Redux
Long after I'd made the last major revisions to How To Buy a Love of Reading--the Advance Readers Copies already printed, the copyedits completed--I began creating the "books" on the virtual bookshelf of my website. By providing interested readers with additional material, (photo albums, a journal, excerpts from fictional books mentioned in the novel), I wanted to extend the world of the novel past its covers. I thought it would be a fun project, and I knew the site's wonderful designer, eat.tv, inc, would make the "books" look terrific. I loved the fictional world of the book I had written about for so long. I thought of it like going back to visit a place where I'd "lived" for so long.
But here's the thing: forgive the cliché (which would make at least one of my characters cringe), but you can't go home again. Or at least, as I discovered, not without a lot of cognitive dissonance.
Revisiting my own text, reading the book and deciding what I could put onto the site that could add to the story without altering anything in the story, I started to feel like an intruder, a time traveler (who has to make sure she doesn't step on a butterfly, else the entire history of mankind will be irrevocably changed). It wasn't that difficult not to misstep. But after stomping around that world so long, doing whatever I pleased in it, I resented having to look where I trod. As happy as I was to be able to create the new site material, I was happier, still, when it was over and I could leave the world of How To Buy a Love of Reading. It isn't my world anymore; it belongs to the characters.
We talk about literature in the present tense (Alice follows the White Rabbit, Tom Sawyer runs away) because--as my high school English teachers told me and as I went on to tell students of my own years later--the novel is forever "happening," the text eternally "alive." My book is alive, all the characters playing their parts in the present. But I can no longer interact with them. I'm only a ghost, looking in from their past.
About Tanya
Tanya Egan Gibson's debut novel, How To Buy a Love of Reading, was published by Dutton in May 2009 and had its paperback release by Plume in July 2010. Her essay, "Bump," is forthcoming in the anthology Milk and Ink: A Mosiac of Motherhood. An...
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The Great Gatsby, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, Bel Canto, Carter Beats the Devil, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, The Lovely Bones, White...
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Redux
Letting the book go has certainly been the only possibility until now. But we are on new ground with websites, eBooks, and social media. Suppose the book was only available in a Kindle version and you wanted to update a character or correct an error? Or you had a lot of reader feedback that the ending sucks. Or every review and a bunch of friends tell you that it is just too long and would be be a much better book if you did some serious pruning?
I'm about halfway thru. I still like C. Very believable. But I was out of patience with H. after a couple of chapters. Addicts in the throes of a runaway addiction really don't have personalities. It is very hard to make a drunk believable. Bukowski did it, but the drunk is always a complete shit. Malcolm Lowry did it in Under The Volcano, but the drunk is like a movie, all images and sensations. Now that I think of it, Raymond Carver did it too, but the drunk is not at all likeable or noble, but a deadbeat loser.
I do like the reading problem plot, the distrust of books, intellectualizing. Derrida wrote about the distrust of writing in the ancient world, as opposed to discussion, in which the truth tended to be found. But writing could always lie.
Michael Lipsey
Hi Michael, I agree that
Hi Michael,
I agree that we're on new ground. Will the nature of "books" -- especially with e-readers -- change to something no longer static? Might there be the possibility, then, of different versions of the same book? Choose-your-own endings, so to speak? Or, as you suggested, re-writes by the author after the fact? And, then, is one of these versions (the first one? the last one?) a definitive, "real" version of the book? For me, some of these questions are related to the idea of what C calls Aftermemory in the book. That is, is what *could have* happened just as "real" as what *did*?
Best,
Tanya