All Posts By Michael Kahn

Michael Kahn is a trial lawyer by day and a writer by night. He is the award-winning author of 11 Rachel Gold novels and 3 standalone novels, including his most recent one, PLAYED!, and several short stories. His latest Rachel Gold novel, BAD TRUST, is the 11th in that series.
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Opening Passages to Greatness

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Photograph by Caryuqi

The other day I stumbled upon The Heart, a wonderful series in the online version of The Atlantic in which authors discuss their favorite passages in literature. Browsing through the collection, I came upon John Rechy’s discussion of his favorite, which is the opening sentence of William Faulkner’s short story, “A Rose for Emily,” which also happens to be on my list of greatest short stories, although I confess I had never before focused on that opening sentence, which is as follow:

When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant—a combination gardener and cook—had seen in at least ten years.

William Faulkner

Read it again, and you will start to see how much is going in that sentence, from the formal reference to “Miss Emily Grierson” (thus an unmarried woman) to the fact that no one but an elderly man-servant had seen the inside of her house for at least a decade (thus she died a recluse). As Rechy states:

Everyone goes to Miss Emily’s funeral, a ritual not to be missed. Clearly, this lady who died unmarried was of importance to everyone. And yet the town itself is eventually divided, and we see that division here in the first line. The men attend her funeral “through a sort of respectful attention for a fallen monument,” but that “sort of” tells us it’s qualified admiration. And there’s the subtle, metaphoric symbolism of “a fallen monument,” which is thematic—the fall of the South after the Civil War— which Faulkner often lamented, at times too much.

By contrast, the women go there to see what is inside that mysterious house.

And all gleaned from that first sentence, which ends with a hint of suspense. What might be hidden in that house? As with any great opener, I was intrigued–so intrigued, in fact, that I had to re-read that short story, which was even better than I remembered.

Which got me thinking about the opening passages in other great short stories. So I browsed through some of my favorite stories and found several intriguing and well-crafted openers–sometimes just a sentence, other times more than one. I will confess that I also discovered that some of my favorite short stories–including ones by Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anton Chekhov, and James Joyce–do not start with a bang, although most do end with one.

Set forth below are examples of great opening passages from some of my favorite short stories. Enjoy!

  1. “The Swimmer” by John Cheever. “It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, ‘I drank too much last night.’ You might have heard it whispered by the parishioners leaving church, heard it from the lips of the priest himself, struggling with his cassock in the vestiarium, heard it from the golf links and the tennis courts, heard it from the wildlife preserve where the leader of the Audubon group was suffering from a terrible hangover.
  2. “The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry: “One dollar and eighty–seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty–seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.”
  3. “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe: “TRUE! –nervous –very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”
  4. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce: “A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man’s hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees.”
    Ernest Hemingway
  5. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” by Ernest Hemingway: “‘The marvelous thing is that it’s painless,’ he said. ‘That’s how you know when it starts.’”
  6. “Barnaby the Scrivener” by Herman Melville: “I am a rather elderly man. The nature of my avocations for the last thirty years has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom as yet nothing that I know of has ever been written:—I mean the law-copyists or scriveners. I have known very many of them, professionally and privately, and if I pleased, could relate divers histories, at which good-natured gentlemen might smile, and sentimental souls might weep. But I waive the biographies of all other scriveners for a few passages in the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener of the strangest I ever saw or heard of.”

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Make America Naughty Again

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As many of my readers know, I haven’t been able to quit my day job. Fortunately, the focus of my day job is intellectual property law–a legal realm sprinkled with just enough quirky issues to keep my day job fun.

One such example is the subject of my latest post on my law firm’s blog, entitled “Make America Naughty Again: The Risk of Risque Trademarks.” Back when I took a class in trademark law at Harvard, I never dreamed that the question of whether you could register an X-rated trademark would be the subject of important federal court cases. But now it has–and resulted in important rulings by the United States Supreme Court and the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. Or, as we might now say, Shit Happens®.

Here is a link to that post. Hope you enjoy it.

FYI: The image at the top of this post is just one of more than 100 pending “shit” trademark registration applications. A similar number of applications have been filed to register trademarks containing a word that rhymes with “truck.”

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Cain is able, better than most, and far darker: An Appreciation

By Posted on 0 Comments3min read1297 views

At least thirty years had passed since I first read The Postman Always Rings Twice by James Cain. I confess that during those intervening decades my memory of the short novel had faded into a vague recollection of a dark somewhat sexy crime story involving low-life hustlers that took place somewhere in California.

Oh, occasionally I would come across the title in articles and blog posts on great opening lines in American literature, where Cain’s opener–“They threw me off the hay truck around noon”–often made the list. But that was about it for me.

Until last week. While listening to an interview of mystery novelist Laura Lippman discussing her new novel, Sunburn, a book she acknowledged was inspired in part by Cain’s Postman, she spoke of her strong admiration for Cain and mentioned that she teaches his novel to her students in a writing course.

Great timing, since I happened to be looking for a good audio book for my commute to and from the office. A quick search turned up a version from Audible narrated by Stanley Tucci. James Cain and Stanley Tucci? That sounded like the perfect combo for a terrific listening experience–and its was, clocking in at just under 3 hours from start to finish.

Laura Lippman was right. The Postman Always Rings Twice is a gem of American literature. While we typically associate the American Noir genre with murder mysteries, such as those by Dashiell Hammett, there is no mystery here, although there is plenty of suspense in those 116 pages.  The book tells the story of a Frank, a drifter who takes a job at a diner and falls for the greasy owner’s seductive wife, Cora, who convinces Frank that getting rid of her husband is the only route to freedom and a better life. We readers follow the two protagonists through every stage of what they believe is their plan to commit the perfect murder. It fails the first time, appears to succeed the second time, but appearances can be deceiving.

As with so many great works of literature, the experience is so vivid and captivating that it’s hard to believe that the novel is more than eighty years old. From the crime to the sex, nothing feels outmoded or subdued. Here, for example, is Frank checking out Cora for the first time: “Except for the shape, she really wasn’t any raving beauty, but she had a sulky look to her, and her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her.” And he does indeed when she demands that he bite her and rip off her clothing.

So if you’re looking for a terrific short read–or short book on tape–I strongly recommend The Postman Always Rights Twice. And while there has been much rumination over the meaning of that title–especially since no postman makes an appearance in the novel–I’m fairly confident you will grasp its significance by the time you finish the book.

Enjoy!

 

 

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The Magical Lure of the Intimate Voice

By Posted on 1 Comment4min read1447 views

I have written here and elsewhere of the power of a great opening line. If you can imagine a bookstore as a crowded singles bar with each book hoping to get lucky, that first sentence essentially functions as the author’s pick-up line. Sure, a sexy book jacket helps, since it will increase your chances of getting pulled off the shelf. But as the old saying goes, you can’t judge a book by its cover. And thus when that curious reader opens to page 1, your odds greatly improve if you can start with something original and enticing.

Leo Tolstoy did it with Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” And Jane Austen most certainly did it with Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” They are hardly alone. The Internet is filled with lists of great opening lines, such as this Top 100 from the American Book Review and this Top 30 from The Telegraph.

Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about an even more powerful seduction tool: the opening paragraph. Many of the great opening lines, including the two quoted above and, of course, “Call me Ishmael,” stand alone. Literally. They are one-sentence paragraphs. Yes, they catch your attention–much like that snappy pick-up line in the singles bar. But then, well, you need to start all over again.

The real magic takes place in a great opening paragraph. A real paragraph. Not just a one-liner. And what makes an opening paragraph great? The magical lure of the narrator’s voice. Take, for example, the greatest opening paragraph in American literature:

You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly—Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is—and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.

Or this droll opening paragraph of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep:

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved, and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

Two very different opening paragraphs, two very different novels, but both sharing something vital: a distinct and intriguing narrator voice. And while Huck Finn and Philip Marlowe share little else in common, those two opening paragraphs have drawn millions of readers into their stories.

In mulling over great opening paragraphs, I came to another realization: almost all are written in the first person. That’s Huck’s voice we hear. And Philip Marlowe’s voice. Those opening paragraphs achieve a special intimacy between the reader and the narrator. The same is true for so many other great opening paragraphs–from Pip (in Great Expectations ) and David Copperfield to Holden Caulfield and Augie March and so on and so on.  Pick your favorite opening paragraph and odds are its narrated in the first person, and often by the protagonist. (We can let the critics debate whether Nick Carraway is the real protagonist in The Great Gatsby.)

I confess that I, too, have succumbed to the lure of the opening paragraph. One example comes from my novel Firm Ambitions:

Despite the allegations in the petition, fellatio is no longer included in Missouri’s list of infamous crimes against nature. It remains, however, “deviate sexual intercourse,” which the criminal code defines as “any sexual act involving the genitals of one person and the mouth or tongue of another.” The code calls it a class A misdemeanor. Vicki McDonald calls it a Big Mac with Special Sauce.

And finally, no serious discussion of great opening paragraphs can ignore the Grandmaster of Gonzo Journalism, Hunter Thompson, who opened Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with the greatest first paragraph since Huckleberry Finn and thus provides us with a perfect closing paragraph here. As with Mark Twain’s opener, it’s hard to imagine any reader coming to the end of Thompson’s first paragraph and not continuing on to the second. Enjoy!

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. . . .” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus, what are these goddam animals?”

 

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I’m Sorry, Anna.

By Posted on 1 Comment4min read1835 views
Mark Twain

For more years than I’d care to admit, my take on Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina was perfectly summed up by fellow Missourian Mark Twain, who famously defined a “classic” as  a novel “that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”

But then a few months ago, while browsing my bookshelves in search of something to read, I once again paused at the spine of my unopened copy of Anna Karenina, this version the award-winning translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky that I had purchased on a whim more than a decade ago. Having recently read two of Tolstoy’s most powerful (and depressing) short stories, The Death of Ivan Ilych and Hadji Murad, I decided it was time to give Anna her due. After all, I told myself, a novel that starts with one of the most famous opening lines in all of literature must be okay.

And so I removed that 817-page small-type tome from the bookshelf, lugged it into the bedroom, and heaved onto the nightstand. There it would remain for just over two months, lifted most nights for about a half-hour-or-so of reading. Like a determined marathoner, I stuck with the novel all the way to that final monologue of Kostya Levin as he walks down the hallway to check on his brother.

The verdict?

I will say this for Tolstoy. The novel lives up to the intriguing promise of its opening line, which reads: “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Tolstoy gives us several unhappy families: the Karenins, the Vronskys, the Levins, and the Oblonskys, and each one is unhappy in its own way. Moreover, Tolstoy brings many of those family members to life in a remarkably vivid manner. You recognize each one from almost their first appearance, and you come to know them as you read on, and even now, months later, I can visualize most of them. And just as remarkable, many of those characters are ones you would not want to spend any time with. Indeed, some are downright creepy. But alive on the page and in your mind.

But . . . I confess I finished the novel somewhat confused by its title. Yes, Anna Karenina is an important character in the novel, and her illicit (but understandable) love affair with Count Alexi Vronsky drives one of the plot lines that eventually leads to her suicide, but her story does not, at least for me, dominate the novel in the way one might expect of a title character. Think of the roles of the title characters in some of our great works of literature:

  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  • Emma
  • The Great Gatsby
  • The Count of Monte Cristo
  • David Copperfield
  • The Adventures of Augie March
  • Macbeth, King Lear, and the other Shakespeare tragedies
  • and so on and so on.

In other words, the names in those titles are the dominant characters in the stories. Yes, Ophelia is an important character in Hamlet, and her death is every bit as disturbing in that play as Anna’s death is in the Tolstoy novel, but Shakespeare named that play after the main character, and not Ophelia.   If we applied that rule to Tolstoy’s novel, the title would be Kostantin Levin, the exasperatingly conflicted but lovable  hero of the novel, and a character that  many critics view as Tolstoy’s autobiographical doppelganger.

Leo Tolstoy

As you have surmised by now, I like Anna Karenina but I didn’t love it. I found the characters far more compelling than the predicaments in which they found themselves. Shame on me.

And, perhaps even more shameful, my favorite character was neither Anna nor Levin, even those two were clearly the most genuine and deeply imagined characters in the novel. No, my favorite character–the one whose appearance always made me smile–was Anna’s brother Stepan Oblonsky, a/k/a Stiva. He is the impish, fun-loving, superficial socialite with a naughty roving eye.

Stiva’s mischief opens the novel. That famous first line sets the stage for the next paragraph, which begins:

Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family and household, were painfully conscious of it.

And then we meet Stiva:

Three days after the quarrel, Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky–Stiva, as he was called in the fashionable world– woke up at his usual hour, that is, at eight o’clock in the morning, not in his wife’s bedroom, but on the leather-covered sofa in his study. He turned over his stout, well-cared-for person on the springy sofa, as though he would sink into a long sleep again; he vigorously embraced the pillow on the other side and buried his face in it; but all at once he jumped up, sat up on the sofa, and opened his eyes.

“Yes, yes, how was it now?” he thought, going over his dream.

And from that point forward, it will be Stiva who will brighten the scenery and rescue the reader at some of the darkest moments in the novel.

Finally, I should note that my lukewarm endorsement of Anna Karenina is not the unanimous view of the Kahn family. My wife Margi LOVED the novel and places it near the top of her list of great books. So don’t automatically follow Mark Twain’s advice. If you haven’t read it, give it a try. And let me know what you think.

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What’s Your Dream Reading Spot?

By Posted on 2 Comments3min read1796 views

On a lounge chair near a waterfall? How about a desert isle beneath the shade of a palm tree? Or maybe on a raft floating down a lazy river? Is there a margarita on a little side table? Or perhaps a Corona with a lime wedge?

I received delightful email from a self-described book lover who prefers to remain anonymous. She described her dream reading spot: “A window ledge with over-sized pillows and cozy blankets, complete with storage underneath to hold all of my favorite novels.” And then she asked me to share my dream reading spot in this post. That got me thinking.

My two current reading spots are satisfactory but hardly dreamy: one is a red leather chair in our den facing overstuffed library shelves and the other is the bed next to a nightstand with a precarious stack of books.

Functional? Check.

Convenient? Check.

Dreamy? Nope.

And thus when my reader posed her question, I set down my copy of Anna Karenina–with, I confess, a sigh of relief, recalling Mark Twain’s definition of a “classic” as “a book people praise but don’t read”–and tried to a imagine a reading spot so perfect that even the entire oeuvre of Leo Tolstoy would be welcome. I quickly came up with the three basic requirements. My dream spot would need to be:

  1. Outside my house;
  2. In a natural surrounding (e.g., trees, flowers, birds);
  3. Near water.

Now I confess that “outside my house” may require me to move, since there is no water besides our plumbing, and my current natural surroundings are limited to our backyard. But the question asked for my dream reading spot, right? As such, the sky is, quite literally, the limit–although neither a blimp nor a drone made my short list.

The easy pick, with minimal decorating demands, would be a hammock between two palm trees on a beach near an ocean. But I confess that a hammock on a Mediterranean beach is a LONG WAY to travel to spend a few hours reading a book. So, at least until we put our house on the market, I decided trade my hammock on the beach in Mallorca for a gazebo near a bubbling brook in Missouri.

But unlike that hammock, which merely requires two existing palm trees, a gazebo requires not just a gazebo but the furnishings inside that structure. Although I will never be a featured designer on Bravo TV’s Million Dollar Decorators, I do have access to Google.

First step: pick out my gazebo. I did some searching and found this one offered by Amish Country Gazebos.

 

Not bad, eh? I’ll order one with screens, since this is, after all, Missouri, and during the summer months our fine state feels like Mosquito Central.

Okay, got the gazebo. But then I had to furnish it. I did some more searching–Macy’s, Amazon, REI–although I soon landed on the Arhaus website, where I discovered that Arhaus features full sets of outdoor furniture (as opposed to me having to methodically select each chair, table, lamp, etc.)

So I studied each of the many Arhaus outdoor furniture collections and narrowed the choices down to the two below:

Emory Collection (Arhaus)
Emory Collection (Arhaus)

 

(If, instead, you prefer your dream reading spot to be indoors , that same Arhaus website is not a bad place to start. Check out these collections.)

Unable to pick one over the other, I am fortunate that the other major reader in our house–and the one with far better taste than me–is my wife Margi. I called her over, explained (or tried to justify) my selection of a gazebo in Missouri over a hammock between two palm trees and asked her advice on the furniture. Without hesitation, she opted for the Emory Collection.

So there you have it: my dream reading spot. Oh, yes, and I’ll have a chilled Corona with a wedge of lime.

And, when you have your dream reading spot ready to go and need a book to read, may I suggest this one.

So what’s your dream reading spot?

 

 

 

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A Truly Challenging Question for Me (and You)

By Posted on 0 Comments3min read1425 views

I received an email from the folks at Goodreads asking for me to answer the following question: “If you could travel to any fictional book world, where would you go and what would you do there?”

What a great question! And one you should ask yourself as well. Here’s how I answered it:

I started by sorting through the fictional worlds of my favorite novels, and soon realized that I had no interest in spending any length of time in any of those worlds. Moby Dick may be the Great American Novel, but life on the Pequod under the rule of the obsessed Captain Ahab was not my idea of a great time. As for Huckleberry Finn, a day or two floating down the Mississippi River aboard the raft with Huck and Jim would be fun, but once that steamboat destroys the raft and forces Huck (and, if I don’t drown, me) onshore, the fun would end. The Roaring 20s version of Long Island with Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway? Nope. The corrupt L.A. of Raymond Chandler’s mystery novels? Nope. The English countryside of Jane Austen’s 18th Century novels? Maybe for a few days, but that would get old pretty fast. The Deep South of William Faulker’s amazing novels? Are you kidding? The Greek siege of the ancient City of Troy in the Iliad? No way–though I’d love to hang with Odysseus for a few days. The 19th Century Russia of Anna Karenina? Not for me. As for roaming the countryside of Spain in the 1600s, I concede that it has a certain appeal, especially while sharing a full wineskin with Sancho Panza. However, trying to cope with Don Quixote would drive me crazy. Moreover, given that the Alhambra Decree had expelled all Jews from Spain in 1492, a picaresque adventure with the Man of La Mancha might end unhappily for yours truly.

I flipped through the rest of my list of favorites. Blood Meridian? Catch-22? The Scarlet Letter? For Whom the Bell Tolls? Nope, nope, nope, nope.

Try it yourself. Run through your own list of favorite works of literature and you will likely discover what I discovered, namely, to borrow that old saying about New York City: it might be a nice place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there.

As I was about to give up, I had my epiphany: Shakespeare!

No, not the Denmark of Hamlet or the Scotland of Macbeth or the Venice of poor Shylock.

Instead, I selected that fairyland forest on the outskirts of Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Can there be any better place to travel than a magical forest inhabited by fairies, lovers, and those six hilarious amateur actors, including Peter Quince, Nick Bottom and Tom Snout, who comprise Shakespeare’s version of the Marx Brothers. As for what I would do on that moonlit evening? Well, if I couldn’t convince Peter Quince to find a role for me in the play they plan to present for the wedding of the Duke and the Queen, I’d just find a comfortable spot near that stage, fill a tall glass with wine, and enjoy the evening.

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Can’t Leave Rachel Out!

By Posted on 0 Comments1min read1125 views

As you might infer, the main character in my Rachel Gold mystery series is named Rachel Gold. But back in the beginning, back many years ago, on the eve of publication of my first novel, Grave Designs, there was no Rachel Gold mystery series. Just a mystery novel featuring as the protagonist a savvy young female attorney named Rachel Gold. Period. But before long, upon the urgings of my agent and publisher, there was second Rachel Gold mystery novel, and then a third, and so on.

Every few years, however, I decide it’s time for a change of pace, time to write a standalone novel that’s outside the series. Such as my newest one, Played!.

But, as explained in an essay that Crimespree magazine published on the eve of the release of Played!, Rachel somehow finds a way to make a fun cameo appearance in each of those non-Rachel-Gold novels, including the new one. Here is a link to that essay. Enjoy.

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Relaxing With Some Tense Thoughts

By Posted on 0 Comments6min read1266 views

My epiphany occurred as I read an interview of John Updike from nearly a half century ago. Ah, I said to myself, nodding my head, so that’s why I did it.

The “it” was doing something I’d never before done in all of my prior novels and short stories. Each of those prior works, like the vast majority of works of fiction, was written in the past tense. Even though deciding which tense to use in writing one’s novel is an important decision for any author, the choice of past tense is so common that readers (and many authors) generally don’t take notice of it. For example, a chapter might open: “Harry raised the rifle, took a deep breath, aimed, and pulled the trigger.” Change the tense from past to present and the scene feels different: “Harry raises the rifle, takes a deep breath, aims, and pulls the trigger.”

I made the choice to write my new novel, PLAYED! in the present tense. Why? Well, it just felt right. But later, after I’d handed in the manuscript, I came across John Updike’s Paris Review interview from 1968, in which he said of his decision to set Rabbit, Run in the present tense,

Rabbit, Run was subtitled originally, “A Movie.” The present tense was in part meant to be an equivalent of the cinematic mode of narration. The opening bit of the boys playing basketball was visualized to be taking place under the titles and credits. This doesn’t mean, though, that I really wanted to write for the movies. It meant I wanted to make a movie. I could come closer by writing it in my own book than by attempting to get through to Hollywood.

And PLAYED! also began as a screenplay entitled “False Pretenses.” About halfway into the script, I decided instead to tell the story as a novel. But by then, having already visualized the story as a movie, I decided to write it, in John Updike’s works, in the “equivalent of the cinematic mode of narration.”

Later still, after I’d gone through the page proofs and sent my corrections back to publisher, I decided to take a deeper look at this tense issue. And I discovered, to my surprise, that there is an impressive stack of present-tense fiction, many of which you and I have read. They range from bestsellers, such as Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games, to literary stars, such as Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which won the Booker Prize in 2009,  to classics, such as Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, which opens with one of the most cinematic first chapters in all of literature (and decades before the invention of motion pictures).  There’s Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next, Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent, and Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, which had the added attention-grabbing device of being written in the second person. It opens: “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.”

Many authors–including yours truly–opt for the present tense without much deliberation. As Hilary Mantel explained in an interview in The Guardian, she had no plan regarding the tense of her novel. “I was writing as I saw it,” she explained. “It was only a little later I became aware of what had happened and saw that I’d made two important decisions very quickly – tense and point of view. And they are inextricable.”

Below is Chapter 6 from PLAYED!  This is where Cherry Pitt, the hot young wife of the powerful and corrupt Chicago attorney Leonard Pitt, baits the hook to snare Hal, the goofball younger brother of the the brilliant but nerdy lawyer Milton Bernstein. As with the rest of the novel, the scene is written in the present tense:

Primo Dog Tuesday.

That’s Hal’s name for it. During the year he worked as a fitness trainer at the East Bank Club in Chicago, he became addicted to Chicago-style hot dogs—those Vienna Beef marvels on poppy seed buns with yellow mustard, neon relish, and green sport peppers. When he moved back to St. Louis, he scouted out places to satisfy that passion, and Primo Dog was one that made the cut. Although Woofies is still Hal’s numero uno in St. Louis, Primo Dog is the closest one to Old Chatham Country Club, and that’s where Hal heads at 12:15 each Tuesday on his lunch break.

Primo Dog Tuesday.

Ray mans the grill. He nods as Hal walks up to the counter. “The usual, big guy?”

“You got it, dude.”

A few minutes later, the tray of food in hand, Hal uses his foot to push open the screen door to the tables outside. That’s when he sees her. He stares, and the door swings back against him. Seated alone at a table facing him is Mrs. Pitt. She’s wearing skinny jeans, a red tank top, and sunglasses.

“Mind if I join you?” he asks.

Hal waits for her answer. She is holding the hot dog — not the bun, just the dog — between her thumb and forefinger. Long nails, red polish. She glances up, shrugs as if to say suit yourself, and bites off the end of the hot dog.

With a nervous smile, Hal sits down. He unwraps his hot dog and takes a big bite.

“Didn’t see you at the pool today,” he says as he chews.

“That’s because I wasn’t here.”

“Yeah.” He forces a laugh, “Guess that’s probably why.”

He takes another bite of his hot dog as he tries to think of something to say. He’s usually pretty good with chicks, but with this one he’s in brain freeze.

Finally, he says, “I read somewhere that hot dogs are bad for you.”

She looks at him from behind her sunglasses but says nothing.

“Too many nitrates.” Hal shrugs. “They say you shouldn’t eat them.”

Mrs. Pitt studies him as she bites off another piece of the hot dog and slowly chews it. “What do you suggest I eat instead?”

“Don’t know.” He shrugs. “Guess I’m a big one to talk.”

“Are you?”

He tries to grin, completely lost now, treading water.

“I’m married,” she says.

“Oh. I’m not.”

She lowers her head to stare at him over her sunglasses. “How long is your break?”

Hal checks his watch. “I’ve got to head back in ten minutes.”

“Too bad.” She stands. “See you around.”

“Wait.” Hal stumbles to his feet. “How about tomorrow? It’s one my days off. Wednesdays and Thursdays.”

Mrs. Pitt pauses, staring at him from behind her sunglasses. “How about what tomorrow?”

Hal tries another grin. “Whatever takes longer than ten minutes, I guess.”

She glances down at his empty plate. “Does anything take you longer than thirty seconds?”

“Depends what you have in mind.”

“A beer.”

“Sure. I can make that last longer ten minutes. Guaranteed.”

She smiles. “That sounds nice.” She tells him her address. “Come in through the alley. Twelve-fifteen.”

Stunned, Hal watches her walk toward her Corvette, staring at that awesome little round butt swinging back and forth in the tight jeans. He jogs over to her car as she starts to gun the engine.”

“Mrs. Pitt, I don’t even know your first name.”

“Cherry.”

She guns the engine again, puts it into gear, and roars away.

Hal watches her speed down the street.

“Cherry,” he repeats aloud, and then he smiles. “Dude.”

Watching  her red Corvette disappear around the corner, he never once considers the improbability of their encounter at Primo Dog. If you’d asked him right then, if you’d come up to him as he stood out there by the curb in the warm afternoon sun and asked him if he didn’t think it a bit odd that the wife of a millionaire lawyer, a woman you’d normally expect to see at lunch at the Zodiac Room in the Neiman Marcus at Plaza Frontenac or maybe at the Women’s Exchange on Ladue, just happened to be eating at a hot dog joint in West County at exactly the same time as him—well, if you would have asked him that, he would have given you one of those thousand-watt smiles and a shrug and said, “Hey, dude, guess the lady’s got good taste.”

But at the same time as you? you’d ask. On the only day of the week you go there?

Another shrug, and then a cocky wink. “Luck of the draw, dude. Luck of the draw.”

 

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Michael A. Kahn