How to use this Page

Every representation of a person's life is just that—a representation. A curation. A summary. An interpretation.

I know that. I off went to see "Amy," the deeply moving documentary about the great singer, Amy Winehouse, fully aware that what I was about to witness was a life encoded by footage and recall, and not a life itself.

Still. There are some incontestable things about this British singer with a genius touch and a tortured relationship with her own talent. First (incontestable): she could sing. Second (I think it's clear): she wasn't always sure of who to trust. Third: she died too young of alcohol poisoning in a body winnowed to near nothing by too many drugs and an eating disorder.

Fourth: Winehouse never originally wanted to be famous, never thought she would be famous, never imagined herself capable of fame. She is there, in the footage, saying so. But fame became hers, fame became her, and she had to live, and die, with the consequences.

There is a dividing line between those who make things in order to be known or seen, and those whose loyalties lie with the things themselves—the songs, the films, the stories. There are those who craft themselves into a brand—who orchestrate aggrandizements, who leverage opportunities, who seek out "friendships" that will advance them, who overstay their welcome, who build cliques that further not their art but their careers, who ricochet with gossip. And there are those who (I think, in the book world, of Alice McDermott, Marilynne Robinson, and Michael Ondaatje) seek out private quiet. Yes, they cede to interviews and talks and touring when their books are released. But they also vanish from public view, and consumption, just as soon as they're able.

Fame—a seething hope for it—is not what propels them.

Watching "Amy," one wants to turn back time. To give the artist her creative space. To let her walk the streets without the blinding pop of cameras. One wants to give her what matters most—room for the everyday and the ordinary. Supremely talented, unwittingly destined, Amy Winehouse suffered. She made choices, certainly. She faced a wall of personal demons. But the media that stalked her and the fans who turned hold some responsibility for what happened.

Artists have the responsibility to do their work for the right reasons. They have responsibility to the work itself—to not sell out, to not write to trends, to not step on others in their quest for something.

But fans have responsibilities, too. To give the artists room to make, to risk, to sometimes fail. To love artists for who they are and what they do and not for whether or not, in this bracket of time, they appear to be potentially famous. To see artists as people who would be better off, who would be healthier, given some time to live with dignity instead of trailing endless glitter.

Add a Comment

Earlier this summer the impeccable Bill Wolfe invited me to write a short piece for his beautiful blog, "Read her Like an Open Book" that focuses on the work of women writers (their methods, their work). I had been thinking a lot about books that matter and the clicking tock, about the world we're in and the role of writers. And so I wrote a quick piece on the topic that began an interesting conversation out there in the virtual world.

A few weeks later urgency was still on my mind, and my dear friends at Chicago Tribune gave me room to expand on the thesis. This time I included books—both fiction and nonfiction—that have lately impressed me as significant.

That piece runs here today.

Add a Comment

In Alaska, a new friend asks me what I am reading and I say Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See. I show her the book's first page, and she says, "Read it to me. Out loud." I demur. She insists. I read. In the belly of the boat while the glacial mountains float by. "Leaflets," I say, reading the chapter title. Then:

At dusk they pour from the sky. They blow across the ramparts, turn cartwheels over rooftops, flutter into the ravines between houses. Entire streets swirl with them, flashing white against the cobbles. Urgent message to the inhabitants of this town, they say. Depart immediately to open country.

The tide climbs. The moon hangs small and yellow and gibbous. On the rooftops of beachfront hotels to the east, and in the gardens behind them, a half-dozen American artillery units drop incendiary rounds into the mouths of mortars.

I hear my own breath catch. I look up into Kristi's face. She isn't sure, quite, about the passage I've read, wants to know why it has enchanted me. I read phrases out loud again, verbs, that word incendiary webbed into the lush lyric of the cartwheels, the flutter. How can you speak about what you love? How can you convey the genius of Anthony Doerr, who has never been more genius than this new novel of his—541 pages long, ten years in the making, and it reads too fast, you could read it in a day, you cannot read it in a day, for there will be nothing like it again or soon. Doerr is like Ondaatje, Doerr is like McCann, Doerr is like McDermott, Doerr is like Hagy, Doerr is a writer, pure.

And this new book—about a blind girl in France and a smart boy in Germany and the war that brings them together but only after terrible journeys and terrible losses and only for a moment—this new book is wrenching and glorious. Wrenching first. Glorious because of its deep and tender soul. Because Doerr embraces life even in the midst of dying. Because Doerr inclines toward science as he writes his art, which is to say that he inclines toward the curious mysteries of our world. Snails. A massive diamond. Electromagnetic waves. The cell that divides and divides again, until it is a human, howling.

I love this book. I believe in it, wholeheartedly. I believe in Doerr. Why do books still wear labels—YA or A, historical or contemporary, literary or not? Banish them. Now. Anyone who loved The Book Thief will be astonished and grateful for this book. Anyone who swoons over an Ondaatje sentence will recognize the power here. Anyone who wishes to return to France or Germany at the time of a devastating war will be returned in a fresh way, an eyes wide-open way.

Anyone who reads will emerge brokenhearted but also grateful that Doerr doesn't just break our hearts. In surprising and redeeming ways, he heals them, too.

Add a Comment

The pages of my copy of The Sense of an Ending, the gripping new novel by Julian Barnes, had not been cut.  I had to slip my finger in between each one as I lay reading at the close of a snowy weekend.  This pleased me greatly.  The feel of the paper against my skin.  The sound of a story unfolding.

I am always confused by critics of the short novel—by those who refer to the shorter novel as something lesser than.  I remember a conversation with Alice McDermott (Charming Billy, That Night, At Weddings and Wakes), in which she spoke of writing the kind of stories she herself liked to read—shorter and more compact novels, densified worlds, intimate places, landscapes of measured, studied sentences.

Yes.  Me, too.  The short novel may or may not be about plot, may or may not be commercial (whatever that is).  But when it is handled with the intelligence of an Alice McDermott or a Julian Barnes or a Julia Otsuka or a Kate Chopin or a Michael Ondaatje (Coming Through Slaughter) or a Chloe Aridjis or a Kathryn Davis or an Anne Enright, for example, I personally think there is nothing finer.  Brilliant short novels have the impact of poems.  They are, most often, shorter precisely because the writer has taken the time to banish the extraneous and diluting, the self-aggrandizing or -indulgent.  There is a story to be told.  There is its core and there are those things essential to its core.  The brilliant writer of shorter novels holds that line, maintains his or her focus, goes blessedly deep, does not skip from this event to that—indeed, does not concentrate on "events" at all.  Character and meaning, language and symbol, the ripe stuff.  Brilliant short novels concentrate, primarily, on that.

I know many who would disagree, and that's the beauty of this literary community—the possibility of conversation, dissension.  (And of course I have many beloved books on my shelf that run past 300 pages, though I will admit that I don't have many favorites that run past 400.)  But I hope no one will disagree with me about this new book by Julian Barnes.  From the first sentence to the last I hardly exhaled.  The entire book was of such a piece that I felt certain that Barnes himself was sitting here, telling this story about a man, Tony Webster, resorting the memories of his youth.  Webster had thought himself a regular-enough student with a regular-enough first love affair.  He had gotten on with his life and lived it reasonably well.  But when he learns that he has been remembered in a will in an odd and oddly disturbing way, and when, over time, he is presented with evidence of who he really was as a young man, he is staggered in the way that we all are staggered when presented with contradictions of our own fine self-opinion.

Barnes, whose Nothing to Be Frightened Of, is a fine and teachable book of nonfiction, puts his philosophical genius on full display in this novel, his great capacity for going deep.  One example of many:

And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse—a feeling somewhat between self-pity and self-hatred—about my whole life.  All of it.  I had lost the friends of my youth.  I had lost the love of my wife.  I had abandoned t

5 Comments on On Short Novels, The Sense of an Ending, and Julian Barnes, last added: 11/3/2011

Display Comments

Serena said, on 10/31/2011 5:04:00 AM

I am with you. I want a powerful economy of words, though I do love a Stephen King tome now and again...Like reading IT for the second time since I was 10...what a difference.

Melissa Sarno said, on 10/31/2011 6:35:00 AM

I like short novels. I like stories that get in and out of the heart the matter quickly and with tight language. I also wish that films were no longer than 90 minutes. I don't know what that has to do with anything. Just felt like sharing.

Wendy said, on 10/31/2011 6:53:00 AM

Oh, I agree, Beth - I think some of the best books are the shorter ones. Peirene Press puts out some terrific books (mostly in translation) which are less than 200 pages...two which I really loved were Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius...which spanned only 105 pages, and Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal which was only 126 pages. And Tinkers by Paul Harding (which won the Pulitzer last year) was amazing...and very short. Of course, I also include YOUR books in some of the best short fiction out there :)

Sarah Allen said, on 10/31/2011 9:18:00 AM

This made me feel better, in a way, because my first manuscript is looking like its gonna end up at around 85,000, which is totally fine, but still on the short side. I like the short ones too. I think all lengths have their place, and it matters more to me how well a piece is written then how long it is. That's the point, isn't it?

Sarah Allen
(my creative writing blog)

Lilian Nattel said, on 11/3/2011 2:40:00 PM

I love short novels. I'm putting this on my list.

Add a Comment