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Disagreement Over a Novel

Norbert Kovacs

    Mr. Robert Taylor liked that he lived a normal, respectable life. He liked that he owned an attractive eight-room house in the Long Hill section of Trumbull, Connecticut. He saved a lot to acquire the expensive home and perhaps the costs to keep it were getting over his head, but he was proud he had the place. He liked to work on the home and talked about doing so with his colleagues, who owned homes like his. His colleagues made their homes favorite topics of conversation, too. What is more, Mr. Taylor had a happy, fairly average marriage. He and his wife had their differences, such as how to spend money or whom to invite to their weekend get-togethers, but otherwise got along decently. As with most people he knew, Mr. Taylor made a favorite hobby of watching TV. He liked to see sports, the popular prime time shows, and the evening news on the broadcast channels. He set his schedule to watch certain favorite programs and kept to it. He never would have ventured to see a mind-provoking documentary, say, on urban sprawl or listen to experimental music on the Sirius channels. As a rule, Mr. Taylor dressed in the neat style of the fellow businessmen of his field. Proud of the look, he was conservative in his attire even on weekends when he wore a long sleeve shirt and vest, dark slacks, and worn dress shoes around the house.
    Mr. Taylor used to feel as content over his thirty year old son, Jimmy. Jimmy was an excellent writing talent and worked at an established magazine in Fairfield. He was admired for his writing on politics, art, and film. But Jimmy had fallen in his father’s esteem since he started dating Elsa Potts, an artist who lived in Bridgeport. Mr. Taylor thought Elsa the wrong type for a respectable fellow like Jimmy. By Jimmy’s own account, Elsa was poor and not making much advance from it. But she had worked some influence over Jimmy, it seemed, for he talked about the young woman endlessly. “She is such a different person,” Jimmy said. “She thinks these things about art, people, that no one else does. It’s her talent.” Whenever he heard this praise, the reactionary Mr. Taylor threw up his hands and marched away raging.
    However, Elsa was not the worst for Mr. Taylor as it concerned Jimmy. When Elsa had become a less volatile subject in the Taylor home, Jimmy visited his father in a friendly spirit and asked a favor. He said he had been working on a new “idea novel” that he thought made several serious statements about how people live today. Jimmy had gotten a literary agent to take an earnest interest in the book and now asked his father to read the work and make comments about it. Mr. Taylor read it and saw as he expected for his son that the book was very well written—the style was fluid and enjoyable. However, the work had a lot of upsetting subject matter. Most of the book was a picture of the egocentric and hedonistic sides to modern life that make people feel uncomfortable discussing. Mr. Taylor was unsettled by the content enough that he made a quick issue of it when his son next visited.
    “This book is sick, Jimmy. You can’t write about people so. As if they’re animals.”
     “I’m not saying that people are animals, Dad. I’m showing people who have real feelings and thoughts about each other. They express them uniquely. I want those feelings and thoughts on the page so a reader really sees a personality. It lets me show sides to people and achieve things I couldn’t otherwise.”
     “People will read this book and say you have a dirty mind. They’ll say you’re hung up on sex. They’ll think you’re slipping them an adult novel.”
    “I’m not slipping anyone an adult novel. Yes, the novel does get physical, but it’s just to describe things a little differently. My characters are a little different than characters in other books.”
    “The book has too much sex. But it has more problems than that. You show people being too egocentric. Like that character who lies to his parents for money.”
    “There are people who do it. I think it belonged in the novel. I wanted my character to do it then grow past it.”
    “But to lie?”
    “Well, I’m not saying everyone would lie that much to a parent. I just was showing what goes on with one materialistic person. Too many other authors don’t go into lies of that sort in a way that people can appreciate. I want people to see what greed and coldness are like in real life.”
    “But people get worried when it’s a child lying to their parent.” Mr. Taylor leaned closer to his son as if to be confidential. “You should respect your readers’ taste.”
    “Telling the truth has nothing to do with respect.” Jimmy sounded annoyed.
    Mr. Taylor felt his son was missing the point. “Then what will people say? They’ll all claim your work is too strange and different to like.” Mr. Taylor pulled his chair closer to his son. “You should re-do this book as a more traditional story. I know you could develop it nicely with that style of yours.”
    “I won’t write something that’s trite and conventional.”
    “Who said you should? No, I’d like to suggest some ingredients for a work that your readers and critics would like to see. You need new kinds of characters for one, not your alienated and self-troubled twentysomethings starting their lives in a new city.”
    “I see a lot in those alienated people. They have unique issues.”
    “Sure but who likes hearing of those? It’s dysfunctional. People want something else. They want to see someone who can succeed at something important, someone who becomes famous. Someone who becomes a hero...”
    “There are many ways besides seeking fame for a person to do something interesting in a story—definitely, more meaningful ones. I could write for instance about an intelligent talk over lunch. Or an artist reflecting on his life and developing a new work of art in the process.”
    Mr. Taylor made a face. “I’m talking about what will impress a reader.”
    “I’d like to write something ‘original’ and ‘deep’. Perhaps I have the talent to write original, deep prose.”
     “You can write a deep story that gets the public interest.”
    “Like what story?”
    “Well one where people go after the big things—money, power, beautiful people, fame, the stuff the average person desires but finds hard to get. You can write lots of different stories about that stuff. Like how about a guy trying to get rich and the scheming people who get in his way? Maybe you could write a romance with a beautiful woman who knows a powerful politician’s secret.”
    “How would I develop a story like that?”
    “Well, let’s suppose for the sake of discussion you write about the man trying to become rich. You could talk about how he acquires a name and connects with powerful people.”
    Jimmy stared. “He would want just a name, not something more?”
    “It’s a comforting thing to have a name. Many people would be contented to be one. Plus, you do interesting things to get one.”
    Jimmy shook his head. “Couldn’t my character instead want something personal for him or the few people he knows? It would help him be more of an individual rather than a caricature.”
    “A character would be plenty individual if they became wealthy, gained power, and won beautiful women. A character would have to be unusually hard working, talented, and attractive to achieve those things. But to return to the guy after money...he needs some conflict if your readers are going to stay interested in him. How about having a schemer try to ruin him when it looks like he’s about to take over a company? Like claim he’s embezzled the company pension fund. Then have the hero expose the schemer so that he has to quit his job and run into hiding.”
    Jimmy shook his head. “Dad, you see things too simply. How many people can you really say are going to persecute someone like that? And you don’t even bring up any faults in the main character.”
    “Give him a few minor ones if you like for interest. But mainly, the hero should get the love of a beautiful woman; the determined man should have power and wealth; the villain should die or go to jail. Heroes get what they do because they try harder and dare more than everyone else; villians because they are self-interested and violent. A good story reveals those things.”
    Jimmy scratched his forehead and gave his father a bewildered look. “But your story isn’t going to be a picture of what people are really. Your stories would make a big deal about power, looks, clichés of romance, physical surface. But what about anything deeper? What about the sides of people that can’t be immediately understood by everyone?”
    Mr. Taylor considered this silently awhile. “I don’t know. I suppose that’s the limit to my choice of story.”
    “Exactly. There’s so much to people and their characters that your idea of a story never explores. A serious author builds up a narrative as he goes into the depths of character. He makes a character great; he doesn’t assume having a certain trait makes you so to start. He works to elevate a character—if he’s committed to the task, I think he will build a good one and a different kind of story. He’ll be able to write about any aspect of human character that he chooses. Any character, any revealing act, any truth becomes his clay. I’ve imagined a new narrative just by thinking of character like this. It would belong to a book other than we’ve been discussing. The book would have a main character/hero with a callous and uncaring wife. The hero would have a heated, adulterous affair with another woman during the story.”
    “How can he be the hero then?”
    “When his spouse is self-interested and cold, maybe adultery’s not a problem. For my main character, adultery is a relationship where he’s newly valued.”
    “Newly valued for sex.”
    “My main character would be interested in his lover for her personality, not a fling.”
    Mr. Taylor shifted in his chair; he had not supposed his son would have tried to claim this. “Well, go on.”
    “So my characters would work hard to live out what they think is right. They’d go out of their way because they feel their connection worth it, even if they might be disapproved or treated differently for it. My adulterer would like his mistress because she’s honest and beautiful, though not rich.” Jimmy paused and put a hand to his chin, caught by his imagination. “He would see her often. He’d walk with her in public where nobody would recognize them. But he’ll fear when she pushes their relationship to develop. He will consider he’s still living with his wife.”
    Mr. Taylor opened his eyes wide. “You mean, his mistress wants him to leave his wife and live with her instead?”
    “What of it? She’d be in love: there’s a reason. Besides, her offer to live together would bring the relationship to a difficult pass I would turn to effect. The main character would think whether he should make the leap and move in with her. Likewise, he would consider if he chose against it, if he did from an inferior motive like fear or uncertainty that he loved her.”
    “In other words, he picks and chooses which relationship he will respect, with a mistress or with his wife? What do his ties mean to him then since he changes them at will?”
    Jimmy shook his head. “He sees all relationships can be meaningful. Just that not all relationships work out, so he goes after a new one that might.”
    “Well then, should people give up on each other whenever it’s convenient? Aren’t you forgetting the love and happiness that come from good friends and committed spouses? Mine for your mother? If you go leave a person, you give up that love when you may not have a good reason. Shouldn’t there be some guideline, a standard, to keep a person from shortchanging themselves in those cases?”
    Jimmy held silent awhile before he said, “I guess you might be right. Well then, I think I’d have my adulterer consider whether it’d be worth leaving his wife. But if he did go through with it, I’d have him commit to his lover in his heart, so he could be confident they would remain together.”
    “I guess that would be better than going for her on a whim.”
    Jimmy studied his father. “You know, what you’ve suggested about a person holding to a standard makes me think you would be okay with my seeing Elsa.”
    “Oh?” The mention of Jimmy’s girlfriend caught Mr. Taylor off guard.
    “I am committed to her. I wouldn’t leave her for some trifling reason, some random other woman.”
    “Good. However—”
    “Your issue was what she’s like. She is a very decent, honest person. You don’t know because you haven’t meet her face to face. Actually, she seems as serious-minded as this model character you have been persuading me to write of. Elsa thinks of values in art sort of like you do. She believes art should present values in a way that really moves and invigorates people.”
    “Is that right? Like which values would I take away from her art—assuming I ever saw it?”
    “Truth for one. Justice. She says her work projects values like those visually. She has done blood red and bone white paintings about violence and peace. Pasted collages about love and poverty. She creates art where she shows serious values at odds. In conflict. Sometimes to bring on conflict.”
    Mr. Taylor felt beside himself. “Her work sounds more dynamic than I believed it could. Maybe even visceral. Exciting on a good day.”
    “She can get intense making her stuff too. She tells me how she struggles to paint and give the idea of truth or justice by it. She thinks sometimes she will show a man is strong despite his closed views; then, she imagines presenting a woman as openness, full of life. She has her conflicts deciding it. Just like you said a romance can create boredom or excitement for a reader.”
    “Well then, she is more of an artist than I gave her credit. More interesting as a thinker too. I have underestimated her. Maybe I could come to like her.”
    “I hoped you would agree when I explained.”



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