What Are We Reading?
September 2007
Fascinating interview with Mary Gaitskill in the Fall 2007 issue of Glimmer Train. The interview is probably old because she's talking mostly about Veronica (2005), but her straightforwardness and intellectual clarity are rare, both about the novel and about her process as a writer and artist. Her primary advice for aspiring writers is not to ask for advice. Early in the interview she says, I taught myself to write by reading and writing a lot and by not showing it to people constantly. That's the thing about the writing program that bothers me, this idea that you need to show it immediately to a group of twelve people. They're not going to have a deep understanding of your work even if they spend the entire two years with you. It's very difficult to have a deep understanding of another person's work. It's a very intimate thing, how a story is working on the inside. It's very difficult to comment on that. All you can comment on is the outside. There's much more-about the experience of music, the cult of the body, and the dangerousness of "the ideal." A great interview with one of the most original writers of our time.
Here are a couple of things I enjoyed reading this month:
Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade (Delacorte Press) by Diana Gabaldon-Lord John Grey began as a subsidiary character in Gabaldon's Outlander series, an 18th-century lord who is educated, urbane, and an honorable and competent major in King George III's army. He is also a homosexual, living in a period in which homosexuals were regularly imprisoned or executed, which makes him a reliably interesting character for a mystery series of his own. In this installment, Lord John solves the mystery of his father the Duke of Pardloe's apparent suicide. The Seven Years' War provides some of the context, and Gabaldon recreates the times vividly, from the ironies of Lord John's necessarily secret life to the horrors of the battlefield.
The Keep (Anchor Books) by Jennifer Egan-Games, games and more games. Narrative tricks have their pleasures, winking acknowledgements of the author out there pulling the strings, identity puzzles, clues that we may be identifying with the wrong character, questions of sanity. Jennifer Egan is a skillful writer (I really admired her last novel, Look at Me), and this is a tight, layered little fiction about guilt and safety and how we hold on to who we essentially are (or let it go). But ultimately, something felt a little cold in the exercise. There were brilliant moments, but I was left feeling like, okay, next time just tell me the damn story.
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Rosemary Zurlo-Cuva lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she works as a free lance journalist and teaches creative writing to middle schoolers. A fiction writer and poet, she is at work on her first novel, Travel for Agoraphobics.
