Yes, I’ve been updating this blog not-at-all, so this post is like closing the gate after the horse has gone off, yes, but still: I now post regularly, along with my fellow Upstart Crow Literary agents, on our company blog. If you are at all interested in hearing what I’ve got to say, that is the place to go.

Thanks for reading As the World Stearns, and I’ll see you in my new home!

M.

For me, it has always been about What Happens Next, about storytelling at its most fundamental, that breathless and then, and then, and then. It can be easy to forget that, sometimes—I become enamored with a writer’s wit or pyrotechnics or form-bending exercises, and I spend ages hacking through wildernesses of metafiction, giving my brain a workout on playgrounds devised by genius loons. (I’m thinking, of course, of the usual suspects: Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Jeanette Winterson, Paul Auster—really, this shelf is endless, and endlessly fascinating.) Or I meander slowly through finely wrought character studies, in books that are about the nuances of personality and make high drama out of small moments. Whatever—these are all good, worthy books.

But while in the midst of them, I sometimes forget about the visceral joys of plain old story. Until I stumble upon it again and recall, Oh yeah! This is what it’s all about.

Which brings me to The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. I began reading this the other day, and it’s a struggle to pull myself away from it. Yes, it is wordy and long and taxes my vocabulary, but good God! It moves like it’s on speed. Things happen, pretty much from the first few pages. Our naif hero d’Artagnan takes offense and challenges a stranger to a duel; the stranger can’t be bothered because of a mysterious plot he’s involved in with the beautiful Milady; d’Artagnan suffers a theft of the thing he most prizes in the world. And that’s all in the first chapter. I don’t know where it’s going, but I can’t wait to get there.

Dumas keeps the reader on a need-to-know-basis, telling us no less than but no more than we need at any particular point in the story, filling us in as things develop. He perfectly illustrates the tried-and-true reliable story mnemonic  ABDCE—Action, Background, Development, Climax, Ending. That formula is usually used to discuss the short story, but it applies just as much to the novel, and to sections within novels: engage readers with action, parcel out just enough background to pique our interest, escalate to some sort of breaking point, get out.

We can all learn a thing or two from that kind of story. Speaking of which, I’m going to get back to it.

It seems a foregone conclusion that Slumdog Millionaire will win Best Picture at the Academy Awards tonight. Well, okay. I haven’t even bothered to see all of the competition, but Boyle’s movie was certainly the liveliest, most consistently entertaining of the nominated films I have seen. Not as moving, complex, and real as Milk, no, but …it is fun here and there. It does have that going for it. And yet I hope it doesn’t win much of anything.

Don’t get me wrong. I like overheated melodrama. I love dancing on train platforms. I am even fond of completely outlandish story structures like the Q&A one at the heart of this movie. I like me my crazy storylines in service of a good time. But there is so much that is deeply wrong with Slumdog Millionaire that I can’t let go and enjoy the frippery of the story. That it has been embraced so feverishly by so many Westerners I find deeply suspect, because no way no how not in a million years would this story fly with US audiences if it had been set in, say, New York.

But others have said this more sharply. Here’s a long quote from a blog review a friend linked to:

…the problem is when you show every hellish thing possible all happening to the same person. Then it stretches reason and believability and just looks like you are packing in every negative thing that Westerners perceive about India. . . .

Let’s say I made a movie about the US where an African-American boy born in the hood, has his mother sell him to a pedophile pop icon, after which he gets molested by a priest from his church, following which he gets tied up to the back of a truck and dragged on the road by KKK clansmen. Then he is arrested and sodomized by a policeman with a rod, after which he is attacked by a gang of illegal immigrants, and then uses these life experiences to win “Beauty and Geek”.

Even though each of these incidents have actually happened in the United States of America, I would be accused of spinning a fantastic yarn that has no grounding in reality, that has no connection to the “American experience” and my motivations would be questioned, no matter how cinematically spectacular I made my movie. At the very least, I wouldn’t be on 94% on Tomatometer and a strong Oscar favorite.

But I can forgive Boyle and his screenwriter for the ridiculous structure. Because why not? There is a larger, more offensive storytelling sin to focus on.

The big one? Boyle’s cynical exploitation of other people’s pain as “local color.” That is to say, going for the easy emotional push-button of observed pain as a shortcut to connecting viewers to the main character. If a story is actually concerned with a character overcoming real suffering, then by all means, the viewer needs to see it and understand it. (Any number of films come to mind, but think of, say, Christy Brown in My Left Foot.) But is Slumdog Millionaire that kind of story? No, not at all. It’s a shameless melodrama about, . . . whatever—true love against all odds, featuring gangsters and gunplay and the usual cheapjack stew of genre elements. That is, it’s storytelling as frivolous entertainment, which I typically love.

Except the horrors depicted in the movie are still very real for millions of people. And so the whole movie feels morally lopsided as a result. It’s too inconsequential to do justice to the uglinesses evoked. Raiders of the Lost Ark, one notes, does feature Nazis as cartoon villains, but no mention of the incomprehensible crimes they committed. Kasdan and Spielberg knew—as Boyle does not—that too much reality will swamp a fun, fluffy tale. Once that story mentions the Holocaust, we could give a damn about Indiana Jones and his bullwhip.

Because storytelling can’t have it both ways: You don’t get to pull the curtain aside to reveal genuine pain and suffering, then drop it and milk the audience’s reaction for your diverting sideshow. That’s crass, that’s cynical, and Boyle shouldn’t be rewarded for it.

Well worth checking out.

M: So that’s what I do. What about you? What do you do?

Q: Whatever I want. (pauses significantly) You know what I do.

(silence while Stearns processes)

M: (blushing, no doubt) Well, I do now.

Q: So, what do you say?

M: Erm, you know, I don’t usually have to … pay for that sort of thing.

Q: Really!?

M: Hey! Be nice!

(Q mutters, goes off in search of other prey.)

M: (uncomfortable shifting) Well, do you have children?

Q: No.

M: Are you, like, married to a children’s librarian?

Q: Um, no.

M: Do you maybe read children’s books for fun?

Q: No.

M: Well, okay then. Nothing you would have heard of.

M: Eh, New York, by way of California.

Q: Oh, I thought you were British!

M: No, just anal-retentive and well-spoken.

Q: … Oh.

This complaint that the American market doesn’t translate enough world literature is an old one, but the numbers that are usually cited aren’t quite as clear-cut as they might at first seem. Thing is, the lion’s share of books translated into other languages are translated from English—American and British authors—and are big bestsellers. John Grisham. Stephen King. Sue Grafton. Maeve Binchy. Frank McCourt. J.K. Rowling. Lemony Snicket. Etc.

These books aren’t translated because the publishers in France and Turkey and Poland are keen to engage in an international dialogue with American literature. These books are translated because there is a market for these books, and because these books sell, and sell well.

The real test is to ignore translations from English, and for someone to examine how many books each market translates from a more obscure source. South Korea, say. Or, heck, let’s say Japan. Big country, big body of literature. I’d wager that the numbers will be awfully similar.