Writer's Rant

I would like to try a little something that, to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never tried on my blogs before, and that is a book review. I don’t know that this will become a regular feature, although the books that I’m reading, whether of great literary merit or next to none, always seem to generate lots of thoughts in me that could be worth sharing.

But I am filled with strong feelings about my most recent read, The Cloister Walk, by Kathleen Norris, such strong feelings that I don’t think I could keep them to myself. The ironic thing is that the strong feelings are both strongly positive and strongly negative. Let’s be clear from the beginning, Kathleen Norris is an incredibly gifted writer. I really truly do admire her and her work and think that I should dive into some of her poetry, because it is clear from the way she writes everything that she is, perhaps primarily, a poet. Cloister is the second book of hers I have read, the first one being Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith. She has a very distinctive writing style, one of the features of which seems to be that she works primarily through small essays and vignettes that are cobbled together to form truly massive books. Sometimes a massive book is okay, as with fiction that is very surfacy and easy to work through, but her work is so heavy, it’s simply too much to take in such large doses. But I am getting ahead of myself here.

My single biggest critique of Norris’ work is perhaps not even so much a reflection of Norris herself as the editing process that her books appear to have gone through. Each time I have read one of her books, the feeling that I come away with, right along with my awe for her tremendous talent, is WHERE THE HECK WERE HER EDITORS? She writes these massive tomes of work, but the problem is that every time I get the feeling that every single one of those essays did not need to be included in the book. Some of them are simply weaker than others, and some simply don’t seem to meld well with the content of the rest of the book. Why were those just left in there? There is so much material that if the weaker parts were omitted, there would still be plenty of book to go around.

I think relatedly, but to a much lesser extent, some of the stronger essays in the book also seem to show signs of careless editing. As in, I could see minor changes or suggestions that could have been made to make the essay much stronger, but I feel like those suggestions were perhaps not made. Also, I think the overall structure and flow of the books is good, but sometimes one questions the overarching philosophy of why things are placed together. Also, I think from a lack of structural editing, each piece seems to stand so singly on it’s own that there is actually a great deal of repetition, not only of subject matter, but the book goes so far as to give background information for the same event twice; one gets the feeling that it’s because the essays were each originally written to stand on their own, and then just stuck together and published as is. Did anyone read through the entire manuscript together before sending it to the presses? I feel like that should have been the first thing to fix, because without addressing this, the book lacks organic unity.

Let me be as clear as I can be: I say these things not because I regard Norris as a weak writer. I think that her prose is beautiful, stunning really, and her thoughts are deep and lovely. She has so much good to say, not just about monasticism, but about life, writing, faith and doubt. That is why I’m so frustrated that the editing process seems to be so shoddy. I feel like her prose is so dazzling, and the success of her first prose book, Dakota, so phenomenal, that someone, somewhere (and one hopes fervently that it was not Norris herself) believed that this book was fine as is, that her obvious strength as a writer would excuse the need for editorial process. Nothing could be further from the truth! So I guess in reading this I was just left frustrated that the work of a truly gifted writer was not made to come to full fruition.

In case you can’t tell, I’m rather passionate about writing in general, and really, equally as passionate about editing. The two are two halves of the same process! Neither can be omitted without detriment to the other!!! Ahem. Okay, calming down now.

Anyway, if you haven’t read Cloister Walk and are at all interested in monasticism, spirituality, or writing itself I would still recommend this book, particularly if you’re not the kind of person who psychotically edits everything she reads in her head as she’s reading it…