Audible incredible

A skeptic for years, I am a complete and total convert to recorded books. I can't tell you how many more books, sometimes very good books, I've been able to read in the past three years or four years just by hooking on some earbuds when I run. I started with cassette tapes and CDs from the library, but these were clunky and not terribly portable. I discovered the joys of Audible.com when my wife gave me an iPod Shuffle a few Christmases ago. Finally, I could take a book anywhere. What have I read by listening in recent years? A lot of forgotten classics and some new ones. A short list: Sula by Toni Morrison, The March by E.L. Doctorow, Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton, The Sportswriter by Richard Ford, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, Saul and Patsy by Charles Baxter, Mornings on Horseback and John Adams by David McCullough, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, A Sentimental Education by Flaubert, Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, When You are Engulfed in Flames and Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris, Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. And this does not begin to count the hundreds of stories I've listened to on NPR's Selected Shorts podcasts and The New Yorker's monthly fiction podcasts. And just with an hour each day on a treadmill. Or a longer run on Saturdays when I'm training for a marathon. I shudder to think of how much good literature I would have not experienced in recent years had I simply stared at a television screen in the gym or at passing cars on the road.

Recently, the value of Audible.com hit home as sharply as ever when, over the course of a couple weeks, I listened to Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin. The novel, of course, is no news to anyone. It only won the National Book Award for Fiction last year. With this novel and his earlier "biopic" Dancer (a novel about the life of Rudolf Nureyev), McCann may be sprinting to the top of my list of favorite contemporary writers. As a child of the 70s (though I was born in the 60s) what I admire about both books is how he brings alive the physical details, the cultural pulse, the social entropy of that oft overlooked decade. And Spin is simply a tour de force, with so many competing points of view, gender identifications, nationalities, races, age groups, and social classes convincingly presented in either first person or third peson limited that it awes the writerly imagination. Drawing on these many different perspectives, McCann recreates a day in the summer of 1974 when an acrobat famously walked across a tightrope stretched between the the twin towers in New York. And in doing so he recreates an era, a city, a country. Read it or listen to it. Either way it will be an awesome pleasure. I'm glad I didn't miss out.

A Paris party

One of the interesting features for me in writing this book is that certain chapters are from other points of view. Even if the book is Vincent's life story, I don't always remain in his point of view. This isn't unusual, although perhaps a bit counterintuitive. Colum McCann, for example, did the same in his book Dancer, a fictional take on the life of Rudolf Nureyev. As with McCann's book, a reader of mine may not pick up on the logic of why certain chapters are presented from other points of view. All I can say is that the chapters had to be written that way. The other points of view were present from the first moments I imagined those scenes. I was working on one yesterday that featured a party in Monmartre attended by many people Vincent knew there. The point of view character is Suzanne Valadon (there she is on the right, as portrayed by Renoir, and on the left as she portrayed herself) , a painter who ran with the Neoimpressionist crowd, modeled for some of them, and eventually earned well-deserved esteem for her work. In this case, there's a very specific reason why I presented the scene from Valadon's point of view. She did attend a party that Van Gogh went to and, years later, documented her observations about him. Anyone who looks into Van Gogh's biography will probably come across Valadon's recollection of that party. In doing the party scene it was Valadon's recollection that guided me from the start.

But here's something I've noticed, both in my own chapters and in real life research. Those who offered first person recollections of Van Gogh often remembered a man who is much more quirky, temperamental, and even anti-social than the Van Gogh I see in his own letters. So both in my book and in historical data, pictures of a canny and empathetic man butt up against pictures of a driven, self-involved, bewildering crank. Am I muddling the picture of my protagonist to a dangerous degree? Or am I presenting an interesting, real worldly complexity. After all, how we think of ourselves, how person X thinks of us, how person Y thinks of us, and how person Z thinks of us can be wildly divergent notions. The phenomenon I'm noting with Van Gogh is probably no different than it would be for most people, if others (years later) took the time to write down recollections of them. And in Van Gogh's case, the reputation of a man who cut off his own ear and eventually shot himself had to have embedded itself in people's minds. I think it may be true that in retrospect people remember a Van Gogh that was more erratic than the real man. Or maybe that's an excuse, an apology. But I think it makes sense. But too finally it's irrelevant to my dilemma, which is: should I keep these different pictures of my protagonist together, sometimes side-by-side? Will that help or hinder my novel? For now, they're in. Complexity is normally a good thing for main characters. It's not bad if mine demonstrates some. But with that said, I'm a long way from being done and from having made final decisions.