“I’m not writing for a particular audience. The reader in mind is me. If someone else would write these books I could go play golf.”…
Leave a CommentPublishing dark matter since 2018
Tag: Fiction
Though I’ve never met Jeff Schnader, we are both fellow alumni of Columbia University and fellow authors whose work has been excerpted at The Write Launch, where I learned he had set a novel on campus during the riotous years of Vietnam War protests. I remember those days well, though not as well as him. Of course, I had to seek him out. That wasn’t hard, as he has a website that runs down his career as a physician, journal editor, published science writer, and now fiction writer, and found him welcoming. Aside from being a thoracic surgeon, I have a lot in common with Jeff (besides first names), and now we have both published subversive novels. So, let’s hear it for:
1 CommentIt saddened me greatly when my principal muse David Cornwell—aka John le Carré—passed away last December twelfth at 89. By my lights, the Brits should make that date a national day of mourning. Were it not for the spell of the holidaze, I would have said something about it at the time, so please allow me to pay my respects now.
He was a gifted storyteller. It wasn’t just how scrupulously he constructed his characters and how mercilessly he deconstructed them that I admired; he also kept me guessing about outcomes, so many of them equivocal. As in real life, few of his protagonists triumph, and some don’t make it. Along the way, he tends to adjust the attitude of some and lets others slide into more august or shrunken versions of themselves—until, like George Smiley and Peter Guillam in his 2011 A Legacy of Spies, they leap out of retirement. (Le Carré scholars reckon that Smiley would be a centenarian at the time, having cut his espionage teeth in 1930s Berlin.) Being billeted throughout Central Europe by the Foreign Services through the 1960s and having traveled widely since, Cornwell’s settings bubble with both old- and new-world authenticity.
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A review of Red Dress in Black and White by Elliot Ackerman. Alfred A. Knopf, 2020, 272 p., with reference to Liar’s Candle by August Thomas, Scribner, 2018, 310 p.
Because I am an American married to a Turk and have written about her country in memoirs and a novel, I tend to gravitate to novels by Americans that are set in that big, messy, volatile country that’s hard for outsiders to get their heads around. Even though it has been a liberal democracy almost a century, modernity still clashes with tradition, poverty mushrooms in the dark shadows of wealth, and as in many countries of late—sadly including mine—its politics have grown distinctly illiberal. As one of Elliot Ackerman’s characters cynically remarks, “There is no Turkey, only Turkish elites.”