I had not wasted any time getting to the book signing table when the reading ended and had even bought my book before the event started. Now, waiting for the writers to get there, those of us who had formed an indistinct line wondered which seat Percy would take and which his co-reader, Dagoberto Gilb, would take. Most PEN/Faulkner readings feature one well-established writer and one lesser known but promising writer, and the book signing lines are often embarrassingly lopsided. Having never heard of Gilb, I wasn't sure which writer was which, but watching people's restlessness, I felt I was about to find out.
When they arrived at the table and chose their seats, the line almost immediately shifted over to Gilb. I found myself the first in Percy's line - which made me glad - but also the only one, which made me uncomfortable. Didn't people know he was one of today's literary darlings?
He had read from his latest book, The Wilding, in a shockingly deep voice that recalled James Earl Jones as Darth Vader. The discordance between his young, sweet features and this dump truck rumbling sound reminded me of singer Josh Turner. It was well-suited to his material, which is dark, mysterious, and creepy.
(In fact, there is so much blood and unexplained death in the three stories I read yesterday from his collection Refresh, Refresh that I had to stop because I had started feeling ill. I should have gotten a clue from the fact that Peter Straub wrote one of his jacket blurbs.)
My jury is out until I've read enough of his work to form an opinion, but I noted a few things from the evening:
1) Storytelling as art
There's reading words off a page or news items off a teleprompter, and then there's infusing life into every spoken word of a story so that you are sucked in and experiencing what the characters are going through. Garrison Keillor, of course, is the penultimate storyteller, expert at holding the attention of an audience. Of all the readings I've attended, Percy's came the closest to hitting that mark. The booming of his voice, shaded with latent menace, combined with the dark nature of his writing, reminded me of the "Radio Mystery Theater" I couldn't help listening to on WCCO after turning the lights out (against my better judgment). I would lie in the dark, the covers pulled up to my chin, telling myself "Turn the radio off! Turn it off now!" but unable to stop holding my breath waiting to hear what happened next.
I'm not saying writers should do sound effects when they read their stuff or have musical interludes to play when they reach space breaks. But reading can be performance art if one spends the time practicing a piece and thinking about how the way one reads will affect the audience. Whether one chooses to take this approach is a personal decision, but I think if you can increase your hold on the audience and make it more memorable and - dare i say - entertaining*, that can only be good not only for your story and you as a writer, but literature in general.
*(Entertainment may sound lowbrow relative to what writers want to achieve, but maybe it is a necessary prelude to enrichment.)
2) A new form
Percy referred to a 120-page story as "my..." , paused for the perfect length of time, and said "shnovel." It was funny and cute, and Percy is disarming in his way of putting the cute right after the macabre, so everyone laughed. It's nice to have a new term for something that's too long to be a short story (or even a long short story) and too short to be a novel; the term novella is so freighted with negativity and awkwardness that I've become hesitant to use it. Injecting a little humor into a new term for this form might just get people to relax and let it be!
3) What Lies Beneath
I was struck by how easily and quickly Percy moved from the disturbing to the comic, how he could set you on edge one moment and in the next make you laugh and want to share a cup of coffee and ask about his kids. It made me wonder whether he was a dark person with surprising moments of levity or an easygoing guy with disturbing issues lurking underneath.
Of course, this is a continuum, not a simple dichotomy, and we probably all move along it one way or the other at various times in our lives. It isn't important as a reader to know where the author is, but this spectrum is what keeps me reading and certainly what keeps me writing.
Photo credit: Esquire
