Tag Archives: literary fiction

At the Bird Feeder on a Snowy Day

It’s been a great bird-watching winter so far. New Year’s Day was particularly auspicious, with not one but two backyard firsts. One, I saw an Eastern bluebird in my yard for the first time in the fifteen years we’ve lived here. Bluebirds like to hang out where the edge of a wood meets a meadow, and, while we have the woods, we don’t have the meadow. But there he was at the feeder, and he has remained a regular visitor ever since. I’m planning to put up a nesting box in case he’d like to introduce his squeeze to the neighborhood and settle in to start his own little flock.

The other first was that we had four Northern yellow-shafted flickers around the feeder at the same time. Four! What could it portend? Growing up in my family, we used to say, “Never follow a flicker. It will bring you bad luck.” Not because it was verifiably true, but it sounded intriguing. Of the four in my yard, it was a large male that came to the feeder, and he actively chased off what I took to be a younger male in the group every time Junior tried to come to the feeder. And yet that same beefy male waited and shuffled his feet deferentially as he let a starling—a starling!—bogart the suet. “Kick him out!” I kept insisting from the other side of the window, like an appalled parent on the sideline of a soccer game. “Show him who’s boss!”

There is no convenient place to sit and watch my backyard, an unkempt spot ringed by woods and undergrowth, and that’s a good thing. As it is, I spend far too much time allowing myself to be distracted from the painful slog of writing, hopping up from my desk each time outside activity catches my eye, or I hear a loud or distinctive call. There’s so much going on:

The goldfinches with their sharp pecking order spend so much energy policing the area and chasing underlings away that it seems, from a Darwinian perspective, like a counterproductive survival strategy.
All in one tree at the same time, a single individual from ten different species: downy woodpecker, titmouse, house finch, goldfinch, chickadee, robin, sparrow, nuthatch, cardinal, wren.
How is it that the wrens have such a huge imposing voice? How is it possible to fit that kind of lung capacity and vocal power into such a tiny package?
The big-chested robins that show up this time of year in large gangs are eerily silent, as fifty at a time dig through the leaf litter and gouge into the earth looking for a meal. These are the non-migratory robins, and they have no song. Like tiny pillagers, they systematically ransack the yard, leaving behind countless chunky piles of staining purple poop.

Rainy days are good at the bird feeder, but it is at its busiest on snowy days. Normally, there are long stretches at the feeder with virtually no activity, but in the snow the action never stops. These are bad writing days. Certainly there are far worse ways to waste time than watching birds (stalking Facebook to see if anyone else has liked my page certainly comes to mind), and sometimes I even attempt to excuse this behavior by insisting to myself that I’m sharpening my observation skills. But in this new year, my objective is to develop discipline.

Boy, you can sure hear those blue jays. Loud bullies to other species, blue jays have an admirably well-developed sense of community. I once unwittingly disturbed a blue jay’s nest: the cry went up, and within less than a minute I was surrounded and actually frightened by what must have been every blue jay within a ten-mile radius. The unnerving ruckus was so loud that neighbors came out to see what was going on.

I was talking about discipline; right. In “The Getaway Car”, Ann Patchett’s wonderful “this is how I did it” essay of advice to aspiring writers, she asserts that there is no such thing as writer’s block, merely procrastination, and more generally a simple lack of discipline. I agree with her. As Patchett says, “Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?” She recommends developing the discipline to sit at a desk for a set period of time every day, during which you are allowed to do absolutely nothing—“no phone, no Internet, no books”—unless it is writing.

What about looking out the window at the birds?

There goes the resident bald eagle cruising past, heading upriver. One rainy winter day he hung out on a bare branch in the backyard for hours, hunched and looking completely miserable. I wonder whether he was procrastinating, too.

It took me five years almost to the day from the time I wrote the first words of my first novel until I wrote the last. That doesn’t count the time between deciding to write it and starting to write it, or the time after it was “finished” until it could actually be considered “done”. I am determined to shave at least a few years off this process for Book #2.

I would bet that the majority of writers spend many hours avoiding writing. (Dorothy Parker, anyone? “I hate writing. I love having written.”) Patchett describes doing everything on her task list, down to the most trivial or normally repellent, rather than hunkering down to write. National Novel Writing Month, affectionately shortened to NaNoWriMo, was founded on the premise that the most important thing to do is just write. It’s an extraordinarily simple concept: Bang out 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days. No editing. No navel-gazing. Write. Even if it’s crap, just get it on the page. The collective resources of the NaNoWriMo movement are there to offer encouragement, a sense of shared purpose, a word-count repository, and the virtual camaraderie of knowing you aren’t alone in your slog.

Did I write 50,000 words? Are you kidding? NaNoWriMo is held in November! Can you imagine? It was my turn to host Thanksgiving this year! What were they thinking? (Excuses for not writing are invariably whiny and self-serving.) I don’t have time to write a novel in November! Why didn’t the organizers think to put it in a less-busy month, like February or March?

We’ll see the ospreys again in mid-March, always the week of St. Patrick’s Day. Their surprisingly high-pitched shrieks call me outside to scan the sky for the first sighting. They are my harbingers of spring. Just a little later, we’ll start to see the great blue herons shake off the winter and start their regular, slow pterodactyl cruises up and down the river, barking their hoarse, gravel-throated calls to each other as they pass.

Oh, it’s a painful irony that it takes discipline to develop discipline. But I’m hopeful. After all, here we are, heading into the teeth of February, and I’m still striving to remain seated, focused—thinking of—doing nothing but—writing. Even if it’s crap, just get it on the page.

Wait, was that a pileated woodpecker I just heard?

More Advance Praise

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“As Charley Beck would do in Yacovissi’s quietly compelling family drama Up the Hill to Home, let me jump straight to the punch line: This is the book you will carry around with you – on the porch swing and waiting in line at the post office – to see how our great-grandparents lived in these United States once upon a time …”

– Rafael Alvarez, author, Tales from the Holy Land

There’s Still Time

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I feel as though I’m always late. And I don’t mean on the little day-to-day stuff, though I’ll be the first to admit I feel my personal clock runs perpetually about five minutes behind everyone else’s. No, I’m talking about a more existential kind of lateness, like that the moment I finally decided to start writing my novel was the moment the Washington Post stopped printing “Book World” as a stand-alone weekly feature. (And has Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the Post done anything to hint at its resurrection? No. He just buys Goodreads instead. That’s fine, Jeff. We were pretty sure you weren’t serious about the paper anyway.) And then, with just a few months to go before publication of my novel—oh, so close—here is Jonathan Yardley clocking out after “thirty-three years and four months—a third of a century almost to the minute” and three thousand book reviews. Yup, I’m late again.

Arguably, I’ve been late for a long time: my own almost-third of a century since I was propelled out into the world clutching my diploma, the one that trumpeted my degree of limited practical application. Perhaps the stark relief of securing a job ahead of graduation stunned me into forgetting my love of writing. And I forgot for a long time.

As I approached thirty, my mother gave me the excellent advice to choose what I did with my life, and to guard against allowing my life to simply happen to me. “Because before you know it, you’ll wake up one day, look in the mirror and say, ‘When did I get old?’ And you’ll realize you didn’t do what you wanted to do.” Roger Waters of Pink Floyd grasped this unhappy phenomenon early on, when at the advanced age of 29 he wrote the lyrics to “Time”:

And then one day you find / Ten years have got behind you. / No one told you when to run. / You missed the starting gun.

and this:

The time is gone, the song is over. / Thought I’d something more to say.

Unfortunately for me, I didn’t heed Mom’s (or Roger’s) advice as completely as I might have. If I had, perhaps my first novel would not have waited until the year I turn 53 to make its debut.

On the other hand, this puts me in the same class with Richard Adams, who was my age the year that his first novel was published. With its tale of imperiled talking rabbits, Watership Down was an unlikely runaway bestseller in 1972. Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes came out when he was 66, and the great granddaddy of all late-to-the-party writers is perhaps Norman Maclean, whose transcendent A River Runs through It and Other Stories was published when he was 73.

It’s probably a little silly to be ticking these examples off as though they prove something—perhaps nothing better than that there are not so many examples to be ticked off. But I’m not the only one who’s taking a bit of heart from the concept. Electric Literature recently posted an interactive graphic put out by Blinkbox Books showing the age at which well-known authors published their breakout books, to prove that many great authors flower later in life. It’s perhaps telling, though, that Adams is the oldest debut author listed.

There are, however, other examples besides McCourt and Maclean who didn’t make Blinkbox’s cut, and I came across one of these recently as I struggled to catch up with the newspapers that constantly pile up in my house. (As I said, I am late with everything. We can debate the time-investment-to-value-realized calculus of reading three-week-old newspapers some other time.) The item in question was a review by Michael Dirda of Hermione Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald. Dirda caught me right away when he said, “But few of us will ever manage such dramatic rebirths as Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000), who never published a book until she was just shy of 60—yet became one of Britain’s most admired novelists.”

Reviews like this make me wonder what the heck I’ve been reading for the last thirty years. Why am I not already familiar with Fitzgerald’s work? It seems that in the time I haven’t been writing, I’ve been doing precious little reading also, which is a far, far more dire waste of time. More than anything, realizing how much good reading I haven’t been doing is what makes me want to find the giant rewind button.

I understand, of course, that I could just as easily have reached my 53rd year without getting a book published. It’s simply painful to acknowledge that it’s been longer than a generation since I could have made anyone’s list of young writers to watch. As we all discover eventually, you cannot unwaste time; you can only resolve not to waste any more of it. I hope I’ve learned that lesson in enough time.

It’s a Real Book Now!

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We’ll be shipping review copies of literary historical novel Up the Hill to Home to all the large review sites and newspapers this week. Even though the book won’t be released until 28 April, reviewers require a full 90 days ahead of publication to complete a review. Holding a printed copy for the first time was pretty cool, though!

Book Review: The Dog: A Novel

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This review was originally published 20 November 2014 in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

Living in a swanky waterfront highrise, cruising in a sweet ride, pulling in big bucks from a cushy (if mind-numbing) job, rubbing elbows with the mega-rich: not hard to take, you say? Then you haven’t read The Dog: A Novel, Joseph O’Neill’s long-awaited follow-up to Netherland. Unfortunately for fans of the lovely, restrained, and insightful writing of O’Neill’s previous novel, The Dog is disappointingly unlovable: a painful, sometimes painfully funny, tortured treatise on the everyday horrors and miseries of modern life, written with such lack of restraint that it feels almost like an endurance test. Do you have what it takes? Are you tough enough to finish this novel? Perhaps that really is what O’Neill is striving for in this cautionary tale that illustrates no matter how bad things are at any given moment, they can always get exponentially worse.

When we meet our almost-nameless hero, X, previously a midlevel corporate attorney, he is several years into living with the aftermath of an imploded long-term relationship; whoever he once was, which perhaps wasn’t all that much to begin with, appears to be permanently unrecoverable. He’s paying dearly, and on many levels, for the crime of having stayed too long and too quietly in a lopsided and suffocating situation, but one that didn’t present a compelling reason to leave until it was just that much too late.

It’s a testament to how bad things are made for him stateside — his bank account drained, his professional reputation in tatters, and his personal Google results sabotaged through “a fiendish new form of defamatory publishing that one might term ‘search libel’” — that X is willing to take a job offer after a chance meeting with an old college chum, Eddie, to be the “family officer” of Eddie’s ultra-rich Lebanese family in Dubai. This even after he is stood up for his surprise interview with Eddie’s irrational brother Sandro in an epic and expensive way.

In this case, “family officer” translates as well-paid errand boy, janitor, and baby sitter, the rubber-stamping drudge whose signature is required on byzantine and highly suspect financial dealings. We see almost immediately how badly this is working out, as X composes mental emails to the two Batros brothers that he knows he will never send. They are pointless; no one listens to him.

So, yes, X works for the Batros family and, yes, we end up meeting Alain, the “Al” in the family — Get it? Al Batros. Albatross. — Sandro’s sullen, obese, badly parented 15-year-old son who portends ill for X.

More than anything, X — who offers that he is the dog, always living in the doghouse — wants simply to be acknowledged as “your presumably decent human being presumably doing a pretty decent job of doing his best to do the right thing in what is, however you look at it, a difficult world.” He expends significant effort attempting to be considerate of others, especially the less fortunate, offering a 10-point treatise (with subclauses) to outline his position on providing charitable donations to help out the foreign workers who toil in near-slavery in the United Arab Emirates, and taking pains to ensure that the women he pays for sex are not victims of trafficking or coercion.

His only comforts in an otherwise intolerable existence are sex with those women, of whom he only requires that they be nice to him; occasional pedicures provided by his diving buddy Ollie; and the use of a state-of-the-art massage chair. He defends his ownership of this chair by saying, “It’s not as if it’s stuffed with miniscule underlings coerced into massaging me.”

If all this screams “first-world problems,” it’s still hard to watch X “dreading the empty and shameful hours and days and weeks and years ahead.” Everyone deserves to be the hero of his own life, but X understands that he has washed out of his: not a has-been, but a never-was.

It is tough to understand what O’Neill is going for in the approach he takes in the novel, making his readers work very hard in puzzling ways. The voice is markedly inconsistent. Sometimes, the story comes almost as one long aside, as though X might be offering all this to some guy he met in a bar, and it is stuffed with pages-long, multi-nested, parenthetical digressions. It’s a gimmicky and aggravating device, with O’Neill insisting you notice how many asides he can nest inside the next and then close them all at once. (The answer is six.)

Then, in huge stretches, X launches into disquisitions on a stunning array of topics, usually in protracted and impenetrable pseudo-legalese. O’Neill dares his readers to slog through it, to read it all. The effect is alienating — perhaps intentionally so, but it’s a perilous tactic.

At times, the prose is engaging, though, and some of the more pithy observations are spot-on. O’Neill adds a new collective noun to the vernacular: “a sadness of masturbators,” for the group of men awaiting their turn with the plastic cup and bad porn in a fertility clinic jerk-off room. He treats with disdain the people who keep score of others’ lives, and notes, “The uncharitable observer — is there another kind?”

As the book nears its close, the reader who has made it this far wonders with increasing urgency how the tale will end, since it does not appear to be working its way toward resolution. O’Neill keeps us anxious to the very last. In a story like this, “happy” is far too much to expect, but the fact that X finally makes one decision for himself is perhaps the closest we can hope to get.

Excited to Announce Pre-Pub Endorsement!

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“Jennifer Bort Yacovissi has written a strong, serene, uplifting debut novel. Up the Hill to Home satisfies the heart but also pleases the mind. Readers will discover here a gifted writer with a firm grasp of American history, a fine way of turning a phrase, and a crisp sense of humor. What most novelists find impossible Yacovissi has accomplished: she has given us a living portrait of a loving family.”

Bryan Crockett, Ph.D., author of Love’s Alchemy: A John Donne Mystery

Book Review: The Shimmering Go-Between

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This review was originally published 24 September 2014 in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

By the time a book is in galley form and sent out for review, there is almost always a synopsis on Amazon or Edelweiss that describes the plot. For The Shimmering Go-Between, Lee Klein’s debut novel (Atticus Books, 295 pages), there is nothing. This appears to be intentional, since on the book jacket itself there are two head-scratching statements: “It’s best not to reveal too much”, and “All we can say is: please no spoilers.” This leaves the reviewer in a bit of a bind. One presumes that Klein wants people to read his novel, so how does he suggest enticing them to do so?

The title is from a quote by Vladimir Nabokov: “Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall tale, there is a shimmering go-between . . .” Indeed, the book is one long collision between normal, everyday real life—sprinkled as it is with familiar heartache and tragedy—and eye-popping, alternate-universe fairy tale.

We meet Dolores when she is twelve and still undeveloped, but taking advantage of her brother’s pornography collection while she heals from a bad fall from her bike. It’s not a great summer, and it turns worse when she starts feeling oddly nauseated and notices that her stomach is distended. Doctor visits and blood tests reveal the answer: Dolores suffers from parthenogenesis. Perhaps more devastating, she suffers from parents who don’t believe her when she insists that she is truly untouched. After three consecutive, terminated “episodes”, she’s put on birth control and the matter is never discussed again. (Just an FYI to the author: The Immaculate Conception refers not to Mary’s conceiving a child without benefit of insemination, but rather to her own conception free from the stain of original sin. It’s a common—ahem—misconception.)

Yes, perhaps that’s a spoiler, but since all that happens by Page 15, there’s plenty more surprises to come.

Dolores’s condition and history isolate her, and she keeps herself deliberately separate from her peers. She makes it almost through college before finally allowing herself to be wooed by a young politician named Max who has nice eyes and a beard. If Dolores as a virgin is hyper-fertile, Dolores having sex with a bearded man has all sorts of unimaginable outcomes that raise thorny moral issues that reverberate throughout the book, and that Klein and his characters sometimes notice but on which they take no particular position.

The outcome of her and Max’s college affair sets the stage for another long stretch of determined isolation during which Dolores throws herself into her editorial work at National Geriatrics. Eventually, though, she admits to being smitten by her best friend at work, a widower named Wilson whom she describes as tall, kind, and—could it be otherwise?–bearded.

It turns out that Wilson is the heart of the story in many (almost) literal and figurative ways, and on several levels. We get to know both him and his late wife Rue more fully than we do Dolores, who almost becomes a secondary character later in the book. Eight years on, Wilson is still quietly mourning Rue’s sudden death from a collision with a deer; five seconds earlier or later would have made all the difference. But that type of if only . . . randomness is universal. In the sublimely alternate worlds that Dolores, Wilson, and Rue experience, it’s not just that the universe is random, it’s as though any possibility of true choice is removed from the equation. Virtually no consequence is the result of a character’s freely elected choice or action. Wilson’s free will is so compromised that he is controlled by not one but two occupying and competing forces. His one personal choice is to cultivate a unique sexual talent that he shares with paying subscribers through his website; he can hardly be expected to anticipate the consequences when that talent marries up with the product of his blackmail-induced assignation with Dolores. By the time we figure out who is actually narrating the story, the pressure is building toward explosions both personal and widespread.

In a story like this, in which the author introduces multiple levels of reality that demand his readers’ trust and willingness to go along for the ride, it’s imperative that the reality we’re familiar with be utterly believable. Thus, after years of consciously isolating herself for fear of what results from intimate contact, it makes no believable sense that Dolores’s first gambit to re-enter the world is to blackmail her friend, the man she fantasizes about spending a normal life with, into having sex with her. Even more unbelievable, we never hear her consider the probable outcome, based on her past history. He has a beard for heaven’s sake! How can she possibly be caught unawares? There are several such elements that just don’t feel true, when they really need to.

Dialog is not Klein’s strong suit, but his prose is sometimes captivating. Outside of Wilson, Rue, and Dolores—it’s a lovely detail that Wilson surrounds himself with women whose names mean sorrow—the other characters are there merely as plot devices. When Max comes along again late in the novel, it takes a minute to remember that we know him. Klein’s sketches, which are sprinkled throughout to illustrate apparently random story components, have a quirky charm. Klein compares his story to those of George Saunders and Charlie Kaufman, and it’s easy to see the same meta-ness here as in, say, Being John Malkovich. Fans of Saunders’s fiction and Kaufman’s films will probably appreciate this tale that goes between the reality we know and the other ones that just haven’t broken through yet.