Storytellersunplugged

By Stan Ridgley

What books do you choose to read? And which books do you like to read?

Which books are you driven to read?

There are differences, you know.

If the question comes up, most often people ask me what books I like to read.

Now, they ask this question for assorted reasons. Either to shut me up from my latest soliloquy on product differentiation . . . or as a casual pleasantry. What a great conversation-starter! And more revealing of character and taste than the average person might apprehend.

But for this purpose, I accept the question as a genuine request to discover what I think are the kinds of books and stories I find most instructive for my own writing. What do I consider a good story?

Well, first let me confess.

Let me confess to you a problem that I know is shared by many booklovers.

So many books infest my shelves that, when I finally get an hour or so of quiet time, and I can pick and choose to my whim . . . I am paralyzed. So many choices, and the selection of a single book means rejection of all the others, some possibly more worthy of attention. That is the perpetual conundrum.

So I usually nap.

Or I visit the bookstore to purchase several more great books for later reading. For the arrival of that glorious moment when I shall have the time, endless time! Rather like bookworm Burgess Meredith in the classic Twilight Zone episode as he stacks the hundreds of books he’d like to read on the rubble-strewn steps of the public library after a nuclear holocaust. Finally, he has the time.

But here is a minor paradox.

When I do read a good yarn, I find that I will go back to it and reread it. Caress it and wonder at why I thought it so grand to begin with. It is akin to the man who finds a great restaurant and a great menu item and begins to settle in comfortably, as with a comfortable friend. It doesn’t mean an aversion to the new and different . . . it means appreciation of the old and proven.

So I reread old favorites. Even as I know what will happen in the stories I read. I am fascinated at how the story unfolds, at how the author moves events along, striking a balance among all the essential elements of storytelling.

With that as the obligatory throat-clearing, let me share with you two of my old favorites. They differ vastly from each other in important ways that will be obvious, but they also resemble each other in the fundamentals of good storytelling.

The first book is The Spike, a cold war thriller published in 1979. I’ve read it five times in the past 28 years.

Authored by Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss, The Spike is considered by some in intelligence circles to be the finest novel in the cold war CIA vs. KGB genre.

For me, it is difficult to define the particular attraction for me of this story, except to note that it has all of the elements of a good novel – a compelling lead character with strong beliefs and who changes dramatically as a result of powerful events, colorfully described. The novel has a supporting cast that is diverse and well-drawn. The stakes are high.

The novel is also obviously political and, on the extreme political left, it was considered “McCarthy-esque disinformation.” Methinks the storyline simply cut too close to home for the progressive tastes of Alexander Cockburn and the folks at the Covert Action Information Bulletin. In fact, having served in Military Intelligence for eight years, I know it cut close to home in certain respects.

But then, what powerful novel doesn’t have an agenda, political or otherwise?

Most stories worth the telling will call out folks who don’t want the story told, whether fictional or not. And The Spike hit a nerve with people who saw themselves limned with what might have been uncomfortable accuracy. As the bad guys.

And so it stirred considerable debate.

There’s an analog in the world of film, although much of the cold war fodder was anti-Washington and against the “Military Industrial Complex” labeled by President Eisenhower and conceptually fleshed out by C. Wright Mills.

Dr. Strangelove, Seven Days in May, Failsafe, Wargames, The Day After, Red Dawn, and The Day After Tomorrow…. Evil and one-dimensional military types, the exaltation of technology over human control, and thinly veiled portrayals of real-life folks.

Good yarns all, and yarns that angered certain constituencies with political proclivities differing substantially from those of the films’ themes. Nuclear Armageddon makes for epic storytelling in the military-industrial-complex-meets-the-disaster-movie genre. [In the aforementioned Twilight Zone episode, no such political theme is discernible . . . simply the despair of a single man and his struggle with the aftermath. An episode I plan to enjoy again.]

All of these films stirred and stir debate on the discrete issues, of course. And that is what The Spike did in its time.

In fact, The Spike performed the same vital function as did the books Failsafe, Seven Days in May and, a decade earlier, Graham Greene’s The Ugly American. Each took a point of view, and you were bound to agree or disagree with it.

Perhaps the edginess of The Spike, then, was its attraction for me, as well as its sweep, its multifarious characters, and the tremendous stakes involved.

But I mentioned two books that I enjoy rereading. The other?

John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra.

O’Hara’s is decidedly different.

Appointment’s portrayal of the class structure in 1930s America and the ugly sinewy strength of some class mores is, I think, brilliant. But this has been said by more able writers than I.

For me, the strength in O’Hara is his powerful characterization, particularly of the self-destructive protagonist Julian English. The sense of presence, the sights, the smells, the sounds are all original and compelling. It rivals The Great Gatsby in its capture of an era and the human behavior that is channeled by the quirkiness of a cloistered environment.

O’Hara’s characters are introspective, and yet their introspection sometimes has a hollow and self-deceiving quality . . . as does our own ersatz introspection at times. We recognize ourselves, and this recognition is uncomfortable. I suspect that there are times when we believe we’re being brutally honest with ourselves, and yet we’re truly only trying to convince ourselves of our worth, our good motives, our essential goodness.

Deep thinking can be confused with revelation. Deep thinking can obscure and blind us as well as it can reveal to us. Deep thinking is not necessarily honest thinking.

And this is what O’Hara portrays so well. At least, for me, this is the received wisdom.

Quite obviously, The Spike and Appointment in Samarra are two entirely different books, equally attractive to me for overlapping reasons.

Both share the quality of great story and compelling characters. But one is introspective, involves the fate of those in a small town, and is bound temporally by several weeks… the other is sweeping, event-oriented, involves the fate of nations, and stretches over 15 years.

Both books offer the novice writer magnificent instruction in how to construct scenes, how to transition between scenes, how to handle character description, how to deliver backstory, how to craft crisp and spare dialogue. It’s all there… in both.

In fact, what a method to “learn” how to write, if such a thing is truly possible. Certainly craft is apprehensible, and I find these two books – even in their extremes—valuable in that respect.

Oh if I had the ability to write both types of novel! Failing that, they are books I will re-read.

But not today, and doubtless not tomorrow.

For there is no time.