Month: November 2010

The End in Sight

~ Flynn ~ Leave a comment

I can see that the ending of “The Jane Austen Project” will take everything I have and then some. Everything I know about Rachel and Liam and their situation, and everything I know about Jane Austen. Everything in fact that I know about novels, and about life up to this point. But it is not primarily a matter of knowing; it comes from some deeper place than that.

And when I write a paragraph like that, and read it back over, I wonder: Am I making too much of this? Am I making it sound harder than it really is?

No.

I just read a magnificent ending. Indeed, the whole book was great. It fills me with joy to know that Jonathan Franzen is alive and among us, apparently in good health and capable of writing many more books like  Freedom. I began to fall in love with this book on Page 4, when he described his main female character, Patty, then in her early 20s and part of a newly gentrifying St. Paul neighborhood, in this way:

Tall, ponytailed, absurdly young, pushing a stroller past stripped cars and broken beer bottles and barfed-upon old snow, she might have been carrying all the hours of her days in the string bags that hung from her stroller. Behind her you could see the baby-encumbered preparations for a morning of baby-encumbered errands; ahead of her, an afternoon of public radio, the Silver Palate Cookbook, cloth diapers, drywall compound, and latex paint; and then Goodnight Moon, then zinfandel. She was already fully the thing that was starting to happen to the rest of the street.

It’s so amazing. Where do I start? The pitch-perfect detail, rich but just short of being over the top. The Silver Palate Cookbook. Public radio. Latex paint.  Zinfandel! The risk of locating a character so precisely, of course, is that readers of a future generation (and I have no doubt there will be such readers) will need footnotes. They will get it, but not entirely. But the real triumph is the move from the particular to the general to the universal. She was already fully the thing that was happening to the rest of the street. At this point, she might be just a stereotypical yuppie of a certain place and time; the point of view in this section, which is very cleverly done, seems to be a sort of Greek chorus of the neighbors, everyone and no one in particular,and to this narrator, Patty is clearly an enigma. As her mystery is revealed to the reader, slowly, over 562 pages, the stakes keep getting higher. For the characters, of course, but even more so for the writer. How to tie up a story with so many complex elements? How will he possibly resolve all this in a way that is both inevitable and surprising?

The good news is he does, magnificently. Reading this book gives me hope in endings, life, the future, and the future of the novel. And it gave me one important lesson: while it might be hard to write a good ending, it is not impossible.

In Which the Narrative Fights Back

~ Flynn ~ 1 Comment

It is nearly two months since I wrote the previous post. Where did the time go? Well, where does it ever go? Is that not the whole problem with life?

I suppose  that I should be excited. In the weeks since my last post I have had an experience I have often read about happening to other novelists and would-be novelists but never quite believed possible, when the characters revolted and refused to behave as they were told, instead rendering the narrative lifeless, stranding me in repeated blind alleys, until I relented and gave them what they wanted.

There was a character I meant to kill. I have intended all along, since I was first planning this novel in early 2008, to kill this character at the end of the book. The death had an important narrative function, or so I thought. It was supposed to be all about what we sacrifice for love and art. The death was supposed to make everything that happened after that, the tidy resolution of the various plot points, possible.

Except it didn’t work that way. Killing the character suddenly created a number of serious, seemingly unfixable problems. Worse, it suddenly halted the forward momentum of my narrative. As in real life, when someone important dies, everything stops, everything changes, and you are left gasping and paralyzed. How did I fail to realize that would happen?

I myself was devastated by the death of my character. It wasn’t supposed to work like this. They are, after all, fictional. How can I entertain such tender feelings for them? It seems the height of self-indulgence.

And I have to wonder, did Jane Austen have such problems?

Did she ever struggle, for example, over the question of whether Henry Crawford should come to his senses and not elope with Maria but persist in his love for Fanny? Actually, that is not a very good example. Did she ever think about having Willoboughy repent at the last minute and leave Sophy at the altar to reunite with his beloved Marianne, and marrying Elinor off to Colonel Brandon instead?

I have to think that she did not. And that is the difference between Jane Austen and me. She knew what she was doing. She never let the seams show. If she lived today and had a blog, it would probably be about needlework and fashion, but never about the struggles with her art.

On the other hand, thanks to the canceled Chapter 10, we do know that while she never doubted that Anne would end up with Captain Wentworth, there was some confusion in her mind about exactly how to make this happy event take place in a way that was dramatic and yet natural.

So maybe Jane Austen wasn’t perfect. I take only the most moderate comfort in this reflection, however.

I am still waiting for the other fabled thing that supposedly happens to novelists, when the characters rise up and push me to the finish line, when the force of the narrative propels me to the end, breathless but effortless. Yeah. I am waiting for that.