Monday, July 31, 2006

Passivity in American Letters

In a recent essay in the New York Times Book Review, author Benjamin Kunkel complained that the problem with today's memoirs isn't that they're untruthful but that their protagonists are too passive. Without citing specific examples (except for a quote from Running with Scissors), Kunkel argued that today's memoirs feature main characters whose only accomplishment is to have endured suffering and survived.

Last weekend, memoirist Mary Karr responded, in a letter to the Book Review, by referring Kunkel to his own novel Indecision, whose hero has so much trouble making up his mind about anything that he does just about nothing for about two hundred pages. Finally, after taking drugs and having sex in South America, Kunkel's hero decides to do something: he goes to his old prep school and delivers a lecture about something called "democratic socialism." Not exactly an edge-of-your-seat plot.

Passive heroes are not unique to memoirs. You can find plenty of passivity on both sides of the fiction/non-fiction divide. I agree with Kunkel's complaint (and said something similar in my own essay on memoirs in Poets and Writers) that too often American memoirists write about bad childhoods, abuse, drug addiction, surviving a fatal disease, any affliction you can name. However, a survey of American fiction turns up much the same thing.

Want to read about surviving child abuse? Try Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison. Surviving slavery? Start with Toni Morrison's Beloved or The Bluest Eye and then keep on going. Surviving the boss from hell? Try The Nanny Diaries or The Devil Wears Prada. From award winners to best-selling fluff, our fiction is filled with heroes and heroines who survive rather than act.

Why is this happening? For one thing, during the `90s, thanks to Oprah Winfrey and the increasing popularity of ethnic and gender studies, we became surrounded by the victim narrative. On TV, in school, in the movies, newspapers, and magazines, stories of manly straight white men doing bold deeds were replaced by tales of noble sufferers (often victims of those manly white men) whose act of courage was to tell a story that had not yet been told.

I also think the passive hero syndrome is a side effect of the growth in the teaching of creative writing. It's hard to make up stories and at the same time to make them believable. As a result, many creative writing teachers exhort students to "write what you know" (without adding, "or else, know about what you write.") And since most people who take creative writing classes in America are not rocket scientists, brain surgeons, or astronauts, the world that they know may not seem immense. They may not recognize the drama of everyday events like work, family, and love, but rather feel tempted to reach for that one awful time in their lives when everything seemed to go wrong.

One more thing. Our lives today in America can seem so easy and well-ordered. Anything we could want can be found in a moment on the Internet. We walk into a restaurant and within minutes we are served a tasty meal fusing tastes and spices from a variety of sources, Asian, Mexican, African, French, all in one bite. Credit cards arrive every day in the mail promising us more free money to shop with. In such a climate, maybe we enjoy the thrill of watching things go wrong instead of right so often.

Whatever the cause, all this passivity in American writing can't be good for us because the picture it paints is false. As Americans, we enjoy a position of privilege and power unmatched on the planet since the time of the Roman empire. And yet we turn a blind eye to the things that go on in our name around the globe and instead cry over re-runs of talk shows because we too were not hugged enough by our fathers or we too have trouble managing our alcohol intake. When will our writers stop re-enforcing our penchant for self-pity and start exhorting us to wake up, and act up?

Sunday, July 16, 2006

How's Your Book Going?

At some point, every writer has probably had to answer the question "How's your book going?" I wonder, however, if other writers have had as much difficulty as I have in coming up with an honest answer.

For me the process of writing a book begins some time shortly after birth. It is the direct result of my collected life experiences, some large and meaningful, others seemingly insignificant, which together point me toward an interest in arcane subject matter. Sprinkle in some day dreaming and extended periods of self doubt. Then write. Read what you've written. Try not to throw up. Rewrite. Read again, preferably after hiding all sharp objects in the vicinity. Repeat this process one hundred times and you might end up with a first draft.

What is a first draft, anyway? Or more precisely, what is a draft? When I write a novel, I try to move logically from point A to point B and somehow always get waylaid at point Q and a half. I attempt to flesh out one character, only to discover that as I learn more about who she is, I learn that her interactions with my only fully realized character in the novel make absolutely no sense. And just how many rooms does Mrs. Hinckel's apartment have? Was the picture in her living room of a landscape or a naked woman straddling a unicorn? What does the interior of the synagogue on Rykestrasse in Berlin look like? What magazines would you find in the waiting room at a German doctor's office? Answering burning questions like these, that's the romantic life of a writer.

Right now, I've written and re-written the novel I'm working on so many times I've lost count of all the pages I've typed and torn up. My main character has gone from the age of 37 to 23. Her husband has changed careers several times (he's now an international lawyer specializing in real estate, and let's hope he sticks to it). Her boyfriend has changed nationalities several times and gone back to his original origins as of this writing. The book's length has gone from 160 (handwritten) to 350, streamlined down to 200 (a bit of a starvation diet), and now is hovering at a reasonable 250, where I hope it will linger.

It's a fine piece of work, but I'm the last person to know anything about it. Now is the stage when I begin passing it around to critics I trust so they can tell me about the holes I can't see because I've had my nose rubbed into this story for too long. I'm waiting for the advice I desperately need to bring this book home.

"I'm closer to the end than to the beginning," that's how my book is going. How much closer, I'm not sure yet.