Agony and Anguish - RABBIT, RUN

For a while now, I've been struggling with a title for my book - and the two books that will follow to make up the trilogy. First mistake, give the title so much power that you can't help but buckle under its impossible edict.

Should you decide to do a search on "how to title a novel," hoping to find some bit of inspiration, you'll find the same vague suggestions over and over. Use the hero's name or the villain's name or aspects of their character or place or a metaphor. The list goes on. But for me, it failed to inspire.

So, Rabbit, Run. John Updike does so much here. So much to steal--from the richness of a protagonist that you simultaneously care about and despise, to the impending sense of claustrophobia that existence seems to usher in underhandedly ("As he closes the door he feels he has spent his whole life opening and closing this door"), to the impossibility of simple resolution.

But what I need most right now is title guidance, and here, at least, I have my first step forward.

Rabbit, Run. An imperative. Maybe instead of trying to pull a title intact from the narrative, I start with mood. Grammatical mood. A command. Run, hold, steal, breathe. That at least feels like a start.

Tidal Imaginings - MOON PALACE

Pulled into this book so forcefully...a book where so little actually happens. Boxes of books double as furniture, time passes by virtue of books consumed (not so much read as felt with the tip of a finger), weight is lost, fathers are lost, money is lost, and all of it is ultimately found in one way or another.

There is so much to steal from Paul Auster--but first and foremost, the general ambiance of M.S. Fogg's narrative voice (which sounds like a boat name to me). 

A few lines that I will either steal verbatim (epigraph?) or at least, steal in spirit: 

"My life had become a gathering zero, and it was a thing I could actually see: a palpable, burgeoning emptiness...The room was a machine that measured my condition: how much of me remained, how much of me was no longer there. I was both perpetrator and witness, both actor and audience in a theater of one. I could follow the progress of my own dismemberment. Piece by piece, I could watch myself disappear" (24).

"Byrne told me that you can't fix your exact position on earth without referring to some point in the sky. Something to do with triangulation, the technique of measurement, I forget the details. The crux was compelling to me, though, it's never left me since. A man can't know where he is on the earth except in relation to the moon or a star. ... We find ourselves only by looking to what we're not. You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky" (151-2).