Two 2011 best ofs revisited

I was hardly scientific about it, but like many reading people I kept a cursory tally of which books made the various "best of 2011" lists when such lists were everywhere last December: on the radio, in magazines, in newspapers, on the web. Two historical novels earned frequent mention: The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak and Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks. The latter won more notoriety than the former--and I'd been meaning to get to Brooks's novel for months when those "best of" lists gave me the push I needed. The Sojourn, meanwhile, I was less familiar with, but based on descriptions by those who hailed it, it sounded very much like a book I would like. Well, a few months and a million different activities later, I've finished both of these historical novels and am ready to deliver my, characteristically belated, reader's report. Both books are impeccably researched and carefullly considered, both demonstrate significant strengths to go along with glaring weaknesses, but finally this "best of" historical duo hit a disappointing one-for-two. To choose a different, non-baseball metaphor, if I were film critic Roger Ebert, thinking in terms of thumbs up and thumbs down, I would have to give Caleb's Crossing a measured thumbs up and The Sojourn a reluctant thumbs down.

It's not surprising to find out that The Sojourn is Andrew Krivak's first novel. Being the grandson of Slovak immigrants, there is a feeling of personal mission to the book. The Sojourn tells the story of Jozef Vinich. Born of immigrant parents in the United States, he must accompany his father back to Europe at age two after his mother dies and father subsequently fails to earn a living in America. Eventually, Jozef develops into a talented marksman and serves as a sniper in World War 1, fighting for the Austrio-Hungarian empire. The second half of the novel details Jozef's trying experiences in the war and the vacant, pointless life he is left with afterwards. At novel's end he manages his return to the United States. As Jozef says, his sojourn around the Old Country is finished. If this sounds like a winning formula for a literary war novel, it is. Or should be. And Krivak can be hailed for the amount of research he carried out about the Great War generally and the role of snipers specifically. The book exudes historical authenticity. Furthermore, when Krivak commits himself to a scene, his scenes can be riveting. But The Sojourn fails for two basic reasons. First, Krivak indulges in way too much talking about his character's life than showing that life. I am intensely relieved when he finally agrees to present a scene, but those scenes are invariably too short and too distant from the last one or the next. Second, a related failure, Krivak really loves to hear his own narrative voice, which results not just in overwriting but in sentences so ungainly I would run my pen through them if he were a fiction writing student. Krivak's operating premise seems to be, Never use three sentences if you can cram everything into one. Here's just one example from mid-way through the book: "And although we remained silent as we moved, over tea they (who seemed to know who and what we were) would remind us, in a tone strangely hieratic and as though they could see into our disappointment at having been ordered away from Soca, that this, too, was a front, these mountain borders that separated centuries of their own cultures, convictions, and quiet life from the new, false sense of nation that the Italians in their folly had already succumbed to, and of this we had no doubt as we fell back into formation and followed our guides along some path that remained invisible to us and yet to them had been carved in stone by great-great-grandfathers long ago." Try adding up how many different statements are embedded into that one sentence. Krivak is not without talent as a writer, but sentences like that one made whole sections of The Sojourn a chore to get through rather than a pleasure. And book reading should not be a chore.

Caleb's Crossing moves in odd fits and start but it is on the whole a valuable read. Based on a real historical fact that in 1665 a Wampanoag from Martha's Vineyard became the first native American to graduate from Harvard, the novel is narrated by one Bethia Mayfield and chronicles how she met and befriended Caleb on the Vineyard and then accompanied him--along with her brother Makepeace and a second christianized Wampanoag named Joel--to Cambridge when Caleb went off to study there in a preparatory school. (Bethia works as a servant at the school in exchange for her brother being allowed to attend.) As one might expect from any contemporary novel, the Wampanoag and their shaman culture are presented as beleaguered entities, mistrusted, underestimated, and misunderstood by a rather arrogant puritan, English culture ruthlessly set on hegemony. Bethia, meanwhile, who in several significant ways feels herself at odds with puritan culture as well, proves to be the intellectual superior of not only her brother but nearly every other person, Caleb and Joel being the exceptions. This is not to say that Caleb's Crossing feels cliched but that like many contemporary historical novels it truly says more about our own time and our own cultural perceptions than it does about the earlier period. It took a little while to fully immerse myself in, but Brook's novel finally grabs and holds your attention. Brooks certainly knows how to write a scene, and she also does a remarkable job of developing a voice for Bethia that is both perfectly clear to the modern ear and yet feels like a believably 17th century one. This is to say that there is a puritan tone to Bethia's speech; enough to convince but not enough to bore. I was a little surprised when, having presented Parts One and Two of the novel as long journal writings of the teenaged Bethia, Brooks gives us Part Three as the journal of the much older, near death Bethia. We are apparently to believe that a woman driven to write when a teenager--evocatively and at length, and despite exhausting chores she must carry out--would stop writing completely for almost 50 years and then suddenly pick it up again. Much happens in the private life of Bethia in those intervening years, but it's a tribute to Brooks's discipline that she does not allow Part Three to drift much off course (no pun intended). Part Three remains focused on Caleb and the plight of the Wampanoag, despite the fact that Bethia's own life during those intervening 50 years had little to do with the Wampanoag at all. I almost was ready to write the book off as a promising yet very eccentrically structured tale, but Brooks reins in her novel and brings it to a satisying if not terribly happy close.

Keeping my characters talking

It's a whirlwind writing semester for me, as I bounce back and forth between writing fiction and poetry and trying to simultaneously market two novels and a collection of stories. Well, maybe "market" is a loaded word when it comes to the story collection, Island Fog. I've been editing it again recently and have submitted it to a couple of contests. I like the historical fictions I've written since last summer and added to the first half of the book. It's on account of these fictions that I've remade the book and am excited again about finding a readership for it. (I wrote about this in a previous post, I know.) But, like all historical fictions, this group of stories does raise various questions about what I can and am "allowed" to do. I was confronting some of these questions the other day when I looked over one story called "King Philip's War," set in 1823. The two key characters in the story are boys, one twelve years old and the other ten. The older boy is caucasian of English descent; the younger is a mixed-race child, half Wampanoag and half Irish. They live on a relatively deserted part of Nantucket island, and thus the two are more friends by necessity than choice.

It's a somewhat dialogue heavy story, at least compared to the other historical fictions in the collection. And this raises the complicated question of how a writer can effectively mimic the speech habits of an earlier era. I think this is one of the hardest aspects of composing historical fiction, one in which a writer, if he allows himself or herself to, can feel very straightjacketed. The "rules" for writing exposition--at least the practices I follow for myself--seem fairly straightforward: try to name things as they would have been named at the time; avoid contemporary slang or any expression that sounds too much of our own time; avoid blatantly anachronistic technical or medical knowledge; be true to attitudes that would have prevalent in the era, while recognizing that just as in our own time different people will different opinions. Beyond that, when writing exposition I simply try to compose good sentences. For a twenty-first century author to try to directly imitate the written English of the 1700s, let's say, or 1452, is, in my opinion, to risk something that comes across as forced and phony--and thus not alive. (What written English to use to suggest the written version of a non-English language from long ago is a whole other question.)

When writing dialogue, the matter gets more compicated, but the issues are similar. The characters ought to sound like they could exist in the given time period, but they can't sound like stick figures either. And the latter, to be frank, is the bigger issue, in my opinion. Some authors, like Geraldine Brooks in Caleb's Crossing, try to make the speech of her characters sound like what she imagines 17th century New Englanders might actually have sounded like. This might seem like a self-evident strategy to employ in writing historical fiction, but it's never a straightforward matter, because if one is writing about an era prior to the invention of sound recording, one's decisions about what spoken language sounded like is inevitably based on written language. And then, of course, one must ask, Who's written language? It gets fairly dicey fairly fast. Imagine if someone in the future made decisions about how we all talked in 2012 based solely on our written language, or only on the written language of a minority of the population. Now, this isn't to say that a historian or linguist or creative writer can't locate written documents that might reasonably suggest how some people talked in a given era--I know there are documents out there that linguists rely on--but, even then, if you base your dialogue strictly on what can be found in such sources, you are acting more as the copyist than the writer. In my opinion. Will your characters be able to say what they need to say, and more importantly, will their speech sound alive to your readers' ears--as alive as speech sounded to real speakers back in the real time--or will it sound stereotyped? I bet that if one conducted a study of historical fictions from various decades or centuries one would find that the "historical" speech of the fictional characters comes relatively close to the sound of speech in the era when the book was written. There's a reason for that. We don't want our characters to sound like--or be--stereotypes. Ever. Stereotyping means a character's--and a book's--death.

So what I decided, finally, to do with my two Nantucket boys is to allow them to sound incompletely of the 19th century. I've denuded their speech of any modern terms or slang, of course, and I took away some of the many contractions I originally inserted. But I also left several contractions. Because to my ears and my readers' ears, characters that speak without contractions will sound stultified, overtly mannered--and neither of these boys are mannered people. Even if their speech is not very accurate to the time; it's accurate to their character. And that's what I've decided is more important.