... [There is] a truth that novelists shy away from: their trade embarrasses them. When you first start making things up, you expect that someone is going to tell you to stop. Perhaps you want them to, so that you can get back to behaving like an adult, and make a living in the real world. You have to invent a character, a main character too -- readers expect it, though the notion of setting up this giant "as if" device and lugging it around with you is inherently shaming. You know your main character barely emerges from layers of solopsism, and for the longest time it -- it is an "it" before becoming a he or a she -- dangles from some part of yourself, an ugly parasite, an unviable cojoined twin.
Eventually you give it a name, in a squeamish separation ceremony, a combined amputation and baptism. Somehow this rite of passage convinces readers to accept your squirming offcut as a real person, although one who lives in an alternate universe. But you, the writer, remain ashamed of your ploy. You can hide the same, or bypass it altogether, by doing what Mischa Berlinski does -- give the main character your own name, and pretend you or your alter ego are in the business of jotting down a few facts. You fit out your book with the apparatus of nonfiction -- footnotes and a reading list. Then your publisher writes "A Novel" on the cover, and the complicity comes full circle; writer and reader sit winking at each other, and the story begins.
Initially I found myself agreeing with almost none of that description of writing a novel. The strange birth metaphors, the business about shame and embarrassment as if writing a novel were a particularly unglamorous sexual fetish, the general air of revulsion -- for me, that is not what novel writing is about.
But then, in a reaction typical for me, I thought, Uh oh -- maybe that means I'm not doing it right. (Woman in Woody Allen film: "I finally had an orgasm, but my doctor said it was the wrong kind.") Should writing a novel be a wrenching process of dissociation, of revealing the worst parts of myself under the pretense of art? Would achieving that level of discomfort mean I was finally a real artist and not just a hack or dilletante writing surface-level comedy?
Then I remember the lesson of Sullivan's Travels: Sometimes people need "Ants in Your Pants of 1938" much more than they need "O Brother, Where Art Thou."
2 comments:
I agree with you, Mark, and not that article. Big surprise there, I'm sure. (The Woody Allen thing is so funny.)
I BEGAN writing my novel Home Products in the summer of 2003, a few weeks before my wife gave birth to our first child.
But even before I began work on the book I bought a black hardcover sketchbook. In its pages, I started writing down whatever I liked in what I happened to be reading. Among the earliest journal entries is the opening line of a review that had appeared, in the New York Times, of the film "The Hours". This was also the opening line of a novel by Virginia Woolf. I cut it out and pasted it in my journal. "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."
There are no notes around that neatly cut out quote but I can imagine why it had appealed to a first-time novelist. You read Woolf's line and are suddenly aware of the brisk entry into a fully-formed world. No fussing around with irrelevant detail and back-story. And I began to write various opening lines.
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