The Lord keeps working in mysterious ways, meaning that despite my review of Shelley Shepard Gray’s Christian-inspirational novel ‘Hidden’ last year, Avon Inspire, an imprint of Harper Collins, continues to dubiously honour me with its publications. The latest two arrivals are by Lori Copeland, who in 1995 “sensed that God was calling her to use her gift of writing to honour Him”. This is how I came to own a promotional copy of ‘Twice Loved’, whose front cover posits the question: Will Willow sacrifice her future security for a chance at true love?
In ‘Hidden’, I did indeed find much that was hidden – namely, sex, dressed up as inspirational fiction. I opened a random page of ‘Twice Loved’ (page 119, for those of you who want to jump to the saucy bits) and discovered much the same. “I believe the Gray boys sing well enough, the judge said. But when the new organ arrives, the service will improve enormously.” I say! And further down the same page, a character called Silas announces, “Best beef I’ve had in months.” Uncle Wallace responds, “Wait until you taste the fudge cake.” You can feel the homo-sensuality oozing off the page as these nineteenth century ‘gentlemen’ discuss supposedly mundane matters.
Thinly veiled eroticism aside, let’s cut to the plot. The Civil War’s just finished, and Silas, the bloke who likes a portion of good beef, is beyond middle age, well off, and wooing Willow, the new 19-year-old school teacher at Thunder Ridge, Texas, who’s rolled into town after being advised of his availability, accidentally setting fire to the town saw mill on the day of her arrival. (It happens. And according to the narrative, the fire would “later be compared to the Second Coming” – how much later I’m not sure, given that according to a quick search on Google News, the Second Coming still hasn’t come).
So anyway, Willow thinks that hooking up with beefy Silas would be okay, because she’d have no money worries, and her mates Copper and Audrey, who’ve come along too, would be provided for. End of story, materially happy ever after. But wait, inspirational fiction fans, there’s another character who’s not middle-aged and wealthy, he’s young and dashing and called Tucker (yes, he really is). He owns the saw mill that the heroine reduced to ashes, and he makes Willow weep with his “impossibly good looks and headstrong manner”.
I won’t keep you in suspense any more than I kept myself in suspense (spoiler alert here for all you Lori Copeland addicts), so let’s once again make a beeline for the book’s final page. “Lunging, Tucker seized Willow by the waist and took her with him into the ditch.” You dirty Tucker! “For the first time in a long time, Thunder Ridge was wet.” And the final paragraph begins, “A grin split Willow’s features.” Silas, in case you’re worried about the old fella, cops off with Copper instead.
Having merely perused the text, it seems only fair to tackle some of the 12 questions that the author asks at the end of the book, as though conducting a Sunday school class for a particularly backward group of under-5s. “It seldom rains in Thunder Ridge – just thunder and lightning. Still, the townspeople won’t move away. They prefer to stay and trust in God to send rain. Have you ever been in a position where all you could do was pray and trust? Did God come through for you?”
I wonder what Ms Copeland’s answer is for those who prayed and trusted, but ended up drowning, or shot, or crashing, or uncured anyway. That they didn’t trust and pray hard enough? It’s nice in fiction when God comes through for the characters, but what’s the explanation when prayer doesn’t work in real life? That God likes some of us better than others? Is the entity that created our world and our universe and, I suppose, all the elliptical galaxies and spiral galaxies and irregular galaxies too, is he answering prayers based on some arbitrary code of judgment we have to guess at according to those he chooses to “come through” for? Blimey, it’s enough to make you keep your hands off the fudge cake just in case God disapproves and holds it against you when your plane’s going down and you’re praying and trusting that he’s going to step in and fix the engines.
"
How are you doing today?”
“I’m good, thanks. How about you?”
“I’m good too, thank you.”
It’s a simple enough exchange, if somewhat moribund, and I’ve had it with thousands, possibly millions, of Americans in the service industry since moving to this country. But the other day at a Safeway in the aesthetically deprived exurbs of Maryland I stumbled across a new variation. The young girl scanning my bar of chocolate, a bunch of bananas and an energy drink (pre-match meal for over-35 year olds), looked like she was getting ready for Halloween a couple of weeks early. She had purple streaks in her long brown hair and a strange expression on her face. I thought it might be a scarily seasonal in-store promotion the cashiers had been reluctantly dragged into by the misguided goons of marketing and management.
She: How are you today?
Me: I’m good, thanks. How about you?
She (sighing): You know, not so good. I had a terrible night.
Me: Really?
She: Yes. I made the mistake of spending it in an abandoned house.
Me: (not making a sound, just standing with my mouth slightly open, waiting for a further explanation)
She: I didn’t fancy going home. So a friend and I ended up in this abandoned house. Big mistake. It was kind of scary.
I felt at this point as though I should say, “Yes, I know what you mean. Every time I’ve spent the night in an abandoned house, I’ve ended up thinking it was a big mistake too.” But as far as I can remember, I’ve never spent the night in an abandoned house, unless you count sleeping on the concrete floor of a bothy while on a Scottish mountain-hiking ‘holiday’. But given that the alternative was putting up a porous tent in a rainstorm in the dark and being trampled by several thousand sheep, the abandoned house option won the night.
I didn’t have the time to tell the girl in Safeway all this. I had my things in their bag, and kick-off was just an hour away. I needed energy and protein. Even though the next customer had her items on the conveyor belt, the girl was looking at me as though she wanted to tell me more. Much more. As though I was the only customer all day who had listened. But all purveyors of oral fiction know that when you’re staffing the ‘15 items or less’ checkout, the only tales to be told are short ones.
“You have a good day now,” I said as I walked away. What a disappointing ending.
My name has somehow landed on the mailing list of the Harper Collins’ imprint Avon Inspire. This means I regularly receive books that publish a line of “inspirational women’s fiction that features that which matters most: family, community, faith, and love.”
Aside from the alternative school of thought claiming “that which matters most” also covers, in no particular order, football, sex, music, the economy, the environment, proper beer, good manners and the public execution of the owners of any dogs that crap on my front lawn, it’s an odd notion that a branch of fiction must define itself as inspirational. The old eastern Bloc tried something similar with socialist-realist literature, and aside from a few texts that sneaked through due to the clot-headed censors’ failure to understand imagery, it was mostly dull. Which is what happens when you try to write a book glorifying life in a cement factory.
Most recently I have become the privileged owner of Shelley Shepard Gray’s ‘Hidden’, a novel about Anna, a “modern girl on the run” from a fiancé “with good looks and prestigious position at a top law firm,” but who’s also violent (boo!). She takes refuge with an Amish family (hurrah!) and “finds fulfilment in the Amish way of life”, which will be handy with the coming energy crisis. Yet she still has to win the trust of one family member, Henry, who has “got the raging hots for her, but is tortured by sexual anguish suppressed by a stringent and quite frankly unsustainable moral code.” Okay, I made that last bit up. The book’s big question, according to the press release, is: “Can he accept that Anna may truly be his soulmate?”
Given that this is inspirational fiction, my guess is that he will, though not without a 200-page struggle. Ah what the heck, I can’t wait. Let’s turn to page 201 (of 202): “Very slowly, very deliberately, Henry curved an arm around her and pulled her close.” Whoooargh Henry, you sly old dog! Is this how the author wants to “showcase her Christian ideals”, as the publicity blurb states? With this filthy, depraved groping? The book ends with them both contemplating a rabbit in a field (“Look, she whispered to Henry, to the man…who would one day be her husband. Another rabbit.”). And it’s not the rabbit of recession I referred to in my last blog entry, but an inspirational, hopping, fertile, action-ready rabbit full of the jumping joys of spring. At least I bet that’s Henry’s view (why didn’t she just call him Horny and be done with it?).
Aside from the commercial angle -- ‘Hidden’ sells at a meta-spiritual $12.95 -- you might ask what is the purpose of literature that so clearly wears its heart on its jacket, with closure as comforting for its readers as a talking bearded Jesus doll. I unwittingly found the answer the other day when a noisome bluebottle landed on my computer screen. The nearest item to hand was ‘Hidden’, which did a messily efficient job of flattening the insect, with the operation concluded by a swift mopping up of its guts using a moist tissue. The book, alas, is sullied and will soon be sent for recycling.
One of the book’s “questions for discussion” says that it is only when the book’s characters “put their futures in the Lord’s hands that they find joy,” asking, “When has following God’s path brought you success?” I played God with that irritating (and undoubtedly evil) fly, consequently reaching a state of peace and contentment due to the absence of its buzzing and dive-bombing. It seems the mysterious delivery of ‘Hidden’ into my post-box was all part of A Plan. Count me in as one of the truly inspired.
I just read Tom Perrotta’s Little Children, a suburban satire about a neighbourhood of unfulfilled soccer moms and their reaction when a convicted sex offender comes out of jail and moves in close by with his mother. It was a good, quick read, if not a memorable one, mainly due to the lack of particularly interesting characters, reflecting as they did the predictable archetypes of the Book Club Belt. Also, I resent it when you’re reading a book and it’s obviously been tailored to be flogged for its film rights. The soap opera plot culminates in the overtly contrived tying up of all loose ends, and you’re left feeling less like a reader and more like a sucker.
Little Children has already been released as a film, as was one of Perrotta’s earlier novels. That’s grand for the author, who has to make a living like the rest of us. I just wonder why he didn’t quit the pretence and type it up as a film script to start with.
The two occasions I’ve managed to sign up with literary agents were because of novels that apparently had film potential. Again, it’s a business like any other, and literary agents who have to pay the mortgage know that selling a novel on its fine literary merits alone will maybe pay for a new hat. And more likely a baseball cap than a handmade Tyrolean with a feather in its band. But rather than share the bubbling enthusiasm of the London agent who once said, “Ian, this has got film rights written all over it!” I was more disconcerted that this was seen as the book’s main selling point. Although, as neither book of the two ‘film potential’ novels was sold, that was maybe not the case after all (leaving them with a total of zero selling points).
Not that I’d have been turning my nose up at a fat check from a studio eager to secure the future production of a book about a…ha ha, I’m not going to tell you what it was about in one line. When I attended a script-writing class, that was the first lesson. Learn to sum up what your film is about in a single, two-clause sentence. “It’s about a [main character], who [has a goal].” Hollywood moguls are busy people, and they get distracted if your idea takes more than three seconds to explain, supposing you (or your agent) can actually get to talk to one in the first place.
You have a little more leeway when writing a novel and presenting it to a literary agent (also very busy people). Maybe as long as it takes to describe a book on the back of its jacket. Typically, that will be a three to four sentence paragraph, and each sentence will include a teaser, with references to at least one of the following: an unhappy marriage, a stunted career, a sexual deviant, an unfulfilled parent, a character with a seemingly terminal illness, an addict of some sort, and a group of people who are members of a book club.
The agent will then judge if your novel has the potential to sell as a film, and may agree to read the first three chapters. Depth, length and too much ambiguity are unwelcome, while vague membership in a discernible current publishing trend or category such as Lad Lit, Sad Lit, Bad Lit, Buddy Lit, Lamp Lit (just invent one and say you saw it mentioned in the New York Times Book Review) is an absolute imperative. If necessary, spell it out and put the words into their mouth: “I really feel this book has film rights written all over it.”
There are three sorts of novelist. 1.Unpublished – that would be most of us. 2. Acclaimed – that is, published and admired by family, friends and a handful of discerning readers and critics. And 3. Successful – that would be your Tom Perrottas. Readable, forgettable, but very sellable. Writing to a formula that succeeds. Mrs. Pop believes it’s the key to her early retirement. I’m still waiting for the Big Bad Idea to encapsulate in a single, two-clause sentence.
The Lord keeps working in mysterious ways, meaning that despite my review of Shelley Shepard Gray’s Christian-inspirational novel ‘Hidden’ last year, Avon Inspire, an imprint of Harper Collins, continues to dubiously honour me with its publications. The latest two arrivals are by Lori Copeland, who in 1995 “sensed that God was calling her to use her gift of writing to honour Him”. This is how I came to own a promotional copy of ‘Twice Loved’, whose front cover posits the question: Will Willow sacrifice her future security for a chance at true love?
