Lemony Fish

Yesterday the Boston Globe ran an interview with Daniel Handler, representative of Lemony Snicket, which included this exchange about childhood reading:

BOOKS: What was the first adult book you read?

HANDLER: It was “Fish Preferred” by P.G. Wodehouse. I picked that one for its title…

If young Daniel had expected a story about a liking for fish, he would have been disappointed. Fish Preferred refers to the novel’s male lead, Ronnie Fish, and the ups and downs of his stock—not as in “fish stock” but as in “the stock market.”

When Fish Preferred was published in July 1929, speculating in the stock market was all the rage. Even ordinary readers knew the difference between “preferred stock” and “ordinary stock.” Of course, speculation by ill-informed investors was part of the stock bubble that burst just a few months later.

Wodehouse had originally titled that novel Summer Lightning. That was the name of the serialized versions that appeared in both the US and UK earlier that year, and that was the name on the British edition published the same month as the American.

The British edition includes a preface from Wodehouse that explains the situation:

It is related of Thackeray that, hitting upon Vanity Fair after retiring to rest one night, he leaped out of bed and ran seven times round the room, shouting at the top of his voice. Oddly enough, I behaved in exactly the same way when I thought of Summer Lightning. I recognized it immediately as the ideal title for a novel.

My exuberance has been a little diminished since by the discovery that I am not the only one who thinks highly of it. Already I have been informed that two novels with the same name have been published in England, and my agent in America cables to say that three have recently been placed on the market in the United States. As my story has appeared in serial form under its present label, it is too late to alter it now. I can only express the modest hope that this story will be considered worthy of inclusion in the list of the Hundred Best Books Called Summer Lightning.

That preface also contains Wodehouse’s reply to a common criticism:

A certain critic—for such men, I regret to say, do exist—made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained “all the old Wodehouse characters under different names”. He has probably now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha; but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have outgeneralled this man by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.

And indeed, Summer Lightning/Fish Preferred is a sequel, one of the early Blandings Castle novels. Apparently all current editions have reverted to Wodehouse’s preferred title.

“The lessons they want to hand down”

The Horn Book just sent me editor Roger Sutton’s interview with Daniel Handler on the textual side of Why We Broke Up. I don’t think it’s yet on the web, so this might be a reminder to sign up for the Horn Book’s electronic newsletter.

In any event, at one point Handler (né for book-buying audiences Lemony Snicket) says:

I don’t quite understand what YA literature is. To me it’s the genre where the authors publicly talk the most about the lessons they want to hand down to the reader, even more so than in picture books, I’d say. It seems like everybody who's writing a book for a fifteen-year-old is trying to save a particular kind of fifteen-year-old from a particular kind of thing.

That’s just not true. There’s a whole ’nother kind of YA lit whose valuable lesson about life is reassuring a fifteen-year-old that others are going through a particular kind of thing just like them, so they don’t need saving.

(Unless, of course, the “particular kind of thing” is the adolescent belief that nobody is suffering just like them, that everyone else in high school is having more fun than they are.)

But does Why We Broke Up at the end offer a sense of hope?

Creating Value

Of all Lemony Snicket’s comments on the Occupy Wall Street movement and the financial/political elite’s reaction to it (also ensconced on Neil Gaiman’s website), I thought this was the most incisive:

Money is like a child—rarely unaccompanied. When it disappears, look to those who were supposed to be keeping an eye on it while you were at the grocery store. You might also look for someone who has a lot of extra children sitting around, with long, suspicious explanations for how they got there.

When we start implicitly comparing mortgage barons to Count Olaf, they should know they’re in trouble.

Pullman Pulls for the Omniscient Narrator

Today's Guardian newspaper offers a column by Philip Pullman about the power of narrative voice. He seems to suggest that the style of narration distinguishes a “story” from the “literature” that expresses it by establishing tone, perspective, and characters’ interior lives. In particular, Pullman addresses the different tools available to moviemakers and novelists. He concludes:

And despite the profound and unsettling discoveries of modernism and post-modernism, and everything they show us about the unreliability of the narrator and the fallacy of omniscience, some of us still, when we read, are happy to accept that the narrative voice has the right to comment on a character, whether tartly or sympathetically, and the ability to go into that character's mind and tell us what's going on there. Do we ever stop to wonder how extraordinary it is that a disembodied voice can seem to tell us what is happening in someone's mind?

That narrative voice, with those mysterious powers, is the reason I write novels. I'm intoxicated by it.

I think Pullman's approach to narration is, if not actually idiosyncratic, quite uncommon these days. For many years before Lemony Snicket, most fiction writers tended to write either in the voice of a character or in a disembodied, unintrusive storytelling voice that closely followed the main characters(s). Snicket's success spawned a bunch of other snarky narrators, but few writers let their narrators intrude in other tones.

Pullman doesn't play by those rules. In a 2005 New Yorker profile, Laura Miller reported:

Pullman is a partisan of the third-person omniscient narrator, which he thinks of as a character in itself—a disembodied “sprite.” This ringmaster of many a nineteenth-century novel can, as he told me, ”go anywhere and do anything and see anything, and is both male and female, both old and young, wise and foolish, cynical and credulous, all these contradictory things at once. The narrative voice that tells ‘Middlemarch’ is just as much a made-up character as Dorothea or Mr. Casaubon.”

Pullman's narrative focus is also unusual these days in turning on a dime, entering a scene by following one character and leaving with another we've never tracked before.

But are such techniques unique to “literature”? I think equivalents exist in many other forms of storytelling, including cinema. In fact, Pullman’s description of a “disembodied voice...tell[ing] us what is happening in someone's mind” is clearly inspired by movie voiceovers. A purely literary way of describing an omniscient narrator might be “a never-identified historian recounting people’s thoughts.” It’s still an intoxicating, mysterious power, of course.