Pity the Novella: Neither This Nor That

Ah, the novella.  The awkward cousin at the wedding reception who, in his suit-straining obesity, grazes at the buffet table while eyeing the slim, sharp young things having a good time out on the dance floor.  Someone should tell that fat cousin he's still loved, even though he has crumbs on his necktie and no one ever asks him to dance.

The novella is fiction at that awkward stage: Too plump in plot and character to be called a short story, but often too thin to warrant its own publication as a stand-alone book.  It is both "more than" and "not quite."

But what sets the novella apart from its thinner cousins, the short story and the anorexic short-short?  And what about those other fellows, big and solid as linebackers queueing up for dollar dances with the bride--the ones who call themselves novels?  Does the novella dream of someday bulking up to their heft?

Someone please take pity on the novella.  He needs a lot of love to remind him that, yes indeed, he is a valuable member of the family.

And that's precisely what Dan Wickett and the good folks over at The Emerging Writers Network are doing by celebrating June as Novella Month. Wickett writes, "I've always been fascinated at the range of different ideas behind exactly what makes a novella a novella." All this month, EWN is posting capsule reviews of contemporary novellas and asking guests to offer up their interpretation of "what makes a novella a novella."  Coming fresh off the maypole dance of Short Story Month, June seems the perfect time to sit back in the hammock with a glass of lemonade (or gin-and-tonic if you're reading John Cheever's Oh What a Paradise It Seems) and delve into the foggy world of the novella.

The novella lives an ill-defined existence.  The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as "a story with a compact and pointed plot" and "a work of fiction intermediate in length and complexity between a short story and a novel."  Novellas usually range in length from 20,000 to 40,000 words.  The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction even more precisely defines the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000 (what's up with that odd 17,500, guys?).

Setting aside word counts for a moment, we still find plenty of debate about the social status of novellas.  In his Afterword to Different Seasons, Stephen King called the novella “an ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic.”  He goes on to say, "Now, artistically speaking, there's nothing at all wrong with the novella.  Of course, there's nothing wrong with circus freaks, either, except that you rarely see them outside of the circus."

King, of course, knows a thing or three about novellas; a good majority of his "short stories" are really those fat cousins in disguise.  In fact, I think the first time I ever heard the term "novella" was when I picked up a copy of Different Seasons in 1982.  That particular quartet of "longish stories" has produced two great movies (The Shawshank Redemption from "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" and Stand By Me from "The Body") and one really mediocre movie (Apt Pupil from the story by the same name).  The fourth novella from that collection, "The Breathing Method," is perhaps unfilmable thanks to its horrific cover-your-eyes scenes of childbirth.

King's latest "book," Blockade Billy, is nothing more than two novellas gussied up by the publishers to cleverly withdraw $10 from your wallet while insisting you're really getting your money's worth with this handsome little hardcover.  Eh.  I've read Blockade Billy and I'm not convinced it's King at his peak ("Morality," a noirish lesson in greed, is better than the titular tale of a creepy baseball catcher), but I'm also not convinced they're novellas.  I've read other King short stories which were longer, wider in scope, and deeper in character.  But maybe that's just the cynic in me speaking--the one who's pissed at the $10 pickpocketed from his wallet.

The point here is, even publishers are at a loss to properly catalogue and classify the novella.  Is it just a question of length and lack of chapters?  Is it structure as much as it is content?  Defining "novella" forces us to examine the short story even more intently for how it executes its blade-sharp, blink-quick effect.

On the eve of publication of his much-lauded collection of novellas, The New Valley, Josh Weil wrote a paean to the form in the July/August 2009 issue of Poets & Writers:

Just as the brevity of the short form lends itself to particular purposes and demands particular strengths, just as the expansiveness of a novel allows for different approaches to story and unique potentials for what it can accomplish, a novella is shaped by the restrictions of its length, but it should be defined by what those restrictions allow it to do. It is a different animal altogether: Though worded as concisely as a short story, it has room for scenes to breathe. Moments can linger. The fist that squeezes the world of a short story into a few compact scenes can be unclenched a little--bits of backstory let in, descriptions filled out, characters lived with longer. But the novella embraces not too many characters, and not too wide-ranging a plot, not too vast a scope--those are the realm of the novel. A novella compresses the world with a short story's focus, but it explores that smaller space with a novel's generosity.

Still unsure as to what, exactly, constitutes a novella?  Take heart, dear reader--you are not alone.  For most of us, it's sort of like the classic definition of pornography: you know it when you see it.  At John Madera's hitherandthitheringwaters website, he offers up an incisive look at the novella's origins, sorts through the many definitions of the form and--frosting on the cake--provides links to dozens of "my favorite novella" lists by writers he polled.  Their answers won't help resolve the muddle of definition--one man's long short story is another woman's novella is another person's short novel.  But, at the very least, you can compile a pretty extensive reading list from all their suggestions.

Here are some literary works which most folks agree can be called novellas (though I'll admit I've always considered some of these to be novels):

The Dead by James Joyce
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Man Who Would Be King by Rudyard Kipling
Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
The Bear by William Faulkner
Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison
Miss Lonleyhearts by Nathanael West
The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico

As for me, I'm going to do my part to further EWN's cause by committing to reading at least one novella during the month of June.  Better yet, I'll read three--the trio of novellas in Josh Weil's The New Valley.  I've been wanting to read that book for nearly a year.  I can't think of a better time to pull it off the shelf.  Thanks, Dan Wickett, for the friendly shove.

And what about you, dear reader?  Do you have a list of favorite novellas?  Feel free to share with the rest of us in the comments section.

The Writing Habit: Desk Job

I sit at a desk.  I face the wall.  If you sit facing the wall, the only way out is through the sentences.

--E. L. Doctorow

Of all the tools of the trade, the writer's desk is surely third only to the pen and paper (or keyboard and screen).  It's here on this playing field of wood--or metal, or Formica, or Little Tykes plastics if you a very, very young author--that we spread our papers, our reference books, our imaginations.

In the bustling hustle of our daily lives, the writing desk is the one calm constant, a place where we can center our focus, channel our imaginations, lasso the words.  The writing table is an icon, a prime square of tiny real estate where we create universes.  I'm fascinated by the places where other writers sat during the composition of their books.  I've already mentioned the thrill I felt when I saw Flannery O'Connor's desk (or at least a faithful duplicate of the original), and I would probably give my left pinkie to be able to sit at Thomas Hardy's desk.

The Guardian ran a series on writers' rooms a couple of years ago, which included a photo of Jane Austen's writing table: "This fragile 12-sided piece of walnut on a single tripod must be the smallest table ever used by a writer."  The Like Fire blog has an on-going feature called Strata where contemporary writers describe the geology of their writing spaces.  And of course, there is the illuminating book by Jill Krementz, The Writer's Desk, which gives us mere mortals a peek into the habits of E. B. White, Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, and others.

Environment is everything to the writer.  At least it is to me.  I must be properly situated, north by northwest, at a casual slump, hydration near at hand, before I can begin typing the first letter.

I've never been one to scribble on yellow legal pads.  I can't sit cross-legged in the bed with a laptop humming on the blankets in front of me.  And, unlike Scott Turow, I simply refuse to tap the keyboard on a daily commuter train.  I must have solitude, I must have my classical music, I must have the coccoon of my books enveloping me.  Surely, I'm not the only picky writer.

No, we all compose each in our own way.  Charles Dickens sat at his desk from nine in the morning until two in the afternoon, as Peter Ackroyd notes in his biography, Dickens:

When he returned to his study in the morning, everything was neatly and precisely arranged; a vase of fresh flowers on his desk....the desk itself always placed in front of the window so that he might look, unseeing, out at the world.  And he needed quiet, dead quiet; in Devonshire Terrace an extra door was added to keep out the noise.  He was surrounded by books.

It's no secret my kinship with Dickens runs deep.  I may not have his frenetic industry of talent, but I feel his passion for the craft.

Back to the desk.  In the photo above, you get a snapshot of what my 10x8 world looks like.  Like E. L. Doctorow, my desk has always faced the wall, leaving me to find my way out only through the sentences.  Besides, the view out a window would only serve to slow the writing process.  I'm the kind of person who is distracted by butterflies.

I work in the basement of our 1920 Craftsman house.  There are two paneled doors which open into the room from the rest of the basement.  The boiler ticks and hisses just outside my work area and I have a good view of the staircase and each morning, at 5:30, our black cat coming down, hesitant as a stalking panther.

My office space was originally designed to hold the previous owner's gun collection.  There are, of course, no firearms or ammunition here these days--only the weaponry which peppers my novel.

Every day, starting at 5 a.m., I sit at the desk my wife and I bought several years ago at either an antique store or a garage sale--my memory's a bit cloudy on the details.  The one thing I do know for certain is, I fell head over heels in love with this desk the minute I saw it.  It has a surface large as an ocean, rises to the perfect height to meet my forearms, and has a cut-out space tailored to the length of my legs.  The surface has a well-worn patina; my wife and daughter once put in many hours refinishing the desk for me one Father's Day.  I've since abused that gift by carpeting the surface with water rings and coffee stains, but all of those marks only serve to make this desk fit me like an aged glove.

Taking a tour of my desk in the photo above, starting at the left and going clockwise:

• the first two piles of books are an omnibus of Agatha Christie mysteries (I was reading The Mirror Crack'd when I took the picture), Paul Harding's Tinkers, and Ivan Doig's Work Song (which I'll be reviewing for New West).
• a box of Kleenex for my early-morning congestion
• another stack of someday-I'll-get-to-them books: The Library of America volume of Flannery O'Connor's collected works, Brad Gooch's biography of O'Connor, and The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps.
• a Vera Cruz Vanilla Yankee Candle (I'm a scent-whore)
• a blue glass of water
• a glass of Riesling (please note: this photo was not taken at 5 a.m.  I generally don't start drinking until noon.)
• my HP Pavilion laptop--the focal point of the desk and, in general, my writing life
• assorted gadgetry (speakers, modem, printer)
• page proofs for a short story which will be published in Connecticut Review later this year
• above the desk, I've taped an inspirational quote from Strunk and White
• and, to the right, you see the first two of seven bookcases which surround me like a womb in this writing space.  These are the classics--the Cathers, the Dickenses, the Faulkners, the Hemingways, the Melvilles, the Steinbecks, the Tolstoys, the Whartons, the Zolas.  They watch me with dusty stares and remind me that I'm just one puny writer sitting at a desk in a long pantheon of scribes,doing his best to get the words out of his head and onto paper.

Pretty Young Things

The New Yorker has mulled, culled, and ultimately anointed its "20 Under 40" list of promising fiction writers.  The last time the magazine pulled this kind of publicity stunt was 1999 and included such hot-and-future luminaries as David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Junot Diaz and Jhumpa Lahiri.  This decade's complete list (which will appear in next week's issue of The New Yorker):

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 32
Chris Adrian, 39
Daniel Alarcón, 33
David Bezmozgis, 37
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, 38
Joshua Ferris, 35
Jonathan Safran Foer, 33
Nell Freudenberger, 35
Rivka Galchen, 34
Nicole Krauss, 35
Yiyun Li, 37
Dinaw Mengestu, 31
Philipp Meyer, 36
C. E. Morgan, 33
Téa Obreht, 24
Z Z Packer, 37
Karen Russell, 28
Salvatore Scibona, 35
Gary Shteyngart, 37
Wells Tower, 37

Congratulations to all the young pups--though, at the half-ripe age of 39 (which is still in my rearview mirror) I'd hardly have thought of myself as "young."  Not even "young-ish."

Looking at the list, I'm wondering if editor Deborah Treisman and other staffers shouldn't have just gone with a larger list called "30 in Their 30s."  Only two of the 20 were in their 20s (a lot of 2s in that observation).  If the list is really supposed to focus on the best writers who are just breaking the horizon, it seems to me most of the energy should come from those on the younger side of the scale.  Or, was it too hard for The New Yorker to find sustainable talent among those fresh from MFA programs?

At any rate, the purpose of the list--regardless of who made it and who was left standing at the door behind the velvet rope--is to call public attention to fiction writers whose names are relatively unfamiliar to most readers.  It works for me: of the 20, I hadn't heard of Li, Mengestu, or Obreht.  Of the others on the list, I'd only read books by Bezmozgis and Packer.  But I really loved what I read.  My review of Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is here and my review of Bezmozgis' Natasha and Other Stories is here.  So that bodes well for the other 18, I think.

Others I might have added if I was king of the world?  These are just the ones I came up with, based on the books I've read in the past five years: Amanda Eyre Ward, Reif Larsen (The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet was only sporadically good, but I really loved the book's inventiveness), John Brandon, Joe Hill (to paraphrase Willie Nelson, the guy can scare the paint off a trailer hitch with his ghost stories), Kevin Brockmeier, Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), and Roy Kesey.

Soup and Salad: Book Break-Up, A Library Under the Gavel, Teeny-Tiny Library, Henry Roth's Final Chapter, Paris Review Blog, Feel-Good 'Shining'

On today's menu:

1.  At The Millions, Sonya Chung provides a taxonomy of the many ways she's given up on books: It's Not You, It's Me: Breaking Up With Books.  While I take exception to some of the books she quits mid-read (how could she not like Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke?  And James Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man--painful?  Really?), I can relate to the turbulent swirl of guilt and shame she feels while struggling through books she should like, but can't.  What I can't connect with, however, is how she's able to stop mid-page and quit the book forever.  I haven't abandoned ship on a novel since....well, I can't remember the last time I waved the white flag.  There have been a few books I've flung across the room, crying, "I'm through!  I'm through!"  But moments later, there I'll be, walking over to pick it up, murmuring, "I'm sorry...Didn't really mean it...Are you hurt?.....Here, let me bandage that rip in your dust jacket").  Unlike the 27-year marriage to my wife (approaching three decades of unadulterated comfort and joy), I will stick it out with a book long after the happiness erodes and is replaced by mediocrity.  This, along with surreptitious nose-picking and a love of Captain and Tennile, is one of my greatest character flaws. 

2.  Later this year, Sotheby's will auction off "one of the finest collections of first-edition books assembled in recent times."  Valued in the ballpark of £8m-£15m (that's $12-22 million for us Yanks), this collection from a single individual includes the first collected edition of Shakespeare poems (dating from 1640), a copy of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone "in its original cloth," and an inscribed edition of A Christmas Carol which Charles Dickens gave to his friend and confidant, the actor William Macready.  The mind reels, the mouth salivates.

3.  And now this from our British friends across the pond: Looking to re-purpose an obsolete telephone booth?  Convert it into the world's tiniest library!

4.  Henry Roth is an author I should have added to my list of Unread Classics I've Been Meaning to Get Around to One of These Lazy (Ha!) Afternoons.  And now I find that W.W. Norton is about to publish another of his posthumous novels?!  Stop the bus, please--I haven't even cracked open Call It Sleep.  What's really beautiful about the story behind the book is the fact that it was brought to life by a 32-year-old fiction editor at The New Yorker named Willing Davidson, "who in background and bearing couldn’t be less like the prickly, self-doubting Roth, but nevertheless felt a deep connection to his life and work."  I like the fact that his first name is Willing and that he took the time to sort through mountains of manuscript pages and cryptic notes on behalf of a dead writer who has been largely forgotten.

5.  Ladies and gentlemen, The Paris Review has entered the blogiverse:  "We have been looking for a way to keep in touch with our readers between issues."

6.  I leave you today with The Shining: The Feel-Good Movie of the Year.  The only thing that could make this funnier would be the late, great Mason Adams doing the voice-over.

"2,000 and counting" (an excerpt)

U.S. Army photo

Normally, I'd resist the urge to write a maudlin post in observance of Memorial Day.  There are plenty of well-meaning websites (complete with the Muzak version of "Some Gave All") and forwarded e-mails from your equally-well-meaning uncle to fill that void.  I purposely tried to avoid writing about Death in a Time of War for this day.

But recent circumstances have practically begged me to do otherwise.  Four days ago, the war in Afghanistan saw its 1,000th casualty.  Born on the 4th of July, Marine Cpl. Jacob C. Leicht was killed when he stepped on a land mine that ripped off his right arm.  His brother told a reporter: "He said he always wanted to die for his country and be remembered.  He didn't want to die having a heart attack or just being an old man. He wanted to die for something."  Unfortunately, history will remember Cpl. Leicht more for the number 1,000 on his corpse than for his qualities as a warrior, brother, and friend.

I was in Baghdad for the 2,000th casualty of the Iraq War.  It was a public affairs nightmare.

And, of course, that provided fodder for the novel I'm currently writing.  Starting with a post from one of the blogs I fabricated for Fobbit, here are a couple of excerpts featuring public affairs officer Lt. Col. Harkleroad.  And, yes, many parts of this do bear more than a passing resemblance to reality.

From the blog A Line in the Sand:

1,996.
For those of you marking your scorecards at home, that’s the tally as of right now, this instant, this nano-second before the next bomb is detonated, before the next grubby thumb presses down on the remote-controlled cell phone trigger or the next zealous Muslim chanting “Allah Akbar!” steers his car bomb toward a U.S. convoy and some unlucky soldier literally bites the bullet, dubiously privileged with his fifteen minutes of fame as Number 2,000.
But that’s four bodies down the road.
For now, the score hovers at 1,996.
Better mark it in pencil, though.  And have an eraser handy.
The media is drawn like jackals to a watering hole by the number 2,000.  It is a milestone, they say, one to be marked with a top-of-the-fold story.  They love the sensuous curve of the 2 and the plump satisfaction of those triple zeroes, lined up like perfect bullet holes—BAM! BAM! BAM!
2,000 is a number most Americans can hold in their minds and remember the awful waste of this war, this overlong field trip to the desert where we got ourselves tangled in a briar patch and stuck to the tar baby of terrorism.


* * * * *

The number 2,000 had been plaguing Stacie Harkleroad for weeks.  Each day brought a fresh round of tick marks, inching closer and closer to that grand total score of 2,000 American bodies—bullet-riddled, beheaded, and bomb-blown-to-smithereens.

Months ago—what now seemed like years—he had opened the latest issue of USA Today to read:  Fifty-eight American troops died in Iraq in February, the fewest fatalities since 54 died in July 2004, preliminary Pentagon statistics show.  Translating the death count into a daily rate, February’s losses were down sharply from January and less than half those in November, the war’s bloodiest month for U.S. forces.  The February figures raise the total U.S. death toll in the war to 1,490.

Even as Stacie folded the newspaper, bent his head and tucked into his sausage and eggs on that long-ago February morning, the body-o-meter was clicking over to 1,500, thanks to a suicide bomber who rammed his truck into a U.S. checkpoint twenty miles south of Salman Pak.

When Stacie got to his office, booted up his computer and read the e-mail from G-3 Ops, he stared at that figure—the 1 standing at attention, the 5 slouching, the zeros with their empty, shot-out innards.  It was such a nice, perfectly-shaped number—deceptively pretty, falsely clean.  Then he thought about trying to count 1,500 people (heck, let’s not even make it people—say, popsicle sticks, instead) and he realized how hard it would be to count, how exhausting to tally that volume of popsicle sticks.  He was sure he’d lose track halfway through—distracted by the image of sitting on the back porch with his mother, slurping at a Fudgsicle evaporating in the Tennessee heat—and he’d have to start over from the beginning.  One thousand, five hundred.  That was nearly half the number of soldiers in the division.

Now the figure seemed quaint, already antiquated.

An additional 496 bodies--plus another four unlucky souls this morning--had been added to the pile since February and this was rapidly becoming a problem, a whopper of a problem which lay across his shoulders like an iron mantle.

For the last two weeks, the Public Affairs Office had been besieged by phone calls from reporters, begging to be embedded with task force units which had suffered an unusually high body count.  This, the reporters said, would give them a greater chance of being on the scene when number 2,000 meets his (or her) fate.

The reporters are deplorable, yes, but who can blame them? Harkleroad thought.  They are merely fueled by ratings, which in turn are stoked by the American public, who in turn self-righteously deplore the media’s obsession with this grim milestone.  Round and round she goes…



[Later in the novel....]

When Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad learned the identity of Soldier Number 2,000, it caused him increased consternation and prolonged bouts of nose-bleeding.  From Number 1,990 onward, he’d been keeping track with tick-marks on the dry-erase board mounted on the wall next to his desk.

Private Ralph J. Egbert, KIA, Salman Pak.  Tick.
Sergeant First Class Israel Munoz, KIA, Sadr City.  Tick.
Specialist James D. Apgar, KIA, Sadr City.  Tick.
Private Ellis Wheeler Jr., KIA, Mosul.  Tick.
Private First Class Andrew C. Mount, KIA, Mosul.  Tick.
Second Lieutenant Erika Sheridan, KIA, Mosul.  Tick.
Specialist Isaiah D. Washington, KIA, Ramadi.  Tick.
Specialist Aaron L. Karst, KIA, Ramadi.  Tick.
Private Jamie Rosen, KIA, Ramadi.  Tick.

For days, he’d stared at that next blank spot, playing guessing games with gender, rank, location.  If he had his druthers, what would he, Eustace L. Harkleroad, prefer the 2,000th American casualty to be?  A Hispanic sergeant who leaves behind a wife and eight children in El Paso when his humvee hits a bad bump in the road and flips into a canal?  A milk-fed Midwestern boy, so quickly promoted to captain when he was barely five years out of West Point, who burns to a crisp in the back of an armored personnel carrier?  A black female medic stabbed to death by one of her patients, a crazed Local National whose bandages she’d been so lovingly, tenderly, heroically changing as he lay on a cot in the Combat Support Hospital when with a crescendoing growl he reared up, whipped out a boxcutter and sliced her jugular (investigation still pending)?  He prayed to God that Number 2,000 wouldn’t be just another bland, run-of-the-mill death—blah-blah patrol struck an IED in the neighborhood of blah-blah killing Private Joe Blah-Blah.  When it finally came, Harkleroad hoped the last tick mark would have the punch of drama, a heart-tugging story which would bring a misty tear to the eye of even the most callous, hard-drinking reporter in the Associated Press.  America deserved a grand, glorious death to mark this most ignoble of occasions (he could never use that phrase, of course, but he sure liked the sound of it).  “Where are you?” he asked the blank spot on his dry-erase board.  “Who are you?”

The Billboard of Fiction

While serving in Iraq five years ago, I knew I was onto something good, writer-wise.  This is the stuff of novels, I thought every day when I woke up.  You just can't make this shit up.  The deployment was handing me a book and, after 17 aimless years in the Army spent trying to figure out my purpose in the Military Machine, I knew I was in the right place at the right time.

If this sounds callous and self-serving, I apologize.  It's not my intent to trivialize war and death.  Just the opposite, in fact.  I'm trying to understand why I was in that country for a year and, in the bigger picture, why we as a country invaded, occupied, and stayed long after the welcome mat was yanked away.  Sure, I could write a memoir--and it would join the hundreds of others saturating the market right now--but for some reason, I need to filter my deployment experience through a novel.  It's only by painting on the billboard of fiction that I can make sense of what I saw over there.

Like one of Fobbit's characters, Chance Gooding Jr., I kept a daily journal during my year in Iraq.  The writing was intense and exhausting, leaving me little time for anything else in my down-time, but I knew I needed to capture as much of what surrounded me there in Camp Liberty (aka Fobbitville) as I could.

Later, bits and pieces of what I recorded found their way into the novel--sometimes verbatim, sometimes transmogrified by the imagination. Here is a typical journal entry, exactly five years ago to this day (I've changed some names to protect the innocent):

May 30, 2005:  I’m pulling sergeant of the guard duty again tonight—and plan to make some headway in Don Quixote while making sure everyone in our Trailer City can get a safe, restful night’s sleep.  My runner is a young, smiley-faced kid from the Judge Advocate General's office named Specialist Rizzuto—I knew him down in Kuwait but haven’t seen much of him since moving up here.  He’s telling me all about his work—“I work in post-trial” (whatever that means)—and how he and the JAG colonel have had to roam the streets of Baghdad looking for witnesses to testify at courts martial.  “I’ll tell ya, sergeant, we go places that most military convoys never dreamed of going.  We’re going down to neighborhoods which have never seen Americans before and they’re staring at us like we’re from another world.  And then one time last week we ran into an anti-American demonstration.”

“Hoo, boy,” I said.

“We turned tail and got out of there fast!”

Rizzuto tells me of other trials:  “We just got done sentencing a soldier to life in prison.  Pre-meditated murder of a local national.”

“Really?”  My eyebrows raise.  “I didn’t hear about that.”

“Nobody did.  It’s not like it was kept hush-hush or nothing.  But for some reason, nobody heard about it.  Just like they don’t hear about all those senior people who are getting busted, like E-7s and above who are getting court-martialed for all kinds of stuff.  Drunk and disorderlies—”

“Hold on,” I interrupt.  “Where are they getting this stuff?”

Rizzuto gives me a winkly little smile.  “Aw, come on, sergeant.  It’s out there for people to get.  Mostly KBR contractors—they’re the ones who’ll hook you up.”

“Man, that’s just stupid.”

“Speaking of stupid.  We had one sergeant first class in one of the brigades who got a little too…celebratory during the NCAA playoffs and he was going around to all the rooms.  Drunk and butt naked.”

* * *

Last night, at 10:00, I was lying on my bed reading Stephen King’s The Drawing of the Three and listening to Mozart on my headphones when I was jolted out of bed by a trailer-rattling BOOM.  I looked at my watch.  Awfully late for the terrorists; they’re usually off shift by now.  With the latest crackdown—the U.S. offensive called Operation Squeeze Play and the Iraqi offensive called Operation Lightning (Al-Barq)—I guess the terrorists are getting desperate….or more wily.

Six hours earlier, the insurgents launched an assault on the Baghdad Major Crimes Unit facility, where a lot of detainees are being kept.  They’d hoped to be able to spring their brothers in evil.  They attacked the MCU barracks with small-arms fire and RPGs, taking the Iraqi Police by surprise (though they quickly regrouped and started firing back).  Around the same time, they set off Improvised Explosive Devices and Vehicle-Borne IEDs at four different locations around the neighborhood, hoping to frustrate US efforts to come in and back up the besieged IPs.  We could hear all the chatter over the loudspeaker as it was unfolding.  At one point, one of the commanders radioed in, saying, “The IPs report they’re running out of bullets.”

That’s when I sat up and really started to pay attention.  This was like some crazy movie unfolding all around us.

The loudspeaker squawked again a few minutes later:  “The observation tower at Checkpoint 5 reports a large group of armed individuals—all dressed in black—moving toward BIAP.”

I pictured the black-clad jihadists jogging toward the airport.  If they conquered Baghdad International Airport, they’d easily move on into Camp Liberty.

A few minutes later, the threat had passed.  Nothing that a few well-aimed American bullets couldn’t take care of.

Eventually, reinforcements made it to the MCU facility and law and order was restored.

The smoke still hadn’t cleared when a sergeant major back in the Provost Marshal’s Office told me, “I don’t know what the final BDA (Battle Damage Assessment) is going to be, but it doesn’t look good for the terrorists.”

But now, at 10 p.m., this IED is loud enough to make me put my shoes on and step outside on my porch.  Above the gurgling hum of my air conditioning unit, I hear small-arms fire coming from just on the other side of Signal Hill.  Two red tracer bullets arc into the air like a tiny, out-of-season fireworks display.  I stand there listening to the near-distant brrrrrap! brrrrrap! of the .50-caliber machine guns.  I look around and see others standing out there, too—the orange fireflies of cigarettes glowing in the dark.  After five minutes, I go take a piss then return to my novel and, eventually fall into fitful sleep.

At the G-3 Sergeant Major’s meeting today, he tells us, “Just so you know, Tigerland got hit with a rocket last night.”

Tigerland is the area of Camp Liberty adjacent to our division headquarters.

“Somebody did get injured, but he’s okay—only minor wounds.  Still, scary for him and everybody around him on Tigerland.”

There is a moment of silence, then everyone else starts telling stories of what they’ve heard.

“Capt. Zipperer had a 7.62 round come through his roof last week.  When he woke up, there was the round sitting on the floor of his hootch.”

“I heard there was a rocket fired at a C-130 as it was taking off from BIAP last night.”

“Did you all hear the firefight at Temple Gate last night?  It must have gone on for a hour, hour-and-a-half.”

And then there was the specialist who was found on the ground near his unit’s motor pool, a bullet in his head.  His roommate found the body.  We’re still not sure what happened, but it’s likely one of two things: suicide or murder.  It’s strange to think of such a thing as good ole American homicide while we’re over here in a war zone.

Overall, though, today was the same-old, same-old. IED here, VBIED there. Here’s a typical Significant Activity report:

SIGACT 12 AT 1400 D/1-64 AR REPORTS A VBIED.   A BLUE DAEWOO SEDAN PULLED UP NEXT TO A STATIONARY M1 ABRAMS ON RTE PREDATORS AND EXPLODED.   NO CAUSALTIES, MINIMAL DAMAGE TO M1 ABRAMS TURRET.   1-64 AR CORDONED THE AREA AND CONDUCTED A POST BLAST ANALYSIS.   ONLY REMAINS RECOVERED FROM SUICIDE DRIVER WAS 1 HAND.   SUMMARY 1XAIF KIA 1X BLUE DAEWOO SEDAN DESTROYED

Something about that severed hand, though, makes me choke with pity.  Don’t these terrorists know they’re literally wasting their lives?  At least twice today, VBIEDs blew up “before they reached their objective.”  I hope they enjoy their 70 virgins because their deaths didn’t accomplish anything here, apart from making a few new road craters which Iraqi workers have to come repair.  I picture one of those local Iraqi workers picking up that sole-surviving hand.  Does he treat it with gentle pity?  Or, angry and bitter, does he mash it beneath the heel of his boot?

Down in the weeds with the sentences

An Army public affairs officer I worked with in Alaska was particularly fond of the phrase "down in the weeds" to describe nit-picking the details of the task at hand--as in, "This 853-page annual report really gets down in the weeds when it comes to counting the wrenches in the motor pool;" or, "Good God Almighty, that four-hour staff meeting would've been three-and-a-half hours shorter if G-3 Operations hadn't got down in the weeds with that PowerPoint lecture on training schedules."

He used "down in the weeds" like it was a bad thing.  But when it comes to writing, and especially the process of re-writing, spending some time hunkering low in the grass is a very good idea.  As I move through Fobbit sentence by sentence, I'm forced to question each adverb and judge the fate of every dangling participle.  I cut, I slash, I bind.  Leaning in this close, I'm examining the narrow lens of the sentence, and temporarily forsaking the wider aperture of the novel as a whole.

It's tough to amputate and even tougher to re-build.  But sometimes, I hit upon something that seems to work, a new image that arrives unnanounced on the scene.  I had that kind of moment this morning as I was working my way through a chapter where an infantry company has set up a security perimeter around a failed suicide bomber in a crowded Baghdad intersection.  The would-be terrorist crashed his car into the back of an armored vehicle and no one is certain if the explosives are inert or active.  An Explosive Ordnance Disposal team sends a robot out to investigate.

Here are the sentences as they appeared in the first draft:

Without warning, the half-dead man came to life. The whir and grrr of the robot had roused him from his stupor and now he was agitated, yelling at the robot, which stared back at him without blinking, despite the curses invoking Allah the terrorist hurled at it.

 After spending nearly half an hour in the weeds with these two sentences, they emerged as:

The half-dead man came to life. He coughed and a rope of blood spurted from his lips. The whir and grrr of the robot had roused him from his stupor and now he was agitated, taking it out on the robot, which stared back at him without blinking despite the curses invoking Allah the terrorist hurled at it.

"Without warning" seemed like too much fat, as if I needed an introductory build-up to what was about to happen with the next seven words.  Highlight, ctrl-X, and poof! they're gone.  I like the fact that "half-dead" is more prominent now, punching up the irony of the guy coming back to life.

Then it occured to me that we moved too abruptly from the terrorist regaining consciousness to him yelling at the EOD robot.  I thought hard, picturing the scene.  What would he do?  I saw him sitting up and coughing blood from the effort.  The image in my head suggested that word "rope" and once it was there on the page, I really liked it.

Next, I wondered if "yelling" wasn't too strenuous at this point.  The dude is weak from loss of blood (not to mention the fact that his skull is fractured and a half-dozen ribs are broken).  Would he really be yelling at this machine?  Better to let the hurled curses suggest the volume of his anger.  I decided to add "taking it out on the robot" because elsewhere I give the T-271 robot anthropomorphic qualities and this fit right in with the machine having its feelings hurt.

As with everything else at this stage, there's a good chance even those re-written sentences won't survive future pass-throughs with the editing weed-whacker.  But, at least for today, it was productive to spend a couple of hours crouched down among the sentences.

Tactile Pleasures

Embedded in Lisa Peet's wrapup of Day Two at BookExpo America at the Like Fire blog is a nifty story highlighting the tactile pleasures of books.  Peet has read several books on her Kindle device, but was left feeling vaguely dissatisfied by at least one novel, Paul Harding's Tinkers.  She writes:

I enjoyed it well enough, but on finishing I knew that I’d have to buy the book in print form as well.  I didn’t give much thought to the reason. It was a purely emotional response:  The book is as intricate as the tinker’s horse-drawn wagon, filled with rows of small wooden drawers, that it describes.  I wanted to hold it in my hands, flip back and forth and see words and paragraphs in relation to actual pages.  That’s not always necessary for everything I read, but it was for Tinkers.  In my case, it’s what the book wanted, and I can’t put it better than that.

I can't either.

I don't own a Kindle.  While I'm not morally opposed to them, I just don't see myself owning one any day soon.  Sure, there's something to be said for having multiple books in the palm of my hand, and I'm all for greening the environment, and Lord knows I couldn't live without the 13,000 songs on my iPod.  But the truth is, I can only read one Kindled book at a time.

Furthermore, when I read a book, I like to feel it.  Not the cool synthetic, amalgamated shell of an e-reader, but the fibrous textiles of individual books.  The book as an object--from the cover art to the velvet whisper of turning pages--is as much a part of the reading experience as the contents.  Even now, I can recall the wrist-ache from holding Don Quixote while lying on my cot in my hooch in Baghdad; or the mylar-covered jackets of library books I read as a boy which were grimed (and germed) with a hundred handprints; or the chemically-comforting scent rising from new books.

Books are more than e-ink words scrolling across a screen, they are individual works of art.  They are like us: tall and skinny; short and over-fed; sleek and flashy; tattered and torn.  I often walk along my bookshelves, running my eyes over the broken-spined, the water-warped, the insect-nibbled.  Each one has something to say to me.

I like the idea of books calling to us; and, by extension, authors calling to readers.  If each of my books has something to say to me, then there are more than 6,000 voices coming from my shelves at this moment.  I know I'll never be able to answer all of them, so I somewhat serendipitously let them find me.

By coincidence, at nearly the same moment bookseller Michelle Filgate was putting a copy of Tinkers in Lisa Peet's hands at BEA on Wednesday, my wife was putting one into mine.  Yesterday was my birthday, but my wife couldn't wait to give me this book (if for no other reason than to bring an end to my insistence that we stop at every @$#&$!! bookstore in Montana to see if it was in stock).  I was at a day-long business meeting in Missoula Wednesday and when we met for lunch, she put a plastic shopping bag in my hand, delivering the gift with a knowing smile.  There, sandwiched between two pairs of jeans from Old Navy, was Tinkers.  While I appreciated the jeans, I have a feeling Tinkers will give me hours of deeper and richer pleasures.

I reached in the bag and drew it out.  Lisa Peet is right when she says that it's "a lovely little smooth-covered paperback, light as a bird."  As I held the book in my hand, it felt like it wanted to take flight.

Want more serendipity?  I just now opened Tinkers to a random page to see if I could find a choice passage to quote for this blog post.  These are the first words my eyes fell on (page 44):

This is a book.  It is a book I found in a box.  I found the box in the attic.  The box was in the attic, under the eaves.  The attic was hot and still.  The air was stale with dust.  The dust was from old pictures and books.  The dust in the air was made up of the book I found.  I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it.

I'd like to tell you that I thumbed through the pages until I found this most-perfect passage.  But the truth is, the book knew what it wanted.  It called to me and I answered.

Soup and Salad: "My Life With the Lincolns," Shirley Jackson, Mark Twain tells all, Bill Murray

On today's menu:

1.  Gayle Brandeis talks to largehearted boy about the music that infuses her new novel My Life With the Lincolns in the website's regular feature Book Notes.  Like the rest of largehearted boy's site, Book Notes blends books and music in a very cool way--sort of like an "extra" on a DVD--where writers discuss how music directly or indirectly influenced their book.  (For Fobbit, it would definitely have to be U2's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb--but I'll save that discussion for a future blog post).  Brandeis' new book sounds like a good one and I'm adding it to my wish list right now.  I really enjoyed her The Book of Dead Birds; and when I was in Iraq, she was kind enough to send me an early draft of the novel which eventually grew into Self Storage.  If you haven't read any of her work, today's as good a time to start as any.

2.  Helen Oyeyemi nicely dissects Shirley Jackson in a review at The Barnes and Noble Review:  "Like Poe, Jackson repeatedly linked chills and laughter."  If I failed to mention it earlier, Jackson is also high on my reading bucket list.

3.  Someone who's not on my bucket list, but who famously kicked his own bucket on at least two separate occasions?  Mark Twain.  I know, I know, I should bow down and revere Mr. Clemens, but he has never clicked with me.  Somehow, I got off on the wrong foot with him, and though Life on the Mississippi is competently written, it's just not the be-all, end-all.   Same goes for Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.  In fairness, I probably should give Twain another try, but right now that's so far down on the list, it's below the bucket.  Even so, I'm very intrigued by the news that his autobiography, sealed for 100 years, will soon be released.  Is this just another publicity stunt from the grave, or will the book really reveal some scandle which Twain wanted to keep secret for a century?  What could be in there which needed to be kept from readers until now?  A bastard child prone to painting fences?  A mistress with the pet-name "Puddin'head"?  Or perhaps the revelation that "Mark Twain" is not a riverboat navigation term but the name of a popular 19th-century toothpaste?

4.  Bill Murray!  Better yet, Bill Murray!!  (The dude deserves two exclamation points)  It's time to celebrate the ingenuity of Baby Ruths floating in the country club pool.  Paste Magazine opines on the Top 10 BMs.  I have no quibble with what's on there (despite never having seen Ghostbusters, Broken Flowers, or Lost in Translation), but I probably would have swapped out one of their picks for what I believe is an equally-great BM: his endearing camp counselor in Meatballs ("It just doesn't matter!  It just doesn't matter!").

Who is Hugh Walpole and Why Has He Invaded My Library?

When I tell you the story of how I met Hugh Walpole, I’d have to start off by saying something grandiose like “It was one of those moments when luck, timing and commerce converged.”

Mr. Walpole, for as much as I know him by now, would appreciate grandiosity, mottled with pomposity.  And, by the way, when I say “met Hugh Walpole,” I am strictly speaking in the biblio sense of the word.  The dude’s been dead for 69 years.

I discovered him on a bookshelf, dirty with neglect, in the garage of a modest house in the foothills of Butte, Montana.  My wife and I, always the intrepid antique-hunters, had gone there for an estate sale advertised in the local paper.  We found the usual assortment of eight-track tapes, corroded hand tools, macramé potholders, and photo albums featuring children beaming at us from the yellow-tinted 70s.  The usual ho-hum junk for a dime.

Then I stepped into the garage, saw the bookcase in the corner and those two rows of tattered-but-proud spines.  I stepped a little closer and saw that nearly every title was written by the same man: Sir Hugh Walpole.

Hugh who?

His name rang a bell in my head.  But only faintly.  I was familiar with Hugh Walpole in the same way I was familiar with mascarpone cheese: heard of it, never tried it.

I started pulling the volumes off the shelf and flipping the liver-spotted pages. Above the Dark Tumult, The Bright Pavilions, The Secret City, The Inquisitor.  The titles seemed to promise darkness, light, and mystery.  The volumes had all been printed in the 1920s, 30s and 40s; only one still wore its dust jacket and nearly all of them were stained with water, coffee rings and (as I’d learn after reading a few passages) tears.  The books puffed dust and sighed with age when I opened the covers.  There were nearly two dozen Walpoles there on that shelf and I wanted them all.

The man running the estate sale—mid-sixties, rumpled clothes, stained teeth—walked over and asked, “You interested in them books?”

I tried to un-widen my eyes.  As a book collector in the advanced stages of delirium, it’s best not to play your hand too early.  “Oh,” I coughed, “I might take a look at one or two of them.”

“Well, if you want ’em, I’ll give ’em to you for 50 cents each.”

Holy Mother of Book-Glue!  My veins constricted and my ear lobes started to tingle.

Five minutes later, I was toting a box brimming with Walpole out to my car.  I was moving at a half-trot, hoping I could get in, start the car, and drive away before the poor man realized he’d just been robbed of what looked like genuine literary gems.

At the time, I thought I’d snagged Walpole’s entire canon.  Even then I knew he was an author who had languished into obscurity and if I, compulsive reader that I am, had never heard of his works, then surely he couldn’t have written much more than I had in the box sloshing around in the back seat.

Wrong-o, buck-o!

A Wiki-search soon revealed that Sir Hugh Walpole had once been a word factory--his pumping pistons and chugging levers going 24/7 for several decades in the early 20th century.  Starting with The Wooden Horse in 1909 and continuing until his death of a heart attack in 1941 he wrote with the kind of ambition only someone destined for literary glory could sustain.  By all accounts, he strained too hard for that glory, eventually earning dismissal by the critics and a withering caricature by Somerset Maugham in his novel Cakes and Ale.  Walpole’s obituary in The Times gave him the kind of back-handed slap no writer deserves: “He had a versatile imagination; he could tell a workmanlike story in good workmanlike English; and he was a man of immense industry, conscientious and painstaking.”

“Immense industry,” indeed: over the span of a three-decade career, he wrote 36 novels, five volumes of short stories, two plays and three volumes of memoirs.  Not to mention the screenplay adaptation of one of my favorite Charles Dickens movies, the 1935 version of David Copperfield.

So what happened, Hugh?  Where did it all go wrong?  Was your fiction really so third-rate that you so quickly tumbled off the literary radar, forever muted to the obscurity of garage sales, flea markets and estate sales?  As at least one blogger has noted: “His career stands as a salutary reminder of the fragility of literary reputation.”

Nonetheless, at one point someone must have liked him enough to buy each new release when it hit the bookstore in Butte, Montana.  And not just “bought,” but “read.”  Even as I left the estate sale, I felt certain that whoever once lived there had devoured each and every one of those Walpoles.  I think of her—for I really suspect it was a woman of leisure—absorbed in these novels while outside her window the hills of Butte, Swiss-cheesed with mines, belched toxic smoke.  Inside, she lounged in her parlor, Debussy on the Victrola, and let herself be carried away to England’s Lake District on flowery clouds of Walpole's words.

The thin papery sky of the early autumn afternoon was torn, and the eye of the sun, pale but piercing, looked through and down.  The eye’s gaze travelled on a shaft of light to the very centre of the town.  A little scornful, very arrogant, it surveyed the scene.
--The Inquisitor (1935)

As I do with every book that comes into my library, I opened each of the Walpoles and read the first few paragraphs, knowing that this might very well be all I ever read of the book (sadly, my rate of book intake far exceeds my rate of reading).  From the first word, I found Walpole to be a lively, engaging writer who pulled me into his books with both hands grasping my shoulders:

No one perhaps in the United Kingdom was quite so frightened as was Nathalie Swan on the third day of November, 1924, sitting in a third-class carriage about quarter to five of a cold, windy, darkening afternoon. Her train was drawing her into Paddington Station, and how she wished that she were dead!
--Hans Frost (1929)

Miss Henrietta Maxwell, when she was about thirty-five years of age, suffered suddenly from misfortune.  She had been for many years quite alone in the world, an only child whose parents had been killed in a carriage accident when she was ten years of age.  Then she had acquired an almost masculine independence and self-reliance.  Until lately things had gone well with her. Without being rich, she had had, until that fatal August of 1914, quite enough to live upon.  She had taken a house in St. Johns’ Wood, not far from Lord’s, with an adorable garden, paneled dining room, and a long music room at that back.  She had soon loved this house so much, so deeply, that she had bought it.  Then, when the war came, she threw herself completely into war work, nursed in France, worked with desperate seriousness and the severity of a brigadier general over those whom she commanded.  Towards the end of 1917 she broke down, had insomnia, came back to England to rest, found it a much longer business than she had expected, and was not really her old self again until after the Armistice.  Perhaps she would never be her old self again. Before the war she had not known what nerves were. Now she knew very well.
--“Chinese Horses,” from The Silver Thorn (1928)

And this, perhaps my favorite among the first-paragraphs I read:

Death leapt upon the Rev. Charles Cardinal, Rector of St. Dreots in South Glebeshire, at the moment that he bent down towards the second long drawer of his washhand-stand; he bent down to find a clean collar.  It is in its way a symbol of his whole life, that death claimed him before he could find one.

At one moment his mind was intent upon his collar; at the next he was stricken with a wild surmise, a terror that even at that instant he would persuade himself was exaggerated.  He saw before his clouding eyes a black pit.  A strong hand striking him in the middle of his back flung him contemptuously forward into it; a gasping cry of protest and all was over.  Had time been permitted him he would have stretched out a hand towards the shabby black box that, true to all miserly convention, occupied the space beneath his bed.  Time was not allowed him.  He might take with him into the darkness neither money nor clean clothing.
--The Captives (1920)

In all honesty, there are some clues which point to Walpole’s fall from fame: he is too in love with the comma; subordinate clauses swell the sentences; and he never turned away an adjective begging to be written.

But yet, there is something about his writing which draws me in, makes me want to read more, despite the obvious flaws bogging down the pages.

Leafing further into The Silver Thorn, I come across a couple of passages from two short stories which tickle the bibliophile in me:

“What a jolly lot of books you have!” Foster turned round and looked at Fenwick with eager, gratified eyes. “Every book here is interesting! I like your arrangement of them too, and those open bookshelves—it always seems to me a shame to shut up books behind glass!”
--“The Tarn”

In [Miss Maxwell’s] heart of hearts she thought that nobody’s books looked quite so perfect in their shelves as did hers.  They seemed to like the room that they were in.  They wanted to show her that they did, and there was so much sun in that library that their hearts were thoroughly warm, and some of the most cynical books in the world became quite amiable and kindly from living in that particular corner of that library.  In fact, after reading Stendhal one winter very seriously, she moved him bag and baggage from the rather chilly corner by the door and put him in the sun-drenched spot near the window and hoped it would do him good.
--“Chinese Horses”

Well, I’m sorry to report that, due to the location of the Ws in my own library, Mr. Walpole’s books will have to lodge in the passageway just outside my main library in the basement.  It’s a dark and sometimes chilly location, but I hope that the warmth of Walpole’s sentences will brighten the gloom of Virginia Woolf, Richard Yates, and Emile Zola.

I could be entirely mistaken about the perceived charms of Walpole’s writing.  After I start reading his novels, he may turn out to be like that cool guy you meet at the party who seems full of wit and outrageous exploits, but who—after you get to know him and have heard him drone through the same stories for the fourth time—turns out to be nothing more than a pompous blowhard.   If that’s the case, Mr. Walpole, you deserve your cold, dark shelf in the basement.   Otherwise, I'm glad to have made your acquaintance.