Morality

6 Reasons to Have Sex… or write about it.
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6 Reasons to Have Sex… or write about it.

two pair of feet under a sheet

6 Reasons to Have Sex

Or why I have open door sex…in my novels I mean.

In Romance fiction, historically and derogatorily referred to as “bodice-rippers,” as well as other genres, there is today a huge range of what we in the industry refer to as “heat level”. This includes books ranging from sweet, inspirational (e.g. religiously or morally conservative) all the way to fifty shades of grey, and every other conceivable colour of the sexual rainbow. Whether you’re into same sex or different sex, young sex or old sex, sex in two’s or three’s or more, or no sex at all, you’ll find it out there, somewhere, in a novel.

You Can’t Please Everyone

Readers from every background, value system and sexual orientation can increasingly find themselves, (or what they fantasize about,) between the covers of a book. Or, on the other hand, be shocked, offended or disappointed. This makes it trickier for authors to decide whether to, or how much to, show sex in the pages of their stories. No matter what you do, some reader somewhere will be unhappy.

two lego storm troopers holding handsthree beetles having sexwoman's hand, glove, whip, leg in stocking

Somewhere in the middle of the spectrum is the bulk of it, and even there, authors have their own particular style of consummating the romance arc, from kisses and caresses that fade to black, to detailed open-door sex with lots of “pink parts” and assembly instructions.

 

Why Is there Sex in My Novels?

I’m no prude, but as a writer it was difficult for me, from a traditional Catholic background, to get comfortable describing sex scenes. It took some stretching and learning to find my comfort zone as an author. So why do I do it?

 

Sex Is an Important Storytelling Tool

I’ve found, with each respective manuscript, that it gets a little easier, and I get a bit more creative. As I’ve become more clear that I never was writing traditional romances, but rather women’s fiction with strong romantic storylines, I’ve become more free about how I represent sex on the pages of my books.

 

Sex Isn’t Always about Sex

Representations of sex, and not necessarily just the implied sex that happens after the lights go out, the shower door closes or the curtain falls, are an important storytelling tool. Just like dialogue, description and other kinds of action scenes, like fight scenes, for example. In fact they have a lot in common with fight scenes, in that they are a combination of action and internal dialogue, with a heavy dose of the visceral and emotional. That’s a lot of power at the author’s disposal to enrich the story and the reader experience. Why would I leave it out? 

 

woman touching her face

 

Six Important Reasons to Show Sex on the Page

 

1. Vulnerability

  • In romance fiction, the developing relationship between two people is as important as each of the heroine and hero’s (or other characters) own character arcs. And they are intricately intertwined. Intimacy is an inescapable part of that relationship arc. Achieving intimacy is an important indicator that these two characters have let down their guard enough to allow themselves to be vulnerable with each other. Being vulnerable, or “getting naked” with the antagonist is how we know they have grown, changed and are ready to embrace their essential selves.

2. Empathy

  • One of the important reasons we read fiction is to empathize with and experience vicariously how other people deal with life. It expands our own world view and gives us insights into how to live our own life better. Even to avoid troubles. If we’re left to guess what happens behind the bedroom door, we haven’t learned anything about how other people have, or can have, sex or the intimacy that is achieved. That’s an opportunity lost that diminishes the reading experience.

3. Character Growth

  • Sex is ALWAYS about more than sex. In getting naked and vulnerable, issues come up. These include values, life and relationship goals, past relationships and their fallout, self-image, including body image which is an enormous issue for women, and emotional vulnerability relating to past wounds the character has experienced and has to be addressed as part of the story and character arc. To properly address the character growth, these essential subjects cannot be ignored. In my opinion, the depth of the story will suffer.

4. Emotion

  • How people approach their sexual partners and engage in sex is very revealing (pun intended) of who they are and how they feel about the other person. Even how they approach life in general. This changes throughout the story, and is in fact a big part of the story being told. People have sex for different reasons, at different points in their relationships and lives, and the specifics help to show this.

5. Catalyst

  • Sex in itself is an intense experience that can unlock emotions and break down barriers, allowing the individuals to realize truths they may have previously denied and move forward. Thus the sex scene itself is an important tool for the storyteller to advance the characters evolution toward whatever happy or tragic end they have earned.

6. Information

  • Sex isn’t always the same. It doesn’t always work and it isn’t always good. It can be awkward, funny, playful and even ridiculous at times. Sometimes what’s most important to the character in that moment is not the fact that they’re having sex. Perhaps they’re frightened, planning their escape, bored or preoccupied with other problems, like what to make for supper or how to win a court case. This can be shown through the contrast between the character’s actions and their thoughts, and can be very entertaining, informative or amusing.

Oh, you can’t do that, people won’t buy your books!

Going back to my point about pleasing, or not pleasing, every reader. Many times I’ve had writing coaches, publishing gurus and author colleagues expound to me, “Oh, you can’t do that, people won’t buy your books!” And of course every published author has had bad reviews as well as good ones. Some reviewers are not shy about telling you what they don’t like.

 

Reader Opinions

One of my favourites was a review of my book, The Art of Enchantment, a very romantic, sexy book set in Italy, about a relationship between a shy, introverted artist and a very sexy Italian architect. Moreover, the theme of the book is, in one sense, sexual liberation and expression. I played with this idea by having my heroine researching and writing her Ph. D. thesis in art history about the relationship between sexual repression and religious ecstasy in Renaissance art. How one suppressed was expressed via the other. (A completely fabricated thesis topic by the way.) When one reviewer said, “This was a really good book except there was too much sex and swearing,” I laughed. I loved it. A review like this tells other readers exactly what to expect, and helps them choose. I wish I had more.

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Publishers Parameters

I don’t want anyone to read what they don’t enjoy. But I would argue that one reason to read is to expand our horizons and embrace vicarious experiences that stretch us beyond the limits of our one life. And despite the proscriptions publishing houses, editors and imprints put on their authors about story length, subject matter, themes, morality and, particularly in romance fiction, heat level, I think every writer has to write what they want to write.

You can’t squeeze a (good) story out of a stone. A good story has to come from an author’s heart. So an author has to write the stories that are meaningful to them. I understand that publishers have to do this, because it’s part of their business branding. There can’t be a Harlequin Blaze or an Avon Inspire without clear boundaries, because it’s their job to help readers find the reading experiences they are looking for.

 

The Author Chooses, Then the Reader Chooses

This is one reason I’m independently published. I wear the publisher’s hat as well as the author’s hat. This makes my world more challenging, because I don’t conform to the convenient categories that other publishers or authors have established. So maybe it takes a bit longer for my ideal readers to find me and discover my stories.

But it’s also freeing, because for me this means I can explore themes, plots and characters that are real, complex and interesting to me. It doesn’t mean fitting my stories into particular shapes to please or meet the expectations of particular readers. As an artist, I am unbound. Some of the things I write might make you uncomfortable. They might make me uncomfortable. That’s a very personal thing, and I’m alright with it. Be forewarned. This is my brand.

My Brand

Some of the issues that have come up for me and my stories aren’t so much around heat level, and whether the particulars of the sex are shown on the page, but what kind of sex it is and with whom. In my case I’m not talking about BDSM and other kinds of erotica. In fact I don’t write sex scenes for their pure erotic value, even though of course I want to show attraction, intimacy and passion between two characters falling in love when that is the story I’m telling.

Wrong Sex, Real Life

Rather, I’m challenged when I write about sex that’s questionable in other ways: extramarital, when one of the characters is married to someone else (’cause that never happens), or sex that’s platonic, that is, friends with benefits, sex that’s therapeutic, sad or angry, sex that’s just convenient, or sex that happens for all the wrong reasons. Perhaps it’s a question of morality or good judgement. If nothing else, humans learn from having sex, whether it’s “right” or “wrong.” These, too, are part of real life, and part of our lived experience as human beings. In that regard, in my opinion, it is never wrong to include them in the stories I write, or you read. But that choice is entirely yours.

Do you: *strongly disagree  *somewhat disagree  *feel meh  *somewhat agree  *strongly agree?

Let me know what you think in the comments below, or if you’re shy, reply privately. I really want to know!

Join My Tribe!

And if you think you’d enjoy reading my kind of stories, please sign up for my email list to find out about my upcoming release, A Forged Affair… in which you will definitely find “wrong” sex. And also some really “right” sex. And acrobats and a giant. In the south of France. Also I’m revealing the beautiful new book cover to subscribers first! How can you resist?

If you want to know what I get up to day to day, and what my writer’s life looks like, you can follow me on Instagram, where I mostly hang out, and also Facebook or Twitter. I hope to see you there!

Yann Martel’s Beatrice & Virgil: Book Review
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Yann Martel’s Beatrice & Virgil: Book Review

Yann Martel’s Beatrice & Virgil

Yann Martel's Beatrice & Virgil cover artI recently finished reading Yann Martel’s Beatrice & Virgil, and afterwards I was kind of speechlesslessly moved… and disturbed.  But after the prickles in my skin smoothed and my fur unruffled, a couple of sleeps later… these thoughts came to me.

 

One could say that it is ‘like’ Life of Pi in that it’s deep and philosophical… and… it has animals in it… but there the resemblance ends. Beatrice and Virgil is a darker book, and upon reflection, the key difference is that instead of being about me, it’s about you. And by that I mean that it’s ultimately about empathy. It’s a subtle and a quiet book.

 

One could say that it is ‘like’ Life of Pi in that it’s deep and philosophical… and… it has animals in it… but there the resemblance ends

 

Martel begins by introducing us to his narrator Henry, a writer not unlike Martel, we are led to believe, and through this sleight of hand, helps us to believe and empathize and get inside of Henry’s head and heart. Then takes us on a journey with Henry, getting to know first the characters in a play, Beatrice and Virgil, absorbing their remembrances and thoughts and feelings, until they too are like our own, eventually and literally ‘getting under our skin.’ Martel succeeds in a fresh, innovative and sneaky way, through a fiction inside a fiction, in helping every reader to empathize with Holocaust survivors in a way they likely haven’t done before, in a lasting way, and then he even manages to ‘help’ us empathize with the perpetrator of the Horrors, the old taxidermist, a Nazi war criminal, through his obsession, his consuming guilt and self-loathing, even through his cold detachment… and thank you, that’s not creepy.

 

Martel succeeds in a fresh, innovative and sneaky way, in helping every reader to empathize with Holocaust survivors in a way they likely haven’t done before, in a lasting way

 

You’ll say I’ve missed the point, that Martel meant this book and its subject matter to represent an allegory for the blind ignorant, cruel destruction and extermination by humankind of animalkind, and yes it manages to do that too, like an oroboros eating its own tail, it goes round and round, one meaning the other. It’s about the heartless destruction by man of all life, his own kind, other kinds… the planet… individual lives… relationships… families… pasts and futures… dreams and hopes… entire habitats and cultures… ultimately himself. Martel helps us feel these things, from the armature that underpins us to the markings on the surface of our fur, in such a way that we can never forget.

 

Martel helps us feel these things, from the armature that underpins us to the markings on the surface of our fur, in such a way that we can never forget

 

If that is not enough for a slim volume to accomplish, Martel’s book does one more thing. The author slyly and wittily announces his intentions at the outset through his puppet Henry by laying out his thesis- that while history can tell us what is real, only fiction can teach us what is true. And just like his panel of judges, we are not completely convinced. He then proceeds to prove it.

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The Cut Direct

WHERE HAS BUSINESS ETIQUETTE GONE?

 

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BY-GONE DAYS

 

Those of you who read Regency fiction will know what this term means: The cut direct. For those that don’t, it refers to the social snub, a complete diss. Which was done very rarely only under extreme circumstances when a person was in the wrong place at the wrong time or behaving in an inappropriate way for their social class or the setting, or importantly was known to have done something shocking or socially unacceptable. It was extreme and it was noteworthy and it was a shocking cut down.

 

It was not done simply because you were too busy or self-important or didn’t like someone. Despite the accentuated social hierarchy in Regency England, people in those days understood that every person was worthy of acknowledgment regardless of their place. Whether a servant, a merchant or a member of the nobility, everyone had an appropriate address and everyone was acknowledged. It was ungentlemanly and unkind to treat people badly or to just simply ignore them. Not that there were not social boors then as now.

 

Which brings me to my reason for my blog post today which admittedly is a bit of a rant. This is been bothering me for sometime now.

 

Be Nice or LeaveFALLING STANDARDS

 

In the last couple of years, I’ve had occasion to apply for employment or to make inquiries with a number of business people. And I’m frankly still shocked at the lack of appropriate business etiquette that seems to be the norm in today’s world.

I sometimes wonder if it it’s a problem unique to the younger generation but I hope that that’s not the case and I would rather not believe that.

 

Although if it is a demographic phenomenon I can only assume that the current generation have learned their bad habits or failed to learn good habits from their parents, teachers and mentors. Perhaps we simply forgot to pass along what we understood and took for granted.

 

Free-Vector-3d-Social-Media-Icons-Pack-2012-New-Twitter-StumbleUpon-PinterestANOTHER CASUALTY OF THE ELECTRONIC AGE?

 

Alternatively, and more likely, this can perhaps be explained by our sudden global immersion into an age of electronic communication. Early on (The 80s and 90s?) there was some kerfuffle about lack of etiquette in email communications and people talked about that and took the time to critique and to pass along what they felt were important guidelines for appropriate behavior.

 

Now of course we have Facebook and Twitter and Instragram and LinkedIn. All these new, abbreviated forms of communication added to our options for and to further confuse our standards of appropriate social congress.

 

But things have clearly gotten out of hand.

 

Standards of behavior and modes of communication that might arguably be appropriate for some of the new social media platforms should not therefore translate into our person-to-person, face-to-face interactions. I should say that this does not apply to follows, friends and likes. But I’ll leave advice about what’s appropriate on those platforms to the social media experts.

 

telephone and keyboard in officeA SOCIAL OBLIGATION

 

It used to be and not so very long ago that if you phoned someone and left a message they were socially obligated to return your phone call. It didn’t matter if they were busy or if they didn’t want to talk to you or even if they didn’t like you. The onus was on them and it reflected poorly on them if they simply ignored your message. The same went for written communications and invitations, which clearly extends into the world of e-mail. It maybe electronic but it’s still mail.

 

If you’re very busy and very important… It’s likely you have staff and one of their responsibilities is to take care of your correspondence. Note the word correspondence: the CO and the RE meaning that it involves two parties and it’s reciprocal.

 

Sadly we live in an era of spam. We are all of us bombarded with email spam, with advertising, with telephone solicitations of every kind. All of them intrusions into our privacy (you remember privacy don’t you?) And the stuff of course must be ignored and should be ignored but that’s another rant.

 

But I’m talking about our personal one-to-one communications. The kind that impacts on our daily lives and our livelihood. I realize that sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference between one and the other. It’s my belief that we need to assume that a person who’s contacting us with their own name has a good reason to do so, is doing their job and pursuing some worthy goal and deserves to be acknowledged respectfully and politely. Until proven otherwise.

 

trash behind mesh fence

FINISH WHAT YOU START

 

Furthermore if you initiate communication with a person or persons and then someone responds to that you owe them the courtesy of a reply. If you post a job and receive responses to that in the appropriate mode and manner then the onus is on you and it is appropriate business etiquette to acknowledge and reply to those responses. It is just plain rude to ignore them.

 

No matter how busy or important you are you owe those people the respect of an acknowledgment. Very likely you have staff whose job it is to do exactly that. It’s up to you to say thank you for responding and then let people know if the position is been filled or if their application is unsuitable. They’re worthy of that. Has our new, electronic age of communication so depersonalized our exchanges with other human beings that we can now without compunction treat them like trash?

 

Everyone’s time is valuable. If someone made the effort to find your notice, to prepare materials, and to submit them, how can you imagine that it’s alright to just ignore them? Is that how you treat your clients? Is that how you want to be treated? Let’s remember the golden rule people. We’re supposed to be living in a civilized society.

 

It reflects very poorly on you and on your business and business practices. This applies equally in personal and social situations. And yet regretfully it seems to be the new norm.

 

What about you? Have you received “the cut direct”? How did it make you feel? Did it change your opinion of that person or company? If you agree with me, how do you think we, as a society, can address this failing? Create courses for students to teach social and business etiquette? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

 

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Corporal versus Cerebral Temptations

Come in, sit down, have a cup of tea. I want to tell you a story.

Truly, I tell you, I’ve been absconded by fairies this past three days, and taken on a fanciful journey. My body aches with fatigue, my head spins, my spirit soars, and my feet have not yet returned to the ground.

2Yesterday I felt I could not write a blogpost, I had nothing to say, I was bored with blogging, I did not care. But I realize that yesterday I was still in thrall, and only today am I able to tell you about it. But quickly before I fall asleep.

ARTIST STUDIOS

This past weekend brought yet another expression of the boundless creativity and rich cultural life that this small, rural island community contains – namely the annual Denman Island Artists Studio Tour. While there are more artists per capital on this small island than just about anywhere else in the country, just twenty or so are featured each year on the tour, and of these I spent part of the weekend visiting but a few.

While there are many talented painters, photographers, potters, sculptors, metal artists and quilters, etc. here, there are just two or three artists who’s medium and offerings stirred my soul and that I want to share with you. Firstly, Studio Angelika, where Angelika Saunders creates “mixed media collage with hand-made papers” as well as sculptural objects and handmade boxes, in a beautiful seaside cottage setting, using a variety of natural and found materials and objects was a revelation.

MAGICAL MIXED MEDIA

CYNTHIA MINDEN IMG_1451-4Angelika’s creativity is boundless, and her sensitivity to colour, texture and composition truly inspiring. On my own artistic journey, I have always been particularly drawn to mixed-media collage and assemblage sculpture.

In Angelika’s hands, fibres and scraps of nature that common mortals would walk past, such as dry twigs and the lacy skeletal remains of leaves, feathers, sea shells, stones and bits of rusty metal, become gems that find their way into her skillful compositions. She generously and enthusiastically demonstrated her paper-making technique when I expressed a particular interest, and I can hardly wait to get my hands on some tools and materials to try my hand at this fascinating craft, not to mention all the things one can do with the paper.

SPIRITUAL PLACE-MAKING

The second studio tour that moved me was Dragonfly Knoll Gallery, home of John Tallerino and Marc Randall who engage, respectively, in assemblage shrines and hand-made books. You’ll soon see the connection.

1 A at 6 highThe entire atmosphere at Dragonfly Knoll is serene and magical. These two spiritual gentlemen have created an entire world around their lovingly hand built home using recycled heritage windows and doors, romantic dormers, embracing porch upheld by gnarled tree trunks, a garden filled with insightfully placed shrines and objects of beauty and spirituality, from gongs made of rusted iron to wire, mesh and glass dragons in flight, to clockwork Steampunk-inspired chicken sculpture. Their studio, made up of several charming”rooms” along this corridor (my old architecture prof Brian MacKay-Lyons would have loved it), was one of the most comfortable, inspiring spaces I’ve ever felt. While I love John’s shrines, I fell in love even more with the place, made up of all these bits of evidence of the mindful, centred and inspired way that John and Marc live. It was Hobbit-like, in some ways, and a place I could imagine easily spending three hundred years, with never a moment bored or restless.

I was also very moved by Marc’s lovingly hand crafted books, with their hand-made papers (see the pattern?), whimsical embossed and hand dyed leather covers, carved and polished wood, and hand stitched bindings. I want to rush right out and take a workshop on hand-made books, and begin this exploratory creative journey myself. Somewhere in the muddled mix of hand-made paper and books, and mixed media collage is my own spirit scratching in its attempt to find expression.

INSPIRED STORYTELLING

What, you might ask, has any of this to do with loss of sleep? Well, in addition to touring artist studios over two days, and having my sensibilities and spirit carried away on a corporal plain, I spent almost every waking hour reading one of the most compelling novels I’ve read in a long time.

FlowersStorm_avoncovers_2nd_web-200x322I inadvertently discovered author Laura Kinsale last week through a Smart Bitches, Trashy Books review, and after sampling Nick Boulton’s delicious voice on samples of her audiobooks, I became intrigued by Laura’s storytelling and downloaded an e-book of Flowers from the Storm. Once I began this amazing, compelling tale, I literally could not put it down. At my age, all-night reading binges are not well-advised, and yet I watched the dawn light creep into my bedroom windows two of the past three nights as I turned page after page after page of this beautiful story.

The hero, Christian Langland, Duke of Jervaulx, suffers a cerebral hemorrhage, and his journey of suffering, madness and recovery, in stark contrast and complement to the spiritual struggle of the pious Quaker heroine, Archimedea Timms, makes this a one-of-a-kind love story.

I found Christian’s handicap with language fascinating, and as he emerges from the fog of his damaged brain, and expresses himself with increasingly complex vocabulary and sentence structure, Maddy and his close friends adjust and simplify their own speech to make themselves understood by him. At the same time, the tempo and rhythm of Laura Kinsale’s prose is deeply affected by this linguistic transformation so that we began to see and feel and breath in the stark, staccato, powerful jumbled poetic word arrangements of the hero, and this begins to feel normal. Better than normal, somehow. No ordinary historical romance this, an absorbing and compelling tale of human suffering and redemption, as well as a deeply moving love story that will stay with me forever.

While on the one hand I want to buy and read everything Laura Kinsale has written, a part of me wants to dwell in Christian and Maddy’s world for a while yet. And I’m left with an even greater dilemma, which is, should I spend my precious hours here on earth reading, writing or pursuing creative and spiritual expression in visual arts? There never seems to be enough time to do it all. And in the end, we still have to sleep.

Tell me what inspires or excites you. Do you have obsessions that keep you up all night? Are you a compulsive reader, or an artist that finds beauty in the ordinary world?

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Half-Blood Blues: Book Review

AUTHOR ESI EDUGYAN

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Earlier this month I had the pleasure of meeting Esi Edugyan, the author of Scotiabank Giller Prize winning Half-Blood Blues at the Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival, and to hear her read excerpts from her latest novel. At that time I had only just begun reading it, and as of last night, I am done. When we spoke, I asked her about the used of dialect in her book, which is populated by a mix of jazz musicians hailing from Baltimore, Chicago, New Orleans, Montreal, Germany and France. The use of the Baltimore”black” vernacular of narrator and protagonist Sidney Griffiths, in particular, as well as his motley crew of compatriots, is important because it contributes greatly to both the development of character, as well as to distinguish between one and another, and also plays a critical role in painting the mood and experience of that time and place: World War II Berlin and Paris. Several of the books reviewers, and several of the commenters at the conference, referred to the rhythm and tone of the language, and how it animated the story and lent it the musicality and feeling of the jazz music of the era. While I don’t disagree with this, and I very much enjoyed the language of the novel, this was not my main focus.

USE OF DIALECT IN FICTION

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As a writer, I was principally interested in how she had researched the dialects she used, and how, as a writer she had decided how much, and which elements, of vocabulary and syntax she decided to use and which to leave out. This is what I asked her about. She answered that she had sourced and listened to recordings of spoken word by contemporary jazz musicians, including Louis Armstrong who is a minor character featured in this novel. She also said she had to use a lot of discretion to find the right balance between illuminating character and culture, and keeping the language clear enough to not alienate or confuse readers.

I dealt extensively with this problem in one of my own books (The Aviary) which features a Canadian woman in Yorkshire, who is surrounded by characters who all have an accent of one kind or another (to her ear), and finds herself quite challenged by the famously difficult Yorkshire dialect. I have received a fair bit of feedback from editors and beta readers about this at various stages, and made many changes to try to find the right balance.

Esi agreed, stating that she believes it was the extensive use of dialect that initially made the novel difficult to sell, and she did make changes accordingly in response to her editor’s feedback. Certainly there are many examples of excellent novels that use dialect to varying degrees. I find it hard to believe that so many readers find it so impenetrable as to limit an author’s creative freedom (unless you happen to be Peter Carey, but even he gets flack, apparently). The sound of language is so important to one’s experience of a story, I would think those in the business, and those who love to immerse themselves in a good story, would be more flexible and tolerant, and willing to do that tiny bit of extra work that it takes to become familiar enough to overcome any initial challenges. But apparently not. Or not often enough for publishers to take the risk.

CHARACTER, EGO, AMBITION, FRIENDSHIP AND VALUES

As a reader, I have to say the element of this story I found most compelling was the flawed main character and narrator, Sidney Griffiths, himself. Sidney is a sensitive guy with big dreams, too sensitive we and he think, for some of the company he keeps, including his life long friend and companion Chip Jones, a hard edges, big mouthed and often crude character whose friends seem to tolerate him because he’s sometimes funny and also a great drummer. Too sensitive, we also think, when Sidney’s disappointments, sense of betrayal, and lurking mistrust of others ends up alienating him from them. It is his own frailty as a human being that ends up doing him the most harm, as he lashes out and behaves in less than admirable ways simply because of his own frustrated ambition, or desire. Sidney, however, and I have to think Esi did this quite consciously, seems a bit more ordinary that the other characters in the book. He is neither an eccentric nor a genius, nor terribly damaged, as it turns out, neither a coward nor a hero. It is this very ordinariness that makes him sympathetic, and helps us to step in his shoes as he and his friends are tossed about by the winds of fate.

Without spoiling the story for those who haven’t yet read it, I will only say that it raises several questions for me, such as: When should we acknowledge that our youthful dreams of greatness will never be realized? Perhaps we haven’t been given the talent, the determination or the luck to make it happen. Is it more important to do a thing exceptionally well, or to do a thing because it brings you joy? Is any sacrifice or choice justifiable in the pursuit of excellence? Of success? Even when it hurts others? When our life is over, will we value our accomplishments more, or the people with whom we shared the journey, for better or worse?

EXCELLENCE VERSUS JOY

Near the end of the novel, there is an exchange between Chip and Sid about whether and why they continued playing the jazz music throughout their lives. Sidney says, “It was supposed to be this joyful music. And I just couldn’t find none of that joy in it no more.” And Chip’s reply is interesting. He says, “I don’t understand that at all…The music is the joy. That’s how you find it again. By playing.”

In some ways, it seems to me that Sid deprived himself of the joyful music because of the pain and sense of loss and guilt he suffers, because of other decisions and actions he made in his life.

What do you think? Is it more important to do a thing exceptionally well, or to do a thing because it brings you joy?