Jane Vandenburgh
The Architecture of the Novel (Counterpoint, $15.95)
What we have here is a quiet manifesto about the literary writer's innate need to tamper with, or thumb her nose at, all the cheap hack's truisms, or the ceaseless, perennially awful carpentry advice about novel-writing.
Half this new book from Jane Vandenburgh is a wise and whimsical glossary of terms useful to novelists, or to anyone who wants to read novels like novelists do. Just when I thought nobody could say anything else interesting about writing novels, here's one that reads like a glorious jailbreak.
"A" is for "anecdote;" "B" is for ""broken symmetries."
"D" is for "destiny," and "E" is for "earning in" but also for "evil."
"Earning in" is not to be confused with a novel's "earning out" its advance, for it refers to something even more elusive, such as a novel's having a right to exist.
These are heady words, here in the epoch of a steroid-fed chicken in every pot and an MFA under every roof.
"Equality between writer and reader" includes this: "We do not write down to our readers, because we are not better than they are. This pertains especially when we're writing for young people; we are not better than children and don't even necessarily know more than they do. We are merely older."
If there is an "architectural" requirement for the novel, Vandenburgh seems to be requiring that it be situated well, with a full view of the river of Time. Much of the sheer grace of this book comes from her steady reminder to the reader that even wood and architecture are fluid. She acknowledges her own influences: not only James Wood and Anne Lamott, but also Welty, Forster, Gardner. At the same time, she admires the work of filmmakers such as James Cameron's painstaking linguistic preparations for the making of Avatar, and quotes Judy Collins on the merits of listening to liturgical choir music.
My favorite glossary entry is "The Way We Name Rivers," under "W." Citing Welty's use of a favorite 1945 geography text, George R. Stewart's Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States, Vandenburgh likens the accrual of novelist's truths to the linguistic confluence of Dutch, Indian, and English in the New World. Every "new" place was, in fact, ancient:
In order to write our scenes, we go to a specific place in the story which can be any place at all. We accurately name the river there by describing its action as carefully as possible. We don't worry at all about its tributaries or headwaters or where the river (which is our story) is going to spill into the sea.
We write one piece of the river and call it Big Rock, then we write the one called Little Bend.
We enter the time of our story and look around. It may seem as wild and as strange as the New World did to the first European explorers. We look around, entering it respectfully, listening to the voice of those who already live there to find out what the story's things want to call themselves.
We enter our story as we would a foreign country.
The Architecture of the Novel is a valuable tool for fiction writers not only for what it offers on the subject of novelistic carpentry but also for what it offers on the subject of originality. In Vandenburgh's new world, you can file "American fiction" also under "P," which stands for "perennially renewable."
Jane Vandenburgh's other books are Failure to ZigZag, The Physics of Sunset, and A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century.
