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More Musings on Suspense

Max's post below started me thinking about suspense and how good it can be. Why is it that suspense seems to work better visually in a movie say, than in a book. Everyone's watched a movie and started yelling at the screen, right? It work so well when you the audience is given information that the characters aren't and you have to watch them work against that. In books, it works so differently in my opinion.
Why does The Cottagers work so well? We know how Nicholas died, we knew from the first chapter that one of these cottagers was probably going to die. So after he dies, how do you sustain the narrative? Why should we keep reading? What worked well in this book I think was that I couldn't wait to see how the characters would react to Nicholas's death. And how would they react to the intense questioning from the authorities? And the ending, well, I won't give it away here. But suffice it to say, I wasn't expecting it really. I loved that Klimasewiski chose to go without the neat wrap up at the end. It didn't have the same suspenseful punch of watching Hitchcock, but I think that's what makes this book work.

Suspense: The Painful Pleasure

For some reason, suspense and the contemporary novel don’t seem to mix all that much.

Insomuch as suspense is a fairly key element of storytelling, I don’t think we need to couch a discussion of suspense in terms of “genre” fiction versus “literary” fiction. Instead we can ponder why suspense is often squeezed out of many contemporary novels.

Classically, the selective omission of information and methodical pacing are employed to imbue a plot with suspense. Here the stingy storyteller parcels out information bit by bit to satisfy the hungry reader who works to piece together the fractured details. But to provide just a puzzle is not enough to bring about the painful pleasure of suspense. There must be peril, uncertainty, or unease as well - dark clouds on the horizon or just overhead.

Hitchcock was a master here. He could imbue a story with menace, build up expectations of a disaster and string the viewer along until the string was taut to the point of breaking. And more recently, some contemporary novelists have experimented with suspense, testing its limits and breaking its rules - I’m thinking Paul Auster here and The Horned Man by James Lasdun, a suspenseful favorite of mine.

Many modern novelists seem to eschew suspense, however. They willfully remove the story from the heat before it can reach a boil. A flash-forward or flashback will reveal some critical point in the early going, and the reader’s focus is guided back to subtleties.

In The Cottagers, Marshall Klimasewiski sticks with the suspense. First, it is the menacing sort. From the opening pages, when we first meet creepy, young Cyrus, peering through the brush at his new temporary neighbors, we know something terrible will happen to “the cottagers” who have arrived for an extended stay in sleepy East Sooke. Then, once that terrible thing has finally happened, the detective story begins, though Klimasewiski turns this on its head by letting the hapless yet self-important “scoutmaster,” Constable Cortland be our Sherlock Holmes.  And finally, once the chain of events has more or less been sorted out, we are left with how the protagonists will go on from here.

The cottagers’ lives are shattered by their trip to East Sooke, but rather than the plot petering out or the unveiling of a moment-of-truth epiphany, that lingering legacy of Joyce (“the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling upon all the living and the dead”), Klimasewiski delivers a payoff here that is completely unexpected and prompts the reader to reassess the entire book.

Hitchcock’s memorable silhouette comes to mind once again, pointing to Norman Bates’ mother.

Suspense, in itself, is not enough to sustain a story. As the storyteller builds suspense, the reader subconsciously builds expectations and comes to expect revelatory plots points that conform to those expectations. The skilled storyteller can take that built up emotional capital and shatter it with a final virtuoso twist that confounds everything that comes before it. The epiphany was meant to replace this final twist in fiction, to evolve it. As James Joyce and his many descendants have shown us, the epiphany can elevate fiction in its way, but readers should not deny themselves the satisfaction of suspense.

LBC Podcast: Mark Binelli

Nominator: Jessica Stockton

Nominee: Mark Binelli

Subjects Discussed: What's real and what's not real in Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die, anarchism, 20th century film references, the Coen brothers, Upton Sinclair, extemporaneous speeches, on not writing the novel chronologically, the sensation of research, knife-grinding, Buster Keaton, meat metaphors, Out of Bounds, shopping S&V around to publishers, Dalkey Archive Press, the fragmented trial scenes, and experimental fiction.

Excerpt from Show:

Binelli: When I hit on the comedy team idea, I immediately liked that. And then at some point, I can't say when, but at some point the name "Sacco and Vanzetti" just popped into my head and it was such a perfect comedy team name.  Initially, it seemed so ridiculous, which it is obviously.  But then the more I thought about it, the more parallels between anarchism and slapstick started to come out.  And it just kind of weirdly made more and more sense.  So I just decided to embrace it.

Backup Link: (MP3)

(A co-production of the LBC, Pinky's Paperhaus and The Bat Segundo Show.)

Author Interview: Mark Binelli

The following is an interview with Mark Binelli, the author of the novel, Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! (Dalkey Archive, 2006).  He is also a journalist who has written many pieces for Rolling Stone, The Believer, and other outlets.  He lives in New York.

(A quick note of apology for the slacking research as I toss two questions to Mark about his days at the University of Michigan, butchering information on both)

Dan:

Thank you, Mark, for taking some time from your schedule to answer some questions.

Mark:

No problem.

Dan:

You’re listed as a native Detroiter in your biographies.  Actually Detroit, or a suburb?  Or, was your family one of the many, many (as was my own) that started in Detroit proper and moved to the suburbs in the late 60’s or early 70’s?

Mark:

I grew up in St. Clair Shores, a suburb on the east side. (Between 8 and 9 Mile, for non-Detroiters who’ve seen the Eminem movie.) (Trivia: the trailer park depicted in that movie is actually in SCS.) My parents both emigrated from Northern Italy, my mom’s family to SCS and my dad originally to Detroit proper. (6 mile!)

Dan:

You attended the University of Michigan as an undergraduate.  Was it the fact that it was the big university in the area that drew you there, or did you go to attend a specific school?

Mark:

The former. Really did sadly little research into schools.

Dan:

It was a journalism degree there, correct?  Did you take any creative writing course while you were there?

Mark:

It was an English degree, with a creative writing sub-concentration. I took a class with Nick Delbanco, who I believe still runs the MFA program, and a really cool woman named Tish Ezekiel. But did lots of journalism as well, at the school newspaper.

Dan:

You went on to receive an MFA at Columbia, right?

Mark:

Yes. People knock MFA programs, often for good reason, but it really worked for me. Coming from a freelance background, I needed deadlines, and the knowledge that people would be reading my work, that fear of public humiliation. I had two workshops with Ben Marcus and a seminar with Lawrence Weschler, who were both fantastic. I found the rest of the program a bit lackluster, at least at the time, though I’ve heard it’s much better now. I also found having a peer group extremely helpful. There’s nothing like being surrounded by other people who are just as excited about books and writing as you. (Incidentally, one of my best friends, Dinaw Mengestu, who was at Columbia at the same time, just published a novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, that’s getting rave reviews. I’d highly recommend it.)

Dan:

You have had a really nice run as a journalist, writing for Rolling Stone, The Believer, and other outlets.  Looking through your Rolling Stone articles, you’ve done features on a wide variance of people – from Britney Spears to Kid Cannabis, to Ali G before he was big on HBO, and the list goes on.  Who did you enjoy meeting and writing about the most?  How about the worst?  Any really big surprises from what you expected vs. what you ended up meeting?

S&V--A Great Read

I remember first hearing about Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die almost a year ago when Dalkey published it. A publicist over there sent me a copy in hopes that I would read it and like it. Onto the pile it went, along with too many other alluring books sent by publishers that I just haven't gotten around to reading.

Well, now that I've read S&V, if it's any indication of the quality waiting for me in the books sitting in my stack, I need to make more time for them.

What to call this book? A poetic metaphor for how comic duos sublimate the urge toward anarchy? An alternate history of two little-known-yet-still-infamous immigrants? A story of making the American Dream?

Well, call it all that. What I think I appreciate most about this book is how Mark Binelli mixes these elements, and others, within not only this novel, but within chapters, scenes, and even paragraphs. The book to me feels very carefully considered, a work in which the author took time to carefully choose his images, to link his metaphors so that the whole thing pulls closer together the more your read.

On one level this is a very pleasurable experience, as it makes S&V a book that is thoroughly enjoyable to re-read as you hunt back through to solve it like a detective.

But in another way the book is pleasurable--simply experiencing it. I can't say I'm the world's biggest fan of slapstick, but in this book Binelli has made the sensibility of this brand of comedy something completely enjoyable. He's captured it on the page, uses it as the basis of this book's unique feel. What I'm saying is that S&V has a very distinct sense to it. It's often funny, but more often feels like a riff on the sensibility of a certain brand of film. I greatly enjoyed immersing myself in this realm every time I opened the book.

What does this have to do with two wrongly executed Italians? Well, very little, and also everything. Although Binelli appropriates Sacco's and Vanzetti's names, he takes very little else of their biographies. Yet, he has found a career into which to put his S&V that allows him to capture an understanding of the anarchism the real S&V represented. And, in the end, I think Binelli's two Italians have a lot to say about the real ones.

All in all, I think this was a great book, and I'm indebted to Jessica for making us all read it.

A Guide to Cultural References in S&V

If, like me, you are more than a bit obsessed with cultural references, one of the fun aspects of reading Mark Binelli's novel is tracking down all of the public figures Binelli cites and wondering precisely whether they do, in fact, match their real-life counterparts.  Such a question must be answered on a case-by-case basis.  The book's frequent references to "Supplementary Material" only takes the reader so far.

Here then is a helpful list of resources, avoiding such obvious references as Buster Keaton, Ezra Pound, and Fatty Arbuckle, for all those currently reading Sacco and Vanzetti.

Andrews, Maxene and LaVerne: Part of the Andrews Sisters, a popular musical trio of the 1940s. (286)

Balbo, Italo:  A one-time bank clerk who became a Fascist Party gang organizer, also known for shooting, beating and killing people over a two-day period in June 1921.  Presumably, Mussolini also liked him for his conversational skills.  (188)

Barbette the Enigma:  He was a kid from Texas who began cross-dressing and became a Paris sensation, often receiving as much as $2,000 a performance.  (114)

Borrah Minevitch:  The oldest all-harmonica group.  The idea behind BM was to hire a dozen or more boys, teach them harmonica basics, and dress them up.  The Harmonica Rascals, as they came to be known, appeared in many films. (114)

Bunny, John:  Weighing over 300 pounds, John Bunny was one of the earliest silent film comedians.  (230)

Carnera, Primo: Carnero was the world heavyweight champion of 1934.  This made Mussolini very happy, until he joined an anti-Fascist resistance group.  He did indeed go onto a string of roles playing a giant in the many Italian Hercules movies.  (54)

Ching Ling Soo:  An Englishman by the name of William Ellsworth Campbell who impersonated a Chinese conjurer.  He actually modeled himself after another conjurer named Ching Ling Foo.  (114)

Chupacabra:  This may be the name of a kangaroo in Binelli's book, but the real reference is an animal unknown to science. (60)

El Brendel:  He emerged from vaudeville and appeared in many films with a clipped Swedish accent.  (114)

Fregoli, Leopoldo:  Beyond being a "quick-change artist," Fregoli had an uncanny gift for mimicry and impersonation. The great filmmaker Georges Méliès employed him in l'Homme-Protée, where he played twenty different characters.  (122)

Gardella, Tess:  An Italian-American singer who played in blackface in numerous films. (114)

Hamilton, Sir William:  Referenced in a "Supplementary Material" note on p. 45, he was an ambassador at the court of Naples thought Hot Peas N Butter's Danny Lapidus, who is a musician based in New York City.  Maybe Binelli will spill the beans.  (107)

Lorenz, Edward: A bona-fide meteorologistwho first recognized chaotic attractors. (31)

Montgolfiers, The: The real-life family was known for its ballooning, but Binelli reimagines the French aeronauts in a painting "depicting a skyful of hot-air balloons, in a race." (35)

Mailer, DeLillo, Willie, Cormac McCarthy, my father

I happened to be in San Francisco two weekends ago, so was able to do the podcast interview with Ed Champion in person. (I was out there to interview Willie Nelson, who was playing a bunch of nights at the Filmore. This prompted my father to say — and you have to read this in an extremely thick Italian accent — “Didn’t he sing that song, ‘All the Girlfriends are the Wives of Somebody Else Now’? He meant ‘To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,’ but I think inadvertently wrote the best song title of all time.)

Anyway, I mentioned to Ed that I’d recently done two literary interviews myself, for Rolling Stone. First was Norman Mailer, who remains, unsurprisingly, a great talker. Here’s the intro I wrote, before I realized none of the Q&A’s were going to have intros:

 

Norman Mailer dedicated his 1966 collection Cannibals and Christians to Lyndon B. Johnson, “whose name inspired young men to cheer for me in public.” Indeed, by the latter half of the Sixties, Mailer — who had published his first book, the World War II novel The Naked and the Dead, in 1948, to great critical and commercial acclaim — had become a prophetic elder statesman to the burgeoning counterculture, having already dissected the American hipster in “The White Negro” and cofounded The Village Voice. The Armies of the Night, Mailer’s book about the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, at which he was arrested, won the Pulitzer Prize, and remains a seminal document of the era. (And, stylistically, something to marvel at, particularly the first half of the book, written entirely in the third person, to alternately obnoxious and hilarious effect, e.g. “Actually, Mailer had not been that drunk.”) In the ensuing decades, Mailer wrote about Watergate, Jimmy Carter, Mohammad Ali, the history of the C.I.A., New York City graffiti artists, Hitler, Madonna, the space program, Lee Harvey Oswald, sex and, in his sprawling true crime masterpiece The Executioner’s Song, the killer Gary Gilmore. At the same time, Mailer’s violent personal life often threatened to overshadow his work, his indiscretions including (but not limited to) head-butting Gore Vidal before a taping of The Dick Cavett Show, challenging Vietnam-era national security advisor McGeorge Bundy to a fistfight at a party and stabbing his second wife with a pen knife during a drunken argument.

Now Mailer is 84. He normally walks with the assistance of a pair of canes, though on a recent visit to his Provincetown, Massachusetts, home, he emerged from his study with two free hands and made his way slowly across the room, hunched and crabwise, frozen in a permanent wrestler’s pose. His handshake remains tight as a vise. He sits in a round-backed rattan chair in front of a vast picture window overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. He’s a bit hard of hearing, and has allowed his white hair and eyebrows to go wild and unruly, creating an air of mad science. The glint in his light blue eyes remains piercing, still the look of one prepared (maybe hoping) to throw a punch.

The Q&A should be on newstands now. I think only audio clips are on the RS website. In general, I’m not a fanatic for Mailer’s work, but The Executioner’s Song is one of my favorite nonfiction books. I’ve always wondered why the style of that book — incredibly spare — is so different from his others. So I asked him. Here’s his response, which didn’t make the final cut of the Q&A:

"Well, I had a huge amount of material, for one thing, and it was people out in Utah who speak very simply, most of them, and so the interviews themselves suggested the style. I started the book with a fancier style and I wrote about two chapters and then gave it up, because I could see it was the wrong way to go about it. And then there was a certain vanity involved. At that point, there were a lot of people talking about the virtues of a simple style, and my whole thing is, let’s cut out all the horseshit. There is nothing easier than a simple style. I wanted to show there is nothing to writing a simple style. Try a baroque style, you little sons of bitches."

I love that he wrote a thousand-page book as basically a fuck-you to Raymond Carver et al.

About a month later, I interviewed DeLillo, which was incredibly intimidating. That hasn’t run yet. But interestingly, when I asked him about influences, the first person he cited was Mailer. Not someone I would’ve guessed.

One final non sequitur: I happened to reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road while flying back from SF. (Pretty disappointing, I thought. I’m a huge fan of Blood Meridian, and this just felt incredibly thin. Though I’m still delighted by the thought of his audience with Oprah.) Anyway, as I was reading, I glanced up and noticed that the in-flight movie was that Will Smith movie The Pursuit of Happyness. (Why do they spell happiness that way in the title, does anyone know?? God, that’s awful.) I haven’t seen the movie, but the concept is Will Smith and his son (played in the movie by his real-life son) are homeless, until Will Smith eventually works his way into becoming, like, the head of a Fortune 500 company. Something like that. Anyway, looking up from the McCarthy and seeing Will Smith and his son living on the streets prompted a fantasy about them starring in the movie version of The Road, trudging through post-apocalypic ash, stumbling across spit-roasted babies, etc. For some reason I found this very amusing.

Thanks again. This was fun. 

Keeping novelists honest

It’s funny: I hadn’t given much thought to what I’d blog about today. But then yesterday evening I happened to listen to an interview on NPR with Ian Jack, the editor of Granta, about the magazine’s new “Best Young American Novelists” issue. (You can hear the audio on WNYC’s website.) During the interview, Jack was asked about any trends he happened to notice in the writers chosen for the issue. Here’s a loose transcription of his answer:

“This is what I like. I’m not a great fan of magical realism and I’m not a great fan of the over-fertile imagination... What I like is what has to be called the realistic novel... we had some novels, not writers chosen for the list, who were really really formally experimental... An interesting thing about the novel is... it’s not a subsidized artform. It really has to find an audience. So you can’t have a kind of Tate Modern of the novel... Finnegan’s Wake would really be hard-pressed now to find a publisher. Whether that’s good or bad, different discussion... Novels need to be sold and need to find their audiences, and I think that in a way has kept them quite honest as art forms. Or you could argue in another way it’s kept them quite conservative as art forms.”

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Finnegan’s Wake being unpublishable today is unquestionably “bad.” It’s surprising to me that the editor of a major literary magazine would find this point debatable. Though I’d love to hear the counter-argument. (“No, man, fuck Joyce!”) Taste is taste, of course, and he does ultimately offer that final caveat. But seems weird to equate realism in novels with being “kept honest.” Making formal experimentation... what, exactly? Dishonest? Cheating, somehow?

I don’t have a strong opinion about the Granta list itself, other than I’m very happy that my friends Judy Budnitz and Rattawut Lapcharoensap are on it. (Just for the sake of disclosure: I’m 36, so ineligible; the cut-off was 35.) But mostly I’d like to say, again, that the existence of forums like the LBC are terrific, for precisely these sorts of reasons. 

Greetings

Hi all. Thanks so much for reading and discussing my book, and special thanks to Jessica Stockton for nominating it, and for being so generally suppportive since it came out. Anyone visiting NYC should be sure to stop by McNally Robinson, the bookstore where Jessica works. It’s one of the best in New York, and also has a terrific cafe, a.k.a. my office. We staged a very fun book event there last year, where I was able to sidestep my hatred of public speaking by having a couple of actors (the hilarious Al Ramos and Stuart Rudin) dramatically read a handful of the “transcript” scenes as Sacco and Vanzetti. Al and Stu actually used to do a sort of fat-skinny meta-vaudeville thing on various off-Broadway stages, so they couldn’t have been more perfect. (They’d been recommended by another Dalkey author, Meredith Brosnan, who is also a playwright. His novel, Mr. Dynamite, is a great relentless rant... READ THIS! Especially if you’re a fan of Sam Lipsyte’s Homeland. It’s that tone of sustained misanthropic hilarity, only in this case very Irish.)

So, the punchline of this anecdote is, I later discovered that Stu, who played Vanzetti, and who is an incredibly sweet guy in real life, had a small but key role in Silence of the Lambs. He was the mental patient who greets Jodie Foster the first time she goes to visit Hannibal Lector. I won’t repeat his full line in a public setting that my mother might stumble across, but it begins with the words, “I can smell your” ... That was Vanzetti.

Okay. I guess Ed Champion will be posting a podcast later this week, and Dan Wickett just sent over a Q&A. Beyond that, I’m not sure if I have much else to say about the book, but am happy to answer any specific questions. Just post in comments if you'd like. More tk.

Seeing is believing

We talk about Mark Binelli's slapstick incarnations of Sacco & Vanzetti, and amazingly, several of us in the LBC have seen Laurel and Hardy films. We'll passionately proclaim that Buster Keaton was a far better comedian than Charlie Chaplin and cite the movie scenes to prove it. Maybe it's not just us -- silent films seems to have had a resurgence lately. If you want to see a silent movie with live accompaniment, you can, all across the country (and beyond).  In addition to these venues and festivals, many museums and libraries show silent films, too.

When I lived in LA I loved going to the Silent Movie Theatre -- it shows silent films most every weekend, including this next one. In Seattle, silents play at the grand Paramount Theatre every Monday night (April 30: Harold Lloyd). In Fremont, California (that's in the Bay Area), the Essanay Silent Film Museum regularly shows silent films on Saturday nights. It will also host the 10th annual Broncho Billy Film Festival, June 24-30, 2007.

But you don't have to wait until then to catch a festival.

- From April 21-May 6, the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, NYC screens William S. Hart movies.
- Later this week, April 26-29: the 10th British Silent Cinema Festival in Nottingham, England.
- At the New York Historical Society in Manhattan you can catch the Silent Clown Film Series on intermittent Sundays; next up, May 6
- Cinevent, (Columbus, OH) May 25-28, 2007 - movies + collectibles
- San Francisco Silent Film Festival, July 12-14, 2007
- Cinestation (Massillon, Ohio), September 27-30, 2007
- Giornate del Cinema Muto (Pordenone, Italy) October 6-13, 2007
- Kansas Silent Film Festival (Topeka) February 22-23, 2008
- Cinefest (Liverpool, NY) March 13-16, 2008

Chances are silents can also be found at these places: 3 grand theatres around Chicago (check local listings).  Perhaps the Chataqua Silent Film series in Boulder, Colorado, will be on again in June. The Vickers Theatre in Three Oaks, Michigan will probably be screening silent films again this August. Cinecon 43 might happen this year at its regular time -- Labor Day Weekend -- in Hollywood, CA. But that'll be competing with the Telluride Film Festival, which may have a silent or two, out in Colorado.

A terrific and authoritative resource for all things silent film is SilentEra.com.

And the International Laurel & Hardy Appreciation Society is called Sons of the Desert. Organized not by chapter but by tent; there may already be a tent near you.