An entertaining story about a plausible family

Rachel (Rocky) is the protagonist narrator of Wreck, Catherine Newman's second novel about Rocky's family. (The first was Sandwich.) Rodky is in her mid-50s like Newman; she writes—or has written—magazine stories like Newman; she lives a small city in Western Massachusetts like Newman.

Rocky's immediate family is her husband Nick, a freelance physical therapist; her son Jamie, a management consultant in New York City; her daughter Willa, a PhD candidate; and her 92-year-old father. Jamie is married, Willa is gay.

At the beginning of the novel, Rocky hears of a train-car crash in town which killed the car's driver who was one of Jamie's high school classmates. This wreck reverberates throughout the novel as Rocky sleeplessly obsesses about the driver who she did not know and about the wreck's cause.

It is not much of a stretch to think of Rocky herself as a slow-motion wreck. On page one she discovers "a red bump with three smaller red bumps trailing away from it—a kind of dermatological shooting star." The bumps spread, become a rash and although they are ugly they are not painful. They are also a mystery to the doctors and specialists Rocky consults. There seems to be no cause and no cure.

Much of the book is is an account of Rocky's daily, upper middle-class life: her insomnia, her dealings with her editor, her love for Nick, Jamie, and Willa, her patience with her elderly father, her visits to doctors and their tests, her obsession with the train-car crash. It's not all that riveting until we learn that Jamie's employer consulted for the railroad and agreed to the corporation's decision to cut staff, maintenance, and repairs. Jamie worked on the account.

Wreck also held my interest even through Rocky's visits to doctors because tiresome. Newman can be a very engaging. often funny writer. From page 2: "Here's what's true about the Internet: very infrequently do people log on with their good news." And here from page 182: "Her staticky hair is standing straight up. Talking to her is like trying to have a conversation with someone while they're being electrocuted." 

Wreck is an engaging, lively, and entertaining novel about a plausible family, the humor tempered by an underlying seriousness. It's not the kind of thing I ordinarily read, but I'm pleased I did.

Why continue to write fiction?

I read the August cover story in The Atlantic, "The Age of Reading is Over" by Rose Horowich.

She writes, "According to the National Academy for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation's reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2922. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the percentage of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023 . . . ." And there is no reason to think (or hope) these figures will improve.

As someone who spends several hours every day writing fiction, who at this moment has three completed novel manuscripts and is working on a forth, who weekly sends queries to potential literary agents to no positive effect (so far), this is a sobering, thought-provoking article. It makes me wonder why bother?

I posted the question on a novel-writing website. I asked the group are you writing to say something you believe is significant, important, worthwhile? Are you writing to purely entertain? Do you care whether you are read or not or is the process the reward?

No one who has yet responded is looking for a large audience: "I write to tell a Story with only an audience of 'one' in mind." "I write because I've always kept stories in my mind, and I need to give them somewhere to go." "I mostly write for myself to be honest." "I want to give people the gift of reading because I have cherished it myself." 

While I certainly want readers, the more the better, I write on. It's a lonely occupation, but at least I'm not alone.

Catching up

My faithful readers, both of you, realize I have not blogged since June 24 and here it is July 24. I am drafting a new novel and when my writing goes well, this blog drops in priority, behind family visits. the writing, translating and memorizing Japanese vocabulary (I want to read Japanese one day, not translate, which means struggle through—sentence by sentence), and the ordinary daily, weekly obligations.

I do, however, continue to read in the evening and this is a summary of what I've read in the past month.

The Queens of Crime, a mystery by Marie Benedict. Her novels "excavate from the past the most important, complex and fascinating women of history and bring them into the light of present-day where we can finally perceive the breadth of their contributions as well as the insights they bring to modern day issues." This one, set in England in the early 1930s, features five well-known British mystery writers as characters who solve (fictionally) a true murder.  It's narrated by author Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957). I am a minority finding it impossible to suspend disbelief about the characters however or their actions, despite Benedict's ability to weave what is known about them into her story.

Nightshade, a mystery by Michael Connelly. Another smoothly written, carefully crafted story featuring a new Connelly character, LA County Sheriff’s Detective Stilwell has been “exiled” to a low-key post policing rustic Catalina Island, after department politics drove him off a mainland homicide desk. A body is found weighed down at the bottom of the harbor—a Jane Doe identifiable at first only by a streak of purple dye in her hair. Who is she? What happened to her? Who did it? Another impeccable Connelly police procedure set in a small community.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, the 2011 Booker Prize winner, which is why I picked it up. It is not very long, but what it lacks in pages more than makes up for in depth. The narrator, Tony Webster, tells the story of his life in two parts, his youth and romance and college (Cambridge) years, and his sixties when he is divorced, comfortably retired, and remembering. His tranquility is shaken when he receives an unexpected legacy from an old girlfriend''s mother. Why would the woman do such a thing? Tony attempts to learn, the reader along with him. My only hesitation about the novel came late. Tony goes to such lengths to convince the reader that what he recalls is accurate I began to wonder just how reliable a narrator he is. Nevertheless, I'm glad I read it and recommend it.

The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, (1931– 2016) was an Australian-American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She was born in Australia and also held U.S. citizenship. Her 1970 novel The Bay of Noon was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010, and her 2003 novel The Great Fire won the National Book Award. I've known of her for years but had never read her so I checked out another of her notable novels, The Transit of Venus. Reportedly it took her seven years to write, but I am afraid it took me less than a week to decide that the writing is so rich, so thick that finishing it would require more effort than I was willing to give.

The Feeling of Iron by Giaime Alonge, translated from Italian by Clarissa Bots. Alonge is an author, screenwriter, and associate professor of Film History at the University of Turin and this thick novel shares many characteristics with a film: short, vivid scenes, many characters, and much action which occurs on two timelines, Prussia and Poland during WWII and Central America in the 1980s. I will not attempt to summarize the story. It includes patriotic Germans, Nazis, Polish and Czech Jews, CIA agents, Sandinistas, and more and more. Alonge blends real people and true events so skillfully with his fiction it is impossible (for me) to know for sure where history stops and story begins. By the end of the book, all 416 pages, I felt almost as if I had lives through the collapse of the Third Reich and the Sandinista struggle in Nicaragua, a accomplishment of both the author and his translator.  

A mystery that flows as smoothly as the river it evokes

We see the body of Jimmy Quinn on page 15 of The River We Remember, William Kent Krueger's twenty-third novel. Quinn has taken a shotgun blast in the chest and dumped in the Alabaster River where vicious channel catfish fed on him.

It's 1958. No cell phones, no DNA, no internet and WWII and Korea memories are fresh. We're in the fictional Black Earth County, MN, just north of the Iowa line where Sheriff Brody Dorn lives above the jailhouse in Jewel, population 4,000. The Alabaster, the river we remember, flows through Jewel and is almost as much a character as the residents.

The area is rich in history. The Sioux massacred white settlers and the whites massacred the Sioux. That may have been after the Civil War, but some Black Earth locals keep the rage fresh, as they do toward blacks and Japanese. The last is particularly sensitive because Kyoko, whose family was vaporized by the Nagasaki A-bomb, is married to an Indian, a former Marine, who farms his family's land.

Jimmy Quinn was the biggest landowner in Black Earth County, a bully, a drinker, and, as we gradually learn, a serial pedophile. Few citizens are sorry he's dead. Indeed Sheriff Brody himself attempts to make Quinn's death look like an accident. But it wasn't.

I've just begun to hint at the novel's complexities, which involve the Quinn family, Brody and his family and his history, Angie Madison who is attracted to Brody and her son and her history, a middle-age lawyer, the newspaper editor, the town drunk, and the Creasy clan of reprobates. 

But for all the characters, for all the complexities, for all the individual stories, for all the shifts in point of view Krueger is able to keep the action moving clearly as surely as the Alabaster flows. He is able to evoke the natural world. From the Prologue: "On quiet nights when the moon is full or nearly so and the surface of the Alabaster is mirror smooth and glows pure white in the dark bottomland, to stand on a hillside and look down at this river is to fall in love."

He's also able to introduce a tincture of philosophy. From the Epilogue: "Our lives and the lives of those we love merge to create a river whose current carries us forward from our beginning to our end."

A superior mystery.

A smorgasbord of engaging thoughts and ideas

Zadie Smith writes in the Forward to Dead and Alive, her third collection of essays, that you "might start from the first page and just plough through. Or look for a subject that interests you in the Contents, and begin there . . .   Whichever route you choose, you are welcome. Feel free."

I do. And did. Smith doesn't give the option skipping essays entirely (what writer is going to suggest that?) but you can and I did and still found the book stimulating and valuable.

She is a marvelous writer (i.e., filled with marvels) who has published eight novels and a play. She was was born in October 1975 in Willesden, north-west London, to a Jamaican mother and an English father. She attended the University of Cambridge where she studied English literature as an undergraduate at King's College, Cambridge. She published her first novel, White Teeth, in 2000. She taught fiction at Columbia University School of the Arts and joined New York University as a tenured professor of fiction in 2010.

Smith regularly publishes essays and commentary. The essays in Dead and Alive appeared mostly in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and she has published in Kenyon Review, The Guardian, and elsewhere and several appear in the book for the first time.

I am afraid I skipped the book's first five essays which are about art which doubtless reflects my limitation. On the other hand, I was held and fascinated by her comments on five dead writers: Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Martin Amis, and Hilary Mantel.

I didn't expect to enjoy her review of a book that I'd never head of and is not a topic that affects me directly: Black England. But it's a world and a history I know little about and was pleased to learn more.

And her essays on fiction and writing are worth the price of the book if you write or if you are interested in the craft. Indeed, one of the works is called "Consciousness and Consciousness: A Craft Talk for the People and the Person." She has an informative essay "On Writing The Fraud," her most recent novel which I have added to my "To Read" list.

Zadie Smith is an interesting writer with interesting things to say on a variety of topics and she says them clearly and entertainingly. I'm delighted I read as much as I read of Dead and Alive. 

A useful word—but not in English

In the Japanese short story I'm currently translating, one of the sentences contained a word that I don't believe English contains, for all the words it does have—腐れ縁, pronounced kusare-en.

The first characters by themselves, 腐 れ / kusare, can be a derogatory term meaning rotting, spoiling, decaying, corroding and it can be a verb: to rot, to spoil, etc.

The second character, 縁 / en, can mean (as one of its six meanings} relationship between two people, bond, link connection.

Put them together as a single word and my dictionary says it means "an undesirable but inseparable relationship/" Who'd a guessed?​

Can this seed fall on good ground and bear fruit?

Now that I've read Octavia Butler's biography it was time to read one of her books and I chose Parable of the Sower.

I've been aware of Butler's name for years, which is why I read her biography. I have not been a science fiction fan since my twenties, however, which is why I'd never read one of her novels. The science fiction I once read tended to feature space and science: The Man Who Sold the Moon, The Martian Chronicles, The Andromeda Strain. Butler, based on this title, is up to something else.

The first person narrator, 15-year old Lauren Olamina, begins telling her story on July 20, 2024. (The book was published in 1993 and the entries are dated.) She lives in a walled community north of Los Angeles with her father, who is a minister and the community's leader, her step-mother, and brothers. Lauren is hyperempathetic; if someone nearby is injured she literally feels the pain.

Civil society is collapsing. A new drug has blighted the country. People who take it, "burners," shave their hair, paint themselves garish colors, and start fires. Fire for these addicts is better than sex. The police are indifferent or corrupt or, like the firemen, want to be paid before they'll help. Rival gangs war one each other and anyone foolish enough to cross them. Stores and businesses that can afford armed security guards survive; those that can't don't. America is becoming a country of all against all.

Halfway through the book as Lauren's life becomes grimmer and grimmer the compound's walls are breached and burners pour through burning and slaughtering indiscriminately followed by scavengers who steal whatever they can. Lauren and two neighbors escape. The second half of the novel is the story of their perilous trek north.

A number of things struck me about the book. Butler is black and Lauren is black; she has to be careful traveling with a white companion and in fact passes as a man. Butler wrote when crack cocaine was plaguing the country. Lauren does not like or trust the police (with good reason). Although society is collapsing, radio stations still broadcast and ammunition for weapons is still available (and a good thing).

Also, a major thread in the book is Lauren's thoughts about God and development of a religion. "God is Change, and in the end, God prevails. But there's hope in understanding the nature of God—not punishing or jealous, but infinitely malleable. There's comfort in realizing that everyone and everything yields to God, There's power in knowing that God can be focused, diverted, shaped by anyone at all. But there's no power in having strength and brains, and yet waiting for God to fix things for yo or take revenge for you."

I don't know what I expected when I opened the book. I was impressed by Butler's imagination and inventiveness and I'm delighted I finally read it.

Six hundred seventy pages of wonderful

The thing is 670 pages. Okay, it was a 2025 Man Booker Prize finalist, but do I want to spend three weeks of my reading time on two young people "whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years"? Do you? After all, the world is filled with shorter novels waiting to be read. Nevertheless, I gave it 50 pages to see how it goes.

Three weeks and 670 pages later I closed The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai in awe of her talent and thankful I'd decided to read this, her third novel. (Her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss. won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award.)

It would be nice to offer a unique, penetrating, adequate comment but I cannot improve on the words of others. Author Andrew Sean Greer wrote, "[It] achieves the ultimate of what a book should do: carry us away into other peoples’ lives, thinking as they think, feeling as they feel, until it comes around and shows us to ourselves. Grand, magnificent, intimate, more than wonderful, this is a novel you will hold close to your heart. I certainly did. I cannot recommend it enough,” 

And author Lauren Groff wrote, "Literary love stories are vanishingly rare these days, and The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is that even more precious thing: a love story that's also profound, sparkling, funny, exquisitely written, and that teaches us how to love in full-throated exultation for the astonishments of this world."

The novel needs all those pages to hold all the characters: Sonia's parents, Sunny's mother, their servants (including the cook the mothers compete for), relatives, eavesdroppers Sonia's lover, Sunny's lover, Sunny's best friend. Yet even with all the characters and the unfamiliar Indian names and Indian dishes, one should have no difficulty knowing who was who and the food is clearly food.

We watch daily life in upper class Indian life, Indian customs and cuisine, and more and more. The action takes takes us Vermont, New York City, Delhi, Allahabad, Goa (what do you know about life in Goa?), Venice, Mexico. 

And in addition to conjuring up a wealth (a plethora?) of characters, Desai puts them in a recognizable historical reality. The older characters remember Partition; we watch the contemporary ones experience anti-Muslim pogroms and 9/11.

Desai is also able to weave in interesting, apt observation, almost philosophical tidbits that illustrate a character or a situation. Here for example are Sonia's thoughts about death: "It was worth believing in an impossible story of God, so when death occurred and the impossible happened, you already believed that anything could be true, and if you believed in heaven, you would be much less sad. So many reason to be religious."

I hope that by writing about the length of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny I have not discouraged potential readers. Yes, it's long. Yes, it's about Indians. Yes, it requires a commitment. And yes, it is an exceptional book.

It's not a book for claustrophobes

Nevada Barr was a Park Ranger in the National Forest Service when in the early 1990s she created Anna Pigeon, a Park Ranger in the National Forest Service who finds herself embroiled in crimes in America's national parks.The first Anna Pigeon mystery, The Track of the Cat, was published in 1993. The most recent, Boar Island, the 19th, was published in 2016.

She published her first book, Bittersweet, in 1983 when she was 31. She describes it as “a kind of ‘cowboy’ book because I'd grown up on westerns and loved those; it had a female hero and was a bit uneven," Unfortunately, “The publishing house really didn't know what to do with it. A neo-gothic lesbian western? I think it sold 1200 copies and then went out of print.” But after Bittersweet, Barr sold nothing for ten years. “I'd written a lot of stuff,  but it just wasn't selling.”

At the time she was living in Minneapolis, and says she actually made a pretty decent living there doing voice-overs. industrial training films, and an occasional play. She liked Minneapolis—“but it was just too cold!” Moreover, “I wasn't going to go any further. I was 37 years old, and you know men can kind of slide into the old silver fox thing, but women just start to lose work. I also was getting tired of it, and I became very interested in the environmental movement. The Park Service seemed like a really neat way to segue out of acting because I could do it during the summers and still make a living as an actor during the winters.” She quit acting entirely and entered the Park Service full time when she was 40. Anna Pigeon was a natural result.

Although Track of the Cat was a prize-winner and led to a contract for more books, I did not care for it, feeling that it has many flaws of a first book—although it was not one. 

On the other hand, I cannot recommend highly enough Blind Descent, the sixth book in the series by which time Barr was fully in control of the characters, the situation, and the environment, which is almost a character itself.

Anna is dispatched to Carlsbad Caverns National Park when her close friend and fellow ranger, Frieda Dierkz, is severely injured while exploring the treacherous, labyrinthine depths of Lechuguilla Cave (which is a real place). Battling her claustrophobia, Anna fights her terror and joins the rescue mission.The After hours of squeezing through narrow wormholes and crawling through inky blackness, Anna reaches her injured friend. In a fleeting moment of lucidity, Frieda whispers a warning: her fall was no accident.

Before the team can successfully extract her, however, a second incident results in Frieda's death and nearly kills Anna as well. She realizes a killer is underground with them, although why is just one mystery among several. Anna is, in effect, in a "closed-room" murder mystery deep beneath the earth. As the survivors return to the surface, Anna has to unravel a web of complicated relationships, shady business practices, and park politics to identify the murderer.

I think the book succeeds because Barr is able to evoke the absolute blackness, the absolute strangeness of a cave. She describes in detail the equipment cavers must use to descend 150 feet into the darkness—and climb back out. The motive for the murder makes sense to me as does the identity of the killer, which is not always the case. If Nevada Barr is a new name to you, and if you read mysteries, I recommend Blind Descent.

Another Japanese factoid

I just stumbled across (or on) an interesting Japanese word in a story I've begun translating: 買い食い.

The first character, a version of 買う, is pronounced "kai" and means "to buy."

The second, a version of 食る, can in this context be pronounced "gai" and means "to eat." (I had to look that up.)

Put them together and, according to my dictionary, you get "kaigai" which means "buying and eating sweets (esp. of children); between-meal snacking.' 

Thank goodness for the dictionary.​

A paragraph from Tana French's "The Keeper"

I am reading Tana French's new novel, The Keeper, the third book she's set in the West Ireland hamlet of Ardnakelty and featuring retired Chicago detective Cal Hooper.

Tana Fench

I do plan to talk about it in more detail when I finish, but I wanted to take a minute to point out that the quality of her writing is what puts French "in a class by herself" according to The New York Times. Here is one small snippet to give you a taste:

"These women [of the hamlet] won't tell her [what she wants to know about a dead girl]. All of them were born wearing the prime directive like a birthmark: say nothing. Talk plenty, keep the chat flowing, but when it comes to anything that has weight, saying it would only lead to trouble. Everyone here will say nothing expertly, but Lena is still fluent in her mother tongue, even if she refuses to speak it, She'll know, by whether they warn her off, if there's something they're keeping unsaid."

Does that give you a sense of the women, the community, and Lena's place in it? It sure does me. Remarkable. 

Sandra dies

So you want to know what a novel can do? How's this . . . .

Sandra tells her half of the story in the first person with barely a hiccough after she dies in a freak accident and is cremated in Nepal.

The author narrator tells the other half, the story of Trip, Sandra's 15-year-old autistic son. He does not talk much. 

Sandra and her ex-husband have dumped Trip in a therapeutic school in what sounds like the Arizona desert.  Trip wanders away from the school and is picked up by Anthony, a decent if feckless guy who is driving to Florida to  board up some Airbnbs before a hurricane hits. In other words, as best his parents know, Trip has vanished.

Sandra is in Nepal to scout out a conference, "Death and Denouement." for a PBS documentary, a conference "for people who study death." Many of the attendees assume one's consciousness—spirit, soul—lives on after the body dies or have an open an open mind. After Sandra' dies, she lives on in the bardo (we're in Buddhist country after all) or in a form a purgatory, one in which she can see what the living are doing.

Anthony with Trip in tow visits a lavish party on the coast of what sounds like South Carolina, steals a large, lavish sailing yacht, and heads to sea. Unfortunately for Trip, Anthony is (was) a recovering alcoholic and he became drunk at the party. Once the drunken adult and autistic teen are at sea, events run down hill. Will Sandra's spirit save Trip? How can it? Will Anthony sink the boat? What can Trip do—if anything?

I do not believe in a life after death, but I was willing to stay with Amie Barrodale's novel Trip to see how she writes herself out of the hole in which she put herself. Trip requires a larger than usual suspension of disbelief, but I've decided it's worth reading. With the giant exception of Sandra's death and subsequent adventures, Trip's experiences with Anthony are, for me, plausible and convincing. It's an interesting combination; almost as interesting as a story told in both the third and first person.  

A soap opera with a pedestrian mystery

Domenica de Rosa writes mysteries as Elly Griffiths, fifteen in the Ruth Galloway series. An interviewer pointed out that readers love her characters—maybe more than the mystery—and asked if that is a key to her appeal. 

Griffiths agreed. “Character—definitely. Funnily enough I’ve been writing about Wilkie Collins. He said character and humor are the most important things in writing. I think that’s right. I do think that character is plot. I mean you can have the cleverest plot but if you don’t have characters that people relate to then there’s no tension and suspense. It matters because tension and suspense come from caring about what’s going to happen to those characters. I think fiction is great at relationships between people’s chosen families, not blood family.” 

The Last Remains is reportedly the last in the Ruth Galloway series. (Griffiths has another mystery series set in Brighton, plus three stand-alone books and four children's books.) It is, I think, more family drama than mystery although there is a body and Ruth and her young daughter are put in danger by the villain, so that makes it a mystery.

Ruth, in addition to being an archeology professor, helps the police as forensic archeologist. She's called when a builder discovers a twenty-year-old skeleton behind a wall in a shop he is renovating (the skeleton has a modern metal plate in an ankle). The police are able to identify the skeleton fairy quickly as a young archeology student who vanished twenty years earlier. What happened to her and who hid her inside the wall? One twist: had her body been hidden immediately after her death the decaying stench would have given her away; the skeleton had been moved from somewhere else.

Complications on top of complications. Ruth's university is eliminating the archeology department and her job. The estranged wife of Ruth's long-time lover, Nelson, wants to return to the couples' home with their 5-year-old-son. Nelson is father of Ruth's 15-year-old daughter and is head of the local police,  A good friend of theirs, Michael Malone aka Cathbad, was somehow involved with the dead student. Late in the book Cathbad disappears and although he's been helpful in earlier books and lives with a police officer the circumstances are suspicious.

While I found the mystery thin and the personal stories pedestrian, I admire Griffiths's ability to keep in motion all the plates she's set spinning without dropping one. She gives us access to the internal states and thoughts of different characters without drawing attention to what she's doing. I'm not so sure about referring to earlier books (cases), although it may give series readers a shock of pleasure, but it is clever to have a child character show up in The Last Remains as an exceptionally helpful adult. Griffiths fans will enjoy The Last Remains. Newbies should start earlier in the series.

A ripping good international spy adventure from 1903

The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of the Secret Service Recently Achieved by Erskine Childers is a classic. Ken Follett, the author of The Eye of the Needle and other thrillers and historical fiction, calls it "The first modern thriller." 

First published in 1903, the novel is in some ways a boy's adventure story as two friends from Cambridge work to uncover German plans to invade England from its North Sea islands, a coastal string that stretches from Holland to Denmark.

What raises the book from the routine and helped it become a classic—aside from being a ripping good story—is the author's belief at the beginning of the 20th century that in fact England did face the danger of a German invasion from across the North Sea, a danger for which the country was entirely unprepared. The Riddle of the Sands makes Childers's case for the danger using  fiction set in real places.

"Immensely popular in the years leading up to World War 1," writes the publisher of the 2018 reprint I read, "The Riddle of the Sands is a precisely drawn and geographically accurate adventure that . . . was perceived as so accurate, in fact, that it actually influenced the placement of multiple naval bases by Winston Churchill after its publication."

The novel follows Carruthers, a bored British Foreign Office clerk, who accepts an invitation to join his old friend Davies on a sailing trip through the treacherous waters of the Frisian Islands off the German coast. But what begins as a leisurely holiday quickly transforms into a tense investigation. Davies believes that German forces are secretly preparing for an invasion of England—and he needs Carruthers’ help to uncover the truth. Both are Cambridge graduates in their mid-20s. Carruthers speaks fluent German; Davies is a brilliant small boat sailor. As the two navigate shoals, fog, and suspicious naval activity, they stumble into a geopolitical conspiracy that would later echo the real fears and rivalries of pre-World War I Europe.

Childers writes from the inside. He had extensively sailed the waters he writes about and was himself a veteran of British intelligence. If you buy it, make sure the edition includes the five charts charts that support the story. Some readers may be put off by the 1903 British sentences, but they are no more complex than Conan Doyle's or Wilkie Collins's.

According to Wikipedia, Childers was a firm believer in the British Empire and served as a volunteer in the army expeditionary force in the Second Boer War in South Africa. His experiences there began a gradual process of disillusionment with British imperialism. He was adopted as a candidate in British parliamentary elections, standing for the Liberal Party at a time when the party supported a treaty to establish Irish home rule, but he later became an advocate of Irish republicanism and the severance of all ties with Britain.

On behalf of the Irish Volunteers, he smuggled guns into Ireland on his own sailboat that were later used against British soldiers in the Easter Rebellion. He had a significant role in the negotiations between Ireland and Britain that culminated in the Anglo-Irish Treaty, but was elected as an anti-Treaty member of the first Irish parliament. He sought an active role in the Irish Civil War (over the acceptance of the terms of the treaty) that followed, was arrested as a rebel, and was executed in 1922 by the Irish Free State.

You can't help mattering. Now what?

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, like many of us, continues to try to understand both physical reality and other people. She grew up in White Plains, NY, where she graduated from an all-girls high school whose primary concern was to prepare girls for a life of Orthodox Jewish marriage and motherhood. By her senior year she was regularly playing hooky, mostly going to libraries to try to get herself some semblance of an education. She is a professor, the mother of two adult daughters, and an atheist. 

She married at nineteen and, because her husband was pursuing his graduate studies at Caltech, she spent her sophomore year of college at UCLA. After that year, she and her husband returned to New York City, he to continue his graduate studies at Yeshiva University and she to continue her undergraduate studies at Barnard College. She graduated summa cum laude and immediately went on to graduate work at Princeton University, receiving her Ph.D. in philosophy with a concentrate in philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. 

She returned to Barnard, where she taught courses in philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of mathematics. It was during her tenure at Barnard that, to her own surprise, she wrote her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem which became a critical and popular success. She says that writing the novel changed her relationship with academic philosophy. She has now published ten books: novels, nonfiction, and a book of stories.

Her latest book is The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us. She says she had been gestating its ideas ever since The Mind-Body Problem, when she first introduced the idea of the mattering map—a way to illustrate the different modes of mattering—in her effort to understand the sadness of her main character. The Mattering Instinct is influenced by Baruch Spinoza’s own attempt in the Ethics "to firmly ground an objective ethics on secular grounds that we can all accept, no matter our theological beliefs, or lack thereof."

On page 1 of The Mattering Instinct Goldstein writes, "Every living thing is driven by a mandate that ensures it matters to itself—which is to say that it prioritizes its own surviving and thriving." In human beings "self-mattering engenders one of the most persistent forces in human motivation, which has us striving not only to survive and thrive but also striving after an existence that we deem meaningful in our own eyes." I.e., I am significant—important even—not only to myself but to other people.

While there are many ways to matter in one's own eyes, Goldstein identified four mattering types: socializers, transcenders, competitors, and heroic strivers—four islands in the Sea of Longing on the mattering map. The longing to matter, she points out "can bring out the best and the worst of us, while generating bottomless disputes as to what is the best and the worst of us . . .At their worst, these divides can make us regard targeted others as hardly mattering at all."

The Mattering Insinct describes the characteristics, the strengths, and the weaknesses of socializers, transcenders, competitors, and heroic strivers. (Which are you? I'm apparently an heroic striver.) Goldstein illustrates each flavor of mattering with a short bio of someone famous or obscure who exemplifies the characteristic. The book goes a long, and original way to explain why and why not people act the way they do and don't do. It can also help motivated readers minimize the worst in themselves. 

Do towns correspond to internal states? Who knows?

This is why I cannot write for most literary magazines. They—some—print and promote and hold up as admirable and worth emulating writing like this: 

An actual pinwheel

“It was a town caught in the pinwheeling stasis between living and dying, between chrysalis and mortuary. I want to examine why it is I am drawn to places like this, why I always return to this specific feeling of haunt and dislocation, this purveyance of fugue.

“I start by asking: do these places visually and externally correspond to a world within, to zones and aspects of my interior? If extrapolated and perceivable as place, as geography, as topography, would it match the desolate, degenerate, eroded, and scarred? Do these places call to mind or call into being a deep loneliness, a call to lonely places—am I finding my ghosts in the world without?”

Because "stasis" means "a period or state of inactivity or equilibrium" what would a "pinwheeling status" be except a cheap paradox? And what would life in a town caught between chrysalis ("a quiescent insect pupa or a transitional state") and mortuary be like?

One can only feel sympathy for someone drawn to place like that, especially a place that causes the author to return to this purveyance of fugue—which means?

The author asks some good questions (I guess), but I do not care enough to learn whether the person is finding his/her ghosts in a world without. . . ghosts? 

The lives and thoughts of Spinoza and Leibniz

Baruch de Spinoza (1632 - 1677) is another philosopher I've known about but not known, which is why I read The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World by Matthew Stewart. I didn't care about Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz ((1646–1716), but with two intellectual giants in one book, how can you go wrong?

Spinoza, of Portuguese-Jewish origin, was born and lived in the Dutch Republic and lucky for him that he did. Given the religious conflicts within Europe at the time, his philosophy could have meant his death. 

He received a traditional Jewish education, learning Hebrew and studying sacred texts within the Portuguese Jewish community, where his father was a prominent merchant. As a young man, Spinoza challenged rabbinic authority and questioned Jewish doctrines which led the rabbis to expel him from the community in 1656 when he was 23 years old. He never married but devoted himself to philosophy and supported himself by grinding lenses (and the glass dust probably contributed to his early death). Despite being a non-person in Jewish eyes and a Jew in Christian, Spinoza was able to find a wide circle of friends and diciples.

Leibniz, a German polymath, was active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist, and diplomat. He created calculus independently—but 10 years after Newton. He was active in many other branches of mathematics, such as binary arithmetic and statistics. He's been called the "last universal genius" due to his expertise in many fields. He wrote works on philosophy, theology, ethics, politics, law, history, philology, games, music, and other studies. Leibniz also made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in probability theory, biology, medicine, geology, psychology, linguistics and computer science. He met Spinoza briefly in 1676.

Spinoza argued (among other things) that nature is God and God is nature. Leibniz argued that the God of the Bible is God and that Spinoza was an atheist. Because Leibniz believed that God would not—could not—create a flawed or imperfect world, this is the best of all possible worlds. (Voltaire satirized him in Candide.) After meeting Spinoza, Leibniz spent considerable time and thought refuting the older man's philosophy.

The Courtier and the Heretic tells general readers the outlines of their lives (with an excellent bibliography if you want to know more), their philosophies, and the worlds in which they lived. I am not enough of a scholar or specialist to tell whether Matthew Stewart has omitted key biographic or philosophic information. For me, his book fascinating and satisfying. What more can you want?

A disappointing introduction to Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal (1623–62 )is one of those intellectual figures I think I should know more about than his famous wager so when I saw Blaise Pascal: Miracles and Reason by Mary Ann Caws on sale I bought a copy.

"Pascal's Wager" is the argument that it's in your best interest to believe in the existence of God, because it's a rational assumption and does no harm, whereas disbelieving risks the possibility of eternal punishment in hell. It assumes of course both the existence of God and the existence of hell, and if you don't believe in God and his heaven, why would you still believe in hell?

Blaise Pascal: Miracles and Reason is a handsome book. Attractively designed and printed on heavy paper, it fits neatly in the hand and is well-illustrated with color and black-and-white plates. It includes notes, bibliography, and index.

I'll let the publisher describe the contents: Mary Ann Caws "takes us back to Pascal’s youth, when he was a child prodigy first engaging mathematics through the works of mathematicians such as Father Mersenne. She describes his early scientific experiments and his construction of mechanical calculating machines; she looks at his correspondence with important thinkers such as René Descartes and Pierre de Fermat; she surveys his many inventions, such as the first means of public transportation in Paris; and she considers his later religious exaltations in works such as the 'Memorial.' Along the way, Caws examines Pascal’s various modes of writing—whether he is arguing with the strict puritanical modes of church politics, assuming the personality of a naïve provincial trying to understand the Jesuitical approach, offering pithy aphorisms in the Pensées, or meditating on thinking about thinking itself."

Unfortunately, from the unreadable Preface by Harvard professor Tom Conley to the ponderous text by Caws the book is a disappointment. One small example, Pascal supported the tenets of Jansenism in their conflict with the Jesuits but it is not clear what they were or why Jansenism was an issue in 17th century Catholicism.

Caws is clearly fascinated by Pascal, his life and times, but she does not show the non-specialist reader for whom Blaise Pascal seems intended why we should care. Although one reviewer writes "I'd happily present this book to anyone getting acquainted with Pascal as a fine introduction to the man and his life that will usefully as well as pleasurably inflect reading and considering him," I'd suggest looking for something more comprehensive and accessible..

John Green reviews the era in which we live

I was familiar with John Green for his best-selling novel, The Fault in Our Stars, which if you have not read I recommend. Today, however, I will write about The Anthropocene Reviewed, his collection of essays adapted and expanded from his podcast. 

The anthropocene is defined as "the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment," that is, right now. Green reviews and rates different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale as if they were restaurants—everything from the QWERTY keyboard and sunsets to Canada geese and the penguins of Madagascar.

He talked about the book in a New York Times interview in which David Marchese. the interviewer, noted that in the book Green gave the internet three stars and at the end asked a bunch of rhetorical questions, including: “What does it mean to have my way of thinking, and my way of being, so profoundly shaped by machine logic? What does it mean that, having been part of the internet for so long, the internet is also part of me?” 

Green's response: "The easy answer is that when the internet becomes part of you, you cede a certain amount of your overall sense of self to online experience, which can be wonderful in some ways. This is going to surprise you, David, but I was a big nerd when I was a kid. I would have loved to be able to connect with young people the way that young people can connect with each other now across time and space around shared interests. It would have been amazing for me to have a relationship with other people who were obsessed with collecting every version of the 1986 Chicago Cubs baseball cards. The internet has facilitated communication in lots of really beautiful ways. And then there is the cost." The cost he says without saying is that people in their posts can be ugly, vicious, and nasty.

Most of the 48 essays are short—four or five pages—and most include some history or background on the topic: first recognition that Halley's Comet was a comet (worth 4,5 stars), discovery of the Lascaux cave paintings (4,5), why teddy bears (2.5), air conditioning (3.0), staphylococcus aureus (1.0). 

Some readers may disagree with Green's ratings. Some may argue that you can't rate something like the internet at all. Three stars compared to what? Smoke signals? The telephone? No one can argue with the variety and discernment of Green's essays. An entertaining, interesting, and useful collection. 

Women and orgasm

It was a confluence of items: a spam offer, a book review, and a book, all concerned with women and orgasm, which my online dictionary defines as "a climax of sexual excitement, characterized by feelings of pleasure centered in the genitals and (in men) experienced as an accompaniment to ejaculation." 

The offer in my spam filter promised "She’ll Be Shaking & Begging — Tonight, Make her scream your name." It is not offering a vibrator, but a product that promises to give men an erection that will give a woman an orgasm. Here we are, fifty years after The Hite Report was published and the myth lives on that way to orgasm is via a male erection.

A couple weeks ago, in a review of a new book about Shere Hite and her best selling book, The New Yorker reviewer Margaret Talbot writes, "[The book's] main takeaway was the the  startling revelation that most women achieved orgasm not by means of vaginal intercourse alone—or what Hite, to the sniggering discomfort of many audiences, often referred to penile' thrusting'—but through manual or oral stimulation of the clitoris." (The New Yorker, 3926, p68)

The narrator of Miranda July's popular novel All Fours doesn't need an erect penis—or a male lover for that matter—to enjoy multiple orgasms, although she has nothing against men and their erections. The publisher says, "All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman."

One reviewer called All Fours a female Portnoy's Complaint, which is not fair, but may prepare unsuspecting readers for the reading experience. I remain saddened that there are enough misinformed men apparently that spams like the one I cite can find customers. I'm sorry for the men, sorry for their partners.

Outline your fiction or no?

Maybe it's the difference between creating genre fiction—mystery, thriller, romance, fantasy—and literary fiction.

Jesse Q. Sutanto

Jesse Q Sutanto who has a degree in creative writing from Oxford University, writes YA rom-coms, YA thrillers, and adult contemporary fiction. She told a Writer’s Digest interviewer “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.e., she wrote them by the seat of her pants (if you can visualize that).

But it was not 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.” She says that by her eighteenth book her outlines had become meticulous. “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.” (https://www.writersdigest.com/be-inspired/the-wd-interview-jesse-q-sutanto)

Roger Rosenblatt

Roger Rosenblatt has written 22 books, six off-Broadway plays, and has taught creative writing. In his book Unless It Moves the Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing he says he tells writing students because they ask that they should never outline. "The trouble with using an outline is that you'll follow it . . .You'll cover everything you've put down in one portion of your outline, all the while aiming for what you've put in the following portion. All you'll be doing is reading a road map. You'll never surprise yourself with a sudden turn."

A student asks if an outline will keep the story orderly so that it's clear to the reader. "Don't worry about the reader," says Rosenblatt. "Worry about the story. Your story will determine its own orderliness without your planning it out step by step." (p. 34)

Maybe this writing game is more complicated than putting words on paper.

How does she do it?

I don't know how to review—let alone critique—Elizabeth MeCracken's short story collection The Souvenir Museum. 

A dozen stories. Individual characters—individuals—in every one. Domestic and international settings: Ireland, Scotland, somewhere in the midwest (Illinois? Indiana?), London, Rotterdam, Swampscott, Galveston, Austin, Boston, Denmark, Amsterdam.

Which is not to mention an original—or interesting—situation in every one but I'll mention some anyway: A wedding in rural Ireland. An affair between a directionless young woman who drinks Jim Beam and a much older radio advice doctor. A young man and an older ventriloquist who takes him into her bed. Two fathers take their son to a waterpark. A middle-age couple enjoy a honeymoon on a moored Amsterdam canal boat.

Aside from character, setting, and situation the language of the stories is worth the price of admission. Here are some examples literally taken at random:

—It was his eyes that confused things, so joltingly blue they seemed to hold every emotion and its opposite.

—Then, helped by a dozen hands, as in a child's séance, they were lifted up and the cave was filled with applause, genuine, sarcastic, dutiful.

—New Year's Eve in a Rotterdam garret, the whole block blacked out, bottle rockets rattling the casements: Mistress Mickle, villainess of the children's game show Barnaby Grudge, off duty and far from home, ate a cold canned hot dog in the dark and pronounced it delicious.

—She's basically a hermit, Sadie had told him, and Jack had imagined a lady lighthouse keeper, a kind of nun—not a nun nun, since Linda was Jewish, but a woman of the book, devoted to reading.

Unlike the writing I often find in literary magazines McCracken's English is not so rich wuth metaphor and fine words it is almost cloying. She'll create a word if necessary—"joltingly"—but it does not call attention to itself for interrupt the flow. The Souvenir Museum is amazing. I wish I could tell you how she does it. I can only suggest you see for yourself.

A dual portrait of Anna and Tom, digital nomads

Writing teachers tell students they should show not tell. Writers should, my search tells me, "convey emotions and actions through descriptive details and sensory experiences rather than simply stating facts. This approach helps readers engage more deeply with the story by allowing them to infer feelings and situations from the characters' actions and surroundings." This is such a commonplace that I was intrigued by Perfection, Vincenzo Latronico's short novel, translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes (who is not credited on the cover), because he mostly tells the story rather than shows it.

Latronico is almost thumbing his nose at readers by starting the book with six pages of a careful, detailed description of a Berlin apartment. I.e., "Sunlight floods the room from the bay windows, reflects off the wide, honey-colored floorboards, and casts an emerald glow over the perforate leaves of a monstera shaped like a cloud. Its stems brush the back of a Scandinavian armchair, an open magazine left face down on the seat . . . ." No dialogue, no conflict, no story, just a lovely apartment.

We learn this is the apartment/workspace of Anna and Tom, a young couple from elsewhere—where exactly is not spelled out; they do not speak German and hang out with, party with other ex-pats. They are successful in the gig economy as graphic designers, website designers, menu and brochure designers. Money does not seem to be a problem, but Berlin after the Wall came down was an inexpensive place to live. Anna and Tom are lucky to find and occupy apparently permanently a spacious, desirable apartment while the getting was good. Before Berlin was overrun by affluent Germans.

Although their apartment is perfect, their relationship (and their sex) is rewarding, their friends are fun, their work satisfying (relative, say, to bartending or waiting tables), Anna and Tom and are dissatisfied for reasons they cannot identify. For one thing, "There was the tangible reality around them, and there were the images, also all around them." Images they cannot resist. Images on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, news feeds, social media. They appear to live in a constant state of distraction, helpless to do more than to skate on the surface of reality. Not even their intimate relations, pleasant as the sex is, leads to anything deeper.

I found Perfection ultimately engaging and remarkable, a dual portrait of Anna and Tom as they live as ex-pat, digital nomads in Berlin, Portugal, Sicily over about twenty years as Europe and society changes. Friends return to native countries, parties begin to pall, people grow older. Apartments endure. 

A fascinating biography of an interesting writer

As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish science fiction Octavia Butler (1947-2006) is a fascinating author. Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E Butler by Susana M. Morris is a fascinating biography and introduction to her work.

Butler was singular because she was the first Black woman to consistently write and publish science fiction. Why science fiction? Butler sounds like any writer on certain days when she writes: "Why should anyone pay attention to what I had to say? Did I have anything to say? I was writing science fiction and fantasy, for God’s sake. At that time [the 1970s] nearly all professional science-fiction writers were white men. As much as I loved science fiction and fantasy, what was I doing? Well, whatever it was, I couldn’t stop. Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.” 

After her father died, she was raised by a single mother in Pasadena, California. When she was 12 years old she watched a B-movie science fiction film that lit an unquenchable fire in the girl. She began writing her own science fiction stories on the typewriter her mother had given her. She was encouraged by a sympathetic school teacher and later won a writing competition at Pasadena City College, and a year later won fifth prize in a Writer's Digest short story contest.

In 1969 she met Harlan Ellison at a Screenwriters Guild workshop and he became a mentor and champion of her work. In 1970 she spent six weeks at the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in Pennsylvania (it's now at UC San Diego) where she met Samuel R. Delany. Despite the encouragement and support her mentors gave her, she was not able to publish. She worked at menial, backbreaking day jobs to pay her rent and buy food and Morris reports that "She stuck to a grueling writing schedule, often writing from 2 to 5 a.m. and then working a full-time job. She finally sold Patternmaster to Doubleday in 1975."

In 1979 she sold Kindred, a time-travel novel about a contemporary Black woman who travels back to the antebellum South. Gradually her life became somewhat easier. (Hard to imagine how it might have become harder.) She completed the five-book Patternist series. She was published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. She won a Hugo Award. She traveled internationally for research and as a representative American writer. In 1995 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant," acknowledging her talent and vision.

Butler recognized her calling. She wrote, "I am a fifty-three-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects one day to to be an eighty-year-old writer." She never made it, but she was still writing when she died.

These comments do not do Positive Obsession justice. Morris, an associate professor of literature, media, and communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has, in fewer than 250 pages, conveyed the texture of Butler's life and its events and introduced the reader unfamiliar with Butler to her works. One can hope that the biography sends new readers, even those who say they do not read science fiction, to Butler's novels. 

A young interpreter adrift in The Hague

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura is her second novel narrated by an unnamed woman.  The first was A Separation and that narrator was a married translator. Intimacies' narrator is single and an interpreter at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. (She has native fluency in English and Japanese "from my parents" and French "from a childhood in Paris," plus professional proficiency in Spanish and German. A polyglot.) Both novels have interesting things to say about language and the difficulties in moving from one to another. 

The narrator in Intimacies has come to the Netherlands to escape New York and work at the Court. Her father is dead, her mother lives in Singapore, she has no siblings, no friends, no lover. She is looking for a place to finally call home.

She meets and becomes the lover of Adriaan who is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. She makes friends with Jana who witnesses a seemingly random act of violence virtually on her doorstep. The interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with with the crime as by chance she befriends the victim's sister (The Hague is not a big city.). And she's pulled into an explosive political controversy when she’s required to interpret in a trial in which the former president of an African country is accused of war crimes.

The publisher says, "A woman of quiet passion, she confronts power, love, and violence, both in her personal intimacies and in her work at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her, forcing her to decide what she wants from her life."

I had a sense of a woman adrift. She is good at what she does, indeed the Court offers her a permanent position. Interpreting the words of an accused mass murderer, however, is too much for her. Adriaan goes to Lisbon to meet with his estranged wife, leaving the narrator with the keys to his apartment and a promise to call. He doesn't, and I found it difficult to understand why she does not do something to resolve the situation until a resolution is forced on her.

Kitamura's descriptions of the former president's arrival in The Hague, the preparations for trial, and the trial itself are brilliant. I had a clear sense of the narrator's involvement with and attitude toward the former president and the man's feelings about his arrest and trial. For me, however, this was not enough to endear Intimacies to me.

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.