books

News from Book World

/ lynnkanter / 2 Comments
Photo: Mr. T in DC

My idea of heaven.                 Photo: Mr. T in DC

So much has been happening in the process of turning Her Own Vietnam into a real live book! Let me catch you up.

An ARC is born

Tomorrow my book will go to the printer, who will produce Advance Reader Copies or ARCS  – the semi-final version of the book. It looks almost exactly like the finished book – it has cover art, a brief description of the novel and even a couple of blurbs – and the text is laid out as it will be in the final version.

But an ARC is not a final version; it’s an uncorrected proof. It still needs tiny tweaks and corrections. So if a brainstorm hits me with a brilliant new way to end the novel, can I still revise it? Nope. The book is essentially done. Within a few days my publisher will send out the ARC to reviewers who may appreciate the book, or savage it, or – and this is the most likely scenario – ignore it.

Blurbs to the rescue

In a previous post I described the nerve-wracking process of asking well-known writers for blurbs. Well, the writer who had been so kind to me in the past was generous once again, and provided a wonderful blurb. To do so required her to lug my printed manuscript on a family vacation. I am more than grateful, and really hope the karma of her kindness will come back to her in the end.

Another author spills her writing secrets

A couple of weeks ago I posted about my writing process. Now you can get a glimpse into the writing process of another writer, Kristin Ohlson. Her third book, The Soil Will Save Us, is sparking national conversations about a cheap, innovative and practical way to combat climate change – and it’s been under our feet the whole time. Take a look here.

Help me re-name a major character in my novel!

/ lynnkanter / 22 Comments

I started working on Her Own Vietnam more than a decade ago. The main character – the nurse who served in Vietnam – is named Della Brown. I named her sister, another major character, Rosalie Brown.

In a plot twist I could not have invented, my publisher is also named Rosalie. And she doesn’t think a major character should be named after her.

Darn it, she’s right.

Here’s where you come in

Can you help me come up with a new first name for my character? Her last name, of course, will remain Brown.

I will give you some parameters, and you can post your suggestions here. I am on a deadline, so all suggestions need to be posted by midnight (Eastern USA time) on Wednesday, April 23.

If I choose a name you suggested, I’ll thank you on the book’s acknowledgement page.

What you need to know about the character formerly known as Rosalie Brown

  • She was born in 1953 to a middle class white family in upstate New York.
  • Her other family members are older sister Della Brown; mother Ruth Brown; father Thomas (Tommy) Brown; partner Anne Isaacs.
  • The name needs to be three syllables long. (Why? Because otherwise the rhythm will be messed up in every sentence that currently includes Rosalie.)

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Ready? Re-name!

For a novelist, naming a fictional character is personal, like naming a child. It’s possible I will come up with my own new name for her – and it’s certain that my decision will be based on subjective criteria (the name is pretty, it reminds me of my second cousin, it just feels right, etc.).

I will miss Rosalie Brown terribly. But I’m looking forward to seeing the names you suggest before midnight on Wednesday the 23rd of April.

Hope springs eternal.

Hope springs eternal.

On rereading “Mrs. Dalloway”

/ lynnkanter / 3 Comments

 

Can't. Stop. Reading. Photo: David McSpadden

Can’t. Stop. Reading.
Photo: David McSpadden

Every decade or so I reread Mrs. Dalloway, the stunning 1925 novel by Virginia Woolf. Each time I find something new to admire and appreciate.

The novel takes place in London, during a single June day in 1923. World War One is over, but its impact can be felt everywhere. Clarissa Dalloway, an upper class woman in her 50’s, is preparing to throw a party. Peter Walsh, who once loved her and whom she rejected for the more predictable Richard Dalloway, has just returned to London after five years in India. A veteran is going mad in a way that makes perfect sense after the horrors of the war, and his immigrant wife is growing desperate. All of these people, and more, connect and intertwine and pull apart in unexpected ways as Clarissa Dalloway’s past and present collide.

A book for the ages – my ages

I first encountered Mrs. Dalloway when I was in college. I was intoxicated by the novel’s glittering, faceted language, its swirling points of view, its complex sentences and circuitous paragraphs.

I was also struck at 19 or 20 by the fact that this acclaimed novel dealt with something I was just beginning to discover myself: that women of all kinds sometimes fall in love with other women – intense and romantic, even when utterly chaste. The long-married Mrs. Dalloway, looking back on her years, considers the moment at 18 when Sally Seton kissed her as one of the happiest of her life. “Had that not, after all, been love?”

The first time I read the book, Clarissa Dalloway was older than my mother. Today I am older than Clarissa Dalloway, and I understand and appreciate her character in ways that were unavailable to me earlier. The discursive, stream of consciousness inner monologue; the way Clarissa’s thoughts swoop like birds through time, alighting briefly on instants in her youth, then the present day, then back to childhood; the power and presence in her daily life of people long gone – all of these are familiar to me now.

Laughing out loud

For such a serious book, which broke all kinds of narrative conventions and introduced new ways of creating character, the novel is full of wit. I laughed out loud at this caricature of myself and my activist friends, people whose “causes” had “made them callous”:

Miss Kilman would do anything for the Russians, starved herself for the Austrians, but in private inflicted positive torture, so insensible was she…[S]he was never in the room five minutes without making you feel her superiority, your inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you were; how she lived in a slum without a cushion or a bed or a rug or whatever it might be, all her soul rusted with that grievance sticking in it…

 Keeping some secrets

Despite many readings, the book has yet to yield all its secrets. For instance, why is the phrase “very upright” repeated so often and in so many contexts, starting with a description of Mrs. Dalloway herself? What is the purpose of the roses that appear in so many scenes?

Of course, there is a tremendous amount of scholarship on Virginia Woolf’s work, and it’s likely I could find the answers to my questions there. But for now I prefer to mine the novel’s meaning myself, through the slow pleasure of reading and rereading.

After all, it is not the book that changes over the years, but the reader.

 

Are these books your cup of tea?

/ lynnkanter / 5 Comments

For a change of pace, I thought I’d stop talking about my own book and post some mini-reviews of books I’ve read lately. Some I loved. Others were, well, not my cup of tea.

Let’s start with four books I enjoyed.

These books were my cup of tea

My cup of tea! Photo: Girla Obscura

My cup of tea!
Photo: Girla Obscura

Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon.
In 1977 William Least Heat-Moon lost his job and his marriage, and decided to pack his truck and drive across America on small country roads – depicted on maps as the “blue highways” that trickle off from the major expressways. In his travels he meets fascinating people, explores dwindling small towns and their human history, and considers what to do with the rest of his life. Although he identifies as Native American like his father, Heat-Moon resembles his white mother, so he frequently hears the unselfconscious racism that white people share with one another. The book is a satisfying meander through territory that is by now twice-vanished: the rural towns whose singularity was already being erased by television and superhighways; and the America of 1977, still reeling from the Vietnam War and the social upheaval of the 1960s.

Margot by Jillian Cantor.
What if Margot Frank, Anne Frank’s older sister, had survived the concentration camps? What if she tried to shed her past by moving to Philadelphia and creating a new identity for herself as a non-Jewish woman named Margie Franklin? This is the premise of Cantor’s compelling and haunting novel, which takes place in 1959 just as the movie version of “The Diary of Anne Frank” sweeps across America.

The Museum of Abandoned Secrets by Oksana Zabuzhko.  
This sprawling novel takes place in modern-day Ukraine and in the Ukraine of 60 years ago. The plot hinges on the friendship between two women in today’s Ukraine: a journalist who hosts a popular TV interview program, and a respected artist who is killed in a freak car accident. Their story develops with a parallel story about a woman freedom fighter during WWII, about whom the journalist is trying to make a documentary. The novel is a bit challenging to read – the plot swirls around in time and place (some of it taking place in dreams) – but well worth it for the revelations about life in Ukraine, explorations about how people absorb or fail to absorb seismic political and cultural shifts in one lifetime, and wise observations about human nature and friendship among women.

Notes from No Man’s Land by Eula Biss.
A collection of essays about race, written by a white woman. The essays are brilliant, incisive, brave, and unpredictable, drawing surprising connections and provocative conclusions about everyday American life and the hidden and overt dynamics that bind us together and tear us apart.

Not my cup of tea

Not my cup of tea. Photo: Ege Maltepe

Not my cup of tea.
Photo: Ege Maltepe

Here are two books that got lots of buzz and critical praise, but that I found disappointing.

Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner.
A bold but naive young woman, known only by the city of her birth (Reno) moves to New York to be part of the cutting-edge art world in mid-1970s. What Reno loves is speed – as in skiing and riding motorcycles – and men. These two appetites get her involved with the black-sheep son of a rich Italian family that manufactures motorcycles, and ultimately in the radical politics of Italy. Despite the critical acclaim it received and the fact that on the surface this book should appeal to me strongly, I was only lukewarm about it. Reno’s passivity in her relationships with men got tiresome.

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwen.
I’ve tried and tried to like Ian McEwen, but to no avail. While I can appreciate the clarity and precision of his prose, it has always seems soulless to me. And when his novels reveal their startling plot twists at the end, you can practically hear the Law & Order “cha-chung” sound in the background. His depiction of the inner lives of women characters is particularly unconvincing, although that actually turned out to be a strength in this book. All that being said, Sweet Tooth does have some things to recommend it. The novel is about a young university graduate who almost accidentally finds herself working for MI5, the British Secret Service, after being groomed for the job by an older professor with whom she had an affair. Her undercover task is to find and encourage with grant money the right sort of young writers whose work will provide cultural and intellectual support for the anti-communist side of the Cold War. Set in the 1970s, the novel does an excellent job of portraying the atmosphere of Britain in decline, beset by terrorism, economic woes, cultural upheaval and self-inflicted political wounds.

So many books…

I just finished reading the novel The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd (my cup of tea!) and started Redeployment by Phil Kay. Among the many, many books on my teetering “to be read” pile is The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.

How do you handle the perpetual problem of so many books, so little time?

Why Vietnam?

/ lynnkanter / 12 Comments

Fatigue shirt

Whenever I mention my novel (which, you may have noticed, is fairly often), people ask me why I chose to write about a woman who served as an Army nurse in Vietnam. Did I serve in the war? Was I ever in the military? Am I even a nurse?

No, no and no.

But like most members of the Baby Boomer generation, my youth was shaped by the war in Vietnam – and by the movement to end it. One reason was the draft. Unlike today’s wars, which seem to be fought only by a small and grievously burdened community, the Vietnam war had the power to reach into almost any American home that had a teenage son.

The shadow of the Good War

My father and all my friends’ fathers had served in World War Two. We grew up in the glowing shadow of that Good War. But the Vietnam war was the first to be waged on television, and it became frighteningly clear that this was not a good war – and that our political leaders were lying to us about it.

The 1970 killing of American college students by uniformed troops – as the students peacefully protested on their own college campuses at Kent State and Jackson State – made me feel profoundly alienated from my own government. While it would be other issues that galvanized me, my life as an activist began that day.

Who could ever understand?

So what happened in 2000 that first gave me the idea to write a novel that would become Her Own Vietnam? Honestly, I can’t tell you.

I was walking down the street when it struck me: What would it be like to be a regular middle-aged woman, just living your humdrum life, but to have that experience in your past? To have participated in a war so hated by much of your nation that the hostility unforgivably slopped over onto you and your comrades, the very people your country sent to wage the war?

How would you feel? Who would you tell? Who could ever understand what you’d been through?

Starting from scratch

I had to start from scratch. I knew nothing about their lives. I started by reading everything I could find about women who served in Vietnam. There wasn’t that much.

Then I joined a listerv for women Vietnam veterans. They knew I wasn’t one of them, that I was there to research a novel, that in fact I had marched against the war.

Yet they welcomed me. They answered my questions and shared their stories – even some that must have been painful to tell.

“I don’t speak about Vietnam”

As I listened, I realized I had been wrong. I did know something about their lives after all.

Because many of these women, these war veterans, had for decades kept their service a secret. They were in the closet. And having come out myself in the pre-rainbow days of the early 1970s, that was an experience I understood all too well.

“I don’t speak about Vietnam, and most people in my world don’t even know I’m a veteran,” one woman told me. “I prefer it that way.”

Her name was Chris Banigan. She had been a Captain in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, and had served two tours in Vietnam, from 1969 to 1971, based in Quang Tri and then Chu Lai.

Chris generously shared her vast knowledge and experience, from specifics about how nurses learned to deal with gunshot wounds (they treated a live, anaesthetized goat who had been shot for that purpose), to the details of her recurring nightmares about the war.

The ghosts of yesterday

She was patient with my many questions, and told me, “I actually find them quite therapeutic because it makes me think about things I’ve chosen not to think about. I think it will help me to get past the ghosts of yesterday and burst into tomorrow with a greater exuberance for life.”

Chris was the first veteran to read an early draft of my novel, and gave me her careful corrections and quiet encouragement. Because she lived in California and I lived in DC, our conversations took place via email. That changed on Veterans Day of 2003, when I was thrilled to meet her in Washington at the Vietnam women’s memorial.

A miraculous encounter

Miraculously, that day she had encountered at the Vietnam Wall a soldier who had been her last patient in Vietnam. He had been visiting the Wall for years on Veterans Day, walking along its gleaming black expanse and asking everyone if they knew a nurse named Banigan. Finally, he asked her.

She told me later, “I remember when I took him to x-ray. He was terrified that his eye had been blown out, and he could not be reassured until he saw the reflection of his left eye in the x-ray machine. Odd, the things you remember.”

Chris seemed to remember everything. “Over the last three decades, I have never gotten over the sights and smells of Vietnam and the causalities of that conflict,” she said, “and I continue to monitor the death toll in the shape of Agent Orange, PTSD and shattered lives.”

Chris Banigan died suddenly, 10 years ago this weekend, on March 15, 2004. She was only in her fifties. I am quite certain a part of her died in Vietnam.

Why Vietnam?

By telling the story of Her Own Vietnam, I hope to shine a light on a fascinating but hidden corner of our shared American history, and to honor women like Chris Banigan.

“They did not pick their war,” Chris said of her sister Vietnam veterans. “They only served.”

Click here to see Chris Banigan’s photos and descriptions of her time in Vietnam.