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When Characters Come Off the Page
Oct. 16th, 2025 10:25 amCooler weather is turning me contemplative. All I really want to do is lounge on my couch and read. And I want to read immersive books, books that you don't read so much as live.
Immersive books are not necessarily good books. I wouldn't call the Cormoran Strike series, for example, particularly well-written (though it is better written than its author's earlier Harry Potter series.) But its prose is serviceable enough to support the weight of all those details, the underwriting of an entire imagined universe so that I actually see the characters (and no, the Cormoran Strike I see doesn't look anything like Tom Burke in the television series). The narrative's events have their own folder in my brain's filing system: not with the memory of real events but also not with the scattered impressions of made-up things. It's very strange.
Every once in a while, you stumble across a book that is both good and immersive. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell is such a book. I am doing my annual reread and wondering, Why aren't there more books like this one?
And also musing on Susannah Clarke's own perplexingly strange fate: After she finished Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell, which is brilliant in every possible way, she became incapable of writing. It's as though the Gentleman With the Thistledown Hair, furious over her unflattering portrait, slapped her with a curse, perhaps a cease & desist suit in fairy court. (She did publish two slim volumes after Jonathan Strange, but they were trunk stories, written before the novel.)
I wonder what people who don't read do when they're feeling contemplative?
###
Money in the bank is making me complacent.
Really, I should not be lolling on the couch, book in hand, because I've got a shitload of stuff to do and will be hanging out with real-life Flavia in the City all weekend long, which shaves a couple of days off the time I have to do things.
I have been wondering whether I should tell real-life Flavia about the chick-lit novel.
In the first two chapters, she's characterized as this rich dilittante, and I rather think her feelings would be hurt if she found this out.
You're BRAVE, real-life Daria told me.
Yes, I answered. Writing semi-autobiographical fiction is fraught with danger, which is why I have spent the last who-know-how-many-years writing a novel about June Miller, wife of Henry Miller, BFF of Anaïs Nin. Anaïs Nin’s feelings are not gonna get hurt if I describe HER as a rich dilettante.
Flavia’s character does deepen & get richer as the novel progresses. The third part of the novel will be written entirely in Flavia’s first-person POV, & in the fourth part of the novel, Grazia, Daria, & Flavia go off on a wacky roadtrip together to spread Neal’s ashes, & they’re all BFF, basking in mutual admiration.
Immersive books are not necessarily good books. I wouldn't call the Cormoran Strike series, for example, particularly well-written (though it is better written than its author's earlier Harry Potter series.) But its prose is serviceable enough to support the weight of all those details, the underwriting of an entire imagined universe so that I actually see the characters (and no, the Cormoran Strike I see doesn't look anything like Tom Burke in the television series). The narrative's events have their own folder in my brain's filing system: not with the memory of real events but also not with the scattered impressions of made-up things. It's very strange.
Every once in a while, you stumble across a book that is both good and immersive. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell is such a book. I am doing my annual reread and wondering, Why aren't there more books like this one?
And also musing on Susannah Clarke's own perplexingly strange fate: After she finished Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell, which is brilliant in every possible way, she became incapable of writing. It's as though the Gentleman With the Thistledown Hair, furious over her unflattering portrait, slapped her with a curse, perhaps a cease & desist suit in fairy court. (She did publish two slim volumes after Jonathan Strange, but they were trunk stories, written before the novel.)
I wonder what people who don't read do when they're feeling contemplative?
###
Money in the bank is making me complacent.
Really, I should not be lolling on the couch, book in hand, because I've got a shitload of stuff to do and will be hanging out with real-life Flavia in the City all weekend long, which shaves a couple of days off the time I have to do things.
I have been wondering whether I should tell real-life Flavia about the chick-lit novel.
In the first two chapters, she's characterized as this rich dilittante, and I rather think her feelings would be hurt if she found this out.
You're BRAVE, real-life Daria told me.
Yes, I answered. Writing semi-autobiographical fiction is fraught with danger, which is why I have spent the last who-know-how-many-years writing a novel about June Miller, wife of Henry Miller, BFF of Anaïs Nin. Anaïs Nin’s feelings are not gonna get hurt if I describe HER as a rich dilettante.
Flavia’s character does deepen & get richer as the novel progresses. The third part of the novel will be written entirely in Flavia’s first-person POV, & in the fourth part of the novel, Grazia, Daria, & Flavia go off on a wacky roadtrip together to spread Neal’s ashes, & they’re all BFF, basking in mutual admiration.
