Here, in This Sun

A woman waits in an auto repair shop while her car is serviced. While waiting she is distracted by the glare of sunlight through the shop's windows, to the point where she envies the blind man waiting across from her, with his "deep black sunglass lenses." She goes on to ruminate about the lack of blind women in the town, at least in public places, and concludes that "even with a German Shepherd's protection" such women would be vulnerable to muggers and rapists. Odd thoughts for a woman to be harboring on an otherwise ordinary day at the auto shop. But then Anna—that's her name—is hot and tired ("She had often felt tired lately"), and even a little dizzy, and these oddly cynical thoughts might be ascribed at least in part to her exhaustion.

Then the litany of odd thoughts resumes with Anna concluding that "everyone in the [auto repair shop] waiting room" is vulnerable, at the mercy of mechanics "with their greasy fingers and wrenches clinking under their car hoods." She's convinced that the mechanics are out to rip her off, and furthermore that she deserves it for "sitting helplessly [at home] in her vinyl seat, watching Jeopardy" instead of teaching herself mechanics (one wonders if at the dentist's office she berates herself for not having gone to dental school). One begins to suspect that these aren't merely the ruminations of an exhausted and wary woman, but the warped notions of a paranoid. At the very least Anna is deeply depressed.

The world as interpreted by a mind slightly off its tether is the subject of this opening, one that makes for a good if disturbing read. I for one want to know more about this character who feels so undone by the rays of sunlight through a window that she wishes herself blind, and compares spare car parts to human organs "in nests of shredded packing paper."

In first-person fiction we call such a character "unreliable." What makes a narrative unreliable isn't usually that we're given the wrong facts, but that the world is presented through the distorting filter or tinted lens of a psyche that has lost its grasp on the objective world: i.e., that may see things very clearly, but doesn't see them as you and I would see them. Unreliable narratives are either void of perspective, or offer us perspectives that are warped.

A good example of this is the narrator of John Cheever's masterpiece "Goodbye, My Brother," who tells us up front that his family "has always been very close in spirit," then goes on to eviscerate said family and especially his brother, who by the story's end has been attacked not only verbally but physically, laid flat on his back with a saltwater-logged root. From the narrator's perspective this may pass for filial devotion, but Cheever's readers are bound to see things differently, as he meant us to.

Another prime example of an unreliable protagonist is the butler in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, a man rendered so emotionally comatose by his inured sense of propriety that when given his once real chance at love he botches it. It's a terribly sad story, rendered sadder for being told by its victim who doesn't even see how sad it is, or even that he's the victim.

But the woman in the work presented here has more in common with Chief Broom, the narrator of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a native American inmate at a mental hospital in the Pacific Northwest, for whom events unfold through a thick, hallucinatory fog as he pushes his broom back and forth down the hospital's corridors. Though his view of things is distorted, still, for Kesey's novel about a belligerent individualist who fakes his way into the looney bin to avoid prison time Chief Broom is the perfect narrator, since he's been faking his own mental illness. Only after Kesey concocted Chief Broom (which event, we're told, occurred during one of the fledgling author's many drugged interludes), was he able to successfully write his novel.

Don't get out the peyote just yet. Unreliable narratives are rare and tricky birds, and should only be ventured into with the sure understanding that an unreliable narrative is intended, since the ultimate subject of an unreliable narrative is always the protagonist's unreliability. Otherwise, you run the risk of presenting readers not with an unreliable character, but with an unreliable author, for which there can be no excuse. If there's nothing wrong with Anna; if her bizarre, unbridled perceptions turn out to be nothing more than the writer flexing his or her descriptive muscles, being clever or cute for cuteness or cleverness sake, then this opening fails for making promises it has no intention to deliver on.

I suspect this author won't let us down; that these perceptions of Anna's are there for a good reason, to introduce us to the psyche of a woman on the verge of mental breakdown. I suspect, too, that as the story progresses her problems—along with her perceptions—will only get worse.

Hit and Run

A private investigator arrives at a murder scene. The weapon: not a bullet or the gun that fired it, but "the blunt square shape of the front of a car" traveling fast enough to have "become airborne . . . before slamming into its victim."

Though not stated as such, these observations clearly belong to Matt Selden, private-eye, as he takes in the scene, "pull[ing] his coat closer around him." We don't have to wonder what sort of coat he wears. As befitting the grand tradition of hardboiled crime fiction into which this snugly falls, it has to be a trench coat, one with the lapels flipped raffishly up and that has no doubt seen better days, as has its haggard, cynical owner.

Without even having read beyond the second paragraph already I feel I know Matt, or know his type. I've met him many times before in books and movies. He is Sam Spade in Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, Marlowe in Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. No stranger to violent crime or danger, he's been known to engage in a little of both himself now and then—for the sake of his clients. He's cocky, tough, a bit on the flip side—but not without principles, or a heart. He may not always get his man (or woman: the hardboiled school doesn't discriminate on the basis of sex); but his batting average is better than that of the cops with whom he shares a common goal, but with whom he nonetheless always finds himself working at cross purposes.

Pioneered in the 1920s by Carroll John Day and popularized in the '30s and '40s by Chandler and Hammett, the hardboiled genre—referred to less than generously by some as "pulp fiction"—remains hugely popular to this day. Part of that ongoing success may be owed to the genre's timelessness and versatility. After all, as long as there are criminals and crimes, someone will need to solve them—or try. That may explain why the genre has attracted writers as otherwise unlike each other as John D. MacDonald, Robert B. Parker, Sue Grafton, Walter Mosley—and others whose titles dominate bestseller lists, each of them giving the hardboiled theme a different twist.

Here, the "twist" seems to be that Matt Selden, private eye, is also a man of the cloth. "No," Matt replies when a burly police sergeant also at the scene sneers "Ah, Jesus" at him, "just one of his faithful ministers[italics mine]." It's not the first time that a fictional man of the cloth has slummed as a detective. In the early part of the last century English novelist G.K. Chesterton published 52 short stories starring Father Brown, a priest who moonlights as a Sherlock Holmes-like detective. Unlike his hardboiled successors, Father Brown exemplified the quiet humility of his other calling, and seldom spoke except to utter something profound. More recently Fr. Brad Reynolds and Andrew Greeley (himself a priest) have given us mystery-solving clergymen.

Though Hammett was an exquisite stylist (whose dialogue was so strong to arrive at a screenplay for The Maltese Falcon director John Huston supposedly had his secretary strip everything else out of the book), and beautifully-crafted hardboiled novels exist, to succeed at the genre gorgeous prose is by no means a prerequisite. "Adequate" sums up the style of most such novels.

Here, the prose is better than adequate. "Death had come airborne and metallic" draws me right in; there's a wisecracking, poetic edge to it that, I soon learn, is a product of the protagonist's steely cynicism. However hardboiled, the prose still makes room for atmosphere ("The first rays of the sun sparkled on the spire of the stately old church") and convincing detail ("His eyes narrowed as he saw a change in the color of the bitumen"). The trails of blood drifting away from the corpse are likened to the tendrils of a jellyfish. Though I regret the lack of faith in the reader that has the author assuring us us that the tendrils are of blood, still, the description works. With similar efficiency via a brief exchange of dialogue the author effectively renders the strained relationship between protagonist and beat sergeant.

Mean, lean, and clean—almost (but not quite) slick: befitting of a genre of which we've come to expect no more or less.

Road Train

Though the term is more familiar in Australia, a road train (or roadtrain) is a truck pulling two or more trailers in tandem. Here, in this effective opening, the road train becomes a source of anxiety and terror looming on the wavering horizon, "floating toward us above a hot blue lake across the road"—like one of those B-movie monsters from the 1950s, The Blob or Empire of the Ants. No longer simply a conveyance transporting innocent merchandise from point A to point B, here the road train becomes Yeats' "vast image " arising out of the desert sand . . . moving its slow thighs. . .slouch[ing] toward Bethlehem to be born." The narrator finds it scary, and so do we.

In fact the truck is only a truck—but still a source of fear and anxiety as it bears down on the protagonist in her car "like a boat with a cresting bow wave ahead of it." We are in Australia, somewhere in the outback, presumably. As one of the road train's trailers swings over the double white line the narrator braces herself for the collision, for "the smashing, shrieking, grinding impact of a side-swipe"—which, of course, doesn't come.

Instead of being smashed to death, the narrator is jolted into the past, into a memory of another violent disaster. Evocations of fire, screaming, of hot metal ticking, "blood oozing," of sirens wailing and emergency lights flashing off of buildings. The memory is vague but vivid. We learn that someone very close to the narrator—Simon, possibly the narrator's husband—died in "the crash."

Then the flashback ends and we return to that wavering stretch of highway—the same road, apparently, where Simon met his fate a year earlier. She is traveling from Perth to Sydney, a distance of over 4,000 kilometers, over forty hours, traveling "with Alice [her daughter?], [her] bags, and the last bits [of her life] in her car." The rest of her belongings are in the hands of "the removalist"—the Australian term for a moving contractor.

Though little is spelled out, much is conveyed in this efficient opening page: a mother whose life has been shattered by tragedy, hoping to leave that tragedy behind her and begin a new life. Will she make it? The road itself becomes a hazard, a portent—a symbol for the journey that has just begun, and which with its mirages and hazards is bound to be treacherous.

Clinic Caper

This scene of marital bliss set in the confines of a dermatologist's examination room feels more like something complete in and of itself than the opening of a longer work. If there's any doubt, the title of the piece seals it.

Not that there's anything wrong with telling a story in a page or two. In fact, anyone who can do so has my unqualified admiration. The trick, though, is to tell a story and not just relay an amusing anecdote.

An anecdote is a short narrative constructed around a unique, curious, and often provocative incident, one that typically reveals character through extreme circumstances and almost always with humor as its end. The term comes from the Greek word anekdota, meaning "unpublished"—an indeed, most anecdotes are relayed orally and not intended for nor worthy of the printed page except as illustrations serving some larger purpose—evoking, for instance, some facet of a character or characters. Served a la carte, anecdotes tend to be as ephemeral as they are amusing. They are garnishes or appetizers, not the main course.

Though quite nicely written, the opening scene here feels more anecdotal than it might were the emphasis less on the singular, curious, and provocative event in the clinic, and more on the two principle characters, Jim and his narrating wife. As it stands, I can imagine such a tale being told at a dinner party (a popular venue for anecdotes). The guests, who know this couple well—and who've also had their share of cocktails—are extremely amused, weeping with laughter. Their host is on a roll. When she gets to the part about the dermatologist's fiendish chair launching her husband through the stucco wall, I see them all doing spit takes with their wine into their Roquefort pear salads.

But literature isn't a dinner party, and the "guests" (unfamiliar readers) need something more than cocktails to wet their appetite for anecdotes. They need context. They need some sense of who these two are when not goofing around at the dermatological clinic. That sense—the very little of it that we get—is tucked into one sentence in the opening paragraph ("at the age of sixty-six and forty-one years of marital bliss, we saw no reason to occupy separate rooms"). We're told that they are an older, happily married couple, a statement the anecdote goes on to confirm. It does so charmingly and (except for the mishandling of internal quotation marks) with skill. It meets our expectations; nothing more. It neither suggests nor reveals anything more or less about the characters, who they are, or why we should care about them enough to want to keep reading.

And since the scene merely confirms what we've already been told—without a hint of irony or paradox or a shadow of doubt, I'm left unsatisfied. Again, at a dinner party I would be content to know that my hostess and her husband are lovely, happily married people: sure, it's probably not the whole story; in fact it may well be a total illusion. And yet what are dinner parties for if not to parade ourselves in front of our guests in our favorite masks?

If literature serves a purpose it's to tear those masks off--or at least let us peek through them and see the real lives underneath. Here, with this opening, I'm shown only the mask: a bright, smiling, charming one.

Supposing the shenanigans in the examination room were underscored by something grave? Supposing this routine visit to the dermatologist turned out to be anything but routine, that "everything" was not "all right"? The small blotchy growth on his shoulder? A stage-3 melanoma. Then this would be no mere anecdote, but revelatory of a devoted wife's courageous humor in the face of terror and tragedy.

The underscoring item needn't be something as grave as cancer, but it should carry us beyond anecdote.

The Valyserian Festival

Writing a good novel doesn't require genius. You don't even have to be all that smart. But you do have to work hard, and to care. If you don't care, readers won't, which may translate into them tossing your book into the fire grate.

If great care goes into writing a novel generally, greater care should go into its opening. Within the first few paragraphs or pages you'll either gain the reader's confidence or lose it. Gain it, and you can get away with a lot. Lose it, and you won't get away with anything.

With this opening I lost confidence after the first paragraph.

The prologue sets us in a kingdom on another planet on the festival day of the Valyseriat—a species about which we learn little beyond that they're not human (one thinks immediately of Vulcans and Spock). We are firmly in the world of fantasy and science fiction.

Some writers suffer from the mistaken notion that—because they're writing fantasy or science fiction—they don't have to sweat the details. The opposite is closer to the truth. It's easy enough for me to believe in the world I walk and breathe in daily; to believe in another world I need to be convinced. And the way to convince me is through precise, telling details.

In the first paragraph we get no such authenticating details: just a man named Alec sitting by "a large window" concealed by "scarlet curtains" as he watches the festival unfold. All of the sights, sounds, and other sensuous details of the festival are left off the page. We don't know who Alec is hiding from, or why. Though the first line suggests a plurality of festivals, later there seems to be only one. We are told that—while so concealed—Alec thinks, "The Valyseriat"—and that he does so "curiously," meaning either he's curious about the festival, or that the thought in itself is odd. But then we learn that Alec isn't curious at all; in fact he finds the whole spectacle ludicrous. As for the thought being curious, it's not; it's lame, like a man staring at a hamburger thinking, "A hamburger."

A sentence later we're told that Alex studied "about [the Valyserians] alongside Aaron." We aren't told who Aaron is, only that he is "in Earth" (on the Earth? Buried on Earth? Digging a tunnel into the Earth?). Though he studied these beings, they "left no . . . history," however it is known that "they were the leaders of the Valyses" (whoever they were, their history being no less obscure). I wonder what Alec took away from his studies, since he knows nothing.

There are other problems with this opening. Since the scene that follows (in which Prince Alec is summoned by the king to discuss his coronation) has little bearing on the Valyseriat or their festival, why choose this crucial moment to dip us into their nebulous history? Might there not be a better time to fill us in on that background? Alec himself can't "care less" about them; why should we? Furthermore, these are supposedly Alec's thoughts as he peers out from behind the scarlet curtain: but why would he be thinking of things that don't matter to him? Why should he be watching the festival at all, or even present, if not out of diplomatic responsibility in his capacity as Prince, in which case his purpose is defeated by hiding behind that curtain?

Added to these larger questions and concerns are small errors like tense shifts ("now that it has resurfaced Alec was worried") and inconsistent handling of viewpoint (is it "[his] father" or "the King"? From Alec's point of view it should be one or the other). Taken all together, the problems have me wondering two things: 1) how familiar is the author with her own material, and 2) how much does she care? Throughout this opening, I'm dogged by the suspicion that the author is either inexperienced in the art of writing fiction, or winging it, or both. I don't sense that great effort went into these paragraphs.

In any case, more effort needs to go into them, since as they stand the author's imagination and ambitions aren't matched by her skills. More care must be taken to satisfy a close, careful reader, the sort of reader who demands integrity and precision—a category into which most agents and editors fall.

The Common Era

There are two principle ways in which characters are evoked in fiction: descriptively, through summary or exposition, or dramatically, through scene.

In this opening page of a novel about a popular young high school teacher with an unhealthy (or anyway dangerous) infatuation with one of his students, the summary method is employed with much skill and success. "Show, don't tell," goes the old writing workshop chestnut. But there's nothing wrong with telling: it just has to be done well.

Here, it's done well. The long second paragraph is packed with information about Stephan, the protagonist—information that serves not only to orient us about his status as a school teacher, but to authenticate that status through telling details (he founded the school's cycling club; his male colleagues wear plaid shirts). By the time I get to the bottom of the page, there's no doubt at least in my mind as to the authenticity of this earnest, long-haired, tieless, earringed high school teacher "seasoned by age yet unspoiled by its coming strain." I feel that I know him, and more than that: that I know something of what it's like to be him.

The advantage of summary description is that through it authors can convey lots of information in little space, as here. Summary description is expedient: it does the job quickly and efficiently. The disadvantage is that, unlike drama, which evokes character through action and dialogue, exposition renders it exclusively through language: i.e., we're forced to accept the author's word[s] for who this person is. As evidence goes—assuming that the narrator is reliable (as most narrators are)—it's solid evidence, but it falls short of being damning evidence. For damning evidence, nothing works as well as actions.

And in this opening the only action given to us is the negative one of Stephan "avoid[ing] the eyes of Mona McCullough." Through his not looking at Mona we learn something about him: namely that he has a thing for her, and also that he is afraid—with good reason—of that thing. The only other hint of "action" here takes the form of sweat breaking under Stephan's armpits — an action which, however involuntary, likewise speaks volumes.

From there we launch into the long expository passage. But wouldn't it be nice if the ratio of action to description in this opening were more balanced—if, for instance, the author were to lavish as much time and detail on the first paragraph as on the second; if we were told not just that he avoids looking at Mona McCullough, but what, precisely, he is avoiding. For instance, those eyes: were he to look at them, what would he see? What does she wear? How does she sit at her desk? Does she wear a skirt? What color? How short? Are her legs crossed? Does she pry off the heel of one saddle shoe with the toe of another (while gently licking the freshly sharpened tip of her #2 pencil)? While avoiding Mona McCullough's eyes, what does Stephan imagine? What inappropriate images does his lustful imagination cast before him as he pretends to examine the syllabus on his desk?

These and other specific details form—or might form—part of the present action of the opening scene, rendering Stephen—as well as the object of his downfall—vivid and unforgettable before we are dipped into summary background.

Mommy Get Your Gun

Behind trash bins in a garbage-strewn alley a woman seeks cover from a gun-toting assailant. Of the assailant's identity—or the cause underlying his or her murderous pursuit of the protagonist—we know nothing, not on this first page. We know only that the protagonist is the single mother of a boy named Jamie, who, in the midst of his mother's back-alley struggle for survival, has taken an accidental fall at school and bloodied his nose.

The juxtaposition of two utterly incongruous fictional worlds, of noir detective and struggling single mom —Raymond Chandler meets Murphy Brown—is as tantalizing as it is perplexing. Assuming this woman is ducking real bullets, how on earth did she get herself into such a jam? Equally impressive—and no less perplexing—is the nonchalance ("I rolled my eyes") with which she proceeds to shrug off what a few moments before had been a serious threat to her life and limb to rush to the aid of her slightly injured child.

Or had the threat been serious? Are we being played with? What, exactly, are we to believe?

Whatever is going on here, one thing is clear enough: that somewhere a tongue has been lodged firmly in a cheek. The world of this novel isn't my world, and (hopefully) isn't yours, but a world existing in a parallel universe, one where gun-toting mothers interrupt back alley shoot-outs to kiss their offspring's skinned knees: The world of satire, or, more precisely, of spoof.

The word "spoof" derives from a hoaxing game invented in around the turn of the 19th century by British comedian Arthur Roberts. Since the game involved trickery and nonsense, it wasn't long before the word itself came to stand for tomfoolery. As applied to literature, it denotes a light, playful parody, which, presumably, is what we have here: a parody of a detective novel wherein the detective is an otherwise typical, struggling single mother.

On this first page, that satirical world is created with considerable authority, an authority earned in part by the author's unwillingness to explain, apologize, or make allowances for her premise. As soon as we read, "I crouched, unmoving and stifled; the garbage bins masking my position," we are already ensconced in that ironic world. By plunging us directly into action, the author avoids exposition, and, with it, explanation. In much the same way Kafka convinces us via a single sentence that overnight a man has been transformed into a giant beetle. How this transformation occurred, why it has occurred, Kafka wisely abandons to the reader's imagination. Otherwise it is a fait accompli.

But there are other, smaller ways in which the author undermines that same authority, including poor punctuation (that imprudent semi-colon in the first sentence), subject-verb disagreements (see sentence #3), tense shifts (sentence #4), and a tyro's embrace of adverbs ("desperately," "suddenly," "directly," "slightly"). Given her far-fetched premise that asks so much of readers by way of suspending disbelief, the author has no wiggle-room for such confidence-shaking errors: she'd better get everything just right; for sure she can't get away with telling readers that her heroine's eyes "[follow] the top of [her] head."

Even in a world where single moms shoot it out in blind alleys, we still expect eyes to tag along with the skulls that hold them.