September 2008
Ξ September 22nd, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ BLOOD OIL, Films, My Diary, Writing, mine and others |
It’s been a busy few weeks for me. The third Lachlan Fox novel, BLOOD OIL, came out late August. I’ve toured for it and I’m happy with the final product and the feedback from readers is so far, so good. Other than that, I started another novel late August, and finished it mid-September. It’s outside the Fox series and it has 15 year-old protagonists, so I guess it’s a teenage-audience book, but I like to think that all ages will read it as it’s an archetypal story of identity and survival told in a way I’ve never seen or heard. I wrote it un-contracted and it will be interesting to see what publishers think of it.
Highlights from what I’ve been reading…
James Frey’s BRIGHT SHINY MORNING. He’s described it as a love letter to LA, only the kind of letter you’d write to a lover you’ve been with for ten years. It’s that and more. I caught up with Frey when he was in Melbourne and he mentioned that he’s very much carrying the torch of Norman Mailer which was nice to hear because that’s exactly how I think of Frey’s writing: he works in prose but he’s essentially, like Mailer, an essayist and chronicler of the self and the times around him. His best subject has been himself, much like Mailer, a man I never met Mailer and it’s a regret because I sense that he, the artist, the observer, was the most interesting part of his fictional creation. Mailer never really had the big novel that I’m sure he’d hoped for, certainly not as big as his precursor Hemingway. Much of his best work are now period pieces, which is not a bad thing in itself and they were important and current and immediate reads at the time I’m sure (AN AMERICAN DREAM, and WHY ARE WE IN VIETNAM?). In this regard he was closer to Orwell, who was an essayist better than a prose writer and his books lacked any real future importance. Frey mentioned that in a discussion he had when dear old Mailer was still alive, that the man said to him and I may paraphrase: “You’re it now. It was Hemingway and then me and now it’s you.” I think that anxiety of influence crippled whatever real originality Mailer might have developed, as it did to Hemingway with his artistic competition to Tolstoy. Hemingway’s greatness was his short stories, which rival any other master of that form, Joyce, Chekhov, Babel, and he’s certainly the best short story writer we’ve seen since Joyce’s DUBLINERS (although my readers will know I have an affinity for Proulx and Winton as modern virtuosos of the sublime). Hemingway was the master of ellipses and his longer works, particularly THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, misses this virtue of aesthetic economy. William Faulkner praised this book as Hemingway’s best but then his taste was a little off some of the time. It’s at once a Christian parable and a work of sentimentality and it’s far too much for the novel to bear. To Frey’s credit he has none of that. I’d not say Frey’s strongest point of writing is his brevity for he details his prose as a painter might paint a canvas and apply stroke after stroke to built a picture that’s as rich as it is intriguing but what he achieved as a writer of literature is develop a parataxis that is at the forefront of achievement of 21C writers. I have no doubt that one day in the not too distant future, should Frey tackle an issue that strikes a chord with a time or generation, such as Mailer did with his VIETNAM etc, then he will receive the recognition that he deserves and strives for. He will be studied at universities, they will no doubt incorrectly read his work, but he will be appreciated as a poet observer beyond the limited view we have of Mailer, because he’s capable of better writing. Frey has written about his writing process that he approaches the page and task much like a method actor, to really get into the mindset that the given scene requires. I’ve tried that with some of my works but have found it to be too self-destructive and dangerous to everything around me. I do hope, and I trust, that Frey will get to write a canonical novel beyond the immediate that will last the ages and place him in his country’s best writers, to make them, as he says, insignificant. The danger, if he does not achieve this, as I believe that Hemingway realized he had not produced a novel to beat Tolstoy (THE SUN ALSO RISES came closest, but even it was beaten by Hemingway’s own short work, seen in much of the FIRST FORTY-NINE STORIES). In a letter to his publisher Charles Scribner, Hemingway wrote: “Am a man without any ambition, except to be champion of the world, I wouldn’t fight Dr. Tolstoy in a 20 round bout because I know he would knock my ears off. … If I can live to 60 I can beat him. (MAYBE).” Hemingway’s suicide at 61 had its reasons beyond anything hereditary and more than any sickness, like we saw only a few years ago in Dr Gonzo, another genius journalist-writer. Sadly, that door in the psyche is still an option for too many talented, ambitious artists, particularly and usually young men, which I might discuss in detail another day.
If we look at 20C American literature Nathaniel West’s MISS LONELYHEARTS rates right up there. Pynchon couldn’t touch him, only Faulkner holds the higher title. Of living writers, McCarthy’s BLOOD MERIDIAN ranks, as does DeLillo’s UNDERWORLD. Steinbeck was crippled by the shadow of Hemingway, as I believe Mailer was crippled to produce a work of sublime aesthetic achievement by Mailer himself, a Mailer constantly sparring with both himself and Hemingway. I mention these writers because of this: Faulkner’s AS I LAY DYING, West’s MISS LONELYHEARTS, Pynchon’s GRAVITY’S RAINBOW, and BLOOD MERIDIAN, UNDERWORLD, etc, go on through time to prove to us what literature can do, and these works go on harming and teaching and killing us with every read.
I don’t think that such a canonical work is beyond his reach of Frey and it’s certainly within the scope of his ambition. He has the ambition to be heavyweight champion of the literature world, to obliterate the others - if there are any remaining with similar ambitions - into obscurity, and I love him for it. The best I can hope to muster would be to muscle up and fight these guys, as Hemingway did against Stevens - which I’ve written about here before - and I like to think I’d be able to rank pretty high in those stakes. Sure, it’s been tempting to me as it is for so many young writers to write something of such worth and greatest that it will be remembered through all time as something of the finest aesthetic beauty, and maybe one day I’ll dedicate the time to do that but maybe I’ll just keep at my thing, whatever that is. At any rate, Frey’s proved with his third novel that he has reach beyond himself, and produced something that isn’t too restricted to time and place, which is a reach greater than Mailer could ever muster as he placed himself too near events time and time again. Frey’s A MILLION LITTLE PIECES is Mailer’s ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF and BRIGHT SHINY MORNING could well be THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG. Mailer was his own best fiction complete with every nuance New Journalism brought along. Frey was there and now he’s broken the mould and stretched his wings. Mailer wrote in ADVERTISEMENTS: “…I pointed to the farthest fence and said within ten years I would try to hit the longest ball ever to go up into the accelerated hurricane air of our American letters. For if I have one ambition above all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoyevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner ad even old moldering Hemingway might have come to read, for it would carry what they had to tell another part of the way.” Hemingway characterized ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF, in a letter to George Plimpton, “as a sort of ragtag assembly of his rewrites, second thoughts and ramblings shot through with occasional brilliance.” It’s easy to read Frey and say that he might share much with Mailer, much more than we may ever realize. Mailer as described by Richard Poirier: “…insists on living at the divide, living on the divide, between the world of recorded reality and the world of omens, spirits, and powers, only that his presence may blur the distinction. He seals and obliterates the gap that he finds, like a sacrificial warrior or, as he would probably prefer, like a Christ who brings not peace but a sword, not forgiveness for past sins but an example of the pains necessary to secure a future.”
Over the coming years I’m excited to watch just how far the reach of James Frey can go, and I look forward to him carrying the torch another leg of this great relay, to hit the ball out of the park and show the world what literature can still achieve.
What I’ve been writing…
My newest novel, titled ALONE.
I’ve read a heap of “Young Adult” fiction because I’ve just written my first, a little break in-between writing Fox novels. I read like 50 or so, from Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl (a couple of my childhood favs) to Robert Muchamore and Matthew Reilly. The older books still hold up, even Marsden’s TOMORROW Series reads well, so does OSC’s ENDERS GAME. I flinch at a lot of Blyton, as I’ve done with other period pieces of fiction that I’ve re-read as an adult like LORD OF THE FLIES and KING SOLOMON’S MINES, and while there’s still something to like in them they never live up to the memories of the first read when I was full of youthful ignorance and ready to be carried away. Contemporary YA fiction, with the exception of perhaps Jasper Fforde (if you’d call his stuff YA) is so utterly boring. It’s action and thrills but it’s hollow and doesn’t say much about anything. Golding’s first novel in LORD OF THE FLIES is relevant today but only if you are a teenage private school boy, likely an English one at that, who identifies with those weak characters; that’s all those characters were, private English school boys, and that’s all they ever will be, products of an author who had been through that system and continued a similar one by serving in the Navy and further residing in that system in teaching. I just now re-read Huck Finn, and yes, again I flinch at the language that we now know to be very non-PC, but Huck has so much more depth than any of Golding’s characters. Huck has irony, not seen in Ralph et al, and Golding’s “creations” are no more than humourless names with embarrassingly small views and ridiculously limited minds. There’s nothing universal about LORD OF THE FLIES, it certainly is not an allegory of moral depravity, it’s nothing more than a story of a few cardboard private school boys continuing their existence in a situation that a mature writer would have explored and mined for richness beyond the literal and expected, making names on a page resonate through the ages.
Now that books are marketed to kids like never before we need some bright shiny voices and stories available that are beyond the ordinary. We need the KIM and HUCK of today. So, I’ve created Jesse, in my first YA novel, ALONE. It’s McCarthy’s THE ROAD but set during the apocalyptic event rather than years after, with four teenagers at the centre as seen through Jesse’s eyes and without the overt writerly influences that hampers McCarthy’s effort. ALONE is a product of today and written for today’s readers and like THE ROAD, LIFE OF PI, THE BOOK THEIF, THE ALCHEMIST, ENDERS GAME, THE HOBBIT, THE LITTLE PRINCE, and SIDDHARTHA, I can see it will be read by adults as well as teenagers as well as advanced kids, and I hope they all identify with the archetypal qualities in the story. We follow four teenagers for three weeks and we see how they cope and survive in a city that has been attacked, and through it Jesse struggles with his identity and ego and self as much as his friends’. It holds no punches. It’s raw and it’s real and it will be interesting to see what publishers think of it. Clearly I’m biased - but I’ve admitted on many occasions to not liking my previous work when I’m working gone the next project - and this has not happened with ALONE. I’m writing FOX 4 and 5 back-to-back, as the storyline and through-arcs carry through them both and I figure it’s smart to mine this creative zone that I’m in while it lasts. But when I think back about those four lonely characters in ALONE, I still love them and I love their story and it was a great month of writing. I’ve looked back and felt that way about anything I’ve ever written. Usually I’m glad the writing ordeal is over and the world I’d created and lived in for months on end is behind me.
What I’ve been watching…
A few DVD’s.
GONG BABY GONE. Enjoyed it about as much as the book. The twists still worked, even though I expected what was coming. Ben Affleck did a great job of directing. The only thing I had issues with was the small jump cuts in the scene where they were in the house of the mother - they worked fine, but it seemed out of place as a device and the first couple jarred until I was used to it. Still, it’s a little thing, like the little things I pointed out with Tony Gilroy’s first effort in MICHAEL CLAYTON. Make no mistake, both these guys can direct better than most, it’s just my super-critical eye because I expected so much. What pleased me the most with both their efforts is that they have such a minimal, old-school approach that is not reliant on any visual gimmickry.
STREET KINGS. I like David Ayer and I expected so much from this film and it didn’t deliver. TRAINING DAY was a deceptively good script and well acted and executed. In fact, I didn’t love it that much on the first run through but after reading the script and re-watching I got so much more from it, but perhaps that’s either me not being in the mood in the first instance to take it all in, or they filmmakers didn’t do a good enough job putting the script to screen. I suspect a bit of both. HARSH TIMES remains my favourite Ayer film and it’s small-budget genius. Chris Bale and Freddy Rodriguez were perfect; Bale’s character was utterly riveting and frightening and most importantly incredibly empathetic, which cemented Bale in my mind as one of the best actors around. Anyway, STREET KINGS could have been the story that I wanted to write, and when I’d read early news about it I was disappointed that I’d never get to write a similar novel that I’ve been kicking around in my head for a while, the third of a cop trilogy. But, I will write that novel one day soon, about a cop who’s hard and tough as can be because of the two novels before it (both storylines of which came to me in separate dreams with the same cop characters – go figure), because STREET KINGS and its ridiculous cast did not deliver.
