"Let's Take the Long Way Home"

"Let's Take the Long Way Home" (Random House, 1010), by Gail Caldwell, is subtitled "A Memoir of Friendship." It tells the gripping and touching story of Caldwell's close friendship with fellow writer Carolyn Knapp (author of "Drinking: A Love Story"). They met in the Boston area in midlife, initially drawn together by their mutual love of taking walks with their dogs in a beautiful wooded area. They immediately "clicked," and became inseparable; their commonalities included their writing, their dogs, their athletic endeavors, especially rowing on the Charles River, their shared status as recovering alcoholics, and their fierce independence. Sadly, a few years later, Knapp was diagnosed with and soon died of lung cancer. Caldwell, along with Knapp's fiance and a loyal group of friends, attended Knapp during her illness and deeply mourned her after her death. There are many novels and memoirs about family and about romantic relationships, but not enough about the depth and power of close friendships and the great support, joy, and profound enrichment of one's life that they can bring; this memoir provides a reminder of the enormous gift provided by close and sustaining friendships.

Writing is Hard

Yesterday (11/18/10) I posted “An Ode to Composition.” That post was heartfelt. But after a long, hard writing session later that day, working on an academic book project, I have to acknowledge the more difficult side of writing. My post on composition didn’t negate the difficulties of writing, but it certainly skipped over them. So let me say outright what most people know: writing is – for most of us – hard and even sometimes painful work. My colleagues and I spend much time discussing this: Why is something we want and love to do still so hard? Although I have been writing and publishing for many years now, and although at times and in some ways I enjoy and am excited by the process, I still find that large parts of it feel like climbing a steep mountain. It is also a satisfying process, and there are moments of joy. But I can't deny that creating something from nothing -- getting from an idea to a finished article, essay, or book -- is a huge undertaking. Figuring out what one wants to say, formulating a statement of that intent, finding and including the proper support, organizing the text into a clear, logical, and readable form, is all hard work. In addition, because of the emotional component of writing, especially writing that will be judged (e.g., articles and books for publication), the writing process is also full of tension, unease, and fear of failure. And then there are the ways we work against ourselves: procrastination, distraction, doubting ourselves, giving up. All of these have to be fought and overcome, in order to get back to the hard work of chipping away at a writing project until somehow, miraculously, if we work very hard and are very fortunate, it gets finished and into print.

An Ode to Composition

My university recently switched to an institutional version of gmail. One small but significant detail that I noticed and like about it is that for creating a new message, it asks us to “compose message.” I like the idea that it uses the word “compose,” which reminds us that all writing requires composing. Even if we only take a minute or a few seconds to think about how to word an email message or a text message, we are composing. We are putting words together in a particular way; we are framing our messages; we are thinking about our various audiences and purposes for our various messages. These are all the things that those of us who teach writing tell our students, which is why writing classes are often called composition classes. Often people think of writing as a skill, and in a way it is, but not in the way typing or programming or gardening are. Most of all, writing is thinking, and then composing those thoughts into effective combinations of words to form sentences, of sentences to form paragraphs, and of paragraphs to form letters, emails, memos, essays, chapters, and books. When I hear the word “compose,” I am also of course reminded of composers of music, who put together notes, sounds, and instructions about orchestration and about volume, in order to create glorious music. Both cases -- composing writings and composing music -- are marvelous, complex processes that create something new in the world, something unique and valuable. Obviously some writings, and some musical offerings, are better than others, but all are worth celebrating, even if only for the good intentions and the effort. And when the composing succeeds, what wonders are sent out into the world!

"By Nightfall"

“By Nightfall” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010), by Michael Cunningham (best known as the author of “The Hours”), is a strange, intriguing, and at times faintly creepy novel. It is set in New York City’s artsy Soho, and features a very odd trio of main characters. Peter owns an art gallery, loves his wife, and ponders the place of beauty in his life. His wife Rebecca edits a literary journal. Ethan, Rebecca’s much younger brother, breathtakingly beautiful but lacking direction, with a history of serious drug-taking, comes to stay with Peter and Rebecca for a while. Peter finds himself drawn to Ethan’s beauty and his resemblance to Rebecca when she was younger; this attraction, and Ethan’s casual duplicity and self-protection, combine to cause a major upheaval in the lives and marriage of Peter and Rebecca. Interwoven with this story are Peter’s meditations on art, beauty, love, aging, romance, and more. Cunningham captures the contradictory desires that often appear at mid-life: on the one hand, the enjoyment of a comfortable, happy, reasonably fulfilling life, and on the other hand, the yearning for something “big” and dramatic – a passionate romance, a huge, brave yet somehow effortless change in one’s life – to happen before it is too late. He understands the mid-life fear of having allowed life to pass one by, the fear of having “settled.” These are all serious issues, obviously, but Peter's sudden preoccupations with them seem rather superficial and even melodramatic. “By Nightfall” certainly keeps the reader’s attention, but there is something a little too facile, a little too self-indulgent in the character of Peter that put this particular reader off a bit.

On Reading More Male Writers Again

I just realized that the last three novels I read were all by male authors. That realization made me reflect on how I have fluctuated over the years regarding the gender of novelists whose works I have read. Like everyone else of my age (Baby Boomer), in school and in college days I read mainly male authors, with a few notable exceptions (Austen, Bronte, Eliot, Woolf, Cather, and a few more recent female novelists); they were the ones considered the “best”; they formed the “canon.” Not only were most of the novelists male, but most of their main characters were male as well. I, like most female readers then, had to do what some feminist literary critics later described as suspending reality in order to identify with the mostly male main characters of most novels. But along with the women’s movement of the late 1960s and the 1970s came a glorious increase in novels (and short stories and poetry and plays) by women writers being published. For the avid reader I was, this development was manna from heaven. For many years afterward, I read mostly works by women, with women as the main characters. Now that there are as many women writers being published as there are men (although there is still the issue of how seriously women writers and “women’s topics” are taken; see my posts of 8/26/10, 9/4/10, and 9/15/10), I have gradually, in the past few years, begun reading more novels by male writers again. This has not been a conscious decision, as much as a natural evening-out process. Also, I give much credit to the women’s movement, not only for the increased number of novels by women being published, but for the fact that the worlds of women and men are now less separate than they were, and therefore the subject matters and styles of novels by males and females are less different, more overlapping than they were. I still read many more women writers than men, but the proportions are less starkly different than they were for a long time.

"The Rain Before It Falls"

I just finished listening to “The Rain Before It Falls” on CD (BBC Audiobooks, 2008), by Jonathan Coe (one of “The Jonathans” that I posted about on 11/2/10). It is a family saga, about a dysfunctional but -- mainly, although at times tortuously -- loving family over many years and many (mostly sad) events. The conceit of the novel is that the elderly Rosamund, who is dying, dictates her own life's story and the family story, and the ways in which they intersected, onto cassettes for Imogen, the long-lost but much-loved granddaughter of her cousin and best friend. Beatrix. She organizes her memories by choosing and describing 20 photographs taken at various times in her and the family's lives. Her taped narration is framed by the narration and stories of her niece and grandnieces, who when they cannot find Imogen after Rosamund's death, listen to the tapes themselves and add their own stories, thus creating a story-within-a-story effect. Consequently, the novel is somewhat schematic, but the structure mainly works. Rosamund’s voice, and some of her digressions, sometimes grow a little wearying, yet most of the time the story is compelling. Rosamund is and always has been neurotic and needy, but is nevertheless a sympathetic character. Overall, I enjoyed the book, not surprisingly, since this kind of character-driven, relationship-enmeshed, psychologically intriguing story is exactly the kind that I most like to read. Added attractions are the English setting, and -- for those listening on CD as I did -- the lovely English accent of the reader, actress Jenny Agutter.

Finally (Foolishly?) Finished Franzen's "Freedom"

I did it! I finished Jonathan Franzen's 562-page novel, "Freedom." If you read my interim reports on 11/8/10 and 11/11/10, you know that I was not enjoying, and was not impressed by, this novel, but because of all the critical attention it was getting, and at a certain point because of all the time I had already invested in it, I felt compelled to continue to the end. So I won! I wrestled the novel to the ground! I was able to leave Walter, Patty, Richard, Joey (although I kind of liked Joey), Jessica, Carol, Connie, and Lalitha behind with relief and no regrets! Hurray! On the other hand, I spent many, many hours on a novel that was pretty unsatisfying and that I had to struggle through, so maybe I actually lost? In any case, maybe I have saved some of you from spending time on this vaunted but disappointing novel.