Books

Laura Miller explains why she didn’t vote in the NYT "Most Distinguished Novel" survey:

My point in objecting was not just some namby-pamby reluctance to make any relative evaluation about literature, because that really is an important thing that critics do: declare that some books are better than others. I have no problem doing that, but I hate imposing a rigidly, atomistic structure on it. Ultimately, novels are so diverse that once they attain a certain level of quality, they really can’t be meaningfully ranked against each other. Some people I discussed this with had a hard time understanding that not wanting to exert an excess of judgment isn’t the same thing as refusing to make any judgment at all. I don’t know why this is so difficult to grasp; it’s like the difference between being decently neat and having obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Well, yes. There’s more.

Roger Mudd writes for the NYT about the restoration of Eudora Welty’s home, divulging a charming anecdote involving bourbon and a dinner catastrophe along the way. Mudd’s emergence as the Expert Friend of Eudora Welty would be a little annoying, if it wasn’t clear just how much he adored her:

Always close at hand was her favorite reference book, "Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable" and in it her favorite entry — "Assemblage, nouns of" — as in, "a clutch of eggs," "a muster of peacocks," "a bench of bishops." Eudora once challenged me to play the game. She won hands down with "a stack of librarians" and "a plastering of politicians."

Congratulations to Rick Bowes, whose "There’s a Hole in the City" has won the storySouth 2006 Million Writers Award for Fiction. (Via Matt Cheney.)

There’s a new Dave Schwartz story (always cause for celebration) up at Strange Horizons. Check out "The Water-Poet and the Four Seasons."

Re: the whole wrong-headed Gladwell post on The Viswanathan Incident.

Ted Chiang drops a nice point over in Gladwell’s comments:

"Surely an idea is more consequential than a sentence."

In the context of copyright law, this is not true. Copyright is intended to protect the expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves. One can decry the extremism of recent intellectual-property legislation and rulings and still support this basic premise.

Almost all fiction deals with the same basic ideas: love and death. What distinguishes Shakespeare from Joe Blow are the sentences.

See also, Ms. Link’s comment (which you should really go read all of):

Point number two: Genre fiction (young adult, science fiction, mysteries) is not necessarily more formulaic than any other kind of art. Formulaic fiction is formulaic. That’s about as far as I think you can push this argument, and even then, the most original works of art depends — just as formulaic fiction does — on the writer and the reader being aware of (or emotionally attuned to) certain patterns or formulas. Writers set up and then elaborate on, or break, or distort certain patterns. Or else they present the same formula, but so elegantly (or at least so capably) that the reader is charmed into seeing it in a new light.

UDPATED: Gladwell concedes defeat.

And from a surprising quarter. Malcolm Gladwell weighs in on the Viswanathan Affair:

After the story breaks, McCafferty’s publisher starts huffing and puffing and threatening legal action, Viswanathan apologizes and goes on the Today show, her publisher Little Brown (which is incidentally my publisher too) withdraws her book from the market, Harvard launches an "investigation" and Viswanathan gets pummeled by a hundred angry columnists, pundits and bloggers.

Can someone tell me why? This is teen-literature. It’s genre fiction. These are novels based on novels based on novels, in which every convention of character and plot has been trotted out a thousand times before. If I wrote a detective story, set in 1930’s Los Angeles, about a cynical, hard-bitten private eye, with a drop dead gorgeous secretary and a series of lonely housewife clients, would anyone bat an eye? Of course not. It may be a stolen premise. But we accept that within the category of genre fiction a certain amount of borrowing of themes and plots and ideas is acceptable—even laudable.

Whoa. Again with the generalizing.

I am really not liking all the commentating on "teen fiction" by people who clearly have no idea just how challenging and diverse the field really is at the moment. Jeez. Knock it off. Do your homework.

Not to say that I don’t think there’s a legitimate point buried in his post about genre conventions, but please, do not imply that all teen novels or all novels within any genre are the same old, same old. There’s a difference between using (or playing with) genre conventions and plagiarism. A big one.

If Viswanathan directly borrowed passages whole-cloth from the McCafferty book, no matter what its quality, then Gladwell’s argument seems irrelevant. Plagiarism shouldn’t be about whether the product is high quality enough to care about. It is the act itself that is problematic and offensive. Does the reaction fit the supposed crime in this case? Maybe not, but that’s a symptom of bad timing in my opinion. This particular story popped up just in time to continue a news cycle that was already gristing.

I also have to disagree with Gladwell’s assertion that:

But once we have conceded that in genre fiction its okay to borrow themes, why do we get so upset when genre novelists borrow something a good deal less substantial—namely phrases and sentences?

Because phrases and sentences are execution. Even in the lowly genres. (That is sarcasm, folks; that’s what really galls me about this — the base assumption that genre novelists are something else, something lesser.) They are what the blood and sweat goes into; they belong to the writer who generates them. Execution is everything in storyland. In writingland.

May sentences by different authors sometimes echo each other with no sinister cause? Sure. No harm, no foul. But, at base, plaigiarism is stealing something of value and passing it off as own’s own and that something belongs to another writer. That’s serious business and should be taken seriously.

And then there’s this, when Gladwell starts in on the actual comparison of the passages in this case:

My question is whether it is possible to write a teen-lit novel without these sentences:

From page 7 of McCafferty’s first novel: “Bridget is my age and lives across the street. For the first twelve years of my life, these qualifications were all I needed in a best friend. But that was before Bridget’s braces came off and her boyfriend Burke got on, before Hope and I met in our seventh-grade honors classes.

From page 14 of Viswanathan’s novel: “Priscilla was my age and lived two blocks away. For the first fifteen years of my life, those were the only qualifications I needed in a best friend. We had first bonded over our mutual fascination with the abacus in a playgroup for gifted kids. But that was before freshman year, when Priscilla’s glasses came off, and the first in a long string of boyfriends got on.”

Calling this plagiarism is the equivalent of crying "copy" in a crowded Kinkos.

To answer the question posed: Um, that would be an unqualified YES! I don’t think this is great writing, and I read a LOT of teen fiction with great writing. And guess what? With unique voices and superior craft as well. So, yes, you can write "a teen-lit novel" without these sentences. Cute.

I don’t really care enough about the whole did she or didn’t she in this particular case to learn enough to come up with my own answer to did she or didn’t she. What I do care about is the uninformed denigration of the entire field of teen literature. KNOCK IT OFF.

So, next week over at the LBC it turns out we’ll be discussing Edgar winner for best paperback original The Girl in the Glass! Congratulations, Mr. Ford!

(Thanks, Gavin!)

Good thing there’s plenty of nice, sane, excellent writers in the world.

Chris McLaren considers how much easier it is for knowledge of the artist to contaminate the experience of the art these days:

I’m not sure what the conclusion is here. For authors, the obvious conclusion is to be mindful of the potential effect of your online persona on your audience. For me, in the audience, there isn’t as obvious a conclusion. Maybe I just need to reconcile myself again to the fact that the artist and art are different, and try not to be so shocked when an artist reveals himself to be very different from my mental idea of who they are. I’m not sure I can do anything about the related bias question, or even if I should feel like I should do anything about it.

And he gives examples, which is always the fun part.

I almost read John Hodgman’s The Areas of My Expertise awhile back, but then it strolled back down to the library without even asking if I’d had a chance to read it yet. Thus, I re-entered the long line of  library patrons too cheap to actually shell out for the book and was finally allowed to check it out again a few days ago. I realize that I am perhaps poised on the cutting edge of September 2005 (AT LEAST) talking about it now, but them’s the breaks out in here in the sticks with our begging cup. And I’m a sucker for a miscellany, especially one so concerned with the Loup-Garou.

I thought y’all might be amused by this little section of "HOW TO WRITE A BOOK: THE FIFTY-FIVE DRAMATIC SITUATIONS," on what is the best kind of book to write:

I was asked this many times when I was a professional literary agent. The answer at that time was obvious: The most marketable kind of book to write was one in which vampires fight serial killers. But the best kind of book was one in which the vampires fight large weather systems and perfect storms.

Of course, that answer isn’t correct in today’s publishing environment, as neither sort of those examples includes a worldwide conspiracy overseen by a centuries-old religious secret society. While my initial response dates me hopelessly, literature — bless it — ever grows and matures.

There’s also these two entries from the table OTHER MARKETS FOR YOUR SHORT STORIES:

Where to Market Your Short Stories Featuring Lots of Footnotes, Comic Book References, and Lists – The Journal for Extra Smart Boys

Where to Market Your Charles Bukowski/Raymond Carver Slash Fiction – Penthouse, circa 1981 and What We Talk About When We Talk About Raymond Carver Having Sex With Charles Bukowski Monthly.

Ah, sweet mockery.

I’m too tired to muster much of an entry, but what the hell, right? I want to talk about the book I just started.

You see, I’ve been in a bit of a fiction slump for the past month or so. Every time I picked up something new and started it, I did not fall madly in love. I was not swept away. I was not awed. I was not in love. Now, I certainly don’t expect to feel this way about every book I read, but I do expect it every once in awhile. And I expect a cousin of that feeling to occur a fair amount. I don’t read very many books I don’t like (see Jenny Davidson, see Colleen Mondor): mostly I put those down. I’m still not sure whether this slump was purely related to my own reader’s malaise (it happens) or to the books I was attempting (at least a few of them deserve another chance). I was getting my fiction fix mostly by rereading novels I already knew and loved well.

Anyway, this lack of dazzling fiction has been somewhat eclipsed by all the excellent nonfiction reading I’ve been up to (see 75 sidebar, down and to the right) and by some excellent stories in the Fountain Award jury reading. But. I was still beginning to worry. Fretting really, like some Mr. Rogers-type unable to find a clean sweater. Where is a book I LOVE? What if I’ve become one of THOSE people — you know, the ones who rarely LOVE a book anymore?

Last night, C and I went out to dinner and a couple of glasses of wine and bookshopping. He picked up the lovely Justina Robson‘s Living Next Door to the God of Love; I picked up Laura Whitcomb‘s A Certain Slant of Light (suddenly available, after a year of remembering to look for it at bookstores but never finding it). I think we also bought a couple of others off the remainder table, but that’s indelicate to speak of. (A real aside: The bookshop girl was charming and we got to talking about the Tiptree Award somehow — she ordered Air while we were chatting — and she recommended Wes Stace’s Misfortune for it and was amazed it was already on the short list for this year.) I took both the novels when we got home. I haven’t made it to the Whitcomb yet — though I’m sure I’ll love it, based on Justine’s reaction. I haven’t made it there because I started Living Next Door.

This book is completely exhilarating. (Someone Fed-Ex a copy to a certain D.I. stat.) I was in love with it by the end of the first paragraph:

There’s a kind of hush all over the world tonight: the sound of lovers in love. The rosy fug of it is so overpowering that I can’t hear the special kind of silence I’m listening for; the one that will tell me I’m about to die.

Whew.

And it is online. (Thanks, Mike!)