Reinventing ourselves, through fact and fable

By Caroline Leavitt, 2/8/2004

Can reading really alter your life? Can you credit -- or blame -- a particular book for urging you to quit your dead-end job, or fall heedlessly in love, or pack your bags to start a fresh new life in Tobago?

J. Peder Zane, the book-review editor of The Raleigh News & Observer, thinks so, and he charged 34 literary luminaries including Margot Livesey and Peter Cameron to contemplate that very question, asking each writer to focus on the one book that was the most daunting or dangerous or tempting -- or any adjective that might prove that reading is far more transformative voyage than passive pleasure. The results, first published in the News & Observer, are collected in the absolutely superlative ''Remarkable Reads: 34 Writers and Their Adventures in Reading" (Norton, paperback, $15.95).

There's Charles Frazier, so taken by Antonin Artaud's descriptions of Mexico's canyon country in ''The Tarahumara" that he trekked 2,500 miles to see and experience the land for himself. Marianne Gingher revered Eudora Welty's book ''The Robber Bridegroom" so much that she summoned up courage and risked being fired in order to crash a faculty party and meet her idol. And Zane, who was practicing youthful hipness as a way to belong, got a nudge from Freud's ''Civilization and Its Discontents" that the hippest thing he could really do was to silence the roar of the crowd, question everything, and go it alone.

One of my favorite of the essays is Joan Barfoot's ''The Maddest Book I Read," about the perilous power of books. Barfoot begins with some youthful, romantic notions about insanity. Madness, for her, was a siren song, promising a glittering, heightened awareness that was irresistible. Being crazy was a creative act, a way to strip yourself down to your essential core, and if Barfoot couldn't go mad herself, she could have secondhand experience of it by immersing herself in Doris Lessing's ''discombobulating" masterpiece, ''The Golden Notebook." Lessing's book gave her Anna, a heroine teetering into breakdown, and also ''a fevered contact high" she craved. Barfoot reread it every year, right up until she took in a schizophrenic friend. Unlike the intense, almost wonderful madness in ''The Golden Notebook," that of Barfoot's friend was harrowing to be around. ''Pain spoken and shared" wasn't healing the way it was in the novel -- it was so contagious that Barfoot began to question her own sanity. Shattering yourself in order to put yourself back together might work in fiction, but here, in Barfoot's kitchen, it seemed far too dangerous. ''Even brave, wise, magnificent novels cannot be, should not be, are not intended to be recipe books," Barfoot writes, and she pries herself from the printed page and asks her friend to leave.

Crafting your reality from the true experiences of another is one thing, but what if you're raised to believe that fairy tales are not only true, but your birthright? Laurie Fox's ingenious novel ''The Lost Girls" (Simon & Schuster, $23) introduces us to four generations of Darling women, descended from the original Wendy. Each is said to be visited in girlhood by Peter Pan, whisked off to Neverland to fall in unrequited love, only to be set back adrift in the real world. They're lost girls who can't settle for plain old reality and go mad trying.

Is the problem that these women are ''barking mad"? Or is it that they need to mesh the fantastical elements of their lives with the real ones? Certainly a bit of the fairy tale leaks into their lives. After all, Wendy Darling Braverman, great-granddaughter of the original Wendy, is married to a Peter Pan-ish sort of man, who can't muster up energy to look for a job. And her mother, deserted by an airline tycoon, pens self-help books on the Pan syndrome, trying to nail it down and cure it. But it's not until Wendy's rebellious daughter Berry has her own encounter with Peter, a meeting that ends with her a lost girl in a mental ward, that Wendy has to reexamine the tale and rewrite her own ending.

The conceit of the book is deliciously original, rendered with the tart, modern spin of a fractured fairy tale. Pirates are lost boys who forgot their pledge to never grow up and, finding they have, tend to get a bit peevish. Mermaids don't really drown the men they've lured out to sea. Instead, the men are too humiliated and overwhelmed by the lusty encounters to swim back to their ships and so give themselves up to ocean depths.

I was having so much fun reading that I forgave the book some of its sins. There's a certain heavy-handedness in spelling out its message, a bit of overwrought writing, and a Peter as insubstantial as his shadow, who doesn't make much of a case for five generations of women falling helplessly in love with him.

So is this particular Peter Pan real or a figment of maddened imaginations? Ultimately, that question doesn't matter. Not to me, because the book's flirtation with reality vs. story is so much fun. And not to the Darling women, because it's the legend, the story that became the rudder steering their lives. And to soar above it, while still understanding and embracing its power, takes a kind of magic more powerful than any of Peter's pixie dust.

So can books change our lives? According to these two terrific books, the answer is absolutely. Thrillingly. And sometimes, if you're very lucky, happily ever after.

Caroline Leavitt's new novel is ''Girls in Trouble."

Books on Writing

I love exploring how writers overcome setbacks, blocks, horrible reviews, lack of sales. Books like On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner (1983), Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott (1994), On Writing Well by William Zinsser (1976), Talking Horse: On Life and Work by Bernard Malamud (1996), and all the volumes of correspondence by Maxwell Perkins. (Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence edited by John Kuehl and Jackson R. Bryer (1971), The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway-Maxwell Perkins Correspondence edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli (1996), Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins selected and edited by John Hall Wheelock (1950), Max & Marjorie: The Correspondence between Maxwell E. Perkins & Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings edited by Rodger L. Tarr, and To Loot My Life Clean: The Thomas Wolfe-Maxwell Perkins Correspondence edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Park Bucker.) For instance, it is fascinating to read the discussion between Ernest Hemingway and his editor Maxwell Perkins about the publisher's desire to edit out certain words from Hemingway's book:

. . . .The operation of emasculation is a tiny one-It is very simple and easy to perform on men-animals and books-It is not a Major operation but its effects are great. . . .I know, on the other hand, that you will not want to print in a magazine certain words and, you say, certain passages. In that event what I ask is that when omissions are made a blank or some sign of omission be made that isn't to be confused with the dots that writers employ when they wish to avoid biting on the nail and writing a hard part of a book. . . . (The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway-Maxwell Perkins Correspondence edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli (1996, p. 91))

Also, John Gardner's take on editors and publishers is revealing (and unfortunately) right on target:

One should fight like the devil the temptation to think well of editors. They are all, without exception -at least some of the time-incompetent or crazy. Like writers, they are under insupportable pressures: they have to choose books that will sell, or at least bring the publisher honor, so they become hypercritical, gunshy, cynical. It is useful, in short, for young writers to think of editors as limited people, though if possible one should treat them politely. They are often ambitious idealists . . . . but they're unsure of themselves. The editor is happiest when he can bet on a favorite while at the same time appearing to have discovered him. (On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner (1983, p. 101))

Finding Material

Where does one find the sort of material that will move him to more fruitful, more effective writing? How does he do it? The answer is anticlimactic‑the way differs for each writer. The trick is to try anything‑everything, to experiment within the limits of one's capabilities, to learn what those capabilities are. Talents differ. Some writers are more gifted stylists; some handle ideas more effectively‑ideas as drama; some have and convey greater feeling; some create more complex characters. Some are enormously inventive; some are more technically proficient. Talents lie within talents; you must learn the geography and archaeology of yours.

Let me conclude with a few thoughts that come to mind to convey to those of you who are consciously on the hunt for something worthwhile to say. Finding it may become the work of a lifetime‑a true seeking always. is‑but even as one seeks he must say what he knows presently as though it were worth saying, although some writers would warn you, "There's nothing to write about. Amuse yourself. It's all words and nothing but words." Others translate "something worthwhile to say" into "something new." But I'm sure you understand that novelty‑being a la mode‑at the heart of the scene, is not necessarily being where a writer ought to be. On the, other hand, to experiment implies concern with newness, though best as originality. That means it is your business to try to present your material, if you possibly can‑‑‑‑‑we are back to talents within talents‑to present it in new forms.

Obviously the major source of fiction ideas is the self's experience, your lives, individual to collective. I want to say a word about the collective, but first let me qualify what I said about originality by adding that one ought to say what he can say‑although it has been said, written, untold times before. To throw out experience because it isn't unique (theoretically individual experience always is) is to throw out the baby with the water. One has to begin at the beginning‑with what one is and knows.

from "Finding Your Voice" in Talking Horse by Bernard Malamud

The Novel is Like a Tapestry

". . . .the novel is like a tapestry. It's a long and painstaking process, and I have to work on the details and create an alternative world, and it has to, be as full and rich as I can make it. A short story is like painting a watercolor--the challenge is to have a lightness of touch. What I'm working with is nuance and subtlety and ellipses--what I'm leaving out is important as what I'm putting in. I have to work with the power of suggestion and I love the form because of this.

From "An Interview with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni" THE WRITER'S CHRONICLE September 2002

Dialogue

Dialogue, contrary to popular view, is not a recording of actual speech; it is a semblance of speech, an invented language of exchanges that build in tempo or content toward climaxes. (Sol Stein)

Give Your Characters Goals

Give your characters specific, urgent goals. Make the goals important. Make them believable, and make sure they’ll have emotional impact for the reader. If the character’s long-range goal is to find happiness or inner peace, you’ll have to give him a dramatic, difficult history that will infuse the goal with power through contrast. No matter how important the goal is, it has to be urgent in order to have emotional force. Put pressure on the character’s ability to achieve the goal. Make it a race—against time, an enemy, his own mental stability, financial security, danger, another’s choices—to keep the tension high.

From “Fiction’s Connecting Link: Emotion” by Kathy Jacobson from:
The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing edited by Meg Leder and Jack Heffron

Revision

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil. (Truman Capote)