Thomas Mullen

Interrelated Thoughts on Sacred Games, The Wire, and Everything Bad Is Good For You

(OK, I've been slacking on the blog. I have an excuse, which will interest those of you wondering about my new book: I've been busy putting some finishing touches on the manuscript, which my agent has now read and green-lighted. So after a few more edits I'll be sending it off to my editor, and then, presumably, I'll have more time to exercise my right as a 21st Century Human by blogging. So, here goes...)

I recently read Vikram Chandra's 900-page Indian cop-gangster epic Sacred Games. Good stuff. But let me note again that it was 900 pages, meaning that it finishes second only to Infinite Jest as Longest Novel By A Non-Dead Guy I've Ever Read. And honestly, if it had a different font size and a more standard use of paragraph breaks, it probably would have been 1,100 pages. (The first sign of trouble, after noticing how impressively heavy the thing is to carry around (in hardcover!), was the fact that it didn't have page headers listing the author or title, as the book designer wisely dispensed with them to buy Chandra a few extra lines per page, which probably saved them 50 pages or so.)

I really dug this book. Taking place in present-day Bombay/Mumbai, it alternately follows a humble, hardened Sikh cop (Sartaj Singh) and Bombay's number one gangsta, Ganesh Gaitonde. Most critics spent much ink noting the crazy multinational empire that Gaitonde builds, with harems in Thailand and movies in Bollywood and money laundering in the Middle East and assassination plots in London, etc, and all the attendant statements about globalization and interconnectedness. But my favorite parts of the book were the Singh (cop) chapters. Cop stories are so easy to get wrong, as there are so many cliches waiting for the ambitious writer to trip over, and I can think of few cop novels that I've really, really liked. Chandra, though, does a perfect job of following the genre conventions just enough to keep the story going while also subverting them in interesting ways. Through Singh's investigations, we get to learn about the tensions between different castes and immigrants and religions in Bombay (tensions which resonate in any country), the complicated modern relations between men and women (there's a great blackmail plot involving an affair), and the constant presence of corruption and graft (Singh is portrayed as a Good Cop partly because he only takes some bribes, which tells you something about the state of policing in India).

I might even call Sacred Games a Great Book, but a 900-page Great Book, like a great marriage, is going to have its rough patches. I eventually became bored with the Gaitonde chapters; maybe this makes me out of touch with my fellow Americans, but mobster characters (Goodfellas, The Sopranos, etc) don't quite do it for me. Also, the Singh chapters were told in spare but pitch-perfect third-person narration, combining an eye for detail with a heartbreaking weariness of what Singh sees around him, whereas the gangster chapters were a cockier first-person, narrated by a total egotist who I eventually got tired of. Egotists can be either superb narrators (see Nabokov) or really annoying ones, and Gaitonde seemed more the latter to me.

But the part of the book that I vacillated between admiring and disliking, and the theme of today's post, was the many many tangents and sidebars and extraneous stories. Tangents, of course, are what can make fiction so interesting and fun, but too many of them can muddle a book. And a reader's tolerance for tangents tends to decrease on page 650 or so, when we start wanting the storyteller to get on with it already. Writers constantly face choices, choices about what to put in and what to leave out. I myself struggle with this all the time. The Last Town on Earth has chapters or long sections written from at least six major characters' perspectives, so there was a lot of balancing to do, lots of balls to keep in the air at once. But readers can only handle so much before confusion or impatience set in. As a writer, I tend to gravitate toward multicharacter, multiperspective stories (my new one has at least five characters' perspectives, as of the current draft), so I can totally relate to the desire to put more in, to add something from the daughter's perspective and something from the second-cousin's perspective and hey maybe a chapter about the immigrant waiter at the restaurant down the street and something about that panhandler guy, etc. Aiming for that epic scope, trying to tell The Complete Story, to get it all down, to encompass this great big sprawling story we call Life. But as a reader, that sometimes doesn't work, and we want the writer to use his artistic judgment to choose only the characters and stories that best tell his tale. So: why this disconnect?

Because I'm behind the times TV-wise, I've only recently started watching Series 1 of The Wire, which has been hailed by critics as the best show in the history of television. And I can't disagree: I absolutely love it. If I didn't have a toddler and if my wife and I weren't always so tired by dinnertime, we'd try to watch a season a week. What makes the show so great? The dialogue and the realism, yeah, but mainly the characters and the complexity and the many interwoven subplots. There are at least a dozen "major" characters thus far, cops and drug dealers and cop's spouses and DA's and drug dealers' girlfriends and judges and other cops and other dealers, and I'm only on the eighth episode. The show has been called "a television novel" because of its novelistic scope, encompassing so many characters and daring to go on tangents (for example, by taking time in a random episode to show ten or fifteen minutes in the life of one of the characters we hadn't seen much of before, just to flesh him or her out, to add depth, to reveal something new). It's awesome, and addictive: I want to know more about everyone. Yay, complexity! Yay, tangents! Give us more!

In Steven Johnson's provocative Everything Bad Is Good For You, he argues that societal whipping posts like TV and video games are actually making us smarter, not dumber, because they are so much more complex than they used to be. Instead of Pacman running around on a simple screen, Myst or Doom contain hundreds of secrets that need to be explored, challenging our cognitive processes. And instead of the linear storytelling and small casts of CHIPS or Starsky and Hutch, more recent TV sensations like Lost or 24 have countless subplots and dozens of characters and aren't afraid to confuse us or leave us hanging or throw out information that it might take us a whole week of water-cooler gossiping to figure out. Johnson argues that people who blindly bemoan TV and praise literature haven't noticed how far TV has come, and he makes a lot of points that intrigue and frighten me as a novelist.

Because here's the thing: Some of the aspects of The Wire that I most love are extremely difficult to pull off in fiction. Even though The Wire has been called "a TV novel," the fact is, few novels have as many characters and perspectives as The Wire has. It out-novels the novel. And it makes me wonder (or fear) whether this is a sign that TV could be (shudder) a more effective medium for complex storytelling than fiction is. Why? First of all, the visuals help: as anyone at a cocktail party or at a new job knows, we remember faces a lot better than names. So when a random, previously unimportant character wanders on screen in episode 5 and suddenly does something really important, we might not remember his name, but we do remember that he's the guy that threatened McNulty a few weeks ago. Whereas, with fiction, for example Sacred Games, when Chandra suddenly hits us on page 500-something with a 40-page chapter that's a flashback to an episode early in the life of a character whose name I don't at all recognize, because he hasn't been mentioned in hundreds of pages, I'm kind of lost, and maybe even annoyed. Second, TV and film are more social than reading; even if we don't remember who that somewhat familiar face on the TV is, we can hit pause and ask our friends, whereas reading is solitary.

(I should note that some of The Wire's extraordinary writers, like Richard Price and George Pelecanos, are also great novelists. And that, although critics and writers love The Wire, its viewership was relatively low compared to, say, Everybody Loves Raymond, so maybe viewers don't want complexity after all. Or maybe only certain kinds of viewers.)

So what does this all mean? I have no idea. I only know that, as a writer, I want to tell complex, complicated stories, and I want to go on tangents, to find a way to squeeze in this perspective and that story and this anecdote and that overlooked character. I want to get it all, even if this challenges the reader -- and maybe, if it challenges him, that very challenge will become addictive, and make the reading experience so much richer and more rewarding than a straight first-person linear tale would have been. But I have the constant fear that if I do make it too complex, if I ask too much of the reader, if I annoy him too much, he'll throw up his hands, put the book down... and just turn on his TV.


link to this | File:  Book Reviews  TV  Writing 

Are writers crazy? Maybe not, but that sentence struck me as a particularly apt way to begin my first blog posting. I was thinking about this because I was catching up on some New Yorker reading recently, and it turns out that two issues in the past few months ran articles about famous writers who suffered from severe depression and alcoholism. The first story, about William Styron, was an excerpt of his daughter's recently published memoir; the second detailed the mysterious death of Malcolm Lowry, author of the postmodern classic (or is that a contradiction?) Under the Volcano.

The Styron article notes that, while the Sophie's Choice author could be quite the entertainer when hosting cocktail parties dotted with intellectuals and filmmakers, his heavy drinking didn't exactly make him the most pleasant father to have around the house, particularly when his writing wasn't going well. According to Syron's daugher, his depression was not necessarily a result of the wounds one normally equates with troubled writers (bad sales, cruel reviews, no money, dismal job teaching remedial writing to a community college in East Nowhere, etc). He received plenty of acclaim and what seems like more than respectable financial success for a novelist. As will happen when you're on top, he did receive his share of ire as well; The Confessions of Nat Turner, which won the 1967 Pulitizer Prize, was strongly criticized by black intellectuals who disapproved of the white author's take on Turner. Still, the New Yorker article lays the blame for Styron's troubles on subtler demons that sprang from his mother's death when he was thirteen.

The Lowry article, meanwhile, details that author's tempestuous marriage. His wife served as his editor, but also as his nurse and all-around lifesaver -- he was so addled by various mental problems that she tied his shoes for him, and his alcoholic spells were so bad he occasionally begged on street corners for spare change to buy more booze. Lowry's death was ruled accidental at the time, an overdose on various medications and alcohol. But some scholars are arguing, the story notes, that Lowry's wife, driven to exhaustion and despair by his manic extremes, may have deliberately fed him too many meds that night.

So the same magazine ran two stories, in less than three months, about depressed, alcoholic novelists. The Crazy Writer is almost a stereotype, except there's too much evidence to consider it a mere stereotype. Looking back, there indeed have been many maniacs, depressives, suicides, and other legions of the unwell in our ranks. And they're the writers who get the most attention, because they're so much more interesting -- interesting and repulsive and horrifying and sympathetic and sad and tragic -- than the more typical writer, who tends to be a quiet sort who spends far too much time alone in his or her office. We can't all be Hemingway, shooting rhinos and scaling mountains, or F. Scott, boozing with Manhattan's and Hollywood's glitziest, though journalists of course would prefer it if we could. The Crazy Writers, finally spared their torments in the placid afterlife of the canon, look down on us mortal writers from their pedestals. They are benighted saints of passionate madness, and it is as though we living authors should kneel before their books and vow to sacrifice our own mental health in the pursuit of similar artistic riches.

I read the two Crazy Writer stories with a mix of fascination and terror, thinking, could this happen to me? Could the sting of bad press, or, the opposite, the dizzying impossibility of high expectations, ground me down to such a lowly place? Fortunately, I don't think so. I had a healthy upbringing, and I have a supportive family -- this seems to disqualify me from about 90 percent of literary breakdowns. I don't agree with the theory that writers or artists are all a bit crazy, and that this craziness is what drives us to create, and that the crazier we are, the better our art. Thank God for the example set by folks like Michael Chabon and Jeffrey Eugenides, hugely talented and successful writers who also, as far as I know, seem to lead sane and healthy lives.

Soon after I got my first book deal, I saw Bret Easton Ellis give a reading at Olssons Books here in D.C. At the time I'd only read his first novel, Less Than Zero. That book helped Ellis achieve widespread fame and literary success at an insanely young age, something that he has admitted was both a blessing and a curse. Ellis was on tour that night to promote his new book, Lunar Park, which I later read and enjoyed very much. The main character of Lunar Park is an approaching-middle-age writer named Bret Easton Ellis who is haunted by a man who looks just like he did back when he wrote Less Than Zero. He is also being stalked by a man who looks just like the terrifying protagonist of his ultraviolent later novel, American Psycho. So, although I wasn't yet an expert on the cult of Ellis, it seemed irresistibly symbolic for me, the newly minted writer, to attend the reading of a novel about a writer who goes crazy, written by a writer who himself may or may not have gone crazy.

Ellis has a deadpan sense of humor and put on a fun show. But during the Q&A, it was one of the unfunny things he said that has stuck with me. He was asked about his writing routine, how he does it, how long, what time, etc, and one of the points he made was that, in order to write well, you "have to be healthy." I had never thought of that before. Maybe it's because I myself, despite having written a novel about an epidemic, have been blessed with a largely healthy life. But I think it's a great point Ellis made, and I get it more now than I did back in that September of 2005, as I myself not only have gone through the full publishing cycle but also have had my first child and have dealt with the attendant sleep-deprivation, family illnesses, emotional stresses, etc. You have to be healthy. Writing when you haven't had any sleep and are subsisting on espresso in the daytime and bourbon at night might sound romantic, and might fit perfectly with all those Crazy Writer stereotypes, but it won't result in great art, and you'll likely go crazy. Writing on Quaaludes and speed sounds edgy and wild but will leave you with some awfully long, incomprehensible sentences that, odds are, will not be studied in the kinds of Postmodern Fiction courses that first got you really into Pynchon and Beckett. Writing when you're emotionally and psychologically unwell and unsafe might sound therapeutic, but it also might be the wrong way to deal with some important issues you need to deal with.

(And yes, I know, a few Great Works have been created this way, sure, and yes, you could argue that artists occasionally need to experience life at the extremes in order to get new perspectives, to find bizarre and original sources of inspiration, etc, okay, but even then I would argue that they need to recalibrate themselves before sitting in front of that word processor. And yes, I also have admitted when asked that one of the reasons I write is because it "keeps me sane," and there is a lot of truth in the notion that a writer, if deprived of his artistic outlet, might go a little looney, and yes, I see this, definitely, but here again there is a fine line.)

So I want to share Mr. Ellis' sage advice to any aspiring writers out there. I try to remember it on days when I'm too foggy from a long night up with a sick toddler, or when I myself am losing a fight with the flu or am otherwise overstressed or freaked out or unwell. I want to write, I want to create, I want to push envelopes and cross lines and tear down old buildings, but first I have to be healthy. I want to push and push and push, but in my art, and not in my life. I want inspiration and creativity and new ways of seeing, but I don't want to inspire my daughter to write a memoir about my many foibles, or inspire my wife to kill me. The New Yorker will have to find another crazy novelist to write about -- and no doubt they'll find one.


link to this | File:  Writing