So you want to be a famous novelist

I don’t want to ruin a streak, so just as pretty much everyone who has chosen a book has said: “I loved this book!” I mean, really loved it. Since I finished reading it, I’ve evangelized it to everyone who mentions any of the following: books, reading, Barnes and Noble or awesomeness. Or pretty much to anyone who uses words, really. I probably could have finished it in just a few days, but I forced myself to dole it out in smaller pieces and took the better part of a week because I didn’t want it to end. (I’d be interested if anyone else did this, or if I was just being weird.) To me, the most powerful thing about the book was that since I finished it, it has made me very aware in the real world of the different clichés he used to make his own book popular. This does make me a more skeptical consumer of popular culture, which I won’t necessarily value-judge as good or bad. But in fairness, I’d also say that the good that came from reading this book is that it has encouraged me read more than I have in years (I’ve finished three books since I started this one).

I liked a lot about How I Became A Famous Novelist (or HIBAFN). I thought the book managed some sharp criticism, impressively covering all aspects of the writing business. It takes on everything from MFA programs, literary criticism, the business of the publishing industry, the sometimes-ridiculous nature of genre fiction, the editorial process, the mass-reading audience and even Hollywood and a few more that I’ve probably neglected to list here. Additionally, this is one of only a few books that had me laugh out loud while reading. (Yes, I LOLed.) I think the funniest parts of the book were the asides-- the excerpts from other books, the faux NYT best-seller list, the fake reviews of The Tornado Ashes Club and things like that. But like any good criticism, it was so funny because it was so true.

What I didn’t like about the book? Honestly, I didn’t like that Hely felt we needed to learn lessons by having Pete constantly doing the wrong thing. We’re set up from the beginning to see Pete as a kind of anti-hero, a slacker who is only self-interested, skating by doing the very minimum… but I really wanted him to succeed with his master plan. There were many times when I was like “Man, I would have kept it together if that was me.” Now granted, if Pete didn’t mess up all the good he created in the first half of the book, I suppose there wouldn’t have been a very interesting second half. But I kind of felt let down when Pete wasn’t awesome at Polly’s wedding, when he screwed up the Television interview and when he gets pwned at the literary debate. This is probably my own fault for identifying too closely with the main character, but I am also curious if others were looking for that atavistic pleasure of being the badass Pete thought he was going to be when he set out to write the novel.

I wanted to open this section up for general discussion about HIBAFN, or any of the questions above. Further discussion to follow.

Preston Brooks: Flaming A-Hole or no?

Personally, I disliked Preston Brooks as a character, and would have liked to see him get his comeuppance at some point. Even by the end of the book I wasn’t convinced he wasn’t just a bloviating windbag. However, the book sets him up as a sort of voice of truth. In his television interview, Preston Brooks says, “Writing is a cudgel I wield to chase away the brigands who would burn down the precious things of the human heart.” That moment makes Pete realize that Brooks, and very likely all novelists, are “con artists.” Is he right?

Fame? I, for one, want to live forever.

I thought the novel was also very incisive when talking about the nature of fame and mass popularity. Consider the following excerpt:

Anyone who’s paying attention in America can tell you it’s strange which things become famous and popular and why. I like to imagine that, around 800 B.C., somewhere in ancient Greece, a guy, let’s call him Linus, wrote an epic poem. It was pretty good, full of adventures and strange animals and sexy goddesses and five-armed monsters and all the stuff epic audiences go for. Linus started orating it, or whatever they used to do. But somehow, people just liked The Odyssey better. No one could explain why. Maybe a particular king or something insisted on the Homer version, and everybody went along. Maybe Homer got there first, or had a better orating voice, or ran a better marketing campaign. But 2800 years later, we’ve all heard of Homer and nobody’s heard of Linus.

You could argue that The Odyssey was the better work. More intelligent or poetic, or addressing universal themes – and that’s why it lasted. But I don’t think so. There’s not much evidence that fame and popularity follow any kind of logical pattern. And who can tell these days anyway? The whole thing’s more or less a crapshoot. For every Charles Dickens who catches a break, there’s probably some guy named Bartles Osbrook who was just as good but less lucky. In some alternate universe they gather and read Osbrook’s classic A Christmas Fable around the holidays.

After cracking the 23^rd spot on the NYT Best-seller List, Pete spends Christmas with his family. He says that he was “nervous that I’d be called upon to say witty things, but instead everyone assumed the regular things I said were witty.” What does this observation reveal about the nature of fame, or about the nature of family dinner table conversations? What do we think of Hely’s take on popularity?

Is it the message, or the messenger?

Things could have worked out differently for Pete if he had simply not revealed his literary insincerity. In some way, he is like a magician who reveals his secrets, a cardinal sin in that business. Do we think his primary error was admitting his motives, or did he commit a graver sin against Literature, with a capital L? Consider his statement at the bar with the MFA students: “I’d profaned the evening. These people treated stories like sacraments.” Should they be in general, or is it commentary on the literary bubble within these programs?

How to write a best-selling novel

Based on research conducted in bookstores and the NYT best-seller’s list, Pete Tarslaw devises a set of rules for how to write a best-selling novel. Among them:

• Abandon truth.

• Write a popular book. Do not waste energy making it a good book.

• Must include a murder.

• Must include a club, secrets/mysterious missions.

• Main character is miraculously liberated from a lousy job.

• Novel must have scenes on a highway.

• At dull points include descriptions of delicious meals.

Are there any common best-seller tropes that he left out? What can we add to the list? Also, how does this list of rules compare to the common “rules of fiction” widely taught in high schools and universities? If it were real, would we have chosen to read The Tornado Ashes Club in this book club?

What is “good” writing?

Late in the book we meet Professor Mintz, who believes that books should be judged not on their literary merits but based on their popularity. Instead of teaching Moby-Dick in class, his students read an 1880s novel about cannibals that he deems superior to Melville’s classic because it was more popular in its time. Is there an intellectual case to be made in support of Mintz’s literary approach, or is it absurd?

Editing in HIBAFN

The technology exists today for anyone to publish a book. Without an editor, however, a vanity press will still put out books like Moon People (first page link).

Within HIBAFN, Lucy engineers the sale of Pete’s book and becomes its editor and also manages to come out of the novel not only professionally successful, but “wise” (considering her choice of, and Pete’s reading of, Peking). At the same time, mega-successful author Pamela McLaughlin says “Editors are accountants with red pens.” What is Hely trying to tell us about editors/the editorial process, or is he merely highlighting the divide between authors and editors?

Bad Good Writing

I wanted to include one last section for anyone to write in some intentionally bad Good Writing, or good Bad Writing or any combination thereof. I’ll try and work on a paragraph of my own, but I thought it’d be fun to give people the opportunity, since it seemed like so much fun in the book.

How I Became A Famous Novelist, by Steve Hely

Hello again, friends. We've passed the first lap and here we are back at the beginning. After changing gears (behind the scenes) about nine times, I've finally settled on our next book which will officially kick off the second season of a very special book club (or AVSBC, as television without pity calls us). That book is How I Became A Famous Novelist by Steve Hely.

After some of the heavy reading we've had, I think of this book as a palate cleanser. More importantly, this is one of the few groups out there that I can trust to be literary enough to actually get this book and why it's funny. I think it can open up discussions of what makes "bad" writing... well, bad, and why so much bad writing is popular. So yes, it's a book about writing a book, which delves feet-first into meta territory, but having just sampled some snippets of it, I can tell you it is not only very funny but also very, very smart.

I don't want to give away too much, or ruin any of the jokes in the book (the fictional NYT Bestseller list is particularly hilarious) so I'll add a quick note from the publisher's site here...

"Narrated by an unlikely literary legend, How I Became a Famous Novelist pinballs from the postcollege slums of Boston to the fear-drenched halls of Manhattan’s publishing houses, from the gloomy purity of Montana’s foremost writing workshop to the hedonistic hotel bars of the Sunset Strip.

This is the horrifying, hilarious tale of how Pete Tarslaw’s “pile of garbage,” called The Tornado Ashes Club, became the most talked about, blogged about, read, admired, and reviled novel in America. It will change everything you think you know—about literature, appearance, truth, beauty, and those people out there, somewhere in America, who still care about books."

And I'd like to link to a real fake website for the fake book in the real book. It should give you a pretty good idea of what we're about to get into. (I highly recommend the fake interview with the main character). Additionally, here's an excerpt from the (fake) book The Tornado Ashes Club by the main character, Pete Tarslaw:

In strewn banners that lay like streamers from a longago parade the sun’s fading seraphim rays gleamed onto the hood of the old Ford and ribboned the steel with the meek orange of a June tomato straining at the vine. From the back seat, door open, her nimble fingers moved along the guitar like a weaver’s on a loom. Stitching a song. The cloth she made was a cry of aching American chords, dreamlike warbles built to travel miles of lonesome road. They faded into the twilight, and Silas leaned back on the asphalt, as if to watch them drift into the Arkansas mist.

Away from them, across the field of low-cut durum wheat, they saw Evangeline’s frame, outlined pale in shadow against the highway sky, as it trembled.That’s the way it is with a song, isn’t it? she said. The way it quivers in your heart. Quivers like the wing of a little bird.

In a story too. He spoke it softly in a voice that let her hear how close they were. That’s the way it is with a story. Turns your heart into a bird.

I made this choice because I think we're a group in America that still cares about books. (Hopefully I also found something that no one has read yet!) Discussion questions to follow in a few weeks. Let me know of any questions, concerns, etc.

Snow Crash

I think it was clear from the post where I announced my selection that I love this book. It's hard to pinpoint exactly why, but I think it really comes down to how well he understands hackers and hacker culture. Little peeks into Hiro's life, such as his reflections on his relationship with Juanita and his struggles to be happy and motivated as a corporate employee, are astonishingly spot on. But I'll be honest: Most of the reason I love Snow Crash is for passages like this:

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug delaers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken. The crowning touch, the one thing that really puts true world-class badmotherfuckerdom totally out of reach, of course, is the hydrogen bomb. If it wasn't for the hydrogen bomb, a man could still aspire. Maybe find Raven's Achilles' heel. Sneak up, get a drop, slip a mickey, pull a fast one. But Raven's nuclear umbrella kind of puts the world title out of reach.

Which is okay. Sometimes it's all right just to be a little bad. To know your limitations. Make do with what you've got.

I have a feeling, however, that regardless of my feelings about this particular novel, in a lot of ways, it was more of a challenge for our group than Gilead was. I decided to go with fewer structured discussion topics to see if it doesn't help foster a little more concentrated discussion. I'm very interested to hear your discussions!

Babel

"The cult of Asherah lifes. The Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates is the cult of Asherah."

Science fiction is a difficult genre to define, but I'll give it a shot. Science fiction is the exploration of what would happen if a specific technology or concept were developed. If anti-gravity existed, the world would look like this. If interstellar space travel were possible, the universe would look like this. The real root technology of this novel, however, is rooted in the past.

Much of Snow Crash is dominated by conversations between Hiro and Librarian about Babel, the Sumerians, and the propagation of religion as a virus. This is characteristic of Stephenson's work - his most recent book, Anathem, which I read shortly after finishing Snow Crash for the book club, is dominated by old school dialogs like you'll find in classic philosophical texts. The main plot - that L. Bob Rife is using a metavirus and a Pentecostal religion to promote glossolalia so he can control them with a master tongue - encompasses a lot of big topics that require a lot of background knowledge, but Stephenson's dialogs attempt to get that data across to the reader without getting too dry by using his characters' conversational style.

Use this post to discuss the topics of the Tower of Babel, linguistics, viruses, and religion. What did you think of Snow Crash's central science in this work of science fiction?

Et cetera

          Hiro did not attend Juanita and Da5id's wedding; he was languishing in jail, into which he had been thrown a few hours before the rehearsal. He had been found in Golden Gate Park, lovesick, wearing nothing but a thong, taking long pulls from a jumbo bottle of Courvoisier and practicing kendo attacks with a genuine samurai sword, floating across the grass on powerfully muscled thighs to slice other picnickers' hurtling Frisbees and baseballs in twain. Catching a long fly ball with the edge of your blade, neatly halving it like a grapefruit, is not an insignificant feat. The only drawback is that the owners of the baseball may misinterpret your intentions and summon the police.

          He got out of it by paying for all the baseballs and Frisbees, but since that episode, he has never even bothered to ask Juanita whether or not she thinks he's an asshole. Even Hiro knows the answer now.

Use this post for random topics you want to discuss that don't necessarily warrant an entire post. Some suggestions:

-Feminism in Snow Crash
-Uncle Enzo
-L. Bob Rife
-What nationality would you be? What Burbclave would you live in?

The Future in Snow Crash

          “She has to find someplace to pull into. If she could find a Nova Sicilia franchulate, that would do it – the Mafia owes her one. Or a New South Africa, which she hates. But the New South Africans hate jeeks even more.

          Scratch that; Hiro is black, or at least part black. Can’t take him into New South Africa. And because Y.T. is a Cauc, they can’t go to Metazania.

          “Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong,” Hiro says. “Half mile ahead on the right.”

          “Nice thinking – but they won’t let you in with your swords, will they?”

          “Yes,” he says, “because I’m a citizen.”

Stephenson has a satirical, wry, cynical, but still plausible vision of the future. If anything, seems MORE plausible now than it did 17 years ago when the book was first published. With over half our state governments struggling to even pay their workers and our national debt in the trillions, a future where the federal government has shrunk down to “Fedland” and everything from housing to transportation to law enforcement is handled by capitalism run amok seems closer every day.

His vision of technological progress is also approaching reality. Snow Crash was written in 1992, when most of us were getting our first email accounts and most people hadn't even heard of the Internet. While his technological "predictions" are a bit less astonishing since the precursors of most of his inventions were already in place, his descriptions of them have shaped their development. Apparently Stephenson is revered like a prophet in Second Life, and Snow Crash is the bible.

What was your take on Stephenson's vision of the near future?

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

After much deliberation, I've decided that Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson will be my selection. Much like Mrs. White and her selection of Gilead, I'm using my turn to select a book that is completely different from what we've read to this point, and unless I'm mistaken, it will be something completely new from a genre standpoint for a large majority of you. Unlike most of the people in this club, most of my reading, aside from our book club, comes from the fantasy and sci-fi genres, and I want to use my selections to broaden your horizons like you folks have broadened mine with your selections.

Snow Crash is sharp and funny, a nice counterpoint from Gilead. It will also be quite a culture shock; from John Ames' slow, sedate, spiritual world of the past to the near-future world of high speed pizza delivery that Hiro Protagonist lives in - when he's not jacked into the Metaverse. Yes, the protagonist's name is Hiro Protagonist. Stephenson has a wry sense of humor.

Snow Crash is one of the modern classics of science fiction, and Stephenson is one of the few sci-fi writers of today who has a chance to transcend the genre like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. There's a lot to appreciate here, from the satire of modern life, to the Stephenson's vision of the future of computing and communications... and that's not even taking into account the story itself, which is plenty enough reason to love the book. As paul pointed out to me a few days ago, this is our longest selection to date, at 468 pages, but I don't anticipate that being much of an obstacle. This is a novel that was written to be read - not written to win a Pulitzer. The pace of the story carries the reader along with it, especially compared to previous selections like Revolutionary Road and Gilead... both great books, but they read like a Sunday drive. Snow Crash reads like a Formula 1 road race in comparison.

Here's what the publisher has to say:

Only once in a great while does a writer come along who defies comparison — a writer so original he redefines the way we look at the world. Neal Stephenson is such a writer and Snow Crash is such a novel, weaving virtual reality, Sumerian myth, and just about everything in between with a cool, hip cyber-sensibility to bring us the gigantic thriller of the information age.

In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo's Cosa Nostra Inc., but it the Metaverse he's a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that's striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about infocalypse. Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous... you'll recognize it immediately.

I think 4 weeks should be plenty of time for us finish the book so we can begin discussion. That would put us at September 6th. If people think they need longer (or heck, even shorter, since I read near half the book yesterday after composing this post), drop a comment here and we can modify as needed.

Gilead

Although Marilynne Robinson's Gilead had been strongly recommended to me by two people whose literary opinions I value quite highly, I now admit my initial reluctance to read it. A epistolary novel about a preacher in 1950s Iowa just didn't sound like something that would grab me, I suppose. And although the first fifty or so pages were exquisitely written and sprinkled with gorgeously constructed sentences and sentiments, I'm not entirely positive I would have made is past those first fifty meandering pages has it not been for two things: this book club, and this passage:

I'm writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you've done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you...You're just a nice-looking boy, a bit slight, well scrubbed and well mannered. All that is fine, but it's your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined (52-53).

As corny as it sounds, I fell in love with John Ames (and, consequently, this novel) during this moment, a moment which encapsulated John's worldview for me: there is the potential for grace in everyone, beauty and joy can be present in even the most ordinary of things, and the mere existence of a person can be miraculous. (Of course this worldview is tested later in the novel with the return of Jack Boughton, but that's a topic for discussion, I suppose.) And after a few more glittering moments like the one above, I stopped searching for a plot - though one does eventually emerge - and started reveling in the way the novel was making me feel. Gilead is perhaps the single most loving thing I have ever read. For me, this book was a source of calm during a time in my life when it was sorely needed, and I am deeply thankful to have read it.

(And for the record, I'm not just saying these things because this book was my choice. I quite sincerely mean every single sappy word.)

But with that said, I also understand that this is an incredibly challenging novel in a lot of ways. Some readers take issue with the use of religion, others with the seemingly random narrative structure, and I'm sure a great many readers called it quits before the eventual plot began to reveal itself. And although I can (and will) defend all these criticisms, I can't fault anyone for having them. Gilead is an acquired taste, and one probably needs to be in a certain frame of mind to fully appreciate it.

So, in accordance to custom, I've posted below several questions for possible discussion. I hope you all get a chance to share your thoughts at some point soon, and please feel free to add a topic/question if you feel there is something I have overlooked. After all, there's quite a lot here to discuss.