William J Cobb on books & film

This has to be No. 1 in some weird category of Books I Like But Have Not Read. I’ve mentioned it before: Steve Hely’s satiric/comic novel, How I Became a Famous Novelist, which came out this summer, and it sounds funny. Here are two of the rules that touch on issues I’ve written about recently:
“Rule #1: Abandon Truth: People will believe thousands of different lies in succession rather than confront a single scintilla of truth. People like love that crosses the years, funny workplaces, goofy dads who save Christmas, laser battles, whiny hags who marry charming Italians, and stylish detectives. But try telling somebody a single true thing about human experience and they’ll turn on the TV or adjust their Netflix queue while you starve to death in the rain.
“Rule #4: Must Include a Murder: Not including a murder is like insisting on playing tennis with a wooden racket. Noble perhaps in some stubborn way, but why handicap yourself?”
I recently blogged about That Murder Problem. As convenient as the murder plotline is for novels/storytelling, how much of life are we avoiding to follow that old killer song and dance? While promoting my novel Goodnight, Texas I got some laughs at a bookseller event (an industry thing where you meet and greet with bookstore owners/buyers) when I confessed that there was no murder in my book, “But maybe I should have killed someone?” I asked. This followed a dozen novelists who described their books as about 1) a recently divorced Manhattan D.A. 2) who stumbles on a plot to assassinate the president, while investigating the murder of a call girl linked to her ex-husband, 3) who has joint custody of their mutt, a scruffy beagle/dachsund/airedale mix who is the most lovable perp-biter since McGruff the Crime Dog—who has a blog, by the way: www.mcgruff.org/.

So this weekend I read Nick Reding’s Methland, a nonfiction book about the effects of the crystal meth “epidemic” on America (this is harped on too much) and in particular, on the town of Oelwein, Iowa. In part I read it because it seems to have gotten good press about speaking to The Decline of Small-Town America. (My novel Goodnight, Texas focused on this problem, too. I’m simpatico.) I also live in two small towns, one tiny (Westcliffe, Colorado—population 1500 maybe?) and the other medium-sized (State College, Pennsylvania—population 90,000 maybe?). I don’t doubt that both towns have crystal meth users, but I’d also bet that both towns have more binge drinkers than speed freaks. It’s the kind of book that may be full of accurate statistics (which should always be taken with a grain of salt) and juicy anecdotes (it needed many more of these), but still seemed to hype its argument. No doubt meth use and Mexican drug cartels are major problems, but where would they land on the list of Our Worst Problems? I don’t know.
Reding does a good job of tying the drug problems to bigger issues like Big Agriculture and Big Pharmacy. But he also seems to hang out in bars mainly to socialize with the meth users, and I have no doubt that if I hung out in bars a lot I’d probably meet some ne’er-do-wells, too. But both of my towns aren’t really defined by the bars and druggies. It’s a matter of how you look at it. The people I socialize with in Westcliffe tend to be smart, hard-working, upbeat, and outdoor-oriented. State College tends toward the yuppie vision of the world, parents with kids in preschool, good jobs, and a Starbucks latte habit. The Great Recession seems a bigger problem for the country right now.

So being the father of a two-year-old, it took me a while to watch the based-on-a-true-story Changeling (2008)—a star turn for Angelina Jolie (whom I sympathize with; she seems like a kind mom, even if she is a Hollywood brat, perhaps grown wiser now), and another stunner directed by Clint Eastwood. Imdb.com has some great details about this, including that most of the film is true to life, although it’s hard to ever trust Hollywood. The writer, J. Michael Straczynski, supposedly wrote the screenplay in seven days, after months of research on the real-life Wineville Chicken Coop Murders. I can believe it. The story is riveting and dense with odd details that work best because it’s based on an actual event. I immediately wanted to know how much of the story was accurate. It seems that much of it was. A great example of the power of fiction vs. nonfiction. If it was all fictionalized, I don’t think it would be as good a film or story. When Jolie’s character is placed in a psychopathic ward by the police, that would seem too rhetorical (message = bad police) if it had not happened.
As a novelist, I pay attention to the patterns of classic stories/novels/films, and have sometimes squirmed against the preponderance of murder plots. It’s the ultimate sin, perhaps, the ultimate bitter end. I admire the storyteller who can avoid murder plots and write a great book. Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary come to mind, but since both feature suicides, that’s a squishy distinction—suicide is self-murder. Lolita is a classic murder story, although the heart of the story is not the murder, but Humbert’s forbidden love. I’ve written about Out Stealing Horses as one of my favorite recent novels, and it has an accidental death in it, an accidental murder.
Now I know that the definition of murder implies a deliberate, not accidental, killing. So technically when Lars kills Odd in Out Stealing Horses, it’s not murder. But still. It’s an Unnatural Death. Perhaps that’s what novels seem to feature most often, The Unnatural Death. Why?
The simple answer: it ups the ante. An easy question for storytelling is: What’s at stake? With a murder, it’s all. What more can you lose?

So there’s a minidebate in the NY Times this week about nonfiction writers writing about family, the painful and embarrassing moments. It arises from a book published in the U.K. and recently in the U.S., Julie Myerson’s The Lost Child, about her son’s “drug addiction,” told in horrifying tones. When I learned it was weed, I thought it all sounded overheated. (The Sunday NY Times review of it was even more overheated, with the (humorous?) tag, Reefer Madness:
www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/books/review/Browning-t.html?_r=1&ref=books
After the many fake memoirs, I don’t trust the genre. The best books can convince the reader, of course. But in a case like the notorious James Frey, many readers had been suspicious before the news broke that he had faked much of it. (Notice the connection: Rehab, anyone?) The writers usually hide behind the old “that’s how I remember it” dodge, which I think works as long as no one is hurt by what you write. But many are basically juiced-up because the subject wouldn’t sell without some added drama. In plain English, they’re lying. Now if we’re talking about “making things up,” that’s what fiction does best. With style and pizzazz. Only fiction doesn’t sell as well as “nonfiction.” So these ‘memoirs’ are placed in that category because of the confessional craze, because they will sell better. Here are some writers responding to that question of What can you write about? in the NY Times:
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/the-memoir-and-childrens-privacy/?hp
The second guy is basically saying, Anything for a buck. It’s best not to know him. The other three do acknowledge the complexity of the issue, and the need for tact. It’s not like this is something that suddenly developed in the memoir craze. For centuries writers have written thinly veiled fiction (and less so, nonfiction) about their families: Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1951) is a classic. I don’t remember a single embarrassing, nasty incident in all that beautiful book. Too bad his son didn’t want to get high. I imagine Nabokov would have made it funny.
I’ve written about family in my novel The Fire Eaters, much fictionalized. I did speak with my mother and sisters, and some of them weren’t thrilled with some of their depictions, but then again, they were supportive, and the most dramatic moments, in general, were fictionalized. I left many events out that would be too painful. That’s another story, the one that hurts.

Here’s a gem from Sunday’s NY Times “Inside the List” piece in the Book Review:
HARRY POTTER, YEAR ZERO: Speaking of Harry, here are the 10 titles grown-ups were reading when “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” the first book in the series, made its debut (at No. 16) on the adult hardcover fiction best-seller list, on Dec. 27, 1998. Note that there is only one vampire novel on the list.
1) “A Man in Full,” by Tom Wolfe.
2) “Bag of Bones,” by Stephen King.
3) “The Simple Truth,” by David Baldacci.
4) “Mirror Image,” by Danielle Steel.
5) “Rainbow Six,” by Tom Clancy.
6) “The Poisonwood Bible,” by Barbara Kingsolver.
7) “When the Wind Blows,” by James Patterson.
8) “All Through the Night,” by Mary Higgins Clark.
9) “The Vampire Armand,” by Anne Rice.
10) “Memoirs of a Geisha,” by Arthur Golden.
On this Sunday’s list, four titles fit the fantasy-genre category. I think. I’m not really sure what a “werepanther” is (DEAD AND GONE, by Charlaine Harris. (Ace, $25.95.) “Sookie Stackhouse searches for the killer of a werepanther”), but it sounds like you don’t want to stand in your yard and try to coax it to a bowl of milk, calling, “Kitty kitty kitty.” Also, three titles in ’98 would (loosely) fit the ‘literary’ category (Golden, Kingsolver, Woolf); today that number appears to be one (Russo). I’m not sure. With many of these writers, I’m only working with the brief description, which can be deceptive. Memoirs of a Geisha, by the way, is a terrific read. The movie was pretty, but missed the power of the book.

So I’m reading the NY Times this morning and encounter a head-in-the-sand scolding the notion of Peak Oil here: www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/opinion/25lynch.html
I’ve read much about this idea and some of it includes (hopefully) laughable doomsday scenarios, and some of it seems quite rational and worrisome, particularly Matthew Simmons’ excellent book, “Twilight in the Desert,” about the mysterious state of the Saudi oil industry. In a nutshell, the Saudis have historically one of the greatest supergiant (industry term) oil fields, which may be declining. Aramco, their oil company, keeps their information secret, so we don’t really know. Simmons is honest about this. He notes we still have plenty of oil, and make new discoveries all the time, but makes the logical statement that, from what we know, we do probably face the likelihood of declines in production during this century. He doesn’t predict the next Mad Max replay, but he does say it’s logical to face the fact that at some point, perhaps in the not-too-distant future, we will want to use more than we have, which will affect price, and global geopolitical stability. 
Lynch discounts that altogether, and moreover, makes not one mention of climate change. E.O. Wilson, the eminent science writer, makes the simple statement that if we burn all the oil we have underground, the planet will be uninhabitable. I imagine Lynch would discount that notion as well, and go shoot some birds with Dick Cheney. But you can’t talk about how much oil we have and use without realizing how it affects climate change.
Actually, perhaps Lynch’s vision of the future could be summed up by the film “Wall-E,” with its rusting tankers drydocked in a dead planet.

I wrote the following as a request for a former student, to be posted on the Southeast Review’s webpage:
Mystery in Storytelling
One of the tricks in story telling—and believe me, there’s a hundred tricks that the best writers use unconsciously, subconsciously, accidentally, purposefully, or not—lies in how to keep you interested, keep you turning the pages. As a young writer it was my good fortune to study with Donald Barthelme (whose Sixty Stories is only of the best book o’ stories ever) and Edward Albee (the Broadway boy wonder who was kind and generous as a professor, whom I saw direct a knockout performance of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, only one of the best American plays ever), and both of them said, “Surprise the reader.” Yet a basic problem arises with the element of surprise: how to keep it from being corny or forced. That’s where it’s useful to have some idea of the greater notion of Mystery.
First off, let me dispense with the notion of Mystery as some trump card that’s played at the end of a mystery novel—murder with an icicle, where the weapon melts away, as in Sherlock Holmes and later, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002), as the way the murderer/rapist is ultimately dispatched by a hand from heaven. That’s all fine and dandy, but not what I mean by Mystery. It’s part of it, no doubt, but not the whole enchilada. The best sense of Mystery is almost indefinable, ineffable—a sense that things aren’t what they seem (in Life as in Fiction, they rarely are), that something is wrong here but you can’t put your finger on it, that there is something interesting just behind that door, lurking in the shadows, in the odd expression that woman at the dentist’s office just gave you, in the foreboding you feel as you hear the telephone ring in the dark of night.
One of the best novels of our fresh-faced 21^st century is Out Stealing Horses (2006) by the Norwegian writer Per Petterson.  From the get-go you know that something’s amiss: An aging man retires to the countryside to live in peace and harmony, after some implied calamity in his life, and meets an old acquaintance on the road of his remote neighborhood. Not to spoil too much—if you haven’t read this novel, you should—this brief meeting with an old acquaintance stirs to the surface a childhood tale of accidental death, unhappy marriage, and heroism during World War II. What I find remarkable about Horses is that all of the people are essentially good, decent, honorable human beings, although things go terribly awry by the end. There are no villains, but there are mistakes, misdeeds, cruelty and heartbreak. Even the Nazis seem like decent human beings, and you feel sympathy and compassion for them.
Here’s the trick, and I don’t feel any guilt here, as magicians do in giving up the illusion—Mystery lies in what is left unsaid. What is hidden. Held back. Until that perfect moment for it to be revealed, whatever it happens to be.  In Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses (a gorgeous title, isn’t it?), which is arguably one of the best novels of its time, he holds back a stunner about the narrator’s dignified, beloved father until the very end. At that moment, all the mysteries and quizzical, emotionally charged moments come into sharp relief, and it delivers a kick to the gut that is the mark of a terrific novel. Which is what we all want to write, isn’t it?
The only recent novel that outshines Out Stealing Horses in its darkest-of-the-dark way is Cormac McCarthy’s end-of-the-world howl to the human condition, The Road (2006). We all have our little special moments in our little careers and grab bag of Hopes & Dreams, and two of mine have involved somehow brushing shoulders with the greatness of McCarthy: once he won a literary book award the same year I won an award for a story, and we were listed side-by-side (he got more money, natch), and the second occurred at the release of my last novel, Goodnight, Texas, which was reviewed in one magazine side-by-side with The Road. A friend of mine criticized The Road’s plot because, “I could guess what would happen from the beginning.” As in that the father would die, the son would live on. I agree. That’s not hard to figure out. But then again, that’s not the Mystery.
In one of Vladmir Nabokov’s wickedly good novels of the 1930s, Laughter in the Dark (1938), he sums up the plot at the outset: “Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster. This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man’s life, detail is always welcome.”
Mystery often lies in the details, what makes up the meat and bones of our lives. In The Road, the scene where the father and son open the trapdoor to discover the huddled slaves of the cannibal-clan is one of the creepiest, most horrific images I’ve ever read. The scene where the father/son stumble upon a cache of food just as they are about to starve to death creates a feeling of joy and exultation. That’s not a trick. It’s natural and true to the heart.
Part of the Mystery of The Road rests in what will become of the human race: Is the boy a savior? Will they/we all perish? It closes with one of the best endings in contemporary literature, and in that coda, McCarthy suggests a time when all that we know and care about will be gone and forgotten: “Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
I can’t top that. The Mystery of the world. That’s what makes us gasp and glow.

So I noticed this little gem this morning, in Newsweek, an article titled “Isolation Increases in U.S.” (www.newsweek.com/id/213088)
Here’s a quote from it: “Social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace may provide people with a false sense of connection that ultimately increases loneliness in people who feel alone. These sites should serve as a supplement, but not replacement for, face-to-face interaction, Cacioppo says. He compares connecting on a Web site to eating celery: “It feels good immediately, but it doesn’t give you the same sustenance,” he says. For people who feel satisfied and loved in their day-to-day life, social media can be a reassuring extension. For those who are already lonely, Facebook status updates are just a reminder of how much better everyone else is at making friends and having fun.”
What keeps me away from more digital socializing is the time-suck factor. We only have so much (tiny) time in our lives, and when I’m knocking on heaven’s door, I wouldn’t want to regret the many hours I spent texting. Sure, texting is a form of writing, and writing is communicating, and twittering is . . . well, twitter. We all draw the line somewhere. I know I spend too much time on email, but most of it is business-related, so it’s part of the job. Mainly I think I want more Time. To finish that book (Pete Dexter’s new novel, Spooner, is terrific), to play with my daughter (we shot hoops in the park yesterday, and she’s only almost-three), to do all those things that don’t involved keyboarding . . . .

After about two weeks of traveling, which included visiting family in St. Louis, I’m back in Pennsylvania, house painting, breathing a sigh that I have DirecTV again. The various motels we slept in while crossing the Heartland all seemed to have the same horrible cable TV, with a lineup that resembles what a victim watches in a tacky motel room as we go to “Killer Cam” viewpoint: Chuck Norris kicking or exploding something, infomercials about miracle towels and natural male enhancement pills, the occasional AMC classic like Red Dawn.
I just saw an infotainment piece about Tom Cruise’s son starring in a remake of that grade -B action movie where the Soviets invade and take over the US, starting in Colorado, of all places (“Go Wolverines!”).
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20285234,00.html?xid=partner-CNNHome-%27Red+Dawn%27%3A+Casting+exclusive%21
The best scene is the Soviet paratrooper invasion at the beginning, machine-gunning the school like the ruthless do-badders they were.
It makes me wonder: How old is Cruise’s son? Is this going to be Red Nightlight: The Toddler Invasion?

That’s like a J.P. Donleavy title, isn’t it? No one mentions Donleavy anymore. He was a great comic novelist in the Sixties and Seventies. One of his titles is The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B (1968). He’s good. His best novel is The Onion Eaters (1975), about a plan to bring the snakes back to Ireland. But that’s not what I’m thinking about this morning. I’m glad I’m not at a press conference, like Obama being asked about Henry Louis Gates getting arrested at his own house. I’d definitely blurt the wrong thing and get CNN all righteous on me. Look, even my text is blue. (Can’t figure out how to fix it, either.)
So my last post mentioned the theory that a cataclysmic “impact event” (usually thought to be either an asteroid or comet) wiped out the Clovis Culture around 12,900 years ago. Here’s an article about it in yesterday’s Scientific American: www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=did-a-comet-cause-die-off.
It’s a good piece, giving voice to the theorists and skeptics as well. One skeptic argues that evidence shows there was never a great die-off to the Clovis people. I’ve heard that, but the evidence he’s arguing for is rather scant and sketchy as well. Few archaeologists (but some) will admit we really don’t know much of what happened 13,000 years ago. We do know that period was the last gasp or so of the large mammals, like mammoths and ground sloths.
But one thing they left out or touched on only tangentially: The period between 12,900-11,500 is known as the Younger Dryas in climate terms, a return to Ice Age conditions in North America for 1,500 years. The cause remains a mystery. Some argue the impact locale was the Great Lakes region and that it loosed a mighty rush of fresh water into the Atlantic, flooding and stopping the Gulf Stream. It’s relevant today because a similar event is projected if too much fresh water from Greenland ice cap melt floods the Atlantic once again. For a great read about this and other possible global warming ramifications, check out Tim Flannery’s The Weathermakers.