Adam Reger | Freelance Writer

Philadelphia-based freelance writer

Category: Reading

January 11, 2011

Here’s to Giving up

. . . on books you don’t enjoy reading, that is.

For most of the new year, I’d been working on Adam Levin’s mammoth (i.e., 1,030-page) tome The Instructions. And for most of that time, I was waiting for it to go somewhere. Finally, on page 272, I put it aside for a little while. I picked up Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics), have found it to be awesome, and am now reconciling myself to the fact that I probably won’t be going back to The Instructions. It will join Chris Adrian’s The Children’s Hospitalon my bookshelf as over-long, over-hyped novels, published by McSweeney’s, that I found to be all sizzle and little steak (though in both cases I didn’t/won’t finish, so I should really be less confident about dismissing them; all I can fairly say is that both novels completely lost forward momentum, making their enormous length (700+ pages in the case of The Children’s Hospital) unjustified and thus all the more tedious).

It got me thinking about the ethics of giving up on any book, no matter how little I’m enjoying reading it. I’m sure lots of people are like me in that the thought of giving anything up carries a certain stigma. Even considering giving up on a dull book is a new phenomenon for me. I suspect the stigma of quitting comes from years and years of schooling, when I literally couldn’t have stopped reading something for fear of failing class. But bundled up with that fear is the idea that with any book, no matter how dense and seemingly terrible, if you can just push to the end, there will be something revelatory in the experience of having finished it; that’s very much the implicit promise an English teacher makes when he/she assigns you to read 1984 or Julius Caesar.

But once you recognize a stigma as coming from your years of schooling, it’s fun to celebrate the fact that you’re no longer in school by defying said stigma. I’m going over my list of books read in 2010 (yes, for the first year I kept a list) and realizing that it was a banner year for flaunting my ingrained prejudice against quitting books. I thought I’d share my list of abandoned books (which I also penciled in, mainly so that, if I’d ended up reading like 17 books, I could comfort myself by looking at all the books I also spent time on without finishing), for whatever such information is worth. Read the rest of this entry »

1 Comment
January 7, 2011

Noveling

I wanted to share a novel-writing resource I’ve found useful over the last few weeks, as I’ve changed course while working on my novel. As usual, I’ve gone on at length in the run-up to sharing this valuable resource, Randy Ingermanson’s “Snowflake Method” for outlining a novel, so I’ll link to it here in case you’d rather not wade through the waist-high verbiage below.

In a nutshell, I became frustrated with the increasing aimlessness of my novel. I had what I thought was a good idea of where it was going, what the various threads were, and so forth. But each scene seemed inessential, even dull. I felt like I was writing only for the purpose of getting that day’s word count in. I could all too easily see to the end of this process, when I’d have a first draft I didn’t care to revise, and would be faced with re-writing the entire thing.

I thought, “What will I do before the second draft to make this less of a mess?” The best answer was that I’d look through, see what I had, and rigorously plot out the second draft based on the storylines and characters I’d worked out. This satisfied me for about thirty seconds before the obvious occurred to me: why not plot it out beforehand?

I’ve never worked that way before. I’m not ideological about it, though; I just think it’s fun to free write, catch a hint of where this thing is going, and then follow it there. I think Stephen King, in his surprisingly great On Writing, describes this method as something like finding dinosaur bones in the ground and then just following the process of excavating them. I’ve found that solid . . . but it’s never worked for me for the novel. Part of what gave me pause as my novel went along in its bumbling fashion was that I’ve been here before. I’ve written two novels, and each one I wrote more than once. That thing I said about getting to the end of a first draft and not caring to revise it? Yeah, I was very much speaking from experience on that one. (I would argue that my first novel is more like three novels, since each one shifted focus quite a bit.)

So I was left with the alternative: to plot. (I should stop and confess this is hardly a new dilemma for a writer to face; so much so, the website for National Novel Writing Month has at least one forum thread dedicated to the “Plotters versus Panters” (i.e., by the seat of your pants) schools of thought, and there are over 70,000 Google results for that search phrase. (Interestingly, “Plotters versus Panthers” turns up about eight times more results. Go figure.))

I looked around the internet for resources or advice on outlining a novel. Read the rest of this entry »

3 Comments
November 11, 2010

Sad (Book-Related) News

Joseph-Beth Booksellers, a real high point in the life of Pittsburgh’s literary scene, is closing this weekend. Darn this rough economy!

They moved from a big, lovely two-story space (with escalators and a weird, tiny tranquility fountain sort of thing) to a more cramped space earlier in the year, but still had a great selection, at least in the fiction section and, especially, in the number of literary magazines they carried. I special-ordered Jack Pendarvis’s Awesome one time and the clerk advised me that if it came in and I decided I didn’t want it, that was fine. Some may see that as a lack of business acumen, but I was impressed by the book-first attitude evinced by that policy.

On a note that is either more positive or slightly morbid, though, they are having a great sale—40 percent off everything—until they close on November 14th.

Leave a comment
November 4, 2010

Sentence(s) of the Year

The last two lines of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds*:

Well-known, alas, is the case of the poor German who was very fond of three and who made each aspect of his life a thing of triads. He went home one evening and drank three cups of tea with three lumps of sugar in each cup, cut his jugular with a razor three times and scrawled with a dying hand on a picture of his wife good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.

*These lines are in no way a spoiler; thus my putting this important message after the excerpt.

I just rescued this excerpt from my Facebook page, where it was toiling in obscurity, trapped in the little-loved FB “Note” format. The rest of At Swim-Two-Birds has absolutely zero to do with these lines, but is written in a similarly beautiful and surprising style, and its Irish characters speak with the wit and verbal pizzazz you would expect. Among my favorites is a dialogue of several displaced characters from literature in which the others grow obviously bored with the long-winded verse saga of Finn McCool, a figure from Irish legend represented as a tired old man.

1 Comment
October 10, 2010

Excerpts of the Week: “The Bushwhacked Piano” by Thomas McGuane

Here debuts a new, marvelously simple blog feature, “Excerpts of the Week.” (Or “of the Day,” or “Month,” depending.) I’m terribly conscious that my take on whatever book I’m reading at the time is almost always “It’s really good” or some variation thereof. If I wanted to do book-blogging the right way, I’d take exhaustive notes and/or blog my profound insights as I had them. Seeing as how I don’t do either, a good halfway step would seem to be sharing portions of each book, the writing on which I’m basing my “It’s really good” judgment.

So, without further ado, the first installment. I’ve just started Thomas McGuane’s The Bushwhacked Piano. So far, um, it’s quite excellent. Very funny, which I guess is what I’d heard about it, but still the funniness has surprised me. The best description I’ve come up with so far is that it’s a slightly drier version of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, and perhaps more closely tethered to reality. Or at least, with characters who are less fully caricatures; there’s still a certain element of caricature in The Bushwhacked Piano. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, also comes to mind, although it’s written in a style that’s less fluid than Amis’s.

Anyway, two excerpts here. One that compelled me to laugh out loud, then return to the sentence to again laugh out loud, and then read it aloud to a friend: (By way of context, all you really need to know is that the main character, Nicholas Payne, is a bit of a cad.)

“Later, some entirely theoretical argument with the bartender ensued during which the bartender thrust his face over the bar at Payne to inquire how anybody was going to wage trench warfare on the moon when every time you took a step you jumped forty feet in the air” (27).

And the second excerpt, after Payne has tracked his beloved to the Montana ranch of her parents, the Fitzgeralds, who detest him:

“When sophisticated or wealthy women get angry, they attempt to make their faces look like skulls. Missus Fitzgerald did this and looked awfully like a jack-o-lantern. She was that fat” (107).

In both cases the humor is entirely unexpected, coming in at an oblique angle to the main thrust of the narrative. And both seem rooted in a kind of truth, if I can use that word: observations of people and the way they behave that ring true (at least to me). In the second excerpt the observation, about sophisticated women, is explicit.

In the first, the bartender’s behavior reads to me like a much broader characterization: of a certain kind of person who, during an absurd, hypothetical conversation, is too pedantic to let a piece of minutiae go. It’s a great piece of characterization of the bartender, and reminds me of a memorable craft tip I got once during graduate school: it really helps the overall work of fiction to occasionally imbue these sorts of non-essential characters—I could say here that the bartender, who isn’t given a name or a face, is making a “cameo”—with idiosyncratic and attention-grabbing traits. The idea is that the bartender’s trajectory only briefly crosses that of the main character, and to attribute to him these weirdly intense feelings about lunar warfare is to give the bartender a bright red flag whereby he announces that he has his own life, is on his own path, and in however brief or quiet a way he is not just a prop in the background of Nicholas Payne’s story. This sort of thing would get tiresome if repeated often—as tiresome as it is to be reminded, by strangers on the street, that they have their own deal and aren’t just extras in your movie—but every once in a while it serves to shine a light on the rich and textured “real world” of the piece of fiction.

Leave a comment
September 23, 2010

Further Franzen

Making steady progress through Freedom, which thus far is impressive and engrossing. The novel should be, and is, of special interest to me given the navel-gazing I’ve done in the past (see here and here for starters) on the subject of the mainstream novel, meant to garner millions of readers; implied in those dispatches was the notion that the literary novel belonged elsewhere. Franzen’s novel, of course, is a “literary” book that also aspires to bestseller status; Franzen has talked about his task of making the work so compelling one turns away from television and video games.

As a preface to registering a minor complaint about Freedom, let me say as clearly as possible that I greatly dislike this guy, B. R. Myers (at whom I took an earlier swipe here). He seems not to derive any pleasure from reading, only smug satisfaction from knocking down popular and approved-of books and writers. He has an unreasonable fixation on prose, too, to the seeming exclusion of all the myriad other elements that make a work of fiction go. And that is from someone who occasionally feels he is unreasonably fixated on prose style, who has wrestled with some of the same writers Myers trashes in his A Reader’s Manifesto—Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy among others—and in some instances tossed their books across the room.

With all that said, I start to wonder if Myers isn’t onto something, regarding Franzen’s prose, when I read sentences like this:

“She was a very good and painfully earnest and strenuously mature young person whose exasperation with Patty and Joey—her feckless mom, her ruthless brother—was seldom so extreme as not to seem comical” (171).

I hate this sentence because it is really quite masterful for about 3/4ths of its duration. Franzen uses rhythm to get away with out-and-out telling; nothing concrete here, nothing to be seen, heard, or felt. He keeps a beat even as he interrupts himself: feckless mom, ruthless brother. And in terms of telling us this, it all is perfectly satisfying and appropriate within the context of the story: this is a section where the main character, Patty Berglund, is sharing her autobiography; Franzen is using the fairly sophisticated trick of having a character write about herself in the third person, and having the “character” in that text (now at an extra remove or two from Franzen’s  third-person creation of the Patty Berglund character) reflect on the character’s daughter, Jessica, and what she thinks of her mother and brother. The sentence falls, too, within an immediate context of a couple stitched-together scenes involving Patty and the novel’s most interesting character, Richard Katz, a sexy musician and an old Berglund family friend.

All of which makes it mildly infuriating to come to the far side of that second em dash and have to stop flat. Wait. Seldom so extreme . . . not to be comical. So she’s rarely extreme, and it’s not funny. Or no, she’s seldom so extreme that it’s actually funny? This clause reads like a Mobius strip, and though the following sentences and a feel for the novel and the character, Jessica, tell me the meaning—she is so extreme it is funny (see how clear things can be when you strip away double negatives?)—by the time I decided to let it go, I’d come to a dead stop.

It’s just one sentence, and I’m sure by the time I hit page 562 of Freedom it’ll be long forgotten. But these are the kinds of lapses that, accumulating over the length of a book, can make it less readable, less engrossing, less magical than a book otherwise could be.

3 Comments
September 15, 2010

Tom Scharpling Twitter Novel

Yes, those words do all go together. I’m late to the game on this, but apparently Tom Scharpling, host of the Best Show on WFMU, has been writing a novel called “Fuel Dump” on Twitter, 140 characters at a time. Some generous soul collected these “tweets” in one place, but apparently he or she (understandably) got sick of it at some point, because looking at the Fuel Dump Twitter feed, the story seems to have advanced way beyond that.

To the extent that I understand the plot, it so far involves Michael Richards (a.k.a. Kramer) showing up at someone’s door with a shotgun, a Cigar Aficionado freelancer pursuing an interview with Kid Rock, the freelancer’s elderly uncle divulging the whereabouts of a buried treasure to an unscrupulous nurse and her beau, and Senator Joe Lieberman appearing at an aide’s house covered in blood and enlisting her help in burying a body in the woods. Listening to Tom talking about it, it sounds like he’s met the considerable challenge of making each “tweet” advance the story without being completely boring.

Leave a comment
September 10, 2010

A Movie Theater in Homestead, Pennsylvania

(After (and with apologies to) Allen Ginsberg)

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Al Jaffee, for

I walked past the storefronts under the trees with a headache

self-conscious looking at the neon displays.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went

into the neon movie theater, dreaming of your enumerations!

What thrillers and what rom-coms! Whole families dallying in line! Cashiers leaning on their counters! Ushers whisking popcorn into their butlers!

I eyed the box-office boy. Are you open, I asked of him. I am open if you are ready, said he.

Where are we going, Al Jaffee? The movie begins in six minutes. Which way does your beard point tonight?

One for Scott Pilgrim, I said.

Do you mean Scott Pilgrim versus the World, he asked of me.

Where are you tonight, Al Jaffee, with your snappy answers to stupid questions?

Yes, that’s the one, I murmured, and felt absurd.

Will we walk all night through solitary streets, Al Jaffee? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely and fail to produce timely zingers to inane questions.

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past black SUVs in strip malls, home to our silent apartments?

Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Alfred E. Neuman quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

Leave a comment
September 8, 2010

Franzen Redux

1) I received Freedom in the mail yesterday. Quite excited to start it, though I am just getting into Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, which so far is fantastic.

2) I have a subscription to MOG, an online music site that’s a pleasant and necessary diversion at work. I was a big fan of Lala, until Apple bought it so they could demolish it (as it was an iTunes competitor). One cool thing about MOG is that there is a scale one can slide during a given song, selecting a notch on a spectrum from “Artist Only” to “Similar Artists.” So when I was listening to a ton of Ween, I could have slid the scale over to “Similar Artists” to listen to what MOG thought was in the same ballpark. And if I were listening to a compilation album, and Ween came up, I could then slide the scale all the way over to “Artist Only” and thereby jump into a Ween mix. And so on—you could jump in and out, deciding you like Ween but you’d like to see similar artists, and from that decide what you really wanted to hear was the Butthole Surfers or early Flaming Lips—and so forth. Here is an interesting New Yorker piece about the larger online-music scene, with some special attention paid to MOG.

Navigating MOG, though, has put me in mind of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and a program he describes one of the characters writing that uses (what sounds to me like) similar technology, and which the character sells off for nearly $20 million. I’d always thought it was called Eigenvector, but apparently it’s actually “Eigenmelody.”

It is, of course, deeply impressive that Franzen thought this up. I suppose similar things were around in the early 2000s, but I remember reading The Corrections a few years late and being impressed by the novelty of this idea. Invention isn’t considered the strength of Franzen’s writing, but this again calls to mind his friend, David Foster Wallace, and all the technological developments described in Infinite Jest.

2 Comments
September 1, 2010

Franzen

Jonathan Franzen interviewed by the AV Club here. Two of my favorite things, finally joined. His new novel, Freedom, is receiving glowing reviews. I’m bending in my position of resigning myself to waiting a year ’til the paperback comes out . . . and have just added my name to the surely long waiting list at the Carnegie Library. From the interview alone, though, one gets a sense of the scope of the novel and its ambition. You can also get a clear sense of Franzen as a thoughtful writer, grappling with significant issues: freedom, clearly, and what it means in the current American context, but also slightly meta concerns such as hooking and keeping readers. His take on it is, as with most things, unimpeachable: that it’s the writer’s job to produce work so compelling the reader turns away from cable, YouTube, video games, etc., etc. in order to read the book. Period.

In what limited press and review materials I’ve read from this novel’s publicity push, Franzen has come off as a more likeable person. Having read both How to Be Alone and The Discomfort Zone, I got the clear sense that he’s a warm and funny person but that there’s a thin shell of reserve that can come off as chilly. Even reading this interview, the number of long pauses put me in mind of television appearances where his stoic face, those thick-framed glasses, that arrogant stubble(! I don’t know where that came from; I’m just going to go with it), made him come off as detached, a snob. Knowing he went to Swarthmore College, and possessing just enough knowledge of the place to form some key assumptions, probably doesn’t help. (I grew up one town over from Swarthmore.) Franzen seems, in general, the opposite side of the coin of his friend David Foster Wallace, who possessed a formidable intellect but seemed always to take pains to be self-deprecating and to connect to his audience. This is an observation, though, that suggests the folly of thinking you “really know” a public figure based on his/her writings and televised appearances.

Addendum: I forgot about this, or perhaps I never fully noticed, but I guess there was a small “feud” surrounding Franzen and Freedom when the writers Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner both complained about all the press. It was one of those annoying one-sided feuds that shouldn’t be called a “feud” because, well, you wouldn’t call mosquitoes buzzing around your ear a feud. But there’s a good rundown and, indeed, takedown by Lisa Solod at Open Salon (I guess a branch of Salon where people can post their own stuff? Don’t let that keep you away, though: the writing and reasoning are both Salon-quality.).

1 Comment