Reading 1Q84: The Case for Fiction in a Busy Life

Essays
November 14, 2011 | 3 books mentioned 27 5 min read

Related Books:

When I was assigned to review 1Q84 for The Christian Science Monitor it had been four months since I’d read a page of anything. That last book I’d tried to read had also been by Haruki Murakami — The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle — and my bookmark was right where I’d left it, on page 52, the day my wife had gone into labor with our second son.

cover Raising young children poses two challenges for reading fiction. The first is time, and not having much of it. The second, which I find harder to overcome, is that raising kids and reading fiction require somewhat different mindsets: fiction opens you to new possibilities, but once you’ve embarked on an all-consuming activity like raising kids you don’t want to think too much about other possibilities; you just need to put your head down and do it.

I started 1Q84 at 9pm at the end of a long day that had featured a 103 degree fever (my youngest son Wally, age 4 months) and several bathroom accidents (his older brother Jay, age 2 years). As I slumped on the couch with a cup of peppermint tea and my large yellow review copy of 1Q84, I found myself grasping to justify why, outside of the assignment I’d been given, it made sense to spend my only free time of the day reading fiction.

But I did read the book, that night and every night after for a month, and I found that as I read 1Q84 and got deeper into Tengo’s and Aomame’s stories, I stopped questioning the purpose of fiction and instead began to see reading 1Q84 as one of the few necessary things I did all day. The reasons for the change of heart had to do with wonder, with love, and with the way literature provides for the best parts of who we are.

1Q84 is long (nearly 1,000 pages) and wildly imaginative, but at heart it’s a simple love story. Tengo and Aomame, both 30 years old, shared a singular, intense moment as children, disappeared from each other’s lives, and have been trying to recapture that kind of intimacy ever since. As 1Q84 opens they fall into an alternate world which is sinister and illogical, but which gives them the chance to find each other again.

Aomame calls this world 1Q84 (in which the “Q” stands for “question”) and it is most clearly distinguished by the fact that two moons hang in the sky — the familiar moon and, alongside it, a smaller moon, “slightly warped in shape, and green.” The moons preside over Aomame’s “sex feasts,” several murders, Tengo’s surreal trips to see his dying father, and one of the most transfixing nocturnal dream scenes I’ve ever read. The moons are a tangible reminder of the warning delivered to Aomame by her cab driver, just before she steps out of a taxi on a gridlocked Tokyo expressway and inadvertently into the world of 1Q84: “Please remember: things are not what they seem.”

A few days after I started reading 1Q84 I was standing in my Michigan backyard, talking on the phone with my brother, when the unusual brightness of the night caused me to look up at the moon — nearly full, unobstructed by clouds — for the first time in as long as I could remember. For a moment I was so taken by the view that I lost track of my brother, who was continuing to tell me about his weekend.

Afterwards I called Caroline out to the backyard. If it had been a while since I’d looked at the moon, it had been even longer since we’d looked at it together. We don’t have much time to stare up at the sky, and even if we did, the moon is outside our realm of concern. I have to care for my kids, earn a living, be a good husband. What difference is it to me if the moon is waxing or waning, full or crescent? For a few quiet minutes we looked up at it together before retreating inside from the cold.

Several of the most important scenes in 1Q84 take place in a playground atop a slide, where one at a time Aomame and Tengo (and a third character, the surprisingly heartbreaking private investigator Ushikawa) stare up at the sky.

The first time Tengo sits on the slide and notices the moons he thinks to himself, “No matter what happens to me in the future, this view with two moons hanging up there side by side will never — ever — seem ordinary and obvious to me.” The unordinary sight of the moons sets Tengo to wondering. He wonders, “What is going to happen to me from now on?” He also wonders about Aomame. “Someone is after Aomame,” he understands. “She’s hiding like a wounded Cat. I don’t have much time to find her.”

Reading about Tengo and seeing the moon in my backyard, it occurred to me that wonder gives us height, makes us consider new possibilities, motivates us not to linger where we are.

And it seems that reading 1Q84 pollinated my life with wonder in three ways. The first is that when Tengo wondered, I wondered alongside him. “What is going to happen to me from now on?” In a quiet house at night with two boys sleeping it feels like time stands still. Yet of course the drum keeps beating; somehow we move on.

1Q84 also inspires wonder through its beauty. “Her little pink ear pressed against his chest,” Murakami writes. “She was hearing everything that went on in his heart, like a person who can trace a map with his fingertip and conjure up vivid, living scenery.” Many nights I closed 1Q84 feeling hungry to go out and create something beautiful myself.

The last way that 1Q84 inspires wonder is the way that all great art inspires wonder: it mirrors life from a fresh angle. Murakami uses the world of 1Q84 to jog Aomame and Tengo into seeing their lives in a new light, and his novel had the same effect on me. One night, about halfway through 1Q84, my wife and I said goodnight to each other and turned to go to sleep. But before closing my eyes I propped myself back up on my elbow and looked intently at her face lying sideways on her pillow. There she was, old familiar Caroline. But for a moment she appeared as strange and wondrous as two moons in the sky.

1Q84 is not a book about wonder, though. It’s a book about love. For the three weeks I was reading it and all the days since, I’ve found myself thinking more consciously than usual about the importance of love — not as a fact that exists between two people — but as a feeling that puts a floor beneath our feet.

As Aomame and Tengo try to make their way towards each other and out of the world of 1Q84 what they’re really straining for is feeling. In their accustomed world of 1984 they might have gone on with their lonely lives but in the forbidding world of 1Q84, events and changes in their own hearts make stasis untenable.

“If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life,” Aomame tells her friend Ayumi. And in one particularly riveting scene (that would surely feature prominently in a 1Q84 trailer should the book be made into a movie) Aomame concludes that such encompassing love is not possible for her, so she takes to the side of the highway and puts the barrel of a pistol in her mouth.

1Q84 never drove to me to such depths, but it did help me recognize the difference between feeling and not feeling. The night after I finished the book I couldn’t figure out what to do with myself. Over the course of a month 1Q84 had become a part of my routine and the activities that had previously occupied my evening hours seemed unappealing in comparison.

So instead of mucking around on the Internet or folding laundry, I went upstairs to my two-year-old son Jay’s room and sat in a chair beside his crib. He was lying flat on his stomach with his hands beneath his body and his head tucked into a corner of his crib. Even asleep, he seemed to glow with life. As I watched him breath in and out, all the cells in my body flooded with a feeling so grand that it crowded out all possibility of thought.

Later, after I’d left Jay’s room, I realized that while being a parent is tiring and sometimes boring, it also means that all I have to do is walk upstairs to experience a feeling that, like Aomame said, is akin to salvation. I also thought about all the hours I’d spent reading 1Q84, and suddenly it seemed clear why it had been a worthwhile way to spend my time: When life wears us down, great fiction gives us back our human shape.

, a staff writer for The Millions, writes the Brainiac ideas column for the Boston Globe and blogs about fatherhood and family life at growingsideways.wordpress.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @kshartnett.

● ● ●
Essays

The Literature of the Standing Desk

Essays
May 15, 2014 | 3 books mentioned 4 5 min read
Illustration from an 1899 book, School Hygiene, by Dr. Ludwig Wilhelm Johannes Kotelmann, John A. Bergström and Edward Conradi.

In an 1883 article from Popular Science, Dr. Felix Oswald expounds on the remedies of nature. Mingled with imperatives about taking cold baths before dinner and opening bedroom windows at night is this pearl: “At the first symptoms of indigestion, book-keepers, entry-clerks, authors, and editors should get a telescope-desk. Literary occupations need not necessarily involve sedentary habits, though, as the alternative of a standing-desk, I should prefer a Turkish writing-tablet and a square yard of carpet-cloth to squat upon.”

The Turkish writing tablet never quite took off, but the standing desk, over a century later, has entered its heyday. It’s changing the cubicle skyline of corporate America, the open-plan shared workspaces of the startup world, and the studios and work nooks of thousands of writers across the country.

Facebook reportedly has about 350 standing desks, with another 10-15 requests coming in each week from employees. The desk manufacturer Steelcase began selling height-adjustable desks in 2004. Since then, sales have increased fivefold. Its clients include Apple, Google, Intel, Boeing, and Allstate.

As a novelist with a day job in the high-tech world, I see standing desks popping up all around me. They range from jerrybuilt towers of books with balanced flat-screen monitors to ergonomic masterpieces with whisper-quiet hydraulic systems. A friend of mine who writes for Rolling Stone stacks several reams of paper on his conventional desk and perches his laptop there. My boss, a digital marketing director who’s a little under five feet tall and comes to work in heels, has a sleek model from Varidesk and an inch of cushioning foam at her feet. She spends most of her days sitting in meetings, so she relishes the forays back to her desk to check emails. She claims that standing helps her concentrate and sleep better at night.

According to recent studies, the health risks of sitting for prolonged periods of time are significant. After an hour of sitting, the production of enzymes that burn fat in the body decline by as much as 90 percent, thereby slowing overall metabolism. Interestingly, while the scientific data around the perils of sitting is better today than it was in 1883, the year of the Popular Science article, the reason people stand to work are largely the same — they feel more energized and compelled by the task in front of them, whether it’s editing a novel or a spreadsheet.

Winston Churchill at his standing desk.

For writers, the standing desk has a long and prestigious lineage. It’s often seen as a workhorse of productivity and inspiration. Great novels and speeches, treaties and philosophical tracts, have all been written at the height of the sternum. Kierkegard, Dickens, Hemingway, Woolf, Nabokov, Churchill, and Thomas Jefferson all used them. Though, to be fair, they weren’t always faithful to their tall desks. Churchill sometimes liked to lie in bed, propped up on pillows, when he was working on a speech or manuscript. And Jefferson liked to use a lap desk on occasion. But it’s hard to imagine either politician producing their most muscular prose while reclining. Surely “We shall fight on the beaches” and the original draft of the Declaration of Independence were written from behind slanting, adjustable desktops. Jefferson’s standing desk even had two extra legs to keep him anchored during his mental heights.

Mrs. Dalloway was written at a standing desk. So was David Copperfield. The 19th-century novelist Elizabeth Gaskell noted the layout of Dickens’s study: “…books all round, up to the ceiling and down to the ground; a standing-desk at which he writes; and all manner of comfortable easy chairs.” In the 20th century, Quentin Bell, Woolf’s nephew and biographer, wrote that she “had a desk standing about three feet six inches high with a sloping top; it was so high that she had to stand at her work.” It’s often said that Woolf treated an emerging manuscript like a painter’s canvas, that she liked to step away from the work to consider it from new angles.

Hemingway at his improvised standing desk in Cuba.

Hemingway’s standing desk was perhaps the crudest of them all — a set of bookshelves with a typewriter perched on top.

In a 1954 Paris Review interview with Hemingway, George Plimpton begins by describing the writer’s workspace in Cuba:

“He has a special workroom prepared for him in a square tower at the southwest corner of the house, but prefers to work in his bedroom, climbing to the tower room only when “characters” drive him up there…The room is divided into two alcoves by a pair of chest-high bookcases that stand out into the room at right angles from opposite walls…It is on the top of one of these cluttered bookcases — the one against the wall by the east window and three feet or so from his bed — that Hemingway has his “work desk”—a square foot of cramped area hemmed in by books on one side and on the other by a newspaper-covered heap of papers, manuscripts, and pamphlets.”

Nabokov, like Churchill and Jefferson, knew the value of standing to write, but he also knew when to sit down. In Brian Boyd’s Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years the famous writer’s afternoon routine is delineated:

“Nabokov would be back at his desk by one-thirty and work steadily until six-thirty. Normally he would have started the day in ‘the vertical position of vertebrate thought,’ standing ‘at a lovely old-fashioned lectern I have in my study. Later on, when I feel gravity nibbling at my calves, I settle down in a comfortable armchair alongside an ordinary writing desk; and finally, when gravity begins climbing up my spin, I lie down on a couch in a corner of my small study.”

Philip Roth also uses a lectern, at least he did until he publically announced that he was retiring from writing. In the documentary Philip Roth: Unmasked, we see the writer at his standing desk — one at his Connecticut hideaway in the woods and another in his Upper West Side work studio. The lectern is kept at right angles to the view, presumably to avoid distraction. Roth has said that he paces about half a mile for every page he writes.

Philip Roth at his lectern. Credit: Nancy Crampton

Despite the undeniable health benefits and the pedigree of the standing desk, there’s something about the seated desk that’s hard to give up. For one thing, it has deeper drawers and recesses for hoarding stationery and curios. The Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, has collected a number of famous desks over the years, including ones that belonged to Edgar Allan Poe, Compton MacKenzie, and John Fowles. In 2008, when John Fowles’s widow shipped her husband’s archive and desk to the Ransom Center, she left the entire contents of the desk intact. For sheer variety, it’s hard to beat what’s tucked inside the Fowles’s much-loved desk, its left drawer marked with scrawled addresses and phone numbers in the author’s hand.

Newspaper clippings
A set of blue labels with white string ties
A box of staples
Old photographs
A Richards Sheffield pocketknife
Four pairs of eyeglasses
An envelope of dried seeds
Two canisters containing typewriter ribbons
A tin of pastels
A paper fan
Swedish and Greek coins
A leather dice shaker
A pair of medical scissors
Two pipes
A set of brass knuckles

The list goes on. For every five practical items, like a box of staples, there is something enigmatic, like the set of brass knuckles. Given that fiction involves the careful selection of details that are concrete, sensory, and significant, Fowles’s desk is a microcosm of the writing enterprise itself. It contains worlds.

The standing desk, on the other hand, is less capacious and sentimental. There’s very little room to store abandoned manuscripts, rejection letters, or knickknacks. Distractions are kept to a minimum. It’s taller, sleeker, and less hospitable than its slouchier cousin. In the way that it mimics a lectern, a podium, or a drafting table, it reminds the writer that this activity requires blood, enzymes, and exertion. Here is your novel, spread out like a map or a campaign speech. Here are your poems, arranged like blueprints. Pace, stamp your feet, fold your arms, but stay upright. Stand there like it’s the prow of a ship.

Essays
| 3 books mentioned 4 5 min read
● ● ●
Essays

Fake Failures: Why Are Successful Young Women Writers Playing Miserable Online?

Essays
November 16, 2016 | 3 books mentioned 11 6 min read
The flippant micro-chronicling of every bad mood, awkward exchange, and looming, soon-to-be-abdicated responsibility works to obscure all of the privilege, yes, but also all of the striving that got you to the big boys’ table in the first place, and to undermine your actual (often extremely good) work.
Essays
| 3 books mentioned 11 6 min read
● ● ●

27 comments:

  1. Pingback: Reading fiction, raising kids | Growing Sideways

  2. Lovely reminder. Fiction feeds us. Your reflection reminds me of Agatha Christie’s lament that “if I sit down and read a novel after breakfast I have a feeling of guilt.” But your essay says go ahead. Read a novel after breakfast. Or late at night. Or whenever. The main thing? Read. Thank you.

  3. You’ve captured this beautifully. I’m about 1/3 of the way through 1Q84, reading it in small doses each night as the house settles down and goes quiet, and, for the first time in a long while, feel as if I’m as on the trail of something BIG as Tengo and Aomame…

  4. Thank you for this beautiful review, this is how Murakami makes me feel too. My husband bought me a copy of IQ84, knowing I love the writer and it has sat expectantly on by bedside waiting to be read for a couple of weeks now while life keeps me busy… After your review, I am determined to settle in with it as soon as I get home tonight.

  5. I haven´t read this Murakami´s book yet, but reading your essay filled me with such a joy… I fully get your point – you have expressed the feeling of a passionate reader when reading a great book – thank you for that.

  6. Pingback: On how great fiction makes us more human « wish i were somewhere else

  7. Have been reading the book (Traditional Chinese translation) since more than half a year ago but the thirst to know what would actually happen kept me reading on. 1/3 more to go and I shall finish it before 2011 does! Murakami never fails to trigger the reader to think about what is racing through the minds of the characters he portrayed, offering new perspectives to us at the same time. 1Q84 really pushed this limit to the maximum with the somewhat bizzare storyline.

  8. Pingback: Review: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami « Roaming Olivia

  9. Kevin, this piece of writing is gorgeous, with fantastic insights into the book, and fiction-reading generally.

    I finished 1Q84 4 days ago. I was deflated after reading Janet Maslin’s review of it in the New York Times. It seemed to me she was sneering at bits and pieces of the book she found confounding, and made no attempt to understand that the beauty of the book is its theme of love’s power to shift one’s world right off its axis. You capture Tengo and Aomame’s world-shifting love very well. So, thanks and admiration. Are you on Twitter?!

    And by the way, no spoilers but I found the end of the book VERY satisfying, which after 925 pages, I was grateful for!

  10. Thank you so much, Barbara, and all the other commenters for the kind words! And I am on Twitter (@kshartnett).

  11. Thank you for the beautiful review and the evocation of that intense and mysterious experience of being-in-a-book.

  12. “He was lying flat on his stomach with his hands beneath his body and his head tucked into a corner of his crib. Even asleep, he seemed to glow with life.”

    This is absolutely beautiful. In these two sentences, I get a real glimpse of what parenthood must be like.

    And, overall, a great essay! I never quite understand why I spend so much time reading fiction until I do it and realize that it’s the most important thing in the world.

  13. very lovely article, sir. i am so glad you shared with us your feeling about reading the book and the connection it brought out between you and your family.

  14. This is a wonderful essay, which brought back fond memories of what it was like to be engulfed and swept away by John Williams’ “Stoner” after reading a review (I think the New York Times) declaring it was a “perfect novel” (and pretty much agreeing with that sentiment). The best books truly allow you to live in and be alive inside them … and once read, they live inside of you. But as the father of a 2-and-a-half year old … well, do I need to say more?

  15. Pingback: melly made it
  16. Pingback: Other People’s Words « melly made it
  17. Pingback: Friday Links
  18. Pingback: PEN.org » Blog Archive Weekly Roundup: The Best Parts - PEN.org

  19. Really inspiring review. I’ve read a number of1Q84 reviews and this review really hits the spot in terms of what the reader comes away with during, and after the read. Many readers don’t want to read a blow by blow plot summary. I appreciate understanding the complexity of the yearnings of the heart, empathy (as well as the existential ‘atlas shrugged’ nature of mankind) and all the lessons one takes away from having experienced a piece of fiction as part of their own lives.

  20. Literature is an island of sanity. We can’t be who we really are without it.

    103 is a temperature to weep over. Hope the baby is having a happy day today.

  21. You make a great case for fiction and argue its necessity so eloquently. 1Q84 is a tome and no small feat (not unlike Danielewski’s House of Leaves, which I have bookmarked 10 pages from the end). However, the hardcover is gorgeously designed and that alone makes me want to purchase a copy. I’m not a fan of Murakami, but your review encourages me to take a second look and grab a copy of 1Q84. Who can resist a love story, after all? Especially one with such day-to-day resonance!

  22. Pingback: Monday Snax « Little Stories

  23. “He was lying flat on his stomach with his hands beneath his body and his head tucked into a corner of his crib. Even asleep, he seemed to glow with life.”

    “Then he farted”

    If your life is anything like mine, which I suspect it isn’t.

    Seriously though, what a lovely review. Many thanks.

  25. Pingback: reading to fulfill « Book of The Sacred Rung

  26. I have just finished the book and your essay perfectly captures the feeling I felt while reading it. This was my first Murakami novel so although I expected the fantastical elements I hadn’t expected how he uses them to highlight human emotion and most of all, love. My favourite quote:

    “It’s like the Tibetan Wheel of the Passions. As the wheel turns, the values and feelings on the outer rim rise and fall, shining or sinking into darkness. But true love stays fastened to the axle and doesn’t move.”

Add Your Comment:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Essays

The Art of Dialogue: A Symposium

Essays
October 23, 2014 | 3 books mentioned 7 12 min read

(The following is an imaginary symposium. The dialogue (except for the goofy shit) is adapted directly from these books: On Writing (2000) by Stephen King, On Directing Film (1991) by David Mamet, This Year You Write Your Novel (2007) by Walter Moseley, Reading Like a Writer (2006) by Francine Prose, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005) by Jane Smiley, and How Fiction Works (2008) by James Wood. Apologies to all. Enjoy.)
MODERATOR
Everybody, shut up. Just be quiet. Now, I realize that a group of writers like yourselves would jump all over the chance to point out the irony of me beginning a symposium on dialogue by telling everyone to shut up, but I don’t want to hear it, okay? Spare me. Let’s just get this over with. Jane Smiley, let’s begin with you.
JANE SMILEY
Thank you, Moderator. To dare to write about many different characters, and to keep them straight without the help of actors, is in many ways a bold endeavor. It imposes several duties upon the author.
MODERATOR
Like what, for instance?
JANE SMILEY
Well, each time a character speaks, he is likely to speak in a way that differs from every other character and also from the narrator because distinctiveness is one of the main methods an author has to organize his characters so the reader can keep them straight.
MODERATOR
Interesting. A very practical observation. Dialogue helps differentiate characters. Good.
JANE SMILEY
I have mentioned order, in the sense that the readers don’t want to get the characters mixed up, but there is also the progress of the plot. Characters in dialogue are required to more or less move the story along. If they are just sitting around chatting meaninglessly, then the novel comes to be about the meaninglessness the characters are demonstrating.
DAVID MAMET
Excuse me, I completely object.
JANE SMILEY
Jesus. Of course.
MODERATOR
To what do you object, Mr. Mamet?
 DAVID MAMET
You don’t have to narrate with dialogue. The only reason people speak is to get what they want.
JANE SMILEY
I wasn’t finished, Mr. Mamet. First of all, I said “more or less move the story along.” I understand that dialogue isn’t how you tell a story. But certainly dialogue must in some way pertain to the narrative, even if they aren’t speaking of the literal plot. Depending on his role in the novel, though, a character is also required to have something interesting to say that simultaneously deepens the reader’s knowledge of him, deepens the reader’s knowledge of other characters, deepens the reader’s understanding of the story, and best of all, deepens the reader’s knowledge in general.
DAVID MAMET
No, no, no. The purpose of dialogue is not to carry information about the “character.” In the first place, there is no such thing as character other than habitual action, as Mr. Aristotle told us two thousand years ago. It just doesn’t exist.
WALTER MOSLEY
Wait one minute! Why are we letting David Mamet in here? Are we all aware that he’s talking about films, not novels?
DAVID MAMET
Yes, but I’ve written novels.
WALTER MOSLEY
Yeah, like two. The Village and The Old Religion.
DAVID MAMET
And Wilson: A Consideration of the Sources.
WALTER MOSLEY
Okay. Whatever, we’ll call it three. But either way, I think your view of dialogue is greatly skewed by playwriting and filmmaking. So let me please interject a bit. We’re talking about the use of dialogue. That alright?
MODERATOR
Sure, do whatever you want. See if I care.
WALTER MOSLEY
First, I agree with Dave over there that dialogue shouldn’t be used for exposition. Many new writers use dialogue to communicate information such as “My name is Frank. I come from California.” This is the simplest use of dialogue. It’s okay for a job interview or a chance meeting in a bar, but in a novel, dialogue is meant to be working overtime.

But I also agree with Jane about the many uses of dialogue. Every time characters in your novel speak, they should be: (1) telling us something about themselves; (2) conveying information that may well advance the story line and/or plot; (3) adding to the music or the mood of the scene, story, or novel; (4) giving us a scene from a different POV (especially if the character who is speaking is not connected directly to the narrative voice); and/or (5) giving the novel a pedestrian feel.
MODERATOR
Pedestrian? Why pedestrian?
WALTER MOSLEY
Thought you didn’t care, Moderator?
MODERATOR
Don’t push your luck.
WALTER MOSLEY
To answer your question: Absolutely. Making the dialogue seem pedestrian might seem counterproductive to the passionate writer. Here you are, telling us a story of profound feeling in which the main characters are going to experience deeply felt transitions, and I’m asking you for ordinary and prosaic dialogue. If you can get the reader to identify with the everydayness of the lives of the characters and then bring them — both reader and character — to these rapturous moments, you will have fulfilled the promise of fiction. The reader is always looking for two things in the novel: themselves and transcendence. Dialogue is an essential tool to bring them there.
MODERATOR
Okay, okay. Let’s get another voice in here. Francine Prose, you’ve been sitting over there quietly. What about you? Do you think dialogue should be pedestrian?
FRANCINE PROSE
Thank you, Moderator. In one sense, yes, I do think that. Among the things I remember hearing when I was beginning to write was the following rule: you shouldn’t, and actually can’t, make fiction dialogue sound like actual speech. The repetitions, meaningless expressions, stammers, and nonsensical monosyllables with which we express hesitation, along with the clichés and banalities that constitute so much of everyday conversation, cannot and should not be used when our characters are talking. Rather, they should speak more fluently than we do, with greater economy and certitude. Unlike us, they should say what they mean, get to the point, avoid circumlocution and digression. The idea, presumable, is that fictional dialogue should be an “improved,” cleaned-up and smoothed-out version of the way people talk. Better than “real” dialogue.

Then why is so much written dialogue less colorful and interesting than what we can overhear daily in the Internet café, the mall, and on the subway? Many people have a gift for language that flows when they are talking and dries up when they are confronted with the blank page, or when they are trying to make the characters on it speak.
MODERATOR
And you also agree that dialogue shouldn’t be used for exposition?
FRANCISE PROSE
Well, in extreme cases, yes I think I would warn against inventing those stiff, unlikely, artificial conversations in which facts are being transmitted from one character to another mainly for the benefit of the reader:

“Hi, Joe.”

“Nice to see you again, Sally.”

“What have you been doing, Joe?”

“Well, Sally, as you know, I’m an insurance investigator. I’m twenty-six years old. I’ve lived in Philadelphia for twelve years. I’m unmarried and very lonely. I come to this bar twice a week on average, but so far have failed to meet anyone I particularly like.”

And so forth.

But even when novice writers avoid this sort of dialogue, what they do write often serves a single purpose — that is, to advance the plot — rather than the numerous simultaneous aims that it can accomplish. To see how much dialogue can achieve, it’s instructive to look at the novels of Henry Green, in which many of the important plot developments are conveyed through conversation.
MODERATOR
Oh, wonderful! Finally, some examples! I’ve been waiting for over a thousand words for this.
FRANCINE PROSE
Throughout Green’s work, dialogue provides both text and subtext, allowing us to observe the wide range of emotions that his characters feel and display, the ways in which they say and don’t say what they mean, attempt to manipulate their spouses, lovers, friends, and children, stake emotional claims, demonstrate sexual interest or unavailability, confess and conceal their hopes and fears. And it all passes by us in such a bright, engaging splash of chatter that only slowly do we realize how widely Green has cast his net, how deeply he has penetrated.
MODERATOR
Example, please.
FRANCINE PROSE
Yes, okay. Here it is:

“Did your father happen to mention that he’d taken me out the other afternoon?” she inquired.

“No,” the boy said in an uninterested voice. “Should he?”

“We ran across each other in the street. I’m afraid I can’t afford anything like the gorgeous meal he provided.”

“But curry’s my favorite,” Peter claimed. “I wish I had it every day. Decent of you to ask me.”

“No, because I do truly enjoy seeing you. It takes me out of myself. And you’ve little idea how few there are I could say that of. Though, d’you know, it could be true about your father. He’s so terribly handsome, Peter.”

The boy broke into mocking laughter, with his mouth full.

“Look out for the curry,” she warned. “You’ll blow it all over me and the table.”

When he had composed himself he said, “Well I once ate a green fig looked exactly like Dad’s face.”

Then, after a brief pause to discuss a mutual friend:

“Are your parents still in love?” she asked.

“My mother and father? God, I suppose so. Are yours?”

“Not a bit. No.”

Peter went on eating.

“They don’t even share a room.”

A little later:

“How long have they been married?”

“Lord, don’t ask me. I wouldn’t know.”

“All in all, I imagine they were still very much in love,” she suggested.

“I expect so,” he said.

“You won’t tell them I mentioned this, will you?”

In this passage from his final novel, Doting, nineteen-year-old Annabel Payton has invited Peter Middleton, a student two years younger than herself, to have lunch at an inexpensive Indian restaurant near her office. Annabel has a crush on Peter’s father — as the awkward, somewhat thick-headed Peter may or may not be aware — and is attempting to extract information about Peter’s parents from her lunch companion. Word by word, the dialogue captures the rhythm of someone trying to discover something without disclosing something else, of an interlocutor who cannot stop pushing until she finds what she is seeking. It’s a model of social inquisition carried out by someone who doesn’t much care about the person she is interrogating, except that she would like to keep him from forming a low opinion of her and from figuring out what she is doing.

At the end of the scene, Annabel asks Peter if he thinks his mother is beautiful:

“Yes,” he said, rather gruff. “As a matter of fact.”

“Me too,” she echoed, but in a wan little voice. “She has everything. Hair, teeth, skin, those wide-apart eyes. By any standard your father’s a very lucky man.”

“Why?”

“To have such a wife of course. Would you say she liked me, Peter?”

“Fairly, yes. No reason not to, is there?”

“Oh none,” she agreed casually.
MODERATOR
Let’s get technical for a second. Why is that scene so suggestive of things without spelling them out? What makes Green’s use of dialogue so effective?
JAMES WOOD
Can I step in here for a moment?
MODERATOR
Oh, I didn’t realize we had critics here, too.
JAMES WOOD
Well, I’m also a novelist. The Book Against God. Anyone? Anyone?
MODERATOR
We haven’t read it. But go on. Maybe a critic’s opinion will be useful here.
JAMES WOOD
Wonderful. In 1950, Henry Green gave a little talk on BBC radio about dialogue in fiction. Green was obsessively concerned with the elimination of those vulgar spoors of presence whereby authors communicate themselves to readers: he never internalizes his characters’ thoughts, hardly ever explains a character’s motive, and avoids the authorial adverb, which so often helpfully flags a character’s emotion to readers (“she said, grandiloquently”). Green argued that dialogue is the best way to communicate with readers, and that nothing kills “life” so much as “explanation.”
MODERATOR
So you think the excerpt that Francine presented is effective because of the lack of “explanation”?
JAMES WOOD
Yes, information is communicated silently, slowly, through careful accumulation of a character’s actions, their words.

Here’s a working example. Green imagined a husband and wife, long married, sitting at home one evening. At 9:30, the husband says he is going across the road to the pub. Green noted that the wife’s first response, “Will you be long?,” could be rendered in scores of different ways (“Back soon?” “When will you be back?” “Off for long?” “How long will it be before you are back?”), each one capable of a distinct resonance of meaning. The crucial thing, maintained Green, was not to hedge the dialogue with explanation, as in:

“How soon d’you suppose they’ll chuck you out?”

Olga, as she asked her husband this question, wore the look of a wounded animal, her lips were curled back from the teeth in a grimace and the tone of voice she used betrayed all those years a woman can give by proxy to the sawdust, the mirrors and the stale smell of beer of public bars.

Green felt strongly that such kind of authorial “assistance” was overbearing, because in life we don’t really know what people are like. “We certainly do not know what other people are thinking and feeling. How then can the novelist be so sure?”
MODERATOR
Do you agree with all of that? It seems a bit strict, doesn’t it? Almost overbearing?
JAMES WOOD
Yes, you’re quite right. Green, counseling against being overbearing, is laying down a fair amount of prescription himself, and we do not need to take his doctrine scripturally. Notice that when Green does his parody of explanation, he also falls into a deliberately breathy, second-rate style (“wore the look of a wounded animal”), whereas we can imagine something more continent, less offensive: “Olga knew what time he would come home, and in what state, stinking of beer and tobacco. Ten years of this, ten years.” Fulsome explainers like George Eliot, Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Philip Roth and many others would all have to retire themselves in Green’s universe.
MODERATOR
Okay, okay. Let’s take a pause for a moment. What have we learned here so far? Anything? It seems that every rule you try to make about dialogue has many contingencies, many exceptions, ways around it. Characters shouldn’t speak in blatant exposition but subtle forms of expository information are allowed. They should sound like “real” people but not exactly like real people, as normal conversation consists of ums and ers and likes and, truthfully, uninteresting filler. Writers should let the characters’ speech say more about them than the narrator, though we have numerous successful examples of writers who break this rule. Finally, dialogue should always be performing multiple tasks at once. Is there anything else? Anything practical? Anything at all like a rule?
STEPHEN KING
Yes, I have something to add.
MODERATOR
Go on.
STEPHEN KING
Adverbs. I can be a good sport about adverbs, though. Yes I can. With one exception: dialogue attribution. I insist that writers use the adverb in dialogue attribution only in the rarest and most special of occasions…and not even then, if you can avoid it. Just to maker sure we all know what we’re talking about, examine these three sentences:

“Put it down!” she shouted.

“Give it back,” he pleaded, “it’s mine.”

“Don’t be such a fool, Jekyll,” Utterson said.

In these sentences, shouted, pleaded, and said are verbs of dialogue attribution. Now look at these dubious revisions:

“Put it down!” she shouted menacingly.

“Give it back,” he pleaded abjectly, “it’s mine.”

“Don’t be such a fool, Jekyll,” Utterson said contemptuously.

The three latter sentences are all weaker than the three former ones, and most readers will see why immediately. Contemptuously is the best of the lot; it is only a cliché, while the other two are actively ludicrous.

Some writers try to evade the no-adverb rule by shooting the attribution verb full of steroids. The result is familiar to any reader of pulp fiction or paperback originals:

“Put the gun down, Utterson!” Jekyll grated.

“Never stop kissing me!” Shayna gasped.

“You damned tease!” Bill jerked out.

Don’t do these things. Please oh please. The best form of dialogue attribution is said. All I ask is that you do as well as you can, and remember that, while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.
MODERATOR
Okay, good. A rule of sorts. I like it. Yes, Mr. Mamet?
DAVID MAMET
To get what they want! That’s why people talk!
MODERATOR
So what do you want, Mr. Mamet? Why are you talking right now?
DAVID MAMET
I want future generations to make great art! I’m trying to help.
MODERATOR
Help us now by being quiet. What was the point of this symposium? Have we really learned anything? Let’s get the writer in here.
JONATHAN RUSSELL CLARK
Yes?
MODERATOR
What was the point of this? What, could you not think of something to say yourself?
JONATHAN RUSSELL CLARK
Well, kind of. I realized that I didn’t have anything new to add about dialogue. All the observations I could make I’d first heard articulated in these books. What could I add?
MODERATOR
That’s laziness disguised as modesty, Mr. Clark. I’m not buying it.
JONATHAN RUSSELL CLARK
Well, the other thing was that none of these writers had anything definitive to say. Everything they said had some qualification to it. Or, if they were more stringent, I could think of a great counter example. So I thought that if I put a bunch of voices together and showed how difficult dialogue is to even talk about, I’d maybe contribute something useful.
MODERATOR
Let me spoil it for you: you didn’t.
JONATHAN RUSSELL CLARK
Oh. Sorry.
JAMES WOOD
Can I go now? I’ve got a long flight.
WALTER MOSELEY
Me, too. Plus I’m hungry. The invite said there would be snacks. I don’t see any snacks.
JANE SMILEY
Everyone up for a bite to eat?
WALTER MOSELEY
Sure.
JAMES WOOD
Alright.
FRANCINE PROSE
I could eat.
DAVID MAMET
Fuckin’ a.
JANE SMILEY
Not you, David.

(DAVID MAMET exits, pursued by a bear.)
JONATHAN RUSSELL CLARK
Ha ha!
JANE SMILEY
Or you, Jonathan. None of us even know who you are.
JONATHAN RUSSELL CLARK
Oh. Sorry.
WALTER MOSELEY
Plus you only put us all together because ours were the books you happen to have on your shelf.
JONATHAN RUSSELL CLARK
But at least that means I bought all your books!
WALTER MOSELEY
Yeah, yeah. Whatever, man.

(Everyone exits except for MODERATOR and JONATHAN RUSSELL CLARK.)
JONATHAN RUSSELL CLARK
Looks like it’s just you and me.
MODERATOR
We’re the exact same person. So, basically, you’re by yourself in your room.
JONATHAN RUSSELL CLARK
Like always.
MODERATOR
And you’re talking to yourself.
JONATHAN RUSSELL CLARK
Yeah. Funny. In a symposium about dialogue I end up alone, talking to myself.
MODERATOR
And what does that tell you?
JONATHAN RUSSELL CLARK
That dialogue is a conversation a writer has with himself, a conversation he has with his characters and a conversation between characters. That it’s all three. That, ultimately, the art of dialogue lies within the writer, determined by how he perceives people, human interaction, motivation. That dialogue, as much as it speaks to a character’s identity, speaks to the writer’s as well. That rules are almost impossible. That a writer has to engage with dialogue, be in conversation with it, so to speak.
MODERATOR
I was going to say that you need some real human friends. I mean, listen to yourself: you’re talking to yourself about fake characters talking to each other. Pretty sad.
JONATHAN RUSSELL CLARK
You know what’s worse? To me, it isn’t sad at all. If the only dialogue I have in my life is the dialogue of great writers, I don’t have a whole lot to complain about. They’re great conversationalists, at least.
MODERATOR
Yeah. At least you’ve got that. Come on. Save the document and be done with this.

 
END

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Essays
| 3 books mentioned 7 12 min read
● ● ●
Essays

On Literary Cravings and Aftertastes

Essays
March 28, 2014 | 3 books mentioned 3 8 min read
I had a voracious appetite to consume certain books I’d read long ago, revisiting passages that had always been especially moving. Or -- and this was fun and also eerie in its accuracy -- I found myself submitting to cravings for books I had never before read but the combined language, plot, and characters of which turned out to produce the perfect meal of prose for this pregnant bibliophile.
Essays
| 3 books mentioned 3 8 min read
● ● ●
● ● ●
● ● ●