novels

Twitter Shakespeare

~ Flynn ~ 2 Comments

Today, being on Twitter finally paid for itself.

This might seem absurd, as being on Twitter has never cost me anything, at least in monetary terms. I could say it’s cost me something in agony, time and effort, but that wouldn’t be true; since I became a part of the Twitter landscape back in 2009, I have been among the lamest Twitterers going. The problem was I never quite understood what I was supposed to be doing on it; in theory I understood, but practice eluded me. Why would strangers be interested in my 140-character effusions on subject like “Clarissa”? And they weren’t. I wasn’t, even. Twitter was like a movie I’d walked into the middle of, a series of disconnected conversations at a party where I did not know anyone; nothing ever seemed to have any resolution.

If Twitter had a cost, it was measured out in bafflement.

Twitter would be completely dead to me if I did not get those e-mails suggesting people I might want to follow (but why?) or those containing the news that people were following me (even more so why?).

When I learn I have a new follower (I can’t count my followers on the fingers of one hand, but if I had a few more fingers I could), I have to wonder what strange creatures they might be. I read their tweets, their little self-descriptions and I check their Web sites. That was how I learned this morning that Pam Mingle, fond of what-ifs and gelato and books, author of a novel called “Kissing Shakespeare”, had become my follower. “Kissing Shakespeare,” I was intrigued to learn, involves time travel, Shakespeare and love.

Pam Mingle’s blog was exactly the sort of writer’s blog I like best: serious without being self-important, full of practical advice and intriguing links. But I could not focus on the blog yet. I had to know more about the book.

Here is someone who had wrestled with exactly the problems I have been facing. Like, how do you send a person into the past in a way that is not annoyingly improbable and doesn’t become all about the science fiction? What would the time traveler notice when they got there? What would they be disgusted by? What would they like? What sort of person would they need to be? How do you solve the existential problems time travel creates without making too little of them or, again, making it too much about the science fiction? What about her decision to make this a YA book? Was that a good idea? What did she gain and what did she give up with that?

I had to know more about this book. It was the work of but a moment to log onto my public library Web site, download “Kissing Shakespeare” onto to my Kindle and start reading. I’ve only read a few chapters, but I am fascinated. She’s nailed it, I think. More on this later.

This is exactly what I needed to have happen this morning. And I owe it all to Twitter.

Bipolar Me

~ Flynn ~ 4 Comments

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George Orwell, as usual, was there first and said it best:

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness.”

I read this long ago, but I used to think he was exaggerating. Now I see that he was understating the matter. And he left out something important: it’s like having, not just an illness, but a mental illness. With no disrespect intended, but instead deepest fellow-feeling, I think I finally understand what being bipolar must be like. Continue reading →

Further Reading: Ivanhoe

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Near the beginning of my current draft of “The Jane Austen Project” there is an allusion to “Ivanhoe.” As a matter of principle I have tried to read the books my characters read, and while I long doubted there was much to be gained from reading “Ivanhoe,” I downloaded the free Kindle version onto my phone anyway, just to have something to read in case I accidentally found myself on the subway between library books. This happened, and I started reading it.

I am perhaps a third of the way through, and it’s astonishing. Continue reading →

Further Reading: Second Impressions

~ Flynn ~ 3 Comments

Knowing little of the person but what I read in The New York Times, Sandy Lerner, as an idea, has long fascinated me, to the extent that she inspired a minor character in The Jane Austen Project, an ancient Ph.D. mathematician and tech billionaire with an obsession with literature, thought to be bankrolling the Jane Austen Project. When it turned out that Ms. Lerner (who for the record is neither ancient nor a Ph.D.) was giving a talk at my own local Jane Austen Society chapter, on a night that I already had off, no less, that I would be going to hear her was obvious.

I don’t know what I expected, except that it was certain to be interesting. It was that, and much more. Ms. Lerner, it turns out, has written a novel, having spent 26 years researching a historically accurate sequel to Pride and Prejudice. Continue reading →

The End in Sight

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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.

E.M Forster and Jane Austen

~ Flynn ~ 5 Comments

Inspired by Colm Toibin’s review of a new biography, I am now rereading a book that doesn’t fall into my list of TJAP-approved reading, but maybe it should: Howards End.

Perhaps E.M. Forster has the truest claim to be Jane Austen’s spiritual heir, not Henry James or Edith Wharton or Virginia Woolf, those who are in some ways more obvious contenders to the title. It strikes me reading this novel now in 2010 that I am as far  away in time from the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes and London in the early years of the 20th century as Forster was from the Dashwoods and the Middletons and London in the early years of the 19th. Their world seems distant and yet entirely familiar; but then, so does Jane Austen’s. And perhaps this is the thread that links the two: an interest in eternal and timeless human truths, as expressed in simple, outwardly rather unexciting, daily events. Forster, like Austen, was interested in how money lay at the root of many aspects of life, in how people got along, found meaning and found love. But these comments are so general that they could describe a lot of novels; what is it, actually, that links the two, the clergyman’s spinster daughter and the closeted gay man? Intelligence, obviously, and irony.  A kind of imaginative sympathy.

Reading Forster, you  feel certain you would have  liked him if you could have met  him, and yet I search for the source of this certainty without success. There is a kindness that seems to hover around his paragraphs, as if he was writing with a smile, feeling affection for even his most annoying characters. However, I am not sure this is also true of Jane Austen; the part about the smile, maybe. To me she seems never bitter, never hateful, as some critics have affirmed. But she can be merciless! One thinks of  the Eltons, or Lady Catherine, or Elizabeth Elliot.

I have read Howards End…how many times? I don’t remember. I know I first read it 20 years ago, in Hong Kong, finding a paperback Penguin version in a used bookstore on Hollywood Road.  “J. Dunkerley, Q.A.S. Sept 76” is inscribed in the front, so this particular copy already had a history then. I wrote my own name on the same page, the year, the place. English-language books were expensive and hard to come by, and I held on to this one as the treasure it was. J. Dunkerley, perhaps reading this for a class, made many notes in the margins, which seem insightful when they are legible, which is not often.

Whenever I reread Howards End, it is always with a feeling of surprise, as if some part of my mind is reading it for the very first time. I do not seem to bring the earlier readings along with me as ballast and contrast, as is true for some other chronically reread books (Unbearable Lightness of Being, Anna Karenina). Perhaps because it isn’t the plot that sticks with one so much, as the way the writing seduces the reader despite all the odds. Mrs. Wilcox, for instance. How did he do that? There seems nothing to her, and yet she anchors the book.

She was not intellectual, nor even alert, and it was odd that, all the same, she should give the idea of greatness. Margaret, zigzagging with her friends over Thought and Art, was conscious of a personality that transcended their own and dwarfed their activities. There was no bitterness in Mrs. Wilcox; there was not even criticism; she was lovable, and no ungracious or uncharitable word had passed her lips. Yet she and daily life were out of focus: one or the other must show blurred.  And at lunch she seemed more out of focus than usual, and nearer the line that divides daily life from a life that may be of greater importance.