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.