Any spare change?

growth--the dramatic motion toward change inherent in a character, an institution, a place, or a thing; the need for a front-rank character in a novel to advance or retreat in relation to behavior and understanding.

Growth is accretion or erosion, the consequences of a character's participation in a longform story, the evolution or devolution of an organization or institution; it is tangible movement in a direction the reader will recognize, a movement to which some emotional weight is attached by the character who experiences it. In the longer dramatic narrative, characters have the time and the need to grow; this is, after all what is meant by development.

Characters change, come to realize, or at the very least are held hostage by their circumstances. Institutions change, arguably for the better or worst, depending on the characters involved in the institutions. The mythical town of Pluto, ND, so vivid with promise in the early pages of Louise Erdrich's The Plague of Doves, devolves toward the end of the novel as a virtual ghost town, while in the same narrative the principal characters age, grow away from or grow into other mind- and heart-sets, while the once thriving Pluto Historical Society, down to two members, disbands.

It is not so much that growth in a longer work must be particularized in detail as it must be recognized with some hint of what is to happen, allowing the reader to imagine (and argue) about the likely results. Shorter works do not have the convention or luxury of recording change; they instead play out on the characters being led to a brink and bade farewell, their intentions not readily known.

As the twenty-first century novel and short story gather traction and personality, it is almost unthinkable that their characters will, as many earlier novels and stories decreed, all live happily ever after but will instead be buffeted with the whims, uncertainties, and multifarious inducements of life as we have come to know it. Modern life has evolved to the unthinkable come to pass. Future life grows into the yet more unthinkable. If we are realistic, there will always be an elephant waiting for us somewhere, be it the living room, the Greyhound Bus station, the supermarket, or the already crowded landscape we like to think of as the soul.

Submissiveness

submission--an offering of a novel or short story for publication; a presentation of a manuscript to a literary agent or editor with hopes of impending publication; a practice engaged in by a writer in which work is offered to a publishing venue.

The moment comes when a writer knows a particular work is finished, that there is nothing more to be done to it without transforming it into something altogether different that what it is now, that readers will not be aware of any additional tweaking or changes. 

 If the work is a novel, the writer usually sends it to a literary agent because relatively few publishers will read book-length manuscripts unless they have been invited. If the work is a short story, the writer sends it to the editor of a magazine or journal, hopeful of it being accepted and scheduled for publication. Such is the nature of submission. Writers wishing to have their work published accept the process of submission as a way of life, just as the actor or actress accept the reality of audition, equally as the musician accepts the reality of audition.

True enough, some writers are invited to submit stories to journals and novels to publishers. These writers are generally veterans of previous publications, which came from previous submissions.

As a generality, writers whose work reflects a difference in theme and voice, while observing an awareness of what makes a story, will have a higher rate of acceptance than writers who strive to make their work less different, possibly even lapsing into derivative or imitative approaches.

Beginning writers see submission as some Sisyphean chore; published writers see submission as a way of writing life.

When Joseph Heller was told he'd have to change the title of his forthcoming novel, Catch-18, because it was on the same list as Leon Uris's Mila 18, Heller readily agreed to changing the title of his novel to Catch-22 because it had been submitted previously to twenty--one other publishers before being accepted.

TheOld College Try

Ten College Novels




College novels and stories set at universities are like class reunions; we are curious to revisit them but nervous about encountering old friends and our old self. Here are ten novels that reunite us with the specter of what we might have been and what we are now.

1. Philosophy 4 by Owen Wister (1901). Set in the Harvard of the late 1880s, this tale of young undergraduates trying to cram for a final exam in philosophy is simultaneously a snapshot of a time where the concept of higher education was locked in battle with career opportunism, and a satire on the last fling before settling down to work in the family business. This is an early work by the man who was later to write The Virginian, the iconic novel of the American West, itself a simultaneous snapshot of a time of romanticism and opportunism.

2. Stover at Yale by Owen Johnson (1911). Not to be outdone by a Harvard novel, Johnson, a Yalie, produced a plot-driven tale of Dink Stover, an athlete/scholar who rises through the rigid ranks of early twentieth century Ivy League social layering, torn between his attractions for the secret society and club life and his genuine desire for a first-class education and service to his alma mater. Stover at Yale ran serially in McClure’s magazine, where an eager public of Yalies and civilians awaited each installment; to this day it is on the shelves at the Yale bookstore.

3. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1920). A gifted combination of autobiography, wish fulfillment, and sociology, the narrative tracks Fitzgerald’s alter ego, Amory Blaine, through his career at Princeton, then to the Army during World War I, followed by dismal attempts at securing the success he sought as a writer during the years after the war. Nor was Amory successful in his pursuit of two young women he considered to be the loves of his life, his adventures ending somewhat as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ended, with the protagonist heading into the future, his only companion the confidence in his talent.

4. Stoner by John Williams (1965). A splendid example of a coming-of-age story, the narrative tracks the seeming destiny of William Stoner, a young man from a poor farming family, sent to an agricultural college only to fall so desperately in love with the world of literature that he switches to the state university, where he pursues a doctorate in medieval studies. Virtually ignored when it was published, Stoner has continually attracted the admiration of critics and novelists on both sides of the Atlantic.

5. The War between the Tates by Allison Lurie (1974). Against the subtext background of the Vietnam War, Brian Tate, an academic at a thinly veiled Cornell, married and father of two dreary teen-agers, has begun an affair with a ditsy young graduate student. Tate’s wife, more often than not the protagonist, rebels at the affair, then goes on to become even more rebellious when the graduate student discovers she is pregnant and refuses to consider an abortion.

6. Foolscap, or The Stages of Love by Michael Malone (1991). A bickering university faculty, rivalry for chairmanship of departments, and genius scholars, all menu items for the college novel, strut and fret their quirky moments on the stage of this drama-oriented romp. Drama prof Theo Ryan doesn’t see the implications of his newly written play, but Josh Rexford, America’s most acclaimed playwright does, and in the process turns young Ryan’s life upside down to get a revision done.

7. Moo by Jane Smiley (1995). College-based novels are often the place for satire, given the nature of faculty, students, and administration, all rancorously at one another’s throat, all deliciously tracking on separate agendas. Set in a Midwestern university devoted to the art and science of agriculture, featuring a hog named Earl Butz, we find amid the cow plop and satire an orgy of agricultural and academic chaos, paced as humor must be paced, but not too fast to override well-crafted portraits of the university species.

8. Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon (1995). Reaching into his own experiences with a novel that seemed easier to keep adding material to rather than finish it, Chabon has taken Professor Grady Tripp, currently in at over 2600 pages with his second novel, given him as a lover the wife of the college chancellor, added the complication of her being made pregnant by Tripp. Always able to make the implausible leap off the page as perfectly normal, Chabon further adds to Tripp’s woes a cantankerous student who has shot the University Chancellor’s dog and stolen the Chancellor’s prized possession, the jacket worn by Marilyn Monroe on her wedding day to Joe Di Maggio.

9. Straight Man by Richard Russo (1997). A significant Russo theme is family conflict, often demonstrated by a clash of agendas between father and son, a theme brought to the campus of an undistinguished college in Pennsylvania, where Hank Devereaux, nearing fifty, has a job as an English professor he hates, has not been effective as a novelist for a long while, suspects his wife may be having an affair, and is looking at the possibility that he has prostate cancer. Russo, who knows his way around farce, college campuses, and the fuzzy borders between humor and pathos, has engineered a confrontation between Devereaux and his father, the dean of literary critics as well, Devereaux is suspected of having used a golf club to kill a much beloved swan.

10. July, July by Tim O’Brien (2002). Using an ensemble cast for his major characters, O’Brien, famous at this point in his career for his war-based novels, orchestrated a head-on confrontation between the college reunion and middle age. There are few plot twists or surprises, but as the reunion begins and the alums arrive, then interact, there are considerable emotional wrenches along with their consequences.

There are significant others, such as Randall Jarrell’s biting satire Pictures from an Institution, Francine Prose’s Blue Angel, and John Hassler’s The Dean’s List, each in its way reminding us that the university is an institution of higher yearning. ##