(Author’s Note: I’ve been a bit busy lately, so I’m reposting this essay about one of my favorite modern novels. Enjoy…!)
Even though I fancy myself a literary fiction writer (even when I’m writing detective or sci-fi novels), I don’t read that much literary fiction. I read a ton when I was young, especially in college, and lately I’ve found it difficult to find novels that don’t seem derivative or poorly imagined or just downright silly. And for those rare books I do find engaging, I often arrive at them in circuitous ways.
Take Kaui Hart Hemmings’ celebrated novel, The Descendants. Like a lot of books I read, it became known to me from a movie adaptation, although, strangely enough, I didn’t actually see the movie. I was on a flight to Europe some years ago, on an older model jet that still had drop-down movie screen, and the in-flight movie was The Descendants. I didn’t pay for the earphones, but even as a silent film it looked interesting, with George Clooney skulking about some lush tropical landscape that I somehow knew was Hawaii. I looked the movie up on Imdb.com and found that it was based on a novel, so I looked that up. It was a debut novel and looked the kind of book I might like: a literary story, told from a single point-of-view, with relatively few characters, a vivid setting, a compressed time-span, and an intriguing premise.
So, I checked it out on Overdrive. And, man, was I lucky I did.
Author’s Note: I’ve be rereading Saint Jack by Paul Theroux this spring. Again. Every time I read it, I feel like my own writing improves. Maybe it’s my imagination.
Anyway, I thought I’d repost this essay about it. Enjoy…!
Novice writers sometimes ask about the difference between “literary” fiction and “commercial” fiction, and so-called learned people often answer something like this: “Commercial fiction is about plot; literary fiction is about character.”
But what any real student of literary fiction knows is that all novels—all good novels, at least—have a plot. That is, they have a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and some element of that story compels the protagonist (and, thus, the reader) through each phase. A short story without a plot isn’t a short story; it’s a poem. And a novel without a plot is a very long poem, the only real difference being a lack of fixed line-breaks.
No, what people really mean when they talk about literary fiction being “plotless” is that the plot, while discernable, is usually internal in nature. This lies in direct opposition to popular novels. Plots of popular novels are often extrinsic, with threats and goals that are externalized and easy to understand. Plots of literary fiction are intrinsic, private to the hidden thoughts, fears, and desires of the main character. Or, put another way, literary fiction often makes use of a plot that revolves around a symbol—something crucial to the hero for reasons that even they might not understand.
Horror and suspense novels have the most obvious and extrinsic plots: Escape the Monster; Kill the Monster; Get the Girl (or Boy); Live to Tell About It. The degree to which the writer of such fiction can make the internal life of the hero relevant to this plot might define the quality of the work, its “literary merit,” but it is by no mean an essential aspect of the genre itself.
Great horror novelists like Stephen King can blur the line between genre and literary fiction almost to undetectability, as in King’s most famous and widely admired novel, The Shining. While ostensibly a ghost story, King elevates his novel by rendering the psychological make-up of his main character, Jack, in vivid and poignant detail. Early in the book, the reader learns that Jack is a failed writer and recovering alcoholic—conditions that combine to make him uniquely susceptible to the seductions of evil emanating from the villainous hotel. But only later do we learn that Jack is also an adult victim of child abuse, a “key” to his psychic make-up that makes the second half of the novel all the more tragic.
In this way, King confirms what Flannery O’Connor said about fiction: “A story always involves, in a dramatic way, the mystery of personality.” She also said that every novel is, in a sense, a whodunnit, if only the psychological sense. The whodunnit of The Shining is Jack’s abusive, alcoholic father.
Of course, the best literary fiction writers can blur the line, too, from the opposite direction. I’ve written before of my love of Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, which won the National Book Award in 1973. The story of two world-weary young men who conspire to smuggle a kilo of pure heroin from Viet Nam back to the States, the novel could easily be mistaken for a crime thriller. It’s only the way Stone is able to make the heroin a symbol for both of the men, especially the tragic main character, Ray Hicks, that allows him to wind a deeply affecting literary novel around the spine of that frantic and violent tale.
I’ve been thinking about all this plot business recently, even since I read a very fine novel called Saint Jack by Paul Theroux. Most people classify Theroux as a travel writer—his book The Great Railway Bizarre is often cited as a masterpiece of travel literature—but I know him primarily as a fiction writer, one of the best of the past fifty years. I had admired his books Kowloon Tong and Hotel Honolulu, but for some reason I never read Saint Jack, one of his earlier novels, despite my having been intrigued by it since I was in high school, when I saw Peter Bogdanovich’s wry and mysterious movie adaption starring Ben Gazarra. Part of my failure to actually read the book probably had to do with its relative obscurity; I could never find a copy even in my favorite used book stores. But one of the great boons of the digital era is that the back-catalogues of countless writers are now available, and Saint Jack somehow popped up in my Kindle recommendations for a whopping two bucks! Woo-hoo!
And, man, was that two bucks well spent! Saint Jack presents the reader with one of the most colorful and endearing low-life characters in the history of literature. American ex-pat Jack Flowers is a part-time shipping supplier and full-time pimp working the streets of Singapore. Middle-aged and mildly alcoholic, Jack’s seedy character is redeemed, somewhat, by the kindness with which he treats his affable young prostitutes (his “girls”) and also the hypocritical men (the “fellers”) who seek their services. At least, Jack hopes he is redeemed, fancying himself as a man of importance, a protector to the feckless, lustful, and greedy souls haunting the streets of the city. Cooling his heels in a hotel lobby as he waits for a girl to finish her session with a “feller,” Jack often indulges in…
[t]hat momentary daydream which flits into every reflective man’s mind and makes him say his name with a tide, Sir or President or His Highness—everyone does it sometimes: the clerk wants a kingship, it’s only natural—this dubbing was a feature of my every waking moment. I wasn’t kidding; even the most rational soul has at least one moment of pleasurable reflection when he hears a small voice addressing him as Your Radiance. I had a litany which began Sir Jack, President Flowers, King John, and so forth. And why stop at king? Saint Jack! It was my yearning, though success is nasty and spoils you, the successful say, and only failures listen, who know nastiness without the winch of money. If the rich were correct, I reasoned, what choice had they made? Really, was disappointment virtue and comfort vice and poverty like the medicine that was good because it stung? The President of the United States, in a sense the king of the world, said he had the loneliest job on earth; where did that leave a feller like me?
Unhappy and adrift, Jack’s only ambition is to somehow strike it rich, though he has no plan for doing so. He once dreamed of opening the classiest whore-house in Singapore, a goal that, we learn, was briefly realized in previous years (with tragic consequences). At the point of the novel’s opening, he seems to have stagnated, both financially and spiritually. Then, a stranger enters his life. Leigh, a British accountant hired by Jack’s boss, is of roughly the same age and disposition as Jack, but his life has taken an opposite path. Completely conventional and straightlaced, Leigh nonetheless takes a liking to Jack, even as he finds himself slightly horrified by the details of the man’s street-wise existence. Jack, for his part, sees Leigh as a kindred spirit, a decent “feller,” albeit one who would never hire one of his “girls”. More importantly, Jack is disturbed by Leigh’s disapproval of him, although he struggles to understand why.
Of course, the reader knows why: Leigh is a symbol. He’s a mirror in which Jack sees himself—or, rather, some better version of himself that might have been. In Leigh, all of Jack’s moral failings are revealed.
In this way, his appearance serves as the instigating action of the novel, the beginnings of the plot in which Jack will be forced to explore his own life history. A more generic kind of novel might have proceeded with a burgeoning friendship between the two men, Jack and Leigh, in which the former would find enrichment and even escape from his louche existence. But in Theroux’s capable hands, the story takes an unexpected turn when, barely one-third into the novel, Leigh dies suddenly from a heart attack while drinking in Jack’s favorite “club,” surrounded by boozy British ex-Pats (whom Jack loathes even as he craves their approval).
I previously alluded to O’Connor’s theory that every good novel is a kind of whodunnit, and Saint Jack is a wonderful case in point. It falls to Jack to call Leigh’s wife and tell her of the man’s passing, and also to arrange the funeral, which Theroux renders as predictably absurd and yet surprisingly moving. At this point, the story becomes a huge, Mobius-loop of a flashback in which we learn much about Jack’s past, including the reason he finds himself in Singapore (he’s a fugitive fleeing drug charges in the States) as well as his brief and glorious stint as a whore-house proprietor. Jack pours all his artistic and self-aggrandizing impulses into this joint, an opulent mini-resort which he grandly bestows with the name Dunroamin—a moniker which vaguely evokes an English estate as well as being a homophone for Jack’s yearning for permanence, a true home. (He’s “done roamin’”; get it?). He also pours in all his money, and for a time Dunroamin is successful. But its very success contains the seeds of Dunroamin’s destruction, as it soon attracts the ire of the local Triads, whose henchmen kidnap Jack and tattoo his arms with Chinese curses. Upon his release, Jack finds Dunroamin burned to the ground, his hopes for a better future having gone up with it.
As it turns out, Jack’s days as a house-pimp are not entirely over. He gets a visit from an old acquaintance named Schuck, a CIA spook who once ran a government-subsidized “hotel” with Jack providing R&R to battle-crazed Vietnam soldiers. If the operation of this hotel represented an even deeper moral failing for Jack than his previous ones, Schuck soon tempts Jack all the way into the abyss, hiring him to film a troublesome American general trysting with a prostitute. Whether or not Jack will go through with the plan is the climax of the novel (and one which I will not reveal here).
Saint Jack is a classic novel by one of our most underrated literary writers. Check it out…
It’s almost a cliché to state that, as you get older, you re-evaluate a lot of things you liked in your youth. Often (alas), you discover that the books you read, the music you listened to, and the movies you listened to when you were in high school really weren’t that great—with a few exceptions. Also, as you age, you sometimes discover that something you didn’t pay much attention to when you were young is actually pretty frickin awesome.
That happened to me recently with this song, “Still the Same,” by Bob Seger. For some mysterious reason, the song popped into my head about a week ago and wouldn’t leave. Maybe I heard it on the speakers at the grocery store; I don’t know. But for some reason, I kept hearing it, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
This was even more strange considering that, as a kid, I didn’t really groove to much of Seger’s music. I mean, I liked his stuff, especially “Night Moves.” And his songs were all over the classic rock station that me and my friends listened to, so I knew all of them by heart, almost, and I admired them. Ironically, though, the one Seger-hit that didn’t register on me at all was “Still the Same.”
Until now. I found myself looking it up on Youtube, playing it, then playing it again. I really listened to the lyrics for the first time, and I was totally blown away by them. On the surface, it’s another one of those mythopoetic songs about dark, conflicted hipsters in the 1970s (Steely Dan wrote some great ones, too). In this case, the narrator sings about a gambler—who could be a man or a woman—with whom he was friends but now rejects because they’re “still the same.” That is, despite enormous talent, intelligence, and self-control, the gambler is essentially dead, emotionally and spiritually. They’ve achieved the kind of life they always wanted, but they are basically at a dead-end. A corpse.
Of course, the mere act of describing the song makes me want to hear it again. After all, Seger says everything I just did, but in poetry. Take the first verse:
You always won every time you placed a bet You’re still damn good, no one’s gotten to you yet Every time they were sure they had you caught You were quicker than they thought You’d just turn your back and walk
Imagine how many more words a bad writer would need to say the same thing with much less effect. “You were consistent in your skill and ability, winning all the time. And you have maintained that skill, somehow, despite the fact that you are a lot older now. Both in the past and now, your rivals always underestimated you. On each occasion when they thought you were beaten, you managed to simply get up and leave as if nothing had happened.”
Blech!
As a writer, I find myself in awe of the economy and density of Seger’s lyrics. There is one line in particular—“You still aim high”—that I find heartbreaking, even though it’s only four words (four beats) long. Somehow, it encapsulates all the admiration, even love, that the narrator still feels for the “gambler.” (I put it in quotes here because I believe that “gambler” is really just a metaphor for some kind of hustler, male or female, who gets by on their smarts, charm, looks, and daring. E.g., almost everyone in Hollywood.) The narrator still loves the gambler (perhaps they were lovers, once?), even though he now sees the gambler as a bit pathetic. “Still the same,” but no better. Stuck. Stagnant. In another of Seger’s hits, he describes a “beautiful loser.” In this song, he describes a beautiful winner—who wins the world but loses their soul.
In other words, the song is a great 70s rock tragedy, in the same vein as “Layla”, “Dreams”, and “Free Bird”.
Maybe I should go back and re-listen to those songs, too.
I recently decided to gather my best short stories into a collection, which I have entitled West. You can now get it on Amazon! And it’s cheap! (Free, if you have Kindle Unlimited.) The paperback will be coming out soon.
As I was working on a recent post about the great sci-fi and fantasy movies of 1982, I re-read the Wikipedia page on one of those films, Conan the Barbarian. It’s a great movie, despite the fact that it’s really just a raunchy, gory, over-the-top B-movie with an A-movie budget. I loved it when it came out, as did millions of others. It was, in fact, a culturally significant film, in its own way, and the Wiki page reflects this. A lot of passionate, obviously smart people have contributed to the page over the years. (Wikipedia is, imho, the single greatest triumph of the internet, but that’s a subject for another post.)
Of course, the page inevitably includes a rather insightful section called Themes, in which people have enumerated the topics that the film explores—or at least seems concerned with. These include “The Riddle of Steel,” “Death,” “Wagnerian Opera,” “Individualism,” and “Sex.”
I’m sorry, but “Sex” is not a theme of this movie, nor any other. Neither, for that matter, is “Death.” It’s a topic, surely, perhaps even a motif. (Note that I’m using the word “motif” in its strictest, compositional sense, as it is referenced in musicology.) But it’s not a theme.
Yeah, I know. I’m being a bit of an English-major-snob on this one. A word-Nazi. But bear with me, please. If you’re a person who really tries to appreciate literature, either on the page or on film, then the distinction between theme and motif is important. It’s even more important if you’re a fiction writer who struggles to create books that have some meaning and not mere entertainment that is purely disposable. Not that there is anything wrong with fiction that is mere entertainment—entertainment is great—but let’s not kid ourselves that it’s the pinnacle that people should aim for.
The film’s Wiki page comes much closer to the idea of a real theme when it discusses “The Riddle of Steel” (although it completely mischaracterizes and misinterprets the real matter at hand). As anyone who has seen the movie knows, The Riddle of Steel is a connundrum—not so much a riddle as a philosophical question—that Conan believes god will ask him when he dies. The question goes something like this: “Which is stronger? The sword, or the hand that wields it?” Or, put another way, “Technology? Or willpower?” “Brute force, or the power of conviction?”
It’s actually a pretty deep question, especially when one considers that film’s original script writer, Oliver Stone (who later went on to direct a few films, himself) is a veteran of the Vietnam War, which surely represented one of the greatest struggles of all time between technology, on the American side, versus sheer determination and courage on the North Vietnamese side. (Please don’t write to me and tell me that determination and courage were displayed on both sides of that tragic war. I realize this, and I am over-simplifying the conflict for the sake of argument.)
This posing of a philosophical and moral question, which the hero of the film (and, thus, the viewer) struggles to answer is, to my mind, the real definition of a theme. Perhaps the supreme example of this questioning is Raymond Carver’s classic short story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” in which three couples—all in late middle-age, all alchohic, and all jaded—discuss the definition of “love” over drinks. It’s a great story, not just because it captures the individual voice and attitude of each character, but also because all of the characters seem to be genuinely struggling with something—a matter of real import that, each one senses, will reveal something about their own lives. As one might expect, each character has their own story to tell about the subject, beginning with this one from a woman named Terri.
Terri said the man she lived with before she lived with Mel loved her so much he tried to kill her. Then Terry said, “He beat me up one night. He dragged me around the living room by my ankles. He kept saying, “I love you, I love you, you bitch.” He went on dragging me around the living room. My head kept knocking on things.” Terri looked around the table. “What do you do with love like that.”
She was a bone-thin woman with a pretty face, dark eyes, and brown hair that hung down her back. She like necklaces made of turquoise, and long pendant earrings.
“My god, don’t be silly. That’s not love and you know it,” Mel said. “I don’t know what you’d call it, but I sure know you wouldn’t call it love.”
The story continues around the table, with each character telling their own story about the general subject of “love.”
In Carver’s supremely able hands, each of these stories is shocking, yet rings true. Completely, brutally true. Some of them are also funny as hell, in a gallows-humor sort of way. One of the greatest things about the story, though, is the way it never gives us a definitive answer to the question it asks. To the contrary, the story raises even more questions—deeper meta-questions that the characters, themselves, are unaware of but which we, as readers, are. Is there a single definition for love? Is that question even meaningful? Does love even exist, really, in the cosmic sense? Does it matter?
In the same way, Conan the Barbarian presents its hero with several possible answers to its central thematic question. The first is given by Conan’s father (played by the great character actor William Smith) in the opening scene, where he tells the young Conan that the one thing he can ever depend on. “Not men. Not women. Not beasts. This,” he says, gesturing to a sword he has just forged. Of course, he is not talking about that particular sword, or even swords in general. He is, we sense, talking about all the intangible things for which the sword is a symbol—discipline, training, courage. The martial ideal.
Later in the film, the villainous Thulsa Doom presents Conan with another answer. In that famous (and surprisingly shocking, even now) scene when he beckons one of his followers to literally jump off a cliff, he suggests that control over the human mind—through dogma, religion, and all the other tools of tyrants—is far more powerful than strength of arms, either literal or metaphorical.
So, which of these answers does Conan accept. Neither! In fact, his tale seems to suggest a third answer, one which is never articulated—never explicitly told—to either Conan or the viewer, but is rather born out by the action of the narrative. The answer, simply, is love. It’s Conan’s love for his murdered parents that sustains him through the ordeal of slavery and drives his desire for revenge. He also loves his friend, Subotai, and he comes to love Valeria even though she is, initially, a rival. Later, it’s Valeria’s love of Conan (along with some help from Subotai) that saves his life after they rescue him from the Tree of Woe. And it’s Conan’s grief over the death of Valeria that causes him to go on his final (foolhardy) confrontation with Thulsa Doom, where he uses his father’s broken sword (note the symbolism, there; steel really isn’t that strong, after all) to behead the man.
I think it is important to note that even in a “silly” genre movie like Conan the Barbarian, good writing can add a level of thematic resonance to any work of fiction. That is, it can turn a potentially crappy movie into a good movie, and a good movie into a great movie. It’s this complexity that separates the vast majority of films (and books, for that matter) from the few we remember years later—that tiny minority that we deem “classics” after the fact.
Another thing to consider is how Conan the Barbarian, like Carver’s short story, doesn’t fully answer its own thematic question. At least, not completely. The ending is ambiguous. Yes, Conan kills the bad guy, and (we are told) ends up a king himself, but he “sits on his throne with a troubled brow.” In others, the verdict is still out on what the real answer to The Riddle of Steel is, after all.This kind of ambiguity is, of course, a hallmark of all good fiction. We, as viewers and readers, don’t get a definitive answer—mainly because the kinds of questions that good fiction asks are, ultimately, unanswerable in any objective sense. They are always about choices. Priorities. Does honor matter more, or friendship? Revenge, or love?
I am very happy to announce that I am a finalist in the Best First P.I. Novel category for this year’s Shamus Awards! Many, many thanks to the good people of The Private Eye Writers of America for this great honor.
Good luck to all the other nominees, especially my friends Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson and Henry Wise. I hope one of us wins. And I really hope it’s me.
As some dedicated readers of this blog might know, my friend Margaret Luongo and I posted a pair of videos discussing George Eliot’s classic novel Middlemarch to our “Read A Classic Novel…Together!” channel on YouTube. Ever since then, I’ve been meaning to take the time to write a post about it, mainly because it had such a big impact on me. I mean, lots of books have achieved the classic moniker and yet don’t hold up to modern scrutiny. But Middlemarch does. In fact, it’s one of those titanic works of literature that you almost can’t get your head around. It has so many sides and so many aspects, such that it attains a kind of sublime quality. Like Shakespeare’s works, Middlemarch is a different experience for everyone who reads it.
When I say titanic, I mean it literally. Middlemarch is a big book–eight hundred pages in most editions–following the lives of six major and at least a dozen minor characters in the fictional, provincial town called Middlemarch. The story is set in the 1830s, but Eliot wrote the book in the 1870s, when the world had already been vastly changed by the industrial revolution in England. And so, the book has a little bit of a “lost world” feel to it. One can sense that Eliot (whose real name was Mary Ann Evans) is writing about the social and economic environment that is already a thing of the past. However, absolutely nothing about the book feels the least bit sentimental or nostalgic. Quite the contrary. Eliot was a great writer whose blazing intelligence seems to illuminate every page of this very long book. And everything she describes feels as true and relevant today as when she wrote it.
I had a lot of fun being on the “Do You Remember the First Time?” panel at the Edgar Awards Symposium last week. Panel chair Terry Shames did a great job, and I got to meet some hitherto online-only friends like Audrey Lee. I also made some new ones.
I was pretty nervous and I think it shows, but oh, well. Check it out if you’re interested.
Ash Clifton, Writer 