Katharine Weber Is Keeping It Unreal
I just started reading Katharine Weber’s new novel, True Confections, in preparation for her appearance next month (Monday, January 11) as part of the author/blogger discussion series I curate for Greenlight Bookstore, the independent shop that recently opened in Fort Greene. (I’m only introducing the evening’s discussion; Weber will be interviewed by Levi Asher of Literary Kicks.) In the novel, Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky purports to be telling the history of Zip’s Candies, the Ziplinsky family business, but it is immediately (and amusingly) apparent just a few pages into the first chapter that for all Alice’s insistence on the “truth,” there’s an agenda at play. Now, as somebody who grew up seeing the Schrafft’s sign from the highway driving through Boston growing up, I suppose there’s a bit of me that wonders if Zip’s is based on any real family-owned candy business… but Weber would like to remind us that such questions are, for the purposes of fiction writing, rather beside the point.
To write a novel is to engage in an invented reality over an extended period of time. The willing suspension of disbelief that we expect from our readers has to start with the writer’s own willing suspension of disbelief beginning with the first intentions about the novel. Over the months and years of writing, as the novelist willingly and gladly dwells in this alternate realm every moment she spends wrestling with sentences (and for most other waking hours as well, spent away only from the physical task of writing it down), the world of the novel looms larger and larger, becoming more and more specific and vivid.
This conjured reality doesn’t cease to exist when the novel is finished. The opposite is true; full knowledge of these people in this time and place, and all its verities, is deepened through the revision process. Editing and then copy editing offer fresh challenges to the author’s authority to justify the information, stated and implied, of the novel’s internal logic. Whether it is the consequence of the way gravity reverses with every completed rotation around its three suns on the planet Zorth, or the telltale moment that occurs in the middle of a peculiar ritual of birthday party toasts practiced by a family in rural Kentucky during the Civil War, the integrity of the invented reality must be deeply known and experienced by its inventor in order to succeed. Writing a novel is a kind of extended phantom tour of duty in this other place, even as we go about our ordinary lives.
Once the book is out in the world it can be quite disturbing when this reality is resisted and misunderstood by readers. The willing suspension of disbelief is necessary to the fundamental transaction between the reader and the writer—in exchange for a willingness to believe, the reader gets to be entertained by the novel. But the contemporary reader seems these days far less willing or able to transact business with the authors of contemporary novels that are not magical, set in the distant past or future, or filled with vampires.
13 December 2009 | guest authors |
Stephanie Kuehnert Picks Out Some Ballads
When I was thinking about ways I could invite Stephanie Kuehnert to talk to Beatrice readers about the inspiration for her second YA novel, Ballads of Suburbia, I remembered that we were coming up on the holidays, and gift ideas are always helpful this time of year, right? So I asked Stephanie if she would be willing to recommend some of her favorite ballads, songs with the sense of emotional energy that drove her fiction, and she was totally up for it—and there’s one recommendation here I can totally get behind, one that I can understand even if my enthusiasm isn’t as intense as hers (but that may just be because I haven’t heard the CD in a decade), and one that I’d never heard before but I’m absolutely going to check out.
When Kara, the main character in Ballads of Suburbia, talks about ballads, she says, “I’m not talking about the cliched ones where a diva hits her highest note or a rock band tones it down a couple of notches for the ladies. I mean a true ballad. Dictionary definition: a song that tells a story in short stanzas and simple words, with repetition, refrain, etc. My definition: the punk rocker or the country crooner telling the story of his life in three minutes, reminding us of the numerous ways to screw up.”
Even though Kara is not a fictionalized version of me (I swear!), she and I do share the same definition of a ballad. So keep this in mind while reading over my recommendations for albums with great ballads. This is why you aren’t going to find the soundtrack to The Bodyguard on my list or any hair metal albums. (Though I do have a big soft spot for “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” by Poison; I’m not gonna lie.) Think of these as my favorite storytelling albums.
8 December 2009 | guest authors |