Nobody Here

With three months to go before the kickoff of 2005's NaNoWriMo, it's time for a plan&outliner like me to get geared up. Research to be done, characters to create, worlds to build, plots to, um, plot. I've been mulling over thoughts for my next book since I finished my last one in May, and each idea is more dingbat than the last. I don't think I've hit anything yet that would sustain my interest through a year of staring at page and screen until my eyes bleed. But let us not concern ourselves with minor details like "ideas" and "originality" and "plot." I need to get me to Costco and start stocking up on fun-size Snickers.

Who's NaNo'ing this year?

I know you’ve all been waiting on tenterhooks for my review of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. A brief pause here while I look up what a tenterhook is. According to dictionary.com, it’s either a piece of hardware or a state of anxiety. I never knew. Anyway.

It’s good. Here’s why. (No major spoilers. I did read though that someone hung a big banner on an underpass in Britain revealing the ending, and I know it’s mean, but I couldn’t help but laugh.)

Reason #1: No big gaping why-didn’t-he-just’s (WDHJ's).

WDHJ's are a big problem in the series, books four and five in particular. Say, for example, a character, we’ll call him Floyd, wants a sandwich. It’s June, but Floyd knows the school two counties over will be opening in two months' time, and he knows the cafeteria serves sandwiches for lunch every Tuesday. Armed with that knowledge, he sallies forth, getting plans of the school, digging a tunnel beneath the cafeteria, putting his minions in charge of cafeteria lady recon. Then, the fourth Tuesday in October, when Betty Lou has a doctor’s appointment and Mary Jo steps out at precisely 10:40 to go to the Ladies’ and take her meds, he swoops up from the floor tile he’s meticulously removed and replaced with a trap door, snatches a sandwich, goes back down through the floor, and makes off back to his lair with it. It’s all a lot of fun to read, but the whole time you’re going, “Why didn’t he just go down to his kitchen and make himself a sandwich? Or maybe go to Subway? Or for heaven’s sake, at least pick a closer school!”

It isn’t quite that bad in the HP books, partly because the narrative feels true enough – as fantasy must – to have your trust, and partly because you can use what you know of the characters and their world to answer your own questions. But you shouldn’t have to. Personally, I think that if your plot is not going to make use of the simplest and most obvious solution to a problem, you need to have the question of why asked and answered in the narrative. Otherwise people might think your only answer is “so the book will be more than ten pages long,” which isn’t really good enough. It’s been my biggest problem with the series, and Half-Blood Prince has none of it. That’s not to say there aren’t unanswered questions, because there are plenty, and a cliffhanger to boot. But they’re questions that will either be answered in the final installment (I hope), or that aren’t so crucial that the story won’t ring true without answers.

Reason #2: Surprises. At this point – this is the second-to-last book in a long series - a person thinks they know, generally, what's up and who's on what side. But there are twists left in this plot, some of which I didn't come close to predicting, and I guessed the secret of The Usual Suspects in the first three minutes. As for the identity of the half-blood prince to whom the title refers, none of my guesses were right.

Reason #3: A mercifully low level of house elf involvement.

Reason #4: Harry is back. Book five Harry was annoying, which was exactly what the character needed to be at that point, but that didn’t necessarily make him fun to hang out with for 800+ pages. In Half-Blood Prince, it’s a relief to be behind the POV of someone less irritating again.

Reason #5: Action. The kissing kind. Hey, what’s a teenage boarding school story without a little romance?

Reason #6: Fred and George in pimp clothes.

So there you have it. I'm brooding a bit, because most of my theories for what's to come cannot end well for Harry, and it would be cruel to kill him off in the seventh book. But I've got a couple of years to wait until then, which means a nice long stretch for you of a relatively Potter-free blog.

*Post title ripped off from Austin Powers

Roy wanted to know why I like Flannery O’Connor’s short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find". I couldn’t remember why, so I read it again. I’d have posted in his comments, but I think that post was too far back to be on his front page now.

I think peeps of an academic or philosophical bent tend to focus on the religious aspects of the story. Certainly the Misfit’s saying that Jesus’ raising the dead threw everything off balance is the crux of the moral struggle of those Christians who believe in justification by faith alone: if I can live after my death through nothing more than faith, why be good at all? And if that isn’t true, if Jesus can't do what he says he can, if I therefore can’t live after my death, well, why be good at all? Systems like Catholicism get around this with a pretty specific process for getting into heaven, but the faith-aloners (and although I’m speaking specifically here, this of course applies to countless other non-Christian beliefs as well) can’t get out of it that easily. Their goodness produces no personal gain at all, and while that may make goodness in some way more noble, it also makes it tricky at times. Just ask the Misfit.

But that’s not why I like the story. Interesting as they may be, "A Good Man" is more compelling than the sum of its spiritual questions. Its beauty is in the details (though not the details that use the N-word, which, it bears mentioning, is objectionable to read in any context.) It’s in the tiny phrases, sewn in almost casually, that make things real. The beauty is in obnoxious little John Wesley, who maybe two pages earlier you were thinking you wouldn't mind having the very fate that turns out to be in store for him, reminding you forcefully and painfully as he’s taken to his death that he’s just a little boy: “Hiram pulled Bailey up by the arm as if he were assisting an old man. John Wesley caught hold of his father's hand and Bobby Lee followed.”

Make them real enough, and even if they’re brats, jerks, or crazy old ladies, people will care.

I haven’t finished reading anything new lately, because the stack on my nightstand has been put in a holding pattern, in some cases half-finished, while I re-read the fifth Harry Potter book in preparation for the sixth installment’s release next weekend (hey, it’s almost 900 pages, these things take time). I’m very much looking forward to book 6, and since I live to talk about kidlit, when I finish it I’ll surely have some comments or other to make here.

Anyone who has a startlingly high level of commercial success is in for a lot of disapproval (just ask Stephen King), and J. K. Rowling is no exception. A lot of the Potter-venom is just silly, but of course there are also valid criticisms. If we only read perfect books written by people who are equally talented in all aspects of writing, we wouldn’t read much, would we? I would never deny a certain level of what I’d call sloppiness in the Potter books. But neither would I ignore a genius for worldbuilding the likes of which we haven’t seen since the days of Lewis and Tolkien.

If that’s not a talent you find compelling, fine. I’m not saying you have to read or enjoy them if they aren’t you’re thing. All I’m saying is, I don’t begrudge you your stick-in-the-butt MFA’s latest yawner, so you can just back up off my Potter-love, can’t you?