The Crimson Petal and the White, by Michel Faber

I mentioned this here before.

This is a very long historical novel about a Victorian prostitute, Sugar, whose brilliance and ambition is spent making her customers very, very happy, and on writing a semi-autobiographical wish-fulfillment novel in which a prostitute named Sugar inventively murders all her customers; William Rackham, who is pretty much a loser until he falls for Sugar, and she repays him and uses him by letting her smarts and his money transform him into a perfume magnate; Agnes, Rackham's mad and religiously obsessed wife, who hallucinates nightly about being cared for at the Convent of Healing; Sophie, their young daughter, who seems to take more after Sugar that she does after either of her parents, at least in the brains department; Henry, Rackham's sweet, socially awkward, devout brother, who is guiltily in love with; Emmeline Fox, an independent-minded and socially progressive widow who works with an organization that tries to get women out of prostitution, but is hampered by its inability to offer them opportunities that are actually better.

I feel so torn about whether or not I should recommend this book. About four-fifths of it was brilliant and entertaining and incredibly well-written and well-characterized, and I would recommend that part unless you have a very low tolerance for excessive scatology and tragic irony.

Aaaaand then there's the last part, which was still well-written but in which the plot takes some strange turns when characters do things that don't make a whole lot of sense, and then, just as events seem to be building toward a climax, the whole thing just stops.

I like open-ended conclusions of the sort where you have enough knowledge of the characters to make a reasoned choice between which of several outcomes might happen, or the sort that conclude with the sense that while this story is over, the lives of the characters will continue and there will be other stories that will remain unwritten. But this is not that sort of ending. It's just a stop, with nothing concluded, at least one very important mystery left unsolved, and with the reader not in possession of enough information to determine what had happened, or what might happen next.

This is doubly frustrating because the entire conceit of the book is that the narrator tells us things that the characters cannot know. This is one of the book's best and most powerful devices, such as the moment when the narrator tells us that the mad wife, Agnes, has a brain tumor-- something none of the characters could possibly know at that stage of medical science, nor do anything about if they did know. So with that device in place, and so important in the rest of the book, it makes no sense for the readers to be suddenly deprived of information about what had happened right before the ending, and then deprived of an ending as well.

( Massive spoilers regarding specifics of the last fifth )

Success

Apropos of discussions going on in the journals of janni, sartorias, and others, regarding what defines success and failure as a writer, how to manage failure, and how to know whether to persevere or give up, I thought I'd mention a conversation I had with a friend the other day on a related topic.

I was grumbling to her that I kept having "big breaks" that ended up being not quite as big as I'd hoped: a play off-Broadway-- that no one saw; staff writer on a TV show-- that was ignominiously canceled after no one saw it; sold a book-- that did not hit the bestseller list, and so did not cause all doors to be opened to me.

There are levels of success: first publication, regular publication, full-time writing (not now, but I have been there in the past), and-- the great, elusive goal-- to be able to write whatever I want and automatically get it accepted, as long as it's good. And I mean in all the media I write for-- not just books, but comic books and articles. For movies, TV, and plays, which operate under different constraints, the ability to at least automatically get it seriously considered. Offhand, the only people I know personally who have reached the Big Goal are Neil Gaiman and perhaps Holly Black. I know plenty more who would count if I knocked off the "all media" requirement.

But I think I'm closer to that goal with the latest "big break" under my belt. So it seems that my career, at least, is not really about waiting for the big break that will catapult me to where I want to be, but more like a ladder with some broken rungs, where you periodically slip down a few, but keep going up, and cannot just fly to the top.

And by "broken rungs," I mean things like literally thousands of rejections, getting my TV show canceled, and spending seven years writing a novel that I still haven't finished.

I manage failure by thinking of it as the possibly temporary failure of an individual project, not the failure of my life. Projects can always be revived and recycled. And if not, there's always something new.

Now, I suppose I was always talented. In fact a way with words is really my only talent, if you define it mean "something one has always been good at, and which gets better than most people can make it when you work at it." By "most people" I mean "most of the population," not "most writers."

But whether other people should persevere or not, I really can't say unless that particular person asks me. And even then I can only comment regarding how much talent and skill I think they have. Whether it's worth it or not to them is something that they know better than me. Whether they mind a lot of failure, which comes with the teritory; whether it bothers them that they probably won't feel like writing a lot of the time; whether they want to have a career that frequently consists of enacting my icon; whether they'll be content with the odds that they will never be able to give up their day job; that's not something I can determine. I can't even say, "Don't do it if it doesn't make you happy," because it might make you happy later, not everyone has happiness as their highest goal, and maybe doing something else would make you even more unhappy.

All I can say is this: I see a lot of talent on LJ, I've seen a lot of people here publish for the first time in the last few years, and I'd like to see more of you get your writing out on the shelves. So if it's really what you want to do... I'm rooting for you.

Success

Apropos of discussions going on in the journals of janni, sartorias, and others, regarding what defines success and failure as a writer, how to manage failure, and how to know whether to persevere or give up, I thought I'd mention a conversation I had with a friend the other day on a related topic.

I was grumbling to her that I kept having "big breaks" that ended up being not quite as big as I'd hoped: a play off-Broadway-- that no one saw; staff writer on a TV show-- that was ignominiously canceled after no one saw it; sold a book-- that did not hit the bestseller list, and so did not cause all doors to be opened to me.

There are levels of success: first publication, regular publication, full-time writing (not now, but I have been there in the past), and-- the great, elusive goal-- to be able to write whatever I want and automatically get it accepted, as long as it's good. And I mean in all the media I write for-- not just books, but comic books and articles. For movies, TV, and plays, which operate under different constraints, the ability to at least automatically get it seriously considered. Offhand, the only people I know personally who have reached the Big Goal are Neil Gaiman and perhaps Holly Black. I know plenty more who would count if I knocked off the "all media" requirement.

But I think I'm closer to that goal with the latest "big break" under my belt. So it seems that my career, at least, is not really about waiting for the big break that will catapult me to where I want to be, but more like a ladder with some broken rungs, where you periodically slip down a few, but keep going up, and cannot just fly to the top.

And by "broken rungs," I mean things like literally thousands of rejections, getting my TV show canceled, and spending seven years writing a novel that I still haven't finished.

I manage failure by thinking of it as the possibly temporary failure of an individual project, not the failure of my life. Projects can always be revived and recycled. And if not, there's always something new.

Now, I suppose I was always talented. In fact a way with words is really my only talent, if you define it mean "something one has always been good at, and which gets better than most people can make it when you work at it." By "most people" I mean "most of the population," not "most writers."

But whether other people should persevere or not, I really can't say unless that particular person asks me. And even then I can only comment regarding how much talent and skill I think they have. Whether it's worth it or not to them is something that they know better than me. Whether they mind a lot of failure, which comes with the teritory; whether it bothers them that they probably won't feel like writing a lot of the time; whether they want to have a career that frequently consists of enacting my icon; whether they'll be content with the odds that they will never be able to give up their day job; that's not something I can determine. I can't even say, "Don't do it if it doesn't make you happy," because it might make you happy later, not everyone has happiness as their highest goal, and maybe doing something else would make you even more unhappy.

All I can say is this: I see a lot of talent on LJ, I've seen a lot of people here publish for the first time in the last few years, and I'd like to see more of you get your writing out on the shelves. So if it's really what you want to do... I'm rooting for you.