Lisa Rogak’s Holiday Gift Suggestion

Lisa Rogak is the author of more than 40 books; her most recent is A Boy Named Shel, a biography of songwriter, poet, cartoonist, and children’s book author Shel Silverstein. She’s also the author of an unauthorized bio of Da Vinci Code scribe Dan Brown… but her taste in international bestselling thrillers seems to run a bit more upscale, as her holiday gift recommendation demonstrates.

Whenever one of my friends sees me headed their way with a fiendish glint in my eye and a book in my hand thrust out in their direction as if in greeting, I know they’re going to react in one of two ways: Either they quickly glance at their wrist —whether or not it is adorned by a watch—and offer up some lame excuse about how they’re late for a clambake, or they get that deer-in-headlights look and start to sprint towards me in a dead run, anxious to see what it is I’ve discovered this time…

I tend to read some pretty obscure books in the course of my research, with usually ten or more fighting for my attention at any one time, and so I do occasionally wonder about those who eagerly accept a copy of The Only Way to Learn Astrology, The Ghosts of Williamsburg, or Opus Ultimum: The Story of the Mozart Requiem from my outstretched hands. But this year, the book I most often pushed upon them is The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, a beautifully-written Gothic novel translated from the Spanish about a boy, a book, and a nonstop twisty mystery that usually succeeded in tearing my attention away from more important things—like deadlines—whenever I had the nerve to put it down.

And now it’s my friends’ turns to look at me wide-eyed, because I rarely read novels. But The Shadow of the Wind literally took my breath away.

27 November 2007 | gift ideas, guest authors |

Joshua Henkin: Condensing 20 Years to About 300 Pages

Yesterday, I shared an essay from Joshua Henkin about how he dealt with the characters in his new novel, Matrimony, over such a long stretch of narrative time. In this second essay for Beatrice readers, he expands upon that theme. If you’d like to read more from Henkin, he’ll be appearing on The Elegant Variation on Monday, November 12.

Matrimony is about the twenty-year history of a marriage. Weighing in at just under three hundred pages, it is, as Dani Shapiro put it, “at once sprawling and economical.” But how does a writer do that? How do you decide what to include and what to exclude in a novel that takes place over so much time?

Lorrie Moore was once asked what’s the hardest thing about writing fiction writing, and she said, “Getting my characters into their cars.” She was being funny, of course, but she was also, I believe, being serious. The question of how to move your characters around, how to get them from one place to the other without giving the reader a blow-by-blow account (“She took forty-two steps, turned left out of the door, reached into her handbag, pulled out her keys, checked to make sure all was well in the glove compartment, etc.”) is the question every writer faces. How much more so when you’re trying to get your characters not simply from the house to the car but from late adolescence to their late thirties.

Although my novel is made up of scenes from a marriage, it couldn’t rightly be called Scenes From a Marriage. I was picking and choosing, and what I picked and chose needed to be illustrative of something, though not so obviously illustrative as to be reductive. A novelist, it’s important to remember (and I try to hammer this into my MFA students again and again), is never trying to make a point. Points are for anthropologists, political scientists, and mathematicians. A novelist is trying to tell a story and, through story and language, he is trying to convey character.

(more…)

11 November 2007 | guest authors |