Observatio

The reality of it is that books -- novels, I mean -- are competing with all other “entertainment” media, including You Tube, Twitter, video games, pop music, movies, television, and a few things I’m sure I haven’t heard of yet. And if this really is the case, novels probably don’t stand much of a chance against these more visual, more interactive, and less time-intensive activities (though in the aggregate, people spend much more time, or waste it, doing these things than they do reading novels). The question is, can writers find a way to refashion the novel so that it would appeal on a more visual level, or an interactive one, and pump up its competitive chops in the almighty marketplace?

I’m skeptical, to a great degree, because there’s no getting past the fact that consuming a novel is to read, not to view. And to insert, say in an ebook, video clips, musical excerpts, other sounds and images, or even the voices of characters, would be to push the novel beyond its own “novelness” and into the realm of performance.

One quintessential thing about the novel is that it is writtten by a single person; it’s not a collaborative effort. Introducing video and sound would involve other participants in the creation of the book -- directors, videographers, designers, actors -- and that would make it more of a hybrid thing, multimedia. Novels would need a production budget to get completed, and that would be a shame since writing a novel is probably the cheapest creative endeavor anyone can undertake. I happen to appreciate art that comes from the mind of a single person as opposed to a committee. Collaboration is often an avenue toward dilution, corruption (in the “less than it could be” sense), and sacrifice of quality in favor of marketability.

But it occurred to me, while reading a sample of David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, that well-placed and relevant graphics can enhance a novel in a way that might attract more readers. A hundred years ago, many novels were illustrated, a practice that probably ended because of the expense of an illustrator, but I wonder now if there isn’t such an enormous stock of public domain images available that a novel could easily be illustrated with them for next to nothing. Authors could also create their own illustrations with photography or drawing, with collage, or even their own handwriting. From what I can tell, Mitchell uses illustrations to depict certain actual things or events in the book, such as what appears to be a seventeenth or eighteenth century drawing of a breech birth. In many ways, it supports his already vivid description by showing the reader how accurate his description is.

I remember the Griffin & Sabine books of the early ‘90s, when I was impressed by the tactile experience and the vivid detail and color of the materials Neil Bantock used to accompany his words. Not every illustrated novel could be that lush.

Nor could the illustrated novel approach the comic-style graphic novel -- an entirely different beast. The idea wouldn’t be to show every moment in images, only to highlight, enhance, pique, and lead, surprising the reader every now and then with something visual to contemplate.

For instance, I’ve written a novel that takes place in California in the late 1800s, and while working on it I came across a number of photos, maps, drawings, and portraits that enabled me to visualize scenes and locations much more clearly. It would be interesting to include some of them in the book, if it ever gets published (unlikely, it seems), not so much to show a reader what a particular character looks like or to dramatize a moment but to evoke a mood and subtly guide the reader toward a certain way of interpreting the language. W. G. Sebald famously used photographs in his novels for this purpose, and one of the best examples I can recall is Kurt Vonnegut’s drawings in Breakfast of Champions. There were times when his simple Magic Marker artwork made me laugh harder than his brilliantly funny writing.

It’s been a tough task for me to admit that today’s reader is largely different from the reader I was taught to be thirty years ago. Whereas I was encouraged to use my imagination taking in a novel, readers today, especially younger ones, seem to need visual cues because they are less attuned to (or less impressed with) the language. Raised on movies, TV, music videos, and the Web, they appreciate a more literal kind of stimulation. Books, and sentences, are getting shorter. Authors are putting promo clips on You Tube, as if seeing the author is more important to readers than hearing about a book from friends or reviews. And nothing sells books like a movie version, with a major star or two. These days, the experience of a novel has to encompass things beyond the novel itself -- how it came to be written, the author’s life story, how the book relates to the reader’s life. These are elements that weren’t much of a consideration before, or at least the lack of detail in these areas didn’t prevent readers from picking up any given novel. J.D. Salinger would have died in obscurity if he’d come of writing age today.

As I acquaint myself with the Nook, and compare it to the iPad’s bling factor, I can see that the publishing industry will be forced into a more aggressively multimedia approach in the future. The image has displaced the word as our primary unit of communication, though I’m not convinced that means the novel will become obsolete. As long as there is a demand for storytelling, or I should say sophisticated storytelling (and it’s debatable that there is such a demand), there will be a pool of readers for novelists to reach.

The problem will be how to reach a larger audience that will make the novel economically viable in the competitive media marketplace. Appealing to the visual might be one way novelists can evolve with the culture.

All of this is not to say that tossing a few illustrations between a novel’s covers will bring about a renaissance of the written word. Novelists will have to be as careful with the images they use as they are with words. But when the audience has changed, and the survival of the genre itself is at stake, it seems logical and even necessary to adapt.

I don’t mean to say that all novels must have images in them from now on. Only that, sometimes, and maybe more often than we’d like to think, readers will have to be drawn in and compelled to buy a book not because the prose of the opening page is so riveting and lucent but because a picture catches their eye and speaks to them in a way -- subliminally, subtly -- that words don’t achieve on first pass anymore.

Consternatio

Being told by my agent that I’m more or less blacklisted among editors because my first novel didn’t sell well enough to give me a second chance. This is like sending a rookie up to the plate and taking him out of the game after he fouls off the first pitch. In publishing, there’s no such thing as three strikes you’re out. Now it’s one strike and you’re finished -- for good.

I’m livid. It flies in the face of the perseverance instinct every writer is supposed to have. I’d never have gotten the first book published if I’d been inclined to give up after a hundred rejections. Make that a thousand. And so my inclination now is to fight this apparent fact of life and keep going. All of us who have struggled at any kind of serious art don’t like to think that there’s no point in carrying on, and yet, the older I get, the more obvious it is that editors don’t judge a work on its merits. They judge the writer. A seven-year-old “track record” is more meaningful to them than the quality of the book in front of them and whatever potential it might have.

I’m thinking a lot of that old Woody Allen movie, The Front, lately. He plays the public face of some blacklisted writers in the 1950s, during the McCarthy purges, helping them continue to write and earn their livings. It might be time for something like that for me. If I have to outsmart the publishing industry in order to persevere (as I’ve been taught and encouraged to do all my writing life), then, what the hell, I’ll do it. And I’m not thinking of a pseudonym either, because, for one thing, my agent seems cool to the idea. For another, there’s something ironically pathetic about assuming a fictional identity to publish fiction.

No, instead I’m thinking about my wife as my front. She’d be terrific. She’s my best editor and my best reader. She gets my slant, my approach, my style, and my intentions. And to be completely honest about it, she’d be a much better public persona than I am (was). I hated readings and appearances, radio interviews, the constant BS of marketing. She was an aspiring actress when she was younger. Now’s her chance.

I suppose there are potential legal issues that could get me in trouble. I don’t care at this point. It’s the make-or-break moment when I either dig a way around the system’s obstacles or I quit. I’m not quite ready to quit.

In fact, there’s a new idea I want to start writing notes for today...

Observatio

Barry Hannah died not very long ago. He was one of those writers I was glad to have discovered, even if most of the time I didn’t quite grasp what he was trying to say through his madcap, absurdist, even bizarre tales. Often I laughed as I read him, but when I finished something like The Tennis Handsome, I’d shake my head and say to myself, That was interesting. It never occurred to me to emulate him, just as I’d never try to emulate Tom Robbins or Salman Rushdie, or Nabakov, or Twain. You can’t emulate the utterly unique.

But last night I read a short piece in Harper’s: “Why I Write,” by Barry Hannah. It was a speech at Bennington College in 2002, and it touched on what I think are the two most important drives any serious novelist must possess and cultivate. One is the drive to own the past in a comprehensive, personal way, and the other is the drive to venerate language. In the past lay the details and resonating emotional spikes that get deep into what it is to be human, the triumphs and humiliations we can’t forget, the seemingly inconsequential moments that somehow manage to form us though we may shrug them off at the time. Like Hannah, I can remember things my father said to me forty years ago, which, when he said them, had no context but the moment in which he said them. All these years later, they are draped with significance and large meaning, they deepen my sense of human contradiction and self-preservation, and they help to define him in a way he couldn’t have meant to project at the time. The past is where all your material comes from, even if you write about the here and now.

Language, Hannah says in the speech, “still strikes me as a miracle, a thing the deepest mind adores. At its best, when you lose your arrogance and are least selfish, it can sing back to you almost as a disembodied friend.”

You might have in your junk box the picture fragments of the time you found a young rabbit at the bottom of the basement stairs, its pink bowels protruding from a belly no thicker than the skin of a balloon. The cat did it, failed to finish the job out of boredom. You can’t let the thing die there like that, in a slow way, not with its dark, soap-washed eye looking up at you in something between fear and pleading. You will have to kill it, but how? And how do you tell the story of killing it, retaining every detail so that someone else can know what it was like?

Only language, with precision and surprise, is up to the task. Mr. Hannah knew it. All true writers do. And that is why there will always be a need for the writer who is first an artist (as distinguished from those who are first entertainers): so that we will know what we have been through and what it meant, and means.

Consternatio

For me, as a struggling novelist (what other kind is there?), two items in the recent NY Times “Year In Ideas” feature caught my eye. One said that hopelessness might be better than hope, when it comes to well-being. Apparently, for example, prison inmates who were sentenced to life without the possibility of parole fare better than those who are always thinking that the liberating phone call is right around the corner. Makes sense, really. The other said that perseverance might be bad for you. People who kept trying to achieve a difficult or impossible goal, in this study, had elevated levels of C-reactive protein (bad) compared with those who bailed out on the goal.

Persevering with hopefulness in the face of unbelievably bad odds pretty much describes what I do. Oy.

Et alia

Here's something upbeat and useful for a change. (I know my tone's been skewing cantankerous lately). Turns out that if you subscribe to Harper's Magazine, you have access to its entire history -- 1850 to 2007 -- on the web. All you do is register, provide some kind of code from your latest copy's mailing label, and you're in.

Whatever your special area of interest, you'll find a wealth of material from any era of American history after Harper's was founded: writing by Mark Twain, Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Sylvia Plath, and thousands of others. This stuff can be used for research or entertainment, and you can even download .pdf files of the articles and keep them in your hot little memory stick forever.

Right now I'm especially interested in the American labor movement, so I'm trolling through the early years of the 20th century looking for Big Bill Hayward et al.

Kill some time; feed your mind.

Opinatio

I was just leafing through a neighbor’s copy of the New Yorker (never subscribe to the New Yorker -- let a neighbor do it and take his copies when he’s done not reading them) and saw an ad for something called the Moth Storytelling Performances. Many things bug me (no pun intended) about the idea of Storytelling Performances. For one, the ad copy refers to them as “literary.” This seems inaccurate.

If you look the word up in an etymology dictionary, you’ll find that it was built to refer to “alphabet letters,” i.e., writing. In the 18th century it was nailed down to apply specifically to literature, but to my mind that means, again, writing. Books. Especially novels, poetry, and scholarly works. Not a kind of pretentious stand-up comedy. Every time I happen upon a storytelling event (usually a story on TV about storytelling), I see a man or woman of any race gesticulating wildly and overdramatizing their own autobiographies. It’s a derivative of the old monology fad of the nineties, which died even before Spalding Gray did. It isn’t literature.

As with what passes for “poetry” in the American mind nowadays (it comes to us in Slams, not slim volumes), “storytelling” is performance. It’s narcissistic, outlandish, self-indulgent, loud, artless, and ultimately boring. Where, in the past, a writer could guide you through the experience of her story like an orchestra conductor, the storyteller now hurls it at you like Gallagher and his watermelons. You need to be entertained, and what’s a storyteller to do if all he knows how to do is tell stories? There are fewer and fewer outlets for the written story, so he has to assume a persona and take to the stage, which is something called “acting.” He also has to compete with other storytellers in American Idol fashion and turn his art, if that’s what it is, into a shtick so he’ll stand out.

Why is every goddamn thing in ths country a goddamn competition?

I don’t know. This saddens me for some reason, and I can’t decide if it’s ironic or not that the sponsor of the Moth program in the New Yorker was Lunesta -- a sleeping pill.