Lost In The Shuffle

   I recently switched my internet provider from Comcast to Verizon. Of course, that required a change in eMail accounts, since I use the provider and not Google or Yahoo. Well, that fouled up my blog completely because there seems to be no way to swap your identity from one email id to another.
  To make matters worse, I switched back again because I hated everything about Verizon as a web, TV, and phone provider. But that's another story. 
  I now am back at this blog, The New World of Books.  I've copied a few of the posts I sent to the other blog back to this one in case anyone lost me when I was gone.
  I plan to stay put as far as technology goes.
  You will find me here from now on.

You're Never Too Old

When I was young - in fact quite young - I had an unquenchable desire to write. As I’ve said in other places, I wrote my first book when I was about thirteen, my autobiography. My first novel came when I was fifteen. The whole concept of storytelling seemed so unbelievably wonderful, I gave all my free time to it. Where this came from, I have no idea. There were no writers in my family that I know of. I wrote my first novel with a pencil on lined paper and then typed it out on an ancient portable typewriter my mother managed to buy me. My family thought I was crazy spending so much time typing away at something that probably would have no success at all. My father worried that I would get round shouldered writing.

I had no success, but that wasn’t the real point. The act of writing, inventing characters and situations, was something so wonderful, even now I can’t describe it. I wrote into my twenties and thirties. My one mentor thought I had talent, but that I had nothing to say. And as I think back on it, that was absolutely true. But it went deeper than that. In order to be a successful writer, you have to bare your soul. And more importantly, you have to bare the soul of those you love, because it is in them that your experience of life is found. Tom Wolf was not the first to infuriate his family by writing about them and he will not be the last. The book he produced, Look Homeward Angle, is a great book. I had a family story to tell, with interesting characters and events, but I could not tell that story. I could never hurt those I loved. And since my family was my only inspiration, I had no great social agenda, and knew little of the greater world, my novels were shallow and mostly pointless.  I had talent, but nothing if interest to say.

And, of course, in those days, everything I wrote was rejected. And as time went on, and the novels grew farther apart, I didn’t even bother sending them to publishers. I think I sent the first chapter of the first version of Good People, the book I now have up on Amazon, to a literary agent. When I think back on it, the whole incident was ridiculous. He told me the first chapter was very polished for a first time writer and that he would look at the rest of it if I paid him. So much for that. I don’t think I sent Want, which will soon by up on Amazon, to anyone.

I eventually gave up. I became a software engineer and put my writing talent into Cobol and C and Java. I loved writing code and I think I was good at it. They paid me well.

It wasn’t until I was in my late sixties that I began to think that the world that a grew up in - a really poor dairy farm - and the people I knew as a boy would be totally lost to my grandchildren. The world they will live in, the children of very well educated professionals and and even college professors, would have nothing in common with the factory workers and farmers they came from. So I decided to write a memoir to tell my grandchildren who and where they came from. Not only that, I would print it and bind it myself. 

When I looked up my family tree I found that my mother’s family came to America from England within twenty years of the Pilgrims. One of my direct ancestors died fighting in King Philip’s war before the Revolution. Others fought in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. One great great uncle was even a member of Congress. The heart of the memoir, of course, was the farm I grew up on, a worn out affair that no amount of work could have saved.

The only reason I mention this is because writing the memoir really stirred my interest in writing again. When my daughter wrote her children’s book, Turtle Soup and Tiramisu, and self published it on Amazon, the bug really hit me again. I resurrected Good People and re-wrote it, changing one of the characters completely. I then did the same for Want, which is a much longer novel and, although it has nothing to do with farming, is really a story taken in great part from the own life. It’s about a shabby hotel with great expectations.

Those two efforts only made the writing bug bore more deeply into me. I find myself now writing like a demon. I have completed a short work about a man who has a stroke, cannot talk, and watches his family fall apart at the seams, his rich son marginalizing his working class son. Think the silent majority watching as our country is turned into an oligarchy. 

And I have ten chapters done on a new novel about the triumph of capitalism, which is science fiction and takes place in the far future. The triumph is not one for the masses.

I guess the real point here is that it is never too old to do something new, even if it’s something old you did a long time ago.

My Latest Rant

I need a class in economics and maybe another one in marketing. I got an email today from Amazon touting their best books of the year. They are generally in agreement with me on good books, so I took a look. It was then that my lack of understanding of economics clicked in.  The book In the Garden of Beasts of Eric Larson sells for $13.89 as a hardcover. (If you buy $25 worth of books on Amazon, you get free shipping, so the possibility of getting this book for $13.89 is real) The Kindle edition is $12.99. In other words it costs the publisher 90 cents to print, ship, warehouse, and take this book back if not sold. If cars worked the same way I’d drive a Lexus. Amazon puts a little note in their book lists stating that the Kindle price is demanded by the publisher. There are only two marketing explanations to the Kindle pricing: 1) the book is not selling well and the publisher has overstocked and wants to unload them. The fact that the book is on the best seller list diminishes this idea, and 2) the publisher wants to dissuade people from buying the kindle edition. What the publishers have not figured out is that they can made a ton of money with very little effort selling eBooks. But then again, I suppose the buggy whip makers did everything they could to discourage the Model T.

On another note, I had a long discussion with my son, Steve, last night about the state of the American novel. The discussion started when we both commented that the most interesting novels these days are written by Indians. (He just read the White Tiger - great book). His comment was that the American novel is dead. And I think I have to agree with him. American novels I’ve read recently have been awful. I’m talking about well received, highly praised works like A Visit From The Good Squad. Others I could mention are Tinkers, Await Your Reply, Cloud Atlas, West of Here. What’s wrong with them? Well, they are praised for being well written, and they are. But they are also very boring, confusing, pointless, or lacking in characters that seem valid. Why is this?

Well, Steve thinks the point is that it’s not writing that’s changed. It’s America that’s changed. The basic story lines that have maintained English and American novels for a couple hundred years have changed. And I think he’s right. In my view they have centered on Marriage (boy meets girl, struggles, overcomes opposition, and marries to live happily ever after), class struggles (think of The Jungle, etc), the quest (think of Huck Finn and On The Road), and the struggle to overcome obstacles to succeed (Horatio Alger and any of the pioneer novels).  Ok, I will admit that my list can be torn apart any number of ways and probably leaves out many more valid themes, but I am after all just a reader and not an expert in any of this.

But the point I’m trying to make here is that each of these themes for the American novel are no longer valid. Happily ever after is laughable with a divorce rate of almost one in two and premarital sex very much the norm. Almost every American novel I’ve read in the last five years treats relationships as a mine field. Love seems to have lost its way. How many times can you read about unhappy couples without wanting to scream? It’s like listening to a friend who never talks of anything but the slug she’s married to. The pioneer novel is dead because the west had been won and pretty much destroyed by the victory. The quest has lost its way as well because the only interesting searches today are in science and a novel about finding a use for nano tubes would hardly be a page turner. The struggle to succeed has failed because of scale. The boy who struggles to open his own shop pales beside the hedge fund manager who gets multi-million dollar bonuses. And how many times can we read about sleazy traders without thinking we have no chance against the manipulators of the world. Class struggle still exists and may be more relevant today with the huge disparity between the super rich and the middle class, but it will take a genius to give us a great novel on this.

I still think there is great talent out there and maybe the great American novel can still be written.  But we need new themes to capture who we are. And mostly were have to stop sounding like that whining friend.