A Collection of Collections

It happens that in the past few weeks, I read three collections of short pieces, one nonfiction and two fiction:

→ Earlier this year, Roxane Gay published her astounding first novel, and just a few months later, she released a book of essays, BAD FEMINIST. I'm not usually interested in essay collections, but I've been following Gay's online writing, both fiction and nonfiction, so I was eager to read this book. BAD FEMINIST is an excellent, thought-provoking set of essays that combine personal, political, and pop cultural topics.

Gay writes with authority and nuance about issues of gender, race, and sexual violence, and she analyzes the roles these play in the world, in entertainment, and in her own life. She acknowledges the complicated nature of these subjects and the conflicted feelings that lead to her calling herself a bad feminist. Her casual style makes these essays approachable, though some of the subject matter makes me want to shy away. There are essays in here about injustices that left me angry at the world or wanting to cry. Other pieces take a smart look at recent pop culture phenomena. Sometimes these topics are combined in the same essay. (Links are to online versions of essays that appear in the book, often in somewhat different forms.)

Gay's talent is in examining a piece of entertainment or news and using it to discuss a broader issue. In the course of the collection, she looks at television, movies, and comedy, but I especially appreciated her focus on literature. She covers the debate over unlikable characters and the categorization of women's fiction. She considers the absurd and disturbing aspects of the Fifty Shades series and reveals her obsession with Sweet Valley High. And one book review is a powerful, wrenching essay on body image that starts "I went to fat camp once."

While you can find much of the book online as separate pieces, if you like what you see in these linked essays, I recommend reading the collection as a whole. Though there's a bit of repetition, the selection and arrangement of essays works well as a book, and reading it in the entirety offers insight into Gay as a person and not simply a cultural critic. Plus, there's a great essay about her participation in the world of competitive Scrabble that you don't want to miss.

After you read this collection, you might enjoy listening to the Slate Audio Book Club discussion, particularly if you want to hear Hanna Rosin react to the essay in which Gay criticizes Rosin's book.

→ For years, my mom has been encouraging me to read the work of Jhumpa Lahiri, particularly the collection INTERPRETER OF MALADIES. I finally listened to my mother, and of course she was right. These stories are outstanding.

In the space of twenty or thirty pages, characters come alive, plots unfold and resolve, and the reader is admitted into fascinating micro-worlds. And this isn't true of just a few stories in the collection -- every one is absorbing and complete. I'm not sure what makes these stories so successful, but I'm going to be studying them carefully to try and understand what Lahiri has accomplished and figure out how to develop some of this skill in my own writing.

A number of the stories involve characters encountering cultural differences. In the title story, a tour guide in India drives around an Indian-American family, and the mutual reactions flow from distaste to fascination and back as they learn more about each other. The narrator of "The Third and Final Continent", a young man from Calcutta, adjusts to life in the U.S., and then to the arrival of the wife he barely knows. In "Mrs. Sen's", an eleven-year-old boy is looked after by a woman who is new to America and not adjusting well. All of these situations are conveyed with observant and touching detail.

Three Books With Buzz

These three novels I read recently are unlike each other, but they're all books I heard a lot about before picking up:

→ CALIFORNIA by Edan Lepucki was probably the buzziest novel of the summer. The debut received a huge publicity boost after Sherman Alexie recommended it on the Colbert Report (this New York Times article explains the details), and as a result, it made the NYT bestseller list the week of its release. When watching the Colbert episode, I may have squealed a little upon hearing Lepucki's name, because I've long followed her essays at The Millions and had been anticipating the book for months.

In CALIFORNIA, civilization is breaking down, and Frida and Cal have fled into the wilderness. Though life is difficult and isolated, and they are insufficiently prepared to live off the land, this seems like their best chance for survival. Two years in, they're doing pretty well. But now Frida suspects she's pregnant, and they're faced with new fears, uncertain whether they can or should bring a child into their world. They decide to seek help from the nearest community, though the settlement has a menacing reputation. Once they take this step, the story turns into a mystery as Frida and Cal discover unsettling facts about the community's past and its relationship to the world beyond the forest.

The story is a gripping one. I could rarely predict what was coming, and I was always eager to read on. Frida, Cal, and the other characters are well-developed, complicated, and flawed, and the relationships are difficult in realistic ways. For the most part, I liked the pace at which information was revealed, and I was generally impressed by the resolutions of the mysteries. There were a few elements I didn't find as effective, including the ending, but overall, this book earned my recommendation.

→ AMERICANAH by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie came out last year, and I heard about it at the time, initially from this short but memorable NPR interview. Since then, I've encountered rave reviews of the book all over, and it seems to be read and discussed with increasing frequently as time goes on. A movie version is now in the works, so I imagine the buzz will only continue its slow build.

The novel follows Ifemelu from her childhood in Nigeria and teenage romance with Obinze to her immigration to the United States and eventual decision to return to Nigeria. Her time in the US is difficult at first and very eye-opening: Ifemelu never gave much thought to her race while living in Nigeria, but she learns that in America, being black is a significant and complicated part of one's identity. Ifemelu starts a blog about her observations as a non-American black, and as it grows in popularity, she turns blogging and speaking on this topic into a career. She has a couple of important relationships but never really stops thinking about her first love. A smaller portion of the story concerns Obinze's briefer, failed stint in England and the success he finds back in Nigeria. At the core, this is a love story about the long history of a couple, both together and apart.

There's more to the plot, but that's the bulk of it. This is primarily a novel of characters and ideas, and there's a fair amount of focus on everyday life, which is interesting to readers like myself because it's far removed from our own everyday lives. I enjoyed getting to know the characters, learning about life in Nigeria, and seeing several different immigrant trajectories. I loved Ifemelu's thoughts and blog posts about race and was glad to have my own eyes opened by her experiences. However, I would have preferred either more plot or a shorter book, because some portions of the story moved too slowly, and my interest sometimes waned.

The story doesn't proceed entirely in chronological order but jumps around in time, which is something I'm fine with in general but found not entirely effective here. It took me a while to really get into the story, and the timeline shifts were one reason. But after listening to this Guardian Book Club podcast in which Adichie spoke about her reasons for the book's structure, I can better appreciate what she was doing. This whole podcast discussion is a great extra for those who have read the book -- which I encourage, because despite some criticisms, I found this a worthwhile read.

→ When THE LEFTOVERS by Tom Perrotta was published a few years ago, I heard about it repeatedly and kept planning to read it. I finally got around to it this summer because HBO was airing a television series based on the novel, and I wanted to read before watching.

Invisible Man Is Uncomfortably Current

I started reading INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison a few days after Michael Brown was killed by a police officer and protests began in Ferguson, Missouri. At first, I didn't think about the novel in the context of the real-life events unfolding. I'd simply gotten around to the book because someone mentioned recently that this year is the centennial of Ellison's birth, and it reminded me that I've been meaning to read his most famous work for ages.

But as I read on in the novel, I was also hearing more and more reports out of Ferguson about violent, racist police response to the demonstrations and the refusal to investigate an officer's shooting of an unarmed young man. I was clued in early on because I was following the right people on Twitter, but I saw that news and outrage was slow to spread elsewhere. Much of the media coverage has been biased, and a lot of public reaction suggests that because these events involve a black youth and a black community, they matter less than other news stories that Americans get worked up about.

INVISIBLE MAN, published in 1952, portrays a black man's experiences of racism, violence, and invisibility in the 1930s. During another month, I might have read it as a record of the past and rejoiced in how much progress has been made. Reading it now, though, I found that many of the later events in the story mirror what's happening in Ferguson, and the book felt sadly current.

In the novel, the unnamed narrator graduates from a southern high school at the top of his class and is rewarded with a college scholarship -- after he endures disgusting humiliation for the amusement of the town's prominent white men. Things go well for him at the black university until a strange incident with a white trustee that leaves him disillusioned. He moves to New York City, and for a while he's highly visible as a prominent activist in Harlem. The story sometimes veers into the surreal, and those parts didn't work that well for me, but for the most part, I was absorbed by the narrator's life and the often appalling series of events he experiences, which are always complicated and nuanced.

The most upsetting synchronicity with reality comes near the end of the book, when a young, unarmed black man is shot by a cop. The narrator gives a moving speech at his funeral, stating, "His name was Clifton and he was black and they shot him. Isn't that enough to tell? Isn't it all you need to know?" Afterwards at a meeting of the activist organization, he says again, "He was shot because he was black and because he resisted. Mainly because he was black," and his white so-called allies criticize him for focusing on race. It all felt too familiar. I found a couple of other writers who were reminded of Tod Clifton when writing about Michael Brown. I recommend these essays by Charles Kinnaird and an anonymous teacher for their thoughts and the longer excerpts from the funeral speech.

I hope you will consider reading INVISIBLE MAN or any other book that addresses prejudice. I hope you'll talk about the shooting of Michael Brown and the unrest in Ferguson. I hope you're angry that events in the United States today can resemble scenes from a book about the racism of almost a century ago. It's hard for individuals to feel that any small actions can make a difference, but I believe that reading, and talking, and being angry are all important paths toward change.

Observations From the Bookstore Cafe

I'm sitting in the second-floor cafe that overlooks Books Inc. in Mountain View. I've purchased a couple of paperbacks, I've consumed an iced latte, and now I'm supposed to be doing some noveling, but I haven't been able to focus. I chose a table by the railing on purpose because I enjoy eavesdropping and spying on the people working and shopping below, and to nobody's surprise, these fun activities are distracting me from the less appealing task of accomplishing something.

The bookstore is busy, and this is on a weekday afternoon. Print is definitely not dead.

At a table nearby, there's a group of writers having an open meetup. Earlier they discussed their current projects, and they're now silently writing in solidarity. I haven't identified myself to them as another of their kind, and for some reason this amuses me.

I would like to spend all day in this store, but I don't want to be a bookseller, because that's hard work and involves being personable all day. I want a job that consists of sitting here looking down on the proceedings and reporting on my musings. Done, I guess?

I hope that brilliant writing is like heat in that it rises, and that by positioning myself above thousands of books, I'll absorb some words and inspiration.

The Giver Quartet and the Movie

I reread Lois Lowry's THE GIVER back in April because I knew it was being adapted into a movie. I initially read this dystopian kids' book soon after its 1993 release and liked it enough to read multiple times (though I was already well past the target age), so I was curious how it would stand up to my memories. After rereading and discovering that the story is still thought-provoking and affecting, I decided to check out its sequels, which I'd heard were only loosely connected to the original.

My reactions to the followup books were less enthusiastic. None of them are as powerful as THE GIVER, and fans only looking to find out what happened after that story's ambiguous ending will be disappointed by the switch to a new setting and characters. However, the sequels do get better as they go along, and the traditional sequel function also increases in that direction. It's possible to skip any of the books without becoming confused, so my recommendation for non-completists wishing to continue is to go directly to the final book.

The new movie, released last week, was another disappointment. Some critics have reviewed it well, but I'm with the majority in finding it unworthy of the source material.

Here's my take on each of the books, followed by more thoughts on the film:

→ THE GIVER: Life in Jonas's community is pleasant and safe. Every citizen is provided for, children are well cared for by the family units to which they are entrusted, and each twelve-year-old is assigned to a carefully chosen career that will lead to a satisfying adult life. But when Jonas receives his assignment during the Ceremony of Twelve, it's a bewildering one, and what he learns as he starts his training is even more confusing. He's never thought to ask questions about his life before, and now he's questioning everything.

This is a strong, if simple, story of a world that seems like a utopia to the inhabitants but isn't quite so perfect from a reader's perspective. It's written to be accessible to pre-teens, and so at times I would have preferred to have things less spelled out, but in general it's a pretty sophisticated story for the age group, relying on the reader to grasp the limits of Jonas's understanding. It stood up well to what I remembered, and I'd recommend it to both kids and adults.

→ GATHERING BLUE is also set in a far-future world, but in a completely different type of society, a primitive village where life is based around superstition and fear, women and children aren't respected, and nobody is particularly happy.

The plot is very similar to that of the first book: A young person is chosen to fill a special, mysterious role in their community, and this leads to discovering that their world is not what they've always been told. This repeated formula makes the story somewhat dull. More importantly, the second book lacks the element that gave the first one its impact. The society of THE GIVER is arguably better than ours in many ways, and you can contemplate whether what they gave up was worth it. GATHERING BLUE leads to no such philosophical questions. It might keep younger readers interested, but it has nothing special to offer adults.

New Books From Favorite Authors

It's always exciting when a favorite author has a new book out. When I realized that two of my favorite authors were releasing books in July, I could hardly contain my bookish delight. And I'm even more pleased to report that both novels are wonderful and delivered everything I've come to expect from these writers.

→ LANDLINE is Rainbow Rowell's fourth novel. (I've previously reviewed all the others.) Though she's better known for her YA hits, this book (like her first) features adult characters and is aimed at a grown-up readership. The story focuses on the realities of a faltering marriage and adds an element of unreality to create a clever, emotional, and funny tale.

Georgie is a TV comedy writer who finally has a chance at running the show of her dreams. But the timing couldn't be worse, because she's supposed to leave for Christmas vacation with her husband, Neal, and their kids, and instead she has to stay behind in Los Angeles to churn out scripts with her writing partner. Georgie and Neal's relationship hasn't been great recently, and the way he acts as he heads to the airport makes her afraid for the future of their marriage. When he seems to be avoiding her calls to his cell phone, she worries even more. Finally Georgie reaches Neal on his mother's landline -- except the Neal answering the phone isn't quite the same version of Neal as the one who left.

I loved the premise and the way it plays out, and as always, Rowell's characters are the perfect combination of eccentric and relatable. This novel does a great job of portraying the hard parts of staying in love and staying together, but it doesn't mind making you laugh at the same time.

LANDLINE was the first pick in Book Riot's new Riot Read program, so the site has a variety of dedicated content for the book. There's also a podcast episode with a book club-style discussion, for those who have already finished reading.

→ HOW TO TELL TOLEDO FROM THE NIGHT SKY by Lydia Netzer is a weird, lovable story about people falling in love under weird circumstances.

Irene is an astrophysicist who discovers a way to create black holes inside a particle collider. Outside the lab, she's terrified of losing control. George is a cosmologist searching for an equation that explains the arrangement of the universe. He's helped in his project by gods and goddesses that appear to him during migraines. "George and Irene were born to be together," the story tells us. It's not because they have so much in common, and it's not because opposites attract. The reason is that their relationship was planned out before they were born.

Dreams play a prominent role in this novel, and I think "dreamy" is a good word to describe Netzer's writing style. As in her debut novel, which I adored, the narrative often takes odd and fanciful turns. I enjoy the way this style contrasts with Netzer's recurring, and more grounded, themes of geeky love, science and technology, and family (also favorite themes of mine). And I'm especially impressed by how much humor Netzer manages to mix into all of this. (Check out her recent novella for an especially funny take on these themes.)

I have a huge amount of admiration for Rainbow Rowell and Lydia Netzer, and they both inspire me as a writer. I hope you'll check out their work!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ In the New York Times Opinionator blog, Aimee Bender analyzes What Writers Can Learn From "Goodnight Moon": "Yes, move around in a structure. But also float out of that structure. "Goodnight nobody" is an author's inspired moment that is inexplicable and moving and creates an unknown that lingers."

Going Swimmingly

I just had the most rewarding swim. The rhythmic movement through the water loosened up a muscle kink that had been plaguing me. It also helped me (as it so often does) work out a bit of plot that I was stuck on.

My recent vacation to visit my family was wonderful. And despite my fears and occasional past experience, the break didn't diminish my interest in writing, but rather built up some new momentum.

Before, during, and since the trip, I've been working on carefully nailing down the story of the next novel. I haven't historically been the kind of writer who creates detailed outlines in advance, but I feel like I could be, and I want to try it this time. I think if I can discover the story in the pre-writing stage, rather than in the first draft (and the second, and the third), I can reach the finished version in fewer revision iterations and a lot less time.

As always, we'll see how that really goes in practice. But now I've waded in, and I'm gliding smoothly along.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Competing perspectives: At Thought Catalog, Michael Malice advises Never edit as you write: "Editing while you write is like climbing down the mountain as you try to reach the summit. Get the job done first, and only then should you try to go back." Responding in Electric Lit, Lincoln Michel offers a different point of view: "Each path you take--choices of voice, structure, character, setting, etc.--alters your destination. Thinking of it that way, is it so crazy to take out a map and backtrack if you realize you are going the wrong way?"

You Get the Picture

It's been a while since I posted anything about this new novel I'm working on. That's because after I did a bunch of planning and a lot of research and then some more planning, I wasn't sure how to proceed. I still needed to figure out many aspects of the story, and I didn't really know enough about the facts, and it was all rather intimidating. I went off and wrote some other stuff for a bit, and I wrote nothing for a time, and I let myself get distracted by unrelated things. Somehow none of that resulted in progress on the novel. But now I finally have a much stronger grip on the story, and I'm feeling far more confident about getting somewhere. So it's the perfect time to get caught up in the excitement of a vacation and forget all about the novel again!

I'm really looking forward to visiting my family. I'm also happy about feeling that when I get back from the trip, I'll be eager to move forward with this novel instead of continuing to avoid it.

In a couple of other areas, I've made more visible progress:

I'm pleased to report that my new/old Polaroid camera is functional! I was able to purchase the appropriate battery and film, but I wasn't certain I really had it working until I peeled apart the first photograph. I'd braced myself for disappointment, so seeing a clear image there was kind of astounding, perhaps what it might have felt like to encounter a Polaroid for the very first time.

Here, meta-ly, is a photo of my first four photos:

Inspiration vs Perspiration vs Procrastination

There is a component of creativity that comes out of nowhere. At no particular time and for no particular reason, you might be struck by an image or a scenario or a dilemma that enthralls you. Maybe this happens to you constantly, maybe it's rare, but either way, that spark of inspiration can become the thing you're excited to write about (or express in the creative format of your choice). A creative project has to start from something, and this so-called visit from the muse might be the best source for an idea you actually care about.

But any creative project requires a whole lot of ideas, not just a starting point. That sentence you overheard can inspire your novel, but you're going to have to make a million decisions about character and plot and setting to transform that sentence into a story, and that's leaving aside the fact that you also have to sit down and write the damn thing. Since so many brilliant ideas come unexpectedly, it can be tempting to wait around for as long as it takes for all the right pieces to fall into place in your head, but this isn't generally the best tactic.

Coming to every decision in its own sweet time could take forever, so it's important to apply the same discipline to planning and thinking as to writing: Show up and do the work whether you want to or not, whether you feel inspired or not. This won't be effective absolutely every time, but usually, all that's required to get things flowing is to make a start. Focus on the problem, stare pointedly at research materials that might lead to ideas, and a solution will become apparent. It's not magic, it's persistence.

Once you've had a little success with the just-do-it strategy, it can again be tempting to sit back and let the rest of puzzle assemble itself through those useful flashes of brilliance. This might work, after all, now that you've solved that one big problem that was plaguing you for ages.

Don't do that. A crucial aspect of persistence is that it's ongoing. To really accomplish anything creative, you have to work at it and work at it and work some more. Even if it's summer and there are new books out and vacations to plan.

This post is of course simply a timeless observation, relevant to nothing at all particular or currently relevant.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ This summer, London is full of benches inspired by books, and they're rather lovely. (Thanks, Books on the Nightstand!)

→ At The Millions, Jonathan Russell Clark examines The Art of the Epigraph: "Writers don't use them to boast. They are less like some wine and entrée pairing and more like the first lesson in a long class. Writers must teach a reader how to read their book. "

Artifacts of Fiction

Last month, while I was out for a walk in my neighborhood, I saw a sign for an estate sale inside a house that was on the market. I never pass up an opportunity to look around a stranger's home in a socially acceptable manner, so I went in.

It was clear that someone had spent a long life in that house and taken great care of their belongings. I lingered for a while over a beautiful Art Deco bedroom set that has nothing to do with the decor (if you can call it that) of my own house but would fit in well at the home of my antique-collecting parents. Primed by childhood weekends of antique fairs, I turned my highly specific knowledge to the shelves of smaller items in search of any other Deco pieces. I didn't find any, but my attention was grabbed by a set of white dishes with tiny green flowers near the edges. The pattern instantly made me think of being young in my other parents' kitchen. It's a strong memory, but I'm not even convinced it's correct -- it might be my grandmother's dishes that bear this pattern.

Then I spotted another object full of personal significance, but this one had nothing to do with my real family. Instead, it was connected to the fictional family that inhabits my novel. In THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE, the characters buy an early model Polaroid camera. It's not a major event in the story, but the camera does play a role in several scenes, as do the photographs passed down through the years. I put a fair amount of effort into researching 60s-era Polaroids, so it gave me a thrill to unexpectedly discover one in front of me.

The actual camera in my novel, which the characters purchase in 1964, is a Polaroid Land Model 100. It retailed for $165, equivalent to over $1000 in today's dollars. The estate sale camera is a Model 250, available starting in 1967 for about the same price, but the two models are similar in design. The original owner had carefully preserved all the camera's accessories and documentation, and what most excited me was the idea of a carrying case packed with everything my character would have brought home from the store. For $40, I took this piece of fictional family history back to my own real house.