How To Be a Good Wife Review and more

How to Be a Good Wife

Emma Chapman

On the surface Marta Bjornstad is a lonely, middle aged woman going through empty nest syndrome. Her attentive husband Hector sees to making sure she takes her pills. “You know what happens when you don’t,” he admonishes. Yet for the past few weeks Marta has faked taking them, and she begins having visions of a blonde girl. The visions are disturbing, yet something drives Marta to refuse to medicate herself so she can solve the mystery of the girl, even at the risk of her own sanity.

Marta and Hector’s son Kylan comes home for a weekend visit with his girlfriend Katya, and the announcement of his engagement accelerates Marta’s illusions toward the sinister truth about her own marriage.

How to Be a Good Wife is a tense, claustrophobic, and ultimately heartbreaking mystery. My details are sketchy because I don’t want to reveal spoilers. If you were intrigued by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” or Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour,” How to Be a Good Wife will keep you awake for a few nights. Available Nov 4, 2014 in paperback. Picador Books

I recently received two other ARCs in the mail, yet I won’t be reviewing them because, as I said in a previous post,http://laura-moe.blogspot.com/2014/09/are-one-star-reviews-fair.html I don’t like writing bad reviews. I know how hard it is to write a novel, even a bad one. One of these I received from Goodreads. It’s a self published mystery that lacks tension. Rather than publicly humiliate the author, I will send it back to her, and perhaps she can find someone who will praise it.

The other one is from a small press. It too, is a mystery, but the writing itself is godawful. I blame the editor not to pare down the wordy sentences and the numerous misplaced similes that make this particular novel an awkward read. The book may appeal to readers who read just for plot, but I’m an unapologetic word snob. Words are like paint on a palette, and if the writer cannot paint the prose with the right words in the right order, the writing is beige.

Note to self: when entering a Goodreads contest, check out who published the book before clicking on enter.

On a positive note, a recent essay of mine got quoted on Cleveland Poetics
http://clevelandpoetics.blogspot.com/

Meanwhile, check out the entire essay in Poet's Quarterly:
 http://www.poetsquarterly.com/2014/10/confessions-of-failed-poet.html

Why Do We Read Big Books?

Are some novels just too long?

In a previous post I researched one star reviews, and looked for two long books in particular: Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. http://laura-moe.blogspot.com/2014/09/are-one-star-reviews-fair.html  The biggest negative criticism lies in their length.  Ian McEwan, a master of short novels such as Atonement, believes “very few long ones earn their length.”

I both agree and disagree. 1Q84 could have ended after Book Two and I would have been satisfied with the tale. Gutting about 150 pages out of the center of Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers would have improved the narrative for me. And yet I was held captive throughout Donna Tarrt’s 771 page The Goldfinch and Larry McMurty’s nearly 900 page Lonesome Dove.

My former student Logan P. recently finished David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, weighing in at 1100 pages. “On the surface level, it's given me the confidence to move onto much more difficult works,” he told me. “Once you've read one of the longest books ever written not much seems too difficult. And the book is absolutely packed with information on everything from higher-math concepts (it actually helped with my calculus class) to linguistics to how Alcoholics Anonymous functions. More than anything else, Wallace has a way with the human condition, from the highs to the lows to everything in between, and he's not afraid to discuss it”.

When I asked Logan if the book could have been shorter, he replied, “Yes and no. There are many parts that don't add anything to the plot or character development and just stagnate the book as a whole, yet the, "pointless", stagnating parts add to the themes and the book's purpose as a whole.” Logan said the book is “stupidly long, but it's an amazing read.” He summed it up in a single sentence; everyone is addicted to something, from their television to drugs to their love for their country, and it all ends up being a self-perpetuating cycle. “To quote DFW”, Logan said, “’Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being,’ and you definitely learn more about what that means after reading Infinite Jest.”

After initially abandoning it, I “finished” One Hundred Years of Solitude by skimming and scanning the last two hundred pages, and I came away with more insight on why this novel ranks among the greats. Yes, the book is long, and the character names are nearly impossible to follow, yet after awhile I stopped trying to “understand” the book and succumbed to some of its wonders. If you are looking for a linear narrative, this is not your book. The tale reminds me of a Salvador Dali painting, where reality and dreams entwine. The book shares elements with Homer’s Odyssey and The Iliad or The Arabian Nights, parables of how history spins its wheel and lands on the same places of love, wonder, discovery, avarice, greed, brutality, and ultimately, death. One Hundred Years of Solitude begins at a time when “the world was so recent that many things lacked names” and evolves to when “science has eliminated distance.” Melquides, the gypsy, has predicted “in a short time, man will be able to see what is happening in any place in the world without leaving his own home.”  Like Ray Bradbury’s post war era Fahrenheit 451, the prescience of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ s 1967 novel has come true.

Other notable quotes from the text are:

“A person doesn't die when he should but when he can.”

“The only difference today between Liberals and Conservatives is that Liberals go to mass at five o’clock and the Conservatives at eight.”

And yet the novel could have been much shorter, because as Aureliano Segundo says, “Cease, because life is short.”

So are long books worth the time and effort? The short answer is depends on the book. On a deeper level each of us brings to a book our past reading and life experiences as well as our present. Sometimes a book find you, much like Julian Carax’s book in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books in Shadow of the Wind, a relatively short book at 528 pages, found Daniel Sempere.

What are some of your favorite long books, and why?

Putting Yourself Out There

I recently entered a contest called The Agent’s Inbox sponsored on the blog Mother.Write. Repeat. (Kristavandolzer.com) Occasionally Krista opens her blog up for up to twenty people submit queries and first pages of their completed manuscripts.

"An Agent's Inbox" came about because I felt like the blog needed a lift,” Krista said. “Also, because all the existing blog contests focused on first pages and/or shorter pitches. I hated writing shorter pitches, so I thought it would be cool to see the whole query (and simulate an agent's inbox in the process). I can't schedule them as regularly as I used to, since they do take a significant amount of time and I usually don't know when I'll have the time until the last minute, but I enjoy hosting them.”

Each contestant is asked to critique at least three other entries, and a guest agent awards an opportunity to submit anywhere from the first 250 words to an entire manuscript. Krista said she “knows of two writers who signed with the agent who judged the round of "An Agent's Inbox" they entered. “I would like to make it three.”

I recently entered one where the prizes were a first chapter (3^rd place), fifty pages (2^nd place), or entire manuscript for review (first place.)  Posts are public, so anyone with an internet connection is free to comment. While Krista asks that people “please keep comments constructive, it’s a little like Shark Tank for writers.

We’re all experts in writing that isn't our own, yet we’re too close to our own work and need another set of eyes. I had already run my book through a group of great first readers who provided enormous feedback. I also hired an editor to smooth out repetition and fix my numerous typos. (My editor also found where I had spelled a character’s name two different ways.) Breakfast with Neruda, which had gone through a litany of terrible titles, was ready to be seen.

Putting your “baby” out there for display is like watching your son walk into Kindergarten the first day. You know he’s not perfect, but he’s perfectly yours. Will he survive? Will he be bullied? Will he bite someone back? Make friends? Learn anything? Have permanent scars? Refuse to go back?

If you do “the agent’s inbox” or any other public critique, boldly go, but wear a suit of armor under your wet suit.

The driving question for criticism is “did you keep reading? If not, why did you stop?”

Most critiques heeded Krista’s request to remain constructive. In my case everyone who commented said they were intrigued by my story and would read on. The big hitches were in the query letter. Queries are hard. I’d rather write another novel.

How many of you have written unintentionally terrible query letters? I see thousands of hands in the air. (Try writing a bad one. It’s cathartic.  If you look up booksandsuch.com, under the blog posts look for Rachel Kent’s bad query contest. It’s a hoot.)

With the aid of former literary agent Mark Malatesta’s services (literary-agents.com) I learned the important steps to crafting a query, how to pick agents, and other components of marketing oneself.  It’s a ton of work. You may spend as much time devising a query and researching agents as you did writing your first draft.

My query covered the following:

Short synopsis of book, 1-2 paragraphs

Word count and genre

Why I contacted this particular agent (even though this was a contest, I still researched her and found an appropriate quote)

My writing background

My platform

My contact information

Some agents ask to acknowledge if submissions are simultaneous

Most comments said my query was too long, and the agent commented “Query: I really like the premise but each paragraph can be trimmed to get to the meat. Get to the point a lot more. Even your bio is a bit long-winded. Keep to facts. Overall: Even though I think the query maybe tells me a lot but not enough in a way, I'm still intrigued. It's a different story. It stands out. I'd read on.”

Not all submissions fared so well. Some addressed the agent by her first name only. I can’t stress this enough: UNLESS YOU HAVE MET THE AGENT IN PERSON, DO NOT ADDRESS HIM OR HER BY FIRST NAME ONLY.

Others had typos in the query and/or the 250 word sample. One samples began with a long description of the temperature. There’s sort of an unwritten rule to avoid weather reports. In a 250 word sample, essentially the first page, you have no room to engage the reader if he or she is stuck in cloudy weather.

Overall, most submissions were admirably polished, and most participants were gentle in their comments to one another. I received good suggestions, and revised my query based on the agent’s and others’ minor suggestions.

So how did I do? I won second place, so I sent the agent my revised query and first fifty pages. I’ll keep you and Krista posted on whether this agent and I work together.

Labels, agents, writing contests, query, 

Happy Writing.