Review: 'Defenestration' by Matthew W McFarland

Almost four years ago now I reviewed a collection of short stories by Matthew W McFarland entitled Fifty/Fifty and Other Stories. Among those stories was what is now (more or less) the opening chapter of this novella. It was also called ‘Defenestration’, and I gave it 4.5 stars. The question is, does this novella measure up to its namesake?

The short answer is: almost. There was a simplicity and elegance to the prose of the short story which made it a pleasure to read. For the most part, that quality of writing is maintained here. The events of the short story remained largely unexplained. The reader simply experiences the defenestration [for those unfamiliar with the term, it is the act of being thrown from a window] from the first person point of view of the defenestratee (a word I have probably just invented). The absence of a context or explanation for this event is no shortcoming at all for this short, elegant piece.

This novella provides the background, context and sequel to this event.

The plot emerges slowly from the narrative as characters are introduced and stories told. I was very impressed with the way the different streams of the narrative and the characters they featured were gradually woven together into a very pleasing tapestry. I would urge those who prefer stories with a faster pace and more action to exercise patience here. It is not a long book, and if you put in the effort and spare the time I hope you will appreciate the skill of the weave and the elegance of the prose.

As interesting as the plot is, as much as anything this is a series of character studies of a number of mildly to extremely dysfunctional people living in present-day Belfast. Each of the characters is well drawn, although it did take me a little while to sort among the different female characters. Melanie is as delightfully twisted a character as I have encountered anywhere.

The central male character, Adam, who is ostensibly the narrator of this tale, is lacking in detail until well past the middle of the book. We know nothing about him: his age, family relationships or profession. Large sections of the book are virtually a third person narrative and, although we are aware that Adam is the narrator, he is not really present in the story at those times. I remained somewhat confused about his age. At one point, reference is made to his ‘old age’, yet he elsewhere appears as a potentially suitable match for one of the young women in the story.

The author uses a clever device to enable the narrator to relate events at which he is not (ostensibly) present—I don’t want to give away the plot by being more specific. However, this device breaks down in at least one scene towards the end of the story where it can no longer operate. It involves a prison visit of which the narrator cannot be a witness.

The only other misgiving I have about this novella is that the author has a tendency at times to slip into a somewhat didactic and self-conscious philosophical/social commentary. This was a little too direct and obvious for my taste.

A sharper eye for editing would have picked up a few obvious errors here and there.

McFarland is an excellent writer, with a facility both for writing elegant prose and weaving together a good story. I hope to hear more from him in the future.

Review: 'Tzippy the Thief' by Patricia Striar Rohner

Tzippy is the story of a vain, self-indulgent, superficial, pampered and narcissistic 80-year-old woman, at the head of a dysfunctional family. She lives in Florida with her live-in, African-American maid. In her latter years, she is in a relationship with Stan, a long-time friend of the family, and especially of her late husband.

This is a well-written and well-edited story. The prose is crisp and concise. Scenes are created vividly, but with a minimum of excess. At times the writing has an almost journalistic feel. Even during Tzippy’s periods of introspection the author refrains from hyperbole and excess. Nevertheless, Tzippy’s feelings, thoughts and worldview are perfectly apparent to the reader. Only in Chapter 18 did I feel that the writing faltered a little, becoming somewhat stilted and hurried.

In the course of the narrative, various of her children—Shari, Bruce and Naomi—and their spouses and partners come on stage, but the main thread concerns Tzippy’s relationship with her younger daughter, Shari, forty-something and an alcoholic. In her younger days—and perhaps still—Shari suffered from anorexia-bulimia. It becomes Tzippy’s late-life crusade to do what she can to heal this relationship and repair some of the harm she has done to the daughter.

Tzippy also has to face two other issues in her life. She is addicted to benzodiazepines, although she does not at first acknowledge this. The author walks a fine line here, and some readers might think that she overplays the irony as Tzippy reflects upon her daughter’s excessive alcohol consumption, while at the same time popping another pill.

The other issue Tzippy has to deal with is her proneness to theft. She is caught on this occasion and has to deal with the humiliation. At the same time her maid of many years—Angie—is caught stealing money from Tzippy. Again, the irony may be a little overplayed; but, again, it is a fine Iine.

The narrative is related exclusively from the intimate, third-person point of view of Tzippy. She is very much centre stage. This lends her an almost celebrity status: she is very much the star of her life, and of the scenes that play out. This is true even when she seems to be focused on the well-being of others. No matter how much she tries to reach out to others, somehow the story is always still about her. There is a tension here, because it is clear that at times Tzippy really does want to be less selfish and less self-centred; yet, somehow, she is never far from the centre of the narrative, or from her own concerns.

The other characters are mostly well drawn. Shari, the younger daughter, is interesting and complex. Even at her most down and out there is an attractive vulnerability to her. The reader also suspects that she knows very well how to use this to her advantage. She has learned manipulation from a master manipulator. The characterisation of the maid, Angie—an overweight African-American woman with a love for caftans—flirts with caricature, but perhaps just avoids it. Tzippy’s love interest, Stan, seems rather shallow and ineffectual, although I think the author’s intention is to present him as practical, down to earth and balanced. Perhaps he is, but against the bright colours of the other characters, he seems somewhat pale and insipid.

But Tzippy is the centre here. I confess that I found it difficult to like her, as is perhaps evidenced by the opening sentence of this review. I found it difficult to take seriously the problems of this pampered and privileged woman. Nor am I sure whether the author wants us to like her. I did have some sympathy for her. She clearly recognises her own superficiality and selfishness. But I couldn’t help feeling that even this was part of her ‘game’, this need to ‘make things right’ and live a deeper, more satisfying life. I can only echo the words of the judge before whom Tzippy appears following her theft: ‘Mrs. Bryer, go home and stop this nonsense.’ 

Political Mandate (or not)

There has been a lot of talk recently in Australia (with a federal election on the way) about the meaning of a political mandate. When a party is elected into power, does that mean it has a mandate, a right, to put into place all the policies which it took with it into the election?

The answer is NO, and the reasons are quite simple.

When I go to the polling booth I have to make a choice between parties which have proposed a whole raft of policies. Some of those policies I will agree with; some I will not. This is true on both sides of politics. If I decide (for example) that Party A’s economic agenda is, on balance, slightly better than that of Party B’s, and I decide to vote for them on that basis, that does not mean that I support all their other policies. I might not agree, for instance, with their policy on the environment or towards asylum seekers. Just because I decide to vote for a party on the basis of one or a few issues this does not mean that I do, or am obliged to, support all their policies. Nor do I believe it gives them an automatic right to implement those policies.

Democracy does not begin at 8 am and end at 6 pm on polling day. Democracy requires that I and every one of us continues to advocate for the things that are important to us. It also demands that the government of the day be perpetually answerable to the people, and not just on one day every three years or so.

Just because I voted for YOU does not mean that I believe in everything you stand for; and I will continue to speak loudly and irritatingly about those things I think you have wrong.

ANZAC Day

My overseas readers may not know what ANZAC Day is. It has to do with the Gallipoli landing during the First World War. It is a very big day in Australia, and seemingly becoming bigger every year.

It is almost sacrilegious and possibly even considered treasonous to say anything that might be regarded as a criticism of this day. Few in Australia regard Christmas or Easter celebrations with anything approaching religious reverence. ANZAC Day is the only holiday in the Australian calendar that attracts this kind of reverence, from the religious and non-religious alike.

I write the next paragraph with some hesitation, because I suspect many in Australia might find its fairly mild wording offensive. Here goes:

‘Today (25 April) marks the anniversary of the attempt, during the First World War, by the allied forces, including Australia, to invade that well-known enemy of Australia, Turkey. The attempt was ill-conceived and disastrous. Unsurprisingly, the Turks vigorously (and successfully) defended their territory. In Australia we commemorate this event as ANZAC Day. I’m not sure how they commemorate it in Turkey.’

Whatever is going on around ANZAC Day in Australia is a little strange and perhaps also a little frightening. Whatever it is, ANZAC Day is not simply a day when we commemorate and honour those whose lives have been lost in war. We have Remembrance Day—or perhaps you know it as ‘Armistice Day’: November 11—to do that. At least that marks the end of the First World War: a suitable time, one would think, to remember the cost of war. ANZAC Day commemorates an attempt to invade another country for strategic purposes: to control the Dardanelles, a strait providing a sea route to the Russian Empire. It is, of course, tragic that so many people lost their lives in that pointless exercise. The Turks who lost their lives during that campaign (does anyone know how many?) were defending their territory. The Australians who tragically died were not defending Australia—despite the propaganda that surrounds ANZAC Day. Unless, of course, you subscribe to the dictum that attack is the best form of defence: easily used to justify any form of aggression.

I am all in favour of remembering the horrors of war, and commemorating the tragic and often pointless loss of life. Remembrance Day is a perfect time to do that. I am less comfortable with the mythology that continues to build around the commemoration of ANZAC Day. I in no way want to belittle the price men paid at Gallipoli—allied troops and Turks alike. But it is a stretch to claim that the Australians (at least) gave their lives in defence of Australia. It’s sad but true—and no fault of theirs—that they gave their lives in a much less worthy cause.

'Naturalistic' Dialogue

We writers often try to write dialogue in what we regard as a naturalistic style, but this can be fraught with difficulties. The result may not be what we intended.

We know that the spoken word is very different from the written word. We rarely speak in nice, complete, neat, grammatically correct sentences. Our speech stops and starts; words slide together; we leave the beginnings and endings off words; we pronounce words in particular ways; we change direction in mid sentence. It is the ‘words slide together; we leave the beginnings and endings off words; we pronounce words in particular ways’ that causes the difficulties.

The problem with depicting a character as speaking in a particular accent is that we all have accents, although we seldom realise it of ourselves. If we choose to represent the speech of (say) our Scottish or Irish characters in a particular way, why don’t we do so for all the other characters? The result is usually somewhat clichéd, and some of the characters verge on becoming caricatures. If we wish to represent a character as being less well educated—for example by dropping Hs or leaving the ends off words—we are being unfair to them, because we probably also do that ourselves!

Consider this sentence: ‘Are you going to eat that or not?’ Now say it out loud. How many of you said ‘you’ and ‘going to’? I imagine most of us (brilliantly well educated or not) said something like: ‘Are y’ gonna eat that or not?’ I suggest that when we write a sentence of dialogue, we can assume that the reader will ‘hear’ the latter (or something like it) without our having to spell it out. When it is spelled out it can become difficult to read (and downright annoying). It is also incredibly difficult to maintain such patterns consistently. If I write: ‘Whad’re y’ havin’ f’ dinna’, am I going to do this every time the character speaks? When I as an editor come across something like this, should I be going through and removing the Gs off the end of all this character’s words, because I can guarantee there will be plenty of them. It is as much a nightmare trying to edit this into some kind of consistency as it is to write it consistently in the first place.

Then there is the question of how you actually represent these sounds. Short of using formal phonetic notation, it is very difficult to properly represent pronunciation. Consider this sentence which I came across recently: ‘I do luv a good soup.’ Why ‘luv’ rather than ‘love’? How am I meant to pronounce it? Is the vowel sound the same as in ‘put’ or ‘cup’? These are different sounds in my particular accent. The vowel sound in ‘cup’ (for me) is identical to that in ‘love’. On the other hand, ‘put’ is a different sound from ‘putt’ (which, for me, is like ‘love’ and ‘cup’). So ‘luv’ is unhelpful. How I hear it will depend on where I come from, which is the same for ‘love’ in any case, so why bother spelling it differently? My mother, for instance, in her Birmingham accent, will say ‘love’ as if the vowel is the same as in ‘put’ rather than ‘putt’, but as far as she is concerned she is saying ‘love’ as it is meant to be said, and who am I to tell her otherwise?

Note that an accent is different from dialect. A dialect uses different words, rather than just pronouncing the same word differently. If you can use authentic dialect (and not just what outsiders often wrongly consider to be authentic dialect) that is great.

I always think that a better way to alert the reader to a particular speech pattern is to point it out in the narrative: ‘I struggled to understand his strong Scouse accent’ (for example). ‘Fred always misplaced his Hs when he was speaking.’ Then you don’t have to write it all the time. The reader will hear it. If the reader doesn’t know what a Scouse accent (Liverpool) sounds like, nothing you write on the page will help!

I would never say never write out these ‘naturalistic’ passages of dialogue. On occasion it might be helpful if you want to create a particular effect. But if you do, do so sparingly and with great care. Ask yourself: Will this sound to the reader the way I want it to sound? To some it will; to others it won’t.

David Bowie and me

I know. I suppose everyone will want to have their say about David Bowie, which goes to show what an important influence he has been.

The very first song I heard by David Bowie on Australian radio, and the first to which I attached his name, was ‘Queen Bitch’, from the ‘Hunky Dory’ album. A song with the words ‘queen’ and ‘bitch’ in the title? Would that get airplay in the US even today?

Oh yeah

I’m up on the eleventh floor and I’m watching the cruisers below

He’s down on the street and he’s trying hard to pull sister Flo

Oh, my heart’s in the basement, my weekend’s at an all-time low

’Cause she’s hoping to score, so I can’t see her letting him go

Walk out of her heart, walk out of her mind, oh not her

She’s so swishy in her satin and tat

In her frock coat and bipperty-bopperty hat

Oh God, I could do better than that

She’s an old-time ambassador of sweet-talking, night-walking games

And she’s known in the darkest clubs for pushing ahead of the dames

If she says she can do it, then she can do it, she don’t make false claims

But she’s a queen and such are queens that your laughter is sucked in their brains

Now she’s leading him on, and she’ll lay him right down

Yes, she’s leading him on, and she’ll lay him right down

But it could have been me, yes, it could have been me

Why didn’t I say, why didn’t I say, no, no, no

She’s so swishy in her satin and tat

In her frock coat and bipperty-bopperty hat

Oh God, I could do better than that

So I lay down a while and I gaze at my hotel wall

Oh, the cot is so cold it don’t feel like no bed at all

Yeah, I lay down a while and I look at my hotel wall

And he’s down on the street, so I throw both his bags down the hall

And I’m phoning a cab ’cause my stomach feels small

There’s a taste in my mouth and it’s no taste at all

It could have been me, oh yeah it could have been me

Why didn’t I say, why didn’t I say, no, no, no

She’s so swishy in her satin and tat

In her frock coat and bipperty-bopperty hat

Oh God, I could do better than that

You betcha

Oh, yeah

Uh-huh

What the hell was this song about? It was 1972, I was fifteen years old and I didn’t have a clue. But I knew that it was in some way subversive, and I was hooked. Here was my Elvis, my Beatles or my Rolling Stones: someone my parents would hate.

I was (as usual) a bit behind the times. There were other songs—‘Changes’, ‘Starman’, ‘Ziggy Stardust’, ‘Space Oddity’—that other people apparently already knew. I was a nerdy, fifteen-year-old sci-fi geek, and here was the stranger in a strange land himself; here was the real Valentine Michael Smith. Those weirdly alien-sounding vocals, the bizarre haircut and make-up, the outrageous costumes. ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’. It was all there. ‘Ziggy Stardust’ remains—and I don’t think this will be widely disputed—one of the greatest albums of all times.

Over the years David Bowie continued to evolve and experiment, to excite, baffle and disappoint his fans. I suspect all those who count David Bowie among their favourite recording artists will have their favourite era. This will probably be the era in which they first discovered him. He continued to re-invent himself, never content with the success of the past, never content just to repeat himself, never content to simply please his existing fan base. I always wanted everything David Bowie did to be touched with genius, but not all of it was, of course. I hate some of what he did. But he never gave up. He kept coming back. The ‘plastic soul’ era; the Berlin era; the ‘Metal Machine’ era; the ‘Scary Monsters’ era; the ‘new wave/pop’ era. I didn’t like everything he did; but someone else always did.

Then, later in life, in 2002, he surprised me with what I think is one of his best albums, ‘Heathen’. The next two were not so much to my taste. And the latest, ‘Blackstar’, released on his sixty-ninth birthday, just a couple of days before his death? Weird, certainly. I may hate it. I’m not sure. But, once again, he was David Bowie being out there, very much a stranger in a strange land.

There is, of course, much more to David Bowie’s life and career: his collaborations, his movies, his artwork, his internet savviness. He was always the consummate market expert, even down to the timing of his death. Love it or hate it, ‘Blackstar’ is almost guaranteed to become a classic.

David Bowie was my voice in the early years of the nineteen seventies. He expressed for me all the weirdness I was too timid to express myself. Over the years, even during those eras when I didn’t particularly like his work, he was never far from my thoughts. I always had an eye out for news about him. He has accompanied me through life since I was fifteen years old. He is the ultimate icon for my generation. The deaths of very few celebrities have moved me personally. The death of David Bowie has. I feel I have lost a friend and companion this day.

Hemingway, the App

Every now and then a new application pops up that will claim to make you a better writer, or that will offer to edit your work for you. Of course, MS Word itself offers to do some of this, with its spell checker and grammar checker, and I think we all know that the results are chequered at best.

I came across an app recently: the ‘Hemingway App.’ It claims ‘to make your writing bold and clear’. It does this by pointing out what sentences it considers hard to read or very hard to read; phrases that have simpler alternatives; the number of adverbs (of which it will specify what it considers to be a suitable number for a piece of writing of that length); and uses of the passive voice. It is called the ‘Hemingway App’ because Hemingway is so often held up as a writer whose writing is ‘bold and clear’, a paragon for all writers since. He is often cited by those whose aim is the extinction of adverbs. Once you begin to look more closely at Hemingway’s writing, of course, it becomes clear this his writing is far from always ‘bold and clear’; nor does he particularly shy away from the use of adverbs.

Any piece of software like this is just begging to be put to the test, and this can be done on their web site here: http://www.hemingwayapp.com. Text can be entered and subjected to scrutiny. Naturally, the first author anyone is going to subject to this analysis will be Hemingway himself. Here is the opening paragraph of For Whom the Bell Tolls:

He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road and far down the pass he saw a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight.

The first thing the app does is identify three out of four sentences as ‘hard to read’. Erm, well … Either the software can’t count or it is not able to identify sentences very well. There are only three sentences here. Perhaps the app doesn’t know what semi-colons are. Nevertheless, it highlights the whole passage as ‘hard to read’. Hard for whom, one wonders. It identifies ‘gently’ as an adverb and advises its removal. Really? ‘The mountainside sloped where he lay’ would be an improvement? What mountainside doesn’t slope? So, remove an adverb and generate a tautology. The point is that it slopes gently here and not precipitously. The app apparently has no problem with this sentence opener: ‘There was a stream alongside the road …’ I would consider this passive, but the app doesn’t. As an editor I would change this to: ‘A stream ran alongside the road …’ So … not a great start for the app.

It rated this passage a ‘ten’ (good). The lower the rating, the higher the readability, apparently. It goes up to twenty-four. Even the lowest rating of ‘one’, however, is still only ‘good’.

Here’s a passage from a Hemingway short story:

I guess looking at it now my old man was cut out for a fat guy, one of those regular little roly fat guys you see around, but he sure never got that way, except a little toward the last, and then it wasn’t his fault, he was riding over the jumps only and he could afford to carry plenty of weight then. I remember the way he’d pull on a rubber shirt over a couple of jerseys and a big sweat shirt over that, and get me to run with him in the forenoon in the hot sun. He’d have, maybe, taken a trial trip with one of Razzo’s skins early in the morning after just getting in from Torino at four o’clock in the morning and beating it out to the stables in a cab and then with the dew all over everything and the sun just starting to get going, I’d help him pull off his boots and he’d get into a pair of sneakers and all these sweaters and we’d start out.

The app gave this a grade of twenty (poor). That it may be—we are harsh critics—but the point of including it here is to consider adverbs more closely. I have highlighted the adverbs; I see ten of them. The app identified one: roly. Which, of course, isn’t an adverb. (Is it even a word without its ‘poly’ partner?) So … the software doesn’t appear to know what an adverb is.

Finally, who could resist entering some gibberish.

Me thinks this um piece of software is crap. But it likum this. Car happy not today. Me good writer ugh.

This (apparently) is a Grade 1 (but still only ‘good’) piece of writing, with no issues at all. Now I understand what I have been doing wrong.

Some might advise caution when using, or even considering purchasing, the Hemingway App. I would never do that, of course. 

[By the way, this post rated ‘seven’. I’m not at all sure that I should be happy about that!]