Secrets and fears

Who knows what goes on in a family? I learned this as a student. 

'You can spend years with a patient and still they'll surprise you,' Wesley told me after we'd shaken hands for the first time, his fingers yellow with nicotine. 

'How so?' I asked.

He settled himself behind his desk, clawed his hair back. 'You can hear someone's secrets and their fears and their wants, but remember that these exist alongside other people's secrets and fears, people living in the same rooms. You've heard that line about all happy families being the same?' 

'War and Peace,' I said. 

'Anna Karenina, but that's not the point. The point is, it's untrue. No family, happy or unhappy, is quite like any other...'

The Woman in the Window by A J Finn, page 98 

The narrator is a child psychologist; Wesley is her tutor.

First sentences

While looking up the subject of cowboys in order to introduce the idea of Stetson Cowboy hats, I came across this quote by Larry McMurtry, the writer.  Several of his books were turned into films, and these stories are probably best known now by their movie titles: Hud, The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, and Lonesome Dove. 

The quote from McMurtry below is one of several listed in my clipping, but this one particularly relates to writers and the art of writing...

"You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and a verb and perhaps a wholesome, non-fattening adverb or two."

Many books on writing make an enormous fuss about the first sentence, and will quote famous first sentences as though the authors of them knew somehow that these same first sentences would become famous in their own right.  Some of them ignore McMurtry's advice and land us with a piece of philosophy: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife [Pride and Prejudice] or, Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. [Anna Karenina]

But without the rest of the book, these first sentences would never have survived.  Neither of these two sentences is so remarkable that it makes us necessarily want to read further.  What these two sentences tend to do is sum up the theme of the book that follows.  

That isn't the way most books begin.  Here's an example I've pinched from Ben Myer's blog.  (You can also find a quiz on first sentences out of children's books, here.)   This one engages the reader (which is what McMurtry had in mind) without telling the reader how it will all work out.   

‘High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.’ [David Lodge: Changing Places]

Or another example from Ben Myer, this time Flannery O'Connor in full throttle: Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.’

What that sentence does is tell you that you're about to enter a world that's pretty extraordinary and so hold onto your braces.  

I'm not going to repeat everything here that Ben Myers has included in his survey of first sentences, but, since I'm once again reading G K Chesterton (The Common Man, this time), I'm going to leave this topic with this wonderful opening sentence - and the one following.  It comes from Chesterton's Autobiography, which is, in some places, almost as much a book of fiction as fact.  

‘Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgement, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge. I do not allege any significance in the relation of the two buildings; and I indignantly deny that the church was chosen because it needed the whole water-power of West London to turn me into a Christian.’

Re-reading Soul Survivor

I've been re-reading Philip Yancey's Soul Survivor, and enjoying it as much as the previous time I read it. This time, I've just been looking for the most part at his chapters on writers: Chesterton, Annie Dillard, Frederick Buechner, Robert Coles, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
I want to read these writers all over again - apart from Coles, whom I had never heard of before Yancey introduced him. But I'd like to read him.
Not that I've read everything by these authors, not by any means. I've begun War and Peace twice and failed to make it very far (perhaps I was spoilt by the movie with Audrey Hepburn and co), but it's a book I'd like to get into some time. Apart from that, I've never even opened anything else by him. I've read some Dostoevsky, mostly back when I was a lot younger. And at a time when I probably didn't appreciate him for what he is. He definitely needs to go back on the list again. I read Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov (struggling through the Russian names to such a degree that I wrote them down when they first appeared so I could figure out who was who!), and perhaps one other. I've started others, but I think I wasn't ready for them at the time.
Dillard and Buechner are two more authors I'd like to read more of than I have. It's years since I read Dillard's great book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but I remember finding it a wonder. I couldn't tell you off the top of my head what I've read of Buechner's, except that I know I have read several of his books. (Dillard's site, by the way, has a front page that is quite disarming. She says, amongst other things: Here is some information for scholars. I’ve posted this web-page in defense; a crook bought the name and printed dirty pictures, then offered to sell it to me. I bit. In the course of that I learned the web is full of misinformation. This is a corrective.) Dillard doesn't always appeal: I didn't much enjoy her Writer's Life. In fact, I think I gave up on it.
And then there's Chesterton, whom I have read a great deal of. I also have a reasonable number of his innumerable books on my shelves. He's not always easy to read: Chesterton can burble along at a rate of knots making you think he's saying something of value when in fact he's just being Chesterton on a roll. And then suddenly out of the blue he'll turn something upside down and a whole world opens up. To read all of Chesterton would be an indulgence, I suspect. He's always great, but not always great to read. Even some of his best books have their downtime. But when he's on a rolll, no one can match him. In fact, few authors can match him even when he's not on a roll! He's like Dickens. There's an awful lot of him, and a case could be made for everything being absolutely superb. It's not, but it's a world that no one else has ever come close to creating.
To go from these masters to the book I'm presently reading to review is like coming down off the top of the mountain. The book is by John Cairney, who, if I'm not mistaken, is the husband of a cousin of one of my oldest friends. Cairney and his wife were both actors, and it looks as though he may still be.
Anyway, Cairney has written this strange book called flashback forward (no capital letters on the cover). If the blurb hadn't told me that something unusual was going to happen at some point, I don't think I would have persisted with it. It takes a 100 pages for the odd thing to happen, and suddenly the story goes from being a fairly ordinary account of a family moving from Scotland to New Zealand in the late 19th century. The main character, Tom, is not particularly engaging.
And then Tom experiences the volcanic eruption that destroyed the Pink and White Terraces, and the book splits in two. Tom eventually goes back to Scotland and we next read of him as a 60-year-old or so. Tom number two wakes up after the Napier earthquake in 1931, 45 years after his previous disaster experience, and is still an 18-year-old. That's where I'm at currently, and certainly this part of the book has proved to be more effectively written than the earlier stuff, which could have been vastly abridged. No doubt more on it in due course.