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Please note that there will be some crudeness in today’s post. Please leave now if you don’t want to know what John Irving did to some people…

Okay, so every so often, there are scenes so tightly wound that they clearly illuminate everything that’s come before as mere clockworks, components that enable the core metaphor of the book or movie. Tarantino is full of them, as is Paul Thomas Anderson, Jennifer Egan, Steven Holl. It’s a common high-culture malady, as true in modern architecture and modern music as it is in modern literature. We’re supposed to admire the creator’s ingenuity more than the actual sounds or images or words or people.

Basta.

The example that first made me think of this, almost thirty years ago, is the moment when I quit The World According to Garp in full disgust, recognizing all at once that each and every character existed only to play out the author’s cleverness. The hinge of the book comes in the few pages when all of the foreshadowing is triggered at once, like a game of Mousetrap, to implement the whole Rube Goldberg device.

• There’s Garp himself, the product of multiple sexual traumas, who is little more than broken, ambulatory libido.
• There’s his wife Helen, an English teacher driven to affairs of her own by Garp’s inattention and infidelity.
• There’s their son, ignored by both of his ruined parents.
• There’s the repeated theme of physical mutilation as a symbol or outcome of sexual abuse.
• There’s the car with the gearshift lever that they’ve never repaired, its bare metal shaft a symbol of their acceptance of decay.
• There’s the steep driveway, which Garp regularly uses as a test of masculine capability, gauging his speed so that he can coast the last bit uphill and let the car come gently to rest in the garage bay.

Can you guess what dish Irving concocts from this recipe?

(Don’t read this next paragraph if you’re worried about spoilers or naughty words or authorial human decency.)

Helen feels guilty about the affair she’s carried on with a student, has him over to break it off, but agrees to give him a farewell blowjob in his car. Garp is coming home with their toddler son, no seatbelt or carseat, himself uncertain about their marriage and family. He rolls up the hill in the fog, and runs into the back of the student’s car in the garage. In the impact, Helen bites off her lover’s dick, and Garp’s son is thrown onto the gearshift and loses an eye.

Oh HELL no! You didn’t just do that! Oh, fuck you, dude, I’m out!

You do NOT bring me two hundred pages into a book just to reveal that you think of your characters as nothing more than a vaudeville setup. You do NOT ask me to care about real people and then make them artifice again. No. I will not have it.

And I had that experience again this afternoon at about 3:30, while reading the 2015 novel Hausfrau, by Jill Alexander Essbaum. It’s a book of metaphors. The Swiss German language as a metaphor for action and inaction, for the consideration of tense and gender. The work with a Freudian therapist, Freudian analysis being nothing but the investigation of metaphor. The endless affairs as a metaphor for disillusion and passivity. The notion of Swiss emotional reserve as a metaphor for all of male inattentiveness to women’s inner lives. The mixed-parentage baby as a metaphor for all of the secrets Anna can never reveal. Her inner life, enormously detailed in its protective inertia, kept at its own emotional distance from us (and from Anna herself).

But then, at the stereotypical moment of two-thirds-of-the-way-through-the-book, Anna finally tries to do “the right thing,” fails at it, and is immediately punished in the most garish, cruel way that her allies (us, the readers) could ever have imagined. And we suddenly realize that Essbaum wasn’t employing metaphors to help us understand Anna’s life, but rather that Anna’s life, and the lives of those around her, were nothing but authorial metaphors in the first place. The World One is shredded to reveal the World Two author, grinning like Harley Quinn as she reveals her presence behind the levers.

And looking back from that moment of reveal, I can now see that Anna’s therapist Doktor Messerli had all the best lines. She’s actually been the only person in this story with insight or agency, her Freudian metaphoric analysis being the Greek chorus that offers interpretive commentary. Here’s one of the very best things in the book, right up front on p. 6:

“Shame is psychic extortion,” Doktor Messerli answered. “Shame lies. Shame a woman and she will believe she is fundamentally wrong, organically delinquent. The only confidence she will have will be in her failures. You will never convince her otherwise.”

(There’s an entirely different blog essay coming in the next week or so about incorrectly gendering the work of shame, spawned by an article from a couple of weeks ago by Jennifer Weiner. We’ll get back to that at some point, after I get through this afternoon’s trauma.)

This is full authorial malpractice. This is an abuse of trust, asking me to believe in the virtual reality of World One and then ripping it open to see the Matrix beneath, shimmering with its manipulative algorithms. It is a fully Modernist abuse, all head and no heart.

If I were still teaching, I would teach this novel beside Jennifer Tseng’s outstanding book Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness. We could explore the parallels:

• The authors, both celebrated poets embarking on their first novels
• The protagonists, women of similar age (38 and 41), women in marriages that are “good enough” but not at all good
• Both women with children whom they love but do not begin to understand
• Both women in landscapes that they only partially inhabit, different from those around them in some fundamental ways
• Women who embark on secret affairs, and equally secret wandering just to be alone
• Both stories culminating in an unexpected death that the protagonist and others must collectively come to terms with

And even with all of those parallels, one story is generous and the other meager. One is wise, the other merely intelligent. One is kind, the other cold. One uses metaphor inductively, to love, to explore, to illuminate the detailed contours of precious lives. The other uses metaphor deductively, to delimit, to burn away, to incinerate everything outside its own concerns.

Essbaum’s book has done one good thing for me. It has given me the desire to go back and re-read Tseng’s.

Will you tell this author that there are glittering prizes ahead for those who can write as she does?

Robert Hale, British publisher, 1948

Eleanor Alice (Burford) Hibbert was a novelist who wrote steadily and proficiently from the 1930s through the mid-1990s. In her long career, she published over 200 novels. And almost no one had ever heard of her.

They had probably heard of some of the thirty novels she published under her birth name, Eleanor Burford. In England, many readers had probably known of her remarkable career as a historical novelist, the ninety novels published as Jean Plaidy. Americans would more likely have known the thirty books she wrote beginning in the 1960s as Victoria Holt. There were books by Elbur Ford and Kathleen Kellow, books by Anna Percival and Philippa Carr and Ellalice Tate. In the end, it’s estimated that her books collectively sold over 100 million copies in twenty different languages.

She wrote five hours a day, even though that much typing was a physical strain. “I love my work so much that nothing would stop me writing,” she said. “When I finish one book I start on the next. If I take even a week’s break I just feel miserable. It’s like a drug.”

When I feel good about my own work, when it flows without conscious effort on my part, when the high is in full flower, I’m good for an average of eleven or twelve hundred words in a day. More often, it’s in the mid-600s, and even that’s good enough for two books a year. But when Ms. Hibbert was all-in, she averaged over five thousand words a day, seven days a week. At that pace, even a February outside a leap year could be good for a book and a half. Even assuming a few days off for illness or outside responsibilities, that’s 1,750,000 words a year.

I love prolific writers, and aspire to be one. The San Francisco Chronicle daily columnist Jon Carroll quoted William Saroyan as saying, “I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.” It’s like kitchen work; you can make brilliant meals for two hundred diners every night once you know your practice. Every restaurant is fast paced, whether it’s Red Lobster or Blue Hill. Being a prolific writer does not imply that one is a hack. I think it’s the mark of a craftsperson who just does the work, every day.

Over the course of his thirty year career, Carroll published about six million words in the Chronicle, and he became a beloved newsprint philosopher in the Bay Area. In the seven years I’ve been writing steadily, I’m barely at 900,000 (plus another 150,000 or so on the two blogs I’ve run).

Better get to work.

Go up to the place in the bookstore where your books will go… Walk right up and find your place on the shelf. Put your finger there, and then go every time.

Annie Dillard, as reported by her former student Alexander Chee

My shelf was knee high in the first cubby of fiction, the wing that ran from A through Cr, like homeroom. I had to sit on the footstool to read it.

Forty-six books, mostly but not all in paperback.

Two that I’d read. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and All the Wrong Moves. Two of forty six, about four percent.

Most were there as single copies, alone at the cocktail reception and hoping to find a conversation. Nine were twinned with an identical partner, only one in triplet—the featured book of the row, the only one faced out rather than spinewise, and the only hardback.

Only three writers represented by more than a single book. Chabon, Chevalier, Choi. All the rest: only their most recent, or their most famous, or their only.

In class, the idea seemed ridiculous. But at some point after the class ended, I did it. I walked up to the shelf. Chabon. Cheever. I put my finger between them and made a space. Soon, I did it every time I went to a bookstore.

Alexander Chee

By luck of the draw, Chee and Childress would have been shelfmates. I would’ve said hi, but he wasn’t there. But I do know that his bookstore is far smaller than mine, if he could have merely put a finger between Chabon and Cheever. I could have fit my whole forearm in there, shoving aside Mai-Lee Chai and Patrick Chamoiseau and Eileen Chang and Dan Chaon and Kate Chapin and Sasha Chapin and Ryan Chapman and Jerome Charyn and Eve Chase and Maunta Chaudhry and Amit Chaudhury and Chip Cheek. We all know those partygoers who only talk with us for a few minutes until they spot someone important, and immediately leave us forgotten. I fear that Alexander Chee would do that to me, based on the name-dropping in his collection of personal essays that I bought a couple of weeks ago from a different neighborhood in the bookstore altogether. We’re all climbers, even though we inhabit different levels at any moment.

At any rate, my own finger landed, with more precision, between Jennifer Chiaverini’s Resistance Women and Richard Chizmar’s Gwendy’s Magic Feather. Fine neighbors, though not previously known to me. I said hi to them both, and they wished me good luck but let me know that it was lonely sometimes, and that they wrote their asses off: Chizmar as a twenty-year horror writer with books and stories and screenplays galore, Chiaverini with thirty-eight books that I might classify as “cozy history,” originating in her experience as a quiltmaker and quilting teacher. Get busy, they said to me, and then went silent.

I felt like I should make an offering, in gratitude for letting me hang out and pretend to be a colleague. So, because I’ve been at work on a book about extraordinarily talented teenagers, I bought one of the three hardback copies of Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, since it also evokes the experience of talent, and confusion, and high school.

Her sixth book.

Get busy.

The only bookstore I ever had was the paperback rack at the drugstore.

Larry McMurtry

I’ve never known what level my brow is. To use the standard definitions, I’ve been all three, and remain a sort of tossed salad. There’s lowbrow, relating to or suitable for a person with little taste or intellectual interest. There’s highbrow, related to things that are sophisticated, elite or high culture. And perhaps worst of all is middlebrow: easily accessible art and literature, and the people who use the arts to acquire culture and social prestige.

Bingo! Filled the card!

The only hardcover books that ever came into our home were a) the World Book Encyclopedia of 1963, b) my school books, and c) the Readers’ Digest Condensed Books, one bound edition containing anywhere from four to six mildly abridged full novels, released four times a year. (THERE’s a self-publishing idea…)

My house was filled with books, though, like the Avon paperbacks shown above. They were tiny books: an Etsy listing for one of these (Avon S216) shows it as 4.25″ x 7″, half an inch thick, at 224 pages. That thickness was only due to the crap paper they printed on (hence “pulp” fiction), but really, for sixty cents, you could have a full novel that would fit in your back pocket.

I love that. I love everything about it. I love that it was cheap. I love that it was small. I love that it was unobtrusive. I love that there weren’t author photos, or the words “A Novel” on the front. I love that they fell apart, that they weren’t precious, that no one thought of them as collectibles.

I don’t have many left myself. But they were real books, anywhere from 60,000 to 80,000 words, with small text and small margins and single spacing. One of the reasons modern books cost more is that the text is more generous, the spacing more open, the typefaces carefully chosen. The graphic arts departments are doing more beautiful, elegant covers, the page layout designs are equally elegant, and the marketing group is busy harvesting reviews and blurbs and commendations. By contrast, the pulp guys didn’t pay anybody much in the production world, and the “marketing department” was a loose array of rack jobbers, wholesalers who paid a small amount to put wire racks of paperbacks and comics and eight-tracks and greeting cards into drugstores and neighborhood groceries.

The rack jobbers were in a symbiotic relationship with their host stores: they paid for space and inventory, and usually a small percentage of sales; they bore all the risk of shoplifting and wear; and they kept whatever they sold after that. They’d drop by once or twice a month, see what had sold, and re-fill the racks with either high-demand or new titles. I love that too. The word “job” is derived from gob, or a pile of work. So a jobber is a merchant who sells piles of work, always with a ruthless eye toward what is and isn’t selling.

And let’s be honest. That’s what the highbrows do, too.

I was trained in social science research methods, and one of the things hammered into us is that if you’re going to give someone a multiple choice question, the answers need to be meaningfully different from one another. The question “what’s your favorite dinner?” can’t include the options for both fried chicken and Brad Pitt, because one is a food and the other a dinner partner. (At least, we hope…)

Categories matter, dammit. And it’s not as though there’s a single category system that should always pertain regardless of circumstance; categories are situational, related to what we hope to accomplish more than to the thing itself. The thing is a thing; the category into which we place it says more about us than about the object. It’s an end-based sorting mechanism, and we determine the ends toward which we sort.

The thing that got me started this morning was an e-mail from Random House, entitled “The YA Heating Up This Winter.” YA, for those of you outside the book world, is short for Young Adult, the middle of three age-defined book categories:

• “MG”—Middle Grade, ages 8-12
• “YA”—Young Adult, ages 13-17
• “NA”—New Adult, ages 18-24

So these are fine categories for educators, I suppose, perhaps indicating the range of vocabulary that a reader would need. (Green Eggs and Ham was famously the outcome of a bet Dr. Seuss made with his editor Bennett Cerf, that he could write a successful and engaging kids’ book with fifty or fewer distinct words.) But it’s a dumb category for a bookstore, or for its readers. Let’s look at the books in this morning’s YA e-mail:

• Karen McManus: One of Us Is Next
• Melissa de la Cruz: The Queen’s Assassin
• Astrid Scholte: The Vanishing Deep
• Holly Jackson: A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder
• Ransom Riggs: The Conference of the Birds
• Natasha Preston: The Twin
• Marie Lu: The Kingdom of Back
• Jennifer Niven: All the Bright Places

If these weren’t segregated by age, they’d have little enough to do with one another. They are, in order, a contemporary murder mystery, a historical fantasy, a speculative-future fantasy, a cosy mystery, the fifth book in a Harry Potter knock-off series, a psychological thriller, a historical bio (think Amadeus), and a Nicholas Sparks-derived limp romance. They’d be all over the bookstore if they were aimed at adults, but here dumped into a single age-defined box. Kids who are into dragons and magic are different from kids who like murderous high school cliques, but “kids” is the ruling category from the publisher. (In our local bookstore, the books for kids from birth through 16 or so are on an upper floor, surrounded by plush toys and board games… not exactly the landscape for a disaffected Goth kid who just wants to read.)

Within adult books, the distinction between “literary fiction” and “commercial fiction” makes me nuts. Where does Ursula LeGuin belong: in the science fiction genre pool, or in literary fiction because her work is so remarkably elegant and inventive? Bookstores, and the publishing community, have to have a single, stable shelf location for whatever unit comes through the door. The fact that it may not match the author’s conception of it is irrelevant; the book has become a marketing decision, no longer a writer’s story.

A few years ago, I heard the poet Carl Philips tell a story. His early poetry was more overtly political, focusing on his sexual and ethnic identities; his later poetry doesn’t abandon those concerns by any means, but adds other issues to his array. After a reading, a young man came up to him and said “I liked you better when you were a gay poet.” Gay poet is the reader’s box, not the poet’s box. The poet’s just writing stuff.

My friend Aimee tells me that the paper arts community is currently embroiled in a controversy over the definition of paper. American carmakers increasingly don’t make cars, but rather SUVs (don’t you DARE call them a station wagon, even though they are) and trucks (having shed the earlier prefix word “pickup” to become more manly). And “books” are all over the map, from paper objects to audio and .mobi files. In a few years, it won’t be possible to buy audiobook CDs, because CDs won’t exist as a useful category any more, either.

I don’t know… I mean, you know, who cares what you call it, right? But the issue is that categories do the work of including and excluding, perhaps the most basic functions of both social and intellectual life. The publishing industry has built an entire acquisition and sale structure around these inept categories, so they’ve taken on a weight for both readers and writers that they don’t deserve. I’ll quote Brooke Warner, publisher of She Writes Press, on what the categories “literary” and “commercial” do:

Consider Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, a memoir that’s as formulaic as it gets. Her concept is in her title: eating in Italy, praying in India, and loving in Indonesia. And the names of all the countries she visited start with an I. This was a highly commercial and highly acclaimed memoir, and its easy summarization is part of what defines it as commercial.

The writer Neal Stephenson uses the categories somewhat more literally, implying that authors of commercial fiction are expected to support themselves through commerce, whereas authors of literary fiction are expected to support themselves through patronage, like university jobs. Again, this is not a distinction useful to readers just looking for a good story, nor to writers just trying to write one.

Building a book is hard enough. Building the category adds an extra burden, more uncertainty.

More tomorrow.

Our house has been beset by black wasps for the past couple of weeks. They’re digging wasps, and seem to have nested in the soil of a giant potted rosemary that we keep on the porch in nice weather and in the living room in the winter. They aren’t really a hazard—they’re kind of sluggish and not aggressive, so mostly we’ve been able to trap them under a glass and take them outdoors.

I looked them up, and found the following:

Adult females of S. pensylvanicus build an underground nest which they provision with various orthopteran insects… Prey are stung three times, once in the neck and twice in the thorax, and are paralyzed by the wasp’s sting, although they can survive for weeks. The prey are then carried to the nest. While collecting their prey, the females are vulnerable to kleptoparasitism, in which birds, including the house sparrow and the grey catbird , steal the prey that the wasp has collected… The eggs of S. pensylvanicus are 5–6 mm (0.20–0.24 in) long and 1 mm (0.04 in) wide; they are glued to the underside of the prey insect between the first and second pairs of legs. Each of the several chambers in the nest houses a single larva, which consumes 2–6 katydids or grasshoppers. 

Wikipedia, oracle of all that is known

Well, there’s a pretty specific ecological tale, eh? These wasps take down katydids and grasshoppers like a mob hit (once in the neck and twice in the thorax), and have to get back to the hideout before another gang can hijack their victims. Then they glue eggs onto the victim’s belly so that their kids can cannibalize their way to adulthood.

(There’s a Jared Kushner or USC Admissions joke waiting in there somewhere, but it’s too early in the morning, and not my primary task today.)

And the sparrows and catbirds in their own role, waiting on the trail like bandits to steal the already misbegotten goods. And the katydids, innocently chowing on some leaves with a side of aphids when the hit man busts into the diner. The whole thing is a nested tale of ecological functions.

I’ve been thinking about this lately for a few related reasons. First, I’m doing a talk next week at Trinity College in Connecticut, and I’ll be talking about my ecological framing of the adjunct crisis. Second, I’ve been thinking about all of my worry in the past week about honoring both characters and readers, and wondering if I haven’t been really more worried about me. I’m the writer, after all, so it’s no surprise that I’m concerned about my own culpability and capabilities. But a productive way out of this dilemma might be to understand what ecological niche my stories might fulfill. To quit worrying about my own survival as a wasp or a katydid or a sparrow, and to imagine what happens out there because of these stories.

And it’s clear that stories accomplish work, for good and for ill. One of the members of my writing group, homesick for his MFA cohort that he’s now graduated from, has assembled a local reading group to go through the novels of William Faulkner. He said that one of the members asked at some point, “When will something good happen to these characters?” And my friend laughed and said, “You might be in the wrong reading group. Nothing good will ever happen for anyone in a Faulkner novel.”

And I thought to myself, well, Faulk that! Contemporary literature is so oversaturated with misery, it’s like an algae bloom that chokes off all of the oxygen of hope from the biblioscape. Why would I want to provide more misery to a world already suffused with it?

Brandon Taylor describes the first time one of his stories was on the table at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop:

Another thing about that first workshop was that I heard something about myself that I had never heard before: that my story story was protective and civilized and carefully managed. These to me seemed the primary virtues of fiction that I loved and that I wanted to write. There’s nothing I want more than peace and order. I had a difficult life. A strange life. And so in turning to fiction, I wanted to create for my characters a space where the urgent material of their lives would not contain the question of whether or not they would live or die. I wanted to write about people moving through the world who could count on more time, who didn’t have to confront the ugliness of violence and harm and malevolence. I wanted only to make for my characters a space where they could be. I left the workshop that night feeling like I had been struck by lightning. I was angry and ashamed.

The thing I have been thinking about for the last year—every moment of every day almost, and certainly every time I sit down to write, or think about writing—is this question of protectiveness, of orderliness. These traits were presented to me in the way a doctor describes some malformation of the inner ear or bad nerve in the lower spine: not a catastrophe, but not quite as it should be, either. Like I’d have to spend the rest of my life compensating in ways minor and major, making myself slightly more brutal, slightly crueler.

That’s exactly my experience of any review in any fiction workshop, whether in a classroom or at a conference or informally with people trained in one of those realms. It’s like Christopher Walken and “More Cowbell!!” More Misery!!! More Trauma!!! More Suffering!!!

Yeah, that’s a hard no.

I count hospitality as one of my primary ecological functions, the fact that people can come to my home and relax and laugh and have a good time with one another, no matter what other crap is going on in the rest of their lives.

The insistence on cruelty feels to me to be oddly gendered: that serious literature is written by men, and for women to gain entry to the serious camp, they have to be just as cruel as men can be. Every few days, I get an ad in my e-mail from Random House, a regular scrolling feed through mystery and thriller and romance and young adult. And when the “women’s fiction” comes around, I can count on seeing the word heartwarming in more than one of the book descriptions.

Guys don’t get to be heartwarming, nor do serious writers. “Real literature” bears exactly the field markings that Susan Faludi identified for contemporary American masculinity: stoicism, self-sufficiency, competition, and vanity. No one will help you, the world is against you, you’re on your own, and you’ll suffer through it. It’s every bad father ever.

So the ecological function of my stories, regardless of their specifics, is to work against that tide of cruelty, to help re-oxygenate the lake. To say: We can do this. There’s a way through. You’ve got abilities you never imagined.

Every creature, from bacteria to aphid to wasp, is doing something. The difference between us and the lower orders is that we get to decide what role we want to play.

A couple of days ago, in our discussion over the novel American Dirt and the problems it has presented, I raised a set of questions, originally posed by author Alexander Chee and which I saw in the book review by Myriam Gurba:

Writers interested in exploring the realities of those unlike themselves should answer three questions before proceeding: 1) Why do you want to write from this character’s point of view? 2) Do you read writers from this community currently? and 3) Why do you want to tell this story?

As much as it would be nice to have three simple meditative guides, I find these questions to pose their own new dilemmas. For instance, the frame: “writers interested in exploring the realities of those unlike themselves…” How unlike is unlike, and which “realities” are most salient? Every single fictional character I’ve ever considered is unlike me in meaningful and important ways, similar in others. To borrow from my friend Van, who teaches rhetoric and often thinks about the innumerable ways to compare across circumstances or texts: “what difference makes a difference?” What forms of otherness present the greatest potentials for authorial harm? Are there forms of otherness that cannot be bridged?

The first question specifies more closely: “why do you want to write from this character’s point of view?” That’s a particular version of the dilemma, that of casting a POV character. As I mentioned a couple of days ago, there really are only a few of my 80 most recent characters who wear the custom golden POV badge; the rest are the people who are encountered, on stage for a paragraph or a page. But author Brandon Taylor explicitly points out how problematic “minor characters” can be:

When an author writes a black woman who shows up only to be angry in two scenes full of sass and pilfered vernacular, divorcing the anger from its cause and playing to the worst of tropes, he is performing a violence. When an author conjures up a Latina cleaning woman who is old and slow and barely speaks English but leaves her home, the people who love her, and the dignity of her life on the cutting room floor, he is performing a violence. 

It makes sense that I bear some obligations to all of my characters, whether lead actors or supporting actors or extras in the crowd. The issue at hand is, what kinds of obligations?

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Let’s loop back, though, and respond to Chee’s three questions, questions that make sense no matter what the distance might be between character and self.

Why do you want to write from this character’s point of view? I’ve been thinking a lot lately about young people whose talent is recognized early and coached steadily. What does it mean for a young person to be so talented, and to have acquired the singular focus required for professional-level skill? What would he leave aside as he pursued that one thing? And what would it mean for that one thing to be as obscure as table tennis (a sport that I loved in my teens and 20s)? I’m always drawn to write about men of any age who are aiming at something they can’t even understand, and the ways in which they discover capabilities they hadn’t had the chance to fully exercise before.

You’ll notice that there’s nothing in my writerly motivations here about specifically wanting to write an Asian American character. I think it’s just a fact of the sport that a kid that good would be the child of elite players himself, and also be surrounded by a community of coaches and competitors who demand more of him every day—and in the US, that’s going to mean people of Asian heritage. But it’s been noted by lots of writers of color that a common flaw when white writers create characters of color is that those characters are just white. They don’t have the daily lives, the history, the concerns and joys that a person truly of that culture would experience. So my job is to work even harder to understand the day-to-day specifics of David’s life. I’ve done a lot of that. There’s a lot left to do. 

Do you read writers from this community currently? So here’s an embarrassing moment. I don’t read nearly as much fiction as I ought, at least in part because I’m so frequently disappointed. The demand for trauma in contemporary fiction is so high, and the bar ratcheted higher every season, that I’m often unable to appreciate the craft through the pain. I don’t watch many movies, either, for the same reason. I seek out writers of hope, and they’re hard to find. David’s and Gwen’s story is more nearly a Helen Hoang book than an Ocean Vuong book. It has some similarities to Peter Ho Davies as well, a writer who’s done a great job exploring what it means to be simultaneously Welsh and Chinese and American.

And here’s the even more embarrassing moment. I’m an ethnographer. So I’d much more trust my own observations of a community than some other writer’s description of it. It’s like primary and secondary sources, I want to see lives. And so YouTube has been my friend here, watching the loneliness of Xu Xin as he goes back to his bare dormitory room after yet another day of training, watching what it looks like when Soyoung Park nearly collapses after playing Ginastera’s Sonata #1. Biographies as well, especially Andre Aggasi’s brilliant Open, showing us the demanding father and the Bollittierri boot camp and dropping out of school in 9th grade to just play tournaments. Those are the source documents from which this story is made.

Why do you want to tell this story? Well, that’s a tough question to come right after I admitted that I don’t trust fiction to always tell us the truth. But I think it can. And maybe that’s just industrial-scale hubris on my part, to think that I can succeed in doing work that I don’t always trust when others do it. But I’ve always wanted us to see hope, to see the possibilities just below the surfaces of life, and to recognize the room for the greatness of everyday people. That’s what’s behind ALL the stories I write. That’s why I wrote about teenagers 25 years ago, to help people see that those anonymous kids in their classrooms actually had rich, complicated lives.

Another part of it is the creation of what writers call counterfactual narratives. Most of my characters start out in circumstances that are something close to my own experience: the failed academic career; the safe, dull professional work; the high school life of being good at sports that had no social cachet in a football-centric culture. But I use those stories to learn an alternative path, tracking the marble down a different hill than I rolled, to see what the other side of the slope might look like.

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So this has turned out to be a long post, and I’m sure there’s some TL:DR going on. But, you know, the subtitle of this website is “Where a writer thinks things through,” so you know what you signed up for, right?

Back soon with more.

It’s always interesting to think about where the names of fictional characters come from. 

For me, first names are markers of both personality and era. The fact that Robert calls himself Robert, and not Bob or Bobby or Rob, is an indicator of the propriety that he’s grown up with, and of the fact of his birth in the 1910s and adulthood in our story’s setting in 1956. Colin, on the other hand, was born in 1980, during that age when boys’ names ending in “n” dominated the middle-class American nomoscape. I almost never consciously choose characters’ given names; they just feel like the names that those characters are, in concert or in contrast with their surroundings.

The family names are a little more of an artifice, more fully related to the setting of the story than to the character. Tim grew up in a factory family in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and part of the story is his discomfort as a second-class citizen in the Dutch Reformed landscape of Grand Rapids, Michigan: it wasn’t hard for him to become Tim Wolenski, with ancestry in the great Polish immigrant wave of the late 19th and early 20th Century so prevalent around the Great Lakes. Robert grew up in a banking family in rural Indiana, and entered the Abbey of St. Meinrad after high school; it’s not surprising that he has Swiss history, and that’s how Robert Yoder came to be.

This mode of thought has brought about Katie Harrington and Charles Collignon and Bess Kordecki, Gene Lubrano and Luther Strazanac and Camille Wallner, Victor Santos and Doreen Wilkins and Samuel Greene. Names with both individual and cultural significance.

But what does it mean for me to name a character Min-Seo Park, or Liu Liang, or Pham Thi Thanh? What does it mean for me to care deeply about a person whose very name I don’t understand? I don’t have enough access to Asian cultural study to know whether a family name like Liu has ethnic or class or regional connotations in China, whether the Vietnamese family name Pham would be an upper-class or a lower-class name or entirely neutral… and if there ARE class and culture differences, whether those would be known or acknowledged after a couple of generations in the US. I don’t know whether In-Suk is just as different from Min-Seo as Mildred is from Chloe. Names have implications and connotations, not just literal meanings, and those implications and connotations are invisible to me in some languages.

I had lots of Asian American students when I was teaching at Duke, and I learned how situational their uses of their own names were. Howard Chen was also Po-Hao Chen was also Chen Po-Hao, and I’ve seen lots of first-hand accounts that tell me that there’s no fixed decision about which name to deploy in which circumstance. Andy and Gwen only used their American names, Yaolin only her Chinese name. Scarcely any used the traditional surname-given name order in their formal documents or when turning in papers, but maybe that was just exhaustion from trying to explain, yet again.

White people have a whole story in mind when they hear a name like Megan Carmichael, and can expand that story when we see her name spelled as Megan or Meghan or Meaghan or Maygan; white readers have a much thinner image when we hear or read about Sun Xiaoyi, right down even to the basics of age and gender. Megan Carmichael is female, WASPy, and under 40; Claude Haynes is male, over 60, and rural or working class. And I made both of those names up. I also made up Sun Xiaoyi, but white readers would need me to tell them that she’s female and about 20 years old.

I could avoid all this as too distant from my lived experience, and lots of writing commentary would tell me that I should. But I’m writing about the world of contemporary American table tennis, and that world remains largely Asian American. A quick look at the current top 25 under-18 boys in the US shows only three names that don’t have clearly Asian origins—and those three all play out of home clubs far distant from the dual centers of American table tennis culture, New York/New Jersey or the San Francisco Bay Area. I mentioned a couple of days ago that there were 80 named characters in the story, and that 45 were Asian or Asian American; that’s just the fact of the landscape that David Coogan would inhabit (David Coogan himself having an Irish-Chicagoan father and a Japanese American mother, so even the names themselves aren’t fully reliable ethnic indicators).

So I have a lot of work ahead of me to gather a respectful understanding of people whom I’ve come to love and respect from my distance. Min-Seo Park is just a funny, smart, interesting person. I hope I can do her justice.

More to come.

In one of my sleepless hours last night, I was composing a blog essay about what it means that a white writer (me) writes a novel in which 45 of the 80 named characters are Asian or Asian-American. But in my e-mail this morning, a message from our region’s terrific independent bookstore:

We regret to inform you that Flatiron Books, the publisher of American Dirt, has cancelled Jeanine Cummins’ tour. Bob Miller, president and publisher of Flatiron, wrote, “Based on specific threats to booksellers and the author, we believe there exists real peril to their safety.” Northshire Bookstore apologizes for any inconvenience and is issuing a refund to all ticket-holders.

So I turned to the news for more detail. And I clearly haven’t been reading the news much in the past week. American Dirt, and the controversy around it, is all over the place. Even trying to reduce the difficulty to any sort of summary is unfair to the complexity of what’s playing out. Questions not merely of who gets to write a story, but of who gets to review it. Questions of what it means to have a multivalent identity, taking us right back to claims and counter-claims all too reminiscent of the “one-drop rule.” Questions of graphic design and iconography, of what it means to have a barbed-wire manicure. Questions of whether the publisher cancelling the tour because of “threats” and “peril” is another form of stereotyping and victim-blaming.

Questions of what it means to be a victim. Of what constitutes violence.

And of course, the contemporary fire-accelerant of Twitter, difficult social issues compressed to “racist pieces of shit” and “brownface” and “trauma porn.” The important online magazines like Vulture and Slate and Vox all needing their hot take to reinforce their currency.

Amplifying it all, the author’s success to lend the angle of profiting off the suffering of others. The nine-publisher bidding war, the “seven-figure book deal,” the selection into Oprah’s Book Club being the final match to light the conflagration. If this book gotten a $5,000 advance and had sold a mere few thousand copies like almost every other, there would have been no controversy at all; it would have been mentioned as merely one of numerous problematic portrayals of Latinx characters, in the lit review of a poorly read literary theory article by a young scholar trying to make tenure.

(The term Latinx is its own ground of contention. Some Spanish speakers complain that it’s a non-word, and that Spanish is a gendered language that doesn’t deserve to be neutered. Others reject the construct entirely, preferring Hispanic. There is never a singular, uniformly correct answer to any meaningful social question.)

In her furious review of the book—a review that was killed by its commissioning magazine, Ms., because the reviewer wasn’t a famous enough writer to be deemed worthy to take down a famous writer—author Myriam Gurba adds the lines that speak to my own dilemma right now:

Writer Alexander Chee has said that writers interested in exploring the realities of those unlike themselves should answer three questions before proceeding. These are:

• “Why do you want to write from this character’s point of view?”
• “Do you read writers from this community currently?”
• “Why do you want to tell this story?”

These are questions I’ll be sitting with in the coming days as I think again about my own role and responsibilities as a storyteller.

It’s been almost thirty years since cartoonist Ruben Bolling published perhaps my favorite single-panel comic ever, which he called “Human Morality Made Simple.” It was based on “one simple rule: THE MORE A LIVING BEING IS LIKE YOU, THE NICER YOU MUST BE TO IT.”

The form of the comic is wonderfully elegant. It’s set up as a table, with nine rows. “Immediate Family Members” are at the top, “Outsiders” partway down, “Other Mammals” below that, and “Plants” at the bottom. The columns are the four ethical questions:

• Should you help it?
• Can you harm it?
• Can you kill it?
• Can you eat it?

I was reminded of this comic through an email conversation that I had with Aimee over the weekend. She forwarded me an essay from LitHub by Brandon Taylor, called “There is No Secret to Writing About People Who Do Not Look Like You.” It raised all kinds of questions for me about the different relationships I have—and should have—with characters who reside at multiple layers of my stories.

So as an experiment, I spent a couple of hours today going through the manuscript I’d just completed last month, to see if I could identify the nested circles of characters in the book. It turned out to be a fairly easy task.

At the very center, there’s high school senior David Coogan, the protagonist. The book is about him, and because the narration is first person, the book is also by him, and he inhabits every single one of the 240 or so pages. Wrapped immediately around him is his best friend-turned-girlfriend, Gwen Cooper (they met in 9^th grade because they were in alphabetical order in homeroom). Both of them are driven endlessly by their demanding parents, and their mutual understanding of the sacrifices they make for excellence is at the heart of the book’s themes. Although she appears on probably half of the pages, she inhabits every cell of the book. They would be played by the two lead actors of the movie.

Three different actors would qualify for nominations for Best Supporting: David’s father, who appears about 20% of the time; his mother, who appears about 10% of the time but plays a crucial role in Gwen and David’s understanding of their lives; and their friend Park Min-Seo (or “Miss Park”), also at about 10% of the scenes but having an outsized impact in freeing themselves from family. 

So those are the five characters you’d most remember. There are another five who play meaningful and recurring roles in redirecting the action of the book, who act as the external forces who shape different moments.

Aside from those, there are 28 other speaking parts, characters with personalities strong enough to color one or two scenes. Another 42 non-speaking actors: mostly competition opponents, or the managers of some setting.

That’s 80 people to cast with some degree of intention and care. Surrounding all of them… the crowd scenes, the hundreds of people at a Las Vegas national tournament or hanging around outside the tournament in the casino, the thousands of other kids in the high school. Some of those are just wallpaper, a photo drape behind the characters, but sometimes they carry emotional gravity as well, their collective energy and interests usually as a contrast to the characters at the center.

What do I owe to all of these layered lives? Bolling’s questions—Should I help it? Can I harm it? Can I kill it? Can I eat it?—are a starting point, but they’re not quite right. Here’s some alternatives that I’m not fully convinced by yet, but that feel like decent starting points.

Do I love them? Do I want the best for them? Do I understand them well enough to know parts of their story that wouldn’t make it into the book? Would I be able to speculate about their future beyond this story’s boundaries?

Would I recognize miscasting? That is, if an actor tried out for the role, would I know by personality and attitude whether they matched my thoughts about the character? Or would I only know by demographic characteristics, by age or sex or ethnicity? Or would it not matter much at all?

Do they have names? The important people in a story usually have multiple names, because they interact with different people. So David’s father is sometimes Dad (in dialogue), sometimes “my father” (when addressing the reader), sometimes Mr. Coogan (when Gwen talks to him), sometimes Gary (when Gwen’s father talks to him). Other characters only have names as required to suggest the specificity of the place or time or setting.

Are their motives personal or situational? Are they complicated or confusing people, or are their actions fully understood because of the role they play in the setting?

Do they have the power to change others’ thinking? Do they have enough personality or moral force to ask our central characters to reconsider some idea? Or do they only interact in a functional way?

So here’s my current version of Bolling’s simple moral test as applied to fiction. I’ll have more to say about this soon, and I’m sure it’ll change some. (If you’d like to help me change it, tell me what you do and don’t feel is right.)