I love this short essay by Charles Yu about how all family stories are time travel stories, particularly this bit:

Science fiction allows a writer to selectively question assumptions about the world, about ourselves, to fiddle with this dial, tweak this parameter or that one, then run the simulation, boot up a cosmos and see what happens. For me, it is about possibility more than probability.

I know I always bring up Johnson’s line about Shakespeare approximating the remote and familiarizing the wonderful, but it’s applicable once again — Yu enjoys SF because it allows him to play out a trial to which a person (or a family) could not really be exposed, “and see what happens.” Yes, I say. Yes! Really looking forward to reading Yu’s book.

And on an entirely unrelated note, this book about perfume is worth a look even if you, like me, know nothing about the topic. The reviews are beautifully detailed, crisp, cutting, and wittily allusive. For example, here’s a bit from Luca Turin’s review of Guerlain’s “Quand Vient l’Été,” a “dry floral” that gets three stars out of five:

I’m of two minds about this fragrance: on the one hand, I am not fond of this style, a slightly sour, metallic (helional) floral accord that smells like a sucked silver spoon. On the other hand, this one is beautifully executed and has a prim, starchy prettiness that suggests Edwardian TV drama and passions corseted to the bursting point. It brings to mind Ambrose Bierce’s definition of garters: “An elastic band intended to keep a woman from coming out of her stockings and desolating the country.”

One of the things I love most about the internet is the way niche interests become more accessible to clueless outsiders. Like I said, I know nothing about perfume or its history, but that doesn’t mean I can’t take pleasure in watching people who do deploy their knowledge.

A quick Friday link: do go read Sarah Rees Brennan’s charming descriptions of mystery series, including an imagined dialogue between Dorothy Sayers and her publisher about Harriet Vane’s, uh, rather idealized nature. Great recommendations in the comments, too. I’d add Tana French‘s books — I didn’t love Faithful Place as well as the first two in the series, but The Likeness is just brilliant fun, especially if you love The Secret History.

And on that note, here’s a great NY Times profile of Colin Cotterill, a fellow Soho author who writes mysteries set in 1970s Laos (and a link to his newest book, just out from Soho).

Happy weekend, all!

My first week of teaching is over! Or sort of over — my students just turned in their first assignments, so I’ll be reading those this weekend. We spent most of this week reading and discussing published short fiction and we begin workshopping their own work on Monday.

I am very sleepy this morning, not least because T. talked me into attending the midnight showing of Inception with him on Thursday night. Vaguely spoilery reaction below — skip if you’re not into that kind of thing. Non-spoilery reaction: it’s fun and you should see it.

Beyond that, I think A. O. Scott’s review is right on:

… though there is a lot to see in “Inception,” there is nothing that counts as genuine vision. Mr. Nolan’s idea of the mind is too literal, too logical, too rule-bound to allow the full measure of madness — the risk of real confusion, of delirium, of ineffable ambiguity — that this subject requires. The unconscious, as Freud (and Hitchcock, and a lot of other great filmmakers) knew, is a supremely unruly place, a maze of inadmissible desires, scrambled secrets, jokes and fears. If Mr. Nolan can’t quite reach this place, that may be because his access is blocked by the very medium he deploys with such skill.

I had the same reaction to the movie that Scott did — I really enjoyed it and admired the caper-plot machinery, but I felt slightly unsatisfied at the end. I think the problem is that the plot is designed, like just about all of Nolan’s plots, to turn on a series of reveals. Except that these reveals aren’t really surprising. You can see them coming from at least a few minutes away, if not more. T. and I were both perplexed at the critical habit of describing the movie as confusing or hard to follow — it’s complex but incredibly regular, and I don’t think I ever got confused about what was happening or where/when the action was occurring. (Roger Ebert’s review, which is very positive and definitely worth reading, does this a bit; he also points out, interestingly, that Nolan was working on this script while he filmed Memento. [Obligatory mention here of how much I enjoy Ebert's Twitter feed, if you aren't familiar with it!])  I found The Prestige‘s reveals more satisfying, and its moral sense more resonant, too. You would think that a movie that is explicitly about the very foundations of reality would have higher stakes than a movie about magicians, but it seems to me that Nolan might be better at approaching ethical questions sideways rather than head-on. (Do not get me started about the question of ethics in relation to the dreadful The Dark Knight.)

The other weakness of the movie, for me, was the lack of development of the relationships among the characters, especially in comparison to the character-driven drama of The Prestige. This is maybe a flaw inherent in the caper plot, though I think even Ocean’s 11 did a better job of creating real people to fill out its team (and there were, as you’ll note, eleven of them). I liked all the team members just fine — I think I will always adore Joseph Gordon-Levitt, even though I couldn’t get through (500) Days of Summer — but their interactions are shallow. The movie also wastes a chance to do something really interesting, which I won’t discuss much here because it would be super-spoilery, by eliding one large chunk of time that would have allowed it to investigate the relationship between DiCaprio’s character and Watanabe’s character, and to be weirder. I liked Marion Cotillard a lot, which was a nice change from Public Enemies in which she just seemed like a pretty but bizarre casting choice and reminded me that I really do want to see her Piaf movie. (Okay, one spoilery side note regarding her character: Nolan is really obsessed with giving his main male characters idealized wives who died in ways they may be culpable for.) And the movie also made me want to look up a few of the other actors, especially Tom Hardy, who is delightfully smirky.

In sum: not perfect, but it is a gorgeous movie. It will make you clutch the arm of the person sitting next to you, and it may make you think about it after it’s over. And if you have a partner who likes Crystal Castles, you will definitely be unable to get this song out of your head after the movie, as it’s very like the movie score in some ways:

Back in May — long enough ago that I’d totally forgotten about it — Lambda Literary asked for interview questions for the fabulous Sarah Waters. This was just after I’d read The Little Stranger, so I was bubbling over with them, and I left a few at the Lambda Literary blog. Yesterday I was surprised and delighted to see that Lambda Literary had actually asked Sarah Waters those questions, along with great questions by Shelley Ettinger and Jeri Estes. Here’s a snip from her answer to my question about historical fiction, to entice you to visit the LL site and read the rest:

One thing that’s always intrigued me about our relationship with the past is how we’re always rewriting it. You can date a historical novel just like you can a period drama for TV or film: they always tell us as much about the period in which they were produced, as about the period they’re attempting to describe. I don’t see that as a limitation, though. The past is necessarily elusive; we can never “reproduce” it. But we can have lots of fun trying! That’s a big attraction of the genre, for me — taking on stereotypes about the past, and finding way to revise them, or to overturn them altogether.

And now back to teaching prep — as you could probably tell from my previous post, I’ve begun teaching my summer fiction workshop class at UT. Today was day two. Tomorrow, among other things, we’re going to take up Kelly Link’s suggestion of listing tropes you like and use that as an idea-generating writing exercise. (I will cheerfully admit that I do the writing exercises right along with my students.)

One of the most fascinating first-person narratives I’ve read recently: Jessica Stern’s WaPo op-ed about how trauma shaped her professional career and her personality. Stern asks: “Why does the threat of violent death alter some of us, even if subtly, forever? Why does it make us unusually numb or calm when we ought to feel terrified?” Well worth reading, and I imagine Stern’s forthcoming memoir will be too.

(I don’t discuss much plot stuff at all, but if you want to remain totally unspoiled about The Passage, do not read this post or the linked reviews.)

It will surprise no one who’s read Alcestis that I’ve thought about death often in the last few years. Partly this is an occupational hazard of writing about the underworld; partly it’s related to my own life, as my father was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2003 and died in late 2008, while I was working on the last revisions of the book.

If you read this blog regularly, you also know that I talk frequently about genre fiction and literary fiction, and that I’ve been on a tear of reading YA novels.

I think a lot, and care a lot, about what it means to try to write something emotional and immediate and accessible and fun and still beautiful, still “literary.” Still artistically worthwhile, in the way that something like Twilight, satisfying as it is for teen readers and the employee of the blood donation center (!) near my apartment who has a “Forks or Bust!” sticker on her (his?) Ford Explorer window, isn’t.

I read Justin Cronin’s The Passage because about five people on Twitter recently posted about how it “lived up to all the hype!” I remember first learning about it because of the hype, since the world seems to be tremendously amused by the idea of a writer of literary fiction — Ron Charles calls Cronin’s first two books, one of which won the PEN/Hemingway award, “a couple of small literary novels” — producing a big sprawling genre book and then, gasp, selling it for a load of money. I remember reading about Cronin’s book deal a while back and being totally tickled that a fiction writer with an academic job had hit it big with a post-apocalyptic vampire novel. As always, I’m a little wistful about the suggestion that it takes a literary writer to make genre tropes shine. (Read Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. Read Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang and Necropolis and “The Naturalist.” Read Alice Sola Kim’s “Beautiful White Bodies,” which I just discovered thanks to Wiscon and the Tiptree shortlist.) But Cronin himself is hearteningly sensitive to false distinctions of this sort, too:

I think literary is shorthand for appreciated, and commercial is shorthand for sells. I did not undertake the writing of this book thinking that it was one thing or the other, or even that books in general have to be one thing or the other. Those are descriptions of what happens to a book after it’s written.

I read the book in a day and a half, and now T.’s racing through it — he started reading it while I was working and has been agitating for me to finish. Verdict: The Passage does live up to the hype. It’s not perfect; the ending is a little weird because it is the first in a (giant) trilogy; some bits are a little slow even for me. (Also, there are a surprising number of typos and misspellings, which my resident editing/typography nerd cannot forgive.) But you know what? It’s better than The Road. It’s as grabby as Tana French’s The Likeness or as The Secret History. It has a sense of humor, one that penetrates the very structure of the book — a few times, when reading, I could picture Cronin (and his daughter, with whom he apparently plotted much of the book) thinking something along the lines of: “You know what would be even more awesome? Nuns!” or “And then, they watch Dracula!” This is fabulous; this is what Kelly Link was talking about in the post I linked a few days ago. You put what you like in your book, and that makes it appealing.

What makes it appealing to me is its mixture of joy and melancholy. Many people die in this book. (Some others don’t, and that’s just as bad.) Here’s what Cronin said about that in the Times interview I linked above:

“The vampire narrative deals with the fundamental question, the basic human question, and that is, what part of being human is defined by the fact that we’re mortal?” Mr. Cronin said. “If you got to be immortal, would you be trading away your humanity? It’s the fundamental question of what is death to being alive. The vampire story gets at the heart of that. It reassures us that we’d rather be human.”

I wasn’t entirely sold on some of the more mystical aspects of the book, but nonetheless it made me think. What I’ve been thinking about most is the Colony, the group of survivors’ descendants who live in a walled town defended largely by banks of lights run by aging batteries. These lights aren’t just a “peculiar plot point,” as Janet Maslin calls them. For me, at least, they seemed far more central than that. Some of the inhabitants of the town are able to forget that the lights will go out eventually, and some aren’t. How they handle that knowledge, how it controls them — this is at the heart of what happens to the townspeople and the rest of the world.

Maslin’s review mentions the creepiness of reading Cronin’s projection that the future Gulf of Mexico would be an oil slick. I’ve spent way too much time in the last month reading and retweeting appropriately outraged articles about the spill and BP and our terrifying reliance on oil. I signed petitions and made some donations, and I tried to plan ways for us to cut our household energy consumption further. But once I’d done those things, I can’t say my reading those articles, or any of the other links I find on Twitter to the horrifying things we do to each other and our planet, really did much good for anyone, including me. I’ve been thinking about this a lot since reading Alexander Chee’s fine blog post — some good things do come from reading links on Twitter! — about the urgency that online news sources often make him feel, and the anger their content inspires. I feel conflicted about my own relationship to Twitter and to online news in general. I think the act of being outraged about something that you are not forced to experience personally can be absolutely necessary for change, and I fully realize that the choice to step away from something horrible is the epitome of privilege.  But sometimes that moment of outrage before retweeting, etc., isn’t leading to any real change at all. Sometimes it’s performative of identity, consciously or unconsciously: I will retweet this thing because I am the kind of person who is outraged by this thing! Which is not to say that the outrage itself is any less vital or valid. But sometimes it’s also a reminder, a little wearing reminder, that the lights will go out someday. There are some things none of us can step away from, and among them are death and grief. I loved The Passage because it acknowledges that — honors it, even — and also acknowledges that the world is beautiful, even when you’re in the dark woods, unsure of what’s waiting for you in the trees.

This morning, after I’d finished reading at 1:30 last night, I found this post via Shauna James Ahern and Elizabeth McCracken on Twitter, another post that, like this one, starts with the death of a parent but means to talk about love and joy more than about death:

The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of it. And, Johnny, on this front, I think you have some work to do.

…

Don’t be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word love to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.

We’re all going to die, Johnny. Hit the iron bell like it’s dinnertime.

Let’s.

I’m having one of those desperate OH GOD I HAVE TO FINISH THIS SECTION dissertation days, which means my brain is all scattery, which means — you guessed it — links.

First, the fabulous Gwenda Bond, describing and collecting the posts in Kelly Link’s amazing blog tour in support of Pretty Monsters. Links to Kelly’s tour posts are appearing all over Twitter, with very good reason. They’re intense and beautiful pieces of writing, and I agree with Gwenda and Colleen Mondor (see the comments on Gwenda’s post) that they read like magazine essays, not at all the usual “a short and perky blurb about my book” fare of the blog tour. The first two essays are about the birth and early days of Kelly’s daughter, Ursula, who was born extremely premature; the third is about Kelly’s take on paranormal romance in the title story of the volume. Check Gwenda’s post again later in the week for updates on the remainder of Kelly’s tour. (And buy the book, too, of course.)

And more:

• Crime statistics in San Francisco displayed as elevation maps.
• A sensible post about copyright and piracy, written as an open letter to Scott Turow.
• A review essay about dystopian YA fiction by Laura Miller in the New Yorker — focusing on Hunger Games, of course.
• The four stages of fear that result when you get attacked by a mountain lion.

Today — before the migraine of the week hit, thankfully! — I did an interview with Alex C. Telander of BookBanter, a site with a wonderful and varied collection of book reviews and interviews with authors. My interview will likely run in the May 15 podcast, and I’ll post a link here when it’s live, but you should definitely go check out Alex’s reviews and podcasts now, as well.

I’m now pretty brain-drained from migraine medication, but I do have links to share:

• This video of a 99-year-old woman with glaucoma reading and typing on her new iPad is pretty heartwarming. I remember reading on another blog about somebody’s elderly mother having similar success with a Kindle. Accessibility is a good thing.
• Kabul nightlife (link via Lisa Brackmann on Twitter, I think?): just as crazy as it sounds.
• Time-lapse photography of the Milky way rising over Texas. If that doesn’t make you want to write science fiction, I don’t know what would.
• A brilliant new story by Maureen McHugh, about — you guessed it — zombies: “The Naturalist.”

Today is the last day that you can enter to win a book or gift certificate from my fabulous agent Diana Fox just for buying Alcestis. Details here!

I saw this post by Donald Maass about awe linked recently. Interesting stuff, and I think some of the tips — especially the question “Now, how will you provoke that emotion through action alone?” — are excellent. But I actually worked in precisely the opposite direction when writing Alcestis. I tend to be a quiet writer in terms of emotions, and the book as published contains far more emotional content than the first draft did (hard to believe, I know; words like “cool” and “restrained” seem to pop up in reviews!). I was reading a lot of Virginia Woolf — really a lot, I just shelved my Woolf again after moving the other day and it’s quite the little collection — and I noticed that, in To the Lighthouse in particular, her narrators often say something as simple as: “Character X felt Y.” (I’ve mentioned this before, I think.) That’s what Maass suggests writers avoid, and for good reason. If that’s the only tool you use to create emotion, it’ll lose effectiveness quickly. But I went through and added some clear statements of emotion to the manuscript, and I think it helped. Sometimes, one does just feel, and it’s okay to say that directly.

Speaking of strong feelings, do read J. K. Rowling’s essay on single motherhood and Tory politics, whether you’re a UK voted or not.

This article on epigraphs amused me. Alcestis has always had an epigraph:

I have always known

That at last I would

Take this road, but yesterday

I did not know that it would be today.

–Narihira, translated by Kenneth Rexroth (copyright New Directions, who kindly gave me permission to print it in the book)

I’d expected to be told to ditch the epigraph when the book was being laid out and was so happy that it made it through to publication. That epigraph really is an integral part of the book for me; I’m pretty sure I typed in the epigraph before I started writing the actual text. I’d read it not long before I started writing the novel, and it sums up many of the threads of the book: minimalism, knowledge of death, resignation and expectation, the way Alcestis’s experience in the underworld feels both startling and inevitable to her.

One of my favorite uses of epigraphs is in Connie Willis’s brilliant Passage. I know a lot of people who love Willis don’t love that book, but I can’t help it — I do. Each chapter starts with somebody’s last words, and the whole book begins with two epigraphs, both of which could almost be placed at the beginning of Alcestis, too:

I will remember it forever, the darkness and the cold. –Edith Haisman, a Titanic survivor

*

“What is it like down there, Charides?”

“Very dark.”

“And what of return?”

“All lies.”

–Callimachus

If you’re interested in epigraphs and other bits of text that surround the text itself, I highly recommend Gérard Genette’s fabulous Paratexts. Chapter 7 focuses on epigraphs.

Do you have any favorite epigraphs?

Anyway, on an administrative note, things will be a bit quiet around here through Monday or so — we’re moving this weekend and aren’t getting our internet connection hooked up there till Sunday morning. (Cue withdrawal symptoms and sobbing.) Until then, here are some links from this week to tide you over:

• Margaret Atwood on Twitter. (Really, she is, and this is a charming little essay about it.)
• Street photography by Vivian Maier.
• Another fun Lapham Quarterly chart, this one showing where in their homes (or elsewhere) writers composed.
• A 1950s vampire scare in the UK that led to a crackdown on comics.
• A great guest blog post at Sarah Johnson’s Reading the Past: Roger Hudson talks about using pictorial evidence in creating historical fiction.
• Truckers turn to crafting to entertain themselves while waiting for new jobs.