The Oceans and the Stars

A skilled mariner, gifted with leadership, cunning, and physical tenacity, longs to return home from a long and dangerous wartime voyage. Unaccountable powers hinder and undermine him and his stouthearted resistance brings down their wrath. They throw extra hazards and unreasonable anathemas in his way. Men die. He may never see home again. Meanwhile, the woman he left behind, a woman as smart and tough as him, is surrounded and menaced by men who see little in her but advancement for themselves. And every day they spend apart they grow older, that time together lost irrevocably.

One of the most remarkable things about Homer’s work and the Odyssey in particular is that no matter how familiar it becomes, it is always fresh. The Oceans and the Stars, the latest novel by Mark Helprin, clearly demonstrates that. Though not a retelling—Lord knows we don’t need any more of those—it draws inspiration from the Odyssey in new and exciting ways.

After a short prologue in which the Navy prepares a court martial against Captain Stephen Rensselaer on capital charges, The Oceans and the Stars flashes back to the moment that set him on course for this fate. Fifty-two years old, overdue for promotion to admiral and retirement, Rensselaer has been appointed to a cushy advisory job under the Secretary of the Navy. A SEAL during Operation Desert Storm and commander of a patrol coastal or PC, the smallest class of ship in the US Navy, Rensselaer learns that the unnamed president plans to scrap the PCs simply because they’re small and, in an Oval Office meeting to which his boss has brought him as an expert advisor, speaks his mind. The president has him transferred to New Orleans to oversee the construction of the final commissioned PC. It’s not a demotion, but it’s meant as an insult. Rensselaer takes the job seriously.

It’s in New Orleans that he meets Katy Farrar, a tax lawyer whose husband left her and whose children sided with him. Cut adrift and lonely, she and Rensselaer meet on a streetcar and fall in love. Both intelligent, good at what they do, but abandoned and railroaded into career dead-ends with not enough years left to start over, they are ideally matched. Rensselaer plans to complete this final, cutting-edge PC—which he has named USS Athena—turn it over to the Navy, cut his losses, and retire. Then war breaks out.

Interestingly, as The Oceans and the Stars was published two years ago, the war pits the United States against Iran. With the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean aflame, Rensselaer finds himself with a war command. He takes aboard supplies, ammunition, and a half-squad of SEALs and steams out of Norfolk. He has just enough time before he ships out to ask Katy to marry him.

The bulk of the novel concerns Rensselaer and the Athena’s combat cruise, which I don’t want to spoil by summarizing here. Pitted against an Iranian battleship equipped with new Russian technology, a band of ISIS pirates operating out of Somalia, hazardous seas, inhospitable terrain along the coasts, and a chain of command reaching all the way up to the president who booted Rensselaer from the Pentagon, Rensselaer, the Athena, and her crew are sorely tested. And, as that prologue reminds us, there looms on the horizon a court martial—final judgment.

I led off with the Odyssey and though Helprin models the story on Homer, it is not a slavish retelling or adaptation. This makes his actual use of the themes and rhythms of Homer as well as specific episodes not only feel organic to this modern story but much, much more clever. One example from early in the book: as the ship passes through the Straits of Gibraltar, so many men crowd the port rail to ogle the load of topless women aboard a British millionaire’s yacht that the Athena rocks underfoot. Rensselaer has to call them back to themselves and remember their duties as American sailors. Their unseriousness and lust is a threat not only to good order but to the entire ship—the sirens, transferred effortlessly to our world.

Helprin, a veteran of the IDF, renders the voyages, shipboard life, and military culture realistically. And as in any good war novel, he prepares both his characters and readers so carefully for combat that the action offers a breathtaking release of tension. Athena’s confrontations with her enemies, whether the more powerful Iranian vessel or the more ruthless ISIS pirates and the hostages they take aboard a cruise ship, are intensely suspenseful and both horrifying and exciting once they spill over into combat. I’ve seldom been as absorbed in a character’s situation as I was in Rensselaer’s confrontation with ISIS, whose tactics are accurately and disturbingly portrayed.

Though The Oceans and the Stars is a good war story and treats its military setting and technological aspects seriously, with well-explained detail that doesn’t bog the story down, it is also character-driven in a way that similar novels often aren’t. Rensselaer and Katy (her first name is Penelope, by the way) are the most fully formed characters, but supporting characters like Holworthy, the disgruntled Texan commander of Athena’s SEALs, who nurses a childhood wound that drives his service in the Navy, or Movius, Rensselaer’s Jewish XO, who falls in love with a girl while in port at Haifa on the way to the Indian Ocean, are excellent supporting characters. And looming above and at the edges of the story is the president, a capricious autocrat behind much of the misery Rensselaer endures—and overcomes.

There is politics in this novel, but of a refreshing kind. The president is an almost perfect blend of the worst qualities of the last several, and even his political party is not mentioned. The words “Republican” and “Democrat” are used once apiece, by my count, and in no way affect the plot. Rensselaer’s voyage takes place during an election cycle, and just as the lofty machinations of the gods change things for Odysseus, the election matters in unexpected ways for Rensselaer.

What matters to Rensselaer is his duty as a sailor, as an officer of the US Navy, and his love for Katy. He is clear about this. (If The Oceans and the Stars has any fault, it is a tendency toward speechifying in the characters—Rensselaer offhandedly lectures his crew on several occasions—but this is a vestige, I think, of that classical imprint on the story.) As with the nonpartisan politics, it was refreshing to read a story in which courage, duty, and love of country were straightforwardly and unironically spoken of an acted upon. Helprin doesn’t explicitly draw a contrast between Rensselaer and his crew and the gods in Washington, but it’s there, and it’s razor sharp.

While I enjoyed The Oceans and the Stars for its sailing, strategizing, and combat, it most moved me in its love story. I just turned forty-one, perhaps too young to be feeling this way, but Rensselaer and Katy’s predicament—alone, adrift, failed, and unable even to look forward to children—filled me with a powerful wistfulness I still find hard to describe. This is the nostalgia of Homer’s original—nostalgia being the pain of longing to go home. Like Homer, Helprin makes us feel it achingly. And like Homer, he brings his characters redemption in surprising and beautifully satisfying ways.

I’ve heard a lot about Mark Helprin over the years but this is the first of his novels that I’ve read. I will read others. Suspenseful, exciting, realistically and disturbingly violent without getting lost in the horror, The Oceans and the Stars is also powerfully moving—one of the most vivid and engaging novels I’ve read so far this year.

Like, totally

Writing in The American Scholar, novelist Max Byrd considers the simile: its varieties, uses, and abuses. He is correct to begin with the unusual pleasure a striking simile can provide:

“His smile was as stiff as a frozen fish,” writes Raymond Chandler. “He vanished abruptly, like an eel going into the mud,” writes P. G. Wodehouse, the undoubted master of the form. Or Kingsley Amis’s probably first-hand description of a hangover: “He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning.”

Here are two similes packed inside one another in one Chesterton’s most dramatic settings, from The Man Who Was Thursday:

They passed through several such passages, and came out at last into a queer steel chamber with curved walls, almost spherical in shape, but presenting, with its tiers of benches, something of the appearance of a scientific lecture-theatre. There were no rifles or pistols in this apartment, but round the walls of it were hung more dubious and dreadful shapes, things that looked like the bulbs of iron plants, or the eggs of iron birds. They were bombs, and the very room itself seemed like the inside of a bomb.

These examples showcase the more familiar form of simile, the “comparison using ‘like’ or ‘as’” that we all learn about in school. How about the epic or Homeric simile? These extended comparisons can stretch line upon line through the middle of the action of a poem. Byrd:

It takes a dramatic mind to carry a comparison through so logically and so far. The Homeric simile evokes a world far larger than a single flash of thought, however clever. Its length creates a scene in our minds, even a drama where contraries come alive: an army driving into battle, an ocean tamed into a harmless old gent, a bloody clash in the streets between aristocrats and rebels.

The epic simile is one of the keys to Homer’s markedly cinematic effects. In addition to its evocative and scenic qualities, as described by Byrd, it also works as slow-motion. Consider this in the middle of one-on-one combat in Book XIII of the Iliad:

[Aeneas] went against Idomeneus, strongly eager for battle,
yet no fear gripped Idomeneus as if he were a stripling,
but he stood his ground like a mountain wild boar who in the confidence
of his strength stands up to a great rabble of men advancing
upon him in some deserted place, and bristles his back up,
and both his eyes are shining with fire; he grinds his teeth
in his fury to fight off the dogs and the men. So
spear-famed Idomeneus held his ground and would not give way[.]

That’s Richmond Lattimore’s translation. In his more colloquial, dynamic translation, Stanley Lombardo breaks these similes out typographically to give them yet further emphasis. The pausing effect, which concentrates the imagination, is magnificent. Homer employs it a lot, to great effect.

To return to Byrd, what all good similes have in common—and what bad, forced, or embarrassing similes fail at—is vision:

“Perceptive of resemblances,” writes Aristotle, is what the maker of similes must be. There is one more step. The maker of similes, long or short, must perceive resemblances and then, above all, obey the first, and maybe only, commandment for a writer: to make you see. Consider Wodehouse’s “He found Lord Emsworth, as usual, draped like a wet sock over the rail of the Empress’s G.H.Q.,” or Patricia Cornwell’s “My thoughts scattered like marbles.”

“To make you see.” Good similes will not only catch superficial “resemblances,” as Aristotle puts it, but will draw attention to parallels on multiple levels. The best will not only evoke vivid, concrete images but convey moral import. In that passage from The Man Who Was Thursday, Chesterton doesn’t have to tell us how dangerous and unnatural this place is, we see it. In the Amis one at the beginning of this post (from Lucky Jim) we see Jim Dixon’s agonized posture in bed. And in that passage from Homer we see, in detail, Idomeneus’s tenacity, ferocity, and defiance.

We all know to show, not tell, but sometimes showing something else is the best way to tell us about the thing in question.

My favorite of my own similes comes from my master’s thesis. In describing the defensive situation of King Harold Godwinson with regard to his exiled brother Tostig in 1066—knowing all the while that two greater threats, King Harald Hardrada of Norway and Duke William the Bastard of Normandy, were also out there, plotting—I wrote:

Harold probably expected Tostig to join up with one of the two pretenders to the throne and return to his earldom remora-like, attached to the belly of a more powerful predator.

I remember this with satisfaction because my advisor actually wrote “Nice” in the margin, a compliment that did a great deal of good to me when I needed it. I was going to say it’s a shame I spent this one on my thesis, but as that’s still likely my most widely read work I guess that’s fine. A part of me is still hanging onto it for later, though.

Byrd goes on to consider the similarities and differences between similes and metaphors, the simile’s “childlike” qualities, and the work of imaginative preparation the “like” or “as” in a simile does to us as we read. It’s a delightful essay. Read the whole thing here.

Powers and Jacobs on history and fiction

Over the weekend on his new Substack, Tim Powers explained how he comes up with the plots of his historical fantasy novels by scrutinizing works of history and biography for the odd and inexplicable, moments the historians can’t account for with the evidence they have to work with:

A number of people who knew Lord Byron saw him on a street in London in 1811, while at that precise time Byron was delirious with a fever in Turkey. Biographers simply note the fact, leaving any possible explanation up in the air.

Why was Byron in two places at once?

Other examples abound: Edison’s dying breath in a bottle, Arthur Conan Doyle’s endorsement of obviously fake photos of fairies, a cockamamie experiment by Galileo to determine the speed of light. Powers takes these moments and, saving the appearances, makes the inexplicable explicable with magic.

This week at his blog, Alan Jacobs wrote about Irish novelist Thomas Flanagan’s loose trilogy about Ireland’s wars for independence (as well as Flanagan’s friendship with the great Seamus Heaney). In describing a moment in which a man’s memory of a friend is altered by previously unknown history—part of the cycle of “ever-ramifying and ever-elusive historical truth”—Jacobs notes that

For some, of course, the appeal of history is to unearth secrets, however carefully hidden—perhaps not to know everything, but to know more and more, even at the cost of digging up old bones (metaphorically and sometimes literally). And for still others, the appeal of fiction is to imagine all that the historian will never discover. This is perhaps why Flanagan wrote novels.

Both Powers and Jacobs are getting at the way fiction can press beyond the limits of responsible historiography into mystery—literal mysteries in the case of Powers, the everyday mysteries of life in Flanagan. These are things fiction can get at truthfully where history can only speculate. The result—speaking as someone with a foot in both camps, historian and novelist—if done well and responsibly, can reconcile irreconcilable facts and capture the what-it-was-likeness of the past. It can feel more real than reality.

Per Chesterton in The Everlasting Man, writing of the experience of ordinary people in past ages:

So long as we neglect this subjective side of history, which may more simply be called the inside of history, there will always be a certain limitation on that science which can be better transcended by art. So long as the historian cannot do that, fiction will be truer than fact. There will be more reality in a novel; yes, even in a historical novel.

Yes, I’ve quoted that passage here before (here and here and alluded to here), but it’s been a few years and, as much as I struggle not to repeat myself, I ought to be able to include an occasional invocation of one of my intellectual lodestars as a treat.

Both posts above are good. Check them out.

The Ambler paradox

Last night I finished reading Judgment on Deltchev, Eric Ambler’s first postwar novel and a masterpiece of plotting, tension, and especially foreshadowing. (Seriously—if I ever teach creative writing in any capacity, I will assign this or another of Ambler’s early thrillers to teach foreshadowing.) It also has many of Ambler’s sharp, wry observations.

Here’s one from near the end. The narrator, Foster, an English playwright commissioned to report on a show trial unfolding in an unnamed Balkan country, finds himself entangled like many another Ambler protagonist in the preexisting schemes of people much more nefarious and capable than he is. Gradually he becomes a pawn.

In a passage foreshadowing some of what is to come, Foster notes that the Stalinist puppet regime, later, will scapegoat him, condemning him as an agent of British intelligence (among other things), an accusation he finds painfully hard to deny:

With the newspapers it was not difficult; I did as I had been asked and referred them to the Foreign Office. With friends and acquaintances it was less simple. It is, I find, extraordinarily embarrassing to be described in print as a member of the British secret service. The trouble is that you cannot afterwards convince people that you are not. They reason that if you are a member you will still presumably have to say that you are not. You are suspect. If you say nothing, of course, you admit all. Your denials become peevish. It is very tiresome.

A bit of coy reverse psychology suggests itself but is both dangerous and unattractive for the fundamentally honest man:

Probably the only really effective denial would be a solemn, knowing acknowledgment that there might be some truth in the rumour. But I can never bring myself to it. Foreign Office or no Foreign Office, I have to explain what really happened.

There’s a threshold of secrecy and paranoia beyond which all denials are confirmations. This kind of ambiguity offers security for the professional but proves an inescapable trap for the passerby who blunders into this world. It’s a dangerous place for the mind and soul. Witness the conspiracy theorists who go down the rabbit hole deep enough to get into this everything-proves-my-theory mindset. Per Forster, “it is very tiresome.”

It is also a great device for creating irony and tension. Ambler’s thrillers are built on the overlapping realities of the professional intriguer and the bourgeois amateur, and his characters, ordinary people tainted by their contact with these other worlds, have to live with the paradox that their good-faith denials sink them deeper in suspicion. More than one of his narrators uses the telling of the story to try to clear their name and strike back at critics.

The first of Ambler’s novels that I read was The Mask of Dimitrios (aka A Coffin for Dimitrios) early last year. Here’s a similarly trenchant set of observations I quoted from that book at the time, and here’s my full review. Back in the spring I also read and reviewed The Levanter, which features another strong dose of the paradox.

Archetypes vs particulars

F1 and Top Gun: Maverick—both movies about men wearing helmets in vehicles? Or more?

“That’s just like Top Gun: Maverick.” This from my daughter halfway through my explanation of the plot of F1, which I finally saw Tuesday night. I had just finished describing the way veteran driver Sonny Hayes was brought in to teach cocky young driver Josh Pearce and the conflict that brewed up between the two of them. This, to her, instantly brought to mind Maverick and Rooster.

She didn’t mean this declaration as snark or criticism, just old-fashioned excitement at recognizing a parallel, and the thing is, she’s right. I love both movies, and their stories do, superficially, have a lot in common. Does that mean that Top Gun: Maverick and F1 are, at base, the same story? Or that they’re in some way inferior or unoriginal?

I’d say no, and that both succeed magnificently as entertainment on the strength of something I’ve preached about over and over here: particularity.

Back in the spring I railed a bit against overemphasis on vague “themes” and “archetypes” and especially “the Hero’s Journey” as interpretive schemes for stories. These approaches fixate on similarity to the detriment of the specific stories they interpret, which are often oversimplified in the service of strained, banal, misleading comparisons.

And yet, whether archetypes in the full Jungian sense exist, the human mind was designed to recognize and respond to patterns. We generalize for reasons beyond time-saving heuristics. And comparing stories—tens of thousands of them over thousands of years—does reveal recurring patterns, motifs, stock characters, and structural conventions. Here is one early pitfall: those who argue that because there are really only X number of plots, creativity and originality are illusions and nothing but rearranging what has been done before. This plays nicely into the rise of the AI lovers, who argue for AI “art” and “writing” by dismissing actual art and writing along similar lines. But that’s another error for another day. For now: ye shall know them by their fruits.

That said, I’ll call these recurrent patterns and conventions archetypes for now. But like Plato’s forms, these don’t exist in any undiluted version anywhere. We have to discern them within the particulars of stories—vivid detail being “the life blood of fiction.”

Every story, then, must balance the archetypal and the particular, the general and recognizable with the concrete and specific. We understand this intuitively and condemn stories that don’t strike this balance well. A story that leans too heavily in the direction of archetype, of familiar patterns, or that fails to develop believable specifics and defaults to the archetype, we call stereotypical or clichéd. Both of these words come from the world of printing, of reproducing precisely the same thing over and over.

To return to Top Gun: Maverick and F1, they do have many similarities. In both, an over-the-hill legend butts heads with an arrogant but gifted upstart before both learn how to work together to succeed at a goal. This is a story familiar not just from these two movies, but from many, many other action and especially sports movies. No debate there.

What keeps these two movies from being rehashes of old clichés is their attention to the particulars, not just with regard to the highly specialized worlds in which they take place in order to feel realistic but also with the characters invented to tell the story. Sonny Hayes and Maverick are both veterans in their fields who are called back to action, but under different circumstances and vastly different pressures. Both might be loners, but Sonny literally wrecked his burgeoning F1 career and went on to decades of aimless waste and Maverick, whatever has happened in the years between his two films, is still successful, in fact at the top of his game. Sonny, a freelance race car driver, is called back as a personal favor to his old friend Ruben. Maverick is ordered back because he is in the military. His personal drama comes through his relationship with Rooster, son of his dead co-pilot Goose, while Sonny has no history with Josh Pearce and their relationship develops as a professional rivalry. And the overall stakes could not be more different—financial ruin for Ruben or nuclear war with Iran.

The two films also explore different thematic territory, but the particulars, the specific details that make this story itself and not that story, that make this character a memorable individual distinct from that character, could be listed at much greater length.

Particularity not only makes stories and their characters feel real—what would either of these movies be without their attention to naval aviation or Formula 1 racing?—but keeps them fresh. Stories that simply hew to the archetype fail as stories. Compare Star Wars, which, despite being famously archetypal, still feels real and vital, both lived in an living, and something like Eragon, which does many of the same things and fails.

Stories that lean too far into the particulars are much rarer and usually incomprehensible. You hear much more complaint about cliché, and for good reason. But a story that feels familiar but attends studiously to its vivid, concrete specifics can be not only well-crafted art, but a crowd-pleaser.

* * * * *

I’ve written about particularity several other times over the years: with regard to Song of Songs, romance, and “humanity;” Cormac McCarthy’s novels, which could not have taken place anywhere but where he set them; and James Bond and Honeychile Rider, a particular man and a particular woman with particular histories, not stand-ins for “men” and “women.” Particulars being “the life blood of fiction” comes from John Gardner, whose concept of fiction as a “fictive dream” has profoundly shaped my writing. I wrote about that in some detail here.

Contemptuous adaptation

Earlier this month I noted the “fraught” relationship between novels and their film adaptations as exemplified by Elmore Leonard’s struggles to get good movies made from his books—a story that eats up a considerable part of his new biography (which I hope to review in full soon). A lot of Leonard’s struggles were down to the usual Hollywood problems that bedevil novel adaptations: bad casting, indifferent directors, hack screenwriting, producers who don’t understand the material, and budget.

But what about film adaptations of novels that, while they may or may not have these problems, are made with contempt toward their source material? And what if the author, unlike Leonard in the 70s and 80s, is dead?

Agatha Christie biographer Laura Thompson recently addressed this in a multipart essay on what she thinks are the worst Christie film and TV adaptations. The competition is fierce. Between the flashy but pandering Kenneth Branagh Poirot movies and a string of wannabe prestige BBC adaptations, the last few decades have given us a slew of films that treat Christie’s stories as mere raw material to be chopped up and rearranged at will, the better to load down with fashionable social and political messaging. Read through Thompson’s posts to see just how bad some of these can get.

When Thompson reaches the penultimate of her ten worst, the 2016 adaptation The Witness for the Prosecution (which doesn’t even get Christie’s title right), she notes as a long aside:

What I dislike about these twenty-first century adaptations . . . is how much they seem to dislike the reason that they were commissioned in the first place: Agatha Christie.

They want, they need us to know that they despise her conservatism, her class, her structured restraint, her respectability, her reverence for the facade (almost everybody in these adaptations is openly frightful, which means that the tension between seeming and being is entirely lost: a deep distortion). There is a violent urge to expose, to denigrate, to remove human dignity. Everything looks greasy, grimy, filmy; food glistens repulsively; sex is slathered in deviancy; blood of dirty blackish-red drawls across the screen.

Most art today is politicized, and this is the politicizing of Agatha Christie. Her world is a privileged one, and for this she must be judged. Her characters belong, in the main, to about the only class of person who can be attacked with impunity, and there is no holding back. . . . The actual target of this mockery is Agatha, her Golden Age aspect, depicted as resoundingly hollow alongside the ‘reality’ of these adaptations. Of course she was not real, as such; but when it came to people she was never untrue, as these adaptations are.

This is sharp, not only as an account of what these adaptations get wrong and how, but of what they reveal about the filmmakers.

Sooner or later I’m going to get an essay on the recent spate of “retellings” of famous novels from the villain’s or a secondary character’s point of view. What these novels, especially those that seek to undermine the original, like Wicked or James, or those trying to force a currently correct opinion into an old story—usually feminism, for whatever reason—like Julia or Circe, have in common with film adaptations that approach their source material with open contempt is a fundamentally parasitical relationship with the original. Branagh’s Poirot, which is more insipid than insidious, or the ideological BBC adaptations Thompson more severely dissects, rely on Christie for prestige and name recognition and then abuse her work. The result is artistically diminished, “untrue” both to the source material and to good art. Their contempt has led them to make something contemptible.

But when this approach proves profitable, as it often does when the author has the kind of long-term popularity that Christie still does, the filmmakers do it again. And again. See also Fleming, Ian and Tolkien, JRR.

I realized a few years ago that, for the first time in my life, I live in a period in which I dread the announcement that a book I love is being made into a film. This is why. If it is not treated as mere “content” for the system—the hungry volcano god of that earlier post on Leonard’s Hollywood struggles—it will be hammered into the correct ideological shape by hacks before being turned loose, diminished and untrue.

Thompson is the author of Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life. You can read all three parts of her Christie film adaptation breakdown here (a top 11 best), here, and here. The modern slicing and dicing instinct hasn’t stopped a film adaptations of Christie’s work, of course; her books themselves have suffered as well, as I noted here two years ago.

All those names and dates

Here’s a good brief Substack note posted by Joel Miller over the weekend:

In my experience, people who make this complaint have usually had a bad history teacher in high school—stereotypically, but often enough in reality, the football coach. This teacher did not teach so much as test on memorization. And what historical material lends itself most readily to memorization? Not why, the basic historical question, but who and when. Names and dates.

Such an approach has burned many, many people who might otherwise have been led into an appreciation—if not a love—for history, which is a shame because people are, by nature, historical beings.

Joel is right to find this criticism amusing, but it is amusing not only because to balk at names and dates is to avoid some of the basic components of history, but because the person making such a criticism will not mind names and dates at all in other areas. The example I’ve used before is someone’s favorite football team. Ask a guy how his favorite college team is doing and you’ll get a detailed narrative filled with sharply focused arguments about cause and effect—in recruitment, in trades, in the decisions of coaches, trainers, quarterbacks, the administration, and even fans—often covering the last several seasons. Bad luck like weather and injury will feature prominently, as will the advantages of changing material conditions and limitations and the folly and wisdom of good and bad leaders.

All of that is historical thought! And get two such guys together, ask them the same question, and they will differ in interpretation and emphasis. Guy 1 says that everyone knows Coach Blowhard is to blame for the bowl loss, but Guy 2 points out that Coach Blowhard had to use a lot of second stringers after the quarterback blew out his knee at practice (the ground crew overwatering the grass again) and those four linemen got academic suspension. And round and round we go. That’s historical debate!

One can do this with favorite TV shows, the arguments your kids get into, or local gossip. That’s because people are wired to view and explain their lives narratively, and reducing history to data doesn’t just undermine but works against that instinct.

Teachers have to pick their battles, and I don’t test on dates. (The students get plenty of names to remember, though.) I tell my students that memorizing dates to study history is like memorizing page numbers in your favorite book. Per Joel, the page numbers are definitely important—especially if you want to use what you learn and refer back to it—but they’re not why you pick up the book or what you remember afterward.

The Poseidon Gary Stu

Rev Scott heroically tells everyone how it’s going to be in The Poseidon Adventure

Film criticism YouTuber Like Stories of Old posted a video yesterday examining “the cornered villain.” He offers several examples, the best of which are Die Hard’s Hans Gruber and Casino Royale’s Le Chiffre, antagonists whose well-laid plans face genuine threats of failure and who are therefore driven not only by greed, hatred, or ego, but by desperation. Their suavity, intelligence, cruelty, and ruthlessness may make them interesting, but what makes them compelling is their vulnerability.

This is a striking insight, and a good thing to remember when creating any character, not only villains. As it happens, this has been on my mind lately thanks to a recent reacquaintance with the hero of The Poseidon Adventure, which I watched a few weekends ago with my wife and kids.

The late great Gene Hackman plays Rev Scott, some kind of defrocked liberal priest or minister who preaches a weird existential gospel of helping oneself. What I remembered from the many times I enjoyed The Poseidon Adventure as a kid was the risks he ran in leading an escape from the capsized ship, his self-sacrifice at the end, and the heavy-handed religious allegory—crudely obvious to even twelve-year old Jordan. What I did not remember is how obnoxious Rev Scott was.

Loud, abrasive, self-regarding, confrontational, hectoring, and a condescending know-it-all to boot (watch his introductory scene and tell me whether any real human being talks about themselves like that), the film positions Rev Scott as a powerful hero but I found myself wishing something bad would happen to him. He has all the qualities the filmmakers want us to admire and no weaknesses. He is, in internet parlance, a Gary Stu. For most of the movie, he struggles only against the elements and the complaints of the doofuses relying on him to lead them out. He always knows the right path to take and succeeds at everything he attempts.

Almost everything, that is. In a famous sequence late in the film, elderly, overweight Mrs Rosen (Shelley Winters), a former champion swimmer, volunteers to swim a long flooded corridor. Rev Scott insists she stay behind and let him do it—of course he does—in the process of which he is trapped by debris. Mrs Rosen then swims the passage, frees him, and leads him the rest of the way through only to die of a heart attack. Scott is, temporarily, wrecked by her sacrificial death.

It’s a justifiably famous scene, one of the most memorable in the movie. And why? The obvious answer is that Mrs Rosen, who has been dead weight up to this point, gets a moment not only to shine but to save the day.

But this sequence is also the first time we see this cocksure hero vulnerable, and the first time he has a relationship with another character beyond lecturing, bossing, and—in the weird case of the teenage girl—feebly comforting. For the first time in the film Rev Scott actually becomes interesting, because it is the first time he fails at anything and needs anyone else.

A few points of comparison from my recent reading:

• Every character in The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George V Higgins—and most notably the titular Eddie—is working to stay ahead of situations that threaten constantly to spin out of their control. Their desperation increases throughout the novel.

• In The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers, protagonist Brendan Doyle and the host of villains he faces have palpable, intense vulnerabilities. (Powers really puts poor Doyle through the wringer—which helps make Doyle one of his best characters.) Guarding against weaknesses, like a dog favoring a wounded leg, is almost as important to them as what they want to get.

• In Freaky Deaky, Elmore Leonard creates a truly loathsome archvillain in Robin Abbott, a society girl turned hippie terrorist—manipulative, carnal, and frighteningly greedy. But as threatening as she is, she only becomes interesting once her plans start unraveling about two-thirds of the way through. By contrast, lesser villains like gangsta Donnell Lewis and wealthy burnout Woody Ricks have to navigate numerous vulnerabilities and are more interesting than the lofty Robin.

I love Gene Hackman—if I could use a time machine to cast a Griswoldville movie using actors from any time and place, he would play the grandfather—but he is shockingly bad in The Poseidon Adventure. Part of the problem was his phoning it in for a paycheck. But more significant was the character of Rev Scott himself.

It seems a piece of obvious advice, but characters, whether heroes or villains, need vulnerabilities and limitations not only to be believable, but to be interesting and compelling. If you want an example of how not to do it, The Poseidon Adventure might prove instructive.

It was all a dream

I’m currently working on a review of an old book that successfully pulls off the “it was all a dream” twist. The revelation that all or a significant part of a story was actually a dream is one of the oldest and most venerable conventions in fiction. Or, if you’re not a fan, it’s a hoary cliche. There’s a reason both that it eventually became a sitcom staple and that writers keep coming back to it.

That the book I’m reviewing did it well got me thinking about the difference. What separates stories that do “it was all a dream” well from those that only exasperate the reader? I can think of a few things:

One approach is to avoid making the reader feel like they’ve been tricked by a cheap twist by not making it a twist at all. This can be done in two ways by:

• Stating explicitly that it’s a dream from the beginning. Pilgrim’s Progress does this.

• Suggesting that it’s a dream from the beginning. Subtler than Pilgrim’s Progress. The narrator of The Great Divorce hints in the first line (“I seemed to be standing in a busy queue…”) that his story is, if true, then still not quite real.

It helps that both of these stories are obviously dreamlike, so the revelation that they are dreams is not a shock. The point of these stories lies elsewhere. Ditto A Christmas Carol, which plays skillfully with this convention.

But if you still want that sense of surprise, I think the detective novel concept of “fair play” is important. The book I’m reviewing, in which a soldier wounded in battle “lives” several days in a limbo state between life and death before awakening in the spot where he was shot, does several things that keep the surprise from feeling like a cheat:

• It is heavily foreshadowed.

• Dreamlike elements are present from the moment the dream begins, but presented in such a way that the narrator is both surprised by them and can think of perfectly reasonable explanations for them.

• The dreamlike qualities intensify toward the end, when the narrator wakes up. This is a common enough feature of bad “it was all a dream” twists, but seldom done skillfully.

• Double entendre—throughout the story, both the narrator’s own foreshadowing as well as the things other characters tell him have different meanings depending on whether you know he is dreaming or not.

• Related: other characters, who have also been wounded but will not survive, know what has happened and tell the narrator, but he misunderstands them.

• Despite all of the above, until the narrator awakens from the dream, the dream feels real—just like real dreams.

On a second reading, I was stunned to see that the narrator tells the reader almost from the beginning what happened but still manages to make the revelation a surprise. But beyond the specific techniques above, the most important aspect of the successful use of “it was all a dream” is that:

• The dream is thematically relevant.

The dream, in this story, is the whole point. It is not a twist, a final surprise for the reader, but the undiscovered center of the story. A second reading is the best proof. This one not only held up, unlike some of the schlockier Shyamalan movies, but improved upon a second reading. Every moment was loaded with a dramatic irony that made it profoundly poignant. A really remarkable achievement.

I haven’t named this story but hope to have a review written for it and posted on Substack soon. Once I do, I’ll be sure to update this post with a link. In the meantime, I’ll be trying to think of other stories that successfully end with “it was all a dream” for comparison.

Badly written, Emma

The early chapters of Emma concern Emma Woodhouse’s efforts to manipulate people into relationships, most prominently Mr Elton, the vicar, who is not as obliging as he seems, and her friend Harriet Smith, who is a pleasant dope with nothing going for her. When Harriet receives a surprise proposal from Robert Martin, a man held in high regard for his character, intelligence, and work ethic by everyone but who is—gasp!—a farmer, Emma casts about for reasons to tell Harriet to refuse.

When she reads Martin’s letter of proposal she discovers

not merely no grammatical errors, but as a composition it would not have disgraced a gentleman; the language, though plain, was strong and unaffected, and the sentiments it conveyed very much to the credit of the writer. It was short, but expressed good sense, warm attachment, liberality, propriety, even delicacy of feeling.

In otherwords, it is the kind of writing anyone who cares about writing strives for.

Emma tries to spin this quality as a bad thing. At first she tries to suggest that, because Mr Martin doesn’t speak as well as he writes (heaven help all of us of whom this is true) that his sister must have helped him or written it for him, but by the end of the chapter she is dismissing the letter as merely “tolerable” and has convinced Harriet that it is of no importance because it is “short.”

A few chapters later, she has so warped the pliable Harriet’s perceptions that Harriet explicitly compares Mr Martin’s earnest letter to Mr Elton’s dumb riddle and finds the letter wanting:

“It is one thing,” said she, presently—her cheeks in a glow—“to have very good sense in a common way, like every body else, and if there is any thing to say, to sit down and write a letter, and say just what you must, in a short way; and another, to write verses and charades like this.”

Emma could not have desired a more spirited rejection of Mr. Martin’s prose.

The comedy of these chapters lies in Emma’s blinding self-deception (Mr Elton wants her, not Harriet), snobbery (highlighted most clearly by Mr Knightley’s account of talking to Mr Martin in the next chapter), and her monumental hypocrisy (she counsels Harriet to reject Mr Martin in… a brief and direct letter, which she also ends up writing herself). But it’s striking that Austen chose the art of writing to express so much about Emma’s moral character. Mr Martin’s letter reflects his personal virtue and Emma’s reaction to it—most especially her continued doubling down, trying to will her opinion into reality—reflect her immaturity and selfishness.

Writing style is not an infallible guide to moral character, but deliberately rejecting good writing is always revealing. A certain kind of writer likes to pretend that form, style, and the basic rules of grammar and storytelling don’t matter, that they are free to write in whatever way they want. They scoff at the seasoned writers of yesteryear who have tried to lay out some of what works. George Orwell and Elmore Leonard are common targets, but you can best gauge their commitment by how violently they attack Strunk and White. And, like Emma, they work hard to sway others to embrace their error.

The rules usually find them out. Good writing is good writing wherever you find it, but one writes well by seeking it outside of oneself and conforming to it, not by trying obstinately to will one’s writing into excellence—just as Emma has to learn with regard to character, friendship, and love.