Writing Good

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. Therefore “imaginative literature” is either boring or immoral (or a mixture of both). It only escapes from this alternative if in some way it passes over to the side of reality through the power of art—and only genius can do that.

                                                                                      --Simone Weil, Gravity & Grace

As someone who writes boring and immoral fiction much the time, I can only agree with Simone. And yeah, it’s hard to make the good interesting. The interesting, in fact, is almost by definition transgressive. We write about crime, war, sexual betrayal, Cain against Abel. The hero of all our popular fiction invariably has bad guys ranged against him and they are often more fascinating than the good guy. (One has only to compare the fictional cannibal, the urbane, sophisticated, brilliant Hannibal Lechter with his real-life counterpart, Jeffrey Dahmer, dull, pathetic, and empty.) The mildest domestic comedies are about the deadly sins: pride, greed, envy and so on.

And when I talk of the good, I don’t mean the classic Good Guy of melodrama, which is a cinch to write. The hero of melodrama always behaves according to his code; he never suffers; he is a stranger to compassion; he seeks redemption through violence; his interiority is as thin as the oil on his gun. To add interest to this essentially boring figure, we hang vices around his neck like fetishes. He’s divorced, of course. He drinks. He exhibits despair because—wait for it!—there is evil in the world. For this reason fictional melodrama, representing the vast majority of thrillers and detective novels, accomplishes the feat of, contra Weil, being immoral and boring.

This is because being good is a tragic fate, and tragedy has no place in melodrama. The common wisdom has it that no good deed goes unpunished, and the common wisdom is right. The prophets are without honor in their own country, and they very often get the axe. In melodrama, the faux good guys always win, the girl gets rescued from the railroad tracks where the villain tied her: clinch, music up, fade to black. In life, the girl usually gets killed as, often, so does the good person attempting the rescue. This is a downer. Life is enough of a downer, most of us believe, which is why we read escapist melodrama and watch it on our screens, and which is why our culture sinks us beneath a load of immorality and boredom. We are astounded and dismayed when, for example, our politics refects this culture.

Art, even popular art (maybe especially popular art) ought to give us some relief from that, which is why depicting the glory of goodness in art is so important. Maybe genius is necessary. Certainly genius produced Cordelia in Lear, Alyosha in Brothers Karamazov, Jean Valjean, in Les Miserables, the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians, and John Ames in Gliead, to name a few that come instantly to mind. But maybe genius isn’t necessary, quite. Maybe a growing impatience with crap will suffice.

So what is interesting about the good in the real world? I mean a character who is not consumed by sex and violence, who is not posssessed by a desire for fame, fortune, beauty, and the other objects of material desire, who resists not evil with violence. There are such people and their lives are often dramatic, full of action, delight, and varied incident. Car chases and explosions happen to good people too. Also, good people tend to occupy a different moral universe than most of us. They are not pious frauds as a rule. They are not cowards, as a rule. They face evil directly, because they observe the evil in themselves and respond with humility. This is how they stay good, and avoid the besetting sin of the good, which is spiritual pride. They are not withdrawn from humanity but are involved with the suffering of the world and respond with compassion. When they do bad things they suffer, but they rarely suffer guilt, because part of being good is living in the present moment. They may be religious or irreligious, but they always practice discernment, because good action in the world almost always has evil side effects. This moral calculus is far more interesting and tension-making than romantic illusion, if you can get it right on the page.

Writing a good character is hard, because there are no formulas for it. Good is wild and draws you down unsuspected paths. You have to be particularly inventive in your language, because much of the ordinary language we now use to depict good has become stale and devolved into mere sanctimony. Peter Handke expresses a version of this problem in his script for the film, Wings of Desire: “But no one has so far succeeded in singing an epic of peace. What is wrong with peace that its inspiration doesn’t endure and that it is almost untellable?”

I don’t think that goodness is quite as untellable, as witness the examples above. I like the idea of trying to pass “goodness over to the side of reality through the power of art.” I’m not sure that I can succeed in this, but I intend to try, not because I think it will sell more books (it patently won’t) but because I think it’s a (duh!) good thing, and because it makes me ill to purvey nothing but sex, violence, and evil as amusement. Being one with Caligula is a bitch.

Less Miserable

I’m having quasi-Proustian moments as I re-read Les Miserables. This book was the first serious novel I ever read. Prior to that, my reading had consisted almost entirely of books about baseball teams, animal stories, and science-fiction of the pulpier sort. I suppose I was ten or so when I first picked it up.

I did not come from a reading family. My mother read best-sellers, often in the Reader’s Digest condensed version. In the days before paperbacks, if you wanted to read a bestseller and didn’t want to buy the book you rented it from a little cart they had in most drugstores, for a nickel a day. I knew no one who read good books, or listened to good music. In my house the pinnacle of achievement in music was Rodgers & Hammerstein, of theater, Arthur Miller, of poetry, Robert W. Service, of literature, James Michener. My dad read the paper. Well, a common story.

I got my reading from the public library or from expeditions to the used bookstores that used to flourish on lower Fourth Avenue in Manhattan. I would take the subway up from Brooklyn on a Saturday morning, spend the whole day there in the book-stinking dust, happy as a pig in shit. I would come home with a shopping bag full of nickel and dime trash and spend the rest of the weekend absorbed in it, dodging imprecations from my parents to go outside and play. I would eventually go out, but often just to the library.

One day I was walking through the adult fiction section of the Farragut branch library, something I rarely did, since I took nearly all the books I borrowed from the sci-fi ghetto, each of which had the little spaceship pasted on the bottom of the spine. This cover stood out on the row, since it was pure white, a shining bar covered in that cellophane-like plastic that only libraries seemed to use. I read the title: Les Miserables, and under that, “Hugo.” A stranger to French, I wondered what defect in type-setting had shifted the final s of Less to the end of Miserable, but the meaning was perfectly clear, and indeed I very much wanted to be less miserable than I was. Also, I thought it cool that they had used the guy’s first name on the cover.

I took the book down. The designer had chosen to place a full-color reproduction of Delacroix’s painting, Liberty Leading the People, upon the white of the slip cover. I didn’t know Delacroix from ham and eggs at the time, nor had I ever seen the painting before this, but the image gripped me with an awful power. It shows, you’ll recall, a lovely, passionate-looking young woman grasping a bayoneted musket in one hand and a tricolor flag in the other. On her right is a fellow in a top hat, similarly armed, and on her left a kid who looked about my age at the time, toting a pair of pistols. The woman’s breasts are bare. I naturally assumed that the picture was an illustration of some action in the book. The fat volume in my hand, therefore, must in its pages somehow involve a situation where a kid got to handle guns in company with a girl who didn’t mind one bit if he glommed her knockers. Sold. I was worried a little that the librarian wouldn’t let me take it out, as being too adult for a kid, but no. (Note that it wasn’t Les Miserables at all, a book I have never actually read. It was an English translation of it. )

Well, of course, I could comprehend maybe half of what was going on. I knew there was such a thing as the French Revolution, and I assumed this must be a book about it, but the author keeps mentioning the French Revolution as something that happened fifty-odd years ago, and there’s a king on the throne. I understood, though, that I was in the presence of people utterly different from any I had known in my life or even in books. The weirdest alien in sci-fi was a kid from the block compared to Jean Valjean. And they were, in a way I hadn’t encountered before, real people. There was a lot of stuff about what was going on inside their heads, a lot more than what the average 50s sci-fi novel told you about the interior life, and that impressed me, because a lot of stuff was going on in my head too. I picked up here the idea that you could think about your own thoughts. You could apply principles to your thoughts, ideas from outside you, and observe how your behavior jibed with those ideas. Also, I hadn’t understood that fiction could make you have feelings that were neither suspense nor amusement. That was frightening, a little, like you feel when you take a small boat out of a harbor into the open sea, even if you’ve done it lots of times before, you still feel it: you’re not in control, the sea has grasped you.

Now, looking back, I see that this initial plunge into real fiction cast my literary tastes much in the form they retain, like dropping a blob of molten plastic into water. For me to enjoy a novel it has to have some of Les Miserables in it. It must have narrative action, the characters have to be agents of the plot, the plot has to stand within some moral framework, and the thing has to present ideas—moral, political, aesthetic, it doesn’t matter, but something from the higher realms of thought. An old-fashioned view, of course, but there it is. This is still what I like to read and also how I try to write. I appreciate modernism, I get what it’s trying to do, but I can’t love it.

Much later, in college, when I read Moby-Dick, I flashed on the similarities between the two whale-like, so to speak, novels. Valjean, mighty of limb and of desperate vigor, plays the Whale; Javert, implacable hunter, the instantiation of the “evil of goodness,” pursues him in Captain Ahab’s role, while in place of the sea, the characters sail through France, and the storms of French history. In college, I was informed that Moby-Dick had been rescued for modernism, standing as one of the ur-texts that you had to understand in order to get American literature. Les Miserables was considered, in contrast, old-fashioned rodomontade, an example of a dead form. So I was taught; but I failed to convert. Sadly, I can’t do literature, I retain the interest in narrative and character, in breasts and guns, I am indeed less miserable than I was then, and the book had something subtle to do with that as well.

The Stuff in Thrillers

All fiction is a lie, of course, but thrillers tell an especially big porker, which is that life is thrilling. Life is not thrilling. Thrills are unusual events, usually of short duration, and people who want more thrills than that have to spend large sums of money on helicopter skiing or sky dives. Those who are required to enjoy thrills for long periods of time—for example, a rifle company in battle—often end up with PTSD. The thriller genre exists in both media and written form so that people with comfortably non-thrilling lives can dive into thrills in a controlled way, vicariously.

This is one of the mysterious glories of fiction, that we can do this, experience real somatic chills, and weep real tears in response to the actions of beings who do not exist. The problem with thrillers is that the reality they depict is preposterous. You see this most clearly at the movies at one of those fist-fight, car-chase, and explosion-rich items they make for teen-age boys to watch. On occasion, you’ll hear laughter, even from the teen-age boys, because the movie has crossed some perceptual edge into the ludicrous. In written thrillers this jumping-the-shark point is not so obvious, but it’s there, and ever in the mind of the writer, or at least mine.

Where the individual reader places this shark-jumping point will vary, and I admit not being able to read many very popular thrillers because I find them outside my zone. But even if all thrillers are preposterous by nature, many are a pleasure to read, and one key difference between the failures (at least to me) and the successes is what I call The Stuff. Churchill once said that in war the truth is so important that it must be protected by a bodyguard of lies. In thrillers, similarly, the lie must be protected by a bodyguard of truth. For example, if you can create a Southern small-town law office, or Vienna in 1955, or an aircraft design shop, or a banking operation in 2008, or the bureaucracy of the KGB with enough convincing detail, then you can get away with the necessary idiocies with respect to the plot and the characters. Bathed in a narcotic bath of accurate facts and factoids, the reader will give a pass to, say, an agent of superhuman skill and unnatural luck, performing a mission that would never take place in the real world.

So unless one is actually a spy, private detective, femme fatale, or Roman centurion (and few writers are) you will have to get the Stuff through research. Needless to say, research is a lot easier than it once was. I probably have nearly five thousand books in my house, of which a large proportion are devoted to subjects that have appeared as Stuff in my work, and I used to have to spend considerable time in university and public libraries. Now almost everything comes from the internet, because when you’re writing fiction, plausible factoids, the backbone of internet content, are really all you need.

You may wonder, why research at all? It’s fiction, why not make it all up? The reason is that almost all readers have some expertise or experience, and will be irritated beyond reason by boners that they detect, and when they detect them, the bodyguard of truth will be penetrated and they will throw the book at the wall and write a nasty note. For the record, the Battle of the Plains of Abraham took place outside Quebec, and not Montreal as I stated in The Book of Air and Shadows, and Braddock PA is a nice suburb of Pittsburgh, not a decaying rust-belt town near Lake Erie. It’s impossible to overstate how distressing such lapses are. I recently read a novel by a writer I respect, who has the talent to shield the native preposterousness of the thriller behind a densely imagined historical background. Yet this novel’s plot was entirely based on a murder frame-up that involved a silenced revolver. Since there can be no such thing as a silenced revolver, I read the rest of the book in a mood of cynical doubt. If he could be wrong about something that simple to research, what good were all the atmospherics? Who could believe them after the revolver?

On the other hand, maybe I’m just being obsessive. One of the great things about research is that it helps avoid the horror of sitting in front of a blank screen and having to think up what to put. I’m afraid this is what’s happening with The Charles Bridge, the novel I’m writing now. I’m becoming an expert on the period 1786-1848 in central Europe, where and when it takes place, learning probably more than I need to know about the era. I actually hired a research assistant, something I’ve never done before. I’m also having to learn about horses and fencing, subjects on which I was utterly ignorant before starting. Ignorance, it should be said, is no bar to writing a successful genre book: Patrick O’Brian knew nothing about sailing and Mario Puzo knew nothing about the Mob and Tom Clancy knows nothing about advanced weapons, at least according to people who really know about such things. It’s all concocted, it’s all just The Stuff.

Whether strictly necessary or not research does serve to pass the time merrily and, as I say, put off the horror of the blank page. But besides the internet and descriptive non-fiction, a primary source of research is fiction itself. If you want to find out what Pakistan, say, is really like, read lots of novels by Pakistanis. If you want to know what warfare in the 18^th century was like, read the class of fiction known as memoirs. Just now, in furtherance of the current project, I’m reading War and Peace and Les Miserables.

This reading, let us be clear, does not suggest the scope of my ambition. You can’t write novels like that nowadays, talent aside: no one would buy them and no one would read them. Like the Shakespearean verse play and the cave painting, they are artifacts of lost worlds. Still, the project of bringing the past to life remains interesting to me. As often said, the past is another country and they do things differently there, and observing people who are sympathetic yet hold ideas utterly alien to our own about what we consider the unshakeable verities of existence tends to rattle us a little, and question those verities. Maybe they’re temporary dodges and not verities at all? Maybe we just concocted them to shield us from some unpleasant underlying reality? This confrontation is similar to the confrontation with the Other that is one of the chief services of fiction. It’s true that it’s not often found in genre fiction, which is mainly about the affirmation of the verities: yes, the boy will get the girl, yes the criminal will be brought to justice, yes the code of the West remains valid.

But it’s possible to embed real novels inside genre husks, to confront instead of assuage, to provide stimulants rather than soporifics, which is why I try to write the way I do. It’s not a real good way to sell a whole bunch of books, however.

My Social Media Problem

Every week I get an email from Facebook informing me that there has been zero action on my page. This is no accident. Since part of this renewed blogging I’m doing here is an effort to improve my what they call web presence, I’ve been thinking about why I’ve been so reluctant to engage with Facebook. It can’t just be fogeyism, for my wife, who is if anything more conservative than I am, is a Facebook power user. Nor am I a stranger to computers or even social networking. Now that I’m thinking about it, it’s a very deep tale, and in the supposition that readers want to know absolutely everything they can about authors, I will tell it.

First, computers. I am almost exactly as old as electronic computation: I was learning to crawl at about the same time as ENIAC was, but computers did not enter my awareness to any great extent (except as characters in science fiction stories) until I became a graduate student in biology in the mid-1960s. This was old biology, not modern biology, and it was for people who were not good in math. Most of the calculations you had to do were easily handled with paper and pencil or with electro-mechanical calculators. Physicists used computers, but these were housed in special building where you went as supplicants with boxes of punched cards and gave them over to the keepers, who fed them into a machine that occupied a whole air-conditioned floor, and had maybe a tenth the power of an iPhone. A day later you got a sheaf of green and white striped paper, known as elephant toilet paper, at which time you found you had made a tiny error and the output was meaningless. So back to the cards. I was glad not to be a physicist.

In my last year of grad school my department purchased an electronic four-function calculator that did square roots. Unless you are over sixty you have not extracted square roots by hand, but it is a bear, and you have to do it a lot if you are doing analysis of variance. This machine, which was about the size of a hard-bound novel, had its own locked room, where it was bolted to a table, and you had to sign up to use it. One peculiarity of my graduate school career was that in the middle of it the Army Reserve unit I was in was called up for service in the Vietnam War, a footnote to the Pueblo incident (you could look it up) and when I got out I was you might say disaffected. I suppose it was a form of PTSD, although we didn’t have that then. I got the degree, however, but skipped the graduation ceremony and also bailed out of science, finding work as a cook in a Miami restaurant. I was known as Dr. Cook.

Hold that thought. A number of interesting adventures later I found myself employed as an urban bureaucrat in the human services biz. I was responsible for planning and evaluation, the inhumane part of human services, and it was clear to me that without computer readable and analyzable records, the task was hopeless. So I looked into it and found a consulting outfit that was throwing a week-end seminar for clueless people like me and I went. They had a room there with a couple of dumb terminals in it—CRT screens w/keyboards hooked up to a mainframe via modems where you had to put a telephone handset into a large device fitted with rubber suction cups, dial the mainframe—toot, whistle, sigh—and marvelously you were connected to a real computer that you could play with. They demonstrated their social services software, but what we were really interested in was playing Adventure and Pong. I never got my agency computerized because shortly after that I went to Washington and a job at the White House. They didn’t have computers there either.

Now flash back to the restaurant. One evening a new waitress arrived. We became friendly as one does in small restaurants and it turned out she was Bonnie Jean Romney, the wife of Hugh Romney, aka Wavy Gravy, of Hog Farm fame. These were people who traveled around in modified buses and lived a life that was as deep as you could get into Hippie. I arranged for their bus to be parked on the estate of a wanna-be hippie millionaire where I was living and working as a sort of guestish servant, and which I later fictionalized in Night of the Jaguar. When the bus departed for the west coast, I was on it, again as a guestish servant, cooking nourishing meals for ten people out of dumpster dives and road kill.

The point of this is that the Hog Farm was connected in one direction with Ken Kesey and the Merry Prankster crowd and in the other direction to Stuart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog crowd, and I got sort of connected to the latter bunch, I wrote some things for them and when the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link went live in 1986 I joined it. This is The Well, aka The Colonial Williamsburg of the Internet, and for the past twenty-odd years it has been essentially my only social medium. It is essentially a text-based bulletin board operation, consisting of hosted conferences on a very, very large number of subjects by a relatively small group of non-anonymous people. About 2800 people belong to it and of course it is no longer financially viable, any more than Williamsburg would be without foundation support.

The neat thing about a bulletin board is that all the interaction is ordered by topics and subject conferences: that is, it stands in relation to the real Internet as an orrery does to the solar system. Nowadays, if your guppies are sick, you google ‘guppies’ and pick from a dozen websites devoted to the dear tiny fish and you can get any information you need. But on the Well there are only a couple of guppy people and over time you get to know them and their guppies and they get to know you and yours and you become guppy friends with them. If while you’re raising your guppies you happen to have a nervous breakdown or an automotive breakdown you can go to those topics and talk about stress and head gaskets, same deal. The guppy people don’t need to know about it. In other words it’s scaled and ordered like a small town—hardware store, grocery store, insane asylum, pediatrician, massage parlor, etc.—and over the years you get to know the people in it, especially those in the conferences where you spend most of your time.

In contrast, my first impression of Facebook was of a kind of urban cacophony, like you get walking through a crowded train station. Yes, there’s the convention of friending, and you can filter out posts you don’t like, and you can set up private spaces to discuss anything you like, but still . . . when I look at a Facebook-page wall, what I see is dozens of separate conversations going on between people I know and those I don’t, about stuff I’m interested in and stuff I could care less about, plus the videos and the pictures and its all too multi-tasking multi-media for my brain to accommodate. What I flash on when I see modern social media, and I just realized this the other day, is the destruction of real life communities by the forces of progress. A bunch of artists, let’s say, gather in a decrepit neighborhood because rents are cheap. Pretty soon there are coffeehouses, bars and shops and street life and festivals and the place springs into life, drawing on the creativity and good spirits of the inhabitants, and a community forms. Then the real estate people get wise and the rich, or at least their kids, decide that this is a happening place and they want to live there too, and the rents go up and the chain stores arrive, and the artists are priced out and go someplace else and the result is a kind of Disney version—“arty” without artists and without real community. I’ve been through this twice, in SoHo in New York in the 60s and in Coconut Grove in Miami in the 70s and now again in virtual space, because the Well is being sold and may not survive, because it seems that “well.com” is too valuable a piece of web real estate to leave at the disposal of a few thousand people who just want to hang out and have a community. Well, boo-hoo, and let them go to Facebook like everyone else, and what can I say, it’s perfectly true. But I still resent it and I believe this is a big part of the reason for my self-imposed ignorance of FB and its culture.

But ever forward. I have a private Facebook page and a Facebook fan page that my publisher set up a long time ago and which, as I said, has zero traffic. My plan now is to fix this website so that it is not so much a publisher’s website but a shrine to wonderful Moi, and then learn how to use Facebook and Twitter, all before my next book comes out, probably next spring. I am a good soldier. I floss. I can do this.

What I Write About

I’ve decided to pump up this blog by posting more frequently. I suppose I’ve always felt that what a writer had to say should be entirely contained in the work, but this, I’m advised, is not the way the publishing world works nowadays. It’s especially important to me because my publisher was replaced recently by a gentleman who does not particularly care for my work. I had thought that he was not going to publish The Family Dead at all, and so posted here, but that’s not the case. He will publish it, grudgingly, probably early next year, but in the meantime my agent is scrambling to find a non-grudging publisher. So that’s semi-good news.

In any case, I thought I would start this effort by writing about what my books are about. If anyone reads this they would then know whether they’d be interested in looking at one of my books. This would save time and money for those who don’t care about this stuff or would be offended by it, and maybe attract more people who do.

Essentially, I write thrillers with ideas in them. This is a good way to turn off all the readers who want thrillers void of ideas and people who like dealing with ideas but think thrillers are lame. This is not a good business model, therefore, but I can’t help myself I get too bored otherwise.

A thriller is a species of genre novel, and a genre novel is distinguished from a literary novel by having certain conventions of plot. In the mystery genre, for example, there’s a crime, almost always a murder, and the sleuth has to piece together a set of clues to bring the murderer to justice. A romance novel is boy meeets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. The formula is constant, like the recipe for chocolate cake: only the icing and the filling vary.

Despite this, there’s no reason that a genre piece can’t be as wonderful a literary achievement as any supposed non-genre work. Between 1590 and 1640, for example, one of the dominant genres on the English stage was the revenge tragedy. These are formulaic pieces in which the revenger announces his complaint against the target, vows to bring him down, and spends the play isolating the target by killing his near and dear, sowing discord, hatching plots, and so forth, until finally the revenger and the target cross swords and are typically both killed—stage littered with corpses, curtain. There are dozens of these exant, of varying quality. One of them is Hamlet. So in my infinitely lesser case, it still seems interesting to expand the formula by seeding it with impurities like thought and fully-formed characters, in hopes that a pearl may grow.

The core of any thriller is the Bad Thing. The protagonist is charged with stopping the Bad Thing from happening, or if it’s happened already, relieving the Badness or stopping the Bad from occurring again. The terrorists are going to set off a bomb. The great man is to be assassinated. A spy has stolen the plans for the super-weapon. A secret is being hidden by malign forces who will stop at nothing to conceal it. A child has been kidnapped. Usually there’s a Clock in a thriller: the hero has to stop the Bad Thing before a time certain, which increases the thrill. What distinguishes the thriller from the mystery is that the thriller can cut back and forth, cinematically, between what the hero is doing and what the bad guys are doing, which gives the author the opportunity to explore the nature of evil, always a popular trope.

Thrillers can be divided between Sap thrillers and Pro thrillers. In a Sap thriller, a fairly ordinary person is jerked from his or her banal existence by involvement in the Bad Thing. Both Riddle of the Sands and The Thirty-Nine Steps, which novels essentially invented the thriller format in the early 20^th century, are Sap thrillers. The problem with Sap thrillers, however, is that you can’t use the same Sap more than once. The solution here is either to write the same book over again with different Saps (Sap vs. Nazis, Sap vs. terrorists, Sap vs. Mafia) or else write Pro thrillers.

Pro thrillers are almost inevitably series books. Their heroes are men or women who are professionally involved with stopping Bad Things. They’re government agents, private dicks, alienated teens with special talents, retired assassins, just the sort of person one would want in order to stop Bad Things. The main point in this sort of writing is to make each succeeding book virtually identical in language, style, and pacing to the one before, so as to build a customer base for a familiar commodity. Thus in one book the Pro may hunt down an Arab terrorist, in the next he gets Mexican cartelistas, but with very much the same episodes of danger, violence, capture, escape and destruction of the bad guys. It’s very like snacks. The greatness of potato chips is that they’re all the same, more or less, but each one slightly different, to keep the mouth interested. In contrast, my potato chips are not all the same. You could reach into the bag and pull out an oyster. Disturbing!

So one of the things I like to write about is the underlying nature of reality, what philosophers call ontology. Is the world really all particles and the forces among them or is there something else, (as over 99 percent of the human race has believed for over 99 per cent of its existence)? What defines the realistic novel is that is tacitly accepts the conventional ontology. If the supernatural is treated in such a novel, it is as a private belief, and operates in the characters and the plot in that way, and only in that way. Now, clearly, there is a vast fantasy literature that supposes the real existence of an unseen world, but that’s not what I mean, and I don’t mean magical realism either. Yes, there’s a real universe out there (probably) but what we make of it is culturaly conditioned. It’s well known, to take just one part of the sensorium, that our visual world is constructed in our optical cortex on the fly, from relatively small increments of information coming through our eyeballs. And we see only what our culture has taught us to see, and pay no attention to the rest: that’s invisible. That doesn’t really exist. When your daddy tells you there are no monsters in your bedroom, even though you can see them perfectly well, after a while you stop seeing them. Subsequently they live in your head, where they’re not so easy to get rid of.

Undermining personal ontology is a fearful thing and I like to try to do it in my fiction. The art of it is turning things weird just a little bit, so that the remains of reality become suspect, uncertain, menacing. Lord Dunsany, the early horror and fantasy writer, was once asked what was the very scariest thing he could imagine and he said there were two: one was walking into an English garden on a bright June day and hearing the roses sing. The other was being shaken awake in the middle of the night and it’s a clown. So I try to get that going.

That leads into the next thing I like to write about, which is culture and the origin of the stuff we hold in our heads, our model of what the world is like, especially our models of good and evil. We think, without really thinking, that romance is good and democracy is good and freedom is good, but that a system of class-bound aristocracy is bad, and corporal punishment is bad, and that incest and pedophilia are really bad. We think fascism and Stalinisn are the worst systems of government ever devised. We want human rights and to be thin and smart. I agree with these positions, of course, as all right thinking people do. Yet all of these beliefs are culturally induced and there were in the past (just as one example) cultures that not only approved the sexual use of children, but institutionalized it as a normal aspect of maturation.

The point here is that one of the uses of fiction is to reveal the Other. The most familiar sort of revelation is sexual: in fiction men get to know what women are like inside their heads and bodies, and women get to learn the same things about men. We can recall (if we’ve forgotten) what it’s like to be a child. And we get to share the essential humanity of people who agree with us on not one of the bedrock assumptions upon which we have built our lives. A special case of this is the depiction of people who are in some way between cultures, either because they are living among a people not their own or because they are the product of two different cultures—“half-breeds,” as we used to unkindly call them. I believe showing people like this is illuminating for the reader, because it’s not a good thing to leave unexamined the essential motors of our existence. We’re strengthened as people when we’re forced to examone these, which is what education is supposed to be about, and fiction can do it as well. Besides, it’s fascinating, at least to me, and I have a number of such characters in my books.

An extension of this interest is historical fiction. I’ve place historical fictions in several of my novels and the book I’m working on now is an historical novel. Most historical characters in average genre fiction are modern characters in fancy dress. For example, there are who-done-its set in ancient Rome, or Ming China, or medieval England. But in fact the whole idea of finding out who-done-it by following clues, accumulating evidence, and finding the culprit is a modern notion, which is why the detective novel is a 19^th century invention that blossomed fully only in the 20^th. In the old days, to “solve” a crime they grabbed up someone surplus to requirements, or who had made powerful enemies, and simply tortured a confession out of him. The same with modern attitudes toward animals, democracy, feminism, war, equality of opportunity, sex, children and sex with children. The art in historical fiction is thetefore to make the reader live for a time in an utterly unfamiliar head, the theory being that de-familiarization is a good thing, and necessary for helping us live in complex cultural spaces, such as much of world has now become. It’s not popular, though.

Besides that, I’m interested in twins and the acquistion of foreign languages, in weapons and ciphers, in religions and in how to make love stay, and I write about all of these in various novels, sometimes all at once.

Bad News

For reasons I won't go into here, the book I just finished will not be published by Henry Holt. We are looking to place it in some other house, but it will take some time. If anyone is reading this and was interested in reading another book by me, I'm afraid you're going to have to wait a while.

Meanwhile, hope ever springing, I started what will probably be yet another unpublishable novel, a Tolstoyan epic set in central Europe 1786-1848 about the conflict between aristocratic conservatives and liberal nationalists. I've always been interested in cultural conflicts and how and why they make people crazy. Good thing we're past all that nowadays!

Delivery & Acceptance

So I finished the new book (February 12) and sent it off and both my agent and my editor thought it was pretty good, a vast relief. I finished the edit on April 13, and just the other day I got paid. It was very long time between checks. The book is called (as least for now and subject to the approval of Holt marketing) THE FAMILY DEAD. It's a little bit like THE GOOD SON, except Mexico rather than Pakistan, and a father-daughter thing instead of a mother-son thing. Besides that the usual: musings on the underlying nature of reality, guns, car chases, explosions, religion, sex. If all goes well at Holt, it should come out in the spring of 2013.

The next book is going to be an enormous, barely readable, historical novel about a man who lives through the European cataclysm between 1786 and 1848, a period that established the political categories under which we still live: liberal and conservative, left and right, secular and religious. It starts with an assassination conspiracy at the premiere of Don Giovanni in Prague in 1786 and goes on through the wars of Napoleon and the revolutions of 1848. Characters include Mozart, Casanova, and Marx. Just now, I'm doing research, ploughing through Casanova's memoirs, all 12 volumes, and there's a lot more besides. I'm off contract, so I plan on taking my time, but if all goes well, I should have a book by the fall of 2014.