Category Archives: Books

Books Of 2015

by Andrew | Leave a comment

BooksOf20151Jan

I tend to shy away from judgements on published works on this blog (though not elsewhere!), but I thought I’d do my own year-end list of books: books I’ve enjoyed, books that left an impression, books I gained something from. Not all were published this year, and I’m sure I’ve forgotten other books I read in 2015, and this could be a slightly different list were I to write it yesterday or tomorrow.

Edna O’Brien’s memoir Country Girl is perhaps my favourite book of the year. 2015 could go down in literary history as the year I discovered Edna O’Brien. Yay! Love her.  A couple of months after reading, what I remember most: the lyrical prose, the stories of her family and her marriage, the celebs she describes (could be namedroppy in lesser hands, but here they just come naturally and deservedly). I was taken into another world with this book, which is one of my measurements of what a great book should do for me. What a star.

If that book has a contender for my fave, it’s probably Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller, which I finally read back in February. A powerful family story, with a strong setting in time and place (Rhodesia in the 70s and 80s) and great political purpose. Searingly good, and so rich and so intense I eked it out a couple of chapters at a time.

Bill Clegg’s Did You Ever Have A Family is perhaps the novel that consumed me most this year. I can’t quite put my finger on why, as at times I found its central character and a couple of other players a little grating. But then there were other characters who really got under my skin, which makes me think that sometimes we have to set up certain things (grating characters) for other things to work better (characters who get under the skin). They certainly felt real as a result, and worked their magic – the voice and the tone really took hold of me at certain points.

I also enjoyed a reading where Bill Clegg described his process in writing this book: on returning to his hometown after a long time away, he started writing about it. He had a line – She will go – that would end up as the opening sentence of Chapter Two, in fact, but it took four years of accruing many pages in the voices and points of view of an extended community before he landed on the narrative device that would be placed at the start of his book and drive his plot. It took another three years to refine what went in the book (much went out). I think this shows in the deeply felt portraiture of people and place: this was instinctively assembled, bottom upwards, and we really experience a slice of these characters’ lives.

I’d been gripped by Bill Clegg’s first memoir Portrait Of The Addict As A Young Man when it first came out, and, having been impressed by his novel, this year I caught up on his second memoir, Ninety Days, which is about his recovery: whoa! Economical writing, and very powerful in its frankness. A very New York book, too, I thought.

Another economical read was Kent Haruf’s Our Souls At Night. It has a pretty simple setup (oldsters seeking company), and unfolds with a beguiling humour and depth of characterisation, and also a certain darkness. It took me back to the small towns on the plains of Colorado. This is the author’s last novel (he died a year ago), but I still have a few other books of his to catch up on. A lovely feature by him here: ‘The Making Of A Writer’.

Nina Stibbe’s Man At The Helm was probably the novel that charmed me most this year: her characters, her setting (a gossipy Midlands village), and especially her voice. We are there with her and her family in what turns out to be a funny and clever and bittersweet book. Funny is hard to pull off: funny is the mark of a clever writer, and when it’s combined with feeling it’s a powerful thing. And I love that she uses all the words (the effs and the cees), like a good writer should.

Damon Galgut’s In A Strange Room is a strange and unsettling book that held my attention with pretty ordinary events that delivered unexpected turns of suspense. Again, it is the style that wins my praise. He is unafraid to experiment or be something other than obvious, and he does so unpretentiously in a way that seems effortless.

I read a few dreadful (published) books too. I’m usually hesitant about parading harsh judgements on this blog, or even entertaining the idea of dreadful, because my job is about encouraging writers to find their way in the world of writing, and taste is so subjective, anyway – many books I enjoy might in fact be subject to others’ snootiness.

But: I hated A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. It started off so well, and I did admire the book’s management of time – compressing, looping back, opening out as it went along – but I knew things had really gone irretrievably badly when [spoiler!] a character in a wheelchair got pushed down a stairwell by his violent boyfriend, and my visceral reaction was to laugh out loud. I found this book manipulative without being moving, and could not help but compare the misfortunes it melodramatises with any number of real-life stories (e.g., see Alexandra Fuller, above). The book is said to aim for a heightened reality, which sounds like the bold sort of deviation from representative realism that I usually love, but I’m afraid I was not persuaded, perhaps as its fans seem to have identified in very literal and mawkish ways with its cast of cartoonish characters.

It was its reception that probably confounded me most, especially on Twitter, where it sometimes felt as if emotional cripples – stunted by the limits of 140 characters, and craving reaction – were live-tweeting their readings. (Later, I imagined some of these readers were the same people tweeting that London Spy was the best and most heartbreaking thing on telly, even after that last – that word again – dreadful episode; it too had started so well …) So many publishing successes nowadays seem to be twysterically generated.

Maybe I’d not have felt so strongly about A Little Life had I not read the quote from the Atlantic saying this might be the ‘great gay novel’. Ultimately it felt to me like misery-porn for self-hating homos, a ghoulish fantasy for faghags who prefer their gay men as victims, abusers, consumers, or pastry chefs. Eventually I saw sense prevailing among some readers, such as discussion with Scott Pack on his blog. Daniel Mendelsohn’s exacting review in the New York Review of Books (as well as his even more exacting response to a letter from the book’s editor) must rank as one of the most thoughtful pieces of criticism I read in 2015 (and not just because I heartily agree with it). In a year in which personal attacks and trolling have continued to pollute social media, I resisted sharing my own negative responses so publicly. But eventually I thought that it felt pollyanna-ish not to speak about something I felt strongly about, and I note I’ve written more about it here than any of the books that I enjoyed; perhaps this is in fact my book of the year?! Much can be formed in provocation and opposition. And I did at least end up loving-to-hate this book, I guess!

I increasingly think that volumes of short stories should not be read all at once, and I’ve continued to read the short stories in Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins, which I started in 2014. I’m bowled over by her voice and style and sense of place. And in a year where so much discourse in identity politics has been marked by righteousness, I particularly liked how Watkins’s essay ‘On Pandering’ raised questions rather than sought offence.

I’m still working through the most excellent catalogue for the most excellent Celts exhibition at the British Museum, and I’m also a few chapters into Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes (I often read nonfiction in fits and starts). I also enjoyed many pieces I read on or via Literary Hub.

Another great discovery was Lynda Barry. I’d read about her before, but not read any of her books. Syllabus, which gathers together her classroom notes for a course she teaches on creativity at the University of Wisconsin, is called life-changing by its publisher, and I think the hyperbole is warranted. It was also refreshing for me to read something where so much of its energy came through illustration rather than words, and it prompted me to read others of her books: What It Is, Picture This, and One! Hundred! Demons! I should write a review for Syllabus on this blog sometime. Yay! All hail Queen Lynda! I also want to read more widely in graphic novels and memoirs.

While discussing books on writing and creativity, I should mention The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne, which I’m still working through (on pause till I finish my close reading of Silence of the Lambs, which it will discuss in detail as a case study). And I am also pleased that Ursula Le Guin’s Steering The Craft is now more widely available in a new edition.

Further special mentions go to two debut novels coming in 2016 that I was lucky to read as advance proofs: Joanna Cannon’s The Trouble With Goats And Sheep and Kit De Waal’s My Name Is Leon. Both have children as protagonists, and each delivers a certain unexpected bite, but they work their wonders in different ways. Both, I now realise, also have period settings in the Midlands (70s and 80s), which I think is very good indeed: we need more strong Midlands voices in contemporary fiction (okay, Nina Stibbe is another one too – yes, maybe I’m biased). I’d not be surprised to see either of these engrossing novels as prizewinners or book club selections, and I look forward to seeing what comes next from their authors.

There were a number of books I did not get to. I hope in the near future to read Sanjeev Sahota’s Year Of The Runaways and Marlon James’s Brief History Of Seven Killings and Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen; this was a good year for the Booker, it seems. Also Oliver Sacks’s memoir On The Move; his column in the New York Times was another moving read. And maybe sometime soon I’ll get to Elena Ferrante – I confess to starting the first volume several times now, and finding the translation a bit stiff.

I’d also hoped to finish Moby-Dick this year, nay this summer, but other things came along (not least, its mid-Victorian style of rambling and musing, which has its moments, but I’m wanting me some STORY). I’m 40 per cent of the way in, and finally (FINALLY) we’ve met Ahab and had a mention of the whale. More anon (I hope), though for now I think I’m going to take a breather with Anne Tyler’s newest book A Spool Of Blue Thread.

And I realise I still (after three serious goes) have not finished The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro; I was really looking forward to this, and thought it sounded like the sort of literary fantasy I should have enjoyed, but what I did read just didn’t grab me (and I only have sixty pages left to go – which says a lot): sometimes a bit heavy-handed, often a bit lacking (in spark? in magic?). Plus I am tired of the patronising conversations about genre fiction by literary authors and their readers.

The novels I’ve listed as enjoying here have been on the whole pretty straightforward works of realism. People and places and voices were what seemed to count in my reading. No plot-rich pageturners this year, or historical blockbusters, or escapes into fantasy: no Goldfinch, no Burial Rites, no new George R.R. Martin.

Despite my love of novels and short stories, I think the works of fiction I enjoyed the most in 2015 all appeared on television. Game of Thrones continued to entertain and surprise, and I’m looking forward to see how it departs further from the books in 2016. I’m currently watching the second season of Transparent, whose characters at first irritated the hell out of me, until I really fell for them. So Jewish and so Californian, and so many of the joys and misunderstandings of relationships and family life are drawn with truth. And The Bridge also gave surprises, especially beyond the usual resolutions of a police procedural drama – the last hour of the third series was the best hour of telly (and fiction) this year.

Happy New Year!

Steering The Craft, By Ursula Le Guin

by Andrew | 2 Comments

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There are many books with elaborate theories of narrative structure, or top ten ways to create memorable settings/living characters/powerful dialogue. But many easily overegg, or go off at tangents, or create second-order systems that take over and stop the real writing coming through. At the root of all writing is, um, writing, and the basics of writing lie at the core of Steering the Craft.

Ursula Le Guin is of course the author of dearly beloved and ground-breaking novels such as The Left Hand Of Darkness and The Wizard Of Earthsea. She’s also a very generous critic, who reviews for the Guardian, among other publications. Look at her recent review of The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell, for example. Read any of her reviews, in fact: warm, joyful, encouraging of both readers and writers. No snark. This is what reviewing should be. What a dream. Also take a look at this Paris Review interview.

No wonder Ursula Le Guin just received a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. (Note that fellow recipients include those two other writers in the trenches of genre who’re also the writers of what I consider two of the most useful other works on writing: Ray Bradbury, author of Zen In The Art Of Writing, and Stephen King, author of On Writing. When it comes to writing on writing, genre writers rock.)

Back to St Ursula. All of her creative and storytelling brilliance aside, Steering The Craft (Eighth Mountain Press, 1998) is her most useful work for writers of fiction (and nonfiction) looking for practical advice as well as inspiration. It has a long subtitle – Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew – but it’s a short book that’s deceptively simple in what it has to say. Everything it contains is pure gold.

Perhaps it’s easiest simply to give the self-explanatory titles of the ten chapters:

* The Sound of Your Writing
* Punctuation
* Sentence Length and Complex Syntax
* Repetition
* Adjective and adverb
* Subject Pronoun and Verb
* Point of View and Voice
* Changing Point of View
* Indirect Narration, or What Tells
* Crowding and Leaping

Additional sections cover verb forms (in case we need to brush up), provide a glossary of working literary terms, and offer tips on running a writing group (very handy). And its subtitle is Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew.

Such delights! It’s full of many bon mots. Here are just a few choice points.

* Unlike many other guides for writing fiction, St Ursula devotes space to grammar and usage, as you might gather from the list above. But rather than dwelling on technicalities, she gives commonsense principles to work by, interrogating the idea of ‘correctness’, yet still caring about commas – but in the most enabling and graceful of ways:

If you aren’t interested in punctuation, or are afraid of it, you’re missing out on a whole kit of the most essential, beautiful, elegant tools a writer has to work with.

Who could resist that?!

* Writers get bored of apparent experts telling us to ditch the adverbs and adjectives, but at the start of the chapter devoted to them St Ursula gets the point across directly and easily (see, I use them too!):

Adjectives and adverbs are rich and good and fattening. The main thing is not to overindulge.

She continues:

The bakery shop of English is rich beyond belief, and narrative prose, particularly if it’s going a long distance, needs more muscle than fat.

Point made?

* Her chapters on point of view include incredibly practical working definitions, e.g.: observer-narrator in first person; observer-narrator in third person; the detached author; and a term she prefers to omniscient narrator – the involved author:

This is the voice of the storyteller, who knows what’s going on in all the different places the characters are at the same time, and what’s going on inside the characters, and what has happened, and what has to happen … It’s not only the oldest and the most widely used storytelling voice, it’s the most versatile, flexible, and complex of the points of view – and probably, at this point, the most difficult for the writer.

Once upon a time …

* Her thoughts on the idea that stories are driven by conflict are extremely important for all writers to think about:

Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing. Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.

So: how are your characters relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing?

You can sample more of her discussion of story on her own site. Pure gold.

In practice, in much of the work I do as a book doctor or an editor I find that I can make a very quick judgement about the writing on the basis of sampling the voice in a page or two, and I probably have more time or inclination (and patience) than busy agents or editors. Writers who want to be published: you need to get this stuff right. Some of this is about right or wrong, but some of it is about more subtle stuff that has no easy solution. The counsel of St Ursula might just help you get there, though. This is not only a fantastic book for apprentice writers looking for resources as they are getting started, but also an excellent guide for more experienced writers; its clarity cuts through some of the clutter and contradictions in a very level manner, and it will also provide an epiphany or two along the way. It’s a book to read and reread whenever you need clarification and affirmations.

Really, this is one of the best of books on writing, and probably my favourite. It tops my list because of its writer’s voice: reassuring, wise, good-humoured. It makes you want to be in this writer’s presence, but on reflection, in fact, it succeeds in bringing you into her presence. That is something any writer or reader wants to achieve.

Thank you, Ursula Le Guin.

* Post updated in September 2021 to reflect the publication of the new edition, Steering the Craft : A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story (Mariner, 2015). which should be available from online booksellers. You can also read my review of another of her seminal pieces on writing at another blog post, where I also post further links on Ursula: The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (and Life).

Friday Writing Experiment No. 33: A Little Bird Told You

by Andrew | 2 Comments

Goldfinch

This week’s Friday Writing Experiment celebrates the publication next week of Donna Tartt’s very exciting new novel The Goldfinch.

It’s getting the fantastic reviews it deserves, but I do suggest you don’t read any of them until you’ve read the novel itself, as too many reveal far too much. Even things such as the settings are best left to unfold for themselves – the second (or maybe it’s the third) act of the book took me someplace quite unexpected, and it’s richly rendered and full of further surprises. And that is what much of reading for pleasure is about: the surprises, the narrative tension.

This is touched upon in this very inspiring (and spoiler-free) clip from an interview with Donna Tartt shown on the BBC this week:

When asked what she wants people to read her books for, she answers:

First I want them to have fun. Reading’s no good unless it’s fun … What I always want is the one quality I look for in books and it’s very hard to find … I love that childhood quality of just that gleeful, greedy reading, can’t-get-enough-of-it, what’s-happening-to-these-people, the breathless kind of turning of the pages. That’s what I want in a book. But I also want something that’s well constructed, too. I like to be able to drop down in. Dickens goes so fast, he goes like lightning, but at the same time any sentence you can lift up and it’s a marvel and it’s a miracle. To me, I want those two qualities, the two qualities of any great art: density and speed. Density and speed.

Kirsty also says that her books are about secrets, and Donna replies that all books are about secrets and have mysteries at their heart. ‘Every book has some secret, there’s always a secret.’

One thing that can probably be revealed (something I knew before reading – not least as it’s on the cover) is that the story involves a painting. A painting of a little bird: ‘The Goldfinch’ by Carel Fabritius (and if you don’t know much about it, maybe don’t follow that link till you’ve read the novel either: let the novel bring it into your world in its own way). It’s a beautiful, beautiful painting, or so I believe – I’ve never seen the original, but we’ll all want to now, and thanks to Donna Tartt for describing it so well.

This set me to thinking about ekphrastic writing, which is writing that in some way describes art or uses it as an inspiration. Some examples are mentioned here. I remember my friend and co-teacher Stephanie Heit using Pictures From Brueghel in a workshop at Naropa.

Something further: that bird, that little bird. My goddess, that little bird really haunted me – its exquisite form, its vulnerability, ‘a yellow finch, against a plain, pale ground, chained to a perch by its twig of an ankle’. A little bird painted three and a half centuries ago comes to stand for so much, and mining this meaning allows for the depth and richness of reading this great book.

For this week’s writing experiment, create a piece that takes The Goldfinch as a model for writing:

* As an inspiration, use a painting of a bird or an animal, or maybe a fish or a lizard or an insect.

* As with The Goldfinch, you could also place a secret at the heart of this piece. And it might not hurt to aspire towards density and speed in your work, too: perhaps some of its sentences can be marvels and miracles.

* Or you could simply write a poem about that bird. Something like Elizabeth Bishop’s The Fish – I don’t think it was based on a painting, but you could imagine the moment in the artwork as an encounter brought to life in a similar way.

* Most of all, your readers must have FUN.

If you’d like to explore some inspirations, try Animals In Art or even visit the Animal Art Fair. Or take yourself on an artist date to one of your favourite galleries, or root around in gallery websites. Really take in all the details of an artwork featuring your own little bird or animal, and in your own writing embody whatever it – and its subject – might mean.