“The Fine Print of Consciousness”

 Some interesting authorial news today. First up, is a little something from the Who Knew She Was Still Alive Department:

Novelist Phyllis A. Whitney, whose romantic suspense tales sold millions of copies and earned her top accolades from the Mystery Writers of America, has died. She was 104.

Whitney died Feb. 8 in a Charlottesville (Virginia) hospital, not far from her home in Nelson County, her son-in-law, Ed Pearson, said Thursday.

Whitney wrote more than 75 books, including three textbooks, and had about a hundred short stories published since the 1940s.

“I’ve slowed down in that I only write one book a year,” she said in a 1989 interview with The Associated Press, when she was 85. “A writer is what I am.”

Whitney’s last novel, “Amethyst Dreams,” was published in 1997. She began working on her autobiography at 102.

The grand old dame won a coveted Edgar Award some years back. Suddenly I feel like such a slacker.

It turns out that Ian McEwan was really impressed with the film adaptation of his novel “Atonement.” From USA Today:

McEwan says he was initially skeptical of the movie’s $40 million budget, worrying that the big investment would allow commercial considerations, such as pressure to cast marketable stars, to trump artistic integrity. But, he says, “all my fears were allayed.”

He typically regards film as “inferior” to books because “you cannot give the reader the fine print of consciousness. You cannot convey that sense of the onward rush of thought and feeling that you can in a novel.”

McEwan’s novels are an acquired taste. I’m right down the middle with the guy. “Saturday” was impressive and his new release, “On Chesil Beach”, was terrific. However, “Atonement” and “Amsterdam” were truly what-the-hell-are-people-thinking-when-they-praise-this-guy material for me.

But at least McEwan strives, sometimes self-conciously, to create literary fiction, which is more than we can say for John Grisham, right? Right. From the AP:

NEW YORK — Some things John Grisham knows: He got 15 rejections before his first book, A Time to Kill, was published. He made $9 million last year. He’s not James Joyce or William Faulkner. He’s an entertainer.

“I’m not sure where that line goes between literature and popular fiction,” the mega-selling author says. “I can assure you I don’t take myself serious enough to think I’m writing literary fiction and stuff that’s going to be remembered in 50 years. I’m not going to be here in 50 years; I don’t care if I’m remembered or not. It’s pure entertainment.”

Oh God. I just had a horrible thought. What if Grisham continues churning out potboilers until he’s 104? By the way, he just commenced work on his twenty-second book. There’s that “slacker” voice shouting at me again.

Speaking of voices, have you ever wondered what Jack London’s voice sounded like? Well, wonder no longer, you gold seekers and oyster pirates, as the Daily Californian tells us:

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have restored a voice recording of author Jack London’s voice, making it available to modern audiences.

The restoration, which is currently being touched up by a research team at the lab, provides a 1915 recording of a letter by the author.

The audio playback contains a dictated letter London addressed to fellow writer Max Ehrmann discussing the conditions of state prisons and supporting the claims that London made in his novel “The Star Rover.”

“Just a rush letter, ere I sail for Hawaii,” London says in the recording. “Merely want to tell you that everything concerning California prisons in ‘The Star Rover’ is true.”

More details on the restoration process can be found here.

And finally there’s this nugget of Nabokov news from the UK Times Online:

It is one of the most heated debates in contemporary literature: should Vladimir Nabokov’s final and incomplete novel be destroyed, as the author explicitly requested?

Fresh details of “The Original of Laura” — Nabokov’s last significant work — are revealed in times2 today, reviving a debate about the rights of an author to insist on his or her work being destroyed posthumously.

Novelist John Banville, winner of the Man Booker Prize for “The Sea”, says the book is worth salvaging and playwright Tom Stoppard insists the manuscript should be destroyed. The lively debate is here.