You could stay busy keeping up with Roth’s literary output, and I’m obviously a year or so behind. Apparently he has a new one out next month (Nemesis). While the output is impressive, and while the books are better than most garbage we’re inundated with, Indignation is a dud for Roth. It’s a quick read — I read it in three hours — and it’s entertaining enough, but it’s not one that’s going to stick with me. [SPOILER ALERT] The story is about our narrator, Marcus, and his year at a university in Winesburg, Ohio. The son of an overbearing butcher, he’s something of a contrarian; he doesn’t get along with his roommates or the college dean, though he does enjoy receiving blow jobs from a crazy young woman with scars on her wrists. After a year at the university, he gets expelled, shipped to Korea, and killed. The narrator has been dead for the entire telling. It’s not a trick ending, because we learn around page 50 that he’s dead, but still. The expulsion and death are presented in five pages of epilogue material at the end of the book. I was left wondering what the point was. It wasn’t like Everyman, which boldly stares death in the face, and it wasn’t like Sabbath’s Theater, which is a giant F-you to the genteel aesthetic. Like I said, quick read, not one to reread.

Finally ready to make some commentary about this book, though it seems everyone in the media has already weighed in. Based on the news, either this book is the salvation of the novel or Franzen is an idiot. Or both. Or maybe all novelists are idiots. Whatever the case, here are my general thoughts:

• This is a wildly ambitious book; the characters are well and, for the most part, charitably drawn; the themes tap into the zeitgeist of the late aughts; and the story is memorable. Whoever said Franzen writes as though no one told him the novel was dead is correct. You have to admire the scope of Freedom.
• That said, I think I liked The Corrections better, and I’m not sure this book would have gotten such press if it wasn’t the follow-up and if it hadn’t taken Franzen nine years. Everyone loves a decade-long masterpiece, right?
• I raced through 300 pages in a day and a half, then put it down for two weeks to read other books without really missing it, then raced through the second half in a day and a half. Compelling when you’re in it, though not as compelling afterward?
• I’m not sure the ambition was fully realized. There’s a subplot about the main guy, Walter, being involved in a bird sanctuary, and another subplot about his son selling bad truck parts to the U.S. government for the Iraq war. These subplots tap into the political climate, but they got tedious and I feel like they covered old ground. We’re inundated with this news, so it’s kind of stale to rehash certain bits of recent history in fiction.
• I’m reminded of Roth’s American Pastoral and Irving’s The World According to Garp. All three novels have an ambitious scope, and all three are character-driven. This kind of story seems hardest to pull off because, unlike a quiet character story, you have big political plots, but unlike plot-driven stories the rhythm of the narration moves all over the place, in and out of time and place and different characters’ psyches.
• I really wish Franzen were better in interviews because he comes off sounding like a pompous windbag. This book has a satiric bite to it, but it’s no more vicious than anything in Sinclair Lewis or John Cheever. There’s nothing new about Franzen’s discomfort with the bourgeoisie, and I’m not sure it’s fair to gripe about his politics. In his interviews, however, he doesn’t come off sounding so good, and does his book a disservice. I read The Corrections knowing nothing about him, and loved it, but if I hadn’t read it and had to judge him based on recent media coverage, I wouldn’t have bothered with Freedom.
• Still, it’s well worth reading, and if you think you’ll like it, you probably will.

What it is:

This novel definitely does not feel like it was written in 1929. The classic mystery where private investigator Sam Spade unravels a plot involving a woman, a fat man, and a falcon statue is written in a hard-boiled, contemporary-sounding voice. The novel deserves to be a classic for the way Hammett creates tension, ups the stakes, and keeps the reader guessing about whodunnit and why.

Why it’s interesting:

Except for a few rare moments — such as the explanatory dialogue at the end — this is a well executed plot, even held against today’s standards. Ok, the end was a bit thick, what with the bad guy explaining everything in a few pages, but given the novel is 81 years old, you can’t hold it against Hammett. In fact, the novel reads like it was written in the ’60s rather than the 20s. Whereas we know Hemingway is inventing a kind of prose and we know Fitzgerald is writing about themes of the ’20s, Hammett is writing in relatively unstylized (or at least unself-consciously stylized) prose and telling a damn good story. I just finished it, so I’m not sure how best to articulate what I’m saying. Maybe this: we’ve got countless private detective tropes — be it a spoof on The Simpsons or a stylized Coen brothers movie — and we recognize these tropes as hearkening back to something. But what? The Long Goodbye in the ’70s? Humphrey Bogart? All those tropes could as easily hearken back to Hammett. I guess they could hearken back to Poe or one of the 19th century novelists, but those books have creaky plots. The stylized tropes are better than the originals — read Charles Brockden Brown if you need proof. But thinking of Hammett as the original, the hard-boiled private eye in the Golden Age of detective fiction, he doesn’t let you down. The original is somehow better than the tropes, which surprised me.

Further Reading:

I guess Raymond Chandler would be up next. Recommendations always welcome.

Congratulations to Ron Rash for winning this award for his book of stories, Burning Bright. Huge honor, plus a 35k-euro purse.

I’d like to offer a shout-out to this anthology, edited by Tony Hillerman. If you’re interested in mysteries and short fiction, you could do worse than read this book cover to cover. What I’d like to note here is how the setting is inextricably linked to the plot of these stories, which I’m going to argue is why the mystery is a good form for southern fiction. Some opening sentences:

• Dashiell Hammett, “The Gutting of Couffignal.”
  Wedge-shaped Couffignal is not a large island, and not far from the mainland, to which it is linked by a wooden bridge. Its western shore is a high, straight cliff that jumps abruptly out of San Pablo Bay.
• John Steinbeck, “The Murder.”
  This happened a number of years ago in Monterey County, in central California. The Canon del Castillo is one of those valley sin hte Santa Lucia range which lie between its many spurs and ridges.
• Raymond Chandler, “Red Wind.”
  There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.
• John D. MacDonald, “The Homesick Buick.”
  To get to Leeman, Texas, you go southwest from Beaumont on Route 90 for approximately thirty  miles and then turn right on a two-lane concrete farm road.
• Sue Grafton, “The Parker Shotgun.”
  The Christmas holidays had come and gone, and the new year was underway. January, in California, is as good as it gets — cool, clear, and green, with a sky the color of wisteria and a surf that thunders like a volley of gunfire.
• Michael Malone, “Red Clay.”
  Up on its short slope the columned front of our courthouse was wavy in the August sun, like a courthouse in lake water. The leaves hung from maples, and the flag of North Carolina wilted flat against its metal pole. Heat sat sodden over Devereaux County week by relentless week…

I’m speechless, but, yes, Freedom is that good. I’ve been sidetracked for a week, but I’ll post some thoughts about the novel soon.

This is a breezy introduction to writing mysteries, and I’d recommend it to literary MFA students/grads who are looking to add a bit of mystery plot to their novels. It’s amazing that even if you agree with Chabon in his introduction to Best American Stories — that the lines between genre and literary fiction are artificial and should be erased — just how easy it is to divorce yourself from writing as entertainment. Dennis Lehane, in his review of Nic Pizzolato’s new novel, cited missteps that “afflicted whole novels recently by Thomas Pynchon and Denis Johnson, who paid a kind of condescending homage to a genre they didn’t seem to understand fully.” I feel that’s a trap I’ve slid into, and Hayden’s book (along with the reading list of authors she uses as examples) is a good remedy.

Hayden’s book is a quick read, though I wish she’d gone into more details about structure. Broken down, the book is roughly 30 pages of plot, 30 pages of character, 50 pages of basic grammar (use the active voice), 30 pages of how to get published, and 50 pages of interviews with mystery writers. But she does offer some great nuggets of practical advice, such as: If you’re stuck, count the number of scenes devoted to each character, and make your next scene about the character with the least amount of page time. And: Chandler said that if you’re stuck, have a man show up at the door with a gun in his hand. Staged? Yes. Effective? Without a doubt.