a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Friday, July 18, 2003 Too Much of NothingAssuming my novel gets reviewed, I predict three things: 1) One or more snarky remark about my name being almost like that lefty film director's. 2) A joke about Mark Twain. 3) A veiled accusation that I somehow ripped off The Lovely Bones, a phenomenal bestseller which happens to be narrated, like my novel, by the ghost of a teenage kid. "The fictional innovation of The Lovely Bones, the stroke that must have writing school graduates everywhere wondering why they didn't think of it before," Rebecca Mead wrote in the London Review of Books late last year, "is that the book is told from the point of view of the dead Susie: it is a coming of age story told by a character who isn't of age and never will be."That makes me cringe. It tosses me into a hypothetical tank of frustrated MFAs trying to play catch-up with this fabulous new idea that Alice Sebold invented. But I'd been working on Too Much of Nothing for six years before I heard about The Lovely Bones in early 2002, when my (finished) manuscript was making the rounds in New York. I'm not, thank God, a "writing school graduate," and I never labored under the illusion that my idea was original. Mead and the other writers who panned or cheered The Lovely Bones in 2002 for its "innovation" of a dead narrator showed off their leaky memories: None of them remembered a novel from 1991 called Murther and Walking Spirits, by Robertson Davies. (Davies is not such an obscure writer, when you think about it; merely Canadian.) I got the idea for a ghost narrator from that book. I thought it would be fun to move Davies' conceit away from haunted old Toronto into the glaring streets of southern California, where ghosts have as hard a time as screenwriters. UPDATE: Bobbie Allen backs me up on this. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 1:52 AM | |
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 Too Much of Nothing, a novel  Politics and Prose  about our editor 
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