Today is the first day I feel bad enough to lie around and do nothing but read. And despite my initial reluctance in getting used to the 150-year-old language (I haven’t picked up a “classic” novel in years, and for some reason I’ve always been adolescent when it comes to working this hard for a story—not that it’s hard at all) I can’t imagine a better book to read today. The weather here is fairly wuthering, too—cool and damp and overcast, with occasional bursts of wind. I haven’t enjoyed a book this much in a long time.

So now I’m thinking of other good under-the-weather reads. Most of them are gloomy, of course, and many I haven’t actually read, but I imagine the feeling you expect to have when reading a book you’ve heard so much about for so long can’t be all that much different—despite all of this—from the feeling you actually get.

The House of Seven Gables
Great Expectations
Mansfield Park
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (or any Sherlock Holmes)
Crime and Punishment
Any Agatha Christie
Of Human Bondage
The Sword of Shannara (possibly because my brother read and loved it when sick himself once)
The Hobbit (my wife’s favorite comfort-read)
Atonement
Any of the Bertie Wooster misadventures
To Serve Them All My Days
Mariette in Ecstasy

Hmm. I think the only non-Brits on this list are Hawthorne (who was fairly Gothic himself), Dostoyevski (appropriately bleak), Terry Brooks, and Ron Hansen. Apparently I associate England with malaise. Who knew.

For a while now, too, I’ve been wanting to hold myself a little more accountable in terms of reading habits. So, in the manner of my wife and Art Garfunkel, I’ve started keeping a log of what I’ve read, and I joined GoodReads (for whatever that’s worth; I forgot about all about that place, to tell the truth, until just now). And now I’m going to try using this space as a place to articulate my thoughts about some things I read, rather than just some things I’m writing.

First up is Mary Gaitskill’s Two Girls, Fat and Thin. It’s her first novel, purchased while I was in that first-novel bonanza (which, I suppose, I’m not yet out of.) She came as a visiting writer to the school I attended and I got to be a part of her grad-student dinner entourage before the reading, where I mentioned I had been reading Nabokov’s first novel, Mary. So that got into a mini-discussion of first novels, and when the time came after the reading, I bought hers and asked her to sign it. (“To Matt, with an appetite for first novels.”)

That was almost a year ago, and Two Girls languished on my shelf, stuck between two other books I hadn’t read, until August. It’s my first foray into Gaitskill territory other than a years-ago, fairly cursory reading of “A Romantic Weekend,” an anthologized short story in which, essentially, a woman and a married man go off for the weekend to have all kinds of crazy sex. What Gaitskill did at the end with perspective—it alternates fairly clearly, until things shift in the intense last few paragraphs—was interesting enough for me to remember it, but not enough to pull me into her other work.

I’d say similar things about Two Girls—interesting moments, energetic (if not bowl-me-over good) writing, and otherwise kind of eh. The story is, not surprisingly, about two girls. The fat one, Dorothy, was repeatedly raped by her father, and the thin one, Justine, was molested as a child and then effectively (if perhaps not legally) raped by a high-school boyfriend. They meet years later, after Dorothy has become enthralled by both the writing and the person of Anna Granite, a thin Ayn Rand veil. Justine, a secretary who wants to be a journalist, is writing an article for a middling New York culture magazine about Anna Granite, her followers, and what happened to them after Granite (I believe) died. Dorothy responds to the ad Justine left in a Laundromat, which leads to what the flap copy calls “a friendship that will split open both their lives.”

But not really; they don’t really become friends. At least, not until pretty much the last line of the book. Their relationship, and their juxtaposition in the novel, is a little…ill fitting, I think. Overall, Two Girls is an exploration of what can happen after sexual abuse much more than it is a critique of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism (which Gaitskill called Definitism) or a superficial story of how two oh-so-different girls ended up the unlikeliest of friends. In that way, I suppose it’s interesting—one girl clings to ideas about individual strength to overcome her past, the other gets into kinky sex so she can control the feelings that being abused instilled in her.

But the focus on the abuse and sex—while making for tragic and sympathetic characters—led to a narrative that was sort of dysfunctional, to appropriate a Charles Baxter/C.K. Williams term. In one of his essays from Burning Down the House, Baxter writes about the problems that arise with narrative dysfunction, “the process by which we lose track of ourselves, the story that tells us who we are supposed to be and how we are supposed to act.” There’s more to it than applies to Two Girls, but part of his discussion (with help from Marilynne Robinson) is that characters who are wronged early on (either in their lives or in the novel) too often proceed through the novel looking to identify that wrong rather than extract meaning from it. These kinds of stories are largely therapy, populated with characters who only act “according to a predetermined, invisible pattern created by the injury.”

I bring this up not to use Baxter and narrative dysfunction as gauges for good or bad writing, but because Baxter articulates well one of my problems with Two Girls—it’s all about events that happened early on, that aren’t truly explored, and that so overwhelm the characters and story that other (interesting, important) aspects of those things are left essentially hanging on to cloud the narrative and add little value of their own. The lightheartedness of the Granite/Rand bits seem out of place, for example, and the Justine/Dorothy counterpoint isn’t so clear. It was a very disorienting book, and although I finished, it was a plow.

Speaking of, I have declared the end of the second draft! It came much faster than expected, too, which was nice. Even though I was just churning the same few pages over and over for the last few weeks, it happened at a pretty good clip. So that means I’m back to the beginning, looking at what I wrote along time ago—in some cases close to two years—and at turns deleting, rewriting, minorly editing, and almost constantly cringing. I’ve made a checklist of things to look at particularly, so there is still a plan. But once that list is depleted, who knows. Probably I’ll dust off one of my various communicators and get in touch with another writer friend to ask him or her to read it and feed back.

Either way, I’m excited, and things are moving along well. Thought I’d let you know. (Whoever “you” is…)

Basically, my issue is that I don’t know how I feel about the novel I’m writing anymore. I’m getting closer and closer to finishing a second draft, which means that all the pieces should be in place, more or less, sometime in the next few weeks or months. (I’m hoping weeks.) But I’m having a difficult time finding the right voice now, after hundreds of pages and tens of thousands of words. The reason for that (or at least one possible reason whose truth I can’t help but convince myself of) is that I’ve grown beyond this voice. I am no longer the writer who writes this way, who sounds like that, who uses those words to articulate a world.

I think I’ve mentioned this before: A former teacher was fond of telling his students that a writer is a different person, by the time he finishes his novel, than he was when he started it. (“Think of all the cigarettes you’ve smoked, all the hundreds of cups of coffee you drank, all the things you did—things that have nothing to do with writing. You’ve had all these life experiences, so it makes sense that you’d be a different person.”) He said this as a way of making us excited about revision, I think—consider the novel a time capsule, I guess—but I kept thinking, I can’t be a different person. If I’m a different person, I won’t care about anything I wrote. I’ll want to start over, to do it all again. Because in my experience, every time I get over something that used to be important in my life, I don’t just get over it, I send it into exile. I leave it to die of exposure in the woods.

I know I’ve mentioned this before: I have a second novel swimming around in my head. It’s a very different story, and will demand a very different structure and a voice so different and distinct it might as well be from a different writer. And this is part of my trouble, too. I’ve heard all these stories about first novels that flop, and that then paralyze a second novel before it’s even born. The novelist suddenly has a track record (a bad one), and the publisher uses it to determine whether or not to take a chance on the second novel (often, not).

Or else, this interesting/scary phenomenon: a first novel (or book, I guess) that does so well that the publisher wants exactly the same book again. Not that I’m expecting to have a best-seller or anything, but I don’t want to have a problem selling this very different second book just because the first book was a standard arch-plot with a protagonist and an antagonist and a love story, etc., which seems to generally work with readers.

So what I’m afraid of, it seems, is that the novel that I’m kind of tired of writing will end up preventing me, somehow, from publishing the second novel I’m more excited about. It’s a pretty stupid thing to be concerned with when there’s a decent chance this first book won’t ever get picked up, since the publishing industry kind of sucks now. But I can’t help it. And it leads me to envision my Writing Career as well—will it be like that of Jennifer Egan, whom The Rumpus called an “‘unclassifiable’ novelist,” or Paul Auster, who has written the same book a million times?

And in the meantime, while I’m prognosticating my future, I’m losing sight of what I’m doing right now. Skyline feels stupid, now—a book I shouldn’t have wasted my time on, because it’s been written seven dozen times since 2004 and nobody wants to read it again, and on and on. But I need to keep doing it; I need to dig around until I find the voice again and can feel good about all the work I’ve done. And then the book will be finished, and I can move on to the second one, publishers be damned. Right?

We’ll see. I have a feeling that in twenty years people will be telling me what a unique doorstop I have, and how on earth did quartz ever come to look so much like an old, worn ream of paper? And I’ll tell them the story of a novel I tried to write, and how, over time, from disuse and neglect, it hardened, browned, and turned to stone.

But that’s not really what this post is about. This post is about how I don’t see things so glaringly obvious in my own work that I would be so bothered by in someone else’s that I could, possibly, throw a book across a room. I never did that with The Natural, because for some reason that book seems to hold cliches so well—it’s a world made for things you already expect to happen, a book about heroes and baseball, where things always go according to some kind of plan—but I might with some others, given the chance.

Anyway, it kind of concerns me that I can miss something so big and important. This character doesn’t do anything except loom in the proverbial shadows, menacing and smoking and saying creepy things that might be sweet coming from anybody else, but because he’s this kind of caricature he can’t do anything that doesn’t highlight his creepiness. How could I have not seen this until now, 3/4 of the way through the second draft? I saw the pacing issue, which I think is rather more complicated. I saw the Lem Quandary, which is a bit simpler in its problem but more difficult to fix. But I missed this one, until now.

And, really, I only noticed it—despite early warning notes I just saw in a notebook I rarely open anymore about this evil caricature becoming an evil caricature—because I need this character to do something that the caricature would never, ever do. For the plot, and for other characters to be fully realized, this guy needs to change in a way that the caricature can’t. Which means that his entire persona needs to be different than it has been for the entire book. Which means I need to go back to the beginning, AGAIN, to fix him.

I know it shouldn’t bug me—nothing is set until it’s off to the printers, which is years away, and it’s my first novel and all that. Nevertheless, I am bugged. I suppose this is what readers are for, pointing out these mistakes. But in my experience, readers are also for saying occasionally dumb things, and often useless things, and annoying things. Sometimes they’re entirely worthless. (This actually hasn’t happened to me, having an entirely worthless reader, but it’s been close.) So I just don’t know that that’s worth the effort.

Rant, rant, rant. Whatever. I’m doing it. I’m not sick of this thing yet, despite warnings that I will be by the end. It’s a monstrous challenge, but a lot of fun, even when I realize how bad I am at it. And that has never happened with anything else before.

A limited sample, sure, and truthfully those examples took longer to find than I expected, based on a trend I’ve noticed in headlines lately: they’re asking questions rather than answering them. Granted, I don’t pay much attention to the wording of headlines, so this might not be so much a trend as a characteristic of headlines. Or it might be a trend from ten years ago that’s starting to dwindle. But I just noticed it, and I think it’s interesting. Anyway, Gene Weingarten wrote recently about changing headlines, so there—I’m timely. Although he more talks about the difference between print and online headlines, and how online, getting picked up by a search engine is perhaps more important than pulling in readers.

But maybe the interrogative headlines are how editors are trying to do both—use keywords to get the crawling goo-hoo!s to find articles easily and question marks to get readers to click on things they might otherwise not click on. It also might be part of the “interactive news” thing that’s happening, like news blogs and commenting on news stories and all. A question makes the reader feel like part of the story, as if they can say, “Well, I don’t think my favorite uppity politician would ever insult anybody intentionally,” and then click the story and learn that, of course, they were wrong.

Fox News does this a lot, and a bit differently, from what I’ve seen. Most sites put their questions in the headlines of non-pressing issues or feature stories rather than hard news. But Fox has their idiotic “We report, you decide” thing going, which, frankly, is terrifying—that example above (“Will Sanctions Work?”) just makes the unwashed masses feel like they have a legitimate voice in either making the decision or determining its outcome. News—and therefore whatever the news covers—then becomes more personal (which is potentially good, since most people don’t read/watch the news) but also gives the reader/viewer a stake in it all. So when things turn out badly, which they inevitably do, people become angry and disillusioned, because this time it hits close to home.

The next step, though, is that people think they’re smarter and better informed, without having actually learned anything, than the people who are tasked with informing the world of its happenings. And smarter than the people who do the happenings, if that phrasing makes sense. That’s where discontent is bred. If people simply read the news, they are entitled to whatever reactionary opinions they want to hold. But if they feel like they create the news, they feel like they have the power to change the world. That’s how the tea party fits into this whole thing, in my opinion: the people taking over, the Establishment (whatever that means) taking a back seat. The world has always had crazies, but it seems to me that the crazies are encouraged to be a part of goings-on like they haven’t been since I started paying attention.

Maybe it’s an entirely different trend. I don’t know. Maybe it’s about people hating the media for talking about “the wrong things,” and the media responding to allow people to talk about “the right things.” (Which, by the way, are far less interesting.) Maybe it’s something a smarter, more knowledgeable person would be able to see. Maybe I’m just too timid to have a true opinion about all of this. In any case, I don’t really like it. I preferred it when people voiced their discontent with periodicals in letters to the editor rather than polls, and when there was a measure of civility in dissent, rather than  bloviation and incitations of violence. If that time ever really existed.

They do this, so cleverly, by admitting to not having read a book that a lot of people—you and I excluded, of course—will never have heard of. Sometimes they trick you and make something you might have heard of a bit more obscure, say, by calling it In Search of Lost Time instead of Remembrance of Things Past. (Rarely will one ever admit to not having read any of Proust, and never will anyone admit to not knowing who Proust was until they themselves read one of these “Oh my gosh can you BELIEVE I’ve never read THAT?!” posts just a few weeks ago.) Implicit in these posts is the fact, whether true or merely truthy, that the writer has read absolutely everything else there is.

So I thought I would show up Mr. McCrum (Who wrote what, now? Never read it.) and admit to something a bit more…um…impressive, shall I say. I have never read:

Middlemarch, of course
Any Proust
Moby Dick
The Red Badge of Courage
Tristram Shandy
Great Expectations
Oliver Twist
David Copperfield
Jane Eyre (in fact, I’ve read nothing by any Bronte, although I’ve been meaning to try Wuthering Heights again)
Any Henry James
Jude the Obscure
Any Tolstoy
Any Dostoyevsky
Any Russian novelist, come to think of it
Any Toni Morrison
Any Jane Austen (which is hard to do, being the husband of my wife)
Mrs. Dalloway
Nine Stories
East of Eden
Ulysses
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The Sound and the Fury
As I Lay Dying
Any John Updike
Any Norman Mailer
Any Saul Bellow
Any Evelyn Waugh
Any book-length Ernest Hemingway (although I’ve tried to read A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and a short story collection whose name I can’t remember, the last of which I made it a few stories in)
Any David Foster Wallace
Any DH Lawrence
American Pastoral
Portnoy’s Complaint
Any Edith Wharton
A Clockwork Orange
Of Human Bondage
Any Sinclair Lewis
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Any V.S. Naipaul
Any Salman Rushdie
Any Thomas Pynchon
Robinson Crusoe (although I devoured the Great Illustrated Classics version when I was 9)
The Wizard of Oz
Kidnapped
Any Ayn Rand (although this is entirely intentional)
Any Margaret Atwood
Any Cormac McCarthy
Any Henry Miller
Any Shirley Jackson, other than “The Lottery”

I give up. I haven’t read most things everyone seems to think I should have read. A few years ago, when I decided to be a Writer, I convinced myself I needed to read everything. But it was absolutely impossible, and boring as hell for the most part. But as you can see, I’m very terribly read. It’d be much easier for me to make a list of books I have read, but that wouldn’t be nearly as exciting as this post was, both to write and to read, I’m sure. There’s less dirt there.

The issue with balance is actually two issues, micro and macro, gelled together. First I have to gauge how well the story itself is paced—whether it makes sense for the events to progress in the order in which they progress, and at the speed at which they progress. This has been surprisingly difficult, largely because of the second issue, which is how each of these storylines works dramatically in the context of all the others. It wouldn’t make sense, for instance, for the love story to be at full-tilt halfway through when The Un-Drowning hasn’t even started yet and for the hate story to be concluded, even if each of these storylines feels natural and well-paced on its own. But knowing how well storylines are paced on their own is tricky because they all intermingle, and the context of the other ones mucks up my ideas about the first.

Since I’m new at this and have no idea what I’m doing, I have to “invent” “solutions” for these problems. My “solution” for pacing is simply to rotate the storylines—write about the love story for a little while, then the Un-Drowning, then work, then the love story again, then the hate story, etc. This is obvious. Of course everyone writes this way, and of course I would be stupid not to. This is how balance is achieved. No shit. I get it.

But sometimes it can really violate my conception of the whole novel. I just realized that there’s too much love story right in the middle. Well, not just. I had realized it about three times but hadn’t done anything about it and forgot three times. This time, though, I can’t really go forward if I don’t change something. So I have to go back and adjust everything—first dates, first kisses, first sex, first fight, and on and on. Scenes will be adjusted, added, destroyed, and things will get better, right?

I once that a certain novelist knows revision is done when everything she changes makes the whole thing worse. It’s issues like this pacing one—issues that seem fairly small at first but balloon when you’re not looking—that lead me to think I’m making everything worse, but the book still isn’t done. But still I go, I go, I go.

There have been a couple of essays around lately that talk about the pleasures of reading, or not reading. Just looking forward to the next book. I love that feeling—of knowing a book only by the flap copy and being able to imagine, given only the briefest of plot summary, all the places a story could go.

In that way, reading results in a kind of perversion of imagination, I think. Before I start a book, anything is possible and all doors are open. As I begin to read, doors start to close—OK, it’s in first person, so I know the narrator won’t die at the end. And so on. And gradually, that thing that I imagined the story to be will start to shift away from the story itself, as if my eyes are slowly crossing and revealing two nearly identical but separate shadows, until there are two complete versions of it: the one I hoped to read and the one I did.

Every story is like this—whether novel, short story, history, whatever. I expect things from each of my books, and what they give me is never the same. I don’t think I want it to be, though. Part of the joy of reading is the joy of discovery and of being surprised. And I suppose the true measure of the quality of a book isn’t whether or not it fulfilled my expectations, but whether or not it was better—more surprising, more entertaining, more interesting—than what I had hoped for.

I expect a lot from those five books I bought this week. If it turns out that any of my imagined stories was less good than the book itself, maybe I’ll let you know. (Once I get around to reading them, of course.)

I don’t mean the Antithesis Fact; I mean a fact that argues against the thesis. In this case, the thesis is that there is no such thing as the omniscient point of view (at least, it’s not nearly as common or easily writable as we all seem to think); the fact is that not even Charles Dickens is omniscient! Can you believe it?!

Here is the quote itself:

So where is today’s omniscience-seeking reader to turn? Dickens, don’t fail me now? It turns out that the Inimitable Boz is no more trustworthy in his narration than Defoe or Richardson or the paragon of manipulative narrators, Tristram Shandy. In fact, Dickens’ narrators jump around all over the place, one minute surveying London from on high, the next deep inside the mind of Little Dorrit, or Nancy, or a jar of jam. Dickens seems to have recognized the paradox of the omniscient point of view: with the ability to be everywhere and know everything comes tremendous limitation. If you’re going to let the furniture do the thinking, you’re going to need the versatility of a mobile and often fragmented narrative stance.

It seems that in this paragraph, “omniscience” somehow becomes a synonym for “trustworthy,” and “trustworthy” comes to mean “not jumping around all over the place.” OK, I might buy this: if a narrator is truly omniscient, it will not have preference and must, by definition, present everything neutrally, thereby earning the trust of the reader. But for any narrator to see everything at once, as an omniscient narrator must, it has to jump around.

In The Cider House Rules by John Irving, for example, we see the world (or at least snips of it) from over the shoulder of nearly a dozen characters in the first 250 pages: Homer Wells, Wilbur Larch, Nurse Edna, Nurse Angela, Melony, Olive Worthington, Wally, Candy, Raymond Kendall, the stationmaster, the stationmaster’s assistant, and Curly Day. Some of these characters are privileged more than others, of course, and we might stick with one of them for a whole chapter. But over the course of a page, it isn’t uncommon for three or four people’s thoughts to be spelled out. And that doesn’t even address the From On High point of view that describes the history of certain places like Heart’s Rock and Heart’s Haven without being attached to any characters at all. Irving is a disciple of Dickens, so it doesn’t surprise me that their narratives should be similarly broad-minded.

But I think Power would say this isn’t omniscience, it’s schizophrenia, more “jumping around” from person to place to thing that only leads to, somehow, “tremendous limitation” in terms of point of view. So I don’t understand the alternative, really. What I think might have happened is that she got on this train of thought—”You know, I haven’t read a book with a truly omniscient point of view in a while”; “You know, this book isn’t quite omniscient after all”; “You know, none of these are really omniscient, if you think about it”—and somebody she talked to about it was all, “What about Dickens?” And she went, “Shit.” The Anti-Thesis Fact. So she had to scramble to come up with a reason Dickens wasn’t omniscient, because you can’t talk about omniscience without talking about Dickens.

The result is that Power has mistaken omniscience for simultaneity. It’s not that we see London from on high, or that we learn the thoughts of Little Dorritt and Nancy and a jar of jam that she has a problem with; it’s that these things are fused together in sequence, which, apparently, doesn’t work for her. (It creates a “mobile and often fragmented narrative stance.”)

I suppose she’d prefer that they be shown to happen at the same time—parallel narratives sort of like those translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with the Middle English on one leaf and the modern English on the other. Maybe then books could be omniscient. But that’s too silly and cumbersome for most people to attempt. In the meantime, all we get are intriguing, but ultimately faulty and pointless, theories on point of view.