Fiction: Numb by David Abrams

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 15:00:00 +0000

Three weeks before Christmas, my sister-in-law left her husband for another man. When Robin made her grand exit -- slamming the door so hard the Sears family portrait trembled, then seemed to leap off the wall -- my wife’s heart went out to Jerome. She homed in on his pain like it was an emergency distress signal blinking from a glacier’s crevasse. Jerome has always been Elizabeth’s favorite brother because, she says, he reminds her of me -- or vice versa, I guess.

My other brothers-in-law, Zeke and Sam, were always cruel to her, playing tricks, never telling the truth about anything, always keeping an emotional distance. Typical males. Elizabeth told me: “They never talked about anything but sex -- you know, what they were going to do to all the girls we went to school with. When I was in the bathroom, I’d catch them looking under the door with those little mirrors dentists use to examine your teeth -- except they were trying to see me pee. I’d scream and holler for Mom, but they’d keep right on sticking those mirrors under the door.”

Are longer books more important?

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 19:59:00 +0000

There's a canard that book editors don't edit anymore, and David Abrams' recent blog post about the publication of his first novel, "Fobbit," is well worth reading just to see it refuted. Perhaps even more striking, however, is the way Abrams' story alludes to an aspect of any book that has an enormous if somewhat mysterious influence on its quality: length.

"Fobbit," a blackly comic novel set among American armed services support personnel in Baghdad during the Iraq War, was the product of five years' work by the struggling Abrams. The author's final draft clocked in at over 190,000 words; in printed-book form, it would likely have topped 700 pages.

Abrams' agent told him the novel was too long; the author disagreed. According to Abrams, the two of them "insistently lobbed the issue of length back and forth like it was a ragged and bruised tennis ball." The author wouldn't yield much, and what they ended up sending out to editors was a manuscript only a bit shorter than the original. Quite a few turned it down, including two (whose responses Abrams publishes) who said they found the humor more muted and/or less black than they'd like.

Salon.com > David Abrams

Fiction: Numb by David Abrams

Are longer books more important?