Who are You, and Why are You Thinking About Ballerinas?

A few weekends back, I burned through Tana French's first book, In the Woods. It's true that you should not judge a book by its cover, but you can sure as hell sell it. I'd planned to read it ever since I saw the cover image, which successfully conveys both a woodsy branchiness and the organic, creepy look of blood vessels.

The first book won several awards and got deservedly praised every which way, but it had--to my mind--one substantial flaw. The first person narrative occasionally veers to places that seem unbelievable for the character in question. He's Rob Ryan, a youngish homicide detective in Ireland, never finished college, obsessed with his job, troubled by a forgotten childhood trauma that may or may not be connected to his latest case. All well and good, and for the most part, French carries the voice off pretty well.

But every now and then, Ryan let slip a line or a thought that had me turning to the back jacket of the book to look French in the face. He compares the preparation for a murder investigation to the chaos that happens backstage as ballerinas wait for the curtain. He names the French musical piece that young ballet dancers are warming up to. All in all, for someone readers have been given no reason to think of as a ballet aficionado, he seems to know an awful lot about the world of toe shoes and nutcrackers.

While these moments were enough to make me stop reading and address a general, "WTF?" to the empty room, they were minor problems in an otherwise terrific book, and almost as soon as I finished the last page, I picked up French's second book, The Likeness. And there the voice problems ceased: In the second book, the narrative voice is no longer Ryan's, but his former partner's, a young female detective. In The Likeness, the plot is just as taut and the first-person voice comes off without a hitch.


The difference between the two books made me think about the trapdoors in that old writing class dictum: write what you know. I've always thought that it should be followed by a number of caveats, one of them being: unless the character you're creating doesn't have a clue about what you know, in which case, write what HE knows. French's bio says she trained as an actor; my guess is she may have encountered a bit of ballet over the years, but letting it drift into the consciousness of her male detective protagonist--without at least a throwaway line to explain how it might have got there--seemed a misstep.


It also made me think about the difficulty of believably inhabiting a demographic that's not yours--something I'm struggling with right now as I work on a story set in 1960s Mississippi in which the two central characters are a middle-aged black woman and an 8-year-old white boy. I figure, demographically, I've got a little connection to each of them, but I also keep thinking I have to know more, more, more about their lives and their worlds. I keep reading more about the civil rights movement, about life on the Gulf Coast, about what people wore and ate and where they worked and how they lived. Sometimes I feel like I'm going to drown in research and never actually write this story.


It reminds me of the writerly equivalent of that old apocryphal anecdote about Dustin Hoffman: Supposedly, while on the set of Marathan Man, method actor Hoffman, playing an exhausted college student on the run from Nazi war criminals, was staying up late and exercising himself sick to get himself looking and feeling the part. His co-star, Laurence Olivier, saw this miserable wreck dragging itself onto the set each day and expressed concern; when Hoffman explained what he was doing, Olivier said acidly, "Try acting, dear boy; it's so much easier." (If you want to get a sense of how Hoffman took this advice, this photo pretty much says it all.)


I think the opposite is true. Sometimes I know I'm researching just to avoid putting pen to paper. I plan to post this photo above my desk as encouragement.

And Like a Thunderbolt He Falls

I found this article oddly fascinating, and the incident it refers to would make a great poem. Some extracts for the time-constrained:

Of all the moments that might leave an impression on the minds of budding young poets at the Springs School, the day that a hawk killed a blue jay and ate it in the courtyard at the school seems to resonate above all others ...

The subject matter of the poems runs the gamut ... but nothing inspired fifth grade students more than the bitter cruelty of nature outside their window on the day the hawk killed the blue jay.

“These poems all come from classes that had a perfect view on the courtyard,” said Ms. O’Conner.

"A bird of prey/silently snacking/on a blue bird/savoring every bite/its talons/engraved/ in its mid afternoon/snack,” wrote fifth-grader Katherine Espinoza.

“The hawk rips the feathers off/the bird/the tail of the blue jay/goes up/stomped by the hawk/it’s a cat and mouse rampage,” wrote fifth-grader Chris Tapia.

A moment in childhood when, for one reason or another, the attention of many children is directed at one particular event. That so many of them chose to write about it is really interesting. Is it the early development of the classic dictum, "If it bleeds, it leads"? A lack of other source material that feels suitably "dramatic" to kids tasked with writing poems? An instinctive understanding that death is interesting?

Whatever, "its talons/engraved/in its mid afternoon/snack" is a great line. Watch out for that kid.

One for the Ages

Sorry for the long hiatus. I'm not dead yet.

But this blog is likely to remain dark for a bit. My job is sucking a huge amount of my writing energy, and I'm trying to focus what little juice remains on a bigger project.

I will be popping up now and then when the news is worthwhile or the Muse comes knocking.

***

In the meantime, though, before I go back to radio silence for a while, I feel compelled to give a shout-out for a book I have recently been re-reading. For the sake of full disclosure: The author, Andrew Kozelka, is a friend of mine. We went to grad school at Hollins together, though I think we shared only one class, a theory seminar on short fiction. And while most of us young grad students were spending our nights hanging around, drinking, bantering wittily, hoping to show enough intellectual ankle to get us intellectually laid, this guy was burning the midnight oil in his little apartment in downtown Roanoke, churning out two novels and many of the first poems in the book below.

Every time I pick up The Ages, I am struck by a complex roster of emotions: The first is a rueful sense of irritation with the state of poetry publication in this day and age. Here is a book, dear readers, which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series in 2005. A finalist, but it did not win, and then when Kozelka got tired of the ongoing slings and arrows of the contest submission system, he finally did that horrible, shiver-inducing thing which can draw hushed gasps of disgust even from those who know the meaning of the slang term "Dirty Sanchez": He self-published it.

While the innocent among you are googling the term (I tell you now, you'll be happier if you don't), I ask the rest: Has Kozelka, by dropping into the self-publishing well, dipped himself in tar which can never be peeled away?

Maybe he could have gone on playing the game. Maybe he should have. Every time I pick up the book, I argue with myself about it, the angel on one shoulder soothing, It's out there, the devil on the other seething, No one will read it.

Oh, but that's just the first emotion. The second one comes on as I start reading: envy. Deep, lustful envy of these poems. The kind I very rarely experience, that Why the hell aren't I smart enough to write this? sort of feeling. Then, as I read further, the envy vanishes and turns into excitement. Excitement at their ambition, their leaps of imagination, their historical scope, their black humor, their multiplicity of form, their willingness to scavenge through the darkness and bring up gold and icons and drowned slaves and dead czars and heroes who are known as heroes because they killed many, many people.

I realize I am waxing all slobbery here, but I cannot help it: the cumulative power of these poems taken together is hard to overstate. Every time I read them, they make me want to write more, and read more, and simultaneously they make me want to throw every book in the room onto a pyre and light it and go be a throat-slitting pirate somewhere. Really. It is that good.

I'm going to just shut up now and drop a couple of my favorites below. Kozelka's dirty, filthy, self-published book of brilliance is available through Amazon. Buy it, and have a little source of dark light to put on your shelf.

***

The Age of Fable

From the village below the castle

The serfs can see the knights

Cavorting with pale ladies;

They can smell the delicate muttons,

They can feel the blatant unfairness

And what the priest tells them

Doesn't really help.

As for the Revolution

It's at least five hundred years away,

And so they make up stories.

In one, they're strong with rage.

An axe is in their hand. They go

Up to the castle and rape and kill

Everything that breathes.

Then they sit down at the great table

And stuff themselves.

They lay a tax upon the village.

The prettiest boys and girls

Are brought to their bed.

They sleep in. They kill off

Anyone who seems ambitious.

All the serfs in the village know this story,

Though not one has ever told it.

***

The Vision of St. Francis

in the Year of the Plague

Some children undertook

Another crusade

To stop a war their parents had made

But along the way they grew up, had children

Of their own,

And had to protect them with arrow and stone

And had to settle and build a fort

Where soon their children were asking the same sort

Of questions they used to:

Why the need for the wall?

Why even have enemies at all?

Why do we work? Why elect a prince?

It just doesn't make sense.

And so they went off on another crusade

To stop the war their parents had made.

But they didn't want it to be like before

And just end up fighting the same old war

And so when they saw the marauders approach

The children didn't go into a protective crouch

But instead ran out to the desert holding hands

And took to kissing in the sands.

Soon it had gotten dark out and the children couldn't see.

All of this was told to me

By my fever.

***

Teaching Japanese Children English

Not Far From the Hiroshima Peace Park

We the guilty form a wall around innocence,

Killing and being killed where we stand or attack

And there is nothing else between love and the dark,

No wall not of our making, no free-taken home,

And no consolation for the myriad displaced

But to pass briefly through pitiful gardens.