Help Me Name My Novel and You Could Win a Walk-On Role in its Pages

Dear Blog Readers,

We've had a marvelous relationship, you and I.  I've told you about books I love and you've gone out and bought them.  I've hosted contests and you've enthusiastically sent in your entries (some of you have even won).  I've written about my sex life and you've said "Enough already!"

But now, I really truly need your help: give me a catchy, sure-fire title for my novel.  I'm at the point where my agent is ready to start making the rounds of publishing houses, but he's a little "eh" on the manuscript's current title (Fobbit).  I've brainstormed a few ideas, but none of them really leap off the page into my lap.  I'm hoping somebody out there might have a better idea, something that will take my agent from "eh" to "Hey!"

Fobbit has been the working title of my novel about the Iraq War from the start and I am probably too tightly married to the name at this point.  I wanted something simple, direct and memorable (like Catch-22, for instance), but now I'm wondering if it's too obscure for the average reader.  The term is a derogatory military put-down for support soldiers of modern warfare, combining "FOB" (Forward Operating Base) and "Hobbits" (Tolkien's characters who are afraid to leave the shire).  This paragraph from the early pages of the novel gives further explanation:

They were Fobbits because, at the core, they were nothing but marshmallow.  Crack open their chests and in the space where the heart should be beating with courage and selfless regard, you’d find a pale, gooey softness which only went a little way in explaining why they fiercely clung to their desks at Forward Operating Base Triumph, home to the U.S. military task force headquarters at the western edge of Baghdad.  If the FOB was a mother’s skirt, then they were pressed hard against the pleats.

Here's the pitch for the novel--the brief summary to capture editors' interest (I'm open for suggestions on how to improve the pitch, too):

Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding Jr. never wanted to be a soldier, but after 16 years as a journalist in the Army, he’s deployed to Iraq in 2005 as part of a public affairs team.  In the cubicle jungle of military headquarters, he must juggle the demands of phone calls from CNN, compile reports of daily body counts, and placate a boss prone to nosebleeds.  Gooding lives the safe, air-conditioned life of a rear-echelon soldier, but out on the streets of Baghdad, it’s a different story.  The novel also follows a platoon of combat infantry soldiers led by Sergeant Brock Lumley—another career soldier who is also questioning his role as a warrior stuck between bringing peace to a country that may not want it and carrying out the orders of his less-intelligent superior officers, one of whom takes impetuous action on a mission which might just spark an international scandal.  Gooding, the public affairs soldier, must eventually deal with the media fallout from the actions by Lumley’s men.  Gooding and Lumley reflect the two different experiences of the military in combat: the boots-on-the-ground infantryman and the rear-echelon support soldier.  A dark comedy in the vein of Catch-22, my novel highlights the insanity of war and the media circus that fuels it.

For excerpts from the novel, visit this page to get a better feel for the tone of the book.

I was noodling around with ideas for new titles last night and this is what I came up with:

Soft Men, Hard Bullets
The Smog of War
The Soft Soldier Goes to War
Of Men and Marshmallows

Surely you can do better.  If you have a suggestion for a new title (or if you think I should leave well enough alone and stick with Fobbit), please send it to david.abrams@gmail.com

If I like it (or, better yet, my agent calls me in the middle of doing handsprings and cartwheels), there's a chance I'll give you a small, walk-on role as a character in the final draft of the novel.  At the very least, you'll get a thank-you from me in the acknowledgements and a special Certificate of Appreciation printed from my computer and mailed directly to your home address.

Words of Wisdom: Sailing the Ocean in a Bathtub With Stephen King

Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it's like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub.  There's plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.  If I write rapidly, putting down my story exactly as it comes into my mind, only looking back to check the names of my characters and the relevant parts of their back stories, I find that I can keep up with my original enthusiasm and at the same time outrun the self-doubt that's always waiting to settle in.

--Stephen King, from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft


Photo by Jill Krementz

Where the Red Fern Grows: A Boy, Two Dogs and a Pillow Damp With Tears

I've been thinking about Where the Red Fern Grows for about three weeks--ever since the Jackson Hole Writers Conference when Brady Udall (The Lonely Polygamist) interrupted his talk about the structure of storytelling for a five-minute digression on Wilson Rawls' 1961 novel.  Udall had been telling us about how he grew up in a large Mormon family where everyone told stories ("which were essentially lies") and how one of the books that made the deepest impact on him as an early reader was Where the Red Fern Grows.  "It's a story which is built on a simple desire--that of a man longing for his past.  If you remember, it's narrated by an adult who goes on to tell the story of his boyhood with two dogs.  All this storyteller wants to do is return to the hills and valleys and streams of his Ozark youth."

I could tell Udall loved the book as much as I did.

A decade ago, I wrote an appreciation of Where the Red Fern Grows for another website.  I decided to pull it out of storage, blow off the dust, and post it here.  Feel free to chime in with your own thoughts on Where the Red Fern Grows, or whatever book of your youth got you all verklempt.

*     *     *

In 1974, I was skinny, had a bad stutter and dreamed of living in a world populated only with dogs. In my 11-year-old fantasy, dogs would rule the planet, wielding not an iron paw, but a kind of gentle, slobbery democracy: “with liberty, justice and Milk-Bones for all...”  Planet of the Poodles rather than Planet of the Apes.

Short of organizing a Fido for Prez campaign, however, I had to settle for the world in which I lived where two-legged beasts made all the rules.

Still, in my heart, canines were king. Girls had their horses, I had my hounds. To give you some idea of how passionate I was about dogs, let me quote briefly from a semi-autobiographical story I once wrote:

I was immersed in the knowledge of dogs. It was a communion of canis, a baptism of bow-wow. My bedroom walls were papered with posters of St. Bernards, Afghans, Pointers, Dalmatians. Above the head of my bed hung an American Kennel Club chart of all the dog breeds. I referred to it constantly, like the periodic table of elements.

I wrote poems about dogs. I sketched portraits of dogs with No. 2 pencils. I subscribed to magazines like Dog World and Dog Fancy. I checked out boy-and-dog books from the library and read them like illuminated manuscripts. The Gospels According to Old Yeller, Big Red and Lassie.

I had a dog--a one-year-old Labrador Retriever and I shouldn't have to tell you he was my best friend. I went everywhere with that dog and he went everywhere with me. With his oversize paws and warm fur he wore like a baggy suit, he calmed me.  He smoothed my stuttering tongue so I didn’t get stuck, like a revving engine, on m’s and n’s.  He was my tonic and I kept him at my side always.  He couldn't follow me into the post office or the library, but I'd wrap his leash around the bike rack outside and he'd sit there patiently waiting for me.

One day, I emerged from the library holding a book with a scuffed and scratched cover. The binding was loose and many of the pages were (ahem) dog-eared. It had obviously been well-read and well-loved.

Little did I know I was about to join the thousands of readers who read and re-read that book to the point of disrepair. The book was Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls and, at the tender age of 11, I had just discovered my New Testament.

The book affected me in ways that are still difficult to describe.  Some people remember what they were doing when the space shuttle exploded or who gave them their first kiss or how they felt when they were robbed at gunpoint for the first time.  Me, I remember holding Where the Red Fern Grows and thinking how the protective mylar cover was sticky and grimy from a hundred hands which had gone before me.  And I remember the autumn colors of that cover, the boy and his dogs walking through a leafy forest.  And I remember thinking this book had a strange, girly title for a story about coon-hunting.

When I walked out of the library that day, Fern tucked under my arm, I had no idea what was in store for me. I untied my dog and we walked home--me humming an aimless, happy tune; him, panting and bumping the side of my leg with an impatient "let's-frolic" nudge. I looked down and shook my head. "Sorry. Can't play right now. I've got this new book to read." He licked my hand, as if he understood.  Later, he came into the bedroom with me and curled against my feet as I opened the pages of that battered, hand-grimed book.

It didn't take me long to realize I was reading my new Canis Gospel. There, at the start of Chapter Two, were these words:

I suppose there's a time in practically every young boy's life when he's affected by that wonderful disease of puppy love. I don't mean the kind a boy has for the pretty little girl that lives down the road. I mean the real kind, the kind that has four small feet and a wiggly tail, and sharp little teeth that can gnaw on a boy's finger; the kind a boy can romp and play with, even eat and sleep with.

I was ten years old when I first became infected with this terrible disease. I'm sure no boy in the world had it worse than I did. It's not easy for a young boy to want a dog and not be able to have one. It starts gnawing on his heart, and gets all mixed up in his dreams. It gets worse and worse, until finally it becomes almost unbearable.

Reading those paragraphs now, they resound with treacly sentiment.  But back then, in 1974, I sat up, fully alert. Mr. Rawls was writing about me. His words struck a tuning fork inside me and I started humming along.  I had no trouble imagining I was a boy named Billy with an unbearable case of puppy love.

I read on, transfixed and breathless. My mother called me for dinner, I asked to be served in my room. My father said "Let's go for a family drive," I said "Go without me." My dog went unfed, I felt only the slightest guilt. As far as I was concerned, I was out chasing raccoons in the Ozark mountains with a boy and his two dogs.

For those who never read the book or saw the movie, Where the Red Fern Grows is the standard boy-and-his-dog story that another of my favorite authors, Jim Kjelgaard, was fond of writing about. What sets Rawls' book apart from Kjelgaard's classics like Big Red and Outlaw Red, is the gentle, homespun tone that settles over the pages like molasses.

Similar to an episode of The Waltons, Rawls' book is set in Oklahoma during the 1930s. It tells the story of young Billy who, as I already pointed out, has puppy love in the worst way. His family can't afford the kind of coon hounds Billy wants, so the boy works hard for two years to earn enough money ($40) to send away for the dogs he saw advertised in the newspaper.

He then walks about 40 miles (barefoot!) to the train depot to claim his mail-order hounds. Along the way, he encounters a gang of town bullies which leads to one of the many life-lessons Rawls seems to draw from his own childhood. The book is as much about finding your place in the world as it is about finding the right kind of dog to have by your side.

Billy arrives at the depot and, finally, the long-awaited moment arrives when the stationmaster uncrates the dogs:

      Getting a claw hammer, he started tearing off the top of the box. As nails gave way and boards splintered, I heard several puppy whimpers. I didn't walk over. I just stood and waited.
      After what seemed like hours, the box was open. He reached in, lifted the pups out, and set them down on the floor.
      "Well, there they are," he said. "What do you think of them?"
      I didn't answer. I couldn't. All I could do was stare at them.
      They seemed to be blinded by the light and kept blinking their eyes. One sat down on his little rear and started crying. The other one was waddling around whimpering.
      I wanted so much to step over and pick them up. Several times I tried to move my feet, but they seemed to be nailed to the floor. I knew the pups were mine, all mine, yet I couldn't move. My heart started acting like a drunk grasshopper. I tried to swallow and couldn't.

Billy names the dogs Old Dan and Little Ann (after seeing the names carved in a heart on a sycamore tree) and the three become inseparable. There are coon hunts, cracker-barrel advice from Grandpa, deaths, and a final tragic confrontation with a mountain lion. Rawls details the trio's ensuing adventures with such sensitivity and detail that there's little doubt he's writing directly from the heart.

The story builds to such a sad, "say-it-isn't-so" conclusion that I had to set it aside several times before I reached the last page. My nose prickled with the onset of tears and it was only a matter of time before my pillow got all soggy.  I sat up in bed, reached forward and scratched my dog’s ears. “C’mon, boy,” I said in a husky voice, “let’s go outside and throw a Frisbee for a little bit.”

But when I came back half an hour later, the scuffed-cover book was waiting for me in the same place I’d left it. I drew a shaky breath and lay back down, my head on my unbearable pillow, my dog at my feet.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s confession time:

Where the Red Fern Grows is the only book I’ve ever read (and, remember, I read like you breathe) that has made me cry. I struggled through the last 15 pages, my throat seizing up and great salty tears waterfalling off my cheeks. My dog looked up, whined, and nosed the side of my foot. “It’s okay, boy,” I whispered.

But it was not okay. I would never be okay from that moment on. Mr. Rawls had built a door for me to step through—from endlessly-happy boyhood to the cautious world of adults where sorrow could rise up quickly and strike like a viper. Since then, I’ve done my fair share of crying at movies* but I have never ever shed a tear over the printed word since that day 26 years ago. Somehow, Rawls makes the reader so attached to this boy and his dogs that when there is sorrow and loss on the page, there is also sorrow and loss in the reader’s heart. It is catharsis to the nth degree.

[*The Scene: The lobby of the Teton Theater in Jackson, Wyoming.
The Time: 9 p.m. on a summer’s night in 1975. The 7 p.m. show has just ended.
The Action: David Abrams is being carried—yes, carried!—out of the theater by his parents, one on each arm. David is sobbing, blubbering beyond all control. It is a Biblical wailing and gnashing of teeth. He is an embarrassment to all who know him.
The Movie?: Well, duh. Where the Red Fern Grows.]

Brief website research reveals that Wilson Rawls spent a dirt-poor childhood in Oklahoma and was an eighth-grade dropout. Inspired by Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, the young Rawls dreamed of someday writing a book that generations would treasure. At the time, he was too poor to even buy paper and pencils.

As an adult, he started writing stories, but he soon got discouraged because of his lack of education. No publisher would buy a story that was filled with spelling and grammar errors. In complete despair, he burned all of his manuscripts. When his wife learned of this, she asked him to write one of them again--for her sake, if nothing else.

He sat down and, for the next three weeks, he wrote nonstop—not even pausing for punctuation—and churned out a 35,000-word manuscript. He gave it to his wife and left the house, unable to face what he thought would be her disappointment in him.

Disappointment? Hardly!

His wife cleaned up the grammar and together they submitted it to Saturday Evening Post which then serialized that “disappointing” story. Doubleday quickly picked up on it and published the tale in 1961—thirteen years before a dog-brained boy in Wyoming walked out of the county library with a copy of that same book under his arm.

Wilson Rawls only published one other book, Summer of the Monkeys, before his death in 1984.

As a postscript, let me add that Where the Red Fern Grows has continued to reverberate to the next generation of readers. Two months ago, my 11-year-old daughter brought a copy of the book home with her from the school library. Its cover was creased, its pages were dog-eared.

I was with her when she finished reading that book. We were driving home from the supermarket and she finally got up the courage to read those last 15 pages. I drove in silence, the air between us fragile and moist. When I dared to sneak a glance at her, she’d closed the book and was staring wordlessly out the window. A single tear—the first of many—was working its way down her cheek.

My First Time: Rae Bryant

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. Today's guest is Rae Bryant, author of the just-released short story collection The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals from Patasola Press.  Her stories have appeared in BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review), Opium Magazine, and PANK, among other publications and have been nominated and short-listed for several awards.  Flavorwire had this to say about her work: “Will make you simultaneously laugh and cringe at the squeamish awkwardness of post-one night stand intimacies…witty…strangely fantastical and familiar.”  Bryant lives outside Washington D.C. where she is the founding editor of Moon Milk Review, a nonprofit print and online literary and arts journal.  Her website can be found here.

My First Rooftop Party

Place a rooftop virgin on Le Bain in the West Village. Lay a foggy spring Hudson below. Give the virgin wine and crepes and tell her, this, my dear, is publishing. This is New York. This is where you should want to be. It won’t much matter anymore, the fog, or maybe she’ll believe the fog is everything, an aesthetic necessity like impressionist gloom below a mountaintop. Bright and interesting and streets and cars, statues and liberties, are all wasted below the mountaintop.

On a rooftop in New York, the literati are svelte, fluid sculptures in black suits and dresses, leggings, full-mouths and considerations. Some even grin. They wear piercing, vacant eyes. The virgin will study the eyes. She will wonder how long it will take to develop these eyes like cocktail ironies and how long it will take to lose her first time rooftop sensibilities. Literati never towel drape when walking from bed to shower, couch to table, nor do they cover their breasts after sex. In this crowd, bodies are communal like intentions, and this will make the rooftop virgin nervous. She’ll wonder if losing her virginity will hurt. Will it be in degrees of cramping gesticulations or apathy, the way the svelte absently move and respond to collectives around them, everyone placeholders of themselves. They are there, but not really. They are across the roof already, speaking and air kissing to different collects, measuring stratospheres like cord lengths of invisible pissing because to actually pull it out and piss off a rooftop would be uncouth. Cliché. It is the metaphorical pissing that is vogue now. Tomorrow, it will be actual, after the release of the street artist, who now sits in a jail cell. He was caught pissing off his East Village rooftop through the fly of his jeans, top buttoned. Tomorrow, everyone will love him, the artist. They will philosophize his pissing and the zipper cuts on his penis and how he conceptualized pissing through his fly off a rooftop. He will get media coverage. And the literati will curse their short-sightedness for not being the first to see the potential of it all. Such a simple idea. They will empathize with the genitalia blood and the stylization of the arc, how the piss left a dark stain down the brick front of the building across the street. Then they will sign the artist for a three book deal and say things like, did you need stitches? Penis stitching is marketable.

Literati say things with their eyes. They build contracts and whisper boldness. Propose intimacies. Rooftop virgins should be aware. The whispers come with very real possibilities.

Flavorpill/Electric Literature with Harper Perennial BEA Party — The Standard, May 23, 2011

 

Soup and Salad: John Updike rests in peace, Bookstores charge admission to author readings, Two "Best Short Stories" lists, Trials & tribulations of a novelist's first book deal

On today's menu:

1.  John Updike's family holds a memorial service two years after his death.  From the local newspaper:  Those who came to honor the prolific Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer, praised for his literary "Rabbit" series and the chronicling of late 20th century American life in many novels, short stories, essays and poems, read from his works and witnessed the marking of his Pennsylvania resting place with a New England-style slate memorial.  Carved by his younger son, Michael J. Updike, 52, Newbury, Mass., the black marker is highlighted at its top with a wry, smiling facial portrait of Updike with attached angel's wings, as if the author's soul is transcending to heaven, his spirit living on.  At the marker's bottom are carvings of a scythe, representing the divine harvest, an hourglass for the shortness of life and a skeleton for the fragility of life, according to Michael...."I started the memorial last year, but it took awhile because I did it at my leisure," son Michael said. "You could say working on it was therapeutic, but we (the family) also felt Pennsylvania needed some special recognition of him."


2.  By now you've probably heard some independent bookstores are charging patrons to attend author appearances ("Come Meet the Author, but Open Your Wallet").  The Millions helps put it in perspective in this article: "...if open access to readings diminishes, will readers grow more familiar with an author’s brand than with the real person behind a text? Considering that packaging and promotion are just as much part and parcel with being writer as creating content, why shouldn’t an author’s public appearances be monetized? Writers have increasingly become products in and of themselves while getting paid less and less for their literary artifacts."
What do you think?  Would you pay to hear an author read from his/her work?  If so, which author(s) would make you open your wallet?  Sound off in the comments section below.


3.  The Library of America's Reader's Almanac blog examines two "Best Short Stories" lists--one from 2011 compiled by One Story, one from 1914 by the New York Times.  Most of the results are predictable; but there are some writers from the 1914 list who have slipped off the shelf into obscurity.  Irvin S. Cobb, anyone?


4.  Speaking of obscurity: I'd never heard of novelist Alex Shakar before, but he has an interesting story to tell The Millions about his first book deal back in 2000:

      “We’re closing in on a deal,” my agent told me on the phone. “I’m just turning him upside-down now and shaking him for loose change.”
      It was midday on a Monday in early August of the year 2000. The Nasdaq, rested from its breather in the spring, was sprinting back up over 4,000 toward its March peak. Vice President Gore, demolishing the Bush son’s early lead, was pulling even in the polls. TV commercials depicted placid investors being wheeled on gurneys into operating rooms, stern-faced doctors diagnosing their patients with dire cases of money coming out the wazoo.
      The previous Friday, bidding on my first novel had reached six figures, then paused for people to track down more cash. I’d later learn one editor spent the weekend trying to reach her boss on his Tanzanian vacation, finally getting through via the satellite phone of a safari boat on the Rufiji river, but that he wouldn’t OK a higher bid because he couldn’t get the manuscript in time.
      I was 32. I’d never made over $12,000 in a year.

I Was a 38-Year-Old Catcher in the Rye Virgin

Today marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of The Catcher in the Rye.  Ten years ago, I wrote a tribute to J. D. Salinger's novel. I had just finished reading the book for the first time and I was like the virginal bridegroom who rolls over in bed, feeling the new blush of orgasm coursing through his veins.  So, take it for what it's worth.  Or don't.  See if I care.

*     *     *     *

On July 16, 2001, Holden Caulfield—arguably the most talked-about youth in literature (get in line, Huck Finn and Harry Potter!)—turned 50.  That same day, my own mother turned [edited for delicacy’s sake].  So, Holden and Mom share the same birthday.  That just kills me, if you want to know the truth.  Anyway, I don’t think they’re related.  But if they are…well, that would explain a few things about my character.

And let me take a moment to explain something about my character.  You probably don’t give a good goddam about my character.  I’m just a micro-blip on the computer screen of your life, and that’s fine, it really is, but I think, and please correct me if I’m wrong, I think I speak for a lot of people when I say I never read The Catcher in the Rye.  Not until July 16 in the Year of Our Lord Two-Thousand-and-One, that is.  On the occasion of Holden Caulfield celebrating a half-century of shelf-life, I finally introduced myself.

That’s right, ladies and germs, if my literary life is a tabloid headline, it would scream: I WAS A 38-YEAR-OLD CATCHER VIRGIN!

“I don’t know how it happened really.  One day, I was fifteen and reading everything I could get my hands on—John Updike, Saul Bellow, Erich Segal—page after page, book after book.  Complete and utter lack of self-control.  I was [sob] a library slut.  And then, I turned around, and I was grown up—a saggy past-his-prime man who’d never read J.D. Salinger.”

I always wondered what the fuss was all about.  What was in this book—that paperback edition I’d seen so often with the orangey-red cover and simple yellow-lettered title—what was it, exactly, that I was missing?  And how had I let so many opportunities to read it pass me by?  I consoled myself with the fact that I personally knew some highly-educated people—good, honest people with sheepskin degrees on their wall—who had never ever read Moby Dick (the losers!).

It’s not like I grew up in a close-minded community (don’t let the fact I’m from Wyoming fool you).  No, I could have put my sweaty-slick teenage hands on Catcher at any point during my Acne Years.  Certainly my 10th-grade teacher—the balding, beak-nosed man from Alabama—the same one who had an unpublished novel called “The Scatological Implications of Brick-Laying” sitting at home in his top desk drawer—that teacher of mine was progressive enough to have assigned the book to our class.  But he didn’t.  Which is curious.  He is, after all, the one who encouraged me to read Updike’s Rabbit, Run, which is sort of like Holden Caulfield, the Later Years if you want to know the truth.

No, I have no one to blame but myself.

Whatever the reason for my virginity, I feel I have to be openly honest with you, the anonymous you floating out there in cyberspace.  Just so you see all my cards on the table here in front of us.  I come to you with no extra baggage, no wild-eyed, saliva-lipped ravings of “I’ve read Catcher twenty-eight times, forward and back, upside and down, and I can recite any passage to you at the drop of a hat—go on, pick a page, any page.”

I won’t sit here and tell you J.D. Salinger first introduced the world to Holden Caulfield in two short stories, “I'm Crazy” and “Slight Rebellion off Madison,” which were published in periodicals during the 1940s.  You probably already know that.

And I won’t bore you with the fact that Time called The Catcher in the Rye a “tough-tender first novel” or that The New York Times loved Holden’s narration, calling it his “own strange, wonderful language.”  Or that the book, beyond anyone’s expectation, rocketed up the bestseller list and stayed there for seven months.  Or that the title comes from a Robert Burns poem (“if a body meet a body coming through the rye,” though Holden thinks it’s “catch,” not “meet”).  You probably know that, too.

Nor will I ramble on and on about the censorship—how Australian customs officers impounded a shipment of the book in 1957; or how, a year later, Catcher in the Rye was displayed on a “Smutmobile” parked in protest outside the state capitol in Oklahoma City; or how it was banned in school districts throughout the 1960s and 1970s and how, as recently as 1992, school libraries in Iowa and Florida took it off the shelves due to its cursing and “lurid passages about sex;” or how Salinger one day in 1953 just up and retreated to Cornish, New Hampshire and, as Amazon.com states, “hasn't published a syllable since 1965” or how the novel had its darkest hour in 1980: on the evening when Mark David Chapman fired five bullets into John Lennon, then pulled Catcher out of his coat pocket and sat down to read.  You know all that.

No, I’m simply going to tell you how I, a slump-shouldered man of nearly four decades, approached the book like I was an inexperienced 17-year-old bridegroom unbuckling his pants on his wedding night.  I had no clue what was in store for me.  Or how it would change my life.

Now, I crack open my 1951 hardbound edition (no dustjacket, plain black board cover, deckle-edged pages, faintly yellowed--sniff them and they smell like fifty years of back shelves in bookstores).

Now, I read.

Now, I finish, look up at you and say (voice fluttery at the edges): “It’s goddam good.”

Reading Catcher in the Rye—especially the first time—is like sitting astride a galloping horse.  You bounce and jounce, you make that funny uhn-uhn-uhn sound, you lose your breath then catch it again.  In the end, all you can do is grab those deckle-edged pages and hold on tight for the 277-page ride.

Here, for instance, is how Salinger bursts out of the starting gate:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.  In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them.  They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father.  They’re nice and all—I’m not saying that—but they’re also touchy as hell.  Besides, I’m not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything.

That’s jet-propulsion writing if I’ve ever seen it.  As they say in the movies, He had me at "lousy childhood."  I was hooked like the trout that swallowed the fly.  But that’s the thing about Salinger, see.  One sentence moves you to the next and the next and there is rarely a time when you want to stop, look up, then decide to put the book down and go do household chores.  The laundry can burn and the dinner can go unfolded as far as I’m concerned.

Holden’s is a simple voice, a voice full of angst and self-pity and frustration and depression.  And yeah, profanity.  That stuff kills me.  Not to get on a soapbox or anything, but Holden Caulfield swears because, as John Lee Hooker said, “it’s in him and it’s got to come out.”  His profanity is not there for shock effect; it’s an expression of his rage against the system—the mindless, do-as-they’re-told masses.  Those slump-shouldered gobs of humanity (like you and I) tend to get all squirmish around Holden and his fierce independent spirit.  Four-letter words are both his sword and shield against their conformity.  Holden uses “goddam” to slash and burn, thrust and parry, serve and protect.

So maybe you’re out there in cyberspace, mouth-breathing all over your monitor, and you’re wondering what exactly I’m talking about because you, like the former me, are a Catcher virgin.  It’s okay.  Nothing to be afraid of.  Stay calm and everything will be all right.  We’ll get through this, you and I.

The first thing you need to know about the book’s plot is this: nothing happens.  And yet, everything happens.  It’s that simple.  Salinger takes us on a journey through 48 hours of one boy’s life as he gets kicked out of Pencey Preparatory School (“molding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men”).  He’s flunking every class but English.  This is just before Christmas, so you can imagine what this must do to his peace-on-earth-goodwill-to-men spirit.  He decides to ditch the last couple days of school and head for home where he hopes to say good-bye to his much-loved younger sister Phoebe before he heads out West where it’s pretty and sunny and nobody’d know him and he could pretend to be a deaf-mute.

That’s it.  That’s the “action.”  Over the course of those 48 hours, the 16-year-old Holden fights, smokes, drinks, hires a prostitute (unconsummated) and writes an English composition about a baseball glove.

Through it all, there’s his voice.  Oh, what a voice.  Salinger builds the book based on the cadences of language.  Every “anyway,” every “boy,” is carefully calculated according to the Principle Law of Staccato and Repetition.  Holden is a drumbeat on our ears: pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.

He reminds us of every anguished teen we’ve ever seen.  James Dean.  Go Ask Alice.  The Breakfast Club.  Young Elvis.  Ponyboy and the Outsiders.  Those snap-fingered kids from West Side Story.  Maybe—no, probably—Holden reminds us of the slightly-confused person who used to stare back at us from the mirror years ago.  Holden’s just trying to find his place in the world.  Aren’t we all?  Isn’t there a little bit of Caulfield in each of our spleens even now?

“Did you ever get fed up?” Holden asks a girl he’s taken out on a date.  “I mean, did you ever get scared that everything was going to go lousy unless you did something?”

The funny thing is—or the sad thing, if you want the truth—Holden, for all his talk and bravado, never does strike out West, but ends up taking his sister Phoebe to the park where he watches her ride the carousel—a ride that goes around and around but never gets anywhere.  But yet there’s always the promise of the prize.

The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything.  If they fall off, they fall off, but it’s bad if you say anything to them.

And so, on the one hand Holden is a bit more self-aware by page 275.  On the other, he’s the most imperfect of tour guides through the journey of life.  His reliability is called into question early in the book.  Chapter Three begins:

I’m the most terrible liar you ever saw in your life.  It’s awful.  If I’m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I’m going, I’m liable to say I’m going to the opera.  It’s terrible.

But we stick with him anyway (if nothing else, to find out what is real and what is conjured from the thicket of his mind).  It’s impossible to resist the pull of his voice.  He is the moon, we are the tide.

So, now you’ve come this far with me.  I hope you’re not expecting a goddam medal or anything.  If you’re anything like me, you’re drippy with sweat and you have to pee really badly.  Well, tie a knot in it, Junior, because I’ve got just a little more to say to you.  Yeah, you, the mouth-breather who’s leaning too close to the computer monitor.  (That kills me.  It really does.)

Listen, I can’t say this any other way:  If you read only one book this year, read The Catcher in the Rye.  If you were lucky enough to have someone force it down your pink quivering throat back in the Acne Years, fine.  Fine and jim-dandy.  But if it’s been years (decades, even) since you sat down with your tatter-covered, dog-eared copy, well then you know what you need to do.

And if you’re one of those poor schmucks who’s managed to make it this far in life without your eyeballs rolling across Salinger’s pocketa-pocketa prose…

Well then...

It’s about time.

Oh, and Happy Birthday, Holden, you old so-and-so.

Friday Freebie: True Confections and The Music Lesson by Katharine Weber

Congratulations to Michael Cooper, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: Shambles and On the Outskirts of Normal by Debra Monroe.

This week, I have another two-fer deal for you: The Music Lesson and True Confections by Katharine Weber.  She's generously donated--and signed!--paperback copies of these novels to one lucky winner and it's as sweet a deal as the candy factory at the heart of True Confections.  Weber's new book, The Memory of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family's Legacy of Infidelities, will be released next Tuesday and this would be a good chance to catch up on her novels (she's also published Triangle, The Little Women, and Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear) before reading her memoir which focuses on her "powerful, talented, but troubled family" (Publishers Weekly).

Lies, half-truths and unreliable narrators are at the heart of nearly everything Weber writes and nowhere is that more evident than the two novels up for grabs this week.  Briefly, here are the publisher's blurbs for The Music Lesson (1998) and True Confections (2010).  [For what it's worth, I've always loved the title of the latter book for its play on the tabloid magazine True Confessions; as readers quickly find out, the truth is a highly subjective thing when filtered through the novel's narrator, Alice Ziplinsky.]

"She's beautiful," writes Irish-American art historian Patricia Dolan in the first of the journal entries that form The Music Lesson. "I look at my face in the mirror and it seems far away, less real than hers."  The woman she describes is the subject of the stolen Vermeer of the novel's title. Patricia is alone with this exquisite painting in a remote Irish cottage by the sea. How she arrived in such an unlikely circumstance is one part of the story Patricia tells us: about her father, a policeman who raised her to believe deeply in the cause of a united Ireland; the art history career that has sustained her since the numbing loss of her daughter; and the arrival of Mickey O'Driscoll, her dangerously charming, young Irish cousin, which has led to her involvement in this high-stakes crime. Her vigil becomes a tale of love, regret, and transformation. As Patricia immerses herself in the passions of her Irish heritage, she discovers what has been hidden beneath the surface of her own life--and what she must do to preserve the things she values most.

Take chocolate candy, add a family business at war with itself, and stir with an outsider’s perspective. This is the recipe for True Confections, the irresistible novel by Katharine Weber. Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky’s marriage into the Ziplinsky family has not been unanimously celebrated. Her greatest ambition is to belong, to feel truly entitled to the heritage she has tried so hard to earn. Which is why Zip’s Candies is much more to her than just a candy factory, where she has worked for most of her life. In True Confections, Alice has her reasons for telling the multigenerational saga of the family-owned-and-operated candy company, now in crisis. Nobody is more devoted than Alice to delving into the truth of Zip’s history, starting with the rags-to-riches story of how Hungarian immigrant Eli Czaplinsky developed his famous candy lines, and how each of his candies, from Little Sammies to Mumbo Jumbos, was inspired by an element in a stolen library copy of Little Black Sambo, from which he taught himself English. Within Alice’s vivid and persuasive account (is her unreliability a tactic or a condition?) are the stories of a runaway slave from the cacao plantations of Côte d’Ivoire and the Third Reich’s failed plan to establish a colony on Madagascar for European Jews. Richly informed, deeply moving, and spiked with Weber’s trademark wit, True Confections is, at its heart, a timeless and universal story of love, betrayal, and chocolate.

If you would like a chance to win The Music Lesson and True Confections (both of which have been autographed by the author on the title page), all you have to is answer this question:

Which relative of Weber's produced the first movie with smells, the regrettable flop that was Aromarama?  (Visit Weber's website to find the answer)

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.   One entry per person, please.   Please e-mail me the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section.   Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on July 21--at which time I'll draw the winning name. I'll announce the lucky reader on July 22.

Storming the Bastille with Charles Dickens

Today is Bastille Day and all across France tonight you will hear the crackling boom of fireworks, designed to simulate the roar which could have been heard on this day back in 1789 when revolutionary mobs rose up and stormed the the country's notorious prison (known formally as Bastille Saint-Antoine).

As Wikipedia tells us, "the Bastille represented royal authority in the centre of Paris. While the prison only contained seven inmates at the time of its storming, its fall was the flashpoint of the French Revolution." On the morning of July 14, "the Bastille was nearly empty of prisoners, housing only seven old men annoyed by all the disturbance: four forgers, two 'lunatics' and one 'deviant' aristocrat, the comte de Solages (the Marquis de Sade had been transferred out ten days earlier). The cost of maintaining a medieval fortress and garrison for so limited a purpose had led to a decision being taken to close it, shortly before the disturbances began. It was, however, a symbol of the alleged royal tyranny."

Charles Dickens, of course, had his own version of the historical events.   And so, as our French allies celebrate their own version of the red-white-and-blue today, I turn my attention to Chapter 21 in "Book the Second" of A Tale of Two Cities.  Even sliced and dissected from the rest of the book, these words are proof of Dicken's incredibly forceful talent.   You don't have to know much about the characters or the previous scenes to appreciate the way these words writhe on the page like muscular snakes.   We join the action in progress:

      Saint Antoine had been, that morning, a vast dusky mass of scarecrows heaving to and fro, with frequent gleams of light above the billowy heads, where steel blades and bayonets shone in the sun. A tremendous roar arose from the throat of Saint Antoine, and a forest of naked arms struggled in the air like shrivelled branches of trees in a winter wind: all the fingers convulsively clutching at every weapon or semblance of a weapon that was thrown up from the depths below, no matter how far off.
      Who gave them out, whence they last came, where they began, through what agency they crookedly quivered and jerked, scores at a time, over the heads of the crowd, like a kind of lightning, no eye in the throng could have told; but, muskets were being distributed--so were cartridges, powder, and ball, bars of iron and wood, knives, axes, pikes, every weapon that distracted ingenuity could discover or devise. People who could lay hold of nothing else, set themselves with bleeding hands to force stones and bricks out of their places in walls. Every pulse and heart in Saint Antoine was on high-fever strain and at high-fever heat. Every living creature there held life as of no account, and was demented with a passionate readiness to sacrifice it.
      As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this raging circled round Defarge's wine-shop, and every human drop in the caldron had a tendency to be sucked towards the vortex where Defarge himself, already begrimed with gunpowder and sweat, issued orders, issued arms, thrust this man back, dragged this man forward, disarmed one to arm another, laboured and strove in the thickest of the uproar.
      "Keep near to me, Jacques Three," cried Defarge; "and do you, Jacques One and Two, separate and put yourselves at the head of as many of these patriots as you can. Where is my wife?"
      "Eh, well! Here you see me!" said madame, composed as ever, but not knitting to-day. Madame's resolute right hand was occupied with an axe, in place of the usual softer implements, and in her girdle were a pistol and a cruel knife.
      "Where do you go, my wife?"
      "I go," said madame, "with you at present. You shall see me at the head of women, by-and-bye."
      "Come, then!" cried Defarge, in a resounding voice. "Patriots and friends, we are ready! The Bastille!"
      With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had been shaped into the detested word, the living sea rose, wave on wave, depth on depth, and overflowed the city to that point. Alarm-bells ringing, drums beating, the sea raging and thundering on its new beach, the attack began.
      Deep ditches, double drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great towers, cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. Through the fire and through the smoke--in the fire and in the smoke, for the sea cast him up against a cannon, and on the instant he became a cannonier--Defarge of the wine-shop worked like a manful soldier, Two fierce hours.
      Deep ditch, single drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great towers, cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. One drawbridge down! "Work, comrades all, work! Work, Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques One Thousand, Jacques Two Thousand, Jacques Five-and-Twenty Thousand; in the name of all the Angels or the Devils--which you prefer--work!" Thus Defarge of the wine-shop, still at his gun, which had long gown hot.
      "To me, women!" cried madame his wife. "What! We can kill as well as the men when the place is taken!" And to her, with a shrill thirsty cry, trooping women variously armed, but all armed age in hunger and revenge.
      Cannon, muskets, fire and smoke; but, still the deep ditch, the single drawbridge, the massive stone wails, and the eight great towers. Slight displacements of the raging sea, made by the falling wounded. Flashing weapons, blazing torches, smoking waggonloads of wet straw, hard work at neighbouring barricades in all directions, shrieks, volleys, execrations, bravery without stint, boom smash and rattle, and the furious sounding of the living sea; but, still the deep ditch, and the single drawbridge, and the massive stone walls, and the eight great towers, and still Defarge of the wine-shop at his gun, grown doubly hot by the service of Four fierce hours.
      A white flag from within the fortress, and a parley--this dimly perceptible through the raging storm, nothing audible in it--suddenly the sea rose immeasurably wider and higher, and swept Defarge of the wine-shop over the lowered drawbridge, past the massive stone outer walls, in among the eight great towers surrendered!
      So resistless was the force of the ocean bearing him on, that even to draw his breath or turn his head was as impracticable as if he had been struggling in the surf at the South Sea, until he was landed in the outer courtyard of the Bastille. There, against an angle of a wall, he made a struggle to look about him. Jacques Three was nearly at his side; Madame Defarge, still heading some of her women, was visible in the inner distance, and her knife was in her hand. Everywhere was tumult, exultation, deafening and maniacal bewilderment, astounding noise, yet furious dumb-show.
      "The Prisoners!"
      "The Records!"
      "The secret cells!"
      "The instruments of torture!"
      "The Prisoners!"
      Of all these cries, and ten thousand incoherences, "The Prisoners!" was the cry most taken up by the sea that rushed in, as if there were an eternity of people, as well as of time and space.

Illustration: "The Sea Rises" by Hablot K. Browne, Book II, Chapter 22. All the Year Round (October 1859)

Epic Lit: West of Here makes Cecil B. DeMille look like a low-budget hack

There’s ambition, and then there’s Ambition.  Jonathan Evison’s West of Here is told on such a grand, epic scale it makes Cecil B. DeMille look like a low-budget indie director.

Producing even a slim novel is an audacious undertaking for any writer, but in his second book Evison (All About Lulu) proves he’s got stamina and mettle—much like the two centuries of characters who walk large across the Pacific Northwest landscape in West of Here’s sprawling plot.  The author cuts back and forth between two stories: the exploration and settlement in 1890 of Port Bonita, a small town on the Washington coast; and the efforts of those settlers’ descendants nearly 120 years later to honor the pioneer spirit with the annual Dam Days festival.  Though the first half of the novel focuses on the 19th-century story, Evison eventually starts cross-cutting between the two plots at a faster pace, with succeeding chapters showing how the two generations contrast and complement each other.

Though West of Here’s canvas is large as an Albert Bierstadt mural, Evison never loses sight of the half-inch human figures on the landscape.  In 1889, we meet “thirty-four-year-old Arctic explorer, Indian fighter, and rugged individual James Mather” ordered by the governor to “conquer the last frontier of the Washington Territory.”  The sum total of Mather’s orders, in a champagne toast from the governor, was one word: “Succeed.”  We also meet Ethan Thornburgh, a visionary whose plan for a hydroelectric dam will shape the town’s destiny; and Eva, a prototypical feminist who is determined to be “more than a chicken-tending, child-rearing Madonna of the frontier.”  There’s Eva’s brother Jacob, come to “rescue” her from a life with no future in a town with even less potential, in his dim view:

A beach littered with savages huddling around fires. A muddy hill bristling with stumps. A cluster of oversized tool sheds, some of them on silts, emblazoned with crude signs, masquerading as commerce. Not a brick building or a gas lamp among them.  And all of it hemmed in by an impenetrable wilderness. He could scarcely wait to leave.

Other characters include a prostitute straight from Central Casting: “Galloping” Gertie McGrew who “could suck a billiard ball through a drainpipe;” the local Klallam Indians who, predictably, fall prey to the white man’s alcohol; a Shaker commune; and on and on it goes with a cast list as lengthy as the barrel of a frontier long rifle.

And that’s just the 1890 crowd.  In the 2006 plot, Evison introduces us to Dave “Krig” Krigstadt, former high school basketball star, now the production manager at High Tide Seafoods and part-time Sasquatch hunter; Timmon Tillman, ex-con who arrives in town hoping to begin a new chapter in his life (when he applies for a job at High Tide, Krig tells him, “P.B.’s all about fresh starts.  Used to be, anyway.”); Franklin Bell, Tillman’s parole officer and year-round eggnog drinker; and Jared Thornburgh, Ethan’s descendant, who is doomed to live “in the shadow of this obsolete dam, his fortune linked inextricably to its hulking existence, its legacy of ecological menace.”  Jared is being forced to literally dismantle Ethan’s dream, proving that the future can be a pretty dispiriting place when you get there.

You’ve seen most of these characters before in Hollywood, from The Way West to Deadwood.  What’s fresh in Evison’s take, however, is the clever way he melds the modern with the tried-and-true.  In the case of Curtis, a teenager addicted to huffing spray paint and prone to visions of past lives, he erases the boundary between past and present as the boy becomes a conduit through which the past speaks to present-day Port Bonitans.  Whether they listen or not is another matter.

In the early days, the town has a reckless energy, fueled by the hopes of manifest destiny: “Port Bonita, with its crude and youthful vigor, its laughing, belching, bawdy can-do spirit,” Evison writes.  “A pugnacious town, Port Bonita, a fighter, and a damn good bet.”  The first section of the novel—nearly all of it set in 1890—ends with Ethan and Jacob standing on a bluff overlooking a chasm where plans for a dam are about to be unrolled.  You can practically hear the turbines of progress in Ethan’s voice when he says: “A glittering city will take shape along that strait, Jake, you wait and see.”

But 120 years later, that optimism is crushed flat as a tin can of salmon. Even as it gets ready to celebrate Dam Days, the town is mired in economic doldrums:

Fucking Wal-Mart. They killed everything. Curtis could hardly recognize this place anymore. He was almost embarrassed to admit that as a child, Port Bonita had seemed like a glorious place, the center of the universe, and Dam Days had seemed a grand occasion marked by fry bread tacos and brass bands. Now it seemed stupid: a bunch of fat whites and sad-looking Indians mulling around Lake Thornburgh as if there were anything to see, anything to celebrate but a hulking mass of useless concrete and a lot of chain-link fence. As if Port Bonita were anything else but one big fucking Wal-Mart.

Evison is evocative in his descriptions of both people and place.  Here, for example, is our introduction to Ethan Thornburgh as he steps off the steamer onto the dock at Port Bonita in 1889: “a young man of some distinction, all buttoned up in a brown suit with tails, freshly coifed, smelling of camphor and spices, his cleft chin clean-shaven, a waxed mustache mantling his lip like two sea horses kissing.”  And here is the view of the town that stretches a short length in front of him: “There was only Front Street, a ragtag row of structures running east to west in an arrangement that suggested jetsam spewed on the shoreline.”

Particularly in the 19th-century sections, Evison writes from a literary tradition whose trail was blazed by historical novelists like A. B. Guthrie, Allan W. Eckert, and Larry McMurtry.  Evison takes some of his sentences right up to the fence between originality and cliché.  Thankfully, he never climbs over that fence (or, if he does, it’s a purposeful nod toward pastiche).  In recounting the wilderness trek of Mather and his party, Evison seems to be calling up the ghosts of classic adventurer-explorers in passages like this:

For days on end, they marched silently but for their own labored breaths and the plodding progress of their snowshoes, toward the broad face of Olympus. The brittle wind chapped their faces, burned their eyes, whistled past their ears with a ghostly howl. Hunger would not be ignored, nor was it content to simply gnaw at their bellies; by the middle of March, it began to work upon their minds. Trudging forward, they were as five strangers—together yet alone—imprisoned by their thoughts.

Haunting both halves of the book is one of the most significant characters: Bigfoot.  He’s the howl in the wilderness for Mather and his doomed party, and he’s the threatening shadows in the forest for Dave Krigstadt who tries to record the chilling “vocalizations” as proof of his encounter.  Evison uses Sasquatch to show the fear and mystery of the invisible wilderness, that region of the deepest woods where few men go, but all of us populate with our imaginations.  To believe in Sasquatch is to have faith there is still more to be discovered in this overmapped world of ours.  All the Dam Days in the world could not hold back that sense of mystery.

As much as anything, West of Here is a novel about a failed economy.  Back in 1890, Ethan reflects, “Perhaps Port Bonita was not an address, after all, not even a place, but a spirit, an essence, a pulse—a future still unfolding.”  But 116 years later, residents of Port Bonita find unemployment and shuttered businesses have weakened that pulse: “For five generations, Port Bonita was an orgy of consumption that seemed like it would never end.  Every day was Dam Day.  But now it was time to clean up the mess.”

As the story closes, Jared Thornburgh is giving the keynote speech at the annual festival—a speech he’s struggled the whole novel to compose—and even in the pouring rain and the disinterested listeners, he’s delivering his message to the town: “So I say to you, Port Bonita: Onward!  There is a future, and it begins right now.”  It’s a Hollywood-uplift moment (cue the swelling orchestra), but it’s one that this grand-scale novel, bursting at the seams with energy, has been working toward for 500 pages.  Evison more than earns his crescendo.

The Last Werewolf is in your bookstore today

Thanks to the always-evangelical folks over at Shelf Awareness, I am bumping Glen Duncan's novel The Last Werewolf to the top of my To-Be-Read pile.  Actually, it will be one notch below the summit because I have vowed--publicly and privately--that I would read Siobhan Fallon's You Know When the Men Are Gone at the next available opening in my schedule.  And I always stick to my vows.  Take my 27-year marriage for instance.

Back to the werewolf.  As I mentioned, the "Maximum Shelf" newsletter from the Shelf Awareness crew re-whetted my appetite for Duncan's book, which officially launches today.  I've been reading a lot of short stories lately--much more than normal, which is about five times the average norm of most readers--and I've been itching to sink deep into a novel.  I need a story which will envelop me, fold me into its depths, twine around me like a boa constrictor.  From all I've read, The Last Werewolf will do that.  I always hate to set the bar too high with a book before I begin, but right now, I feel like I need this aging, libidinous werewolf to take me away.

Here are just a few snippets from the Maximum Shelf Awareness issue....

From Bethanne Patrick's review:

One of the biggest advantages to having a 210-year-old main character is showing off that character's absorption of the societies in which he's lived through his narration--and that's why reading Jacob Marlowe never gets old: he literally doesn't, and Duncan has sustained a young man's view of history not only through the years that Marlowe lives, but past them, into his volatile present. It's an authorial feat that works and will give many readers a smart, sexy, satisfying summer read.

From the interview with Duncan:

How did you go about constructing an evolving personality for an almost-200-year-old being who, to the outer world, appears ageless and not out of the ordinary, but is in fact very, very different from you and me?

At the risk of sounding irascible: What do you mean, 'How did you go about constructing an evolving personality...'? That's what novelists do. You sit down with a character and imagine how he or she would respond to a given situation. The given situation here is (a) turning into a homicidal monster once a month and (b) having an expected lifespan of 400 years, but the imaginative process is exactly the same as it would be if the given situation happened to be a 50-year-old midwest housewife discovering her husband's having an affair with his secretary. You use your imagination. And at the further risk of opprobrium (and police investigation), I confess I don't think Marlowe is all that different from 'you and me.' If he was, we wouldn't sympathize with him or get his jokes. Granted, lycanthropy forces him to kill and eat people, but the point is, lycanthropy would force 'you and me' to do exactly the same. The whole novel depends on seeing ourselves in the monster and the monster in ourselves.

Knopf editor-at-large Marty Asher also chimes in on the novel's appeal:

The first thing that drew me to it was the quality of the writing. We publish a number of important literary writers at Knopf--Kazuo Ishiguro, Julian Barnes, Graham Swift and many others. Glen Duncan's prose is at that level. Secondarily was the element of surprise: the author convincingly and often sympathetically got inside the head of this creature, and he plays with the readers' emotions--you feel for him because he is the last of his species and is contemplating suicide. One is constantly surprised and startled.

There's so much more at the Shelf Awareness website, you owe it to yourself to go check out the entire package.  And, by the way, if you're not already a subscriber to Shelf Awareness, you're missing out on one of the best sources of book news, reviews and interviews.

Now if you'll excuse me, the wolf is at the door...

My First Time: Yelizaveta Renfro

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. Today's guest is Yelizaveta Renfro whose collection of short stories, A Catalogue of Everything in the World, was recently published by Black Lawrence Press. Renfro's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, North American Review, Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, South Dakota Review, Witness, Blue Mesa Review, Fourth River, Bayou Magazine, Untamed Ink, So to Speak, and elsewhere.  She earned a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of California and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from George Mason University. She is completing her Ph.D. in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  Her essay, “The Wisdom of the Oak,” appears in the June/July 2011 issue of Reader’s Digest.

My First Time in Your Shopping Cart

 

I want to be in your shopping cart at Big Y with the Ball Park Franks and Velveeta, but not too near the sweating Budweiser. Or I want to be with the organic leeks, couscous, and Smart Chicken. Just toss me in with whatever’s in the cart. I—the corporeal I, the one pushing a shopping cart—want to wait, stalking the newsstand, until you come to pick me up, but my three-year-old is just not into loitering by the checkout. Finally, I reach out my hand to the Reader’s Digest, reaching for myself.

This is my first foray into mainstream America. Sure, I’ve previously found my work squirreled away in literary magazines on the mile-long Barnes & Noble magazine rack. This time, though, I’m right here between Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food and CBS Soaps In Depth, at arm’s reach, in the same store where you load up on Hefty garbage bags and Doritos, Dr. Pepper and Twinkies, the mainstays of America.

I pluck three copies and tuck them in with my two avocados, five ears of fresh corn, ten pounds of potatoes, five jazz apples, two mangos, two pounds of carrots, and loaf of fresh bakery bread. I want to shout hysterically, “I’m in here!” No, that’s not true. Actually, I’m nervous the cashier will ask me why I need three copies of Reader’s Digest. As she rings up the produce, I make up plausible reasons: There’s just something in there I really like. But what if she asks what it is? What if she looks inside and finds my photo on page 180? I’m just buying them for some friends. That seems a safer bet. At the senior center. They play bridge. I begin to embellish the story, just in case.

But of course the checker displays no curiosity at all, sending the three copies sailing down to the bagger who deposits them in the sack that they congenially share with the five ears of corn.

Don’t get me wrong: I like for people to read my work. I just don’t like to bring undue attention to myself, as a person made of flesh. Actually, I like being tucked away in the pages, hiding there. You see, I am not nearly so impressive, so polished and certain, in person. Those written words that I send out in the world are finished and shining, while the rest of me is an impromptu performance, and I never excelled at public speaking or stand-up comedy or off-the-cuff remarks. I think of all the witty and memorable things to say much later, when I don’t have to look you in the eye, when I can calmly write it all down. I like to send my words flying across a computer screen or notepad—not from my mouth. I like being in your shopping cart. Cozy me up to the Cheerios. I like shredded wheat, too. Not too close to the chocolate—I don’t care for it, and it might melt on me in this weather. Celery makes me gag. Tell the bagger to be careful. Don’t let me stick to the condensation on the milk carton, and don’t leave me forgotten, pressed up against the edge of the counter. That’s right—in the bag with the dry goods. I’m going home with you tonight.

Or maybe you pick me up in the waiting room at your dentist’s office, dreading a root canal. Or you’re in the waiting room at your cardiologist’s. Or you’re at the pediatrician’s, sleep deprived, rocking a six-week-old in one arm. Or I arrive directly in your mailbox. It’s a great big dented-up metal thing at the end of a dirt driveway. It’s a mail slot right through your front door. It’s a post office box. It’s a pretentious, ornate monstrosity, all gilt and curlicues. Or it’s shaped like a rooster.

However you come by me, go ahead. Pick me up. You will learn so much. The cover alone promises you “The World’s Dumbest Criminals, Celebrities, Lawsuits, Tweets, and more!” as well as “Goof-Proof Grilling Tips.” The funny thing is, I would never buy a publication that makes such boasts. I would never even think to search for one such as myself there. Each time I open the pages, I am newly surprised to find myself there, sandwiched between “25 Things Your Eye Doctor Won’t Tell You” and a poem by Wendell Berry.

And after you read my words, you think about them. Maybe you’re the kind of person who writes to authors, so you write to me. You look me up on Facebook. You send me an e-mail. You tell me your ninety-year-old mother was delighted to find me in the pages of her Reader’s Digest. You send me a helpful clipping from your local newspaper about bark lice on trees. You send a letter printed out all in small caps, telling me about the five oaks on your property and the life lessons you have learned in seventy-six years of living. Or you handwrite a note in your impeccable penmanship, thanking me for nurturing your spirit on this day. Or you fill four pages detailing all the places you have lived and visited in your eighty-five years. You tell me you are a gardener who has learned from nature. You tell me about a dead child and a dead spouse, or about your faith in being reborn daily. You have advice and delight to share.

And I reply: thank you for giving me space in your grocery cart or your mailbox. Thank you for letting me in. I hope we can do it again.