Somewhere in Huntsville, Texas...

an English teacher made an assignment.

That's no surprise, of course.

What is a surprise is that I, a 41-year-old legal editor in Illinois, know this (and only this): a group of students in Huntsville, TX were given an assignment related to the last line of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.

I know this because on this very blog, I have a post about the last line of The Sun Also Rises. Earlier this evening, I got a couple of visits to that post from different IPs in Huntsville, Texas, and both came in on Google searches for strings like "Sun Also Rises last line" and "what is the last line of the sun also rises?"

Those visitors were, undoubtedly, disappointed. My post about the last line of the novel doesn't reveal the line itself, although if--as I suspect--they're high school students, they may have picked up some insights that might sound impressive in the classroom. And, of course, I'm not exactly sure what the assignment is.

I'm pretty sure, though, that it's due tomorrow. As it got on toward ten and eleven o'clock tonight, that search traffic from Huntsville, TX really picked up.

Synchronicity II

Just a couple of hours after my post about taking risks, my daughter and I sat down to watch The Ron Clark Story. On his first day teaching in Inner Harlem, Clark hung two handwritten signs: Dream Big and Take Risks.

Honestly, I'm starting to wonder if there's more going on here than confirmation of what I've always preached to other writers. I'm starting to wonder whether someone is trying to tell ME something.

But that's not what I came here to talk about tonight. No, tonight I want to talk about ordinary people in fiction. This one started nibbling at my brain a few weeks ago, when I visited Regina Doman's website. Regina Doman is a Catholic writer whose books were recommended to me in a comment on my Catholic Blog. She writes grown-up, novel-length stories based on fairy tales, and on her website, she has a quote from G.K. Chesterton:

The old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling: they startle him because he is normal.

My initial interest in the quote, I must admit, stemmed from the use of a semi-colon and a colon in the same relatively brief sentence. Secondarily, I was personally pleased by the concept because my latest novel-in-progress has as its protagonist a young man who works on an assembly line in central Indiana. But finally (by which I mean, after two minutes or so), I started to think from a writer's perspective, and to think about some of my favorite fiction. Could, for instance, anyone be more ordinary than Nick Adams? Hemingway's Nick Adams stories were among the earliest fiction to dig its hooks into me and really make me think about the art and craft of creating characters, but Nick could have been the boy next door to any of us.

Doman clearly took the words to heart--and I don't say that just because they appear both on her website and in her book. The two heroines of her first book are high school girls living with their widowed nurse mother in an apartment in New York.

Today, Jacquelyn Mitchard referred to the main character in her latest novel, Still Summer, as "the most ordinary of mothers". In fact, she pointed out that most of her characters are "people we already know". That definitely rang true to me, and it got me thinking about some other popular phenomena, too. Seinfeld, for instance...the show that became famous and wildly successful for being "about nothing".

We've all long known that identifiable moments were an important part of drawing in a reader, so it should come as no surprise that identifiable characters work. After all, the people who live lives much like our own, like those we see around us, are the most likely to have experiences that we identify with, to think in ways we'd think, to react in ways that we can understand and empathize with.

On one hand, this isn't much of a surprise--it's common to most of the memorable books I've read, and it's something I've apparently been leaning toward unconsciously myself. Still, I always find that it makes a difference when something has been consciously identified, that examples and opportunities begin to present themselves from all directions when a new consciousness enters the picture. I'm not sure yet how it will affect my writing, but it will be turning over and around in the back of my mind, awaiting its opportunity.

The Best Book I've Ever Read? "BEST"? What Exactly does "best" mean?

I saw a posting in a forum this afternoon asking that question--"what's the best book you've ever read?"

As always when presented with questions that are at once subjective and categorical, I became paralyzed by questions and clarifications. It was an interesting question that got me thinking, but it wasn't one I could answer with the name of a book.

The roots of my inability to answer might lie in my internal dichotomy; when I was a teenager and the most important place in my life was a little wooden desk with a blue plastic Smith-Corona typewriter on it, the walls above that desk were adorned with two black and white posters: Rick Springfield and Ernest Hemingway.

But it might be more complicated than that, too. It might simply be that "best" means something different in one moment, in one context, in one shade of light, than it does in another. What is it that makes those books stand out in our minds as "best" and stay there for years to come? I don't know. But as writers, if we can figure it out, it can only help.

The first book I can remember really falling in love with was Willard Motley's Knock on Any Door. I think that I was thirteen or fourteen when I read it, which might explain a lot--teenage girls do seem to have a penchant for good-hearted bad boys. But maybe there was more to it than that: the book was set in Chicago, the hometown of my heart; it highlighted the way the criminal justice system often does more harm than good, a topic near and dear to my heart long before I became a criminal defense attorney; maybe the character development was very strong--Nick Romano certainly seemed a flesh-and-blood person to me then, though I haven't read the book in many years.

But then, if you asked me for my favorite book, I'd probably say The Sun Also Rises without even stopping to think. The stark, unemotional revelation of some of the hard realities of human nature couldn't be more different from the tender-hearted expression of Knock on Any Door. Hemingway made me nod sagely; Motley made me reach out unconsciously and plead with Nick not to take the next step.

Were either of them the best book I ever read? I think, at least at one time, that I'd have awarded that designation to A Severe Mercy. A Severe Mercy is the only book I can recall having sent me on a truly obsessive quest for all of the author's previous works--I even tracked down Sheldon Vanauken's master's thesis! But when someone asks for the best book I've ever read, I think there's a bit of a request for a recommendation in there, a recommendation that isn't entirely subjective, and Vanauken's best-known book is a biographical account of his conversion to Christianity and the death of his young wife, interspersed with correspondence between the author and C.S. Lewis. Not for everyone, I suspect. Which also keeps me from giving the title to The Life You Save May be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. It was a huge hardcover book, but I carried it with me on the train, anyway. I balanced it on the edge of the sink and read it while I brushed my teeth. It seemed endless and ended too quickly. It was the most artful blending of tangentially-related stories I have ever seen anywhere in literature, fiction or non-fiction. But it's a mingled biography of Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day and Walker Percy. Again, not necessarily targeting a broad market.

So what about some normal books, hm?

I'm in love with Jacquelyn Mitchard. I want to be her when I grow up, but it's a problem, because I'm already 41. Jacquelyn mitchard writes books that fit into the category I'd usually call "throwaway novels"--and I don't mean that in a bad sense. I've been known to write one or two of those myself. They're simply books that we probably aren't going to buy in hardcover and keep forever on the shelf in the den. They're a good read and then you move on. Except Mitchard does something a little bit special in hers, at least for me. Whenever I read one of her books, I find myself nodding at various points and saying, "Yes, that's true. That's exactly right." Sometimes it's something I've observed before, and sometimes it's a bit of a revelation. But in every book, I find myself recognizing larger truths in the actions and reactions of Mitchard's characters. I'm still not enshrining leather-bound copies of her books, but I do keep them, and sometimes I re-read them, because they're quick and easy novels full of not-so-quick-and-easy thoughts, and some of those thoughts bear revisiting.

And I see that I've neglected to mention here that C.S. Lewis is my favorite author.

I think, though, that there is a common thread. For me, it seems that what makes a book memorable is the truth it uncovers, the layer it peels away. Hemingway did that without adjectives, without emotion, with a matter-of-fact depiction. Sheldon Vanauken did it by revealing his own aversion to the truths, and carrying the reader along his own confused and reluctant path. Willard Motley did it by painting rich emotion. Jacquelyn Mitchard does it subtly, with a sentence here and an observation there, woven so tightly in to the story and the dialogue that you're free to gloss right over those truths if you want to. But for me, I think the presence of those truths is what makes a "great book". I still don't know which one is BEST.

The Sun Also Rises

No, this isn't some big philosophical post about how better days will come. It's literal.

Aw, man. Even that sounds like a pun, in context.

Forget the whole titling thing. I want to talk about The Sun Also Rises, the Hemingway novel. If you've never read the novel and you think you might someday, then I suggest that you stop reading right now, because the rest of this post is about how the last line of the novel changes everything that came before.

That's quite a device today, especially in film. Kevin Spacey suddenly walking upright in the last frames of The Usual Suspects springs to mind, for instance. But in the twenties? It seems to me not so much. Maybe some literary scholar will read this (because all the top literary scholars read my blog, of course), and step forth to tell me how wrong I am and provide a list of other examples--I think I'd be fine with that, and probably run straight out to read those books and analyze the trend. Because what fascinates me is that Hemingway seems to have done it decades before it became a common device and no one seems to have noticed!

I've read a lot of essays on The Sun Also Rises, and engaged in a lot of discussions, some in college classrooms and some over drinks late at night and some on the truly incredible Lost Generation forum, where the knowledge base is dazzling. There's always a lot of talk, of course, about the significance of that last line, but it's always presented as a change, a learning moment, character development.

Nuh uh. I don't think so. (This is the part you won't want to read if you haven't read the book and think you might someday)

I think he knew all along.

I think that famous last line is so very powerful precisely because it shifts the context of everything that came before. He was never fooling himself! He accepts what he accepts and he makes the decisions he makes without buying into the illusion, without believing that if it weren't for his injury, it would be happily ever after.

Even Brett seems to buy into that illusion, and she's the reason it could never be. She'd be the one to find some other reason to stray, to walk away, to come and go, to hold back something...and yet she thinks, "if only". Jake, it becomes clear in that last sentence, doesn't think "if only" at all--or if he does, it's a very different "if only" from the one that's tossed in front of us throughout the book.

I love the book, but that's the thing I love most about it. The thing every other student of Hemingway I've encountered seems to think I've made up.