Janet Fitch

Writer’s View: Washington Post Reviewer Puts Readers In Boxes

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Michael Dirda at The Washington Post has your life in books all figured out.  He recently explained that whether you read fiction or re-read fiction is completely dependent on your age.

When you’re young, you love re-reading books or having the same books read to you. Later on you read series and then engage in competitive reading. In college required reading that takes up your time, and once you graduate and box up those books, you only read best sellers.

Finally, as a senior, you have no interest in new books, so you re-read old favorites.  Why?  Get ready for some cheesy prose:

Seen it all. Been there, done that. It’s then that people nearly always do return to the books they loved when young, hoping for a breath of springtime as the autumn winds blow.

Did you hear some melancholy violin music playing in the background?  I know I did.

There are no studies quoted in his musings, no statistics, just the writer making gross generalizations based on his idiosyncratic experience.

I’ll share my own experience as a reader and longtime reviewer for newspapers, radio stations, and online magazines.  See how it matches yours.

I’ve been re-reading books ever since elementary school.  It started with The Three Musketeers and I, Robot.  Then it moved on to various books by Henry James whom I discovered in junior high school and truly fell in love with in college along with Edith Wharton, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, and George Eliot.  I’ve revisited all of them periodically over the years.  I didn’t wait to become an AARP member.

And I never competed with anyone. Reading was always private for me, an escape and a joy.  That’s unlike Dirda, for whom page count conferred “cachet.”  He writes that in “ninth grade, I doggedly worked my way through a two-volume history of English literature mainly to show off.”  Mine is bigger than yours surely had to be more interesting than that.

But I guess not.  Imagine having that kind of sterile competition to deal with along with all the other problems of mid-adolescence like acne, gossip, and embarrassing parents.  And what kind of brain-dead school did he go to that encouraged such a twisted view of reading?

While I had plenty of required reading in college as an English major,  I often went beyond those reading lists to read widely, especially books in translation by Russian and French authors: Turgenev, Gogol, Balzac, Zola. If that meant not finishing a required book in time for a class, my own choices usually won out.  But if we were assigned a novel by Henry Fielding, I wandered off and read several other books of his to get a better feel for his literary universe.

My detours were always fun. Assigned to read Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, I felt obliged to read Fielding’s hilarious parody Shamela.  The first book is all about a good servant girl beset by a lascivious lord and the triumph of virtue; the second is all about that servant girl conning the same lord into marriage.  Why isn’t Downtown Abbey’s Julian Fellowes sinking his teeth into that nasty little masterpiece?

As for being a slave to the best seller list, I feel sorry for Dirda if that’s how he lived his post-college years.  I haunted bookstores back in the day and usually looked at what was new and hot, but sales and publicity didn’t matter to me.  What counted was whether the subject or the writing grabbed me. Preferably it would be both.  And there’ve been dozens, maybe hundreds of best sellers over the years that friends and reviewers have raved about that have left me cold.  Sometimes nauseous (or nauseated if you prefer).

Starting in the 1990s, I spent many years as a book reviewer in print, on-air and online.  I sometimes re-read a book I was crazy about, like Terrill Lankford’s LA thriller Shooters and Charlie Huston’s vampire PI book Already Dead.

But my full initiation into reading a series has only come in my 50s with books by Bernard Cornwell, Martin Cruz Smith, and C.S. Harris. Nonetheless, I’m still always on the lookout for writers who’ll engage me and take me on a fresh voyage. Writers like the amazing Lori Rader-Day, Janet Fitch, and Penelope Fitzgerald.  The genre can be fiction, but I’m a big fan of biography and history too, as long as the prose is fine and the narrative engaging.

Michael Dirda may have his theory about how readers read, but it’s really just a theory until he can back it up with facts.  Though theory could be too elevated a term.  It’s more like a notion, and a fairly dubious and ageist one, too.

Maybe he’ll explain the use of slow cookers for various age groups next.

Lev Raphael is the author of 26 books in genres from memoir to mystery, most recently State University of Murder.  You can read his latest interview about it here.

Writer’s Memoir: After 26 Books, I’m Still Learning How To Write

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I’m a highly visual person and I think I got my training early, growing up in New York, a paradise of museums.  From elementary school onward, my parents took me on repeated trips to the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan.

My very first exposure to genius was when the Met bought Rembrandt’s “Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer” for an unheard-of sum.  I recall being very little and actually crawling through the crowds on my hands and knees so I that could get to the front.  The moody, evocative painting was breathtaking, an entrance to a brand new world.

But that’s what I felt in every museum, whether it was discovering Braque at MOMA, Kandinsky at the Guggenheim, or Monet at the Met.  I didn’t have words for my experience, but looking back, I know that time after time, I felt elevated, transported, and hungry.  I wanted to see more.

And I did, roaming gallery after gallery, and expanding my range to other museums like the Frick.  It was a world of magic, discovery, and promise.  I often felt like Henry James when he visited Rome the first time and wrote “I went reeling and moaning thro’ the streets, in a fever of enjoyment.”

I never imagined that I was going to be a painter, but from second grade on, I felt destined to turn the world into words the way these masters turned the world into experiences on canvas.  Each one was a doorway to wonderment and a world that was waiting for me in Europe.

Sculpture appealed to me, too, whether Greek and Roman glories at the Met or Brancusi’s stark, eloquent experiments in texture and form at MOMA and elsewhere.  Years later I would be moved to tears by a whole exhibition of Brancusi’s sculptures at the Tate Modern when I wandered through the near-empty galleries.  Like a character in Brideshead Revisited, I felt that I was “drowning in honey.”

When I started publishing fiction after years after creative writing classes and completing an MFA in Creative Writing, I was keen to paint with words, to describe what people and places looked like.  Sounds and aromas were secondary, not that it stopped me from writing many books and winning prizes, doing book tours here and abroad, finding my work being taught at universities, and even selling my literary papers and correspondence to a university library.

But in recent years, certain writers who appeal to more than the visual have captured me and taught me to be a better writer because they create an environment that’s also aural and olfactory.  Martin Cruz Smith does this in his crime novels set in Russia that expose corruption and bloated bureaucracy, the chaos observed by his cynical hero Akady Renko.  C.S. Harris also creates a mesmerizing landscape that is multi-dimensional in her Regency mystery series which often explores the wealth and privilege of the period’s upper crust.

In a league all its own is Janet Fitch’s best seller White Oleander about Astrid, a young girl coming of age despite the vengeful, seductive madness of her brilliant, demanding, poet mother.  Sent to jail for murder, her mother is the unhappy touchstone in Astrid’s life as she bounces from one foster home to another, learning harsh lessons about life, memory, and herself.  Her Norwegian name can either refer to strength or beauty, and both are qualities she discovers in herself through harrowing circumstances.

Fitch’s story-telling is powerful because it’s rooted in emotion and the senses, woven through with striking similes and metaphors:

By April, the desert had already sucked spring from the air like blotting paper.

I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this.  Despair wasn’t a guest, you didn’t play its favorite music,  find it a comfortable chair.  Despair was the enemy.

So much going on in Kandinsky, it was like the frames were having trouble keeping the pictures inside.

The pearls weren’t really white, there were a warm oyster beige, with little knots between them so if they broke, you only lost one.  I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn’t come apart.

Of course Astrid doesn’t get her wish as her life gets broken apart again and again, breaking the reader’s heart because she feels so deeply and is so alone.  That last quotation is a perfect example of Fitch’s gift for taking an object and making it become deeply personal, emblematic of a character’s turmoil.

I was so caught up in the beauty of the writing and the fierceness of the author’s vision, I didn’t want it to end, but I also knew that it would inspire me to make my own books live and breathe more fully than before.

Lev Raphael is the author of State University of Murder and two dozen other books in many genres. He offers creative writing workshops, editing, and mentoring online at writewithoutorders.com.