A writer more interesting than her writing

Vera Wong goes down to her San Francisco tea shop one morning to find the door broken open and a body on the floor holding a flash drive. Vera doesn’t know what comes over her, but after calling the cops like any good citizen would, she sort of . . . swipes the flash drive from the body and tucks it safely into the pocket of her apron. Why? 

Because Vera is sure she would do a better job than the police possibly could, because nobody sniffs out a wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands. Vera knows the killer will be back for the flash drive; all she has to do is watch the increasing number of customers at her shop and figure out which one among them is the killer. So begins Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto.

As the book evolves the reader meets four characters any one of whom could have been the murderer, assuming a certain suspension of disbelief, but all of whom have good reasons not to have been responsible. I am afraid that by the process of elimination, I identified the murderer—although not the means or motivation—two thirds of the way through the book.

In fact I found Sutanto more interesting than feisty Vera Wong. Sutanto grew up shuttling back and forth between Indonesia, Singapore, and Oxford and considers all three places her home. She has a Masters from Oxford University, but it took her nine years after graduating from her creative writing course to get her first publishing deal. She now writes YA rom-coms, YA suspenseful thrillers, adult contemporary fiction, and adult suspense novels.

She told a Writer’s Digest interviewer in 2024 that she usually creates the plot first because “I outline my books before I start writing. But I never know what the character is going to be like until I actually start writing. Then their voice kind of comes out onto the page. When I first started writing, my first ever book was totally pantsed. I didn’t know how to outline and so I think the first three books I wrote, I pantsed them. I remember my husband being like, ‘I was just reading an interview with this author, and he says that he outlines his books before he writes them.’ And I was immediately like, ‘How dare you. I’m an artiste. Every author has their own process. Don’t tell me to outline.’ And then I realized, this isn’t working because I was getting stuck all the time. Even after I finished the draft, it would be a hot mess. I would have to rewrite a lot of it. So, when I first started outlining, I only outlined about half of the book, and things would surprise me. There was a lot more flexibility.”

By her eighteenth book her outlines had become meticulous. “I like to say I’m a Chinese mother: My outlines listen to me because my characters are scared of me. They know not to surprise me. My outlines, they have no chill, you know? They’re chapter by chapter. They tend to be 12 pages long, and they’re quite detailed.”

By October 2024 Sutanto had published 11 books in four years. How had she managed? “Because it took me so long to get my first ever publishing deal—during those 10 years I was writing and then I would get really sad when the books ended up getting rejected by everybody—I learned the healthiest thing for me to do was, once I finished a book, once it was ready to query or go on submission, the best thing for me to do was to immediately move on to a new project. To fall in love with a new project so I could let go of the last book. So, I got into that habit where as soon as I finish a draft and I edit it, I send it off to my agent.

“Now I actually do take a break, but I emotionally detach myself from it. Then I’m actively thinking of my next project. I’m actively asking myself, What do I want to work on next? So that’s number one, the mental health part of the answer.

“And then the logistics part. I’ve trained myself to write super-fast because it’s the only way I can outrun this really mean little voice in my head. I call it my ‘editor,’ and as I write, this inner editor is saying things like, ‘Oh wow, that sentence is awful. That’s so awkward. Does that even make sense? The character is so boring. This plot makes no sense.’” To silence the voice, she writes in 15-minute sprints and stops after 2,000 words. “I don’t do anything with that manuscript for the rest of the day. It gives me a break, and I’ve written 2,000 words.” Do it every day and you soon have a book.

You can find the interview at https://www.writersdigest.com/be-inspired/the-wd-interview-jesse-q-sutanto

Sutanto has also posted instructions on how to outline, write, and preserve your mental health while doing it at https://jesseqsutantoauthor.com/for-writers  Good stuff.

Not much happens but the book is very funny

Barbara Pym (1913-1980) is one of those authors—their names are legion—one thinks one ought to have read but never have, or that's what I think. In a moment of hopeful self-improvement recently, I checked out A Glass of Blessings. I chose it because it was convenient and Philip Larkin, a poet I admire, blurbed: "“The most underrated novelist of the century . . . The subtlest of her books—the sparkle on first acquaintance has been succeeded by the deeper brilliance of established art.”

Wilmet Forsyth is a 33-year-old, childless, middle-class woman married to a boring, if devoted, British civil servant. She fills her days with shopping, lunching, good works (the Anglo-Catholic Church and three priests play key roles), and tea. Her most exciting experience was serving as a Wren in Italy during WWII where she made friends with Mary and met her husband.

Although not a lot "happens" in A Glass of Blessings, the book is filled with incident and is more than redeemed by Pym's writing. "Harry [a friend's husband] was one of those non-intellectual men who are often more comforting to women that the exciting but tortured intellectuals. He might not have any very interesting conversation for his wife at the end of the day, might indeed quite easily drop off to sleep after dinner, but he was strong and reliable, assuming that he would be the breadwinner and that his wife would of course vote the same way as he did." Of course. 

In other words, Pym can be very funny. Not laugh-out-loud funny, but knowing-smile funny. 

Another example: "He was one of those preachers who, in coming to the end of what they have to say, find it impossible to stop. Sentence after sentence seemed as if it must be the last but still he went on. I felt as if I had been wrapped round and round in a cocoon of wordiness like a great suffocating eiderdown."

'There is one complication in Wilmet's cosseted life: she has never had a lover and she becomes infatuated with the exceptionally handsome brother of her friend Mary. Unfortunately for Wilmet, the young man is gay at a time when homosexuality was a sin that "dare not speak its name" and was illegal. It is possible that Wilmet never realizes why her feelings for the guy are not returned, and Pym's writing is subtle enough that, I suspect many readers at the time—1958—did not realize either.

I have a sense that the society and life Pym evokes no longer exists, even making allowances for the fact that the book is fiction. Which makes reading A Glass of Blessings even more rewarding than many novels. 

A character who is looking for connection

Katie Kitamura's first two novels were told from male points of view. She told an interviewer from The New Yorker that "I didn’t want to [write about women] until I was sure I was really good enough. You know, writing male characters is not very difficult because there is a vast canon of male characters written by men, for men, for any writer starting out to draw from. Finding the voice of a male character is in so many ways what a Ph.D. in American literature trains you to do."

She's now published three novels with three somewhat different, unnamed female voices. The first was A Separation, published in 2017. At the beginning of the book the narrator's husband has left their five-year marriage and, when the novel begins, has gone to Greece to research professional mourners for a book he's writing.

The narrator, a translator, who appears to be in her late 20s, early 30s, travels from her London home to the Greek hotel where her husband has been staying. He's not there, although he has not checked out and she spends much of the book waiting for him to return so she can tell him, finally, she wants a divorce.

It's late in the season and the hotel is almost empty. The narrator interacts with the driver who takes her sightseeing notwithstanding the landscape has been blackened by fires. She talks to a young woman on the hotel staff and realizes (concludes) that her husband has slept with the girl and discarded her, not the first time such a thing has happened. The husband's appearance two thirds of the way through the book is a shock, but it follows naturally from the place and the situation.

I especially enjoy Kitamura's apt observations about people and life, perhaps because I can't do it. "People were capable of living their lives in a state of permanent disappointment, there were plenty of people who did not marry the person they hoped to marry, much less live the life they hoped to live, other people invented new dreams to replace the old ones, finding fresh reasons for discontent."

One more example as the narrator muses about differences in age between a man and a woman: "Of course, at twenty girls do not care so much about age, a woman of thirty would think twice before embarking on an affair with a man more than two decades older, should the affair develop into something more serious—and the odds of a woman wishing for it to become something serious grew exponentially as she aged—then a gap of two decades would become critical, nobody wanted to marry a man who would soon be at death's door."

Obviously, these are the thoughts of A Separation's narrator. They are not necessarily those of the author. They add to the character's personality and character, and are yet another reason to relish the book. Which I did.

When is a translation "faithful" to the original?

The unnamed narrator/protagonist of Katie Kitamura's 2017 novel A Separation is a translator. Her profession is irrelevant to the main story, but at one point she muses about translating Balzac's story Colonel Chabert, "although not with particular success."

Katie Kitamura

She writes, "I had not been able to find the correct register for capturing the particular density of Balzac's prose, I generally translate contemporary fiction, which is an entirely different affair—the colonel of the title is presumed dead in the Napoleonic Wars."

Because Balzac was born in 1799 and his first book published in 1823 even he may have had difficulty finding the appropriate French register for his story written years after Napoleon. 

In any case, Kitamura observes that "translators are always worried about being faithful to the original, an impossible task because there are multiple and often contradictory ways of being faithful, there is a literal fidelity and there is in the spirit of, a phrase without concrete meaning."

Being faithful to the original is something I worry about when I translate Japanese. Because I'm translating popular, contemporary fiction—not "literature"—I believe most of the meaning is on the surface and I can do okay. But because I have to work so hard to understand many sentences, I'm sure I have not done some justice. 

The English I produce is interesting, reads well, and makes sense. Is it faithful to the original? I can only do my best and hope.

Three of the pleasures Audition offers

Karie Kitamura's slim novel Audition affected me so strongly, so positively I have obtained two of her earlier novels, A Separation and Intimacies, something I never do. (Probably because there are so many books I want to read. I do read the new book of an author I've enjoyed on the theory that the writer tends to grow more skillful with experience, an obviously false assumption).

Audition's narrator is a middle age actress in the last week or so of rehearsing a new play in which she plays the lead. She lives with her husband Tomas who sounds like an academic who writes articles about art.

The novel has two parts, preparing for opening night and after the production's phenomenal success. I am not going to say more because the novel's structure is one of its pleasures.

Another delight is the (unnamed) narrator's thoughts about life, acting, and art. Is she an unreliable narrator, unable to distinguish between life in the world (real life) and life on stage (playing a role). Until I finished the book and thought about it I had not considered that the narrator may not be the most objective, disinterested reporter of events. I had taken everything she said as verifiable, if fictional, truth.

(Indeed, is any novel's first-person narrator ever a reliable source? Can you—should you—ever entirely trust a narrator's account of events? Something to think about when I'm reading. And writing.)

Another pleasure of Audition is Kitamura's writing. The book is a joy at the sentence level. She is not afraid of long sentences: "And although the actor was only in his sixties, as soon as I heard the story of the notes on the counter, the forgotten lines—not even forgotten, because they had not been retained and then lost again, they evaded his mind's grasp altogether—as soon as I heard this, I was able to envision his death, I was able to imagine the parabolic arc of his decline, I understood that eventually his mind would disintegrate to the point that his memory of the world and of himself, would be lost, and with it everything that formed his being."

I hope that picking out one 99-word sentence does not discourage readers from trying Audition; this one is unusually long, chosen to make my point. If I have deterred a literature loving reader. I apologize. And I apologize to Ms. Kitamura whose work I enthusiastically admire. 

What you need to survive in 1600 America

I was taught that a story can have one or a combination of only three conflicts: man (which includes woman) against man, man against nature, or man against himself. That's it. All conflicts can be put into one of those three buckets.

Lauren Groff's novel The Vaster Wilds is almost entirely the story of a woman against nature. The time is a winter the 1600s; the place is the New World (although the exact location is never identified) including scenes from the character's past in London and shipboard. The central character is a young servant girl, perhaps 15 years old or so when the book opens.

She's never identified by name reflecting her insignificance. She was called Lamentation in the poor house where she lived for the first four years of her life, Zed by her mistress because she was nothing.  

In the opening pages, the girl is slim enough to slip through a crack in the palisade surrounding a New World fort. Native worriers are besieging the fort. The starving settlers have resorted to cannibalism. The child she loved and cared for is dead. The girl has stolen a coat and good boots from dead settlers and has accumulate everything she will need to survive in the wilderness: cup, hatchet, knife, flint, and two coverlets. She a nebulous idea of traveling north and eventually connecting with the French. 

Groff writes brilliantly about the girl's life in the wild, her life in London, her shipboard romance during the crossing (her lover is washed away in a storm), the natural world, and what the girl does to stay alive. I am in awe of her imagination and inventiveness.

Nevertheless, I am not the most sympathetic reader of The Vaster Wilds. By the nature of the book, Groff is writing from the outside. She does a creditable job of inhabiting a 17th century servant girl's consciousness, but I am afraid I was unconvinced. I had problems with the book's weather which seems to change from bitter winter to temperate spring remarkably quickly. And just when the girl is about to starve to death she finds another source of food. Finally, the book might almost be read as an allegory of the colonial settlement of America.

All that said, I am pleased I read it if only for the writing and Groff's creativity.

And now for another opinion . . .

At this writing, Amity Gaige's novel Heartwood has 14,250 customer reviews on Amazon, the vast majority of which are positive with five stars.

While I often read book reviews to identify likely titles, I rarely read Amazon or Good Reads customer reviews and never read a review, professional or customer, before I review a book because I want to approach the work relatively uninfluenced.

Amity Gaige

Once I've reviewed a book, however, I enjoy reading reader opinions to see how others saw it. I am especially entertained by the comments of the people who gave one star to a book I gave five starts. Which brings us to Heartwood.

"The story is unbelievable and full of tired narratives and cliches."

"This is a boring, boring book - like being trapped in a movie and trying to calculate how much time you have left because it’s too dark to see your wristwatch. One dimensional characters, put together solely to try and form a meandering, pointless shell of a plot.

"So many pointless story lines. This book could have been written with half the words. Skimmed the last 50 pages. Didn’t care anymore."

"The writing is scattered - the plot difficult to follow - and often just downright weird. There were several points that I considering stopping - negative comments about our country and the Bible. But when the warden discusses homosexual feelings for another character, I was done (page 117)."

In other words, some readers resisted or objected to elements in Heartwood I found were strengths.

In an Author's Note at the end of the book, Gaige says that the spark that ignited the story was an account of a 66-year-old woman hiking the Appalachian Trail in Maine, became lost in 2013, and died. The novel borrows some details from her story—the location, the conspiracy theories it provoked, her profession as a nurse—but this is fiction, which is not sufficient for some readers.

"I found this book to be offensive - to use so many of the specific details of the real-life tragedy of Gerry Largay seems unethical. (I did not know Largay nor was I involved in her search. I have never thru hiked the AT.) The same fictional story could have easily been set in a mountain west setting, with a different profile of the lost woman, but the author made so many of the details the same to Largay that the novel was unnecessarily insensitive to me."

"I sincerely don’t understand how a fiction author would use so many (core) similarities to an actual event, where the real life character died. The plagiarism of real life (location, ME SERE, husband support along trail, AT flip flop hike) was so disturbing . . .  While reading the book, I Googled many times to search if Gaige needed permission from Largay’s family, and didn’t find the answer. Sheesh, what a disappointing and disturbing read."

As the man says, you pays your money and you takes your chance.

What could have happened to Valerie?

Because I have been lost in thick woods (at night!) and because I have hiked some of the Appalachian Trail, I came to Amity Gaige's novel Heartwood with more than a passing interest. Basically, it's the story of a middle-aged, married nurse, Valerie Gillis, who leaves the AT in Maine briefly to pee and becomes lost. When she doesn't meet her husband at the next check point, the Maine Warden Service (a real organization) mobilizes to find her.

If it were only the report of how the Maine Warden Service mobilizes to find a lost hiker, hunter, or child it might make an interesting article. Because Gaige has published four novels, Heartwood is interesting and engaging and holds the reader's attention for the length of a book.

We read the notes that Valerie writes to her mother when she is lost. We follow the activities of game warden Lt. Beverly Miller who directs the search for Valerie. We read the Bronx interview with "Santo," a large Black man who hiked with Valerie. We see Valerie's husband George who has been acting as her support, driving north, paralleling the AT. We meet Lena Kucharski, an elderly woman with a computer living in a Connecticut assisted living facility; Lena has an online friend, /u/TerribleSilence, who tells her about the missing woman. We read the useless or misleading calls and emails that come in to the tip line the Warden Service has set up. 

And running through the entire novel is the knowledge that often, if a missing person does not turn up within the first 48 hours of being reported, the odds of being found alive decline from possibly to probably to certainly dead. Depending on the individual's condition, one can survive about three days without water, a couple weeks without food. The Maine woods are full of water but Valerie has no idea what of the vegetation will feed her and what will kill her.

Indeed, aside from leaving the trail to find some privacy, Valarie has made a number of decision that made a bad situation worse. She gave her husband her geo-location device because the AT is so well marked and she wanted to save weight. She has matches but does not know how to build a fire. She doesn't know how to travel in a straight direction in un-blazed woods. When she realizes she's lost, she continues to move.

(Safety tip: Always tell someone where you are hiking and if you become lost, stop. Save your strength, water, food, matches. Panic makes you stupid.)

Because no one element is very long—some are only a page or two—the reader has no opportunity to become bored and part of Heartwood's pleasure is watching Gaige fit the pieces together. You don't have to have hiked the AT to enjoy the novel. 

What happened on that Japanese beach?

Susan Choi manages the extraordinary in her 2025 novel Flashlight. In 450 pages she creates four fully rounded characters and evokes their lives in the US, Japan, France, and North Korea over a fifty-year period. And she does it without losing the reader's interest in their lives and the events that batter them.

When Flashlight begins Louisa is a nine-year-old American child living with her parents, Ann and Serk, in a small city on the west coast of Japan in what sounds like the late 1950s. She goes to a Japanese school, has picked up the language, and loves to swim.

Ann was—and in some ways remains—a free spirit. In her teens, she traveled in the Middle East with a boy she married long enough to have a son at age 19 and get divorced. The ex demands—and gets—all rights to Tobias who Ann does not see again until he is 19. In her mid-20s Ann marries Serk and has Louisa.

Serk is ethnically Korean. His family was brought to Japan before WWII where he grew up. (Korea was a Japanese colony until 1945.) An exceptional student, Serk added English to his Japanese and Korean languages. After the Korean War, North Korea invited Koreans living in Japan to return to the peninsula where the Communist government had established a socialist paradise. Serk's family, with the exception of a married sister accept the offer, but he is dubious. However, because of Japanese prejudice, Serk does accept a US Government offer to study in the States where he obtains a green card, a doctorate in mechanical engineering, and a university professorship.

Tobias, like his mother Ann, is a free spirit, accumulating languages and experiences. When we meet him, he is living in a Buddhist temple, paying his way by doing odd jobs for the monks.

Serk, Ann, and Louisa are in Japan for a year because Serk had to replace another professor at a sister Japanese university. One evening Serk disappears and Louisa is found almost drowned on the beach and Flashlight takes a totally unexpected—but historically accurate—turn. To say more would, I believe, spoil your pleasure.

I am in awe of Choi's ability to create character and to have them dance through decades without missing a beat or losing the reader. I thought I was finished with fat books. I was mistaken.

Comberland River Review has published my story

My story "The Chrysanthemum Flower" has just been published by the Cumberland River Review, a quarterly online literary magazine published by the department of English at Trevecca Nazarene University in Nashville.

The story is based on bits an pieces of my life, which may indicate a failure of imagination, an inability to invent. Or it may indicate an ability to shape and give meaning to life events.

In either case, I briefly taught a prisoner Japanese in a cell block of a maximum-security state prison. I did translate the Japanese story quoted. "The Chrysanthemum Flower" builds on those two experiences. 

You can read the story by clicking on this link. Or by searching for "Cumberland River Review," clicking on "Current Issue," and clicking on the story.

I welcome any thoughts, comments, or observations the story provokes. Enjoy.