by Sara Nelson
As you know, I’ve fallen in love with books and their authors before. So you’ll understand how serious my Faber flirtation was when I tell you that I could have no more double-booked on him than . . . well, you follow the metaphor. Even more telling: the first thing I did upon closing Crimson Petal was set out to meet the rest of its family. Faber, apparently, also wrote a novel called Under the Skin, which came out in 2000; there was no question that I would read that next.
I’m not always an oeuvre reader, or at least not an oeuvre-in-a-row reader. I kind of flit from one topic, one genre, and one author to another, depending on my mood and what’s going on around me and also, to some extent, what’s in the nearest pile at three A.M. Call me fickle, but in the same way that I hesitate to reread, I’m too impatient to stick with one author for weeks at a time: I want to get on to the next thing. And besides, sometimes reading a writer’s books back to back can be like scheduling a second, or third, or fourth date too close to the first: you get such a rush of information and some of it is stuff you don’t necessarily want to know, at least not so soon.
That’s what happened between me and Paul Watkins, for example. I first “met” Paul through Archangel, his weird novel about an environmentalist and a logger in the American Northwest; I remember loving it especially because it had some strange characters and subplots, one involving the local crazy woman whom towns-people called Mary the Clock. “This is great stuff!” I remember thinking, as I trudged out to the bookstore to find everything else my new beloved had ever written. “I need more.” But I never got past the first thirty pages of The Story of My Disappearance, and to judge from the lineup of uncracked Watkins spines on my shelves, I never opened the others. For me, Watkins made a great first impression, but to get to know him was, I’m afraid, to get over him.
Still, I’ve certainly “done” a writer’s whole body of work before and enjoyed it. There’s Philip Roth, of course, who, as far as I’m concerned, can never write enough. Through the decades when many friends told me they’d taken a Roth sabbatical—“too mean,” some say; “too sex-obsessed,” according to others—I’ve faithfully read every one of his books; I may have found some titles harder to get into than others, but I’m endlessly fascinated by his ability to tell the same story of Jewish dislocation again and again. Ditto, Diane Johnson’s novels (but not the nonfiction); there’s something about her obsession with the clash of cultures that resonates with me. And when I discovered Elinor Lipman’s Isabel’s Bed, back in the mid-nineties, I knew I’d found a soul mate in what some critics have called the “contemporary Jane Austen.” Not only did I immediately go out and read all her previous novels, including her best and first, And Then She Found Me, but I still make sure to read the subsequent ones as soon as they’re published. Even though they’re not all spectacular, I feel closer to Lipman with every book; because she’s like a friend from childhood with whom your relationship ebbs and flows, I can recognize and forgive the inevitable flaws and false steps because I’ve been walking along with her for so long.
It’s a truism—some might say a tragedy—about contemporary publishing that a successful writer needs to become a brand, like Kleenex: you write one book that establishes your sensibility and themes, and then you have to write that book over and over again. That’s clearly the secret behind the success of, say, Mary Higgins Clark and John Grisham and Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum; Ludlum is so well established as a brand that there are still books coming out under his name (written from “notes” and with an “editor”) although he died back in 2001. And even many so-called more serious writers seem to write the same book multiple times to continued success. Look at Caleb Carr, who made a name for himself with The Alienist and then turned around to write virtually the same bestselling book—a historical thriller with social and political undertones—in The Angel of Darkness. (And then look at the failure of his Killing Time, a foray into sci-fi horror; you can look at it, but almost nobody else did.) The list is very long: David McCullough (impossibly detailed historical portraits); Kathryn Harrison (turgid tales of forbidden sexuality, whether fiction or no); Anita Shreve (upscale romance); among many others. “It’s just easier this way,” one editor told me recently. “Readers like to know what they’re going to get.”
Maybe it was ever thus. There’s a school of thought that insists even Dickens and Edith Wharton wrote the same novels of manners time and again. But where does that theory leave, say, Truman Capote? On one recent morning, I curled up in bed with Breakfast at Tiffany’s while Charley watched SpongeBob SquarePants on Nickelodeon. Having not read the book in years (and having seen the movie ages ago), I was struck by its gentleness, and the fact that the original portrait of Holly Golightly was a lot sadder and darker than Audrey Hepburn ever implied; how could this possibly have come from the same author who wrote In Cold Blood? The subject matter and tone couldn’t be more different, and yet when I looked at the true-crime masterpiece, I realized the two did have something in common: they both contained exquisitely detailed portraits of people on the edge of society, and both created an almost unbearably recognizable sense of place. They’re very different books, but there is a thread that connects them.
Still, I pity poor authors. Either they go ahead and write what they want, and what they know, and what the masses—if the number of people in this country who buy books are enough to qualify as one mass, let alone more than one—want them to write, and then a wiseguy like me comes along and calls them one-trick ponies. Or worse, somebody takes a flier and tries to write something different or strange or unexpected, and that same wiseguy feels betrayed. “What happened to the man I loved?” I would have wailed to Paul Watkins.
Maybe the point is, as Vladimir Nabokov once said, that good writers should imitate only themselves, in different forms, but that doesn’t mean they should try out sensibilities like so many jackets at an after-Christmas sale. Maybe it’s best, at least for us persnickety readers, when a writer has one set of subjects or themes that he revisits in different ways over time. Or at least that’s what I told myself as I opened Faber’s Under the Skin and began to read about this weird race of creatures, part animal, part human, who abduct and kill full humans, whom they call “vodsels,” and sell them off for meat. But for a long while, I was having trouble associating this tense and edgy sci-fi-ish novel—which reminded me of Animal Farm, Jonathan Lethem’s Girl in Landscape, and a weird dogs-asking book called The Lives of the Monster Dogs—with the languorous, lush, and Dickensian Crimson Petal and the White. “Be careful,” the editor of the last had told me when I called to say I was going out to get Under the Skin. “It’s very different.”
I’ll say. Crimson Petal is about a whore and her lover, and its venue is class-defined nineteenth-century England. It has a few subplots (though true Dickens lovers say it doesn’t begin to have enough) about the businessman’s brother, his servants, and his long-suffering wife. Under the Skin, on the other hand, is a seemingly straightforward narrative about an apparent female who has been surgically altered and forced to be a murderer; it’s set in a vague future. One is a historical; the other an allegory. And yet, eventually, I began to see a flicker of connection between the two: while set in different times and written in different styles, both books explore the cruelties of society, the viciousness of sex, and the subversion of women. Both clearly reflect Faber’s sensibility—and he’s one sick, you should forgive the expression, puppy.
It’s worth pointing out, though, that I read the Faber oeuvre in the exact opposite order in which it was written (or at least published: articles about the forty-two-year-old author say he has been working on the Victorian opus off and on for twenty years), so any conclusions I may draw about his emerging sensibility could be backward, too. If you read Roth in order, for example, you clearly see what reviewers would call the “maturing” of the author from a sex-obsessed Jewish boy (Portnoy’s Complaint; Goodbye, Columbus) to a sex-obsessed old Jewish man (The Dying Animal). Reading Kat
hryn Harrison in order, from Thicker Than Water (a novel about a young woman’s consensual affair with her father) through The Kiss (a memoir about her own consensual affair with her father) through The Seal Wife (about a mute Inuit woman who has an affair but doesn’t speak about it or anything else), you can imagine that she’s slowly working through her demons. With Faber, the fact that Crimson Petal does not end disastrously—he told one interviewer that he killed Sugar off in an earlier draft; here, she simply disappears from William’s home—suggests he has come a ways since his bleak, black view of the world portrayed in Under the Skin.
But then again, maybe I’m overthinking, and just trying to make excuses for the guy I’ve decided this week that I love. I do that with all my paramours, I realize: give them the benefit of the doubt even when their behavior is weird and they start scaring me. Had Leo been in one of his black moods the night I met him, I doubt I would have been interested. But like Faber, he hooked me with his very best self right from the start. In reading as in life, first impressions count: they’re what make you stick around for the rest of the story.
November 25
Openings
Speaking of first impressions, publishers believe in them, too. A lot. In fact, you might be amazed to learn just how much they think your purchase patterns have to do with titles and jacket design, and sometimes even blurbs. An enormous amount of time and discussion goes into choosing those titles and covers, which is depressing when you realize that so many of the books you like often have the worst of both. (Facing the Wind? Slammerkin?) Sitting here looking at my piles, I try to divorce myself from what I know about the books inside and just concentrate on the jackets. Hmm, could I get away with blaming my ho-hum reaction to Hammett on the fact that the cover was so dark and the grainy photo of the writer so vague that the last thing I felt was compelled. But then, look at the fuzzy cover and terrible title on House of Sand and Fog, one of my very favorites: it’s so dark and dreary I might have mistaken it for a horror novel.
Because a lot of times I have the opportunity to choose books before they even have covers, I’m usually not swayed one way or another by design. And I’m often amazed when I go into a bookstore and see something I read in proof all dressed up and ready to sell: “That’s what they put on the cover?” I’ll often think. I might have had a completely different image in mind. Clearly, then, I’m not the best person to ask about what jackets should look like, and I’ve learned over the years not to try to judge a book by its cover.
On the other hand, I’m more than happy to start judging it at its first line.
As I discovered last week, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint has a great one: “If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head.” Who could resist such an opening? It has mystery and violence and pathos. It suggests—no, it advertises—that the story to come will be filled with humor and heart. It does what every writer, and every publisher, wants a first line to do: it draws the reader in.
A sentence like that should be parsed and examined and taught in writing classes all over the country, or at least in writing classes that concern themselves with getting their students published.
The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint is a first novel by a writer named Brady Udall, who found some critical success a couple of years ago with a short-story collection called Letting Loose the Hounds. It’s about Edgar Mint, an accident-prone half-Apache orphan who somehow manages to survive a life full of comic disasters, the likes of which we haven’t seen since John Irving’s The World According to Garp or Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone or maybe even John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, though I have to admit that I’m basing that last part of the statement on some vague recollections of stuff I read about Dunces, having never actually read the book itself.
In other words, it’s a big, sprawling picaresque that, now that I’m done with it, I’d say delivers on its promised humor and heart. But I wavered there for about a hundred pages in the middle, and for a few not-so-brief-or-shining moments, I considered dumping it altogether like all those other well-reviewed but impenetrable (to me) tomes I’ve already told you about. Toward the middle of the book, I felt that the raw energy of the opening turned just plain raw. Is it me or is there just a bit too much of what my grandmother would have called bathroom humor? It seems, for pages and pages, that Edgar and his friends can’t stop referring to the “shithouse,” playing really, really gross and violent pranks on one another (one has to do with inserting a string in a very private place and then setting it on fire), and calling one another “retard.” I mean, I’m the mother of an eight-year-old; I know how boys are . . . but geez. I could almost hear Jack Nicholson from A Few Good Men booming in my ear, “You want the truth about boys? You can’t handle the truth.”
But unlike virtually every other adult in Edgar’s life, I didn’t abandon him, believing somehow that the wit and pathos of his original voice would return to save us both. That’s the good news about a good first line: Like the romantic insanity of the first weeks of a love affair, it can ground you, and keep you from bolting later on when things calm down. But there’s risk in opening big, too: A powerful beginning raises a reader’s hopes. Should the rest of the book not measure up—and let’s face it, so few do—I feel ripped off.
Hell hath no fury like an expectant reader scorned.
Publishers know this, of course, and the smart ones try to head disappointment off at the pass. As I was starting to drag through the middle of Edgar Mint, I turned to look at the copy on the back cover. (My version, which I found at the bottom of a pile that had been sitting in my office for a year, was what publishers call an advance reading copy, which is just like the real book except not proofread, and sometimes with a different cover. ARCs are not all that common for paperbacks—reaching out to reviewers and booksellers and other big-mouths usually comes only at the hardcover stage—but it so happened that this one came that way.) There, on Vintage Books letterhead, was a note from the novel’s paperback editor, Marty Asher. “When I read the opening lines of The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint. . . . I knew I was a goner,” Asher writes, before reproducing the entire first paragraph. And then he goes on: “All of us at Vintage are Edgar Mint fanatics and if this letter simply gets you to read past that amazing first paragraph, then I have no doubt that you will be a goner too.” I put those thirteen words in italics (Asher didn’t, of course) because when I read them, mid-slog, it suddenly hit me that the editor knew what I knew: the best stuff was at the beginning.
If, as the saying goes, every journey begins with a single step, every book begins with a single sentence—and I think that the more enticing that sentence, the better. Would you have dragged through Moby-Dick (if, that is, you ever did drag through it) if it had begun with a convoluted explanation of whaling instead of the simple statement: “Call me Ishmael”? Would generations of reluctant high school readers ever complete their summer reading requirement, A Tale of Two Cities, were it not for the provocative “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”?
I’m supposed to be a sophisticated reader. I’m supposed to know better. But like the very experienced Marty Asher, I too can get besotted with a great first line. Here are some that belong in my very own First Line Hall of Fame:
The first time I had sex with a man for money, it was September.
—LAUARA KASISCHKE, Suspicious River
I have noticed that when someone asks for you on the telephone and, finding you out, leaves a message begging you to call him up the moment you come in, as it’s important, the matter is more often important to him than to you.
—W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM, Cakes and Ale
My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered.
—ALICE SEBOLD, The Lovely Bones
I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods.
—TRUMAN CAPOTE, Breakfa
st at Tiffany’s
It was love at first sight.
—JOSEPH HELLER, Catch-22
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
—JANE AUSTEN, Pride and Prejudice
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
—GABRIEL GARCIA MÁRQUEZ, One Hundred Years of Solitude
See what I mean? The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint is in mighty fine company.
December 10
Friends and Family
I can’t tell you the title of the book I read last week because, well, it doesn’t have a title. In fact, it’s not even officially a book yet; it’s just a pile of 250 typewritten pages in search of a publisher. The author, Peggy, is a friend of mine, one of my very favorite people in the world, but one who would tell you on first meeting that she is not, professionally or temperamentally, a writer. On Friday, she called and asked me if I’d look at her manuscript. And then she uttered the two most dangerous sentences in the English language. “Tell me the truth,” she said. “Please be honest.”
Tell me the truth. That’s what Charley said earlier this month when we began planning our Christmas visit to Liza’s house. “There’s no Santa Claus, right, Mom?” he said. “Just tell me the truth.”