Do Novels Still Matter?

By Martha Nichols for Talking Writing


As far back as I can remember, I’ve wanted to read people’s minds. I was obsessed by everything I knew adults hid: unspoken nastiness; unshed tears; passion—so much passion and swallowed rage.

Which means that even at the age of ten, I was destined to love novels above all other forms of writing.

I still do. After a hiatus from novel-reading this past spring, I’ve re-discovered the joys of sinking into a long work of fiction. Moreover, Jonathan Franzen’s "Rereading The Man Who Loved Children" makes me want to defend the novel, any novel, partly because Franzen gets at least one thing wrong.

His piece about Christina Stead's 1940 novel, which recently appeared in the New York Times Book Review, is wonderful. I feel encouraged to give Stead another try. But what strikes me most are his opening questions:

“[H]aven’t we all secretly sort of come to an agreement, in the last year or two or three, that novels belonged to the age of newspapers and are going the way of newspapers, only faster? As an old English professor friend of mine likes to say, novels are a curious moral case, in that we feel guilty about not reading more of them but also guilty about doing something as frivolous as reading them….”

With all due respect to Franzen and his professor friend, no.

I haven’t secretly kissed off novels. I disagree that they represent a moral dilemma, except maybe for academics who think they should be reading “serious” nonfiction. And to equate novels with newspapers (or the dying print distribution system of news) is silly. What’s endangered is the journalistic long feature, and, yes, novels are long form. But there the comparison ends.

His opening is a rhetorical device. By the end of the review, Franzen has made the case for the value of reading Stead’s novel or any other challenging literary work. I doubt he takes the newspaper/novel comparison seriously.

Yet what comes through is a particular definition of “the novel”: a literary epic like Ulysses or To the Lighthouse or The Corrections. From monolithic works such as these, Franzen claims, we are all far too distracted by the multitasking demands of modern life. As he notes in one annoying aside, “shouldn’t you be dealing with your e-mail [instead]”?

Franzen’s high-brow assumptions have gotten him into trouble with the likes of Oprah in the past. While I have a love for many literary novels, I don’t think great literature defines the form. Literary fiction has always had a comparatively small audience. (Long ago, I made peace with my inability to tolerate Ulysses.) Sure, you can say literary novels are endangered by BlackBerrys and iPhones, but people were saying that 50 years ago about TV.

It’s the serialized, “what happens next?” aspect of a page-turner that still makes novels popular—and lucrative for some writers—whether you like Dan Brown or not. No matter how much I loathe The Da Vinci Code, it is a novel.

We still do want to know how the story ends. We want to know what’s going on in other people’s emotional lives. I do, anyway.

For years, memoirs have been shoving novels aside, but in certain basic respects they are alike: page-turning stories of triumph and disaster, with reality highly reconstructed. Even in this kind of “true” story, the truth is open to interpretation. But Franzen keeps beating the wrong drum:

“Because haven’t we left this stuff behind us? High-mindedly domineering males? Children as accessories to their parents’ narcissism? The nuclear family as a free-for-all of psychic abuse?... [W]ho wants to look into the mirror of a novel and see such ugliness?”

Um. A lot of people? Unless you’re one of those domineering narcissists.

Of course we want to read this stuff, although maybe not in the demanding "private family language" of Stead or Joyce—or at least not always.

What’s more, I’d argue that novels matter because they offer multiple points of view. Their narrators often have self-evident flaws. Unlike the omniscient news-writing voice—which is suspect in its supposed objectivity—a novelistic narrator reminds us that we all see the world through our own judgments.

In the constantly morphing, self-replicating online universe, we need that reminder more than ever.

In mid-May, at the end of my teaching semester and during a difficult family trip to California, I was suddenly struck by the need to sink into a novel. A 12-year-old friend of mine suggested Uglies by Scott Westerfeld, a young-adult novel about a near-future world in which all teens undergo an operation that turns them into “pretties.” I was hooked.

From there, in the space of two weeks, I read through the Irish comfort food of Maeve Binchy’s Heart and Soul, the literary weepie Sometimes Mine by Martha Moody, and the historical Rashomon-style kaleidoscope of characters in The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier.

I’ve now embarked on Scott Turow’s Innocent, which feels like revisiting a well-loved vacation house. Twenty-plus years ago, Turow’s blockbuster Presumed Innocent kept me up late at night—not just the story, but his gutsy approach of using a first-person narrator who's a possible murder suspect.

OK, I have decidedly middle-brow tastes.

But here’s Turow in Innocent, via his soul-stained protagonist Judge Rusty Sabich, who is brooding at the dinner table on his sixtieth birthday:

“I shrug, but somehow in retelling the story, I confront something that has grown on me over the hours, which I am reluctant to acknowledge, even to my wife and son: I am sorely guilty that I sent a man to the penitentiary for the sake of prejudices I’m now ashamed I had…. Contemplating the moral force of the point, I go silent.”

I make no sweeping claims for novels like this except that they’ve immersed me when I needed to be immersed. I’m reminded of the standouts from my youth: Childhood’s End, The Lord of the Rings, Pride and Prejudice—and every trashy gothic romance that took me to other worlds and time periods and revealed, even in the most rote way, the secret emotional nooks of others.

It’s in sharing the secrets nobody wants to admit—the shame, the guilt, the missed opportunities—that we learn empathy and, I hope, the ability to embrace complexity in a messy world. Yes. Oh, yes. Yes. Novels do matter.

Erasing Family Stories—and Reclaiming Them

By Martha Nichols for Talking Writing


I learned to erase stories at a young age.

This profoundly inhibited my writing, so much so that I didn't realize it until well past college and into adulthood. Then, in the late 1980s, I took a workshop with Bobbie Louise Hawkins, the indie fiction writer and poet, in which she urged us to write down a family story.

Every family has stories, she said in her tell-tale drawl, stories they tell for comfort, for fun, for explanation—even if it's the wrong explanation. Family stories are powerful, she said.

I nodded along. But I felt my arms locking around my body. A stone seemed to lodge in my throat. I could visualize the stone—egg-shaped, smooth, glittering, obsidian—but no story.

At the time, her collection Almost Everything, which includes "Back to Texas" about Bobbie Louise's childhood, seemed like an unsentimental gem to me. In "When I was little...," she writes:

"The bottom fell out of melons that year and made them not worth the picking. We would walk along the rows busting ripe melons and eating only the heart. It was a luxury that took some heroism; the sand was hot as a frying pan and we were bare-footed."

I remember Bobbie Louise exhorting us to delete all adverbs and adjectives. That wasn't hard for me to do. But stripping out the sloppy language left me with nothing like a melon's heart.

I had no tall tales to draw on, I realized, no stories about larger-than-life aunts or uncles or "favorite cousins." I didn't come from a Southern storytelling tradition. But worse, I came from a family with little motivation to remember.

Growing up with a mentally ill parent encouraged helpless watching. Our family creed was constant erasure of pain, of blame. For the budding writer I was, it undercut my ability to convey what I saw.

My mother used to tell me to lie about her affliction, especially on medical forms, because of the prejudice against the mentally ill. This became a received truth for me, an uncontested way of being. Meanwhile, she often abandoned her own advice, explaining her diagnosis to work acquaintances, hair-cutters, postal carriers, grocery-store checkers.

Now I see too well the problem with erasing the consequences of breakdowns and raging fits, of shifting the blame in euphemisms such as "your mother was sick." For a good story, you need protagonists, not helpless watchers. You need someone to admit what's wrong.

When children grow up with adults erasing and reworking the truth, those kids can rebel. They also freeze up.

I've done both, and I still imagine every line I write disappearing as soon as the pencil moves on, every word I type vanishing on the screen. I see a little girl hunkering at the bottom of a deep hole, only a circle of blue sky above.

I see teenage me scribbling in lined yellow notepads, drawing cartoons, some of sexy women with ballooning breasts, some of angels and fairies—and every one of these forbidden images erased as soon as I mark it down.

Bad things would happen in our family—even good things—but nobody ever talked about them. I grew up with no sense of shared narrative, no comforting beginnings, middles, and ends. For a girl who loved The Lord of the Rings and Sherlock Holmes and Mary Renault novels and the Greek myths, it was like being blindfolded. 

Then, I think, that's not true. We did talk about the time my mother trudged all the way up Mt. Lassen, as if she'd conquered Everest. We talked about our adventures driving across the Mojave desert late at night, eating pinion nuts at dawn in our over-heating Dodge. I think we must have.

Yet the tenuousness of my own memories disturbs me. I do remember, but few events of my childhood were converted into cherished stories we told over and over. Without that cherishing, memories become endangered, too.

For the longest time, pulling together stories or articles eluded me as a professional writer, no matter how much I knew about expository writing. I wrote poetry, but my impulse faltered there, too. Even in the most non-linear of forms, truth eventually needs to shine through.

It's not an accident that I toiled as an editor of other people's stories for years. For at least a decade, my husband and close friends knew I was doing the equivalent of yanking my own hair out—I need time to write! When will I ever have time to write?—trapped by my own tangle of frustrations.

Bobbie Louise Hawkins is not immune from erasing and reworking the truth of her life. She was once unhappily married to the poet Robert Creeley, and I remember her talking about her insomnia, her own depression. Perhaps reshaping stories is what all writers do. Yet mining our own lives does seem like the right place to start. You can't get to the poetic compression of Bobbie Louise's work, for example, without acknowledging what came before.

Here's how she autographed my copy of Almost Everything: "For Martha, with pleasure—keep it up—see you again! Bobbie Louise Hawkins, August 6, 1988." I haven't seen her since, but even the hint that I had something to share or "keep up" has propelled me forward. That workshop became a turning point.

Now I write down every passing idea in my writing notebooks, and they pile up year after year. Sometimes I read through a notebook cover to cover, especially when I'm on a long airplane ride by myself, when I have time to stare at the clouds, to allow that smooth obsidian egg its due.

My notebooks are rich in ideas, stories, anecdotes, mental life, but often I come across entries that I've completely forgotten. It's not just that I'm getting older; I was well schooled in how to forget. But I don't want to forget. Not ever again. I'm obsessed with the notion of writing it all down, of the words remaining solid and present.

Sometimes I worry I'll lose the notebooks, they'll burn in a house fire, they'll be stolen.

It still comes hard in my own family, telling stories with my young son. But I make sure that we talk about "the time you had to swallow that malaria pill and you kept spitting it out" or "the time you sprayed insect repellent in your eyes, and you screamed so loud we had to call Poison Control. We had to hold you close until you calmed down."

I know this pool of stories is the underground life of my family. For an adoptee like my son, having family stories to draw on, to claim, seems crucial for his evolving sense of self. We build identity through stories, through being allowed to speak—not by keeping our mouths shut.

In a 2004 monologue, which she performed at the Naropa Summer Writing Program in Boulder, Colorado, Bobbie Louise Hawkins talks about a "happy ending" ironically, poignantly, wisely:

"It's time to adore the mundane. The daily is your heart's desire. The mundane world must be our joy. The daily, be our darling. The commonplace, be our morning song. The usual, be our heaven. The common place, our morning star. The usual. Sit on the veranda, drink tea, watch ducks navigate the pond. It is summer. And you are living a very long, unfinished, Russian novel...."

Yes. Every family has their own version of War and Peace. Mine hovers somewhere between The Idiot and Nabokov's Pale Fire.

But I've learned to live with my guilt and shell-shock. I've learned "to adore the mundane," because I'm writing my own Russian novel.

Searching for Max Perkins: Are Writers Groups the New Editors?

By Elizabeth Langosy for Talking Writing

I have a smattering of books that address the relationship between writers and their editors. In nearly every case, the editor was Scribner’s legendary Maxwell Perkins.

Browsing through Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence and Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters, it’s clear that Max, in addition to serving as editor extraordinaire, was literary advisor (Max to Scott: If the Cosmop would give you $30 or $40,000 for the serial, I think the only strong argument that could be advanced against taking it would be the quality of the magazine.), book club leader (Ernest to Max: There were too many bayonets in it somehow. If you are writing a book that isn’t romantic and has that as one of its greatest assets it is a shame to get awfully romantic about bayonets.), bank account (Scott to Max: I see by the memo that I have had a $3,243.00 advance... Could I have $500.00 more?), and friend (Ernest to Max: Wish you could come down... We could make a whole succession of new good old days...).

My single experience of working with a book editor was highly professional—no insider gossip or savvy career advice. Long story short: My husband and I wrote a detective novel, had it placed by our agent as the first in a new series of mysteries, worked with the series editor for six months to get it in final shape, then had it rejected by the publisher at the last minute because he wanted the first five years of the new series to feature previously published authors (which we were not). Our agent shifted his focus from book to film writers, detective novels fell out of fashion, and I went back to penning short stories. All this happened 25 years ago. I really have no idea what sort of support one can expect from the average book editor of 2010.

Where, then, does a writer like me find both encouragement for my efforts and hard-nosed critiques of my work? While developing the list of Max Perkins’s value to Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and the other authors he nurtured, I realized that I could well be listing everything I value in the members of my writers group. Well, maybe I haven’t hit them up for $500, but they have come through for me in the difficult periods in my life. Could my writers group be my Max Perkins?

Max journeyed to Key West (in his suit, tie, and jaunty cap) to fish with Ernest Hemingway. My writers group travels from New Hampshire and various Boston-area towns for potluck dinners, story critiques, and mutual commiseration. A writers group as small and long-lived as mine is a sacred trust. You know everything about each other, and that knowledge is both helpful and traumatic when you’re called upon to be brutally honest about a creative effort.

As with the members of my writers group, Max Perkins was an excellent editor and softened his criticisms with praise. In most cases, his suggestions appear to have been well-taken (Ernest to Max: We’ve eliminated Belloc, changed Hergesheimer’s name, made Henry James Henry, made Roger Prescott into Roger Prentiss, and unfitted the bulls for a reproductive function).

My writers group alerts me to useless minor characters, unintended changes in point of view, and places where getting too close to “what really happened” actually weakens the story. Their suggestions for word changes and additional illuminating sentences can be so superlative that I can’t think of any alternatives and use them verbatim. Then I’m racked with guilt and doubt. Does this mean the story is no longer my own? Even if only one suggested sentence in an entire story has been used verbatim, I can torture myself by imagining that critics in the distant future will point out that specific sentence as an (undeserved) example of my writing excellence.

When I began editing the long (60-page) short story I recently completed, I realized that I had another model of productive editing, different from both the long-distance communiqués of Max and company and the intense meetings of my writers group. During my long (now ended) tenure at Harvard University, I worked closely with a colleague on the final editing of reports and proposals. We sat side by side for days on end, reviewing documents one line at a time. One of our primary goals was to ensure that each sentence was both accurate and understandable even to someone who knew nothing about the proposed or reported project. When problems were identified, we made a highly effective team in brainstorming solutions.

I asked this colleague, Judy, if she would help me edit my story using the same method that worked so well for the dozens of reports and proposals we finalized over the years. The experience ended up being phenomenal. Due to our differing schedules and the length of the story, we weren’t able to work side by side on the entire piece as I originally had hoped, but we did have one long afternoon session that was both very productive and more fun than diligent work is supposed to be.

Judy also read through the entire story and was especially astute at identifying previously overlooked places where a reader might question the accuracy of a word or concept. Her very first comment was on the names I’d chosen for my main characters (Judy to Elizabeth: I don’t really like the names–Chloe is too out of the ordinary and her parents probably wouldn’t have come up with that 40-50 years ago. Ishmael is too distracting...). I located a website that tracks government statistics on the use of names and found that she was right. The two names were not only generally uncommon (particularly Ishmael) but were given to few, if any, babies born in the 1950’s and 60’s. Because I didn’t want others to get bogged down by questioning the names, I changed them to ones that I verified were popular during that time period.

I have never been as pleased with the final version of one of my short stories as I am with this one. I’m sure this is due in large part to my recent retirement and my ability to now work on my writing all day, every day, for weeks on end if I choose to. But I also believe that my composite Max Perkins served me well.

How do you undertake the editing process? Who do you turn to? Do publishing houses still have a Max Perkins on staff or is this role filled in a different way today?

Story Prompt

By Judith A. Ross for Talking Writing

Here we are in Barcelona. The photo is by Akos Szilvasi, a photographer who lives and works in Cambridge, Mass. Akos was born in Hungary and has also lived in Germany. (You can enlarge the photo by clicking on the image above.)

A U.S. resident for twenty years, he is still struggling to figure us out. For example, why all the fuss about health care -- isn't that a human right?

But let's forget politics for a moment and enjoy the street scene above. Who are these people? Where are they going? What are they thinking?

Okay, all of you fiction writers out there, tell us a story!

The View From One Inch Shorter

By Elizabeth Langosy for Talking Writing

It has been two months since I accepted an early retirement offer from Harvard University in order to focus on my fiction writing (my optimistic starting point is described in “An Awfully Big Adventure?”). Since then, life has swept me along on its merry (and sometimes not-so-merry) path.

Did I begin working on my writing? Yes, I did. As planned, I reviewed three stories awaiting final edits and decided which one to work on first. I was both giddy with the prospect of writing days stretching ahead and terrified that I’d made a huge mistake in leaving my job, but on my first workday, I identified—and, more importantly, saw how to resolve—a critical problem with the opening pages of my story. I knew then that I’d made the right decision.

What happened next? I regret to say that I was completely distracted by an overload of paperwork and obligations. These fell into three categories:

Money: My post-retirement to-do list held 22 items, ranging from “Cancel subway pass” to “Submit final Flexible Spending Account receipts.” All of them had to do with funds I could receive or funds I could avoid uselessly spending—but only if I submitted a specific form and associated documentation. When I realized that I was in danger of forgoing money I was owed while continuing to pay for things I no longer used, I knew I had to set aside time to complete the paperwork.

Mom: My mother is 87 years old and has congestive heart failure. She’s now in an assisted living facility, but her doctor suggested that she move to a higher level of care. This prompted my siblings and me to begin simultaneously researching long-term care options and finalizing a partnership agreement a lawyer had drafted several years earlier to preserve and protect a summer cottage we’ll inherit. Many phone conferences and email exchanges ensued, some of them contentious. As the longtime family peacemaker, I ended up revising the partnership document to reflect our conversations while running interference between my siblings.

Mayhem: Well, not literally mayhem, but how many things can happen at once? Between the time of year, happenstance, and things I’d neglected to do over the summer, my calendar listed appointments for nearly every day in September and October. Many of these involved family and friends and others had to do with medical appointments I’d been putting off. At one of these appointments, my annual physical, I learned that I was one inch shorter than I’d been the previous year.

One inch shorter! How could that be? “That happens when people get older,” said the medical assistant as she left me in the examination room. Well, yes, it happened to my 87-year-old mother, who now looks tiny standing next to me in photos. But I thought I had many years to go before I started to shrink, which—face it—is what is happening. Since that appointment, I’ve used up even more time in researching this phenomenon. I’ve learned that height loss can sometimes result from poor posture or a lack of stretching exercises, but the results of my planned experimentation with that will not be known until my next height measurement.

In the meantime, I’ve identified a hidden benefit of decreased height. I was walking a familiar route the other day (the route of my twice-daily walk to and from the subway during my working years) when I realized that things looked subtly different. What could have changed so radically in just a few weeks? I indulged myself in imagining that my newly expanded focus on writing was enabling me to notice much more about my surroundings than I’d seen before. But the truth is that I’ve always noticed what’s around me, storing away images and overheard conversations for future stories. Then I thought of my decreased height. I’m used to seeing things at a flat height or at one or two inches higher, depending on the shoes of the day, but I’ve never seen things at a lower height. Could it make a difference? To test this theory, I tried walking a few steps on tiptoe and suddenly everything looked “normal.”

So now here I am. My calendar is mostly clear for November and December, and I’m back to revising my story. I’m trying to get in at least five hours of solid writing each day and have been reading a lot more fiction than before. I’m also making sure to get in a daily walk, ruminating on the day’s writing conundrums, collecting snippets of conversation, and viewing the world from one inch shorter.

The TW Thriller List: Just in Time for Those Spooky Nights!

By Martha Nichols for Talking Writing

As promised, here's a list of thrillers recommended by Talking Writing fans and Open Salon commenters to my recent post "A Vaccine for Bad Writing." (It also ran on TW as "Get Your Dan Brown Vaccination: D1B1.")

As "Part One" of the vaccine, I quoted Maureen Dowd's hilarious review of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol. As "Part Two," I listed great thrillers as an antidote.

I haven't read all the titles and authors below, but I now have a new list for many a winter night to come. I've also added a few myself, especially in the "truth is wilder than fiction" category. Enjoy!

More Thrillers from Discerning Readers

• Charles Palliser, The Quincunx
• Philip K. Dick, The Minority Report
• Iain Banks, The Business (also Whit)
• Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
• Robert Ludlum—"anything by him" (including the Bourne series)
• Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost
• Tana French, In the Woods
• Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers
• John Le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
• Richard Wright, Native Son
• Robert Ward, Red Baker (comment: "nobody's heard of this book; but it's terrific")
• Richard Price, Clockers
• Ruth Rendell—"anything by her" (including The Bridesmaid)
• Martin Cruz Smith, Gorky Park (also Rose)
• Pat Conroy, Beach Music
• Scott Turow—"anything by him" (including Ordinary Heroes and more votes for Presumed Innocent: "the best psychological page-turner I've ever read")
• Kate Atkinson, Case Histories
• Charles McCarry—"anything by him"
• Ian Rankin—"anything by him"
• Robert Littell, Legends
• Mo Hayder—"anything by her"
• Carl Hiassen, Native Tongue
• Robert Daley, Prince of the City ("OK, it's nonfiction...but reads like a novel")
• Michael Crichton, The Great Train Robbery ("lots of fun facts about Victorian London, and inspired [loosely] by real events")
• Jonathan Harr, A Civil Action (nonfiction, but a rip-roaring tale)
• Rebecca Smith and John R. Emshwiller, 24 Days (ditto, Enron)
• Kurt Eichenwald, The Informant (ditto, a pathological liar)
• J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground (ditto, Boston—oh, Boston)

Special Anti-Vaccine Award for "Worst Prose I've Ever Had The Misfortune To Wade Through championship": Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Here's my original list of antidotes with the Dan Brown posts:

Part Two of D1B1: The List that Protects Me

• Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent
• Dennis Lehane, Mystic River
• Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
• Elizabeth George, What Came Before He Shot Her
• Sara Paretsky, Killing Orders
• Laurie King, A Darker Place
• Eliot Pattison, The Skull Mantra
• Graham Green, The Quiet American
• Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander
• Kerstin Ekman, Blackwater

Any other titles and authors you would like to add?

Get Your Dan Brown Vaccination: D1B1

By Martha Nichols for Talking Writing

I've taken a vow. In this, I am as self-abnegating as Dan Brown's crazily obsessed villains, flagellating myself (OK, I'll skip the castration) in the name of decent fiction.

Against the most horrendous odds, I have crafted a vaccination for Brownitis. D1B1 comes in two parts: (1) commune with Maureen Dowd's recent review of Brown; (2) list, read, and buy other well-written page-turning thrillers as an alternative—and tell your local bookseller why you are doing so. Let the healing begin.

Part One of D1B1: The Least Painful First Step

When Maureen Dowd is good, she's wickedly good. After reading her review of Brown's latest novel, The Lost Symbol, I didn't feel quite so depressed that I'll never be a novelist raking in over six figures. These lines alone are worth the price of the New York Times Book Review:

"The author has gotten rich and famous without attaining a speck of subtlety. A character never just stumbles into blackness. It must be inky blackness. A character never just listens in shock. He listens in utter shock.

And consider this fraught interior monologue by the head of the Capitol Police: 'Chief Anderson wondered when this night would end. A severed hand in my Rotunda? A death shrine in my basement? Bizarre engravings on a stone pyramid? Somehow, the Redskins game no longer felt significant.'”

Dowd makes fun of Brown's over-use of italics among many, many other writerly sins. So does Janet Maslin, in an earlier review in the Times. But unlike Dowd, Maslin lauds Brown for his ability to set an unlikely series of events into motion and to keep the pages turning. She ends her review by noting that the reader, almost any reader, likely will be picking up The Lost Symbol at his or her nearest bookstore.

Not this reader. I love plotted fiction, and I'm a big fan of candy-for-the-mind thriller junk, but The Da Vinci Code was more than junk. It made me doubt the sanity of the reading public, just as I doubted the U.S. electorate in November 2004.

Yes, I did read to the end of The Da Vinci Code, although there were many pages I skimmed or skipped because of the awful prose. When I got to the end, I felt gipped. Fortunately, I hadn't shelled out money for the book, but it's only redeeming value seemed to be the belly laugh I got at its amazingly shocking conclusion.

(Please. Did Brown never come across any feminist fantasy and revisionary historical novels of the 1970s? What about Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology? Guess I had the benefit of sitting in on all those alternative feminist spirituality groups in the 1980s.)

Here's what I have to ask: Does a page-turning plot really excuse excrebably bad ideas? (I'm getting into these italics.) Maslin and happy booksellers would no doubt say this kind of disposable fiction is pure escape, and that Brown is giving customers what they want.

But can't we, as writers, do better than this?

Yes. See Part Two below.

One of the things I love about Dowd's review is that she engages with Brown's ideas and sends them up as a load of hooey—particularly his smarmy rationalizations about the Masons. It's bad enough that the hero of Brown's novels, Robert Langdon, is a professor of "symbology" at Harvard; now we get a new love interest who specializes in "Noetic science," which Brown describes as a study of “the untapped potential of the human mind.” Dowd barely has to comment on that one.

And she's so good at deflating pumped-up melodrama:

"You can practically hear the eerie organ music playing whenever Mal’akh, the clichéd villain whose eyes shine 'with feral ferocity,' appears. He goes from sounding like a parody of a Bond bad guy ('You are a very small cog in a vast machine,' he tells Langdon) to a parody of Woody Allen ('The body craves what the body craves,' he thinks).

But Brown tops himself with these descriptions: 'Wearing only a silken loincloth wrapped around his buttocks and neutered sex organ, Mal’akh began his preparations,' and 'Hanging beneath the archway, his massive sex organ bore the tattooed symbols of his destiny. In another life, this heavy shaft of flesh had been his source of carnal pleasure. But no longer.'”

Oh, Maureen. Thank you for reminding us that sometimes the emperor really does need to wear some clothes.

Part Two of D1B1: The List that Protects Me

* Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent

* Dennis Lehane, Mystic River
* Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

* Elizabeth George, What Came Before He Shot Her

* Sara Paretsky, Killing Orders

* Laurie King, A Darker Place

* Eliot Pattison, The Skull Mantra

* Graham Green, The Quiet American

* Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander

* Kerstin Ekman, Blackwater

* And so many more...!

Dear reader, if you feel at all tempted to buy The Lost Symbol, save yourself. Even Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park qualifies as an antidote. Add suggestions here for other well-written page-turners—for your own D1B1 vaccine—and to help me keep renewing mine. I'm always on the lookout for the most nourishing candy.

An awfully big adventure?

By Elizabeth Langosy for Talking Writing

9/9/09 seems like an auspicious day to start blogging. No one has succeeded in convincing me (despite more attempts than I care to recall) that dates and times that align do not have mystical significance. When I glance at the clock and it reads 11:11, all is right with the world.

My entrance into the blogosphere is made possible by my decision, six months ago, to accept an early retirement offer from Harvard University so that I could focus on writing short stories. At that moment, I was 58, exactly half a century older than I was when I discovered that books did not magically appear in shops and libraries but were created by people who wrote down stories they made up. What a fantastic concept! I immediately knew that I wanted to be a fiction writer when I grew up. Not only did I love to read, but I was constantly inventing stories in my head. I never gave up on that dream—it just took me a very long time to get here.

In the past five decades, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to put words together to convey everything from the benefits of a home database to the emptiness of a shattered friendship. I married an artist, raised two daughters, and worked full-time at a freewheeling assemblage of mostly creative jobs that included stints as a computer game designer, video scriptwriter, and communications manager. I wrote fiction in spurts of varying intensity, in inverse proportion to the intensity of whatever job I happened to have at the time and the amount of guilt I felt in squirreling myself away from my family on fleeting weekends at home.

Then, with seven years to go before my expected retirement date and the freedom to finally focus on my own writing, I suddenly found myself with the chance to do it NOW. And exactly where am I now? Well, let’s see…I’m a Harvard retiree (as of one week ago) living in a happy, somewhat chaotic two-family house with my artist husband, oldest daughter, son-in-law, and two irresistible grandchildren, ages three and five. My younger daughter, who recently moved back to Boston from Los Angeles to be closer to all of us, lives around the corner. I have a room of my own—the former pantry of the 1890 Victorian that was converted into the two-family—that contains the essentials for fiction-writing and has great views of my daylily garden and the sunset.

I’ve spent the past week clearing my writing desk of accumulated junk mail, Spongebob Squarepants tattoos, old business cards, outdated Whole Foods coupon books, stray buttons and coins, and other detritus of a too-busy life. The opportunity I’ve been waiting for is at hand. I have three stories drafted and honed over the past decade and new (perhaps better) ideas on the back burner. The Writer’s Market lists both literary agents and magazine editors. Poets & Writers warns of approaching contest deadlines. My loyal writers group waits for my manuscripts, red pens poised.

Now where do I begin?