They Have More Money

I reread The Sun Also Rises recently for inspiration for my novel. I wanted to study it like a scientist to discern its artistic secrets.

I had remembered the plot as fairly simple: a bunch of hard-drinking expatriates go on a trip to Spain where they fall apart in various ways during a bullfigting fiesta. But it's not simple at all. Hemingway was smart and he'd been a journalist -- he has a startling gift for introducing vivid dynamics early on. So in the first 30 pages or so you meet Robert Cohn, the outsider, whose wife is aging, jealous and doomed and he wants to leave her. You meet Jake Barnes and learn he's impotent from a war wound, and that he's in love with the beautiful Englishwoman Brett Ashley, who loves him too but won't be with him because she needs sex. She's a self-destructive drunk; Jake is a passive, patient drunk; various people arriving from elsewhere are much more serious drunks, and Robert Cohn never gets drunk but is restless and needy.

I'd forgotten that H-way (as I like to call him) sketched in these dramatic dynamics from the beginning. It's what we called, when I was a script reader, "high stakes" plotting. It's a good lesson how involving this is because it's an easy trap in writing, one I often fall into, to dance around your hottest material with an endless warm-up. 'The good part is coming,' you think to yourself, while writing scenes you can tell are boring and you'd be bored reading. 'Just wait till we get to the cool part.'

I took a fiction class with the great Sam Lipsyte (Venus Drive, The Subject Steve), who kept telling us: "Never write a sentence thinking, 'this is boring but I have a really neat thing to say in a minute.'" He advocated ruthless cutting, and under his tutelage I became a minimalist. I felt uneasy writing like that, because it was counter to my natural instinct, which is to tell, tell, tell. But I liked him so much I just wanted his praise. I hacked away at my writing till it was as lean and taut as a Raymond Carver haiku. It felt totally unnatural to me -- I didn't recognize myself in it -- but I realized it was technically better than my usual stuff. It was good to trim the fat.

I tried an actual H-way style imitation and it was amazingly fun. Choosing just a few details to drop in, trusting the reader will connect the dots.

Anyway, The Sun Also Rises is a structural and stylistic jewel, but its antisemitism is extremely pervasive. Robert Cohn is portrayed as a klutzy outsider because of his Jewishness. The other men are flawed and alcoholic, but they have a savvy Cohn lacks. The scorn they direct his way is chilling, as is H-way's own attitude to the character, evident through his fictional counterparts.

What did I learn from studying TSAR? For one thing, that the rich make amusing character studies. Too bad, because I don't know the rich so I can't write about them. But other useful things: convey personality through speech and action, don't describe people's traits. Have some major-ass things going on. Try to depict a time and a place as these things are interesting to future readers (and matter anyway -- the socio-political backdrop informs the mindset and actions of the characters).

I hope some of you are trying to write a novel. Otherwise these posts are going to seem awfully boring.