Books for Dudes: Seven Protean Literary Plots, From Chabon to Steinbeck
By Douglas Lord Oct 6, 2011I love a challenge like Ethel Merman loves a parade. I did an Ironman this summer, and while that was difficult enough, I threw in an extra Ironman. Why? For the challenge. I pick up that theme here. It's not easy to encapsulate 700-plus pages about the protean literary plots and give examples that a dude would read, but I did it-for the challenge.
Slogging through Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories will take years, but it's worth it as it's fascinating. It has made me "read" every title I so much as look at a bit differently. While thick, it's clear and understandable and helps readers see stories as (stay with me here) meta-constructions of the seven archetypal plots: comedy, tragedy, voyage and return, overcoming the monster, rebirth, quest, and rags to riches. I wouldn't call my reductions of them, below, a gross oversimplification, but it is kinda icky.
I look forward to your rebuttals and suggestions, not to mention standing in awe of your collective brilliance in the comments.
COMEDY
Chabon, Michael. The Wonder Boys. Villard. 1995. 368p. ISBN 9780679415886. $23. F
For Booker, the essence of comedy is when a "little world" (e.g., a family) undergoes the "transition between two general states"—confusion/darkness and clarity/light. Aristophanes wrote the prototype way back in 411 B.C.E. Lysistrata's warrior menfolk realize where their "inmost priorities lie" when their womenfolk deny them sex in order to stop their wars. When they reunite with their mates, confusion turns to light (aka makeup sex). In my world of Scooby-Doo, the analog is when Velma finds her inevitably dropped glasses and the plot becomes, literally, clearer. Booker uses Jane Austen (excuse my throwing-up noises) as one example, ipso facto Pride and Prejudice and Zombies fits. So would, imho, almost any character-driven tale from Scott Westerfield's "Leviathan" series to Chuck Klosterman's Downtown Owl. Chabon's incredible works generally end with much joy after massive, uproarious confusion; The Wonder Boys features the maximum of both. Grady Tripp, a classic "professor gone-to-seed," was once a "wonder boy" with a bang-up first novel. Now he's a pot-smoking lump who can't let go of his unfinishable second book, which now comprises a stack higher than five reams of copy paper. There's a lot of arguing, a shot dog, a stranded tuba, a dissolving marriage, and the massive, unfinished magnum opus. Three male leads all take turns undergoing various kinds of crises, but our sympathies lie with Tripp, who eventually has a joyful reunion with his pregnant lover and moves on to write anew. All the comedy elements are there; confusion has cleared, and Velma found her glasses. Jinkies!
OVERCOMING THE MONSTER
Duncan, Glen. The Last Werewolf. Knopf. 2011. 293p. ISBN 9780307595089. $24.95. F
OtM stories boil down to this: Hero Destroys the Great Evil Threatening Home. Capice? Booker's prime example is The Epic of Gilgamesh (next on my to-read list, promise), but he also includes James Bond, Westerns, thrillers, and Star Wars. My favorites are told from the point of view of the monster, like when you feel sorry for the titular character of John Gardner's Grendel even as he rips people limb from limb, eats the bits, and brings the trophies home to Mother. Duncan presents just such a sympathetic (but still outrageous) monster, and things get fun. Jake, a werewolf, is too-cool-for-school. Savvy, globe-trotting, and Kant-reading, Jake throws out Latin phrases and tosses off old-timey Victorian references like any Eurotrash aristocrat who enjoys the finer things in life. The problem is, once a month he becomes hypersexual, hunts somebody, and eats them. While he remembers the time he ran guns for the anti-Fascists in Spain, he's also startlingly earthy with phrases like (and I quote), "What the fuck is going on here?" Duncan injects walloping energy and fun into the story, which chronicles Jake's learning that he is the last werewolf. This makes him all weary and suicidal and feeling every one of his 200-plus years (in dog years, that's 1400). He's being hunted down like a dog (ha!) by the werewolf-hunting union, and some vampires want his special, sun-defying blood. But just when Jake's chips seem cashed, he finds a beautiful she-wolf named Talulla (a Choctaw name meaning "leaping water'), and things are suddenly looking up. Enjoyable, entertaining, hirsute, and sometimes a little breathily dramatic, this features the freakiest postscript ever: it's nonfiction!
THE QUEST
Toyne, Simon. Sanctus. Morrow. 2011. 486p. ISBN 9780062038302. $25.99. F
Seems like an easy category—what's more basic than an Arthurian or Indiana Jonesian search for the Holy Grail? Booker identifies five main parts of the Quest: Hero receives a compulsive Call to Action, undergoes a long, hazardous Journey to get something, Arrives but is immediately frustrated, undergoes Final Ordeals, and then wins the Goal. Ernest Cline's Ready Player One, featuring a main character named Parzival, is an immensely entertaining new Quest story, but I chose to showcase Sanctus. A couple of steps up from an airport novel (shhh, I won't tell), Sanctus has short, cliff-hanger chapters so easy to read it feels selfish. There are these sooooo serious monks who live in an immense, secretive citadel in southern Turkey that's like a giant anthill. It's all mystery and shroud. They protect something called The Sacrament (turns out to be a stash of the best Jamaican Stumpworm you ever...), and they ruthlessly stop at nothing to keep the thing secret. Tell me, do you think a spunky young chick aided by some unlikely companions possessing special skills and knowledge might be able to bring the whole, centuries-old and secure thing down with a reckless, MacGyvered plan using nothing more than a couple of coils of rope and bolt cutters? Do they undertake a hazardous journey to get there, and once they do, do they almost call it quits because it's just so insurmountingly insurmountable? Will Audrey Tautou show up with her lovely neck jeopardized by a scratchy-wool-cloak-wearing monk with a hard-on and freaky ideas about the Fifth Commandment? Nah! If you didn't enjoy The Da Vinci Code, then you won't enjoy this. [Sanctus was featured in our "Fall Fundamentals" first novels feature.—Ed.]
TRAGEDY
Bachman, Richard. Blaze: A Novel. Scribner. 2007. 285p. ISBN 9781416554844. $24. F
Tragedies must end with the villain's death, so Anna Karenina and Lolita are prime examples. Most of what I thought was "tragic" was something else entirely, though (see the Extra Credit section below). Blaze's villain, Clayton "Blaze" Blaisdell, is a once-bright boy irreparably brain damaged by his abusive father. He then suffered horribly during a horrible life in horrible foster homes and a horrible orphanage. The giant (6' 7 ", 275 lbs.) Blaze is loyal to his friends and tries his best to be a good person, but a poopyhead named George lures Blaze into a life of petty crime. The biggest scheme the two never pulled off was to kidnap and ransom a baby from a wealthy family. After George's murder, Blaze lacks direction and, with the ghost of George encouraging him, decides to complete the crime on his own. The five dramatic stages are met to a tee. A long Anticipation Stage sees Blaze deciding that this caper will somehow fulfill and redeem him; in the Dream Stage, he achieves initial success by preparing a nest for the baby and caring for him. But 'cuz the cops are quick in Maine, things go bad fast, and the Frustration Stage finds Blaze forced to think on his feet (kind of hard with brain damage). As the net closes, Blaze is overwhelmed in the Nightmare Stage; even though he dutifully protects the baby with all his might, Our Villain "precipitates his own death" in Destruction. The drama is released, and everything returns to normal. The difference between Blaze and a traditional villain (see King Lear, Dorian Gray) is that readers LOVE this fella so wronged by life. You just want to sit him down and rub his big, dented head.
VOYAGE AND RETURN
Martel, Yann. Life of Pi: A Novel. Harcourt. 2001. 319p. ISBN 9780151008117. $25. F
Wherein Hero temporarily enters a different world and is greatly changed by his experiences there. He returns improved, perhaps, writes Booker, "moved from ignorance to knowledge." Five stages begin with a Fall into the other world; in Martel's elegant Life of Pi, Pi is on the brink of adulthood when his ship sinks, and he is a castaway for 227 days. First adrift on a lifeboat, then stranded on an island, he gets back into the lifeboat and makes it to Mexico. Did I mention the Bengal tiger? That's key to the next stage: Initial Fascination/Dream. This unfamiliar world is initially exhilarating to Hero, but it's not somewhere he can ever call home. In Pi's case, this is doubly so as he is accompanied on his Voyage by Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal Tiger (I still don't understand why he's named Richard Parker). As time goes on, Pi enters the Frustration stage with "difficulty and oppression," in this case slow starvation and Pi's increasing need to maintain his unlikely Alpha role on the boat. The next two stages, Nightmare and Thrilling Escape and Return, are straightforward. After almost starving, they suddenly wash ashore. The tiger disappears into the jungle, and Pi returns to normal life, but how did he grow? Well, readers soon discover that the tiger wasn't a physical beast but the symbolic representation of the fierce, animalistic drive that Pi had to evince in order to survive the superhuman tribulation of spending seven and a half freaking months alone and slowly starving to death. Pi grew from boy to man—even if he's also become a food hoarder.
REBIRTH
Begley, Louis. About Schmidt. Knopf. 1996. 273p. ISBN 9780679450337. $23. F
Rebirth is when a character moves from a frozen/hard/dark/sick/decayed state (where your boss is most of the time) to a liberated/warm/awakened/healthy/growing state (where my gf is most of the time). Examples include A Christmas Carol, The Light Princess, Silas Marner, Sleeping Beauty, The Secret Garden, and the Star Wars saga. Rebirth shares many elements of Tragedy, except there's a woompfy miraculous redemption at the end. Perhaps Updike's Rabbit Angstrom novels are Rebirth in long form, but Louis Begley's About Schmidt fits the bill. The first two of the five Rebirth stages show a Hero under the thrall of some dark power even though things seem to be going reasonably well. I hope it doesn't hurt much when I tell you that the dark power that Albert Schmidt is enslaved to is a comfortable, upper-middle class American Dream existence with a wife and kid. The story begins at the tail end of stage three, when the poison has started to show its destructive effect. Schmidt realizes that most everything he has worked for is meaningless—his kid is a greedy pig, the wife he strove for is dead, and his magnum opus of attorney files has been deep-sixed. He has been plunged "into a state of total isolation." Alone and lonely, Schmidt enters stage four, when the dark power has seemingly completely triumphed. But then, ah!, miraculous redemption appears when stick-up-his-butt Schmidt allows himself to be seduced by Carrie, a vivacious young bombshell, and he helps her get rid of her assface of a boyfriend. In allowing him to rescue her, the woman (in the film, it's a child) effectively redeems our imprisoned Hero, and he moves from prisoner to loving father figure.
RAGS TO RICHES
George, Alex. A Good American. Amy Einhorn: Putnam. 400p. ISBN 9780399157592. $25.95. F
A multigenerational family epic, A Good American's amiability and lack of pretension differentiate it from the usual saga-esque sufferfest (e.g., the treatments of Leon Uris or James A. Michener). This light whirlwind is loosely told by family grandson James Meisenheimer. Like any RtRs, the story unfolds in "alternating phases of constriction and expansion." An initial period of wretchedness and stepping Out into the World is followed by modest early successes, which are in turn countered by a central Crisis. A period of maturation is followed by a Final Ordeal and a Final Union, the latter a big "act of liberation." As we say in Missouri, that dog'll hunt. Frederick and Jette fall in love in Hanover, Germany, around 1900. While they are happy to find each other, everything else is pretty damned miserable for these two misfits who share a passion for food and music, themes recurring throughout the generations. After Jette gets pregnant, they boogie away from her disapproving family and are soon the hottest young couple in tiny Beatrice, MI. There, they begin a generations-long tradition of restaurateuring. Then Frederick's death in World War I throws the young family into crisis. Suicides, murders, births, successes, failures—all very Booker-ish constrictions and expansions—push the narrative forward two generations with deft, fast descriptions of dozens of characters, which sometimes approach pastiche. After James's mother dies while birthing his younger twin brothers, the drama seems to lessen in intensity and concludes with a protracted period of descendants happily going forth and multiplying not as immigrants but as 'reglar 'mericans. James is increasingly preoccupied with self-identity, but one gets the sense that the Meisenheimers have achieved Booker's ideal state: "complete, loving union...lasting indefinitely into the future."
EXTRA CREDIT: Really, dude? OK, fine. You want extra on top of a challenge, here you go.
Comedy: Both Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, a hard-boiled detective story set in a speculative all-Jewish Alaska, and the slight The Final Solution (a "novel of detection"), an amazing study of how World War II must have looked to the English fit Booker's comedic requirements. If you can't classify your story in any other way, it's probably a comedy.
Overcoming the Monster: To avoid misadventure by werewolf, use this formula to calculate the date and time of full moons: d=20.362955 + 29.530588861 x N + 102.026 x 10 -12 x N2 where d is the number of days since 1 January 2000 and N is the number of full moons since the first full moon of 2000. Straight outta Wikipedia, dude.
Quest: MacGuffin are fascinating plot devices! They can be almost any noun, that is, a person, place, thing, or idea. Does an uncomfortable stasis need to be changed? That's the MacGuffin in the Nazi criminal roundup of Christopher Reich's The Runner. Does a threat that needs to be neutralized? That's the mythic hadals in Jeff Long's The Descent. A MacGuffin could be treasure à la the Maltese Falcon, the concept of safety or homeland as in Cormac McCarthy's The Road or Richard Adams's Watership Down, or even information, like a roll of microfilm in a John Le Carré novel or a murder weapon in an Ed McBain. Indeed, failed quests for MacGuffin are endlessly entertaining. Most bad Quest endings, from Moby-Dick, where killing the whale is the MacGuffin, or The Searchers, where the Journey stage has run amok, are one of life's pleasures.
Tragedy (notes and special asides):
- Failed comedy with tragedy thrown in: Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down
- Rebirth with sad character: Bogus Trumper from John Irving's The Water Method Man
- Antihero in heroic situation: Yossarian from Joseph Heller's Catch-22
- Failed, if sad, quest: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- "Mere pathos" featuring antihero: Hawk from Robert B. Parker's "Spenser" series
- Blaze and George form a variation of the duo from another tragedy, John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men
Voyage and Return: Booker also identifies a "strictly social" V&R as a valid genre (Trading Places, Pygmalion, and Brideshead Revisited). Interestingly, all the YA books I read can easily be classed as V&R. Perhaps it's because children are more easily seen as "learners"? The Chronicles of Narnia, The Cay, Kensuke's Kingdom, Lord of the Flies, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Hatchet, even one I've been meaning to read forever, Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard.
Honorable V&R mention: Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, in which ten characters are transported to a different world (Soldier Island) where they learn—and are exhilarated, if badly—that they all have one thing in common: they are all responsible for the untimely death of another person. The Frustration and Nightmare stages are long and quite dramatic for all, regardless of the order or manner of their deaths. Christie subverts the Thrilling Escape, but brings in the police to 'Return' the story to reality, in this case classifying the case as unsolvable.
MOFO: We've been fecund enough this month, thanks.
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