This month, MostlyFiction.com features two novels by an author I hadn’t heard of before – Brian Morton. The earlier of the two books, A Window Across the River, considers a question that I have often thought about: how does an author write convincingly without re-creating people that he or she knows, thus hurting them in the process? A Window Across the River is about a 35-year old novelist stuck with writer’s block who looks up an old boyfriend. Their relationship becomes problemmatic, in part because he fears ending up in one of her short stories. One Amazon review calls this "a writer’s read" — not much happens, but Morton deeply explores the characters’ thoughts and emotions.
From Salon.com:
[Morton is] intrigued by the delicate layers of human emotion and character, but unlike most of the other writers who share that interest, he doesn’t approach them romantically, in gusts of quasi-poetic lyricism, or sidewise, in allusive, spare prose. He doesn’t write the kind of sentences that people who praise sentences go for. His style is straightforward, almost workaday, and he’s not afraid to tell rather than show. But the dirty secret of both the flowery and the stoic approaches to writing about feelings is that they both make good masks for sentimentality. The terse, glancing, chiseled mode in particular offers writers a way to indulge in bathos without seeming to.
Morton has a newer book out as well, also reviewed on MostlyFiction, called Breakable You. From Mostly Fiction:
A sensitive exploration of who we are and how we love, Breakable You focuses on three members of a family who no longer understand (or in most cases, care) what it means to be a family. All have made independent choices in their pursuit of life and career, and they now have little in common and few avenues of communication. As Morton, a particularly intimate writer, reveals his characters’ hopes, fears, strengths, and weaknesses, the reader comes to understand them and, in most cases, empathize with them…. Alternating points of view among his characters—serious thinkers all, Morton explores the universal subjects of love, life, and death, but his characters are unique, and their interpretations of how one develops a life, what love means, the responsibilities it entails, and how one copes with death and dying are also unique.
From Curled Up With a Good Book:
Morton dissects his characters with an astonishing and unflinching ease, exposing the flawed yearnings and hidden aspiration behind the outward façade of daily life, but the heart of the novel… is both heartrending and inspiring. From the profound observations of humankind to the excruciatingly painful wounds carried in secret, Breakable You is a remarkable exploration of the true meaning of love, loss and the moral compromises that betray the soul, a reminder that: “You’re forging your own character during every minute of every day, with every decision you make.”
I can’t find any other reviews of Breakable You online. Has anyone heard of Brian Morton before? Any thoughts to share?