Bringing Reading to Life: Setting

Okay, first things first:  until tomorrow at 5:00 PM EST, you can tell me about the best book you’ve read recently and get entered to win a $5 giftcard to Powell’s Books.  Jump on it!

Second thing:  unfortunately we had to cancel the first Books Distilled Book Club last night because there were some participant conflicts. We’ll be rescheduling, so if Turn of Mind has been on your to-read list, pick it up and maybe you can join us!

I was trying to decide last night (which, for me, is last minute) what to write about in today’s post.  Yesterday I had a great conversation with my faculty mentor, Hollis, about the most recent work on my novel that I turned in.  One of her major comments was that I needed to beef up the setting in pretty much every scene.

Over the summer at our residency, Da Chen gave a great seminar on setting.  When I worked with him last semester, he told me, “Setting is like a local god.  You must pay homage to it, or your story will not come to life.”  That sounded pretty important to me.  In his novel Brothers, as well as in his memoirs, China comes alive as if she were an additional character shaping all the other characters’ destinies.

I began thinking of all the novels I love most, and I noticed as they came to mind how fully developed the setting is in each one.  Right now I am reading Joan Leegant’s Wherever You Go, and Israel has come alive:  stifling hot, dusty, and yet still retaining a jewellike distinguished beauty.  New York City, by contrast, is dull, humid, cloying; its luxury overblown and its poverty seedily atrocious.

Last weekend I was overcoming a cold, and for comfort I reread one of my favorite books of all time:  The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman’s first installment in the three-part His Dark Materials series.  If you’ve read it, the opening scene when Lyra and Pantalaimon hide in the Retiring Room provides a fully developed setting.  The room is like a microcosm of Jordan College, masculine and opulent.  I was struck by just how much setting Pullman pours into that first scene–not just in the physical room the characters occupy, but orienting the reader in a world where people’s souls are embodied in animals called daemons; in a political world where the Church is the largest and most powerful force imaginable; and introducing the fantastic landscape of the North in which the Aurora pulls back the curtain of the physical realm and allows us to see a city in another universe.  That first scene sets up the entire series masterfully.  And it is grounded in setting so concretely that you feel you know the size and shape of the wardrobe in which Lyra is hiding.

My fellow classmate, Reuben, recently wrote a craft essay on setting which I cajoled him into sending to me.  He read Janet Burroway’s chapter “Far, Far Away: Fictional Place,” who quoted Jerome Stern: “a scene that happens nowhere often seems not to happen at all.” Think of your favorite novels.  Does the setting come to mind immediately?  Think of The Sun Also Rises: Pamplona.  The Lord of the Rings:  Middle Earth (the Shire and Mount Doom; Rivendell, Lothlorien, Moria; Minas Tirith; need I go on?).  The Great Gatsby:  “East Egg” (Long Island); the city; Gatsby’s gaudy mansion.  More recent novels–The Paris Wife (Paris in the 1920′s); Deep End of the Ocean (Chicago); The Map of True Places (Salem).

So it’s true:  setting is a local god.  Since the novel I’m writing is set in Philadelphia, looks like a trip to the city where I grew up is necessary.