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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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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Mystic moments: Taliban poetry and more

sunlight-cloudsWhat's the purpose of poetry? A news story made me think about that question again. It also made me take a fairly recent book down from my shelf that I haven't looked at in a while, Poetry of the Taliban, edited by Alex Strick Van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn (Columbia University Press). The Times of India reported that a university in Kerala pulled a poem from a class syllabus that had been written by an Arabic poet who's a former Guantanamo Bay detainee with alleged links to al Qaeda. The poet, Ibrahim al-Rubaish, composed the poem, "Song from Guantanamo" (for more information on this poem and the poet, see the two links at the end of this post) and it's included in an anthology that's a part of that college course in Kerala.

What I wanted to know, obviously, was what the poem said: What was behind the university administrators' decision? What had disturbed them?

The news article doesn't quote from the poem, but it does include an interesting point about the reasons behind the decision to pull the poem:

The Dean's report, without commenting on the literary quality of the poem, said it would be against moral values to prescribe a poem penned by a person who is said to have terrorist links, the sources said.

It sounds like the decision was based more on  the poet's alleged associations than on a specific message in the poem. (I'm sure there are plenty of people more familiar with this news story than me, and if you're reading this post, I'd welcome your comments and clarifications!) When you read the poem itself in the links at the bottom of this post, you'll probably conclude the same thing.

That brings me to the Linschoten/Kuehn book. It isn't about this situation, but it still seems relevant for this discussion, and that's why I wanted to share it with you.

Before I left my last job, that book arrived at the Times editorial offices and I kept it. Its title intrigued me. What did the poems say to their audience? I expected 200-plus pages of verse attacks on the West. There are certainly fierce, rallying cries like these lines from "Blood Debt":

Today, I write history on my enemy's chest with my sword, I draw yesterday's memories on today's chest once more.

But I also found other poems of intense spirituality with no hint of any political or military context:

I have opened my mouth in prayer, You have brought down your blessings In order to make my body blessed, To have the problems resolved. The spot on my heart makes a candle like the sun...

A preface to the book declares that "it is no exaggeration to say that in the ever-increasing archive of studies on the Taliban only a miniscule number have attended to the movement's aesthetic dimension..." Linschoten and Kuehn have certainly addressed the need for this kind of aesthetic study with their invaluable book.

But I also think their book not only helps us to understand the poems they've collected -- composed in the pre-9/11 and post-9/11 world -- but also situations in the world like the one involving the university in Kerala. The editors (and the translators of the Taliban book) have provided us with a deeper level of knowledge that can only help the world community -- and our common future. With that in mind,why not keep the poem in the Kerala syllabus and accompany it with context? The stakes remain the same, don't they?

My friends, I welcome your comments.

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If winter came to George R.R. Martin, what next?

George R.R. Martin in 2010. Credit: Julle So, what kind of obligation does a writer have to his fans?

I couldn’t help thinking of George R.R. Martin after watching a trailer of Baz Luhrmann’s production of “The Great Gatsby.”

That might seem like an unexpected leap, but it’s not a big one. Thinking about “Gatsby” made me think about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last novel, the unfinished “The Last Tycoon,” and then, “The Last Tycoon” made me think about Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire” saga.

When he died in 1940, Fitzgerald left behind notes and outlines for “Tycoon.” He didn’t complete the manuscript, but he left a pretty good idea of what he wanted to do and how he planned to get there. Edmund Wilson put together Fitzgerald’s outlines and notes in an edition, and you’ll find richer insights on how to write a novel there than you will in any book or class titled “How to Write a Novel.”

That brings me to Martin. There are two more books to go in his saga, and he’s working on the sixth, “The Winds of Winter.” Plenty of his fans worry that we’re heading for a Robert Jordan situation — Jordan died before he could finish his epic “Wheels of Time,” and Brandon Sanderson finished it for him.

If something like that were to happen to St. George — God forbid! -- would any outlines or notes exist like Fitzgerald’s? (For anyone who can’t believe that I’d speak of the sublime Fitzgerald and Martin in the same breath, oh, get over yourself.)

I keep thinking that Martin should do the same thing, if he hasn’t already. Even if he changes his mind on some of the details of what’s supposed to happen to Tyrion Lannister, Daenerys  Targaryen, the poor, afflicted Starks et al., he knows where his story is supposed to end. He’s always said so to interviewers.

So, here's what I'd suggest to George:

One afternoon, why don’t you sit down at your desk with a plate of honey-dipped walnuts baked in a cookfire, pour yourself a flagon of brown bitter ale, and sketch out the basic plot points of  books 6 and 7 like Fitzgerald? Then, next time you’re running errands around downtown Santa Fe, stop by the bank and leave them in your safety deposit box in case of emergency.

Then, another writer — like Patrick Rothfuss, Daniel Abraham, or even David Benioff (producer of the HBO series and a novelist himself) -- could give us the conclusion that Martin wanted, not one imagined by somebody else, even if the words aren't entirely his.

That gets me back to my question at the top. Does Martin owe his fans anything?  Probably not. Even with everyone breathing down his neck — including HBO — he should be writing the story for himself.

On the other hand, writing is one of those situations in which a special relationship develops between a writer and reader. There’s a special bond there, a contract. Any of you who have traveled to Westeros and have aligned yourself with Starks, Lannisters, the Night’s Watch, etc. know what it means to be fiercely loyal. When it comes to his fans, George probably does too.

My friends, I welcome your thoughts!

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