About that novel

Obama in the Oval notwithstanding, it's been a shit month.

Just posted this to my novel workshop discussion board:

Dear Novelists,

Despite my best efforts, my novel insists on becoming a fucking bleak but spirited meditation on illness -- not at all what I wanted to write, the opposite, in fact.

Some of you know that my own health has been unsteady for many years, and has frankly tanked in the last few months. The smoky scrim affects the attitude, you see, darkening both the writer's world view (a.k.a. the H*** Doctrine) and the characters' moods, abilities, and personalities. Whereas a protagonist was sharply complex, occasionally witty, perhaps endearing if exasperating in Chapter 2, by Chapter 8 he comes off as caustic and cynical, and nothing if not self-involved. Another character, initially in possession of some semblance of humor, now finds herself altogether bereft of charm. Wit is eclipsed by a withering tongue; anything and anyone in her orbit is a black gnat to be swatted away efficiently, inelegantly. Nor can I seem to write minor characters who might elicit empathy or interest; even the children are hateful.

It sucks to be sick. It does. I wish I could write a novel about people rising to an impossible occasion, but the truth is that some people don't rise at all. The power of positive thinking is crap, I assure you. (I've lived twelve years in fear and loathing. Twelve years!) Yes, optimistic people beat odds all the time. So do cynics. And yes, sunny dispositions "lose long battles fought heroically," while many, many more frightened, confused, grim and hopeless souls slip without note into the great hereafter. It's an obscene fallacy that you can think and act your way out of cancer, and while it's my nature to appear upbeat -- some say naive -- I'm bone-tired of putting on the show.

Writing this novel was to be, for me, a way of spinning beauty of the transcendent sort out into the universe. Human heart conquering and all that. What I've learned is that the only beauty I have to offer is the godforsaken Keatsian kind: the truth as I know it at this moment, ugly and unvarnished, spare, splintered, seething and practically impossible to manage.

Writing the first sixty-five pages of "Control Theory" has been, aptly, not only a reflection of but an exercise in the theme of the novel itself: mustering the illusion of control in an uncontrollable circumstance. The prose is precious, careful, cold. It's pretty in places, but passionless. (Passion being the willful release of control.) Just look at how ridiculously crafted, how cloying, this first-draft synopsis is -- I wrote it in early December, before the most recent shitstorm shook me awake:

"Coco Fine and her family have lived next door to neighborhood eccentrics Victor and Anna Gibbles for four months, and they’ve never tried to be friendly. But when Anna collapses one rainy afternoon, her daughter appeals to Coco for help, initiating Coco’s reluctant involvement in the Gibbles’ lives.

Anna, a successful painter, is a diabetic and alcoholic whose declining health has gradually thrust Victor into the role of fulltime caregiver. As their relationship succumbs to the pressures of illnesss and Victor forges a friendship with Coco, Anna decides to end her life.

Hilarity ensues.

Not really. Coco and her husband Charles, rattled by the death of a neighbor they never took the time to know, resolve to assuage their guilt by “adopting” Victor—checking in on him, inviting him to holiday meals, having their young children, Eleanor and Gus, spend time with him. Each relationship deepens and differentiates, revealing the complexities of Victor’s and Anna’s marriage, the mutable dynamics of the younger Fine family, and the sacrifices people make for those they love."

...Really, aside from the aside, you can almost sing along with the jacket flap copy, can't you? HORK.

Screwing up my courage: where to go from here? Well, I think what I turn in next will necessarily be a hot mess. Coco a bad mother? Yes, indeed, I believe she is. Victor an acerbic old miscreant lusting after the neighbor as his wife -- herself a real peach -- lies dying upstairs? Absolutely, yes. Crap kids? Fuck yeah.

Will these people be likable? I doubt it. Despicable with a dash of funny, more likely. Will they be interesting? They interest me. Will their actions and motivations be true? Utterly.

Tired of being sick. Tired of writing what other people want to read, of saying what other people want to hear.

Gloves off.

***

So... I experienced the sudden onset of new symptoms on Friday afternoon, just after I got home from chemo. Awful, terrible mess. I'm to call Dr. J's office tomorrow to check in, and will go get checked out on Tuesday. Meanwhile, a ton of crap to do for school -- meetings, papers, so many pages to read. I like reading, of course, but feel overwhelmed and unable to concentrate. I've apparently dropped the ball on the novel award I administer for my teaching assistantship; got the faculty adviser, who is also my novel workshop instructor and my thesis adviser, a bit worked up. The worst. It'll be a stone miracle if I pull off finishing this semester.

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.