The writer Paul Freidinger is my guest on this site for the first time — first, I hope, of many. We both grew up in Central Illinois and probably played basketball and baseball against each other in the early sixties. Astoundingly, Paul had a poem in the same Florida Review as my “Wilbur Gray Falls in Love with an Idea,” in the mid-eighties, and still we didn’t actually meet and shake hands until four or five years ago. In addition to being a serious and remarkable poet, Paul is a gargantuan reader and reviewer of contemporary fiction. You would not, I think you’ll agree, if you read the piece below a thousand times, peg him as a Cub fan. Enjoy.

For the last few years I’ve followed the reviews of contemporary fiction by James Wood whenever I’ve had the chance. I have to say I usually feel younger than he is although I am older by more than fifteen years. I feel younger because reading him leaves me with the sense of being vastly inexperienced in comparison to his depth of understanding the pantheon of Western literature. My lack doesn’t diminish the sense of pleasure and insight I receive when I read his reviews. In light of this, it took the gift of his recent book How Fiction Works to be motivated to read it. I’m left with the impression it should be required reading for any writer or anyone who has a serious interest in literary fiction.

I am not intending for this to be a full-length discussion of the book. I would hope to discuss other parts of it in the future. For now I would like to focus on a small section which I think a reader could apply to any book he or she may be reading. I should preface this by saying I hate the term “literary fiction,” and that distinction only serves to marginalize writers and readers alike. When I was young, I always wondered what made a book a classic. As I grew older, I decided a classic was simply a great story told in a superior way. I can also confess that I often disagree with Wood, as many qualified critics do. I think the value of his book is that it offers practical models to approach a wide variety of modern fiction.

I should point out that Wood is impressively grounded in the classics and the evolution of the novel and has a thorough grasp of Western philosophy. In his book he focuses on Shakespeare, Flaubert, Proust, Chekov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Austen, Henry James, Joyce, among others, attempting as he goes to trace the evolution to the modern novel and the use by authors of free indirect style. He speaks highly of writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, J.M. Coetzee, and V.S. Naipaul. Contemporary writers he likes include people as diverse as Ian McEwan, Norman Rush, Marilynne Robinson, W.G. Sebald, Josè Saramago, Roberto Bolaño, and Alexsander Hemon. He argues in favor of a realist fiction which respects the lineage of the tradition of those named authors, but he isn’t above embracing certain postmodern writers, as long as they don’t diverge into “hysterical realism,” narrative in its lightness that is neither unbearable nor grounded in the realm of a character’s possible life.

Of the current novelists, I want to draw attention to this one quote as a simple way to assess a book. Wood explains at length:

The novelist is always working with at least three languages. There is the author’s own language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; there is the character’s presumed language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; and there is what we would call language of the world—the language that fiction inherits before it gets to turn it into novelistic style, the language of daily speech, of newspapers, of offices, of advertising, of the blogosphere and text messaging. In this sense, the novelist is a triple writer, and the contemporary writer now feels especially the pressure of this tripleness, thanks to the omnivorous presence of the third horse of this troika, the language of the world, which has invaded our subjectivity, our intimacy, the intimacy that James thought should be the proper quarry of the novel, and which he called (in a troika of his own) “the palpable present-intimate.”

As it turns out, I read Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence at the same time I was reading How Fiction Works. About Rushdie’s Fury Wood wrote that “playful self-indulgence is a sign of an author in terminal decline.” The Enchantress of Florence is no less an example of this. I feel certain Wood would say it has a hard time staying grounded, that the author falls in love with his own cleverness, that Rushdie can’t be serious long enough to write the novel he is capable of. As a reader-reviewer, I can easily agree that Rushdie the author overpowers his characters. I wouldn’t say this is one of his best books. On the other hand, I would say that Rushdie remains a unique practitioner of fiction, suited as no other current writer is to articulate how Hinduism and Islam are bound and simultaneously antithetical and the tragic way Western Civilization continues to misunderstand Asia and create problems on a world stage born of our own ignorance. He is a brilliant story teller to boot, and for all of its faults, I loved The Enchantress of Florence.

Wood takes issue with two other books of which I am fond: Delillo’s Underworld and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. I took the effort to track down Wood’s reviews of both books, and he pronounced both of them failures. He charged Underworld with having no center and being populated with dead characters. The Corrections, he went on to say, was a distillation of DeLillo’s book, concentrated on a single family’s dynamic, but suffering from the same lack of authenticity, the same absence of “living, breathable” characters. I love both of these books, and they have become part of my own ontology, part of the way I experience the world. Rarely does a day go by that I don’t evaluate some experience by the means I learned in reading DeLillo and Franzen. For me they are examples of how fiction can teach us to live, to judge experience, to gain a heightened sense of receptivity. I empathize with the characters easily, and I was sad to see both come to an end. Again, I would like to say that, in retrospect, James Wood helped guide me through them, after the fact, and reading his reviews helped me appreciate them more; perhaps, more because of their flaws. I have read two novels by Norman Rush and disliked them intensely. I read them because of Wood’s recommendations. An odd thing happened for me with Rush. Wood aptly demonstrates how Rush creates a style of language by cobbling it together in an unusual way. It turns out that he articulated something I attempt with my own writing: the process of forming a language with different registers that contain within them a kind of tension, perhaps unlike any ordinary spoken language, but one that forces a reader to pay attention and see the world from a new perspective. I guess my argument here is that one needn’t subscribe wholly to the church of James Wood to learn from him, and that poets have as much to gain from him as fiction writers.

I’ll continue with one last comment on the dangers, as Wood sees them, of a writer adopting the “language of the world.” Here, Wood cites David Foster Wallace as the poster child for good intentions gone awry. About Wallace’s use of this style, Wood fires, “the language of his unidentified narration is hideously ugly, and rather painful for more than a page or two.” He goes on to say,

the risky tautology inherent in the contemporary writing project has begun: in order to invoke a debased language (the debased language your character might use), you must be willing to represent that mangled language in your text, and perhaps, thoroughly debase your own language… In other words, the novelist’s job is to b

ecome, to impersonate what he describes, even when the subject itself is debased, vulgar, boring. David Foster Wallace is good at becoming the whole of boredom.

Whether or not you the reader buy his assessment, I think any writer today grapples with the challenge of how to use language effectively. I think Wood reveals himself in this prejudice, and I can list any number of reputable writers who would ignore his advice. Ignoring his advice would not minimize the writer’s task.

I will say, in ending, that this is one small component of Wood’s rubric. I’m advocating the value to a reader of intentionally assessing a writer’s language and whether the characters’ voices are true to themselves or simply an author’s desire to convey his own conceits at the expense of a character’s personality. I’m suggesting a reader examine whether a writer can resurrect our daily language and give a character an authentic voice, or whether he becomes a victim of the superficial, to the degree of being unable to make us care enough about that character to complete his story. The rest of Wood’s book takes one deeper into the formation of a novel and what is essential to its success. He offers equally sound advice as he takes the reader through the essential elements of the novel. Give it a chance, read the book. It might make you a better reader. It might even cause you to reconsider your own writing.

* All quotes are from James Wood’s How Fiction Works.

I am so pleased that Jeanie Thompson, the poet who serves as Executive Director of the Alabama Writers’ Forum, allowed me to let fly with an amplification of my November lecture at Spalding University (I teach poetry and fiction in the brief residency MFA program there). The amplified piece appears in First Draft, the great magazine of the Forum edited by the estimable Danny Gamble (a toast to both Jeanie and Danny). Last summer, I wrote a friendly overview of the work of David Huddle for the Southern Review, Huddle being a friend and mentor since 1991 when I met him at Bread Loaf after years of admiring his work from afar. The piece in First Draft, entitled “Deep Image, Humor, and the Poetry of William Matthews,” observes my modest little friendship and connection with Matthews, who died a day or so after his 55th birthday in November of 1997.

You can read First Draft, including my article, at

http://www.writersforum.org/pdfs/FirstDraft/spring2009.pdf

and how can you resist!

Both the Spalding lecture and this retrospective of mine in First Draft are the results of a long mood of remembrance many of us have been in since the 10th anniversary of Bill’s death, which was in November of 2007. Back in February of 1997, working at that time in a consulting firm in Longwood, I coordinated with UCF to bring him to Orlando to read. He read at UCF on February 13th, 1997, and stayed at the Holiday Inn across the street from the main entrance. I joined him for breakfast the day after the reading and to give him a ride to the airport – he was in a rush to get back to Celia on Valentine’s Day. His book Time and Money had won a big award, the Ruth Lilly Award, as well as the New York Critics Circle Award, and he appeared to be getting the recognition we all thought he’d deserved for a number of years. He was tired, but he was happy, and at the reading he was funny and generous. As we sat there at breakfast eating fruit and cereal and talking, he had almost exactly nine months to live. We can never know these things.

“I think there might be a Pulitzer in Time and Money,” I told him.

“No,” he said. “Helen (Vendler, the influential poetry critic through whom one must go to the Pulitzer, or at least such was the case at the time) doesn’t like people like me.”

Isn’t that a wild statement?

After that, in August of ‘97, we traded notes. He was just back from Israel and, I think, Prague, and that was entirely too much travel for a man in his condition. He and Celia were scoping out a house to buy. The September before, 1996, he’d had surgery for serious vascular problems, probably shouldn’t have come to Orlando the following February. So in that next August I wrote and asked him how he was doing. He wrote back, very quickly, “I suppose you mean by that have I quit smoking.” It was a funny, faux cranky remark, seriously funny. I say how can we ever know what’s ahead, but I’ve always thought if anyone knew it was Bill himself. The evidence was piling up in his interior life, I imagine, after that big surgery, though he wouldn’t have been likely to mention it. (to be continued)

The death of John Updike caused a flurry of retrospect and comment in the New York Times, and as usual looking at all of it gives a fuller picture than looking at any bit of it. Michiko Kakutani wrote a great appraisal, and Christopher Lehman-Haupt wrote the actual obituary. The slide show link below is somehow richer than all the words surviving writers lavish on Updike, the master of words.

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/01/27/obituaries/0127-UPDIKE_index.html

Somewhere in these materials Philip Roth eulogizes that Updike was 20th century America’s version of 19th century America’s Nathaniel Hawthorn. I don’t think that’s far off at all. I like the comparison to Henry James, because of the full array Updike brought to the label “Man of Letters.” Michiko Kakutani, in her piece, finally said he published too much, and observed that in one of his nonfiction collections of articles he reprinted the captions he’d written for Marilyn Monroe’s pictorial in Playboy way back when.

Updike was not only a man of letters but a man of books. The Times coverage included Updike’s famous thoughts about the origins of his writing, that before he loved writing sentences, he loved books, the making of books, printing presses, binding, typewriters, pens, paper, filling pages with handwriting or typing or print. For him, finally getting his written words between the covers of a published book, that alone was supremely important and satisfying to him, and thus he kept the mighty pace of three pages of writing a day, an average of one book a year (and way more writing than just one book in a year — 800 contributions to the New Yorker magazine, counting the fact that he, like our friend Jamaica Kincaid, was an anonymous writer of the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town feature).

A friend who is a friend of a relative of Updike’s has written me that his death of lung cancer began in September when he was hospitalized for what they thought was pneumonia. It was reported that he checked into a hospice facility near his home in New England on Monday and died Tuesday. I believe I read he has two books coming out this coming year.

Because of his prose, which could be especially when he was young a bit of an acquired taste, I’m seeing persistent critical comment about his style even in his obituaries and the appraisals. He was a big deal and it will take years to get him into perspective. Michiko Kakutani quoted James Wood from long ago saying, in effect, that Updike was way more style than substance. I’ve said on this page that even I, who worship at his feet and memory, believe Updike’s novels were not the best display of his writing. I’ve said you can find his best writing in his short fiction precisely because his expansive painting of detail is controlled better in the short form — he really lets the horse go in the long work. I am fond of a couple of his short novels that are rarely mentioned, one being A Month of Sundays.

My ex-wife was a fanatic about Updike from the time I met her in 1964. She introduced me to his work and we followed his career all the way. I believe in my files I have that Time magazine from ‘68, pictured above. I have a hardback copy of Couples from back then, and many copies of the Rabbit and Bech series. In 1995 I was on a road trip for my job and was driving back to the hotel on the beltway between Eden Prairie and Minneapolis airport. The NPR station announced that Updike was in town, speaking McAlister College in St. Paul. I went to the hotel, changed into jeans, and drove up there for the reading. I got there way early (two hours). I found the venue, an old gym at the college, with a student center (I seem to recall) one floor below it. I got two slices of pizza and a large cup of orange juice, went into the gym where chairs were being set out for the event, placed myself on the center aisle in the first row, and waited. I was 49 years old, and I felt like I was thirteen and about to meet Stan Musial. After the reading, I was second in line behind another fanatic for the book signing. The other fanatic had brought all his old Updike books and, while 300 people lined up to meet the author, had Updike sign them all. Then I stepped up and Updike flashed a smiling generous look at the departing fanatic, a look that very clearly and bemusedly said, “You see it all in this business.”

The only book I had with me that day that he might sign was my softback copy of the 1995 Best American Short Stories. I had a story (”Forty Martyrs”) in the back list that year, the section of the book “100 Other Distinguished Stories from 1994,” and he was in the same list. He was always in the book or in the backlist, year after year. For me it was unique and happy, this development, so I carried it with me everywhere I went. I told him it was the second time he and I had been in a book together (we were both in the 1988 O. Henry volume — he was frequently in there, but once ["Arcola Girls"] was quite a thrill for me). He said, “Let me see,” and I gladly flipped from U’s to the D’s. He said, “It’s great to meet you,” and shook my hand. He was super cordial, and in a great mood, as his appearance at McAlister was co-sponsored by The Hungry Mind bookstore on the occasion of the publication of his Rabbit compendium, all four of the Rabbit novels in one book. Combined into that volume, the Rabbit series was a ranking contender for the elusive label The Great American Novel. My encounter with him was about a minute and a half and I’m surely treasuring both the signature and the memory this week.

Reading this Richard Bausch story again, a favorite of mine for fifteen years (another of the stories my good friend the writer Mary Burns pointed me toward) (and having met Bausch himself since the last time I read it), I’m as pleased as I was the first time. This story appeared in the 1990 Best American Short Stories anthology, and, in fact, Bausch had two stories in that volume. I think he and Alice Munro are the only authors ever to pull that off (someone give me a shout about this if you know). It is so perfect that this story, which then was entitled “A Kind of Simple, Happy Grace,” is one of Bausch’s honored two that make up that achievement. James Wood, in his fine book How Fiction Works, sometimes seems not to have a clue about how fiction actually works, and I think it is because he’s so taken by the craft aspect, which can be talked about at length. Only God knows how the art aspect works, and that part is so mysterious and magical even God hasn’t bothered to write a book about it. Perhaps Wood’s intention (I’ll confess here I’m not through the book though I am through the section on characters in fiction) is to explore the question How Fiction Works rather than answer it. I haven’t read as much fiction as Wood has (very few people have – he’s amazing), but I’ve written more of it, and I can tell you the word “works” in his title is tricky. Anybody who ever ran a workshop knows it. It’s avoided. Works for who? What constitutes working? The word, when you think of it, is intentionally vague. “Well, I dunno, it just works, works for me anyway.” That kinda thing.

In the chapters where Wood is pondering character, he turns to the traditional terminology of round characters and flat ones (well, not so traditional – the terms, Wood advises us, come from E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel), and he (Wood) concludes all characters, even the best ones in the best fiction, are somewhat flat, because they can’t be round, because round characters are “real.” Real people are round characters, and fiction can’t go that far in creating characters, so in fiction they’re all a bit flat. And for damn sure, you aren’t going to have any round characters in short fiction because it’s too short to make them even a little bit round! Take a look (How Fiction Works, p 128), I think he really says this.

We have to find our way to stories. We tease them up from the subconscious by following a trail we hope we’re seeing but maybe not and maybe that’s okay, just keep going. The trail is mostly made up of characters who emerge as we write. In the back of the Best American Short Stories anthology in which the story we’re talking about appeared, Bausch reported that one summer it came to pass that he had to drive to work on “a route that led [him] past several churches, ranged within sight of each other in the lovely hills beyond McClean, Virginia.” He said that from that landscape he began to imagine a story about two men from different denominations and that the story would somehow involve them finally coming into “a sort of helpless embrace.” Bausch had no idea what the embrace would be about, who they men were, or how the story would get there. He couldn’t know that because he didn’t know the men yet. I love this, the story and understanding the background of it. What story was whispering to Richard Bausch from this landscape? After many blind alleys, he finally found it. He says it took him seven years to write. “So simple,” he said. “I don’t have the slightest idea why.”

“Design” begins with the Catholic priest Father Russell watching from his window the aging Baptist minister Reverend Tarmigian raking his leaves across the way even though the leaves weren’t finished falling and the old man was in no condition to be doing it. Tarmigian, ailing, pale and just a little dottering, didn’t seem at all well even from a distance, and Father Russell was going through a bad time, worried about everything, including but not limited to the old minister on the opposite side of the deep gully separating their churches. To get from one to the other one had to walk down to the sidewalk by the road, and walk over there, crossing the gully on a sidewalk bridge. Finally, having watched the old man struggle in his work, Russell had to go over there, even though through the years he’d actually avoided contact with the Reverend, idle conversation, waste of time, a whole flock on the right side of the gully to worry about, plate full, can’t take on the scene that’s going on over on the other side. So guilt came to roost. Time to go talk.

I think Tarmigian is one of the most interesting and fine characters I’ve seen in contemporary short fiction. I love this man, bright eyed though dying, still raking the leaves of the massive churchyard, still carrying the mulch up the hill to the cemetery where his wife, dead twenty years, was buried. Pausing there to pray a while, and back down the hill to work. Teasing Father Russell for being so worried about him. What are characters in fiction? James Wood asks rhetorically as he opens his discussion on character development in his book. But it isn’t even a question worth asking, is it? It’s like asking, What are people for? One might as well ask what are atoms in a compound? What are rivers through a field?

While parrying Father Russell’s concern about his well being, Tarmigian lapses into preacher shop-talk, telling him that recently he’s been counseling a couple who have been married 52 years and want a divorce. Tarmigian is on the one hand wryly amused, on the other hand enthralled by the question. He tells Russell, it’s like the woman suddenly slaps herself on the forehead and says, what were we thinking? Fifty two years! The couple can’t agree on what television show to watch. Damn sure they don’t want to sleep in the same room! Those are just a couple of the points of contention, but fifty two years is the main thing – when marriage was invented, nobody ever dreamed two people would have to co-habitate until they were blue in the face. One farts a lot, the other is stone deaf, years ago they went beyond knowing each other well into the region of knowing each other too well, then past that into the zone of once again not knowing each other at all. This is what hard labor and crusades and disease were for, to kill off one of them, most likely the male, mercifully of course, we hope, in some regular civilized death way, but one of them has to go. Read the fine print! Until death do us part!

Father Russell, in the story, makes three trips over to Tarmigian’s place, worried about him. In the second trip, Russell has traipsed over to the very frail Tarmigian’s side of the gully to get him to stop working and go to a doctor. Russell is having a crisis, ostensibly so worried about Tarmigian that he can’t sleep, though we, the reader, can see this is a case of classic projection and Russell is easily as worried about himself. Celibacy! He’s forty three, alone, coming unstuck from reality. He has is own neurotic past to deal with and he can’t deal with it by himself in his creaky old rectory, nobody can!, his flock’s going walkabout all over town, the past haunts even those of us who aren’t neurotic, his faith-tormented present isn’t feeling so great either, and his prospects looking ahead are pretty grim if you ask me (and for sure he’d agree, in this mid-life mood of his). Imagine the storms inside this man. And don’t forget, for a priest, this kind of worry about self is masturbation pure and simple – self indulgence – so he’s (convinced himself he’s very) worried not about himself but about the guy next door. And also. Russell is a good guy and really IS worried about the guy next door.

Tarmigian meantime is on Russell’s last nerve, seeming to push his worry to the limit. In this second trip over, Russell comes into the church and finds Tarmigian, normally dottering even on terra firma, teeterin

g at the very tip top of a rickety ladder painting the upper regions of the interior of his church. You have to know Richard Bausch to know how he loved writing this, so funny I’m laughing in my chair right now. When Tarmigian coughs, the ladder tips this way and that, and he coughs a lot. One hand’s fully bandaged from a mishap with the sharp lid of a paint can, and that’s the hand Tarmigian holds on with – the paint brush is in the other one. Father Russell fairly seizes up watching all this.

In the third visit of Father Russell over to Tarmigian’s place, when the priest arrives, Tarmigian is nowhere to be found, and Russell places himself in a pew in Tarmigian’s church and waits. Russell is a wreck, on the edge of a breakdown, worried about Tarmigian’s health and, of course, himself. He’s shaking and upset, holding back tears. He really wants to go to confession to this old minister, his father in a way and his brother in another way and in yet another way his priest, but Baptists aren’t into the sacrament of penance, dang. Finally Russell hears Tarmigian’s voice, out on the front walk with someone, talking loudly as he strolls into the church. He’s walking into the church with an old woman, and the old woman is deaf. Tarmigian sees the priest sitting there and welcomes him, introduces him to the woman, who turns out to be guess who, the woman of the 52 year marriage on the rocks, and asks her to settle a moment in a back pew while he talks with the priest who seems to be wigging out. As they talk, the woman shouts she can’t hear what they’re saying and that she’s deaf as a post. Meantime Tarmigian is calming the priest. The woman yells a couple more times, “Hey, what’s going on over there. I can’t hear a thing. I am stone cold deaf!” Tarmigian is aware she’s trying to figure out what they’re talking about, these two men of different cloths – what an odd thing. “What’s going on?” she shouts. It’s puzzling. She can see one of them is upset. “Hey!” she shouts, kindly, but just letting them know she’s lost as to what’s happening. Tarmigian, ever more frail, talks Russell down best he can, telling him to relax, all’s well, it gets like this sometimes, don’t worry – “I’m fine,” he assures the priest, “don’t worry about me,” etc. Russell is in tears. They are a few feet away from the deaf woman in the pew who’s watching them but can’t hear them. Finally Tarmigian says to Father Russell, turned away so his lips can’t be read, something like, so, are you gonna be okay? and then he says, “C’mon, let’s shake hands so she sees us — no, wait,” he says, “let’s embrace. Let’s give her an ecumenical thrill.” And they do. Of course, in the story, the hug is way more important than just performance for a deaf onlooker. We’re in Russell’s third person limited point of view and he feels the skeletal remains of his wise and kindly old Baptist neighbor, experiences the embrace as confession, and nearly collapses in the old man’s arms. Tarmigian, we assume, experiences it as fellow reverend and father figure to the young priest, as spiritual healer and marriage counselor to the old woman.

Under that different title, you can find the story in the 1990 Best American Short Stories. I recently read it in my copy of The Stories of Richard Bausch. I wish James Wood would read “Design.” What is character in fiction? It’s art. It’s a bunch of words the artist makes live and breathe so it’s a round character we’re better for having met, this old minister Tarmigian. The author found this man among the churches in the landscape he was driving through at the time. He imagined an embrace and found his way to it. Inspired, he knew just the brushstrokes to give us and exactly when to stop. He got two stories into the 1990 Best American. This one took him seven years. That’s how fiction “works.” So simple.