Would One Narrator Have Worked for The Help?

Finished The Help. Good book. Very interesting and enjoyable take on the 1960's South as all hell is breaking lose. The verisimilitude of the novel is very good and I like the way the author wove in the events of the time, JFK assassination, Medgar Evers killing, the advent of air conditioning, television shows. Very good. And of course the maids views points gave the story it's hook and really it's reason for being. It's what it was all about right?

So here is my question. Why the multiple narrators? Why not stick with Abileen who opens the novel instead of cutting away to everyone else? Minny is a strong narrator but she is too prejudiced in her views. Skeeter, our alternate protagonist does not have the voice. It is a failure of the novel that the main white character, our character, whom we are in sympathy with is probably the weakest. Besides evolving into a writer and leaving the South for NY at the end, she just doesn't really catch fire.

But Abileen, she is a character and it is her book. It is fitting she should have the first chapter and the last chapter. She is the voice heart and soul of the book and it is curious that the author should use multiple narrators when all it did was distract us and take away from the power of the novel. Multiple narrators are used for great effect when other viewpoints are essential but this is not the case in The Help. I would argue the power is diluted by not seeing it though Abileens eyes.

We could experience all the bigotry and cruelty of the ladies of Mississippi through Abileen. She could give us every blow by blow and she would pull the loose ends together. Put her against the Skeeter story of her failed relationship with the Senators son and her dying mother and her struggles to become who she is. This could all still be achieved with Abileen by having Skeeter tell her about it when they get together. The author has power in Abilbeen and Minny, but the other characters are weak and a bit stereotypical.

But all in all a good novel from a viewpoint we don't ofter hear. I just wanted to hear more of it.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Getting my First Agent

I had been working a real job that took all my time and I felt my literary career slipping further and further away from any sort of reality. I was at a crossroads when I decided I had to do something or I would lose sight of my dream of being a novelist altogether. I had written several novels that continued to gather rejection letters from publishing houses and I became convinced my problem was that I didn't have an agent. I had sent my partials to many agents and received the same rejection letters that publishers were sending with just a different letter head. But sending out more manuscripts seemed futile. Somehow I had to break through the wall of New York publishing. There was only one thing to do, go to New York.

I arranged to stay with a friend in Brooklyn and gave myself two weeks. It was my vacation time and so I went to New York in the beginning of December. I brought forty partials of my two novels and and my thick WRITERS MARKET listing all the agents. I flew in and settled myself in my friends apartment and readied my attack. The next morning I took the subway into Manhattan. The day was cold and overcast. I got off the subway in lower Manhattan and began to walk with my heavy backpack. I went to the first address I had pulled out of WRITERS MARKET. A very harassed man answered the door in a small office. I explained who I was and handed him partials of my manuscript. He stared down at the pages like something strange and foreign. Well I've never had anyone come too my door and hand me a manuscript he said, staring at me.  He shrugged. Thank you. I'll look at it.

This then was my plan. To drop off my partial manuscripts and synopsis all over Manhattan. To literally walk to every agent I could find. That first day I hit ten agents and returned to Brooklyn with blisters on my ankles. The second day I headed out in tennis shoes and worked my way into Mid Town. The agents were in small office, large offices, apartments, high rises, bungalows, basement apartments. Some of them were nice and invited me in. Most of the agents just took my manuscripts and smiled for the doomed. One harassed man in a small office overflowing with manuscripts cried out, this isn't done this way. Another agent sold me a book he had written. Another agent working out of his apartment said he was getting out of the business because fiction was too hard to sell.

I ran out of manuscripts on the third day and ran off forty more copies. At the end of two weeks I had hit every agent I could find and had no more manuscripts. I flew back to Chicago to wait for the fruit of my labor. Kind letters came back from the big apple and silence. I never did get an agent from that trip to New York, but a month later I quit my job and started writing full time. I landed an agent later that year. He was one of the ones I had missed.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Kindle Download of Rocket Man

"Rocket Man is a hilarious, well written novel about one man's search for the New American Dream." - James Frey, author A Million Little Pieces and Bright Shiny Morning

The funniest serious novel since Richard Russo’s Straight Man, rich with the epic levity of John Irving and salted with the perversion of Updike." - Chicago Sun Times

Writer in Residence for the Ernest Hemingway Foundation William Hazelgrove's third novel is "a charming tale of fatherhood, family, and the American Dream." (Midwest Book Review).

"This critically insightful diatribe against conformity is recommended." - Library Journal

The Dare of Franzen's Fiction

I have gone back to reread The Corrections before taking on Freedom. Reading Jonathan Franzen is a bit like taking a crash course on just about everything. As Oprah said in her famous dispute with the author, "he threw in everything but the kitchen sink." Maybe he did or maybe he didn't, but there is certainly no less is more at play with Franzen's novels. Of course I say that and maybe he cut the book down from several thousand pages so there you go Mr. Hemingway.

But reading Franzen is rigorous. He dares you to let your mine wander. The way he dares your level of erudition if not just outright knowledge on the world at large. The fiction writer as fountain of information certainly is at play here. I do think he dares those New York Times reviewers and editors and New Yorker readers with voluminous knowledge on a myriad of subjects. Fiction writers should have a grasp on pieces of everything ,but Franzen seems to have a grasp on just about everything and it is all there in his prose.

And it is this type of rocket fueled fiction that garners the paychecks and pushes one to the top of the literary mountain. No one can dare to out Franzen Franzen except maybe David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest. The two writers were friends and it would seem to make sense because the same hyper intelligence is at play to some degree in both men. Again the dare comes in...dare to take it all on and come up with a synthesis that puts your fiction into a coherent narrative.

So what am I saying? I admire Franzen's essays and I admire his novels, but I find a curious skating on ice quality to the volumes of information given in block pages with little break. Again the bye given to Franzen would suffocate most editors of other authors fiction. That they deem we should know about (the Corrections) Chips dealings in Soviet Russia or Denise's strange machinations with a restaurateur's wife and the intricacies of being a chef... well it is a testament to the writer. He has obviously dared the critics, the editors, and  a hell of a lot of readers to call him on the volumes of back story in his novels and nobody has called his bluff. In fact with Franzen, one could make the case the back story is the story.

I suppose it comes down to your definition of fiction  If you want the big New York Times book review summation of American life book, then maybe Franzen is for you. But if you want that personal moment defined, the living and breathing of every day life, the little tar bubbles on the roof, or the wet galoshes of your childhood in the closet, or maybe the man in the pink suit watchng over nothing outside the bedroom window...then maybe Franzen is not your man.  Guess I'll read Freedom and find out.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Hallowed Ground--visiting 9/11

It's our new Grand Canyon. Our Gettysburg, Pearl Harbor. You cannot believe a space like this can exist in New York. Something came and took out those buildings and those people. They are still there. You can feel them in the heat shimmer and the large steel skeletons starting for the sky. What did they think when those planes darted out of the clear blue September morn? Some thought of family and friends before fire or a hurtling death.

"They jump," the taxi driver says. " I see them and never forget. They jump because the fire is worse than you know jumping into the air."

You hear those words as you stare across the hazy chasm. Large white buildings used to be there--gone. No more. People ant climb around the chasm in a chain of silence. The steel workers are impervious now. They have worked in this space for years. Almost ten years but it still clings--the past battlefield of our republic. Go to any Civil War battlefield and it still clings there too. The death of all those people is in the still air. The heat. The grinding enormous cranes working like stoical robots to rebuild a city.

"I had to come see this," a man next to me says. We stand and stare into the yellow later afternoon void. "I had to," he says quietly.

Yes. No more spoken as the people stream by. A respectful silence. Young children have no idea and chatter away. You do have to see it. It is a memorial site and you cannot come to New York and not come pay your respects. That is what you are doing. You come to see those people who died all those years ago. Over three thousand. The cab drivers tell you there is nothing to see anymore. Not true. It is still there in the Grand Canyon of our sorrow. All those people lost in the wink of an eye.

You drift up to St. Paul's church. This is where it gets you. Here is where the firemen and the cops came to rest between shifts. It is right on the edge. Incredible this old church George Washington sat in with the time worn graves still there. You enter and you see the shrines of pictures still there. All those people looking for people no longer of this earth. All those fire department badges and then the pictures of the fallen. They are men of old America. Big bushy mustaches and wide smiles. Germans, Italians, Irish. The cops and the firemen. They have a fine sheen of dust on them. The Teddy Bears are coated in dust. It has been almost ten years and we are creeping around the remains of battle ships or tanks or any other debris left over from a war. Except these were civilians.

The church is stone quiet as people make their way past a cot used for firefighters to rest. The shrines of mementos left after the devastation brings you back to those days. Such heavy sorrow in the small shoes, slippers, boots, left outside the church. Where did all those people go? Women wipe their eyes and men hide behind shades. It still breaks your heart. Amazing we became such a divided nation after this. Seems nothing could have pulled us from our collective sorrow.

But you emerge back into the sunlight and start walking toward Broadway. You can no longer hear the cranes and the sorrow lifts as you pass into New York again. You walk on and it is behind you, but you will never forget. You will never let it go. Not until you follow your countrymen and breathe your last.

05/02/2009

http://www.billhazelgrove.com

The Citizen Reviewer

How many people read the New York Times Book Review? Raise your hands. Hmmm...small crowd. How many people go and buy the books after reading a NYT Book Review? Extremely small crowd. My novel was reviewed in the New York Times and I did regard it as a benchmark, a status symbol of the novelist finally arrived. I do read the New York Times Book Review. Religiously. Every Sunday. But I must confess to a feeling akin to reading short stories in The Saturday Evening Post and that is I am reading something that belongs to a different time. The books reviewed are of a certain staple: fiction, international fiction with protagonists who overcome incredible odds in war torn regions. Biographies of long lost literary figures or Teddy Roosevelt. Alec Baldwin's diatribe on his divorce. Up and coming novelists on the back pages. Literary lions no one has heard of outside the literary lion circles. Historical fiction. Not that this is bad content....but it is no secret that book sections in the major newspapers are vanishing. The Chicago Tribune's book section was marginalized to the Saturday edition. The Washington Post Book World was practically eliminated. The New York Times Book Review is one of the last holdouts and thank God for that. So, the question is where are people going to find out about books now? An answer might be they are going nowhere to find out about books. Or we might believe what Steven Jobs said who proclaimed no one reads anymore--a self serving observation from Mr. IPOD. But the fact is people are still reading and reading a lot. I know. I have been to land over the rainbow and it is a bit like OZ. Strange new munchkins called Citizen Reviewers are reading and writing the reviews in cyber land and this is what people are reading. It is not only the big Book Blog sites that are claiming the attention of the reader, it is the ordinary posts of the ordinary reader. If books are still sold in the fundamental way of word of mouth then it makes perfect sense that the middleman paid reviewer would become antiquated in age of the Internet. We now have the direct links for readers to click on to find out to what the most relevant class of reviewers think--other readers. The obvious site for this well of reviews is Amazon.com where readers post directly to the book they just read. A book with fifty some reviews will give the reader a more balanced view of a book then the opinion of one Ivory Tower reader. Consensus is the word of the day in cyberland. Other sites like Library Thing, Shelfari, Goodreaders all work off consensus reviews. A hundred people read a book and rate it and then you get an average. The fringe reviewer who doesn't like anything and the over the top reviewer who loves everything are marginalized by a healthy discerning middle. No one is getting paid and yes you will have the author friends and enemies weighing in, but in there also will be people with honest opinions. The result is much more democratic and that makes sense in a democracy. Art by the people and for the people and reviewed by the people. It doesn't matter really if we like it or not because it is here. The argument for a paid reviewer is one that he or she is trained to review. Maybe. But don't you get a skewed viewpoint by a single rarefied person reading books they prefer? Getting through the literary gates of most heavy hitter review publications is reserved for those who catch an editors whim who is literally deluged with books. We can't expect a fair and judicial process from harried overworked reviewers or editors who have even less staff today. So, by default, we end up with a polyglot of books being reviewed by a polyglot of readers. The New York Times Book Review will always be the benchmark for the literary world and I think that is a good thing. But the Citizen Reviewer will certainly be a second opinion...something everyone should have.

TO MY BIG BROTHER GEORGE

AND so it goes. The final line of It's A Wonderful LIfe. I always watch that movie and I appreciate the line. But, really what does it mean? George has no money. He is in debt. His life insurance policy is all he has. As Henry Potter, the villain says, "You're worth more dead than alive George."
So, what does his brother Harry mean by that final toast? Surely, he speaks of the riches of a well lived life. George has many friends and is loved and this is finally what gives him his wealth. I wonder how many people think of wealth in those terms. I would say we have to redefine wealth. I have come up with a new criteria. Now that I have a family and I see the sands of time slipping away, I think we have all been swindled into thinking what true wealth is. This is my criteria for wealth:

When was the last time you came home early from work?When was the last time you didn't go into work to spend it with your family?When was the last time you called up a friend and did something with them for no reason at all?When was the last time you spent the entire day with your family doing nothing?When was the last time you slept in?When was the last time you took a walk? When was the last time you curled up with a good book?When was the last time you turned off your cell phone or beeper?When was the last time you planned to do absolutely nothing?When was the last time you didn't try and fill all your time with workWhen was the last time you did something with your son or your daughter?When was the last time you watched a sunset? A sunrise? When was the last time you looked at the stars?When was the last time you walked through the woods?When was the last time you didn't read the newspaper or get on the Internet and didn't care what was happening in the world?When was the last time you remembered what it was to be a kid again?When was the last time you went to a coffeehouse with a book?When was the last time you had a party and didn't' give a damn about the cost or what it did to your house?"When was the last time you read poetry?

Well, you get the picture. I have come to view wealth a whole lot differently. I saw a man the other day in front of his million dollar vacation home on a beautiful lake. His son was out on the dock. The man came out and swept the dock while his son watched. When he was done, the man went back into the house. I wondered if that man knows that one day his son won't be there at the end of the dock. So I guess that's what Harry Bailey was saying in the end. He was toasting his brother who didn't have any money but had all the things that money simply can't buy. Time. Money can't buy time and that is precious.
So I say it to loud and clear, here's to George, truly, the richest man in town. Amen.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com

A Hand Up

When a writer gives you a hand up you are very thankful. Generally you don't get too many of these from other writers who are very busy with their own careers and writing. Maybe they don't like your work. Maybe they dont' give blurbs. Tobias Wolfe was very nice and said he was swamped with books as did Tom Poratta. I understand. Bestelling novelist David Liss did review my book and gave it a great one,http://www.amazon.com/review/R8NJQ80GXYO3O/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm. You always have to be appreciative to the writer who does give you a hand up. It is a long trecherous road and authors are a cautious bunch. The rug can be pulled at any time and many a writer has served as a cautionary tale. So when a writer goes out a limb and says they think what you have written is great then you can only hope that you will be able to do the same for somone some day.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com

Wide Lawns and Narrow Minds

So went Hemingways famous quote about his hometown of Oak Park. A reviewer of my recent novel, Rocket Man compared my take on modern suburbia to this quote. I would have to say that Hemingways quote seems mild by comparison. Rocket Man deals with another phenomenon not thought of in Hemingway's time--the corporification of suburban American. If Rocket Man deals with anything it deals with this final rung of our oligarchy (rule by the wealthy class) that has gone so horribly bad. But for years this is what we have had. A rule by the corporations of America and they have literally changed the landscape. Corporations thrive on homgenity, organization, streamlining complexities down to general assumptions. If we have on man do one thing then he can do that one thing all day long and be efficient at it. So went the thinking of Henry Ford when he came up with the assembly line. This basic maxim has spread out over the land in our homes that all look the same, our schools that churn out good little soldiers, not original thinkers, and our institutions, from churces on down that quite literally look like corproate buildings. Rocket Man's main character Dale Hammer is at sea not because he is so different in this landscape, he is failing because he refuses to be a cog not unilke the character in Orwells 1984. Dale is losing his home and struggling to keep his family together which includes his unemployed father who has come to live over his garage. In a sense they have been corporate refugees, hanging on to see when the next shoe will drop. In that way, they certainly do mirror us all.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

www.myspace.com/rocketmanbook

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