I’m putting the moral of this story right up front so no one misses it. Buy the book before it’s gone.

This is a lesson I learned long ago, but our Library of Forgotten Books project drilled the knowledge into me yet again. For the project, I (like everyone else in the store) had to choose a favorite book that had fallen out of the public eye and spotlight it so that a new audience could find the same joy in it that I did. Easy peasy. I’m often paralyzed by choice, but in this case I knew immediately who to turn to: Penelope Fitzgerald.

Born in England in 1916, she didn’t begin publishing fiction until she was in her sixties, but still produced nine classic novels along with several works of non-fiction and a pair of story collections. Before her death in 2000 she’d achieved considerable acclaim and even won a Booker Prize, but she modestly eschewed self-promotion and never reached as many readers as she deserved. And she deserves as many as she can get. Her work is always substantial, yet effortless to read, each novel a marvel of comic deftness. I don’t know of any author who can sketch scenes and characters better than she does, and certainly none of her competitors can match her for economy. Every time I’ve finish one of her books, I’m stunned to realize how much she accomplishes in so small a space. Her longest novel has fewer than 250 pages, but it’s as immersive as one twice its size.

Which of her books to add to the Library, though? I had particularly fond memories of Human Voices, her 1980 novel depicting emotional entanglements on the home front during World War Two. London is beset by bombers, and BBC Radio establishes a shelter for its employees so that they can safely continue the work of “saving Britain from despondency and panic” without ever leaving the office. Did I mention that it’s a co-ed shelter? Romance blooms for some, annoyances build between others, and  small moments of human interaction stand out against the larger historical backdrop. It’s a can’t-miss winner to please just about anyone.

When I went to order copies for the store, however, I was brought up short. The book isn’t out of print, but the publisher isn’t doing it any favors. Just a single copy was on hand for shipment. ONE. Across the entire nation. So I tried At Freddie’s, Fitzgerald’s behind-the-scenes peek at the actors in a decaying theater. Same deal. The Golden Child, her comedic thriller about the theft of Egyptian artifacts from the British Museum? No dice. OK, those are early novels. What about her later works, her masterfully researched and fully imagined fiction set in other lands? Innocence is set in Tuscany, and Fitzgerald imbues that landscape with all the charm of a travel ad without ever losing grip on the real difficulties the aristocrats and the lowborn alike experience in their shared villa. Then there’s The Beginning of Spring, set in Moscow on the verge of the Russian Revolution, and The Gate of Angels, set in the philosophical milieu of turn-of-the-20th-century academics who struggle with belief and doubt. Nope, nope, and nope.

After checking the stock on all her novels, only two were on hand in quantity—her last one, The Blue Flower, and the one I chose to promote to you, The Bookshop. It tells the tale of Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance who risks everything to open a bookshop—the only bookshop—in the seaside town of Hardborough. By making a success of a business so impractical, she invites the hostility of the town’s less prosperous shopkeepers and runs afoul of the local arts doyenne. Florence’s warehouse leaks, her cellar seeps, and the shop is apparently haunted. Trouble ensues when she dares to sell the then-scandalous Lolita. Only too late does she begin to suspect the truth: a town that lacks a bookshop isn’t always a town that wants one. Like all Fitzgerald’s fiction, The Bookshop is a sharply intelligent entertainment, and given my profession, it’s probably the novel I should have picked in the first place.

Don’t misunderstand— the other Fitzgerald books I’ve talked about are still available, and I’ll happily put one (or all) of them in your hands as soon as I can. It’s just that the publisher’s attention has moved on to shinier, more current titles. Those are the ones being talked about, and those are the ones taking precedence on printing presses, so those are the ones people are seeing and buying. Sales of older books suffer in comparison, and they fall lower and lower in priority, creating a whirlpool of sorts that can suck even the greatest book into the void.

Which points out why we launched the Library of Forgotten Books to begin with. By stopping every now and then to reconsider the past, we can stop the vicious cycle that sends stories into oblivion and fight back against the tyranny of the Next Big Thing. No matter when it was written, a book is always as new as its most recent reader.

—James

In 1991, the shortlist for the Booker Prize, the UK’s most prestigious literary award, consisted of six male authors and no women at all. To that point, in fact, only ten percent of all shortlisted books in the history of that prize had been written by women. But the 1991 list was the one that sparked a movement of sorts, as a group was formed dedicated to doing something about this particular kind of gender disparity. By 1996 they’d launched their own award for women’s writing, with a corporate sponsor to promote it and an anonymous donor who agreed to contribute the funding for a £30,000 annual prize. Thus was born the Orange Prize, open to female writers from any nation whose books were published in the UK. Over the years, winners have included Ann Patchett, Zadie Smith, Rose Tremain, Ann Michaels, and many others. As of last year, the telecommunications company that had long sponsored the prize decided to focus its efforts elsewhere, so while new sponsorship is being sought, the award is officially referred to as The Women’s Prize for Fiction. I prefer the handle my colleague Cindy coined—The Prize Formerly Known As The Orange Prize, or The P.F.K.A.T.O.P. for short.

This year’s shortlist is a veritable Who’s Who for ladies of letters, all high-visibility, well-respected candidates:

• Hilary Mantel for Bring Up the Bodies
  
• Barbara Kingsolver for Flight Behaviour (as it’s spelled across the pond)
  
• Kate Atkinson for Life After Life
  
• A.M. Homes for May We Be Forgiven
  
• Zadie Smith for NW
  
• Maria Semple for Where’d You Go, Bernadette
  

Mantel has already won just about everything there is to win for her very popular historical novel, and the other nominees are also favorites, here at Island Books and in the larger world. If there’s a dark horse, it must be the entry from Seattle, Maria Semple, who’s a relative newcomer to fiction, although her latest satiric comedy is a runaway hit. It’s great to see one of our own share the spotlight with international bigshots, and that’s one of the nicest aspects of the P.F.K.A.T.O.P. Very few other literary prizes draw from such a broad geography.

But the P.F.K.A.T.O.P. is not without detractors. Since its beginnings, some have criticized it sharply. Booker winner A.S. Byatt called it “a sexist prize” that was “never needed,” and critic Auberon Waugh referred to it as the “Lemon Prize.” The iconoclastic feminist Germaine Greer speculated that we’d next see a prize for “writers with red hair.” On the other hand, American novelist Cynthia Ozick has said that given the global history of sexual discrimination, the prize “was not born into an innocent republic of letters” and went on to say that, “[f]or readers and writers, in sum, the more prizes the better, however they are structured, and philosophy be damned.” I tend to take her view on this matter, as I do with most related issues. She can be pretty convincing (and quite funny) on the topic of writing and gender. Watch her eviscerate Norman Mailer at a 1971 debate in New York on the subject of “Women’s Liberation.”

Further proof of the validity of the P.F.K.A.T.O.P., if any was needed, arose from a recent kerfuffle that started on one of the the world’s most visited websites and spread from there. A Wikipedia moderator, motivated by an over-inflated sense of efficiency and who knows what else, decided to streamline the site’s lengthy list of “American Novelists” by moving some members of it into subcategories. He (of course it was a he) began to systematically delete women’s names from the main list and spin them off into their own section, “American Women Novelists,” without creating a comparable “American Men Novelists” section. Most of you will quickly recognize why this was problematic and can skip the next paragraph, but if not, read on.

It’s useful at times to differentiate one thing from another, and no one questions that it’s constructive to do so. That’s why Wikipedia has subcategories in the first place, and why we have more than one section in the bookstore, and why bakeries sell more than one kind of cake. But when those bakeries organize their stock, they don’t pick one flavor to favor. They don’t declare that “cake” by default means “chocolate,” so chocolate cakes don’t need a label, while all other kinds—carrot, angel food, red velvet—get shelved separately. They hang up one big sign that says “CAKE” and stick little identifying flags on all the varieties equally. Cake is cake and writers are writers; they shouldn’t be judged by the color of their frosting or their gender, but instead by the content of their character and the quality of their crumb. So to speak.

After the moderator’s reshuffling was brought to public attention (initially by Amanda Filipacchi, one of the affected writers), Wikipedia rolled back the change, so that’s good. What’s not so good is that it happened in the first place, and that a substantial number of people still don’t understand what the brouhaha was about, including the guy who started the whole thing. You can read some defensive comments from him at the bottom of this summary article from the New York Review of Books.

I don’t know if it’ll ever happen, but until everyone recognizes that you can’t measure the difference between men and women by how much one gender deviates from “normal,” I think there’s a place for the P.F.K.A.T.O.P. I’ll be applauding the winner on June 5th, whoever she may be.

—James

At Lady Molly’s begins with Nicholas Jenkins, having broken off his affair with Jean and now concocting “scenarios” for the film industry, being introduced through a studio colleague to the slackly-run home of the titular Lady Molly Jeavons, where he meets various members of the sprawling Tolland family (of which Molly is a part) and hears the news of Widmerpool’s engagement to an older woman, Mildred. Jenkins later lunches with Widmerpool, who quizzes him awkwardly on the propriety of premarital intercourse with one’s intended. Quiggin invites Jenkins to weekend in the country with him and Mona, who have been cohabiting since she divorced Templer. While there, Jenkins meets Quiggins’ landlord, the wealthy but left-leaning eccentric Erridge, who heads the Tolland family, and his sisters, realizing instantaneously that he’s fated to marry the younger one, Isobel. Jenkins then dines at a night club with a group that includes a jaundiced Widmerpool and his fianceé. Mr. Jeavons confidentially reveals to Jenkins a long-ago connection he has to Mildred, and dances her off as Widmerpool retires from the scene because of his illness. Erridge travels to China to investigate the political situation there, bringing Mona with him and creating a minor scandal. Widmerpool’s engagement founders, and Jenkins’ is made public. During another party at Lady Molly’s, Mildred’s brother-in-law discreetly reports to Jenkins that she dropped Widmerpool after a fumbling failure in the bedroom, immediately followed by the appearance of the jilted fiancé, who offers Jenkins advice on marriage.

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Either the books are getting better or I’m becoming more amenable to Powell’s style (or both), because At Lady Molly’s was probably my favorite in the series so far. Long out of school, the characters seem to be playing for higher stakes, and their gossip is juicier than ever. I have to keep reminding myself that the Dance was written well after the period that it describes, as it feels so authentically of that era. That’s why its fairly frank treatment of sexuality, especially alternative sexuality, is refreshing. Witness the interesting ménage that Norah Tolland and Elizabeth Walpole-Wilson establish. Powell is no radical, but neither is he judgmental, and I can think of few other novels of the 1930s that would have presented that sort of material at all.

Jenkins, as Powell’s stand-in, continues to display the same refusal to condemn anyone or anything completely. When interrogated by prospective in-laws about Widmerpool’s fitness for marriage, Jenkins conveniently and typically finds a way to politely duck the questions. Widmerpool, despite his obnoxiousness, is actually growing more respectable in Jenkins’ eyes, apparently because he’s so consistently himself. Jenkins even seems to be seeing Widmerpool as a kind of reverse doppelganger when he considers how the two of them have shared affection for the same women. I get a sense that Jenkins is wondering if there’s not something to Widmerpool’s forcefulness.

He’s not alone, either. I’m realizing that many of the most ridiculous, grotesque characters are the most strong-willed, while the ones with initially appealing personalities are vague and malleable, even unformed. Compare Widmerpool, Erridge, and even Gypsy to superficially better-mannered, socially-adept figures such as Stringham and Templer. The former achieve their desires more often than not, while the latter squander their promise and become increasingly confused about what they should be doing with their lives. Add Truscott to that list, too. Once pegged as an up-and-comer who would star in any field he chose, he still hasn’t accomplished anything and has now lost his business position. He’s the poster boy for what we talked about in earlier installments, the tendency of bright young things to fade and fall out of contact. You never know with the Dance, though—he may express some willpower and stage a comeback yet.

Speaking of the importance of will, what do you make of this from page 203, narrated by Jenkins on the topic of his own impending nuptials?

Marriage, as I have said, is a form of action, of violence almost: an assertion of the will.

How romantic. And I loved this bit from page 136 as well:

Would it be too explicit, too exaggerated, to say that when I set eyes on Isobel Tolland, I knew at once that I should marry her? Something like that is the truth; certainly nearer the truth than merely to record those vague, inchoate sentiments of interest of which I was so immediately conscious. It was as if I had known her for many years already; enjoyed happiness with her and suffered sadness. I was conscious of that, as of another life, nostalgically remembered. Then, at that moment, to be compelled to go through all the paraphernalia of introduction, of “getting to know” one another by means of the normal formalities of social life, seemed hardly worth while. We knew one another already; the future was determinate. But what—it may reasonably be asked—what about the fact that only a short time before I had been desperately in love with Jean Duport; was still, indeed, not sure that I had been wholly cured? Were the delights and agonies of all that to be tied up with ribbon, so to speak, and thrown in a drawer to be forgotten? What about the girls with whom I seemed to stand nightly in cinema queues? What, indeed?

You can’t say he’s going into this with his eyes closed.

One last quote from page 97, which I share only because I had trouble making heads or tails of it:

Later that evening, I found myself kicking my heels in one of those interminable cinema queues of which I have already spoken, paired off and stationary, as if life’s co-educational school, out in a “crocodile,” had come to a sudden standstill: that co-educational school of iron discipline, equally pitiless in pleasure and in pain.

“That co-educational school” would seem to be life, and as best I can tell, “out in a ‘crocodile’” just means “walking in a pair.” So the metaphor says that life is a way of proceeding into the world in gendered pairs, but it’s temporarily ground to a halt? A lot of weight being placed on waiting in movie lines in this book. I’m surprised Powell didn’t call it Standing Nightly in a Queue.

Oh, I almost forgot to give a prize. The winner of a copy of Third Movement, courtesy of University of Chicago Press, is Mary C. Mary, contact us at info@mercerislandbooks.com to claim your book. We’ll take a hiatus from handouts next month, but resume the freebies in June.

Next up: Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant on May 30th. Available as part of Second Movement or separately as an ebook.

—James

Painting by Max Ginsburg from the cover of the 1980s Warner Books edition of At Lady Molly’s.

Previous installments:

• Book One: A Question of Upbringing
• Book Two: A Buyer’s Market
• Book Three: The Acceptance World

April 23rd is the International Day of the Book. It’s official—the UN passed a declaration about it in 1995. Why did they pick that date? Well, it’s Shakespeare’s birthday, for one thing. It’s also La Diada de Sant Jordi, a major holiday in Barcelona and the rest of Catalonia since the fifteenth century. In English, we call it St. George’s Day.

Historically, Catalonian men gave women roses on that day, and women gave men a book to celebrate the occasion—”a rose for love and a book forever.” In modern times, the books go to both genders, and half of all books sold in the region every year are exchanged on April 23rd.

A few years ago, an independent bookstore in Austin, Texas decided to bring this tradition to the US. At the time, the employees at BookPeople were very excited about a new novel called The Angel’s Game by Barcelona native Carlos Ruiz Zafon. It’s a marvelously atmospheric thriller that features a secret Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a huge library of old, forgotten titles lovingly preserved by a select few. According to tradition, each initiate of this clandestine place is allowed to take one book from it and must protect it for life. So the good people of BookPeople each chose a favorite volume that had fallen out of favor, and they spent the month around St. George’s Day promoting those titles and competing to see which one reached the most new readers.

Flash forward to 2013, when we at Island Books have decided to steal … er, borrow this fabulous idea and create our own Library of Forgotten Books. Our highly literate staff has selected an assortment of wonderful volumes that haven’t gotten the love they deserve. At least not lately. There’s a little something for everyone on the list. Our selections include a heartfelt memoir of a marriage of opposites, essays on old New York, and writing about the singular pleasures of the table, not to mention novels of death and war, love and delight, and the unfettered possibilities of the imagination.

Give one (or more) of them a good home, won’t you? Though they’re not brand new, the stories are far from stale. Of course you can visit our website to see all the titles, but you’ll want to come into the store to page through them in person. Books like these are most alive when you hold them in your hands. As they say in Catalonia, a book is forever. As long as someone remembers it.

—James

“Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves.”

—Umberto Eco, from The Name of the Rose

Books occasionally talk to blogs, too, and vice versa. And blogs about books talk to blogs about books, and so on. This was one of those weeks where almost everything I read reminded me of something else I’d read or written, to the point where I started thinking that no one, including me, had ever thought a thought that had never been thought before. Does that make sense? Probably not. I’ll try to untangle the ball of yarn for you with a few examples.

The first is a new novel by English writer Jane Gardam called Last Friends. It’s the concluding volume in a trilogy that I didn’t know was going to be one. At age 84 she’s still working at the top of her game, and has surprised her fans by adding more nuance and depth to the saga that she began in Old Filth and continued in The Man in the Wooden Hat. When an author works the same territory repeatedly, my interest often wanes with each new release, but in this case I think Gardam has enriched the ground on which her series stands. I talked more about the added value of this kind of multi-channel storytelling a couple of months ago on this very blog.

A few weeks after that I wrote about the nominees for this year’s Best Translated Book Award. The finalists for that prize have now been named, and I’m glad to see that most of my favorites have made the grade, especially the complex and fascinating Maidenhair by Mikhail Shiskin. A colleague at another shop recommends it eloquently, calling it “[a]n intoxicating, revelatory masterpiece overflowing with courage and beauty, a living testament to the written word. This book is not a book, it is a boat to carry you across oceans.” You almost need a cigarette after reading that blurb, don’t you?

Speaking of other stores, I ran across some striking photos from San Francisco’s Green Apple Books at the LA Review of Books blog. The gorgeous wear and tear on their lovingly preserved floors sparked memories of last summer’s communal effort to restore our own much-abused carpet.

Why did I start making so many links between what I was reading and what I’d written? It’s almost certainly because I picked up Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander this week. It immediately brought to mind a post I made here several months ago about consciousness and cognition. Hofstadter is one of the world’s leading experts on how the human mind works, and in this characteristically conversational new book he and his junior colleague posit that the basis for all human thought is analogy. That is, we categorize things both physical and abstract and compare them to each other every minute of our lives, often in ways that we don’t even notice. I won’t try to explain in a paragraph what these two brilliant academics get up to in five hundred or so pages, so I’ll just say that reading their book is like taking an exciting intellectual journey, one that will undoubtedly have you, like me, making unexpected connections between yourself and the world around you.

—James

Book three of the Dance takes place in the early 1930s, a few years after the events of the preceding novel. Narrator Nicholas Jenkins, while visiting his Uncle Giles, meets the dramatic Mrs. Erdleigh and has his fortune told, with a special emphasis on his so-far unfulfilling romantic life. Later, Jenkins attempts to solicit an introduction for a book through Quiggins, a collegiate acquaintance. At that appointment, Jenkins bumps into another old friend, Peter Templer, and meets Templer’s wife Mona for the first time.This leads to a reconnection with Templer’s sister Jean; the torch Jenkins has carried for her on and off since his teen years is rekindled and he embarks on a secretive relationship with her. Meanwhile, Mona leaves Templer, seduced by Quiggins’ literary prospects and exciting radical politics. Mrs. Erdleigh makes a surprising appearance on the arm of the obnoxious Jimmy Stripling, and Jean reveals an old affair with him to Jenkins. Pondering these various domestic complications, Jenkins attends a reunion dinner honoring his former headmaster Le Bas, along with Templer, the now-divorced Charles Stringham, and others. Widmerpool, once an object of scorn but fast becoming a force in business and politics, there launches into a tedious speech that concludes only when Le Bas collapses of a stroke.

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Once again, business first. The winner of our latest giveaway is Karen, who made some of our most astute comments yet on our last post. Congratulations, Karen, and contact us at info@mercerislandbooks.com to claim your prize, a free copy of the Second Movement. We’ll be giving away copies of the subsequent volumes in the series as we go, so let’s hear from the rest of you. All it takes to win is an opinion.

Back to the book at hand, I realize that it’s not very analytical of me to say, but I think this was my favorite section so far. The Acceptance World felt somewhat more concise than books one or two (book three is slightly shorter than the others, so this may not be an illusion), and in it Jenkins shifts closer to being an actor than an observer. He actively seeks a meeting, first with Members, then with Quiggins, about his art book project, and he’s instrumental in the dissolution of the Templers’ marriage, at least inadvertently. There’s a bit of his old vagueness when he describes his initial grappling session with Jean in the back of the car—“All I knew was that I had not thought it all out beforehand”—but he does actually admit to taking her intentionally into his arms. And we learn that he’s published a novel! So he’s not just sitting at home waiting for invitations.

Uncle Giles once again bookends the story. To me, there’s something appropriately familial about his presence in the series. He’s not around often, and he doesn’t figure prominently in the events that concern the narrator day to day, but he always returns as a constant against which the fluctuations of friendship can be measured. If Powell intends this interpretation, then I expect an increasing role for Jenkins’ family as he ages in later books. After spending his twenties (and the roaring 1920s) out of their orbit, it seems natural that he’d spin back their way as he moves into his more somber thirties and beyond.

Not just the narrator’s age suggests a new seriousness. The characters know that the market is slumping and we know even if they don’t that another war is on the horizon. Inklings of it are already here in the background, with much talk about “the situation” in one country or another and how it will or won’t affect economics at home. It’s refreshing to read from this historical perspective, about a time when Communism could be fashionable and Fascism could be comical and neither ism was very consequential.

On the level of the prose itself, Powell once again finds a neat way to sum up what he’s attempting in the series. The second paragraph on page 32 consists of Jenkins’ thoughts, but also Powell’s, I suspect:

I began to brood on the complexity of writing a novel about English life, a subject difficult enough to handle with authenticity even of a crudely naturalistic sort, even more to convey the inner truth of the things observed … Intricacies of social life make English habits unyielding to simplification.

Thus we have a complex sequence of a dozen books instead of one brief novel.

My vote for funniest line in this book goes to one from page 108. Jenkins is conversing with Gavin Walpole about the present habits of his aristocratic daughter:

“I expect she finds plenty to do,” I offered.

“Her breeding keeps her quiet,” said Sir Gavin.

He spoke almost with distaste. However, perceiving that I felt uncertain as to the precise meaning of this explanation of Eleanor’s existing state, he added curtly:

“Labradors.”

What highlights were there for you? Don’t be afraid to mention lowlights, either. Positive or negative, comment below. I’d love to hear what you think.

Next up: At Lady Molly’s on April 25th. Available as part of Second Movement or separately as an a ebook.

—James

Previous installments:

• Book One: A Question of Upbringing
• Book Two: A Buyer’s Market
  

A couple of months ago, we announced our first-ever short story contest at Island Books, and then we sat back to watch the submissions roll in. The majority of them came in just before (or even on) the March 17th deadline—way to maximize your writing time, people. It was a treat to read all your entries, so our heartfelt thanks go out to all who participated. It’s time to declare the winning names, so without further ado…

In the kids category for authors 12 and under, the winner is seven-year-old Lauren Novak for her illustrated tale “The Runaway Hat.” We loved this simple story with a rhythmic beat. It stuck in our heads like the best children’s books always do, and we can almost picture it between hard covers. An excerpt:

Once there was a hat. However this was a quite naughty hat. In fact, it kept flying away.

So there was a man then a hat came on his head. Then the man said, “What a fine hat. What a perfect hat.” And with that he set off…

You can read the rest here: “The Runaway Hat”

In the teen category for authors 13 to 17, the winner is fifteen-year-old Cecelia Rosenman for “All People Want In.” The author does an excellent job of imagining herself into the mind of an older character and expresses some sophisticated ideas admirably as she does so. The story begins:

Diversity is all the same. It’s taken years working as a college admissions counselor to understand that. Here I am again, dreading a new tour before it’s even started.

It’s always the same. I make my speech in a huge beige room filled with exhausted children and their eager parents. I talk about the wonders of my college and urge the overwhelmed kids to work harder because I’ll only let in a few of them. Then lipstick-y women push the teenagers in front of me while the fathers loosen the ties that have been choking them for the past hour.

Of course, I was oblivious to all of this when I was eighteen…

You can read the rest here: “All People Want In”

In the open category for adults, the winner is Steve Workman for “Hazel Lassoes the Hoover.” Virtually all the stories in this group had something to recommend them, from painterly scene-setting to strongly felt characterization, but Steve’s submission seemed the best combination of techniques. It offers some catchy phrase-making, recognizable figures, and considerable verve. A sample:

What I remember is that sometime around nine years old, it became plain to me that my family was boring. Weekly visits to the piano teacher provided the kids with theory, lessons, and practice, but there was never any music going in our house. My father would buy a new one-year-old Dodge Dart four-door from Hertz every third year, then give his old one to Mom. An aeronautical engineer, he came home every afternoon and read magazines like Aviation Week, always on the same end of the couch. As a family we were constantly in training to expect the expected…

Read the whole story here: “Hazel Lassoes the Hoover”

Again, thanks to everyone who submitted. We appreciate the time, effort, and intelligence you put into your stories, and we’re honored that you shared them with us. It was a great experience, and you shouldn’t be surprised if we do it again next year.

—James

Since our most recent recommendations for book club reads proved so popular, I thought I’d piggyback on the success of that post with some more advice. Which is: Liven up your next meeting by adding drama. I don’t mean that you should turn your book club into a hair-pulling episode of Real Housewives: 98040, obviously. I’m suggesting that you try reading something written for the theater.

There are plenty of plays out there that contain all the depth of a great novel, brimming over with plot and characterization. One of my favorites in this regard is Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, the Czech-born, English-bred, Oscar- and Tony-winning writer. All his works are rich stews of idea and amusement, but Arcadia may be his best. It’s set in one place but in two eras; all the action occurs at the same country house, some in the Austenesque early 1800s and some in the present day. The historical scenes feature a precocious teen, her rakish tutor, and several other indelible figures, including a pet tortoise. The modern portion presents a group of scholars, all with competing agendas, who descend upon the estate to research what really went on there back in the day. There’s another tortoise, too (or maybe the same one).

As the centuries roll back and forth and the anachronistic characters drift past each other invisibly, Stoppard gives us bedroom farce, poetry, a duel or two, scientific theorizing, romance, and even antagonistic visions of proper landscaping technique. Through it all there’s humor and, despite the intellectual trappings, heart. It’s one of those rare plays that has more life on the page than on the stage—however fine it may be in performance, there’s always a new way to see it in your imagination.

Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine takes similar liberties with space and time, taking its characters from colonial Africa under Victoria to contemporary London. Note that the comparison of the 19th century to our allegedly more enlightened times isn’t always flattering. Actors playing women in the first act take on male roles in the second, and vice versa; Churchill’s overtly feminist, polemical approach is excellent fodder for group discussion. It’s also wildly entertaining.

Less quirky but no less provocative, Yasmina Reza’s The God of Carnage takes a familiar domestic situation and uses it as a starting point for a remarkably thorough exploration of human nature. There’s been a fight at school, and two sets of parents meet to sort out their response in a civilized way, but the evening quickly degenerates into petty personal politics. Issues of class, race, and prejudice come to the fore, and the adults bicker until they seem more childish than their offspring. Great parts when you’re playing make-believe, but not in real life.

Speaking of playing parts, I’ve saved my more daring suggestion until now, when you’re in a receptive mood. Instead of reading a play quietly and privately before getting together to talk about it, read it out loud as a group. Don’t get stage fright yet, I’m not asking you become a full-fledged strutting, fretting thespian. But lifting the words off the page, as it were, and hearing them spoken, even without actorly histrionics, brings out nuance and inflection that isn’t always apparent in print. That’s one advantage, and there’s another, more important one. You don’t have to read that month’s book club selection ahead of time. You can just meet and experience the play all at once, with fresh eyes and open minds. When you don’t have to strike sets, futz with props, or adjust lighting, you can read your way through most plays in one evening and react to it with your buddies before the bell tolls to send you all back home. Dramatic literature is the perfect choice during holiday season or at any other busy time of the year.

If you still get butterflies in your stomach when thinking about the concept, well, that’s why they serve wine at book clubs. Cheers!

—James

The topmost image was taken from a greeting card sold at Island Books.

The chattering classes (a phrase coined by Auberon Waugh, son of novelist Evelyn Waugh) continue to debate the future of print. Literacy itself is on the upswing, as text messaging pushes aside voice mail and crawling chyrons take up increasing acreage on our TV screens, so pundits are less concerned than they once were about images replacing words completely. They’re still worked up about how those words will be delivered to us, though. Will everyone be reading eBooks or …. what to call them? Apparently we’ll soon need a retronym to clarify what we’re talking about, much as we now must specify “acoustic guitar” or “analog clock.” For now I’ll stick to calling them what they are, thanks—books.

The topic has been so much discussed that it’s grown more than a little tiresome. We at Island Books are happy to sell you a story in bits and bytes or on paper, as you prefer, and we try not make a big song and dance about it. More interesting, perhaps, is the question of how writers are creating their stories. That is, how does a tale turn from a mere fizzing in the mind into words that can be read?

Things started, of course, with the oral tradition. Bards around campfires told and retold stories for thousands of years before the idea of writing was born. The earliest examples of stories being permanently preserved in print come from around 2600 BC, when the Sumerians, Akkadians, and Egyptians began pressing cuneiform into clay tablets and carving hieroglyphs on stone walls. The most significant of these is the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, a tale of creation and destruction that still speaks to modern audiences. Papyrus, parchment, and paper were developed as the centuries passed, as were various alphabets that made writing easier, but authors continued to produce work by hand. Even after the development of the printing press in the 15th century, a story had to start as a manuscript. It wasn’t until 1883 that this changed.

That was the year that Mark Twain employed a newfangled invention and submitted a typewritten copy of Life on the Mississippi to his publisher.  He’d handwritten it first and then had a secretary type it up. The technology took off soon after, and it wasn’t long before authors began composing right on the machine. Around the turn of the 20th century, Henry James dictated many of his novels to a typist, and fifty years later, Jack Kerouac famously bashed out On the Road in just two weeks in front of the keyboard. Harking back to ancient times, he typed onto a continuous scroll of paper instead of onto individual sheets.

Soon another innovation took root. As described in a recent Slate article, English thriller writer Len Deighton became the first person to write a novel via a word processor in 1968. The device weighed 200 pounds and had to be hoisted into his home with a crane. Much like Twain, Deighton required the assistance of a professional; it was a woman named Ellenor Handley who actually entered the words into the contraption so that fans could read Bomber.

Nowadays we’re all using computers to write, or most of us are. A few holdouts, including Will Self and Cormac McCarthy, cling to their Underwoods and Olivettis (Olivettii?), but I certainly didn’t hand-write this before you read it. What’s next? Well, readers in Japan are enjoying something called the “cell phone novel,” consisting of short chapters of under a hundred words sent by text message. Presumably most, if not all of these are “written” by a pair of thumbs dancing across a handheld device. Can’t say I’m looking forward to the proliferation of this trend, but I won’t discount it. People probably laughed at the first scribe who switched from counting sheep to telling stories, and look how far that got us.

—James

If you can read and understand this, you’re spoiled. Not because you get to enjoy the fabulous writing of Message in a Bottle—not just that, anyway—but because it means you know English. When you do, you can wander the world trusting that you’ll run into someone else who can speak your language sooner than not. It’s a great privilege to be monolingual and still be able to communicate with a wide swath of humanity, and we anglophones are a lucky, lucky lot.

The drawback to the global dominance of English is that while we’re assuming that the rest of the world wants to hear what we have to say, we’re not able to listen to what those other people are talking about to each other. This becomes all too apparent when you look at the number of books translated from English and compare it to the paltry number translated into English. It’s very difficult to calculate the percentages exactly, given how many books are published each year in different editions and formats, but the figure thrown around most frequently is three percent. That is, of all books published in the US, just three percent were originally written in another language. If you exclude reprints and retranslations of existing texts and drop purely functional writing (financial reports and the like), the total is even lower. Things aren’t much more diverse in the UK, either. A recent study indicates that translated poetry, drama, and fiction may account for up to 4.5% of published work there. For context, you should know that a mere five percent of the planet’s population speaks English as a first language.

We’re missing out on a lot, obviously. Which is why my ears always perk up when I hear that the longlist of nominees for the Best Translated Book Award has been released. This annual prize honors the finest work available from around the globe, and it was founded by the University of Rochester’s resource for international literature, Three Percent (guess where they got their name). I’m someone who tries to keep up with this stuff, and I’m familiar with much of the list, but every year they surprise me by uncovering several titles I’ve never even heard of. This group will be winnowed to a shortlist on April 10th, and the winner will be announced on May 4th.

• The Planets by Sergio Chejfec, translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary (Argentina)
• Prehistoric Times by Eric Chevillard, translated from the French by Alyson Waters (France)
• The Colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, translated from the Persian by Tom Patterdale (Iran)
• Atlas by Dung Kai-Cheung, translated from the Chinese by Anders Hansson and Bonnie S. McDougall (China)
• Kite by Dominique Eddé, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz (Lebanon)
• We, The Children of Cats by Tomoyuki Hoshino, translated from the Japanese by Brian Bergstom and Lucy Fraser (Japan)
• The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq, translated from the French by Gavin Bowd (France)
• Basti by Intizar Husain, translated from the Urdu by Frances W. Pritchett (Pakistan)
• Mama Leone by Miljenko Jergović, translated from the Croatian by David Williams (Croatia)
• Awakening to the Great Sleep War by Gert Jonke, translated from the German by Jean M. Snook (Austria)
• My Struggle: Book One by Karl Knausgaard, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett (Norway)
• Satantango by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes (Hungary)
• Autoportrait by Edouard Levé, translated from the French by Lorin Stein (France)
• A Breath of Life: Pulsations by Clarice Lispector, translated from the Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz (Brazil)
• The Lair by Norman Manea, translated from the Romanian by Oana Sanziana Marian (Romania)
• The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller, translated from the German by Philip Boehm (Romania)
• Traveler of the Century by Andrés Neuman, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia (Argentina)
• Happy Moscow by Andrey Platonov, translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler (Russia)
• With the Animals by Noëlle Revaz, translated from the French by Donald W. Wilson (Switzerland)
• Maidenhair by Mikhail Shishkin, translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz (Russia)
• Joseph Walser’s Machine by Gonçalo M. Tavares, translated from the Portuguese by Rhett McNeil (Portugal)
• Island of Second Sight by Albert Vigoleis Thelen, translated from the German by Donald O. White (Germany)
• Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey and Anne McLean (Spain)
• Transit by Abdourahman A. Waberi, translated from the French by David Ball and Nicole Ball (Djibouti)
• My Father’s Book by Urs Widmer, translated from the German by Donal McLaughlin (Switzerland)

As usual, it’s the small presses that are making the effort to share these excellent books—Open Letter Press, Melville House, Seagull Books, Dalkey Archive Press, Archipelago Books, New Directions, New York Review Books, and others. It’s thanks to them that the pile on my nightstand is as big as it is.

If this cornucopia is too bountiful to take in all at once, you can sample some of the finest international writing in a single volume. Best European Fiction 2013, edited by Aleksandar Hemon, offers a literary tasting menu from across a continent. It’s as enjoyable as a night out in a tapas bar. Salut!

—James

Book two of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time takes narrator Nicholas Jenkins to a series of parties. At a formal dance, he falls definitively out of love with Barbara Goring, who has also been the object of Widmerpool’s affections, at least until she humiliates him by dumping a container of sugar over his head. After that dance, Jenkins bumps into his former schoolmate Stringham and an old family friend, the painter Deacon. The group crashes a louche gathering hosted by Mrs. Andriadis at a house she is renting from the now-married Jean Templer, on whom Jenkins once had a crush. Over the following summer, Jenkins is introduced through Deacon’s antique shop to another painter, Barnby, and spends a weekend in the country visiting the castle of industrialist Magnus Donners, who employs both Stringham and Widmerpool. The latter embarrasses himself again by crashing his car into a driveway urn and, on the rebound from his failure with Barbara, is somehow convinced by the radical bohemian Gypsy Jones to pay for her abortion. In the fall Stringham marries Lady Peggy Stepney, and Deacon celebrates his birthday at yet another party, dying soon afterward due to complications from a tumble down the stairs. After the funeral, Jenkins unexpectedly trysts with Jones.

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I promised a giveaway, so let’s get that out of the way to start. Random selection from among the comments on the first thread gives us Smpbloch as a winner. Congratulations, and a free copy of the Second Movement, courtesy of University of Chicago Press, awaits you. Just drop us a line at info@mercerislandbooks.com to claim your prize. We have one more copy to give away, so I’ll be choosing another winner from this month’s comments, too.

Book two opens with a painting, produced by Deacon many years before the events described in the novel and discovered for sale many years afterward. The first book similarly began with the memory of art, the allegorical painting by Poussin that gives a name to Powell’s fictional cycle. Not sure what to make of that other than art’s role in the relative permanence of recollection. That would seem to be one of the central themes of the entire project.

A somewhat different tone in this installment, I thought. Jenkins remains detached, but is forced by circumstance to be somewhat more involved in the action than he was in the first book. Nonetheless, his motives remain opaque and often surprising to himself as well as to us. He’s been interested in several young women, but falls in and out of love without much understanding of how or why. He’s interpreted each infatuation as progressively more sophisticated and mature, and I’ll be curious to see if his affair with Jones fits that schema or breaks it.

Interesting too to compare the various kinds of socializing going on in this volume. Jenkins is intrigued by the relaxed conventions of the bohemian world, but also somewhat repelled. To this point, he’s thrived on rules and has yet to become comfortable without them. That formal world of debutantes and dances has yet to disappear completely, of course. I was reminded of Whit Stillman’s 1990 film Metropolitan, which examines the vestiges of those traditions with a fond eye. As an aside, there are far fewer troubling ethnic stereotypes to deal with in the movie than in A Buyer’s Market.

Widmerpool continues pricelessly to be Widmerpool, falling down and rising again and again. He’s almost admirable and yet horrific in his single-mindedness. I loved his sudden appearance at the dungeon window, and the way so much of his personality is explained by the simple remark that his father used to sell “liquid manure.”

I’ll be carrying two quotes with me as I proceed through the series. The first comes from page 23: “[N]othing establishes the timelessness of Time like those episodes of early experience seen, on reexamination at a later period, to have been crowded together with such unbelievable closeness in the course of a few years; yet equally giving the illusion of being so infinitely extended during the months when actually taking place.” That seems a good summation of how we live through time at different speeds, and captures the way this series is assembled, too.

The second comes from page 193: “Perhaps intimacy of any sort, love or friendship, impedes all exactness of definition…In short, the persons we see most clearly are not necessarily those we know best.” This applies in life as well as in the creation of literary characters. The most memorable people aren’t always the closest or the most important.

Next up: An Acceptance World on March 28th. Available as part of First Movement or separately as an a ebook.

—James

Photo from Channel 4’s 1997 TV adaptation of A Dance to the Music of Time.

Previous installments:

• Book One: A Question of Upbringing
  

By now you’ve heard the news: they paved Richard III and put up a parking lot. Five hundred and twenty-eight years after his death in battle at Bosworth Field, his remains have been found and definitively identified. The location of his body, the pattern of wounds on it, and mitochondrial DNA analysis all indicate that the skeleton discovered beneath a Leicester construction site is that of the disgraced medieval king.

The amount of attention that’s been focused on this story has been somewhat surprising to me. I knew that there were a fair number of history geeks who’d take notice, but I had no idea that the mainstream media and the blogosphere would be buzzing at such an intense pitch about it.

I suspect credit goes to multiple factors. Richard lived long enough ago that  his exhumation is of archaeological interest, triggering an Indiana Jones-like excitement about the mysterious past. On the other hand, he lived just recently enough to be part of familiar history, and to have a recognizable personality. Throw in a heaping helping of plebeian besottedness with the aristocracy, and voilà—hoopla.

Now that we know who these bones belong to, the conversation seems to be turning again to what kind of man he was. At this remove, we’ll never know his character with anything like certainty, of course. The personality that we think we know is and will always be a construct. His current reputation as an avatar of evil stems mostly from Shakespeare’s wildly popular play, The Tragedy of King Richard III.

It was first performed barely more than a century after the events it describes, when the royal family who unseated Richard was still in firm control of England. As such, it’s not surprising that it depicts Richard as a perfect monster and his replacement, Henry VII, as a glowing beacon of rectitude. It’s from Shakespeare that we get the image of a scheming “bottled spider,” a “bunch-backed toad” who seduces a widow over the coffin of her late husband, who Richard himself has killed. It’s funny that the historical figure is so hated by many, given that his fictional incarnation and the villains that he begat, including Dallas’ J.R., are such crowd-pleasers.

The foulest crime attributed to the real Richard III is probably the murder of the two young princes who had a claim on his throne. It’s accepted as fact by most that the boys died at his hand or at least by his order. Over the years, however, some have argued that he’s been unfairly slandered by this accusation. There’s nothing like proof that he killed them, and very little evidence that they died at all prematurely. Some contrarian historians assert that Richard had no motive to eliminate them, instead pointing the finger at his successor.

The theory is a little complicated, but the essence is this: Richard assumed the throne on the death of his brother by convincing Parliament that his brother’s marriage and therefore his heirs were illegitimate. Two years later, the would-be Henry VII came out of France with his army. When the dust of war settled and Richard was dead, Henry had the perfectly legal edict of illegitimacy rescinded, which moved the princes back to the top of the succession list. So they were a threat to Henry, not to Richard.

It’s a fairly convincing argument, at least as presented by Josephine Tey in her detective novel The Daughter of Time. First published in 1951, it’s considered a classic of the genre. It features Tey’s recurring hero, Inspector Alan Grant, who in this case isn’t out beating the bushes for ne’er-do-wells. Instead he’s flat on his back in the hospital, bored out of his skull. To pass the time, he starts examining old portraits and reading old records, eventually marshaling a full-scale investigation into the past. The wonderful thing about the book is how it possesses all the spirit of a thriller without putting its protagonist into any danger. The only true action derives from the mental gymnastics Grant undertakes from the safety of his cocoon, but Daughter of Time is suspenseful nonetheless.

At the very least, Tey’s tale will have you reconsidering your most closely-held knowledge. Received wisdom comes from somewhere, usually from someone who had something to gain. Whether or not Richard III had a twisted soul to match his twisted bones, his real legacy is as a reminder that truth can stand on shaky ground.

—James

The first book of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time introduces us to narrator Nicholas Jenkins and a handful of his friends and relations. We meet Stringham and Templer, his roommates at school, and then their officious headmaster Le Bas, who becomes the subject of a prank orchestrated by Stringham. As the young men leave school and head into adulthood, they start to move in different directions, with the cynical Templer taking a finance job in the City. Jenkins summers in France, where he dabbles in unrequited romance and re-encounters another fellow student, the dogged but inelegant Widmerpool. Jenkins returns to England to take a place at university alongside Stringham, who quickly grows disenchanted with academic life and enters the business world with the encouragement of his glamorous mother, brusque stepfather, and Sillery, a don more interested in establishing social and political connections than in teaching. The novel closes as it began, with the appearance of Jenkins’ itinerant Uncle Giles, as ever obsessed with the imagined injustice he suffers at his family’s hands.

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Well, what did you think of it, fellow readers? Hope you liked it—I did. This is intended to be a forum for voices other than my own, so I don’t want to monopolize opinion, but I’ll get us started by sharing a few thoughts I had as I turned the pages.

The newest season of Downton Abbey began airing in the US just as I was reading the book, and it coincidentally takes place at almost the exact same historical moment that A Question of Upbringing does, the first years of the 1920s. The twin subjects of the television show are society’s elite and the servants who support them, so it was interesting that Powell’s novel mainly covered the experiences of the more middling classes, relatively speaking. It occurred to me that Jenkins, the narrator of QU, comes from approximately the same milieu as Downton’s Matthew Crawley. Before the latter inherits vast wealth and a title, of course.

One of the things I most enjoyed about the book was Powell’s understated humor, as on page 21 when the narrator says, “I spoke more about Stringham, but Uncle Giles had come to the end of his faculty for absorbing statements about other people.” Such an apt, devastating way to sum up Giles’ solipsism. Even though QU is full of meditative insight about human psychology, it also contains many scenes of what could be played as broad, even slapstick, comedy, as when Jenkins misdirects a declaration of love toward his landlady instead of the sweet young thing he’s had his eye on. As Powell handles it, the description is dry and self-mocking, and all the more hilarious.

I’ll be curious to see how the series develops from here, and how many of the characters we meet in the first book reappear in Jenkins’ life. Clearly, some relatively minor figures will, and others who briefly play vivid, seemingly important roles won’t. That’s a very lifelike quality, I find. The odd, inscrutable Widmerpool will certainly be seen again. After he leads the Scandinavian tennis opponents to rapprochement for motives that are unclear to Jenkins, the narrator says, “Even then I did not recognise the quest for power,” and I noted, “More of Widmerpool anon.”

Jenkins himself is probably the most fascinating figure in the book despite how little we really learn about him. He’s at the center of all the action without taking the center of the stage, and is almost staunchly noncommittal in attitude throughout. He seems to have a chameleon-like ability to convince others he’s on their side even when their points of view are diametrically opposed. Is he of Stringham’s party or Templer’s? Or neither? Does he laugh along when Stripling concocts plots to torment Farebrother or frown? It’s hard for us to tell, and it’s hard to tell whether Jenkins knows his own mind about these things.

For me, the narrator’s most emblematic moment of detachment occurs on page 57, when he and Stringham discuss Templer’s suitability for domestic life. Stringham asserts that Templer has none, and asks, “You agree?” to which Jenkins merely replies, “I see what you mean.” It’s a very non-confrontational, Seattle-style response. Sympathy for everyone is ideal in a fictional narrator, but I suspect it’s a detriment in the real world.

But enough of what I think. It’s your turn. Do you agree or disagree? Don’t just say, “I see what you mean.” You can react to what I’ve said or raise a topic of your own. (Those of you who read these posts in your email will want to click the headline at the top of the message to go to our blog site where you can leave a comment.) As an incentive for you to participate, the generous people at University of Chicago Press have agreed to donate some copies of the subsequent volumes in the series. I’ll be randomly choosing winners from among the comments, so if you’d like a FREE BOOK, speak up. Comments will remain open until our next Dance to the Music of Time post (and beyond, if you want to keep talking), so keep the conversation going.

Next up: A Buyer’s Market on February 29th. Available as part of First Movement or separately as an ebook.

—James

Photo from Channel 4’s 1997 TV adaptation of A Dance to the Music of Time.

The twentieth century will be American. American thought will dominate it. American progress will give it color and direction. American deeds will make it illustrious.

—Senator Albert Beveridge (1862-1927)

Writer Evan Connell died last week at his home in Santa Fe. He was 88 years old, and had for decades been peripherally famous in literary circles. His bestselling work was non-fictional, a meticulously researched history of the Battle of Little Bighorn and character study of of General George Custer called Son of the Morning Star, but he was primarily a creative author whose stories took many forms and wore many different styles. There was meditative, philosophical book-length poetry of a kind that’s rarely been seen since the days of ancient Greece and Rome (Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel), a sprawling novel about the Crusades (Deus Lo Volt!), a taut psychological examination of societal and personal degradation in the 1960s (The Diary of a Rapist), a fictitious notebook of medieval science (Alchymic Journals), and…well, that should give you the idea. He had a remarkable career by any standard, with only his refusal to repeat himself or subject himself to categorization keeping him from even wider renown.

Connell’s most acclaimed books were published about ten years apart, in 1958 and 1969. Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge together tell the story of an upper-class Kansas City couple whose superficially secure and comfortable marriage has its foundations shaken by repressed emotion and an inability to cope with change. The novels were adapted into a moderately successful film starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, but it didn’t capture the full depth of characterization that’s present in the books. They’re marvels of economy and understatement that have impressed authors from Dorothy Parker to James Patterson. Told from different points of view, the novels are excellent on their own, but read in conjunction they inform and enrich each other dramatically.

Writers frequently employ multiple perspectives in a single book, of course, and they extend a single story across multiple books almost as frequently, but it’s rare for someone to publish a stand-alone novel and then write another that casts the same topic in a completely new light. Or so I believe. Connell’s death got me thinking about this approach, but I couldn’t figure out what to call it or come up with more than a handful of examples.

The first may already be familiar to regulars here. Jane Gardam’s veddy British novels Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat came out in 2004 and 2009 respectively, and they remain popular choices at Island Books. The first of them tells the story of Sir Edward Feathers, a Raj orphan who struggles through an English childhood before heading to the Far East and becoming a prominent jurist—his nickname “Old Filth” is an acronym for “Failed In London, Try Hong Kong.” The following volume, from the point of view of the eventual Mrs. Feathers, reveals many details about their life that her husband keeps hidden when he tells his story, and it shows her to be a far more complicated figure than the one he introduces to us.

Maile Meloy, an American author, published Liars and Saints a decade ago, a novel that depicts four generations of the fervently Catholic but frequently sinning Santerre family. She followed that up with A Family Daughter, in which we find we must unlearn much of what we thought we knew about the characters. According to the latter book, Liars and Saints is an autobiographical novel written not by Meloy, but by one of the younger Santerres. She’s tinkered with family history for the sake of her fiction, and the true version is told in A Family Daughter. I mean, the “true” version. Here, let Meloy explain:

I wrote Liars and Saints first, with no thought of writing another novel about the Santerre family. I really thought I was finished with them.  It wasn’t until after Liars and Saints came out that I started thinking about writing a book about someone who’s written a novel, and about the way people wonder what’s true in it. Then it seemed interesting to have one of the secret-keeping Santerres write one, so that A Family Daughter would seem to be the bigger, messier, less-streamlined source material that Liars and Saints came from.

Asking around uncovered some other pairs that seemed to fit, notably Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card and Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice. I’m not sure how many other examples are out there, but it seems likely that most of them would be found in the speculative genres. I suspect that’s because SF, fantasy, and horror emphasize world-building in a way that so-called literary fiction doesn’t, and this technique creates a special kind of external reality. As I see it, anyway.

Look: a single novel is like a painting, beautiful, flat, and complete. Two novels that call each other’s narratives into question are more like two mirrors that reflect the same object, each from its own angle and each with its individual distortions. You can never see the object except through the mirrors, but their differing perspectives not only suggest its existence, but that it has more dimension than a single view can capture. The sense of reality is thereby heightened.

So now that we know how some writers make stories feel realer than real by writing them twice, what do we say they’ve done when they’ve done it? We can’t talk knowledgeably about this phenomenon in our college classes or at our book club meetings without a fancy name. Intersecting duologies? Novels of co-dependency? My favorite suggestion isn’t actually all that fancy, and it came from a friend: Stereo lit. Reading one book is great, but it’s even better when you multitrack your mind. Turn up the volume and read two.

—James