An Old Friend Talks about Writing

I was in the car last winter when I heard Natalie Goldberg on NPR giving an interview about Old Friend From Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir.  (The book was published in 2007, so maybe the station was rebroadcasting an old interview.  Or maybe, because of the prevalence of memoirs on the best-seller lists in the last few years, the interview felt timely.)  I remembered Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones (her Zen-influenced book of writing instruction) from somewhere in my undergraduate days, so I decided to check this out.

I’m not planning to write a memoir any time soon, but I thought that I might find some information and ideas that would serve me as a teacher of writing.  And I wasn’t disappointed.  For me, the best aspect of the book is its ten-minute writing warm-ups (of which there are approximately 80):

Tell me everything you know about ice cream.

When did you pretend not to care?

Begin a ten-minute writing with No Thank You.  Every time you get stuck, write No Thank You again and keep going.

We all come from someplace.  Where do you come from?  How did you escape?

What do you know by heart?

Write down the details of a funeral you attended in winter.

Over the years, what Halloween costumes have you worn?

What was missing?

What made you know something was over?

Between such writing prompts, Goldberg includes short chapters about her own writing experiences, samples of good writing by a variety of authors (with discussion of what makes it good), an examination of challenges to the writing life, her philosophy of writing, and some physical exercises for writers.  (This last is where Goldberg loses me a little.  Though not as central as it was in Writing Down the Bones, her new-age, hippie, Eastern perspective is still a presence; she spends several chapters on meditation, breathing, walking, and other ways in which writers can find the muse.)

Goldberg also has some insightful things to say about reading.  I think, for example, that I would like to turn this quote (from a chapter titled “No Whining”) into a big poster:

We start to read Moby Dick or Heart of Darkness, Native Son, Don Quixote and ten pages into it, we decide it’s too hard, it’s boring, we don’t like it . . . . We would be called immature if after ten minutes of meeting someone, we said to him, I don’t like you.  And yet this is often exactly what we do when we encounter a few pages of a new book.  Our job is to stay with the author’s words and see what we can learn.  Push through.  It takes a while to settle into a book’s territory.

If you’re thinking about writing a memoir—and Goldberg suggests that every life has multiple memoirs just waiting to be told—this is worth your time.  It’s not a book that you need to charge through in one sitting (although, with its short chapters and interesting anecdotes, you certainly could); rather, it’s the kind of book that you might return to when you need a little inspiration and encouragement.

 

Shakespeare Fans Riot in New York

Who knew that a disagreement over the performance of Hamlet ignited a riot on the streets of New York in 1949?

Nigel Cliff’s The Shakespeare Riots (subtitled Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth-Century America) teases that riot in its prologue, and then it leads the reader through the collision of people and circumstances that caused it.  Chief among the figures in the book are William Charles Macready, a renowned English actor on his farewell tour of the United States, and Edwin Forrest, an American thespian who enjoyed his status as the country’s first native star of the theatre.  Though the two enjoyed a friendship in their early careers, their different performance styles, their differing interpretations of Shakespeare, their outsized egos, and their professional jealousies ultimately resulted in an intense rivalry.

But this rivalry between two actors would not have led to riot without a variety of other factors—lingering tension between the United States and England after the war of 1812, renewed tension between the two countries over Texas and the Oregon Territory, massive debts owed by the U.S. to European countries in the first half of the nineteenth century (and the outright refusal of several states to pay those debts), an influx of immigrants to New York, the corrupt politics of Tammany Hall, and the growing gulf between America’s upper class and its miserable poor.

By the time that Cliff returns to the fatal riot in the book’s final chapters, he has illuminated all of these topics (occasionally in more detail than is necessary).  His book also reveals a great deal about the status of actors and the theatre (in both England and the United States) at this time period, the lives of Macready and Forrest (as well as some of their theatrical contemporaries), the abuse that Shakespeare sometimes endured at the hands of theatre managers (such as a performance of King Lear that ended with Cordelia’s marriage and Lear’s return to the throne), and the love that commoners on both sides of the Atlantic felt for the bard.  (As Cliff makes clear, the mid-nineteenth century was perhaps the last time in which people of all backgrounds and occupations gathered in the theatre to be entertained by Shakespeare’s words—the last time in which everyday people knew some of Shakespeare’s plays so well that they could prompt forgetful actors by calling out lines from the audience).

This is definitely a niche book, but you don’t have to be a theatre buff to be entertained and enlightened by The Shakespeare Riots.

 

The Enlightened Ones

In the simplest terms, Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado is a book about two Filipino writers.  Crispin Salvador, an aging novelist and essayist who has long made his home in Manhattan, is found drowned in the Hudson River near the beginning of the new millennium.  The manuscript of his long-awaited masterpiece is missing.  Miguel Syjuco (yes—the author of Ilustrado features as a prominent character in his novel), Salvador’s young protégé, sets out to locate the manuscript and, in the process, begins working on a biography of his mentor.

In an attempt to learn more about Salvador, Syjuco returns to his native Philippines to interview the dead writer’s sister, former teachers, and literary friends-turned-enemies.  At the same time, Syjuco is forced to confront familial problems from his own past.  (As it turns out, the two writers have much more in common than their chosen profession; each has compromised politicians in his family tree, each was sent abroad for his education, each has a troubled history with women, and each hides a very similar secret about his past.)  Ultimately, the book fleshes out the stories of both characters’ families for several generations into the past, providing a history of the Philippines through invasions by the Japanese, the Americans, and the Spanish. 

The book is told in a unique style—blending first-person narration by Syjuco; third-person narration from an omniscient presence witnessing Syjuco’s progress; excerpts from various novels, short stories, essays, and interviews (fictional, of course) by Crispin Salvador; passages from Syjuco’s biography-in-progress; bizarre dream sequences; recurring bawdy jokes; and contemporary forms like blogs and text messages.  While there are times that this style becomes a little tiresome, it is probably one of the great strengths of the novel.

For me, the novel is not without its problems.  The beginning of the book (despite the immediate interest created by Salvador’s mysterious drowning and his missing manuscript) really doesn’t catch fire; for the first couple chapters, I wasn’t sure whether or not I wanted to continue.  Furthermore, the novel doesn’t ever answer some of the essential questions introduced in those first few chapters.  By the end of the book, Syjuco has moved on to bigger themes—and while I understand that, I would still appreciate answers to a few of the questions that set the whole novel in motion.

Most significantly, though, the book doesn’t always work successfully in providing a history of the Philippines (which seems to be one of its important objectives).  I know a little about the days of Ferdinand (and Imelda) Marcos, the election of Corazon Aquino, and some of the recent bombings in Manila, but I have to admit that my knowledge of Filipino history is woefully inadequate.  Because the historical pieces are not presented chronologically, because Syjuco hops back and forth between the two families, and because much of the historical information is presented only in thumbnails, I don’t feel that Ilustrado added as much to my understanding of the Philippines as it could have.  (I read a review that suggested a timeline of Filipino history at the beginning of the novel would be useful, and I have to agree whole-heartedly.)  Novels like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and A Thousand Splendid Suns are much more effective in combining narrative about interesting characters with history about another culture (the Dominican Republic and Afghanistan, respectively).

So…it sounds like I didn’t really like this book, but that isn’t exactly the case.  This first novel of Miguel Syjuco is not without its flaws, but there is a lot to appreciate in Ilustrado.  Since I finished the book, I find that my thoughts keep returning to it—and that’s never a bad thing.

 

Get Hooked on Another Classic

If you haven’t read Hemingway in a while (or at all), The Old Man and the Sea is a great place to start.  It’s short.  It’s spare.  It’s suspenseful. 

One man.  One fish.  A struggle bigger than either of them.

 

Traveling with the Joads Again

Sometimes revisiting a classic can be disappointing—the book isn’t the way that you remember it, or it feels too much like homework, or it just doesn’t seem very relevant.

But that is not the case with John Steinbeck’s classic of the Great Depression, The Grapes of Wrath.  As I reread this novel, I discovered again just how good it is (and how incredibly pertinent it is today).

I have to admit that the first few chapters were a little slow (probably because I was trying to read in a very distracting environment), but I absolutely could not put the book down during the last 300 pages.

What I most appreciated on this return to The Grapes of Wrath was the intercalary chapters.  I remember that I found them really frustrating when I first read the book many years ago—they kept interrupting the progress of the plot.  On this reading, though, I found them to be powerful passages that are as important today as they were in the days of the Joad family.

If you missed this one in high school, you owe it to yourself to pick it up now.

 

Lives of Quiet Desperation

In “What Good is a Story?” (an essay from her 2002 collection, Small Wonder), Barbara Kingsolver wonders why Americans (who tend to lead very busy lives) are willing to pick up massive novels but unwilling to pick up short story collections.  Bonnie Jo Campbell’s American Salvage proves that a great story collection is worth the time.

The characters in Campbell’s stories (set in rural and small-town Michigan) are largely working-class, down-on-their-luck, struggling-for-a-break men and women.  The young husband who can’t leave his meth-addicted wife because of their newborn child.  The laid-off janitor who can’t support his wife and step-kids on the small salary he makes as a groundskeeper.  The foundry worker (badly wounded and disfigured on the job) who accidentally runs down a teen-aged girl on a foggy, pre-dawn road.  The man who breaks both legs in a boating accident and can’t accept the kindness of his girlfriend.  The young woman abused by her uncle.  The woman who hopes for a better life (with her much older husband) on his dying farm.  The man who accidentally sets his own leg on fire when he is pulled over by a police officer.

Hope and happiness are infrequent (but not entirely absent) in these stories, yet this is an incredibly powerful and moving collection.  Campbell creates real characters and—in just a matter of pages—makes her reader connect and care.  American Salvage is definitely one of the best books that I have read recently!

 

Nobody’s Perfect (and That’s a Good Thing)

Set in Rome, Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists is the story of a small international newspaper run by American publishers.  In brief sections, the novel recounts the origin of the paper (founded after World War II by a businessman from Atlanta), its heyday in the 1970s, and its ultimate decline at the turn of the millennium.  The bulk of the novel, though, is not about the workings of the newspaper; it is really a chronicle of the lives of the men and women who work there.

Each chapter of this novel reads like a short story, with each story focusing on one of the paper’s employees—the man who writes the obituaries (who confronts an unexpected death in his own world), the business writer (who finds love after a burglary of her home), the editor-in-chief (who unexpectedly encounters a former lover at a newspaper conference), the managing editor (who has fallen in love with a woman several decades his junior), the head copy editor (who invites a college friend to Rome, only to learn that his friend is not the man he remembers), the business manager (who discovers, after her divorce, that love might be possible again when she meets an enchanting young man on a flight to the United States), an aging freelance reporter in Paris (who resigns himself to the fact that his wife has fallen in love with another man), a young writer auditioning for a job in Cairo (who finds himself competing with—and abused by—a more seasoned journalist), and the owner of the newspaper (who has absolutely no interest in the daily workings of the paper and spends his time hiding with his basset hound in the mansion purchased by his grandfather, the grandfather who founded the paper).  And—in one of my favorite chapters—Rachman tells the story of one of the paper’s readers, a woman who reads each day’s paper in its entirety.  (This means, of course, that she usually can’t finish a paper on the day it arrives; as a result, she has only made her way to the news of 1994.  She finds herself perpetually trapped in the past, and—to ensure that no one spoils the surprise of events that she has not yet read about—she forbids all discussion of the news and all modern technology in her house.)

The Imperfectionists is—by turns—touching, funny, sad, and thoughtful.  It is a glimpse into the modern decline of the newspaper, but—more than that—it is a study of humanity, of (as Rachman writes about the newspaper near the end of the novel) “the idiocy and the brilliance of the species.”

(My one complaint:  The “where are they now” paragraphs in the last chapter—the kind of quick updates on characters that play over the closing credits of high school movies—are unnecessary.  To me, they diminish the ending of the book.  I would much rather that Rachman leave each character where he does at the end of his/her chapter—let me keep thinking about those characters and about what happens to them after I close the book.)

 

Not Just for Teachers

I really enjoyed Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s novel Madeleine is Sleeping, a lyrical and dreamy book that was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2004.  When I read that Bynam recently published a new book, I was interested.  When I found out that its main character is a teacher, I was in.

Ms. Hempel Chronicles is really a collection of eight short stories about Beatrice Hempel, a woman in her late twenties who teaches English (and sometimes social studies) to seventh graders.  Each story could certainly stand on its own—completely perfect as its own little slice of life.  (In fact, six of the eight stories originally appeared in various literary magazines over the past ten years.)  Taken together, they form a wonderful mosaic.

Most of the stories cover the years that Ms. Hempel spends as a teacher, capturing the energy of seventh-grade students, her doubts about herself as a teacher, her engagement to a young man she first knew vaguely back when they were in school, her relationships with other members of the staff.  They also, though, take frequent glances back to Beatrice’s childhood—and especially to her connection with her father. 

One story in the collection, “Creep,” breaks significantly from the others in order to tell about a teen-aged Beatrice who listens to punk rock on a late-night radio show and carries on telephone conversations with a strange older caller.  Another, “Satellite,” finds Beatrice visiting her young sister and their widowed mother and discovering things about both women that she never before imagined.  In the collection’s final story, “Bump,” Ms. Hempel, who has now left the teaching profession, encounters one of her former students on the street; in the conversation that follows, she learns as much about herself as she does about the young woman.

This quiet, insightful collection doesn’t disappoint!

 

Abandon All Hope…

Raw, graphic, violent, disturbing.  Those are the words that jump to my mind when I think about Peter Akinti’s novel Forest Gate.  And—I think—that is exactly as Akinti intends.

The novel begins when two black teens attempt suicide in the Forest Gate projects of London.  The two young men face each other across a littered alley, each jumping from atop his building (a rope around his neck) at the designated time.  Ashvin, a political refugee from Somalia, succeeds in ending his life.  James, born in the neighborhood to a family enmeshed in the drug trade, survives.

While recovering in the hospital, James meets Meina, his dead friend’s older sister.  (After her parents were killed in Somalia, she and Ashvin came to live alone in a small apartment in Forest Gate.)  Against the odds, Meina invites James to move into her apartment; before long, their friendship grows into love.

In an essay following the novel, Akinti explains that he wrote this novel as a sort of rebuttal to what he sees as the mythical, post-racial England portrayed in much recent fiction.  Indeed, it is clear that both Ashvin and James—despite their different back-stories—are angry young men who feel that London—that the world—has already made decisions about who they are and what they can accomplish in life. 

For me, though, Akinti’s essay is more persuasive than his novel.  The characters in Forest Gate don’t always feel fully realized, the choices they make are not always believable, the changes in narrator from one chapter to the next are distracting (with some characters possessing much clearer voices than others), certain graphic acts of violence seem more intended for shock than integral to the story, and the ending of the book is just too unlikely.

(This novel contains strong language, graphic violence, and graphic sexual passages.  It is most definitely not a book for everyone.)