California Posts

Brad Watson’s “Miss Jane”

Brad Watson’s novel Miss Jane is about a girl born to a farmer and his wife in rural, early 20th– century Mississippi. The baby was born with “apparently manageable urological condition” makes her incontinent and later hampers her from marrying and being sexually active – considered to be a serious problem in her community. Later while explaining to her the doctor says:

“What you have on the inside is just as complex—I mean it is just as much a wonder of a miracle of the human body – as anyone else. But it didn’t get to finish putting itself all together, didn’t get to finish itself up and get everything right, before it was time for you to be born. Or maybe I should say at some point, for some reason, it just stopped making itself into what it was supposed to…”

Dr Eldred Thompson who assisted at Jane’s birth is a kind-hearted soul who does not share his wife’s ambition to move to a sophisticated urban practice but would rather than remain an old-time country doctor. He often marvels at the variety of patients he attends to: And all these wretched souls came out of the womb perfectly normal, the doctor thought, looking around. What can say what life will make of a body? Later Dr Thompson’s sentiment about keeping peacocks in his backyard to deal with his loneliness when a widower oddly enough illuminate his empathetic caregiving of Jane too “I like to think they really exist just because they are oddly beautiful” 

Dr Thompson takes little Jane under his wing and documents her progress meticulously. He shares his notes with medical colleague, Dr Ellison Adams, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland in the hope a possible cure can be discovered through research developments. The correspondence spans a few decades. By the time surgical intervention is possible to rectify it Miss Jane is elderly, more or less a social recluse, living on her family farm and has no desire to go ahead with the procedure.

As a child Jane has a joie de vivre that astounds everyone given her condition. She is warm, loving and ebullient but becomes reserved as she experiences first-hand the hostility of her classmates at school until they are reprimanded by their teacher for not making fun of anyone for “being who she is”. Jane continues to live with grace and quiet dignity. “She was the only one made the way she was made…[but] is determined that she would live like any other girl as best she could.” Yet when as a teenager Elijah Key (who is keen on her) asks if she is happy with life Jane wonders.

She did not know what to say. She’d never put a word to the sadness she could sometimes feel, especially in the last couple of years, that would linger at the edge of her thoughts like the invisible ghost of someone she thought she recognized but didn’t know who it was, some kind of familiar she couldn’t quite grasp.

There are others in the community but her relationship with her parents is beautifully told. With her mother it is fraught with anxiety. As she grows older Jane notices “her mother shut herself down in the secretive way she sometimes did when she wanted to hide something from you”. With her father she shares a special relationship where she may be the daughter of his twilight years but he is sweetly protective of her. He teaches her to fish, literally and metaphorically. Her father would take her into the forest and point out the beauty in the flowers and trees to her all the while naming them but stopping short of their erotic overtones such as with the stinkhorn mushroom.

Her father would point things out to her. He knew the names of most trees, the oaks, elms, sycamore and sweetgum, the magnolia, swamp bay, cherry, cypress, pecan. Some shrubs, the buckeye, sweetshrub, huckleberry, sumac, snowbell. Flowers of the valley, wisteria, joe-pye weed, jack-in-the-pulpit.

Ironically Jane will forever be surrounded by the woods and animals that procreate and give sustenance while she cannot. Despite her physical constraints her father taught her to be alive. He is practical and makes her future secure by buying insurance in her name and bequeathing the farm to her since it will give her a living and privacy too.

Award-winning writer Brad Watson has been an aspiring movie star, a garbage collector, a digger of ditches, a bartender, a professor, and much more. Brad Watson wrote Miss Jane drawing upon the story of his own great-aunt. As he says in an interview, “My mother’s family was a pretty stoic bunch, after all. But Jane was not dour, like some of the tough ones in there were. From what little was remembered of her, she was kind, generous of heart, as well as tough. She did not ever complain about loneliness, I was told. She lived her life as if nothing was ‘wrong.’ I, at the time I became interested in her, was pretty much wallowing in self-pity for this or that. I never knew her. But I began to admire her. I wanted to know more. So I tried to imagine a life.” In an essay he wrote discussing Southern Literature “My working mine, in the novels, has been family history, looking to family stories for what might illuminate something about a place and time, and the people in it, who are now gone but who seem as real as anyone living today, and who perhaps may cast a light on how we came to be who we are now. But what seems to me still distinctive, most distinctive, about Southern writing, is the sense of place in the work.” Watson was born and raised in Mississippi, spent much of his adult life in Alabama, and has taught there, in Florida, Mississippi, California, and for the past 11 years in Wyoming. In Miss Jane Watson presents a multi-faceted society wherein he gently questions the idea of “normal”. It comes home strongly when Jane’s mother consults a psychic, only to be told that Jane will never be “normal, like other girls,” but she’ll be happy: “Unlike you.”

Miss Jane is an elegant and sensitively written historical novel that will linger longer after the book is shut.

Brad Watson Miss Jane Picador, 2017. 

“Price Fighters” ( The Hindu, 31 Aug 2014)

“Price Fighters” ( The Hindu, 31 Aug 2014)

( The Hindu asked me to write a short piece about the ongoing price war between Amazon and Hachette. It was published on 31 August 2014. Here is the link: http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/price-fighters/article6365601.ece . I am c&p a longer version of the article published. ) 

Cartoon accompanying the Hindu article On August 10, 2014, Authors United wrote an open letter decrying Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ pressure tactics on Hachette to lower ebook prices. The letter — written by thriller writer, Douglas Preston and placed as a two-page ad, costing $ 104,000, and signed by well-known names such as James Patterson, Stephen King, David Baldacci, Kamila Shamsie, Philip Pullman, Donna Tartt, Ann Patchett, Malcolm Gladwell, Paul Auster and Barbara Kingsolver —states, “As writers — most of us not published by Hachette — we feel strongly that no bookseller should block the sale of books or otherwise prevent or discourage customers from ordering or receiving the books they want. It is not right for Amazon to single out a group of authors, who are not involved in the dispute, for selective retaliation.” The writers printed Bezos’ e-mail id and asked authors to write to him directly.

This letter came after months of a public spat between publisher Hachette and online retailer Amazon. No one is privy to the details but it is widely speculated that the fight is about the pricing of books, especially e-books. Authors began to feel the effect of these business negotiations once Amazon stopped processing sales of their books or became extremely slow in fulfilling orders. It even removed an option to pre-order  The Silkworm , by J.K. Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith, prompting the author to respond on Twitter where she encouraged her three million followers to order  The Silkworm from high street stores and independent booksellers. Ironical given that Amazon’s motto is customer satisfaction.

 Amazon defended its actions through a letter released on its website, Readers United (http://www.readersunited.com/), and circulated it to self-published authors using their Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform. In it, the company said that for a “healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive.” Amazon is asking for all e-books to be priced at $9.99 or less. Misquoting George Orwell’s ironic comment on the popularity of new format of paperbacks in the 1930s, Amazon wrote that even Orwell had suggested collusion among publishers. It released the e-mail id of Hachette CEO, Michael Pietsch, asking readers to write to him directly to make books affordable since it is good for book culture.

 Pietsch replied to all those who wrote to him stating clearly, “Hachette sets prices for our books entirely on our own, not in collusion with anyone… More than 80 per cent of the e-books we publish are priced at $9.99 or lower. Those few priced higher — most at $11.99 and $12.99 — are less than half the price of their print versions. Those higher priced e-books will have lower prices soon, when the paperback version is published. … Unlike retailers, publishers invest heavily in individual books, often for years, before we see any revenue. We invest in advances against royalties, editing, design, production, marketing, warehousing, shipping, piracy protection, and more. We recoup these costs from sales of all the versions of the book that we publish — hardcover, paperback, large print, audio, and e-book. While e-books do not have the $2-$3 costs of manufacturing, warehousing, and shipping that print books have, their selling price carries a share of all our investments in the book.”

Amazon’s shareholders are getting tetchy with the massive losses the company has posted once again. For the current quarter, Amazon forecast that the losses would only grow. It expects a healthy rise in revenue but an operating loss of as much as $810 million, compared with a loss of $25 million in the third quarter of 2013. Losses increased as the firm spent heavily in a bid to expand its business with its first smartphone, the Fire Phone. Bob Kohn has pointed out the monopsony power of Amazon, which has a current market share of 65% of all online book units, digital and print, is not just theoretical; it’s real and formidable. When a company has dominant market power and sells goods for below marginal cost, it is engaging in predatory pricing, a violation of federal antitrust laws.”  There have been articles in USA for the government to enforce the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936, the law prohibits a retailer from wielding its mere size to bully suppliers for discounts. But as Colbert’s experiment of promoting debut author Edan Lepucki’s novel California showed that if readers want, they can procure a book from anywhere. His discussion about it, stemming from his anger for Amazon’s monopolistic practices, propelled California to becoming an NYT bestseller.

In India, commercially-successful author Ashwin Sanghi, drawing parallels between the music industry of 2002 and publishing of today, says, “Books are at an inflection point in 2014; a bit like music was in 2002. Music producers were accustomed to selling CDs whereas Apple wanted to sell singles at 99 cents. The face-off between Amazon and publishers/authors is similar. Publishers wish to charge prices that the industry is accustomed to while Amazon wishes to charge prices that customers will like, thus inducing more customers to buy on Amazon. I think the time has come for Jeff Bezos to sit across the table with publishers. There is no alternative.”

Another author, Rahul Saini writes “I have never supported the idea of monopoly and that is what Amazon is clearly trying to do here. Looking at the argument Amazon is making, it does make sense — buyers are always driven by low prices and heavy discounts (the Indian book market is a perfect example) but I firmly believe that the retailer does not own any right to dictate the pricing of a book. It has to be a mutual consent between the author and the publisher.”

 Popular author Ravinder Singh has his own take. “A publisher has the right to decide the cost of its books (in any format).  If the retailer really wants to bring down the price of the book, he can discount on his margins and should be free to do so. To decide the price tag of a book is a publisher’s (and not retailer’s) prerogative. Having said that, knowingly delaying shipment of titles of a particular publisher (and their authors’) just because it is not accepting the demand, leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth — readers, authors and publishers. Amazon may be right about the price-demand elasticity of the e-book and in saying that it can certainly bring more readership and thereby more money (offsetting the drop in price). But Hachette has all the right to decline it, even if it means letting go off money. As far as authors are concerned, they would not like to see one particular entity in the entire chain (that has accumulated huge powers), be it a publisher or a retailer, to decide their fate. They want to reach out to as many readers as possible, on time and make the royalties that they deserve.”

 Writing in the Guardian, Kamila Shamsie says, “All writers should be deeply concerned by the strong-arm tactics Amazon is using in its contractual dispute with Hachette — similar to tactics used in 2008 with Bloomsbury titles.  Writers want their books to reach readers; and we want to be able to earn a living from our work. It’s a great irony that the world’s largest bookseller is prepared to trample over both those wants in order to gain a business advantage even while claiming to stand up for readers and writers.

Others disagree. Major names in self-publishing including Barry Eisler and Hugh Howey petitioned Hachette asking the publisher to “work on a resolution that keeps e-book prices reasonable and pays authors a fair wage”. This has gathered over 7,600 signatures.

 Publishing is not like selling biscuits or furniture. It isn’t a question of taste and preference but an exercise in social philosophy. Amazon is primarily a tech-company whose dominance in the book industry is unprecedented. There may be some similarities with what happened in the music industry 10 years ago but publishing thrives on editorial tastes, which requires human intervention, not a series of algorithms promoting and recommending books. The book industry relies upon editors who know the business of “discovering” authors and converting them into household names. This public outrage against the ongoing battle between Amazon and Hachette proves that books are important to the cultural dimension of society.

1 September 2014 

Web Analytics Made Easy -
StatCounter