A novel by any other name

I never understood why my parents named me Randy. Not Randall or even Randolph. Randy. It's certainly not Germanic, like Koch, for instance, or Meinert, my mother's maiden name. It's not a name handed down from my father, Leonard Herman, or borrowed from my uncles Edwin or Lloyd, Delbert or Vernon . It's not Biblical nor the sort of name one gives like a talisman, in hopes that it will bring wealth, power, or fame. And it's definitely not complimentary. If, before naming me, my parents had checked a dictionary -- though it's unlikely they had one in 1957 -- they would have found that “randy” means, first of all, coarse or vulgar, and second, amorous or lustful. It's not to say that I've never been one or more of those things, but that's not the point. The question is, why give a kid such a name? Even the horses on our farm had more flattering names: the affable “Charlie,” the earthy “Dusty,” the very Protestant “Luther,” and especially the masculine “Rocky,” a name our quarter horse had years before the Stallone movie made it famous. I have no intentions of changing my name, and even though I've occasionally considered going by John, my middle name, I probably never will. Randy is my given name, and I won't give it back.

Granted, none of us had any control over the names our parents gave us, and it's not until we're out in the world and interacting with people that we discover the consequences of their decision. Names can be unfortunate predictors, like Seymour , the name of the small, bespectacled, nerdy kid who rode the same school bus as my brothers and me. They can be the source of teasing, like my older sister Darla's name, which couldn't easily be shortened like Kenneth to Ken or Ronald to Ron, so my brothers and I simply called her “Da.” And when our given names don't convey what our childhood and teenage peers perceive to be the truth about us, they rename us. When I was in junior high, we ironically called one of the special ed kids “Wizard,” respectfully referred to linebacker Curt Mattison as “Animal,” and scornfully called rotund Jimmy Clarken “Fatboy.” Math teacher and head football coach Gary Dalzell was “Bulldog;” social studies teacher Adrian Smith became “Kool Ade;” balding Mr. Hillman was, of course, “Chrome Dome;” and Industrial Arts instructor Robert Ramsey was “RUR,” the sound his spelled-out initials made. Even my blue 1960 four-door Bel Air had a name: The Sherman, short for Sherman tank because that's how it was built. We reveled in names and found joy, power, and possibility in naming, all of which became evident again over the past couple of months when local novelist Carlos Flores asked me to help him name his newest novel, scheduled for publication by Texas Tech University Press early in 2006.

He chose his working title -- Sweet Purple -- simply because that's the name of the book's first chapter. It served its purpose during the two years of drafting but always struck me as overly sweet, slightly sentimental, and -- since I've been a Minnesota Vikings fan since I was 13 -- a contradiction in terms. More recently Carlos used the title Pirates under the Mulberry, but again I wasn't convinced this was the best choice. The publisher, too, thought it suggested a book intended primarily for adolescent readers, a too-narrow association that didn't do justice to the story or recognize the full range of its potential audience. As Tech's deadline for the manuscript and a final decision on a title bore down on Carlos, our search for a new name took on increased urgency. As a result, our assumptions, biases, and preferences about titles affected the different approaches we took as we tried to find one that fits the book.

We generally agreed that bad titles result from a variety of things. A long title can be difficult for readers to remember, which means that they're unlikely to talk about it, causing word-of-mouth publicity to be dramatically reduced. This may have been one of the considerations that caused T. S. Eliot to change the name of his poem “He Do the Police in Different Voices” to the now famous “The Waste Land.” Similarly, Charles Dickens's unwieldy Tom-All-Alone's Factory That Got into Chancery and Never Got Out eventually became the much more compact Bleak House. And I didn't have to search far for contemporary examples. The abstract 13-syllable title of San Antonio poet Marian Haddad's recent collection -- Somewhere between Mexico and a River Called Home -- is still tough for me to recall. Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven poses a similar challenge, but it's easier than Haddad's since it's more concrete and calls up images of well-known characters. When it comes to titles, short is generally better than long.

Words that are difficult to pronounce can also make titles problematic. I struggle with Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge as would most readers with F. Scott Fitzgerald's original title for The Great Gatsby: Trimalchio in West Egg. Difficulty of pronunciation can also be caused by unfamiliar foreign words. Carlos suggested as possible titles for his book some that included the words “tirilongo” and “subterráneo,” both of which are a challenge to pronounce and are unlikely to be recognized by non-Spanish speakers. The danger here, of course, is that readers may be discouraged from even picking up the book or opening it to the first page. Derivative titles, too, can make bad impressions. They might suggest a lack of originality regardless of the actual content of the book. Mimicking a title might also be perceived as authorial or editorial opportunism, especially if the title resembles that of a well-known or best-selling book. Since publication of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club in 1990, best-selling “club” books have become common: The Liar's Club, The Killing Club, The Master Butchers Singing Club, Fight Club, and The Dirty Girls Social Club. One of the editors at Texas Tech even suggested that Carlos call his book The House on Hueco Street , an obvious reference to Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street ; this, they argued, would be a good marketing ploy. However, Carlos and I agreed that his title shouldn't suggest that he or his book is trying to ride someone else's coattails or that his novel bears any resemblance to Cisneros's work.

While we usually agreed on what constituted a bad title, this didn't help us identify a good title. Here's where our paths diverged. I spent a recent Wednesday evening browsing titles of the several hundred books I have at home and scribbled down about twenty ideas suggested by this random perusal. None of them were particularly good, and the next day all failed to provoke either Carlos or me to exclaim, “Oh, momma, that's IT!” Consequently, I tried a different method, a more analytical and methodical approach to understanding how novels are named. On Saturday evening I categorized the titles of the 589 published novels and short story collections that I have at home (clearly not the sort of thing done by someone who is actually randy) and found that half fall into two categories. First, the type of title recurring most often -- on 26% of the books or 154 titles -- consists of a noun preceded by one or more adjectives: The Bean Trees, A Thousand Acres, Love Medicine, Invisible Man, Small Island , Fight Club, etc. Slightly fewer -- 24.4% or 144 titles -- are comprised of a noun followed by a prepositional phrase: A Farewell to Arms, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Stones for Ibarra, Tomcat in Love, House of Sand and Fog, The Shadow of the Wind, The Almanac of the Dead, etc.

The remaining 291 titles fall into 20 different categories; however, again almost half of those constitute the two largest groups -- 78 titles (or 13% of the 589) are proper names, such as Anna Karenina, Ulysses, Staggerford, Oliver Twist, Lolita, etc., and 60 (or 10.2%) are single, unmodified nouns, such as Solstice, The Hobbit, Ceremony, The Street, The Corrections, Tracks, The Rainbow, etc. The remaining 26% or 153 titles are fairly evenly distributed in the other 18 categories: 29 titles (or 4.9%) contain two or more nouns, such as War and Peace or The Old Man and the Sea; 27 (or 4.6%) consist of an independent clause, such as The Sun Also Rises or No One Writes to the Colonel; 21 (or 3.6%) begin with a present participle, such as Going After Cacciato or Breathing Lessons; 14 or (2.4%) are a possessive plus a noun, such as Simon's Night or Gravity's Rainbow or form a command, such as Weep Not, Child. The least common are questions like Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (0.34%), similes such as Like Water for Chocolate (0.34%), adverbials like Anywhere but Here (0.34%), and prepositions by themselves as in Through and Through (0.17%). Titles take all shapes and grammatical forms, and clearly some are more common in fiction than others. However, this doesn't mean, as I realized while scratching titles in a spiral notebook, that the best ones are necessarily the most common. However, cataloging the content and syntax of titles gave me the clarity I didn't have earlier.

This led me to do what Carlos and I had tried to do during the last couple of rewrites of the book -- find a phrase or clause in the text that in some way reflected the themes and plot of the story. I started at the end of the novel, flipped backwards through the last chapter, and jotted down scraps that caught my eye and which had the compact clarity of a potential title. These included The House by Heart; My Heart, Heavy As a Stone; Brave Like a Pirate, and Nothing of the Ugly World. The idea that the reader will discover near the end of the book the source of the title and its true significance in the context of the story is a gift that readers would surely appreciate. Meanwhile, Carlos took a different route. He went to Amazon.com and searched for titles that contained the word “house” since this is a vital element in his novel. He got several thousand hits, reviewed about one thousand, and produced variations based on those that most appealed to him. This resulted in a list of 175 potential titles, about eight of which -- including House of Fathers, House of Pirates, Strangers in Our Own House, and When It Snowed Ashes and Mulberries -- we eventually considered keepers. By Sunday night we had expanded and trimmed the field again and, with the general agreement of Carlos's family, settled on the top three, which he forwarded to Texas Tech on Monday.

The decision still isn't final but will be within the next few days. And I suspect that Carlos is feeling like a parent making a choice that will have ramifications for years to come. Unlike me, however, the book won't complain, and we need to remember that like Luther and Rocky, a horse by any other name. . . .

(Randy Koch teaches English at Texas A&M International University and is director of the Writing Center at TAMIU.)