Thursday, November 30, 2006

Bursting with Books

Last night as I was cleaning out my closet, my book tower fell over.

I love books. I always have. I'm the kind of person who has a hard time going into a bookstore and walking out empty-handed. As I've begun to publish, I have more friends who write books and publish as well, and so I feel it's important to support their work by buying their books. I also believe strongly that independent bookstores are a great resource on the endangered species list, so every time I go into one of those, I almost always buy something as well.

The result of all this is that almost every square inch of surface area in my apartment is packed with books. My bookshelves, of course, but also my desk, my nightstand, the floor beside my desk, are all taken up by books. For some years, I used to save every book I've ever acquired, even ones I didn't like. After moving several times, I began to wonder whether it was such a good idea to continue carting around that thousand-page copy of Iain Pairs's An Instance at the Fingerpost, a book that sat on my shelves for four years unread. Did I really need to save Gould's Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan, despite its rave review in the New York Times and beautiful gold spine? (Owned for six years, never opened once.) Or how about Jim McGreevey's Confession, or The Nanny Diaries, books I acquired for cheap, out of curiosity? My curiosity has now been satisfied. I'm ready to move on.

So every once in a while, I add a book to a tower of Babel that grows and grows in my closet until it reaches an absurd height, and then I remove the books from the apartment, sell them or donate them or give them away. The trouble is, the tower seems to grow ever more rapidly, and it's all I can do to keep up.

Still, it's hard to let go of a book. Maybe I will find time for Gould's fish after all. And maybe I'll want to refer to those Nanny Diaries for a scene to share with a creative writing class. (About how to write a fast-paced but ultimately shallow satire of a shallow subculture of upper crust New York with a deeply unsatisfying anticlimactic ending?) Tastes change. Maybe I'll regret letting of Mr. McGreevey. If I just squeezed those books together a bit more tightly on the shelf, there'd be room for one or two more...

So what do you do with books once you've read them? Keep them all? Some? How do you decide? I'd be interested to hear.

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Return to Oz

For my current project, which features a Wizard of Oz fan as its main character, I've been rereading several books in the Oz series written by L. Frank Baum. (Baum wrote thirteen sequels to his bestselling hit novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. After his death, the series was continued by a few other authors. Even today, many hopefuls to the title Royal Historian of Oz continue to pen Oz sequels.)

One of the wonderful things about re-reading these books, which were written over a span of twenty years from 1900 until the author's death in 1919, is seeing the development of a writer over time, emotionally as well as stylistically. The first book was never intended to launch a series. Indeed, Baum wrote other stories about magical two-letter lands, like The Magical Monarch of Mo and Queen Zixi or Ix. Yet somehow the lands of Mo and Ix never made the same mark on the culture as Oz.

When Baum began writing his sequels to the original book, he tried to get around the problem of returning to the same territory by setting several of his books outside the land of Oz, telling stories about characters who traveled through other magical lands (including another two-letter country, Ev) to get to Oz. Finally, in 1910, with his sixth entry in the Oz series, The Emerald City of Oz, Baum announced that the land of Oz was forever cut off with the rest of the world and so he could no longer receive news of the latest Oz happenings to report in future Oz books. The series was therefore concluded.

For a few years, Baum wrote other fairy tale books, none of which approached the success of the Oz books in terms of sales, even when he tried to import a couple of Oz characters into his non-Oz stories. So in 1913, he "discovered" that he could resume communication with the land of Oz via the telegraph, and he wrote one Oz book a year from then on.

What accounts for these books' enduring charm? Baum certainly has his moments as a writer, particularly in the first chapter of The Wizard of Oz, in which his masterful interweaving of plot, character, setting, and word choice is as good as anything ever produced in American letters. Baum also has his weaker moments when he relies on a series of literary tics that get increasingly annoying with their repetition in each new book. Food is often "smoking hot." Trees are always "stately." Rooms in fairy castles are often scented with sprays of perfume and lit with a soft glow from an unknown source. He tends to do much better when he's tackling the flat landscape of Kansas than the enchanted halls of castles in the Emerald City and beyond. His characters can also seem to lack much variation. They're usually a combination of lucky girls like Dorothy, vain, silly, arrogant talking cats and villainous queens, good-hearted idiot savants like the beloved Scarecrow, resourceful, calm, unruffled boys, and villains whose silliness always seems more genuine than their cruelty.

At the same time, Baum tells his stories with remarkable sincerity, so much so that it's hard to believe that Oz is not a real place. He writes about his favorite characters as if they're good friends, and describes magical encounters with genuine wonder, as if they'd occurred to him rather than been invented by him. As a child reading these books, I used to dream of finding just the write cyclone to whisk me away to Oz. As an adult going back to them, I was surprised by how quickly the same longing recurred and how difficult it was for me to shake it off.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Good and Bad

This week I've asked my creative writing students to give me some feedback on how their work is progressing and how the class is going for them. I've gotten some very thoughtful and interesting responses. For example, I was surprised (and gratified to learn) how interested many of them were in the fine art of line-editing.

One thing that's stuck with me from these responses and others I've heard from students in the past is their desire to know what makes for "good" writing and what makes for "bad" writing. When I used to teach poetry, for example, one student asked me to bring in a good poem and a bad poem, explain to the class what made one good and the other bad, and then hand out a list of rules so that students could follow them and write only good poems in the future.

It's a perfectly reasonable thing to want to know, and if anyone out there could provide me with rules of "good" and "bad," I'd be grateful to hear about them so I could pass this information on to others. For myself, I no longer can claim to know what "good" and "bad" mean anymore, and increasingly I find that I no longer care.

I think that Zadie Smith's recent novel On Beauty is a textbook example of a "bad" book. In fact I think it represents some of the worst tendencies in contemporary literature and constitutes a fundamental misunderstanding of E. M. Forster's Howards End, the book that Smith claims inspired her own novel. The New York Times Book Review, however, names it as one of the top ten books of the previous year. They think it is a "good" book. Good for them, good for me. I have my opinion, and they have theirs.

I also think rum raisin ice cream is an example of "bad" ice cream. What if I said that the New York Times sang the praises of rum raisin ice cream? Would you care? Would I change my opinion of rum raisin?

For me, the only opinions about literature that mean anything are ones that engage with the essential qualities of the text. We can talk about characters and word choices and plot structure and setting and the use of time. We can talk about how tired we ought to be as readers of books detailing (yet again) the petty tempests in academic teapots, or the cloying contemporary fetish for "updating" plots of classic novels by transplanting them roots and all from the past to the present, ever so cutely substituting "emails" for "letters," for example. Then we can have a real discussion about the validity of these specific decisions.

As for what's good and what's bad, I can only say what I like. But you, reader, are equally entitled to like what you like. But by simply exchanging our opinions about good and bad, we immediately end the discussion because we can go no further. Because as much as I hate rum raisin, you'll still go on eating it, and as much as you want me to switch from cookie dough, I'm sticking to that too.