The Music of Making

With the book House, I've been noticing this second time around that Tracy Kidder focuses on individuals with an eye toward bringing them together later in scenes that are often contentious. The effect is almost like a concerto, a musical composition in which individual instruments have solos, then they are all brought together to play in concert. Here is one definition of concerto from The Free Dictionary:

Musical composition for solo instrument and orchestra. . . . Nineteenth-century concertos were often conceived as a kind of dramatic struggle between soloist and orchestra; many later composers preferred that the soloist blend with the orchestra.

Wikipedia makes this contribution:

The etymology is uncertain, but the word seems to have origin from the conjunction of the two Latin words concert (meaning to tie, to join, to weave) and certamen (competition, fight): the idea is that the two parts in a concert, the soloist and the orchestra, alternate episodes of opposition and cooperation in the creation of the music flow. (Concerto)

That last bit--the idea of alternating "opposition and cooperation in the creation of the music flow"--is very similar to what Kidder is doing in House.  Each person involved in the house building has a section where we learn about him or her--what he or she thinks, what each person looks like, acts like, his or her speech, history, vices and virtues, almost as if the author is doing a character study. Then those individuals come together for a few pages. Like a concerto, there is the solo performance, then the ensemble, back and forth, over and over.

Once we start to get to know the people in Kidder's book (or as the writer has allowed us to know them), we try to anticipate how they will behave in group settings, how each will react to the moves of the others.  Such anticipation increases the tension in the story; we wait to see how things will turn out.  Will Jonathan, the owner and successful lawyer, manage to get a concession in price from the "rigid" builder? Will the carpenters feel like they're getting suitable compensation for their hard work?  Will the architect solidify the plans in time to begin framing?

Like a concerto, though, there is not always opposition; sometimes there is cooperation.  The exciting part is that you (the reader) never know which it's going to be. That's how Tracy Kidder keeps us reading, how he makes a seemingly mundane subject like building a house into a "dramatic struggle."

Detour: To the Galapagos Islands

This fall, when I started this project, one of the books I read is one I bought years ago: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time, by Jonathan Weiner.  It won a Pulitzer prize the year it came out, 1994, and received high praise from all who reviewed it, with good reason: it's a wonderful book.  Not only is it well written, it's revelatory. I thought I understood evolution before I read this book, but after reading the book, I realized I had only the barest notion of how species change.  What I discovered from The Beak of the Finch is that the process is much more complex and much more exciting than I could have ever guessed.

The author, Jonathan Weiner, tells the story of two scientists, Peter and Rosemary Grant, whose work with finches on the Galapagos Islands (Darwin's finches) began in 1973 and continues to this day.  Every year they spend months on the tiny barren islands out in the Pacific, intensely studying the finches who live there. They observe, measure, weigh, and tag the birds, recording and processing all the data, writing up the results.  After all these decades, they have gotten to know many generations of birds. And by know I mean intimately; they know them as individuals--when they are born, when and with what bird they mate, where they nest, the number and identity of their offspring, and when and by what means they die. Each bird is noticed, cared about throughout its life, mourned at its passing.

The book interweaves the story of the Grants with Darwin's story, and compares what he started to learn back in the 1830s with what the Grants have learned from their 20th century study--that the finch's beak (and other physical characteristics) is crucial to its survival, and that it changes over the course of generations of finches. That might not seem too earth-shattering a conclusion. After all, changes occur over generations in all species.  Humans as a group have become taller, for instance, in the centuries since Shakespeare's time. But what the Grants learn is that these changes are not just variations, but constitute the creation of new species of finch whose members don't mate with one another. And these different species exist simultaneously, sometimes diverging widely from one another, other times merging back into a single species.

But to me, that wasn't the most exciting revelation of the book. What I found the most eye-opening was the understanding that not only do such changes occur, but that they occur very quickly--not over eons but years, months even, especially for species who reproduce 4-5 times a year and mature in a matter of weeks as the Galapagos finches do.  And that this change from one species to another can just as quickly change back, can in fact change back and forth many times over decades so that the resulting finch seems hardly altered but is in fact the product of many back-and-forth fine tunings driven by environment and the struggle to survive.  We don't "see" evolution happening, but nonetheless it is happening all around us all the time.

This understanding made me look at human evolution in a different light.  I began to wonder whether the different early humans from millions of years ago were not successors but contemporaries, trying to survive in the same environment at roughly the same time. Maybe, instead of one human species triumphing over another as some paleontologists have theorized, the two species instead merged to create a third species that continued to change back and forth over the eons, diverging and merging, adapting to the changes in the earth's environment, even perhaps to our current era. (Could the Yeti, Sasquatch, Abominable Snowmen be in fact other human species?)

But how does Beak of the Finch fit with the controversy of evolution vs. creation that still continues? Well, I think it adds depth to the discussion.  We can't deny that changes occur in nature, whether you call it evolution or not. I believe there's room for the argument that God created nature with its built-in capacity to adapt and change, sometimes in a monumental way.  But that's a topic for another post.

From House to House

Merry Christmas, everyone!  It's a quiet morning here in Cincinnati, Ohio.  It snowed a little last night, just enough to give the world a bit of white frosting. No one's up but me, so I thought it would be a good time to post another report on my reading progress . . .

Having finished The Gun Seller, by the man who plays House on TV, I decided to switch to something different, this time a non-fiction book by one of my favorite authors, Tracy Kidder.  That book, entitled House, is about an actual house, the kind that gets built and people live in.

Published in 1985, House is the story of the building of a custom-designed house in Amherst, Massachusetts, from conception to completion.  Kidder introduces us to all the people principally involved in the project--owners, architect, builder, carpenters--and we get to know them over the course of the book.  That might sound like a dull story, but it's actually quite interesting.  Tracy makes it into a suspenseful narrative because of all the problems that arise, both practical and interpersonal.

I started reading this book about 15 years ago, but didn't get past the middle, so I'm having to start over to remember all the people and events.  But again I'm involved, with the project and the people, to the point where I'm waiting to see what happens.

So far, the plans have been made, the ground has been broken, and the builder is trying to come to an agreement on price with the owners.  There are negotiations, with the builder trying to stand firm on his price and the owners trying to get him to come down.  There's discussion about fundamental differences in the way people view how such deals should be made--the old "dicker vs. non-dicker" controversy.  Some people hate to dicker; other people live for it. That conflict comes up early in the book.  At this point, I don't know how they're going to resolve it.  I'll keep you posted.

This is the second of Tracy Kidder's books; the first was The Soul of a New Machine, published in 1981.  That was the story of a group of computer designers, back in 1978 when computers were still big and mysterious.  It's a fascinating look at that culture and gives readers insights into how our computer revolution came about.  I really enjoyed it.  In fact, remembering it now makes me want to read it again. 

Tracy Kidder writes about people in their environment, always with intelligence and compassion.  He's written about school teachers, residents of an old folks' home, small town police, crusading doctors, and even his Army detachment in Vietnam.  His latest is about a Haitian doctor.  I've read all but two--the Vietnam memoir and the latest.  I've started and will eventually finish the book about school teachers, Among Schoolchildren.  It's on my list.

The Solution to the Maze

Well, I finally finished Hugh Laurie's The Gun Seller this week. At about the middle of the book, when the maze-like plot finally started to clear up a little, there were a few enjoyable moments. It is about a gun seller (the villain) who is involved in military-industrial-complex-type nefarious deeds.  The hero (first person narrator) is a smart, strong man facing moral dilemmas throughout.  Of course, there's a beautiful dame or two thrown in for good measure.

It was entertaining, for the most part, and once the action started, there were fewer moments of excessively wordy descriptions (or perhaps I had gotten used to them by then), so I was able to forget I was reading a novel and start to care a little about the characters.

I'd recommend it to those who like Hugh Laurie and are curious about what he's like as a writer. But if you're looking for straight mystery/spy thriller fiction, better go elsewhere.

Words, Words, Words!

After putting it aside for a few weeks, when I plunged in again with Hugh Laurie's book, The Gun Seller, I began to notice a certain similarity of style to another book that was full of words, a book written centuries ago entitled The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne.  This book, a serial that started in 1759, is known for its multiple digressions and mixed-up chronological order, both traits that make it hard to read today. Yet once you get into it, it is rather strangely entertaining and funny--as long as you don't expect it to be like a normal narrative. It was the style of Sterne's book that came back to me when I began reading Laurie's book, to the point that I wondered if he consciously imitated Sterne, or whether it's simply a traditional British way of writing comedy.  Here's a sample from Tristram Shandy:

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me.—

You may have noticed that the above quote is a single sentence; indeed, it is the first sentence in the book.  Can you see the resemblance with Laurie's narrative?

Of course, any book that begins in this way is going to present challenges.  One of the challenges, in my opinion, is that such attention paid to words makes readers very much aware that they are reading a book, and that the book is fiction. With such a style, you can't entirely suspend disbelief and get immersed in the action. Reading Tristram Shandy or The Gun Seller is like sitting in a theater, trying to enjoy a play, but the person next to you is constantly poking you in the ribs, saying, "Did you get that? Isn't that a riot?" It makes for slow going, to say the least.

I'm finally getting to the part where there is some action, however.  I'll write more about that later.

In the Middle of Things

I'm starting this blog in medias res, or in the middle of things, you could say, since at this point I'm about 18 books into my quest. (See the list, in the left hand column.)  I started this project in the summer, and since then I've read a few histories, some novels, and a science book.  I'll be telling you about those books as I go along, taking a detour off the here-and-now road to discuss The Beak of the Finch or The Professor and the Madman or one of the others.

At the moment, I'm in the middle of a novel called The Gun Seller.  It was written by Hugh Laurie, who many of you probably know as the star of the TV show House.  I really like the show and the actor, which is one of the reasons I decided to get the book.  Curiously though, the book was published in 1996, long before the TV show got started and the actor became well known to the U.S. public.  It's Laurie's only novel to date, though he's apparently done other writing--screenplays, articles, songs. (I got biographical information from the only official website that I know of for Hugh Laurie, from Fox.) 

Laurie's obviously a multi-talented fellow, but I'm not sure what to make of the novel.  It's apparently intended to be a not-quite-serious take on a spy novel, something I figured out right away from the tone and the excessive verbiage.  I thought, is this guy serious?  There were so many words!!  I must confess I was put off by that when I first started the novel--so much so, in fact, that I stopped reading it.  It was just too hyperactive, if you can imagine a book being hyperactive.  Well, here's a sample:

Now, my question goes like this: do you break the arm quickly--snap, whoops, sorry, here let me help you with that improvised splint--or do you drag the whole business out for a good eight minutes, every now and then increasing the pressure in the tiniest of increments, until the pain becomes pink and green and hot and cold and altogether howlingly unbearable?(3)

That was only one sentence, mind you, and it was two paragraphs into the opening scene. Can you blame me for being a little bit put off?  I guess it is supposed to be humorous, but I found it nerve wracking, so I set it aside and read a couple of histories and a serious mystery novel before I returned to it, but I must say, even though I know it's supposed to be like that, the wordiness still distracts me.  I can picture Hugh Laurie saying the words, though, which helps me get into the spirit of things.

I'm still only about 2/3 the way done--partly because it's not a book you can really entirely get into (for the reasons mentioned).  But I'll talk more about that and the book's other features in my next post.