In Which I Decline to Take Anne Lamott’s Advice

Twain vs. Lamott

Earlier this year, I read Stephen Koch’s Modern Library Fiction Workshop, and enjoyed it, and felt encouraged, and so now I’m reading Anne Lamott’s book, Bird by Bird, hoping for the same thing.

If I were a bird, I’d be a chicken. Plump, delectable… the common man’s bird. You get the idea.

The book has the virtue of being well written and funny. It is good, according to my emotion-o-meter: I laughed many times and cried once—full tears with spillage, not just misty. It’s getting cold outside, so my wife and I will sit on the couch, our legs stacked or intertwined, reading quietly. When one of us reads something they like, we will laugh or snort. This prompts the other person to say, “what?”, which gives the original laugher/snorter the opportunity to read a paragraph. Our little ritual. I did this a lot with Bird by Bird.

Anyway, the point is that it’s much easier to take someone’s advice if they are an obviously good writer, with a voice and the ability to tell stories. It isn’t that Koch was a bad writer, necessarily—but his book was businesslike and straightforward, and Lamott’s is so clearly from the pen of a real storyteller.

So, anyway, Bird by Bird is a good book, and has a lot of useful stuff to say about self-doubt and noticing and perseverance and the reason for writing in the first place. My only beef with it is when Lamott gives more specific writing advice—when she tells me how to think about plot, characterization, dialogue, or scene descriptions, for example. Not because she’s a bad writer, but because I do not want to write like she does, at least not right now, and not with my current project. She’s into confessional autofiction and seems geared toward a certain kind of twentieth-century psychological realism that I don’t want to—have never really wanted to, if I’m being honest—pursue. The project I am working on is a nineteenth-century novel set in the present day, and so it pretty intentionally doesn’t do what a good twentieth century novel should. Allegorical or paper-thin characters, explicit debates about contemporary controversies, moralizing, jokes, a plot that at time chugs forward mechanically in a sort of nineteenth-century way—I like all of these things, and so I’m putting them in my book.

My idol and model for this book is not, like, Meg Wolitzer or Jonathan Franzen or other writers whose work would be, I imagine, more well suited to Lamott’s advice. (And, no shade—I really liked The Interestings and Freedom and am sure I’d like Lamott’s novels if I read them.) I want to follow in the footsteps of the weird writers of the late nineteenth century: the utopian/dystopian/science fiction writers like Edward Bellamy, but most of all Mark Twain, especially the more maligned Mark Twain of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Pudd’nhead Wilson, a writer whose rollicking jokiness, delight in language and aphorism, and winkingly overtly constructed plots make his work really go.

Here’s what I mean. (Skip to the last section if you want to avoid Pudd’nhead spoilers.)

Here be spoilers

Last month, I read and re-read Pudd’nhead Wilson, Twain’s best late work according to critics. Pudd’nhead is a complete mess in many ways. The characterization is thin and unrealistic; certain characters, including the title character, are hardly people at all. In fact, Twain called Dave Wilson, the primary protagonist, a “lever” or mechanical contrivance that he used to make the plot work. There’s a certain cheapness and flimsiness to his plot.

And yet… it still works, somehow; the book is a series of jokes, often mean jokes, that culminates in one final big, mean, joke—an act of confounding irony that is, in its sheer cleverness, dazzling and provoking and annoying and outrageous.

Here’s how it goes. The scene is the small Missouri town of Dawson’s Landing in 1830s-1850s. Pudd’nhead Wilson is this lawyer who is smarter than everyone else in Dawson’s Landing, although they can’t see it, since they’re so stupid. He is a representative of science, rationality, the larger world. And he has a strange hobby: taking fingerprints. He takes the fingerprints of everyone he’s ever met, it seems. He even takes the fingerprints of newly born babies. (Clank, clank, goes the machinery of the plot.)

Clank, clank. The Entertain-o-Tron 5000 is here to entertain you.

Well, Roxy, a slave who works as a nanny, is white-passing and has a white-passing son. After having her baby, she realizes with horror that he might be sold down the river—a fate worse than death. Desperate to avoid this, Roxy thinks about killing her baby and then herself. But then she happens upon a better idea: what if she simply swaps her baby with the son of her master, Driscoll? After all, the two babies are about the same age, and they look just about identical. (Why does Driscoll not notice this? Because of a bunch of flim-flam reasons that make little sense! Clank, clank goes the machinery of the plot again, but who cares? Twain’s not playing the game of “believable.”)

Roxy’s scheme works, but it backfires—her biological son is treated as a rich young white man. As the years pass, he becomes decadent and constantly gambles, falling ever deeper into debt. Eventually, his dissipation leads him to commit a murder. And now it’s up to Pudd’nhead, with his fingerprints, to figure out whodunit.

I won’t bother you with all of the details, but eventually Pudd’nhead, using science and logic and very convenient fingerprints, determines not only that Roxy’s biological son has committed the murder, but that the babies have been swapped at birth! Roxy’s son is revealed to be “black,” and a slave, and is promptly sold down the river—the fate that Roxy desperately tried to avoid all those years ago. It’s the final twist.

The end!

In one sense, Pudd’nhead’s use of logic and science gets at the truth: he discovers the identity of the murderer. But in getting at one truth, Pudd’nhead’s logic enforces a larger fiction: the fiction that Roxy’s son is “black,” and even more broadly, the fiction that race exists as a meaningful category. When you live in a corrupted society that is committed to its own absurdities, the point seems to be, your ability to figure out what is “true” is not always a tool that enforces justice. Rationality, when it’s deployed in a corrupted and irrational system, can be just as absurd as irrationality.

But Twain also doesn’t let us off of the hook emotionally. No great book ever does. By making Tom into a despicable, selfish murderer, he seems to try to make the reader glad that he is sold down the river, even as he dramatizes the hideousness, irrationality, and injustice of slavery. And I haven’t even gotten into the strange, upsetting, corrupt but moving relationship between Roxy and her son. It’s so dark, and kind of awful, but—well, like I said, the overall effect is dazzling. It’s such a tricky, elegantly/blunderingly ironic, strange little book, one that does not hesitate to goose its reader in the left brain lobe. It’s full of bonmots and jokes and absurd scenes that exist only for the sheer fun of it, but there’s a sort of clockwork rationality to it, a sense that the book has been constructed as a kind of puzzle or mechanical toy.

No more spoilers

I don’t want to write a book exactly like Pudd’nhead Wilson, but I guess I want to give readers many of the same pleasures that Twain offers, the pleasures of a certain kind of self-aware text: a novel that knows it’s a novel and works in a self-consciously novel-like way, but that doesn’t lean so far into its own meta-construction that the dream of reality is completely shattered. But nonetheless, a novel that engages a reader’s rational faculties at least as much as it engages her emotional faculties.

What I like about Pudd’nhead Wilson, and so much of Twain’s work, is that he is really trying to engage with his readers’ rational minds! He’s not just making works of fiction: he’s putting together little interpretive puzzles—almost koans, in a way. The final line of Pudd’nhead Wilson—when the final twist is revealed—harmonizes perfectly with the novel that precedes it, but it also pulls the rug out from under it. This kind of reading experience does not do what someone like Lamott says reading should do. I highly doubt if anyone has ever wept over Pudd’nhead Wilson, or if any of Twain’s readers believe in the three-dimensional humanity of any of Pudd’nhead’s characters. But I love the experience of reading Twain—just as much as I love the dream of reality that Lamott is trying to get her students to create, just in a different way. “You must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work,” writes Lamott. “Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable…Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this.” And… I don’t know. This is certainly not the model of writing behind a lot of my favorite books. Twain is certainly not writing toward vulnerability most of the time. I think this is good advice for a particular kind of writing. I don’t know if that’s the kind of writing I want to do, at least right now.

Someone on Substack—can’t remember who—wrote about Kurt Vonnegut’s rules for writing. (Vonnegut’s another writer whose plots go clank, clank.) And they singled out the most important rule—the only actually important rule, really, which is rule no. 1:

“Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.”

Reading Lamott’s work reminded me that there are many, many ways to do that, and as long as the magic trick works—as long as the words keep the reader’s eyes moving to the end of the page and they’re not completely pissed off at me for having taken up their time in this way—I have succeeded. One of the ways to do that is to create believable, real characters, who are three-dimensional and appear to have lives and ideas of their own—what Lamott is challenging her readers to do. I love those books, and Lamott has some good ideas for how to make one.

But another way to satisfy Vonnegut’s rule that is to go a little crazy and work to engage the reader like Twain engages his. I love those weird old books, too, and I want to make one. There are no books, so far as I am aware, that give any advice for how to write a book like that. But that’s what makes the writing process fun, isn’t it? I have to work it out as I go.

Anyway, with that, it’s back to the office, to the worn pleather chair, to the IKEA desk before the sun rises, until this second draft (which is taking forever) is done.