Recent History
Recently, I exhumed an old file from my archives, a satire I wrote during my 3L year of law school in the winter of 2005/6. 
The novel, which I called Two L, was based on the plot of Measure for Measure, transposed to current day Harvard Law.
As I was readying the files for publication, I realized that there was just one problem. (Okay, two problems if you count the fact that reformatting the old files was completely kicking the tenderer parts of my anatomy.) The problem was that current day was no longer current day.
As I read through the novel, I was struck by just how much had changed since 2006, both at the law school and in the world. My main character, the eponymous 2L, makes a comment about her grades, a royal flush of A’s and A-‘s. HLS no longer has grades. They’re on a pass/high pass system now. There’s a great big new student center that wasn’t there when I was there five years ago. And I’m sure there have been other changes, if only I knew where to look for them.
Since I wrote Two L, the world has undergone dramatic financial upheavals. One of my favorite bits, while writing the book, was a scene in which the characters are engaged in the 2L job hunt, a minutely choreographed mating ritual between the second year law students and the top tier of America’s law firms. In 2006, the legal market was booming; law firms were courting students, wooing them into practice. Anyone reading this and making choking noises? Yep, that’s a world that’s been turned on its head.
Then there are all those little mundane life details. Yes, my characters have cell phones, but there’s a comment, at one point, about the bill of a boy’s baseball cap brushing against the silver-tinted plastic of his phone. Remember those phones? The plastic ones designed to look like metal? When my heroine slides her laptop into her tote bag, it clunks against her palm pilot. I can’t remember the last time I saw anyone use one of those.
I have the same problems in writing the modern segments of my Pink Carnation series, in which my heroine has very slowly moved from autumn of 2003 to summer of 2004. Someone recently asked me whether Eloise and Colin, the hero and heroine of those modern segments, had announced their relationship on Facebook yet. They don’t have Facebook.
And if Eloise were to go back to the States and leave Colin in England, they wouldn’t have Skype. Was this blog around in 2004? I can’t remember. But I’m willing to bet not.
It fascinates me how quickly a novel written as a contemporary can become a historical artifact, a snapshot of a lost world. In 1814, did Jane Austen look back at Northanger Abbey, written in the late 1790s, and marvel how dated it felt? Or is it just that our world moves faster now?
The novel, which I called Two L, was based on the plot of Measure for Measure, transposed to current day Harvard Law. As I was readying the files for publication, I realized that there was just one problem. (Okay, two problems if you count the fact that reformatting the old files was completely kicking the tenderer parts of my anatomy.) The problem was that current day was no longer current day.
As I read through the novel, I was struck by just how much had changed since 2006, both at the law school and in the world. My main character, the eponymous 2L, makes a comment about her grades, a royal flush of A’s and A-‘s. HLS no longer has grades. They’re on a pass/high pass system now. There’s a great big new student center that wasn’t there when I was there five years ago. And I’m sure there have been other changes, if only I knew where to look for them.
Since I wrote Two L, the world has undergone dramatic financial upheavals. One of my favorite bits, while writing the book, was a scene in which the characters are engaged in the 2L job hunt, a minutely choreographed mating ritual between the second year law students and the top tier of America’s law firms. In 2006, the legal market was booming; law firms were courting students, wooing them into practice. Anyone reading this and making choking noises? Yep, that’s a world that’s been turned on its head.
Then there are all those little mundane life details. Yes, my characters have cell phones, but there’s a comment, at one point, about the bill of a boy’s baseball cap brushing against the silver-tinted plastic of his phone. Remember those phones? The plastic ones designed to look like metal? When my heroine slides her laptop into her tote bag, it clunks against her palm pilot. I can’t remember the last time I saw anyone use one of those.
I have the same problems in writing the modern segments of my Pink Carnation series, in which my heroine has very slowly moved from autumn of 2003 to summer of 2004. Someone recently asked me whether Eloise and Colin, the hero and heroine of those modern segments, had announced their relationship on Facebook yet. They don’t have Facebook.
And if Eloise were to go back to the States and leave Colin in England, they wouldn’t have Skype. Was this blog around in 2004? I can’t remember. But I’m willing to bet not.It fascinates me how quickly a novel written as a contemporary can become a historical artifact, a snapshot of a lost world. In 1814, did Jane Austen look back at Northanger Abbey, written in the late 1790s, and marvel how dated it felt? Or is it just that our world moves faster now?
.jpg)
Comments
Post a Comment