Here’s a large photo gallery I created of the cars of the novels by Jack Matthews. Lots of photos, a slow-loading page, but generally enjoyable (I wrote a short introductory essay as well).
Category: Jack Matthews
Gambler’s Nephew by Jack Matthews (Book Review)
Print Editions: $12.44 ( as of Sept 6/2011) Amazon; Barnes & Noble ; Print Version Available (240 pages). Ebook: None.Estruscan Books, 2011 Author Website.
Summary: A highly readable and historically accurate story about how an accidental killing of a slave in 19th century USA affects various families and communities. A old-fashioned yarn told with cunning and irony.
Rating: 5 Stars.
Recommended if you like: Mark Twain, books about pre-Civil War and the South, novels that depict a panorama of characters (a la Dickens), John Gardner’s Grendel, William Kennedy, Saul Bellow
I am a fan of this taut and brooding novel about 19th century America. It centers around the accidental killing of a slave by an abolitionist while trying to save him and a murder that occurs as a consequence. Matthews has tackled historical subjects before. His story collection Tales of an Ohio Land dramatizes historical events while his earlier novel, Sassafras, depicts a phrenologist who travels along the wild frontier in the 19th century. Unlike the allegorical and satirical Sassafras, Gambler tackles more social and ethical issues, depicting 19th century morality in ways that would make the modern reader squeamish. Matthews doesn’t pass judgment on beliefs and superstitions which might seem repugnant to the the modern reader. Instead Gambler’s Nephew shows how people lived with such beliefs while still professing themselves to be religious and upstanding. Reading this book, one can’t help wondering what aspects of our behavior will seem barbaric to future generations.
I’ve always enjoyed the short fiction of Jack Matthews, and I’m happy to report that this novel is profound without being ponderous. It’s also a fast read. Even though the action turns around the abolitionist and his brother, neither has much actual “stage time.” Instead the novel is populated with servants, jailers, steamboat captains and slaves. The last third of the novel centers around the journals of Lysander Crenshaw, the “upright” slave owner whose slave was accidentally killed by Dawes. This part is slower and more deliberative (a contrast to the rapid pace of Books One and Two). The key thing, I think, is recognizing the parallels between Nehemiah the abolitionist and the slave owner; both were guided by moral impulses and both were troubled by the guilt of their decisions.
Here are three things I like about this novel. First, a lot of characters are rounded out and treated with sympathy and dignity. There are no villains here: only wounded or misguided people. Second, despite the book’s tragic dimension, there is also a lot of humor: in the dialogue, in the casual observations, in the character descriptions. (I particularly recommend the prison scene where a condemned prisoner named Biddle attempts to bribe his jailer for some alcohol — a scene which is both horrifying and hilarious). Each chapter expands the story by introducing a new character; at the end, the reader has traveled all the way back to the slave owner’s plantation during the slave’s escape … and stumbled upon surprises along the way. Finally, the book is littered with quips and diction and one liners which enliven every page. Example: “Two month old puppies chase their own tails; we don’t have tails to chase, so we chase imponderable questions.”
See Also: This disclaimer about reviewing books.
Free Writing Ebook: A Worker’s Writebook by Jack Matthews
Jack Matthews is a distinguished 86 year old fiction writer. Recently he published an ebook called A Worker’s Writebook.
I helped him do the formatting and design for it.Between August 1 and September 4, 2011, this ebook will be a free download. See the ebook description page for more details about how to download it.
Below is the preface which I wrote for the ebook.
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Jack Matthews has not only published more than 15 books of fiction, he taught classes in fiction writing to students at Ohio University for over four decades. This book consists of his teachings, insights, ramblings and ruminations about the art of fiction.
Many books have been written about the craft of fiction writing; how is this one different?
First, a Worker’s Writebook: How Language Makes Stories consists of essays and dialogue (called interludes). These interludes punch holes in the rules and pronouncements made in the essays; they also help the book avoid seeming too dogmatic. The two voices in the interludes are not exactly "characters" but the author and a contrarian voice within the author. The comparison to Platonic dialogues is apt; Matthews received his undergraduate degree in classical Greek literature and has always found echoes of the classical age in contemporary art and life. Still, the "poetics" of Writebook is grounded less in Aristotle than Aristophanes.
Writebook touches upon some practical aspects of writing fiction (such as naming characters and writing speech cues). But Writebook focuses on helping the writer write more boldly and with more attention to the linguistic vehicles of thought. For Matthews, most stories fail through under-invention, not because the rules of narrative have been disregarded.
Chapter 2 (Taxonomies) and 3 (Structural Matters) cover various paradigms for plot and character development. These are worthy subjects and Matthews has interesting things to say (especially when he tries to analyze his story Funeral Plots with these same paradigms). At the same time Matthews recognizes that there is no magic paradigm or archetype capable of explaining what makes all stories successful – these are just guides. At some point you just have to trust writerly intuition. Writebook helps the potential storyteller to cultivate this intuition and be flexible enough to bend rules when necessary. Matthews writes, "Anything can be done if it’s done in the right way: with style, panache and cunning."
Many writing books include a chapter or two listing literary cliches to avoid. For the most part, Writebook doesn’t do that. Instead it goes deeper and analyzes why some metaphors succeed and others do not. The funny Parable of the Indifferent Ear provides a good case study about how linguistic inventiveness doesn’t always translate into effective writing.
Literary insights from Writebook can be applied to drama, novels and poetry; but they are especially applicable to smaller forms like the short story (though Matthews’ claim that a short story of more than 10,000 words rarely succeeds is sure to be controversial). Writebook’s musings on the novel are still interesting (Matthews has written several novels, including Sassafras, a philosophical-satirical work that is every bit as expansive as Dickens or Balzac). But if you are seeking a guide specifically about novel writing, you might check out Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at a Novel, Milan Kundera’s Art of the Novel or even (!) Stephen King’s On Writing.
Similarly, although Writebook includes a few writing exercises – Matthews calls them gimmicks – there are probably better books for that (with Josip Novakovich’s Writing Fiction Step by Step being a notable example).
Writebook introduces lots of new ideas and terminology: the non-sequential time opening, the Swamps of Antecedence, pointedness (which, as I understand it, is how stories gain enough momentum to escape the gravitational pull of the author), linguistic vehicles (the actual words which transport the thought) and why flat characters aren’t always bad. Also, the technique of overcoming writer’s block by trying deliberately to write something bad or meaningless actually works (I’ve tried it).
Matthews wrote Writebook in the mid 1990s (and distributed it to his creative writing students throughout the years). Since then, Matthews has retired and kept busy with various writing projects (described in greater detail in his 2009 interview in Chapter 7). At 85 years old, Jack Matthews is still writing fiction and teaching occasional writing classes. For more information about the life and writings of Jack Matthews, see www.ghostlypopulations.com
I almost forgot; Writebook is wickedly funny. I won’t spoil the jokes; suffice to say that one of his former students said Matthews was "so damn witty" in the classroom that he reminded her of Groucho Marx. Writebook has serious and even lofty aims. But this is fun reading. Matthew’s style is playful and pedantic; Matthews enjoys inventing characters on the fly to illustrate his points and adding qualities to them until you begin to wonder if Writebook is going to veer into becoming a novel. After I finished this book, I still remember snarling black-eyed Greta Hutchins; she is still snarling, and I am wondering what she’s going to try next.
Robert Nagle, Personville Press, April 2011.
P.S. Jack Matthews’ new novel Gamber’s Nephew was published in July 2011 by Estruscan Press. The widely-praised 1967 novel Hanger Stout, Awake! will be republished as an ebook by Personville Press in Fall, 2011. If you wish to be informed about future publications by Jack Matthews, go to ghostlypopulations.com and sign up for the mailing list.
Ghostly Populations Now Online
Here is a website about Jack Matthews. I’m writing a book on the writings of Jack Matthews, and I’ll be publishing essays there, providing news & updates and collecting secondary material about his works. I’ll probably cross-post longer stuff here and on ghostlypopulations, so you won’t miss anything by looking here.
Interview with U.S. Short Story Writer Jack Matthews
This interview was conducted via email in Summer, 2009 just after Jack Matthews’ 84th birthday. Throughout the process, Matthews had a lot of fun with it: answers were sometimes full of deliberate misspellings and archaic contractions. After I assembled his answers into a rough draft
(where I replaced ampersands in his answers with the spelled out word “and”), Matthews protested; punctuation was for him a religious matter; I later learned he had once published an essay “Philosophy of the Comma” to explore (among other things) the question of whether the “frequency of semi-colons in a prose text is a clear and accurate measure of the author’s intelligence.” Sometimes I would be disconcerted by the superficiality of an answer (only to learn later that he had already written an essay about the same topic or devoted a chapter to the subject in his unpublished 1994 A WORKER’S WRITEBOOK). See also: Jack Matthews: An Introduction, Jack Matthews: The Art and Sport of Book Collecting), and On Choosing the Right Name for a Story Character. Also, some of my superficial ramblings about what makes a Jack Matthews short story so special. (Aug 2011 Update: www.ghostlypopulations.com contains news, updates & criticism about Jack Matthews.
The Author and his craft
How long does it take a serious writer to learn brevity? Mastery of form? The ability to produce a deep aesthetic enjoyment?
This is an interesting question — like the others, indeed, but not as answerable as they. I think one strives to generate meaning as energy; it’s like a demonstration in classical mechanics in physics: we say we are “moved” by a story, for example. So if there is a quantum of meaning expressible in 20 words and you express it in 10, you’ve doubled the power of the sentence. (This quantification is very crude, of course, and doesn’t do justice to the beautiful complexity of a good sentence).
