I caught a glimpse of an intriguing title the other day, "Our Souls at Night." What a great title, I thought. So I picked up the novel whose title it is, by an author I had never heard of, and began to read. I was not impressed at first, but put off by the spare writing, overly simple and flat-footed and awkward as if by intention. If some writing is 'mannered,' this, the second paragraph, struck me as 'anti-mannered':
They lived a block apart on Cedar Street in the oldest part of town with elm trees and hackberry and a single maple grown up along the curb and green lawns running back from the sidewalk to the two-story houses. It had been warm in the day but it had turned off cool now in the evening. She went along the sidewalk under the the trees and turned in at Louis's house.
Turned off cool? Next sentence: turned in?
Perhaps my preciosity is showing. Or I am just quibbling. But I read on, and was sucked in. A good novelist has the power to draw the reader into his world and keep him there, page after page. But I am only 30 pages in, so no more commentary from me. Let the author speak. He tells his story in The Making of a Writer. A fine piece of writing. A couple of passages struck me. The first helps explain Haruf's simple style.
During that period of my life out on the high plains, I was more or less a happy kid, I think, and I survived childhood with only a few hard lessons that I still remember. One was: don’t you be a show-off, and I have tried to abide by that injunction ever since, with all its contradictions and complications.
And here he makes a point I have often made:
If I had learned anything over those years of work and persistence, it was that you had to believe in yourself even when no one else did. And later I often said something like that to my graduate students. You have to believe in yourself despite the evidence. I felt as though I had a little flame of talent, not a big talent, but a little pilot-light-sized flame of talent, and I had to tend to it regularly, religiously, with care and discipline, like a kind of monk or acolyte, and not to ever let the little flame go out.
I would put it like this: You have to believe in yourself beyond the evidence, evidence which, in the beginning, is insufficient to justify belief in one's powers. Take that, W. K. Clifford.
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