Adventures at Midlife

I write and edit for a living. Have for years. Most of it is a combination of flackspeak and journalism, short and sweet, avoiding the hyperbole that my client base always wants. I like to imagine I’m channeling Hemingway as I slash away at bloated copy and reduce an item to its essence. (Think the Associated Press Handbook, not the Chicago Manual of Style.) But I occasionally get to write something I’m proud of, something I’ll return to and read and rearrange and tweak and massage just a little. “No good writing, just good rewriting,” I remind myself. Yep, yep. I can do that.

It’s usually at this point that I’ll pick up and read something that smacks me in the forehead and makes me realize I am a hopelessly illiterate hack who should trash her word processing software before she does any more damage to herself or the English language. Annie Dillard’s little burnished diamond “The Maytrees” is my latest lesson in humility. I have a copy of her much-acclaimed and Pulitzer Prize-winning “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” sitting in one of my to-be-read piles scattered around the house — so many books, so many more distractions — so this was our first encounter. Read the rest of this entry »

I stumbled upon Denise Mina quite by accident, er, Amazon. I’d ordered and read a couple of Minette Walters’ mystery fiction, and trusty Amazon popped up with several recommendations, including Mina’s previous books, The Dead Hour and Field of Blood. (Okay, I succumbed to some shameless marketing. Sue me.)

This series features Paddy Meehan, Mina’s not-quite-likeable heroine who is scrabbling after a career as a newspaper writer in the uber-macho world of Glasgow. I’ve been to Glasgow, and was quite taken by its grey, grubby, hung-over, working-class charm. Nay, this isn’t your Masterpiece Theater Scotland, but it has its own energy. After some encounters with unsavory types, several high-speed chases and some brushes with death in the last book, Paddy had managed to solve the case, scoop her rivals and — SPOILER ALERT — get herself knocked up, quite a dilemma for even a not-so-good Catholic girl.

At the end of the book, I had one of those wonderful “turn-the-page-OH-NO-where’s-the-rest-of-the-story?” moments. Mina set us up but good, but my patience has paid off and I will find how she deals (or in Paddy’s case, doesn’t) with her problems.

One of the things I love about good crime and mystery fiction is how authors manage to balance the character development of their major players against the unfolding of the story. Those characters, their strengths and, better yet, their weaknesses, should add to or be revealed by that tension. Mina’s Paddy, with her messy life and stubborn will, is a great one.

Northanger Abbey, which was entirely new to me, is a mere bauble compared to Jane Austen’s later works. In her intro to the PBS adaptation Sunday, a thoroughly Anglified Jillian Anderson pointed to its being Austen’s first novel, written at 23 and sold to a publisher for ten pounds — and promptly put on a shelf.

Austen seemed to intend it to be a send-up of the overwrought Gothic novels that were so popular in her day (and that she undoubtedly read). But it so clearly establishes the themes of Austen’s later works: romantic love, duty to one’s family, class structure and the myriad entanglements of money. Young Catherine may be confused about everyone’s motives, but we aren’t, or shouldn’t be: Income is all.

As Stephanie Cootnz reminds us here, romantic love as a basis for marriage is a recent phenomenon:

Marriage became the main way that the upper classes consolidated wealth, forged military coalitions, finalized peace treaties, and bolstered claims to social status or political authority. Getting “well-connected” in-laws was a preoccupation of the middle classes as well, while the dowry a man received at marriage was often the biggest economic stake he would acquire before his parents died…Until the late 18th century, parents took for granted their right to arrange their children’s marriages and even, in many regions, to dissolve a marriage made without their permission.

I used to accuse my mother of paying my husband to marry me. (They both denied it.) Two hundred years ago, it wouldn’t have been very strange.

According to this in the NYTimes, the Japanese may be pointing the way for the evolution of the novel: the cellphone novel, a largely feminine phenomenon:

Of last year’s 10 best-selling novels, five were originally cellphone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels. What is more, the top three spots were occupied by first-time cellphone novelists, touching off debates in the news media and blogosphere…

Here’s how it works:

One such star, a 21-year-old woman named Rin, wrote “If You” over a six-month stretch during her senior year in high school. While commuting to her part-time job or whenever she found a free moment, she tapped out passages on her cellphone and uploaded them on a popular Web site for would-be authors… After cellphone readers voted her novel No. 1 in one ranking, her story of the tragic love between two childhood friends was turned into a 142-page hardcover book last year. It sold 400,000 copies and became the No. 5 best-selling novel of 2007…

I wonder what it says about our attention spans? And if the authors hew to the minimalism used by most texters, the novels would be positively Hemingwayesque. (And the spelling!) Read the rest of this entry »

It’s bitter cold here, but I am warmed at the prospect of a Jane Austen overload, which began Sunday on PBS with the first of a series of Austen adaptations, Persuasion.It is interesting that the producers chose to begin the series with Austen’s final novel, which speaks of a change in the British caste system brought about by the realm’s success in the Napoleonic wars. After earning his reputation and fortune at sea, Ann’s Captain Wentworth could finally thought to be worthy of her — although we and Ann knew he was all along. 

 I love this story, and I loved this setting of it. It speaks of second chances and the unchanging nature of love and hope. ”The one claim I shall make for my own sex,” Ann tells Captain Benwick, “is that we love longest, when all hope is gone.” 

That Ann, beyond all hope at 27, could break through the selfishness of the people surrounding her to find and claim her future is so compelling. Perhaps it speaks of Austen’s state of mind as she moved into her late 30s and on to her death at 41. Always hope — for something better, for a resolution, for the knitting up of loose ends. The film was all muted colors and misty British air, dim closeted rooms and pale faces.

While I liked the 1995 film version (especially the brooding Ciarán Hinds as Wentworth), I hated its portrayal of Ann’s family as slap-stick caricatures. In the PBS version, they were cloying, narcissistic snobs, which is probably more of what Austen had in mind. (And we wonder why she hated Bath…) 

I chose this novel for my turn at our Jane Austen Book Club.  Up next on PBS: Northanger Abbey.

I admit I was particularly pleased to open a Christmas package from my spouse that contained Sue Grafton's latest, T is for Trespass. Despite a childhood spent literally camped out in the city library waiting for copies of the Nancy Drew mysteries to show up, I'm admittedly a newcomer to crime and mystery fiction. (I'm waiting for a long convalescence to start in on Agatha Christie.) But I'm catching up — I've preordered Denise Mina's latest, I never miss "Mystery" on PBS, and I've inhaled all the previous installments in Grafton's alphabetical series.