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Stieg Larsson is the universe’s hottest author at the moment. His three-novel series that began with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has become a kind of Harry Potter phenomenon for adults. Larsson died at 50, before any of the novels were published. But he told friends he knew his books were going to make millions. They laughed at him, of course. Even the greatest writer ever born would be a fool for being so certain of financial success. But according to some who knew him well, Larsson wasn’t a great writer, not even a good one.  Consider this compelling testimony in the Times today:

Anders Hellberg, who was Larsson’s colleague in the late 1970s and early ’80s, goes even further and claims that someone else must be behind the Millennium books: Larsson himself was simply not good enough a writer. Larsson worked then as a graphic designer for Tidningarnas Telegrambyra, or T.T., a Stockholm news agency that is the Swedish equivalent of The Associated Press. He occasionally wrote longer pieces for T.T., as well as captions, and would ask for advice about his writing. “It was not good; it was impossible,” Hellberg, now a journalist at Dagens Nyheter, the largest and best of Sweden’s several morning papers, told me. “Every professional writer knows these things: you look at a text, and you can see this is terrible. Some texts are a little messy, but you can work them out; but here nothing was good — not the syntax, the way of putting things, nothing.”

I know exactly what Hellberg means. As a professional writer, you can spot raw talent, even when cloaked in a trash heap of awkwardness and lack of experience. But it’s even easier to spot NO talent. It just leaps out at you. Imagine a concert musician listening to your Uncle Charley playing chopsticks on the living room piano. There’s just no mystery there.

But . . . I have seen people who were beautiful, even famous, fiction writers turn around and write stiff, soulless and downright stinko non-fiction pieces. I always assumed the explanation was that they were used to having any detail they could imagine in their fictive paint box. But when they sat down to write non-fiction, they were blindsided by the sudden lack of source material. They had no idea how to go out and research-report a subject thoroughly enough to replace the kind of information they could simply call up out of inspiration when writing fiction. As a result, they were firing blanks in non-fiction, and their entire writing machinery broke down for the lack.

So it’s possible it can work the other way: someone who was never any good at writing journalism is transformed when he’s no longer limited by the facts. At least that’s what I’m going to believe, because thinking that there’s some secret author out there using Larsson as a beard is way too Shakespeare vs. the Earl of Oxford for my tastes.

Good reviews are always nice, but the most gratifying reviews not only praise, but make it clear that a professional reader has found in your work exactly what you had worked so hard to put in to it. That’s what this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review does for Scott Higham’s and Sari Horwitz’s “Finding Chandra.”

When we began to shape the manuscript last spring, we knew that the biggest challenge we faced was the fact that our story had already played out twice, first in the media frenzy surrounding the case in the spring and summer of 2001, and then in the multi-part newspaper series on which the book was based. But I knew we still had an opportunity to make it seem new. So often when the parts of a story are dissected and minced under a microscope, everyone loses sight of the big picture, the context in which the parts belong, and make sense. Plus, Scott and Sari had some fabulous new reporting that got at the underlying forces which made of this sad case a tragic farce. We spent a lot of time and energy figuring out how to create suspense in a story of which the outline was so well known.

So it was especially gratifying to see the review Sunday, especially the following excerpt:

“[Finding Chandra] builds suspense through the careful articulation of the things that the police and the media botched, and through the revelation of how various players in the case had a hand in their own undoing. It’s an impressive feat of reporting and storytelling, full of the kind of plot elements that seem unbelievable and are made all the more engrossing because they’re true.”

As

So a reporter is interviewing a Thai general, who is shot right before his eyes, and THIS is what he writes? Back in the day, we coined a word for this bizarre phenomenon, when a reporter who personally experienced some dramatic, even traumatic event, proceeds to write his story as if he were piecing it together from sketchy third-hand reports. We called it “foreign correspondent’s disease.” And we meant no disrespect. It’s just that reporters who race around from war to disaster  are used to spreading themselves so thin over the Hindu Kush-es of the world, covering such volumes of human calamity on very short deadlines, that they tend to write as if by telegraph. Leaving themselves out of it is a kind of code of honor, to a fault.

Sure, first-personism can be abused and way overdone, but maybe we can settle on at least this modest formulation: If you happen to be an eyewitness to history, try not to shut your eyes.

Story Surgeons’ first editing project to hit the book shelves is now out: Finding Chandra, by Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz , has already garnered some excellent early reviews, and it’s about to get a good dose of national attention. Serialized in The Washington Post already, the book on the strange and terrible saga of the Chandra Levy murder case is headed for some of the big morning shows and People magazine, among other things. Scott and Sari are such pros, and great to work with. We did it mostly over g-mail and the phone, but we finished up in an all day session on my back porch last fall, all three laptops plugged into an extension cord that ran out my back door, as we wrote the last chapter together over coffee and scones. It will be what I always remember when I look at the book on my shelf. The climax to the day came when the last few paragraphs of the book materialized unexpectedly. Sari mentioned that the last time she’d visited Chandra’s mom, Susan Levy revealed she STILL believed Gary Condit was involved in the crime, despite the arrest of an immigrant drifter. As Sari described that interview, she mentioned something that happened that absolutely screamed out: “SURPRISE ENDING.” I won’t describe what it was here, because I don’t want to spoil it, but when I heard Sari’s account, I practically shouted, “Put that in!”

They did, and you ought to check it out. The whole book reads like a great suspense thriller/psychological drama. Often when you are working on draft after draft of a long project, it can get to be something of  a chore reading through one more time. But with this project, every time I went through it I was almost shocked at how quickly it read. In the end, they made the writing seem effortless, and that’s how it is to read.

It’s a well-known writerly fact that the prime driver of reader interest is conflict. My college writing professor always used to say that if you wrote about an old man who needed absolutely nothing more than a porch and a sturdy rocking chair, everyone was bored. But if the only thing that old man really needed beside the rocker and a porch was an old woman who just couldn’t stand to see him sitting there rocking all day, then you had something.

But conflicts are such a useful tool because they are, by nature, dynamic. They are the itch no one can keep from scratching. And the more we scratch, the bigger the itch gets. And it doesn’t just get itchier, it MUTATES!

Consider a real-life situation.  I take my dog for a walk through the neighborhood. As I wind down a long street toward the cul-de-sac, I see a woman frantically waving her arms and yelling something I can’t quite make out. I walk a little closer until I can see her desperately holding onto a leash, a feverish dog tugging at the other end. And now I can hear her. She’s saying over and over: “Get away! I can’t control the dog!”

So even though it breaks my dog’s heart, I pull her up short and drag her back home before she’s completed her appointed rounds.

A few days later, same walk, same woman. Once again she’s waving her arms and screeching for me to get away. Again I pull my dog up short. But this time I’m angry. What does she mean she can’t control her dog? If she can’t control her dog, what’s she doing walking around the neighborhood with it? She expects to just lurch down the street and have everyone flee before her?

I make up my mind that the next time I run into the woman with the runaway dog I’ll say something. I rehearse it in my mind. “Look, lady, if you can’t control your dog you shouldn’t be walking it around the neigborhood.”

A smallish, every day conflict, the kind life is rife with. So as a writer, how do you leverage the situation, mutate it into some unexpected direction?

Philip Roth wrote in the voice of his fictional alter-ego, novelist Nathan Zuckerman, a lament that has always reverberated in my mind: “If only I could invent as presumptuously as real life! If one day I could just approach the originality and excitement of what really goes on! ”

What is the human imagination, in other words, in comparison to God’s imagination?

Back to our story. A few days later I’m coming down toward the cul-de-sac and there is the out-of-control lady again. She starts the usual screaming, the hand waving. This time I keep coming, trying to get close enough to deliver my message. “Look lady,” I begin. But she just screams more frantically. “I have a bad arm!” she shouts. “I can’t control the dog!”

“Then you shouldn’t be . . . ” Before I can get the whole sentence out, the dog lurches, the woman yelps and pitches forward on the swale. The dog is snarling, furious, churning its legs and dragging the woman and her bad arm along the ground.

When I turned 56 last week, I was flooded with various age-related speculations. For instance– and I gave this concept to Weingarten for one of his columns recently (oh the selflessness of editing) — the day I was born, I was closer to the 19th Century than I was to the present day.

Awesome as it is, that is not an actionable fact (unless you consider jaw-dropping an action). But I had another insight that I can act on: There’s a moment in one’s reading life when it might make sense to stop looking for new books to read — an uncertain enterprise that produces as many disappointments as successful outcomes — and instead begin to reread all the books that not only worked for you, but had such a powerful impact that they shaped who you were and what you have become. In other words, make a list of your favorite books of all time, and read them all over again.

My list is long enough that if I stuck to the rereading plan, I’d almost certainly run out the clock before I finished them all. And I’ve actually begun — not with a book from childhood or adolescence or young adulthood, but a series of 13 novels I’d read maybe just five or six years ago. This is the Patrick O’Brian series on the English naval captain Jack Aubrey and his friend and ship’s surgeon Stephen Maturin. I referenced it in a recent post, but I didn’t mention that discovering great passages you only vaguely remembered — or didn’t remember at all — is one of the great perks of rereading.

It is odd, to the point of bizarre, how much of the plot line of the books I have forgotten in just a handful of years. But that makes it even more fun to reread — you can relive even some of the plot suspense you remembered so fondly from the first time around. “I know they get out of this mess, but how?”

It’s not just the re-living that makes this exercise worthwhile. You read differently the second time through. For one thing, time has changed the you that is reading. But even more significantly, freed from trying to follow the overarching outline of the plot, learning the characters, or being distracted by the author’s feints and slights of hand, you have more attention left for the deeper structures of the book, the language itself. The language, the way the characters speak, and the way the author speaks of his characters in a restrained omniscient voice, is what I am most enjoying this second time through. I keep running into small delights — at one point, the author refers to exclamation points as “points of admiration.”  And despite the serious life-death drama, on this second read through, I’m seeing much more clearly the strong, almost slapstick strain of humor that runs through it all — to the point where I’m astonished that I didn’t note it as clearly the first time.

And it’s reassuring: the quality of the writing, the insights, the sheer craft — all are revealed in a clearer light. It’s no mystery why these books lived on in my thoughts for years. It wasn’t an accident that they were the first ones I picked up to reread.

But now I’m already curious about what will happen when I go even further back in my reading history. What would I think of something I absolutely adored when I was 16? Like Catch 22, say. Will it seem juvenile? Impossibly dated? Will I see it as the work of genius that so captivated my teenage self?

I can’t wait to find out.

Yesterday Gene Weingarten won his second Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, which, according to no less an eminence than Joel Achenbach, is the first time anyone has repeated in that category. As Joel recounts, the story behind the winning story began on the morning I read about the unimaginable horror of a local man who went off to work, forgetting his adopted child in the back of his car, strapped into a car seat, on a hot summer day.

I found it so unimaginable, in fact, that I couldn’t stop imagining it. With me, it was more “how could anyone survive that” than “how could anyone do that,” because I knew I would have been capable of that. I know that I can get frighteningly distracted. I know that I can forget stuff. Important stuff. REALLY important stuff.

And as I sat there imagining the unimaginable, I knew there was one person who was even more outrageously forgetful than I was.

Gene Weingarten.

I also knew Weingarten was obsessed, an absolute connoisseur of moral dilemma and metaphysical angst, the unsolvable puzzles that make the human condition so particularly pathetic.

I knew that he would be particularly haunted because of his own fears that he could commit this atrocity himself, and that if the worst came to pass, he would never be able to stop torturing himself for it.

It turned out I hit it on the nose. Years ago, when we were both at the Miami Herald, Gene forgot to drop his toddler daughter at pre-school, and almost went into work, leaving  her in the back of a locked car on a sweltering South Florida day. Just as he was about to close the door on her forever, she said something.

He’d never told anyone, not even his wife.

So when I said, “You were born to write this story,” he didn’t just take it as an assignment, he took it as a sacred mission.

The first thing we decided to do was the one thing we knew would be most difficult of all in a difficult story: try to get the father who had just killed his child by accident to talk to us. Gene called the man’s lawyer, trying to persuade him that his story would be a sincere exploration of how this horrible thing could happen to a good man. The lawyer said: absolutely not. Not now. He said the guy was undergoing treatment. He said he’d let Gene know when or if he could ever contact the man. Weeks passed. Gene learned the man had returned home. He spent days trying to contact the lawyer. The lawyer never responded. So Gene wrote a letter,  a very sympathetic and moving letter, and drove to the man’s house with the idea that he would simply hand-deliver it and walk away. The letter explained why Gene was interested, that he believed it could have happened to him. It said if the man didn’t want to talk, Gene would pledge to leave him alone.

No sooner had he returned to the office than the man’s attorney exploded, threatening all sorts of immoderate actions and launching personal attacks.

That, we figured, was that.

Gene wondered if we should even go ahead with the story.

I said absolutely. That we needed to canvas prior cases, to find people in different phases of recovery, or lack of recovery, from nearly identical tragedies. That the whole point was to get inside the perspective of someone to whom this had happened, to understand it from inside out. There were enough cases out there, unfortunately, that I felt convinced we could find some who would be willing to talk.

And soon enough, Gene hit the jackpot. A woman who had left her infant son in a car several years earlier who, weeping over her dead son’s body, had vowed to take on whatever discomfort, endure the hate and humiliation of public exposure, in order to present herself as a stark warning to other parents. She would strip her soul bare in order to save someone else’s child. Gene was the opportunity to fulfill of her vow.

She became Gene’s guide into this far corner of hell. She revealed herself with fearless, some might even say reckless honesty. Through intelligence, eloquence, and genuine empathy, Gene had won her absolute trust. And that relationship paid an almost miraculous dividend: the woman decided to attend the trial of the father of the most recent victim.  She connected with the man in the halls of the courthouse, reached him with their shared horror, and eventually, she persuaded him that he should talk with Gene, and that doing so would, ultimately, save others from the nightmare that had become his life.

Gene would have his story, and eventually, his second Pulitzer.

There’s a blog I love,  because I am a secret science geek. Ever since Wednesdays in first grade, when they would cancel science hour if I was absent, I have had a passion for talking and reading about science. High school chemistry cured me of any chance that I would actually become a scientist — ie. chemical valences, to wit:

“In chemistry, valence, also known as valency or valency number, is a measure of the number of chemical bonds formed by the atoms of a given element. Over the last century, the concept of valence evolved into a range of approaches for describing the chemical bond, including Lewis structures (1916), valence bond theory (1927), molecular orbitals (1928), valence shell electron pair repulsion theory (1958) and all the advanced methods of quantum chemistry.”

I found I liked the BIG PICTURE issues, but not so much the in-the-weeds details. But I still am unaccountably attracted to science discussions aimed at laymen. I’ve been a big fan of the Cosmos and Culture blog at NPR’s site, which is about as sophisticated a discussion as you can get and still hope to attract non-scientists. But sometimes the weeds get a little high, and the question becomes, is it good science, or just bad writing?

Consider this from today’s blog item: “…it is indeed possible for a mind-brain system that is quantum coherent, decohering to classicity and back partially or totally to coherence. Then mind has consequences for the classical matter of the brain by acausal decoherence to classicity, not by acting classically causally on the classical matter of the brain.”

I can’t tell here, because I can’t discern a single atom of meaning. But I have a faith in the language, and I believe someone who deeply understood the issues involved, who was also a seriously good writer, could somehow say whatever the author is trying to say here in a way that even I could understand.

Read The Elegant Universe the first chance you get. It may be the smartest science writing for non-scientists by a major scientist, ever.  Brian Greene pulls it off because, despite the fact that he has deeply esoteric knowledge of one of the most esoteric subjects possible, he also deeply understands where, conceptually, the average reader is coming from. He knows how to point the mind, how to back off and say, “you can’t completely understand this without five years of advanced math study, but . . .” and then come up with a metaphor that will at least convey the sense. But he doesn’t stop there: he’ll also explain the ways in which the metaphor falls short of full conveyance of the idea.

In other words, there’s always another way to skin the cat. Language is a tool for nudging a stranger’s consciousness, herding it along, until finally it arrives at something like enlightenment, or to put it more technically, to “acausal decoherence to classicity.”

Sometimes I read something that strikes me with such force, I wonder if others respond to it with the same intensity, or even anything approaching it. Usually it is a passage that delivers a powerful shock of recognition, as if the author has swept aside a curtain and there, with stark clarity, are your own most intimate reflections. It is for moments like that, even more than the wonderful and historically accurate adventures or the unforgettable relationship between the two main characters, that I so enthusiastically — and perhaps tiresomely — recommend to my friends that they read the Patrick O’Brian novels about British naval officer Jack Aubrey and surgeon Stephen Maturin, circa 1800. To be sure, the series has a cult-ish following, but I fear many more who might fall in love with it would never pick it up, mistaking it for some pot-boiler seafaring romance, or if they do begin reading it, bail out at the first difficulty with the period language and the baffling naval terms.

But those who aren’t put off in advance or in the early going will find serious reward.  Consider this passage from page 350 of my edition of the second in the series, Post Captain (all you really need to know about the situation is that Stephen Maturin has found himself forced by strictures of the contemporary code of honor into the prospect of a profoundly unwanted duel, and he’s borrowed pistols to practice his shooting):

“The evening, as he rode back, was as sweet as an early autumn evening could be, still intensely humid, a royal blue sea on the right hand, pure dunes on the left, and a benign warmth rising from the ground. The mild horse, a good-natured creature, had a comfortable walk; it knew its way, but seemed to be in no hurry to to reach its stable — indeed, it paused from time to time to take leaves from a shrub he could not identify; and Stephen sank into an agreeable languor, almost separated from his body: a pair of eyes, no more, floating above the white road, looking from left to right. ‘There are days — good evening to you, sir’ — a parson went by, walking with his cat, the smoke from his pipe keeping him company as he walked — ‘there are days,’ he reflected, ‘when one sees as though one had been blind the rest of one’s life. Such clarity — perfection in everything, not merely in the extraordinary. One lives in the very present moment; lives intently. There is no urge to be doing: being is the highest good. However, ‘ he said, guiding the horse left handed into the dunes,’ doing of some kind there must be.’ He slid from the saddle and said to the horse, ‘Now, how can I be sure of your company, my dear?’ The horse gazed at him with glistening intelligent eyes, and brought its ears to bear. ‘Yes, yes, you are an honest fellow, no doubt. But you may not like the bangs; and I may be longer than you choose to wait. Come let me hobble you with this small convenient strap.'”

Shock of recognition? Yes, I rarely ride horses among the dunes or practice my marksmanship with dueling pistols, but that exact sensation of a sudden habitation of the present moment, a dazzling clarity that renders the unremarkable completely extraordinary, has followed me from its first appearance, and sometimes my life seems to unfold insignificantly between those present moments, which contain all the meaning anyone could wish for.

I don’t like to say I told you so, but I really, really want to.

I likened the writers of Lost to con men or derivative traders who “are shamelessly abusing their viewers’ trust. They rack up the profits from bizarre and outrageous  turns in character and plot without any intention of ever repaying the emotional investment.”

Today in the Post, in Lisa de Moraes always excellent TV column, we read that Lost co-creators Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have said they aren’t going to even try to tie up all the zillions of lose plot ends. Their excuse: not enough time.

Lisa goes on to say, “If you’re expecting they will nonetheless come through with some kind of post-finale TV special, online chat, tweet — anything! — to answer their rabid fans’ lingering head-scratchers, you need to think again. They have no intention of discussing the show after the finale airs on May 23.”

No, I reckon not. And from now on they are only going to use untraceable cell phones and travel under assumed names.