Adam Felber, there is no way to describe my love for you

It's rather fitting that I finally finished Adam Felber's Schrodinger's Ball today. Leap Day--a day of the strange--or as Brown students and alumni know it, Josiah Carbury Day. (Professor Carbury is the beloved, fictitious professor of psychoceramics... think about it.) And Schrodinger's Ball is nothing if not a celebration of the academic and strange.

The novel is not so much about quantum mechanics as it is a quantum mechanic novel. I know of no other way to explain it. It embodies the principles of the theory in its storytelling and, in a way, it is a story about quantum mechanics, too. 

Normally, I'm not a quantum mechanical kind of girl. I'm much more about string theory. Quantum mechanics makes me scrunch up my face with distaste for the paradoxes and holes when string theory makes me want to swim in it. Felber changed my mind, if only for his book.

In parallel story lines that must needs connect by the end, Dr. Schrodinger is an unwanted house guest to a narrator who uses the first person plural, a young man exists in a state of simultaneously being dead and not, a homeless lunatic rewrites history, the President of Montana abdicates his responsibilities, the maybe-dead guys' friend moons over a girl, and a hungry rat searches for a meal. It is worthy of a monumental eye roll except that Felber is brilliant. Brilliant. The plot and the structure pack so much into the brief novel, so much more than the sum of its parts. It is a zipped file of a novel. (Sorry, that metaphor even hurt me but I can't say it any better.)

Read it. Now. There is a computer error in the book. It made me laugh out loud and yet it is poignant and smart. Felber's writing is unlike any other and I can find no other book to compare Ball with. 

I'm keeping this post short so you can go read it now. Right now.

(PS. You might be wondering why I haven't posted in a while. You might also wonder why I referenced "finally" finishing a brief and brilliant book. I began reading Schrodinger's Ball on November 13, 2011. Coincidentally, I now how a 3 1/2 month-old son.)

stepping into that same river again, or not

I first read Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake perhaps five years ago. A stunning experience. As I neared the end of the book, I could not escape the feeling that once I looked up from the last page, I would see a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Snowman's world. My reading would make it so. Fortunately, that did not happen. Instead, Oryx and Crake earned its place in my top all-time reading experiences.

So it took me until a few weeks ago to pick up The Year of the Flood, Atwood's companion book. How could it be anything but a disappointment after my visceral awe at Oryx and Crake? Having completed it I must say it was not as extraordinary. How could it? But it was still brilliant.

The Year of the Flood follows two protagonists who--similar to Snowman/Jimmy--bounce back and forth between their current post-pandemic survival and their lives before the world ended. Seemingly random main characters in the beginning, as the book continues, the reader realizes these two, Ren and Toby, were both part of an environmentalist religious cult before the "waterless flood." As the narrative continues, the reader realizes that they were both on the periphery of Jimmy/Snowman and Crake's lives. I went back to reread Oryx and Crake so that I could appreciate those tiny tossed away sentences that were all that Ren and Toby (not even named in the original book) contributed to Jimmy's life.

Much of the book centers around the cult, God's Gardeners. Despite the pages of ink dedicated to them one cannot in the end know if they are a force behind Crake's plague or lucky survivalists. And again, this mirrors

Oryx and Crake. Are the leaders of God's Gardeners MaddAdam? How much does Oryx know.

And I must say, perhaps my favorite part of the book was when Ren and Toby see Snowman. Despite all of the voices in his head throughout Oryx and Crake, I never thought of him as crazy. It seemed a perfectly natural reaction to being the last human alive, guardian to a new race and pawn of your best friend. It was only after reading Flood that I saw he was insane. And it broke my heart. It made the rereading of Oryx and Crake so much sadder, lushly pathetic.

Lots of parallels, but plenty of divergent plot and themes to make The Year of the Flood a masterpiece in its own right. A true companion to the first.

i feel like less-than for not having loved it

Maybe all of that that commercial, YA, and paranormal reading has finally gotten to me.  I read Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs and didn't love it.

I hang my head in shame.

Maybe I need to give back my elitist card.

Did I find it interesting? Mostly? Engaging? I guess. Beautifully worded? Of course. A striking commentary on post-9/11 America? Yes.

But. But... For the first third of the book I did not realize that the narrative was supposed to be written by Tassie (the MC) as an older woman. So I was incredibly frustrated by how wise and mature and paced the narrative voice was. Beautiful but inappropriate to a 20 year-old. I got over that about 120 pages in, but there should have been some earlier signpost for me.

Also, I hated Tassie. And not in that way where it is fun to hate characters. In that way where I didn't give a crap about her at all. I didn't like her and so having to watch her live her life for a few hundred pages made me hate her.

The vegetation. So much description of vegetation--natural, cultivated, and cooked. You could have cut 30 pages from the book by editing down the vegetation.

So what did I like?

The stories. All three. Mary-Emma's, Reynaldo's and her brother's. They wove together beautifully. The parts of the book that really told their stories made me so happy. I sank into the book at those moments.

And now, I feel like a literary snob failure. Like having read Stephenie Meyer and Charlaine Harris and Carrie Ryan has destroyed my capacity to appreciate "real literature" (though I don't believe that). I was supposed to love this book.

my desperate, stupid hope

Please be warned, if you have not already read Markus Zusak's The Book Thief, this post is one giant spoiler. Stop reading now, and go read this book.  Then come back and read on. I am not going to bother writing a full review since many people have already done so. Instead, I am going to focus on what I think was the particular genius of the book -- perhaps not intrinsically, but in my experience of it. A particular emotional journey. 

Markus Zusak made me feel desperate, irrational hope.

I wasn't a fan of the character of Death. I didn't feel like I gained anything by knowing what colors were in the sky or how tired he was. I didn't need him to have a personality. What Death added, as a narrator, was his omnipotence and pretty great foreshadowing. The dangling, "he would be dead in six months," that made heartache so inevitable. Rather perfect for a book taking place in Nazi Germany.

So, by the time Rudy, Hans, and Rosa are dead, by the time Himmel Street is destroyed and everything in Liesel's life is gone, I was ready for it.  It is brutal but feels like the only possible story the little girl could have lived. Except...

Max.

Oh, Max.

It broke my heart that Max left when he didn't have to. And then I hoped against hope for his safety. We heard nothing of him, which drove me mad, but it felt right since Liesel didn't know what was happening to him either.

I maintained a stupid, irrational, desperate hope that Max was going to be ok.  I mean, of course he's not going to be ok! He's a Jew on the run in Nazi Germany! But I hoped, like Liesel, I hoped. And I justified this hope by saying, "Death has already told me about everyone else dying, so maybe no news is good news when it comes to Max's fate."

So my heart fell into my stomach when Max came through Molching on the death march. And I cried when he and Liesel had their goodbye.

I stopped reading after the bombing of Himmel Street and had dinner with my husband. I spent half the meal telling him about the story and how depressed I was and how beautifully Zusak told it. (He did not understand how anything that would upset me this much could be counted as "good." Yet the man reads Cormac McCarthy.) After dinner, I told him I wanted to finish the book but that it couldn't possibly upset me further. With everything taken from her, death would be a relief for Liesel Meminger. Or, she'd survive as the lone candle of remembrance. Either way, I was past hurt.

So yes, I was surprised and inappropriately relieved when Max came walking into Liesel's shop after the war. And while the only epilogue they are given was their hug, I choose to believe that their care and kindness slowly morphed into love and they moved off to Australia together to raise three children and die of old age. 

Shut up, you can't convince me otherwise.

I tip my hat to you, Markus Zusak. Thank you for your incredible storytelling. And for taking me on such a desperate journey of hope.

adapting to the right medium

Last night, I watched John Krasinski’s film adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.  I should say up front that I have never read the book.  My previous experience with the content was from another adaptation, a theatrical production that John Krasinski knew as well.

So this should be an interesting post… comparing two adaptations into different media without knowing the source material.  And I must distinguish between the quality of the adaptation and the appropriateness of its medium.

I’ll begin with the theatrical adaptation.  Picture yourself, if you will, at Brown University. In addition to the official theatre department productions and the various plays put on by student groups, occasional enterprising students mounted shows independent of any producing body.  These often happened in the upstairs space of the student theatre—a rehearsal room come lobby come rec room—dark and poorly maintained. In the early 2000s.

It was in this space that Chris Hayes (now Washington editor of The Nation) directed an adaptation of Brief Interviews.  Just a serious of monologues performed with a chair, sparse lighting, and pages in hand if the actors had not memorized their parts.  It was a who’s who of the best male acting talent at Brown.

I went to see the production with two girlfriends, fully intending on going to a party afterward.  Our experience in the theatre that night was so raw and powerful, disturbing, dare I say it—hideous—that our plans for the rest of the evening were abandoned.  We returned to my dorm room to drink rum into oblivion in silence.

Chris Hayes’ production was unapologetic.  It put forward a number of men’s stories for the audience to judge and to judge themselves by.  I can’t say whether it had the same feel as Wallace’s work, but I can say it is in my top five most affecting nights in the theatre.

John Krasinski performed one of the monologues that night.

So it was with a great deal of anticipation that I watched his film adaptation yesterday (with an associate producer nod to Chris Hayes). 

Alas.

By giving the interviews a framing device—Julianne Nicholson is a grad student interviewing men while coping with her own ex-boyfriend’s infidelity—the content was diluted.  Cheapened.  Context robbed the monologues of their ferocity.  And this particular frame left me feeling like this was supposed to be a romantic comedy that never got romantic or comedic.

The monologue performed by Dominic Cooper’s character in the movie was the climax of the theatrical production for me.  It’s brutality has only ever been rivaled for me by Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman.  But with the context of an angry student trying to fight a bad grade (or is he really reaching out for help?), it became overwrought.  John Krasinski’s monologue about the hippie rape victim becomes insipid when it is his excuse for cheating on his girlfriend.  Alas, the frame was poorly crafted.  The movie, disappointing.

But I wonder whether it would have been possible to create any film adaptation that would do the work justice.  A modern American movie version cannot allow a series of disjointed monologues and any plot threading them together softens some of the ragged edges. 

And then there is the lack of being present in a movie.  Theatre’s power is in its presence.  In the audience being in the room and sharing the experience with the performers.  Theatre makes the audience complicit in the production.  It implicates them while film distances.  (I am now thinking of Oskar Eustis making the same argument in a dramaturgy class at Brown.)

I write about Brief Interviews here, not because I felt like ranting about a disappointing movie, but because it has led me to think about medium.  Film was the wrong medium for an adaptation of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.  On the other hand, I have read plays and thought, “why is this a play and not a novel?”  

There are stories and experiences better suited to particular media and that is something, as a writer, to think about.

ode to paranormal

Holding this particularly episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer up as an example of what made the show transcendent is a bit of a cliché, but I’m going to start my blog post here anyway.  “Surprise.”  It is the episode in the second season wherein Buffy and her vampire-with-a-soul boyfriend Angel have sex.  The unanticipated consequence of which is that Angel loses his soul and becomes evil.  More than any afterschool special or high school health class could possibly hope to accomplish, this episode and the rest of the season manifest a terrible truth for many young women: “I thought he loved me, we had sex, and then he became a monster.”

Women don’t ever say, “I thought he loved me, we had sex, and then he started behaving in a way that made me feel as hurt and betrayed and scared as I would if he had become evil.”  No, they say, “he became a monster.” 

Therein lies the weight of Buffy and all of the best in paranormal/sci-fi/fantasy/magic realism.  By shirking the boundaries set by realism, these genres allow artists to get to the emotional truth of a story and put it forward in a concrete, literal way.  

This is how life feels.

There are a myriad of other brilliant scenes and episodes in Buffy that exemplify such emotional truth, as do any great zombie stories, vampire fiction, Hogwarts escapades, what have you.  (Almost all of my favorite YA is paranormal because everything feels so high stakes and raw when we are young.  The time lends itself perfectly to the literalization of emotion.)  Paranormal fiction is metaphor writ large.  It is emotion made literal.

I am a great lover of John Donne’s poetry and one of my all time favorite lines is from “A Fever.”  Donne writes about the woman he loves being fatally ill and says, “The whole world vapours with thy breath.”  A beautiful and profound statement.  Technically a metaphor but you get the sense for this grief-stricken poet, it is quite literal.

When Villanelle loses her heart to her lover in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, she does so literally.  It is years later that she is strong enough to break into the woman’s home and reclaim her heart from the glass jar in which it has been kept.  Sethe is literally haunted by the ghost of her daughter in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.  For characters in these hyper-real stories, nothing “feels like,” it only “is.”

My MS, FLIGHT, is the story of a woman who is so unable to accept who she is that she destroys her own happiness and that of the people she loves the most.  It’s a favorite character type for me (Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica, anyone?) and by writing a work of magic realism, I could make the stakes real.  Maria doesn’t just go through a “self destructive phase” after her father dies or a boyfriend breaks her heart, she literally self destructs.

The high stakes makes for great fiction.  But it also, for me at least, feels much more true than any realism I know.

YA, paranormal, love triangles, and my psyche

One of my beta readers had some pretty serious gripes with FLIGHT.  She was mad at how my love triangle ends in the book.  She thinks my MC, Maria, made the wrong choice.  I'm ok with this gripe.

As I sat with beta reader A, we discussed why she didn't like Maria's choice and I realized that her opinions had much less to do with characterization or plot, but about her own sense of that is important in intimate relationships.  And -- now I am not about to say I am a great writer or that FLIGHT is great literature -- that's what great art does.  It holds a mirror up tot he audience/reader and makes them see themselves a little bit differently than they did before.

Carrie Ryan recently blogged about the love triangle in her amazing book The Forrest of Hands and Teeth.  The entry includes spoilers, so go read the book first.  Then read her post.

I'm a grown woman and I am happily married.  So my husband takes some umbrage that I like to read paranormal YA and that FLIGHT has a love triangle with a married woman at its core.  So let me explain why this genre, this plot, and Ryan's post speak to me.

I have a pretty strong sense of who I want to be.  And despite being considered an adult by any cultural measure, I still have no idea of exactly how to get from who I am to who that is.  In fact, I don't even think that I could truly be that who-I-want-to-be given all of the other factor and obligations in my life.  Part of why I like YA paranormal (The Forrest of Hands and Teeth, Twilight, Harry Potter, and others I can't think of off the top of my head) is that at their core, these books are about the main characters trying to work through this very dilemma.  And the paranormal component raises the stakes, states emotional truths through the literalization of metaphors (I'll have to blog on this topic separately, lots to say).

As with paranormal elements, love triangles are a manifestation of this dilemma -- who does the MC want to be?  At least the best ones -- Catherine/Healthcliff/Edgar, Ilsa/Victor/Rick, Buffy/Angel/Spike, Arthur/Guenivere/Lancelot -- are.  Notice these aren't literature's great lovers.  Love triangles aren't about romance.  I have very strong opinions about who is "right" for the torn party and each is a little Rorschach test of who I am.

But enough about me.  Go read Ryan's post, read some good YA paranormal love triangles, and learn a little bit more about who you are.