Wednesday, February 24, 2010

The lake, the cabin, the cottage

One thing Greenwood has going for her is the setting. If anyone was going to do a convincing comedic-ending novel in the Austen tradition set in North America the only way it would work would be if it was set in a place where people summer.

In my life, anyway, it was there and at yacht clubs that some sort of genuine community based on virtue still existed. It was there that I learned to tie the reef knot and also that it should never be used for anything more demanding than wrapping parcels. It was that way with a lot of the skills I learned: it wasn't just, "this is how you do it".

To be honest, most of those skills don't have much application and I haven't practiced some of them in a long time. But learning about the impact of your actions and learning snobbish little values—like always leaving things a little better than you found them—have served me well my entire life. If I wanted to write a novel in the Austen tradition, that's where I'd set it.

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