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The Chinese Duplication
Mar. 6th, 2003 07:30 amSimon Lipskar did, in fact, reply to me:
Dear Ms. DiLucchio:
If you can forgive my impertinence at making a suggestion such as this on the basis of fifty pages, a synopsis and your email to which I'm replying, I think you're biting off more than you can chew for a novel that needs to work commercially. Waiting 15,000 words to settle into a relationship with your characters is asking too much of readers, I fear; writing a novel that really works as a supernatural thriller but also as humor -- meaning not that it has comic moments but that it is a comedy -- is a task I would hesitate to set in front of Henry James, never mind Chaucer (I'm not saying it can't be done, but you yourself wrote that it's never been done successfully before, so I don't need to convince you that it's a Sysiphussian task).
You mentioned TROPIC OF NIGHT, obviously a novel that one could generically describe as a supernatural thriller. Of course, it is marvelously complex, provocative and fiercely intelligent as well -- it's "deeper" than 99.9% of the stuff that gets sold as literary fiction. What makes it work in the commercial marketplace, though, is that it both involves us very deeply in the lives of its main characters pretty much from the first sentence and that the author has wrapped his ideas and themes in an awesomely suspenseful and compelling narrative that grabs us from the very first page.
In any event, we could go back and forth like this for quite some time. I can't, based on the concerns I have with the pages I read, justify reading the complete manuscript at this time -- as I'm sure you can guess, every author to whom I respond personally with more than a form rejection is convinced that if I would only read the complete manuscript I would be swayed; however, should you at some point decide to revise the manuscript in such a way that would seem to ameliorate the issues I raised, I'd be happy to reconsider.
Best of luck.
Yours,
Simon Lipskar
This is a man I would like to work with. Intelligent, generous – he must be to compose such a considered, thoughtful response to a stranger – and obviously wise to the workings of the commercial marketplace. Is he right about my book? That's irrelevant. There are numerous artists' paths, and one of them, clearly, is to squat on the margin and over the years develop some sort of respectability (Bukowski, Kerouak, Van Gogh.) Another is to start out giving an audience what it wants and then once they're hooked, take them where you want them to go.
In either case, best case scenario for Saturday Night In the Sky would obviously be for Ralph Vicinanza to pick it up. The themes, the subtext, the characterizations are all too deeply interwoven in the structure – four alternating points of view. I was trying to fine-tune the prose in such a way that the reader's metabolism would actually shift between POV passages and to a large extent, particularly in the second half of the book, I think I succeeded.
However, I think Lipskar is right that I don't – didn't – have the technical chops to pull it off. The novel is flawed. This becomes most obvious in the second-to-the-last chapter where I literally wrote myself into a corner and had to rely on a creaky and unsatisfying deus-ex-machina device to pull the characters out of the cul de sac in which they'd become trapped. This actually is not so big a problemo in midlist genre fiction which is filled with Douglas Adams/Tom Robbins wannabes. And, again, this is not so bad for a first novel.
Revising the novel to meet Lipskar's specifications would be such a laborious undertaking that it would make more sense to begin writing a new novel, crafted to his sensibilities. The Chinese Dalai Lama clone is a pretty respectable thriller meme, I think. I looked over those first few chapters I typed in December, coming down off my manic creative jag – Esmond Ridenour, the tortured Brit art historian restoring the ruined gomba in Mustang, his menage-a-trois with the blonde and glacial Grace (his ex-wife) and the dead climber Fitter – all strong, interesting stuff, from chapter 2.
Chapter 1 is useless – the discovery of the body of a dead Chinese scientist, written through the POV of a 12 year old boy who never reappears again. I think what might work here instead would be a kind of Bruce Shoemaker introject – a rich, American Marxist, deliberately playing poor, who works a program manager for a foundation that gives grants to projects throughout India and Nepal. The foundation funds the restoration of an ancient Buddhist monastery in Mustang (which I will rename) and Chapter 1 covers his trip from the airport in Katmandu to the small town of Lo Dzong.
Dear Ms. DiLucchio:
If you can forgive my impertinence at making a suggestion such as this on the basis of fifty pages, a synopsis and your email to which I'm replying, I think you're biting off more than you can chew for a novel that needs to work commercially. Waiting 15,000 words to settle into a relationship with your characters is asking too much of readers, I fear; writing a novel that really works as a supernatural thriller but also as humor -- meaning not that it has comic moments but that it is a comedy -- is a task I would hesitate to set in front of Henry James, never mind Chaucer (I'm not saying it can't be done, but you yourself wrote that it's never been done successfully before, so I don't need to convince you that it's a Sysiphussian task).
You mentioned TROPIC OF NIGHT, obviously a novel that one could generically describe as a supernatural thriller. Of course, it is marvelously complex, provocative and fiercely intelligent as well -- it's "deeper" than 99.9% of the stuff that gets sold as literary fiction. What makes it work in the commercial marketplace, though, is that it both involves us very deeply in the lives of its main characters pretty much from the first sentence and that the author has wrapped his ideas and themes in an awesomely suspenseful and compelling narrative that grabs us from the very first page.
In any event, we could go back and forth like this for quite some time. I can't, based on the concerns I have with the pages I read, justify reading the complete manuscript at this time -- as I'm sure you can guess, every author to whom I respond personally with more than a form rejection is convinced that if I would only read the complete manuscript I would be swayed; however, should you at some point decide to revise the manuscript in such a way that would seem to ameliorate the issues I raised, I'd be happy to reconsider.
Best of luck.
Yours,
Simon Lipskar
This is a man I would like to work with. Intelligent, generous – he must be to compose such a considered, thoughtful response to a stranger – and obviously wise to the workings of the commercial marketplace. Is he right about my book? That's irrelevant. There are numerous artists' paths, and one of them, clearly, is to squat on the margin and over the years develop some sort of respectability (Bukowski, Kerouak, Van Gogh.) Another is to start out giving an audience what it wants and then once they're hooked, take them where you want them to go.
In either case, best case scenario for Saturday Night In the Sky would obviously be for Ralph Vicinanza to pick it up. The themes, the subtext, the characterizations are all too deeply interwoven in the structure – four alternating points of view. I was trying to fine-tune the prose in such a way that the reader's metabolism would actually shift between POV passages and to a large extent, particularly in the second half of the book, I think I succeeded.
However, I think Lipskar is right that I don't – didn't – have the technical chops to pull it off. The novel is flawed. This becomes most obvious in the second-to-the-last chapter where I literally wrote myself into a corner and had to rely on a creaky and unsatisfying deus-ex-machina device to pull the characters out of the cul de sac in which they'd become trapped. This actually is not so big a problemo in midlist genre fiction which is filled with Douglas Adams/Tom Robbins wannabes. And, again, this is not so bad for a first novel.
Revising the novel to meet Lipskar's specifications would be such a laborious undertaking that it would make more sense to begin writing a new novel, crafted to his sensibilities. The Chinese Dalai Lama clone is a pretty respectable thriller meme, I think. I looked over those first few chapters I typed in December, coming down off my manic creative jag – Esmond Ridenour, the tortured Brit art historian restoring the ruined gomba in Mustang, his menage-a-trois with the blonde and glacial Grace (his ex-wife) and the dead climber Fitter – all strong, interesting stuff, from chapter 2.
Chapter 1 is useless – the discovery of the body of a dead Chinese scientist, written through the POV of a 12 year old boy who never reappears again. I think what might work here instead would be a kind of Bruce Shoemaker introject – a rich, American Marxist, deliberately playing poor, who works a program manager for a foundation that gives grants to projects throughout India and Nepal. The foundation funds the restoration of an ancient Buddhist monastery in Mustang (which I will rename) and Chapter 1 covers his trip from the airport in Katmandu to the small town of Lo Dzong.
