Something Novel

It’s entirely something else now, but when I conceived of Round Bend Press I imagined it to be a conduit to my collection of plays at Lulu, the printing company that makes all this possible.

Anyone can publish a book these days, and that is a new democratic reality. However, as with democracy in general, it is not a perfect thing. A lot of crap has joined the publishing parade. (On the other hand, some very reputable presses, the mega-monoliths, publish their own fair share of crap.)

A few years ago I was brooding about not having a job and sending out dozens of resumes a week to various companies and hearing nothing back except a rare letter thanking me for my interest.

I was collecting unemployment at the time and working four to eight hours a day slamming out cover letters, fine tuning my approach to job hunting, and lamenting the old adage that says hunting for a job is the hardest job you'll ever have.

At the same time I was writing a novel.

Who in the hell is going to publish this I thought as I finished a draft. It hasn't novelistic qualities at all. It's a mystery, but not really a mystery. It's a crime novel, but not one in the ordinary sense. It's social satire, but loosely constructed. It's an anti-war novel, but marginally concerned with war. It's a social novel, but has elements of the anti-social throughout. What is it? Well, I thought, it's a slightly deranged stab at several genres at once and not a very good novel at all.

But there it sat in my laptop; several weeks of work come to naught.

Then I discovered Lulu. I'd never heard of it, but searching the Web for publishers, I read a story about "print-on-demand." Lulu was mentioned prominently in the story, so I investigated. I soon learned how the concept works and I decided to give it a try. I got terribly excited, typing my novel up as per the web site's suggestions, decoding the Cover Design template (but not fully), creating an actual book. Before this happened you might say I was out of touch. I still am usually, tagging along behind the masses, out of touch with what is happening in the technological world, movies, science, contemporary lit, art, pop culture, etc.

Holy cow! This is the job I've wanted all along, I realized as I worked at making my own book. I don't need to write deferential letters to strangers trying to convince them that I am a sincere hard worker who will do their company proud. I can do this instead!

Well, one can't simply stop looking for paying work, which I haven't, but let me put it this way—I now spend more time with Round Bend Press than I do with my futile job search. The economy is so bad in Oregon that I feel like quitting altogether and taking a tent into the woods; one would either die there or manage to live with the beasts. Or one could turn into a Ted Kaczynski-like figure, writing incendiary tracts against capital.

(I’m not advocating bombing anyone FBI guy. I’m not advocating anything here.)

I called my novel The Friends of Round Bend and self-published it at Lulu. The book wasn't ready to be published I discovered soon thereafter, having an assortment of typos and misspellings and a myriad of other problems (narrative, syntax, vocabulary, etc. etc.) All and all, a quite amateurish job filled with problems that I'd managed to overlook in my excitement to finally publish a book.

A slightly better issue of the novel was still up at Lulu until recently. I decided in the end that until I rewrite it or completely lose interest in its possibilities, I'll just leave it alone as a symbol of my subsequent efforts. (Today I have a collaborator on the project; perhaps something will come of that.)

It used to be said about Sherwood Anderson that he was a mediocre novelist and that short stories such as those he published in Winesburg, Ohio were as close to perfection as anything he wrote. His novels were too episodic, critics said. They lacked the necessary cohesion of the novel form, which is organic and fluid in structure. Winesburg, Ohio is indeed an unstructured, informal novel inasmuch as all the stories in it are interrelated. It is a fragmented glimpse, but not novelistic in the usual way we define the concept. As short stories however, the book is masterful.

The ideal novel wouldn't have chapters; it would open with the first sentence and each subsequent sentence would make perfect sense relative to the previous sentence and the next sentence, so that if one sentence diverged from its novelistic essence the entire structure of the thing would collapse and be indecipherable. In a sense, this is what Hemingway was talking about when he said his method was to write "one true sentence" at a time until a story was told. To banish the extraneous would then be the ultimate goal, giving the novel a ringing truth like the best haiku. A long novel would break into a myriad of haiku moments. No padding or flowering, simply the author's voice giving recognition to a moment or an object or a thing.

I imagine that nothing would ever to need happen in the novel if this were the case; it might perfect nothingness, which, as Sartre postulated, is the most significant realization of the way things are.

But of course Sartre may have been full of shit.


TS