctions raise
for the serious first novelist.) As product, genre fiction is commercial fiction is popular fiction.
Popular because people buy it—enough of them that those who write it sometimes make money.
It bothers readers, of course, when a genre tale doesn’t do what they expect. A coming-of-age
tale whose protagonist becomes a serial killer is probably pushing the envelope a bit too much. It
violates not only “the formula,” but the essential, celebratory nature of the genre. Suppose,
however, that the protagonist is a transsexual? Sometimes coming-of-age is simply a matter of
getting laid. But as which sex? Or as both?
I’m getting way ahead of the thought process I actually went through once I realized I wasn’t
going to get anywhere with the draft I had. I didn’t connect the dots nearly as fast as this
reporting suggests. Time had passed, a couple of years. I had started the second Andy Lerner
novel while still trying to shop Not Fade Away to literary agents.
I had a minor epiphany on a flight back to San Francisco from Denver, where I’d attended a
conference of the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers. I hadn’t managed a significant moment with
the author of Death by Beef Bourguignon; instead, I’d had one of those agonizing ten-minute
sessions when the novelist gets to pitch his or her book to a literary agent, in this case a woman
from Fort Worth. My big chance! Texas, get it?
“How long is it?” asked the agent. Shelia Rosenthal by name. Jewish, get it?
“A little under two hundred thousand words.” Meaning a little over that.
“Needs to be half that. Or less,” she said. And passed.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 72
Bam! I got it. In my defense, let me say that I’d corresponded with a number of agents by
then and even sent sample chapters, but no one had ever asked me how long the book was. Nor
had I volunteered that information. I was stupid, but not that stupid.
After Denver, I thought the book could be made saleable simply by reducing its length. As
much rewriting and polishing as I’d done, I’d never attempted significantly to shorten it. I
thought that was someone else’s job—the mythical editor at the mythical publishing house. A
Max Perkins at Scribner’s sort of thing, editing Thomas Wolfe.
How to shorten an overlong novel? Simple. Reduce the number of words and pages.
Uh, not exactly.
A novel, even a first draft, has not only length but structure—exposition, rising action,
climax, denouement. It is a living organism, however misshapen. Remove muscle or bone or
sinew, and you maim it; injure the spine severely or slice a vital nerve, and you cripple it; rupture
a major organ, and you kill it.
This analogy lacks only one essential ingredient. You guessed it. FAT! Not Fade Away
wasn’t too long; it was overweight. Lose the fat and you don’t damage the major systems and
vital organs; you improve the way they function. Now that was an epiphany.
Overweight was but another way of saying overwritten. Overwriting was like eating all day
long. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner lose their meaning, their value as nutrition and the pleasure of
anticipation. And when does one exercise? Stop gorging and start exercising, and the calories
consumed at mealtimes fulfill their essential function. That precept, applied to revising the draft
of a novel, meant cutting within scenes, paragraphs, and lines of dialogue. The result? A lean,
mean literary machine, its structure readily apparent in its slim, symmetrical contours, all parts
working smoothly and in harmony.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 73
Theoretically. The problem with this process, as with most diets, is that it’s effective, but only
up to a point. A relatively painless process, it reduces the worst of the excess—the bloat, as it
were—but not much more. When I’d completed this revision, I had a second draft, but not a
substantially shorter one—seven hundred pages. Or so.
This type of revision is calorie-counting only, which aims at weight loss rather than
redistributing the weight or replacing fat with muscle. It doesn’t measure calories against other
significant factors—metabolism, body type, hereditary, exercise. Some people diet assiduously
and don’t lose weight. The organism is what it is: literary fiction.
I hadn’t wasted my time producing that second draft; I just hadn’t solved the problem. More
seriously, perhaps, I hadn’t gone all that far in the direction of solving it.
When I had no more luck shopping the second draft than the first, I concluded that the novel
was still too long not because of overwriting, but because it was literary fiction. I was a
SERIOUS NOVELIST, and literary fiction was what SNs wrote. That I couldn’t market my
novel might have nothing to do with the quality of the work, but rather with my ineptitude in
marketing it or even with the marketplace itself. I’d come to understand, however, that whatever
else might be impeding a “read” for the book, the number of words and pages would sooner or
later trump everything. This reality was brought home to me when, on the basis of three sample
chapters, an agent in Oxford, Mississippi, requested the entire second draft in hardcopy. The
manuscript was returned unread.
The lesson I still had to learn, the truth that remained just a spot on my internal radar
intermittently blipping LENGTH! LENGTH! LENGTH! was that the writing of a novel is
inseparable from the marketing of it. The trap, however, no less dangerous than the notion that a
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 74
novel must inevitably find a publisher simply because it is well-written, is in coming to believe
that the marketing of it is everything. Ars Gratia Artis may mean no more in publishing than it
does on the M-G-M logo, but it’s a mistake to dismiss that ideal altogether. Otherwise, the term
literary fiction wouldn’t exist, even in Ukrainian.
Here are some additional, possibly inflammatory thoughts on the taxonomy of literary and
genre fiction. GENRE NOVELISTS: DO NOT READ THE REST OF THIS CHAPTER!
The genre novelist begins not with life or experience, but with a genre and its conventions. He
or she is attuned not to the muse, but to the siren song of commercial success. Writing is a
business venture, focused less on the intrinsic quality of the product than on that product’s
success in the marketplace. I doubt anyone has a vocation or calling or intense creative urge—as
opposed, perhaps, to a knack or facility—to write detective novels or spy thrillers, still less
vampire fiction or lesbian erotica or lesbian vampire erotica. These people want to make a buck.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The genre novelist may have great personal and
professional integrity and, in addition to the ease or facility I mentioned, a highly developed
sense of craftsmanship. That novelist may have a fertile imagination and a gift for storytelling.
These are not, however, the primary trigger to creative effort. Nor is there an autobiographical
trigger beyond, perhaps, the author’s fantasy life. (See Daniel Silva’s spy series featuring Gabriel
Allon, who wears an “SJ” on his chest which stands for SuperJew. He inherited his superhero
outfit from Ari ben Canaan of Exodus.) The genre novelist works not with his own vision but a
telescope that keeps the end result perpetually fixed in view. You don’t often hear the question,
is it possible to write SERIOUS genre fiction? You don’t hear it because the answer is obvious,
particularly as successful genre novelists are generally required to produce a book a year.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 75
Indeed, Silva, who publishes at least a book per year, provides a useful illustration of my
point. In his latest Gabriel Allon book, The Rembrandt Affair, the plot turns on Nazi theft of
wealth from Holocaust victims, specifically Dutch Jewish victims. A list of these includes one
“Sara da Silva Rossa, born Amsterdam, 8 April 1930, murdered at Auschwitz, 15 October 1942”
[Silva’s italics]. So one can’t help but wonder if Daniel Silva’s frequent use of Nazi war crimes
in the Allon series has at least something to do with a Silva/da Silva Rossa family connection.
But this “seriousness” is impossible to reconcile with the conventions and language of genre
fiction. Later in the same book Silva references a chalkboard that contains “eleven names of
eleven former KGB agents, all of whom had been killed by Gabriel and Mikhail. Now Gabriel
wiped the names from the board with the same ease he had wiped the Russians from the face of
the earth.” ‘Nuff said, at least for me.
There is, however, another question. Is it possible to work genre elements into serious fiction
without adulterating its seriousness (that is to say, dumbing it down)? The answer is a qualified
yes. Charles Dickens—definitely. Wilkie Collins somewhat less so. Pat Conroy and John Irving
—less so still. Apart from any question of how well it’s done, the unknown serious novelist who
tries to disguise his work as commercial fiction does so not to make millions, but to attract agents
and publishers.
Am I suggesting that all genre fiction is crap? Do I think that successful genre writers are not
skilled workmen—uh, workpersons—practicing a craft, but are instead talented purveyors of
dreck? Well, no, of course not. (I don’t say that in chapter 16 either, where I discuss literary crap
at some length.) Dan Brown writes crap, but the late Robert Parker didn’t. Nor does Ruth
Rendell or P.D. James, Henning Mankell or Karyn Fossum. I’m not suggesting that genre
writers, by definition, have no talent; what I am saying is that, for better or worse, they have no
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 76
genuine, galvanizing artistic calling or curiosity or sensibility in regard to their own work. Which
is fine. Especially for them. If they did, they wouldn’t be genre writers. By definition. The most
common blurb for genre writers like James and Rendell and Mankell who sometimes stretch
conventions or work outside the genre box is that their work “transcends” narrow genre
classification, approaching or becoming “literature.”
A difference therefore exists between Parker on the one hand and Rendell and James on the
other. If each of the Spenser novels is exactly the same, it’s not because a novelist as talented as
Parker lacked the ability to make them different or that he wasn’t a hardworking, discriminate
craftsman. But, like every successful genre novelist, he played to his success and to the
expectations of his readers. Like any successful businessman, he delivered a popular product—
well-made, reliable, and undemanding (even his literary allusiveness being right off the standard
Eng. Lit. syllabus—Frost, Yeats, Browning, T.S. Eliot). To attempt to apply the discriminations
of art rather than the standards of craftsmanship to Parker’s work is to risk discovering that, for
thirty years, produced his annual Spenser (and even Young Spenser for back story) simply
because he could write it to template and that the series might have been far better had it been far
shorter. Spenser and Susan Silverman do not age, but the same can’t be said of the mandatory
banter between them. There are themes in the Spenser novels, but they are undercut by all too
predictable routines. Their style became increasingly, even elegantly spare, but it is in service to
these routines. It sets them up and therefore renders them well-crafted shtick. Because time
doesn’t pass, the characters don’t change or grow.
That there is nothing obviously cynical or dishonest about Parker’s work (other than the
layout and padding of the physical product, for which, I suppose, we can blame Putnam)
suggests that these “routines” suited Parker’s own needs or personal history. Even a superficial
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 77
glimpse at his biography will suggest the reason for the centrality of the Spenser-Susan
relationship or the presence of strong, positive gay characters. But that doesn’t mean that the
literary potential of the work wasn’t severely compromised by commercial considerations and an
established, expectant readership. This is but another way of saying that success breeds repetition
of a dangerous kind. We see the same characters and situations in Parker’s other detective series
featuring Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone and even in his western series centered on Virgil Cole
and Everett Hitch. Only now they are dangerously close to being stock characters and situations.
Rendell and P.D. James differ from Parker in that their detective fiction is often said to
“transcend” genre or to “cross-over” into general or mainstream fiction, though these categories
defy exact definition. (Whatever such books cross-over into, it is not the same thing as injecting
genre elements into otherwise serious fiction.) One thing missing in Parker’s series that both
Rendell and James create is a sense of time passing. The policeman heroes, Wexford and
Dalghiesh, age and change as the series proceed, and the times in which they live change as well.
There is an affective and reflexive relationship between this growth and change. In contrast, the
latest Gabriel Allon novel is set in 2009, and Gabriel is still active and energetic if gray at the
temples, and still enormously attractive to young and beautiful women. But he was recruited by
Israeli intelligence in 1972 to avenge the Munich massacre. So you do the math. The prize in this
regard must, however, go to Spenser, who in the early books is a Korean War vet. Good grief,
even the Vietnam vet P.I.s and caper artists are starting to age.
To say the least, then, The sense of time passing and of retrospection is not a consistent
feature of genre fiction. One of the things that inhibits artistic seriousness in genre fiction is that,
more or less by definition, any sense of life lived in time is static. Generally speaking, genre
fiction takes place in a perpetual present. A great many such novels specify mm/dd/yyyy, some
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 78
even hh/mm/ss; however, given the conventions and repetitiveness of genre fiction, such
specificity has the effect of emphasizing an immediacy that inhibits retrospection. In a timeless
now, memory has no meaning. Even in the genre of historical mystery, time is suspended in the
particular period that the historical series inhabits—the Great War and its aftermath in the
detective series of Jacqueline Winspear and Charles Todd, the years prior to and during World
War Two in the work of Alan Furst and James Benn.
The problem isn’t that the author fails to provide historical details or to render thoroughly a
period setting. These are provided with an amplitude and exactitude that are often impressive and
occasionally excruciating, but they contextualize plot and character rather than reacting
dynamically with them. As Jane Smiley notes in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, discussing
history as a feature of fiction, “essential to history is the idea that time has passed [my emphasis]
and that the past is different from the present.” One is also reminded of Virginia Woolf’s critique
of the Edwardian novelists in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown:” “They have given us a house in
the hope that we may be able to deduce the human beings who live there.” In genre fiction,
though there are exceptions (see chapter 13), history becomes simply another convention that
teeters on the brink of cliché—the carnage of the Western Front, the shell-shocked young soldier,
or the trains of cattle cars moving rounded up Jews ever eastward toward the gateway marked
“Arbeit macht frei.”
In contrast to the manufacture of genre fiction, the writing of literary fiction is a profoundly
solitary, introspective, and self-centered effort. It has everything to do with what made the
novelist undertake the effort in the first place rather than take the LSAT or enroll in business
school. That catalyst—call it vocation, inspiration, compulsion, or some more exotic neurosis—
inevitably takes precedence over the commercial possibilities of the end result. In my case, as
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 79
I’ve insisted, I had no choice but to write about southeast Texas and Jewish characters.
Otherwise, I wasn’t going to be a productive writer. Whatever the autobiographical trigger that
propelled me as novelist, it involved a certain place and time and a particular set of people.
(Okay, some people never get over high school; others never get over family. Often, they’re the
same people, and many of them become either artists or criminals.) It may not always be so, but I
have to mine that vein for all its worth—artistically, if not financially—before moving on. And I
believe that all serious novelists begin with time and memory and history, personal or otherwise.
One’s calling as a serious novelist, one’s choice of subject (let’s pretend for a moment that it
is a choice) may make for a lonely professional existence and a self-righteous frame of mind, at
once defiant and defensive. All such novelists, struggling for credibility, viability, and a reason
to go on in the face of near universal indifference (in the dark night of the soul, we are all
Vincent van Gogh) undoubtedly enter a phase where they say fuck you to everyone. Some never
leave this phase. The process of making their fiction marketable without allowing it to all but
unrecognizable to themselves depends in no small way on learning who to say fuck you to.
Traditionally, the literary agency and the publisher help to educate and to integrate the lone
wolf SN in the social and promotional realities of the literary world. It is easy enough—though
hardly a slam dunk—to accept the realities and climb aboard the promotional circuit after
success is achieved, success being defined at a minimum as reasonably enthusiastic agent
representation, commercial publication, and a few good reviews generating at least modest sales.
It is quite another to master the realities and to manufacture success alone or from whole cloth.
So while self-publication may remove the most painful sting of all—that of not being published
—the chasm between self-publication and traditional publication is all but synonymous with the
gap between serious and commercial fiction, literary and genre fiction. The stories I’ve heard of
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 80
“cross-over” from self-publication to traditional publication (Vince Flynn, for example)
invariably involve genre fiction. Any crossover, however, depends on a literary agent, and so the
familiar catch-22 reasserts itself in only slightly disguised form: no self-published writer of
literary fiction can crossover without an agent; no agent will be interested (for very long, if at all)
in representing a self-published serious novelist. Too much risk, too little upside. Unless, of
course, the novel is already successful. And what are the chances of that? See the last two
chapters of this book for a full description of the pitfalls involved in that endeavor.
Bottom line: the genre novelist craves fame (and, of course, money) to validate his or her
work, the serious novelist a reputation. As a result, frequently enough to justify the
generalization, the genre novelist is granted a well-situated stall in the marketplace; the serious
novelist—if he or she is very good and very lucky—gets to be a writer-in-residence.
Though they may seem unnecessarily rigid and arbitrary, these distinctions are important,
indeed essential. So far from originating in literary snobbery or elitism, they derive from the
rigidities of the defined marketplace.
DISCLAIMER TO GENRE NOVELISTS WHO READ THIS SECTION ANYWAY: JUST
KIDDING, GUYS!
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 81
Chapter 8
Glimmerings
Here is where things stood, about the time of the millennium. A couple of years had passed
since I’d completed the second draft, years occupied on the marketing side by query letters,
sample chapters, literary competitions, and writers’ conferences. Like Hattie Mae, I knew what I
knew. Unlike her, I didn’t know enough.
What knowledge I did possess, I hadn’t achieved entirely on my own. I’d gleaned occasional
bits of useful information such as the guidance on length from Sheila Rosenthal and the negative
reinforcement of same from the agent in Mississippi. I’d received some highly positive feedback
on the original opening chapter and the descriptive power of its prose from a reader in a fiction
contest I’d entered, only to be told that I hadn’t made the short list in the literary fiction category
because my synopsis of the rest of the novel was “weak.” (This is the sort of thing that will drive
you up, and over, the wall.) I knew that I was supposed to take writing classes, join a reading
group, network on the Internet, sell everything and move to New York.
One agent was impressed enough by the first three chapters to request the entire novel on
diskette. She responded that she loved the writing, but read less than half of the book. She felt
that the story began to “bog down” at about chapter fourteen (the deleted chapter dealing with
the threatening weather following Grandma Celia’s funeral and the flashback to the Big
Hurricane). She also felt that the novel showed great promise, recommended that I hire a
professional editor, and offered to refer me to one.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 82
As my friend and former English teacher, John Nicholson, pointed out, this was professional
“validation” such as I’d never received before—and at the height of the era for me when, in a
guide to literary agents, an agent in New York listed but one criterion for query letters addressed
to him: “Don’t tell me your wife likes it.”
An interesting comment, notable for both its cold, hard realism and its savage contempt. The
fact is my wife did like it—a lot. She had indeed been more than supportive, such support being
generally assumed to be blind (at least by literary agents with a pathological hatred of both
writers and women). She had been an enthusiastic sounding board on virtually all aspects of the
novel—reading, correcting, questioning, and advising. Together, we thrashed over the back story
of Emily’s marriage and infidelity, the bond between Hattie Mae and Great-Grandpa Simon, and
what ultimately proved to be the many, many versions of chapter one. But John Nicholson was
right. I had finally received some professional validation.
That was how I connected with Lenore Raven. But instead of marking the end of the process,
the beginning of the end, or at least the end of the beginning, it marked only the beginning of
everything. The real beginning. For a price, Ugarti—a price.
No less certainly, though, it marked the end of something.
The end of the Max Perkins/Scribner’s editing pipedream—the fantasy of, Mr. Gordon, we
love your book and want you to work with one of our senior editors to cut it to publishable
length. (Advance appreciated, but not required.)
The end of not paying, in the monetary sense, to have my book published.
The end of thinking that talent will out regardless of the obstacles.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 83
The end of thinking that writing didn’t include extensive rewriting as well as cutting. And
rewriting. And rewriting. . . . Then more rewriting.
I’ve said I didn’t know enough. Actually, I knew quite a lot, but I didn’t know that I knew it.
I’ll have more to say about the editing process—what it involves not only in literary, but in
financial terms. Never, ever forget that professional editing is a business, and no matter what
anyone tells you, people go into business for only one reason.
The editing process didn’t alert me to problems of which I wasn’t already aware, at least as an
intuitive glimmering. It did, however, provide me with potential solutions.
GLIMMERING #1: Lenore’s Law has another obvious corollary, though I was a long time
coming to full awareness of it: dumb it down. But, the serious novelist cries, I’M A SERIOUS
NOVELIST! I wasn’t there yet. It’s about the market, and the market is dumb, dumb, dumb.
That’s the real meaning of Lenore’s Law. It’s possible to reject the notion that all readers are
stupid—as I’ve said, I’m not sure even Lenore thinks that—without disbelieving that the market
is dumb. The whole is less than the sum of its parts.
GLIMMERING #2: The marketplace consists of more than target readers. It includes all the
people who stand between the novelist and those target readers. It includes not only the obvious
intermediary functions—agenting, editing, publishing, bookselling—but the functions subsidiary
or related to them that, in effect, interpret the marketplace for both writer and reader. To a large
extent, interpretation also defines the marketplace.
Literary fiction ignores, to one degree or another, not only the conventions that drive genre
fiction, but the marketplace as well. It rests on the belief that talent overcomes the marketplace.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 84
With an unpublished novelist, this notion introduces the element of risk. The marketplace pays
lip service to quality, but it doesn’t like risk. To put it mildly.
GLIMMERING #3: To become publishable, a first novel (literary fiction division) must do
one of three things. 1) It has to become something else. OR 2) Those who can get the book
published have to think it is something else. OR 3) They have to make the target reader think it
is something else. (There’s a fourth alternative but we’ll get to that much later.)
GLIMMERING #4: The second of these options will work only if the powers-that-be decide
that the book already is something else or, if not, that the third option is viable. Being risk averse,
they aren’t likely to do that. So the first option looks like the best.
If the novel is too long, it may seem that one of the obvious ways to make it something else is
to make it shorter. Making a long first novel shorter is a priority, but a shorter piece of literary
fiction is still literary fiction. My second draft experience suggested that simply trimming the fat
—cutting words and pages—not only doesn’t make it something else, it doesn’t even make the
book that much shorter.
GLIMMERING #5: You don’t make literary fiction into something else by shortening it.
You shorten it by making it into something else.
GLIMMERING #6: How to make a piece of literary fiction into something else: dumb it
down.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 85
PART III
________________________________________________________________________
Something Else
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 86
Chapter 9
Dumb and Dumber – Part I
Working with a professional editor through additional drafts of Not Fade Away taught me that
dumbing it down, more often than not, is a two-tiered process. The first involves understanding
and working with the marketplace, the second giving up any claim to being a SERIOUS
NOVELIST—whether one writes with the speed of Flaubert or not.
Let’s be clear, though. By the time a first novel reaches a professional editor, that editor is
taking the novelist plenty seriously. The latter may still be a Wannabe, but he or she has become
a professional Wannabe. As with most distinctions between amateur and professional, this one
involves the payment of money.
Be that as it may—as it unquestionably is—the writer no longer finds him- or herself alone in
treacherous waters, at best rudderless, directionless, and surrounded by sharks, at worst
becalmed. He or she now has the editor for a guide. The secret of survival, however, is to
maintain a healthy sense of danger, to regard the editor as a navigator steering by the stars rather
than by radar, experienced and reliable but not infallible. The stars, to complete the analogy, are
THE RULES.
The latter serve two functions. One applies to improving the writing, the other to improving
the prospects of the writing in the marketplace—i.e. representation by an agent, sale to a
traditional publisher, then sale to enough readers at least to cover the cost of the editing to the
author. The inevitable overlapping and confusion of the two functions takes the novelist to
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 87
DUMB. A thorough misunderstanding or rigid misapplication of the two—or, of course, both—
takes the novelist to DUMBER.
In the last chapter I remarked that literary fiction ignores both genre conventions and the
marketplace. It doesn’t, however, dismiss THE RULES—not entirely, anyway. And many
aspects of the editing process don’t qualify as dumbing down at all. The attention to spelling,
punctuation, grammar, and the other mechanics of writing, the concern for coherence, concision,
and the construction of sentences and paragraphs, the ability to suggest the right word or phrase
or, better yet, to spot the wrong one, improve even the best writing almost beyond measure. Most
usefully, and at its best, editing provides not only an essential second pair of eyes, but a
professional, experienced pair of eyes.
Such scrutiny contributes not only in these ways, but to plot and character development as
well. For example, with Not Fade Away Lenore Raven suggested a major change following the
beating up scene and preceding Andy’s illness. Instead of the published sequence in which
several plot lines come together as the family sorts and packs up Grandma Celia’s possessions, I
had a dinner scene between Andy and Marty, then a brief chapter in which Andy confronts
Emily with what Marty has told him about Hattie Mae working for them only part time. These
repeated certain information and were less dramatic than the scene at Grandma Celia’s house.
In short, many of THE RULES affecting the writing—and, therefore, driving the editing—
make so much sense that it seems harsh also to think of them as way stations on the road to
DUMB. Consider these, for instance:
Show, don’t tell.
Start close to the action.
Less is more.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 88
Don’t hold out on the reader.
Murder your darlings.
I have no quarrel with these as useful guidelines. Most had a salutary, shortening effect on
subsequent drafts of Not Fade Away, so that the final, “marketable” version was forty percent as
long as the first draft.
Show, don’t tell is the dramatize RULE; it stresses both conflict and action.
Start close to the action is a closely related RULE; it reduces exposition and description to
what is essential, thereby reducing the length of scenes and chapters. It has a cognate in the
RULE that tells a screenwriter to enter a scene as late, and exit it as early, as possible.
Less is more is the antidote to overwriting, the madeleine rather than the layer cake (although
Proust himself is not exactly a model in this regard).
Don’t hold out on the reader is the RULE derived from “all readers are stupid” and “all
readers are lazy,” which are no more RULES than they are laws. They are beliefs—for those
who believe them. I, for one, don’t (they are utter nonsense), and I’m in pretty good company.
Henry James, in the Preface to The Wings of the Dove, emphasizes that the enjoyment of a work
of art is not greatest “when the work asks for as little attention as possible.” More recently, Ian
McEwan has remarked that “narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.” As
Wilkie Collins insisted fully a hundred and fifty years ago in regard to readers, “Make ‘em laugh,
make ‘em cry, make ‘em wait.”
Murder your darlings is—well, the subject of a separate chapter.
Why do I regard the application of these RULES as also and inevitably a means of dumbing
down literary fiction? The answer is I don’t. My difficulty isn’t with the application of them, but
the misapplication.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 89
They are misapplied because they are misunderstood. Or, indeed, understood.
Many other RULES exist, most of them just plain silly—not because of what they state, but
because of the absolutism with which they are applied.
Avoid “ly” adverbs. . . . Don’t use the passive voice. . . . Don’t use flashbacks. . . .
Some RULES are silly only in juxtaposition to another RULE, which also becomes silly.
Read a lot of good fiction. Learn from the masters. . . . Don’t read too much good fiction.
You’ll simply be imitating the masters. (Excuse me—that’s a bad thing?)
Some RULES are at once silly and infuriating. Of these I’m going to mention only one:
Always end a chapter with the “point of view” character.
The short riposte to this RULE is a simple but resounding what the fuck? A longer one is that
in ANY work of fiction the point of view “character” is ALWAYS (as in, without exception) the
narrator. That is to say POV isn’t a character, but a strategy and a technique for presenting action
and character. As such, though the narrator (even a third-person one) isn’t simply or
categorically “the author,” the narration (as opposed to, say, character development), is always
under the author’s conscious control.
That being the case, let’s break down POV in the current context. First-person narration and
third-person omniscient are equally straightforward. With the former, every chapter ends by
definition with the POV character. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee might have ended a
chapter with a line of dialogue spoken by Atticus Finch, but that doesn’t mean the chapter would
have ended from any POV other than that of Scout, the narrator. With third-person omniscient,
again by definition, POV isn’t restricted to any particular character—regardless of whether we
identify the narrator as “the author.”
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So the gray area, in theory at least, becomes third-person limited POV. Let’s even assume
that a novel, The Ambassadors, for example, is narrated entirely from that point of view. Henry
James’s novel isn’t (as early as page one, it isn’t), but let’s pretend. So Strether, at once
intoxicated by and regretful of the life’s banquet that is Paris, ends with the passionate entreaty
to little Bilham at Gloriani’s garden party, “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.” And that
chapter, one of the most important in the book, immediately concludes—remember, we’re
pretending—with the following sentence: “Gee, Lambert, thought little Bilham, studying his
friend’s innocent expressive countenance, tell me what you really think.” According to THE
RULES, this would be a bad thing. I repeat, What the fuck? It might be a bad choice in that
context, but not because of any general, inflexible RULE about it.
And, yes, there’s also a RULE that says Don’t digress.
Of the five “non-silly,” RULES I’ve selected, let’s examine the single belief behind the first
three, and in relation to the ostensible purpose of each. Don’t hold out on the reader also has a
purpose, serving as a sort of Fairness Doctrine. (If Andy realizes that Great-Grandpa Simon is
coming to live in his bedroom, he ought to let the reader know about it.) Murder your darlings is
—well, the subject of a separate chapter.
The essence of the first three RULES is, respectively, dramatize, accelerate, select. The
ostensible purpose of all three is to sharpen “conflict,” a word that no Howtu-write guide can
mention without noting that “the essence of drama is conflict.” But the belief that drives these
RULES is: the reader is easily bored. One could, of course, take that statement about drama as
literally as possible and agree that, “Yes, the essence of drama is conflict, but the essence of
narrative is—what?” It isn’t drama, not entirely. It has dramatic elements, but it has other
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elements as well. Point of view for one thing. Description for another. It has action, but it has an
interior life as well. Thought, memory, perception. The essence of narrative is—narration. It is a
tale, a telling. If it were pure drama, it would be a play; if it were pure action, it would be a
movie.
Bingo! Now we’re getting somewhere. Hold that thought.
A tale being something told, it is absurd to stipulate something inherently “wrong” or
ineffective about telling rather than showing. Nor is it valid to insist on a clear distinction
between the two. Everything in a narrative is telling. Whether point of view is first-person or
third-person, limited or omniscient, the story is related by a teller, not a shower—or, rather, a
show-er. The Wings of the Dove again: James doesn’t show us the final scene between Merton
Densher and Milly Theale; he tells us about it, as a function of narrative point of view, and for
reasons he is clear to elucidate in his Preface to the novel.
Consider two areas where the distinction is said to be important: basic exposition and
character description. Is it “better” for information to be conveyed by action or dialogue rather
than related directly? Maybe; maybe not. (There is, inevitably, a RULE against burying
exposition in dialogue. The only rule should be against doing it clumsily, as in The Collected
Works of Dan Brown.) It depends on the particular tale, the particular telling. “For the first six
weeks that Ashenden was at the sanatorium he stayed in bed.” So the omniscient narrator of
Somerset Maugham’s “Sanatorium” tells the reader in the opening paragraph. Isn’t that more
economical than even the following terse exchange?
“Did you hear?”
“Hear what, old boy?
“It’s all over the club. Ashenden has tuberculosis.”
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Or should Maugham have begun with pure showing? “Ashenden coughed into a white
handkerchief. When he took it from his mouth, it had a bright stain of blood on it.” No, because
the story isn’t about Ashenden’s tuberculosis. By the middle of that first paragraph he is up and
about among the other patients. His TB is what Alfred Hitchcock called a “Maguffin.”
Or read one of the most famous openings in American fiction: In my younger and more
vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever
since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people
in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’
Or Huck Finn again: You don’t know me without you have read a book by the name of The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain,
and he told the truth mainly.
Some of the most memorable narrative prose ever written has been telling rather than
showing. Nick Carraway tells us the guest list at Gatsby’s mansion; he doesn’t show all the
guests arriving, because the comedy and the invention are in the names of the guests. The
Zuckerman/Portnoy/Kepesh narratives of Philip Roth are so rich and inventive that one scarcely
notices that they are extended monologues. And just as there’s no crying in baseball, there’s no
drama in a monologue. You need dialogue for that. With a monologue, the only drama is in what
is told. Also see Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, which—you’ll excuse the expression—has the balls
to be an internal monologue.
Similarly, with character description: Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a
comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence;
and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. Of what
possible use would it be, as an alternative, for Jane Fairfax and Miss Bates to describe Emma by
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discussing her? “That Emma, so handsome and clever,” sighed Miss Bates. “Yeah,” agreed Jane.
“And don’t forget rich.”
Of what use for Mr. Knightley to say, “You know, Emma, you’re handsome, clever, and rich,
and you’re not a bitch, but you are a meddler”? For the purpose of Jane Austen’s tale, how much
more effective to have that economical, omniscient opening sentence, the better to show through
the ensuing narrative how much that brief description says about Emma Woodhouse.
Start close to the action is an elaboration of Show, don’t tell built on an opposition implicit in
the latter: showing is active; telling is static. Therefore, showing means action. Well, not exactly.
Showing means action, but it may also include the implications of the action and reflections on
the action. To insist that action is showing in its purest, if not only, form is to conflate what is
related with the way in which it is related—not so that each complements the other, but so that
one obliterates the other.
The sentence, “Dick crossed the street” starts closer to the action than “I saw Dick cross the
street” or “Tom saw Dick cross the street.” Strictly speaking, the latter two sentences are also
telling rather than showing, because they explicitly introduce a narrator. But they are also
potentially richer in action, because the narrator integrates action with point of view. Did Dick
actually cross the street or did the narrator only think it was Dick and act on that misinformation?
The possibilities grow richer still with, “Tom thought he saw Dick cross the street.” We now the
character’s awareness of a possible mistake, though it puts us at two removes from the action. So
the first sentence doesn’t make the narrative better, only shorter. And it saves the reader the work
of dealing with the implications of the action. Start close to the action, as a reflection of the
belief that the reader is easily bored, really means, Don’t bore the reader by making that reader
think. Another way of saying, all readers are lazy.
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Less is more would seem to contradict that notion. The RULE encompasses two values:
selection and suggestiveness. What the novelist includes should not only contribute to the
narrative, but also imply what hasn’t been included. Ernest Hemingway applied this principle
better, or at least more famously, than anyone. The economy of language, the emphasis on nouns
and verbs at the expense of adjectives and adverbs, the reliance on anaphora, serve as a
commentary on the meaning of the words not used. Similarly, the specificity and compression of
what is revealed in an action or situation suggests that the weight of the tale lies below the
surface details. See “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” or “Hills Like White Elephants” as a perfect
example of this technique. They explain the “iceberg” metaphor routinely applied to
Hemingway’s method. Not to mix metaphors, but in no way is the iceberg method a form of
dumbing down. Unless it’s the movie Titanic.
If, however, one isn’t Hemingway (or Samuel Beckett), and most of us aren’t, the Less is
more RULE isn’t all that it appears to be. For one thing, eliminate enough of the iceberg and the
only thing floating on the water is a chunk of ice. It’s possible not only to shorten a novel
without improving it, but also to inflict great damage on it if the only goal is to shorten it. In
other words, less is less. For another, however large, the iceberg may not have been an iceberg to
begin with, only a chunk of ice floating on the water. If there is no more, no amount of less will
create it. In either case, the RULE supports rather contradicts the first two RULES.
So does the fourth RULE. Don’t hold out on the reader doesn’t mean tell the reader
everything. Nor does it mean what I suggested earlier—that the reader has a right to know
whatever the narrator knows. What if withholding something of this sort from the reader
increases the effectiveness of the tale? That the nameless governess narrating the bulk of “The
Turn of the Screw” may or may not be hallucinating as to the ghosts increases the ambiguity of
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the tale. The narrator of the frame story—or, more likely, the narrator’s friend, Douglas, who
knew the governess in the past and wrote down her narrative—may also know that the governess
later spent time in an asylum—or that she didn’t. Should he tell the reader out of fairness? The
second narrator in Iain Pears’s An Instance of the Fingerpost, Jack Prescott, is assuredly mad, but
he doesn’t know it, and the reader doesn’t either until the fourth narrator makes it clear. The
reader isn’t confused, simply unaware, which makes the shock of discovering the second
narrator’s madness all the more acute and satisfying. In both works, less information is more.
So what the RULE really means is, Don’t make the reader do any unnecessary work.
All of THE RULES purport to be about the writing but are in fact about the marketplace. They
mean don’t bore the reader with description or exposition that can’t be disguised as something
else. They mean less narrative, more dialogue. They mean spell everything out. They mean
novels short enough to be screenplays, so that they can more easily become movies. They mean
novels that look more like screenplays, so that they can more easily become movies. They mean
novels that look more and more like each other, so that they can more easily become movies.
Better yet, movie “franchises.”
I grew up with the movies. As a boy and young man, I defined existence and experience
through them. The first draft of Not Fade Away contained so many movie allusions that if I’d cut
all of them, I’d probably have had a publishable second draft. I love good movies, bad movies,
great movies, trash movies. I’m capable of watching Citizen Kane and The Killer Shrews in the
same evening and enjoying them equally.
My beef as a writer, since I obviously have one, is with what movies have made of the reading
culture. Not readers, but the culture in which they try to function as readers. It isn’t readers who
are stupid, but a culture—a marketplace—that assumes they are stupid. Or lazy. Or both. Movies
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did not create this culture—not exactly. They merely pander to it. They do so in a way that has
less to do with considerations of form and content—more action, less description, shorter scenes
and passages of dialogue—than with commercial possibilities. I suspect that profitability in the
publishing and marketing of fiction has far less to do with what readers will buy than what
filmmakers will buy. Duh, Ron!
Nor is my quarrel with certain precepts as to the writing of fiction. Nothing about the
application of THE RULES I’ve described (and others) should necessarily turn literary fiction
into something else. To the extent that they can help reduce an overlong novel to publishable
length, they achieve the salutary effect I mentioned in regard to the overlong early version of my
own novel. In this sense they are only an elaboration or variation on “the second pair of eyes”
process I noted above. But once a novelist or an editor or both begins to employ them, DUMB
looms on the horizon. That this is, also on the face of it, not necessarily a bad thing, makes it no
less inevitable.
To sum up, I believe the process of dumbing down occurs for three reasons. First, as I’ve
already suggested, THE RULES are RULES rather than guidelines; that is, they are regarded as
absolutes, as radar rather than reckoning. Second, THE RULES don’t say what they really mean.
Third, because of the first two reasons, THE RULES mean that the process will end, almost as
inevitably, not at DUMB but DUMBER. That, so far from being a good thing, is almost always a
bad one. For the serious novelist.
Oh, wait a minute. Before I say why, I see that I still haven’t discussed one of THE RULES I
listed. Murder your darlings is—well, the subject of another chapter.
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Chapter 10
Murder Your Darlings
Who said it first? Many, if not most people, who interest themselves in the question credit the
phrase to William Faulkner. But Faulkner’s formulation was, “You must kill your little darlings.”
The phrase actually appears to have originated with Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in On the Art of
Writing (1914). “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine
writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press.
Murder your darlings.”
Whoever first formulated it, it takes precedence over any of the other RULES I’ve referenced
as a guide to making a novel, especially a first novel, publishable. Quiller-Couch’s comment
occurs in a chapter called “On Style” and specifically refers to “fine writing.” And “fine writing”
sounds like something suspiciously close to “over the top” or “purple prose,” if not always or
precisely that. Faulkner doesn’t specify, and his dictum comes closer to the pervasive way in
which freelance editors apply the RULE. Both versions apply, however.
Murder your darlings prescribes some severe medicine, particularly to the sickly, bloated
early drafts of a novel. The RULE mandates deleting a passage because the author produces it as
a piece of “fine writing.” By extension, fine writing becomes not only a matter of style, but
encompasses anything the author particularly likes—any “darling.” In this sense, it prescribes
penance for the sin of pride. It says that if the author likes a passage, it must somehow be “too
much,” as fine writing is stylistically. It therefore becomes a version of the Less is more RULE,
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an inversion of it: More is less. It says, with devastating simplicity, that if a novel is too long, it
must be because too many words and pages are given over to the novelist’s darlings.
So application of the RULE has gone way beyond Quiller-Couch’s “fine writing.” Agents and
editors view it as the fixit for all that may ail a novel. It serves as the literary version of
“terminate with extreme prejudice.” The novelist is not only licensed to kill, but required to.
The good news: it works. It works because it puts everything on the table for revision or
deletion. The bad news: it puts everything on the table for revision or deletion.
The question becomes not is the killing legal or effective, but is it necessary? Does it make a
novel better, or only shorter? The supposition of Faulkner’s dictum and, up to a point, that of
Quiller-Couch, is that murdering your darlings improves a book. And it does. So the question
becomes, does murdering your darlings really mean what it seems to mean?
To answer that question, one might usefully go back past Faulkner and even Quiller-Couch all
the way to Samuel Johnson. “Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a
passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.” The danger of “fine writing” is still
there, but note also the word “passage.” It is a little more specific than Quiller-Couch’s “piece of
writing.” Though it condones murder (“strike it out”), it establishes the limits of a “darling” as
something less than extensive. It emphasizes the words themselves, their arrangement and
felicity, rather than, say, the structure of the work as a whole or the manipulation of point of
view in a novel, or the narrative strategies employed. It refers to style—a la Quiller-Couch.
Finally, the word “darlings.” Obviously, they are things the writer loves too much, if not
beyond all reason. But the RULE isn’t Murder your loved ones or You must kill your best
friends. The sin the writer is being warned against with darlings, starting with Dr. Johnson and
Quiller-Couch, isn’t overwriting or even “purple prose,” much less telling rather than showing or
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starting too far from the action or a detailed description of a room or a neighborhood, but
cleverness. Moreover, it is cleverness as evinced in a particular turn of phrase. As if I was to say,
for example: “Too often ‘murder your darlings’ becomes ‘the Slaughter of the Innocents.’”
That sentence is nothing if not a darling. Whether it should be murdered or not is depends on
several factors, not least the context in which it occurs. Nor should we ignore the RULE’s middle
word, YOUR. James Woolcott noted in a profile of the writer Dwight Macdonald that the latter
referred to “an inner veto power. ‘When I say no, I’m always right, and when I say yes I’m
almost always wrong.’” Even a first novelist generally knows when a passage is a darling that
should be murdered, even if an editor has to put the knife in his hands. In chapter 14 of Not Fade
Away, when Andy lies ill and can’t help with the sorting out and packing up at Grandma Celia’s
house, I had initially written: “I felt like an island in the middle of a great river, various currents
of life swirling around me, lapping insistently at the shores of a feverish, ruminative lassitude
and slowly but steadily eroding the banks of inaction.” I’d always known that sentence was a
darling, but it took Lenore Raven to make me murder it. The sentence now reads: “I felt like an
island in the middle of a great river, various currents of life swirling purposefully around me.”
For me, the original sentence and its revision illustrate what Murder your darlings really
means and how the RULE ought to operate. It makes the book better. It is anything but a marker
on the road to DUMB, much less DUMBER. But unless a novel is lousy with darlings—and that
is unlikely even with a work of literary fiction (except Finnegan’s Wake)—murdering them will
not make the book appreciably shorter. When the RULE becomes a means of doing anything
necessary to reduce a book to saleable length, the process crosses the line into DUMB. When the
process makes the novel into something the author scarcely recognizes, when it becomes not
only something else, but something else entirely, the process has entered DUMBER.
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Chapter 11
Dumb and Dumber – Part II
The progression from DUMB to DUMBER appears in film adaptations of novels all the time
and does much to explain why good and even great novels seldom make good or great movies.
Too many of the elements that produce a fine novel get lost in the adaptation. This occurs partly,
and inevitably, because of the relationship between the feasible, marketable running time of a
movie and the reading time of all but the shortest novels. It also occurs because narrative
complexity must give way to the dramatic and visual requirements of conventional
moviemaking. On the other hand, genre fiction and popular fiction generally, even pulp novels,
often make fine films (Double Indemnity, The Searchers, The Godfather, The Silence of the
Lambs), because the narrative complexity of literary fiction wasn’t there to begin with and
doesn’t act as a constraint on the filmmaker.
The rare exception of fine literary fiction making an equally fine film usually means that the
screenwriter or director or both devised some filmic equivalent of narrative complexity. The
French Lieutenant’s Woman serves as a paradigm here, with the film’s modern frame story of a
movie being made of the novel replacing the narrator’s ironic, retrospective take on Victorian
England. Voice-over narration in a film may effectively supply a similar equivalent (The
Magnificent Ambersons, The Age of Innocence). Curiously, though, when voice-over merely
duplicates passages of memorable first-person narration, complexity seems a hit (To Kill A
Mockingbird) or miss (The Great Gatsby, all versions) proposition, perhaps because the voice
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belongs to a character in the film. Success then depends on whether telling complements
showing or competes with it.
A much more recent example of the successful adaptation of a quality novel, No Country for
Old Men, rather begs the question. Despite Cormac McCarthy’s artistic pedigree, one wonders if
the novel can be described as literary fiction at all. As Walter Kim noted in his New York Times
review of the novel, “the characters' states of mind rate little commentary and are completely
dissolved in their behavior, which consists of fleeing and fighting and little else.” The tale has “a
mechanistic certitude that satisfies the brain's brute love of pattern and bypasses its lofty
emotional centers.” In short, the novel is a superior genre piece, a noir thriller with a Texas
accent.
I mention film adaptations because of my earlier comments regarding the effect of movies on
the literary marketplace and to illustrate why the narrative elements usually removed in an
adaptation represent a form of dumbing down. (In this context, the salient point about No
Country for Old Men is that these elements didn’t have to be removed because they weren’t there
in the first place.) Given the running time parameters of most films, dumbing down reflects not
so much audience stupidity as limited attention span and impatience. One difference between a
moviegoer and the reader of a novel, one so obvious and so often overlooked that it seems to be
deliberately ignored, is that a moviegoer is captive in a way that a reader is not. Within a ninety-
minute or two-hour time span, a movie not only has to capture the viewer’s attention, but to keep
moving. A reader, however, can proceed at any pace he or she chooses. Presented with narrative
complexity, the reader can put the book down and step away to mull that complexity for a time
before returning to it. That is one of the pleasures of reading. (To be sure, one can turn off and
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step away from a DVD viewed at home, but somehow the “imprint” isn’t there, because the
movement has ceased; the pause interrupts rather than amplifies.)
Read the opening pages of The Wings of the Dove quickly and see if you know what’s going
on. Not much, except inside the head of Kate Croy; the difficulty of the syntax reflects what is
happening there. The long opening paragraphs have to be read several times, and ruminated
upon, before the rhythm of the prose becomes familiar and comprehensible and before the reader
forms some notion of “the action” beyond, “She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come
in . . .” And waiting (unless it’s in Casablanca) scarcely qualifies as action. The film version of
the novel is a good one, largely faithful to the plot and with a strong central performance, but it
isn’t the novel Henry James wrote in terms of narrative technique or complexity. These account
for the difference, whatever quibbles one may have with plot, casting, or a slightly changed
ending. The film is all dramatic action rather than point of view, whereas James insists in his
Preface that “there is no economy of treatment without an adopted, a related point of view.”
Why is this loss of narrative complexity DUMB rather than different, attributable to the
formal requirements and constraints of another medium? Well, I’m exaggerating—though not
much—to make a point. The translation of serious fiction to film is a form of dumbing down
because the movie marketplace isn’t reality but a construct or simulacrum of reality. The reality
of movie adaptation has to do with running time; the simulacrum has to do with what should fill
that running time. What fills running time derives from the marketing perception of who buys the
most movie tickets. Guess what: it’s not the same people who buy literary fiction.
This is DUMB because it assumes that the movie-going public is homogeneous and that
commercial success therefore consists of one predictable set of factors. This is DUMB because
the assumption, and the behavior it engenders, persist despite the persistent success of “small”
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films. Such evidence produces not a more sophisticated perception of the variety of potential
audiences, but a greater leveling of moviemaking to guarantee the loyalty of that nonexistent
homogeneous audience. That is even DUMBER.
I have dwelt on this process because it applies to novel-writing and publication as well. It
would be easy to blame the movies for inevitably—given the nature of the relationship between
them—infecting the writing and publication of fiction with the DUMB virus and the even more
virulent DUMBER. As I suggested earlier, while there is a great deal of truth to that assertion,
especially as a contemporary phenomenon, I don’t think the movies created the virus. It grows
and flourishes in a culture—social and political as well as literary—that is profoundly hostile to
complexity of any kind. It’s possible to get into a chicken-egg argument here, but I believe that
DUMB and DUMBER helped create the popular art of the movies rather than the reverse. What
is another kind of narrative that prefers simplicity to complexity? That’s right—a myth. Another
possible definition of a myth, a variation on the one I provided earlier, is something we believe
instead of history. As I noted earlier, one of the things American movies have been particularly
good at is rewriting our history as myth (see chapter 19).
Not that the process hadn’t begun early in our literature. Huck Finn is vastly outnumbered by
the boy-heroes of Horatio Alger. For every Natty Bumppo or Nick of the Woods or Young
Goodman Brown, there exist scores of Deadeye Dicks and fictionalized versions of Kit Carson
and Buffalo Bill. The highest aspirations and judgments of our literary culture demand big ideas,
expansive themes, and—in fiction—narrative complexity. They even demand—omigod!—great
length.
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Our popular culture, on the other hand, values none of these things, though the mainstream
audience is not entirely to blame. Rightly or wrongly, literary fiction is regarded as a highbrow
commodity in a culture that has always been balanced precariously between middlebrow and
lowbrow. In a marketplace aggressively defined as anything but highbrow, such fiction must be
dumbed down to become marketable, especially for the unpublished novelist. Our popular
culture only seems to be tipping ever more rapidly in you-know-which direction, when in fact it
was ever thus. It never was a country for old men—unless you’re Cormac McCarthy.
The actual process of dumbing down is easily stated. It consists of rigorous application of
THE RULES to simplify narrative construction, make the timeline and action sequential, and
transform the implicit to the explicit. To the extent that the novelist retains control of this
process, the effect is minimal—less is more—and the results may work to the benefit of all
concerned. Whether working with an editor or not, the novelist must own the process, utilizing
the “inner veto” in the murder of his or her darlings.
Not that the process is ever that straightforward. An agent or an editor or both may mouth
assurance that the final veto rests with the writer while doing everything possible to usurp that
veto. That this struggle is neither devious nor unscrupulous (usually) only makes it the more
insidious. Those in thrall to the marketplace, being risk averse and perceiving risk in every
elegant turn of phrase and twist of the narrative, every subplot and subordinate clause, will
overcompensate for that risk. The writer, in turn, must respect the risk but resist the
overcompensation. The veto must be “inner” not because it rests finally with the writer, but
because it originates with the writer.
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However unequal this struggle for the unpublished novelist, it may create a workable and
useful tension, serving to apply the brakes to both the writer and the marketing “element” before
either becomes a runaway train. When the balance of power doesn’t hold, however, virtually all
of the advantage goes to the marketing side. The novelist has his integrity and amour-propre but
little else. He or she probably doesn’t have an agent and almost certainly will never have a book
deal. Or, if that last sentence isn’t true, the one preceding it isn’t either. That’s the game. DUMB
or DUMBER.
DUMB, in my view, represents an adjustment to the marketplace rather than a complete
capitulation to it. DUMB may reshape a serious novel, but DUMBER goes a crucial step further
and misshapes that novel, because it distorts the reality that DUMB recognizes. DUMB makes a
virtue of necessity; it is transactional, and those involved understand the price being paid and
what that price buys. DUMBER abuses and degrades necessity, driving up the price to support a
marketing structure built entirely on fear. DUMB is a prostitute; DUMBER is a pimp.
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Chapter 12
Not Fading Away
I’ve gone into the how of making literary fiction into something else, but haven’t said what I
imagined that something else to be for my own first novel. I was still fairly dumb myself when I
entered into the first of multiple edits with Lenore Raven, but I was smart enough to realize that
my notion of something else and hers probably wouldn’t mesh perfectly.
It’s perhaps clear by now that something else means “lacking in complexity.” Combine this
with the how factor, and the definition becomes algebraic: literary fiction – complexity =
something else. This definition reflects Lenore’s influence rather than my natural inclination.
Though I had become more than willing to transform the book into something else to get it
published, I wanted Not Fade Away to not fade away.
That desire formed the tension of our relationship, a necessary tension if a novel, not to
mention the novelist, is to avoid becoming something else ENTIRELY.
Lenore completed her first pass through the novel in May, 2001. (At the time, I didn’t realize
it was only a first pass.) I’d sent her my original draft rather than my ineffectual revision. In for a
penny, in for a pound. Or 5.3 pounds, the weight of 853 typed pages.
The following excerpts from her critique summarize her overall reaction:
“. . .the framework and all the elements of a viable novel.”
“. . .a plausible and sympathetic protagonist in Andy Lerner, who operates in a believable
twentieth-century American setting.”
“. . . credible conflicts that create dramas and minidramas that play out through the book.”
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“What I see in Not Fade Away is a talented and articulate writer who is flexing his literary
muscles, writing in the exuberant flush of creativity almost as if his next breath depended upon it,
much as I imagine Thomas Wolfe wrote. But Wolfe needed an equally talented editor, Max
Perkins, to restrain him and compress his prodigious output into lasting works of literature,
didn’t he?”
Yes, he did. I scarcely needed reminding of the Thomas Wolfe/Max Perkins thing. And I
understood the additional comparison she was making.
Her recommendations for improving the book all turned on its excessive length:
Show, don’t tell.
Start close to the action.
Less is more.
Don’t hold out on the reader.
Murder your darlings.
Okay, she didn’t put it that way exactly. Well, actually, she did, but she amplified each of
these recommendations and provided specific examples from my own writing.
I want to be clear. I didn’t come to my awareness of, and smoldering resentment at, THE
RULES because of Lenore Raven. I knew about them not only from the Howtu books, but from
literary criticism as well, of which I’d imbibed immoderate, if not lethal, doses in graduate
school. Besides, Lenore was right. I had plenty to learn in regard to each one of her
recommendations. But it proved to be a matter of degree rather than kind.
Lenore considered, for example, that I’d done a good job of showing rather than telling.
“Remember, too, that from the reader’s perspective, action is all-important.” And “writers should
have the word Show tattooed on the back of their left hand and Don’t Tell on the other, and they
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should chant those words like a mantra while they work.” As I’ve emphasized, it’s the
absolutism of THE RULES and their mechanistic application that I find a problem. They ought
to lead novelists to conclude that, like Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter, they should have
LOVE and HATE tattooed on the backs of their hands as well.
Though her initial write-up wasted little time in using the phrase murder your darlings to
indicate that everything was on the table for revision or elimination, I’ve already demonstrated
that in actual practice she usually limited herself to the “fine writing” that the original Dr.
Johnson/Quiller-Couch stricture really seems to address.
Less is more became the paring down of particular descriptive passages to reduce the
multiplicity of detail, especially early in the narrative, rather than a radical reduction in the scope
of the plot or the removal of certain characters.
Show, don’t tell became primarily the conveying of information through dialogue rather than
internal rumination by Andy. Despite the “all-importance” of action and the obligatory “Never
forget that story means drama,” start close to the action meant pretty literally what it said. At the
start of chapters and sections, I tried to avoid either interior monologue, a character sketch, or
some other form of what Lenore called “narrator voice-over.” Much of this therefore overlapped
with the application of Show, don’t tell.
Don’t hold out on the reader—in this pass through the book—meant that I always and
immediately indicate the time and place of each scene and that I leave no plot points unresolved
at the end of the book. I knew I was writing a sequel, but the reader didn’t. I realized I was trying
to finesse that situation and not doing a good job of it.
Curiously, the problem of the book’s length finally reduced itself to a single issue: the frequent
flashbacks. That some of them were extended sequences, that some were embedded in the
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middle of sequences that had to be resumed, and that some included information extraneous to
the flow of the narrative, made their effect on the number of words and pages excessive, out of
all proportion to the value or entertainment they provided. Add to them a more subtle and even
more pervasive form of flashback that Lenore called the “switchback,” my habit of starting a
chapter or major section at one point in time and then having Andy recap how or why he was
where he was, and the effect on length was that much more pernicious.
Once most of the flashbacks were eliminated, the narrative could be pared down by applying
Lenore’s other recommendations. Instead of substantially reducing the novel’s length, the latter
served a more useful function of continuing to reduce the length after the bulk of the cutting had
been performed. This approach made the smaller cuts more significant (in terms of length) in
proportion to the now smaller bulk of the book.
But to regard the major reason for the length of the initial draft and the key to reducing it as
first a violation and then an application of THE RULES, one has to view the embedded
flashbacks as a “darling.” Okay. If using them as a structural device to show the past impinging
upon the present amounts to “fine writing,” so be it. Still, though I had minimal difficulty
aligning the “inner veto” with Lenore’s advice, I’m not so sure.
Where the veto failed to kick in concerned the retrospective mode of the narrative, the issue I
alluded to in chapter 3 of this book. This issue had nothing to do with flashbacks or switchbacks,
but with the narrator’s tone and his perspective on the story. What I didn’t introduce earlier was
another factor in the editorial tension I’ve referred to, one that had a direct effect on how the
story should or should not be “framed.”
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Lenore did four passes through the novel. The last was a line edit, and most of the detailed,
hands-on work occurred there, line by torturous line. Indeed, substantial portions of many
chapters were rewritten during that edit.
The write-up after the first edit noted that “Not Fade Away is a ‘frame story’; it begins after
all the action is complete. Your narrator is the adult recounting events in his life as a fifteen-year-
old. At least that’s what we learn eventually.” She cited John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany
as an example of framing a narrative and added: “Frame stories always sacrifice immediacy, but
you gain the perspective of a narrator who can interpret the events as we look back on them; thus
the framed story offers two perspectives—the young protagonist who experiences the events and
the older person who can tell us what it meant to him. You may also lose suspense, as Irving
does, but you can make that sacrifice if you think it will offer more gains than losses.”
Exactly. No demur beyond suggesting that the novelist might not sacrifice suspense so much
as provide suspense of a different kind. No correction except that her words imply a reader of the
first draft wouldn’t realize that a frame story is being told until well after the opening. In fact,
less than three hundred words into that draft came the sentence I quoted earlier: “Or so I
remember it, at a great remove of time and distance.”
What Lenore didn’t suggest in May, 2001, was that I eliminate the retrospective framing. Nor
did she conflate it with the embedded flashbacks. Making the action of the story sequential didn’t
make it any less a memory. Indeed, in that first write-up and others, she suggested ways of
making the frame story more effective. No mention of removing it entirely occurred until
December, 2005, at the beginning of the line edit.
I understood Lenore’s reasoning. “We are striving for immediacy,” she wrote me. “That's also
why we advised against the literary opening of chapter 1.” Further: “If you take a highly
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descriptive manuscript that unfolds fairly slowly, then wrap it in a cocoon of retrospection,
which also slows the story, then you are not going to keep your reader captivated. The
acquisitions editors don't have the time or the patience to float through a leisurely book. . . . If we
want a crack at a contract, we have to deliver rapid blows.”
Note three things in that statement. First, the pronoun we. Lenore had recently hired Rick
Usher to assist with the line edit. From her statement, as well as a rewrite of chapter 1 suggested
by Rick, I concluded he was responsible for so late a change in regard to the frame story. I might
have wondered why that hadn’t occurred to Lenore earlier. (In fact, I did wonder.) The second
point of interest is your reader—singular. Contrast it with acquisitions editors—plural. There is
only one reader, whose taste, preferences, and patience can all be precisely calibrated.
Acquisitions editors are no less undifferentiated, but they are a group, united by their lack of
time and patience to “float” through books. It’s a subtle distinction, reinforcing not the
connection of writer and reader, but their separation, and calling attention to those who do most
of the work. One writer, one reader, and a whole impregnable phalanx of professionals between
them. It’s up to them to let the writer through. Who do you think really rules the marketplace?
Of course, I’m parsing the hell out of that statement and assuming some distinctions on
Lenore’s part that I can’t prove. I may simply be paranoid, but Lenore’s statement neatly
encapsulates many of the pluses and minuses of the editing process.
Lenore wasn’t wrong. The book did have to get past the acquisitions editors (assuming it ever
attracted an agent), and they weren’t likely to be interested in a book that dawdled. It would
never get to “the reader.” Therefore: Acquisitions editors = the reader.
But by the time Lenore and Rick suggested eliminating the frame story, the book was down to
four hundred typewritten pages. Most of the lush descriptiveness had been curtailed. Getting rid
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of the frame story might increase pace but wouldn’t shorten the book that much more. So what
did author dawdling/reader floating actually mean? Were they the same thing?
I concluded that they were, at least to the acquisitions editors. The issue was no longer length,
but something else. “We are striving for immediacy.” In that same email, Lenore wrote of the
beating up scene being rendered within the frame story: “A turning point in your book, an
intense plot spike, loses much of its intensity.” Something else = immediacy. Immediacy =
intensity. Therefore: Something else = intensity.
But there was more, “the bones of the story after the adult retrospective is removed—the real-
time adolescence of Andy. You will see that we are doing quite a bit of work on it because it's
heavy with description (albeit gorgeous writing) and not so heavy as I'd like, for marketing
purposes, on action. I'm sure you can see how we are worsening some situations, making some
of the characters' behavior more extreme, etc.”
Such an endeavor produces numerous possible formulations:
Story – (retrospection + description) = immediacy.
Action = story – (retrospection + description). Therefore:
Action = immediacy. Moreover:
Action = extreme(situation + behavior).
Extreme = intense. Therefore:
Extreme(situation + behavior) = intensity. Therefore:
Extreme(situation + behavior) = immediacy. Therefore:
Extreme(situation + behavior) = something else.
And let’s not forget the equation with which this chapter began:
Literary fiction – complexity = something else. Therefore:
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 113
Literary fiction – complexity = immediacy = intensity = action. Therefore:
Literary fiction – complexity = Extreme(situation + behavior).
I also devised another proposition: Author dawdling = reader floating. To which I would add
several other possibilities:
Reader floating = reader not captivated.
Author dawdling = leisurely narrative.
Leisurely narrative = (retrospection + description) + extreme(situation + behavior)/extreme.
Therefore:
Leisurely narrative = retrospection + description + situation + behavior. Therefore:
Leisurely narrative = complexity. Therefore:
Complexity = literary fiction. Therefore:
Literary fiction = author dawdling.
Author dawdling = reader not captivated.
Literary fiction = reader not captivated.
If I’ve exaggerated, it’s because the assumptions about the literary marketplace that give rise
to such “equations” rest on reasoning as absolute but unprovable as they are. “If we want a crack
at a contract, we have to deliver rapid blows.” That sounds like a mixed metaphor, but it isn’t.
The first novelist isn’t fighting for the title, but for a shot at the title. That’s fine. But the writer
has not only to score knockouts in the qualifying fights, but to score them quickly—not because
that’s the best or only way to fight, not even because it protects the fighter, but simply to
minimize the promoter’s risk. And yet, one of the greatest of heavyweight boxers was able to
sting like a bee because he floated like a butterfly. Muhammad Ali wasn’t DUMB; Sonny Liston
was. Ali didn’t fade away; Liston did. Ali was an artist; Liston was something else entirely.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 114
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Once I began to think in those terms, I saw how I, as a
first novelist, wasn’t going to fade away either. Or become something else entirely.
Lenore prefaced her comments about retrospective narration by saying, “I'm really happy to
discuss this with you further. This is your book, and you must feel good about the direction it
takes.” This statement coincided with a recommendation to delete an allusion to the Clutter
family of Holcomb, Kansas, whose murder provided the source of Truman Capote’s In Cold
Blood (1966), the film version of it in 1967, and the more recent film Capote (2005). Lenore and
Rick thought this allusion would suggest a connection to one or more of these and inhibit “the
reader’s” suspension of disbelief for my book. Their logic still escapes me, except that Andy
wasn’t likely to have known about the Clutters until 1966 (making the allusion retrospective).
But by 2005, I understood the mindset behind so ludicrous a comment. I responded with an email
stating that the novel was literary fiction and that I did not want it “dumbed down.”
Lenore’s reply provided the epigraph of this book. I got the point, having known when I
wrote the email what the nature of her response would be. But I had made my point. I restored
the retrospective mode—selectively but immediately. Four paragraphs into chapter one, Andy
says, “In those days I often thought my Grandma Celia would have made a better first lady than
Mrs. Eisenhower.” The reference to Lionel Kahn as a future Watergate Special Prosecutor from
the passage I quoted in chapter 6 of this book also reappeared, though in a different context. Note
too that the frame story is only implicit in the reference to the Clutter family. Andy could have
read a brief, back-page item in the newspaper similar to the story that caught Truman Capote’s
interest. (I admit I’m in Edmund Wilson/Turn of the Screw country here. It can get pretty silly.)
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 115
I applied the same strategy to other aspects of the dumbing down process. The aftermath of
the beating alludes to the original version of The Fly, and to Dean Martin in the equally classic
western, Rio Bravo. The two allusions from Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities in the same paragraph
are less explicit, but “recalled to life” has more familiarity to likely readers—as opposed to “the
reader”—than the Brooks of Sheffield episode in David Copperfield. So felicitous a phrase might
even prompt such readers to seek its source if they don’t already know it. None of these is
baffling and frustrating in the way that “the declaration from Independence” would have been.
And one final word about the fly that recalls Andy to life—a buzzing fly. The allusion to Emily
Dickinson’s poem “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died” is transparent. A reader either knows the
poem or not. If not, nothing about the buzzing fly suggests that they ought to know it.
What had I gained by restoring the retrospective mode in this fashion? A detailed look at that
last example reveals that the allusiveness is closely linked to the frame story.
Was it only later that I recalled the moment in Rio Bravo when Dean Martin hears the
"Cut-throat Song" and his hands stop shaking? Did I really appreciate, then and there, the
irony of being recalled to life not by Mr. Jarvis Lorry of Tellson's Bank, London, but by
—The Fly? It doesn’t matter. Something quickened at my core, some impulse primal and
undeniable and real, not to bleat “Help me! Help me!” but to stand up and get moving.
No matter what anyone said or did to me, I knew I wasn’t a pile of shit.
The phrase “Was it only later . . .?” reasserts the retrospective framework, suggesting not only
that “later” is much later than, say, the following week, but that the narrator is recalling that
“later” from an even more distant perspective. Andy’s use of the word “irony” also suggests the
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 116
mature reflector on past events. The allusiveness reinforces the significance of this act of
memory without compromising either the plausibility or immediacy of the remembered
experience. We’re really talking about three movie allusions, because at the time of the beating
Andy has more probably seen the 1935 version of A Tale of Two Cities starring Ronald Colman
on TV than read the original novel. (Indeed, Andy confirms this in chapter 41.) They establish
the cultural context in which the young Andy lives without making him unbelievably erudite for
his age and situation. “Help me! Help me!” is one of the most famous exit lines in movie history.
Andy doesn’t say, for example, “Was it only later that I recalled that moment in Stendhal’s The
Red and the Black when Julien Sorel . . .?” Nevertheless, the chain of allusion establishes a
sophisticated connection between the horror of what has just occurred, the death and rebirth of
which it is the catalyst, and the possibility of redemption. The significance of the experience lies
not only in its actuality, but in the mature, recollected understanding of that actuality.
The allusive, retrospective framework therefore creates possibilities that “immediacy” does
not without seriously compromising the flow of the narrative. On the contrary, it enhances the
action, because it generates suspense that readers will ultimately find more satisfying.
Immediacy asks, does Andy survive? Of course, he does; that’s a given of the book’s existence.
The survival question produces scarcely a ripple in the line of action. In contrast, though
retrospection makes survival moot, it offers three spikes in suspense. Does Andy get revenge? If,
so how does he get revenge? And what does it cost him?
My decision to let my title do much of the retrospective work enabled me to be more selective
in the retrospection. The title is an allusion that suggests the narrative framing. I also said in
chapter 3 that the retrospective mode made me the writer that I am. Writing for me is as much an
act of memory as of creation. I bring to it not only my experience, the people I’ve met, and their
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experiences, but the books I’ve read, the movies I’ve seen, the music I’ve heard. All supply the
frame story of my fiction, the imaginative reconstruction of which is its substance. It is, to quote
Wordsworth again, “emotion recollected in tranquility.” It is history, not current events.
In Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man (1928), the first of his three George Sherston books,
Siegfried Sassoon writes: “As I remember and write, I grin, but not unkindly, at my distant and
callow self and the absurdities which constitute his chronicle. To my mind the only thing that
matters is to do something. Middle-aged retrospection may decide that it wasn’t worth doing; but
the perceptions of maturity are often sapless and restrictive; and ‘the thoughts of youth are long,
long thoughts,’ even though they are only about buying a racing-cap.” What strikes me about this
passage in a memoir disguised as a novel disguised as a memoir is the balance between
immediacy and retrospection. Each is richer because of the other. I wouldn’t go so far as to
suggest that the racing-cap is Sassoon’s madeleine—the passage doesn’t work that way; the
memory is anything but involuntary—but the simplicity of what is going on is deceptive. The
balance exists because the retrospection neither supersedes nor judges the earlier experience; it
neither chooses experience over innocence nor views it as the superior state. Instead, the
reflexive relationship between the two establishes both the immediacy and the meaning of the
past as the end-state of mature reflection. Except for the war poems, I hadn’t read Sassoon when
I wrote the passage I quoted above from Not Fade Away, but I might have.
In any case, I had finally learned to apply in a consistent fashion the necessary tension
between author and the marketplace that would work for me—if not (as it turned out) my editing
partners. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Less is more.
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PART IV
________________________________________________________________________
Believe It or Not
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 119
Chapter 13
What’s in a Name?
The first serious glitch in the editing process concerned the naming of characters. In every
draft of the novel, Lester Todman had always had the same name, which may owe something to
the Mark Goodson-Bill Todman team that produced television quiz shows in the nineteen fifties.
But I had a more important reason for selecting that name. Lester has the diminutive “Les,”
which implies “less,” not as in less is more, but as in less there than meets the eye. Moreover, in
German—Great-Grandpa Simon’s native language—tod Mann means “dead man.” I intended
Lester Todman’s name to suggest something about the character and to establish an ironic
contrast between him and another, even more important character. In short, a “darling”—but a
transparent one, like the buzzing fly.
During the line edit, Lenore pointed out the similarity between that name and “Todd
Berman.” I had two character names of four syllables or less with two of the syllables identical.
Lenore believed the reader would confuse these character names. “Readers recognize names
mainly by sight, not by sounding them out. We want to have the names as distinctive as possible,
to make certain the reader will recognize each one at a glance.” Apparently, I ran the risk of the
reader thinking that one of Andy’s contemporaries and close friends was sleeping with Andy’s
mother and was likely to end up as his stepfather.
Other names presented similar, if lesser problems. In chapter two, at the first country club
dance, several teenage girls had first names beginning with “M.” Melanie, Melissa, Marilyn.
(Not to mention that Melanie has a brother named Milton and Andy an algebra tutor named
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Mabel Beecham.) Well, at least I had Andy and Norman gobbling Hersheyettes at the dance
rather than M&Ms.
I could simply have changed Todd Berman’s given name. I didn’t think of him as a dead man
(teaser: not in this book, anyway). Mark Berman, perhaps? I dunno—another M. In any case, a
change of given name wouldn’t solve the problem, as Lenore stated it. “I’m worried about these
names being so similar: Todd Berman, Judy Berman, Lester Todman, Andy Lerner.” To which
she might have added Norman Nodler’s first name.
On the other hand, these names weren’t all darlings. There’s nothing clever about “Judy
Berman.” “Norman Nodler” is alliteratively comic, but hardly a piece of “fine writing.” All of
the names were consistent with the milieu of my boyhood. I knew countless Bermans,
Silvermans, Glassmans, Grossmans, and Weismans. I even knew a Nodler, though not a Norman
Nodler. I knew plenty of other Normans, however, as well as Marks and Todds and Larrys,
Melanies, Melissas, and Marilyns. To me the names I chose originally didn’t seem that similar.
Would anyone really confuse Todd Berman with Lester Todman? My wife didn’t. And who
cared if there was a Melanie, a Melissa, and a Marilyn at the same party if the latter two were
mentioned only once and never appeared again? Lenore hadn’t said anything about the names in
the three previous edits (remember that for later), so how serious could the issue be?
Nevertheless, I conceded her point about reader name recognition. Not every potential reader
was Jewish or grew up in Houston in the 1950s and 1960s, though that wasn’t what really began
to trouble me. Nor did any potential “inner veto” focus on the current darling—my symbolic
naming of Lester Todman. Instead, I focused on Todman/Berman and Lester/Lerner. Change
only those, I thought, and everything else was much less potentially confusing. The murder of a
darling would occur, but only as collateral damage. Because I didn’t want to change the Berman
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and Lerner surnames more than I didn’t want to change the Todman surname, Todman became
Glick. I also changed Lester to Leo, because Lester looked a lot like Lerner.
In an exchange of emails, Lenore agreed with my notion on the major problem with the
names and how to fix it. This solution provides a perfect example of DUMB that doesn’t cross
the line to DUMBER. It’s a concession to a notion of the marketplace that may or may not be
true. “Readers recognize names mainly by sight, not by sounding them out.” Even if it is true, it
assumes all potential readers will have the same tendency. (I, for one, don’t.) It assumes that all
the characters are herded onto the first page of the novel and introduced there. On the other hand,
it’s a painless concession, as many editing changes are. It didn’t alter the book in any but the
most superficial sense. Lenore had a valid point about similarity—Berman/Todman;
Lester/Lerner—even if the assumption behind it was questionable. Perhaps whatever I gained by
suggesting that to Andy’s mother, Emily, Lester Todman was interchangeable with Bernie
Lerner as husband material, I’d lose by making Lester and Bernie similar “failed” fathers. Better,
maybe, to give Johnny One-Note a one-syllable surname as well. In playing DUMB and
ostensibly making the book just one teeny bit less Ukrainian, I was thinking in Ukrainian.
The change achieved a ripple effect. Left undone, it might have been both a problem in the
work and a negative factor in marketing it. Having made it, however, I didn’t have to make
wholesale changes that would have made no character name resemble, in sound or syllable, that
of another. Perhaps what occurred was not after all the murder of a darling, but something
analogous to it that accomplished the same thing. I’d also suggest that the editing process worked
smoothly in this instance because even in recognizing the primacy of the marketplace it managed
to finesse slavish adherence to THE RULES. Lenore found the single name change effective, but
didn’t chide me for thinking in Ukrainian (even if she thought I was doing so). I appreciated her
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insight as a way of identifying a naming problem that I don’t believe would have occurred to me
if I’d been working alone. Life was good. Would that the matter had ended there.
Not much later in the line edit Lenore got to the name Cornel Greenberg. He is a guest at the
Lerner home after Grandma Celia’s funeral. “Is this a real name for a Jewish man?” asked
Lenore. “Is it spelled correctly? Because I don’t want anything to trip up your readers and take
them from suspended disbelief, I think this name needs to go.”
I was puzzled. I knew Jewish men of an older generation named Lionel and Ansel, if not
Cornel—though I had an Uncle Arthur who bore a strong resemblance to Cornel Wilde. Lenore
informed me that she had consulted the court of last resort. “I searched the Web for men named
Cornel, and I couldn’t find one except Cornel Wilde, who first appeared in films as ‘Robert
Cornel.’” I replied that her web search had missed the American writer Cornell (two l’s)
Woolrich, who wrote “It Had to be Murder” (the short story source of Hitchcock’s Rear
Window), and The Bride Wore Black (which Truffaut filmed), and it had missed Cornell
Borchers, a German actress of the nineteen fifties.
Trivial, no? Trivial, yes. As Jessie Royce Landis says to Cary Grant, arrested for drunk
driving in North by Northwest, “Pay the two dollars, Roger.” Make the change, Ron. As a matter
of fact, I did make it. Or rather I recast the section involving Cornel Greenberg and others like it
as overheard dialogue rather than as Andy telling the reader what he’s overheard. All in all, not a
bad thing. Show, don’t tell.
Still, the very triviality of the Cornel Greenberg issue continued to nag at me.
Tripping up my readers? How? Why? Was this a contradictory corollary to THE RULE about
not keeping the reader in the dark? Don’t keep anything back, but don’t startle the reader either.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 123
So, in fiction, startling is a bad thing? But isn’t one of the pleasures of both novel-writing and
novel-reading an occasional jolt of the unexpected? All surprises are “startling,” or they wouldn’t
be surprises, but not necessarily jarring or discomfiting. They don’t always involve Janet Leigh
and a shower at the Bates Motel.
Take them from suspended disbelief? Almost a hundred pages into my novel a reader is going
to be incredulous that a character is named Cornel Greenberg? A character who never reappears
and isn’t even really a character, but someone, like the M girls in chapter 2, in the background?
And the incredulity is so severe that it destroys suspension of disbelief? Is the latter that fragile?
Perhaps, but not so fragile that it can’t be easily (not to mention ludicrously) rescued. “If you
need to have Cornel here, at least put the second L at the end, so it will look familiar to the
reader.” So the whole structure of suspended disbelief depends on a double L? You think?
Early in this book, I made the statement, “The reader will put up with any length if you
engage his or her imagination.” In fact, two things must happen for a novelist to secure the
reader: that reader’s imagination must be engaged, and he or she must suspend disbelief. These
two prerequisites are less unrelated than at first appears.
Shakespeare provides a useful starting point, specifically what Harold Bloom calls the
dramatist’s “invention of the human.” Whatever else that lavish claim means—no need to enter
into Ron Rosenbaum-style indignant hand-wringing over whether Bloom actually thinks that
Shakespeare is God (though Bloom was hardly the originator of that notion)—at the very least it
encompasses the creation of characters both believable and changeable. Shakespeare gave us
vividness, depth, and differentiation in the creation of character. He gave us human psychology
rather than the typology of medieval literature. Chaucer’s Pardoner is the grandfather of
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 124
Shakespeare’s Iago, but the Pardoner is inseparable from the age that produced him, while Iago
is a character for the ages.
In a sense, then, Shakespeare invented literary realism. The latter, of course, connects him to
the novel, which is primarily a realistic form, in that it attempts to replicate life as most of us
experience it in recognizable settings or situations (or both). And it would be difficult to identify
a good or great novel that isn’t character-driven. With Shakespeare as well, we think first and
foremost of character; that is how we have come to frame discussions of the plays. Not the
revenge plot of Hamlet, but Hamlet and his problems.
But the inventor of “realism” wrote plays in blank verse. I’m guessing that nowhere in the
world do ordinary people speak in that mode. Theatergoers and readers suspend their disbelief
that any “real” person would do so. That is what permits a writer working with the most artificial
and stylized of forms to be the “father” of realism.
Of course, we’re talking about Shakespeare. Not every playwright working in blank verse
could take for granted an audience’s “willing suspension of disbelief,” in Coleridge’s famous
formulation. Nor can everyone who writes a novel. And even the most “realistic” novel requires
suspension of disbelief, because no novel could ever possibly “happen.” (That is what makes the
very word “realism” a problematic literary term. As the James Shapiro observes in A Year in
the Life of William Shakespeare, theater is “fiction and realism a convention, an illusion.”)
Everything that occurs in a novel is an imitation of reality, a reality heightened, arranged, and
elaborated, a selection and compression of the elements that define reality: time, memory, action,
perception. Ulysses comes no closer to replicating real life than The Odyssey does. Look no
further than the novel’s shifting points of view. Doesn’t happen in real life; each of us is stuck in
his or her own mind.
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Joyce’s novel seems more “believable” the characters placed in historical time and a real city,
their occupations, concerns, and behavior closer to those of actual, ordinary people than are those
of gods and heroes. But believability isn't reality; rather, like Aristotle’s dramatic unities, it is a
set of conventions that enables the reader to suspend disbelief. In that sense, these conventions
don’t differ from those of epic poetry. So Joyce’s title and the structure of his novel demonstrate.
In an interview, the novelist Anthony Powell (A Dance to the Music of Time) both admitted and
made a virtue of the novel’s inability to replicate real life. “People think that because a novel's
invented it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel's invented, it's true.
Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true since they can't include every conceivable
circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.”
Believability reverses the conventions that inform other, less realistic literary forms than the
novel. That is another insight implicit in Joyce’s use of them for his epic of a single “typical”
day. What drives the novel toward realism, formal as well as substantive, is its subject matter—
human character in all its complexity. This was Shakespeare’s “invention of the human,” the
typically human, despite his myriad of kings and princes, the distant or uncertain time periods of
his plays, and their “exotic” locales.
The conventions of a literary form serve both subject matter and the intended audience. As the
machinery that delivers the subject matter to the reader, they condition the reader’s expectations.
At the same time, they wouldn’t survive if the audience didn’t accept them and if the author
didn’t make effective use of them, satisfying and occasionally expanding those expectations. The
blank verse soliloquy provides the perfect vehicle for presenting the consciousness of a Hamlet
not only because Shakespeare was a genius—that lies in the poetry of the soliloquies—but
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because the audience accepts it as an effective device for entering Hamlet’s mind. No one in any
audience at any time has ever believed they were really inside that mind. Even a film that uses
voice-over to portray a character “thinking” is employing another convention.
The poetry—the blank verse—enhances rather than inhibits suspension of disbelief because
the audience acknowledges the entire theatrical construct as illusion. (That’s not the Forest of
Arden, but trees painted on canvas.) Similarly, the conventions of epic poetry—the hero’s
journey to the underworld, for example—support a suspension of disbelief rooted in the
formulaic development of a familiar tale being told, or sung. With gods and heroes, anything can
happen because they’re unlike everyone else.
Early on, however, the novel turned previous literary conventions around. Thoroughly
grounded in the everyday world, it all but dispenses with the notion of illusion or artifice. More
accurately, it accomplishes a literary sleight of hand. By establishing believability as a
convention, it induces the willing suspension of disbelief necessary to any successful piece of
fiction. Repeat after me: No novel could ever really happen.
Consider again my reference in chapter 3 to Richardson’s Clarissa. The conventions of the
epistolary novel are no more real than those of the dramatic soliloquy; they only seem to be
because they rest on the commonplace activity of letter-writing. (If they don’t exist already,
novels structured entirely as a series of emails or text messages soon will.) So-called “stream-of-
consciousness”—as in Molly Bloom’s interior monologue—is likewise pure artifice grounded in
the most basic human functions and emotions. Leopold Bloom in Nighttown, presented as a
drama, is no more “realistic” an episode than Odysseus in the underworld. It doesn’t have to be.
Suspension of disbelief is an absolute; it either occurs or it doesn’t, and it is unconscious. It is an
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act not of intellect, but of imagination. Anyone who tries to suspend disbelief almost surely fails
to do so.
With the novel, the act of imagination essential to suspension of disbelief occurs exclusively
in the reader’s mind, unaided by bardic song, legendary tales and familiar plots, theatrical sets,
actors’ masks or makeup, cinematography, or the shared assumptions of an audience, be they
groundlings or seated in a luxury stall. Theoretically, every novel is sui generis, its characters
and experiences the unique expression of the novelist’s interaction with “real life.” Write what
you know. To explore a unique take on real life—as opposed to, say, the Trojan War—a reader
must accept its basis in the real.
The conventions of believability are largely responsible for garnering the reader’s
participation, not because they ground the narrative in absolute faithfulness to reality, or
duplication of it, but because they provide the vehicle that allows the novelist’s imagination and
the reader’s to meld and to soar above reality. Even if it is an earthbound journey down a big
river. “You don’t know me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of
Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the
truth mainly.”
Most novels are not unique. They're like having sex in the age of AIDS. The reader is reading
every book the novelist has ever read or otherwise encountered in the culture. Ulysses again
provides Exhibit A. Similarly, Kafka’s Gregor Samsa is Everyman, and the metamorphosis of
Philip Roth’s Everyman recalls Gregor’s physical decay. Philip Marlowe is Sir Galahad in a
fedora, Childe Roland at the Chateau Marmont.
What is unique, always, is the reader’s own experience of reading the novel, that melding of
his or her imagination with the author’s. And if the reader is anyone but my cousin and has a
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prior reading history, the latter will also inform the current reading. And the first and most
important thing it will do is condition the suspension of disbelief.
A reader of Not Fade Away who has read Great Expectations or Absalom! Absalom or both is
probably easier to engage than one who hasn’t not because they recognize that Miss Beecham is
a version of Miss Havisham or Rosa Coldfield, but because they have been conditioned by their
reading to suspend disbelief in such a character. Thus, all the “unbelievable” elements associated
with Miss Beecham—her extreme isolation, the perfectly recreated antebellum mansion, the
howling dog, the flag-draped coffin—become less troublesome in a way similar to the naming
pattern in the novel. This is not the reader who will say, “Wait just a damn minute. How does the
dog know exactly when to howl? Why does he howl? What’s in that coffin?”
When readers say a novel isn’t believable or realistic, what they probably mean is that they
couldn’t suspend disbelief. Of a cleric in Barchester Towers, Henry James said that he could
believe a man was named Quiverful or that a man had fourteen children, but he couldn’t believe
that a man named Quiverful had fourteen children. That is disbelief unsuspended. But Trollope
also made use in several novels of a law firm named Slow and Bideawhile. James doesn’t
mention that name. So what general precept was he posing?
Quiverful and Slow and Bideawhile are symbolic naming—of a very crude sort. Slow and
Bideawhile is no less obvious in its intent than Quiverful, but it is a more effective name. Indeed,
the law firm is rather Trollope’s version of Krook’s shop in Dickens’s Bleak House or the
Circumlocution Office of Little Dorritt, employed for more than the mere comic effect of
Quiverful. For all its literalness, it carries some metaphoric weight. Though both names are
consistent with Trollopian realism, what James called “the complete appreciation of the usual,”
the law firm is more so. It joins Margin, Vellum, and Foolscap (stationers) in an accretion of
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detail that becomes a densely threaded social fabric—the Balzacian Comedie Humaine that is
Trollope’s fiction. If it doesn’t inhibit suspension of disbelief as Quiverful does (for Henry James
at least), it’s because it has more valid credentials of believability. One can no more believe that
a law firm could really be called Slow and Bideawhile than that a man named Quiverful could
have fourteen children, but the latter name dangles from the social fabric like an errant thread.
And why? One suspects that in addition to the fourteen children, it’s because the name has an
artificiality compounded of sight, sound, and sense, especially applied to a cleric.
That is the paradox of realism. Believability induces suspension of disbelief. The more
artificial the literary form, the more artificial the conventions that produce this condition. That
sounds like another “law,” but it’s only another belief—mine. Still, it would seem to follow that
the same sort of artificiality will not work for the conventions of the novel.
Unfortunately, if the reader resists making the imaginative connection, the conventions of the
novel will do much of the work for him. That genre fiction regularly does provides another
distinction between it and literary fiction and explains much of its popular appeal. It’s no
accident that the movies are for the most part defined by genre. Historically, the studio system
and the star system which it absorbed and perfected, depended on genre; commercially, the
structure, casting, and marketing of movies depend on genre; critically, the auteur theory and its
derivatives depend on genre.
In fiction, genre conventions suspend the reader’s disbelief for him, conditioning not
imagination, but expectation. If boy and girl kiss happily on the last page of every romance
novel, then the reader’s imaginative journey to the last page may as well proceed on automatic
pilot, and almost certainly does so. The same applies to the opposite convention that ends the
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western; after the cleansing violence of the final gunfight, the laconic, loner hero passes up the
girl and moves on to the next town—his significant other being either his sidekick or his horse.
The mystery or detective novel is no less stylized than the romance and western, but its
conventions are more complex, giving rise to the numerous permutations of its sub-genres. It is a
genre, however, composed almost entirely of archetypes—loner P.I. male, loner P.I. female,
femme fatale, master criminal, psychopathic serial killer, bumbling police detective, snitch,
stoolie, maverick cop, brilliant ratiocinator. The striking thing about this variety and the
explanation for many mystery conventions is that most successful mysteries belong to a series
built around a hero/heroine or, less often, a locale. From Poe’s Dupin and Doyle’s Sherlock
Holmes to Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone and Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, the detective
dependably reappears.
This is good marketing, of course. When Sherlock Holmes died with Moriarty at the
Reichenbach Falls, one wonders who was more outraged, Conan Doyle’s readers or his
publishers? Moreover, reappearance works with other mystery conventions such as titles
(Doyle’s “The Adventure of . . .” pattern, Grafton’s alphabet sequence) to obviate any concern
about willing suspension of disbelief. In a similar process, the romance novelist writes the same
ritualized story— true love as the Holy Grail—over and over again. (Homework assignment for
readers: where did the notion of “true love” originate?”)
Reappearance easily reinitiates the reader’s previous suspension of disbelief. That the reader
as well as the detective has returned makes “willingness” a given. But what prevents
reappearance from becoming, or seeming to become, repetition? The answer is—nothing. The
reader’s enjoyment, however temporary, derives from the repetition as evidenced in the
predictable, expected play of convention—the hero cracking-wise, the detective inspector
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examining the murder scene, the medical examiner reading clues in an autopsy, the grilling of a
suspect, the masterful explanation in the library.
The reader isn’t soaring imaginatively on an authorial Concorde, merely carpooling with the
writer to a familiar destination. The commute is familiar, the ride not overlong. The reader soon
categorizes both the other passengers and the driver and occasionally discovers something new
about them. But anything new must remain within the bounds of convention. If one of the riders
suddenly opens the door and leaps into heavy, fast-moving traffic, the carpool is threatened, if
not destroyed. “I can’t believe he did that!”
Even repeatability may become an issue if it occurs outside established convention. The
mystery novels of Anne Perry offer a useful example. For me, neither the stylistic sloppiness
consequent upon publishing two novels a year for many years nor her overwrought diction
inhibits the believability of her work. Nor do her titles, the melodramatic connotations of those in
the William Monk series, the inevitable literary allusiveness of the World War One novels, or the
place-name pattern of her Thomas/Charlotte Pitt series. It is the relentless exoticism of her
character-naming that does the damage. Every minor character and not a few major ones must
carry a unique but utterly farfetched name. Or if not an unusual name, an unusual spelling: Alys
instead of Alice. Why must a character be named Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould? I feel like
Henry James. I can believe (barely) that a woman has the first name of Vespasia or the last name
of Cumming-Gould, but I can’t abide both. “Readers recognize names mainly by sight, not by
sounding them out. We want to have the names as distinctive as possible, to make certain the
reader will recognize each one at a glance.” Yeah, sure—that’ll work.
In this superficial way Perry tries to distract the reader from her cliché-ridden style and mind-
numbing repetitiveness. The reader, she must think, will perceive this as evidence of a unique
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style. Guess what—the reader won’t, because it isn’t. Anne Perry exists as a writer only because
she is a genre novelist, but in some profound way, despite her steady if unspectacular success,
she seems not to understand her own genre.
As a practitioner of the “historical mystery,” she has created a fictional world full of vivid
historical and period detail. That is her great strength, but she severely undercuts authenticity
with “the mysterious” rather than relying on the history itself. The character names inhibit
believability because they reflect an unnecessary disjunction between history and mystery. They
are symptomatic of a larger problem in her work. Steven Saylor’s mysteries set in Republican
Rome are believable because the mystery derives from the details of the historical moment, the
corruption and collapse of the republic, and they are peopled with many of the historical players
in that drama. In a genre that is at once highly conventionalized and profoundly character-driven,
Saylor’s characters connect history and mystery. Perry injects historical detail into what is
essentially another genre—the paranoid thriller in which powerful unseen forces manipulate
public events. As if Victorian imperialism and World War One did not offer subject matter on a
par with Republican Rome, Perry presents them as driven, respectively, by a sinister “Inner
Circle” and a “Peacemaker” less like Lloyd George than Lex Luthor. Her core readers, I suspect,
are lazy connoisseurs of Victoriana and the carnage of Ypres and the Somme, distantly
affectionate and all but disengaged. They suspend disbelief out of habit.
Anne Perry isn’t alone in writing a series about the Great War. As I noted in chapter 7, the
war and, especially, its aftermath now constitute a successful sub-genre of the detective story,
most conspicuously the Inspector Rutledge novels by Charles Todd and Jacqueline Winspear’s
Maisie Dobbs series. A comparison of the two series raises an interesting issue involving willing
suspension of disbelief. Inspector Rutledge, a war veteran, manages not only to return to his
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civilian job, but to solve baffling murders despite a raging case of schizophrenia—frequently, if
not constantly, hearing the voice of a sergeant for whose wartime death he bears responsibility.
In the first book of the Maisie Dobbs series, however, the great love of the eponymous heroine’s
life becomes permanently incapacitated because of shell shock.
On the one hand, the reader is asked to accept that a central character can function despite a
crippling incapacity, on the other that a central character is rendered catatonic by the same
affliction. And the reader does suspend disbelief in both instances—though I have something of
a problem with Rutledge. The issue, as I see it, is that both series treat shell shock not as an
illness, but a plot device. One has only to compare these series to, say, Pat Barker’s Regeneration
trilogy, also a work of fiction about the First World War, to understand the difference between a
serious and trivial treatment of a similar theme and situation. Shell shock matters in Barker’s
work in a way that it doesn’t in the two series—it matters thematically, dramatically and, above
all, historically, involving real people in its core relationships. The madness of the Great War
forms the very substance of the work.
Not that there is anything wrong with how the two genre novelists use the familiar trope of
shell shock. As a device, it can serve diametrically opposite purposes in the two series. Both
series therefore set aside any fundamental truth about human psychology to serve genre
convention. That’s okay, as long as readers understand and accept the convention, as long as they
aren’t asked to take the treatment seriously, and as long as they don’t ignore or dismiss a more
serious treatment. That tripartite proposition is more difficult than it sounds, and for reasons not
altogether to do with the fictional treatment (see chapter 21).
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I also noted early on how often both coming-of-age novels and detective fiction employ first-
person narration to make “discovery” on the reader’s part synchronous with that of the
protagonist. It’s no coincidence that the coming-of-age tale, viewed in genre terms, is no less
character-driven than most effective detective novels. Nor is it any accident, given the additional
elements I noted in chapter 7, that these novels sometimes cross over into general or serious
fiction. In a certain profound sense, it may be that all novels are detective stories. In any case,
Ruth Rendell and P.D. James, like Hammett and Chandler before them, are mystery writers, but
not purely, or merely, genre novelists. They don’t ignore genre conventions, but they do
transcend them, much as John Le Carre has with the spy thriller. And Daniel Silva hasn’t.
In establishing conventions and then outdistancing them, Hammett and Chandler meet one
criterion of the great writer. They opened up whole new territories for the writers who followed
them, as John D. MacDonald did in discovering Florida for the mystery genre. (And MacDonald
was far too good a novelist to need the “color” hook of his Travis McGee titles.) All three were
distinctive stylists, but so was James M. Cain, and he is not “unreservedly great,” because he
perfected a set of genre conventions without ever moving beyond them. Style alone won’t do it if
the conventions become formulaic.
I seem now to be juggling four balls: character-naming, its relationship to character
development, genre conventions, and believability. In fact, though, I’m tossing a single ball in
the air. For the writer this is good news and bad news. It’s easier to toss one ball in the air and
catch it than to juggle four. The bad news is that if the writer drops that one ball—well, he or she
has dropped the ball.
That ball might most accurately and usefully be called not believability, but narrative
persuasion. Which brings me to Patricia Highsmith and The Talented Mr. Ripley.
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Chapter 14
The Talented Miss Highsmith
In chapter 3, I remarked that a coming-of-age novel about a serial killer would be pushing the
envelope a bit too far. Well, The Talented Mr. Ripley goes some distance in that direction. Tom
Ripley is pretty fully formed from the outset, but as the novel proceeds he discovers his true
calling. Patricia Highsmith’s achievement in the Ripley books is to make a multiple murderer a
sympathetic protagonist. That is less shocking in the age of Hannibal Lecter than it was in 1955
(though Tom Ripley makes Hannibal Lecter possible). What remains remarkable is how
Highsmith accomplishes the feat.
It’s a truism that telling a story from a particular character’s point of view inevitably causes
the reader to sympathize, if not always to identify, with that character. Narrative point of view
usually produces “genuine” sympathy or identification; unlike, say, the soliloquy or dramatic
monologue, which tends to utilize irony as a distancing device. The reader knows that the duke
in Browning’s “My Last Duchess” is a monster largely because the duke obviously doesn’t know
it. Sympathy goes to the last duchess and the duchess to come from the negotiations between the
duke and his listener. Sympathy in the Ripley books goes not to Dickie Greenleaf and Tom’s
other victims, but to Tom himself because the reader identifies with Tom, who is a psychopath.
Either first-person or third-person point of view can achieve the effect I’m describing. One
tends to assume that first-person would work better than third, but that is not true. One might
also expect the Ripley books to employ first-person narration. They do not.
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Third-person narration often achieves what first-person cannot, and I don’t mean in terms of
omniscience or breadth of action. Consider the murder of Dickie Greenleaf. “Tom swung a left-
handed blow with the oar against the side of Dickie’s head” creates a sympathetic identification
that “Ripley swung a left-handed blow” would not, “Ripley” being less personal than “Tom.”
But what does “Tom swung the oar” achieve that “I swung the oar” does not?
Imagine The Ambassadors narrated by Lambert Strether. This is, of course, a somewhat
disingenuous example, given the well-known influence of James’s novel on The Talented Mr.
Ripley. It goes beyond the get-my-boy-back-from-Europe request that kick starts the plot, beyond
even the effect of Europe on the American protagonist, the awakening of consciousness that the
Old World engenders. As with Strether—the Jamesian “central intelligence” through whom the
action of The Ambassadors is filtered—the third-person narration ensures the presence of still
another filter. For the sake of convenience, call this filter “the narrator.”
On the first page of the novel, James makes an explicit distinction between Strether and the
narrator, using the term “I” for the latter. On the second page of The Talented Mr. Ripley,
Highsmith writes: “Tom saw the man make a gesture of postponement to the barman, and come
around the bar towards him. Here it was! Tom stared at him, paralyzed.” The effect in both
instances is the same. First-person narration would provide an opportunity for Tom Ripley to
elicit the reader’s sympathy by explaining or rationalizing his actions, but that is not Highsmith’s
game at all. Critics who speak of Tom Ripley “seducing” the reader as Humbert Humbert (a
first-person narrator) does in Lolita misunderstand Highsmith’s narrative technique.
For one thing, her acknowledgement of James’s influence extends to bringing The
Ambassadors itself into her book. Mr. Greenleaf recommends it to Tom, who later—a sly
author’s joke—considers stealing it. Tom proves to be the boy who followed Strether, but with a
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difference. Tom is the American Adam, but a satanic one, an oxymoron that undercuts, and
ultimately negates, the distinction between opposites. That is Highsmith’s point. As she says in
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1966), "art has nothing to do with morality, convention
or moralizing." So Humbert Humbert is a pedophile, and Tom Ripley is a multiple murderer.
What’s the difference?
The difference is that Lolita is a novel about seduction (sexual and otherwise). The narrative
technique of the novel rehearses and underscores the novel’s subject. Humbert Humbert defies
moral standards. Indeed, the purpose of any seduction is to lead astray. As Lionel Trilling noted,
“we find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we
have come virtually to condone the violation it presents. . . . we have been seduced into
conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to
be revolting.” The Talented Mr. Ripley, however, is about subversion. In eliding the continuum
that runs from normality to abnormality, it questions not whether moral standards exist, but
whether they have any meaning or validity. Humbert Humbert pays for his actions. Tom Ripley
does not.. The five novels of the Ripliad are the great modern epic of getting-away-with-it.
But this means more than getting away with murder. The Ripliad is not wish-fulfillment or an
escape fantasy. It redefines murder, making it not an aberration, but a psychological necessity—
not only for the murderer, but for the victim. Murder becomes an “acceptable” form of human
interaction and an ironic commentary on the limits of that interaction.
Critics rightly focus on Highsmith’s matter-of-fact, unembellished style as a major factor in
achieving this radically subversive transformation. “Tom swung a left-handed blow with the oar
against the side of Dickie’s head” is as much a triumph of monotonic style as a masterful use of
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point of view. But such an observation entails a separation of style and point of view that, while
possible, isn’t at all necessary.
Tom swung a left-handed blow with the oar against the side of Dickie’s head. The oar cut
a dull gash that filled with a line of blood as Tom watched. Dickie was on the bottom of the
boat, twisted, twisting. Dickie gave a groaning roar of protest that frightened Tom with its
loudness and strength. Tom hit him in the side of the neck, three times, chopping strokes
with the edge of the oar, as if the oar were an axe and Dickie’s neck a tree.
The narrator who is not Ripley plays Ripley like a violin, or perhaps a trombone. She sets
Tom Ripley apart from what Tom Ripley is doing—committing a brutal, sloppy murder—
alternately sliding him into the action and pulling him away from it. In so doing she sets the
reader apart as well, allowing him or her at once to participate and to disengage. The normal-
abnormal shifts from an antipodal continuum to a sliding scale. Sympathy with Ripley becomes
an index of the reader’s own dark anxieties and impulses.
Highsmith’s third-person point of view blends technique and substance no less brilliantly than
does Nabokov’s first-person narration in Lolita. Her strategy reenacts Sartre’s “keyhole”
anecdote in Being and Nothingness to dramatize the existential truth at the core of The Talented
Mr. Ripley: If, as a Highsmith’s biographer, Andrew Wilson, notes, an individual is
simultaneously the observer and the observed, then he or she is not an extension of the world, but
only an isolated object within it. As if the oar were an axe and Dickie’s neck a tree. Murder
becomes an acknowledgement of this isolation, the index of Tom Ripley’s realization that he can
never be one with Dickie Greenleaf or any human being, least of all himself. Tom can only
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assume the murdered Dickie’s identity as a way of not remaining that isolated, vulnerable object
stranded within himself. Here the Ripliad itself becomes a metafiction.
For me the most problematic of literary devices is the use of identical twins (even as recently
as Tana French’s The Likeness). One must accept that the commoner who fills in for the king not
only looks exactly like him, but sounds exactly like him as well and either possesses the same
tics and mannerisms or has the acting skills to mimic them. With the possible exception of
Darnay/Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, mere resemblance is not enough. (I should also point out
that Dickens makes crucial rather than extended use of the resemblance. Unlike The Prisoner of
Zenda, the whole book isn’t about the imposture.) But, of course, everything depends on
suspension of disbelief, and the device is almost invariably used to enable melodramatic action
rather than to examine character itself. That is to say, it is invariably a plot device.
The convention, and the suspension of disbelief, rest on the assumption that identity is fluid
and superficial. Provide the right physical characteristics and opportunity, and one character
easily becomes another (as certain stand-up comics have convinced us for years). The ease with
which Tom poses as Dickie without actually resembling him plays with this notion of fluidity
and overturns it. It is the narrator/author, the creator of the fictional world, who makes Tom
Ripley an object in it. She can make Ripley sympathetic only by replicating, in her relationship
to her characters, the situation that makes him what he is. The making of fiction becomes an
existential act rather than a moral one.
The notion of the doppelganger does not apply here. In such an existentially observed
universe, no one has a double. The Ripliad has no Humbert Humbert/Clair Quilty relationship.
Nor does Tom “erase” the identity of his victims as, in some interpretations, Humbert replaces
Lolita’s with his own.
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Suspension of disbelief, then, rests not on the believability of the plot or the verisimilitude of
the action, but on the reader’s identification with, and acceptance of, the characters—beginning
with the protagonist. No one should underestimate the effect of even incidental character details
on believability. That is what it means to say that one can believe a man is named Quiverful or
that a man has fourteen children, but not that a man named Quiverful has fourteen children. Point
of view is essentially a means of revealing character and returns us to the notion that good fiction
is character-driven. It tells us that point of view is, ultimately, the engine that drives plot.
If all of these observations are valid, how is Cornel Greenberg any different than the
Reverend Mr. Quiverful or Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould? The answer is, he isn’t. At least,
not in the sense that he is exempt from any of the conditions—dare I call them RULES?—that
govern narrative persuasion.
I believe that neither Cornel Greenberg nor any of my other character names, nor any names
like it used by any novelist—anytime, anywhere—will affect a reader’s suspension of disbelief.
Though essential to any fiction, suspension of disbelief is not a matter of one l or two; it is not a
matter of the number of names that begin with M, of names that have the same number of
syllables, or of names that have a particular syllable in common; it is not a matter of recognizing
a name by sight rather than sound. (A person reading a novel in Braille does neither.) Cornel
Greenberg could have been Seymour Greenberg or Romulus Wolfberg, and it wouldn’t have
made the slightest difference. Henry James’s issue is not with Quiverful, but with Quiverful
having fourteen children. The problem is not the name, but the name in association with the
character detail. (Romulus Wolfberg could have a twin named Remus, and the Quiverful rule
would apply only if accompanied by the detail that they’d been suckled by a she-wolf.)
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For me Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould crosses a slightly different line. The florid, Latinate
given name threatens suspension of disbelief because it undercuts the historically valid tension
between the aristocratic honorific and a hyphenate suggestive of a business fortune and a
purchased title. Though possibly a reference to the mother of the Roman Emperor Vespasian, so
what? The historical point is made without it. Such names add an excrescent layer of gingerbread
to Anne Perry’s already cluttered Victorian house of fiction. They attempt to disguise a structure
built on a foundation of concrete period detail but deeply fissured by historical fantasy and
reinforced only by the underpinnings of genre—its conventions, its repeatability, its conditioning
of reader expectations.
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Chapter 15
The Tipping Point
Coincident to the Cornel Greenberg exchange with Lenore, she and Rick Usher came to “a
parting of the ways” (Rick’s phrase). I was never sure of the reason, but it almost certainly
involved money, as Rick wanted to negotiate a separate payoff from me for the work he’d done.
And I hadn’t even hired him! Lenore had brought him on board to assist because of her client
load. She didn’t want the line edit of my book to take “forever.”
Well, it was not only taking forever, it was taking FUCKING forever. Lenore had committed
to a chapter a week, but after a year and a half (May, 2005-November, 2006), I’d received fifteen
of fifty chapters. So at the point where this final edit should have been finished for six months, it
was only thirty percent complete. During the same eighteen months, Lenore had undergone not
only the loss of her editorial associate, but also numerous email malfunctions and other computer
glitches, several bouts of flu, a protracted episode of TMJ, a long sequence of unsatisfactory
administrative assistants, and several Florida hurricanes. What’s an editor to do?
For a start, an editor might not want to waste a lot of time on the name Cornel. “I went on
baby-naming sites, international baby-naming sites, and came up with nothing.” Did I mention
that I was paying Lenore by the hour for the line edit? At a hefty rate? Maybe I should have gone
with Romulus Wolfberg after all. It has two l’s, even if they’re in two different words.
As I soon discovered, I should also have used the word “murmur” rather than “susurration” in
chapter 26. In chapter 32, I shouldn’t have called the dresser in Judy’s room a “chiffonier.” As
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Lenore indicated via attached Internet photos of various pieces of furniture, even “chifferobe”
would work better than my choice.
Okay, got it. No problem there. My problem was with the web searches and the photo
attachments, which also included a series of wing chairs, as if it were necessary to identify
precisely Grandma Celia’s chair. I wasn’t paying an editor thousands of dollars to surf the
Internet. Better a thousand words than even one picture, if only because the editing was supposed
to be about the words and the pictures they created.
In no draft of Not Fade Away was suspension of disbelief so tenuous that under the slightest
strain it would snap like the Bridge of San Luis Rey. What seemed fragile, as well as flimsy and
increasingly erratic, was the editing of the novel. The shifting focus of the changes, the utter
nonsense of the reasoning behind them, brought everything about the process, past, present, and
to come, under suspicion. Call it unwilling suspension of belief in that process and my own
previous understanding of it.
To begin with, if these issues were so critical to the reader’s acceptance of the fiction, why
hadn’t they surfaced in earlier edits?
As I’ve already indicated, the line edit was Lenore’s fourth pass through the novel during the
years 2001-2007. Issues such as specific word choice and the name of a very minor character
might well not surface until a line edit. (Though, to repeat, not as issues affecting suspension of
disbelief.) So too with the length and pace of individual scenes and chapters, the effectiveness of
transitions, the aptness or usefulness of certain figures of speech or passages of dialogue. But the
similarity of major character names that Lenore called attention to pretty late in the game should
have been apparent in the first pass through the book, or the second at the latest. The same
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applies to a bigger issue: the retrospective narrative mode. It also applies to what soon became
additional subjects of Lenore’s increasing concern: character relationships and plot structure.
For example, she was recommending changes that would have 1) made Marty/Judy the
central relationship of the novel rather than Andy/Judy 2) brought Andy and Melanie together as
boyfriend and girlfriend at the end of the book 3) depicted the “disintegration” of Andy’s family
because of Marty’s escapades as blatantly obvious and the subject of gossip in the local Jewish
community 4) created a public altercation between the Lerner and Berman families at the Fourth
of July country club barbecue because Judy was hiding stolen bottles of liquor at the Berman
home for Marty. (Huh? What was up with that?)
My own increasing concern—or, more accurately, my metastasizing paranoia—centered on
two questions. How closely had Lenore read the novel prior to the line edit? If the answer was
“not very,” or even “not enough,” what were the implications?
I reviewed the first two edits and the summaries Lenore had prepared, as well as the emails
dealing with a third read. I also verified what I already knew about the novel itself: nothing
fundamental about plot or character development had altered from draft to draft. To suggest, for
example, that the disintegration of the Lerner family be obvious and public implied a misreading,
or worse, a non-reading of the thematic centerpiece of the novel: “the lie that dwells at the heart
of things.” That Andy might not, or ought not, win and then lose Judy undercuts the very
maturity and insight that Andy spends the entire novel struggling to achieve.
Guess what? No mention of any of these concerns in the earlier edits. Lenore’s suggestions in
regard to character development had been at the level of making Perry, the gym attendant who
befriends Andy, less “flamboyant” and enlivening Melanie’s exchanges with Andy to make her
less of a ditz. I’d made changes accordingly.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 146
What I did discover, however, or rather what I revisited in a more dubious frame of mind,
were certain curious features of those earlier passes through the book.
I had paid Lenore a great deal of money to “edit” my novel, but I had ended up doing the
heavy lifting. She had made suggestions that had necessitated extensive revision and specific
rewrites rather than simple corrections (the latter generally grammatical or mechanical).
Up to a point, which I was a long time in reaching, I considered this situation neither
misrepresentation by her nor unfair to me. Rewriting is a natural part of writing, so far from
being detrimental that it almost always improves the original or earlier version; my novel
benefited from the rewriting process, as did my development as a writer. What I had failed to
perceive, however, was that the previous passes through the book, were actually preparatory
overviews for the real edit—the line edit. Therefore:
RECOGNITION #1: In terms of the first three passes through the novel, I had actually paid
Lenore Raven to READ those drafts. I had mistakenly assumed that because I was working with
an editor, she was editing from the get-go. What she had actually offered with those readings was
not extensive or substantive edits, but commentary, with the cost of the read based on the current
word count. These reads may have been professional—not only competent but timely, objective,
and constructive—but no matter how diligently I implemented her observations and
recommendations, I would never have a publishable draft until I had an edited draft. Therefore:
RECOGNITION #2: Line editing may not be the only kind of editing applied to a work of
fiction, but it’s the only kind that matters. Assuming the writer presents an editor with work that
is competent and potentially publishable, everything necessary to a publishable draft can be
accomplished with a single read, a rewrite based on that read, and then the line edit. But that
would be more work in less time for the editor; he or she would find it harder to balance the
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competing claims and priorities of multiple clients. More to the point, it’s far less profitable than
the long-haul approach. Therefore:
RECOGNITION #3: The editing process is not only expensive up front, it has hidden costs.
These involve not only money, but time, trust, concentration, and civility. The financial cost as a
substantial, absolute figure was, of course, a given. But that figure also had to be compared to the
amount of money I might eventually make on the published novel. Even if I could afford
multiple “edits,” the more money I spent made it less likely that I would recover a significant
portion of it in sales of the novel. So it was to my advantage (if not Lenore’s) to minimize the
number of passes through the book. Nevertheless, recovery of my expenditure wasn’t a high
priority for me, because I never expected to make much money from sales of my first novel.
The other types of cost were the more insidious and troubling ones. As the edits/reads
multiplied, they became a carrot-and-stick in regard to promised publication. In September,
2003, after the second edit (of my now revised and considerably shortened novel), Lenore’s
assistant-of-the-moment sent an email acknowledgment of payment. I knew Lenore liked my
book, but after $15,000, she really liked it! My book would be marketed “under Lenore’s name
and reputation using her contacts.” Such a pronouncement is bound to create a Superman effect
for any aspiring novelist. Publication suddenly becomes faster than a speeding bullet, the editor
more powerful than a locomotive, the first-time novelist able to leap tall buildings (that broad
phalanx of agents, readers, and acquisitions editors that controls access) at a single bound.
The revision after the first read had focused on reducing the book’s length. In her overview of
that second draft submitted to her, Lenore herself wrote: “I recall that this was the main thing I
suggested you do, so I congratulate you for biting the bullet and proceeding with that difficult
task. I hasten to add that all the bloodletting did nothing to harm your essential story or its
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characters.” [R.G.’s emphasis] “In fact, Not Fade Away seems to have grown in its impact on
the reader rather than doing the opposite. You have succeeded, I think, in refining a big, rough
lump of ore into its most precious elements.”
Aside from odds and ends of grammar and mechanics, Lenore had only a pair of
recommendations: “Two fundamentals that could still use some fine-tuning are scene
conclusions and transitions, which often go hand in hand.” Hey, no problem! “Congratulations
again, Ron, for all your success in transforming Not Fade Away into its present form, and thanks
for giving me the pleasure of reading it again. You had to perform a great deal of grunt work to
develop this draft, and you had to be a diligent student to absorb so much technical information.
Anything else I might have to say about your writing brings us down to fine points that are better
left for the next stage—line editing. Once you have worked out the kinks discussed here this
manuscript will be ready for that final edit. If you would like me to help you in that regard, let
me know as soon as possible so that I can save you a place on my work calendar.”
You have succeeded, I think, in refining a big, rough lump of ore into its most precious
elements. Sounded like Not Fade Away was indeed lacking only the line edit. After taking time
to complete another draft to reflect the remaining fundamental changes and to recoup my
finances, I contacted Lenore in the spring of 2004. Because of a sudden change in her email
address that delayed my request, several weeks passed before I received a response. It wasn’t
what I’d expected. The manuscript required another read at an additional charge.
Perhaps I should have disputed this fee, but I didn’t. Given the months that had elapsed since
the second edit, as well as Lenore’s client load, I could accept that even though she might
remember saying my book was already primed for a line edit, she might not remember the details
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of that read. And what she had said had not necessarily precluded another read, perhaps even the
reverse: I mean, how would she know if I’d worked out the “kinks discussed here?”
I’d outsmarted myself in two ways by not requesting the line edit immediately after Lenore’s
second read. I’d allowed enough time and other client work to come between Lenore and Not
Fade Away that she could legitimately be in need of a “refresher.” I’d then strengthened her case
by making not only the recommended revisions, but also in trimming an additional ten thousand
words from the manuscript to meet the magic hundred-thousand-word threshold. However much
I’d recouped my finances in the interim, the delay would now cost me an additional $1750.
As a result of that third read, which indicated that the lean, mean Not Fade Away was—wait
for it!—ready for line edit, Lenore wrote: "I see no need to cut anything else, to add anything
significant, to rearrange chapters, or to slave any further over things like characterization,
dialogue, and setting." That was the understanding with which I engaged Lenore for the line edit
early in the fall of 2004, having made only the relatively minor changes she’d recommended
after the third read. That was the contract between us.
Nevertheless, the line edit did not actually show up on Lenore’s radar until after the New
Year. During that time she experienced another glitch in her office email system, which again
slowed communication between us. I spent time, at her prior request, preparing chapter synopses
for the marketing effort. “You'll find lots of good instructions on the Web for that. Include an
author's bio with the synopsis, overview, and market analysis.” So again I was going to pay for
work, the bulk of which I was doing myself. In addition, also at Lenore’s urging, I continued to
tweak the novel’s retrospective opening.
During January, 2005, however, with the line edit set to begin, Lenore experienced another
“massive computer failure.” I did not hear from her until April, at which time she informed me
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that she had “a bit of a waiting list right now for line-editing, so let me know if you'd be all right
with my outsourcing this to one of my colleagues. I'll go over it before we send it to agents.”
But even with the addition of Rick Usher, work did not begin until July, 2005. By then, to my
surprise, much had changed.
Rick’s participation coincided with two principal proposed alterations to the book. The action
had to occur in the here and now, and it had to be “edgier.” “The main thing,” Lenore wrote with
the line edit of chapter 1, “is to add action and tension, which will hook readers and set a number
of wheels in motion.” The retrospective mode would now be a barrier between the reader and
the action. “Literary agents and acquisitions editors rarely read beyond the first few paragraphs
of a manuscript submitted by a new writer unless the material grabs them around the throat and
won’t let go. We want Not Fade Away to have every chance of acceptance, so we have some
work to do here. In my first critique many moons ago I said you needed a better place to start
your story, and I suggested a few alternatives.” But as I noted in chapter 12, Lenore had actually
said something rather different: “Frame stories always sacrifice immediacy, but you gain the
perspective of a narrator who can interpret the events as we look back on them.”
Mere forgetfulness? I’d spent months working on and, in Lenore’s view, greatly improving an
opening that was suddenly to be scrapped. What was going on?
What I thought at the time was that more darlings were about to be murdered in cold blood.
Remember that this book is also retrospective and reflects everything that happened subsequently
in regard to the line edit. To repeat, only in light of later events did I begin seriously to question
everything that had led to the tipping point.
Clearly, that was a mistake on my part. I should have questioned things when those questions
first occurred to me. Why didn’t I? Well, the mea culpa has plenty of clauses to it, some literary
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and some not. Day job, family, travel. All prevented me from focusing entirely on the task at
hand. But every human being copes with family and professional distractions, and they are at
best only a small part of the explanation.
The simple fact, the only real explanation, is that I was willing to do anything—pay any price,
bear any burden—to get the line edit completed, the book marketed and published. This meant
that, so far from questioning the process, I went ahead and made changes to the book that I
regarded as radical and unnecessary I said to myself, and to my wife, okay, I can always publish
my version after I’m famous. The director’s cut. Only when I became convinced that this edit
would drag on indefinitely and that there would, in all probability, be no marketing effort
spearheaded by Lenore did I pull the plug.
Lenore never met the chapter a week goal. Lenore never adhered to the previously stated
scope of the line edit, which became instead an exercise in entirely rewriting the novel on the fly.
Lenore never reread the rewritten chapters, the result being that she continued to raise issues that
had already been resolved. Lenore never responded to my questions until pushed, and as I
increasingly pushed back on her editing edicts, she increasingly responded, tonally if not
literally, “Do it because I’m the editor, and I’m telling you to do it.” Finally, Lenore billed me
over $1600 for editing chapter 30. Not only was that the end of trust and of civility, it produced
the biggest epiphany of all—my Lambert Strether moment, as when he saw Madame de Vionnet
and Chad Newsome on the river. Except that Chad Newsome wasn’t the one being screwed.
RECOGNITION #4: It’s not about the book, it’s about the money. It’s not about a payoff to
the process; it’s about drawing out the process for maximum profitability to the business. It’s not
about editing books; it’s about milking cash cows.
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In light of this realization—duh, Ron!—the earlier edits became nothing more than profitable
set-ups for the line edit that never ends. It can’t end, because there’s no payoff. The answer is
really remarkably simple, like “it’s the economy stupid!” in the 1992 presidential election. It’s
the money, stupid! My money and my stupidity.
To what extent do my complaints reflect on Lenore Raven’s personality and work habits
rather than the editing profession? It’s possible that it’s all personal. Lenore Raven may be a
train wreck. I never met her, never spoke to her by phone. Business was transacted and
impressions created via email and the Internet. I was in California and Lenore in Florida. At one
point, when information on her website indicated that she was offering intensive one-on-one
editing sessions at a cost of about $800 per day, I offered to come to Florida, convinced that face
to face we could resolve all issues and basically wrap up the line edit within a few days. (Can
you spell DESPERATE, boys and girls?) Lenore never responded to this offer. Either it wasn’t
ultimately cost effective or Lenore weighs in excess of three hundred pounds and is as reclusive
as Thomas Pynchon. On the other hand, Thomas Pynchon understands point of view.
Speculation aside, I don’t mean to suggest that Lenore’s business practices were the least bit
unusual or knowingly unscrupulous. At best this process is an imperfect one. I got angry about it,
and then ended it, only when greed, or the appearance of it, became too blatant. And to whatever
extent the shortcomings I detected in Lenore were personal, professional, or both, they had all
too much in common with everything else that goes on in Literary Wannabeland (see chapter
20).
Oh, forgot to mention—after I said nevermore to Lenore Raven, Leo Glick again became
Lester Todman.
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PART V
________________________________________________________________________
Wannabeland
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Chapter 16
White Rabbit
Theory: Wannabeland is all about teaching the Wannabe: how to write, how to make the
writing marketable, how to market the writing, how to network, how to avoid the pitfalls no one
else avoids, how to overcome rejection, disappointment, and despair.
Fact: Wannabeland is all about money—the Wannabe’s money. It’s about not only following
the Pied Piper, but paying the piper. It’s about not always being able to distinguish the Pied Piper
from the rats. It’s about the financial cost of getting published, which is exceeded only by the
cost, financial and otherwise, of not getting published.
From what I’ve observed, most literary Wannabes decide to be writers. Writing fills a hole in
their lives. They leave school, they lose their jobs, they divorce their spouses, their children leave
home, they retire. Some use writing as a form of therapy or recovery. (Step 9: apologize to those
you’ve harmed through your addiction. Step 10: write The Man with the Golden Arm.) The
closest most come to a sense of vocation is a vague but persistent feeling that they have at least
one novel rattling around inside them. Doesn’t everyone?
There’s a story about the writing of Joseph Conrad’s first novel. In his forties, retired from the
British Merchant Marine, Conrad simply sat down after breakfast one morning in the early 1890s
and started Almayer’s Folly. He’d had no previous intention of doing so. Whatever process
brought him to that point had been entirely unconscious.
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If this story isn’t true, it ought to be. Becoming a novelist is an act of spontaneous
combustion. Either that or it’s aberrant behavior—a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
What it’s not is a straightforward decision, like applying to law school or becoming a bartender.
One may want to be a writer, but one doesn’t decide to be a writer. Something just happens,
perhaps the oxidant of observation or perception reacting with memory. I’d suggest that anyone
who decides to be a novelist as opposed to, say, a doctor or a computer programmer or a fashion
designer, isn’t really a novelist at all.
That much, I’m sure, is true of vast numbers of novelist Wannabes. Maybe the most accurate
generalization is to state that they write fiction to create a life for themselves rather than to
express their sense of what life is. They imagine themselves a writer and mistake it for
imagination. They believe that the act of writing makes them a writer. (Based on 13 Ways of
Looking at the Novel, the novelist Jane Smiley appears to believe this too. Surprise! Not
everyone agrees with me.)
Here’s the dirty little secret, the elephant in the romper room of Wannabeland: the stuff most
Wannabes write is crap. Now, a great many published, even successful, authors write crap, so
why should most Wannabes remain Wannabes for doing the same thing? The answer is that what
most Wannabes write is pathetic crap—either the endless drivel that is the literary equivalent of
the runs, involving not the slightest contraction or control of the artistic sphincter, or the all but
petrified pellets that stretch the same muscle to agonizing extremes, leaving the writer straining,
red-faced, and exhausted.
Writing fiction is not a skill, but a talent. (The same probably applies to writing a business
letter, though there’s more room for argument.) When crap is published—on its own merits, so to
speak, as opposed to factors such as an author famous for some other endeavor (Ethan Hawke,
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Jimmy Carter, Newt Gingrich) or the fix being in (your dad’s golfing partner is named Farrar,
Straus, or Giroux)—it’s because the author has a talent for writing crap. For that reason, I’ve
often thought that “Dan Brown” is a clever pen name. “Renowned curator Jacques Sauniere
staggered through the archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery.” That’s crap, boys and girls, but
world-class crap, The Da Vinci Code’s opening sentence—a big, solid, healthy turd, launched by
the peristaltic first word, the two prepositional phrases sliding smoothly behind the single,
propulsive verb and neatly pinching the loaf.
It sounds like I’m suggesting that all published crap is “good” crap, or at least that it doesn’t
smell as badly as unpublished crap. Though either of those contentions may or may not be true in
any particular case, I think they’re irrelevant. In my lifetime, no novelist has produced a
spectacular piece of crap like Peyton Place or Valley of the Dolls or The Carpetbaggers, The Da
Vinci Code or I am Charlotte Simmons without a profound talent for doing so. Jacqueline Susann
didn’t have a successful career because she was a bad writer, but because she had a talent that
trumped her badness. The talent lay not in literary skill or a fecund imagination, in mastery or
manipulation of the marketplace, or even in a pleasant mix of sex and drugs, but in a gifted
triangulation of sleaze, celebrity, and simplicity. That the films of director Ed Wood, bad as they
are, still attract interest and discussion demonstrates that the director had a talent for making crap
that transcends the judgments good or bad. In the words of the Wise Hack of the writers’ table in
the M-G-M commissary, quoted by Gore Vidal, “Shit has its own integrity.”
But let’s take this notion of crap and play with it for a moment. (Sorry if this is starting to
sound Freudian.) Though Ed Wood had a talent for making bad movies, no one was ever going
to teach him to make a good one. Similarly, Jacqueline Susann had a gift of simple presentation
that Hemingway might have admired, but she was never going to be Hemingway. Neither is the
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contemporary thriller writer, Lee Child, whose gift is to marry an oversimplification of the
Hemingway style and code that borders on parody to the violent conventions of the spaghetti
western. Jack Reacher is Nick Adams on steroids, Clint Eastwood with a name (which I suppose
makes him Dirty Harry). No clean kills, no grace under pressure, just a body count and a separate
piece in whatever town Reacher wanders into in each new book.
To insist that the writing of fiction is a talent rather than a skill is not to maintain that skill
plays no part in the writing. Skill is the sum of talent plus experience, more and more in evidence
as a career proceeds and novel succeeds novel. Skill cannot replace talent or guarantee success
any more than teaching a musician to play the piano proficiently guarantees that the musician
will ever appear professionally at Carnegie Hall.
Unlike the other arts, the writing of fiction does not rely on a complementary relationship
between talent and skill. More often than not, in those other arts, talent manifests itself fairly
early as a natural inclination or affinity, which needs to be developed, directed, and honed. It is
not unlike the development of a professional athlete. A novice baseball player wouldn’t report to
spring training for a Major League team expecting to make the team. But, in analogous terms,
that is exactly what the Wannabe novelist thinks. To write professionally, the assumption goes,
the only required talent is to have lived. That requirement feeds two perceptions about becoming
a writer that both explain and sustain the Wannabe hoard: it takes time and it’s never too late.
Wannabeland fosters these notions by insisting that skill can be acquired at spring training
and insinuating that the amateur has a legitimate chance of making the Major League team.
(Even Michael Jordan, supremely gifted in another sport, didn’t try that, though Tom Wolfe
published The Bonfire of the Vanities—arguably, the most overrated novel of the last several
decades.) This assumption has, however, two serious flaws. First, the Major League roster has
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only twenty-five places on it. Less obvious, but no less important, is the disjunction between skill
and talent.
Though skill can’t replace talent, it can enhance it. So can teaching. Both observations apply
to the writing of fiction. But Wannabeland asserts that being taught the skill and applying it will
all but ensure success, because experience and talent, as defined above, are a given. All you have
to do is read the textbook or show up for class or both.
This means, however, that the ratio of Wannabes to the twenty-five places on the Major
League roster is so high as to be way out of whack. The real number of available places is even
less, because the team has a core of returning veterans. Nevertheless, all of the Wannabes believe
that they have the same claim on the manager and coaches. That the Wannabes may not all look
like ballplayers has been cleverly disguised, because they’re all wearing the same uniform and
they’ve all been taught THE RULES of the game. The manager and coaches have to distinguish
not between a select few who have been invited to spring training on the basis of talent and skill
and can be judged in comparison to each other and the veteran members of the team, but with a
multitude so vast that individual features blur. Those in charge become not only overwhelmed
with fatigue, but jaded by the whole process except as it allows them to exercise power over the
powerless.
Under these conditions, who among the Wannabe horde makes the team? Only those who fill
a specific perceived need—shortstops don’t win pennants, pitchers do; fans want to see a
homerun derby, not a pitchers’ duel. Only those whose pitching motion or batting stance looks
exactly like it’s supposed to look. Only those who won’t bring down the wrath of the owners on
management because while they may not succeed spectacularly, they probably won’t fail
spectacularly either. And you can always trade ‘em later.
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That’s just woolly thinking, and not only because the selection process becomes at once
arbitrary and overly cautious. And, though Major League baseball doesn’t work that way,
Literary Wannabeland does. But despite the cliché, everyone of a certain age doesn’t have a
novel in them. No amount of living, no amount of instruction in the difference between Story and
Plot or the nuances of point of view, can replace the imaginative element essential to the
successful novelist—even if the published product is crap.
Another way of looking at literary crap successfully purveyed is to suggest that imagination
may compensate for undistinguished, repetitive prose or that it may manifest itself in extra-
literary ways—inventive or kinky sex, for example, or the roman a clef set in Washington or
Hollywood. Take a look at Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent, a major mid-20th-century best-
seller and Pulitzer Prize winner. All but unreadable, then as now, it contains unmistakable
fictional portraits of FDR, Jack Kennedy, Joe McCarthy, and Alger Hiss. Mix Hollywood and
sex, and you have Harold Robbins or Jackie Collins.
Good or successful fiction or both isn’t the product of showing, not telling or of starting close
to the action or of murdering your darlings. It isn’t even dependent, necessarily, on writing what
you know. Does a male novelist writing from the point of view of a woman nine months pregnant
know what it feels like to give birth? Yet that novelist may effectively and with great empathy
depict the experience by imagining, as a starting point, what it might be like to shit a
watermelon. That’s talent!
And, once again, it can’t be taught. No amount of teaching will make an untalented writer
talented. Knowing and executing all the steps of a dance doesn’t make the dancer Fred Astaire or
Cyd Charisse. A talented writer may benefit from a good teacher. A capable, consistently
diligent editor is, however, a better investment. One could stipulate that a good editor is a
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teacher, with a single significant difference. Editing, like physical therapy, involves multiple
sessions, but sooner or later ends with (one hopes) a healthy book. Teaching, like psychotherapy,
never ends. Obviously, some editing is like that too.
Wannabeland ignores the importance of talent because it’s bad for business. No Howtu book
ever says stop writing in response to repeated, scathing rejection; no writing teacher ever
suggests you drop out of your M.F.A. program and invest your tuition refund in a high octane
mutual fund; no workshop guru ever discourages you from taking the next workshop—the one
that focuses on point of view rather than plot and precedes the one on character development.
Why is it these elements can never be discussed together?
Most Wannabes buy the first Howtu write book, its promises being almost impossible to
resist, but only those who write pathetic crap buy the fifth one. Only desperation blinds them to
the fact that the fifth book is exactly like the first. And so is the tenth. (Don’t ask how I know.)
Strip away the personal history and anecdotes, the recommendations about the writer’s “tools,”
the observations on “the life of a writer,” the exercises in character development and scene
construction, and they all leave the would-be novelist stranded in the same place, that “room of
one’s own” that is neither a room nor one’s own. Wake up and change your underwear. You’ve
fallen asleep in Literary Wannabeland and had a wet dream.
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Chapter 17
Spanking the Monkey
How did I learn that creative writing cannot be taught? In a writing class, of course.
More specifically, in a writing workshop. A workshop differs from a writing class in
generally being of shorter duration and not necessarily unaffiliated with an educational
institution, therefore not leading to any degree. Ostensibly, there’s no grade either.
Being privately run for the most part, they’re more expensive than degree-based or extension
courses. Way more expensive. I paid $2100 for seven weeks in 2003, one session per week.
For reasons I hope this book has made clear, publication for most first-time novelists is about
the marketplace, therefore about the first novel’s commercial prospects. (As if it had any.)
Teaching writing, however, is about literary fiction. Classes are conducted entirely in Ukrainian.
This isn’t surprising, because workshops are not really about publishing fiction. Surprise!
They’re about learning to speak Ukrainian, so that you can take more workshops. With the same
teacher, of course, meaning that the attendee must not only learn Ukrainian, but the particular
Ukrainian dialect that the teacher speaks.
The writing workshop is, however, only incidentally about the work. It’s about the other
students in the workshop, and it’s about the teacher. Especially the teacher. Or, in my case, the
two teachers.
Carla Eumenides and Theo Beck were—and, for all I know or care, still are—husband and
wife. For more than a few reasons, I’ll refer to them in the past tense. Carla was a tall, leggy
redhead in her middle to late thirties and had been in the creative writing program at Stanford.
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She had published one novel—about three generations of twentieth-century Greek immigrant
women coping with and overcoming many decades and varieties of mistreatment. Theo was
perhaps ten years older, shorter, and bearded, a critic and short story writer who’d once
collaborated with a far more celebrated American writer of short stories on an anthology of
American short stories. Presumably, it was this anthology rather than the immigrant first novel
that had paid for the Painted Lady in Lower Pacific Heights and the black, late-model SUV that
looked like a helicopter gunship.
As an American literary Mecca, San Francisco has a cachet second only to New York,
narrowly edging out Boston, which loses as much as it gains by a perpetual cultural dissonance
between bluestocking and blue collar. In San Francisco, on the other hand, distinctions between
highbrow and lowbrow, mainstream and avant-garde, serious and commercial, though palpable
and scarcely insignificant, matter less than simply being a member of the literary club. The
culture is bilingual; both English and Ukrainian are commonly spoken. It doesn’t really matter if
you’re Armistead Maupin or Danielle Steele, as long as everyone knows your name. It is a
culture of celebrity—understandably, being in the same state as the cradle of celebrity.
If everyone doesn’t know your name, it’s essential to be on a first-name basis with those who
matter. Or to suggest that one is. That was the case with Carla and Theo, whose conversation was
larded with references to Toby (Wolff), Marty (Cruz Smith) and Larry (Ferlinghetti). The odd
thing was that this namedropping seemed directed less at the class than at each other, as if the
rest of us were watching a regular, and therefore increasingly tedious, session of mutual
masturbation. Indeed, my impression of Carla, who seemed the alpha dog, was that despite being
married and having borne two children, her most intimate and satisfying relationship was with
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herself. (Or, perhaps, she was just a novelist.) In any case, the people who run such private
workshops are marginal to the literary scene or they wouldn’t be running them.
Surprisingly, given the price of the workshop, the participants included young students as
well as older ones; there were body piercings and tattoos as well as paunches and cellulite and
purple hair as well as gray; there were boomers and slackers, New Agers and aging flower
children (from Berkeley); there were vegans and chain smokers, druggies and drunkards, a
recovering poet, a militant feminist (Berkeley again) and way too many desperate housewives. In
short, the participants were a microcosm of literary Wannabes, racially, culturally, sexually, and
generationally diverse, all loaded with emotional baggage and subject to varying degrees of
weirdness, envy, paranoia, defensiveness, and delusions of grandeur. All shared not the same, or
even approximate, level of talent or skill or writing experience, but an obsessive, craven, fawning
desire for praise—or, more charitably, validation. A significant feature of the workshop was a
collective capacity for self-abasement in the pursuit of this object. Most of the students brought
the same soul-sucking fear into the classroom—the all but certain knowledge that they weren’t
good enough. And the same irrational hope—that they were wrong. (This, of course, gives the
instructor absolute power, which he or she displays no scruples about using and abusing.)
The only exception I’m certain of is—myself. No doubt this seems another helping of
colossal conceit or self-delusion or both, but I didn’t take the workshop to confirm that I was
good enough. I already knew I was good enough to publish. Regardless of whether I ever
published, I already knew I could write. For good and for ill, the two have nothing to do with
each other. I took the workshop because I hoped to meet someone—oh, I dunno, the instructors?
—who might help me find an agent or publisher.
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This would happen because these enablers would also discover that I could write and that I
was publishable. I was also the only participant in that workshop—or, I suspect, in most such
groups—with an already completed, polished novel. My motives may have been self-serving, but
at least they were logical. And, lest anyone forget, I was paying.
But what, exactly, was I paying for? Ay, there was the rub. Personalities and classroom
dynamics aside, I discovered a number of impediments to my goal.
Workshops, even those dealing with “the novel,” focus on short fiction. This practice makes a
virtue of necessity. For the sake of argument, let’s define a novel as any work of fiction over one
hundred fifty pages long (about 45,000 words). Let’s also call anything between fifty and one
hundred fifty pages a novella. Anything shorter is a short story. Now a good way of reducing the
number of Wannabe novelists, or at least keeping them out of workshops devoted to “the novel,”
would be to make a full-length draft of a novel a prerequisite for such a workshop. Otherwise,
ninety percent of the participants in the workshop will never produce what the instruction is
ostensibly designed to produce.
So one way of defining a—how shall I put it?—viable novelist is that he or she has actually
written a complete novel. Not an opening, not a scene, not a chapter, not a sequence of chapters,
but the whole enchilada. To repeat, one either can or can’t write a novel. No one is going to teach
those who can’t to do it. But improve what already exists—maybe.
Such a prerequisite would eliminate much of the overpopulation problem in Wannabeland.
Still, the “curriculum” issue goes beyond it. Most of the classroom time involves students
reading their work and others commenting on it, a practice fraught with peril for all concerned.
The listeners listen to the reader’s work only to see if it might be better than their own. Beyond
that primal, ungovernable fear, they haven’t the slightest interest. As for the instructor, he or she
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has a more complicated agenda, an axe to grind. A more charitable phrase for this imperative
might be the phrase “grow the business.”
The workshop entrepreneurs have a number of tactics designed to achieve this goal. Most
obviously, they compartmentalize their instruction. They treat plot, point of view, and
characterization, for example, as completely separate entities and emphasize them in different
workshops. And each workshop is priced separately—no package deals. If, over one or more
workshops, they encounter a promising student with enough disposable income, and this student
makes sufficient progress on his or her fiction, they may reward that student with intensive, one-
on-one sessions. For an additional price. Per session.
The problem is that few if any students will make the necessary progress. But just as few will
give up, and no instructor will ever tell them they ought to. So the workshop process, like the
editing process, becomes open-ended and ever more expensive.
The “business model” is complemented by a “literary model.” The latter involves not only the
teaching of creative writing, but a particular theory of what creative writing should be. A novel is
one thing and one thing only. This is but another version of THE RULES. In an additional turn
of the screw, the theory happens to reflect the time constraints of the workshop.
Hence, a few of THE RULES promulgated by Carla and Theo:
1) Good novels are short novels. They adhere to the Aristotelian unities as enunciated in the
Poetics and the poetic ideal of compression. (The Poetics was the secondary text of the
workshop, the primary one being the short story anthology Theo edited with the far more
acclaimed, now defunct, writer of short stories. Not incidentally, this choice of text also
improves the bottom line.)
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So novels aren’t really novels. They’re a combination of the short story, the drama, and
the lyric poem.
2) If you must use novels as a model for novel-writing, study those of Penelope Fitzgerald.
In particular, Offshore (140 pages) is “the perfect novel.”
The whole point of the Great American Novel, if not of some English equivalent, is that
no one’s ever written it (except, of course, Philip Roth—a classic example of the
exception that proves the rule).
3) A scene should be no more than two pages long. Not one, not three, not more than three
(oh, the horror! the horror!) but two.
4) The reader must be able to see the end in the beginning. Oh, that again. Question: if the
end is in the beginning, why bother to read the novel?
5) A novel should summarize itself on every page. What the fuck? I still don’t know.
These notions would be nothing more than utter, stupid nonsense if one weren’t paying a lot
of money to hear them. But putting aside even that consideration, they have a profound effect on
the substance of a workshop devoted to “the novel.” In a classroom situation constrained by time
and defined by both the instructor’s agenda and the students’ lack of involvement in one
another’s work, emphasis will inevitably fall on the first chapter. Any discussion beyond that
will just as inevitably focus on individual scenes. Nothing will be said about structure or
narrative arc or time. Only lip service will be paid to plot. Besides the fact that those who haven’t
completed some substantial portion of a novel have little interest in these things, the substance
and methodology of the workshop fragment an object—the novel—whose essence is wholeness.
The only person who cares, however, is the occasional individual who comes to the table with
a whole novel, one that is good enough to make hope of publishing it not too delusional an
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aspiration. Most of the other participants in the workshop will never get that far—in a sense,
they’re just jerking off too—and the instructors are out to make a buck.
This is but another way of saying that the problem wasn’t them—it was me. Later, when I
reached the tipping point with Lenore, one of the things I realized both elaborated upon and
clarified my experience in the workshop: I already spoke Ukrainian. That had been the difficulty
throughout my experience in Wannabeland. I wasn’t really a Wannabe. By temperament,
training, and experience, I had spoken Ukrainian long before I ever wandered down the rabbit
hole. The end in the beginning.
How, then, can I feel entitled to generalize from my particular experience? Well, it occurred.
And, as with Lenore Raven, it was consistent with everything else I’ve observed about
Wannabeland. How else do we arrive at judgments about how the world, or some particular
corner of it, operates?
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Chapter 18
The Marketing Tool Kit: Big Lies and a Little Secret
Those books that focus on tools ancillary to the writing and editing process, or the sections of
the Howtu-write books that focus on these tools, purport to solve the problem of cracking the
marketplace once a first novel is written—even if it is literary fiction. For various reasons, none
of them too mysterious, it takes longer than you might think for the Wannabe to recognize the
sleight of hand being perpetrated. After insisting on the inestimable value and effectiveness of
the tools, the writers tell the Wannabe what to do when they don’t work. As if, sometimes and
quite understandably, they don’t work.
But guess what? They almost never work, because matters seldom progress, in any
meaningful or productive fashion, beyond the query letter stage. And when they do, hurdles and
pitfalls a-plenty still await the Wannabe.
Let’s look at the tools as if the whole process of applying them occurred in a sane, sequential
pattern, like the laying of building blocks. These tools owe their existence to an ingenious people
known collectively as:
The Howtu Tribe
Theory: The tribe’s scouts and guides, chieftains, shamans, and warriors, guide the first
novelist confidently, if slowly, to the Happy Hunting Grounds of publication. Either individually
or in concert, the Howtu equip the novelist for the journey. Howtu fall into several broad but
useful categories: how to write the novel, how to write a query letter, how to find an agent, an
editor, or a publisher; how to negotiate a sale (Yeah, sure!).
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Fact: Yet again—no book or other writing publication can teach someone how to write.
Because of the little secret that I will divulge at the end of this chapter, they don’t really teach the
Wannabe with a marketable manuscript how to achieve publication. The Howtu don’t protect the
novelist from the enemy; they don’t fight the enemy, bribe, conciliate, or negotiate with the
enemy. They are the enemy.
I’ll list and comment upon various items in the tool kit, which includes not only query letters
to literary agents and publishers, but sample chapters, synopses, and outlines, networking and
literary conferencing, writing competitions and physical assaults on the bastions of publishing
(“Sell everything and move to New York.”). Inevitably, however, I’m going to spend the most
time on the query letter. (I said everything I wanted to say about literary conferences in the
Prologue. As to competitions, I feel the same way about them as George C. Scott did the Oscars.)
In addition to being the crucial and most practical point of contact between the unpublished
writer and those who control access to the market place, the ethos (or mythos) surrounding
queries amply illustrates the false promises and real shortcomings of the other tools as well.
Querying: The Formula
Theory: A brief description of one’s novel in a letter of inquiry may pique an agent’s or an
acquisitions editor’s interest enough for that person to request one or more sample chapters or an
outline or synopsis or even—omigod! . . . the entire manuscript.
Fact: An agent or acquisitions editor isn’t going to read the query. A young, crypto-Wannabe
employed by the agent or editor is going to read it. Maybe. This is like putting the power of the
death penalty in the hands of a conservative judge’s first-year law clerk.
Theory: A query letter is no less primary or essential to getting a read than a resume is to
securing a job interview in the business world.
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Fact: Query letters do serve the same function as resumes. But take it from one who knows:
resumes are seldom used to hire people. They are used to eliminate people from the hiring
process. In business, most hiring managers prefer a referral, because it means they don’t have to
read a stack of resumes. And if the new employee doesn’t work out, the hiring manager can
blame someone else for the hire.
Theory: A query letter better be good. It’s the best, if not only, shot the unpublished novelist
has at actually getting something read.
Fact: A query letter may have to be several things, but good isn’t one of them. Rather, it has
to be sexy. Its two essential characteristics must be brevity and surprise. This combination results
in good only if one’s idea of good sex involves an odd coupling preceded by little or no foreplay.
The reader of the query wants to hear something he or she doesn’t expect to hear. Not “I’m
coming” or even “Tell me when I can come,” but something that leads easily to simultaneous
orgasm. Two things make this impossible. (I could remark that a good query letter is as mythical
as simultaneous orgasm, but I ain’t going there.) First, the reader of the query has heard it all.
Second, in fiction, there is nothing new under the sun. The two are not unrelated, but they’re not
exactly the same either.
The first is simply and inevitably a function of the Wannabe business. The sheer volume of
query letters will soon inure even the most callow apprentice reader assigned to them to any
blandishments they might contain. The second derives from the nature of storytelling itself.
I’m hardly the first person to point this out, but examine any story or plot, name any genre,
that doesn’t employ one or more of a very few archetypal elements: initiation, transformation,
quest, discovery, redemption, or revenge. Frankenstein, Now, Voyager, My Fair Lady, and A
Christmas Carol all tell a story of transformation, as do War and Peace, Dr. Zhivago, and Gone
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with the Wind. Scale, scope, and treatment differ, not the essential arc or effect of the action.
Oedipus Rex is as much a detective story as any police procedural, both involving a person in
authority trying to discover the truth. A quest is a quest is a quest, be it for the Holy Grail, the
Celestial City, or Shangri-la, for love, gold, glory, home, or freedom. As I suggested in chapter
five, plot involves two simple things in addition to the causality posited by E.M. Forster: the
passage of time and a journey, the latter literal or metaphoric or both.
But the query letter must insist that there is something new under the sun. Why else would
anyone with the power to enable publication of the work of an unpublished novelist be willing to
do so? Well, that someone might read all or part of a writer’s novel and like it. That simple. But
the fundamental problem with a query is that it isn’t the work. It’s a pitch to read the work, vying
with an vast horde of other pitches. As such, it doesn’t put on display the one thing that may be
new under the sun—the writer’s treatment of familiar material (and, to repeat: there is no other
kind. Or, as they say in Hollywood, there are only twelve stories, right, babe?). It only declares,
you’ll like my book because it’s different. Oops! There it is again—telling, not showing.
Nor can the book be too different. This is where the odd coupling ensues—the stipulation of
something new by the evocation of something familiar. The only way of making the old new is
to yoke together two different but familiar things—as in the formula X meets Y—a juxtaposition
that arouses the reader’s attention. Not War and Peace meets Dr. Zhivago, but War and Peace
meets Wuthering Heights—the battle of Borodino enacted on the Yorkshire moors. Can’t miss,
babe! And the not so subtle bit of legerdemain being practiced is the inference that what is being
presented is not only new, but—based on its pedigree—sure to be successful. The query letter
must make an irresistible, if illogical, pitch—an unusual, exciting coupling and safe sex.
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And a pitch is exactly what it is. Hardly by accident, it resembles a screenwriter’s two
minutes with a producer (or an aspiring novelist’s time with an agent or editor at a writing
conference). It must not only telegraph the plot, but do so in a language the reader understands, a
particular dialect or patois indicative of the outsider’s inside knowledge (try dealing with that
contradiction) of what is really going on. (“Hey, there’s only twelve stories, right?”) What is
really going on, as in consideration of a business resume, is risk mitigation.
A battle-scarred soldier makes a separate peace and heads for home. Could be A Farewell to
Arms meets The Best Years of Our Lives. But it’s not. That’s a combination past its prime. If it’s
sexy at all, it’s sex after menopause. So it’s Troy meets Cold Mountain. But wait. Troy meets
Cold Mountain isn’t new; it’s The Iliad meets The Odyssey. Both of which are really, really old.
Geriatric sex. Yecch!
As I mentioned in an earlier chapter, my particular formulation was “Woody Allen meets
Harper Lee.” With it I intended to convey four things: 1) an essentially comic coming-of-age
story 2) set in the South 3) focusing on Jewish characters 4) narrated retrospectively in the first-
person. My particular ploy was to broaden the playing field to include authors rather than single
works. Not, however, to suggest a many-to-many relationship but a many-to-one. Harper Lee has
only a single novel to her credit, but what a novel! I understood that well enough, but failed to
recognize all of the implications.
For one thing, maybe someone would take me literally and think my book was a non-fiction
novel about Truman Capote’s Black-and-White Masked Ball in Manhattan in 1966. Okay,
probably not—but not all that farfetched a possibility considering that my own editor mentioned
Andy’s reference to the Clutter family as a likely source of reader confusion, and hadn’t Harper
Lee had been involved in that business too?
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But first things first. I was imagining the typical query reader as one with a sense of
geography expansive enough to include both Texas and Woody Allen in the Deep South.
My standard response as to Texas is, “It seceded in 1861, didn’t it?” With Woody Allen,
however, much as I admire his work, I wasn’t doing myself any favors. Never mind the
incongruity of Woody Allen and Texas. (Woody in a ten-gallon hat is wooden all right, as in
Howdy Doody.) At first I failed to understand that “Jewish” was incidental to the impression a
reference to him would create. So was “comic writer,” “screenwriter,” “film director,” “New
York filmmaker,” or even “poet laureate of Manhattan” (cue the Gershwin). Everyone associates
Woody Allen, even his considerable body of prose not only with comedy, but with the one-liner.
And, in this context, not even Allen the writer, but Allen the performer. As both, Woody Allen
descends not from Oscar Wilde or Mark Twain, but Bob Hope. I was possibly conveying that the
principal characters of my novel were Jewish, but I was certainly suggesting that the novel was a
series of jokes. For a novel to be a series of jokes is as bad as for it to be a joke. Almost.
Why not Philip Roth meets Harper Lee? The master of transforming and sustaining Jewish
jokes as literary comedy. Plus, no problem with the Black-and-White Ball. What did Woody
Allen buy me that Philip Roth couldn’t?
It was more what Roth would buy me. I could clearly identify my novel as Jewish-American
fiction. But Philip Roth meets Harper Lee meant Alexander Portnoy meets not Mary Jane Reed,
but Jean Louise Finch. I really didn’t need that monkey on my back.
Did I even need to imply, let alone mention, that the main characters were Jewish? Not
necessarily. Part of the problem with my particular formulation was that it placed Jews in the
wrong region. Jews belong in the northeast and in Hollywood, not the South. This has nothing to
do with reality—with, for instance, the Jewish storekeeper who sold sheets to the local Klan in
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Harper Lee’s own Monroeville, Alabama—and everything to do with stereotypical cultural
perception. But wait! That meant Jews in the South were a story as yet untold in American
fiction, so—whaddaya know!—I had found something new under the sun. Question was, how
was I going to make that clear in my query formulation? (Suggestion in passing: popular fiction
depends not only on genre, but on cultural and literary stereotypes; literary fiction busts these as
well as genres. Stephen Carter, for example, receives much credit for “discovering” the black
middle class in his mysteries, but gets little credit as a mystery writer.)
Woody still seemed the best bet, and I stuck with him. More than anything, I gradually came
to realize, I was trying to finesse the issue of literary fiction. Or, rather, I was trying to remind
the query reader that a work of literary fiction could also be successful commercially. But was
that the reader’s impression? What was I really pitching? A novel called To Kvell a
Mockingbird? Or Say it Again, Atticus (with Clarence Darrow as the imaginary Bogart/advisor
figure)? Maycomb Murder Mystery? (Atticus proves Tom Robinson’s innocence as much by
Miss Maudie’s industrious amateur sleuthing as by his own courtroom skills.) How did it begin?
“There’s a story originally attributed to Sigmund Freud, or Uncle Remus”? Did psychoanalysis
reveal that Scout suffered from penis envy? Did Dill grow up to be Tony Roberts?
Why not just say exactly what I meant? “Not Fade Away is a comic coming-of-age story set
in southeast Texas in 1959 and focusing on Jewish characters.” Believe me, I did. There were no
takers. Because that sentence contains absolutely nothing to entice an agent or editor, not even
when I added, “With Buddy Holly providing the musical accompaniment, young Andy Lerner
experiences a summer of love and loss, defeat and triumph, that forever changes his life.” It is
not a template for querying, but something for the one-in-a-thousand or one-in-ten-thousand
agent who would, for reasons no one could know, be interested in just exactly that. After all, that
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is what happened to Nelle Harper Lee herself. One biographer even speculates that her literary
agent, Maurice Crain, felt an immediate affinity for her because his mother was called Nellie.
Harper Lee: A Perfect Storm in Wannabeland
Be that as it may, these many years after To Kill a Mockingbird was published and became an
instant classic, it is clear that for its author the book created a perfect storm of success for Harper
Lee. Consider the timeline:
1. 1949 – HL drops out of law school and moves to New York; begins to write short stories
in her spare time. This catalytic event sounds like a version of the Howtu advice, “Sell
everything and move to New York.” It enabled Harper Lee to meet successful Broadway
composer Michael Brown and his wife, Joy.
2. 1956 - Michael Brown provides connection to theatrical agent Annie Laurie Williams and
encourages HL to present her short stories to her. Six years have passed, a significant but
not extraordinary, literary apprenticeship.
3. A check (Christmas gift) from the Browns in 1956 finances year to write full time.
Hummh! That sort of thing happens to unpublished writers all the time.
4. Early 1957 - Annie Laurie Williams’ husband, Maurice Crain, her partner in charge of
literary properties takes an interest in HL; says stories need work and that short stories
are a hard sell anyway, but encourages her to write a novel.
5. May 1957 - Crain sends early, unsolicited version of To Kill a Mockingbird (called
Atticus) to J.P. Lippincott publishers. HL meets with Lippincott editors, who urge
revision to tie anecdotal narrative together.
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6. End of summer, 1957 – HL resubmits manuscript. One of the Lippincott editors, Teresa
Hohoff, who likes working with young writers, volunteers to work with her further on the
book. An editor volunteers? That happens a lot too.
7. October, 1957 – Lippincott offers HL contract an advance of several thousand dollars.
Writer and editor work to shape narrative anecdotes into a novel with a cohesive structure
and through line, the arrest, trial, and death of Tom Robinson.
8. 1957-60 – whether or not HL based the Tom Robinson story on the Scottsboro Boys’
trials of her girlhood, the development of her central plot line coincided with the
burgeoning Civil Rights movement.
9. December, 1959 – Lee accompanies her cousin, Truman Capote, to Kansas to assist with
research for In Cold Blood. How likely is it that she and “Dill” talked only about
Capote’s book? In any case, Capote would spread word about TKAM prior to publication.
10. July, 1960 – TKAM published; selected by Literary Guild and Reader’s Digest
Condensed Books; hits New York Times and Chicago Tribune bestseller lists within a few
weeks. (Coincidentally, Freedom Ride from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans began on
May 17, 1960.)
11. January, 1961 – film rights sold.
12. May, 1961 – TKAM wins Pulitzer Prize.
13. 1962 – film version released and acclaimed; Oscar to Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch. I’ve
already noted the rarity of a classic film based on a classic novel. It is impossible to
overestimate the effect of the movie’s success and Peck’s iconic portrayal on the book’s
secure status as a classic.
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The timeline consumes only about a dozen years, not a long time in the life of a young writer
who for seven of those years had a day job to occupy her. And, in contrast to the plight of most
Wannabes, these years were filled with support, encouragement, and validation from a host of
significant enablers. So Harper Lee’s experience is not an affirmation of the “sell everything and
move to New York” principle. It is, rather, the incandescently glaring exception that proves the
opposite. Though the publishing of fiction has changed and contracted in the last fifty years,
Lee’s run of luck and good timing was unique even in its time. About as many Wannabe
novelists are going to succeed by trying hard in New York (or anywhere else) as aspiring actors
are going to find steady work, let alone meteoric fame, in Hollywood (or anywhere else).
I draw other conclusions, or at least inferences, from Harper Lee’s experience, and these will
serve as well to comment on other items in the tool kit for Wannabes. Let’s notice, for example,
that what’s missing from this picture is not only the all-important query letter, but also:
The Sample Chapter(s)
Theory: One or more sample chapters may induce the agent’s or publisher’s reader to request
more chapters or even the whole manuscript. Such samples prime the pump.
Fact: An agent’s or publisher’s reader will NEVER! NEVER! NEVER! read a sample
chapter submitted with a query letter. From my experience, this is true even if some guide or
listing of agents tells you the agent or publisher accepts unsolicited sample chapters. The only
exception MIGHT be if the recipient’s eye, entirely by accident and despite his or her best efforts
to look away, falls on the first sentence and that sentence happens to begin, “In my younger and
more vulnerable years . . .” or “It is a truth universally acknowledged . . .” Otherwise, on the
basis of the query letter, an agent or publisher MAY request one or more sample chapters and
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MAY even read one or more of them before sending you a rejection. (Note: The short stories
Harper Lee submitted to Maurice Crain do not qualify as sample “chapters.” There was no novel
at that point.)
The Synopsis
Theory: A synopsis tell agents, editors, and, occasionally, the judges of writing competitions,
what happens in the parts of a novel they don’t see, which is most of it. It’s the part of the
iceberg under the tip of the sample chapters.
Fact: I suspect a synopsis from a first novelist has about as much visibility as the submerged
part of an iceberg.
To pursue the analogy that began with the comparison of a query letter to a movie pitch, the
synopsis resembles a screenwriter’s initial “treatment” of a script. As an average script runs
about one hundred twenty pages (one page of script equals one minute of screen time), a
treatment is a summary or blueprint of the planned script anywhere from, say, ten to thirty pages
long. Its elements include story structure and narrative, sample dialogue, primary and secondary
characters, perhaps all or part of key scenes, and whatever else may flesh out the detail of the
initial pitch and drive the writing of a usable script. In effect, because a screenplay is itself a
blueprint for the film (see chapter 19), a treatment is a blueprint for a blueprint.
There is nothing wrong with such a step in the development of a screenplay. But a screenplay
ain’t the same animal as a novel (also see chapter 19), so the question becomes whether the
synopsis of a novel achieves any purpose. Well, it would if it led to a read. As in, an agent or
editor is intrigued enough to request sample chapters and/or the full manuscript. Even in this best
case (i.e., unlikely) situation, there are a couple of potential, even likely, traps.
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First, an agent or editor who requests manuscript pages based on a synopsis as opposed to
only a query is almost certainly interested primarily in the novel’s plot. If plot is the novel’s
strong point, a synopsis can convey that as well as anything. But if plot is the driving factor, then
the novel is almost certainly genre fiction. Because literary fiction (almost by definition) isn’t
plot-driven, a synopsis is unlikely to do much service to the novel it purports to “summarize.” In
most cases, if a genre novel has a good query, a synopsis is at best icing on the cake.
For literary fiction, on the other hand, a synopsis is far from the best tool to secure a read. In
most instances it will fail to convey with any adequacy those elements—theme, language,
psychological insight, depth and subtlety of character development—that may make the work
distinctive. Here again the comparison to a film treatment is apt. Given the nature of film
narrative, the narrative blueprint necessarily emphasizes story—and, even more specifically,
action. This is the very thing literary fiction generally doesn’t emphasize. For such a work, a
synopsis is all risk and no reward (as was also my experience with synopses accompanying the
rigorously brief submissions to literary competitions).
Second, consider the possible sequencing where the tools are concerned. Even if a query is
effective, an agent isn’t going to request sample chapters and a synopsis, because then someone
might have to read both. (Remember: an agent will never read any unsolicited material.) Or, if
willing to consider both, which does he or she look at first? You can bet if the first choice
doesn’t grab the agent’s reader, no one in the office will look at the second. So the likelihood,
should matters somehow proceed this far, is that the agency will request sample chapters or a
synopsis. Assuming, of course, that the query wasn’t written in Ukrainian, the dread phrase
“literary fiction” will not have been uttered. Nevertheless, the agent will know because, if
nothing else, “X meets why” will reveal it. In the still more unlikely event of additional interest,
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the agent will request sample chapters. Bottom line: for literary fiction seeking a read, synopses
are a non-starter.
The Outline
Our old friend from chapter 5, where I covered it pretty completely. Based on that earlier
discussion, a relevant question here is what’s the difference between an outline and a synopsis?
Whatever the former is, when does it become the latter? And the overriding question still
remains: what does the outline of a novel look like?
By and large, there is nothing personal in the general inefficacy of the ostensibly
indispensable tool kit. How could there be? Despite the aversion to risk that governs the
publishing industry, one thing especially ensures that most of the tools won’t work: a version of
the law of large numbers. So many literary Wannabes, so little time. Put it another way, what is
indeed missing throughout the whole process is the personal.
That is what Harper Lee had in abundance, and it is a crucial element in making her so huge
an exception. And the point person for the personal is, of course:
The Literary Agent
Theory: No one gets a first novel commercially published without an agent.
Fact: No one gets a first novel commercially published without an agent.
Unlike the other items listed above, agents have an indispensable purpose. For the
unconnected Wannabe, there is no other viable access to the mainstream publishing industry.
The odds of a submission “over the transom” to a publisher being read, let alone published,
approach the likelihood of winning a fifty-state Powerball lottery. The average Wannabe
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therefore has three choices: 1) don’t publish 2) self-publish 3) find an agent. Needless to say, the
“dream” of publication, especially for a SERIOUS NOVELIST, involves only the third option.
Some aspects of finding an agent are a no-brainer. As in, don’t send literary fiction to an
agent who doesn’t handle it. As in, match any product to the agent; find one who can get excited
about that product and develop its commercial possibilities. (Tony Hillerman, author of the Jim
Chee/Joe Leaphorn Navajo mysteries, had a first agent who told him to “get rid of the Indian
stuff.”) As in, don’t sign a contract with an agent who charges a reading fee or a regular fee,
monthly or otherwise, to “represent” you. He or she will do nothing but take your money.
Believe me, I know. I learned the hard way.
Most of these warnings, however obvious, are moot. Anyone who acquires a reputable,
reliable agent may well be approaching the final lap of the publication marathon, but almost no
one does. As with the other items in the tool kit, and despite the myriad listings in guides to
literary agents, the numbers are stacked against the Wannabe.
And so, back to Harper Lee. Look at the timeline I provided above, and one clear fact
emerges from which one may generalize: Someone knows someone. That’s it. That’s the dirty
little secret to publication—dirty because it all but entirely obviates the quality issue. It doesn’t
really matter if it’s good. Maybe the author of a poor first novel won’t be able to publish a
second novel, but the first one will be published. There is a Michael Brown who has a
connection that sets everything in motion. To be sure, persistence,
coupled with sheer good luck in applying the “tools” may hook the first novelist up with the right
agent and also set the publication machine in motion, but what are the odds?
And in noting that Harper Lee apparently did not need the tool kit, it’s also important to
recognize what else is missing from the Harper Lee perfect storm of publication.
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Struggle
I don’t mean the struggle to write, which for most, if not all, authors is a given. I’m not
suggesting that To Kill a Mockingbird was any more or less easy to compose than any other
novel ranging on a broad continuum from, say, Nostromo or Finnegan’s Wake to any product of
the James Patterson or Nicholas Sparks novel factories. But two facts about Harper Lee’s writing
process seem indisputable. When Maurice Crain suggested she write a novel rather than short
stories, she quickly put together the draft of Atticus. And, of course, after To Kill a Mockingbird,
she never completed another novel. What’s interesting is that a Lee biographer, Charles J.
Shields, notes that after Atticus was submitted to Lippincott in the spring of 1957, “Nelle—not
wanting to waste a day of her writing sabbatical—surprised Crain at the end of May with 111
pages of a second novel, The Long Goodbye. Days later, he phoned her with good news;
Lippincott had requested to meet with her about Atticus. Her pen froze.”
And, in a sense, it never unfroze. The fact is, her struggle came after the success of her book
—the struggle not to achieve success, but to deal with it. Her decades of travail involved the
inability to produce, and therefore to publish, a second novel.
To an extraordinary extent, her situation represents a reversal of what normally besets a first
novelist. Some published first novelists do not produce a second novel, and most of those who do
achieve little or no greater success than with the first. In general, the novelist’s struggle is a slow
and uneven one to achieve a certain initial recognition, a readership however small, which may
form the vanguard of eventual fame or reputation, if not the deluge of celebrity and approbation
Harper Lee achieved immediately. To reprise the quote I included in chapter 1, “I never expected
any sort of success with 'Mockingbird.' I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands
of the reviewers but, at the same time, I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me
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encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot,
and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I'd expected.”
Hence, the predictable autobiographical element in her first and only novel combined with
unforeseen initial success to produce a poisonous, paralytic artistic reaction.
It’s as if unexpected triumph and lionization convinced her that anything else she produced
would not only be judged against her first effort, but inevitably never even approach its success.
She had played the trump card of autobiography and won a huge pot, but had no aces left in her
deck. Would the struggle Harper Lee anticipated, that every first novelist anticipates, have kept
her in the game longer than a pat hand?
To come full circle, what I’m suggesting is that to one degree or another, for most novelists,
the autobiographical element is something ultimately, if not immediately, to be overcome. The
novelist may never abandon it, it may indeed provide the foundation of all the novelist’s work,
but the house of fiction he or she creates depends on the right tools to build on that foundation, to
shape the autobiographical materials at hand into a meaningful and beautiful structure. These
tools the novelist must discover and learn to use through time, struggle, and inevitable
disappointment, as no prepackaged, magical tool kit will provide them. And neither the right
tools or the so-called tool kit will ever guarantee publication. Harper Lee was the most fortunate
of novelists—and the most unfortunate.
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Chapter 19
Movie-Made America
As I’ve insisted repeatedly, for most first novelists the path to publication is neither
smooth nor straight. Would that it were only a Yellow Brick Road beset by lions and tigers and
bears oh, my!, but ending at the Emerald City. In reality, the challenges are monumental, the
obstacles often outrageous. The man behind the curtain demands not only the broomstick of the
Wicked Witch of the West, but the Golden Fleece, the sword from the stone, the treasure of
Sierra Madre, and the head of Alfredo Garcia. The long and labyrinthine journey offers no
guarantee of survival, let alone ultimate success.
This book reflects my experience in attempting to publish a first novel, as well as my outrage
at the process. And yet I find myself somewhat surprised by the book I’ve written. I knew I
would include a summing up, but its substance has become something different and more
complicated than I imagined. Rather like the characters in a novel.
Two things strike me now, though the seeds were there in the opening paragraphs. (That
pesky end-in-the-beginning thing.) First: the extent to which, in recounting the writing of my
novel, I’ve talked about writing any novel. No doubt that was inevitable, but it speaks well for
my ability to moderate my conceit and my personal sense of injury and to place them in the
appropriate context. Second: in discussing novel-writing, I’ve talked a great deal about movies.
Surely, I should have known I’d do so, because in a sense my whole life is one long movie
reference. But the reason for that is only partly autobiographical. It’s another, larger reason I
want to focus on now. In support of much of what follows, I owe a large debt to David
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Thomson, his cogent, gem-like mini-essays in The New Autobiographical Dictionary of Film
(2003) as well as several other works.
If the secret to mainstream publication is that someone knows someone, like most
unpublished writers, I started out cold. I knew no one who could obviously or quickly assist me
in getting a novel published. I’d written several screenplays and, living in West Los Angeles,
was acquainted with a few people in the movie business. They were anything but major players,
but might have helped me to the back-door introduction to publication of a produced or at least
optioned screenplay. I mentioned my reluctance to pursue such a strategy in the opening pages of
this book. I realize now that my reservations went well beyond the congenital snobbery the
SERIOUS NOVELIST feels toward the screenwriter and the unlikelihood that I’d ever win an
Oscar and sleep with starlets. It even goes beyond distaste for the well-documented horrors of
screenwriting in Hollywood. My deepest discomfort with screenwriting is a formal one.
Movies are an art form, but screenplays are not. A play can be great literature, enjoyed as
such even if it is never staged. A screenplay can’t be great unless it is filmed, and it can never be
literature. Movies are a visual, kinetic, collaborative art. So, to an extent, is the theater, but it has
its roots in literature. A play is about the words, the text, regardless of what else augments them;
a screenplay uses words not to create the visual, but to propose it. (That is true even of dialogue.)
A play exists outside the proscenium; a movie has no existence outside the frame. In short, a play
is the thing; a screenplay is the tentative, changeable blueprint of the thing.
As the film director Nicholas Ray remarked, “If it were all in the script, why make the film?”
Though that says it all, I can’t help saying more. A movie relies on many elements and can be
good or bad (or good and bad) for many reasons—script, casting, acting, editing, scoring,
cinematography, direction, any combination thereof, and more. A screenplay has its own basic
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elements—a structure both narrative and dramatic, dialogue, character description, even (if the
screenwriter is very foolish) shot selection and line readings—but these exist not as ends in
themselves but only to enable the film. Screenplays are schematic rather than organic. They
conform to a template.
Much the same is true of genre fiction, and serious novelists regard it with much the same
contempt they feel for screenwriting. In genre fiction, the conventions drive form; they define the
template. Movies go one step further, making explicit what genre fiction merely implies. In
movies, genre drives not only form, but substance.
That most movies are genre films or else glaring exceptions to the rule is no accident. The
words have no quality or meaning except as they serve the formal characteristics of film, which
are essentially, if not purely, visual. What constricts the screenwriter empowers the director.
Movie-making clarifies not only the differences between writer and director, screenplay and
completed film, but also between literary fiction and genre fiction. To amplify that point: movies
define the marketplace for fiction not because published novels become movies, but because so
many of those novels are themselves movies—formally, substantively, commercially. David
Thomson notes that “sooner or later movies are about the dirt of crowds and money.” Guess
what—not only movies.
When we identify a great screenplay (Double Indemnity, All about Eve, Sweet Smell of
Success, North by Northwest, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Chinatown, Network, The
Silence of the Lambs) or a great screenwriter (Ernest Lehman, William Goldman, Robert Towne,
Paddy Chayefsky), that greatness has only incidentally, if at all, to do with the words. The script
matters—it matters profoundly—but not in a literary sense. Memorable dialogue, no matter how
clever, pungent, poetic, or faithful to a literary source, does not make the screenplay literature.
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To elaborate on an earlier point, even great movie dialogue is all but dead on the page—a
realization I experienced almost as an epiphany, when reading the excerpt from Citizen Kane that
David Thomson includes in his fine memoir of childhood, Try to Tell the Story (2009). Movie
dialogue lives not by reason of the contextual narrative of the screenplay, but by virtue of its
delivery in the film. Quoting a screenwriter in an essay entitled 20 Things People Like to Forget
About Hollywood (#15 - “Scripts Are Bad Because Nobody Really Reads Them”), Thomson
notes that “’Reading is an alien rhythm to what happens on the screen.’”
Although words can create images, convey movement and gesture, frame action, and establish
mood, the visual power of words is inherently un-cinematic. In prose fiction, the visual is
inseparable from point of view, and point of view belongs to the narrator (character or author or
both). In movies, point of view rests with the camera and belongs to the director. (That is why
attempts to film a story from a character/narrator point of view, Robert Montgomery’s The Lady
in the Lake, for example, are equally exasperating and doomed to failure.) In the beginning was
not the Word, but the Camera. Little has changed since the title cards used in silent films made
the subservience of the verbal to the visual more than clear—and forever, despite the advent of
sound, defined the role of the screenwriter in the power structure of commercial moviemaking.
As Thomson observes, “always it is the visual element that indicates the author, because it is the
sharp point that pricks our senses.” In short, there are no great screenplays, only great films.
The screenwriter’s problem is usually stated as lack of control, no right of “final cut.” The
script will be revised or completely rewritten, often multiple times and by other hands. Scenes
and dialogue will be added, discarded, changed, or improvised during shooting. Writing credit
will be shared, adjudicated, even stolen. That “film is a director’s medium” has long been a
cliché; nevertheless, the term auteur and the screen credit “a film by,” acknowledge not only the
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primacy of the director (even if the director is writer-director), but the reason for it. In separating
the author from the text, these designations define the fundamental nature and function of a
screenplay and the transformation it must undergo. Its purpose is to suggest a vision at once
collaborative and irreducible.
This is the key element not only of a successful adaptation, but also, and more generally, of a
fruitful relationship between writer and director. What is filmed is not the screenplay, but a
shooting script. Screen before play, shooting before script. Not moving words but moving
pictures. Camera first and foremost. Roman Polanski understood the screenplay of Chinatown,
its cinematic requirements, better than Robert Towne did. Polanski didn’t impose his ending on
the film; that ending isn’t only better, it’s inevitable. Though Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid seemed to swing the creative pendulum toward the writer, the film succeeds because the
cinematic trumps the novelistic. William Goldman himself implicitly acknowledges this in his
recurrent use of the technical term “CUT TO:” and his explanation that it is a substitute for the
novelistic, “he said.” If Chayefsky retains “authorship” of Network and The Hospital over
directors Sidney Lumet and Arthur Hiller, it isn’t because the verbal pyrotechnics alone light the
sky, but because the words reach critical mass through image and performance. The angry
explosions of Peter Finch and George C. Scott appear to be volcanic eruptions, spewing satiric
lava in every direction, but are in fact controlled chain reactions. Satire is what closes Saturday
night—unless its literary essence finds an effective correlative in action and gesture, which the
director controls. I’m saying this, and I’m a WRITER!
But I’m a writer, a novelist, with a strong, ineluctable connection to movies. Not Fade Away
may never become a movie, but it is in no small way about the movies. With this assertion I
don’t intend only to reiterate what I suggested in discussing the novel’s origin, quoting David
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Thomson on the iconic Donna Reed. Judy Berman is a movie heroine, but that’s not the whole
story. Nor do I refer only to the extent to which the movies shape Andy Lerner’s initial view of
the world. The book is about the movies in the way certain movies are about movies. And I don’t
mean films about the milieu and process of movie-making. Nor am I thinking in terms of movie
plot, the classic/clichéd story arc of boy gets girl, boy loses girl, etc.
The films I have in mind are Citizen Kane and Rear Window. Though their stories don’t
involve the movies, the movie metaphor in both is neither mysterious nor obscure. Consider the
first as being essentially not about William Randolph Hearst, but Orson Welles: Welles the artist,
writer, director, and star; Welles the magician, with the RKO studio as Xanadu or Prospero’s
island. Citizen Kane provides a superlative demonstration of the moviemaker’s ability to conjure
reality and truth from mere shadows—to employ the power of deep focus photography and
visible ceilings to suggest that the shadows are reality and truth, that twenty-four frames per
second is the speed of life.
That is a version of the lie that dwells at the heart of things, the fire that consumes Rosebud.
The conjuror believes that his talent for illusion is what makes him the rightful Duke of Milan,
only to discover that it dooms him to perpetual exile. Armored in the solipsistic innocence of
genius and inspiration, like newspaper publisher Charlie Kane composing his statement of
principles for the Inquirer, he mistakes the statement for the principles. The inquirer cannot
survive the inquiry, and Xanadu can never be finished. Co-opting, in the service of his own
aspiration and ambition, the Hearst story and the news mogul’s power to manufacture reality,
Welles not only transgresses against Hearst (and, for that matter, Henry Luce) and the studio
bosses, but against his co-screenwriter, Herman Mankiewicz. As a screenwriter, Mankiewicz
merely resented the director’s position in the pecking order. Thus, his famous comment about
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Welles: “There, but for the grace of God, goes God.” But it was Herman Mankiewicz who
telegraphed Ben Hecht from Hollywood in the early 1930s, “There’s millions to be grabbed out
here and the only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.” Mankiewicz was the cynic
both enticed and wounded by power, Welles the artist destroyed by it, not least by his own.
With Hitchcock, the primacy of the director and the power of the camera foster not artistic
pride but artistic prurience. What are that rear window and the dramas it reveals if not a movie
frame? In this instance, the artist isn’t the charismatic owner of the Inquirer dominating that
frame with his statement of principles. He is James Stewart as the injured photographer, “Jeff”
Jeffries, imprisoned in a plaster leg cast and a wheelchair, watching his neighbors through a
telephoto lens; he is Hitchcock confined to the director’s chair, incapacitated except for the
power granted him by his art. But it is an art of stylized neurotic anxiety. Hitchcock claimed his
greatest fear was of arrest, but his film technique suggests that he dreaded even more what arrest
may lead to—exposure. The camera isn’t imagination’s instrument, but its substitute; it reveals
by intrusion and manipulation. Hitchcock gets off on the sexual fireworks between Stewart and
Grace Kelly because neither he nor his leading man can have her; for both, the only anodyne to
impotence is watching. The filmmaker is no less a spectator than the ticket buyer; he just has a
better seat.
Unlike Welles, Hitchcock is no Prospero in exile. Not for Hitch the decades of toiling
fruitlessly in the less arable reaches of the commercial vineyard or, at best, having his wine sold
before its time. He is instead the successful, studio-bound conjuror, who knows that “sooner or
later American films are about the dirt of money and crowds.” Despite his visual and narrative
skills, his technical mastery of filmmaking to create and maintain “suspense,” his genius rests on
the limitation he shares with his audience. Though critics remark on his ability to induce his
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audience to leave their seats, the obvious point is that the audience, no more than the director
himself, ever does so. Over the years, Hitchcock’s brief cameos in the films have increasingly
seemed to me a sly joke that reaches its apotheosis in the opening of North by Northwest, when
he just misses the bus. Hitchcock not only acknowledges, but practices what Thomson identifies
as “the compulsive voyeurism of the spectator,” our common fascination with the darkly
obsessive stuff that dreams are made of and the erotic charge it provides. Movies are voyeurism
without the risk (as the Internet would be, were it not for credit card numbers and the “digital
footprint”). To engage in it other than vicariously is to risk the two broken legs Jeffries has as the
end of Rear Window. To give it up, to be without the obsession, is to be Scottie Ferguson cured
of vertigo; to conquer fear is to lose everything. Of what use to be first in line for the next bus if
you can’t get aboard or have no change to pay the fare?
What can my tale of a Texas fifteen-year-old in 1959 have to do with all of this? Like Young
Goodman Brown setting off on his trek through the darkening, shadowy forest, Andy Lerner
goes in search of the truth, only to have revealed to him the lie that dwells at the heart of things.
To posit the existence of such a lie is not to suggest that there is no such thing as truth, that
everything is a lie or that there is no distinction between truth and lies. To say that Andy
discovers the lie is not to say that he doesn’t find the truth. Knowledge and experience reveal a
complexity ignored by the sharp dichotomy of absolutes—good and evil, light and darkness,
doubt and faith, gods and men, heroes and villains. Myth requires a similar simplicity, one that
accounts for its power and beauty as metaphoric truth. Unfortunately, the unquestioning
acceptance of myth as literal truth requires not only simplicity but simple-mindedness. This is
the lethal mutation that so often produces the lie, not to mention a noun ending in –ism.
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As I suggested early on, our best stories and greatest art originate in myth. One need not
rehearse Plato’s objections to mimetic art in The Republic to observe that if art “lies,” the
deception springs from the imitative nature of art and the pleasure it affords. The problem is
cognitive, not the inability of art to speak the truth, but the mistaken perception of artistic truth as
“reality”—a mistake that originates in willing suspension of disbelief. Art provides a version of
ourselves and our experience that is better than either. Great art recognizes the gap even as it
encourages us to attempt, however futilely, to close it. Lesser art ignores the gap or, all too
frequently and cynically, pretends it doesn’t exist. It is less complicated, less demanding, more
easily “understood.” Great art may be popular art; lesser art nearly always is, conceding at least
something to commercial taste and convention. The hero of great art is Sisyphus; the hero of
lesser art is Walter Mitty.
Moreover, a Gresham’s Law applies to art as well as to money. The lesser coinage drives the
more valuable one out of circulation—into museums, libraries, and private collections, the
holders of the “good money.” The legal tender law empowering this version of Gresham is the
notion that art is art—the equal value of greater and lesser. The lesser art not only comes to
dominate the marketplace, its debasement enables that dominance. It becomes the preferred
coinage of those who traffic there. Movies, purveying stories built for and around movie stars,
refine the distinction in a crucial and devastating way—Walter Mitty is a winner, Sisyphus a
loser. The only thing that succeeds is success. At the top of the steepest hill of all is the
HOLLYWOOD sign.
The stuff that dreams are made of. The Dream Factory. The American Dream.
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Not Fade Away is about movies because it’s about America—the land of heroes and villains.
It’s about “movie-made America,” to borrow the title of a 1975 book (revised 1994) by the
cultural critic Robert Sklar. Consider the notion, the phenomenon, of “movie-made America” in
relation to a phrase almost as pervasive and charged with meaning as the American Dream. The
American Experience encapsulates the quest to fulfill the dream. That experience is not historical
but mythic, rooted in the belief that the past doesn’t matter. Thus the creation of an American
Adam, the inheritor of a new Eden, Fitzgerald’s “fresh green breast of the New World.” Pristine
and isolated, it is a place unencumbered by history and historical time. The American Experience
defines individual as types, the quintessential one being the “Common Man.” His primary
characteristic “rugged individualism,” defines and enables him only because it is a shared value.
To observe that the American Experience antedates movie-made America is not nearly so
obvious a statement as it sounds. The nexus of the two is the national literature.
I initially referred to the myth of the Adamic hero in chapter 2, noting his origins in our
fiction with Cooper and Twain. In his 1955 work, The American Adam, R.W.B. Lewis also
emphasizes the role of Hawthorne and Melville, as well as the non-novelists Emerson, Thoreau,
and Whitman, in the early exposition and examination of the “new man” (not to exclude Henry
James and The American) defined in de Crevecoeur’s eighteenth-century Letters from an
American Farmer.
As that work makes clear, the new Adam sprang from the conditions of the land itself. The
land was virgin even if Adam wasn’t, and it was land that enabled and defined the rhythms of
our historical process—the westward movement, the Indian geno—er, wars, the ineffectual
compromises over slavery, the transcontinental reach of telegraph and railroad, the violent code
of the frontier, the exploitation of abundant resources to fuel unbridled capitalism, the reluctance
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to embrace internationalism. Land meant not only potential wealth, but certain freedom, and
there was enough for everybody (everybody being white, Christian and, for the most part, male).
Land made the American Empire as surely as the lack of it made the British. But for Britain
the sea lanes and the “far-flung battle line” were imperial instruments, as the Roman road and the
legionnaire’s sword had enabled an earlier empire, geography overcome rather than fulfilled.
And whatever else it expresses, “the white man’s burden” is an obligation and a responsibility,
an Old Testament sacrifice. Kipling again: “Go bind your sons to exile/To serve your captives'
need.” In contrast, American expansion wasn’t duty but destiny—“manifest destiny,” the land as
New Testament revelation of innocence reaffirmed. One nation under God, sea to shining sea.
Location, location, location.
The land was not a myth, but as the literal bedrock of American history, the land created the
need for a myth that would address and incorporate its vastness, its abundance and isolation. So
firm a mythic grounding is not a generic feature of historical presentation or interpretation.
History, no less than fiction, always requires a narrative, and a narrative always imposes
selection, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that the historical narrative will be fictive. Conversely,
the myth behind the history doesn’t mean the history will inevitably be “untrue.” I said earlier
that myths were stories that were “truer than true.” I should add that this notion cuts both ways.
“The white man’s burden,” for example, reinforces the British imperial narrative, but as
rationale rather than myth. That history is neither mythic nor fictive, because the rationale drives
the narrative, but is not itself the narrative. It is “truer than true” only as a lie replaces the truth
(land and money grab) and is accepted as such. To refer to “the myth of racial superiority” used
to legitimize the white man’s burden is to make the conventional equation of myth and lie.
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Similarly, “manifest destiny” provides a rationale for American expansionism and racism, but
if the similarity doesn’t exactly end there, a divergence begins. Through the myth of the
American Adam in the New World garden, the rationale becomes the narrative, creating the
American epic—as such epics are traditionally created—through the identification, the fusion, of
the representative hero with the land and its possibilities. This epic narrative is “truer than true,”
not because it substitutes an attractive fiction for a less palatable historical reality (“there’s
millions to be grabbed out here and the only competition is idiots”), nor because it supplies a
simple explanation for complex forces and processes. It provides instead a simple, elegant
reconciliation of the irreconcilable—the paradox inherent in the oxymoron “American history.”
The fictive element in that history, conditioned by the fundamental myth, is the possibility of
escape—from time, history, civilization and its discontents. Inevitably, that is the archetypal
narrative of our literature—from the chase-capture-escape motif in James Fennimore Cooper to
Huck Finn lighting out for the territory to Jim Gatz re-creating himself as Jay Gatsby.
As I noted early on, our best literature, not content merely to dramatize or sustain the myth,
examines and questions it. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into
the past,” says Nick Carraway. “Oleh, Grandfather,” Ike McCaslin salutes the snake in
Faulkner’s “Delta Autumn.” “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past,” remarks Gavin Stevens in
Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun, repeating Maule’s Curse. The great danger of the fictive element
is that a refusal to examine the complex implications and consequences of the myth that
produced it leads to the perpetration and perpetuation of pure fictions. Or pure escape, in several
senses of the term. Movie-made America.
American movies were not, however, the first form of entertainment to exploit and to
exemplify this tendency. Nor were they the first to popularize history. The dime novel and
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Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show had already accomplished that. What the movies accomplished
was to populate history in a particular way and on a particular scale. They dramatized history not
only by fictionalizing it or bowdlerizing it, or both, but by giving historical persons familiar
faces and roles. They made it about stars and featured players and extras, good guys and bad
guys, cowboys and Indians, G-men and gangsters, GIs and Krauts/Japs/gooks —mythic typology
codified and enshrined as type casting.
In short, Hollywood treats real people and historical events just as they treat any other subject.
The classic movie biographies, for example, follow the same story lines and conventions as
wholly fictional product. Yankee Doodle Dandy and The Jolson Story aren’t biographies or even
“biopics,” they’re musicals. The Kennedy assassination and Watergate aren’t historical events,
they’re conspiracy thrillers. The battle of the Bulge is a war movie, the battle of Gettysburg a
costume epic, the Battle of New Orleans a swashbuckler, the battle of the Alamo a western.
Henry Fonda is Abe Lincoln and Wyatt Earp, so Wyatt Earp is also Abe Lincoln; Andrew
Jackson is always Charlton Heston, which means that Andrew Jackson also delivered the Ten
Commandments, painted the Sistine Chapel, and saved Spain from the Moors, only to lose
Khartoum to them. (That Hollywood treats any country’s history exactly as they do America’s
speaks volumes about both Hollywood and American history, not the nature of history itself.)
Obviously, movies blur fact and fiction, and the star system accounts to a large extent for the
confusion. The latter, however, depends on the existence of two additional, complementary
conditions. The history had to possess some element that made it amenable to such treatment. It
did: romance. And the movies had to possess some quality of history. They did: not fact, but
reality. Our literature again provides the linkage.
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Literary critics long ago noted the dominance of romance over realism in American fiction.
The opposition defines the meaning of “romance” in this context, and it is enough to say, absent
long elaboration, that the term leads straight back to myth—that is, not the closely observed
texture of ordinary, time-bound life, but something that transcends the latter and gives meaning
and value to it. America’s creation myth provides the non-temporal underpinning of the national
narratives, both historical and fictive. The through line of both is not evolutionary process, but
elemental conflict. It roots the country’s origins in the opposition of, and the struggle between,
good and evil—history not as the record of what happened and why, but as a story of biblical
confrontation (New World/New Testament versus Old). As a result, evil became easy to
identify: it was un-American. To the list of opposing character types I gave above should be
added patriots and subversives. Adam no longer named the animals; he named names. The
American Adam was born not only by the water, but on the waterfront.
Movies represent the simultaneous and conflation not only of fact and fantasy, but of the
mythopoeic and the mimetic. Movies not only popularize on an unprecedented scale, they make
everything “real.” The illusion of reality fostered by the basic elements of cinema disguises the
inherent romanticism that is the core substance of American film and imparts to it the
“legitimacy” of historical narrative. One nation under God, from soundstage to back lot.
In this context, the representative American film is Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. It is an
archetypal example of the lie that dwells at the heart of things not only because it demonizes the
emancipated slaves and glorifies the Ku Klux Klan. It retains its power in what passes for a more
sophisticated age horrified by such notions for the same reason that its source material, Thomas
Dixon’s novel The Clansman (1905), is scarcely remembered, let alone read. That is, it gives
vivid dramatic life to the Civil War as “the birth of a nation” because the conflict preserved the
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union. That nation, as a condition of its existence (not to mention a primary feature of manifest
destiny) was to be one and indivisible.
But . . . and a big but it is. As a condition of its success, both artistic and popular, the conflict
had to be cast in terms of the opposition created by the creation myth—good and evil, black and
white. Griffith, more than any other film pioneer, “invented” the language of film. As film critic
Roger Ebert has noted, “he was the first director to understand how a movie could mimic the
human ability to scan an event quickly, noting details in the midst of the larger picture.” But
Griffith’s innovations were more than formal or technical; inevitably, they also encompassed the
thematic, substantive language of film as well. Even more than that, Griffith defined the popular
appeal of Hollywood movies. Like the American historical narrative, American movies clothe
myth in the trappings of reality. (So, of course, does television, reductio ad absurdum.) They
hide in plain sight one of the fundamental characteristics of popular art, which is that the
democratic bears a strong tincture of the demagogic. The Capracorn is green, cultivated in the
dirt of crowds and money. Green as in greenbacks, rather than the fresh green breast of the New
World. (Or the green of grapes. Obviously, if the Common Man was meant to sip Chardonnay
rather than chug Budweiser, America would still be called Vineland.)
Even as movies fictionalize and trivialize history, they demonstrate that the historical
narrative itself allows them to do so. As the Henry Gibson character insists in the opening song
of Nashville, “We must be doing somethin’ right to last two hundred years.” Our movies are a
metaphor for American history, demonstrating over and over again that our history should
probably carry a disclaimer: Inspired by real events!
* * *
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And so, back to Not Fade Away. Andy Lerner is an Adamic hero, born by the water (more
about that in a moment). At the beginning of the novel, he believes devoutly in escape—from
school, from bullying, from social failure, from responsibility for his actions and their
consequences. But he believes almost as ardently in history, beginning but scarcely ending with
his own family. What seduces him in the stories Grandma Celia tells is not, however, the history,
but the fictive narrative. (Witness his consternation that the decrepit Great-Grandpa Simon he
knows is the man who faced down gangster bootleggers.) And so, unbeknownst to himself, he is
faced with a paradox, which happens to be the central paradox of American history. For Andy,
the movies provide both escape and an alternate, more desirable personal and family history.
What he ultimately learns is that no escape is possible or, finally, desirable. Life is lived not at
the movies, but in history, in real rather than cinematic time.
Andy both is and is not a typical Adamic hero. Born by the water, yes, but the temporary
overflow of a neighborhood drainage ditch during the rain showers that follow the beating
administered by Rodney Dawson and his pals rather than Twain’s Mississippi. Earlier, I said that
“I wanted to place Andy at a sort of historical four-way stop—American, Southern, Texan,
Jewish.” Each of these reinforces the others in its impact and its influence on Andy. If he finds
himself at a four-way stop, which direction does he take from there? It doesn’t matter, because
any of them will lead him home, where all roads in memory begin—to the lie that dwells at the
heart of things.
Andy is reborn into history as truth, reborn to confront and accept the lie’s existence. Not to
accept or ignore the lie, but to acknowledge it, beginning with the ambiguity about his parentage.
In doing so, he puts behind him the timelessness of a child’s summer for an adult’s life in time.
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He isn’t Huck Finn lighting out for the territory; rather, he shines a light on the past, exploring
his history and the history of his times through memory.
To sum up the summing up: if the theme of Not Fade Away is “the lie that dwells at the heart
of things,” then the book is about the movies, and in multiple ways, because it is about the lie.
History lies to the extent that it relies on a fictive narrative. Art lies (in the Platonic sense),
because in imitating reality it creates a version of experience that seems attainable because it
seems real. And there is no art form closer to reality than the movies. They seduce us into
believing that “closer” means “close.” Moreover, genre-based American movies lie historically
by subverting historical fact to the fictive narrative. And memory lies because it incorporates
both history and fiction. It involves both narrative and selection. How “true” it is depends on the
conscious and unconscious volition of the person doing the remembering, the moral sense and
the love that he or she brings to the task. (To repeat: the book is the first novel of a trilogy.)
The connection of our history and our literature to American movies remains ineluctable. As
David Thomson notes in a more recent compendium, Have You Seen . . .? (2008), “the movies
had done terrible damage to a sense of American history with their addled faith in bogus myths.”
He is writing about The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the film that produced the famous
Fordian dictum, “when the legend and the facts conflict, print the legend.” Illusion equals
delusion. The only antidote is the truth of wisdom—rigorously, often painfully, achieved.
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Chapter 20
Pinocchio Again
The end in the beginning. I remain a Serious Novelist, and that remains a mixed blessing in
terms of the contemporary literary marketplace. I’d also like to revert one last time to the
statement I initially made in the Prologue. Exploring the fantasy that one route to becoming a
published novelist was through Hollywood, I characterized being a screenwriter when one wants
to be a novelist as being Pinocchio instead of a real boy. The same distinction applies (only more
so) to the SN who self-publishes in the hope of attracting a literary agent and a commercial
publisher. That possibility, by the way, is the only form of success available to a self-published
Serious Novelist. There’s a good reason self-publication services were once generally and
pejoratively known as vanity presses.
In its earlier usage, the Pinocchio analogy involved a qualitative difference between what the
screenwriter and the novelist produce; in this penultimate chapter, however, I’m using the same
analogy to establish and clarify a difference not between a novel and some other type of creative
writing, but a self-published novel and one that is traditionally published.
I made the decision to self-publish for three reasons. First, I wasn’t getting any younger, and I
wanted to publish in my lifetime. In addition, I’d worked on Not Fade Away for more years than
I cared to admit and through more drafts than I could count. I needed to move on, in my life and
in my work. Finally, though, and most importantly, I self-published because I had no choice. In
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today’s publishing marketplace, no first novelist writing literary fiction has a choice, unless he or
she has extraordinary perseverance and, more critically, extraordinary luck.
But there’s an inherent paradox, a trap, in self-publishing. Unlike the genre novelist, no first
novelist who self-publishes a work of serious fiction has a prayer of crossing over to commercial
publication unless that novelist has even more extraordinary perseverance and even more
extraordinary luck. It’s not that absolutely no one will notice the work. If the self-published
novelist spends enough money, someone probably will. The problem, in addition to the
ingrained, pervasive agent bias against self-published works—as an experienced editor friend of
mine has noted, “most of them, perhaps even 99% of them, are amateurish efforts that would
never see the light of day otherwise”—is that no one will think outside the genre box.
On the other hand—or else it’s simply another trap—any form of publication is better than
none. (Hold that thought: it will come up again.) Having already spent more money than I—and
my wife—were comfortable toting up, I first consulted her. Everything I did subsequently was
with her generous agreement. Did I say my wife likes the book?
I decided that if I was going to self-publish, I wasn’t going to skimp on it. (Inevitably, there
are self-publishing manuals, which I managed to avoid.) Here I encountered one of the few
pieces of unadulterated good luck in the long process of writing, marketing, and publishing Not
Fade Away. I don’t know where such numbers come from, or why, but I had established $2,000
as the maximum it was reasonable to spend on the publishing venture. (Without skimping!) The
package selected also had to include hardcover as well as paperback publication. Self-publication
was one thing, self-publication only in paperback was quite another. Call me crazy.
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The only package anywhere near the maximum cost that still offered the most in terms of
production quality and marketing options was $2,999. (It was a real comfort to know that the
cost was under $3,000.) That was half again as much as my maximum. But here the luck
intervened. Unlike potential agents and commercial publishers, publishing services immediately
respond to and pursue queries to them. Competition between them abounds, and they follow up
relentlessly. (Hold that thought too.) In November, 2008, the sales rep for the service with the
$2999 package informed me that his company was having a half-price sale. That meant the price
tag fell comfortably within my self-imposed maximum, even with $349.00 added for “expedited”
publication. (Did I say no skimping or not? Besides, as I also said, I wasn’t getting any younger.)
The Premium package included copy-editing. Unlike Lenore Raven’s never-ending, soul-
crushing, bank-account-destroying line edit, this was limited to “spelling, punctuation,
grammatical and obvious word choice errors.” That is exactly what the copy editors delivered.
So far, so good. (Yet again, hold that thought.)
Moreover, as the process moved forward, I had another of those attacks of the obvious that I
like to regard as epiphanies. Self-publication is a form of marketing. I was achieving the
satisfaction of publication simultaneously with a continuing marketing effort. Emails and a press
release were provided as part of the package, and they were said to be targeted in terms of both
the content and setting of the novel. But, as always, for a price. I also paid extra for a review in
Kirkus Discoveries. And once the author turns the spigot on, the author must turn it off. The
book could also be targeted to certain blogs, but at a cost I considered excessive. Despite my
refusal, the publishing service continued to offer other marketing services at staggering prices.
Let me clear about one thing. I have no issues at with the quality of the book produced by the
publishing service. It not only looks like a book and quacks like a book, it is a very handsome
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specimen in both the hardcover and paperback editions, solid, durable, and altogether classy. The
web pages designed for the book as part of the publication package are professional and
attractively functional. The real drawback of self-publication is that publication is only the
beginning. Be careful what you epiphanize. As a profit enterprise, the publishing services exist
not to publish an author’s book, but to sell the author marketing add-ons once the book is
published. That’s what their business model is all about.
And with good reason. Publication means nothing, nada, less than zero, if people don’t know
about the book. The only way they’ll find out about it is through promotion, which means either
that the author spends money or does it himself (which also involves costs, financial and
otherwise). The only sure way to enhance the likelihood of a successful promotional effort is to
spend a lot of money, as in like a commercial publisher, using both print and online media. The
alternative is something called “word-of-mouth” and the notion that it increases exponentially.
The so-called third alternative—driving from bookstore to bookstore with copies of your novel
loaded in the trunk of your car—is an urban legend. At least for Serious Novelists. It’s an utter
waste of time. Not to mention gasoline. And guess who paid for that trunk load of copies.
In its simplest, ideal form, word-of-mouth works as follows. An author gives or sells his or
her self-published novel to at least two people (Friends or family, though either choice is
dangerous, the latter one particularly so. As Jane Smiley suggests, a novel can be a source of
profound embarrassment to those nearest and dearest to the novelist.) Both people read and like
the book, and each recommends the book to two more people, each of whom reads and likes the
book and recommends it to two more people. At this point, three cycles into the word-of-mouth
phenomenon, a maximum of fourteen copies have theoretically been sold. It takes another three
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rounds to cross the 100-copy threshold, then three more rounds to reach a thousand copies, but
only one more round to sell two thousand copies. Only after ten word-of-mouth cycles does
exponential increase even begin to become a significant factor.
This process assumes, of course, that everyone involved reads and likes the book. It also
assumes, though less obviously, that everyone recommends the book in a timely manner.
Exponentiation isn’t exactly the same thing as momentum, but the former relies on the latter, at
least until the exponentiation becomes large enough to be indistinguishable from momentum.
Unfortunately, that isn’t how word-of-mouth really works. That is Platonic word-of-mouth,
not reproducible on this earth. In the world of imperfect reflections of the ideal which we
occupy, word-of-mouth has to deal with readers who read at different speeds, who don’t all start
or finish the book, who don’t all like it, and who don’t all recommend the book even if they do.
In short, it relies on people to whom your novel, much as those people might like and care about
you, is not the most important thing in the world. (Hard to believe, but there you are. Reality
bites like the Hound of the Baskervilles.) Or suppose the friends or family who initiate the
process are over-praising the book, even if unconsciously, because of their relationship to the
author. Word-of-mouth could end in the first round of non-friends or family. Potent word-of-
mouth depends, and depends critically, on anonymity—the lack of any ties between the author
and the readers who kick-start it.
Only one thing may achieve anonymity on a scale large enough to generate effective word-of-
mouth, which is no less dependent on a promotional effort than any other type of “buzz” about a
book. Self-publication requires self-promotion. No one is going to do it for the writer except at a
steep price. The only relatively inexpensive alternative is for the author to avoid the marketing
packages offered by the publishing services: design the ads himself or prevail upon someone else
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to do it at a reasonable rate; purchase print and online ads directly; make a promotional video;
and, of course, do the legwork—often literally, and certainly on the Internet.
This is the second part of the required self-promotion: Get the book itself placed. Get it
noticed. Get it placed in bookstores and, even more importantly, get it displayed in the right
place in those stores. (Driving from bookstore to bookstore with copies of the book—even if it is
true—is no guarantee of placement, let alone desirable placement.) Get the video up on
YouTube; target the blogs that might also assist word-of-mouth; “mark up” the book for
electronic readers such as those marketed by Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Sony.
This effort requires a skill set that one doesn’t readily associate with professional novelists,
certainly not those who produce literary fiction. To offer a gross, unprovable generalization, non-
fiction writers seem to be much better at employing these skills. The short, equally speculative,
explanation is that they’re more “practical.” After all, they’re writing about “real life.” Such
practical savvy is true, I suspect, even of the recovering addict who writes a confessional
memoir. Getting a book noticed is simply another opportunity to exercise the “coping” skills
acquired during the author’s twelve-step rebirth.
I don’t mean to suggest that this kind of effort is demeaning to a writer, even a Serious
Novelist. But of all the kinds of novelists out there, the SN is the least likely to have the
necessary sales skills, Internet marketing savvy and technological expertise, and all-around
chutzpah to be effective at creating a demand, from scratch, for his or her own product. In this
respect, as I noted in chapter 7, the writer of literary fiction differs not only from non-fiction
writers, but from genre novelists as well.
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So how did I, serious novelist that I am, do at mastering the realities and promoting the self?
Can there be any doubt how I did at it? First, however, the good news.
I paid for two reviews of Not Fade Away, the one in Kirkus Discoveries I’ve already
mentioned as well as one from Clarion, a review service of the trade magazine ForeWord
Reviews. Both reviews were exceptionally positive. (Or not exceptionally, depending on whom
you ask. There’s a theory that because a review is purchased, it will necessarily be positive. This
isn’t true, but try convincing those who believe otherwise that it isn’t.) “A wonderfully written
book about growing up,” Kirkus concluded, specifically noting that “Gordon displays
considerable wit along with charged emotional drama, mostly through his adroit use of dialogue”
and that Andy’s relationship with many of the other characters “are stellar examples of perfect
literary pitch.” Even more specifically the review characterized the relationship of Andy and
Hattie Mae as “a stunning portrait of a rapidly evolving relationship.” Clarion described the book
as “a rich and thoughtful tale of self-discovery, both poignant and witty, told by a charming
narrative voice. Dialogue is engaging and skillfully crafted, enriching characterization while
capturing the essence of the time period.” Much as the earlier review had focused on the
Andy/Hattie Mae relationship, this one saw in the growing bond between Andy and Great-
grandpa Simon evidence of “the compassionate young man Andy is becoming as he tentatively
navigates changes both feared and anticipated.” Even more significantly, at least for me, the
reviewer understood the time period and cultural allusiveness of the novel, Buddy Holly as “a
voice of innocence in an era preceding a time of great change and disillusionment.”
So what notice or progress did these reviews garner me? Well, I’ve quoted at length from
them here because of the strong possibility that otherwise you may never see them. Good as they
were, the reviews generated nothing in terms of sales, word-of-mouth, or unsolicited additional
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reviews or recommendations. I wasn’t inundated by offers of representation from literary agents,
and Houston bookstores still expressed zero interest in stocking the book or sponsoring a
signing.
On the basis of the Kirkus review, however, one literary agent did contact me about
representation. She was Rebecca Oliver of William Morris Endeavor Entertainment. I’m using
her real name because my exchange with her was straightforward and altogether professional.
She requested a copy of the book and read it within a couple of weeks. She said she enjoyed it
and thought Andy was a very engaging protagonist—but passed. Her reasons were that she felt
Andy’s relationship with Miss Beecham was “problematic” and that the mystery of Andy’s
parentage was “undercooked.” These may or may not have been the real reasons, especially as
Ms. Oliver remarked that she wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone else had already picked up
the book for representation. So Not Fade Away was ready for prime time, just not on her
network. Frankly, I’d have been surprised if the book had been a good fit for her agency. As an
editor friend of mine remarked, “every agency wants the PERFECT BOOK—for them.” In the
case of William Morris, there was no obvious movie tie-in or easy sell except perhaps to old fart
baby boomers. But, considering that it was a big time refusal, I felt remarkably good about it.
Though it illustrates the role luck plays in the whole process, it was so far above the customary
level of exchange between agents and first novelists that I considered it a validation. Of course,
I’d have preferred having an agent, but I began to feel that I eventually would have one.
Especially as I happened to read that something like sixty agents passed on Kathryn Stockett’s
best-selling novel The Help (set in Mississippi in 1962) before she secured representation.
Naturally, I can’t at this point resist a bad news anecdote, again using real names. Shortly
after my exchange with Rebecca Oliver, on the basis of a review I’d seen, I read Jonathan
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Tropper’s new novel, This Is Where I Leave You (2009). I was struck by its focus on Jewish
characters and saw an additional similarity to my work in its serio-comic tone. I also saw a blurb
regarding an earlier Tropper novel by the novelist Tom Perrotta that noted not the impossibility
of going home again, but the inevitability. This resonates with a line I had written. “We have no
choice but to go home again” is not only the opening sentence of Not Fade Away, it may well
stand as the primary theme of my fiction to date.
In the Acknowledgements of his new novel, Tropper thanks his agent, Simon Lipskar of
Writers House, noting that Lipskar “gets” him as a writer. As I need, without doubt if I am to
succeed as a novelist, an agent who “gets” me, I had another reason to query Mr. Lipskar. Which
I proceed to do, following the submission guidelines on the Writers House website. I also
mentioned that I had two books already completed, not only the novel, but a companion piece,
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It, the latter about writing and trying to market that first novel.
I was well aware by then that my first contact with the queried agency would be not with Mr.
or Ms. High-Powered Agent but the HPA’s assistant, who screens queries and decides which of
them will passed on to the HPA for possible follow-up (presumably according to guidelines
established by the agent/boss). Given the volume of queries, that is a perfectly reasonable,
though hardly foolproof process. I was, indeed, initially contacted not by Rebecca Oliver but by
her assistant, Shaun Dolan. Much, however, depends on the qualities and abilities of the agent’s
assistant. (It’s possible, of course, that it was Shaun Dolan rather than Rebecca Oliver who
actually read my book. It would neither surprise nor disappoint me, though it may have some
bearing on the point to which I’m building.) Simon Lipskar’s assistant is, or was at the time, a
person named Josh Getzler. Within a week of posting my carefully crafted query (about a
nanosecond in author/agent query time), I received the following reply:
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Dear Mr. Gordon.
Thank you for your query for Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Loves It [sic]. I’m sorry I
don’t have better news for you, but I am afraid your project does not seem like one we
could successfully take on at this time. I do hope you succeed in your search for passionate,
enthusiastic representation.
Obviously, my query bored the living shit out of Mr. Getzler. His response oozes ennui and
condescension. Equally obviously (to me anyway), is that in stark contrast to Rebecca Oliver’s
assistant, Shaun Dolan, Josh Getzler is an incompetent dufus—lazy, inattentive, sloppy, and not
noticeably intelligent. The query wasn’t principally about Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It, and
even it was, Getzler gets the title wrong. Am I being over-sensitive and exceptionally snarky
here? You bet I am. The problem is not that this was a rejection. Lord knows, I’m prepared for
that and have experienced dismissals even more curt. The problem is that Getzler can’t be
bothered to adhere to even the very minimal conventions that govern such exchanges and that
vastly favor the agent anyway. It isn’t only I who should be upset, but his boss as well, because
someday Getzler’s phone-it-in work habits and lack of work ethic will cost Mr. Lipskar and
Writers House or some other agency dearly.
And, as Kurt Vonnegut would say, so it goes. Or went—and for quite some time.
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 211
Chapter 21
A Last Word—for Now
There is a final, telling anecdote. It coalesces around a few choice words: Greed, because like
everything else in Wannabeland, it’s first and foremost about a Howtu making a buck.
Incompetence, because the devil is in the details, and so are the warning signs for those willing
not only to look for them, but to heed them. Disdain, because the puppeteer dealing with the
Wannabe knows just how much the Wannabe wants to be a real boy or girl and has no scruples
about exploiting that desire by seeming to pull the strings. And finally, above all else, absurdity.
Rick Usher, the editor who worked briefly on Not Fade Away with Lenore Raven, wrote to
congratulate me on publishing the book. He also referred me to an Internet-based service that
helps Wannabes identify and query the agents most likely to be interested in their work. The
principal contact is another novelist, whose initials are B.S. (I kid you not.) If B.S. really thinks
the writer is good, she’ll submit to agents herself with a personal recommendation—for an
additional fee. This, according to her pitch, increases the likelihood of the all-important read.
One might well ask what makes a novelist go into such a business. The house of
commercially published fiction is a pretty small one these days, and those who live there have no
wish to be crowded out. But let’s give B.S. the benefit of the doubt and trust to another well-
known fact: most fiction doesn’t sell that well. And a gal’s gotta make a living, right?
I checked out the web site and decided, hey, why not? (A few hundred bucks more? Oh, go
on! Help stimulate the economy. It’s 2009.) I filled out the online questionnaire that would allow
B.S.to target specific agents for me. Note that B.S. herself did not undertake to read the book. A
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few weeks later—another nanosecond in Wannabeland time—I received a report that targeted
five agents. Only problem was, all were agents who specialized in Young Adult fiction.
Apparently, because I’d called my book a coming-of-age story and it had a protagonist narrating
events that occurred when he was fifteen years old, it was YA fiction. I wrote back not only
questioning the categorization, but also pointing out the retrospective nature of the narrative—
the older Andy remembering his younger self from an adult perspective.
At her suggestion, B.S. and I talked by phone. She admitted that what I had told her was a
potential “game-changer” in terms of agents to be targeted and requested that I send her the first
twenty pages of the book in soft copy. I did.
She responded within a day or so, saying she was “enormously impressed.” She then offered
the extra service of her personal recommendation, which I accepted. The charge went from
$360.00 to $725.00.
This was the point at which things began to get weird. (How could I have ever doubted it?)
Though B.S. had subsequently requested the entire manuscript in a single MS Word file for
submission to agents who agreed to a read, she only planned to “dip” into the book herself to
help her prepare her pitch. Even the dipping process was delayed by “computer glitches.” (An
unpleasant reminder of Lenore Raven’s frequent computer glitches. Apparently, few of the
Howtu’s of Wannabeland possess reliable personal computers.)
Once the technical difficulties were resolved, B.S. emailed me—in despair. Working with a
detailed synopsis I had provided, she was having no success putting together a more streamlined
synopsis of the book for the agent submissions, “the reason being that everything I extract from
what you have written and from my ‘grazing’ of the ms itself is that this is beautifully written
and full of great characters, but it isn't the book I want to believe it is - the book you want me to
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believe it is - an adult novel with a 15 year old protagonist. What I keep finding is a coming of
age story (your original description) which makes it the Young Adult novel I originally pegged it
as being.” Moreover, in lamenting the lack of an “adult dramatic core” and “heightened drama,”
such as one finds in To Kill A Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye, B.S. regretted that there
was “no trial/racism-and-other-prejudice-issues - Mockingbird - and none of the multi-layered
issues of veracity and meaning, not to mention insanity and homosexuality, that makes Catcher
the book that has come to occupy its place in the canon.”
This was nonsense, if not mind-numbingly stupid, on several levels. Because it is a coming-
of-age story, it is, by definition, a Young Adult novel? I thought we got past that notion (if it ever
existed) with Huckleberry Finn. And are Mockingbird and Catcher, whatever else they are, not
coming-of-age stories? To Kill A Mockingbird is Young Adult fiction because it’s often taught to
high school students? Does being taught perennially in tenth grade make Shakespeare’s Julius
Caesar Young Adult drama? The point is, coming-of-age stories deal with the transformation of
a protagonist from child-like innocence to adult awareness—not Young Adult awareness.
I should immediately have begun to question the competence of B.S. to represent the book I’d
written. There were other, related warning signs. For one thing, no reader would need to “graze”
on more than a paragraph or two to realize that she was reading a retrospective narrative. For
another, B.S. was stressing the criticality of the one element Lenore Raven and Rick Usher had
urged me no less emphatically to scrap. Finally, B.S. was citing as missing in action some of the
very issues that Not Fade Away raises in a major fashion—i.e. racism, anti-Semitism, insanity,
and homosexuality. Once again-- B.S. hadn’t read the book.
But she suggested right away that she might read it, with a view to maximizing presentation
of it as “potentially a terrific book.” In other words, she would recommend changes. Oh, and her
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reading fee was $2,000, and she couldn’t read it until April, 2010. It was now November, 2009.
So I would wait in limbo a minimum of four months, but she needed the money right away “to
reserve the slot.”
Okay, I got it. Two things were in play here. One, of course, was money. But the other was no
less important. Inevitably, the proposed changes that would be the output of the review would
mean making the book something else, not to mention something else entirely. In short, make the
book not necessarily better, but make it more identifiably a genre piece.
I replied with a long email, declining the read by B.S. and making the case for my book’s
“adult dramatic core.” This apparently provided the effective synopsis that B.S. herself had been
unable to write, and she went forward with it. Two well-known agents rather quickly agreed to a
read. The first, J.K., accepted the read with misgivings, feeling that Not Fade Away was a
“small” book. Funny, it looked pretty much like any other volume of fiction to me. Be that as it
may, J.K. declined within a day or two, saying I was a “fine writer” but that the story didn’t
“engage” him. No engagement, no marriage. Who knew? Turns out, size is important.
So B.S. immediately sent the book to her own agent, M.R., “one of the best agents for fiction
in the US.” This was just before Christmas, 2009, and B.S. said she expected M.R. to read the
book by the first of the year. Happy New Year, Ron.
Uh, no. After that, I heard nothing. Not at the beginning of January or at any time during the
month. This wasn’t all that long a time except for what I’d been told to expect. I waited until the
end of the first week in February before emailing B.S. to request a status. No reply. After another
week, I sent a follow-up email. No reply. Another week, another follow-up email. To which I
finally received a response on February 25th.
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Hi, Ron. I fully understand your frustration and I'm sorry if I did not get back to you
promptly on a previous e-mail. I think I was waiting to talk to/hear from [MR]. Which
actually happened a few days ago. She thinks you're a fine writer - no surprise there - but
that she could not place the ms. As much a function of the brutal current market as
anything else. I will have a think about where to go next overnight, and get some
additional contacts out there tomorrow - though I think it might be smarter to put the
choices and e-mails together tomorrow and actually send them on Monday. Not everyone
picks up their business e-mail at home and that's where they're likely to be on a snowy
Friday afternoon in NYC. At any rate I'll send you reports tomorrow and copy you in when
I send the e-mails.
The fact that M. R. had passed on the book was probably the least annoying feature of the
email. So where to begin? Beyond the concern I already had with B.S.’s lack of follow-up and
responsiveness, I was troubled by two things: first, the lack of any specifics. “As much the brutal
current marketplace as anything else” told me nothing to suggest that the read had even occurred.
When I considered the lack of information with the brazen casual indifference of the email’s tone
—“I think I was waiting to talk to/hear from [MR]”—I knew we were going nowhere. And I
suspected that we had been going nowhere for quite some time. Certainly since the time B.S. had
collected $725.00 from me and I had declined the $2,000 review.
Was this all a set-up aimed at extracting money from me? I have no way of knowing for sure,
hence the anonymity of initials. I do, however, know a few things.
Despite her statement in the email, B.S. did nothing to pinpoint or recommend any additional
agents. Nor did she respond to my request for more specifics about the two supposed reads. Nor
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did she respond to my subsequent suggestions and questions about the path forward. Indeed, for
the next month, she responded to nothing except my statement that I didn’t think I’d received
value for my money and that I wasn’t willing simply to write it off. (Knowing that that was
exactly what I’d have to do.)
My decision to answer is based on a genuine desire to explain - though judging from the
tone of your recent messages, it's probably a lost cause. You are undoubtedly a fine and a
talented writer. And NOT FADE AWAY is a very good book. My original concern was
that it might not be quite good enough - not as measured by intrinsic worth, but
by contemporary requirements - but your confidence and the quality of the writing
determined me to go ahead.
So the end result of my experience with B.S. was clarification. Clarification, once and for all,
of the daunting, if not insurmountable, challenge the current marketplace presents to the
unpublished writer of literary fiction. In my long struggle to market my first novel, I have never
read a more absurd or a more revelatory statement than “NOT FADE AWAY is a very good
book. My original concern was that it might not be quite good enough - not as measured by
intrinsic worth, but by contemporary requirements.” On the one hand, my novel is a very good
book. On the other, maybe not quite good enough. Let’s concede that just maybe a book may be
very good but not quite good enough, lacking in some way or other. Oh, but it’s intrinsically a
good book, which would seem to cancel out nicely the not quite good enough possibility. And
though there’s a small implication that my confidence in my book persuaded her to soldier on for
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me—I made her take my $725.00 and represent me—she gives equal weight to “the quality of
the writing.”
So if Not Fade Away is still not good enough to publish, it’s because of something else—if
not something else entirely. Something called contemporary requirements.
And what might those be? Despite B.S.’s lack of informed specifics and despite the fib about
her “original concern”—it wasn’t about very-good-but-not-good-enough, but about how to
categorize the book—I did have a clear understanding of what she meant. Contemporary
requirements define not what a first novel can be, but what it must be if it is to be commercially
publishable now (when, according to a 21010 article in the New Yorker, the publishing industry
is trending toward e-books.) It doesn’t matter, finally, whether that novel is good or bad, whether
my novel is good or bad. The problem goes beyond any question of literary merit or even of
whether the book has previously been self-published. It goes beyond any question of the author’s
competence, craftsmanship, ego, or narcissistic sense of specialness.
The shortest, easiest definition is to say that to meet contemporary requirements the novel
must be genre fiction. That is true enough, and, to repeat, it is one explanation of B.S.’s attempt
to categorize Not Fade Away: in her taxonomy, it’s a coming-of-age story, therefore Young
Adult fiction, and publishable only if so classified and marketed. Based on all the feedback,
positive and negative, that I have received about my book, I think it neither unreasonable nor
immodest to say that if it were a piece of genre fiction, it would already be commercially
published. I will go even further and say that if it were the Young Adult novel B.S. thought it
was, it would already be commercially published. (Interestingly, as I write, a brief item in
Entertainment Weekly observing the fiftieth anniversary of To Kill A Mockingbird notes that if
that novel, as well as The Catcher in the Rye, were to have a hope of publication today, they
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would almost certainly be classified as Young Adult fiction. So this tells me that B.S. was being,
at best, disingenuous in telling me that my novel—because of something it lacked—was YA
fiction rather than that it had to be YA fiction in order to be marketable.) But the genre
requirement is not the full, insidious truth about the contemporary marketplace or the most
dramatic illustration of it. To approach that truth, it’s necessary to ask what a first novel must be
if it’s not genre fiction.
Obviously, based on the comment of the agent J.K., one requirement is that a first novel
shouldn’t be small. That would appear to mean the book should be big, anything in between
being insufficient for a first novel that is literary fiction—insufficient even, apparently, for a
publisher’s midlist, where the less than spectacular sellers traditionally reside. Question is, what
does big mean? Pretty clearly, it doesn’t mean long, though Karl Marlantes best-selling first
novel, Matterhorn, clocks in at six hundred pages. Nevertheless, that book easily qualifies as big
because it’s a Vietnam War novel. Fairly recent history, the horror of war, big themes. Strong
miniseries potential (no surprise that the author’s agent is at ICM). Heavy artillery, thunderous
explosions, bodies blown apart. Ditto in many respects Julie Orringer’s The Invisible Bridge,
with the added fillip of the Holocaust.
In contrast, in a follow-up email, markedly defensive in tone, B.S. reported to me that M.R.
had said my book was “too quiet for the market.” So a book must be big or loud or, preferably,
both, as Matterhorn is. These features are so in evidence that a blurb on the back of the dust
jacket is safe in describing it as “a timeless work of literary fiction.” Ah, but is it? Just as the
coming-of-age story is a genre, so is the war novel. (One more time, hold that thought. War
novel, with or without Holocaust, is a market-friendly genre; coming-of-age must morph into
YA to become market-friendly)
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 219
Of course, both agents were absolutely dead-on right where Not Fade Away is concerned. It is
neither big nor loud. It doesn’t have a high-octane plot, and it isn’t “edgy” (making Lenore
Raven right as well). It takes place fifty years ago in a setting that is neither exotic nor glamorous
and with a protagonist who, though sympathetic and winning, appears more ordinary than he is. I
am also the first to admit that Andy’s apparent “ordinariness” is another possible drawback, as he
develops fully over a trilogy rather than a single novel. More so than in the two remaining novels
of my Andiad, all the big events of the outside world—the first stirrings of America’s tragic
Vietnam adventure, for example—hover at the periphery and the issues they reflect are, for the
most part, raised obliquely or implicitly. In this the novel differs from Kathryn Stockett’s The
Help; set in the 1960s, it has the more explicit hook—a big issue, big as Vietnam—of the fully
emerging Civil Rights Movement and the cachet of “multiculturalism.” Indeed the notion of
implicitness or obliquity is essential to both the manner and the theme of my book, and may be
the ultimate source of my marketing problem with it, especially because, stylistically, the book is
deceptively accessible.
Being fundamentally concerned with “the lie that dwells at the heart of things,” it deals with
learning to perceive and understand what is not directly stated or acknowledged. In any case,
there’s no arguing the fact that Not Fade Away is a small, quiet story of love, death, emotional
and sexual duplicity, insanity, racism, anti-Semitism, thievery, physical and psychological
brutality, the impact of the past on the present, and the destructive power of lies. Because it isn’t
a genre piece, it lacks zombies, vampires, werewolves, witches, warlocks, wizards, angels, the
Tribulation, or the expectation of the Rapture. In the twilight of literary fiction, Jane Austen must
consort with the living dead, and Abraham Lincoln moonlight as Van Helsing to be
commercially viable.
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Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Seth Grahame-Smith, 2009), Sense and Sensibility and Sea
Monsters (Ben H. Winters, 2009), Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Slayer (Seth Grahame-Smith,
2010): one would like to regard these works as playfully as they seem intended. Who knew
Honest Abe was splitting rails for more than log cabins and firewood? Why wasn’t there a play
and later a movie called Abe Lincoln in Transylvania? Maybe you have to be a frustrated serious
novelist at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century to see something in these books
more sinister than mere American vampirism or zombies roaming the Home Counties of
England.(In this summer of 2010, we also have Jane Slayre and Little Women and Werewolves.)
For these books have it both ways. They not only send up classic literature and trivialize
mainstream history, but also the genre that makes the joke possible. That genre’s success and
domination of the literary marketplace reveal several interesting things about the nature of that
marketplace, the reading culture, and readers themselves. Intentionally or not, these books both
define and legitimize the transformation that has occurred in all three. They go to the heart of
contemporary requirements—why they are contemporary and why they are requirements.
Literary fiction and genre fiction have always coexisted. Are the recent best-selling books
I’ve singled out any different than Fielding’s satire of Richardson’s Pamela in Shamela and
Joseph Andrews? Do they differ from the gothic novels wildly popular in Europe and America in
the latter decades of the eighteenth century? Yes and no, with emphasis on the latter. For one
thing, more than two centuries of novel-writing and novel-reading have occurred in between.
What is being parodied is not a new form, but, in two of the first three books I cited, classic
expressions of the form. Indeed, all three are such, granting Bram Stoker’s Dracula the status of
a genre classic. For another, since at least the time of Henry James (who was Stoker’s
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contemporary), the chasm between the two novelistic paths—literary fiction and genre fiction—
has steadily widened.
Literary fiction is literature, and it is art, like poetry. Genre fiction may or may not be popular
art, but it isn’t literary art. It is essentially and unchangeably escapist. And with Dracula, the
apparent exception, one can argue that it was our old friend the movies that have made it an
enduring classic. For all the experimentation and innovation that have occurred in the novel,
classic fiction has been either realistic—“a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to
the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience,” as Hawthorne states in the Preface to The
House of the Seven Gables—or it has attempted to broaden the scope of the term realism. Pace
Virginia Woolf, it has made room for both Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. Hence, the Great
Divide between it and genre fiction.
So what is going on now, as indicated by the three primary examples I’ve chosen? The first
two seem to celebrate the necessary morphing of literary fiction into genre fiction. Unlike genre
fiction, literary fiction is changeable. It can be made into something else and, if necessary,
something else entirely. Given the third example, so can history. And the common denominator
that links history and the novel is—reality. Both literary realism and historical inquiry concern
themselves with humanity’s life in time. As Shakespeare says of the theater in Hamlet, its
purpose is to show “the very age and body of his time his form and pressure,” its players “the
abstract and brief chronicles of the time.” The ghost of Hamlet’s father notwithstanding. and in
this the play is both a transitional and transformative work, “the very age and body of his time”
is natural rather than supernatural—secular, skeptical, human.
All three books, however, reflect and describe a different phenomenon in contemporary
popular culture. The most commercially successful fiction, which is almost invariably genre
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fiction, no longer deals, even superficially, with real people living real lives. Good and evil in
such fiction, their gradations as features and indices of human character and its motivation, exist
to serve the plotting and action of supernatural, often horrific entertainment. I offered the
Hawthorne quote above, because he was explicitly distinguishing the novel from romance. What
the contemporary market emphasizes is an amalgam of both literary senses of the word
“romance”—the unreal (the “non-realistic” Hawthorne sense) and the love story. Readers have
come to expect nothing more because they are generally, and increasingly, offered nothing more.
But the counterargument will claim that this is what the majority of fiction-buying readers
want. That is the argument of the Howtu’s of Wannabeland, chiefly the agents and the
acquisition editors for the publishers. It is, however, a claim that immediately raises two
questions. Why is it what readers want? And is that all they want?
The answer to the first question could be a book in itself, so let’s accept as a given the pure,
thrilling, chilling entertainment value of such fiction; these stories bring it on in all sorts of ways.
To one degree or another, that is what all genre fiction, with its emphasis on plot and action,
attempts to do. That is one of the reasons for the second question. As to a more profound reason
for their appeal, let’s pose a plausible generalization in lieu of that separate book. The reason lies
in the union of horror and romance, the potent mix of the supernatural and the simultaneous
promise and threat of immortality.
These stories satisfy the yearnings for both equality and perfect love of adolescent girls of any
age. Like all fiction, like all art, they simplify reality, but they simplify it in the extreme—in the
extreme even for genre fiction. It is a fantasy of empowerment and fulfillment, independence
and dependence, selfhood and commitment, all in dynamic, kinetic balance, exciting, dangerous,
fulfilling, and utterly fake. Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy kicking the asses of the living dead
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in perfect partnership. Is there any need to go any further than that and speculate that the zombies
and vampires are a metaphor for cells of sub-human terrorists functioning at large in post-9/11
America? Or maybe they represent the hordes of illegal immigrants breaching our ever more
porous borders. Or maybe—go ahead, invent some other paranoid fear. (Yeah, I know, there are
“good” vampires too, as in the Twilight series, and one can speculate endlessly about what’s up
with them. Hmm, let’s see: superpowers, immortality, no STDs. Is it possible that guys read the
Twilight books too? As Danielle Steele once remarked of her own romance novels, her sales
couldn’t possibly be what they are if only women read them.)
Despite conventional wisdom and protestations to the contrary, the driver for this argument is
not sales experience, but risk aversion, just as it is in the mainstream movie business. This type
of decision-making rests on a pair of flawed and fatal assumptions (and fatal not only to the
aspiring serious first novelist). The first is that if the fiction-reading public fails to get what it
wants, that audience will continue to shrink until it disappears altogether. The second treats a
target audience as if it were the entire audience. For example, the Entertainment Weekly piece I
referenced notes that “while overall U.S. book sales fell 3.3 percent in 2009, sales of young-adult
and children’s titles rose 2.3 percent.” Now maybe, to the publishing powers-that-be, a swing of
5.6 percent is astronomical, but to this business-challenged writer that is a little over 1/20th of the
reading public in this country. Should five or six readers out of every hundred drive the entire
marketplace? This is not even to mention that the percentages cited in EW lump children’s and
YA fiction together and reference both fiction and non-fiction. What are the real and pertinent
numbers? (I ask this knowing that, taking fiction alone, they may not be favorable to my cause.
On the other hand, the numbers are also probably skewed by the massive sales of the Harry
Potter books to both children and young adults.)
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In any case, as I noted in chapter 19, such thinking is typical of the movie business, which
practices the same blinkered devotion to genre. Literary successes such as The Help and
Matterhorn, however, prove that this is not the case, even as Oscar-winning movies like The
Hurt Locker do. There is a contemporary audience for any good book, any intrinsically good
book, any intrinsically good first novel, if agents, editors, and publishers will give that audience
what it is seeking. Not instead of what the target audience wants, but as well as what the target
audience—call it the post-Harry Potter generation of Young Adults about to come of age—has
made a success. And as with moviegoers, these readers seldom form a discrete audience; to the
extent that they make a target, they are moving, shape-shifting one. The same adolescent girls
who devour the Twilight series also tend to be those readers fondest of Wuthering Heights. As
Jane Smiley notes, they are apt to be fonder of the novel at that age than when they reread it as
adults. Heathcliff doesn’t have to be a literal vampire to induce adolescent swooning, whatever
one makes of him metaphorically. I should not need to transform Andy Lerner into a Jewish
vampire whose Van Helsing is Simon Wiesenthal wielding a Star of David rather than a cross.
Nevertheless, the raison d’etre of genre fiction, from a marketing standpoint, is the notion of
the discrete, niche audience. Combine this notion with that of there being only one discrete,
niche audience, and the result is deadly to the prospects of literary fiction.
A local situation offers a powerful demonstration of what I mean. In Houston, where I once
again reside, there is a bookstore called Murder by the Book. As the name indicates, it is a
mystery bookstore such as exists in most big cities. It is a well-run business operation that
understands its customers and caters to them. It is a pleasant, congenial environment that
happens also to be a very complete bookstore in the sense that the terms “mystery” and “murder”
encompass every divagation and permutation of the terms, including true crime, horror, spy
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novels, you-name-it. Hardcover, paperback, new and used, first and rare editions. The bookstore
also sponsors several author talks/book signings a week. I have attended those of Daniel Silva,
Peter Lovesey, Louise Penny, Joseph Kanon, Jacqueline Winspear, and James Benn. I was, for
various reasons, unable to attend for Sue Grafton, Michael Connolly, Michael Harvey, and Cara
Black. You get the picture. I shop there, and I spend a lot of time there (particularly on blazing
hot summer afternoons). I like the place a lot, and I spend mo0ney there.
So my attitude toward this exemplary and very successful mystery bookshop is anything but
elitist, contemptuous, or dismissive. But there is a problem.
It is this. One has the distinct sense, particularly at the book signings, that this ultra-large
“mystery” genre is the only game in town. To grant the obvious—the books for sale and authors
who appear will belong to this niche. But the well-attended signings suggest that the prosperous,
steadily buying, and voraciously reading crowd reads nothing but mysteries. The conversations
struck up or overheard deal only with mysteries read and favorite mystery authors. The questions
asked of the visiting authors deal naturally enough with their work, their series, their life
experience and their experience as writers. They not only address these writers as if their work
matters—which it is easy to concede without asking why it matters—they address them as if
their work collectively forms the only body of literature in existence or worth publishing and
reading. The general assumption at the recent Jacqueline Winspear signing I attended was that
her work says something profound about the First World War rather than that, as Ms. Winspear
points out repeatedly, Maisie Dobbs has deep blue eyes and generally wears a cloche hat. The
author has a big, compelling theme, if not an altogether fresh one, but any serious treatment is
made moot by genre convention. Nice lady, reasonably good at what she does, but as I suggested
earlier, Pat Barker she ain’t. But the detective novelist Benjamin Black is John Banville, the
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British author of the Man Booker prizewinning novel, The Sea. And only as Benjamin Black is
he admitted to Murder By the Book. John Banville doesn’t exist.
Okay, MBTB is a particular venue. I get that. You wouldn’t expect to engage in or overhear a
conversation about Homeric parallels in Ulysses (a big, compelling topic, if not an altogether
fresh one) or the pastiche of Victorian poetry in A.S. Byatt’s Possession. You wouldn’t expect
the store to stock winners of the Man Booker Prize. But I can’t shake the eerie, unsettling feeling
that the Gresham’s Law of literary art I posited in chapter 19 has proved itself at Murder by the
Book in Houston, Texas. Somehow John Banville knows this. His decision to publish detective
fiction pseudonymously not only reflects the law; it reinforces and perpetuates it as well.
Though a Republican bastion, the base of the Bush family , Houston is not a cultural or
literary desert, particularly in the area encompassing Rice University and the Museum District
where MBTB thrives and from whence it derives a good portion of its clientele. If there are book
signings by serious novelists, they must be on the Rice campus or at the University of Houston,
or at one of the other local colleges, because they don’t occur at any of the local Borders or
Barnes &Noble stores or even, except infrequently, at the few remaining independent bookstores
in this, the fourth largest city in the country.
I want to clarify something about genre fiction. In this book I have said that my first novel is a
coming-of-age story and that coming-of-age is a genre. I’ve remarked earlier in this chapter that
if my novel were a genre piece it would already be commercially published. Those two sentences
seem to contradict each other. Ah, but they don’t. There is genre, and then there is genre.
Coming-of-age is a literary genre rather than a marketing genre. Guess which one is all-
important to the Howtu’s of Wannabeland. Coming-of-age fiction as a marketing genre is
deemed Young Adult fiction. It exists not in terms of any intrinsic characteristics or quality, but
Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It 227
strictly in reference to the target audience. So perhaps B.S. knew something I didn’t. What I do
know in the case of coming-of-age stories is that they must be designated Young Adult fiction
not necessarily because of what they are, but because of what the Howtu’s insist is the one and
only target audience for those stories.
The point is, the marketing distinctions are both artificial and suspect. Though no one will
admit it, no one really knows what will work. In a certain loose but essential sense, even the
distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction is artificial. Novel-writing and novel-
reading are profoundly democratic endeavors. It is novel-publishing that is not. All novels are
detective stories, in that the both detective and novelist construct a narrative and provide a
resolution. The difference is that the detective novelist, the genre novelist almost without
exception, writes the same novel over and over and over again—and, as I’ve noted previously,
almost invariably in conformance to reader expectations.
This type of fiction is fundamentally different even from the novel sequences of classic or
literary fiction. The reason isn’t lack of “seriousness” or lack of imagination or ineffective
execution per se, but the repetition that drives genre fiction. There is a no dramatic and structural
arc to the genre series, the imaginative pattern of developing action and changing character that
define the serious novel sequence regardless of the number of novels in it. It is there in the
family trilogies of Arnold Bennett and William Faulkner, the multiple, related trilogies of John
Galsworthy, Anthony Powell, and Philip Roth, and the longer novel sequences of Proust, Ford
Maddox Ford, and C.P. Snow. It is less true of novels linked merely by recurring characters or a
single, distinctive locale—Balzac’s Comedie Humaine, Zola’s Rougon-Macquart novels,
Trollope’s Barsetshire series or his Palliser novels, Hardy’s Wessex novels or Faulkner’s
Yoknapatawpha novels as an oeuvre of which the Snopes trilogy is a part. I would suggest that
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my three Andy Lerner novels fall into the first category, though I’m not also suggesting a
necessary qualitative difference between the two groups.
Only rarely does genre fiction aspire to, much less achieve, such literary artistry. Imagination
alone doesn’t suffice or Stephen King would be a great novelist—a serious novelist. Nor does the
creation of an entire fictional world, however vital, coherent, and unique, quite mitigate genre
requirements. Witness the Harry Potter series, in which the problem with J.K. Rowling’s
impressive fantasy saga isn’t nearly as much execution as it is categorization. It’s an odd, but not
entirely surprising, irony that because the Harry Potter books are regarded as children’s and/or
Young Adult fiction, they get less than their due as mainstream literature. They remain genre
fiction by default, with the addition burden that their very commercial success, the childish
(literally) demand for the next novels in the series, and the pressure of an ongoing movie
franchise are reflected in occasional sloppy writing and, more seriously, five of seven books that
are considerably longer than they need to be. This is not the case with Tolkien’s Lord of the
Rings trilogy, perhaps because it’s a shorter work of fantasy, it antedated the movie versions by
several decades, and it was originally more of a cult success rather than a widespread
commercial phenomenon. The trilogy, originally popular among college students also falls less
readily into the kiddie lit or YA category. Then, too, it has a poetic, symbolic, and spiritual
dimension to it that the Potter books lack.
Bottom line, though: genre fiction is fun, and it’s easy. Literary fiction may or may not be.
Most isn’t, but Not Fade Away is. It is fun, it is easy, and it is serious. What’s not to like,
whether or not you happen to be married to me?