Who wants the Shanghai Moon enough to kill for it?

I'm afraid I came late to this party. The Shanghai Moon, published in 2009, was S.J. Rozan's ninth Lydia Chin/Bill Smith mystery (she's since published two more). Chin and Smith are both private detectives in New York City, and the series is interesting because Rozan alternates point of view from book to book. Lydia Chin narrates The Shanghai Moon. 

The reader knows she's in accomplished hands from the first page. Here's Lydia returning to her Chinatown apartment to be greeted by her mother:

     "Who are you?" She shuffled from the kitchen and peered at me. "You look like my daughter, Ling Wan-ju, but I haven't seen her for a long time. She went to California. She said she'd be back soon, but she stayed. I'm happy she's having fun."
     My mother's sarcasm could cut diamonds.
     "Two extra weeks, Ma. And they're your cousins." I kissed her pappery cheek, which she grudgingly allowed. "Have a good time while I was gone?"

The mystery involves jewels that a Jewish wife of a wealthy Chinese official hid in their Shanghai compound during the chaotic closing days of WWII. They've been found, and a Communist Chinese official has absconded with them, apparently to New York. An American lawyer, a woman based in Zurich, an expert in recovering works looted by the Germans during the war, hires Joel Pilarsky, another PI, to find the thief. Pilarsky in turn hires Lydia for her Chinese and Chinatown contacts. And then Joel is murdered.

We learn about the romance between the Jewish woman and the Chinese man via letters that survived and are available on the internet. These, set in a different type,  are moving and convincing and by reading between the lines help the reader understand the history and family relations involved with the jewels.

Not only are the letters convincing, but so is Rozan's evocation of New York's Chinatown. There may not be a Chinese gang called the White Eagles to which Lydia's distant cousin—nickname Armpit—aspires, but I am willing to believe it is. Rozan is also wonderful at writing dialogue that conveys character, advances the story, and adds to the reader's knowledge:

     "Can you really read that?" Bill asked as I got back into the car . . . 
     "Why wouldn't I be able to?" I airily traced my finger down a column of Chinese characters.
     "Because if it was written in Shanghai while Paul Gilder was there, it's probably in the Shanghainese dialect, which, thought Chinese characters carry no phonetic information and therefore can be read by anyone literate, still may be different enough in the vocabulary formed by those characters to baffle a speaker of one of the other Chinese dialects, say for example Cantonese."
     I stared at him. "What are you, Wikipedia?"

The story threads become quite tangled before Lydia and Bill are able to pull them straight. That there are many Chinese names, some similar, may put off certain readers. But at the end of The Shanghai Moon in the middle of the denouement Rosan gives Lydia an observation that is so appropriate and so funny I could not read it for laughing. I may have come late, but I thoroughly enjoyed the party.

Come to be inspired by the panel

The Avon Free Public Library has invited me to participate in its Local Author Festival on Tuesday evening, June 12, one of ten literary events the library will be holding this summer.

My five fellow Connecticut authors—Stephen Kushman, Heidi Ulrich, Lisa Acerbo, Kenneth Passan,  Paul J. Nyerick—and I make up a Fiction Author Panel, the theme of which is "Inspiration." We'll addressing questions like: What inspires you to write? How do you approach writing a new book/story? Do you do any research? If so, what kind?  Do certain books—or kinds of books—inspire you to write? If so, what? What do you do when you’re not inspired?

It promises to be a stimulating evening, and if you are in the Avon area on June 12th, come be inspired.

Four lives, sixty years, an extraordinary novel

Let's start with two remarkable facts about Kia Corthron's The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter that have nothing to do with the characters or plot (or the book's quality):

(1) It is a first novel;

(2) It is 789 pages.

What publisher in 2015 would take a chance on such a manuscript? Fortunately for readers (and Kia Corthron) Seven Stories Press, 25-year-old independent New York publishing company, did.

It was not a total crap shoot. Corthron has an undergraduate degree in communications and film, spent a year in a playwriting workshop after graduation, then applied to Columbia University's MFA program. As a playwright she's won a number of honors for her stage work including the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize (Drama), at $150,000 one of the largest prizes of its kind in the world. And once The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter was published, it won the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel. The editor clearly saw value.

The novel traces the lives of brothers Randall and B.J., who are white, born in fictional small-town Prayer Ridge, Alabama, and who are 13 and 18 years old when the book opens in 1941. And the lives of brothers Elliot and Dwight, who are black, born in fictional small-town Humble, Maryland, and and who are 6 and 12 years old in 1941. The novel concludes in 2010.

Randall is exceptionally bright; B.J. is profoundly deaf, illiterate, and uncommunicative. Randall, impressed as a school child by the life of Helen Keller, teaches B.J. a sign language they can use with each other. Eventually B.J. learns American Sign Language and can communicate with others. Randall, for all his intelligence and promise, is trapped and emotionally/intellectually crippled by Jim Crow Alabama and during the book  Corthron dramatizes the cataclysmic effect on Southern whites and blacks by the Civil Rights movement.

Elliot and Dwight grow up in a stable working class family—their father is a Pullman porter—and live in racially mixed neighborhood. Elliot eventually becomes a lawyer, working out of an Indianapolis law firm and, at one point, defending two young black boys caught playing a kissing game with a white child on an elementary school Georgia playground.

Corthron is particularly strong showing the four boys, Randall, B.J., Elliot, and Dwight, as children at play. This is what it must have been like growing up in small-town Alabama and small-town Maryland in the 1940s. An accomplishment because Corthron herself, although she grew up in Maryland, was born in 1961.

Given her background as a playwright, she is also particularly skilled a creating dialogue that reveals character, age, class, and situation. Here is beginning of the section in which we are introduced to Elliot. The spelling and punctuation are Corthron's:

I got nine lives!
You ain't got no nine lives, cat got nine lives. Dwight don't even look up. Dwight always drawrin.
I'm a cat! I'm a cat! I'm a cat! Meow. Hahahaha!
Shut up.
Whatchu drawrin?
He don't answer. I go over. He settin on our bed. He settin on our bed drawrin.
He got wings! That man got wings!
It's Icarus, Dwight say. Dwight good at drawrin! Look! Fingernails!

Corthron found a way to write dialect that gives the impression of speech without trying to reproduce the sounds exactly (a la Mark Twain). It is so effective and so strong that I had to put the novel aside because I found my black characters talking like hers in the book I was writing.

As one might expect in a 789-page novel covering sixty years in the lives of four main characters a lot happens. But what happens grows out of the decisions/choices of the characters and the situations/circumstances in which they find themselves. The reader may begin to wonder how these four lives converge—will they?

They do. First in tragedy and horror, and finally in perhaps the best resolution possible under the circumstances. The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter is ultimately plausible and satisfying. It engaged me for all its bulk in the characters' lives and the places I know little about. I feel better for knowing for knowing them. I only hope Corthron writes another novel.

How to read as a writer who wants to write better

If anyone is looking for a guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them, Francine Prose has written Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and For Those Who Want to Write Them. Because I love books and want to write better ones, I checked out.

When Prose published the guide in 2006, she'd taught literature and writing for more than twenty years and had published fourteen books of fiction. She's since published seven more. Her novel Blue Angel was a National Book Award finalist. So she's been around the block a couple times.

Prose begins Chapter One by asking, "Can creative writing be taught?" Because she'd been teaching writing off and on for twenty years she could hardly say that "any attempt to teach the writing of fiction was a complete waste of time." Rather she tells people that a good teacher can show you how to edit your work, and the right class "can form the basis of a community that will help and sustain you." But you don't learn to write by taking a class. "Like most—maybe all—I learned to write by writing and, by example, by reading books."

I have said that I read fiction on two levels: I skate along on the surface, following the story and the character(s) ups and downs. Simultaneously, I try to be conscious of what the author is doing with point of view, continuity, dialogue, and description. Prose is much more thorough. A list of chapter titles in order will give you an idea what else you can be sensitive to: Words, Sentences, Paragraphs, Narration, Character, Dialogue, Details, Gesture.

She illustrates what she's talking about with examples from dozens of sources, from paragraphs to substantial passages, and for even more help she includes a list of "Books to be Read Immediately." The book may be more than dozen years old, but the advice is timeless. For example:

"In the hands of a master, even the shortest paragraphs can be enormously powerful, as are the last two paragraphs of Raymond Carver's story "Fat":
It is August.
My life is going to change. I feel it.
Consider how much less successful this passage would be if all three sentences appeared in the same paragraph. As is, the section seem nearly perfect, because every decision about paragraphing contributes to the strength of the story's ending."

This after she has pointed out that one sentence/one line paragraphs "should be used sparingly, if at all." If you're going to use a one sentence paragraph, the sentence had better have enough content to justify setting it off.

In other words, there are no hard, fast, immutable rules in writing fiction. The only question: Does it work? "Work" in the sense of providing a reader aesthetic satisfaction. And unfortunately for the writer, readers are different. What John finds aesthetically satisfying, Jane finds needlessly complex. What Jane finds aesthetically satisfying, Mary finds banal and formulaic. To see how this works, look up the one-star reviews of a book you loved or the five-star reviews of a book you wanted to throw across the room. Readers respond to different things. But I repeat myself.

I think that Reading Like a Writer should be on every serious fiction writer's bookshelf. I read it straight through for this review, but it is worth returning to periodically to be reminded—shown—how the masters have used narration, dialogue, gesture and more to make masterpieces. The rest of us may not be in the masterpiece class, but we can all do better. Reading like a writer can help.