Ten Years in the Tub (18 page)

May 2004

BOOKS BOUGHT
:

     
  
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
— Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

     
  
What Narcissism Means to Me
—Tony Hoagland

     
  
David Copperfield
—Charles Dickens (twice)

BOOKS READ
:

     
  
David Copperfield
—Charles Dickens

A
nyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress. What's that chinking noise? It's the sound of the assiduous creative-writing student hitting bone. You can't read a review of, say, a Coetzee book without coming across the word “spare,” used invariably with approval; I just Googled “J. M. Coetzee + spare” and got 907 hits, almost all of them different. “Coetzee's spare but multi-layered language,” “detached in tone and spare in style,” “layer upon layer of spare, exquisite sentences,” “Coetzee's great gift—and it is a gift he extends to us—is in his spare and yet beautiful language,” “spare and powerful language,” “a chilling, spare book,” “paradoxically both spare and richly textured,” “spare, steely beauty.” Get it? Spare is good.

Coetzee, of course, is a great novelist, so I don't think it's snarky to point out that he's not the funniest writer in the world. Actually, when you think about it, not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful. Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if you're doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, they're the first things to go. And there's some stuff about the whole winnowing process that I just don't get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words—entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I'm sure you could get it
down to twenty or thirty, if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound like manly, back-breaking labor because it's such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging. (It's also why people who work in advertising put in twenty-hour days.) Go on, young writers—treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won't mind! Have you ever looked at the size of books in an airport bookstall? The truth is that people like superfluity. (And, conversely, the writers' writers, the pruners and the winnowers, tend to have to live off critical approval rather than royalty checks.)

Last month, I ended by saying that I was in need of some Dickensian nutrition, and maybe it's because I've been sucking on the bones of pared-down writing for too long. Where would
David Copperfield
be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town! If you want to talk about books in terms of back-breaking labor, then maybe we should think about how hard it is to write a lot—long books, teeming with exuberance and energy and life and comedy. I'm sorry if that seems obvious, but it can't always be true that writing a couple of hundred pages is harder than writing a thousand.) At one point near the beginning of the book, David runs away, and ends up having to sell the clothes he's wearing for food and drink. It would be enough, maybe, to describe the physical hardship that ensued; but Dickens being Dickens, he finds a bit part for a real rogue of a secondhand clothes merchant, a really scary guy who smells of rum and who shouts things like “Oh, my lungs and liver” and “Goroo!” a lot.

As King Lear said—possibly when invited in to Iowa as a visiting speaker—“Reason not the need.” There is no
need:
Dickens is having fun, and he extends the scene way beyond its function. Rereading it now, it seems almost to have been conceived as a retort to spareness, because the scary guy insists on paying David for his jacket in halfpenny installments over the course of an afternoon, and thus ends up sticking around for two whole pages. Could he have been
cut? Absolutely he could have been cut. But there comes a point in the writing process when a novelist—any novelist, even a great one—has to accept that what he is doing is keeping one end of a book away from the other, filling up pages, in the hope that these pages will move, provoke, and entertain a reader.

Some random observations:

1)
    
David Copperfield
is Dickens's
Hamlet. Hamlet
is a play full of famous quotes;
Copperfield
is a novel full of famous characters. I hadn't read it before, partly because I was under the curious misapprehension that I could remember a BBC serialization that I was forced to watch when I was a child, and therefore would be robbed of the pleasures of the narrative. (It turns out that all I could remember was the phrase “Barkis is willing,” and Barkis's willingness isn't really the book's point.) So I really had no idea that I was going to run into both Uriah Heep and Mr. Micawber, as well as Peggotty, Steerforth, Betsey Trotwood, Little Em'ly, Tommy Traddles and the rest. I'd presumed Dickens would keep at least a couple of those back for some of the other novels I haven't read
—
The Pickwick Papers
, say, or
Barnaby Rudge
. But he's blown it now. That might be an error on his part. We shall see, eventually.

2)
    
Why do people keep trying to make movie or TV adaptations of Dickens novels? In the first issue of this magazine, Jonathan Lethem asked us to reimagine the characters in
Dombey and Son
as animals, in order to grasp the essence of these characters, and it's true that only the central characters in a Dickens novel are human. Here's Quilp, in
The Old Curiosity Shop
, terrifying Kit's mother with “many extraordinary annoyances; such as hanging over from the side of the coach at the risk of his life, and staring in with his great goggle eyes…; dodging her in this way from one window to another; getting nimbly down whenever they changed horses and thrusting his head in at the window with a dismal squint…” And here's Uriah Heep: “hardly any eyebrows, and no eyelashes, and eyes of a red-brown, so unsheltered and unshaded, that I remember wondering how he went to sleep… high-shouldered and bony… a long, lank skeleton hand… his nostrils, which were thin and pointed, with sharp dints in them, had a singular and most uncomfortable
way of expanding and contracting themselves; that they seemed to twinkle instead of his eyes, which hardly ever twinkled at all.”