What Makes a Real Boy

A teacher's nightmare: finishing a literature unit two weeks early right before Holiday Break.

The solution: something equivalent to standing at the edge of a high dive, the pool three meters below.

I thought Pinocchio.

Then the robot David from Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence came first.

Then, Brian W. Aldiss's classic short story "Super Toys Last All Summer Long."

It's a simple equation: Pinnochio + Supertoys = Artificial Intelligence. What came together as the lesson progressed was a confluence of theme across novel, story and film.

Pinocchio, of course, is a wooden puppet given motion from Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883). This is a dark novel miles away from the 1940 Disney version with Pinnocchio as an ungrateful boy who wants to be a good marionette but can't help doing outrageously adolescent things like killing the talking cricket who acts as his conscience and selling his A-B-C book (puchased with Gepetto's last coins) to attend the theatre.  It's all a story about free will going head to head with morality and with the help of the Blue Fairy, Pinocchio finally does good and is transformed into a real boy.

David the robot in Aldiss's story struggles to express his love to his human mother, whose husband works at a technology company in a future where the government is stingy in allowing families to reproduce. In this narrative's version of the future, the rich live in hologram homes where nothing is quite real. When his adopted family gets permission to have a real child, Alden's future becomes doubtful. Alden seems to after the consequences of a fake world in which everything is artificial from verdant gardens to face masks that give instant beauty to happiness and love. As technology advances, reality fades. A prescient theme for a short story written in 1969.

Spielberg and screenwriter Ian Watson, working off a futuristic version of Pinocchio penned by Stanley Kubrick, took Aldiss's narrative and expanded it a few steps further. (The movie was released in 2001; it was panned by many but upon a repeat viewing, its bizarre yet engaging charms feel more than wise.) David's mother abandons him when her first son, cryonically perserved after an accident, is brought back to life thanks to advances in medicine. David meets a robot gigolo and together the two set out to find the Blue Fairy whom David believes will grant him the wish of resuscitating his mother's love for him. (Monica, David's mother, reads him The Adventures of Pinocchio which he takes as a manual of existence.) In his quest, David discovers that he is not unique; he is merely one model in a batch of Davids.

Pinocchio must act on the love he feels for Gepetto, for the Blue Fairy and for life itself and stop covering that love up with the misguided  actions of greedy, senseless boy. David in "Supertoys" wants the reality achieved by authentic emotions and David as played by Haley Joel Osment wants the individuality that comes from developing feelings of love and compassion. Together, these narratives explore what it means to be "real"; the boys' desires to love and be loved function as a symbol for all our struggles to be fully expressive, to be fully ourselves, to be fully cherished by others.

When History Meets Fiction

Every summer during a high school and college, I was a lifeguard at a public pool in Northbrook, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago. The real pleasure of the job (besides lathering up with baby oil for the richest tan and applying the Sun-In that made your hair orange) was the paperback books trading between the guards and read throughout a series of fifteen-minute breaks. 

The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough ended up the highlight of Summer 1979. Dane, the secret child of the heroine and her Catholic priest lover, made me want to change my name (Dane...Dane...how different my teen-age life would be) until he drowned in the second half of the book.

John Jakes's 8-part series Kent Family Chronicles (The Bastard, The Rebels, The Seekers, The Furies, etc.) was a multi-summer entertainment. Each book was the same, only following a different historical moment (the Revolution, War of 1812, the Gold Rush, Civil War, Abolition, etc.). More potboilers than  successful historical novels, these books delivered easy thrills.

But looking back, they weren’t that good.

I’ve read some great historical novels recently. Cutting for Stone (Abraham Verghese), Someone Knows My Name (Lawrence Hill). Sitting a notch below but still satisfying is Robin Oliveira’s My Name is Mary Sutter, which covers the opening years of the Civil War through the eyes of a young midwife who yearns to be a surgeon, her New York family and the two doctors who nurture her fledgling career.

In certainly the most interesting twist, Abraham Lincoln emerges as an important secondary character. Here, he’s more than cameo role, more than a walk-on. Interspersed with the fictional characters, he suffers the death of his beloved son Willie and finds himself frustrated over the conflicting war strategies of his advisors. As the Civil War begins, Commander of the Union Army George McClellan wants to swiftly move his men into battle, while General Irvin McDowell believes the Union soldiers unprepared and advises a wait-and-see approach. (Interesting historical fact covered by the book: Robert E. Lee was President Lincoln’s first choice to lead the Union forces but the Virginia native opted to secede and embraced the Confederacy.) Thus, Lincoln, like the nation, is caught between aggressive action and careful introspection.

And so is Mary Sutter, the young woman so furiously bent on going south and becoming a surgeon on (or near) the battlefield. Her family wants to pull her back to safety.

For me, this is what makes a historical novel great. When the author identifies the themes of the chosen history and presents these themes within the physical, psychological and emotional experiences of the lead characters. Here, Mary equals Lincoln. And Dr. James Blevens, one of Mary’s mentors, believes that more soldiers can be saved if doctors invest in the possibilities of the microscope rather than the quick fix of the ambulance. (See, the introspection of research into diseases killing the soldiers off the battlefield versus the ability to get wounded soldiers into hospitals as rapidly as possible.)

Similarly, Abraham Verghese, in Cutting for Stone, effectively echoes the fracture of the political brotherhood of Ethiopia and Eritria during the War of Independence of the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s with the conflict between Marion and Shiva Stone, twins born of a nun and the emotionally vacant Dr. Thomas Stone at a mission hospital in Addis Abiba.

Read Cutting for Stone before Mary Sutter, but consider both to be fine novels of history.

Why 2011 was Hemingway's Year

Looking back on 2011:

With the 50th anniversary of Hemingway's death on July 2nd, the release of Paula McClain's THE PARIS WIFE and Woody Allen's MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, 2011 seemed to be the Year of the Comeback.

Why? and Why Now?

Certainly, what's compelling the novelist Paula McClain and the legendary Woody Allen to revive Hemingway has to be more than an opportunity to exploit the anniversaries for publicity or marketing. Sure, it's another round of nostalgia (the central subject of Allen's Midnight in Paris, which may end up his most successful film ever) and it might even be the result of a desire to resurrect the masculine male hero in a culture where the men have become boys - think Owen Wilson in Woody's movie as the sputtering Gil, unable to set his fiancé straight. (I wonder what the current ratio is between men who own a hunting gun vs. men who have Facebook.) But I think it's more than that. In a cinematic atmosphere of explosions, chaos and excess (think Transformers) and an era in literary history in which post-modern flourishes (faux footnotes, every-changing point of view, text manipulation, etc.) grab the attention of critics, Hemingway's revolutionary prose style shows us how great writing can be if a writer remains focused on what is essential, simple and true.

The author of The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls and the favorite of high school English departments everywhere (at least in the Chicago suburbs circa 1979) The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway developed a lean, muscular style in which no sentence, no word, no piece of punctuation was superfluous. Look at these lines from For Whom the Bell Tolls, as the hero Robert Jordan lingers at the edge of death:

He was completely integrated now and he took a good long look at everything. Then he looked up at the sky. There were big white clouds in it. He touched the palm of his hand against the pine needles where he lay and he touched the bark of the pine trunk that he lay behind.

Notice the momentum created by no commas, the power gained from the stripped-down prose. It's simple, it's elegant, and it has, as many critics have noted, muscle. It relies on the essentials of the scene, nothing more.

Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris (now on DVD) is a movie about nostalgia, about wishing for a more vibrant, intoxicating time. For Allen, as it is for many, it's Paris in the 1920's, a time in which Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso and Degas gathered in cafes, bars and Gertrude Stein's living room to discuss art, life and Fitzgerald's wife Zelda.  Owen Wilson's Gil, suffering writer's block and a shrew of a girlfriend (Rachel MacAdams is usually terrific but boy, is she one-note annoying here), is whisked back to the 1920's where he becomes, to his surprise, a player in Stein's salon. Allen never tells us exactly how Gil time travels but that's a plus -- do we have to have everything explained? Gil wants to stay there until he realizes that wishing yourself back in time prevents you from living in the present. The movie is worth seeing but it's got some problems. Just in case you don't get what Allen is trying to say, he gives Gil a speech in the last act of the movie in which he says, "I have an insight," then goes on to state Allen's theme. Wasn't Woody more nimble with Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors? Oh wait, then there's Bananas, Interiors and Annie Hall? All classics, yes, but I wouldn't call them subtle. When he's not over-explaining, Allen is reminiscing about a time where things, like art and truths, actually mattered. (In the Q & A with Jeff Goldsmith podcast -- a fantastic series of interviews with screenwriters and directors available through iTunes -- Woody Allen said he likes to imagine himself living in great periods of the past until he remembers there was no Novocaine.)

Hemingway even pops up as a character in the film. Played by Corey Stoll (I've never heard of this guy but he makes an impression), Ernest on the screen remains nothing more than a caricature but in a conversation with Gil, he says some interesting things.

HEMINGWAY (to GIL): You liked my book
GIL:  Liked? I loved all of your work.
HEMINGWAY: Yes. It was a good book because it was an honest book, and that's what war does to men. And there's nothing fine and noble about dying in the mud unless you die gracefully. And then it's not only noble but brave.

"Brave", "honest", "noble" : qualities not many contemporary characters possess. Recently, bumbling anti-heroes have gotten all the starring roles. (Walter in Jonathan Franzen's Freedom to name one fascinating, but flawed individual.) As complicated as Hemingway was, his work did not suffer from a lack of strong central figures.

Nancy McClain, the author of this year's The Paris Wife, presents a convincing 3-dimensional portrait of Hemingway from his early Chicago days through Paris and Spain and in a heartbreaking epilogue, his final days in Ketchum, Idaho. Through the voice of Hadley, his first wife, we see Hemingway as a young artist developing his craft. The city of Paris here is as inspirational and as creatively fertile as Woody Allen's City of Lights but it's also cruel and shallow and dangerous to Hadley and Ernest's relationship. There's no nostalgia here, just two people deeply in love who can't survive the dangerous allure and excess of an artist's European education.

McClain, like others, explores Hemingway's connection to the truth. When things are still good in Paris with Hemingway writing "My Old Man" and "Up in Michigan," stories that will later be collected in Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), Hemingway says, " I want to write one true sentence.... If I can write one sentence, simple and true, every day, I'll be satisfied." Hadley, who nurtures the artist and gives birth to his first son Bumby, is written to be a model of simplicity, and the success of their early relationship is evidence of Hemingway's commitment to the truth. Here's the voice of Hadley:

I wore what was easiest and required the least maintenance, long wool skirts and shapeless sweaters and wool cloche hats. Ernest didn't seem to mind. If anything, he thought highly costumed women were ridiculous. It was part of the way he favored everything simple—good, straightforward food, rust and almost chewy wine, peasant people with uncomplicated values and language.

Later, when Hadley flees Paris, Hemingway writes a letter of goodbye:

You are everything good and straight and true—and I see that so clearly now, in the way you've carried yourself and listened to your own heart. You've changed me more than you know, and will always be a part of everything I am.

Hemingway's art may have continued to mine the truth but in his life, the artist became lost in the myth that hardened around him. And it seems to me these current efforts to revive the figure of Hemingway are attempts to see behind the shell of nostalgia and caricature. More than a creative coincidence, these appearances of the young Hemingway in two popular works remind us that as as complicated as the man was, his art did not suffer from bloated prose and literary embellishment covering for shallow ideas.

Note: In another bit of Hemingway nostalgia: a new film, HEMINGWAY AND GELLHORN, will premiere on HBO later this year, starring Clive Owen as Papa and Nicole Kidman as Wife #3 (of 4).

When a Locket Means More than a Locket

Last month, Older Daughter and I went to our first midnight movie together: the opening night of J.J. Abrams' Super 8. She's old enough now to recognize that movies are not just for entertainment; they can be as rich and meaningful as the best of narratives. Take away the pages, the words, the chapters and the binding, books and movies are awful lot alike. If you engage with the film's story as you would a novel or a piece of creative non-fiction, you might find a rich subtext where the filmmaker weaves ideas and messages through the cinematic images. Of course, some movies are pure pop (Transformers, Horrible Bosses), offering not much more than a visual, emotional or comedic thrill. But others give us more by taking on symbol and theme.

Take Super 8, for example. In what some may perceive as simply a high-concept, popcorn movie (an alien on the loose in small-town Ohio), director/screenwriter addresses the thematic idea of emotional repression. Here's the story: Joe, a middle-school kid, and his friends decide to spend the summer making a Super 8 zombie movie, but during a nighttime shoot at their town's train depot, the teenagers witness a horrific train derailment. The scene is captured by their rolling camera and three days later when the film is developed (this all takes place in the 1970's, an era when all film had to be developed in a photo lab), Joe discovers that some kind of monster -- later revealed as a captured alien turned lab rat -- escaped from one of the train cars.

Sounds like your typical summer blockbuster -- and it is. But then, there's this locket. As the movie opens, we learn that Joe's mother as been killed on the job at the steel mill: the first extended sequence takes place post-funeral as friends and neighbors gather at Joe's home. While his repressed father stands in the house, Joe seeks refuge on the swing outside in the snow, fingering a locket that contains a picture of his mother. After Joe's father throws out a guest -- the man who he deems responsible for his wife's death -- Joe snaps shut the locket as the film goes to black. And in case you missed the importance of the closed locket (the film is not subtle --not at all -- but the heavy hand isn't enough to spoil the great moments throughout), there's a loud, echoing boom (the locket slamming shut) on the soundtrack.

In several other spots, the locket reappears (the cameo makes a cameo) and becomes the central symbol of the film. Joe's father, unable or unwilling to express his grief with anyone, wants him to go away from the summer; Joe wants to stay and make the zombie movie. He doesn't speak of his mother to his friends, even thought it's a small town and everybody knows of Joe's misfortune. But Joe keeps that locket, which remains closed, near throughout the movie. And remember, there's his mother's picture in there.

So the locket becomes a reminder that Joe (and of course, his father) remain hopelessly closed off from processing the pain caused by the death of the mother. Later, Joe pursues his crush on Alice Dainard (played effortlessly by Elle Fanning whose performance may be the best thing in the movie), who has been cast as the female romantic lead in the zombie film. Alice is the daughter of the man who called in sick to the mill which led to Joe's mother being called in to work on her day off (the same man thrown out of the funeral reception by Joe's father) and she reveals, in a scene where Joe shows her Super 8 home movies of his mother playing with him when he was an infant, that her father also has been devastated by grief -- yet another emotionally repressed character. As Joe and Alice bond, he shows her the locket; he's getting closer to symbolically opening the locket and consequently, himself.

SPOILER ALERT: This domestic drama is interrupted by the presence of the alien monster escaped from the army train in the derailment and now messing with the town by stealing engines from cars, scaring off dogs and scrambling electricity. And he's got his own version of the locket. In a fairly contrived turn of the plot, Joe and his buddies get their hands on some research films that reveal the monster has been held in captivity for years, the subject of intense research by the government. One scientist suspects that the alien is aggressively violent only because it's scared and homesick. And yet again, a third (or fourth or fifth) character who's cut off, shutting down, acting out.

Emotional repression; it's the big idea of Super 8. And it's a summer blockbuster -- who would have thunk it?

In the end, when the kids go AWOL to find the alien, when Joe's father frantically searches for his missing son, when Mr. Dainard reaches out to Joe's father in an effort to save his daughter, the characters begin to emote and connect, leading to the resolution of the alien invasion. The locket makes a final appearance in the last moments of the film; what happens to it suggests that Joe, his father, Mr. Dainard (perhaps event the monster) have, through the action of the movie, found a way to let go of whatever emotions they've hidden.

Many narratives (films, novels, TV episodes, etc.) have their own lockets -- objects that suggest more than what they are and often, holding the big abstract idea of the story. Woody Allen has his Paris, Stieg Larsson has his dragon tattoo and Super 8 has its locket.

What a Painter Can Do

The English artist Lucian Freud died Wednesday, July 20th, at age 88.

The man -- grandson of Sigmund -- may not have had the name recognition as a Rembrandt, a Gauguin or a Warhol but he was a prolific portraitist who created dynamic often strange paintings of an entire range of bodies and faces. I was immediately smitten with his stuff when I went to see a London retrospective of his work in 2003. And a copy of his REFLECTION WITH TWO CHILDREN hangs in my classroom at school. Or used to hang -- recently, my co-teacher told me the painting intimidating students so it's now in my office.

It's a self-portrait with images of his son and daughter in the lower left corner. He painted it by looking at his reflection in a mirror on the ground. Every year, I use the painting in my creative writing class to ask students what makes a narrative. The assignment: create a first line of a story based on the painting. The kids love the exercise and their responses have been fantastic.

A few examples:

They had no idea what their father would say when he came home to find the dead dog.
The appointment was at 3.
When he showed up in formal wear, they knew they were in a heap of trouble.

The point of the exercise is to challenge students to see a story in everything -- painting, photograph, sculpture, poem, a song, etc. If it suggest conflict, it's a story. Each of the first lines above, and most of the sentences provoked by the exercise, immediately create tension. And it's conflict and tension that set a narrative in motion

Yes, sometimes your imagination must collaborate with the painter in order to get the story started but interpretation (of any given narrative) always requires a creative kick-start.

Certainly there's a story in Géricault's RAFT OF THE MEDUSA.

But is there one here, in Grant Wood's AMERICAN GOTHIC?

There's tension here. What is the woman looking at? Why isn't she, like her husband, looking forward? And look closely at the man. He's also looking to the side. What's going on outside the frame of the painting? And if there's tension, there's story. Yes, we must assume, but I think the mere presence of questions provides the start of a narrative.

That's one of the wonderful things about stories -- they're everywhere.

Why Three is a Magic Number

Consider this:

Olga, Marina, Irina (Chekov's Three Sisters)

Goneril, Regan, Cordelia (Shakespeare's King Lear)

Athropos, Lachesis, Clotho (the Three Fates of Greek Mythology)

Anastasia, Drizzella, Cinderella (French folk tale by way of Disney)

Elinor, Marianne, Margaret (Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility)

Scarlett, Suellen, Carreen (Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind)

Rachel, Leah, Addy (Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible)

Barbara, Ivy, Karen (Tracy Letts's August: Osage County)

See a pattern?

While reading Eleanor Brown's new novel, The Weird Sisters, which features its own trio of sisters, I thought about how often triad of sisters pop up in literature. The title of Brown's book is reference, in and of itself, to the three witches that haunt Shakespeare's MacBeth.

The narrative here follows the three daughters of a Shakespeare professor who's named them after three of the Bard's famous female characters. Rosalind from As You Like It, Bianca from The Taming of the Shrew and Cordelia (from King Lear). The author makes a clever connection between the personality of the girls and the qualities of the literary characters. Brown has several compelling things to say about family and the restrictive roles siblings must play. Birth order dictates behavior as does past behavior and parental expectations. The Andreas sisters are plagued by all these forces and spend the length of the book trying to slip out from under the pressure of family.

Only when a priest from a neighboring church tells Bean (nickname of Bianca) that there's a way out do these girls get smart. Here's what Father Aidan has to say:

We all have stories we tell ourselves. We tell ourselves we are too fat, or too ugly, or too old, or too foolish. We tell ourselves these stories because they allow us to excuse our actions, and they allow us to pass off the responsibility for things we have done—maybe to something within our control, but anything other than the decisions we have made.... Your story, Bean, is the story of your sisters. And it is past time, I think, for you to stop telling that particular story, and tell the story of yourself.... There are times in our lives when we have to realize out past is precisely what it is, and we cannot change it. But we can change the story we tell ourselves about it, and by doing that, we can change the future.

Pretty smart, I guess, but also very convenient. When you need wisdom in your novel, just put in a priest to tell your characters exactly what they need to hear. But, The Weird Sisters entertains with its spunky voice and its quirky details that allow for three richly drawn women. More than anything, though, the book made me think about the odd phenomenon of the three sisters. Back to the point.

Three, of course, is a magic number.

Three represents unity, the harmony of the opposites, wholeness. A shape or form cannot be created without the third side. But considering yin and yang,  a third element represents disruption, which may just connect to conflict, the driving force of every narrative. And what's more, the number three is said to represent creativity, fecundity and fertility—note that a woman's pregnancy is split into trimesters, three segments of three months. So, the number three is tinged with the spirit of femininity.

Thinking about the sisters listed above, and Eleanor Brown's characters, it's clear that each different member of a family triangle possesses different, often conflicting, characteristics. Is this what these authors are up to? Exploring how three different people will react to a central problem, experience or challenge? Revealing three separate methods of solving a fictional dilemma? Do three sisters give a wholeness to the family, a unity, a shape? Is three more interesting than two or four?

Whatever the case, we have them, all these three sisters. And we have them a lot.

Full disclosure: In the book I'm writing (I'm calling it There You Are for the time being), I've also created three sisters: two full sisters and one half-sister named Joan, Phoebe and Kimberly. It just happened, though. I didn't think "Oh, yeah. If you're going to have sisters, you've got to have three." Or "Shakespeare did it, so I'll do it." These three characters just came out from the world of my imagination.

But maybe they did, because three is indeed a magical number, floating around in my creative consciousness as it does for every writer. Wow. Weird.

Postscript: One of the sister teams listed above is actually part of a foursome. But the fourth sister doesn't make it through the first act so I'm kinda still right. Can you pick the offending sisters out of the bunch?

What's Your Accordion?

Back to The Book Thief.

Liesel Meminger, the so-called book thief, discovers that expresses herself the best through reading and writing. As many of her neighbors cower in a bomb shelter waiting out air attacks, Liesel reads from her latest stolen book.

She didn't dare to look up, but she could feel their frightened eyes 

hanging on to her as she hauled the words in and breathed them out. 

A voice played the notes inside her. This, it said, is your accordion.

My accordion is also reading and writing but even more so, it's talking about the stories I read and write, or hear and see on screens both large and small. My friend and mentor Katherine Legan says fine literature teaches us how to live. I go further. Narratives -- on the page or screen -- teach us not only how to live but also to feel, to think, to love.

This project is dedicated to stories and narratives of all kinds. Please join in the conversation and leave your comments about whatever you read on this blog.