Finding a hit and run on the Inside Passage

Carl Brookins' new mystery/thriller opens tranquilly enough. Michael Tanner, a successful Seattle public relations executive, his wife, and a friend are sailing the Inside Passage, the waters separating Washington State from Canada. Fog rolls in and rather than turn their chartered sloop back, Michael continues sailing. A break in the fog abruptly reveals an 80-foot, multi-deck yacht riding motionless in the water. Michael's wife gives a tentative hail, but the yacht responds only by starting its heavy diesel engines and disappearing into the fog.

Only to reappear four pages later to ram the sloop, sinking it, killing Michael's wife and friend, and almost killing him. Why? Who would do such a thing?

Unfortunately for Michael, the Canadian Coast Guard does not believe his story—and there's not much they could do about it even if they did. Michael cannot describe the yacht in any detail; he saw only three letters of the name—GOL—on the stern as it vanished into the fog. The rest of the book is the story of Michael's recovery from the incident, his growth as a person, and—spoiler alert—his final confrontation with the killer yacht.

The book is interesting because Michael is not a detective and not, when the book opens, even much of a sailor. He's a workaholic pr man with partners running a Seattle agency. Not only is he on his own in attempting to identify the yacht, but, given the small world of fishermen and boatmen who live on the islands and along the coast of the Inland Passage, he's known as the guy who lost his sloop, killing his wife and friend. If the bad guys who ran him down think he's too nosy or getting too close to identifying their boat, they will have no compunctions about killing him.

Brookins, an "avid recreational sailor" writes vividly about sailing and the natural world. Here's Michael attempting to make a safe harbor in a storm:

"The compass needle swung wildly as the cruiser smashed through another big wave and the propeller raced as the wave dropped below the stern.The boat headed down into another trough and the sea rose, curling over to meet him. Tanner's knuckles turned white as he gripped the wheel tighter and he realized he was staring up into a huge wind-ravaged wave. The launch shuddered under Tanner's feet when the big wave slammed into the bow. Water sluiced down the forelock and rose against the windscreen. The light in the cabin turned sickly green. He glanced sternward to see the deck awash with foaming seawater."

While the book held my interest as Michael overcame one challenge after another, I do have reservations. Brookins shifts point of view, often, in my opinion, unnecessarily and in a few places with no transition to warn the reader we're now in another character's head. A passage like this halfway through the book drives me wild:

"[Tanner] had only vague memories of the three figures he'd glimpsed on the bridge that awful day. He couldn't identify any of them. Although he didn't know it, Tanner owed his life to that inability. The crew member who had fired the shotgun into the cabin of the Queen Anne [Tanner's sloop] was the same man who jostled Tanner in the small Tacoma bar. The man swore later to his captain that there'd been no glimmer of recognition from Tanner during their brief encounter. The other crew member who'd watched them agreed." These sentences are the author stepping into the story to explain a point to the reader; if something needs to be explained, the original passage needs to be rewritten.

And because we do have access in a few places to the thoughts and motivations of the bad guys, it makes the reason for their original act—running down the Queen Anne—a frustrating and open mystery. All we need know is that they were doing something they shouldn't; as I read the book it seems the original criminal act was unprovoked.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed The Inside Passage enough that I am sending it along to a sailing friend with a note that he should steer clear of mysterious giant yachts that suddenly loom out of the fog.

What you'll find in "The Boy in the Suitcase"

On the first page of The Boy in the Suitcase a Danish mystery/thriller by Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnette Friis, an unidentified female character manhandles a heavy suitcase into a

secluded spot in an underground parking garage. When she opens the case she founds a boy, "naked, fair-haired, rather thin, about three years old." The boy is alive but does not speak a language the woman recognizes. The rest of the book is the story of the Danish woman, Nina Borg, who finds the boy; the boy's Lithuanian mother, Sigita; the rich man who wants the boy; and the really bad man who put the boy into the suitcase.

We know fairly early in the book who the bad guy is. We don't (I didn't) really understand the dimensions of the plot until the end of the book. For most of the pages we follow Nina as she attempts to discover the boy's identity; Sigita as she attempts to learn what happened to her son; and the bad guy who leaves bodies and mayhem in his wake.

According to the book jacket, The Boy in the Suitcase won "Denmark's prestigious Best Thriller Award." As I suggested above, the book does start with a bang. There's then what amounts to a flashback to take the reader up to the point where Nina manhandles the suitcase and finds the boy. Who is he? What is he doing in the suitcase? And where is the friend who asked Nina to pick up the case in her place? Anyone who's read more than one mystery knows the friend is now dead. 

Aside from jumping from one point of view to another in virtually every chapter, which can become distracting, my major complaint about the book is the character of the main character: Why doesn't Nina go to the police? She's a law-abiding Danish citizen, so she has no fear of winding up in the clink herself. Once she's discovered the body of her friend, she knows she's dealing with dangerous people. I wanted to shout at her more than once: GO TO THE POLICE! NOW!

Nevertheless, if the reader finds Nina engaging and sympathetic—and to be fair, she has her own baggage and is in an extraordinary situation—she will, I suspect, enjoy The Boy in the Suitcase if only to see how the bad guy gets his comeuppance. Which is why I read mysteries in the first place.

There are fascinating doings in Sisterland

I picked up Sisterland, Curtis Sittenfeld's fourth (2013) novel because I like what she's written in The New York Times Book Review where she's a regular contributor, and because I thoroughly enjoyed her recent story in The New Yorker, "Gender Studies."

I liked Sisterland so much and feel Sittenfeld's writing has so much to teach me that I've now read the book twice. The next time, I'll go through it with a highlighter, marking the sentences and paragraphs that speak to me especially. So what do I like about it?

The story is told in the first person, Daisy, "Kate," twin sister of Violet. We never leave Kate's perspective, never have to hop into another character's head to understand what's going on. This is not as easy to do as Sittenfeld makes it appear.

Most of the action takes place in St. Louis, a setting that feels both appropriate for the story and fresh. Indeed, this particular story almost has to be set in St. Louis.

The characters feel authentic and fully realized. Even the twins' ability to "sense" future events and predict their occurrence seems plausible. Sittenfeld does not insist on their paranormal talent, so the skeptical reader (me) is able to attribute a scientific(?) account for the events the twins predict. I.e., Sittenfeld has it both ways.

Although Kate is a mid-30s, middle-class, white, mother of two young children, a full-time homemaker, the wife of a Washington University college professor, and utterly average from the outside, Sittenfeld gives us enough of her history, which helps us intuit some of her current thoughts and actions, enough to make her relationships and actions interesting and credible. While the novel's structure is not straighforwardly chronological, neither is it confusing.

Finally, the writing is extraordinary without calling attention to itself. Here is Kate on the second page of Chapter 1. She's just had lunch with her twin sister Violet, "Vi," who has told her not to leave a big tip because she didn't like the food. Kate says:

—"You of all people should realize that's not the waitress's fault." For years, all through our twenties, Vi had worked at restaurants. But she was still regarding me skeptically as I set down my credit card, and I added, "It's rude not to tip extra when you bring little kids." We were at a conversational crossroads. Either we could stand. I could gather the mess of belongings that accompanied me wherever I went—once I had been so organized that I kept my spice rack alphabetized, and now I left had an bibs and sippy cups in my wake, baggies of Cheerios, my own wallet and sunglasses—and the four of us could head out to the parking lot and then go on to drop Vi at her house, all amicably. Or I could express a sentiment that wasn't Vi, in  her way, asking me to share?

Consider all the information packed into that paragraph: particulars about Kate, her current situation, her age, her relationship with her twin, her attitude toward tipping, and more. For example, "baggies of Lucky Charms" would have said something different about her from "baggies of Cheerios."

Here, a few pages later, is Kate seeing Vi on a television screen in a local news program during which Vi forecasts a major earthquake is soon to convulse St. Louis:
 
—Seeing her, I flinched. The big, loose purple tunic she wore had seemed unnoteworthy at the Hacienda [the restaurant where they'd had lunch] but now appeared garish, and even if she hadn't been in the same clothes, I'd have guessed she hadn't slept the night before: There were shadows under her eyes, her face was puffy, and she didn't have on makeup. I had never been on television myself, but I knew you at least needed foundation.

One final extended quote because Sittenfeld writes so well about children, who in Sisterland play small but significant roles. Amelia is the three-year-old daughter of Hank, a neighbor; Rosie is Kate's two-year-old.

—Outside, Amelia and Rosie skipped in front of us, and Hank was beside me as I pushed Owen in the stroller. Amelia slapped her palm against a lamppost, and when Rosie mimicked the gesture exactly, I thought, as I often did, that Amelia and Hank were like mentors to Rosie and me: Amelia was always beckoning Rosie toward the next developmental stage, while Hank was the person who'd most influenced me as a parent. It was from Hank that I'd learned to give Rosie her own spoon when I'd fed her jar food, so that she wasn't constantly grabbing the one I was using. Hank had told me to put Triple Paste on her when her diaper rash got bad ("Way more than you think you need, like you're spreading cream cheese on a bagel," he's said), and to buy a Britax car seat after she outgrew her infant seat, and to go to the Buder library for the best story hour . . .

Because I admire Sisterland so much, I'm reluctant to try Sittenfeld's three earlier novels: American Wife, Prep, or The Man of My Dreams. I'm afraid they'll disappoint as works of a novelist still maturing. Rather, I'm looking forward to the next fiction she publishes. I selfishly hope it will not be a long wait.

Why Tana French transceneds genre

At the end of my review of Tana French's Into the Woods I said I would be looking into her second mystery, The Likeness. I have. It may be even better—richer, deeper, more complex—than Into the Woods, but in my view they are both so superior to the ordinary mystery it is pointless to compare them with each other.

Start with the narrator. Into the Woods is narrated by a Dublin murder detective Robert Ryan. His partner, to whom he becomes extremely close, is Cassie Maddox. Cassie narrates The Likeness and Rob, who has left the Murder squad, never appears in the new mystery except in Cassie's memories.

The book begins with Cassie and an older detective, Frank Mackay, creating a persona, Alexandra (Lexie) Madison so that she can go undercover to infiltrate drug ring in University College, Dublin. In the course of that investigation, Cassie is stabbed, is pulled in out of the cold, and is promoted to Murder when she recovers. Now four years after Lexie has ceased to exist, young woman's freshly-dead body has been found—Alexandra "Lexie" Madison.

She'd been stabbed and bled to death in an abandoned cottage. Rain has washed away footprints, and there are no obvious clues to her murder—or why she was killed . . . or who she really is. She's been living with four Trinity graduate students in a grand house one of the students inherited from an uncle. Interestingly—and if the reader can accept this, nothing else in the book requires one to suspend belief—Cassie bears a remarkable likeness the dead girl. Frank persuades Cassie and Sam, the other detective on the case and Cassie's significant other, to assume Lexie's persona and continue living with the four Trinity students.

The detectives tell the students—Daniel, Abbie, Rafe, and Justin—that Lexie was badly hurt, is in a coma, and that gives Frank and Cassie time to prepare for the new undercover assignment. When Cassie/Lexie is delivered to the house, the students are delighted to see their housemate (and one-fifth owner of the house) home safe and sound.

Daniel, Abbie, Rafe, and Justin are students, not murderers. Although Frank and Sam do their best to shake their alibi for the night of the girl's death, they are unshakable. The police turn over every rock in the neighborhood looking for someone with some reason to stab "Lexie." No one. Meanwhile, Cassie/Lexie wears her wire, keeps her gun handy, and keeps her eyes and ears open.

Although I had a pretty good idea of who stabbed Lexie (if there are a limited number of possibilities, and if the author is playing fair and not introducing the murderer in the penultimate chapter that's not difficult), I had no idea why. Moreover, I didn't care. Tana French's characters are so fully realized that the mystery is almost secondary. Who are these people? Are Cassie's perceptions accurate or is she kidding herself? Is she in fact a reliable narrator? Exactly how much danger, physical and emotional, is she in? Will she be able to walk away unscathed? I'm not going to tell you.

I am going to tell you that The Likeness is almost 500 pages of 11-point type, so this is not a book to take lightly. I will also tell you that Tana French is the real deal, one of those writers who transcends genre. Which means that even if you don't care for mysteries but want a superior story with exceptional writing, look her up.

What Mailer thinks of "the spooky art"

Toward the end of his life—he died in 2007 at age 85—Norman Mailer assembled a miscellany, The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing, that Random House published in 2003. He calls writing, and more specifically novel writing, a spooky art because there are unproductive hours "that feel like nothing so much as the act of trying to start an old car when the motor has gone dead on you.... But there are also odd, offbeat, happy days when something does happen as you write and your characters take surprising turns, sometimes revealing themselves to you on the page in a manner other than you expected them to be." Spooky.

The book, a collection of edited interviews, essays, reviews, comments Mailer gave, wrote, or made over fifty years. The book is organized by his thoughts on the lit biz, craft, psychology, philosophy, genere, and other writers: Tolstoy, Twain, Hemmingway, Miller, Lawrence, and some final thoughts on American Letters.

While I question much of what Mailer says and did not read every word in the book, I did find plenty to think about in the words I did read. Here's Mailer in a 1995 interview: "Writers aren't taken seriously anymore, and a large part of the blame must go to the writers of my generation, most certainly including myself. We haven't written the books that should have been written. We've spent too much time exploring ourselves. We haven't done the imaginative work that could have helped define America, and as a result, our average citizen does not grow in self-understanding." Without getting into the argument whether the writers of Mailer's generation spent too much time exploring themselves, I'm not convinced (although Mailer is) that the novelist's job is to define America, nor do I believe that the average citizen would have read the books had they been written.

Mailer has an exalted view of the novelist's task: "Ideally, you are there to bring wealth to others. Wealth of observation, of perception, the riches of a philosophical attitude that is to a degree new, insights into psychology the reader hasn't had before—all these are on the selfless side of writing." At the same time, there's the writer's ego, vanity, and the desire to advance oneself as a writer. If the tension between the writer's selfless and selfish sides grows too great, it can bollix up the writing.

I found Mailers observations about other writers interesting. He feels Saul Bellow's one major weakness is that "he creates individuals and not relations between them, at least not yet.... I would guess he is more likely to write classics than major novels, which is a way of saying that he will give intense pleasure to particular readers over the years but is not too likely to seize the temper of our time and turn it." (From a 2002 class.)

I have a sense that Norman Mailer was both incredibly lucky and terribly unlucky. As he acknowledges, lucky in that The Naked and the Dead happened to appear just at the right moment in American history and became an enormous best seller. I don't believe that it holds up well, not the way Red Badge of Courage or A Farewell to Arms or The Things They Carried have held up. Unlucky in that because his first novel hit the jackpot, the public (read the lit biz) and Mailer himself expected great things. Even better, richer, deeper—yet equally popular—novels. Instead, he wrote Barbary, The Deer Park, Advertisements for Myself, and more.

Because his non-fiction—Armies of the Night, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, and especially The Executioner's Song—do hold up, I wonder if Mailer simply misjudged his talent. Was he a middling novelist but one of the best creative non-fiction authors we've seen? On the other hand, without the fiction, would he have been able to create the non-fiction he produced?

In any case, I recommend any serious writer who wants another perspective on the spooky art of writing to look up The Spooky Art.

Why "In the Woods" is a superior mystery

In the Woods is Tana French's first novel. It is extraordinary; one 2014 source listed it as one of the 50 best debut novels since 1950. A friend tells me that her second book, The Likeness, is even better.

It is a mystery, narrated entirely by Rob Ryan, a Dublin detective. Rob has a history: When

he was 12-year-old and known as Adam Ryan, he and two friends went to play in the woods beside their suburban development. Hours later, he was found unhurt but standing in a pair of blood-soaked sneakers, so deeply traumatized he could not recall what happened. He never does and the bodies of his playmates are never found.

Now, twenty years later, he and his partner Cassie Maddox become the lead detectives in the murder of 12-year-old Katy Devlin, battered to death in the same woods. By regulations—and common sense—Rob should recuse himself from leading the investigation, but he doesn't. Which adds a layer of tension and complexity to the mystery.

The book was published in 2007, and I have not looked any any reviews, but I can imagine two complaints: French spends too much time on description, and Rob Ryan is not a sympathetic character. As a writer myself, I wish I could create a paragraph of description as vivid and engaging as this:

"Cassie seeps as lightly and easily as a kitten; after a few seconds I hear her breathing slow and deepen, the tiny catch at the top of each breath that told me she had drifted off. I am the opposite: once I'm asleep it takes an extra-loud alarm clock or a kick in the shins to wake me, but it can be hours of tossing and fidgeting before I get there. But somehow I always found it easier to sleep at Cassie's, in spit of the lumpy, two-short sofa and the grouchy creaks and ticks of an old house settling for the night. even now, when I'm having trouble falling asleep, I try to imagine myself back on the sofa: the soft, worn flannel of the duvet cover against my cheek, a spicy tang of hot whiskey still warming the air, the tiny rustles of Cassie dreaming across the room."

Rob, on the other hand, is more problematic. French, a woman, is writing from a man's point of view, but I had no questions about that. Nor could I fault the police work which, from the little I know watching BBC crime shows, reads perfectly accurate. Rob, perhaps because of his traumatic background, drinks too much, smokes too much, and clearly makes a couple of bad decisions. Still, the killing, apparently motiveless, is complex and ultimately the solution is both plausible and satisfying.

If you haven't read Tana French, and if you are interested in writing that lifts a mystery story out of the genre ghetto, look up In the Woods. I will be checking out The Likeness.

What's it like to be a writer, mother, reluctant rock star?

High Tide in Tucson is a collection of essays Barbara Kingsolver published before she published The Poisonwood Bible (1998) but after she had published three novels, a collection of short stories, a book of poetry, and a non-fiction account of women in the

Arizona mine strike of 1983. She was successful enough that (a) her publisher would even publish a book of her essays; (b) her publisher would commission spot art for each essay and use a second color on every page; and (c) send her off on a four-week book tour, "a different city each day" when she was promoting one of her novels.

It's an eclectic collection, travel pieces, observations about contemporary culture and parenting, and the writing life. We learn something about her background, her daughter, her divorce, her new husband. Not much because these are essays, not memoir. They are all wonderfully well-written, possibly better than the originals because she revised them extensively for this book.

While I read the essays in order, the way Kingsolver hoped, I responded most strongly to the ones about writing. For example: "Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion or readers who are going to doubt your facts. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true."

That's not always the case. I just looked at an Amazon one-star review of The Poisonwood Bible in which the reader complains that real rebels are bloodthirsty terrorists, migrations of army ants are not as portrayed, no missionary like the one in the novel every made it to the Congo. People, this is a novel. It's a lie. Kingsolver says, "Now I spend hours each day, year after year, a wicked smirk on my face, making up whopping, four-hundred-page lies." And getting paid for it.

She can be laugh-out-loud funny. She writes about her experience playing keyboard for the Rock Bottom Remainders, a pickup rock band that included Stephen King, Ridley Pearson, Dave Barry, Kathi Goldmark, Tad Bartimus, Amy Tan, Al Kooper, and Roy Blount. They all(?) had some musical background (Kingsolver started college on a music scholarship), but they did not pretend to be professional musicians. They toured to raise money for literacy. In Boston before their first concert, King had a breakthrough: and she told him "I thought he was sounding much better. His face lit up like a carnival ride, and he said, 'You know what I discovered? When I'm not sure what chord to play, I don't touch the guitar, I just do this—air strumming!'"

She has a delightful essay,"Careful What You Let in the Door," about reader mail, the good, the bad, and the ugly (and an essay written when reader mail was marks on paper). Example: "Dear Ms. Kingsolver, Enclosed is something I've written. I'd appreciate it if you could get Harper & Row to publish it. I suggest it be marketed as an Inspirational Essay." At the other extreme: "Dear Barbara, I just finished reading The Bean Trees for the fourth time since I bought it through a book club. Please, please, please write more books!"

What takes this essay to another level, however, is the letter questioning violence in books, movies, TV and (presumably) video games, violence as entertainment. It was followed by a letter from a nun who thanked Kingsolver for a novel "which says something hopeful abo9ut death and the life that can come from death." What is the artist's obligation in writing about hate, cruelty, bloodshed? Kingsolver writes, "I don't know whether my convictions about art—and particularly art that contains violence—will ever be allowed to settle into a comfortable position. They have been revising themselves for a long, long time . . . ."

High Tide in Tucson is entertaining, informative, and thought-provoking. What more can you ask?

How many ways can you describe rain?

Carellin Brooks's One hundred days of rain is a difficult book to review. On the one hand, the story, set in Vancouver, is pretty simple: The unnamed protagonist is breaking up with

her wife and is attempting to build a new life. She has an ex-husband, the father of her five-year-old child. A hundred short chapters in the present tense. No quotation marks (which I know drives certain readers nuts). It rains a lot and Brooks describes the rain in at least fifty different ways. Can I make it sound less appealing?

A Rhodes Scholar, Brooks is a poet who has published two books of poetry and edited two anthologies. This is her first novel. Anyone interested in writing, anyone looking for an original work of literary art, anyone willing to be caught up in Brooks's extraordinary prose for the imagination and possibilities in the language should read One hundred days of rain.

But rather than assert, let me sample the prose virtually at random to give you a taste:

"Rain pummels tiny fists on the window. Tinkles and dances, a small drumming like fingers on a tabletop. Rain gusts and smatters against the glass, pushed by wind. She imagines herself reaching through the phone cord, along the wires, to change that voice to something gasping and frightened. A desire so vivid she feels her hands clutching, the strain of the tendons."

A description of Saturday morning routine with her son: "She bakes. Cornbread, banana bread, puffed yellow German pancake. Something hot to table. Inside they sit ignoring the streaming gloomy world. Lifting cakes still warm to their mouths, buttering the crumbly slices with voluptuous concentration. Their world shrunk to yellow box, small and warm and most importantly dry."

That quotation, by the way, is half of a chapter.

One more—although it is tempting to go on quoting for pages: "Easter. A time of renewal or so it's said, bruited about even, the possibility of growth. So many chances for anniversaries and fresh starts and her is another. She arises from her dented bed filled with resolution. She will sort that errant paper, the piles of it she's been augmenting all year. She will put her taxes into order this time, really. Everything due at the library will be returned, all the languishing dry cleaning rescued, perhaps she will even begin cleaning for their move. The sills and lintels can't accumulate much dust in a month, can they? It isn't too early to wipe down her fridge now, surely?"

Note the metaphors, similes: "tiny fists," "like fingers on a tabletop." Yet so much is pure precise description: "streaming gloomy world," "dented bed," "the languishing dry cleaning." The sentences—the sentence fragments even—are vivid with detail, with sensation. Adding "really" to the sentence about taxes adds a paragraph about unkept promises in a word.

A back-cover blurb says it better than I: "Carellin Brooks offers a loud and persistent rejoinder to the idea of 'the pathetic fallacy': the internal and external do coalesce, and they do so at the apex of the most precise and revealing sentences I have read in years."

There. Have I made One hundred days of rain more appealing?

How to write a novel the George way

When Elizabeth George published Write Away: One Novelist's Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life in 2004 she was a New York Times best-selling author of a thirteen mysteries. So the book is more than twelve years old, but the information and advice is as timely today as it was the day it came out of George's computer.

She points out that this is "one novelist's approach," and other novelists with other approaches are equally successful. She is relatively undogmatic; the only rule in writing a

novel is that there are no rules. At the same time, a novel tends to have a character—or characters—in a setting in a conflict. No character(s), no story. No setting and the characters float in an abstract void. No conflict and there is no plot. I believe the best novels have fully realized characters in recognizable settings with significant and engaging conflicts.

A conflict, by the way, is not an argument or a fight. Conflict arises when a character wants something and cannot easily obtain it because of another character, because of circumstances (social, economic, environmental), or because of an internal flaw. Readers continue to read when they want to see how, and whether, characters will obtain their desires—or not. Will Ahab find and kill Moby Dick? Will Edmond Dantès obtain his revenge? Will Elizabeth Bennet marry Mr. Darcy? Will Robinson Crusoe survive shipwreck?

Because, as George titles her first chapter, "Story is Character," and because it is not easy to create vivid, interesting, engaging characters (as I can testify from personal experience), she spends many pages to describe her process. Before she even begins to draft her novel, she writes a detailed character analysis for every significant character in a book. Her Character Prompt Sheet includes a physical description but "best friend...enemies...core need...pathological maneuver...gestures when talking what others notice first about him/her...what character does alone...." And to show the practice that she preaches, George includes the raw material—seven printed pages, around 4,000 words—she wrote about a character "long before she put in an appearance on the pages of my rough draft."

She researches locations as carefully as a movie director, taking pictures and making notes in a tape recorder, so that when it is time to write about, say, a lonely stone barn on the moors, she knows exactly what it looks like, where there are doors and windows, how the light hits the walls.

She also thinks through her entire book in terms of scenes, again much like a movie scriptwriter who has to decide where does the scene take place, who is in it, who says what, how does the dialogue and action advance the story? The novelist, of course, has the advantage of being able to enter the heads of characters in a way that is either clunky or boring in a movie. And on the subject of point-of-view, George has several interesting things to say. For example:

"You have to have a point of view in the novel, and wise is the writer who makes her decision about point of view early in the process. This one element of the craft is crucial because it's part of how a writer dramatizes events. It also is critical to how the story is structured. . .and often it's part of the entire artistic idea behind the novel."

The book is filled with examples from George's novels and other works, so it is both practical and theoretical. She includes two lists that I have copied and will refer to in the future, "Where People Work" (more than 100 entries including sporting goods store, mobile library, clockmaker, martial arts supplies, limousine driver) and 78 THADs.

A THAD is a Talking Head Avoidance Device, "an activity going on in a scene that would otherwise consist of dialogue. It serves several purposes: It eliminates the possibility that a scene will become nothing more than two or three talking heads; chosen wisely, it reveals character; it may in and of itself contain important information; it can be used as a metaphor." Examples? Eating a meal. Cooking a meal. Working on a car. Grocery shopping. Training a dog. Building a structure. Posing for portrait. Killing ants...and 70 more.

I believe anyone who wants to write fiction or improve her craft can read Write Away with profit—I have. I believe anyone who is curious about one novelist thinks about and creates her books will enjoy Write Away. And anyone who enjoys Elizabeth George's mysteries may like this look behind the curtain to see how she does it.

Journaling? A good idea. This book? Not so good

I asked to review Therapy Through Journaling: Be Your Own Savior by Christopher Kalford because I have kept a journal for many years and I was curious. How is keeping a journal therapy? Could I keep my journal more effectively? Are there aspects of journal-keeping that I've overlooked?

The book's cover states "Escape from traditional therapy...organize your thoughts...analyze your past...live in the present...change your future." With such inducements, who could resist? I couldn't. But I think you should.

The book is unpaged, but I counted 68 pages containing double-spaced type. I doubt there are much more than 10,000 words, in short, about the length of two long magazine articles. You can read it in less than an hour. Length, of course, does not correspond to quality (think of the Lord's Prayer or the Gettysburg Address), but I'm afraid this booklet has neither length nor quality.

There is nothing wrong with Kalford's advice: "...writing journals allows you to gain an outside perspective on your own thoughts..." Maybe better to say "gain another perspective," but let it go. "The physical act of writing your thoughts down can sometimes be enough to help you determine that certain thoughts are being exaggerated or manipulated by factors they shouldn't be, which will allow you in turn to eliminate some stressors..." "Keeping a journal allows you to look back on your life not only for analyzation and reflection, but for an ever growing source of happiness you can constantly draw from."

The trouble I have with Kalford's advice is that he gives no sources to support any of his recommendations, nor does the book contain any indication of his background or qualifications to give advice at all. Does he keep a journal? He doesn't say. Has he benefited from writing a journal? He doesn't say. Does he have any professional qualifications to discuss the therapeutic benefits of keeping a journal? He doesn't say.

In addition, the booklet is more exhortation than instruction. "Do it" rather than "Here's how to do it—and why." And when he has an opportunity to flesh out his message, he turns away: "The benefits of having so much of your life at your fingertips are too numerous to name..." Maybe there are too numerous to name in their entirety, but how about some examples?

Indeed, on page after page the book cries out for examples, anecdotes, quotations to support and illustrate the advice and the claims. For example, I like the idea of starting a conversation with God by writing "what you would want to say to god if he were in front of you." But why not give the reader a couple or three examples of such a journal entry with, ideally, the writer's thoughts and conclusions about the experience?

Bottom line: Keep a journal. But if you don't know how to do so or what the benefits can be, find another book than this.