February 08, 2006

Pacing Ourselves

Like all good Vermont authors, Marc Estrin is a Dickensian. He travels those winding little New England roads from rehearsal to demonstration and home, accompanied by audiotapes of Dickens novels. I would be certain of a political underpinning to that happenstance were it not that John Irving apparently stands upon the end of the political seesaw opposite from Marc’s.

In any case, it always seemed to me that the Gregor Samsa in Estrin’s Insect Dreams is part Kaspar Hauser and part David Copperfield (I mean, the innocent, not the illusionist) — each a manchild moving through an alien world that can’t possibly be as bad as it so clearly presents itself. Surely around the corner is deliverance.

And then came The Education of Arnold Hitler — the story of another such threatened innocent (this one, admittedly, more like Billy Budd than like any other literary character). That novel was both praised and criticized for its Dickensian ending. The realists who didn’t get the irony of it didn’t like the fairy-tale quality of the closing pages. The literary skeptics who know what a dream happy endings always are, even in the most realistic novels, felt just the other way.

The next logical step, we thought, was to serialize one of Marc’s novels. Nothing more Dickensian than that.

We’ve already posted Chapter One of Golem Song — a novel about the definitions society forces upon the individual (as were all of Dickens’ works). And we’ll scroll the rest of the novel out to subscribers, chapter-by-chapter, between early May and November, where we’ve set the book’s traditional pub date.

There’s a reason for this schedule: Golem Song, which is also about messiahs made of clay, opens on Passover and ends on Kristallnacht — November 9, the same day in history when the Berlin Wall fell (which makes it a complex anniversary by any measure). The serialization is meant to match somewhat the flow of the novel itself.

Anyway, all of this, of course, raises the question of how we read these days. (Whoever “we” are.) In a world of tasty bits and sound-bites, how many still immerse themselves in a long novel — or even a short one? My mother-in-law does, but don’t most of us grab a chapter in the same way we set time aside for an episode of 24 or The West Wing? It’s not a night of television we’re after; just one show a week.

Don’t most novel readers try to time their exhaustion to allow a single chapter before sleep? Two chapters if the computer screen hasn’t burned their retinas through that day?

We read in small pieces. Or at least I do.

  I marvel that the lit-bloggers are able to ingest so much and still have the time to discuss online — and at such wondrous length — the novels they read with one another. Maybe the real issue is just that there’s no more room for sleep in our lives.

(I know a woman, a brilliant and lively woman, the daughter of a lauded southern novelist, who watches the webcams of a bakery somewhere in Scandinavia on those nights when sleep eludes her. Apparently the website allows her to run on her computer screen four cameras at once, giving a panorama of the bakery. She tells me that watching such things “yields up a complex set of disappointed expectations.” I love that.)

From anecdote and unscientific observation, it looks to me as though few others these days ever spend as long as the bloggers must, wonderfully lost, sleepless in a novel.

So maybe the time for serialization has come around again. Doling out the text of a novel in chapters doesn’t seem so different from the weekly installments of Dickens’s Bleak House that the Literary Nation is now treating itself to on PBS. Perhaps the Masterpiece-Theater forces at work in those broadcasts, have once again made the episodic rolling out of a story satisfying — satisfying in what was once a purely literary way. (I mean, the concept of episodes seems to me much more literary than theatrical, and I stand by that assertion even as a reader old enough to remember Saturday morning serials at the movie-house.)

Perhaps serializing Golem Song will tap into the sweet old-fashioned (and now blogospheric and book-clubbish) experience of reading the same book, at the same pace as other readers — readers with whom you can rave or complain about this week’s episode.

Yes, I know we’re talking about community on a small scale here.

Using a computer always seemed to me more like composing with paper and pencil than like writing on a typewriter. Maybe in some similar way serializing a novel on the Internet can take us back to an old, lost sense of literary anticipation. A sense that newspapers used to give us.

I don’t know. We’ll see if anyone’s interested in taking in a complex, adult novel this way — piece by piece over many weeks, as part of the regular practice of surfing the web.

And to answer the obvious questions: Yes, Golem Song is already a completed work, and No, we’re not paying the author by the word.

Fred Ramey

Posted in: Publishers Blog, | Keywords: publishers blog

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