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In a sense, COTH, 1989 and tdp are like a trilogy about Tim’s life (with HSZ and DSW being companion volumes). They don’t overlap in time or plot. In that sense then, 1989 is like Empire Strikes Back or Two Towers. A middle volume, with all that that entails. The plot of 1989 should deepen and complicate the plot of the overall trilogy. Also add some disillusionment and darkness, like in Empire. Tim loses something vital, that he can’t get back. Maybe learns something about his past/father that disturbs him, forces him to look at himself and think about who he really is.
The continuous narrative arc in the trilogy is Tim and Helen. In 1989 Tim becomes disillusioned with Helen, and it leads him to stop hanging out with her by the end, until she helps him in his hour of need and they rediscover the connection that binds them.
CotH is about the head, 1989 about the gut and Volume III is about the heart. To put it another way, CotH is about ideas and the intellect, 1989 is about desire and lust and Volume III is about love, courage and will.
In a sense, one challenge of 1989 is not much changes absolutely for Tim by the end. He starts friends with Helen and Jessica, ends with him friends with her. He is changed internally, made less innocent, made into an artist (perhaps). However it is the middle volume of a trilogy. Tim discovers within him both a capacity for good and for evil that terrifies him.
But where on earth can this go in Volume III?
The continuous narrative arc in the trilogy is Tim and Helen. In 1989 Tim becomes disillusioned with Helen, and it leads him to stop hanging out with her by the end, until she helps him in his hour of need and they rediscover the connection that binds them.
CotH is about the head, 1989 about the gut and Volume III is about the heart. To put it another way, CotH is about ideas and the intellect, 1989 is about desire and lust and Volume III is about love, courage and will.
In a sense, one challenge of 1989 is not much changes absolutely for Tim by the end. He starts friends with Helen and Jessica, ends with him friends with her. He is changed internally, made less innocent, made into an artist (perhaps). However it is the middle volume of a trilogy. Tim discovers within him both a capacity for good and for evil that terrifies him.
But where on earth can this go in Volume III?
Not the message, since that's cheezy. But the meaning--created by the act of reading. The reader has been seduced by Santa Zita in Vol. I (City On the Hill) and betrayed in Vol. II (1989.) If CotH is Star Wars, and 1989 is the Empire Strikes Back, does that mean Vol. III is Return of the Jedi, with all that that entails (Ewoks, Darth Vader suddenly turning good, etc.)? If CotH is thesis, and 1989 antithesis, then Vol. III must be synthesis and integration. Both for the characters, but also for the reader's relationship with the writer, and the work.
Point of view in Vol. III should follow these rules:
- Every scene change should involve a change in point of view—ie, POV charcter never repeats from scene to scene
- Never go more than three scenes in a row without returning to character’s POV. For example, if the first scene has Michael, second Tim, then the third returns to Michael, the fourth has to go to Helen, it can’t go to Michael or Tim.
- 0a (spring '91)
- 0b (spring '92)
- 0c included in the 1991 Notebook (Dec. '91)
- 0d (1/4/92)
- I-1 the "Green Draft" (3/30/92)
- Ia Interim Summer Draft (7/23/92)
- II the "Abyss" Draft (10/3/92)
- IIa Interim Draft (3/28/92)
- III (5/11/92)
Tim’s collection of short stories and sketches about Santa Zita. Containing many of the same characters and situations, but with no clear narrative.
One reviewer said:
One reviewer said:
A mish-mash of alternative rock, meaningless sex, recreational chemical abuse, and third-rate philosophizing, appears to regard narrative as an “un-cool” artifact of the western civilization that has spawned the cultural forces of which this is the lamentable but perhaps inevitable end result.
Meandering, converging, diverging, always threatening to engage the reader, but never actually doing so, the collection is like a conversation with a random stranger who at first seems to be charming and witty, but is later revealed to be clinically insane. A conversation that one stumbled into, but is very hard to end. Every time it seems like it will, a new tangent is spun off. Like a never-ending sequence of beginning without finishing.
While inserting the Helen of Santa Zita scenes back into NFFN, I realized i needed a scene from Tm’s POV in between two scenes of from Helen’s POV (her calling Tim, and then them hanging out together at Holly Street)-something that show Tim’s thoughts about Helen and his point of view about their estrangement earlier during winter quarter.
I then had the wacky idea of having the scene start with Tim hearing the Winger song “Madalaine” which triggers an involuntary sequence of memories of the past year—referencing, of course, the famous moment in Proust’s La Recherce du Temps Perdu where a single bite of a Madelaine cookie causes a long episode of involuntary memory. This is something I only know about second-hand, though, I’ve never actually read the book. So it seems like I should. According to wikipedia:
So I now ordered A La Recherce du Temps Perdus Vol. I from Amazon.com The most recent English translation by Lydia Davis, which apparently is highly recommended.
I then had the wacky idea of having the scene start with Tim hearing the Winger song “Madalaine” which triggers an involuntary sequence of memories of the past year—referencing, of course, the famous moment in Proust’s La Recherce du Temps Perdu where a single bite of a Madelaine cookie causes a long episode of involuntary memory. This is something I only know about second-hand, though, I’ve never actually read the book. So it seems like I should. According to wikipedia:
which makes it sound a bit like Notes For a Future Novel, actually. Only without the hair metal.At the risk of over-simplification, In Search of Lost Time can be viewed as a vast bildungsroman in which the neurasthenic narrator discovers that he is a writer after a lifetime spent distracted by society and love. It is also a meditation on time, memory and the superiority of art in recapturing past experiences. It is both a portrait of the artist and a discovery of the aesthetic by which the portrait is painted.
So I now ordered A La Recherce du Temps Perdus Vol. I from Amazon.com The most recent English translation by Lydia Davis, which apparently is highly recommended.
Reading over the beginning scenes of HSZ as I paste tem into NFFN, there are a lot of scenes of Helen thinking to herself, flashing back and ruminating. Probably too many. Patrick O’Brian does a good job of inserting such flashing back into conversations and other activity. Right now it feels like more of a journal of someone’s thoughts than a novel. For example, this scene:
The back-story with Tim is important, because it helps explain Helen’s frame of mind at the beginning of NFFN; broken with her boyfriend and estranged from her best friend, and also because it helps fill in the gaps for the reader between the end of 1989 A Novel and the beginning of volume three.
I’m not in general a huge fan of flash-backs, I think in literary fiction they can work in an interesting way because you’re not presenting the scene directly, as you are the rest of the novel, but rather the character’s perception and memory of it. So in a sense it introduces an element of “unreliable narrator” to it. Of course, this can be dangerous, too, because there is an implied social contract between the writer and reader that the information presented in a flashback be not completely fraudulent, otherwise, the reader wouldn’t know what to trust and may feel cheated. So a flashback can be slanted or incomplete, but not completely untruthful (unless your character is actually insane, like in Faulkner, but I was never a huge fan of Faulkner.)
Helen knew that she would never get through the book left to her own devices. Like working out, some things had to be done with another person or it would never happen. Only the threat of losing face could compel her to continue on. She remembered Tim, and her plan for Valentine's Day. To set the stage for that, maybe they could go study at Golden West. They had done that many times the year before. Time to kill two birds with one stone. Actually three-since studying together might be a good way to improve the situation between she and Tim.
She knew he was still pissed about what she had said to him at Peter's birthday party. It was the first Friday night of the quarter, at Jake and Peter's apartment in Dead Oak. Tim had showed up, and everyone had been really psyched since he had been so MIA the previous quarter, and hadn't even showed up to the epic beginning of the decade New Year's party at Sarah Wolfe's house in Alta Lara. Despite the fact that he showed up, he had seemed moody and out of sorts, almost angry with everyone and everything.
Helen had been irked at him, since everyone was being so nice to him and he seemed only able to be grumpy and irritable in return. She just wanted him to get over it, so they could hang out and he could listen to her problems, instead of caring only about his.
In general, the whole night has irritated her-it wasn't just Tim, but also Jake, Peter and Perse way too wired on speed, watching George being nice to Sophie when Todd Forrest was around, and mean to her when he wasn't, Jamie cling to Peter like a blood-sucking parasite, and avoiding Sarah Wolfe because she wanted to find out what was going on with Todd Fox, and Helen just didn't want to say. All in all, it was bad vibes all around, and Tim had been the one unlucky enough to push her over the edge.
When it happened, Helen had been drinking beers with he and Jake out on the deck. Tim had, in his best Morrissey-esque moping voice, proclaimed that love was for everyone except him. Jake has asked why he was bumming, and Tim had, instead of saying anything, just looked darkly out into the parking lot as if whatever he was going through was so intense that no words could communicate it. This was more manufactured melodrama than even Helen could stand. “Oh, it's just too many Kane College cardiac injuries,” she had blurted out.
She had intended it to be teasing; sharp enough to snap him out of his self-absorption, yet still funny, but it had come out too loud, too cutting-the cruel strike of a harpy's claw. Plus she had said it right in the middle of a pause in the music booming from inside the apartment, so everyone on the deck heard it. Tim had flinched, like he had just been kicked in the stomach, but then he just fixed her with an icy, defiant stare. They didn't say anything more to each other, and Tim left soon after.
Jessica, who had been on the deck with Lana and Roxy at the time, had accused her of being mean in the car ride home. Helen knew it was true, but she didn't like hearing it. And why was Jessica, of all people, defending him? After the way Tim had treated her over the whole April thing, Tim had no right to have Jessica on his side.
So maybe their estrangement was partly her fault. Didn't her breakup with Todd take priority over their stupid tiff? Didn't he understand how hard it was for her? She needed support and all he could do was be pissy. Helen started to get so irritated by Tim that she almost abandoned her plan, but she pushed those thoughts aside. She just had to do it. She had to take the first step.
The back-story with Tim is important, because it helps explain Helen’s frame of mind at the beginning of NFFN; broken with her boyfriend and estranged from her best friend, and also because it helps fill in the gaps for the reader between the end of 1989 A Novel and the beginning of volume three.
I’m not in general a huge fan of flash-backs, I think in literary fiction they can work in an interesting way because you’re not presenting the scene directly, as you are the rest of the novel, but rather the character’s perception and memory of it. So in a sense it introduces an element of “unreliable narrator” to it. Of course, this can be dangerous, too, because there is an implied social contract between the writer and reader that the information presented in a flashback be not completely fraudulent, otherwise, the reader wouldn’t know what to trust and may feel cheated. So a flashback can be slanted or incomplete, but not completely untruthful (unless your character is actually insane, like in Faulkner, but I was never a huge fan of Faulkner.)
That's how I imagine Notes For a Future Novel being reviewed. 2000 pages of college students hanging out, partying, gossiping, flirting, getting together, breaking up, reading, writing, and, sometimes, even fighting.
Today I started inserting the HSZ scenes into NFFN. I wasted a bunch of time trying to remember how to convince Microsoft Word X (I never did uprade to Office 2004) to do "smart quotes." It's already obvious that the opening scene of HSZ is way too long, and is hard to alternate with Tim and Michael's first scenes. So I may need to cut some of the flashing back from the HSZ parts.
Today I started inserting the HSZ scenes into NFFN. I wasted a bunch of time trying to remember how to convince Microsoft Word X (I never did uprade to Office 2004) to do "smart quotes." It's already obvious that the opening scene of HSZ is way too long, and is hard to alternate with Tim and Michael's first scenes. So I may need to cut some of the flashing back from the HSZ parts.
