Friday, March 31, 2006

A Matter of Style

While I can't speak for everyone, it's hard for me to imagine a writer who isn't prejudiced one way or the other about literary style. It won't come as a surprise to anyone who's read even a few sentences of my work that I prefer dry, clear, sharp writing to robust, purple prose. Given the choice between Jane Austen and Laurence Sterne, or to be more contemporary, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon, I'll go for Austen and Roth every time. That's not to say I haven't enjoyed the works of flashier writers ranging from Henry Fielding to Thomas Hardy to David Foster Wallace. But there's a difference in my appreciation of the two types of writing. With Hardy, I'll slug it out with his winding sentences and use of arcane vocabulary like "dumbledore" for the rewards of his bizarre plots and unforgettable characters. When I read a master of concision like E. M. Forster, however, I get pleasure out of his plot and characters as well as the cool elegance of a line like, "To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it."

During the `80s and for a part of the `90s, it seemed as though lush, muscular, flashy prose wasn't quite so commonplace. Minimalists like Raymond Carver held more sway, particularly among graduates of MFA programs. These days, however, walking through the literary fiction section of a bookstore you can't help but trip over plump four-hundred-plus page books jam-packed with zany characters, plot twists, and marathon-length sentences that you don't read so much as decipher, like a message written in Morse Code.

That's not to say the minimalists are inherently superior to other writers. At its worst, minimalism can be a cover for lazy, unimaginative, and dull writing, the kind you might encounter in a Dick and Jane reader. However, maximalism at its worst suffers from much the same disease, lazy, unimaginative, and dull writing that because it's so busy can sometimes seem more impressive than it actually is.

Take, for example, an excerpt from the novel "The Amalgamation Polka" by Stephen Wright, recently published to high acclaim. Here is a representative sentence: "She flung open the window, admitting the clemency of spring, its sweet pastoral breath, and the nervous twitter and rustle of sparrows on the roof." In English, this sentence means that she opened the window and felt a spring breeze and heard birds outside. But that's not good enough for Wright, who wants his character to "fling" open the window (for no apparent reason I could find other than to impress the reader with the choice of "fling" instead of "open"). He then gives us "the clemency of spring," a metaphor that made me pause, but for the wrong reasons. Clemency from what? Winter, I suppose. This leads me to wonder, what sin has been committed to earn the dire punishment of winter? Who handed down this stern judgment? And to whose grace do we owe this welcome "clemency"? "The nervous twitter and rustle of sparrows on the roof" sounds alright to me; that's a specific, if uninspired, bit of detail I can wrap my mind around. The same cannot be said for the cloying and vague "sweet pastoral breath." Maybe this phrase is an attempt to imitate or spoof an archaic, formalized style of writing. So why does it remain merely an attempt at parody instead of a direct hit? For me, it's because the choice of words seems like a forced reach for a kind of majestic tone that the writer isn't himself comfortable with. It reeks of the kind of pretense you often hear in public speakers like Jesse Jackson who are so anxious to pass themselves off as intellectuals that they confuse words like "tragical" and "tragic" or "orientate" and "orient."

Compare the laxness of these word choices with another pastoral image, this from the forthcoming novel by Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan: "The world was golden around me, the evening sun setting light to a row of swaying alders; the alders abuzz with the warble of siskin birds, those striped yellow fellows from our nursery rhymes. I turned pastoral for a moment, my thoughts running to Beloved Papa, who was born in a village and for whom village life should be prescribed, as only there--half asleep in a cowshed, naked and ugly, but sober all the same--do the soft tremors of what could be happiness cross his swollen Aramaic face." Wright gives us sparrows, but Shteyngart gives us "alders abuzz with the warble of siskin birds." Which writer would you rather go bird-watching with? Wright's sparrows are merely there for window dressing, to give us an idea of a real scene. Shteyngart's alders, however, are not only specifically observed, but also they connect the image of the countryside to the theme of childhood innocence ("those striped yellow fellows from our nursery rhymes,"), which in turn leads naturally and elegantly to memories of the narrator's father. Every word in Shteyngart's sentence seems chosen for a precise effect, and yet no one could accuse Shteyngart of dullness. His sentences are every bit as lively and lush as Wright's, with that added advantages of meaning and sense.

So how do we account for the acclaim Wright has received for "the vibrant beauty and savory brilliance of every paragraph" of his writing, "the untrammeled delight it offers to anyone lucky enough to read it"? I can't, except to say that when reading Maximialists, critics are often so distracted by the strangeness of the writing that they don't stop to take the sentences to task and rather accept their somersaulting on faith. It's a little like watching a movie with expensive special effects, when we're so dazed from all the fireworks on screen that when the smoke clears, we forget to notice there's nothing else there.

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

My Own Sex and the City

I'm still jet-lagged from the trip back to Rome, so instead of sleeping I've been watching borrowed DVD's on my Mac until 4 in the morning. A friend lent me the first two seasons of Sex and the City, which I'd never seen before, and that's what I've started with.

The show made its debut the same year that I moved to New York City, and watching it now is like opening a time capsule. This is pre-9/11, pre-dot-com bust, pre-George Bush (even pre-Monica Lewinsky) New York City. The World Trade Center still dominates the skyline. Jobs paying twenty dollars an hour to do little more than surf the internet all day are still plentiful. Manhattan is a big playground of fusion-cuisine restaurants and smoky bars where every night it seems possible you might meet The One, the man or woman you'd spend the rest of your life with.

Like the characters of Sex and the City, I went from date to date, trying to convince myself that despite each new flaw I'd discover in the latest guy I was seeing, this time things were different, this relationship would last. And though none of them did last, none of them ended my faith in the possibility that the next relationship would be different from the one before.

It was a confusing, heady time with daily miracles and catastrophes. I'd just started grad school and was meeting my writing friends in cafes to exchange our latest short stories, hot from our printers. The most ambitious of us would feverishly submit our work to literary magazines that would send back form rejection letters, occasionally scribbled with a cryptic handwritten "Sorry, but try us again!" Or "Nice work" and then an illegible signature as if to say, "Here's a compliment, but don't dare try to use this to establish a relationship with a real person on our staff."

Politics hardly seemed to matter. Certainly they mattered less than the brilliant screenplays we were going to write, the important sculptures we were going to create, the torrent of culture and cuisine we felt it was our duty to consume and comment on.

Back then, the one thing I knew for sure was that I wanted to leave New York as soon as I could. I hated the crowded sidewalks, the lines, the extravagant prices, the snobby bar scene, the stupid parties where you were expected to hold court with a drink in your hand and utter clever bon mots. I used to wander through Riverside Park, trying to find a corner where I'd be surrounded by trees and nothing and no one else. There I'd dream of living in a quiet, civilized college town with my own car and cheap, massive grocery stores with parking lots.

Where would I go? How would I earn a living? Who would I fall in love with? When would I be published? I was so consumed with trying to find the answers to these questions as quickly as possible that I completely missed that I was living in an enchanted fairyland. Many of the literary magazines I used to get rejection letters from have folded because no one reads anymore. The dot-com jobs have vanished. The friends from that time in my life have mostly moved away from the city and started different lives. New York grows ever more expensive, and the city's festive atmosphere has darkened under the shadow of the constant threat of terrorism. Even in our happy, reckless moments, at the back of our minds, our joy is tinged with the upsetting knowledge that elsewhere on the globe, war rages on.

Sunday, March 05, 2006

By Hand

A week ago, I boarded a British Airways flight from Rome to New York (which included a harried transfer at London Heathrow). While on board, I opened up my notebook and began to write a new short story. When I say notebook, I mean the kind with paper inside and not microchips. When I say write, I mean write, not type. I've always written my first drafts by hand... until now.

Getting the pen to move across the paper was like pushing it through sludge. The words refused to suggest themselves. Characters refused to speak. The rooms they moved in remained featureless, unfurnished blank cubes without traces of human contact. I finally had to give it up.

For years, the only way I've been able to start a project has been with pen and paper. (It also makes for a handy parlor trick to pull out of my hat at readings. "You've written an entire book BY HAND?") But I wasn't doing it to impress anyone. It was the way I began writing as a kid, before computers were widely available. It felt natural to be able to flip back and forth through pages, to scribble notes to myself in the margins or on the back of the page. It felt satisfying to scratch, scratch, scratch through a sentence or paragraph that doesn't work, or to scribble in a brilliant new insight across the white space on the top.

Writing by hand also forced me to re-evaluate what I'm working on word by word as I type what I've written into my computer. It created a necessary extra step that gave me a second chance to consider my choices. Did I really believe deep down in that metaphor? Would a character from Georgia really speak like a princess born in London? Was this inside reference to my favorite Jane Austen novel worth an extra sentence that bogged down my forward narrative drive?

I've been a true believer on the subject of writing by hand for so long that now as I try to continue the habit, I'm all the more surprised by my failure. The trouble began with my novel, which I've written twice by hand, once a couple of years ago, and again all last fall in Rome. When I was dissatisfied with the results, I just couldn't face the idea of opening a notebook and starting at page one once more. Instead, I turned on my computer and began to type. My fingers flew. I didn't focus on getting scenes right word by word. I threw in details of setting and physical description when I felt like it, but didn't stop to worry over them. Instead I homed in on action and moved forward through time with each sentence. The characters seemed to dance across the screen, and all I had to do was keep up with them. After a month, I had a glistening new novel instead of the lumpy mess I'd been trying to polish without success for so long.

Recently, as I tried to begin a new story on paper, I experienced the same frustration. Somehow writing each word felt too slow for me. But when I turned on my computer, I felt liberated. Scenes, characters, settings could all be fleshed out later. The main thing was to race to the end, and to go back and fill in shadings later. The new approach worked like a dream. Within a week, I had my story.

I'm not convinced that this rejuvination I feel from working on a computer rather than with pen and paper has much to do with the physical properties of either medium. It's probably making a change for change's sake that helped me more than the nature of that change. If I were a writer who preferred to work afternoons and had decided to swtich to mornings, it might have done just as well. The important thing is to shake things up, not rely on what's worked in the past.

The same goes for the content of the work itself. In my previous work, I explored stable codes of behavior associated with Judaism or American middle class life. In the work I'm doing now, I'm beginning to consider more personal, completely invented codes of behavior that shift from scene to scene, chapter to chapter, plunging characters who believe themselves to be rational into life-shaking confusion. The results are thrillingly and achingly alive. More importantly, they present me with new problems to solve, new people to get to know, new questions to ask my readers who like me are trying to make sense of a world that seems to be teetering on the edge of chaos.