The Truthiness of Fiction: A Review of Lunch Bucket Paradise: A True-Life Novel

Do you remember your father’s workbench? I can still smell the oil, paint, tools, and see the big black vise at the end of the bench. Guest blogger Lanie Tankard was moved by her own memories as she read about the father’s workbench in Fred Setterberg’s new book. Other times, she was more perplexed than moved. Here’s what she has to say about Fred Setterberg’s genre-bending book Lunch Bucket Paradise: A True-Life Novel.

Review by Lanie Tankard.

In Lunch Bucket Paradise, Fred Setterberg sketches “the dawn of promises that maybe promised too much.” His portrait of an era covers the time from the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to the Vietnam War draft, with a geographic concentration on California and Oregon. He tosses in a touch of the Solomon Islands for good measure.

The reader follows the masculine voice of the story as he parses his father’s life, contrasts it with his uncle’s, and then tries to figure out his own. His mother makes appearances, but the majority of the story is told via the major figure’s childhood memories and depictions of the two males prominent in his upbringing.

Chapters alternate between escapades and experiences, with an occasional section musing about topics such as the rise of suburbia, America as the land of plenty, and tuberculosis. We catch glimpses of times past through the sprinkling of brand names (Betty Crocker, Jell-O, Dream Fluff, Rambler, Ronson, Scott’s Turf Builder), TV shows (Steve Allen), and songs (Archie Bell and the Drells, James Brown, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels).

I’ve never been a teenage boy, but readers who have will likely relate to depictions of sexual yearnings. (I did relate to the mention of Snake Stabler, with whom I went to high school. Roar Lions!)

Paternal wisdom is passed down from father to son: “General maintenance…is one of the secrets of life.” “You got to learn everything you can or otherwise you’re just going to be a prisoner, like we were.” “There’s just not a lot of room for mistakes.” “Work hard…stay lucky.”

These precepts bombard the growing youngster alongside aphorisms spouted by his peers: “…where did working ever get anybody?” “Do it one day, and then you just got to get up and do it all over again.” “Nobody likes what they do.”

By the end, the boy has evolved into a young man ready to widen the city limits of the town he has known, poised at the abyss of the world yawning wide open before him — yet afraid of its promises.

And right there is the crux of my dilemma as a reader: I, too, am afraid — of the book’s promises in its subtitle. Is A True-Life Novel true? Is it a novel? Or is it memoir? Is it truth or fiction? Are the photographs from the author’s actual life, or an invented one? Have I read a nonfiction fiction? Faction? Autobiography? Docufiction? Mockumentary? Verisimilitude? Is it literary journalism? Journalistic literature? I find myself scratching my head in confusion.

I’ve pondered this topic before in book reviews: Half-Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel by Jeannette Walls,  The Mother Who Stayed: Stories by Laura Furman, and Freedom by Jonathon Franzen.

Walls explained her use of the term true-life novel to readers in an Author’s Note: “I wrote the story in the first person because I wanted to capture [my grandmother’s] distinctive voice, which I clearly recall. At the time, I didn’t think of the book as fiction…. I saw the book more in the vein of an oral history, a retelling of stories handed down by my family through the years, and undertaken with the storyteller’s traditional liberties.”

Furman created fiction from diaries written by another woman who lived in the 1800s, and clearly detailed this on the copyright page: “This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.”

Franzen stated in his Ten Rules for Writing Fiction: “The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention.”

How does that occur? Novelist Amy Waldman speculates: “Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character’s actions or lines are truer than others.”

So just what is it that Setterberg has crafted in Lunch Bucket Paradise? It’s not Capote, Doctorow, Didion, or Eggers.

I opened my yellowed copy of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, touted on the cover as “Sketches of the Author’s Life in Paris in the Twenties.” I bought this paperback in 1971 at the Hemingway Museum in Key West. In the preface, written eleven years earlier in Cuba, Hemingway commented: “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.” He counseled himself on page 12: “Write the truest sentence that you know.”

I’d feel less toyed with as a reader if Setterberg had clarified what he was doing in the book itself. Instead, I had to Google around to find out. He parsed his method in a recent interview, saying he started out writing a memoir. “Then I said, ‘I’m going to write, and every time the impulse hits me to lie, I’m going to give myself license to do it and see what happens.’”

Hmmm, okay, so here we have two polar opposite approaches — one using truth as a guiding principle and one using lying. I’m curious about how, assuming the ultimate goals are similar, the end products will differ. Is “Sketches of the Author’s Life” a more accurate summation, perhaps conveying the impressionistic method used by Hemingway’s artist contemporaries? Is “A True-Life Novel” truly a subtitle, or is it a disclaimer? Oh, if only James Frey had thought to slap it on the cover of  A Million Little Pieces.

Later, in an online essay on Talking Writing: A Magazine for Writers, Setterberg said he switched from memoir to fiction/lying because he wondered, “Did anybody need to hear about my childhood chemistry set”? Well, frankly, if it’s well written from the heart, I’d like to read about his experiments. Search Amazon on “chemistry sets for kids” under Toys and Games, and you’ll find 108 sets for sale, with 7,043 reviews posted. Obviously they’re still popular.

There’s a certain amount of trust on the part of the reader to allow an author to take liberties with literary license, if a work is well written. And there are individual chapters of Setterberg’s book that hold eloquence within them. His description of his father’s workbench, for example, moved me to tears, for I felt as though Setterberg had been standing in front of my own father’s workbench when he wrote it: “I liked the way the nails and bolts and washers rattled around in their ancient mayonnaise jars as I plucked them down from the wall of cabinet shelves—each container segregated by size and purpose, labeled with an ink-pen scrawl across a strip of tan masking tape.” Did all Dads do that in the Fifties? Mine sure did.

Setterberg’s digression on family photographs is thought provoking: “What do we seize and memorialize?”

His best chapter, perhaps, is the seventh, “Labor Day,” detailing work in a ketchup factory. The house fire thread, however, is dropped for way too long, IMHO, and never fully elaborated.

The copyright page notes: “Several chapters of this book have appeared in serial form….” Some of them won prizes and awards. Yet do they cohere when placed side by side? It’s hard to follow the timeline. And that approach can cause abrupt segues. There is no context, for example, when the protagonist of Lunch Bucket Paradise suddenly appears as a band member in Chapter Six, “Jungle Music.”

The book is a nice recap of a certain period of history in this country. Setterberg offers a look at the seeds of divergent views on the Vietnam War draft. As a reader, though, I felt abandoned at the end. I wanted to know whether the protagonist resisted the draft — and whether Phil survived Vietnam.

In a lengthy look at “The Rise of True Fiction” in Columbia Journalism Review, Alissa Quart termed it a mashup genre and indicated it’s here to stay. So we the readers probably need to try to understand it. On a creativity palette, it can be a useful hue.

Still, some small part of me wonders why true life itself is not sufficient.

 

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Lanie Tankard is a freelance editor and writer in Austin, Texas. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a former production editor of Contemporary Psychology: A Journal of Reviews.

 

Terry Helwig: One Author’s Adventures in Social Media Book Marketing

True or False: Marketing a book is a grueling chore.

You already know this is a trick question, don’t you? The answer? True for some. False for others. Some people love to meet other people and share stories with them. They draw energy from their readers and look for innovative ways to meet more of them at less cost.

One such author is Terry Helwig whose new award-winning memoir was reviewed here by guest blogger Lanie Tankard a few weeks ago. Terry graciously agreed to share her experience of book touring. Below is her story in her own words.

With the downturn in the economy and the upsurge of e-books, book marketing is rapidly changing for authors—especially new authors. Instead of paying for airline tickets, hotels and transfers, many publishers are turning to radio media tours and social media to

promote new releases.  My recent book tour to promote Moonlight on Linoleum: A Daughter’s Memoir was a combination of both the old book tour (flying and driving) and the virtual book tour (staying put).

While I traveled to several states to promote Moonlight on Linoleum, released October 4^th by Simon & Schuster, I undoubtedly reached more people in a single day on a radio media tour while sitting at my dining room table. Wearing a headset, I talked to 19 radio stations in 16 states over the course of eight hours.  The taped and live interviews, ranging from ten to thirty minutes, took place with an array of radio hosts from syndicated NPR programs to morning talk show hosts, the most memorable being Bulldog, Jeff, the Dude who hosts Rude Awakening.

While this service is far from free, it was much more cost effective than flying me to 16 states.  My publisher hired Auritt Communications Group to set up the radio media tour.  A kind, calm-voiced operator, Anna, guided me through the entire day.  She patched me into one radio station after another, told me when to hold, and when to hang up and take a quick break. She listened to every interview, hearing similar answers to oft repeated questions like: How did you come up with your title Moonlight on Linoleum?  What do your sisters think about the book?  Was it hard for you to relive some of the more traumatic moments?  Anna surprised me when she remarked half-way through the day, “I’m going to buy your book; it sounds so interesting.”  It occurred to me that Anna and I had bonded—not face-to-face—but virtually.

In addition to the radio media tour, my publisher touts the value of social media (Twitter, Facebook, GoodReads, Skype, YouTube, blogging, a website, etc.) to promote books.  Simon & Schuster offers its authors exclusive Social Media Tutorials on its Author Portal site.  I had already created a website www.terryhelwig.com and a Facebook fan page for Moonlight on Linoleum, but GoodReads, Skype and Twitter were still unexplored frontiers.

My publisher gave 50 advance reader copies (ARCs) of Moonlight on Linoleum to GoodReads to give away to its members.  This helped readers become aware of my book months before it was publicly released.  I have no doubt the favorable reviews created a buzz for the book, helping it to become one of GoodReads October 2011 Movers and Shakers.  Even without a give-away, a Simon & Schuster tutorial encourages its authors to sign up for a GoodReads author account.

Another Simon & Schuster tutorial explains how to set up a Twitter account.  Within an hour, I was tweeting from @TerryHelwig.  I enjoy tweeting.  Creating a succinct message in 140 characters is a challenge and helps hone my writing skills.  Plus, I like giving a nod to worthwhile organizations, authors, and bookstores.  When I was on book tour in Atlanta, I stopped into Charis, an independent bookstore.  The store was pleased that I tweeted a

picture of me signing their stock and mentioning the name and location of their store.  When I tweeted about being in Nashville for the Southern Festival of Books, five people showed up because they had read my tweet the night before.  Twitter proved to be a fast and efficient way to communicate information about my book.

Now, a month after Moonlight on Linoleum’s release, I hope to settle in and learn how to Skype so I can video chat with book clubs in November.  I like the idea of sitting at home, wearing my favorite pair of fuzzy socks, and talking to my readers in rural and metropolitan communities around the country.  I can interact with many more people because I don’t have to hurry to catch a plane afterward.  Instead, I can click off the computer and slip into my own bed—which could be my favorite perk of a virtual book tour.

Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Have any book tour experiences to share either as a reader or author? Book club members, what do you think of the Skype idea? Have you ever used technology to talk directly to authors?

 

Composing a Life: Counterpoint in Memoir

If you missed Fine Arts 101, read Lanie Tankard’s review below and click on all the links. You will enjoy the ride–especially since a lot of those links take you to countries and cities in Europe. Lanie is heading off to Singapore soon. We’re all lucky she squeezed this fine review of an excellent memoir into her crowded schedule. Since Lanie and I both have this teacher bug we’ll never get rid of, here’s more about Singapore. But be sure to come back to read the review!

[sic]

by Joshua Cody

New York: W.W. Norton, October 2011  (272 pp.).

Available in hardcover and ebook formats.

Reviewed by Lanie Tankard

“In memory everything seems to happen to music.”

—Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

The Latin word [sic] in brackets is a heads up to the reader that what may appear strange or incorrect has in fact been written intentionally or quoted verbatim, according to the unabridged edition of The Random House Dictionary of the English Language.

Thus, we suspect before we ever crack the spine of Joshua Cody’s new memoir about being sick, titled [sic], that we’re likely to encounter the unconventional within its pages. Indeed, that becomes so much the case that Cody may have created a new form of memoir, or at least a subgenre that redefines the approach. I’ve always been fond of intellectual nuance, and [sic] displays it in abundance.

Cody brings to writing a music composer’s ear, to memoir a forceful libretto of cancer survival, and to readers a brilliant polyphonic score played capriccio, energico, and espressivo.

Joshua Cody was a young composer in New York City about to finish a PhD at Columbia University. He had already earned a bachelor’s in music composition at Northwestern University, studied privately in Paris, had a Chicago radio show called “Music of This Century” on WNUR–FM,  cofounded the international journal and website Paris Transatlantic  as well as the Ensemble Sospeso, and written a number of articles.

Then he noticed a lump in his neck, and his life turned upside down when the tumor was diagnosed as a belligerent cancer. Cody cuts right to the chase on the first page of his memoir as he brings us along with him to begin chemotherapy, wondering, “’What’s it going to be like?’”

We hitch a ride inside his head as he’s handed orange pamphlets, “professionally printed, the Garamond font levelheaded, direct but never alarming, confidential, appropriate; poised; the thickness of the paper just right, more consequential than flimsy copy stock, but a good long way from cardboard, which would be terrifyingly permanent. The care that takes, the thought that goes into it: all the parameters are really masterfully designed, as if the hospital had hired a PhD in semiotics from Brown.”

He digresses into his thoughts as he waits, likening that period between being a patient reading the pamphlets and “the unknown experience that beckons” to “Philippe Petit on that taut tightrope between the Twin Towers.”  Cody wants specifics, like what kind of chair he’s going to be sitting in and whether he would be alone in a room.

“Are you expected to carry on a conversation with the nurse? What’s the etiquette?”

Anyone who has spent time docked in chemo ports of call, or accompanied a friend or loved one to such anchorage, will nod in recognition of Cody’s trenchant observations.

And it turns out he’s not alone in the chemo room: “I’d brought a friend, my journal.” Slowly he reels out his life, giving us the backstory of his illness and the childhood memories it triggers. He is a relative of Buffalo Bill Cody.

Joshua Cody thinks about all that is around him, all that is going into his body, all that he has experienced, and all that might happen. He follows, in fact, any line of thought when it pops up in free association. He tunes out his oncologist speaking to him in the present, wondering instead about the strong aroma of rubbing alcohol in the room.

“What was the source of the odor?”

Then he takes off pondering the meaning of happiness, considering the things he would miss if he “made it out of all this alive.”

He talks a lot about writing as he writes — metawriting. He utilizes a conversational manner to bring the reader into his stream of consciousness with phrases such as “I’ll talk more about this later” and “Why relate all this?” He points out “the literary tone I am attempting to employ.”

Cody switches from Susan Sontag to David Foster Wallace with the ease of a conductor directing a baton toward different sections of the orchestra. He transitions from Mozart to the Rolling Stones on his iPod as effortlessly as he talks about actor Ray Liotta in the movie Goodfellas in one paragraph and painter Paul Klee in the next.

Cody travels in his thoughts, rolling along wherever the train takes him. One minute we’re in Paris  with Ezra Pound, and suddenly we find ourselves in Germany: “Like this one time I was in Düsseldorf with a couple of German friends having brunch, and….” Next thing you know, he’s having his car washed in a Chicago suburb, pondering the effect of sunlight on water and glass, listening to Debussy in his head.

Suavely Cody blends remembering with theoretical musings, observations about his cancer treatments, and descriptions of the sex and drugs he turns to for escape. It’s a virtuoso performance.

He begins to experience chemophobias. He sees a psycho-oncologist. He compares the chemotherapy that has just failed him with the radiation that is supposed to save him. His mother arrives to assist, and we see pages of her notes. He reproduces his calendar, covered from corner to corner with medical appointments.

“Being sick is very much a full-time job,” he comments.

Cody is aware of the “immediate stimuli of the present moment” bombarding him along with the “recalled stimuli of the past.” He notes, “And these two layers wrap around each other like two electric currents encircling some wobbly magnetic pole.”

He tells us of his marriage to a Bulgarian girl named Valentina and his fake imprisonment in a pretend hospital room to assist the Kádár government of Hungary in a propaganda charade, with fake IVs in his chest and arms.

His mother arrives, and he tells her they can leave to go to the limo waiting outside because the pretense is over. When he rips out the fake IVs, pretend blood spurts out. Pretend nurses rush in, while eeeevvvver so gradually he is made to understand that everything is very real indeed — that he is in the hospital for a bone marrow transplant and he is having a morphine fantasy.

“Well it just goes to show things are not what they seem.” That line from the Sixties song “Sister Morphine” is an appropriate summation of the events in Chapter 5, which is also aptly titled “Sister Morphine.”

Mick Jagger,  Keith Richards, and Marianne Faithfull cowrote the lyrics to this haunting song. The Stones and Faithfull each recorded “Sister Morphine.”

Recently (October 10, 2011), I heard Faithfull perform the song on her Horses and High Heels tour at Rotterdam’s  Nieuwe Luxor Theater, where this highly talented woman who has battled both morphine and cancer received two rousing standing ovations for her marvelous show. Click here for her performance of “Sister Morphine” at the Citadel Festival in Berlin on May 29, 2011.

As for Joshua Cody: “They took me off the morphine that night and switched me to fentanyl.” He turns to Freud, Darwin, and Nietzsche to make sense of it all, saying, “The crystalline clarity of this morphine delusion proves, perhaps, the Nietzschean maxim that ‘some situations are so bad that to remain sane is insane.’”

Cody considers creativity, memory, subtext, and voice in memoir — asking: “So what, exactly, separates a sharp memory of early childhood, say, from a morphine delusion, or an image seen in a dream from an image read in a book? They’re all equally tangible, equally intangible products of electromechanical signaling.”

These questions are the kind of research done by neuroscientists like David Eagleman, who spoke at the Texas Book Festival on October 23 about his new book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. He noted there are as many connections in one neuron as there are stars in the Milky Way. A NOVA profile explores Eagleman’s investigation of the question: “How does the brain construct reality using the information it takes in?”

Cody debates why certain things bring comfort during hospitalizations for such traumatic events as bone marrow transplants, reminding us “finding sources of pleasure is an important aspect of dealing with high levels of pain.” He compares painters and writers, saying writers are “unjustly burdened by the weight of words.”

Cody examines his parents’ marriage and divorce, and his relationship with his father, who tried to make it as a writer but never did.

Author Jonathan Franzen has also trekked in this territory of memory, particularly in “My Father’s Brain” in How To Be Alone: Essays. Indeed, Franzen makes an appearance in Cody’s memoir several times. (I reviewed Franzen’s most recent book, Freedom, on 100 Memoirs when it came out last year: Part I and Part II.) When I heard Franzen interviewed by Lev Grossman in Austin recently, Franzen mentioned that he was reading [sic], calling it a “weird memoir by an overarticulate guy with cancer — really good.”

Cody underscores the important role his mother played in helping him during his treatments, taking notes and running interference with hospital personnel. He writes, “My mother’s transcription of the dialogue between patient, doctor, caretaker, and pain management staff is fascinating in its expression of the fragile complexity in calibrating the collaboration of different specialists.”

He explains what it means to be in discomfort, he weighs nonbeing versus aging, and he relates the feeling of his near-death experience during the bone marrow transplant. He tells us what suffering is like for the sufferer, and comes close to suicide until he realizes he wants to kill the disease, not himself. Cody knows he’s getting better when he begins to feel boredom, and then says to his mother as they’re finally leaving the hospital, “I love traffic.”

He worries the night before he has to return for more scan results. He can’t sleep, so he sits down to write in his journal, remembering his father’s advice: “write it out, write it out.” He wonders if he’s losing his mind.

“Just keep pen to paper,” he tells himself.

“I am trying very hard,” he replies.

He wraps up his book with “the motif of journals and memoirs” and discusses “’journals’ as opposed to notebooks,” quoting David Byrne  on this arcane point.

Finally Cody admits he’s a bit tired.

“This book turned out to be a little longer than I thought, and way more work. Plus I’m hungry.”

He ends with a crescendo of framing.

As Victor Hugo put it in his essay on William Shakespeare, “Music expresses that which cannot be said, and which cannot be suppressed.”

Joshua Cody is a maestro and his words will ring in my ears for a long time. Bravo!

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Lanie Tankard is a freelance editor and writer in Austin, Texas. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a former production editor of Contemporary Psychology: A Journal of Reviews.

Take a Roadtrip in Your Armchair: The Road to Somewhere by James A. Reeves

Lanie Tankard, reviewer extraordinaire and world traveler, is about to set off for distant lands – again. Before she left, however, she sent in this review. Reading it is an adventure in itself. Enjoy!

The Road to Somewhere: An American Memoir. New York: W.W. Norton, August 2011 (411 pages)

by James A. Reeves

Reviewed by Lanie Tankard

“Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”—Jack Kerouac, On the Road (Part 2)

I took a road trip with James Reeves.

We crisscrossed the grid of this country together, along all the highways and byways, up and down, back and forth, flipping the dial listening to snippets of talk radio to pass the time during fifty-five thousand miles. Along the way, he pondered what he was seeing and hearing, offering observations much like a sociologist would. He photographed interesting scenes along the roadside, calling my attention to images not normally found in travel brochures.

I didn’t want to get out when the Dollar Rent A Car finally ground to a halt five years later in New Orleans, for Reeves had opened his heart on the pages of The Road to Somewhere: An American Memoir and I wanted to keep reading. I truly felt as though I had been in the car with him, so vivid and personal was his writing.

He drove many roads I remember well, and described many towns I know, yet he viewed them from a different perspective and showed me angles I’d missed when I’d been there. Reeves pulled back the curtains of fly-by-night lodgings to peer out the windows at the hidden landscape of America, desperately trying to find a place for himself in it beyond all the Waffle Houses.

What is it that a man is supposed to do, expected to be, required to accomplish? He breaks down his quest for the answers into sections titled Men, Country, Work, Home, Discipline, God, Guts, and Strength.

Driven partly by grief over the sudden loss of his mother, he combines his quest for meaning with his journey through mourning. Reeves adds to the mix photos from his own family and childhood, blending them with memories of his grandfather, his father, and his mother to create a poignant, elegant, thought-provoking memoir unlike any I’ve ever seen.

He takes the “Road to Nowhere,”  á la the Talking Heads 1985 song, and turns it into The Road to Somewhere. Tina Weymouth, David Byrne, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison penned the song lyrics this way:

“Well we know where we’re goin’

But we don’t know where we’ve been

And we know what we’re knowin’

But we can’t say what we’ve seen.”

Reeves, on the other hand, has no idea where he’s going, but he’s sure trying very hard to say what he’s seen. He does so in a scientific, dispassionate way at times, and occasionally  bares his soul on the printed page.

He wonders whether other countries “hold such a passion for their highways,” if our country is too big, what people are picking up in all their pickup trucks, why a shocked woman is standing in the middle of the road in a negligee clutching a cat at 2 a.m. on his drive through the Smoky Mountains — “Just needed a walk,” she tells him.

He notices, “everyone has a device nowadays,” adding “I have no idea what everyone is up to behind their little screens.”  When you can see which newspaper someone is reading or the cover of the book that person is holding, “I can judge you.” In that sense, he notes, technology has taken away our ability to evaluate one another. What might that mean? He wonders at what point handwriting might no longer be required.

Reeves pushes ideas to the brink, saying, “I drive to the edges of things.” He stops to spend time at places that interest him, such as the Cosmic Ray Center in Utah.

Ultimately he sees “There’s kindness on the road.” After his mother dies, he notices his father shuffling around the house, sighing.

“I told him to pack a bag. We’re going for a drive. That’s my answer to everything.”

The tender memories Reeves shares about his mother are some of the most touching parts of the book. The reader can almost see the love. He went beyond her charge to “go out into the world and look around” — he also contemplated what he saw. He photographed it and he wrote about it. And then he bound it between two covers and dedicated it to her, adding, “I miss you.”

A.A. Milne put it this way: “Pay attention to where you are going because without meaning you might get nowhere.” James Reeves, I feel sure, will end up somewhere.

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The Sound of Rain on a Corrugated Iron Roof: Another Lanie Tankard Review

Our popular guest blogger Lanie Tankard has reviewed a pre-publication copy of One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir

 

by Binyavanga Wainaina

Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press (July 19, 2011)

Reviewed by Lanie Tankard

****

Lanie Tankard is a freelance editor and writer in Austin, TX. She is a former production editor of Contemporary Psychology: A Journal of Reviews and a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

This review reminds me of one of my most prized pieces of art–a three dimensional painting from Guguletu, Cape Town, South Africa that is made of metal from the townships. 

How many memoirs have you read about places other than the country of your origins? Is it true that you learn more about your own place when you read about another–just as it is true of travel to other lands?

And what makes a memoir sing, in your opinion?

Bird Cloud: A Memoir Reviewed by Lanie Tankard

Constructing a House, Deconstructing a Life

By now you know that when Lanie Tankard pens a guest post review of a memoir, you want to read the review whether or not you read the book!

Bird Cloud: A Memoir

by Annie Proulx

(New York: Scribner, January 2011)

Reviewed by Lanie Tankard

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx has housed her life in a memoir. During the design and construction of a home in Wyoming, she began thinking about other houses in which she’s lived. She also started wondering about previous inhabitants of the terrain upon which her new abode was taking shape. The resulting framework became Bird Cloud, a name she gave both to her book and her ranch.

Within this memoir, Proulx scatters bits of herself along with research about the property, superimposing her life and the life of the land onto the building design. The triage is akin to a configuration by Frank Gehry, with no clue about what’s around the next corner.

Proulx, known for fiction, broke away from predictability here in a nonfiction nonlinear creation that distorts structure. As in some architecture, the expectation of a work unfolding in a conventional way sets up the tension of lines on a grid being erased. Proulx herself tells us in the first chapter: “Observational skills, quick decisions (not a few bad ones), and a tendency to overreach, to stretch comprehension and try difficult things are part of who I am.”

While Proulx employs the basic unit of chapters, with footnotes and sketches, the story itself runs off in all directions. Bird Cloud chronicles the purchase of 640 acres of prairie and wetlands in Wyoming, and the placement of a house there. Writers can catch glimpses of Proulx’s work habits. Architects may glean insights about flashpoints with clients — and builders. Archaeologists will love her expeditions to uncover fire pits and chert flakes. Birders will go wild over lengthy descriptions of the species inhabiting this tract that she bought from the Nature Conservancy. A river runs through it — the North Platte, accented by cliffs four hundred feet high.

Readers jump from house design to examination of Proulx’s childhood, with tangents of history, biology, archaeology, genealogy, and anthropology tossed in for good measure. Then we zing back to house construction while hunting for Indian artifacts. Suddenly we’re in a lengthy Audubon bird guide, until hopping in Proulx’s truck for a trip to town.

Well-known author Michael Pollan also designed and constructed a building in which to write, documenting the process in A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams. Pollan’s book is a more smoothly flowing philosophical meditation on architecture, the natural world, and himself. The process employed by Proulx is akin to a jerky handheld movie camera capturing the difficulty of living one’s life amidst the chaos of construction or remodeling. And that’s not necessarily a bad approach.

Bird Cloud almost requires several readings to focus on the disparate elements. I found aspects I hadn’t noticed the first time around when I went back to zero in on the memoir theme. Proulx has a good handle on her identity. Perhaps writing memoir assisted her definition of self.

More reticent than Pollan, Proulx tells us straight out that “complexity and clutter are my style.” She employs house not only in the traditional sense of a building made for people to live in, but also in the metaphorical sense of revisiting previous dwellings in her mind to retrieve impressions from those periods. A memory can sometimes arise swiftly from its storehouse, as a bird disturbed from its nest will shoot skyward. It’s easy to visualize these recollections clustering overhead as a cloud of fine feathered friends.

Clouds are opaque, though. If memoirists place recollections down on paper without reflection, the images will remain impervious to light — obscure and unintelligible in meaning. Proulx uses her reminiscences here to delve deeper into her own character in an effort to understand who she is and how she came to be that way. She speculates at times, starting from oral history and searching for facts to back it up.

“I don’t trust the tricks of memory,” Proulx says, bemoaning the difficulty of locating evidence about intriguing stories from relatives. She is plagued by “questions of family origins.” Her need to connect the dots in her ancestry is a universal one, “a burning need to complete the puzzle, to find the missing pieces.”

People write memoir for many reasons. Some merely spout facts and dates. A few assign blame for past events. The adventurous use it as a data-mining device to dig deeper into the cave of memories, bringing up nuggets. Gutsy writers hold a magnifying glass up to these abstract chunks, using the lens of introspection to gain insights about the forces that shaped them into the people they are today.

Proulx offers brief glimpses into her work process as a writer, as well as quick peeks at her soul: “Well do I know my own character negatives—bossy, impatient, reclusively shy, short-tempered, single-minded. The good parts are harder to see, but I suppose a fair dose of sympathy and even compassion is there, a by-product of the writer’s imagination. I can and do put myself in others’ shoes constantly.”

Before Proulx broke out into short stories and novels, she wrote several factual volumes about the making of cider, fences, and gardens. Search “Annie Proulx” on Amazon under Books, and you get 245 results.

The stage of her childhood is set with sharply rendered scenes from as early as two or three years old. Becoming ill, she recalls “the dizzy sensation” as she climbed the stairs and “the relentless nail” that snagged her sweater, holding her fast. She details cleaning out the objects of one house, saying, “I still sometimes think I can go back there and see these things.”

Proulx reminisces about the many, many houses in which she’s lived: “We moved and moved and moved. Over the years we lived in dozens of houses.” She reflects on the possible reasons for that itinerant lifestyle, fleshing out “a hard-to-know father.” She calls the death of a childhood pet crow dubbed Jimmy an “introduction to tragic and inconsolable loss,” but never offers specifics about later losses.

Does memoir have a hard-and-fast rule that a writer must tender an entire life to merit membership in the genre? Or is the field more flexible, responsive to variety? Proulx chooses to put the spotlight on her ancestors and her childhood, skipping the middle chapters of education, work, three marriages, three divorces, three sons, one daughter, and four sisters. She picks up the story thread with a visit to her mother in the 1980s, continuing the exploration of her heritage. Perhaps such concentrated attention on one facet of an existence enables greater clarity.

What is a successful memoir? Is it a “tell all” that makes readers feel like voyeurs? Do we have that right? Can’t a memoir work if it presents only a certain number of details in a way that enables readers to feel their own lives reflected somehow?

The construction of Bird Cloud the house shapes the structure of Bird Cloud the book. Right there on the first page, in her choice of the word “squirted” to describe the way speeding trucks moved gravel into ditches, Proulx is in command of her sentences. And often, they dazzle.

Take this deceptively simple one, as she and her sister set out to visit their mother: “The day was mild for late November, heavy overcast, light rain and fog, one of those dark days that New England breeds in autumn.” Look at the way it’s created. See how it draws the reader in, takes you along with the two women as they set out on their journey. It implies a slight leaning in of the shoulders, with a nod of the speaker’s head, as if to say to the listener, “You know the kind of day I mean, don’t you? You’ve encountered them, too, right?” You could cast the description of that day a dozen different ways, but you wouldn’t catch the same elusive lost-in-thought spirit that allows us to hear the individuality of Proulx’s voice. She is so observant, noticing qualities such as “the scent of wet leaves and rain.”

Proulx, now 75, tells us in anticipation of building Bird Cloud: “This place is, perhaps, where I will end my days. Or so I think.” At that point, she has the prospect of a refuge, but the second sentence foreshadows the book’s ending. After the house is finished, Proulx realizes it could never be “the final home of which I had dreamed.” She alludes to eagles, wasting “no time on tears.” After the book was published, she placed the ranch on the market for a time, but then took it off. In a recent interview from Australia, Proulx indicates she will move back to the property when the snow clears.

Annie Proulx has taken a slice of her life, as if shaving reminiscences from a plank. Before sweeping them up, she examined the wood curls and then put them in her outstretched hands, offering to share them with the world. That takes courage. It’s not fiction this time, but real life. And it’s hers.

****

Lanie Tankard is a freelance editor and writer in Austin, TX. She is a former production editor of Contemporary Psychology: A Journal of Reviews and a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

I searched on Lanie’s name in this blog and found 17 posts in which you can read more of her reviews.

Let’s ask Lanie’s question again, to stimulate your comments. Do memoirs have to cover a whole life? Do your favorite ones go deep into one period of time, expand over a long life, or move between childhood and later life using flashback and flashforward? Talk amongst yourselves!

Things Seen: A Review of Annie Ernaux’s Book from Lanie Tankard

My thoughtful friend Lanie Tankard, knowing that I was in the midst of that wrenching process known as moving, sent me another delicious review. I loved the idea of books as food that she borrows from Annie Ernaux. Her description of this book as an amuse- bouche was perfect, don’t you think? Hope it makes you hungry to read! Bon appetit!

Things Seen

by Annie Ernaux

Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010

Available in hardcover and paperback.

Translated by Jonathan Kaplansky

Foreword by Brian Evenson

French Voices Award

Reviewed by Lanie Tankard

Annie Ernaux sees things and makes notes about them. Anyone who keeps a journal does the same. In fact, her latest book, Things Seen, takes the form of a journal with select dated entries spanning the years 1993–1999. This journal, however, is unique. Writers of memoir can learn much about the ability to observe sharply and clearly from reading it. So can journalists and bloggers.

This respected French writer has already published memoirs about her childhood and the lives of each of her parents, as well as several novels that are autobiographical.

Ernaux’s focal point in Things Seen is the edge.  Her concentration is riveted on contrasts, even though the things she observes are witnessed during ordinary repetitive activities — riding the subway, driving a car, waiting for a medical appointment, hearing the daily news.  She writes sans snark, a rarity in the current era. Her approach is clinical and minimalist, with nary a stray word in the entire 92-page book.

Self-awareness provides Ernaux with the ability to place things seen into a larger context and finally to evaluate their effect. Such talent imbues this deceptively simple and slim volume with such integrity and purpose that the reader is almost forced into a slow savoring of each journal entry as a single amuse-bouche before realizing that together they constitute an entire gourmet meal.

Ernaux is a participant observer of culture, society, and individual responses to the Zeitgeist. She paints with the alphabet as René Magritte wrote with pigments, each producing images of day-to-day events that create awareness of the human condition. Both Ernaux and Magritte force us to be attentive to our surroundings. And yet ultimately, she writes, “Things seen in the outside world require everything; most works of art, nothing.”

She notices the sensation of time passing as well as the need to be noticed. She writes of irony —in mother/daughter interactions, journalism, distant realities, marketing, and social welfare. She makes keen comments about writing as habit, memories as color versus black/white images, reading as food, and the writerly life.

I have always wanted to live in Paris. Thanks to Annie Ernaux, I feel as though I had a brief sojourn there. Yet I am also aware that while each of us has her own city, we both inhabit the same terrain — that of our shared humanity.

C’est la Vie.

Lanie Tankard is a freelance editor and writer in Austin, Texas. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a former production editor of Contemporary Psychology: A Journal of Reviews.

Just in Time for Halloween: A Review of Out of the Transylvania Night

Lanie Tankard, guest reviewer, is back!  This time she has chosen a book that connects to an experience of her own life. I think her “bookend” intro and conclusion is as interesting as the review herself.  I also think Lanie could write a great memoir some day. Perhaps this guest gig is getting her ready. What do you think? Help me encourage her in the comments section.

Out of the Transylvania Night

by Aura Imbarus

Del Mar, CA: Bettie Youngs Books, 2010 (354 pp., paperback)

Reviewed by Lanie Tankard

One sunny London day, Nicolae Ceausescu waved at me — or at least in my direction. To be exact, it was Tuesday June 13, 1978, when the president of the Socialist Republic of Romania rolled by me in a horse-drawn carriage on a state visit. I snapped the photo above of him sitting next to Queen Elizabeth II.

Madame Elena Ceausescu followed in a second carriage with the Duke of Edinburgh. A special train had whisked the Romanians from Gatwick Airport to Victoria Station. The city center was blocked off, creating a massive traffic jam for several hours. Ceausescu had just been to China, North Korea, Cambodia, and Vietnam, where the London Times reported he “was hailed as a friend.”

On that day, he had been president for four years, although some British newspapers referred to him as a dictator even then. That night, he would become the first leader of a Communist country to sleep in Buckingham Palace, while I rested my head in a bed-and-breakfast run by Mrs. Thomas in Muswell Hill. Soon we all returned to our respective countries.

Eleven years later, the Ceausescus were gone. I read the headlines about their execution after a secret military tribunal found them guilty of a series of crimes such as genocide and undermining the national economy.

I really hadn’t thought much about Nicolae Ceausescu until I read a new memoir by Aura Imbarus called Out of the Transylvania Night. She details what it was like to grow up in the central Romanian region of Transylvania,  under the dictator she calls worse than Dracula.

Imbarus was eighteen years old in 1989, when the Ceausescus faced a firing squad on Christmas Day — a holiday Ceausescu had banned. She begins her memoir with a vivid scene of setting out with her parents for some furtive Christmas shopping despite the watchful eyes in her ancient village of Sibiu,  first inhabited in 300 BC.

Skylights on her book’s cover that resemble heavy-lidded eyes are common on buildings in Transylvania. Originally built to protect food stored in attics by allowing in fresh air, this architectural feature became a convenient way to spy on Romanians during the Ceausescu period.

Imbarus describes the role of fashion in keeping a person safe in a dictatorship — how bright colors could draw those eyes toward an individual in a collectivist society. A dark and drab wardrobe ends up being a much wiser choice in such situations. It can mean the difference between staying alive, and becoming a moving target in a red jacket. Even jewelry can bring an individual under suspicion.

Finally her country rebelled. “I was in love with the revolution,” Imbarus writes. Her account of the barricades reminded me of scenes in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Yet the lasting effects of the repressive pre-revolution years, in a starved and freedom-deprived nation, make it difficult for her to find her identity. She departs from her childhood town in quest of not only freedom, but also jazz and palm trees in the United States. Here, Imbarus faced setbacks common to many immigrants, along with a number of personal losses, but each time she kept going.

She ultimately found her salvation by fully embracing her cultural characteristics rather than hiding them. Imbarus became a cofounder of the Romanian American Professionals Network (RAPN), and describes how important such groups are in helping those new to this country “adjust to life in the United States without them feeling that they have to give up their identity.”

The importance of writing personal stories about times of widespread torment is a bit like pointillism in art. Each account is a separate tale until they are all viewed as a saga, and then the entire portrait of an era emerges.

Out of the Transylvania Night could have benefited from additional editing, but the story is so compelling that a reader is drawn in nevertheless. Imbarus grew up idealizing gymnast Nadia Comaneci,  whom she saw in her village from time to time. Praise from Comaneci is quoted on the memoir’s cover. Book group discussion questions are included, such as: “”What expectations of freedom proved to be a hindrance in Aura’s life?”

Writers of memoir will be interested in the disclaimer at the beginning of the book: “This is a true story and the characters are real, as are the events. However, in some cases, names, descriptions, and locations have been changed. Some incidents have been altered and or combined for storytelling purposes. In some cases, time has been condensed for narrative purposes, but the overall chronology is an accurate depiction of the author’s experience.”

An incisive foreword by Dumitru Ciocoi-Pop, former president of Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, defends the appeal of memoir as a literary genre in a time of increasing artificiality. Why read it? Ciocoi-Pop says: “The only answer I can give is: for the necessity of genuine sharing.”

Imbarus notes at the end of her memoir that the Ceausescus’ bodies were recently exhumed to determine if they are actually the ones buried in their graves.Testing of samples obtained July 21, 2010, may take up to six months to determine the true identity of the remains. Many have questioned their deaths, including Imbarus. Ceausescu was known for using a number of different stand-ins to pose for him.

So even when the results are finally in, I will continue to wonder: Was that really Nicolae Ceausescu who waved at me on a London street — or was it his double?

Lanie Tankard is a freelance editor and writer in Austin, Texas. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Jonathan Franzen’s Genre-Bending FREEDOM: Part II

On September 24, 2010, Part I of Lanie Tankard’s comprehensive review of Freedom was published here. Today the review concludes with a fascinating report on Jonathan Franzen’s visit to Austin, TX, Lanie’s home. Channeling Walter Cronkite, Lanie makes you believe that “You Were There!” If you can, I suggest that you get a cup of java and give yourself an hour to read the rest of her review. It includes amazing links and lots of ideas to think about! Be sure to notice that Franzen says he does not have one favorite book – he has 100 of them!

Reviewed by Lanie Tankard

The second section of Patty’s memoir appears toward the end of the novel: “’MISTAKES WERE MADE (CONCLUSION): A Sort of Letter to Her Reader’ by Patty Berglund.” It consists of one chapter: “Six Years.”

Patty writes in third person, dutifully following Rule #4 of Franzen’s own “Ten Rules for Writing Fiction” presented in The Guardian earlier this year: “Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.” She presents her own reason at the start of her memoir’s conclusion: “The autobiographer…has been trying very hard to write these pages in first and second person. But she seems doomed, alas, as a writer…[to] refer to [herself] in third person…. [S]he still can’t bring herself to let go of a voice she found when she had nothing else to hold on to….”

A third-person voice, of course, can allow a memoir writer to remain an observer detached from emotions, but it doesn’t always work that way. (I’ve explored these nuances in another book review.) It’s always insightful to hear authors read their own works. Franzen added depth to my mental images of his characters as I listened to his voice reading their voices.

Franzen’s Writing Rule #6 is: “The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than “The Metamorphosis.”” While Franzen does use memoir in his novel Freedom, he also uses novel in his own memoir, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History. His chapter “The Foreign Language” describes meeting his former wife for the first time. He labels the last three pages, printed in italic, “One other scene from that sort of novel.”

Can a writer separate memoir from fiction and fiction from memoir? Franzen touched on this topic in an August video interview at Barnes & Noble Studio. He says that his first three novels — The Corrections (which won a National Book Award and was a Pulitzer finalist), Strong Motion, and The Twenty-Seventh City — were deliberately satirical. In Freedom, however, he stresses that there is essentially no satire. It’s “made-up stories coming out of the scariest parts of myself.” He calls The Discomfort Zone “a memoir of sorts,” and later reflects on the genre as a whole:

“Writers do raid other people’s experience. Journalists do it all the time. Unless you’ve spent your life in a padded cell, if you try to write a memoir, you’re going to talk about other people. You’re drawing on this stuff, and if you have any sensitivity and any sympathy with other people, you’re actually not just drawing, kind of, the superficial details you see, but you’re incorporating, you’re inventing a story of what was going on with them. And then in fiction, you’re doing it even more so.”

I give the proofreaders of Freedom the very highest marks. I found not a single typo, a rare situation these days. Let’s hear it for the unsung heroes of publishing!

I give the printers the lowest marks, at least on my physical copy. Inkblots resembling black teardrops are splashed on pages 72, 73, 83, 84, and 110. After I determined that this effect was not a segue into a graphic novel, I considered exchanging the book but finally decided to keep it, especially after Franzen personalized the title page with a signature to me — and then smiled and shook my hand. I now view my black ink blobs as mute testimony to the frenzied anticipation of Freedom’s arrival. (And I rate my cover sans O a collector’s item!)

Yet as an editor (and a Virgo), I need to nitpick several tiny details in this book that I enthusiastically recommend. I would have made several editorial decisions differently. I’ve never been a huge fan of semicolons, and in one repetitive use of them I could see no reason or logic behind their insertion. And I feel strongly that an editor should have reined in the overly long blocks of type, particularly at the novel’s end. Franzen may have been attempting to keep the story going, as he did tell the Austin audience that he was not trying to make a modular book but rather “wanted to write something that keeps moving along.” Or else he may have been offering Walter Berglund a vehicle for his ravings. As a reader, however, I wanted to cry out “Whoa, Nellie!” to the runaway paragraphs whose length galloped to infinity and beyond.

And I’m still bothered by the physical evaporation of the memoir’s conclusion.  Let’s track the entire manuscript throughout the novel. Patty writes the first four chapters of her autobiography at the suggestion of her therapist, and leaves them for Richard to read. Richard then leaves them for Walter to read. Credit the power of memoir to move each man to take different actions. I don’t really need to know what happened to that actual manuscript once the reading of it impelled those two men.

Patty then later writes her conclusion at the suggestion of Richard, and mails it to Walter to read — except that he doesn’t even open it. Two months later, she goes to see him in person. He then opens his mail but refuses to read the memoir. He runs down to the lake: “Somehow he was still clutching her manuscript.” That’s the last we ever hear of it. Now, I can accept that ultimately perhaps it didn’t matter to the plot whether he read it or not. But what happened to it? This time, its disappearance in the novel feels like a loose end. If Walter wasn’t going to read it, then why didn’t he stuff it in his pocket, fling it to the four winds by the lake, or bring it back to the house to start a fire? I like closure. I think the Freedom manuscript needed buffing by an editor. Although in fairness to editors, authors don’t always take suggestions and they are the ones writing the books.

The Shakespeare epigraph from The Winter’s Tale setting the theme at the beginning of Freedom does wing its way gracefully home, though, in the last sentence of the middle paragraph of page 535. The following succinct summary of The Winter’s Tale done by Michael J. Cummings illustrates many parallels between the two works: “The Winter’s Tale is traditionally classed as a comedy because the play ends happily. First, the protagonist, King Leontes, reconciles with a friend he had earlier rejected. Then he reunites with his wife, who was thought dead. However, the play is probably better classed as a tragicomedy because, preceding the happy ending, the king’s little boy dies, a bear kills a faithful lord of the court, and Leontes suffers a humiliating downfall before realizing and acknowledging mistakes he has made.” In Freedom, Patty (not Walter) is the character who pens a memoir titled “Mistakes Were Made.”

The epigraph Franzen selected brings to mind other contemporary novelists who trekked the poignant marriage terrain in related brilliant ways: Anne Tyler in Ladder of Years, Wallace Stegner in Crossing to Safety, and Stephen King in Lisey’s Story.

Franzen has also published a collection of his essays, many of which are personal narratives, called How to Be Alone. Some of these classify as memoir vignettes — particularly his eloquent piece about Alzheimer’s titled “My Father’s Brain,” and his moving article “Meet Me in St. Louis” about being asked to enter his old house by Oprah Winfrey’s camera crew. He’s the type of writer who makes the reader nod in silent recognition, thinking, “Oh yes, I’ve been there, too. I know that spot in my heart.”

When composing material about one’s life, writers might consider using the devices Franzen has worked into Freedom:  memoir, autobiography, Q&A interview, editorial, and pro & con debate — or perhaps employing the personal history format of his Discomfort Zone or the essay arrangement with personal narratives or vignettes of his How to Be Alone.

Franzen’s translation of Frank Wedekind’s 1891 German play Spring Awakening has some noteworthy similarities to parts of Freedom. (Franzen distanced himself from the 2006 rock musical version that garnered eight Tony Awards, calling it “insipid” in his 2008 introduction to the play.)

While Wedekind did not write a memoir per se, he kept journals partly to use as a base for writing plays. The journals were published as a diary in 1990. According to Franzen’s introduction to Spring Awakening, Wedekind was “a lifelong guitar player,” as was Richard Katz in Freedom. Spring Awakening also dealt with many of the same potentially shocking themes as Freedom, including a character named Wendla Bergmann — somewhat similar to the name Walter Berglund in Freedom. Indeed, Franzen’s own description of Spring Awakening in his introduction (“the laughability of adolescent sorrows, the sorrows of adolescent laughability”) could also be applied to Freedom.

Brian Boyd,  in his book On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, suggests “evolution can explain the bases not only of human behavior…but also of culture and freedom.” Boyd, university distinguished professor in the Department of English at the University of Auckland, posits, “…[S]torytelling sharpens our social cognition, prompts us to reconsider human experience, and spurs our creativity….” He links “…literature with the whole of life, with other human activities and capacities, and their relation to those of other animals as they compete, cooperate, and play, as they observe, understand, and empathize with others.” And Boyd calls literature “…our best repository of information about human experience….”

Franzen offers in Freedom uncannily detailed surveillance on our time together — for a particular set of people on this planet in this country during a certain period of history — with scrutiny that amazes. It comes close to a dissertation in American Studies. When he signed my book, I asked him how he had managed to capture all the spot-on observations of the minutiae of our era.

“Are you constantly jotting down notes as you’re out and about?” I asked.

“No, never,” he replied.

“All from memory?”

“It helps not to watch a lot of TV,” he said with a smile.

Franzen does not relish being photographed, so the Austin audience was beseeched by BookPeople employees beforehand not to snap any pictures. Emerging from behind a blue curtain wearing jeans and a long-sleeved green plaid shirt, he carried a black leather briefcase, which he placed behind the podium.

“I feel bad that so many of you are standing up,” he began, adjusting his trademark black glasses. “But of course, so am I.”

Grinning (and likely wishing he had packed a short-sleeved shirt), he continued.

“Hi Austin,” he said. “It’s hot.”

After Franzen read from Freedom, he graciously answered audience questions. Here is a selection:

Do you have a special time of day to write?

“I go as quickly as possible from sleeping to working. I’ve had an office for some time, since the 1990s, in a studio. I leave in the morning with a briefcase, as my Dad used to do. ‘I’m off to work. I have a job, too!’”

Are you the 21^st century’s “Great American Novelist,” as Time magazine called you?

“I’m the wrong person to ask.”

Do you have a favorite book?

“No. I have a hundred. One recent one was The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead.”

Do you ever get close to a character?

“If they’re funny. Pain and humor are intermingled. [You’re] trying to [relate] between your raw experience and a reader. You don’t want to hear me screaming in pain. With a novel, you want the pain to be there but you want it to have a boss and the boss should be the novelist.”

When you were growing up, were there any books that influenced you?

“Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy. It led me to believe that I could be a writer. I was very taken with the Dr. Doolittle books, too.”

Did your college education play a role in making you a writer?

“I had professors who were able to open up really deep books and explain them, and show me that they had been written by human beings. That made me think I could also write one of those things, since I am a human being.”

He looked around the room at all the audience members holding copies of Freedom.

“That so many people would buy a hardcover book rather than one to read on somebody’s glowing plastic device says a lot about the future of reading.”

Will you talk about the elephant in the room? Today Oprah picked your book for her book club.

“This evening is the first experience of that. So far, it’s okay. I think it’s a good sign that was the seventh question. The announcement was just made today, and it seems to be a low-key thing so far. So much craziness and stupidity happened nine years ago.”

Will you address the other elephant in the room: Do you think there is gender bias in the publishing industry, and in book critics? As you’re probably aware, the big topic of discussion on Twitter is #Franzenfreude.

“I don’t get tweets. I’d call it the warthog in the room, or the guinea pig. A lot of women are buying my books. Women are very seriously underrepresented in the lists of great literature, like Alice Munro. The critical privilege of a certain kind of moral male writing probably has something to do with that. I don’t disagree. There’s no controversy.”

So what’s next?

“St. Louis. [Referring to his next book tour stop, followed by laughter] I’ve always been committed to the novel. It’s what I’ve spent my life fighting for. But it’s hard to write a novel if you don’t have anything to say. It’s not like I have information that you need, like a research book. It takes me a long time if something hasn’t changed significantly in me or something new hasn’t happened [in my life]. Patience is the hardest task, especially if you’ve published some books already. These last few years have been some of the best of my life [writing Freedom]. I had a purpose and the days went by.”

Lanie Tankard

Lanie Tankard is a freelance editor and writer in Austin, Texas. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a former production editor of Contemporary Psychology: A Journal of Reviews.

Jonathan Franzen’s Genre-Bending FREEDOM: Part I

Freedom

by

Jonathan Franzen

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 2010.

Available in hardcover, CD, digital audio, and ebook formats.

Reviewed by Lanie Tankard

Author Jonathan Franzen, an avid birder, has trained his binoculars here on a different species: Homo sapiens. While he does deal extensively with our fine feathered friends in his new novel Freedom, people are his focus. Cataloging the behavior of humans in their natural habitat has become his specialty. And one of the devices he uses in this book is memoir for the voice of a character named Patty Berglund.

Franzen published The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History, in 2007 prior to writing this novel. I asked him about the effect of the proximity of these two works when he stopped in Austin, Texas, on September 17 during his Freedom book tour around the country.

“Did writing your own memoir so recently perhaps influence your choice of that format for Patty’s voice in Freedom?”

“Maybe,” he replied, after a thoughtful pause in the question-and-answer session at BookPeople.“That’s an original question, one of the most original I’ve had in a while. So ‘Maybe’ is a sloppy answer to a really great question. I’ll have to think about that.”

Franzen employs the question-and-answer format to good effect in Freedom when a teenage boy hoping to impress a girl with an online post interviews a rock-star character named Richard Katz. Richard’s personality shines through in that five-page exchange far better than if the two characters had been merely conversing.

Within the Q&A interview, Franzen also embeds an editorial about rock and roll, revolutions, Apple Computers, antiwar movements, and Republicans via Richard’s answers.

Franzen presents Patty Berglund’s two-part memoir as an autobiography: “’MISTAKES WERE MADE: Autobiography of Patty Berglund’ by Patty Berglund (Composed at Her Therapist’s Suggestion).” The first portion near the novel’s beginning has three chapters: “Agreeable,” “Best Friends,” and “Free Markets Foster Competition.”

Patty starts out by thanking various coaches and teachers who trained her as an athlete, which “helped make up for her morbid competitiveness and low self-esteem.” Next she describes her family, blending facts with feelings: “Patty grew up in Westchester County, New York. She was the oldest of four children, the other three of whom were more like what her parents had been hoping for. She was notably Larger than everybody else, also Less Unusual, also measurably Dumber. Not actually dumb but relatively dumber.” Her height affords her not only the ability to be a basketball star but also an insight: She “was never going to fit into the family anyway.”

Patty offers asides as judgments about earlier actions seen through the lens of years as she ponders the events of her life. She footnotes later thoughts with asterisks: “It occurred to Patty…that maybe the reason….Not that there was anything she could have done about it.” And in another place: “But she needed a modicum of time and breathing space, and even taking into account her youth and inexperience the autobiographer is embarrassed to report that her means of buying this time and space was to bring the conversation around, perversely, to….”

She analyzes: “Few circumstances have turned out to be more painful to the autobiographer, in the long run, than….” And later: “Where did the self-pity come from?…The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free.” (The concept of freedom is viewed from many angles all throughout Freedom.)

Patty utilizes a pro-and-con debate format within her memoir as if putting herself on trial, weighing the morality of one of her actions — and in the process her entire marriage:

“For the defense: Patty had tried, at the outset, to warn….

For the prosecution: ….Patty was the one….

For the defense: But she was trying to be good…!

For the prosecution: Her motives were bad….

For the defense: She loved her kids!

For the prosecution: ….She knew what she was doing and she didn’t stop….trapped in a housewife’s life….

For the defense: ….It wasn’t her fault….

For the prosecution: It was her fault….

For the defense: But she didn’t know that! She thought she was doing the right thing by giving her kids the attention and the love her own parents hadn’t given her.

For the prosecution: She did know it, because Walter told her, and told her, and told her.

For the defense:  ….She thought she had to…be the good cop because Walter was the bad cop.

For the prosecution: ….The problem was between Patty and Walter, and she knew it.

For the defense: She loves Walter!

For the prosecution: The evidence suggests otherwise.

For the defense: Well, in that case, Walter doesn’t love her, either. He doesn’t love the real her. He loves some wrong idea of her.

For the prosecution: That would be convenient if only it were true….

For the defense: It isn’t fair to say she doesn’t love him!

For the prosecution: If she can’t behave herself, it doesn’t matter if she loves him.”

Patty blames, even attempting to palm off her guilt over an affair on Leo Tolstoy as she reads War and Peace:  “The autobiographer wonders if things might have gone differently if she hadn’t reached the very pages in which Natasha Rostov….”

As she puts her life onto paper, Patty works out her emotions through such comments as: “Though this barely scratches the surface, it’s already more than the autobiographer intended to say about those years, and she will now bravely move on.” In some paragraphs, Patty approaches eloquence — as can happen when writing through pain and veering toward honest emotion.

This review will be continued on Monday, September 27, 2010. Lanie will reveal more about her encounter with the author during a book reading in Austin, TX. You won’t want to miss it.

Please leave comments if you have read the book or other reviews, interviews, etc., and have any reactions to share. Lanie and I have both been thinking about how memoir and fiction differ these days and why even novelists (Kathryn Stockett and Bo Caldwell) seem to be drawn to memoir using a variation of a play-within-a play. What are your own thoughts about if and why  this is happening in contemporary literature?