First, a disclaimer: writing about craft will not necessarily be well-crafted. Amanda has set a rather high bar, and I have no beautiful metaphor for the problematic process of the novel, no sinking ship and then the shoring up, no mast and sudden wind, no new world appearing beyond the prow. What I have is a novel that I’m beginning to suspect may not be a novel. That’s more like, I don’t know, thinking you’re in a sailboat and finding you’ve got a dinghy—no wonder you couldn’t get the damn sail up. I know, the metaphor doesn’t work. I warned you.
For four years, I’ve been writing about teaching fourth grade in the black public schools of the Mississippi Delta. Unfortunately, I immediately began writing about the experience for the audience of an MFA workshop, which led me to two errors: first, I started before I could treat the material with a clear, cold eye, and second, I let the opinions of others, their praise and criticism, their ideas, influence the material. In fact, the entire conception of this book as a ‘novel’ came when I brought to my thesis advisor a short story written in dialect from the point of view of a child. Compared to my other work, the piece was polished and elegant, clear in its implications for the character. “This chapter of the novel shows the world of the children, and offers an opportunity for irony, showing how insufficient the efforts of your teacher happen to be,” my advisor told me. More point-of-view chapters followed, the workshop praised the hell out of them, and so I did what my advisor and peers told me: I ‘interpolated’ these ‘chapters’ in the primary narrative of the novel, which was, allegedly, the teacher’s.
In the years that followed, though, I’ve struggled with the teacher’s narrative. In trying to move through time in a logical and coherent manner, I found there was no narrative arc. I’d be writing about one narrative line—the teacher’s obsession with saving one damaged, precocious little girl named Shasprine Gaines—and lose the intensity of the romance I’d set up between the teacher and the Reverend’s daughter. Other times, in a single scene I’d write material that overwhelmed all preceding events—the beating of a dozen children in the teacher’s classroom, for example, demanded closure and sorting and a sense of what its implications were over time, but I skipped along and sent the narrator musing about his dead mother or railing against his judgmental father. I wrote long, static scenes and passages of exposition, trying to deal with the linear passage of time. Here’s a typical passage, written sometime last year, in which my narrator describes downtown Indianola:
The buildings were marked with the signs of dryrot and ivy, the siding a mottled, stricken brown, and the vines that crawled the sills and frames essayed tendrils that entered the cracking walls, twisting feathers of paint free, so that the sparrows quick about the eaves would knock them free with a sound like broom to tile. The sidewalk was broken all to pieces, great rifts and the spreading, hairline fractures whose pattern seemed the same as the ivy above. The powerlines that ran through from the white side of town toward the black sagged near head-height, the grayed poles leaning a little from the top like old men too long on their feet. Over it all hovered the abandoned wreck of agro-industry, solid shadows of silo and mill and warehouse, though the structures themselves were so insecure as to threaten immediate fall: the corrugated tin had been scoured to paper thickness and the crumpling, holed, red-black walls were held by supports so tired of weight that they gave from the edges, pushed the binding bolts free so that only rust held the roofs and walls aloft.
The passage is full of extemporaneous, over-written description, and though it indeed renders downtown Indianola as a wreck, that’s all it accomplishes. There’s nothing happening—not in the prose, not in plot, not within the narrator. I ground out passage after passage, scene after scene, the prose straining and false-noting as I tried to hide absence of intention with turns of phrase and wild flights of language. Intending to persevere through will, I pushed harder and wrote poorer still. Finally, exhausted with it, I let it be for a month, went and read over the full expression, four hundred pages of prose. And I realized I had a bunch of—nonsense. Nothing cohered, nothing linked or moved, nothing was focused on what mattered to my protagonist, what pushed on him or dragged him into the open.
I might have outright quit, except that Amanda asked me to the riverside McMenamins for a drink. The prospect of literary conversation filled me with dread, but lush that I am, I broke for liquor. It was cloudless afternoon, the lull of running water and the cool the river brought to the air perfectly relaxing, and a couple whiskey-sodas in, I was confessing all my woes. Amanda tried to let me figure out the problem myself—she told me a story about how she’d boxed away her novel, and now felt free to enter the work at hand. I missed the point. She told me about her new writing space, a room that was now fully hers, and explained how that too had been a kind of opening. I didn’t get it; I made her spell it out for me. “Mike,” she said the twelfth or fourteenth time I whined about the slack narrative and the static and disconnected scenes, “did it ever occur to you that you’re writing a book of linked stories?”
For a moment, I thought that angels were descending, and I heard hallelujah and a sound of strings, but then I realized it was only the white-aproned waitress with our drinks, and the drift of music from a concert in the park across the river. And yet, I felt my heart lift a little, for all the right reasons. You see, what Amanda was suggesting—that I write about one thing at a time, focusing on the character and the material and letting that dictate the order of scenes, the exposition, the degree of retrospection, and so on—which was how I’d started, before I’d let the well-intentioned suggestions of others alter my process. Since then, my summer’s been all about beating children—I’m writing a story called “Classroom Management,” that’s about my protagonist trying to help a little boy, and instead doing him harm—every time the narrator has called the boy’s house, he reaches no-one, and there’s no message machine. Unbeknownst to the teacher, the boy’s mother has taken up with a guard at Parchman prison, and when she sees the teacher’s number, her boyfriend beats him with a fanbelt. The narrator is determined to help the boy because he’s reminded of a childhood friend who was an African immigrant, and who in adopting a ‘black’ style got in with a bad crowd and later lost his scholarship to college by dealing drugs. The narrator’s father tells him he’s a racist, that as a boy he used to get beat up by a gang of black children in Buffalo, that his black patients (he’s a doctor) rarely pay him. Time in the story is flexible, malleable according to what I’m trying to show, what I need. In the climax of the story, the narrator’s principal beats ten of his students, including Dequarious, in the teacher’s own classroom. Afterward, the teacher leaves the school on his free period, and walks the streets of the black side of town:
At a corner, a package of raw chicken gone bad, a twisting of maggots at the wet center and the edges dried like the fingertips of old men. Three mangy dogs fought for the right to eat it, flies circling about them and the meat as they turned and bent for each others necks with decaying teeth. Three men in yellowed wife-beaters egged them on; it seemed they might have bet on the winner, or at least, it seemed to matter that the battle persisted. They eyed me but had no attention to spare, as one dog got a bite on the other’s stringy leg. The victim screamed, an urgent keening. I gagged, bent over a fence and puked into a yard.
“Oh, no, you didn’t,” I heard a female voice call. I wiped my mouth and spit and met for a moment the judging eyes of a white-haired old woman sitting in the weak shade of a porch on a couch that sank to the ground at the middle.
“Sorry,” I said.
“You gone clean that up?” she said. I looked into the dirt yard, a scatter of cans and cardboard the only decoration. “Well?”
I turned my eyes to the road and walked away, the woman hollering something at my back that had to do with China and her fitting to beat my yellow ass. The line of fences queued but never met, except as heat-haze at the vanishing point. I wound the potholes. The dog cried and cried behind me; the men bellowed encouragement; I kept on until the sound of suffering was only an echo in my ears. Now I came on two teenage boys sparring in the street, throwing mock punches, muscles of their shoulders and arms rippling as they turned circles on the dusty road. One boy caught his feet, fell cursing, and the other boy stood above him, kept him down, throwing mock blow after blow. I saw a scene from childhood: my father at a park, spring afternoon, scent of fresh-cut grass. Me on the playground while he ran laps on the gravel track, and then a swell of voices, me looking up to find my father confronting a group of boys, black boys, twelve and thirteen years old.
“Did you throw that rock?” he said, anger rising to his voice, and then one boy, half a head taller than the rest, taller than my father, stepped forward. “Naw, man, you crazy,” he sneered. “Saying we done something we ain’t. Stupid cracker.”
Even from a distance I saw my father’s eyes go large, saw him step forward, him and the tall boy almost bumping, and then my father had the boy’s arm, ten years of martial arts, and I knew the submission, the boy straight to the ground and my father with his wrist twisted double, the others bellowing and cursing, the boy writhing on the gravel as my father held him, face expressionless, clinical. Finally my father let go and the boy found his feet, gangly and young now, yelling about calling the cops as they all backed away. My father stood and watched them until they’d left the park. Then he hurried me from the playground, his hand trembling as he held mine too hard, him walking so fast for home I had to skip to keep up, and not a word. I knew even then he wasn’t in the right, but the intricacy of such anger and shame had been beyond me.
The boy still standing reached down now, offered a hand and pulled the other boy to his feet. The one who’d fallen brushed clean with disgust, flexed his arms and popped his neck, lowered his chin and lifted clenched fists. Then they began again to circle, dance of steps and harmless blows, voices echoing along the asphalt.
I’d seen Mikhael after what happened at college. I ran into him back at home on break, downtown where the mall-rats and homeless met the dealers and students looking to score. He leaned to a telephone pole, eyes on the ground. He’d grown gaunt, the dimensions of his body thinned and sharpened, dark hollows beneath his eyes. There were holes in the knees of his pants, which hung loosely from his waist as if he’d put on a larger man’s clothes. When he recognized me he straightened, grinned with a white flash of teeth. “Al-ain! What’s up?” I didn’t know what to say, how to bridge the distance between us, so I turned my back. I left him there and walked away.
In a novel, at least the novel I was writing, I could never have allowed this material such attention. Everything there is to say about Dequarious I say in twelve pages; in the next scene, he’s taken away by the police from the teacher’s classroom for beating his cousin with a baseball bat while he slept, the teacher peeling his fingers free from the door, letting him go. The material would never have worked given the other narrative lines I was simultaneously tracing. Yet in a story, one that connects and refracts and expands on the themes of other stories, I have the freedom to focus, to choose what I need.
Here’s my question, folks: am I creating an artificial distinction? A book like Huck Finn, for example, is tremendously episodic, and once you leave an episode, it sometimes fails to come back into play at all except thematically. The problem Twain gives himself, of the book being a ‘novel’ with Jim at the center, might in fact lead to what many believe is Twain’s ‘flinching’ as the book devolves into the trivial antics of Tom Sawyer, as Twain reaches for closure (I disagree—I believe the book is great, but that’s an argument for another essay). And certainly, both novelists and short story writers move through time, through the past and present, in fluid and complicated ways that are not dissimilar. The problem could be that I’m just a poor novelist, incapable of juggling ninety-five narrative lines for the course of a book, and that consequently, I’d rather take the easy out and focus on one thing at one time. You could even argue that a novel consists of an author focusing on one thing at one time, then ordering those points in a manner that’s unified and creates meaning and narrative drive. If that’s a novel, however, I feel I may not be up to the demands of the task.
Regardless, I’m not sure I understand the difference between a book of stories that are unified in characters and setting, that even have causal plot connections from story to story, and a novel. And before someone says Sherwood Anderson, and starts to lecture about ‘linked stories’ or a ‘novel in stories,’ let me say that’s too easy a free pass. The best short fiction has a lapidary quality that allows a movement through time that gives the story a—size. A short story has the ability to stand alone as narrative, unlike the chapters of a novel. Alice Munro’s The Beggar Maid, for example, was billed as a ‘novel in stories,’ though in fact not all of the stories were about Flo and Rose, though they contained Flo/Rose-like characters—the publisher made Munro change the names so that the stories seemed to be linked. The effect was not benign—is that really Rose? you find yourself asking in the later stories, instead of paying attention to what Munro is creating within the story itself.
Common narrators, a common ‘world’ of a book, recurring characters, causality—what is the difference between a book of stories being ‘unified’ and a ‘novel’? Take Isaac Babel’s “Red Cavalry,” where the narrator is often the same, or Hemingway’s “In Our Time,” or books of stories by people like Tim O’Brien and Ehud Havazalet and dozen-dozen other contemporary writers. What are the ‘correct’ distinctions? What is the difference, for that matter, between a story and a novella and a novel? What’s meaningful about the distinction? Am I just being chickenshit in not wanting to take on the set of problems this material offers as ‘novel’ (that’s what my thesis advisor would say), or did Amanda hit the nail on the head?
