Misc: June 2007 Archives

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:

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.