THE LITBLOG CO-OP

from the editor

I am having serious technical difficulties this morning!  two posts have disappeared, when all I want to do is say how much I love EC and her stories and how happy I am to see her discussed here.  I buy very few books every year -- last year, just 2 novels from people I hadn't already published -- so I can always remember what we call in my office that "golden ticket" thrill of opening a box and reading a paragraph and knowing this could be the real thing.  That was the feeling I had when I read the first story in WHEN THE MESSENGER IS HOT, and I had it all over again when I read "Ad," the first story in ALL THIS HEAVENLY GLORY.  Both are technical triple-flips, astonishingly daring and seemingly impossible but carried off with such grace and agility and, above all, pure entertaining wit that, as a reader, you never feel you're being tricked or subjected to a performance.  Elizabeth  is most interested in people, and in seeing how and why we all manage to get through life, and she's also got an incredible sense of humor even in the saddest situations.  I try to read "Football" as often as I can for its beautiful, heartbreaking sadness balanced with an indomitable optimism, and I think overall those are the qualities that draw me to EC's writing again and again.  I'm sorry this is brief and possibly incoherent -- Draft 1 was much better, I swear!

Feel free to ask me something!

Interview with Elizabeth Crane

The following is an interview with Elizabeth Crane, author of The Messenger is Hot and All This Heavenly Glory.  Much more information can be gleamed from her website and blog, www.elizabethcrane.com.

Dan:

Hello Elizabeth, thank you very much for taking some time from your schedule to respond to some questions today.

Elizabeth:

No problem.  Or as my dad always says, "Not to mention."

Dan:

When Ed Champion told you he preferred to mash potatoes by hand, and not with a masher, how surprised were you?

Elizabeth:

I didn't understand until reading the blog posts that both of us probably use the same simple hand tool to mash.  Unless Ed's in there with his bare hands pounding on them.  In which case, I'm very surprised, and somewhat unsettled.

Dan:

Do you think you would have handled the success that you have had recently in the same fashion had it occurred say 15 years ago or so?

Elizabeth:

No way.  It would without a doubt have gone straight to my head.  Plus if you think I'm chatty now, back then I had no censor at all, and I would have been likely to say things no one ever needs to know.

Dan:

The paperback version of The Messenger is Hot has a nice, Conversation with the Author piece in the back.  You made the comment that you had always wanted to do something that you’d feel good about sending into the high school newsletter.  Looking back, was writing the last resort for you in terms of the arts?  Did you focus on acting, or singing, or other arenas before committing to writing?

Elizabeth:

I've been writing steadily in one form or another since I was in third grade, along with various misguided forays into the performing arts.  I just didn't think I was good enough to pursue it as a career until six or seven years ago.  And I was right.  And - man, seeing the newsletter now is every bit as satisfying as I imagined.

Dan:

There seems to be a fascination with movies through your work – the story Something Shiny, the filmmaker section of All This Heavenly Glory, not to mention your having worked in a video store – how much do movies, and other popular culture both help and hinder your writing, if at all?

Crane Is a Little Scared

Hi guys, Crane here. Thought I’d start by addressing a couple of things in your discussions of the last two days. I imagine it goes without saying that I disagree with quite a few of the points you raised, at least to the extent that your troubles with the book were all choices I made intentionally. One place to begin is that the book was never meant to be scrutinized as a novel. It’s a collection of linked stories focused on one character, says “stories” on the title page. Certainly, my intent was for there to be a progression in Charlotte Anne’s life, that her struggles would still ultimately end up propelling her in a forward direction by the end of the book. But at this point, as much as I’d like to write a novel someday, I am still enchanted by the short story form, and that’s what I do.
Also, I stand by all my characters as being completely developed. You can’t see Jenna just as well as Howard? Even characters who make briefer appearances, like the stepbrothers, or the Pink-Park sisters, or Rachel Richmond, or Matteo, or the mom, I believe, are fully fleshed out on the page, although the book is, above all, about Charlotte Anne’s internal conflict. The struggle we have with ourselves is always what’s most interesting to me as a person and as a reader. Sometimes, in teaching writing workshops, I’ll notice that a student will have created some really interesting character, with all kinds of inner turmoil, perfectly well-written, and then suddenly there will be some big external drama that comes out of nowhere because somewhere along the line someone told them that conflict X was supposed to happen on page P, and suddenly I don’t believe any of it.
I also really, really want to make a plea for y’all to consider pioneering with me the complete abandonment of the chick lit discussion. I know some of you have read the two posts on my blog about it from last year (Post 1, Post 2), but I urge you and any readers to read them again. My proposal was that anyone and everyone drop the discussion once and for all. You may have heard folks are talking about that dude who dissed Oprah right now – when that gets boring, I’m sure there’ll be something else right behind it. Meantime, I truly believe there is not one further word to be said on this topic that will illuminate anything, you know, that needs to be illuminated, and that the very discussion takes away from some really good writing simply on the basis of a character being a single female. I will never understand why this in and of itself makes a piece of literature less valuable, why the issues associated with being single longer and having careers are not important ones. Many books out there that some people see in this way, like let’s just say mine, address subjects including: god, cancer, loss, intimacy, friendship, family, work, child abuse, divorce, depression, September 11, identity, alcoholism, sobriety, that’s a short list, and I guess what bums me out is that although it’s true that more women read than men, if you put a book like mine into that category, potentially half of the readers, that being the male half, just won’t read it. Which is unfortunate, because I have a lot of guy fans, and have gotten some of my best reviews from men. More often than not, I find that these reviews tend to say something like, “It’s too bad this book is sometimes categorized that way.”
Speaking of the alcoholism, or lack of it, in the book, this was absolutely considered on my part. I was much more interested in Charlotte’s struggle as a sober alcoholic than I was in telling one more drunk story. Her budding alcoholism is addressed directly, in Famous, and touched on in several others, and it simply wasn’t what I was interested in writing about. There are a lot of books out there that deal with the falling down part of the story. I was interested in the getting up. As I think is clear in Charlotte Anne’s life, that can be as much of a struggle – is it any wonder why she drank, if she’s having this much trouble walking around in the world sober?
Well, I probably haven’t addressed everything you guys have talked about, but I’m going to go answer some of Dan’s questions now for tomorrow.

The Glorious Discussion, Part Two

[In which Kassia, Max, and Sam continue their discussion of All This Heavenly Glory. Warning: at least one participant engaged in actual research. We promise it won't happen again.]

[Sam] Both of you mentioned how the narrative seemed to race. Happened to me too, though I can't say exactly why. Just out of curiosity, I turned to my shelf of writing manuals and asked Auden's favorite question: "Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work?"

Well, hell, I actually never found the answer. Maybe it's all those digressions and changes of direction:

"Charlotte and Rachel go out to the terrace (actually an unfettered black tar roof partially shaded by a large water tower) to fill up the plastic baby pool, which they're admittedly past the age for, but they figure they can cool off and splash around for a laugh.

However, I did come across a funny parallel in Herbert Read's 1928 neglected masterpiece, English Prose Style. In the chapter, "Sentences," Read provides many examples of long, stately sentences, models of balance and the careful deployment of emphasis — none resembling Crane's. But then Read adds:

"Not all long and complex sentences have the architectural harmony of the period. Many such sentences are often in the nature of an agglomeration of inconsistent and unrelated clauses, and should really be split up into several sentences. There is an extreme example in a letter of Swift's, which shows that Swift could on occasion write like a servant girl:

"Last year a paper was brought here from England, called a Dialogue between the Archbishop of Canterbury and Mr. Higgins, which we ordered to be burnt by the common hangman, as it well deserved, though we have no more to do with his Grace of Canterbury than you have with the Archbishop of Dublin, whom you suffer to be abused openly, and by name, by that paltry rascal of an observator; and lately upon an affair, wherein he had no concern; I mean, the business of the missionary of Drogheda, wherein our excellent primate was engaged, and did nothing but according to law and discretion.'"

Funny, huh? I guess our idea of how a spunky young woman would write hasn't changed much in the past 80 years. Only we value spontaneity a little more highly than old man Read did.

But the narrative style in ATHG is a little more complicated than "girl tells her own story." Don't know if you noticed, but of the 17 stories in ATHG only four are in the first person — the ones that take place in the present day. Stories set in Charlotte's youth are told in the third person. (There's also a story told in the second person, just to keep you guessing.)

The third-person stories are kind of a puzzle. They are third-person, but also really imbued with the adult Charlotte's language and perspective. As a result, they feel (to me anyway) as if Charlotte was telling these stories from behind a veil, full of feelings about the events she describes in her past, but for some reason distant from those feelings too. The third-person stories left me uneasy in a way the first-person stories don't. Either of you guys feel this way?

[Kassia] I have discovered a new appreciation for 18th-century servant girls, if they indeed wrote in such a manner. I like your description of Read's sentences (though I thought we agreed that real bloggers don't do research) as "long, stately sentences, models of balance and the careful deployment of emphasis, none resembing Crane's." Well-balanced sentences are surely indicative of a well-balanced mind, and while I cannot presume to speak for Crane's mental state, it is clear that Charlotte Anne has not achieved the mind-like-water state.

The use of third- versus first-person point-of-view seems to tie into a comment I made about gaps in CA's history. Much of what happens in her life is off the page, and since it's clear that Crane made a deliberate choice to divide the timeline by POV, it makes me wonder why CA, the character, has to hide so much of her childhood. She is much more open about Rachel and Karen Pink-Park than she is about herself -- the stories featuring her mother feel especially distant to me. It is interesting that one of the final stories, where it appears that CA has finally gotten it (whatever it is) together, is written in third person, though it's chronologically later than most of the other stories.

One thing I must say I admire about Elizabeth Crane: her memory for the ephemera of the seventies, eighties, and nineties is awesome. Click-Clacks -- the debates I had with my mother over those (right up until she confiscated the ones I talked my grandmother into buying -- apparently they were dangerous to younger siblings, which is something I'd already factored into the equation). These are the details that ground this story in place and time. Amy up the street had a Beautiful Crissy doll (she had all the cool dolls), you have to love a guy who actually listens to Yo La Tengo, and, well, haven't we all watched the Donny & Marie Show (or your generational equivalent thereof)?

[Sam] Stay away from me with those click-clacks ...

Kassia, I really wasn't conscious of gaps. But I don't think I followed the story line as carefully as I might have. I remember being really surprised when I read the jacket copy after finishing the book:

"Here are the events that make up a life: a junior high-school fashion crisis, a best friends betrayal, substance abuse, recovery, finding a satisfying career, dating fiascos, the perfect relationship, the illness and slow death of a parent ... In her lifetime Charlotte encounters hope and disappointment mingled with faith and desperation, laughter on the heels of weeping, the success assuaging the pain of the most embarrassing failures — her path both all her own and instantly familiar."

Was this the book I just read? I think I was too wound up in the language, and humor, and quirks of the narrative to step back and think about Charlotte as a traditional struggling heroine. Maybe I would have gotten there eventually, but I'm not sure. It's hard to always bring to books the sympathy they deserve, isn't it?

[Max] Sam, your quoting the book jacket copy of ATHG illustrates a point I've been thinking about lately, one that (and you'll forgive me for this) plays a part in the James Frey fiasco that's been unfolding: it's really hard to market and sell books. When compared to other forms of entertainment, books don't have much going for them. There are no movie trailers or TV commercials, no radio airtime or MTV, and no guest appearances on talk shows. Excepting a very small percentage of authors who do get the star treatment, the most a typical book gets in the way of publicity is the book itself. The way the book looks and what is written on the back cover is hugely important to how a book is received by the buying public, and that's an awfully small canvas to work with - and so perhaps we try to label a book memoir instead of fiction to make that book jacket more appealing.

An aside: When I worked at the bookstore, I met a young woman author (I can't remember her name) who was just devastated by the pastel pink "chick-lit" book cover that her publisher had put on what, to her, was a serious work of fiction about a female protagonist.

But getting back to ATHG (I think discussing this book causes *us* to digress), I was struck also by Sam's analysis of the narrative voice of the stories in this collection. Though I didn't think about it when I read it, now I wonder what the collection would have been like had all the stories been in the first person. So much of ATHG seems to dwell inside Charlotte Anne's head anyway, I wonder if the book would have felt too internal if the book had been all first person. On the other hand, it seems that the first-person stories lend themselves more readily to Crane's experimental tendencies.

[Kassia takes advantage of technology to get the last word] I know more than a few of those women who received pink covers and felt like they'd been misrepresented or pigeon-holed (though we all know there's no crying in publishing). And in reviewing the jacket copy in relation to the book, I wonder if there was some sort of notion on the part of the publisher of reaching out to the chicklit market. Then, for whatever reason, this marketing plan seemed to fall through. There is a notion that you can't always market literary to the genre crowd and vice versa. Which I think is a shame. We need to reach as many readers as possible, and most of these divisions are artificial to me.

All This Heavenly Glory, LitBlog Style

Welcome to Glory week (Buffy fans, wrong place, but stick around, we're a fun bunch)!. Kassia, Max, and Sam spent the weekend debating the finer points of craft and style and, we're proud to say, sentence structure. Yeah, we're going to bring Jonathan Swift into this discussion. And servant girls. You can't talk about All This Heavenly Glory without a discussion about servant girls. Our only hope is that we don't scare Elizabeth Crane (blogging, almost live, here on Wednesday).

[Kassia] When Max introduced Elizabeth's Crane's All This Heavenly Glory, he keyed in on two main elements of this book: the style and subject matter. Interestingly, he noted that "Crane's writing is the main character" -- and while I want to get back to the characterization of Charlotte Anne and "the genre whose name" Max dares not speak (so mysterious!) -- I want to talk about the idea that a writer's style and voice can serve as the catalyst of a novel (or a novel-in-stories as this is probably more properly described).

From the first page of "Ad", I felt like I was racing through the book. Sure, I idled a little bit around "Jesse Jackson, He Lives In Chicago" -- a reader, after all, does need some time to regroup -- but I feel like I was propelled by the author, not the story. Clearly, I'm not complaining, except for maybe about the fact that I stayed up late to finish the thing, but as I reread Max's comments, I find myself wondering if Crane's style makes it easy to mask weaknesses in the story, most notably some character development -- and does it really matter if that's the case?

[Max] I think "racing" is the right word. I thought it was pretty daring of Crane and her editors to launch us into the book that way, and, as a result, the rest of the book really feeds off of that energy. To your point about whether Crane's writing masks weaknesses in character development, I'll concede that perhaps Charlotte Anne isn't terribly distinguishable from a lot of other female protagonists out there, and that the supporting cast doesn't get as much stage time as it perhaps should, but I also think that you can look at the idea of style and subject matter in another way when it comes to this book. Crane's style - which to me was this great blend of the conversational and the complex - felt to me rather fresh when viewed against the rest of the literary fiction landscape. I wonder if we, as readers, see a coming of age story about a woman with all the typical love troubles, family troubles and work troubles, and we find it hard to imagine that this book really could be daring. Along with some solid, straightforward stories, Crane gives us some rather experimental ones as well (not unlike Ander Monson's, in fact, in their tendencies toward lists and stream of consciousness). But I feel like it's hard for me and for other readers to believe that a book about this character that follows this storyline could be daring and experimental, and yet when you look at the writing itself, this book is anything but typical.

[Kassia] You make an excellent point about the difficulty of seeing a coming-of-age story about a woman with the usual litany of woman troubles (this is, by the way, not the same thing as female problems, though I've never been entirely sure what those might be) with anything but a "been there, read that" attitude. I read a lot of the genre-that-we-will-name-later in the early days, mostly because I believed the editors when they said they were looking for stories that pushed the boundaries. This did not turn out to be as true as one would hope. In many ways, Charlotte Anne is a typical women's fiction heroine (right down to the younger man fantasy!).

And in far more ways, she is not typical. These type of stories are traditionally very linear and often focused on a finite period of time. There seems to be a real fear of letting an author run wild; yet Crane's publisher took this risk, making this a great read for those who wouldn't pick up this type of story and for those who feel like screaming at the thought of another, okay, I'm going to say it, chicklit novel covering the young woman/job troubles/man troubles terrain. I will point, by way of example, to the title story, "All This Heavenly Glory". This felt like a real woman having a obsessive meltdown over a guy, not a character who can't be too insane because we have to like her, and likeable women are not psycho.

In addition to adding experimental stories and breathless sentence structure (not to mention the extreme use of parentheticals within parentheticals), Crane bounces back and forth from childhood to adulthood, picking up pieces of CA's life and tying them to other stories. I got the sense she wrote without a definite order in mind, then put the stories together after, but this comes mainly from certain mentions of the fates of other characters, such as Rachel.

I noticed that Crane took an approach in character development that I'm not sure I like -- I've seen it in other books recently as well, and it may like first-person present tense, something I just need to get used to -- where she tends to pick up her character's story during those moments in between life-changing events. I felt that a big omission, from a reader's standpoint, was CA's alcoholism. This was something big enough to be mentioned twice on the cover flap, yet I didn't the get the sense that CA was any more or less an alcoholic than the average person.

Tune in tomorrow for more Glory. Jonathan Swift makes the promised guest appearance (with the servant girl) and at least one Click-Clack confession is made.

WINTER NOMINEE #3: ELIZABETH CRANE'S ALL THIS HEAVENLY GLORY

When I'm about to do something risky, like run across a busy street - living in Chicago and mostly carless (not careless), I find myself doing this fairly often - I look both ways first.  Maybe I tiptoe out into the first lane to get a few feet of pavement out of the way.  If I've misjudged - as occasionally happens when crossing a six-laner like Michigan Ave., for example - I'll stop halfway and repeat the process.

And maybe Elizabeth Crane doesn't think she's taking a risk when she picks up a pen, or turns on the laptop, more likely, but her book, All This Heavenly Glory, seemed to me, a brilliant exercise in risk-taking.  To return to my, admittedly pedestrian (groan), street-crossing analogy, Crane, in this book, puts her head down and sprints across the street, heedless of oncoming traffic, potholes, pitfalls, etc.  She certainly doesn't tiptoe, not at first anyway.  Crane's book is what is sometimes called a novel in stories.  All of the 18 stories are about Charlotte Anne Byers, and they take us through, in somewhat time-scattered fashion, her life from age 6 to 40.  Byers - a transplanted New Yorker, child of divorced parents, aspiring filmmaker (among many other aspirations large and small) - is the heart and soul of this book, but Crane's writing is the main character.  As such, what I really had in mind, above, with that road crossing analogy nonsense, was the book's first story, "Ad."  Without a prelude or preamble, Crane launches the reader into a stylistically adventurous ramble that takes the form of a newspaper personal ad.  But if those ads, traditionally trimmed and tight, are just sips, Crane's "Ad" is a fire hose, it careens on for several pages, introducing the reader, in trial by fire fashion, to her cavalier use of punctuation and her ability to run a sentence onward to breathtaking lengths without coming off the tracks, as it were.  Stylistically, her stories settle down a bit after that, but don't be fooled by the subject matter: a woman's trials and tribulations in love, family and employment.  Crane is not to be lumped into the genre whose name I dare not speak. 

There is a plaintiveness and sadness here.  Rough-edges, too - the story "Harold the Filmmaker" was cited as an example of this by my fellow Co-opers (who also likened her prose to that of David Foster Wallace).  In the end, Crane lays it all out on the page, the spirit of her character, Charlotte Anne, as well as adventurous linguistic experimentation (here I speak of 1. Crane's penchant for asides, 2. discursions, and 3. of course, lists) and deviations from the stylistically static fiction that appears in most literary publications.  When I first read All This Heavenly Glory, I described it as "rambunctious, elbows-flailing prose" and that still seems like a good enough description to me.

January 30 to February 3 will be "Glory week" at the LBC, featuring a podcast interview with the author and other fun stuff. Mark your calendars!