THE LITBLOG CO-OP

And for Today...

I asked several writers and bloggers if they wanted to say a little bit about Jeff Ford, The Girl in the Glass, or any of his other work. Throughout the day, I'll be posting the responses.

Cons

I want to jump off something Kassia's says in her excellent post, by way of getting to talk about con men. She says:

Now, to me, stereotypes can be useful when done well. They provide useful shorthand in those instances when a quick mental understanding is needed.

The key to creating memorable characters is moving beyond the stereotypes with key, concrete details. Ford could have stopped at the name with Vonda, the Rubber Lady -- you know everything about her right there -- but he gave her a love life and a future. Vonda wasn't page filler. She was an integral part of the story.

I couldn't agree more. In fact, perhaps what makes the characterization here so deft and true is that you could step back and see "types" among the cast. I don't want to take this too far, because I don't think there are any true stereotypes here. But I can't help thinking about con men in general, and how magic they can be when done well in fiction. Which, of course, makes me think of one of my favorite nonfiction books ever, David W. Maurer's The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man. It was originally published in 1940. Maybe it's a bit dated, and sure, there have been plenty of excellent books about the con written since, but it's near and dear to me. Maurer was a linguistics professor at the University of Louisville and the book actually resulted from his linguistic research into the language of the "high swindle." To doubleback to Anne's point, it's only appropriate that The Girl in the Glass should employ such dizzyingly lush language and it absolutely enhances the story.

Anyway, consider Maurer's opening description of a con man:

The grift has a gentle touch. It takes its toll from the verdant sucker by means of the skilled hand or the sharp wit. In this, it differs from all other forms of crime, and especially from the heavy-rackets. It never employs violence to separate the mark from his money. Of all the grifters, the confidence man is the aristocrat.

Although the confidence man is sometimes classed with professional thieves, pickpockets, and gamblers, he is really not a thief at all because he does no actual stealing. The trusting victim literally thrusts a fat bank roll into his hands. It is a point of pride with him that he does not have to steal.

Confidence men are not "crooks" in the ordinary sense of the word. They are suave, slick, and capable. Their depredations are very much on the genteel side. Because of their high intelligence, their solid organization, the widespread connivance of the law, and the fact that the victim must virtually admit criminal intentions himself if he wishes to prosecute, society has been neither willing nor able to avenge itself effectively.

Does Thomas Schell meet this profile? Sure; and yet, he's still only the memorable Thomas Schell and his father, foundling son relationship with Diego was for me the true heart of the book. The relationship that supersedes all the others that Kassia references.

And, as I've said before, aren't all successful stories cons of some kind anyway? Sure they are.

If only I'd had the time, this post would have been considerably longer and touched on how enjoyable the spiritualist element of the story is when coupled with the con. Instead, I'll leave you with a quote from Schell that seems appropriate:

"It's almost too easy to believe that," said Schell, "but I don't buy it. There are no such things as ghosts. Houdini may have been someone who could have made life very difficult for us if he'd ever caught wind of our operation. But I have to say I had the utmost respect for him, because he was right: the spiritualist phenomenon is all sleight of hand, relying one hundred percent upon gullibility. I dare say it doesn't end there, but you can throw in religion, romantic love, and luck as well. No, this was something else."

And a few fun spiritualist links:

Dostoevsky and spiritualism
The Skeptic's Dictionary
The Skeptiseum

 

Lovely Language, Luscious and Dense

Anne, of the excellent blog Fernham, couldn't be with us this week because she's been busy having a baby. (We gave her a pass this time. Congratulations, Anne!) However, she prepared a post in advance on the use of language in The Girl in the Glass. Without further ado:

My heart sank a little when I began reading The Girl in the Glass. Since then, the very thing that first made me wonder if Jeffrey Ford could pull it off brought me joy. The language samples exuberantly not just from one specialized palette, but from many. What a wicked, lovely ride. He pulls it off. Lucky us who get to read it.

In the first paragraph, we read “the orange dot on its lower wings told me it was an alfalfa, Colias eurytheme.” Oh dear, I thought, butterflies. Impossible to write of them without recalling Nabokov; impossible to recall Nabokov without the present book disappointing.

Then, a page later, chapter two begins: “Every time the widow Morrison cried, she farted, long and low.”

Jeffrey Ford is not Nabokov nor is he trying to be. I love that “long and low”: something so sweetly comic in the plaintive fart.

The Girl in the Glass is set in Depression Era New York. In the mansions of Long Island where these charlatans hold séances for the rich and grieving, it is possible to imagine bumping into some of the minor, shadier characters at the edges of Gatsby’s parties. But this is another world, populated by intelligent autodidacts, odd, confident, and marginal like the men in Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn or Moehringer’s memoir, The Tender Bar. This lets Ford sample the lingo of petty crime, carnies, magic and mediums, entomology, literature, psychology, and general Depression Era slang. In itself, this is an exuberant, amusing list: I was not surprised to learn that Ford has a Ph.D. and that he claims to have spent most of his time in graduate school paying attention to other things than his studies: his writing has just that delightful, amazing energy of that guy you always want to buy another pitcher of beer in the grad school dive bar because he’s just so funny to listen to.

What makes it all sing are those moments when the worlds collide. Here Diego, who is at once posing as a young Kim-like Swami and being tutored for better things, tries to figure out what it means that his surrogate father, an extraordinary charlatan of a medium, has seen a ghost. What I love in this passage is the easy marriage of tough talk and Freud:

”He’s taken people six ways to Sunday for years. So he sees a little girl. What’s a little girl?”

“What?” I asked.

“Innocent, he said.

“Antony,” I said, “you should move to Vienna and hang a shingle.”

“Hang my ass.”

http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/distr/lepid/bflyusa/usa/728.htm

All In The Family

I'd planned to jump over to a deeply profound discussion on character and family in The Girl In The Glass, but I think I'd like to start off talking about the idea of story. Because this book has an honest-to-goodness story. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end.

When you finish this book, sure, a few questions remain. What goes unanswered forms the true mystery of the story -- as Gwenda noted, was there ever really a girl in the glass or was it all an elaborate con? Loose ends don't have to be tied in neat little bows for a story to be complete. When a story is well-told, you don't close the book asking, "Is that all there is?"

About character, and, more importantly, characters. I recently reviewed a book with a final action scene, and there were tons of characters on the page. It took everything I had to keep them in place (and I failed; clearly I did not have enough). But even before this, I didn't have a good handle on the secondary characters. They never became individuals to me.

Through excellent choreography -- an action sequence is like an elaborate ballroom dance -- and clear characterization, we know who is who as the bullets fly and justice is served. Gwenda mentions that this story doesn't rely upon stereotypes to build character. Now, to me, stereotypes can be useful when done well. They provide useful shorthand in those instances when a quick mental understanding is needed.

The key to creating memorable characters is moving beyond the stereotypes with key, concrete details. Ford could have stopped at the name with Vonda, the Rubber Lady -- you know everything about her right there -- but he gave her a love life and a future. Vonda wasn't page filler. She was an integral part of the story.

And that leads me to family. Throughout this book, people step out of their ordinary lives and offer unconditional help to Schell, Antony, and Diego. They don't do this because it's necessary to move the story forward. Their actions come from the idea that this group of people who live on the outside edges of society are a family. They look out for each other, they know what's going on, and they worry when a character doesn't check in for a while.

Diego, an immigrant Mexican kid rescued from the streets by Schell, calls the man his father. Schell sees himself as the parent figure. Even when they change roles in the story, they are parent and child. Schell's actions are driven by his need to run this con through to the end because he needs to provide Diego with a future. It almost makes one wonder if somehow Schell knew about Isabel before Diego met her.

You're the Ha-Ha

Convergences.

Jeff Ford dropped in this morning in the comments; here's part of what he had to say:

I think a lot of writers think that to be unremittingly dark is to be unremittingly profound, but one of the surest ways to bumble that mission is to forget the integral role of humor in the human drama.

Well said.

Kassia's post about how well The Girl in the Glass balances humor and noir examines this a bit further. And she's absolutely right. Part of what makes this novel so enjoyable and worth reading multiple times is the humor. Amazingly, the jokes don't ring false the second or third time through. I pin that on character and on the book's darkness.

A couple of LBC members also mentioned in the comments that they appreciated the fact the book has a real, honest-to-goodness story. And again, one of the measures of how well the story stands up is how easy it is to get sucked right back into the mystery and the plotting while rereading. It is one helluva story.

It seems to me easy to overlook how important the characters are to the success of the narrative. You could pretend that they're types ("the con man with a heart," etc), but what makes the story work is that they aren't types. The humor, the noir and the story only work together so well because the characters are thoroughly engaging and specific. Their humor feels true to what these guys (and gals) would crack wise in these terrible situations. The affection the characters have for each other is incredibly well defined and, at base, those relationships are what truly carry the weight in this story. We have all these larger world issues, as Kassia pointed out, the Depression, Prohibition, eugenics, that could easily overwhelm any narrative -- especially one this colorful. But they don't. The characterization of Schell and Diego and Antony Cleopatra and Miss Hush and all the rest of the characters, really, gives us an immediate, more personal reason to understand all these real world bads in the context of this story. Basically, man, I just love these guys.

Anyway, Jeff Ford was also nice enough to point to a couple of books that served as touchstones for the "comic noir" tone (about which I hope he'll say more Thursday). Here's a couple of links for the interested: an excerpt of Dashiell Hammett's excellent The Thin Man and a buy page for James Crumley's The Last Good Kiss (which I plan to pick up immediately). Anyone have any more recommendations of books with the "comic noir" vibe?

Later on, I'll try to post a bit about the joy of con men.

Where Noir And Humor Meet

Here is the test of a good book: when it's a much fun to read the second (or third or eighth) time as it is the first. I'm glad to see that Jeffrey Ford popped in to comment on Gwenda's post, discussing the noir element of The Girl In The Glass, because that's exactly what I wanted to talk about.

Also the humor.

Girl is set during the Depression, an understandably dour time in history. You have the Prohibition (when you think about it, forcing a nation to quit drinking while they're losing their savings...not great politics). You have a war just fought and unease in Europe. You have the rich who are somehow still rich and the poor who just can't seem to catch a break. And you have a lot of people willing to believe in something, anything, that will answer their questions.

Thomas Schell, con man, is just the man to answer those questions. His seances contact the dead, offer people some comfort, and lighten more than a few purses. It's a living. But Schell also collects people and builds an extended family, one of whom is the book's narrator, an illegal Mexican named Diego. Diego's status in this country interestingly mirrors the current fights we have about immigration ("In twenty-four, they invited us to come, because they needed us. Now we're vermin."), and forms a backdrop for future horrors: the eugenics movement and the rise of the Nazi party.

Dark stuff indeed, and because this is, at heart, a murder mystery, bad things happen as our heroes try to solve the crime. Add in a lot of terse, tough-guy type dialogue -- which just absolutely makes this novel read like a Jimmy Cagney movie -- and you have the kind of noir that makes Mickey Spillane timeless.

What Mickey never had was humor. Did Mike Hammer ever crack a joke? God, that man was depressed, wasn't he? Schell, Diego, Antony Cleopatra, and the carnival's worth of, and I mean this affectionately, sideshow freaks all exhibit a droll humor that makes you laugh out loud. Diego's narrative is both wide-eyed innocent, though he's telling the story with wisdom of age, and wise-cracking kid. It's the little things, like him thinking that death puts its own disguise on people while his next thought is "Who would have thought that a man and snake could be so close, but they were."

Though the book has no swordfights, it does have a pitched gun battle. Because it wouldn't be as much fun without a pitched gun battle. And an explosion, which as Schell notes, they probably could have done without, but since it worked, what the heck.

Pretty Glass Houses

So, here's a portrait of the week's hostess (aka nominator), slightly toasty with a second glass of nice chardonnay, more than exhausted and ever-tardy. And yet, this post will appear bright and early Monday morning. Ah, the glories of computation.

Today posts will bat back and forth (hopefully, otherwise you're stuck with my mad-batting) about Jeff Ford's wonderful, now-EDGAR AWARD-WINNING The Girl in the Glass. Cheers!

I suppose to start things off, I'd like to come back to how truly satisfying a read this book is. It takes a lot to pull that off. I always think about Sean Stewart's mission statement as a writer (another brilliant novelist, this one stolen away at present by alternate reality games): "I want to write meaning-of-life thrillers -- books that explore the most profound aspects of human existence, but don't skimp on swordfights." (And, actually, if anyone reading this feels a little high and mighty about genre literature of any kind, I'd suggest you go read Sean's site introduction and, well, just that.)

Girl has no swordfights, but it more than makes up for that in butterflies and carnies and ghosts. In fact, one of the things I love most about this book could be seen as a swordfight of sorts -- the beautiful, pitch-perfect period dialogue throughout, always used to question, advance and expose the story and, more importantly, its wonderfully drawn characters. There are so many great conversations in this book. Here's an example, from earlyish in the book (page 77 for those of you with hymnals; it may seem a bit long for excerpting, but indulge me):

"This detail's a snooze and a half," said Antony, blowing smoke.

"Miss Hush's powers seem somewhat less than startling," I said.

"Well, one thing's for sure, not that we should talk, but that name's phony as a three-dollar bill."

"I thought it was poetic," I said.

"Poetic, maybe. Phony, for sure. Besides that, though, Miss Hush is a fine-looking woman, even if she's got the complexion of a snowball."

"She must live under a rock," I said.

"Did you see the boss's face when she coughed up our real names?"

"I doubt she could see his surprise, because he covered it with that smile."

"Yeah, the business smile," said Antony. "Sleight of mouth."

"Maybe his best trick," I said.

"Do you think she pulled that information out of a dream?" he asked.

"I don't know. She seems like she could either be a con or the real thing, if there's any such thing as the real thing. Schell's pretty much convinced me there isn't."

Antony blew a smoke ring, then flicked his cigarette butt out the window. "Once I was with this traveling show in Georgia for a few weeks, wrestling a bear--"

"Here we go," I said.

"No, it's true. The sorriest fucking bear in the world. It was sort of like rolling your grandmother, like moving furniture. Had to quit; I felt sorry for the bear. Anyway, with that show, there was this old hag, and I mean hag. She sat in a tent and you went in and paid your dime and she'd tell you your future. And for an extra nickel she'd tell you the day you were gonna die."

"Sounds like fun," I said.

"We're talking the loneliest of occupations," said Antony. "But in the short time I was with that crap outfit two people actually took her up on the nickel special. One was a local guy in the little town outside of Atlanta. She told him he had two days to live. Two days later, sure as shit, he's walking home from work and gets struck by lightning. Blood boils, head pops like a grape."

"She got lucky," I said.

"That's pretty damn lucky. Well, not for the guy. But there was another guy too. A midget who was with the show. He went to see her after the first guy got hit by lightning. The midget's show name was Major Minor. He dressed in a military outfit; was a real self-important little prick.* The hag gave him a date in six years. So what? Right? Who's gonna remember that? But about maybe eight years later, I ran into Bunny Franchot, the Alligator Girl, one of the most screwed-up-looking broads I ever knew, in a carnival in South Jersey. She'd been with the outfit in Georgia when I was there. We got to talking, and it came out that the Major, who had this Model T rigged so he could drive it standing up, went out one night, got loaded, and ran himself into a tree. He'd forgotten the prediction, but Bunny never did. It was the exact day she predicted."

I shook my head.

"There's more bullshit in heaven and earth, than you can dream up in your scenario," said Antony.

"Well put," I said.

-- And scene --

Well, actually it goes on, setting up a soon-to-come, jaw-droppingly horrific scene that fulfills the sinister promise of the early mystery, the phantom girl in the glass who Schell says appears to him on a con before he sees her again, this time a missing rich girl in a newspaper.

One of the beautiful things about this particular conversation (and there are many, not least of which is Antony, the big lug of the main trio, who always brings more insight than you expect and turns the right phrase, but in the way he would turn it) is how it comments on one of the core mysteries of the book. Did Schell see the girl or didn't he? Was the girl a ghost in the glass, or wasn't she? What is real and what isn't? When does it matter?

I don't know about you, but this is the kind of thematic underpinning, the kind of question, the kind of story that makes me roll over and purr like a cat. (Which Lauren Cerand says is important.)

So yeah, The Girl in the Glass is one of those rare reads that can go into dark, dark places, but remain funny and remain a pleasure to read. That's what made it so satisfying a book for this reader, anyway. More to come.

(*Footnote for writer geeks: "The midget's show name was Major Minor. He dressed in a military outfit; was a real self-important little prick." You don't even see the semi-colon in that sentence, because it's that sentence. Drool.)

Coming Attraction

Since the Heti podcast is experiencing technical difficulties, I thought I'd jump in with a quick reminder that next week we'll turn our attention to Jeff Ford's The Girl in the Glass. A timely book to discuss, what with it just having won an Edgar in the Best Paperback Original category.

The week will start off with some discussion among members (join in!), feature some commentary about Ford by writers and bloggers outside the LBC midweek, host Ford as guest blogger on Thursday and wrap up with a fantastic podcast by Bat Segundo himself. Please do come by, y'all.

THE GIRL IN THE GLASS by Jeff Ford

Pay no attention to the lady behind the curtain; I'm here to unveil my nomination for this quarter, the vastly underrated Jeff Ford's The Girl in the Glass.

The thing about Ford is that he's unpigeonholeable, and yet his work is always recognizable as his work. There's an unmistakeable voice. There's exploration. There's a high literary standard. There's always something unexpected to be had coming to a new piece by Ford. He apparently never heard of same-old, same-old or just sticking to a winning formula, like say, only writing thrillers about long-kept biblical secrets (although I would totally read Jeff Ford's Da Vinci Code) or legal thrillers (I would also completely read Jeff Ford's The Firm).

His short stories are mostly found in speculative fiction magazines and anthologies (or in his spanking new collection, The Empire of Ice Cream). His novels have been categorized or marketed as literary fiction, fantasy and mystery. In reality, they're all of the above. And the sad thing is, this crazy world we live in, it doesn't make things easy for readers or writers who are interested in finding such a wide range of work. It hides things. My great fear is always that there's someone out there who loved The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, but has absolutely no idea that the short stories and The Girl in the Glass exist. Or, perhaps more troubling, someone who thinks they wouldn't like the other stuff because it's published in a different genre. So, that's why I chose this book to nominate -- that and that I loved it and enjoyed it more than any other novel I read in the last year and that I fear it's so successful at what it's doing some people might dismiss it without seeing what's under the surface.

I wrote on my own site about Girl last year and (stealing a trick from Sarvas) I'm going to quote what I said then:

This book is as sweet a read as any magnificent con in action, and isn't all real storytelling a con of some kind anyway? The story is anchored by the relationships between three scammers working together to bilk the wealthy bereaved: aging con man, Thomas Schell; a Mexican teenager adopted from the streets and playing the part of Ondoo the Mystic, Diego; and good-hearted heavy, Antony Cleopatra. During a con, Schell sees a ghostly little girl reflected in glass, which ends up landing the three in the midst of an investigation into the ritual murder of a rich family's young daughter. The book is dedicated to the author's own son, to me tellingly appropriate, as I read this as being very much about fatherhood--and add to that family, in the larger sense of the word. Vonda the Rubber Lady doesn't help out for nothing, nor does Hal Izzle, or Belinda bring her pigeons; likewise, Merlin protects Morgan for reasons that seem instinctive. (Not that those are the only things Girl is about. One of this novel's great virtues is that it manages to be about many things, as all good novels do.)

I hesitate to give away much more, because I don't want to deprive anyone of the pleasure of reading this book. A couple of words though, for the darker side of the novel. The Klan and eugenics figure prominently, as does the mass deportation of Mexicans during the time period, and the backdrop of other people's poverty in contrast to the rich living of our main characters as they live off the obscenely rich. This balances out the novel's humor and prevents it from ever seeming slight. And the ending, the ending is perfect, absolutely right in the way so few endings are--and especially considering that the ending takes place much later than the conclusion of the story's main action, with Diego looking back late in life on these events.

So yeah, read the damn thing. You won't be sorry. Here's a little excerpt to entice you further. From the first chapter:

Ectoplasmic Precipitation

Every time the widow Morrison cried, she farted, long and low like a call from beyond the grave. I almost busted a gut but had to keep it under my turban. There could certainly be no laughter from Ondoo, which was me, the spiritual savant of the subcontinent.

We were sitting in the dark, holding hands in a circle, attempting to contact Garfield Morrison, the widow's long-dead husband, who fittingly enough had succumbed to mustard gas in a trench in France. Thomas Schell, ringmaster of this soiree, sat across from me, looking, in the glow from the candlelight, like a king of corpses himself -- eyes rolled back, possessed of a bloodless pallor, wearing an expression straight from a nightmare of frantic pursuit.

To my right, holding fast to the gloved dummy hand that stuck out of the end of my jacket sleeve, was the widow's sister, Luqueer, a thin, dried-out cornstalk of a crone, decked with diamonds, whose teeth rattled like shaken dice, and next to her was the young, beautiful niece (I forget her name), whom I rather wished was holding my prosthesis.

On my other side was the widow herself, and between her and Schell sat Milton, the niece's fiancé, your typical scoffing unbeliever. He'd told us during our preliminary meeting with the widow that he was skeptical of our abilities; a fast follower of Dunninger and Houdini. Schell had nodded calmly at this news but said nothing.

We didn't have to sit there long before Garfield made his presence known by causing the flame on the candle at the center of the table to gutter and dance.

"Are you there?" called Schell, releasing his hands from those of the participants on either side of him and raising his arms out in front.

He let a few moments pass to up the ante, and then, from just behind Milton's left shoulder, came a mumble, a grumble, a groan. Milton jerked his head around to see who it was and found only air. The niece gave a little yelp and the widow called out, "Garfield, is it you?"

Then Schell opened his mouth wide, gave a sigh of agony, and a huge brown moth flew out. It made a circuit of the table, brushing the lashes of the young lady, causing her to shake her head in disgust. After perching briefly on the widow's dress, just above her heart (where earlier Schell had inconspicuously marked her with a dab of sugar water), it took to circling the flame. The table moved slightly, and there came a rhythmic noise, as if someone was rapping his knuckle against it. Which, in fact, someone was: it was me, from underneath, using the knuckle of my big toe.

Ghostly sobbing filled the dark, which was my cue to slowly move my free arm inside my jacket, reach out at the collar for the pendant on my neck, and flip it around to reveal the back, which held a glass-encased portrait of Garfield. While the assembled family watched the moth orbit closer and closer to fiery destruction, Schell switched on the tiny beacon in his right sleeve while with his left hand he pumped the rubber ball attached to a thin hose beneath his jacket. A fine mist of water vapor shot forth from a hole in the flower on his lapel, creating an invisible screen in the air above the table.

Just as the moth ditched into the flame, which surged with a crackle, sending a thin trail of smoke toward the ceiling, the beam of light from within Schell's sleeve hit my pendant, and I adjusted my position to direct the reflection upward into the vapor.

"I'm here, Margaret," said a booming voice from nowhere and everywhere. Garfield's misty visage materialized above us. He stared hard out of death, his top lip curled back, his nostrils flared, as if even in the afterlife he'd caught wind of his wife's grief. The widow's sister took one look at him, croaked like a frog, and conked out cold onto the table. The widow herself let go of my hand and reached out toward the stern countenance.

"Garfield," she said. "Garfield, I miss you."

"And I you," said the phantom.

"Are you in pain?" she asked. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. All's well here," he said.

"How do I know it's really you?" she asked, holding one hand to her heart.

---------

Come back the week of May 1 for all sorts of fun -- there will be book discussion, Jeff Ford guest blogging, a podcast to remember and other tricks of the light!