Paul Boccaccio

I don’t think you can know me for very long without realizing I like Neil Gaiman’s writing quite a lot. Some of it’s better than other bits, but over all, the man continues to put out wonderful books. His newest novel, The Graveyard Book, underscores his reputation as a great writer. I read it in one sitting, a few days after it came out. I’d hate to misrepresent myself, so to be fair: I got up once for a drink, chatted with my roommate for a few minutes, but then I got antsy and ran back upstairs to finish it.

Gaiman has said, in an interview, that adults and children read The Graveyard Book as two separate novels. That rings generally true for me, about books as well as life. Children are pleasantly insane, and view the world through a grid of stories. They’re wholly credulous, if you tell your story well. But they’re also more demanding; they invest themselves wholeheartedly or not at all, and they have little patience for insincerity. Children, Gaiman says, see the adventure story in The Graveyard Book. It’s about a kid growing up in a graveyard (obviously, you dim adult) and isn’t that cool? Who wouldn’t want to live in a graveyard with a bunch of nice dead people and learn how to Fade and other ghostly tricks?

The adult—and I sympathize with the child’s judgment of this adult, because they are both simultaneously me—sees The Graveyard Book as an embodiment of Gaiman’s love of life and his belief that we should have no fear of death, themes which run through the rest of his work, but is most explicit in this book (though The Sandman covers similar territory). I disagree. Death is a travesty and corruption and a twisting of life and beauty. (It’s a different story for Christians. Death is only hateful when it’s separation; for us it’s going home and waking up and living true life.) Even so, I never want to get used to death. But the death Gaiman describes is his own wonderfully clean and bright version of death, so it’s the same, in my mind, as when he uses magic: something sweet and fictional, and wouldn’t it be nice if such a thing could be?

I like that Gaiman hasn’t wrapped everything into pretty bows—it’s a story (says the metaphor junkie adult) of growing up, and just as growing up isn’t full of pat solutions, Bod’s life is tangled. Sometimes it works out for him, sometimes not. It’s not simple or fully knowable. But Bod is good and kind anyway. He stands up for his home, and his friends; he does the right thing, or, if he doesn’t, he’s well-intentioned. It’s an optimistic book, as almost all of Gaiman’s stuff is, with the exception of Babycakes (fair warning: that’s disturbing).

Of course, I would have liked more (always more) but that’s a good place to keep the reader. The Hounds of God, the man Jack and his associates, the aura of mystery around Silas: these parts of the story are effective because they tug at the reader and make him create between the gaps. Gaiman put in just enough details to let me create branching histories for those characters, their secret society, mission, and origins. The grasping reader in me wishes, though, in the end, Gaiman had put more in about those things, because he creates stories much better than I do. Or, and I feel the stink of slathering fandom on me even now, I wish he’d write a sequel. Maybe just a novella. Come on, man, just one more, and after that I’ll be fine, I swear. But I know, somewhere deep inside, that he shouldn’t do that. It stands just fine alone.

cruelty. don’t talk to me about cruelty
or what i am capable of.

when i wanted the roaches dead i wanted them dead
and i killed them. i took a broom to their country

and smashed and sliced without warning
without stopping and i smiled all the time i was doing it.

it was a holocaust of roaches, bodies,
parts of bodies, red all over the ground.

i didn’t ask their names.
they had no names worth knowing.

now i watch myself whenever i enter a room.
i never know what i might do.

-Lucille Clifton

I first heard Lucille Clifton read this poem on A Century of Recorded Poetry, an audio collection of significant recent poets. I gained a unique perspective by hearing her read her own work–it flowed cleaner, for starters. It’s one thing to read something to yourself and stress what words you’d like to stress, and put in breaks where you feel they should be; it’s another to hear the original form, as the poet hears his own work. Reading it was beneficial as well: seeing the words opened up other possibilities of interpretation for me, so I suppose the best case would be to hear someone read their poem aloud, and then read it yourself.

I feel a unique connection, experiencing the poem audibly first. The same goes for hearing other types of writers read their work. Some are excellent readers and speakers, like Neil Gaiman or Ursula Le Guin or Mary Robinette Kowal, others butcher their words and stumble around and I feel embarrassed for them. I’d like to be the former. Who wouldn’t? Unless your poems are Really Edgy and Nobody Understands them (or you) and you’re afraid you’d lose all that Glorious Muse if you relaxed a little. Maybe I’ll start recording some of my poems and put them up. Hey, maybe I’ll put some short stories up, too.

Back to Lucille Clifton. Cruelty skates a fine line between drama and melodrama. It’s easy to seem, when writing a poem about mundane things using dramatic images, as if you were manufacturing poetic emotions in order to have something to write about, but I don’t think she’s doing that. She’s using the mundane occurrence of killing roaches, which few people feel bad about, to underscore the unfeeling we have toward true tragedy. That’s hard to do well, but Clifton does it. This is the sort of poetry I like best: pure distillation of emotion, where every word has a purpose; every sound and line break is intentional.

I’m conflicted, because I’d like to write poems of that quality, but that sort of intentionality is double-edged: it feels fake to set out and plan to use certain devices, but good poems rarely come without re-sculpting them a half dozen times. For me, anyway. Keats said, “If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.” I’ll accept that only if we posit that trees have a really hard time making leaves.

Raymond Chandler is fast on his way to my short list of writers. I love his clipped style and imagery. The metaphors are fantastic. Lines like, “My voice sounded like somebody tearing slats off a chicken coop.” He and Dashiell Hammett invented a truly American, truly new style. I’m taking it at face value that Hammett was involved: I own, but haven’t read, The Maltese Falcon. It’s on the list.

Farewell, My Lovely isn’t quite as playful as The Big Sleep, despite the addition of a lounge singer. At times, Farewell feels much more like a James Bond movie—like when Marlowe’s sneaking around the docks and when he infiltrates the boat—if Bond were worn to a nub by the unstoppable, churning grind of the cosmos. Marlowe has more baggage than in the previous book; his witty remarks seem forced and sometimes he doesn’t have the energy to make them at all. He cries, or almost cries; he’s slower, less of a fix-all hero. He gets hurt.

Chandler uses colorful metaphors less in Farewell, My Lovely: he tells it straighter. It’s as if he’s lost some measure of levity, and now he’s telling it as it is, no frills or embellishments. The quote on the back of the book, from George V. Higgins (whom I do not know), reads,

Chandler did not write about crime, or detection—as he insisted he did not. He wrote about the corruption of the human spirit, using Philip Marlowe as his disapproving angel, and he knew about it, down to the marrow.

Higgins is right. Chandler saw to the heart of people; that was his true subject. The heart of people often produces crime, but that’s a side effect, not his central concern.

I’ve never read much crime fiction, so I can’t say whether this fits the mold of mystery or not. I foresaw certain plot twists, and took some pleasure from that, but the language was the real draw for me. Chandler’s economical use of words and his willingness to have a distinctive style make me think of how I can cultivate my own style without the style superseding content. Strunk & White is good, but not the end of the road.