Dangerous Novels for Aspiring Authors

Any young person who wants to be a novelist should of course be a reader as well. But some novels can be more hazard than inspiration. They are often well-written, but their effects have generally been disastrous: they inspired younger writers to imitate them, they created awful new genres that debased readers' tastes, or they promoted literary or social values that we could very much do without.

Among the authors Crawford Kilian lists on The Tyee website are Tolkein, Rand, and Hemingway.  And I have myself just been reading the work of a Kerouac-wannabe who would do so much better trusting his own voice. (Pic of the author left.) Rushdie has a hell of a lot to answer for too.  Any more you can think of?

Also listed are those authors who might be dangerous to newer writers - simply because they are so  good they leave us dumbfounded!

Sisterhood!

I've sat on this review of Shirley Lim's Sister Swing for an awful long time, but because Shirley is back and launching her next book Princess Shawl at Silverfish today, it seemed an appropriate time to actually put my notes together. I've also noticed that I get an awful lot of hits from folks - students? - looking for information about the novel so I get very guilty when I spot those visitors on my site meter! Here 'tis then :

Some years ago Shirley Lim wrote a story called Mr. Tan’s Girls which won the Asiaweek short story contest and found its way into several anthologies, including The Merlion and the Hibiscus which is where I first came across it.

In Sister Swing, she picks up the same cast of characters and replays the short story in the first chapter. But this time the father, Ah Kong, meets his end in a rather more shocking manner - he dies after seeing his two elder daughters examining their private parts in a mirror! (It's a terrible secret the elder sisters share and I was surprised Lim didn't make much more of this later in the novel).

The novel is the story of three sisters, Yen, Swee Yin and Paik, and the narration moves between them with Lim inventing a separate voice for each of them.

Swee Yin, nicknamed Sister Swing, is really the character at the centre of the story. She sees the family name wing as “an occult name … conjuring feathers and flight" and the metaphor is a fitting one because she does indeed test her wings and is the first to fly the nest.

The sisters are left a tidy sum of money in their father's will and Swee decides to take up a course in New York State, where she is incredibly lonely. She's also the first sister to discover love, and has an affair with her lecturer, Professor Lopez.

The complex relationship between the sisters and their various rivalries is very well drawn. Yen, whom Swee refers to as "my oldest sister who grew up to become younger than me" grows up a little lazy, more laid back than Swee Yin, and very much dependent on her younger sister.

Lim spoke at a reading at Silverfish some time ago about the problems that writing the voice of this characters in such a way that it retained something of the quality of Malaysian English, yet was intelligible by American readers.

I was interested to see how Lim rises to the challenge she sets herself, particularly as other Malaysian and Singaporean writers will find this an issue that they also need to resolve.

In Yen's case, though, I must confess the voice does not entirely convince. It is somewhat uneven – some complex constructions are perfectly grammatical, yet in other places phrases in broken English are scattered in and seem a little jarring.

The third sister, Peik, is their father’s favourite child, the one who tries hardest to please. After the father dies she feels left out when Yen becomes Swee's closest confidant, and finds consolation in religion, turning to an evangelical church and changes her name to Pearl. Lim convinces rather more with this voice, particularly with the way her speech is peppered with biblical expressions. (One can't help feeling very sorry when she tells Swee later in the novel that her husband “did not want to make me big with child”.)

I must say that I like the colour and humour of the Malaysian chapters better than those set in an America which is quite cold and distancing.

Yen decides that she also would like to study in the States and the sisters take up courses in Long Beach, California where Swee becomes quickly involved with Sandy, ex-military and studying welding part time, while Yen becomes involved with a biker called Wayne. I really felt frustrated that the girls take up with such obvious losers! Sandy turns out to belong to a white supremacist group, although Swee is very slow to pick up on this.

Central to the novel is the theme of Asian identity, which Lim handles very well. Everyone in America seems to have an idea about what Asians are, or what Asians should be, and seem to want to put everyone together in the same box.

Swee finds herself lumped together with all other Asians, regardless of nationality, and subject to all kinds of preconceptions. Her first lover, Lopez, himself only too aware of racism, urges Swee to "find her community".

Mrs. Butler, her lecturer for Race in America, teaches her about slavery and the history of the blacks, but shows her resentment against the upstart Asian immigrants who “aren’t willing to wait their turn”, and in a clever kind of reverse racism, Swee is not given the A for an assignment she so clearly deserves. “I know you fresh immigrants” says Mrs. Butler “you’re pushy”.

Swee is criticised by a driving instructor who says Asians are too timid and cause accidents by going too slowly. And the sisters are called “gook girls” and “sluts” by the child-wife of Keith, Sandy’s welding teacher (but actually the leader of the white supremacist group). Pinny, a Hong Kong student Swee remembers from her first college, adapts to fulfil racial stereotypes perfectly, and plays the part of a Vietnamese “mamma-san” in a bar for Vietnamese veterans .

Swee is forced to lead an uneasy double-life. As she grows more aware of how Asians are perceived in America, and begins to write articles to give a voice to the wider Asian community, with whom she finds herself identifying increasingly. At the same time, she finds herself increasingly pressurised by Sandy to reinvent herself as "Sue" and dye her hair brown, so as to appears almost white.

In her naivety she cannot see Sandy for what he is, or the danger he poses, and this ignorance has tragic consequences.

Paik also ends up in California, running a mission with her husband Robert and his father Pastor Fung to minister to a congregation of mainly Latinos and Asians. She decides that she wants to spend her portion of the inheritance installing a huge cross atop the makeshift church which uses the premises of a disused furniture warehouse - but like Swee she is impossibly naive and good intentions backfire. Both girls really are unequipped to really cope with life in America, and the novel is really a journey for them to find themselves.

While the plot, in the wrong hands, could have been fodder for melodrama, Lim's writing shows just the right of amount of restraint.

If anything I would have liked the novel to be have been longer and to have explored Paik's story rather more. And the tying up of ends in the last couple of chapters seems rather too neat.

It's almost as if the novel it could have developed into something really good but got reigned back abruptly before it could quite get there ... and one wonders why. Sister Swing comes close being the kind of novel that might have found commercial success in an international market, which is no less than Ms. Lim deserves.

It Jist Comes Oot ...

James Kelman looks back on his earliest struggles as a writer in the Guardian.(This article is required reading for anyone who argues that they don't have time or space for writing ... )

He also talks about his determination to use authentic voice to depict his working class characters in his short stories and later in his Booker Prize winning novel (extract here) and the prejudice he encountered as a result.

"Nice to be Nice" was my earliest attempt at the literary or phonetic transcription of a speaking voice. It so happens that the voice belongs to a working-class man from Glasgow. The story is told in the "I-voice", a first-person narrative. It was difficult to do. I spent ages working on it but learned much from the process.

It was one of the stories I later sent to Mary Gray Hughes. She commented on my early stories, and it was important to me, even if I disagreed with some of it. She advised caution in my use of "dialect", and warned me of the risk of alienating the reader. Mary Gray Hughes recommended I look at the work of Flannery O'Connor and Emily Brontë's use of dialect in Wuthering Heights. Of course I had my own opinions about "dialect" and I sent her "Nice to be Nice". She replied, "Forget all I said about dialect . . . you obviously know what you are doing better than anyone." I never bothered about alienating readers, neither then nor now. The priority was to write the story properly. The readers could take care of themselves.

My original intention in "Nice to be Nice" was to use the phonetic transcription only for the narrative. I thought to apply Standard English form for the dialogue. It was an attempt to turn the traditional elitist assumption on its head. I was irritated by so-called working-class writers who wrote third-party narratives in Standard English then applied conventional ideas of phonetics whenever a working-class character was called upon to say a few words. When a middle-class character entered the dialogue all attempts at "phonetics" disappeared; his or her lines were transcribed in standard form, leading to the extraordinary presumption that Standard English Literary Form is a literal transcription of Upper-Class Orature.

In "Nice to be Nice" the story is narrated in the first person by the central character. I was concerned about other characters. In what sense could the "I-voice" be defined as the central character? Only because he is telling the story. Each of the four characters would see it differently, each of the four characters had their own story, a different story. I started writing them, each as a first-person narrative. The shift in the language of each person was the most interesting factor. That subtlety, the sophistication of how human beings use language, is not possible for the elitist or racist for whom working-class existence may be an amorphous experiential mass, but if you hear one you hear them all, see one you see them all. During the Booker Prize controversy of 1994 much of the hostility directed at How Late It Was, How Late derived from the astounding proposition that the life of one working-class Glaswegian male is a subject worthy of art. I was used to the prejudice but the gleeful abandon with which some attacked my work took me by surprise. It never occurred to the literary mainstream that working-class males from Glasgow might be watching the programme or reading the newspaper.

On one occasion a member of an adjudicating panel asked him if he ever revised his stories "or did it just come out?":

It jist comes oot, ah says, it's the natchril rithm o the workin klass, ah jist opens ma mooth and oot it comes. Similar to the American dancer in reply to a related question, ah jes closes ma eyes an ma feets git to movin.

Kelman of course says he "sweated blood" getting them right.

His earliest collections of short fiction An Old Pub Near the Angel, A Chancer, Not Not While the Giro and The Busconductor Hines will be reissued by Polygon on August 30.