Writing that flows: Bertsch’s ‘Death Canyon’

river water “I should try to just scribble out a mystery.”

Ever heard that before? I have. I think I've even been guilty of saying that myself. Writing a serious novel is hard, Olympian work, but writing a mystery? Oh, c'mon, anyone can do that. It’s not even writing: it’s just scribbling.

My friends, what I've learned from working on a novel of my own is what you probably already know: No writing is ever just scribbling. It’s all hard work. Any story demands steady commitment (and a kind of madness) to stay focused on it for weeks, months — even years — because you want to get it right. Writing a novel has made me far more humble as a reader and a critic ... and far more careful about the words that I use.

Mystery-writing, I think,  often gets reduced to “scribbling” because there’s a simplicity to the narration -- especially in hard-boiled tales -- that makes it all seem plain and easy. I started thinking about that because of David Riley Bertsch’s “Death Canyon: A Jake Trent Novel” (Scribner), published in mid-August but that I’m only getting to now.  It’s a perfect book for summer — murder and secrets in the great outdoors — but since it’s not summer anymore, I realized something else: It’s a perfect book for anytime, especially if you're in the mood for a lesson about good writing.

When I read, I like to search for the author's biography in between the lines. That’s a complicated thing in some author’s work, but in Bertsch’s novel it was easier to detect. This story is suffused with a love and celebration of the great outdoors that's obvious. Then I turned to the jacket flap and discovered why:

Since 2009, [Bertsch] has lived in Jackson, Wyoming, where he is a professional fly-fishing guide.

Of course he is. How could he NOT be?  (For more about Bertsch, you can visit his author's website.) Some passages about the experiences of Jake, an ex-prosecutor, are so full of bliss and joy that they must be rooted in Bertsch's own experience, like this one:

After he finished setting up his sleeping quarters, Jake pulled the fire pan from the skiff and walked a short way down the island to prepare dinner; not daring to attract bears or other curious predators to his sleeping area with the scent of food. He season the trout with a mixture of salt, pepper, garlic powder, and dill that he kept with his fishing equipment. He opened the bottle of beer he had brought along, and as evening settled further into the river canyon, the dusky ambiance and alcohol lightened Jake's mood. He smiled when he thought of his earlier frustration with the council. Things moved slowly here, and he needed to be patient and persist. Besides, he thought, I moved here to escape external pressures. I'm hard enough on myself.

Think Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River.” Think of Jake — like H’s Nick Adams — burned by the world and seeking some healing in this beautiful place, Wyoming’s Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks.

And this, mind you, comes in one of those easy-to-scribble mysteries.

This landscape is Eden-like, and soon enough Jake discovers a serpent. He comes upon a corpse, and this death -- along with two more -- are unexpectedly linked. Villains and a development project loom on the horizon.

It’s a great deal to juggle, and some reviews have been lukewarm, but I think that's because those critics have never written books of their own.  If they did, passages like the Hemingway-inspired one would have impressed them. The same goes for the descriptions of the corpses, which Bertsch pulls off without resorting to cliches. Try to write a scene about a dead body and you'll see how hard that is.

In the end, "Death Canyon" is a deftly executed thriller that serves as a simple reminder of something else: Writing’s never easy.

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Hey, Labor Day's for neanderthals too

BILLs TO PAY: Neaderthals didn't have mortgages to pay, but they still had plenty to worry about. Time for a quick reflection, via a new book, on the American holiday that celebrates work, Labor Day:

Not much has changed about the nature of work since the guy pictured above was roaming the earth, and that fact should prompt you to think more deeply about the career that you give your life to. This came to me in the course of reading Ryan Coonerty and Jeremy Neuner's inspiring new book, "The Rise of the Naked Economy: How to Benefit from the Changing Workplace" (Palgrave/Macmillan).

Why inspiring? Because, my friends, as you're looking ahead to a busy fall, the authors of this book offer a fresh perspective on who we are and what we do in the context of the much bigger frame of human history:

From the moment the first hominids scampered across the African savannas, the human species has been consumed by the work of staying alive. Our oldest ancestors are often referred to as hunter-gatherers, because that was their work.... Some studies show that hunter-gatherers worked only three hours a day, then basically hung out for the rest of the day. Once again proving that evolution isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The single most salient difference between early humans and contemporary humans is not why but how — and, more strikingly, how quickly — the nature of work has changed.

Their book is concerned with this fact -- that the nature of work has changed and accelerated (what's one of the culprits behind this acceleration? yes, it's technology). Even though some people measure this acceleration as being beneficial -- the "naked" in the title refers to how technology enables more people to avoid being stuck in an office five days a week -- the authors also make another unsettling point. Things move so fast, their book suggests, that we become paralyzed by our work. We have little time to evaluate what we do because we're trapped in the constant, hyper-pressures of meeting deadlines:

Early humans were engaged in the basic subsistence of hunting and gathering for two million years; during that period cultural evolution took hundreds of generations and technological advances took a millennium. Today we witness fundamental, even radical, social and economic change within a decade. This rate of change has made us more adaptable than the generations before us. But when it comes to work, an activity as central to human life as eating, sleeping, and procreating — though not nearly as enjoyable — we don’t have the opportunity to analyze and control what is happening to our lives. We are happy if we just keep our dental plan.

It's far too easy to lose ourselves in the rush of business, and the authors' book makes a fresh plea for each of us to do what we can to find the deeper, more meaningful sense of purpose in our work -- even if it's a tedious grind of paperwork and rubber stamps.

Easier said than done, I know, but still it's some welcome food for thought. Wasn't it William Wordsworth who said, back in the early 1800s, that "the world is too much with us"? Man, I wonder what he'd think today.

Have a good one, my friends.

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'When a warrior is gone'... Seamus Heaney

GONE FAR TOO SOON: The master in 2009. Ah God, I thought we'd have Seamus Heaney for at least a few more years. The wispy white-haired Irish laureate died in Dublin today, at the age of 74, according to various media reports, and there are no words to properly express what he contributed to poetry and language during his immense career.

He was a makaris; an archeologist of peat bogs and Latinate etymology; a singer of old songs ("Antigone," "Beowulf," from Virgil) in a thrilling modern idiom... and on and on. He was a wonder.

I'm wrong about one thing, though. There ARE very good words appropriate for this moment of loss  -- his own, taken from his best-selling translation of "Beowulf":

It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end. Let whoever can win glory before death. When a warrior is gone, that will be his best and only bulwark.

He won plenty of glory, didn't he? I wonder if the thought ever crossed his mind, as he worked on these lines in his farmhouse years ago, that such words could apply to him and his career.

Rest in peace, old artificer.

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Rowdy...robust...r.i.p. ... poet John Hollander

poet-john-hollander Well, John Hollander couldn't live forever, could he?

I thought he might. His poetry's  so rowdy and so robust that I figured, if the Grim Reaper showed up at his door, Hollander would tell him to #$%&@ off, and the Reaper would have to listen.

Alas, that didn't happen. The New York Times reported the passing of a great contemporary American poet this Saturday at the age of 83. I have little to add aside from saying that I worked on some edits to an article with him once -- he was the soul of kindness, by the way --  and sharing a poem of his that mixes the high and low as he muses on the battle of the sexes. I hope you enjoy it, my friends.

The Lady's-Maid's Song

When Adam found his rib was gone He cursed and sighed and cried and swore And looked with cold resentment on The creature God had used it for. All love's delights were quickly spent And soon his sorrows multiplied: He learned to blame his discontent On something stolen from his side.

And so in every age we find Each Jack, destroying every Joan, Divides and conquers womankind In vengeance for his missing bone. By day he spins out quaint conceits With gossip, flattery, and song, But then at night, between the sheets, He wrongs the girl to right the wrong.

Though shoulder, bosom, lip, and knee Are praised in every kind of art, Here is love's true anatomy: His rib is gone; he'll have her heart. So women bear the debt alone And live eternally distressed, For though we throw the dog his bone He wants it back with interest.

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Happiness for $10.99

The Happy Islands; photo credit: Thien Zie Yung What’s the definition of happiness? Driving home from Vegas this weekend, I realized that Sin City thinks it has some answers to that question. You start seeing them when you’re still miles out from the Strip, weaving through the desert on Interstate 15. One billboard says,

Gourmet meal  $10.99

with a picture of a lobster tail spilling out of its shell. Like it's on steroids. There’s more meat on display on another one:

Treasures Gentlemen’s Club & Steakhouse

Two kinds of meat, actually. The litany of signs is endless. Like the desert.

Happiness, Vegas-style, boils down to sex, money, and, as another sign declares, “sinful food, heavenly views.”

But novelist David Malouf is thinking about something else in The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World (Pantheon) published earlier this year. On our trip I took along this slender but considerable book — don’t let its mere 112 pages fool you —  to one of the most (in)famous desert cities in the world.

Oh, I wasn’t trying to be some cool master ironist; I wasn’t planning on sitting in my room reading Malouf while the rest of Vegas played. I just admire Malouf’s novel Conversations at Curlow Creek, about a good talk before a good hanging, and I wanted to see what he was about in the new book. Besides, its short length seemed just right for when I wasn’t driving.

As all those billboards were sliding by and the Vegas skyline came into view, I couldn't help thinking of what Malouf says about our contemporary notion of “the good life”:

The good life as we understand it today does not raise the question of how we have lived, of moral qualities or usefulness or harm; we no longer use the phrase in that way. The good life as we understand it has to do with what we call lifestyle, with living it up in a world that offers us gifts or goodies free for the taking.

But if that isn’t happiness, then what is?

Malouf doesn’t provide a single, definitive answer — that seems impossible. Besides, as a novelist, he’s more comfortable with evoking questions and leaving readers to form their own conclusions.

He marshals a glittering assortment of figures — among them Thomas Jefferson, Plato, Montaigne, Ovid, Rubens, Rembrandt, Dostoevsky, on and on — who have offered their understanding of what “the good life” and “happiness” are. Personally, I appreciate the view of 16th century author/diplomat Henry Wotton. Of Wotton Malouf writes:

The happy life for Wotton was the life that made full use of the gifts a man had been given, that fulfilled its promise, first in action, then in days and nights of rest; life had been good to him, but he had also served it well in return....He had done what he could for the world and done no man harm.

imagesDo no harm. How many of us can say that we’ve accomplished this and made full use of our gifts?

Malouf’s provocative, searching book ends on a note that addresses technology and its ill effects on the world. The fact that technology connects us and makes us aware of the entire world separates us from the world view of the medieval peasant by a million miles. His world extended maybe as far as an hour’s walk to a market or town. That was the portion of the world he worried about — unless, of course, invading armies were spotted on the horizon.

His sense of fulfillment was more limited, and also more controllable; technology today reminds us how so much is beyond our control. Malouf puts it much better:

It isn’t a question of whether our mind can accommodate itself to new ways of seeing, to new technologies and realities that are abstract or virtual — clearly it can — but whether emotionally, psychologically, we can feel at home in a world whose dimensions so largely exceed, both in terms of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, what our bodies can keep in view...

And what do we do when that infinite view becomes too overwhelming to think about?

Well, at times like those, nothing probably makes more sense than a $10.99 lobster tail. Then the medieval peasant in us takes over and our mouths start to water. Suddenly, the world's manageable again. We're happy--temporarily. (Man, those billboard designers are philosophical geniuses.)

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