An Open Memo to Publishers and Literary Scholars

RE: Dead Authors’ Unpublished Works

Dear Sirs and Madams:

I have just finished what has been promoted as Louisa May Alcott’s “first novel written at seventeen” and as “the book ‘Jo’ wrote”. If I understand the Afterword correctly, this novel was discovered intact among Alcott’s papers. I imagine the scholars who discovered this were incredibly excited and thought that the rest of the reading public would be awestruck at a “new” Alcott novel.

I hate to say this, since Alcott is a respected author, but: it was horrible. Maudlin. Trite. The characters were mere caricatures. (Noble True Love, Long-Suffering Poor Governess, Prideful and Haughty High-born Lady, Older Haughty Lady Who Learns a Lesson, Less-Worthy Love Interest, etc.) The plot was predictable and underdeveloped. Sure, there was some intellectual curiosity about it: one could tell, reading the book, that Alcott’s early influences were Dickens, Austen and the Bronte sisters. But really, the manuscript should have been left where it was found: in the red notebook among her papers.

As you well know, the process a book takes from an idea to publication is a long and arduous one. Many revisions and edits are necessary to make a good final draft. When an author has died, that process cannot be completed, for obvious reasons. Thereby, any works that are published after said authors death can never be as good as anything that author published in life. (There are exceptions, true, but they are rare.) While you may think that fans of the author may want, for completion’s sake, to read everything that author ever wrote, please refrain from publishing unfinished works. We really don’t want to remember Lloyd Alexander or Madeline L’Engle (or any other deceased author for that matter) for the first drafts of novels they had saved on their computer drives; we want to remember them for the works they finished and polished and published and won awards for.

I am sorry for this aberration in Alcott’s published repertoire. It would be much better for the reading public to read and enjoy her original published works, the ones in which she had control of the writing process, and ignore this travesty.

Thank you.

Jerry Spinelli has written books that I’ve really liked; I thoroughly enjoyed both Stargirl and Maniac Magee. So I was looking forward to reading Eggs, Spinelli’s almost latest book. (Love, Stargirl just came out, too.) While I respect Spinelli’s writing, and while I admire that he’s willing to tackle a subject like dealing with human fragility in the face of death of a loved one, I’m not sure I liked this book all that much.

I’m not saying I disliked it, though. I think what I had was a complete non-reaction. It was neither here nor there; it was neither liked nor disliked. It just was. (Maybe that’s appropriate?)

Anyway. David, a 9 year old boy (who didn’t act like a 9 year-old in my opinion) whose mother has recently died, hates life. Hates that his grandmother is trying to make him make friends. Hates that his father is always gone to his job in Connecticut (“200 miles away!”). Hates his new town. Just hates. (It’s actually pretty grumpy reading.) Until he meets Primrose, a 13-year-old girl with family problems of her own. She is annoyed by her mom, who is, by all accounts, pretty out of it. Neither of them wants a friendship, yet they end up as friends. Neither of them wants to admit that they need the other, so they spend most of the book fighting. (There’s a lot of arguing and fighting in this book. I suppose that’s typical.) And in the end, they realize, well, that life is okay.

And that’s pretty much the whole plot. Since there wasn’t much story, I really wanted to like the characters. But I didn’t particularly like David; he was too grumpy, too mean, his emotions too raw for me. I liked Primrose better, but not by much. She also was quite mean, often teasing and provoking David for no apparent reason. I felt sorry for David’s grandmother and Primrose’s mom. The mother-figures in this book were either spineless or crazy, which bothered me. The only character I really liked was Refrigerator John; he was at least interesting, though I can’t say why. He didn’t really do anything; he was just there as a sounding board for Primrose and David. And an effective one at that.

There really isn’t much more to say about this one. I was complaining to M about David always being grumpy and mean, and she told me that “9-year-old boys are just jerks, Mom.” So, maybe it’s an accurate portrayal of a kid going through the grief process. I just wanted a more enjoyable and compelling one.

There are some books that one can sit and read for hours and hours. This book, by Henry Beston, is not one of those books. I tried, I really did. But every time I read more than, oh, 5 pages, I started drifting off. It’s not that this book is boring; it’s far from that. It’s very lyrical, almost poetic (it made me think of Inkling!), but it is a book that, for me, is best handled in small doses.

In 1924, Beston, at the age of 36, decided (on almost a whim) to spend a year living in the beach house he had built as a sometime summer residence on the Atlantic side of Cape Cod. This book, published four years later, is not a true chronology of his year; it’s more like musings in chronological order. It’s a naturalist book; he loves nature, loves to observe and spend time in nature. He writes, early on:

The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dune these elemental presences lived and had their being and under their arch moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.

I had to constantly remind myself that I was reading a book nearly 80 years old, and not some Wendell Berry book. It is a very Berry-esque book, something I could imagine Berry writing if he had grown up by the sea instead of Kentucky. Another quote, that reminded me of Berry:

The sky this afternoon is a harmony of universal blue, bordered with a surf rim of snowiest blue-white. Far out at sea, in the northeast and near the horizon, is a pool of the loveliest blue I have ever seen here — a light blue, a petal blue, a blue of the emperor’s gown in a Chinese fairy tale. If you would see waves at their best, come on such a day, when the ocean reflects a lovely sky, and the wind is light and onshore; plan to arrive in the afternoon so that you will have the sun facing the breakers. Come early, for the glints on the waves are most beautiful and interesting when the light is oblique and high.

It’s also a birding book; he loves birds and spends pages following their migratory, feeding and mating habits. I think I felt a little wistful about this; I’ve never really been interested in birds (birdwatching is probably forever tied to a very difficult and painful birding section of my 7th-grade science class), but I could still sense the reverence and awe Beston had for these creatures. While not a birdwatcher, I could understand the interest birds do have for some people.

The most interesting chapter, to me, was Midwinter, when Beston describes the horrible, difficult, destructive winter of that year. It was the worst winter Cape Cod had seen in decades; Beston writes that many ships were capsized, many lives were lost (I’d write how many ships and lives, but the numbers escape me now). He lived through it, snug in his well-built house. But, he describes the heroic efforts of the guards at the Nauset Station lighthouse; the coping of the seafaring communities — how they would take the ship scrap back to their houses, while mourning the loss of life, and use it as part of their daily lives; the sheer determination of the sailors on the wrecked ship (one lone survivor of one wreck, ended up heading back out to sea because it was “the only thing he knew”).

He writes at the beginning of the chapter: “A year indoors is a journey along a paper calendar; a year in outer nature is the accomplishment of a tremendous ritual.” There are more quotes I could write, about the destructiveness of humans on the ocean, about the sense of smell, about springtime at the beach; but I’ll leave off here. I envy all those who live even remotely near an ocean; I’ve long felt that I’m happiest when I’m near great bodies of water. (I’m not saying that I don’t like Kansas, or that I’m not happy here; I just feel incomplete, on some level.) So, I’m glad I read this book, if only because it let me experience living near the ocean if only for just a little while.

One last quote:

Whatever attitude to human existence you fashion for yourself, know that it is valid only if it be the shadow of an attitude to Nature. A human life, so often likened to a spectacle upon a stage, is more justly a ritual. The ancient values of dignity, beauty and poetry which sustain it are of Nature’s inspiration; they are born of the mystery and beauty of the world. Do no dishonour to the earth lest you dishonour the spirit of man… Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places.

First, to get it out of the way… Andi heard my plaintive cries (ha!), and put up the September issue of Estella. Go read: we’ve managed to bag an interview with The Book Thief‘s author, Marcus Zusak (take that, Stephenie Meyer!), who sounds like one fine fellow. Eventually I will get around to reading his book. 🙂 I contributed a book tour of Salt Lake City (figured I could squeeze that in while on vacation), and a review of a couple of Jane Austen “sequels”. Coupled with seeing Becoming Jane, which I quite liked, I spent a lot of time in Austen-land last month. Like always, Andi and Heather (who’s less than a week away from giving birth!) put together a fabulous issue.

After finishing Eclipse, I swore off romances, and instead (after a brief adventure with Hugo Cabret) started to read The Outermost House, by Henry Beston for the Armchair Traveler challenge. I didn’t give up on that; I just discovered (after falling asleep a few times), that it’s not the sort of book I can pick up and devour in one sitting. It’s more Wendell Berry-eqsue, something to be taken slowly, bit by bit. And so, I’m reading it a section at a time, one per day. At this rate, I’ll have it done sometime next week. I needed something else to read, though. Something I could get in to, and enjoy. And I found that in L.M. Montgomery’s very charming book, The Blue Castle.

Valancy Sterling is an old maid (it’s the 1920s, people), living with her mother and a widowed cousin, is part of a stuffy old-money clan in Deerwood, Ontario. She is mousy, fearful, and adores the “forbidden” nature books of John Foster. She comforts herself with dreams of heroes and beautiful things in her Blue Castle. On the morning of her 29th birthday, she realizes (yet again) that she’s never even had a life, let alone had someone to love or who loves her. And she realizes that this is something she really wants. She goes to the doctor, who diagnoses her with a fatal heart disease and gives her a year to live. It’s when faced with death that Valancy realizes that she needs to live, and breaking all conventions, she sets out to find it.

I was thoroughly charmed by this book. Valancy is a cross between Anne Wentworth and Anne Shirley: like Anne Wentworth, she’s so nice, she’s so long-suffering that you just ache for her to have something of her own. And when she does finally break out of her shell, you discover the same sort of passion for life and imagination that Anne Shirley has. Montgomery wonderfully portrayed a woman coming into her own, learning to love, being loved in return, and enjoying herself thoroughly in the process. And Valancy’s relatives: oh, they were fabulously awful. I hated them all, the entire book. They were base, they were mean, they were snobs (Valancy accuses them, correctly, of being part of a snobocracy. I loved that.), and they deserved to have Valancy speak her mind to them. One of my favorite scenes was Valancy’s cousin retelling the events of Valancy’s departure:

“The last words I said to her,” said Cousin Stickles pathetically, “were, ‘Who will rub my back at nights now?’ And she said — she said — but no, I cannot repeat it.”
“Nonsense,” said Uncle Benjamin. “Out with it. This is no time to be squeamish.”
“She said” — Cousin Stickles’ voice was little more than a whisper– “she said–‘Oh, darn!'”
“To think I should have lived to hear my daughter swearing!” sobbed Mrs. Frederick.

I howled.

It is a good romance, after all. Even if the ending gets a bit predictable (I bet you could guess the ending right now), and everything turns out quite pat. I didn’t want it any other way. And it still makes me smile just to think about it.

I just spent a most delightful hour reading this graphic novel by Brian Selznick.

I know I’m behind the times, that this has been raved about in the kidlitosphere for ages, but I finally picked it up at the library yesterday on a recommendation from a friend in my in-person book group. I’m so glad I did.

I didn’t read any of the reviews (just enough to know that it was loved by everyone), I had no idea what the book was about. And I appreciated that. So, I’m not going to tell you anything. Just that you should get your hands on a copy and spend some time getting to know the amazing Hugo Cabret.

You won’t regret it.