Marly Youmans and her pip of a new novel

Is there anyone out there, still living (besides me), who knows the term " a pip of a... ?" It's the second part of the THIRD definition on Dictionary. com: 

pip

   /pɪp/  

noun

Also called pipperoo. Informal . Someone or something wonderful: Last night's party was a pip.

And this new Marly book, to appear on bookstore shelves and e-shelves everywhere today,  is *apparently a pip, too---the winner, for example, of the 2012 Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction.

 

 

Noted writer Raymond L. Atkins  puts Marly's book in the high pip category, too. Here's something of what HE had to say of A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage:

 In A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Marly Youmans gives us a beautifully written and exceptionally satisfying novel.  The book reads as if Youmans took the best parts of The Grapes of Wrath, On the Road, The Reivers, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and crafted from them a tale both magical and fine... .

Several of Marly's friends, writers, painters, blogonauts, have interviewed her on the topic of her new book. I am one of these and so here we are: you, me, and Marly.

Laura:

Reading about your new book on your blog, I, of course, noticed that your orphan protagonist shares a name with that other famous orphan protagonist, Pip of Dickens's Great Expectations. That book and Bleak House are two of my lifelong favorites, by the way, so they figure hugely in my imagination and memory.

Names such as Pip or Ishmael or Scarlett, for example, naturally carry strong associations for readers. When a new character bears a name with heavy historical reference, we (the reader) think, "Aha! So how does THIS Pip relate to the Dickens Pip? What is the author telling us about this new Pip, even before his story starts? Is this an ironic use of the name or is it some kind of homage to the Dickens one? What does this MEAN, because in the whole unlimited universe of names from which to choose, the new author has chosen this one and there has to be a reason!

In this case, the fact that the two Pips are orphans seems a double underlining of the connection between them.

Therefore, although perhaps the Pip question has been asked a million times, I'm going to ask it again. Why the Dickens orphan reference, or ...What the Dickens?

Marly:

Laura, it is your luck to be number one! Nobody has yet asked me that question.

 

At one time there was a Dickens reference at the start of the A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, but I am afraid that I took a scalpel to it on the last pass through the manuscript. In an earlier version, I did make an offhand connection to Great Expectations in a line where the naming of Pip was referred back to the Dickens Pip as “a boy who turned out well enough.” Gone!

 

But I was very much a Dickens fan as a child and still am. His somewhat untidy books are overflowing life, and even his flat characters buzz and spin with vigor. Every now and then I feel a pressing need to reread Bleak House, and Great Expectations is among those I have read and reread. When I finally was allowed an adult library card in 6^th grade, I headed straight for whatever Dickens novels were not already shelved in the children’s section.

 

Pip’s family is composed of brothers and sisters with names that are palindromes or palindrome-like:  Otto, Chach, Lil, Mim, and so on, all named by the family patriarch.  Here’s what Pip has to say about those names: “All my brothers and sisters had names like mine—turn them around like in a mirror and they’re just the same, backwards, forwards, inside out. It was a mad freak of my daddy’s to name them that way.  Old Gilead Tattnal.  I guess he was a God-crazy man.  Thought the alpha and omega of a name had to be just the same.  But it makes no sense to me.  God’s not the same backwards and forwards.”

  

The protagonist struck me as a Pip from out of the possible palindromes right away, not so much because of Dickens (I didn’t even think of Great Expectations until later, although certainly the orphan idea is present, and an important relationship with a sibling—none of those uncommon in the world of books or in hard times, which both Pips endure) but because it felt right. Many a writer has not so much chosen a name as met a character with name already fastened, and that is how it seemed with Pip.

 

In some long-buried way, the naming may have something to do with my father having a 3-letter nickname beginning with “P” in childhood. Not a palindrome, but short. While Pip is not modeled after my father, I used the sharecropper’s house where he grew up as the model for the orphanage, and several times my father ran away and rode the rails when he was a teen. I don't doubt that it was a lot more fun than picking cotton or pulling tobacco--sixty years later, he could still doom any noun to perdition by putting “cotton-picking” in front of it.

 

Clearly the circularity of these names, particularly the name of Otto, plays some role in the story.  But I’ll leave that for somebody who wants to put on a critic’s hat, as the reasons for this choice felt obscure but important to me, and I had no wish to investigate them.

Laura:

So the Pip of your novel has no direct association to the earlier Dickens' one? 

Marly:

Not a deliberate one; I thought of the name, and then a moment later realized that it had been used by Dickens. Certainly there is a common thread joining one orphan to another--for each, a sister is quite important. The name came more from an awareness of "Pip" as suggesting the mostly-British usage of  "pipped" or wounded, "pip" as seed that may grow and flower and fruit, and "pip" as the first step of a bird toward hatching. All these things bear on the protagonist's situation and say something about it and him. Of course I remembered the Pip created by Dickens and "brought up by hand." But what did not occur to me until you asked this question was another literary reference--to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and "The Five Orange Pips." The surprising thought just came to me that "The Five Orange Pips" fetches up not only one of many writers (like Dickens) I loved in childhood, but also a direct link between "pip" and danger, death, Savannah, and the K. K. K.

Laura:

Thank you, Marly. Our discussion teaches me, once again, how the truths and power of a well-drawn character are bigger, deeper, and more various than the reader or the writer, ( if I may be so bold as to claim), can know or predict at the outset.

* I'll find out soon when I get my own copy of A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage at our great local bookstore Flyleaf Books. It can be ordered online at amazon.com and other venues. Read it, won't you?

Comments

[marly youmans]

Hi Laura--

Thank you for the lovely post. (And you are wonderfully persnickety!) Hope your readers and passers-by enjoyed the peep-at-Pip. Thanks to commenters, too...

A sample of the book--chapter one: http://www.scribd.com/marly_youmans

[Cathy Johnson (Kate)]

Oh, hooray, a new writer to check out! Thank you, looks marvelous! (And yep, we know pip here in the Midwest!)

[Lucy]

I hadn't thought, consciously, about the name and the Dickens connection (partly perhaps because Pip was my dad's name for my brother before I even knew of GE, so that's its first association for me). As soon as you said it I knew that was why it sat right with what I knew already of Marly's character.

Each of these I read makes me hungrier to read the book!

[Paul Digby]

I love the questions, I love the answers!
A very enjoyable interview.

[Robbi Nester]

Thanks for another illuminating interview with Marly about her new novel. I learn different things with each one.