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David Wroblewski's first novel, with a mood shot by Marion Ettinger.[/caption]
As many of you know, David Wroblewski, widely considered the Chekhov of the Northern Suburbs (okay, maybe more the Faulkner), thrust Denver into the public literary consciousness when his beautiful debut novel, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, was published a few years ago. It was already a NYT bestseller when Oprah selected it for her book club, and, well, the rest is history. What not everyone knows about David is he's as avid a bookworm as you'll ever meet. He fits, better than most people I know, Nabokov's dictum: "...[T]he best temperament for a reader to have, or to develop, is a combination of the artistic and the scientific one."
At this year's Lit Fest, David's leading a weekend course in which participants might find their inner Nabokovian temperament. His workshop focuses on story design, using John Cheever's "Goodbye, My Brother" as the course text. I asked him some whys and wherefores, and his answers are worthy of any writer's bulletin board. We even get an update on how his next book is coming. Check it out!
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John Cheever doing that thing we all assume most writer's do--staring off into space.[/caption]
Q. Why Cheever? Why now?
Why-questions never have simple answers, do they? At least three spring to mind here, beyond the simple fact that Cheever was a great writer and stylist, and well worth studying.
One answer is that a couple years ago -- on your recommendation, in fact -- I read Blake Bailey's biography of Cheever. It's extremely well done, among the best biographies of a writer ever written. Cheever's life was famously uneasy, but what shines through in the Bailey bio is Cheever's constant yearning to transcend whatever he'd written before. And even when he was writing very well, how deep his doubts ran. I reread Cheever's short stories as I went along -- irresistible to do that -- then got hooked on the Wapshot novels, which I hadn't read, and then Falconer. Lately I've been reading his journals, of which he was rightfully proud. He's writing about what he ate for dinner, and his train ride home, and I'm blown away.
Anyway, "Goodbye, My Brother" has long been one of my favorites stories, soulful on the one hand, and technically marvelous on the other. Cheever executes several super-tricky moves so flawlessly you don't even notice him doing it. That was my sense of it, at least. So I copied it out, and it stood up to that, and so it seemed like a good story to study more deeply.
A second answer is that the class does not really center around Cheever at all, but around a series of very general questions about design. We're über sophisticated about design these days, far more on average than twenty years ago. Vastly more than when I was a kid. The word gets attached to everything, faddishly. But the fact is, design is a real and essential part of any creative work, and one can instantly sense its presence or absence in any artifact. A telephone. A building. A movie. And of course, a story. But what exactly does "design" mean? When a thing is designed, who is it designed for? On what basis? How does design take place in disciplines besides writing? Or for that matter, in writing? "Goodbye, My Brother" is just this year's occasion for engaging those questions. Last year it was Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River," two years ago it was William Maxwell's "The Thistles in Sweden." (In a neat circularity, by the way, Maxwell was Cheever's longtime editor at the New Yorker.)
The third answer is probably the most honest: pure self-interest. "Goodbye, My Brother" is a complicated enough machine that, reading it alone, I wouldn't, maybe couldn't, pick up on all the lessons to be learned. But a group of writers has a better shot. I'll learn more. It's as simple, and selfish, as that. Also, it's great fun.
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The book that allegedly started Wroblewski down this path--to all our benefit.[/caption]
Q. I'm always impressed by how closely and methodically you read. Is this something you've always done or did you learn to do it by necessity?
I've fooled you so thoroughly. I'm not a close reader by nature. Just the opposite, in fact. I try hard to turn myself over to a story, let it wash me out to sea, and I go fast and sloppy. I'm greedy for the experience. To engage the analytical tools right off the bat feels like defeat. I catch myself doing it sometimes, even so, especially if the writing has some nagging flaw that I rightfully ought to read past, but can't. It's a horrible occupational hazard. I'll pick up a novel and be cooking along, drooling like a troglodyte, and then I run into a sentence like, "His eyes went to the kitchen," and suddenly I'm all Strunky-Whitey and there's an X-Acto knife in my hand.
The analysis, the close reading, is easy, as long as the story is worth studying. You're on the right side of entropy. It's always going to be simpler to take the watch apart than it was to build it in the first place. And there's such great pleasure to be had in slowing down the prose, watching how it behaves in a reader's mind. I think of those wonderful David MacCauley books, particularly THE WAY THINGS WORK, in which he draws everyday mechanisms vastly magnified, with tiny workman there to help things along, or sometimes as bystanders and observers, scratching their heads in wonder. He's playing with scale, physical and temporal. Close reading is just the same: prose magnified to an enormous scale.
Q. How's your own writing going?
Every day is different of course, but on average, okay. I'm trying to finish a long novel right now, which comes with certain special confusions and uncertainties, but also various equally unnameable rewards. I've been writing it for almost as long as I went to college, come to think of it. Which is a frightening comparison. So let's drop that line of thinking. Did I mention it was long? I was hoping for a novella.
What I've been noticing lately, to be filed in the Don't Do This cabinet, is that when I become unsure of the actual story, I start worrying the words to death. Is this pronoun okay? Have I lapsed into passive voice one time too many? Shouldn't I have used a sparklier verb here? I turn the sentences around and around, and it's a way to not drive the scene forward. After a day of working like that, knowing it's wrong, I'll turn to someone else's fiction for a reset. I have to be very careful with that, but luckily, I've read three really fine novels in a row this spring: Colum McCann's latest, Transatlantic, Robert Boswell's forthcoming Tumbledown, and Denis Johnson's 2007 novel Tree of Smoke -- and in each case I see them blazing past such questions, unfussily, because the story is just red hot.
I'm sure the writing wasn't that easy or simple in any of those cases. Probably the authors slaved fussily away to create the illusion of unfussiness and red-hotiness. I don't really care which alternative is true. I just maintain both ideas in my mind and use whichever one gives me more optimism that day, Coke/Pepsi style. The point is to remind myself not to get unduly discouraged by the little valleys, or overexalted by the little peaks. They are just little valleys and little peaks along the way.
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Amen, mister W. Check out David's one-weekend intensive on story design here, and see you all soon, at Lit Fest!
