Learn a Little Lit

Learn a Little Lit—mystery / crime thrillers

Thursday, 19 July 2012 09:09

Do mysteries and thrillers make good book club reads? More important, do they lead to good discussions?

Take a stroll through any bestseller list; you'll find thrillers and detective stories at (or near) the top. I love suspense mysteries (love them)! But here's my suggestion—read them on your own time. They don't necessarily inspire great book club discussions, primarily because characters are short on development...and plot discussion boils down to "what did you know and when did you know it?"

There are, of course, exceptions. A number of recent authors have jumped the genre ... moving the mystery/crime thriller into "serious" literature. What's that mean?

When critics talk like that about a crime thiller—specifically the new Gillian Flynn Gone Girl...or Tana French's Broken Harbor—they're talking about wonderful, often witty, prose; solid character development; and the exploration of philosophical ideas. Kate Atkinson is another writer who's moved the genre into high literary gear.

The three—Flynn, French, and Atkinson—are not only terrific suspense writers...they've been singled out as writers who probe deeply into character, motivation, how the past impinges on the present, and the nature of good and evil. They get us to ponder our own relationships, as well as the untenable choices life sometimes gives us. In other words, they make us think...and thinking always makes for good book conversations!

On top of good writing, two other requirements exist for great mystery/thrillers:

1. The author must let the line out slowly, knowing precisely when to withhold—and when to release—information. It's a plot technique known as "suspended revelation,"—mysteries depend on it; in fact, it's their defining characteristic. (See LitCourse 6 on Plot.)
2. The clues should be burried in plain sight—yet so cleverly that the reader won't pick up on them. Great mysteries stand up to a re-read, which only then reveals how, when, and where the author hid the clues.

If neither of those conditions is met, the story turns predictable, losing the element of surprise—the very thing that makes mysteries and thrillers so satisfying.

Learn a Little Lit—authorial intent

Wednesday, 10 February 2010 13:34

You've seen those funny cartoons: characters say one thing—but they're thinking another. Authorial intention is sort of like that.

Contemporary literary theory pretty much debunks what authors say they mean—because the words on the page don't always support their intended meaning. Or readers find additional meanings that author's never considered.

Here's an excerpt from an interview with Peter Carey, Australian author of Parrot and Olivier in America and Oscar and Lucinda. An audience member asked Carey about an espisode in the latter novel that reminded her of Adam tasting the forbidden fruit.

Here’s Carey’s response:

Your way of reading that holds up perfectly, I think, and it’s totally consistent with the book and consistent with my intention, and yet it never occured to me!

Then he said . . .

So isn’ t that the extraordinary thing about literature? It only really works when the reader reads it because until then…it’s words on a page…. Everybody brings their own lives, and their own experience, their own intellect… and then a book is made! And that’s the wonder of literature.

No one could have put it better. You can listen to the full interview from this 2003 BBC World Book Club broadcast.

Learn a Little Lit—the point of point-of-view

Tuesday, 10 November 2009 13:51

Olive Kitteridge  got me thinking about point of view—who gets to tell the story. Elizabeth Strout’s book shifts from character to character, a narrative technique that lends her work its depth and beauty. 

We see Olive, not only as she sees herself, but as she’s seen by the community.  The pay-off is a richer, far more complicated portrait of Olive than if she alone—or any single narrator—had told us the story.

Point of view, or perspective, is one of the most important decisions an author has to make.  Whoever tells the story shapes the story.

A little game:  take a couple of novels, change the narrators…and see what happens. Try this as a book club activity. Here are some ideas to get started:

• Remains of the Day:  what if Miss Kenton told the story rather than the butler Stevens?  We’d miss the rich irony of a hopelessly naive narrator.  In fact, if we weren’t inside Stevens’s head, he would seem a pitiless monster of a being.
  
  
• Gilead: if we were to see the story through shifty, unreliable Jack Boughton, the story’s prodigal son, we would never experience our own sense shame as we, along with Reverend Ames, willfully pass judgment on a misunderstood character. 

More on point of view at a later date.  In the meantime take our free LitCourse 8 on Point of View.  It’s fun…quick…and informative.

Learn a Little Lit—characters who come alive

Friday, 03 April 2009 15:08

One of the joys of reading is the people we meet within a book’s covers, literary creations who jump off the page and into our lives. How authors do it—how they make their characters come alive for us—is one of the great mysteries of art. 

Authors invariably say their characters take on lives of their own. Here’s Stephen L. Carter (The Emporer of Ocean Park):

I was occasionally surprised by the messes my characters got themselves into, and the indignant, presumptuous way they demanded that I write a way for them to escape.  Random House interview

 And here’s Philip Roth with NPR Fresh Air’s Terry Gross:

Some magic, some alchemy between knowing and intuiting takes over and our characters take on lives of their own. First time this happened to me I felt like a real writer…. Julia Cameron nailed it when she wrote, “It’s not about making things up but taking them down.”

Even playwright Edward Albee (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf) when asked whether his characters control him suggested they were somehow alive:

I like to let them think they do. It’s a trick we play on ourselves. They don’t exist, and they can’t say anything unless we write it for them. But it makes them happy to think they’re independent.  Boston Phoenix

All this isn’t to say that writers don’t have to think, and think hard, about their characters.  I’d like to continue a discussion of character—what goes into making a good one—in another post.  Stay tuned.

Ideas for Book Clubs

1. Take our free LitCourse 5—about characterization, how we talk about them and how author's develop them. It’s short and fun...and informative. 
2. Talk about some of your favorite characters in literature.  Or some of literature’s most enduring characters.