Titles within a Tale

Titles within a Tale
by: Ed Park

Chances are you haven’t read Margery McIntyre Flood’s young adult oeuvre, which includes “You Can’t Do Anything Right,” “Mom’s Coffee Smells Like Gin” and “You Would if You Loved Me,” otherwise known as “the birth-control one.” Somehow you missed Jean Fung’s “Protracted” (“about hooking up and engineering at a prestigious university, written by the former sex columnist for The California Tech”) and Pamela McLaughlin’s “Strip Tease” (one of her popular Trang Martinez mysteries), Cubby Greenwich’s “One O’Clock Jump” and John Clitherow’s “Mr. Bluebird.”

Though all these titles appeared this year, you won’t find them at the bookshop or at the Kindle store, because they belong to what might be called the invisible library. This library contains books that exist only between the covers of other books — as descriptions, occasionally as brief excerpts, often simply as titles.

The books named above come from three very different sources. Flood figures in Caitlin Macy’s story “Bad Ghost” (from her collection “Spoiled”), a psychologically astute story in which a young woman recalls a fraught spell baby-sitting the author’s daughter. The précis of “Protracted” and a tough-as-leather passage of “Strip Tease” are among the many faux fictions in Steve Hely’s “How I Became a Famous Novelist,” a gleeful skewering of the publishing industry and every cliché of the writing life. And Greenwich and Clitherow (as well as Greenwich’s children’s-book-writing wife, Penny Boom, creator of “The Other Side of the Woods”) are characters in Dean Koontz’s “Relentless,” whose plot spirals out from a best-selling author’s bloody feud with a sinister critic to describe a vast cultural conspiracy. (Appropriately enough, it hit the top spot of the real Times best-seller list.) In 2009, the invisible library is as vibrant as ever, with new acquisitions in every genre.

Novelists have long tucked made-up fictions inside their real ones. Sometimes these interior texts inform the plot or enhance the theme, other times they are just lively bursts of color, sparks thrown off during the authorial process. It’s easy to understand the appeal of creating these miniatures. A few deft lines can conjure perfect examples of untutored rawness (Mattie Ross, the 14-year-old heroine of Charles Portis’s “True Grit,” has a manuscript entitled “You will now listen to the sentence of the law, Odus Wharton, which is that you be hanged by the neck until you are dead, dead, dead! May God, whose laws you have broken and before whose dread tribunal you must appear, have mercy upon your soul. Being a personal recollection of Isaac C. Parker, the famous Border Judge”), sublime dullness (“The Purpose of Clothing Is to Keep Us Warm,” in Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares’s “Chronicles of Bustos Domecq”) or anything in between. Why write the whole book when you can get so much mileage out of the title alone?

Most such inventions have one foot in the comic. We can imagine Nabokov chuckling over Udo Conrad’s “Memoirs of a Forgetful Man” (in “Laughter in the Dark”) and Clare Quilty’s “Fatherly Love” (“Lolita”) — not to mention the alter-Nabokovian bibliography that kicks off his last complete book, “Look at the Harlequins!,” in which “The Gift” (“Dar” in Russian) becomes “The Dare,” and so on.

Aldous Huxley’s very funny first novel, “Crome Yellow” (1921), features not just a varied smattering of invisible books and books-in-progress (Mr. Barbecue-Smith’s “Pipe-Lines to the Infinite,” Henry Wimbush’s history of the town of Crome), but what might be called second-degree invisibles: a bookcase of pageless spines — 10 volumes of “Thom’s Works and Wanderings,” seven of “Tales of Knockespotch” — camouflaging a secret door. These books are fake even in the fictional world where they sprout.

In Raymond Chandler’s posthumously published notebooks, we find 36 unused titles, from “The Man With the Shredded Ear” to “The Black-Eyed Blonde,” as well as reference to Aaron Klopstein, author of such books as “Cat Hairs in the Custard” and “Twenty Inches of Monkey” (a title derived from a catalog listing monkeys for vivisection at a dollar per inch). For all their loopy humor, such jeux d’esprit also suggest a haunting: all the books a writer will never get the time to write.

Indeed, invisible books are charged with the uncanny. No one can possibly have read, or even heard of, every book ever written, so how can we distinguish the fake from the real? H. P. Lovecraft used this ambiguity to great effect in his stories. In “The Haunter of the Dark” (1936), the unfortunate protagonist stumbles upon shelves of “mildewed, disintegrating books” — “the banned and dreaded repositories of equivocal secrets and immemorial formulae.” These include “a Latin version of the abhorred ‘Necronomicon,’ the sinister ‘Liber Ivonis,’ the infamous ‘Cultes des Goules’ of Comte d’Erlette, the ‘Unaussprechlichen Kulten’ of von Junzt, and old Ludvig Prinn’s hellish ‘De Vermis Mysteriis.’ ” The titular details — the sinister-looking double i’s in “Mysteriis,” the rebarbative German tag of von Junzt’s work — are arguably as chilling as the overwrought prose Lovecraft sometimes discharges.

Browsing through the invisible library, one can imagine endless classifications, an alternate Dewey Decimal System for invisible books whose titles double as those of the books that contain them (Nicole Krauss’s “History of Love,” Douglas Adams’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”); phantom books in movies (the self-help books in “Synecdoche, New York”) and on TV (“Tapping a Maple on a Cold Vermont Morning,” published in The Atlantic Monthly by one of the account executives on “Mad Men”); bogus books that are the subject of fictitious reviews (“Idiota,” “Being Inc.” and 13 others in Stanislaw Lem’s “Perfect Vacuum”). Then there are invisible books that later lend their titles to actual books: David Means’s story collection “The Secret Goldfish” takes its name from the collection written by Holden Caulfield’s brother, D.B.; Martin Amis, an avowed Nabokovophile, wrote a novel called “Success” — also the title of an invisible book mentioned in Nabokov’s novel “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.”

Lurking somewhere behind these invented books is an anxiety. Any writer walking through a dusty row of library stacks, or glancing at a title on Amazon with a sales rank in the mid-millions, feels the insignificance of his or her endeavor. Why write more? How can one possibly expect to make a dent in the culture, or even get read by anybody outside one’s immediate family?

Generating titles for an invisible library is perhaps the unconscious acknowledgment of this depressing reality. The fact that one’s characters can be moved by some unlikely volume — the way Kurt Vonnegut’s Eliot Rosewater gushes over the invisible science fiction writer Kilgore Trout’s dystopian “2BRO2B” in “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” — might be a secret wish for the book that’s really being written to find its own champions. It’s a small hedge against oblivion. And in the end, as even our hazy notions of literary history suggest, one can ask whether such invented books are any less real than the titles lost forever at Alexandria — or those residing on your Kindle when it goes dark.

From: the NYTimes