“A novel, like a letter, should be loose, cover much ground, run swiftly, take risk of mortality and decay.”
— Saul Bellow, letter to Bernard Malamud (1953)
Art
Flickr Find of the Day
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, from the Library of Congress Flickr photo stream. The photo apparently dates from 1913 or thereabouts. I always imagined Conan Doyle as a less modern, more Victorian character than this — more like Holmes.
Flickr has lots of wonderful vintage images like this one, not all book-related obviously. I recommend the streams of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, and the George Eastman House for starters, but there are lots more. If you find any needles buried in those haystacks, do let me know.
Is an ebook still a book?
When a printed book is transferred to an electronic device connected to the Internet, it turns into something very like a Web site.
— Nicholas Carr, “The Post-Book Book,” quoting his own upcoming book The Shallows
Can a writer quit?
… our tendency to view writing as a sort of an existential vocation, rather than a job, gets in the way of our ability to grasp that a person who writes one or two (or even five) books at one stage of his life ought not to be constantly asked when their next is coming out — because maybe they’ve turned to a new focus for their life’s work and the real answer is that they’re no longer a writer. Publishing pundits seem convinced that Salinger was sitting on a treasure trove of new work in his run-down New Hampshire home … But the evidence seems limited, in light of Salinger’s noted reluctance to share his work with anyone. Yet we continued to live and hope that something would turn up — because it’s easier to pursue false hopes and prolong fandom, than to avoid entertaining the possibility that he simply wasn’t especially interested in writing — or publishing — any more.
— Jean Hannah Edelstein, Guardian Books Blog, “Once a Writer, Always a Writer?”
Image: Salinger in 1951.
Will e-novels be shorter?
A few weeks ago, over on Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell wrote a post that I’ve been thinking about ever since.
I would estimate that about 80% of the non-academic non-fiction books that I do not find a complete waste of time (i.e. good books in politics, economics etc — I can’t speak to genres that I don’t know) are at least twice as long as they should be. They make an interesting point, and then they make it again, and again, padding it out with some quasi-relevant examples, and tacking on a conclusion about What It All Means which the author clearly doesn’t believe herself. The length of the average book reflects the economics of the print trade and educated guesses as to what book-buyers will actually pay for, much more than it does the actual intellectual content of the book itself. Length may also, of course, reflect some practical judgments concerning the book as a display object.
He went on to predict “an explosion in the number of very short books/essays” as we move to a world of electronic publishing, because buyers will not be put off by shorter books when they can’t actually see (or display) them as physical objects.
I hope he is right, of course. The extinction of padded-out nonfiction books would be good news for everyone, except maybe Malcolm Gladwell.
But what struck me most about the post was how rare it is to see a discussion of how this new medium will affect books themselves. The conversation about ebooks is obsessed with the business of publishing. Which traditional publishers will survive, which won’t? Which reader will dominate, iPad or Kindle or something else? How will authors get by when publishers’ margins approach zero, as resellers like Amazon drive down prices and tent-pole authors find they don’t need traditional publishing houses at all? In all this, relatively little is said about the books.
What about fiction? In a world of ebooks, will fiction shrink, too?
I think it will, but not for the same reason. Unlike nonfiction, which begins to feel overstretched when there are more pages than ideas, there is no “natural” length for a story. Moby Dick and The Great Gatsby are equally masterpieces, of unequal length. I just finished Wolf Hall, a cinderblock of a book, but it did not feel overlong at all. If anything, it ended too soon. (I raved about it here.) The test is whether a story works dramatically. Even a very short story can feel too long.
And that is what will force novels to shrink: as we increasingly move to reading on screens, everything begins to feel too long. The reading public is losing its ability to stay focused on a longer text. Online, readers are conditioned to graze, to nibble and move on. Even the verbs we use for reading on the internet, browse, surf, suggest how superficial the experience feels. These increasingly are our readers, of fiction and nonfiction alike: harried, restless, impatient.
Worse, ebooks will increasingly share the same screens as the rest of the digital tsunami. No longer will you turn off your computer and open a book in peace. The iPad and whatever is likely to follow will be fully web-enabled, so the whole Times Square of the internet will always be one click away. For the moment, dedicated ebook-reading devices like the Kindle offer a quieter reading environment, but that is likely to change as more versatile devices like the iPad enter the market.
I have seen my own patience for long books begin to shrivel. So many novels now seem to drag, particularly in the second act. To be fair, part of it may be other pressures: between two young kids and working, I am squeezed for time. But part of it is the distracted feeling we all share today. It is the way we read now.
I have begun to tune my own writing accordingly. I made a conscious decision to make my third novel shorter than my first two by about 20%. Most of the tightening is in that critical second act, where the pace tends to slow down and the plot often wanders, to no real purpose. I am keenly aware that this novel will be competing with an array of new media and that my hold on the reader’s attention is precarious, and it scares the hell out of me. My competition is not other novelists; it is all the other media crowding onto my readers’ screens and into their minds, try as they might to shut them out. I simply can’t afford to shuffle my feet for a hundred pages and expect the reader to still be there for act three.
Of course, there is nothing new about novelists shaping their work to the tastes of contemporary audiences. Dickens’ novels are long and intricately plotted because that was what his audience demanded. He generally wrote for serial publication in periodicals, so his stories had to extend and ramify over very long periods, like modern TV series. (HBO’s “The Wire” was often compared to Dickens’ stories, and rightly so.) Serial publication also allowed Dickens to monitor how his books were being received and tweak them as he went along to give readers what they wanted.
It is hard to give readers what they want, of course, because it is impossible to know what they want. But I suspect that shorter novels will increasingly become the norm, just as shorter nonfiction will. This, it should be noted, is a hopeful prediction. Better that novels go on a diet than die out altogether.
Image: “Still Life With Burned Books” by Ephraim Rubenstein (oil on linen, 38″ x 50″).
Dr. Johnson: Libraries and “the vanity of human hopes”
“No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library; for who can see the wall crowded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditations and accurate inquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue…”
— Samuel Johnson, Rambler #106 (March 23, 1751) (source) (click that link at your peril — a fella could get lost in a place like that)
Wolf Hall
The reigning Booker Prize winner hardly needs my seal of approval, but I’ll give it anyway: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is wonderful.
The bravest — and most exciting and troubling — aspect of the book is the decision to heroize Thomas Cromwell. Mantel’s Cromwell, steeled by a brutal childhood and an apprenticeship on the continent as a mercenary and then a merchant, is a true man for all seasons. Early in the book, he steps onstage a sort of sixteenth-century James Bond:
Thomas Cromwell is now a little over forty years old. He is a man of strong build, not tall. Various expressions are available to his face, one is readable: an expression of stifled amusement. … It is said that he knows by heart the entire New Testament in Latin … His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed. He makes money and spends it. He will take a bet on anything.
He is never at a loss for words, out-bantering the cleverest courtiers even as he out-maneuvers them. He is sophisticated and well traveled, in an England that is still a small, grim island. Most of all, he has a modern sensibility. He alone understands that the true source of power is trade and finance — money — of which he is a master.
The world is run … not from castle walls, but from countinghouses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.
As if all that were not enough to send readers swooning, Mantel’s Cromwell is warm and sympathetic. He takes in orphans and stray cats, and treats women with respect. He is “unfailing in his amiable courtesy.”
Even his voice is seductive to a modern reader. The story is told in a close third-person: we see through Cromwell’s eyes, we hear his thoughts, but the narrative voice is not the campy faux-Tudor pastiche of costume dramas. Mantel finds a perfect tone — “robust modern English but with a slight twist,” she has called it. The language is salted with just enough anachronism and period detail to keep the reader convincingly in Henry’s England, while at the same time making Cromwell’s voice familiar and accessible. This Cromwell is a man we can understand. He does not sound so different from, say, Dick Cheney: amoral, yes, but also cool, supremely capable, a man of reason. If he tortures, it is only because he must, for king and country.
In fact, the only indications of Cromwell’s cruelty come from others. His stepson worries that Cromwell might drown him: “He thinks you would do anything.” The king says he is “as cunning as a bag of serpents.” But we, the readers, rarely see it firsthand and never quite believe it.
The sainted Thomas More, on the other hand, is the king’s zealous torturer-in-chief, in Mantel’s telling. Sir Thomas personally supervises the racking of heretics at the Tower. Even in his own home, according to rumor, he “keeps suspects in the stocks, while he preaches at them and harries them: the name of your printer, the name of the master of the ship that brought these books into England.” More wears a hair shirt next to his skin and flagellates himself daily. If not a villain, exactly, he is certainly not the hero Robert Bolt described, the modern, the man of conscience.
It is not hard for me to imagine More as Mantel has drawn him, but it is worth noting how bold her portrait of Cromwell is. The traditional view is that Cromwell was not James Bond but Darth Vader.
… one of the most ruthless and powerful operators ever to dominate the politics of [England].
His mastery of the black arts of spin and propaganda, of flattery, patronage and sudden betrayal, make the most ruthless modern politicians seem mild by comparison.
He ran a spy network that was the nearest thing a 16th-century regime could get to the Stasi, saw off his foes with trumped up charges of adultery and revelled in the torture of his enemies.
In a reign of unadulterated terror against the Church, he masterminded the dissolution of the monasteries and the biggest land grab since the Norman invasion of 1066 — seizing one-sixth of the nation’s wealth and turning it over to his master, the King.
One comes away from this brilliant, utterly convincing novel with the disturbing impression that Thomas Cromwell is our “man for all seasons,” he is the slippery sort of hero we deserve. Mantel has denied that Wolf Hall is an allegory of contemporary politics. In fact, she has been nursing the idea for this novel, apparently, since the 1970s. But her Cromwell obviously resonates today, as Robert Bolt’s idealized vision of Thomas More did fifty years ago. Then — after two world wars, the Holocaust, the Gulag, the Cold War — we dreaded government tyranny and we lionized the lone steadfast man who resisted it, who laid down his life for the idea of principle over expediency. Now the enemy is not a government. Our bogeyman is a hair-shirted religious fanatic willing to die for his faith. And we raise up the amoral strongman and tactician, the ultimate government insider who will use any weapon to protect us. In an era of “enhanced interrogation” and “my country right or wrong,” Thomas Cromwell is our man. One generation’s villain is another’s hero, I guess.
Image: Detail from Hans Holbein’s portrait of Thomas Cromwell, painted around 1532-33 (and Photoshopped here). Holbein himself appears in Wolf Hall as a friend of Cromwell, and this painting is mentioned several times. Toward the end of the novel, Holbein finally delivers the picture to his patron. Cromwell remarks that it makes him look like a murderer. His son responds, “Did you not know?” The painting now hangs at the Frick in New York, along with Holbein’s portrait of Thomas More.
Life Magazine Photos of Boston’s Strangler Days
A trove of remarkable photographs of Boston during the Strangler siege. The photos, which are eerie and beautiful, were taken by Arthur Rickerby for Life Magazine. View the whole collection here. Above: A woman wears a hatpin in her sleeve to defend herself against the Strangler, 1963. (Another here.)
