Fumbling toward the truth: irre(l/r)evant questions

I just started the novel, May We Be Forgiven, by A.M. Homes, and am enjoying it immensely. I've read some short stories by Homes before and she has a funny, smart, spot-on voice that I love. She's especially good at rendering the humor and irony in otherwise dark and depressing situations.

I was trying to dissect what works so well about that humor, and I think at least one piece of it is that
her characters fumble their way through the world much the way someone would fumble through their own home in the middle of the night--they stub their toes a lot. They particularly stub their toes on truths that, like furniture, are obvious in the daylight but strange during midnight prowls about the house.

One way this gets conveyed is through dialogue and a lot of questions. Questions are great, both because they suggest disorientation and they demand answers. Oblique questions are even better--in this novel, the questions are often either slightly irrelevant or irreverant, so they often contain a lot of delicious subtext.

Here's one scene I enjoyed a lot. The setup is that Harry Silver (the novel's narrator/protagonist) has been sleeping with his brother George's wife while George was in the hospital (for psychiatric evaluation, it should be noted). After George escaped from the hospital and found Harry sleeping next to his wife, he proceeded to smash his wife's head in with a lamp. In this scene, George confronts the detective and cops who arrive on the scene:

[The detective] turns his attention back to us.

"It's Monday morning. I got out of bed to come here. My wife gives it to me every Monday morning, no questions asked, she likes me to start the week happy, so I'm not exactly feeling fondly towards you."

"What the fucking fuck are you fucking thinking, you fuck," George blurts.  

"Cuff him," the detective says. 

"I wasn't talking to you," George says, "I was talking to my brother." George looks at me. "And those are my pajamas," he says. "Now you've gone and done it." 

"I'm not going to be able to help you this time," I say. 

"Have I committed a crime?" George asks. 

"Hard to know, isn't it," one of the cops says, cuffing him. 

"Where are you taking him?" I ask. 

"Is there a particular place you'd like him to go?" 

"He was in the hospital. He must have walked out last night--notice the gown under his clothes?" 

"So he eloped?" 

I nod. 

"And how did he get home?" 

"I don't know." 

"I fucking walked, in the fucking dark. Pussy Licker."

--Pages 16-17 (Kindle edition). A.M. Homes. May We Be Forgiven. Viking: New York, NY; 2012.

The funniest of these is George's irreverant, obscenity-laden question, which, at first, seems meant for the detective (who, incidentally, has no issue with bemoaning his own carnal deprivations on a domestic violence call), but is actually directed toward Harry. The subtext is pretty clear throughout, even before George calls Harry a "Pussy Licker." George then calls out Harry for wearing his pajamas: "Now you've gone and done it" (a statement that is both supreme understatement and irony, given wearing someone else's PJs is hardly the worst crime of the night).These questions also keep the pendulum of guilt swinging back and forth between George and Harry--neither one of them is innocent, despite George being the only one cuffed. The fact that the questions go unaswered increases the tension and emotional disconnect, and adds a punchy, asymmetrical cadence to the dialogue.

Snapped from irenelyon.com

The conversation grows even more surreal, with questions that are irrelevant in the sense that they  show George is literally not at all relating to the violence that has just perpetrated ("Have I committed a crime?", "Hard to know, isn't it?"), and questions that seem to reverse the order of authority ("Is there a particular place you'd like him to go?" from the detective to Harry). There's also a word misusage ("eloped" vs "escaped") that disorients, but also nicely brings us back around to themes of marriage, guilt, and secrecy. It all makes for a raucous chorus of people who are stubbing their toes up against the truth.

Original expressions: tone-of-voice edition

Based on Roxane Gay's mention in her essay collection, Bad Feminist, I decided to read Pamela Ribon's novel, You Take It From Here (I read the Oyster edition--Simon & Schuster, Inc.: New York, NY; 2012). There's a lot of frank, funny language in the book, and quite honestly, I could have pulled a million examples of fresh, interesting ways to bring ordinary expressions to life. When I went through the examples I highlighted, I found a few that I really liked in particular, and realized they all related to describing a character's tone of voice. Not only are these lines sharp and funny, but they add a deeper dimension to the dialog and the character and create some vivid impressions.

1. A great comparison to the impersonal tone of voice mails; plus, a sense of duality--the message conveys normalcy, but the delivery suggests anything but:

"Danny," she said, her voice oddly calm and stilted, fake chipper, like she was recording an outgoing message for her voice mail. "I would like you to handle this."
--Chapter 9 (25.7% on Oyster edition)

2. The jealousy is palpable in the word "sniffed"; plus, it's magical to read "mucus plug" and "fetal pig" in the same sentence:

"I see y'all went ahead and had Tuesday-night dinner with some new people," Vikki sniffed, the words...coming out of her mouth the way some people say "mucus plug" or "fetal pig."
--Chapter 15 (55.1% on Oyster edition)

3. A delicious character description that builds into an apt simile and a vivid impression that is both visual and aural:

Dr. Fowler's eyes bulged behind round, thin glasses with a yellow tint, and she started each of her sentences in almost a whisper, a mumble that built up steam as she tumbled toward the final punctuation. She sounded like a fleet of police cars on the chase.
--Chapter 18 (61.5% on Oyster edition)

Not so happily ever after

From ghostmothwords

So I finished reading An Untamed State by Roxane Gay--and yep, you guessed it, this post will contain spoilers!!! In an earlier post, I talked about how Gay talks about her writing process for this novel as a fairy tale that dissolves into a not-so-happily-ever-after place. That got me thinking about how novels teach you what kind of ending to expect as you read them: (a) happy, (b) tragic, or (c) somewhere in between. I opted for C on this one--partly because I cheated (I read some of the author's commentary beforehand), and partly because that's how it read. The "signs" I honed in on were:

1. If your protagonist (Mireille) is kidnapped from her family and betrayed by her father from the start, there are no happy endings, period.
2. Mireille's narration refers to both the "before" and "after" the kidnapping. It's clear she will come out alive, if not completely whole. Death is (arguably) the ultimate tragedy, so there's still room for rebirth.
3. Mireille's strength of character--her toughness and resilience read like someone can endure and perhaps even overcome.
4. Support characters--Mireille's husband, Michael, is loyal, loving, and strong--he makes mistakes but, overall, he represents a future worth living for, as does Mireille's young son.

The trajectory of the novel and how it ends seems to bear all these out. 

Here's what happens next: 

From Scriptmag.com

Mireille's kidnappers do, in fact, release her, once her father finally decides to pay the ransom (after 13 days!). The second half of the novel ("Part II: Once Upon a Time") deals with the emotional aftermath of Mireille's ordeal and her struggle to reorient herself to the former "fairy tale" of her life. During her captivity, she has learned to think of herself as a disembodied no one and now has difficulty reconciling this no one to her previous identity as daughter, wife, mother. In the aftermath, she is unable to talk about what happened to her and is both physically and emotionally unable to hold her son. This leads to numerous conflicts with her husband, as Mireille literally flees their home once they return to Miami, driving across the country in her car. Michael initially fails to provide the support she needs, but his mother, Lorraine, steps in and gives Mireille the space, time, and understanding required to begin the healing process. Eventually, Mireille is able to tell her story to Lorraine and to Michael, and is fully reunited with her husband and son. She resumes her life, has another child (via a surrogate), and, eventually, grants her father forgiveness. In a word, then, there is a sort of rebirth--albeit at the cost of the death of a former self.

So what's it all about? 

I've been thinking about how the whole idea of tragedy vs happy vs bittersweet ending not only give the reader something to hold on to and to anticipate, but also informs our understanding of what a story (and life) is all about. What's the point? Well, if Mireille's story had turned out to be a happy one, it would have been a great example of overcoming terrible circumstances, but it wouldn't be quite true to Mireille's point of view. Much of her story seems to be about how "surviving" violence can be a deathless death, and that captivity may continue long after the prisoner is released from his or her cage. 

And if Mireille's story had turned out to be an utterly tragic one, it might also have mis-delivered on another provocative aspect of this story--the way in which Mireille resists her aggressors at every turn--both physically and verbally; likewise, she resists her family's attempts to minimize the impact of this violence. She demands to be heard, and ultimately she is, by her mother-in-law, her husband, and, to some extent, her father.

Persephone, from becauseilovesand

The final mix of tragedy and rebirth seems to represent the experience of the book as a whole--that violence is cyclical, both in time (Mireille returns to Haiti in the violent, albeit natural, aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake), and in the psyche (Mireille continues to feel like two people--her "before" and "after" selves).  In fact, in the novel's final chapter, Mireille encapsulates her experience in a way that could apply to the "mixed" ending as well, through the tale of Hades and Persephone: Hades (god of the underworld) steals Persephone to be his wife, but Persephone's mother Demeter forbids the earth to bear fruit in retaliation. The compromise: Hades releases Persephone, but only after he forces her to eat the seeds of a pomegranate, which doom her to return to the underworld for six months each year. Persephone is ransomed to a complicated future--both free and not free--just like Mireille.

Great expectations: happily or tragically ever after?

I'm currently reading the novel, An Untamed State, by Roxane Gay. Before this, I read an essay collection, Bad Feminist, by the same author. In an essay entitled, "The Smooth Surfaces of Idyll," she talks about her interpretation of Untamed (which came out the same year as the essay collection) as a kind of fairy tale:

"My novel...is in its own way about fairy tales. The story follows a woman who was living a fairy tale and then she is kidnapped and her fairy tale ends.... In the novel, Mireille Duval's  [the protagonist's] happy ending comes all the way apart and then I had to figure out how to put the pieces back together, how to get my characters back to something resembling happiness."

--p122 (Kindle edition). In: Roxane Gay. Bad Feminist. New York, NY: HarperCollins; 2014.

In fact, Part I of the novel is called "Happily Ever After." That got me thinking about happy endings and...well...not-so-happy endings, and how the reader sort of gets a sense from the beginning whether the book will end (a) with some kind of redemption or rebirth, (b) a major tragedy, or (c) a little of both.

My prediction so far (slightly less than halfway through the book): option C
Okay, this is sort of a cheat because the quote above alludes to "something resembling happiness," but I think it will be interesting to write down my experience-to-date as a reader in the middle of the book, and then check back in to talk about how the ending unfolds--tragically, happily, or somewhere in between. Here's where I am so far in gauging this in plot, setting, and character:

1. Plot/conflict
The basic premise of the novel is this: Mireille (a Haitian-American woman from Miami) is taken from her husband Michael and son Christophe and held for ransom while vacationing at her parents' estate in Port-au-Prince. So from the start, we've got tragedy--the best outcome for Mireille is to be returned after suffering brutal abuses, and the worst is to be killed--either way, Mireille's fairy-tale life with her husband and son is shattered. It tells us upfront that there will be no neat endings.

Further, Mireille's battle is not only with her kidnappers, but also with her father, Sebastien, a proud, hard-working businessman who refuses to pay the million-dollar ransom because (a) it means losing the wealth that represents his conquest over a lifetime of poverty and injustice, and (b) he genuinely believes that showing weakness makes him and his family more vulnerable. In phone negotiations with the kidnappers, he tells his daughter to "Stay strong" rather than promising to negotiate her release at any cost. Because family is the central theme of this novel--from the history of her own parents' romance to Mireille's courtship with Michael--this represents, in some ways, the ultimate betrayal. Again, these tragic events point to no good--the best outcome here is a troubled, if not destroyed, father-daughter relationship.

2. Time/setting/structure
However, with that being said, it's made clear that Mireille will survive--physically, at least. First, the author establishes upfront that kidnappings are commonplace in Haiti and that Mireille knows many relatives and acquaintances who have survived the experience and been returned to their families. Generally, it seems that perpetrators are more concerned with getting their money than killing their victims. More directly, Mireille herself indicates an end to the ordeal as she narrates, mentioning her "thirteen days of captivity" and structures her story by referring to "the before" and "the after" of this trauma, as in: "In the before I took the sanctity of my body for granted. In the after my body was nothing."

3. Character/relationships
The rest of the indicators come more from character. Make no mistake--Mireille is strong. Although she isn't able to escape or hurt her tormentors in any physical way, she resists them from the beginning. When she refuses to relieve herself in the presence of a guard, the man tells her she should be more thankful, and she responds, "I'm not going to thank you for a damn thing let alone taking a piss." When her kidnapper orders her to beg Sebastien, via the phone, to save her life, she says only, "I am fine and being treated as well as can be expected..." Her resistance continues, both directly and indirectly, despite being repeatedly assaulted, raped, and tortured, and despite the humiliation of her father's "indifference."

Also woven into Mireille's narrative are her memories of her romance with her husband Michael. She remembers the many challenges to their coming together--some have to do with his being very different from her (raised on a farm, wears "Republican" clothing, oozes Mid-western charm and innocence), but most have to do with the obstacles Mireille overcomes to let Michael into her life--"I do not love easy," she says--obstacles that go to the very core of her identity and body. These include a disastrous trip to Michael's childhood farm (where Mireille plainly does not fit), an equally disastrous, earlier trip to Haiti (Mireille takes Michael's ambivalence to the country as a rejection of her culture), and an earlier miscarriage (which Mireille chooses never to tell Michael about). Through each episode, Michael eventually responds--to Mireille's surprise--with love and acceptance. The resulting portrait of the marriage is of a profound and hard-earned partnership. If this book is about the ways in which love is tested and the way love tests one's personal narratives, then Mireille's inner strength and the strength of her marriage seem capable of achieving some kind of rebirth.

And finally...
Another reason why I feel that the ending will include rebirth and/or redemption is that the novel's antagonists (primarily the kidnappers, and secondarily, Sebastien) are not without their humanity. Mireille gives a complex portrait of her father and, to some extent, of her captors. These are men desperately clawing for the last shreds of dignity, manhood, and salvation they can reach. Mireille's situation--and her body--are literally and figuratively dominated by these men, but in some ways, they are living in a far more illusory fairy-tale than she, especially her father. The redemption of the novel may be at the cost of destroying these harmful fantasies--and the relationships that hang on them--but perhaps sparing Mireille and the life she has built with her husband.

This is my thought process at this stage of the novel--this may turn out to have been a horrible idea, where I end up looking stupid--but I guess we shall see. Stay tuned for spoiler alerts! and whether I was on the right track or not.

Original expressions for ordinary expressions

One of the things I most like to observe in my favorite writers is how they come up with fresh, original ways to describe everyday facial expressions, etc. Although dialogue should be able to hold its own, it can be difficult to add life to an interaction between characters without some equally vivid sketches of their movements, gestures, and mannerisms as they speak. Sometimes these cues are just as essential to the subtext as the words spoken. Here is the first installment of a few good ones I've noticed here and there!

1. An unusual verb--most people would go for "drains" or "he went pale":

"Blood evacuates Lorca's ears and cheeks." 

--p 36, Marie-Helene Bertino. 2 a.m. at the Cat's Pajamas. New York, NY: Random House; 2014. 

2. A vivid simile:

"...Ruelle's face seals over like the visor of a knight clanging down." 

--p428 (Kindle edition), All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

3. A portrait of a grandfather morning his daughter: both an unusual gesture (biting a knuckle vs the overdone bitten lip) and an easily visualized simile:

"Grandpa looks at the pictures and blinks and puts a knuckle between his teeth. For maybe thirty seconds he doesn't answer. He looks like he's standing outside an elevator waiting for the doors to open."  

--p165, The River Nemunas. In: Anthony Doerr. Memory Wall. New York, NY: Scribner; 2010. 

Setting: what you think you know

I took a hiatus from my blog this fall--hello again! For my return post, I've got an unusual way of addressing "place" and "setting" in a novel I was blown away by this year--A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain by Adrianne Harun.

The novel could be labeled as an example of magical realism, but that would be simplifying it. More so, it takes a concept--Devil's Hopscotch, a sinister version of the familiar childhood game, in which innocents fall prey to Old Scratch himself--to analyze the much more difficult concept of life in a hardscrabble mountain town, where poverty, racism, and despair aren't quite enough to explain the mysterious disappearances of local Native American girls and the tragedies of five local youths: Leo, Bryan, Ursie, Jackie, and Tessa. Leo narrates their tale as the inevitable outcome of the Devil's insidious interventions, but the story is interspersed with small chapters that use local folklore and the wisdoms of Leo's deceased Uncle Lud to weave the book's meta-perspective and challenge the reader's perceptions of the characters and the labels we might apply to them based on their origins.

Random drawing found on Drawception. Love it!

My favorite such chapter is entitled, His Playground. One of the unusual ways in which the novel addresses setting is that Leo never discloses the exact location or name of his Canadian mountain town, and in this chapter, he disabuses the reader of any notion that he or she can fully answer the question, "Where are we?" while also insisting that we're not completely without knowledge of the place. Here's a snippet:

You know where we are. You do. Even Uncle Lud...declares there's no need to tell you where we are. You've heard of this place. The news was all over it for a while. And they'll be back, Uncle Lud guesses. That's the thing about places like this. People come here to get lost, but all that means is that they want to do whatever they'd like without anyone interfering.... 

If we give the name, if we say, here we are in Canada, in Terrace or Kaslo or Avola, or we tell you that here we are hidden away like a bunch of bush bunnies in Alberta, you'll say, nah, I passed through there on my holidays or my aunt lived near Smithers or my entire band's been here for more generations than your family has years, and that's not the Terrace or Kaslo or the Peace I know. And you'd be right...."

 This accomplishes about a million different things but here are the top 3, I think:

1. It's a clever way of making the tale feel even more universal and magical.
2. It points out that the minute we identify a place (especially if we already do happen to know that city, town, or country),we think we know it and will make all kinds of assumptions--even in fiction, and more surprisingly, even if we live there in real life!
3. It implies that, despite the anonymity Leo offers, we really do know the specific place he speaks of, but we will pretend we don't so we don't have to acknowledge any potential responsibility or complicity.

For Harun's purposes, this is a great way of negotiating specificity and universality and somehow making it all ten times more interesting--it's also a great way of making the setting support a novel with a very complex voice and narrative. Or, as Leo says, "You see, here's a place where a singular story won't suffice, if one ever could."

Quotes from my Kindle version: Adrianne Harun. A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain. New York, NY: Penguin Books; 2014.

"Fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies..."

I just finished reading one of those books that you wish would never end--that book was Lauren Groff's The Monsters of Templeton.

It was inspiring for another reason, too--the novel has a unique method of approach: it takes a real-life town--Cooperstown, New York--and turns it into a magical alter-ego: the fictitious Templeton, New York. Instead of  a pedestrian, run-of-the-mill upstate town that most of us would take for granted, Groff creates a treasure trove of ghosts, lake monsters, and violent family histories for the main character, Wilhelmina (aka Willie), to discover.

Fictional Templeton map, snapped
from Monsters book preview at Amazon

It's a refreshing and interesting approach--a happy medium between creating an entirely new universe (as in some fantasy or sci fi stories) and remaining rigidly faithful to the truth (like a historical biography or a naturalistic period novel). For example, Groff keeps some of the recognizable features of Cooperstown--the family seat of a great American writer, and the home of the Baseball Hall of Fame and Lake Otsego--but she gives them all a twist. She turns James Fenimore Cooper, author of The Last of the Mohicans, into Jacob Franklin Temple, whose family is the town's namesake; she includes the Hall of Fame as is, but incorporates its 1936 inauguration into the plot with a black twist; and Glimmerglass becomes the alternate name of the lake, complete with a Nessie-like monster named Glimmey. She also takes the characters from some of Fennimore Cooper's fiction and turns them into part of Willie's family history: Marmaduke Temple, Natty Bumppo, and Remarkable Pettibones (although Groff calls her Prettybones in this version).

It's also an interesting solution to a common writer's problem--you want to write about a place, time, or subject dear to your heart, but when you begin to faithfully set it down, it suddenly becomes dull and boring. Or, you begin to find other possibilities more interesting.

Real-life Cooperstown map,
snapped from Google Maps

In my Kindle edition, the author's note explains that this is exactly what happened to Groff when she first set out to write the novel. She says she first started reading as much as she could about Fenimore Cooper, because he's so close to the history of the town, and she wanted to stick to that, but:

"...a curious thing happened: the more I knew, the more the facts drifted from their moorings. They began shaping themselves into stories in my head, taking over. Dates switched, babies were born who never actually existed, historical figures grew new personalities and began to do frightening things. I slowly began to notice that I wasn't writing about Cooperstown anymore, but rather a slantwise version of the original."

She then returned to reading Fenimore Cooper and noticed that in his novel, The Pioneers, he reinvented his town as "Templeton, New York," thus granting her a kind of permission to do the same. Groff says: "I relaxed and followed his lead." And in the end, she discovered that "...fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies."

So, reread your favorite author, or take inspiration from a history book, a Golden Classic, or even something as exotic as a grimoire--and don't be afraid to steal, borrow, or completely rearrange material. You never know what could take shape.