Work that pays the bills (or: Why do successful authors go to Hollywood?)

Buried in this examination of Michael Chabon's film work (including the forthcoming "John Carter" remake, for which he wrote the script) is an interesting contention about why, despite frustrations and failures, Chabon would have taken something like the pulpy-scifi-looking "John Carter":

It’s likely that Chabon received a hefty paycheck for most of these projects—in addition to having sold the film options for many of his books—and screenwriters can spend years before breaking through with a big movie. Perhaps in no other industry can you toil for so long, be stymied so regularly, and still earn millions, while also being considered a relative success. (Chabon has also mentioned that his screenwriting work has helped to provide health-insurance coverage for his family, which includes four children and his wife Ayelet Waldman, herself a successful novelist.)

What looks like a partial indictment or at least a you're-on-notice for the author who first became known as a novelist, and whose next novel TELEGRAPH AVENUE will be out this fall, resolves into kind of a brash truth. Screenwriters get paid for work that sells but is never made, but if your novel never goes into print, you're not going to get your full advance (and depending on your contract, may have to return all of it). And in the meantime, you're living on your day-job earnings, or your royalties from the last book, or dreams and wishes and unicorn rides, or whatnot.

Jacob Silverman's piece is hardly the first to point out that full-time writing is not a lucrative occupation, and I don't carry his concern that those projects will negatively affect his writing. But it's startling to see as successful an author as Chabon pointing out that, in this case, it actually saves him money to step away from his fiction. Here are a few interviews in which Chabon mentions the health-insurance angle, and without getting too deeply into that flawed American system, well, it's not as if he can draw on COBRA from his previous office job since that was probably 15 years ago. (And if you've never been on COBRA, what gets you is not the high cost to begin with -- it's the irregular, steep price increases designed to make you quit.)

It's easy to make light of (as I have) authors who verge into more lucrative media, who sign HBO deals that may never see the light of day or become the fifth writers on flawed screenplays (like Chabon and "Spider-Man 2"). Maybe they're irresponsible with money and possessed of delusions of grandeur, like latter-day F. Scott Fitzgeralds! (Sorry, Francis.) Or maybe they're just trying to get by, and if a two-author household like the Chabon-Waldman complex finds the most thrifty solution is to take side work -- that is still about creating things, mind -- then maybe the more relevant question is "How did we get to the point where we can't afford to keep our literary writers in business?"

Happy Valentine's Day

Here's a sexist old ad about how much more entertaining Dell paperbacks are than women. True, it is really hard to put me in an overcoat pocket because I am a person,but my laughter production is much higher! (Source: cordjefferson.)

Tournament of Books '12: The view from THE CAT'S TABLE

Inadvertently I passed from the childhood memories collected in THE LAST BROTHER to a distinct, but occasionally parallel set in Michael Ondaatje's THE CAT'S TABLE. The body count is lower, the relative income is higher and the turn of events is less tragic, but some of the "didn't know then what I know now" animus is the same.

The surviving grown-up in this case is Michael, who as a young teenager was sent from his father's in Sri Lanka to live with his mother in England. On a mammoth passenger ship for three weeks by himself, Michael bunks with a late-night bridge player and sneaks into places he shouldn't with two other boys (what we would, in this century, refer to as "unaccompanied minors") who he met at "the cat's table" -- the nickname for the table in the communal dining room with the least prestige.

The book is subtly structured like a shell, and it took me a while to catch onto this; after reading the first account of Michael's voyage, including a bracing description of the night he and his friends tied themselves to the deck during a storm, I wondered what more there would be to the book; the story peaks there. Then it turns and begins to flesh out things already revealed. For example, in the next layer, we find out a few details about the post-ship lives of Michael's friends; a further turn reveals (minor spoiler) that he has married the sister of one of them, then that they were divorced. At each point it seems as though there is no more to Michael's story, and then there is more. If this shell had a center it would be reduced to a cocktail-party line like "Oh, you're from Egypt? I once took a boat through the Suez Canal when I was younger. Fascinating country."

And so it was that THE CAT'S TABLE grabbed me more and more, despite what I saw was a sometimes colorless narrator in Michael. Observing everything, he peers through events rather than standing in front of them. His lack of opinions, for example, on the major change that was taking place in his life at first bothered me, but his subtle ambivalence (mixed with a sense of adventure) is woven through the outer layers. Its unfinished nature should go without speaking, particularly since Ondaatje hints in an acknowledgment that the book is autobiographical, and undoubtedly there are more layers to his tale than have been revealed.

ToB first-round opponent: Karen Russell's SWAMPLANDIA! -- this one narrated by actual children in real time, but sharing the adult and/or alien environments and the journey narratives. My pick is SWAMPLANDIA! though; THE CAT'S TABLE, while more solidly constructed, never quite captivated me the same way.

Kindle sale books of the month

I recommend: Jon Krakauer's EIGER DREAMS and Mary Norton's THE BORROWERS, British children's classic (don't look at me like that!) and the basis for the forthcoming Hayao Miyazaki film "The Secret World of Arrietty."
I'm buying: Nick Reding's METHLAND and Angela Lambert's 1939: THE LAST SEASON OF PEACE, because nothing goes together like Middle American drug crime and pre-WWII Britain.

Watch now: "The Joy Of Books"

A Toronto bookstore comes to life in this little bit of stop-motion magic. Thanks to my coworker G for sending this (and re-sending it when I lost the link); please check out the blog she co-created, The Style Low Club.

Leave Hathaway alone!

Anne Hathaway, last seen showing off her unconvincing British accent in "One Day," held her engagement party last weekend at the Housing Works Bookstore in SoHo, and Grub Street is wrong to pick on her for it.

True, Hathaway could have gone anywhere, but here are some points in Housing Works' favor. It's in a great location and is an adorable, atmospheric old building with hardwood floors and an interior balcony. I know a non-celebrity couple who got married there and reported that for an extra fee Housing Works will put a book at each of your place settings for guests to take home. Racked.com even named it one of the best wedding venues "that don't break the bank," although having no idea how much these things cost it seems to me that $155 a person isn't exactly "budget" except here. But! Because it's a nonprofit, a portion of that fee for your wedding or other event supports Housing Works' programs for people with HIV/AIDS. If you're going to splash out the cash anyway, you might as well have it for a good cause.

Hathaway has appeared in a million of your favorite book-to-movie adaptations including "Brokeback Mountain," "Nicholas Nickelby," "The Devil Wears Prada" and "The Princess Diaries," and played Jane Austen in "Becoming Jane." She's also going to be in the new "Les Miserables" adaptation, so let's just agree to argue about that instead.

A "reimagining" of all of Jane Austen's novels due out in 2014 from HarperCollins? Probably unnecessary. Curtis Sittenfeld's take on PRIDE AND PREJUDICE? Okay, now I'm listening.

Sinking into ...THE EMPTY BOAT

I fairly jumped up and down when I found out that Mark Salzman had written a new memoir. I have read Salzman's nerdy-teenager book LOST IN PLACE: GROWING UP ABSURD IN SUBURBIA at least 15 times (and that's a conservative estimate); I named it as one of my favorite books that make you laugh, but that doesn't cover the kind of bizarre kinship I felt with Salzman seeking the solace in cello playing and kung fu that he wasn't getting anywhere else. Not to be dramatic, but it was a book that saved me. I went on to read his most famous memoir, IRON AND SILK, as well as another (TRUE NOTEBOOKS) and two of his novels, but none of them had as much an effect on me as LOST IN PLACE.

And I can't recall that his other books called back as much to LOST IN PLACE as THE MAN IN THE EMPTY BOAT, even though they chronicle very different periods in Salzman's life. LOST IN PLACE ends with him looking ahead to college; in THE MAN IN THE EMPTY BOAT, Salzman is a father of two struggling with the latest draft of his novel, a world away from the future he might have imagined for himself. In a family crisis, he finds himself going back to his teenage years and the anxiety and doubt that seems to plague his whole family, and how they can be -- if not beaten, at least better governed.

I was riveted; I finished it in one sitting, feeling like I was catching up with an old friend. The creative strand (Salzman's wife is also in the arts, although film is her medium) added a layer to the personal story that lent it resonance beyond the specific details of his crisis. (It also made me hope that Salzman finishes his novel soon. You can do it!) If you haven't read any of Salzman's books I recommend this one as a gateway, or start with my favorite and move on to this one next.

I got an e-galley of this book through Open Road Media.

Desert island quiz

If you could only bring one book with you to a desert island, would you rather bring a book you've already read and know is great, or one you've never read?

One-Star Revue: (Not So) GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Tomorrow is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens. (Just telling you now so you still have time to rush out and get a present.) Although he tended to the verbose -- a natural output of being paid by quantity and not quality -- and he never met a character he didn't love to excess, Dickens is considered a master of Brit-lit. If you haven't already been bowled over by articles "revisiting" Dickens in his context, you will be this year. He was a devoted spouse! He never got over his dad! He was the first fighter for social justice (or was he...) 

Just to clarify, these disgruntled comments would not count as revisionist takes on the great man's legacy:

• "This book might be interesting to someone chained to a palm tree on a deserted island."
• "Dickens did not seem to know really what he wanted to do with the plot. He even made two endings!!!"
• "I just wish I could ask the dead author some questions like Why didn't you let Pip grow the Hell up? That poor me, I'm a country peasant with no friends act got real tired real quick."
• "This story has no meaning and Charles Dickens is going no where with this."
• "How can those women be so cold-hearted? That's probably why Miss Havisham got burned in the first place. I bet her heart was cooled off after that."
• "By far the worst literary blunder the world has ever excreted. I would never wish this horific [sic] mass of boredom upon anyone. Avoid this book like the black plauge [sic] (another one of Europe's tragedies)."
• "In terms of food, it could have used a bit more seasoning, like a trip to Denmark. Of course, they didn't actually go to Denmark. If instead of being named "Magwitch" the convict had been called Bozo the Clown, and gave Pip balloon animals instead of money, I would have enjoyed the book much more."
• "ZZZZZZZ SNOOZE ZZZZZZZ!!!!!!!"

"Finn writes in the book every day, he says: lyric lines, possible song titles, diary entries, overheard conversations, grocery lists, to-do lists—his whole life goes into the notebooks. It’s like a used-auto-parts junkyard that you search until you find the part that fits the car you’re working on."

--Geoffrey Himes in Paste on singer Craig Finn's writing process.

Tournament of Books '12: Looking for THE LAST BROTHER

When an adult narrator looks back on his childhood the author gets to have it both ways. The confusion of not understanding what's going on can be an operant to success, only to reveal all with a swoosh; as the child comes to understanding, so does the reader. It's all so clear now! Well, as clear as the intervening years can make it.

The old man who narrates Nathacha Appanah's THE LAST BROTHER is some 60 years away from the events he describes, but the regret he pours over them seems freshly tapped from some interior source. Raj is the last surviving son of a prison guard and a seamstress growing up in Mauritius, a solitary and dreamy child who plays and dreams unnoticed. In one of the earliest memories described, Raj witnesses a storm that will claim the life of his older and younger brothers while they were out playing -- just one of the several natural disasters overshadowing his childhood.

His loneliness lifts a little once Raj befriends a boy named David in the prison where his father works, who he meets in the hospital. Parentless and apparently bored, David doesn't even share a common language with Raj, but the boys pick up a fast friendship, in the course of which Raj sneaks David out of the prison.

It is here where adult-Raj and I wish to interject that the character David is part of a real-life thwarted migratory pattern in the early 1940s during which European Jews traveled en masse on boats to Palestine, only to be refused entry by the British colonial authority and "deported" to Mauritius. (I dispute the word "deported" on the grounds that the refugees were a. never let into the country into the first place, b. sent to another colony of the same empire and c. imprisoned on site in that colony.)The attempt to address David's religion via the Star of David around his neck is clumsy, and it seems as if Raj would understand little about that aspect of David's situation anyway; what he does understand is that his playmate is imprisoned and he wants him out.

There's something disingenuous about all this sorrow for what amounts to an accident of global displacement, and maybe that's the point: Mixed with his regret for having contributed to David's eventual death (this isn't a spoiler; it's revealed very early in the book) is a sort of secondary creeper of sorrow for forcing David to fill that void in Raj's life, without respect to what David might have been going through. Adult-Raj is aghast at his own insensitivity over this, but perhaps he could cut his younger self some slack. If he would acknowledge his own tragedy, it might go down a little easier. 

ToB first-round opponent: Haruki Murakami's 1Q84.

Wonderfully funny, you say?

My friend Marjorie Hakala has an essay on The Millions right now called "Seven Reasons To Read A Dance To The Music Of Time," referring of course to Anthony Powell's classic 12-book series. (I'm so ignorant, not only have I not read this Modern Library pick, I had been saying until yesterday that it was 10 books. Sad.) I think I'm convinced! And if you don't want to take my word for it, Roger Ebert also recommended the article.

WATCHMEN prequels - are you excited?

D.C. Comics announced yesterday that it was going to develop a prequel series to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' graphic novel WATCHMEN, apparently without Moore's blessing. There are a few narratives to this story:

• Moore is famously opposed to any adaptations of his work, including the 2009 movie.
• D.C. owns the characters so he more or less has no recourse as far as that goes. (The Hollywood Reporter quotes artist Dave Gibbons as giving the series his blessing, with reservations.)
• WATCHMEN has a cult following if not a large one, so it's inevitable that these characters weren't just going to sit in the metaphorical vault forever.

As a casual fan of WATCHMEN who didn't completely hate the movie (although a lot of things went awry there, a lot) I am actually sort of excited that there are going to be prequels -- I think there is a lot of depth and richness to the story that, if done right, could span a bunch of new works. It's a shame they couldn't do it in a way that garnered Moore's blessing, but if he was never going to give it, then how should D.C. proceed?

January Unbookening

Checked out 8 books from the library
Received 4 to review
Bought 2 (aforepictured SWEET VALLEY CONFIDENTIAL, not worth it, and yesterday's Kindle Daily Deal for THE BEST AMERICAN NOIR OF THE CENTURY, probably worth it)
Borrowed 1 from a coworker (ROOM, very exciting)
Received 1 belated Christmas present (Bart Yasso's THE LONG RUN, took a detour in the mail somewhere)
16 in

Donated 6
Returned 4 to the library
10 out

I'm kind of stockpiling library books for this Tournament of Books business but I expect this will end. Right now I'm reading a library book I've been waiting months for, Lionel Shriver's WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN. Without spoiling anything, those first hundred pages can really make a person give up all dreams of potential future parenthood, can't they? I'm completely riveted to it though -- I even broke my own rule and read a little while walking to work yesterday. (Don't do this if you're accident prone.)