Believe Care Invest: Moby Dick

A young man who asks us to call him Ishmael gets sick of life in NYC and decides to head up to Nantucket to take work on a whaling vessel. He arrives in town and finds a place for the night, but he’s told he’ll have to share a bed when a mysterious harpooner.

Why Ishmael might be hard to identify with: He’s not telling us the whole story. It’s unclear if that’s even his name. He gives us so many reasons that he’s going to sea that it seems likely that none of them is the real one.

Believe

• He paints Manhattan and Nantucket vividly.
• He conveys his economic situation compellingly.
• Lots of objects speak of the doom coming up: “The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower. You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying implement. Mixed with these were rusty old whaling lances and harpoons all broken and deformed. Some were storied weapons. With this once long lance, now wildly elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen whales between a sunrise and a sunset. And that harpoon—so like a corkscrew now—was flung in Javan seas, and run away with by a whale, years afterwards slain off the Cape of Blanco. The original iron entered nigh the tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man, travelled full forty feet, and at last was found imbedded in the hump.”

Care

• He’s depressed and out of sorts: “Whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”
• He’s estranged from himself: “I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs.”

Invest

• He seems to be a competent sailor, but we don’t have much reason to invest in him, and indeed he will be pretty hapless throughout the novel. He will be the only survivor the mission, but only by sheer luck.
• But we do like that he’s an enthusiastic storyteller: “But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land.”
• He’s funny: He self-mockingly imagines where his sea voyage will be listed in the book of fate, hidden between bigger events: “Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States. “WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL. “BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.”

Strength / Flaw: Observant / Passive

The Annotation Project: Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

BCI tomorrow!  Download here. 

 

Believe Care Invest: White Noise

Middle-aged Jack Gladney, chair of Hitler Studies at College-on-the-Hill in a midwestern town, watches the students return to campus. He lives with his wife Babette and their children from previous marriages. He and American Studies teacher Murray Siskind visit the most photographed barn in America. Foreshadowing of an Airborne Toxic Event abounds.

Why Jack might be hard to identify with: We’re hardwired to dislike men like Jack with an unspecified number of ex-wives he doesn’t get along well with. And of course, like any postmodern hero, he’s disconnected from his surroundings and his own thoughts and feelings, which risks us being unable to connect to him.

Believe

• The book has lots of lists of brand-name objects to make everything specific. “Onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints.”
• Complicated family situations always feel realistic.

Care

• They’re poorer than the students. “Not that we don’t have a station wagon ourselves.” “It’s small, it’s metallic gray, it has one whole rusted door.”
• He’s got a vague malaise: “Things, boxes. Why do these possessions carry such sorrowful weight?”
• We’ll find out shortly after this excerpt that he has a big embarrassing secret: He doesn’t speak or read German, and he trying to learn it in secret.
• But he doesn’t suffer that much in the first half. He’s largely just benignly observing and sort of marveling at his world. He’ll suffer a lot in the second half, where he’ll be exposed to a toxic cloud and find out his wife is having an affair.

Invest

• We like his odd eyes. He uses odd adjectives (his wife’s hair is “a fanatical blonde mop”)
• He’s an obsessive observer: In the middle of a clutch with his wife, he spots a plane: “I met her at the edge of the playing field and embraced her, putting my hands inside the sweatband of her gray cotton pants. A small plane appeared over the trees. Babette was moist and warm, emitting a creaturely hum.”
• He’s funny: Murray says: “I understand the music, I understand the movies, I even see how comic books can tell us things. But there are full professors in this place who read nothing but cereal boxes.” Jack responds, “It’s the only avant-garde we’ve got.”

Strength / Flaw: Observant / Disconnected.

The Annotation Project: White Noise

A 1985 novel that couldn’t be more timely in 2021. Download this here. BCI tomorrow!

 

Believe Care Invest: Emma

21 year old Emma Woodhouse has been raised by a beloved governess Miss Taylor, but played matchmaker for her and got her married off, leaving Emma alone with her dull father. Emma decides she has a talent for matchmaking and set her eyes on new couples, but her sister’s brother-in-law, Mr. Knightley, the only person ever willing to criticize Emma, advises her against it.

Why Emma might be hard to identify with: “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.” Austen’s previous heroines had been in need of a good marriage, but now she tried to get us to like a spoiled rich girl. Austen invites us to judge Emma for flaws that she can’t perceive about herself, so our POV is distinct from the heroine’s

Believe

• The boringness of her father takes the form of an object: backgammon.
• She’s got values: “Mr. Weston was a man of unexceptionable character, easy fortune, suitable age, and pleasant manners; and there was some satisfaction in considering with what self-denying, generous friendship she had always wished and promoted the match.” But we can see that she doesn’t hold herself to the same standards she holds others.  

Care

• “Sorrow came—a gentle sorrow—but not at all in the shape of any disagreeable consciousness.—Miss Taylor married. It was Miss Taylor’s loss which first brought grief. It was on the wedding-day of this beloved friend that Emma first sat in mournful thought of any continuance.”
• She feels she has to be “on” all the time around her father, which is wearying: It was a melancholy change; and Emma could not but sigh over it, and wish for impossible things, till her father awoke, and made it necessary to be cheerful. His spirits required support.

Invest

• She’s too smart for her father: “She was now in great danger of suffering from intellectual solitude. She dearly loved her father, but he was no companion for her. He could not meet her in conversation, rational or playful.” And indeed when Mr. Knightley comes in and starts sparring with her, we can see that she’s smart and lively.
• She has done a good thing in matchmaking for Miss Taylor, so she does have some talent in her chosen avocation, though, as Mr. Knightley points out, she overestimates her contribution. We admire her for giving up her only happiness.

Strength / Flaw: clever / too sure she knows what’s good for others

The Annotation Project: Emma

Our oldest novel!  Do we have anything to learn from it?  Download these here.  BCI tomorrow!

Believe Care Invest: Matilda

4 year old Matilda lives with awful parents who just want her to watch TV, but she discovers a precocious love of books and spends all day at the library reading, first all the kids books and then adult books. Soon she decides that her parents are awful (“If only they would read a little Dickens or Kipling they would soon discover there was more to life than cheating people and watching television.”) and begins playing sadistic tricks on them, supergluing her father’s hat to his head.

Why Matilda might be hard to identify with: We’re not married to her POV. We flit from head to head, including in Dahl’s, who begins the book by talking about how if he was a teacher, he’d say horribly belittling things to the kids. Then the book begins and Matilda’s parents sound a lot like Dahl when they talk to their daughter! To bond with Matilda, we have to say, “I like my hero more than my omniscient narrator.”

Believe

• She loves to read. We love readers. And we specific lists of what she’s reading.
• We gets lots of good details of life as a crooked used car dealer.

Care

• She’s got abusive parents. “the parents looked upon Matilda in particular as nothing more than a scab. A scab is something you have to put up with until the time comes when you can pick it off and flick it away Mr and Mrs Wormwood looked forward enormously to the time when they could pick their little daughter off and flick her away, preferably into the next county or even further than that.”
• We’ve all felt under-appreciated and under-protected by our parents, but her case is extreme. “To tell the truth, I doubt they would have noticed had she crawled into the house with a broken leg.”
• Even the wonderful librarian has a hard time believing at first that she’s really reading all those books. Every precocious kid has had that experience.

Invest

• She’s a genius: “It is bad enough when parents treat ordinary children as though they were scabs and bunions, but it becomes somehow a lot worse when the child in question is extra- ordinary, and by that I mean sensitive and brilliant. Matilda was both of these things, but above all she was brilliant. Her mind was so nimble and she was so quick to learn that her ability should have been obvious even to the most half-witted of parents.”
• She starts playing pranks on them. “She decided that every time her father or her mother was beastly to her, she would get her own back in some way or another. A small victory or two would help her to tolerate their idiocies and would stop her from going crazy.”
• Fascinatingly, she doesn’t discover that she has super-powers until page 100 or so, which is an odd place in a book for a genre-shift.

Strength/Flaw: Brilliant / Not much of a flaw. What do you say, do you see a flaw?

The Annotation Project: Matilda

And we’re back! And I got the book back from my editor! Her verdict: She likes it!  But she says it needs more book examples. The problem, as always, is that there are few books that everybody has read. I imploringly ask you for examples of books that everybody has read that you’d like to see featured here. In the meantime, here’s one: Matilda!  Download this here.  BCI tomorrow.

 

Episode 26: The Eight Character Wheel with Lou Anders

The Secrets of Story Podcast · Episode 26: Beyond Head Heart Gut with Lou Anders

UPDATE: I changed the title from “Beyond Head Heart Gut” to make it clear this is a stand-alone episode. 

Hey guys, it’s a new episode of the podcast! James and I welcome the delightful novelist Lou Anders who expands on Head Heart Gut with a list of eight archetypes hiding in many great stories!  Check out Lou’s site to grab his books and RPGs!