This month we’re reading The Trapeze Diaries by Marie Carter (Hanging Loose). Some people visit shrinks to get to the bottom of things—Marie Carter climbs a ladder, wraps her hands around a bar, and pushes off.

Marie Carter: If you have told me five years ago that I would be an avid student of trapeze and learning all kinds of crazy tricks like foot hangs, ankle hangs and one-knee hangs, that I’d become obsessed with yoga and standing on my head and doing handstands on a daily basis I would have told you to go back to drinking your moonshine. Five years ago I was a couch potato/bookworm with no interest in going to the gym or taking up sports. In high school I was the physical dunce, the last person you would pick for your team. I was also terrified of heights. Nonetheless I was fascinated by circus artists and would find myself crying every time I watched trapeze artists perform and when I finally took a chance and went to my first trapeze lesson, in spite of the humiliation and the difficulties of learning trapeze, I fell madly in love.

But it wasn’t just my physical form that trapeze changed. By confronting the physical specter of fear I began to confront emotional fears that I’d been harboring all my life. The Trapeze Diaries is a book based on my experiences of learning the trapeze and the personal transformation that took place.

“Marie Carter’s The Trapeze Diaries is a tour de force performance —this is a writer transforming the things of daily life, the fears and struggles and unexpected glories, into weightless prose. Carter gets at the question we’re all trying to get at in one way or another: how, in this heavy world, against our own mortality and terror, can we break loose and fly? How can we get around the troubles in our own hearts and make our way toward joy? Carter finds the answer, both metaphorically and physically.”
— Maria Dahvana Headley, author of The Year of Yes

“Not only the lyrical tale of one woman’s love affair with the trapeze, but a powerful story on becoming brave and letting go.”
— Carolyn Turgeon, author of Rain Village

“A quiet meditation on loss and recovery…the narrator’s poignant voice has great clarity as she explores a new life far away from home while recovering from the death of her father. This is a brave and heartwarming book.”
—Donald Breckenridge, author of 6/2/95 and fiction editor of The Brooklyn Rail

by Jon Adams, Slack Water Press, 978-0-9797613-0-0

This month we’re reading The Cruise of the Jest by Jon Adams. The book came to me several months ago in the standard self-published package: uninspired cover, folder with press release and other stuff inside, etc. (Just so you know, we do not look at press kits – they go straight into the trash. A press release, however – a single piece of paper with book stats and blurb – is a must.)

Anyway, as I’ve probably said before, I look at everything. And while the cover was painfully plain, it was not atrocious. And the internal layout was perfectly decent.

Then, there was the content page. Wow.

San Francisco Bay 3
Half Moon Bay 10
Ensenada 20
Cabo San Lucas 27
Mazatlán 38
Tres Marias 49
Acapulco 53
Nuku Hiva 62
Tahiti 76

There are a lot more. In fact, the destinations lead all the way around the world. Well, of course. The Cruise of the Jest.

On to the first page:

He was waiting to find out what Jack wanted him to do next. Jack told him to be on Jest at ten that morning. He didn’t want to be early, so he was lying in his bed, listening to the radio. He was thinking that ten was an odd time. Usually when Jack wanted him to do something, it was more like six in the morning or eight in the evening, dawn or dusk. Back in the summer, the last time Jack told him to be on Jest, it had been eight in the evening. That was when Jack told him to sail Jest down to Half Moon Bay. Jack said he would be there, at the harbor in half Moon Bay, waiting for him when he came in. But it hadn’t happened that way.

Nothing quite happens the way you expect it to, except when it does. And what happens the second time he sails to Half Moon Bay is completely different than what happens the first time.

The Cruise of the Jest is a completely extraordinary piece of classic coming-of-age literature. It is so outstanding that I’m shocked, dismayed, scandalized that no publisher – independent or otherwise – would look at it. Please, do more than look at it. Read it. And give it to your kids to read. And give it to your dads. And your grandfathers.

Below, you’ll find some questions and answer sessions that Mr. Adams and I exchanged through email.

One other thing: Mr Adams has invested in a new book cover.

Q: You have indicated that The Cruise of the Jest is based on your own experience. Could you say a little more about that?

A: Yes, my parents took us (me, my two brothers and my sister) on a world cruise. In 1961 we left San Francisco on the 58-foot schooner Fairweather. We sailed west across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, then up the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. From there we sailed across the Atlantic and Caribbean, passed through the Panama Canal, and then, after four years, returned to San Francisco. But the novel is not entirely based on my own experience. My mother kept a journal during the cruise, a journal that I later inherited. The writing of The Cruise of the Jest actually came about when I began transcribing and editing my mother’s journal because I realized that the journal didn’t tell a story—journals rarely do. And I knew if I wanted to describe what it was like to sail around the world, I needed a story. I think this need for a story is an example of fiction being more believable, and certainly more compelling, than simply telling the facts of what happened. The facts of what happened have their own place in the corridors of one’s experience, but it takes a story to convey that experience to others.

Q: So in addition to your own experience you had your mother’s journal to rely on. How much of the journal is in the novel?

A: My mother’s journal was very useful for many of the details that I used. But even when I used details from the journal, I transformed them according to fit the needs of the story. Let me give an example from the journal, and then the parallel scene from the novel. This example involves Tiriki, an Islander from a small atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago.

[journal]

August 24 [1961]—Manihi. We are leaving Manihi for Rangiroa, a hundred miles away. The girls in the village told me everyone will cry when we leave, but we left in such a hurry during slack water that there was to time for tears. We have a new crew member, Tiriki, one of the young men of the island. Like all the men on these far away atolls, his dream is to go to Tahiti and get himself a big fat wife.

August 26—at sea. It blew hard all night and all day. We arrived at the pass in Rangiroa after sunset and remembering Takaroa, we hove-to for the night. The storm continued into the night and by morning it had blown us so far to leeward that we decided to set our course for Tahiti. Sailing under jib and stormsail and making seven knots. Poor Tiriki is seasick.

August 29—Tahiti. The pilot boat met us outside the reef and led us through the pass. We moored stern-to at the quay in front of the Papeete. Everything below was completely soaked. Drying out came later. First we had to try the Hinano, the famous beer of Tahiti.

In the morning I asked Tiriki to come shopping with me, hoping that in this way I could get him to do some cooking. But this was his first time away from Manihi, and he wanted to put on his new clothes. It seems that Verne [one of the crew] gave Tiriki some of his old clothes. I waited on deck, and when Tiriki joined me, I didn’t know what to say. He had such a happy grin on his face. He was wearing a white shirt with a tie and a pair of boxer shorts. So that’s the way we went shopping. In the evening he went to the outdoor movie wearing a sport coat and the pair of boxer shorts again. No one has the heart to tell him that his clothes were not fashionable.

[novel]

As Skip walked back, he saw that Walker was still in Viama’s, now drinking Hinano beer. He wanted to find out what happened to Eddie, so he asked Walker about the Polynesian on the Dolphin. Walker said, “That’s Tiriki. I picked him up in Mahini and brought him to Papeete so he could find a big, fat wife. I assumed he could speak French because every time I said something to him he said, ‘Oui, Papa.’ I also assumed that he could cook—he said, ‘Oui, Papa’ when I asked him—but I never found out whether he could or not because he was seasick all the way from Mahini. Aside from that, Tiriki is a wonderful fellow, the only fellow I know who smiles even when he’s seasick.”

Just then, Les joined them and began talking about the destruction of Tahiti. “Captain Cook said on his first visit—no, his second visit—that the white man had ruined Tahiti. And look here at the example.” He gestured to Tiriki who was walking by. Actually he was strutting by, with an immense smile on his face. Les was referring to how he was dressed. Walker had given Tiriki some old clothes and Tiriki had cast off his pareu and T-shirt and put on a white dress shirt with a black tie. He also had on a pair of white boxer shorts—and nothing else.

“But this does not illustrate ruin. Tiriki is displaying, like his forefathers, his incorruptible simplicity and naturalness. And before you call him naïve, consider whether his simplicity is not also a natural satire of our own mode of dress. As soon as we reach the tropics and begin to ‘go native,’ the first symbol of civilization that we discard is the wearing of underwear. It is uncomfortable, unnecessary, and probably unsanitary. Tiriki is not only adapting our cast-off symbols of civilization, he is rubbing our noses in the display of our loss.”

I hope this gives at least a glimpse of how fact is transformed into fiction. The facts in the journal and novel are more or less the same, but in the novel, Tiriki’s behavior becomes more than a fact. He is, in a minor way, a symbol of cultural conflict and change. This is absent in the journal.

Q: You have used a number of haiku. What do you see as their main purpose in the novel?

A: I knew that using haiku in the novel was a risk. First of all, I had to actually write them, and second, haiku is not something that is usually associated with sailing. But I wanted to suggest that Skip, the sixteen-year-old main character, has some facility with language, for there are times when his language might otherwise seem surprisingly sophisticated. Also, I wanted to compensate for the rather spare and non-metaphorical style of the novel. The haiku, I hope, suggest a poetic aspect that is inherent in the sea.

Q: In reference to style, maybe you could talk about this statement: “The truth is wondrous when presented in the style of wonder....”

A: I didn’t write that. Skip wrote that in a letter to impress the mother of the girl he is pursuing. In the letter he makes a sly comparison between himself and Odysseus. Homer’s Odyssey seems wondrous in part because Odysseus visited strange countries, such as the land of the Lotus-eaters. Skip says he also visited strange countries. In Tahiti he saw an Islander carrying a pig on his back, which could be described—in the style of wonder—as a land where pigs ride men.

Q: Didn’t you worry about the 60s music references bouncing off the heads of contemporary readers?

A: Like most writers, I worried about many things, but I thought I could get away with some of them if I just didn’t over do it. Mainly, I wanted to use rock and roll for want it meant to my generation: it was the poetry of teenage romance. At the same time, the references to rock and roll are part of the 60s setting of the novel, along with the political references to John F. Kennedy, and the technological references to wooden boats and canvass sails. I think that any story, except perhaps fantasy, needs to be embedded in the details of its historical or social context. This is an important part of what we think of as a story’s realism.

Q: Why did you decide to publish your novel yourself, and what has you experience as a publisher been like?

A: I tried to get published at an established publishing house, but I couldn’t get anyone to actually read the manuscript, let alone publish it. I spent over a year trying to get various literary agents to read it, but without success. I then tried a few small literary presses that accept manuscripts. And finally, since the novel is about the sea, I tried the publishers of sea and maritime books. I think this is a common story of writers who turn to self-publishing.

I then looked at the subsidiary publishers, such as Lulu and Booksurge. But the more I looked, the more I realized that subsidiary publishers mainly do the easy part of publishing, the part that I felt I could do myself (It is not hard to get a block of ISBNs). While the hard part, such as copyediting and promotion, I would have to do myself in any case.

Plus, I realized that I wanted to have control of publishing process. For example, I knew what I wanted the interior layout to look like. The Cruise of the Jest is about sailing around the world and the chapters—there are 29 of them—are named after the ports where Jest stops. I wanted those port names in the running headers (and I wanted them is small caps). In other words, I see the layout as part of the rhetoric of the story itself.

Being both writing and publisher is a major advantage of self-publishing. I think of this as the “director’s cut effect.” It is often little things, but in publishing little things matter, especially when they begin to add up. For example, the novel includes the names of many boats, not just Jest, but also the Astrolabe, the Oceanid, and about fifteen to twenty more. While copy editing, I noticed that sometimes I preceded the name of a boat with “the” and sometimes I didn’t. At first I tired to decide which form is correct, but then I decided that the two forms have very slightly different nuances. Jest is like a character in the story, so like a character it’s name is not preceded with “the.” All the other boats are just boats, they get a “the” in front of their name. This is the type of decision that I think only a writer/publisher is in a position to make.

Maryann Batsakis, ForeWord’s sales manager, has chosen the feature for this month’s Book Club book.

A few years ago Nancy Hammerslough, publisher at Brown Barn Books, sent in Under A Stand Still Moon by Ann Howard Creel as a galley for possible review. Brown Barn always has excellent fiction, especially YA fiction, and this title was great. Nancy and I have since become good friends, and when Heather asked me to choose a YA novel for the ForeWord Book Club, I immediately thought of her. I asked her to send me “something” and it took her about 8 seconds to mail off Northlander by Meg Burden.

Nancy’s choice has not disappointed. Although my tastes in titles (and other things) have grown over the years, the story transported me back to when I was eleven or twelve, reading in my big chair, under two of my favorite afghans, all through the Michigan winters. Back then winter was the best eight months of the year!

The protagonist, Ellin, is a Southlander. All Southlanders have special powers, mostly healing powers. Ellin’s father, the greatest healer in the past 100 years, has been summoned by old colleagues from the Northland to help them learn to heal their king. But the Northlander king hates Southlanders, which means that all Northland subjects hate Southlanders too.

Ellin’s father decides to go anyway, and Ellin must follow him to help. On the way, she gets locked out of the kingdom, is found by a sobbing prince, is taken to the Northland king, and heals him. Think that’s the end? Nope. Author Meg Burden, caught me by surprise several times with her twists and turns.

Ellin is tossed in prison, escapes from a witch hunt, falls for a dark-eyed Lothario, sleeps in a covered wagon, births a foal...what can’t this girl do?

The first book in a series called “Tales of the Borderlands,” Northlander is well written and well thought out. I think Ms. Burden is going to have a great series.

Idiot Wind
(Chapter One of Breathing Out the Ghost)

Let me tell you about the time your grandfather took a sledgehammer to the car.

It was the summer I told everyone I was sixteen, the same summer my family went four months without sleep. Just as the school year was ending the hourly boys at Dow walked out on management. Your grandfather worked the acid tankers back then, and he was beholden to the union, so that left seven of us--me, Mom and Dad, Robbie, and the girls, Cassie, Devlin, and Sally--to get by on $300 a month strike pay. Because my parents had five children, there was no savings account. Right away we were unable to meet the mortgage, and toward the end grocery money was scarce. We did the best we could, of course. We learned to swallow powdered milk without making a face and not to note out loud that we were dining on macaroni and cheese for the umpteenth day in a row. We knew to appreciate our mother for the one delicacy she could afford to indulge us in, the bread she baked with flour and eggs donated by the church auxiliary. Years later I realized she encouraged us to gorge on her endless loaves so we’d be too bloated to complain. She wasn’t the only one who picked up tricks that summer. We kids learned not to ask for seconds or to speak too loud. We learned to stay outside long after dark and to keep the fan running in the bathroom so our odors didn’t annoy him. We had to do these things because we didn’t want to set your grandfather off. Let me tell you, it wasn’t easy. In that environment there wasn’t a sound that didn’t ring loud as an explosion, not a move to be made that didn’t make the claustrophobia all the more stifling.

Nights were the worst. You thought that with silence would come sleep, only there wasn’t ever any silence. As you lay in bed you became aware of all sorts of noises that wouldn’t let you rest. The cedar beams popped and groaned, the drywall cracked as the foundation shifted. Outside, birch leaves slathered themselves creepy-crawly on the shingles. If you were lucky you might drift off for an hour or so, but then a pipe would clang, or an eighteen-wheeler somewhere would accelerate, and you’d be brought right back into a state of lucid, aching insomnia. What usually kept me bright-eyed and bushytailed was the sound of your grandfather pacing the house. He was doing his best to wear out his restlessness.

Your uncle was a little smarter than me in those days. He wore headphones so he didn’t have to hear the racket. All night his spindle dropped records onto the turntable beside our bunks. I know your grandfather heard that sound, too, because he often came into our bedroom to set the needle back in its grip. I’m not sure he was aware I was awake; he didn’t know what a good game of possum I could play. Some nights I would hear him slip the headphones from around Robbie’s ears, not gently at all, really, so I’d be wondering why Robbie never woke up. It never entered my mind he might be faking just like me. Then other nights, with my eyes closed, I’d feel your grandfather breathe all over me, hot and heavy. He didn’t just inhale and exhale, you know; he had this kind of anxious humph that burst all concentrated like kettle steam. There were times he would hoist himself up and under my covers, and he would try to rest by rolling his weight on top of me. This would go on for hours until I’d imagine my spine cracking. This particular night, though, he just stood bedside and whispered, “If you’re up, I need your help.”

In the kitchen he handed me a bottle of sleeping pills he’d bought off his shop steward. “Hide them,” he said. “And don’t tell me where.”  Then he turned around and started counting out loud.

I slid a few drawers out. I shuffled the cracker and cookie boxes, opened cabinets and rearranged soup cans, all to throw him off the scent. Then I stuck the bottle behind an old jar of pickled something or other that had sat untouched for years in the lazy susan. When I went back to bed he’d taken to sitting crooked on the davenport, peeking out a bay window that looked past a flowerbox and some shrubs to the front yard. I didn’t realize what a good job I’d done until, some time later, I heard him rifling the spice rack.

You see, son, the thing is, when you crave it most, sleep is like a ghost; the relief it brings evaporates from your memory, but the weight of wanting it remains. Sometimes as I drive now, thinking I can find you--having to convince myself that I can find you¾I imagine things crawling across the highway. Not dogs or raccoons or deer even, but shapeless things that can’t be caught between edges. What are they? Hard to say, exactly. They usually appear around the thirteenth or fourteenth hour when I have a hundred miles to go before I can rest. But that’s phony of me, I know. There’s nowhere I’m expected. It’s not about getting anywhere now; it’s just about getting on.

I like to think that’s the feeling he faced as he grabbed hold of that sledgehammer. He wasn’t attacking the burden of his great expectations, but something altogether more formidable: their loss. I can’t tell you what he thought his life should have been. I only saw the resentment he felt for what it had become. I do know what my intentions for my life were: you, plain and simple. And the joke is that now I, too, must live with what I don’t have. Back then I couldn’t begin to imagine what kind of indignation could shove a man to such extremes, but now, as you can guess, it’s as clear to me as the yellow lane lines in front of my face. You can’t start a fire without a spark, and my hiding those pills was the flint he needed to strike out against.

Lucky guy. I’m still waiting for my turn to go off.

Here’s how the rest of that night played out:

By the third crack of the sledgehammer your grandmother’s bare feet scuffed the shag as she slapped the walls feeling for the light switch. That sound made me wonder, just for a moment, if a frightened doe had wandered through an open door, searching for a lost fawn. Then came another concrete smack as the hall trembled into brightness and Robbie audibly stirred. I felt responsible, knowing as I did that I’d buried your grandfather’s treasure without leaving him any kind of map, without leaving him so much as an X to mark the spot. So I slipped down to the bottom bunk and stepped lightly on Robbie’s chest, rousing him. The turntable was playing the second song on side two of The White Album, which, two days earlier, we’d shoplifted together.

By the time we made it to the living room your grandmother was already at the bay window. The T shirt she slept in barely covered the fading blue butterfly tattooed to her thigh. She had to stand on her toes to see through the shrubbery, which needed pruning. It was one of the few bits of yard work we’d yet to complete as we tried to reassure your grandfather that, despite the past due notices piling up by the telephone, his world could still be tidied and orderly. I remember the smell of varnish on the trim as I joined her to peek through the window. I remember the evergreens and saplings outside shivering. A silhouette dancing in the driveway, reflections flashing off the mallet. The whole family joining us.

The girls clung to their mother. They slept in your grandfather’s old T shirts, too, and each time the hammer sounded they seemed to shrink, swallowed alive in his stained cotton. Robbie and I, we were older, so we just stiffened and gawked. Soon we could see lights from other houses flip on, and the neighborhood became a constellation held together only by the gravity of our disbelief. Your grandfather shattered the windshield so hard a wiper flipped over the car’s roof. After that, the girls covered their ears and hid their faces, but I was looking at that butterfly tattoo. You must understand: your grandparents were seventeen when they had me, so when I was younger I saw her more as a beautiful older sister than a mother. Once at church I spied the minister pointing at her, saying to a parishioner, “Five kids, out of that,” and I had to agree. Your grandfather had a butterfly tattoo as well, on his right biceps. They were matching jokes, a dare they’d carried out when they were too young to know better, before we happened. Only by that night I’d already recognized something sad about the dull color and the flattened dimensions of the wings. Those tattoos had become graffiti on an earlier undercoat of life that the grit of getting on failed to cover up.

He didn’t stop until he pounded the bumper clean off. For a time, he stared at it, and though darkness confined him to shadow, I imagined him looking at it remorsefully, as if it were a mutt he’d struck while speeding. He didn’t seem concerned or even aware that he woke the neighborhood; he just carried the hammer into the carport and joined us in the living room.

“Now they’re welcome to it,” he said on his way to bed.

We didn’t know what that meant until the next day when the repo men showed up. Robbie and I were in the yard, playing with an old chemistry set that, like everything in our lives that summer, somebody from church had given us out of pity. We watched as the men backed the tow truck into our drive, indifferent to the front tire that gouged our yard. When they finally caught sight of what they’d come to collect they scratched their heads and spit into the grass. Then they stared at us, waiting for an explanation. I stiffened my shoulders and did the only thing I knew to. I was my father’s son, after all.

“You’re welcome to it,” I told them.

After the car was hauled away, we went inside to make sure our sisters knew not to ask where it disappeared to. I don’t know if my dad relaxed at all that night, but I can assure you he didn’t go digging in the lazy susan. Years later--I was in college, I think--I found his bottle of sleeping pills right where I left it, right there behind that jar of pickled something or other.

It’s funny. Back then I would have given everything I owned--which, obviously, wasn’t much--for a little peace of mind. Now I’ve lost all I ever wanted, and I’m afraid to sleep. I’m afraid to even rest my eyes for fear of what I might miss.
It’s funny, too, how in the years since then I’ve come to admire what your grandfather did. At the time I hated him. More than frightened, I was embarrassed. That’s why I told everyone who didn’t know better that I was sixteen when I was really only fourteen. I was already shaving by then, though, and stashing the odd-job money I earned from neighbors thinking it would get me a life of my own. I didn’t know yet that being a man doesn’t mean you’re always able to exact control. I didn’t know that sometimes immolating yourself in anger is your only option. Now I can honestly say I love my father more than I’m capable of loving anyone else, including you. Why?
Because a man seeking his father seeks God, but a father reduced to searching for his son only chases after the man he thought he ought to be.

(Laughter).

Sorry. That’s as profound as the philosophy gets when you’ve only got you and the life you should be leading left to entertain.

Maybe that’s the real difference between your grandfather and me: he wasn’t the kind to talk out of turn. There was more eloquence in that one act of beautiful ferocity than you’ll ever hear in these rambling hours I’ve put to tape. I, meanwhile, am a blabbermouth. I can’t shut up, I can’t not talk, and I hate myself for it. Sometimes I have to say your name out loud, A. J., just to believe you ever really existed. It’s almost a year since you’ve been gone. The milestones are becoming millstones. A whole year, and what’s become of me?

I’ve become the Ahab of the interstates, mewling and puking, raging at the breath of a mist that recedes into nothing.
Raging about it, about you. If you were here, would you hide my pills for me? 

Sometimes I get so tired sleep jumps in front of my wheels, a suicide.

But you, you’re different. You’re a vapor, a whiff, a movement, and all I have are the leftover vibrations to chase. You can ponder perpetual motion, sings the radio, and believe you me, I do. Perpetual motion’s my spook.

The wind’s steeper now, and it’s not even tornado season. The wind rattles the truck, sucks hard at the windows. I have to strap the recorder to the dashboard with duct tape to keep both hands on the wheel. I have to. Wind is a sound without shape, another ghost, another claustrophobia. There are so many now, I run into them, headlong, all the time.

So many that sometimes I think that this truck is nothing but your grandfather’s old house straddling four stupid, spinning tires.

Excerpted from Breathing Out The Ghost by Kirk Curnutt. (River City Publishing 978-1-57966-070-3)

We’ve started a new book. Maryann has already finished it. I’ll be reading mine on the way to New York this weekend. Go out and get yourself and copy and let us know what you think. Here’s the first page. H

All right, so I listened to my wife. After all, I’ve been doing it for nearly forty years, I should have stopped now? Boy, is she going to feel guilty.

            So there I was standing at the corner of Fifty-seventh Street and Park Avenue, minding my own business, waiting for the light to change. My mission was to buy blue shirts, Jane insisted that I buy more blue shirts, they bring out the color of my eyes, she said, they give me a little color. My luck, there was a sale at a fancy store on Fifty-seventh, go there, she said. So I was waiting at the corner, to my left a great-looking woman in her fifties, a real Manhattan type, all dolled up, loaded with jewelry, great body, great legs. To my right, a handsome young fellow wearing a sport shirt and the tightest jeans I ever saw; I noticed the lady glancing at him approvingly. Me, she didn’t seem to notice. At sixty-four, I’m much more age-appropriate for her than he is but, hey, looking is free, let her look. And that was my last relaxed thought on earth because that’s when I noticed the car coming straight at us, right onto the sidewalk. An old man was slumped down at the wheel, eyes closed. His was the last face I ever saw in my life.

Excerpted from I Never Saw Paris: A Novel of the Afterlife by Harry I. Freund. (Carroll & Graf 978-0-78672-054-5)

I usually let novels pile up until they begin to spill under the table before sitting down on the pink couch to read. The spillover takes a surprisingly short amount of time. Surprising or awesome, depending on how you look at it. More than anything else around here, we get novels. Considering that the buyer’s market supports 85% nonfiction to 15% fiction, you have to wonder if there are more people writing novels than reading them. Either novelists are the consummate overachievers, or the folks with the most time on their hands.

So, I sit on the pink couch to read. I read the first paragraph. If it doesn’t do anything for me, I toss the novel into the rejection heap. Here are some first lines that didn’t do anything for me:

From here in Naples, Florida, in our new house, in my new bedroom with its window screen that always has a bright colored lizard crawling across it, I have wondered when my problems started.

First of all, when I got to the end, I felt a little confused by the grammar. Second, I don’t believe that there’s always a “bright colored lizard” on anyone’s screen.

“Sophie opened the door, then stood, reluctant to enter. There was a smell, a scent in the air…

There’s a fine line between too much information and too little in opening paragraphs. This one has too little, and what it does have is cliché.

I met Bryan Hillary on the back byways of the vast Nebraska plains in the early summer of 2006. We had both just experienced strange events in our lives and separately decided to take to the road and travel the dark backwater of the country, the place from where all good stories flow.

And this one has too much. That, plus too many adjectives—take them all out. And oh, that pedantic last clause.

Finally, this one has too many adjectives (contrary to what you may have learned in elementary school, adjectives do not make writing more interesting…it’s the contrary) and 100% cliché.

Her heart was pounding as she sat in the car. Before her was the house, a giant white colonial with black shutters, a quaint portico and the three-car garage set off to the side where she now found herself wondering, What have I done?

Now here are a few that caught my attention:

The people of Rio call their city, “the most beautiful place in the world.” A choir reciting in unison: “The most beautiful place in the world…” This sentiment has been expressed in a variety of tongues in various forms, from tourist handbooks to exotically spiced films, from the conquistadores of the past to the carnival tourists of today who come to visit in package tours. And I agree — although I don’t really know how they conceive of this thing called “the world,” I do believe I’ve seen enough of it.

The first two sentences had me. It’s the sound sense coming in so quickly, then words like “spiced,” “conquistadores,” “carnival,” followed by a certain attractive weariness.

Let me tell you about the time your grandfather took a sledgehammer to the car.

Not “Let me tell you how MY…” but “how YOUR…”

All right, so I listened to my wife. After all, I’ve been doing it for nearly forty years, I should have stopped now? Boy, is she going to feel guilty.

Instantly, a familiar style of speaking, and along with that, certain expectations. I’ll read on.

And finally,

Women only have to come into contact with me to fall ill. They catch colds, they sneeze, sometimes their throats are affected…. For them, it is the first time. Their healthy days were before my time.

Pretty funny. Nothing like a sneeze sixteen words into a story. I’ll keep reading this one too, and so can you. See you soon. Let’s talk. H