Reading Holleran, Again

Just finished reading Andrew Holleran’s short novel (or is it a novella??) Grief.  I believe this is the third time I’ve read this book.  My first time was probably less than two years ago.  Clearly, I like this book.

 

But I continue to ask myself why I like it.  I don’t mean this is any unkind way.  Sometimes I like things in spite of strong annoyance about certain aspects of the work in question, things that simply antagonize me somehow.  The issue with Grief is nothing like that.  It’s a more technical writing issue.  I could almost feel it was my own flaw, and fault myself rather than the book; and maybe that is the truth.

I suppose the main uneasiness I feel is about the nature of this book itself.  What is it?  Is it a novel?  And does that even matter?

Generally, fiction is called a “novel” if it runs over 50,000 words—about 200 pages.  Grief comes in at 150.  I don’t have the statistics on other famous works of fiction, but I suspect quite a few famous “novels” come in under 50,000 words.  The Great Gatsby, in the editions I’ve seen, comes in slightly under 200 pages.

A novel often involves a fairly large cast of characters.  A Passage to India introduces around twenty characters just in the second chapter!  Yet something like The Stranger or The Immoralist contains a minimal number.  Indeed, Andre Gide, after writing multiple long works of fiction, called The Counterfeiters his “first novel.”  And Tolstoy called Anna Karenina his “first novel,” when he had already written War and Peace!  He didn’t know what to call War and Peace!

And I’m not sure what to call Grief.  But it’s beautifully written, and I enjoy reading and rereading it.  It’s a long monologue, involving the narrator and a few characters (fewer than ten, I’d say), as the narrator teaches a class at a Washington D.C. university and tries to get over his mother’s death.  Meanwhile he muses on his own life—that of an unattached, aging gay man at the end of the twentieth century—and the life of various famous Americans (Mary Tood Lincoln, Henry Adams) who were devastated by the deaths of loved ones; and his own friends who have been lost to AIDS.

Novels generally involve a plot.  I can’t put my fingers on a plot in Grief.  The narrator arrives in Washington, meets his landlord, walks around the city, reads about Lincoln and Adams, visits the mother of a friend who died of AIDS, discusses homosexuality and AIDS with students, finishes teaching, returns home.  Does this constitute a plot?  Do I care?

Frankly, I don’t.  I don’t care if this book runs “only” 150 pages.  I don’t care if the cast of characters is minimal.  I don’t care if not very much “happens.”

I love the mood of the book; I love the writing; I love the thoughtfulness.  Perhaps because I used to live relatively close to DC?  Perhaps because I’m a thoughtful, sometimes moody, person, who cares about relationships to family and friends and lovers?

I enjoy it; not everyone will.  Some people enjoy genre fiction; I enjoy this.  Whatever.

Novels, Memoirs -- And the Territory In Between

Some years back, a friend of mine complained that publishers didn’t want to publish her memoir.  They wanted her to rearrange some of the actions, and invent dialogue to make the scenes more exciting.  “But that isn’t the way things actually happened,” she told the publishers.  Eventually she started her own publishing business to facilitate publishing her book in the form she wanted.

More recently, another friend of mine was telling me how she had written a novel based on her own life and a publisher had told her that the story of the novel “obviously had actually happened,” so she should consider writing a memoir instead.

Now, I don’t think it’s that simple; not as simple as “did this story actually happen or not?”

In my mind, novels and memoirs have different feels.

People say nowadays that you should write memoirs as if they were novels; this makes them more “readable.”  Using fiction techniques in memoirs blurs the truth of the memoir though—and we’ve certainly had several spectacular cases over the past few years where it turned out that not only the writing but the actual facts of the story got embellished along the way.  Indeed, certain aspects of the stories turned out to be complete fiction.

Conversely, think of the novels, particularly first-person novels, that might, with a little encouragement, be mistaken as true-life accounts.  How do we know that books like Huckleberry Finn, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Moby Dick, David Copperfield, and The Catcher in the Rye aren’t true life accounts?   We might know that Twain wasn’t Finn, that Salinger wasn’t Caulfield.  We do know that Dickens incorporated his own childhood experiences into several of his novels.  We may know that Melville didn’t live through an experience like Ishmael’s.  But do we know about Joyce’s experiences enough to know how much of himself is in Stephen Daedalus?

Indeed, the 20^th century has given us many novels that are autobiographical or semi-autobiographical.  For starts, we have the novels of Jack Kerouac (notice I called them novels), all based on his own life.  Then the novels of Christopher Isherwood (built around his experiences, even when the plots are not strictly autobiographical).  Then a whole series of novels by Edmund White (chronicling his youth and adolescence and young adulthood and adulthood), Andrew Holleran’s Grief , and Felice Picano’s Men Who Loved Me (subtitled, interestingly enough, A Memoir in the Form of a Novel).  It has been argued that one of the great contributions of GLBT writers to American literature is this genre of autobiographical- or semi-autobiographical novel.

Considering that Picano calls his book a “memoir in the form of a novel,” do we need to differentiate any longer between novel and memoir?  I’d say that we usually do, for two reasons:  First we need to know whether or not to take the substance of the work literally.  Second, I at least still think of novels and memoir/non-fiction in different ways.  More about that to come.