New Tricks?

There was a time when I looked forward to writing something either as a parody or "in the style of." An assignment for 18th C. Literature in college involved writing an essay as Jonathan Swift might have done. I had a ball. At this late stage, an acquaintance whose taste and ideas I admire has been pressing me to write a novel using a theme he suggests with a plot line he supplies. It's not anything like what I've done before, and I'm finding myself truly baffled as I try to figure out how to go about it.

The idea is a good and probably salable one. It's a mystery (he defines only the conflict). I can't seem to manufacture the train of events leading to the crime and its aftermath. Furthermore, he fails to understand how hard it is to make a story unless you (the writer) know the characters who will act it out. I can't get my head around the four main ones. I have thus far three versions of a beginning, complete with different names in each attempt.

Having just taken a look at a passage from one of my novels, I realized something that doubtless should have been obvious from the start:  if my style or voice or whatever you want to call it is too set, how can I hope to create people and motives from someone else's original notion?

Apart from the challenge of producing something analogous to a work for hire, I now face a question that should have occurred to me long ago:  should I try to learn flexibility again, or should I stay stubborn and loyal to what I seem to have become?

And anyone who wants to point out the old saw about an old dog and new tricks, you may keep your remarks to yourself!   ;-). It's a fallacy. You can teach even an oldster if she's willing to learn.

Exotic, Frightening, Inspiring

If you're like me you can't help reading. I've got past the cereal-box-if nothing-else-is-available stage, but I always need to have a book in progress along with a dwindling number of periodicals that I'm trying to catch up with. I wouldn't have it any other way. The problem is that from time to time, one of those books grabs a hold on my imagination and emotions and won't let go in time for me to go on to the next one.

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller is one of them. It's an autobiography about growing up in some of the most unforgiving conditions on the planet in three different countries in Africa. Fuller's parents' work ethic was phenomenal, and their capacity for endurance would have made the Oregon Trail feel like a stroll to them. Because there is nothing familiar to the ordinary American reader about places, names, people, circumstances your interest is guaranteed. The author has a unique voice. Descriptions rarely include conventional modifiers, but instead depend on hyphenated phrases that do more than a paragraph of ordinary prose could to make you aware of what Fuller wants you to understand.

There is so much horror and tragedy that the opportunities for bathos and self-pity by implication are too numerous. Not one is taken up. It's clear from the beginning that the mother is an alcoholic. Before long, it's also clear why. The entire white society seems heavily dependent on drink, and the children learn early, but the sorrows and defeats facing the Fullers would drown most people. No wonder they drink. No wonder the mother succumbs to it. Everyone smokes. Every day a new misfortune seems to befall the family. Yet you come away from the narrative with the most profound admiration for what they withstood without giving in. I have a profound admiration for someone who could tell such a story while resisting any temptation (or so it seems) to reveal how many scars she must bear.

If Sophocles was right when he proclaimed that one must know himself first, Alexandra Fuller has made it difficult to tell whether she has followed that admonishment. To have written this account with so little reference to her own feelings and that reveals almost nothing of how she now views the rest of humanity is a feat.

I can't help wondering if Wyoming (where she now lives) can possibly be wild enough for her. One thing she made no secret of in the book is her enduring affection for Africa, in spite of its frustrating failings, all of them the result of the amoral greed of Europeans. This is a memoir of a stripe as different as a zebra's from a palomino's.