Irving Writes about Writing

In the corner of my home office is a “must read” shelf of novels and short stories, some are ones I want to reread, but most are either new titles or ones I just did not get to during my working career. While many of these I already owned, or buy used from Amazon’s affiliated vendors, I allow myself the luxury of acquiring new clothbound editions written by my favorite writers. Two such recent purchases were Anne Tyler’s Noah’s Compass and John Irving’s Last Night in Twisted River.

When I finished my last book, given to me by my wife for Xmas, a wonderful, informative compendium, Geniuses of the American Musical Theatre; The Composers and Lyricists by Herbert Keyser, I debated about my next book, eyeing that new Tyler and Irving title, among the others I had squirreled away for the “right moment.” Impulsively I picked up the John Irving novel. Not sure exactly why, as I really ENJOY reading Anne Tyler, even if she writes about the same flaky characters in their Baltimore environs. Sometimes I feel like I am one of them, an accidental tourist on the journey of life.

Enjoyment would not be my motivation for reading Irving; rather, I would call it a COMPULSION and perhaps that is why Twisted River, once in my hands, became the choice du jour. Irving’s characters are not ones I easily identify with so I follow them somewhat dislodged from the comfort zone I am normally within Tyler’s or Richard Russo’s worlds.

And, indeed, Twisted River has a panoply of larger than life characters and Amazonian or Rubenesque women, the latter including Injun Jane, Six-Pack Pam, Carmella Del Popolo, and Lady Sky just to name a few of the colorful names. And then there are the men, who are often generically referred to as, “the cook” or “cookie” (Dominick), “the writer” (Daniel), “the riverman” or “the river driver” or the “logger” or the “woodsman from Coos County” (Ketchum), and the “constable” or the “crazy cowboy” or the “crazy cop” (Carl). In typical Irving fashion, there are scores and scores of supporting and minor characters.

Irving makes me feel as if I am entering a nightmare; so from the opening pages of Twisted River there is that sense of foreboding. His writing makes me stop here and there to figure out relationships, or potential relationships, as if I’m moving through molasses at times, but he is such a superior storyteller that you are drawn in and the story itself takes over.

He paints a portrait of three generations over the last fifty years and in a number of places, Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire, Boston, Toronto, a twisted river of American life, Irving painting one part of the picture, jumping to another part of the canvas, temporally and geographically, circling and backfilling, bringing the story back to the beginning at the very end. It is an odyssey for the characters and for the reader. As Irving and I were born in the same year, the historical background of the novel is the one we’ve both lived at the same moment of our lives. The political history of “an empire in decline” is an omnipresent part of the novel’s subliminal setting, the arrogance of power from the folly of Vietnam to the Iraqi invasion.

Many of the usual Irving themes or symbolism are here: the bears, wrestling, New England, hands (or lack of), tattoos, accidents and fate. But, of all his novels, this may be the most illuminating about Irving himself and the craft of his writing. He even describes his Cider House Rules as another work of fiction in this novel called East of Bangor.

The main character in Twisted River is Daniel Baciagalupo a.k.a. Danny Angel, his pen name for most of the novel. Danny is Irving’s voice about writing, revealing his own tricks of the trade such as the following:

Maybe this moment of speechlessness helped to make Daniel Baciagalupo become a writer. All those moments when you know you should speak, but you can’t think of what to say – as a writer, you can never give enough attention to those moments.

All writers must know how to distance themselves, to detach themselves from this and that emotional moment, and Danny could do this – even at twelve

One day, the writer would recognize the near simultaneity of connected but dissimilar momentous events – these are what move a story forward….(He was too young to know that, in any novel, with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.)

Childhood, and how it forms you – moreover, how your childhood is relived in your life as an adult – that was his subject (or his obsession), the writer Danny Angel daydreamed….

I particularly appreciated Irving’s attention to Danny’s experience at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Some of my favorite writers have taught or have been taught there, luminaries such as John Cheever, Philip Roth, Richard Yates, Raymond Carver, Kurt Vonnegut and, of course, John Irving.

One of Danny’s teachers there is Kurt Vonnegut* a kind man and a good teacher. Describing Vonnegut’s criticism of Danny’s punctuation problem gives Irving the opportunity to reveal the major influences on his (both Danny’s and Irving’s) work: Mr. Vonnegut didn’t like all the semicolons. “People will probably figure out that you went to college – you don’t have to try to prove it to them.” [B]ut semicolons came from those old-fashioned nineteenth-century novels that had made Daniel Baciagalupo want to be a writer in the first place….Danny would be at Exeter before he actually read those books, but he’d paid special attention to those authors there – Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville…And English novelist Thomas Hardy naturally appealed to [him], who – even at twenty-five – had seen his share of what looked like fate to him. Danny (and Irving), says of his former teacher: Danny like[d] Kurt Vonnegut’s writing, and he liked the man, too. Danny was lucky with teachers he had for his writing….

Ketchum (the woodsman) is an idealized alter ego of Irving, perhaps the man he sees himself as being outside the world of writing, while Danny’s father (the cook), a kindly man, protective of his son, is the idealized father who Irving never met. Irving loves these characters, and the stories of all three men are so tightly interwoven we mourn their aging in the novel as if they are one.

The reoccurring themes of Irving’s novels, the vulnerability of childhood, and the inevitable loss of innocence, Irving’s pessimistic distrust of human nature are evident here as well:

Danny Angel’s novels had much to do with what the writer feared might happen. The novels often indulged the nightmarish – namely, what every parent fears most: losing a child. There was always something or someone in a Danny Angel novel that was ominously threatening to children, or to a child. Young people were in peril – in part, because they were young!”

But what was political about [his] other five books? Dysfunctional families; damaging sexual experience; various losses of innocence, all leading to regret. These stories were small, domestic tragedies – none of them condemnations of society or government. In Danny Angel’s novels, the villain – if there was one – was more often human nature than the United States.

It is well known that Irving works from the end of a story to the beginning and so does Danny: As always, he began at the end of the story. He’d not only written what he believed was the last sentence, but Danny had a fairly evolved idea of the trajectory of the new novel.…That was just the way he’d always worked: He plotted a story from back to front; hence he conceived of the first chapter last. By the time Danny got to the first sentence – meaning to that actual moment when he wrote the first sentence down – often a couple of years or more had passed, but by then he knew the whole story. From that first sentence, the book flowed forward – or, in Danny’s case, back to where he’d begun.

And so it is with Twisted River, a work that is a mirror within a mirror as it is Danny Baciagalupo who becomes its author in the end, Irving bringing together all the themes and characters in a coda so powerful that I found myself emotionally choked as I concluded the novel, especially relating to one of Irving’s culminating thoughts: Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly – as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth – the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives. It left me bewildered as to how I could have been so unprepared for such a reaction, other than being in awe of Irving’s gifts and the knowledge that we are all bobbing along on a twisted river, a circle of life.

* In my working days we had published The Vonnegut Encyclopedia, subtitled An Authorized Compendium as it had the full cooperation of the great writer himself. I had asked Vonnegut whether he might inscribe a copy to my son who was in high school at the time and already an admirer of Vonnegut’s writings. I was both deeply moved and amused by his inscription:



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Bill Gross Redux

As I’ve noted in some prior blog entries, Bill Gross, the world’s preeminent bond manager from PIMCO, also happens to be an excellent writer. I read his monthly comments as much for their style and wit, as I do for their content. His piece this month Don't Care, although primarily about the sovereign debt crisis, seques into the topic using the experience we’ve all had, the vapidity of cocktail conversation, the inherent disinterest of people in other people, coming to the conclusion that “the careful discrimination between sovereign credits is becoming more than casual cocktail conversation. A deficiency of global aggregate demand and the potential impotency of policymakers to close the gap are evolving into a life or death outcome for the weakest sovereigns, with consequences for credit and asset markets worldwide.”

But I am not going to discuss sovereign debt here (perhaps the most serious one ultimately being our own) but, instead, the experience he so eloquently and hilariously describes as the blather of the social gathering. He even incorporates a graph entitled the “Cocktail Party Empathy Chart,” the X-axis being “Seconds Into The Conversation” and the Y-axis being “How Much I Really Care About What You Are Saying.” As one might imagine, there is a diagonally dropping line from ten to zero in about ninety seconds.

Although Gross covers the five topics such conversations normally wander off to, I’ll use his general observation as my own seque into a very recent experience relating to my last entry , in which I said I was happy to see the preview performance of American Buffalo as it gave me an opportunity to form my own opinion of the production. Since then, three professionally written reviews have appeared, one in the Palm Beach Post which was positive but, I thought, could have been more enthusiastic and two unconditionally excellent reviews, one in The New Times, Broward/Palm Beach and the other from Skip Sheffield’s blog.

We were at a social gathering recently and someone asked whether anyone had seen this new production of American Buffalo so I began to glowingly describe the production and was interrupted by the comment that the Palm Beach Post didn’t seem to be overly enthusiastic. Exactly my point I began to say, and before I could expand upon that it was pretty clear to me this person was more interested in talking about something else relating to one of those five “unbearable minute-and-a-half” topics, not really wanting a thoughtful reply. On Bill Gross’ X/Y graph, I hardly lasted the 90 seconds!

But why should this be a surprise? We don’t even listen to each other on the bigger issues. Look at the recent hyped meeting on healthcare between the President and leaders of Congress, each party pushing its own agenda, preening for their constituents in the all-day televised meeting. Hey, it makes no difference whether we will bankrupt the nation, as long as I look good! Who cares what the other has to say?

But I digress. Thanks, Bill Gross, for reminding us that we need to listen to each other, although I guess he might agree it all seems pretty hopeless.

American Buffalo Soars at Dramaworks

One of the benefits of having a preview subscription to the performances at Dramaworks is the ability to see this uniquely focused regional theatre’s productions before reviews appear. Dramaworks dares to produce mostly classics such as the recent Ibsen's A Doll's House, Frayn’s Copenhagen, O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten, and one of my favorites, Ionesco's The Chairs, simply serving up the very best in theatre, in a highly professional manner. One has to thank William Hayes, Dramaworks’ Producing Artistic Director, for his vision and his ability to consistently achieve Dramawork’s mission of being “a professional not-for-profit theatre company that engages and entertains audiences with provocative and timeless productions that personally impact each individual.”

And, indeed, American Buffalo is provocative, a nearly two hour run time going by with such pacing and great acting that the evening seemed to be compressed into mere minutes. David Mamet’s play is presented as he probably intended, with a perfect set design of a 70’s junk shop, the microcosmic universe where three small-time crooks, inherent losers, but ones with the needs of everyman for respect, friendship, even love, bungle their way through a botched job of stealing a coin collection from a “mark.” It is darkly humorous throughout.

Mamet’s staccato dialogue, although stark and profane, is pure poetry. It has a cadence that carries along the characters’ interaction and the plot. This is how people talk, and Donny, Teach, and Bobby become vividly real. An amusing sidebar is the fourth character in the play, Fletch, who we, the audience never see, but we join the characters in the play, questioning what kind of guy he might be, first thinking he’s the “brains” and then thinking he is nothing but a card shark and cheat, but then learning he was assaulted and is in a hospital with a broken jaw (ironic as he can’t speak in the play anyhow). It’s an interesting conceit that Mamet employs to bring us, the audience, further into the heart of the play.

And on a smaller scale the play is emblematic of today’s Madoffian barbaric business world, and the collapse of moral values. A constant refrain of the play is “hey, we’re talk’n business here.”

All in all, this is great theatre and if any review is less than excellent, I will be surprised.
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eBook War of Words

A follow up to Publishers in the Crosshairs, hopefully a more carefully considered one. The eBook wars are far more complicated than imagined. I quoted Mike Shatzkin from the Financial Times piece, but since then I’ve had enough sense to venture into his blog, specifically his expert report, The wild weekend of Amazon and Macmillan, which in turn led me to Tobias Buckell’s Why my books are no longer for sale via Amazon and Charlie Stross’ Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider's guide to the fight. These lengthy pieces, with their fascinating threads of responses, are must reading, something I might have done in the first place.

I should have known that publishers would find ways to make things hopelessly complex. Any industry that can base its selling strategy on first publishing a high-priced edition, overprinting the same in the hope a lower unit cost will justify a lower list price, and then take back the majority of what has been printed as returns, trying then to resell them on the bargain books table for pennies on the dollar, while, at the same time, issuing a lower-priced paper back edition, has to be suspect to begin with. The eBook wars have become enmeshed in legacy marketing practices such as “agency plans” and inconsistent methods of compensating authors on the sale of such editions (percentage based on “list price” or the net selling price, and/or whether the “agency” discount figure into the same). Then, digital rights management further complicates the issue.

When things become hopelessly complex, simplify. One option is to go to a “net pricing” scheme for eBook editions sold to the retail marketplace through intermediaries and then let the marketplace work; perhaps that price being similar to the eventual paperback list price. Of course, marketing structures and royalty arrangements would have to be engineered with that approach in mind, so there is no short-term silver bullet, and it does not "prevent" Amazon from pricing at less than it is paying the publisher. One has to wonder whether such a publishing practice is even legal or Amazon’s pricing is sustainable. But, I defer to the blogs mentioned above on this subject, following them with great interest, as the eBook wars no doubt escalate. As a society, we can only hope that a negotiated peace does not come at a price too steep for the publishing industry.

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The Ancient Library of Celsus

Publishers in the Crosshairs

Maybe it’s because I’ve been on the periphery of the industry for a while, the salad days of my publishing career behind me, but being a firm believer that information, especially vetted information, has value, publishers seem to be having a chicken-little moment at this stage of technology evolution. I can’t help but hark back to the 1960’s when publishers and libraries were fearing that Ultrafiche, a microfiche that holds up to 1,000 pages per 4x6" sheet of film, would make the printed book redundant. So fast-forward to the brave new world of the 21st century.

No doubt today’s technology is a form of creative destruction that Ultrafiche was not. But the operative word here is creative and publishers bring something valuable to the table, gathering and authenticating information at the higher end of the information pyramid and editing, designing, promoting and distributing trade books at the lower end. I’ve always thought of publishing as an information pyramid, the top of which is “must have information” – mostly scientific and professional – and at the bottom, the kind of publishing which is mostly the mass market stuff competing with movies, magazines, and other leisure-time activities. In the information pyramid there are various categories in between, such as educational publishing, serious trade publishing, etc. The higher in the pyramid, the less price sensitive and visa versa. To a great extent, this applies to electronic distribution as well.

Monday’s Financial Times presented an interesting analysis of the publishing industry’s present predicament, eye opening because it made clear that Amazon, to build market share and ward off the rapid encroachment of Apple and Google, was selling their $9.99 eBooks at a loss. Macmillan’s move to delay eBook editions of new titles by six months was to “force” Amazon to charge more, which Amazon capitulated on, not because of one publisher’s demands but because the announcement of Apple’s iPad threw down the gauntlet of real competition for the Kindle. I thought competition was supposed to drive down prices. Otherwise, the whole matter suggests a form of price fixing.

While publishers might find a $9.99 electronic book unsustainable (if that is their own list price) as, after all, the vast majority of the costs are those incurred in creating the first copy (paper, printing, and binding being a minor part of the expense in publishing), Amazon’s selling at that price is another matter. How long can Amazon sustain pricing that is less than publishers’ charge Amazon, particularly as Apple and Google enter the competitive fray? Aren’t publishers playing a dangerous collusion game “forcing” resellers to charge a particular price? Publishers need to set their list prices for printed and electronic editions, establish a sensible discount schedule to resellers (both price and discount dependent on where the book/information stands in the information pyramid), and then let the marketplace work. Their control of copyright allows them to have this power. It’s not a matter of “negotiating” prices with resellers, but, instead, ensuring they (publishers) don’t fall into the same trap as the music industry, taking safeguards with distributors to guard against unlicensed replication of eBook editions.

According to Mike Shatzkin (quoted in the FT article), “Legacy publishers still want bookstores to last as long as possible. Their business model is built on their expertise in navigating that industry.” No doubt that is true; even though that legacy system is fraught with its own economic problems such as allowing “returns” of unsold copies for up to a year, an archaic business practice that bookstores and publishers seem to be addicted to. However, be it legacy publishing, electronic, or forms yet to be discovered, it is the publishing industry’s need to adapt, not to retard progress. Otherwise, “their failure to recognize that their industry’s economics is of no concern to the marketplace [will be] another nail in their coffin.”

Perhaps the trade book publishing industry needs to be led out of the woods by more innovative independent publishers, with important, influential authors seeking those venues, deserting the present publishing oligarchy that imagines it can control how the resellers should price their publications. Instead, control the timeliness, presentation, and relevance and accuracy of content, bringing together the author and the reader, in any form the marketplace needs.

Of course it is a more complicated matter, within an even larger picture if you take into account the desirable survival of the independent bookstore, the strategic deployment of on-demand publishing by publishers, and how authors, particularly the best-selling authors, look at the eBook – is it a subsidiary right of which they require a larger piece of the action, such as they receive from the sale of movie rights, or even hold the right to themselves to negotiate their own deals with Amazon, Apple, etc.?

Independent bookstores could be compensated for eBook downloads in their own Wifi hotspots – provided publishers and electronic distributors cooperate and agree to give up a little of the pie, as sellers do to Google for eyeballs that lead to sales. It is in the best interests of the industry to ensure the independents’ survival and they can have a role.

Publishers could more often deploy on-demand printing, especially for the so-called mid-trade edition, or do shorter edition runs and then opt for on demand subsequent editions if warranted. This strategy would reduce part of the publisher’s risk.

Authors have to realize that having a multiplicity of publishers and distributors is in their best long-term interests. Reserving eBook rights for themselves to negotiate with electronic distributors will have an impact on publishers’ ability to produce and promote printed editions. Are we, as a society, better off without legacy publishing in any form?

One of my friends and mentors, the late Len Shatzkin (Mike Shatzkin’s father) said it best in his book In Cold Type; Overcoming the Book Crisis (published in 1982 – the industry has always been in crisis!): “Any misfortune for book publishing is a misfortune for all Americans. Books are too important to our lives; we cannot be indifferent, or even casual, about what happens to the industry that produces them.”
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Witch Hunt Feeding Frenzy

In the interest of full disclosure, we own two automobiles made by Toyota and have owned others in the past. I’m amused by some of the ads from competitors, one comparing its car to the Camry but “admitting” their automobile fails to have one feature of the Toyota: “self propulsion.” (Rimshot drum roll, please.) General Motors is offering an “extra” $1000 rebate on any traded-in Toyota. Transportation Secretary Ray La Hood said that Toyota owners should stop driving recalled Toyota vehicles (later “retracted” but damage done). Open season on Toyota, let the witch hunt begin!

It will be interesting to watch the Congressional Hearings later this month on the topic, the perfect opportunity for our representatives to preen and put a protectionist spin on the “facts.” How convenient to have a foreign car manufacturer to bash while being a business partner of GM. Detroit must be having a field day. Where were the Congressional Hearings when the Ford Pintos were exploding in the 1970s?

Forgotten in all of this is the paucity of incidents leading to the recall. According to Consumer Reports, analyzing complaints for the 2008 model year, there were 52 stuck accelerator issues with Toyota, vs. 36 for the next nearest offender, Ford. (Ford has actually recalled some of its vehicles in China for the same problem.) Both car makers had the same market share so, statistically, Toyota does have more of an issue than Ford, 16 more but we’re talking about millions of cars!

The Toyota issue mushroomed after a widely publicized crash of a Lexus that lead to the tragic death of a family, and that then led to a spike of similar reports, not because there were suddenly more faulty accelerators, but because of the publicity. This is how a witch-hunt is spawned.

I once had the exact same issue with a VW Dasher Wagon, but the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration simply ignored the complaint. I also once had a Jeep Grand Cherokee that would suddenly lose power. After repeat incidents, several near accidents, and multiple trips to the Chrysler dealer, they finally said they couldn’t fix it and as the car was no longer under warranty, it became my problem. (The car was towed away to an auction for parts.)

Of course the present recall and concern is warranted and hopefully Toyota will fix all involved automobiles. But it needs to be put in perspective as anecdotal problems with cars will always occur and the scope of the present issue is fairly limited. Let the so-called “Hearings” begin!

"I have seen too many frightful proofs in court - the Devil is alive in Salem, and we dare not quail to follow wherever the accusing finger points!" -- The Crucible by Arthur Miller

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Who wants flowers when you're dead?

A couple of days ago, my friend Bruce and I were exchanging some brief emails regarding Salinger, not for any particular reason other than wondering what he might be up to in his reclusive self-imposed exile, and then the news he died the very day we were having those thoughts. As Bruce said “Are the mystical forces of the universe visiting the readers and men of letters? I'm scared.” There is a special place in our generation’s literary consciousness for the particularly honest, direct, voice of Salinger’s writing. I remember reading Catcher in my late teens thinking how can this guy know what I was thinking?

Salinger also lived in Westport CT for a while, before we settled in that town, and some think Catcher could have been written there.

Strange to be in a world without, now, Holden Caulfield, as well as Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom.

“Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.” --The Catcher in the Rye

Speaking of dead, Florida is known as “God’s waiting room,” and this is no more evident than in the deluge of advertisements and mailings here about estate planning, not outliving your money, etc., but my very favorite came in the mail yesterday, the “opportunity” to “win a pre-paid cremation!” Just more “crap.” RIP, Holden.


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