How did I miss this?

Don't want to talk about cancer today, except to give a quick update that Dr. J doesn't know WTF is happening with me.

What I do want to discuss is this fascinating blog called the Book Design Review (a NYT blog? apparently so). How have I missed it? As with many things I stumble upon, this one came via a random read of another favorite blog, VQR, whose January 29th post is a nice rumination by Jacob Silverman on the state of the art of book covers called "Judging Covers." It interests me as a reader, as a writer, as an advertising and marketing professional, and as someone who has worked with a talented designer named Kevin Flores to design a book, cover included, by a fabulous writer named David Maizenberg. It's still available on Amazon, at twice the original cover price. (We're out of print.) The cover graces the top of this post.

Book cover design is of eternal interest to me -- the psychology behind the design (or lack thereof). The last book I bought because of the packaging was Michael Chabon's "Maps and Legends" -- I love Chabon, knew it would be a good read, but the cover was a layered gem, and the heft of the book (attributable to paper stock, not page count) felt substantial and very appealing. It's really a beautiful book, but you have to see it in person to get the full effect. Feels mysterious and layered, like an elaborate pop-up book does when you're six. 

Meantime, having logged in fifty books for my MFA program's annual First Novelist Award, I can report that, while it's apparent I can and do judge a book by its cover, I'm even quicker to judge -- and abandon -- a book with a goofy title. Holy mother of God, what were these publishers thinking? It would probably be untoward of me to list the worst offenders here; I'll wait until this year's award has been decided before nailing them semi-publicly. 

Book covers and titles... two mightily important elements authors rarely have much control over. Too bad.

Chemo tomorrow, then off for two weeks. A dream. 

Cheever, school, and teeth

     Have read several articles on and one interview with Cheever (Paris Review) in the last several days, as I turn around in my head the effects of his last, slim novel Oh What A Paradise It Seems. One tenet that consistently arises: keep moving forward, don't look back. He did not, for example, like to give interviews because he didn't like to discuss his work (looking back), and he found reading his own books as distasteful as "listening to a recording of my own conversations" -- he didn't do it. Sharklike; always thinking about the next thing. That's good advice for me to cotton to, considering my awful obsession with submitting (and collecting rejections for) my short fictions. If I could just concentrate on the novel to the exclusion of everything else... Publication is like love in that respect: happens when you least expect it, if it happens at all.

     Speaking of the novel, school starts tomorrow, and novel workshop has moved from Wednesdays to Monday evenings. I'll also be taking a lit class (Magical Realism) that meets twice a week, and thesis hours. The Program of Strengthening and Conditioning has worked well over the last week, and I think I will have enough stamina at least to get my ass to campus tomorrow evening. I have a chemo next Friday, and no class the following Monday (MLK Day), so it'll be a few weeks before I can discern whether treatment is going to impede me. In any case, I haven't driven a car in six weeks. Should work out well, I think.

     The Big Story around here is that A lost not one but TWO teeth (center, bottom) in the last two days. The Tooth Fairy came last night to our house for the first time, and back she'll come tonight. This morning, A pretended to believe with all her heart that a fairy had visited her, but her six-year-old cynicism kicked in this afternoon, and she announced she thought it was probably Mama and Papa who'd swiped the tooth and left the loot. 

     The teeth themselves are impossibly tiny, and I will keep them in a special box forever.

Little victories

     My campaign to regain stamina, now in its third day, progresses apace. It's as though I've broken the seal on Roo's Strengthening Medicine and am enjoying exponential results. Last week this time I had to follow a fifteen minute shower with an hour's nap; yesterday I did four loads of laundry. Urrah!

     I finished the last page of Revolutionary Road, closed the book, switched on the teevee, and saw Leo and Kate in a trailer for the upcoming film. Glad I didn't catch it while in the thick of the novel, 'cause that Hollywood set's not at all what I'd imagined the Wheelers' kitchen to look like. The novel now tops my list of favorites, and gives me all kinds of ideas about how to structure my own novel. I could gush for hours about the writing (really, I could; see "Strengthening Medicine" above) but the upshot is: I want to write like Richard Yates.

     I also want to write like John Cheever, whose last novel, Oh What A Paradise It Seems, I am reading this morning. It's slim, spare, and devastating, and has as much to teach about what to leave out as what to put on the page. Makes me want to take a weed whacker to my work.

     I read Chapter 1 of Ruby the Red Fairy to A last night. It felt great; she snuggled close. It's a Big Girl Chapter Book, you see, so intensely interesting. Tonight we discover if Rachel and her new friend Kirstey find anything cool in that black pot at one end of the rainbow.

     Second day in a row we've awoken to driving rain outside, and a pitch-black house. A is a trooper. It takes her a while to wake up, but once she does, she's laughing. What an agreeable little being. There is nothing I don't love about my child.

     Now: more Cheever, then a bit of fictioneering.

Book, film, fentanyl, parent tricks!

     I'm reading Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. It made my wish list because of my writing workshop instructor's high recommendation (he characterized Yates as a major 20th C. post-war literary novelist who has gone largely unnoticed and unheralded). I'm about three-quarters through it, and I love it, both for what it does to me as a reader, and for me as a writer. The story is so compelling, yet not much really happens outside the characters' own heads. All about suburban ennui, middle class angst, the search for greater meaning in work and family life, means justifying ends, and traditional vs. progressive roles of men and women as viewed in the fifties. (If a woman doesn't want children, might she be insane?) Pretty bland stuff. But Yates does the trick of energizing a story that in lesser hands would be a yawnfest by infusing the characters with such specific motivations and actions and flaws that there's instant empathy and, therefore, interest. Even the summary narrative and quasi-scenes sing. Describing the worries of two young children who are, compared to the main characters, only roughly sketched in, Yates puts us in their heads just before they drift off to sleep, "as their toes reach for a cooler place in the sheets." Ah! What a great and telling detail (it's warm in the plain little tract house, they've been in bed long enough to be restless, their worries make them tense) -- a clearly human gesture, so commonplace that the mere expression of it is startling. Beautiful.

     Another point of admiration is pacing and structure. Each character has a rather complex backstory, but somehow Yates slips it in almost between the lines of the forward action. There's very little "flashback" -- a lot of it comes about as summary narrative in the form of in-the-moment thoughts. So tricky, so seamless. I can't express how much I love this book.

     Another inspiration that came my way via Hopie and Andy -- and Netflix -- is the film "Starting Out in the Evening." I hadn't read the novel, but there are many moments in the movie that I am certain come directly from the book, particularly some odd gestures like the graduate student suddenly kissing the old writer's hand; smearing honey on his face; the way they lie side by side, crosswise, on the bed, like corpses. These bits, strung together, pull the characters to life, but it's their motivations -- again, specific, particular, complicated -- that create understanding and empathy. And like Revolutionary Road, nearly all of the "action" is interior: what choices will each person make, and why? How will they respond to each other in light of new information? How will their relationships change? How will they change? 

     I'm a sucker for complicated characters in ordinary situations, and writing that elevates them to individual human status. I haven't written a lick in two weeks, but because of these two influences, the book and the film, I'm jazzed about picking up the next scene of my novel. Not bad.

     Saw Dr. J yesterday, who upped me to 50 mcg fentanyl patches and suggested we take off a couple of weeks before going back for another round of chemo. OK. 

     After five and a half years, I still feel very much a rookie at this parenting business. However, occasionally I stumble onto something that works and makes me feel like a genius. Therefore, I hereby present a Parent Trick:

     M took A to work with him this morning -- she is excited because she will get to sit in on two meetings, which makes her feel very grown up, since "meeting" is the euphemism M and I use when we go somewhere she is not invited. "Miss Amanda is coming over tonight to hang out with you." "Why?" "Mama and Papa have to go to a meeting." Worked for my parents, and so far, it's working for me and M.

     Off to read and, perhaps, write.

I don't have a title for this one.

     Joanne called from Dr. J's office late yesterday afternoon, as I was leaving to fetch A from school. The plan is for Dr. J to consult with Dr. W on my chemo chart/history and get back to me. I hope getting back to me means an appointment in the infusion center, not some rhetorical conversation about limited options and pain relief. At least they're not talking about surgery -- that I know of. Hope I didn't jinx it just then.

     I went to workshop last night (novel) and we talked about favorite first lines in literature. The consensus seemed to be that lines that set the tone/voice or introduce relationships or settings are nice, but what really pulls a reader in is putting characters in play -- putting them in peril, giving them a sharply defined dilemma, conveying the whole world of the novel. Somehow.

     I favor lines that give a narrator (first or third person) a reason to be telling the story right then, right there. Kind of a, "Well it all began when..." sort of thing. For instance:

• "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude) 

     That's a famous example and for good reason. Does an awful lot of heavy lifting, and it's lyrical and beautifully rendered to boot. Another:

• "Fifteen minutes before happiness left him, Josh Goldin led his summer intern by the elbow to share in the hallelujah of a Friday afternoon." (Darin Strauss, More Than It Hurts You)

     Again we're looking backwards and forwards at the same time, and I love that hallelujah image. It's as though the narrator is taking the reader by the arm and saying, I'll get to why happiness left him in a minute, but first you need to know what came before. It all started when..." Here are two more that suck me in but good:

• "First, I had to get the body in the boat." (Rhian Ellis, After Life)
• "My name was Salman, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973." (Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones)

     WHAM! We're there. How can you not keep reading? Although with the Sebold, the first thirty pages or so were among the roughest I'd ever read; I nearly couldn't continue. Actually, I quoted the first two sentences here, but the first one does the work with the past tense, was, telegraphing that this is a narrator whose earthly existence is in question. The second line is the payoff.

     One of my favorite writers, whose work lately has been pejoratively labeled chicklit (lately, because the term and the notion didn't exist when her books hit U.S. markets), is Banana Yoshimoto. Youngest person ever to win the Japanese equivalent of the National Book Award when she was 22 or thereabouts. She was translated to English for the first time in the late eighties/early nineties, and a whisp of a novel that came out in Japan in 1991, Goodbye, Tsugumi, was released in the U.S. only in the last three or four years. (I don't have it in front of me.) Anyway, the first line is:

• "It's true: Tsugumi really was an unpleasant young woman."

     Here's what I love about it: It sets a chatty, conspiratorial tone. It establishes three brains: the narrator, the reader whom she is addressing, and this character named Tsugumi about whom we are eager, suddenly, to learn everything. Yoshimoto's sentences are just this simple and straightforward throughout her work, yet the cumulative effect is a deep reckoning with what makes people tick; their motivations. Their fears, needs, and desires. And how can they help each other thrive? It's subtle, gorgeous writing. 

     The first line of my novel is crap, but I'll make it better once I find out what the thing is about. The only way to do that is to (cough) write it. 

     I'll just be over here, writing, if anyone's looking for me.