A Reading Rut

One of the things I worried about before coming to Rome was the challenge of getting English books here. What I've found is that it's actually very easy to find books in English. Finding the exact ones you want, however, is difficult.

Right in my neighborhood, Trastevere, there are two English-language bookstores: Almost Corner, which sells new books (including both of mine--hooray), and the Open Door, which sells used. If I go downtown, I can also find English-language book sections in the big chain bookstores like Mel and Feltrinelli, though usually they only have books I've already read or books I'd never want to read, the latest in chick-lit or testosterone-driven thrillers. Otherwise, I can check out the library here at the Academy, or if I feel very patient, I can order books from amazon.uk, which seems to take about a month, by which time I'm interested in reading something else.

My problem is I can never predict what it is I'm going to want to read, and it's usually something that isn't readily available, for example, Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy, or a story by an obscure Yiddish author.

Until recently I was doing fine with the books I'd brought with me: the indelible Mayor of Casterbridge by Hardy, a collection of essays and stories by my current obsession, E. M. Forster, which includes a breathtaking piece called "Inspiration." But lately I can't seem to stick with anything. I don't know if it's the book themselves or maybe just my mood.

For example, I tried picking up the new Michel Houellebecq novel, The Possibility of an Island, which I got in the UK edition. (I don't know why, but his books tend to come out there six months earlier than in America.) After about fifty pages, I had to put it down. In the past I've been an avid fan of his, but somehow the fourth time around, his voice, with all its lusty pessimism, simply feels tired. Maybe it's not any fault of the author's. It's just that the world is depressing enough these days. If I'm going to read five hundred pages about how we're going to hell in a handbasket, I'd like a little hope, the kind David Mitchell gave me in Cloud Atlas. Or, at least, something in the way of character other than world weary Parisians making crude ethnic jokes and having glorious jaded sex. And maybe, if it's not too much to ask, a moment of genuine feeling. Perhaps the biggest secret about Houellebecq is that he yearns to be a sentimentalist. When I look back on his last two books, what I remember most are the painful, pathetic scenes, a boy drowning his sorrows in endless bowls of Corn Flakes, the narrator of Platform giving up on Western Civilization after the end of a love affair that caught him by surprise.

Next I tried a slim novel in Italian called "Novecento" by Alessandro Barrico, who's a big cheese here. My Italian skills are still fairly weak, so it's hard for me to comment too much on this book, which is a novel in the form of a monologue which is actually supposed to be the treatment for a film. It was actually made into a film with Tim Roth, and is the story of a pianist who's born on a cruise ship and goes back and forth across the Atlantic and never gets off the ship. All very ironic and world-weary. Capitalism and show business are brutish and so forth. I put it down.

Now I'm working on a mammoth book called The Nazarene by Sholem Asch, a writer I admire greatly for his vision as well as his achievement in his book Three Cities, which I keep haranguing people to dig up. The Nazarene has a more interesting back story than Three Cities, but the part I've managed to get through can't compare in terms of brilliance. Published in 1939, during the height of Nazi atrocities in Germany, The Nazarene is an epic life of Jesus Christ written in Yiddish. You can imagine the response Asch got from the Jewish community when the book came out. The literary community, on the other hand, hailed the book as a great achievement. So far, I can't agree. The book opens fetchingly, with a daring conceit: a Jew in Poland goes to work as a translator for a rabid anti-Semite who reveals that he's actually a reincarnation of one of Christ's murderers. The relationship between these two is rich and intriguing. Too bad that after thirty pages, Asch chucks it entirely and instead relates the anti-Semite's "memories" of Christ in Imperial Judea. Suddenly the language and details of place and character that were so finely etched in the opening disappear. Instead we get the usual Roman carping about that nasty little colony of Judea that gives us so much trouble. If you've seen any movie along the lines of Ben-Hur, you get the idea.

So what's next? Well, I hate to sound like a wimp, but I think I'll just go back to re-reading E. M. Forster.

More Rain, and Other Distractions

More rain. The weather here is becoming a joke that might be funnier if I didn't have to trudge through it. At least the general sogginess gives me an excuse to chain myself to my desk and chip away at my novel, which is moving steadily along. Still, the distraction of the Internet frequently proves irresistable, a link to the pageant of bread and circuses back home, at the heart of the American Empire.

Click, and I can now read a flattering profile of debut authoress Nicole Ritchie. Click, and I learn that a moderately entertaining, though slightly baggy bit of fluff called Prep is one of the best books of the year. Click, and I snicker over an amusing, ironic tribute to the inventor of Stove Top stuffing.

And all this is from the New York Times.

News from the American Academy? The author Oscar Hijuelos was supposed to have visited, but had to cancel at the last minute. We went on with the dinner in his honor without him. In a week or so Laurie Anderson is coming to give a talk. There have been many, many other talks and concerts and tours, a ceramic factory here, a classical ruin there, a sumptuous villa, a collection of drawings off-limits to the public. I could spend a year simply looking at it all. And it might be a profitable investment of my time, but I feel drawn to this book I'm working on. My characters have gotten themselves into deep, deep trouble, and it's up to me to find out what happens to them.

Down the hill, the alleys of Trastevere are decked out with Christmas tinsel and lights. Ornaments are expensive here, and people who put up trees seem to prefer plastic to real. Better for the environment, cheaper, and generally easier to deal with, I suppose. It's also the season for Rome's many, many churches to transform into concert halls. There's a chamber concert this Sunday that I'm planning to catch.

I'm beginning to get used to the buses here, which I used to avoid and still do if I can possibly walk. I've learned that flagging a driver down does no good if you are not standing directly under the sign indicating an official bus stop. Standing a few feet away is an invitation for the driver to ignore you completely and speed by, leaving you to stand in the wet and the cold, waiting another twenty minutes for another ride. In general, the drivers seem a bored, grumpy lot, unwilling to give cogent directions or wait a second longer than necessary for you to fight your way to the door to get off when it's your stop. A friend of mine, riding his bike, was recently hit by a bus that might have continued to squeeze the very life out of him had the passengers inside not risen up and cried out in protest.

The other thing I've learned about Rome is that generally there is some kind of miraculous sight behind every corner if you're patient and willing to explore a little. Generally this kind of miracle involves entering a church. For example, the Santa Maria degli Angeli, which Michelangelo carved out of the ruins of the baths of Diocletian, or the ordinary-looking San Pietro in Vincoli, where I met my new friend Matteo last week. (Matteo Bianchi is an extraordinary Italian author whose works deserve to be translated into English, and hopefully soon they will be.) "Do you know what's inside?" I asked him as we sat on the front steps. No, he'd never been. "Come on, then," I said, so we went in. There are two miracles inside the church of Saint Peter "in chains." First are the actual chains used to bind Saint Peter when he came to Rome. Don't bother wondering if they're real. Every relic in Italy is real. The other, true miracle in this church is Michelangelo's Moses, who sat pondering in the dark when we walked up to him. A crowd of tourists were peering into the shadows, trying to make him out, until I put fifty cents into the light machine and became a hero for half a minute.

Inevitably, miracles become tiresome, and in search of respite, I went with two friends to the Warner Village multiplex where a mob had gathered to watch the new Harry Potter movie. Though the first showing was at 3:10, the box office didn't open until 3, and a mob of Italians held a siege of the box office demanding tickets. At any given moment, the two ticket sellers were serving about ten arguing customers at once. A handsome "steward" named Claudio stood by in his official Warner uniform and calmly looked on. In Italy, there are always at least two people to do every job, one to do the work, and the other to watch. Inside the theater, you feel as though you might be in America, with the smell of popcorn and the overpriced drinks and candy. The only major differences are the VIP smoking lounge and a soft drink for sale called "Pepsi BOOM!"

My friends and I went to the theater showing the "original version" (aka, not dubbed) of the movie, found our seats, and waited for the lights to go down. After twenty-five minutes of ear-splitting commercials and previews, the lights came up and then down again, and then the movie began. And for a couple of hours, we lost ourselves in a fantasy of special effects, art direction, and a world in which every question has one answer.

The Latest from Rome... The Heat is On!

The heat has come on in our building (the law here says you can't have it on until November 15) and none too soon. The past few days we've been showing up at dinner in our sweaters and jackets.

During the day, though, the weather is pleasant, sunny and cool, with no rain. Last weekend, I met my friend Marco who said this last gasp of summer often happens right around November 11, a saint's festival which is popularly known as the day of the henpecked husbands.

Here at the Academy, we're getting ready for Thanksgiving--I am head of the pumpkin pie committee--and Christmas. Every year, the Fellows are expected to put on a show in Italian for the Italian staff, a performance that climaxes with the appearance of Santa Claus, bearing gifts for the children. I'm sidestepping the show by volunteering for the Christmas tree committee, because every Christmas tree needs a good Jew to help make it look beautiful. Actually, I've heard a story that Christmas trees were popularized during the 19th Century by Jews in Germany who wanted to blend in with their Gentile neighbors but couldn't bring themselves to put up a creche in their windows.

My major news is that I've joined a gym called "La Fitness," tucked into one of the dense alleys of Trastevere. Gyms here seem a bit different than those in the States, in that with your membership you get access to a trainer who will lead you around and tell you what to do. My trainer is Realdo, a short, highly muscular man with a craggy face and a shaved head. There's a picture of him in a spangled bikini (and nothing else) as he flexes his muscles and accepts a trophy for natural bodybuilding. Realdo (who teaches in a warm-up suit, not a spangled bikini) explains to me in a slow clear voice exactly how to position myself in front of the weight machines, how to pull the weight, how to breathe. As a result, I've now learned how to say "weight," "three sets of ten reps," and "biceps" in Italian.

My language skills have been improving rapidly. Last week I went to see the Jodie Foster movie Flightplan dubbed into Italian (all movies are dubbed here), and I understood just about all of it. Then again, it wasn't a terribly complex or interesting movie. Jodie spent most of it running up and down the aisles of the airplane, screaming, "Dove mia figlia!" (Where's my daughter!) Now that I think of it, most American movies these days could probably benefit from being dubbed into Italian.

There are times, however, when my Italian completely fails me, usually when it's someone giving me directions over the phone. For example, last weekend Marco was trying to invite me to do something and I had no idea where he wanted to take me. I got so confused I couldn't even understand where he wanted to meet beforehand. Finally, he said, "Meet me at Termini train station, track number 7. That way there'll be no confusion."

So I went, and then followed him to a highway, where we waited about twenty minutes and then a car picked us up (driven by Marco's roommate Ludovica). Off we drove to a neighborhood called "Centocelli" which means 100 jails in English. There we drove in circles, asking directions from passersby who couldn't help us, until we parked illegally beside an abandoned military fortress that had been taken over by a commune of anarchist squatters. By then it was dark, and a light fog had settled over the fortress grounds, which were lit with torches, like an outdoor carnival. After paying three and a half Euros each, we passed through a graffiti-painted tunnel into an underground network of brick and stone catacombs. Inside there were art exhibitions, a cinema, a theater, a display of common household products that were bad for the environment, political action stands, and a market selling organic wine, cheese, olive oil, and other foods. Each stallkeeper offered free tasting and explanations of how his or her wine, soap, cheese, salami had been made without any additives or chemicals.

The crowd was a mix of young people, many of them with dredlocks, a smattering of piercings, leather jackets, and dogs. "Today if you want to be in the punk style, it's necessary to have a dog," Marco explained.

After sampling some putrid cheese, some very flavorful wine and cheese, and a chewy tasteless cake sweetened with organic fruit sugar, I came home with a bottle of organic apple juice and a pot of organic red currant jam. I drank some of the juice last night, but I have yet to use the jam, though it looks pretty in my refrigerator.

Memoir of a Book Tour

What does it take to sell a book? Random House, my publisher, and I were willing to bet that a two-week, six-city tour of bookstores and synagogues across the country just might do the trick. And so in the middle of October, I made my way to the airport in Rome and flew to the United States.

Before publishing my first book, I used to dream of traveling at my publisher's expense to various cities in order to show off my work to appreciative audiences, newspaper and magazine reporters, and radio talk shows. In reality, a book tour may include a little of that dream. If your name is Jonathan Franzen or Toni Morrison, a book tour will include a great deal of that dream. For the rest of us, a book tour is a kind of marathon that can range from moments of exhiliration to deep depression. You pray that people will actually show up, that they've read your good reviews and not your bad ones, that they'll have the right sense of humor, the right politics, or simply that they've seen your author photo and think you're cute.

The biggest trouble with readings is that generally people don't like being read to. Or at least grown-ups don't. So it's important for a writer starting out that his friends and family mobilize the troops.

And mobilize they did. Everywhere I went, I was flattered and honored to see people I loved in the audience, particularly in my hometown of Detroit, where the local Borders brought out extra chairs to accommodate the overflow. Yet, it doesn't necessarily follow that because someone is your friend or family member or family member's friend that he or she is your target audience. In fact, quite a few people I met at readings told me they never read books. And so I read my novel about Jews visiting Israel to Christians who've never left the continent, about a middle-aged housewife with her troubled gay son to older men with no children or young straight career women, or impressionable middle schoolers who'd been promised extra credit by my nephew's English teacher for showing up. The best part of it was that many of these people actually had a good time.

What is the point of a book tour? I'm convinced it's more than the event itself. It's an opportunity to turn the publication of the book, which is really no more than opening a box and putting copies on shelves, into a happening worth marking by local bookstores, media, and readers. Your book gets placed in a prominent position in the store a week beforehand. Your reading gets listed in local newspapers. You sometimes do interviews. You shake hands with booksellers and audience members, several of whom (to my great delight) had read my first book and had eagerly been awaiting my new one.

Then there are the unforeseen wonderful small moments you never expected. I heard from friends of mine I hadn't heard from in years, including two men who came out to me for the first time. In Atlanta, I met a gay man who'd just escaped to the big city from the small town where he'd felt trapped for years and was enjoying his new life of freedom. In Washington, I was met at the airport by a "media escort," which is a person who makes a living by picking up authors in town for book signings and taking them around the city for the day. My media escort turned out to be a smart, insightful social worker with whom I shared a thoughtful conversation about religion and the role of faith in progressive politics. In L.A., I was adopted for the weekend by the synagogue Beth Chayim Chadashim, where I was treated like a rock star.

And then in Chicago, I had a moment that reminded me what this whole business is really about. My eight-year old nephew Nick had just purchased the latest Berenstein Bears book--he owns the entire series--and I asked him if I could read it to him before he went to sleep. Nick very graciously said yes. "Do you have a bear you like to cuddle with when you're being read to?" I said. He did, and with his stuffed animal safely tucked into the crook of his arm, he lay in bed with a completely absorbed expression on his round face as I opened the book to page one and began to tell a story.

Another Rome Diary

My first month in Rome is done. In this time I've written
half of a novel, which hopefully will give birth to its currently
missing other half. Soon, however, I'm traveling back to the
States for a two-week book tour, an odd pause in this yearlong
Roman dream.

October and November are known as the rainy season, and so
far the weather is doing its best to live up to its reputation. As I
write, water has been falling constantly from the white sky
for the past seventy-two hours. The temperatures have dropped
twenty degrees and because the ceilings are so high here, it can
be difficult to stay warm.

Italian food is relentlessly rich, and sometimes delicious. We have a
new cook at the Academy. When Alice (while in Wonderland) says,
"People come and go so quickly here," she could have
been describing the cook situation at the American Academy in Rome.
On the other hand, the bald man in the blue vest and bowtie who
presides over dinner with a clipboard and turns you away if you
haven't reserved your place in advance is a permanent fixture.

Food here has a bewildering variety of names that corresponds
inversely to its lack of variety. No matter what you eat, you will
probably encounter four basic elements. First is some sort of
cured meat, which will always be salty, filled with fat, and bloody in
appearance. Then there's a juicy sliced vegetable, either braised
with olive oil or served raw and coated in olive oil. Next is cheese,
so tangy and thick it could be a slice of meat. Finally, these
elements are combined with some kind of bland recepticle, bread
that's hard and chewy outside and dry inside, spongy pizza dough, or
pasta, which comes in tubes, strings, bowties, shells, corkscrews,
and more (any minor variation in its shape gives it a new name).
Take all this, douse it in olive oil, and serve. Genereally it's impossible
to go through a day without eating pasta. If you're lucky, you may avoid
pizza, but only if you're lucky.

I've been taking my time seeing the sights because I have all year to
look around, but there are a few you can't help bumping into, simply
by walking around. There's the Colosseum, a brown giant that's
visible from all over town, as well as the more modern Victor Emmanuel
Monument, a wonderfully tacky white wedding cake of a memorial built
at the turn of the last century in honor of Italy's first king. Ruins
abound. So much so, that when building their houses, people will grab
a few scraps of columns or old sculptures and stick them into their
walls when they run out of bricks or stones.

Recently I spent a couple of hours in the Capotline Museums, where I
wandered past rows and rows of busts of dead Roman emperors. You get
to know their faces after a while. Octavian has a receding hairline.
Nero is chubby. Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius have beards. Tiberius
looks like a man you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley (and if the
history books are true, you wouldn't).

I've also met a few living Romans, like Federico, an architect who
sometimes picks me up on his motorino. Imagine if a motorcycle could
have a puppy and you'd get a motorino. I cling for dear life as
Federico zips through the traffic at sixty miles and hour, darting
between lanes and yelling at the slower cars: "Go home! Get off the
road! Why are you sleeping?"

Another friend, Mario, is an assistant to a costume designer who's
working on the film version of The Da Vinci Code. Mario is sick of
the city and his dream is to move to New York. We meet to trade
languages.

I've also made friends with an American expatriate, a vegetarian yoga
instructor named Joan who refers to her ex-husband as her "was-band."
Joan points out all the good places to eat and buy bread, and recently
took me to Rosh Hashanah servcies at Rome's main synagogue, which has
a beautiful interior decorated with vines and leaves and the city's
only square dome, which is painted in rainbow colors (from inside).
Unlike American Jews, who if bored during services will yawn quietly
or whisper to each other, Roman Jews see no reason at all to pretend
to pay any attention to the rabbi praying on the stage. They happily
chat with each other in the crowded sanctuary so that the chorus of
their voices sounds like the New York Stock Exchange during high
volume trading.

My Italian is getting better steadily, as I learn to guess correctly
at the words I don't understand. Occasionally I do get thrown off
because the Romans, like the Japanese, substitute "r" for "l," so that
the word for money, "soldi" becomes "sordi." Also, I'm still learning
slang expressions. For example, a person who cuts in line here is
called "Portuguese." "American" has its own connotations here too.
As one Roman expressed it to me, "You are not like your countrymen
because you have culture."

Thoughts from Rome

In this installment, I'm going to depart from my usual thematic essays to write a little about my experience so far at the American Academy in Rome, where I've been for the past three weeks.

Here's the basic set-up. For one year, I'm one of 30 fellows who've been awarded a place to live as well as an office in which to work, two meals a day six days a week, and money for basic expenses. We live together in a historic villa where there's a constant round of lectures and organized trips, as well as support for the research most of us are engaged in. The other fellows come from a range of backgrounds. They're art historians, architects, museum directors, landscape architects, painters, and more. Everyone is brilliant, which is not an overstatement, everyone pursuing provocative individual projects involving questions like the role of the family in the development of organized religion or the history of madness.

And during the course of this year I'm expected to... basically, to do whatever I want. A free year in which to read, write, wander, anything, in a beautiful romantic historic city--you're probably hating me by now.

So far it's too soon for me to speak conclusively about my impressions of Rome, but what the hell, I'll give a few anyway. I've been most surprised by this city's small town feel. It's more like a collection of small villages shoelaced together than a single city with a pulsing, unifying center. Also, there's a strange way in which it feels strangely like a backwater town. Milan is the capital of business, Turin and Naples centers of contemporary culture, Florence, the capital of the Renaissance, Venice the capital of romance. Rome is a bit like Washington DC, the political and symbolic historic capital of the country, a beautiful city constantly inundated with tourists, and yet it's strangely calm and quiet.

People fall in love with this city, its slow pace, its historic alleys, its comfortable cosmpolitan atmosphere. I haven't fallen in love quite yet, but I think that's primarily because I've found that the English language, my primary tool for ordering the world, doesn't work here. The buzz of news, gossip, print, advertising, and TV I've become so used to surrounding myself with in New York is suddenly gone. And in its place is a babel of sounds that occasionally and entirely without warning come jarringly in and our of focus. "hand" "table" "Don't be ridiculous!" "Let's go inside this way" "By yourself." Words and phrases popping in and out, but to connect them, nothing. Sometimes I'll get a run of sentences that seem tantalizingly within my grasp, and then an unknown word creeps in and I'm lost again.

This is good for me. But not easy.

The other thing I find most difficult here is feeling at peace with my own solitude. Rome is not a city of solo acts. Everyone I pass seems to be walking with someone else, especially the tourists, but also the locals walking hand in hand with their lovers or children or even their friends. It's become shocking to me to see someone walking by him or herself. But then I catch a glimpse of myself, alone, in a shop window, and that lone wolf is me. And it makes me wonder, so who am I?

No End to Howards End

It's almost a week that I've been in Rome, and I'll have more to say about the experience once I've been here longer. One of the wonderful gifts about being here is having the time to reread books I love, which is probably the most important thing for a writer to do.

Having just finished Howards End by E. M. Forster for possibly the fifth time, I'm firmly convinced that it's possible to learn everything you need to know about writing from studying this magnificent work of art. It would also serve as an excellent guide on how to think, and more than passable as a blueprint for how to live.

At first glance, the plot seems to amble aimiably, almost carelessly from minor crisis to minor crisis, introducing us to charming characters who get into sticky, though hardly life-threatening, situations. What a miracle it is when the pieces "connect"--the book's epigraph is "Only Connect..."--so beautifully in the powerful finale, like a sleeping giant who's been hidden under a blanket of earth, grass, trees, and rocks until he wakes with a jolt, and we realize that nothing short of the meaning of life is at stake here.

An oversimplified way to present this book is as a struggle of competing values between two English families who meet by chance while on vacation, the Wilcoxes and the Schlegals. Yet Forster's presentation of this schematic conflict is much more highly-nuanced, and with Forster (much like it is with John Kerry) nuance is all.

Yes, the Schlegals, particularly the heroically sensible Margaret and her passionate but shortsighted younger sister Margaret, represent sensitivity, art, culture, liberal humanitarian values. Yet among their camp is the utterly banal Mrs. Munt, who appreciates culture in the most mundane way possible. On the opposite extreme is the youngest Schlegal, Tibby, a careless aesthete (most likely spoiled by his older sisters) whose selfish devotion to the realm of ideas blinds him to the troubles of the living. Even when his own sister cries desperately to him for help, Tibby's more interested in leafing through a text on learning Chinese or checking on his dessert so that it doesn't get cold.

The Wilcoxes seem a much more disciplined, uniform camp at first, embodying the coldness of order, efficiency, what Forster lumps together under a category called "the seen." Yet they too have their degrees. The eldest son Charles is the worst of their lot. Forster tries valiantly but ultimately cannot bring himself to conceal his dislike for Charles's stubborn, cold heart, even in the hour of Charles's mother's death. Next is Charles's younger brother Paul, who's mostly a plot device to develop other characters, and remains shunted offstage until the end of the book so he can appear as a stand-in for Charles when he can no longer be physically present. However, then there's Evie, the only daughter, seems like a brat, good at sports, breeding puppies, and spending her father's money on a needlessly elaborate wedding, but she shows surprising tenderness for her father at the end of the book. She is actually capable of sentiment. Henry, the Wilcox patriarch, is the best of them. Somehow (Forster never explains satisfactorily how), Margaret sees his inner potential for feeling, which comes through at the book's end, though with one glaring deficiency. (Mrs. Wilcox, Henry's first wife, is actually a Howard, and of an entirely different order.)

The question this book poses, still useful today, is which is better, to be sensitive or to make the trains run on time? Supreme in his feeling for nuance, Forster answers, you need some of both, but if you're going to err, choose sensitivity. And yet, as Forster shows, even then the balance is imperfect. We're stuck with events that are out of our control, illness, war, forces of nature, and petty cruelty. There is no answer to the dilemma of being alive.

We can find some hope, however, here and there in various corners of this tragic novel, which feels oddly sunny despite a sour note at the end. I'm especially moved when in Chapter 4, Charles Wilcox tries to explain to Helen Schlegal that it's no use being polite to servants, since they don't understand it. Forster explains to us that the "Schlegal retort" to such cant is: "If they don't understand it, I do." That strikes me as exactly on target. The good we try to do may not always be appreciated by others, but then we don't try to live in the right way for other people. We do it for ourselves.

As a Chocolate-Loving, Democratic-Voting, New York-Living Fiction Writer, I...

My niece recently asked me to read her college application essay, which began, "As a triplet, I..." You may have noticed the way many of us tend to begin every opinion we offer with qualifiers like, "As a woman, I..." "As an African-American, I..." "As a Jew, I..." "As a left-handed lesbian of indeterminate color who enjoys finger-painting in a wheelchair with survivors of sexual assault and tsunamis, I..."

Where does this impulse to bolster an argument by tying it to the author's identity come from? One explanation is that in the age of reality TV and the internet blogger, we've become increasingly convinces of the fallacy that empiricism is the firmest basis of truth. In other words, the best way to know something is by experiencing it.

I remember when I was a composition instructor, I asked my students to write an essay about a time when they'd changed their opinion. What was the opinion and what made them change their mind? I got back a series of essays that ran something like, "I used to think drugs were okay, but then I got addicted to them and realized they weren't." "I used to think science was boring, but then I won a national merit award for my science project and I realized it wasn't." My favorite was, "I used to think pre-marital sex was wrong, but then I got a girlfriend and I realized that it was okay."

Perhaps we've become a nation of empiricist philosophers, but somehow I doubt it. It seems to me that the "experience" part of the equation is less important to us than the "my." We are endlessly fascinated by our own lives, particularly if we belong to a younger generation brought up in an educational system that puts a premium on self-expression over empathetically understand of someone else's plight.

Nowhere has this lesson been driven home more firmly than in literature classes. It's become almost axiomatic that in order to teach a novel, poem, story, or play successfully, it has to relate directly to students' lives. Got a roomful of African-American students? Teach them Toni Morrison, Ernest J. Gaines, and Rita Dove. Jews? Give them I. B. Singer, Philip Roth, and just to be daring, a touch of Jonathan Safran Foer. Hispanics? Garcia Marquez ought to work (never mind that he's South American, not Caribbean or Mexican), and then some Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, and Junot Diaz. The list goes on.

Similarly, writing students are encouraged to mine their own rather limited experience of the world in search of nuggets to write about. Recently I taught a class called "Fiction and Personal Narrative," in which students could submit works of fiction or non-fiction. The students were wonderful writers with great imaginations, but the one question that seemed to stump them again and again was when I'd ask them, "So is this a work of fiction or non-fiction?"

Of course when I was a writing student, and I and my fellow students were no wiser. Our instructors always reminded us that we had to remember the works we were reading were fiction. We were not to assume any story was autobiographical. That state of affairs lasted for about two seconds. Almost immediately after getting our first few batches of stories, I remember we'd whisper to each other in the hall, "Oh, I didn't know he was a drug addict who lived in a shack in New Orleans with a stripper." Or "Wow, I guess she had some unresolved issues with her mother that she's been taking out on her boyfriend." Or "Isn't that funny? I never would have guessed she came from an Orthodox Jewish home and rejected her faith to pursue a career as a writer."

No wonder memoirs are so popular these days. In a way, they seem more honest than fiction writing of this style. After all, what's fiction really? Just non-fiction with the names changed.

When I was starting out, I'd veer between autobiographical and more imaginary modes. Before I wrote my Prague stories, I was working on a series of fantastical tales like "Gay God," about a gay bar where a magical spirit lived above the ceiling and maliciously and capriciously set up couples or broke them apart. A teacher of mine liked my cleverness and imagination, but challenged me to add more feeling to my work. That's when I began delving into autobiographical sketches, inspired by people I knew in Prague. And yet, the two stories that seem to resonate most with readers are ones that also seem to have little direct connection to my own life. One's about a middle-aged couple visiting a concentration camp. The other's about two Czech boys searching for the missing head of a famous statue of Stalin.

It's funny that no one asks me if either of these stories is autobiographical, yet both borrow large chunks of experience and emotion directly from my own life. On the flip side, when I tell people the plot of my new book, about a Jewish mother and her drug-addicted gay son who go to Israel, the first thing they want to know is, "Oh, so did you go to Israel with your mother?" (For the record, the last time I went to Israel in the company of my parents was when I was a pre-adolescent, long before my numerous stints at Betty Ford in the company of Liza, Liz Taylor, and all the rest. And as a survivor of drug addiction, I resent the implication that etc. etc...)

With the book I'm writing now, I'm determined to get out of my own head, learn about experiences radically different from mine and identify with them anyway. For example, I'm currently reading Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, a non-fiction tract about the roots of terrorism, written by a Muslim academic born in Uganda. I've also been checking out homeland security journals online, Communist newspapers, and maternity magazines. As I read, I'm continually impressed by how little I really know, how much knowledge is necessary to even begin to glimpse our complicated existence. As Horace says (and I only know this because it's the quote of the day on my desk calendar as I write this), "To know all things is not permitted."

So, as a pregnant Muslim Communist homeland security expert, I urge anyone who's reading this to forget yourself. Try on a new hat for a day. Use the great divine gift of the imagination to see what's on the other side of those identity blinders you've been encouraged to shackle yourself with all these years. See if you don't learn how small you are.

On Giving Advice

August 4, 2005

My father has become somewhat of a legend in our family for his famous, oft-repeated proverbs, with lessons for handling almost any life crisis. My father on travel: "Best thing to do is stay home." My father on trying new things, "I've never been boiled in oil, but I wouldn't want to do that either." My father on hair stylings: "The longer the hair, the shorter the brains." And my father on giving advice: "Never give unsolicited advice. Either the person ignores you, or he follows your advice and it doesn't work out and then he calls you pisher." What about solicited advice? "Never give that either, for the same reasons."

My father might be horrified to learn that in the past year or so, I've been asked for advice on writing and publishing with surprising frequency for advice. Some of these petitioners are strangers who've contacted me through friends or the Internet. Others are friends or colleagues I didn't even know were writers. So far the requests have been steady, not quite a deluge, and I try as often as I can to say yes, yes, and yes. I know some writers find it bothersome to share what they've learned with aspiring up-and-comers, particularly at a time when it seems that more people are interested in writing books than buying them. (See my blog of June 5, 2005).

Yet it's crucially important that as we move up the ladder, to whatever small degree, we extend a hand down, across, or even up to our fellow-sufferers. An important part of being a writer is to give and get feedback with an audience more intimate than a book critic, more informal than a teacher, more generous than a classmate in a workshop, more idealistic than an editor or agent.

And yet, as I read and dispense stories of my limited experience with publishing, I often wonder what if anything I can provide that's of any use. I recently read an insightful essay by Lynn Freed in Harper's about the occupational hazards of creative writing, in which she confesses to feeling "like a fraud... I have just realized the novel on which I have been laboring for 18 months... is hopeless... Every sentence in it a lie. Who do I think I am... Balzac?"

I know what she means. I'm not like a manuscript doctor who can prescribe a cure for unfocused characters or a weak sense of plot. I'm not even sure I can diagnose an illness. I can only give my honest impression of what I read and why I responded to it in the way I did. But who's to say my impression is valuable? I can safely comment on rules of grammar and syntax, but creative writing cannot be said to have rules so much as techniques or tools. Each new story or play or poem presents its own specific and unique problem to be solved with whatever tools can get the job done. Once the writer has solved that problem, she then has to start from scratch again with each new work she attempts. (Or else churn out the same work over and over, which is not a solution either.)

Sometimes I get asked to read something that baffles me completely, not only in terms of what next steps should be taken, but also the artist's own intention. In these cases, I can only pose questions. Why did you choose these words? Who are these people you're writing about and what do they want? What does the experience of reading this provide to the world?

These are questions for the writer to answer, not me. Anyone thoughtful is as capable as I am of posing questions like these. Alternatively, these questions can be found in the growing number of books on the craft and business of creative writing that get published each year. Yet maybe advice isn't all that we as writers are seeking from each other. Maybe what we want isn't so much an answer as the experience of talking to and being heard by a peer, to get some reassurance that we're not alone. The human contact itself provides more comfort than any wise words.

The trouble is that in the creative process, we are alone. No one can show us a way out or give us a leg up. We have to find our way by ourselves. Even when trying to find an agent or an editor to buy a poem or a story, we have to do most of the grunt work on our own. No one else can make the inevitable process of rejection any easier. The false comfort of companionship lasts only so long before the same knotty problems of word choice and characterization stare us in the face. They demand our attention, which regrettably, can only be given in solitude.

The Retreat from Berlin

The longer I write, the less I feel I know about writing. That's supposed to be comforting, yet every time I go through this process of doubt, it's always painful. With each new project I work on, I've tried to learn from what I did the time before. I wish it were only that easy. Ionce heard that you have to learn how to write from scratch with every new book. Each project has its own lessons to master, lessons that don't carry over to the next one you'll tackle. So far, that's been my experience.

I was lucky that when I wrote Stalin's Head, I had no idea of what I was doing. I simply wrote stories that meant something to me, and after I had ten good ones, roped them together into a collection, and sent them to an agent. I didn't realize how much heavy lifting would go into revising them until they were ready for publication, but I've always seen myself as the workhouse type of writer, anyway. I like having work to do, my desk full of projects to complete. Work doesn't scare me; it gives me a reassuring sense of purpose.

With my second book, Faith for Beginners, I started out from the premise that since so many of the stories in Stalin's Head were about sexuality, Judaism, and politics, I ought to choose a subject that combined all three of those elements: the gay community of Israel. Conveniently, no one had dealt much with Israeli gays in fiction. So I plunked down money for a plane ticket, arranged to stay with friends, and left. The only problem was that when I got to Israel, the gay community there didn't suggest a story to me. Great, I thought, all this time and money wasted. And anyway, who did I think I was calling myself a writer when (at that time) I hadn't even sold one book yet? I spent my last few days in Israel just being a tourist. It turned out those final few days resulted in the inspiration for my novel.

When I decided to write about Berlin for the novel I'm currently working on, I thought, okay, I'll learn from my past mistakes. I won't try to control the subject of my research so much. I'll just travel to Berlin, try to see and do as much as I possibly can, and wait for a story to emerge. Which is exactly what happened. And in the fall of 2003, while I was waiting for Faith for Beginners to be considered for publication, I began writing out a first draft for my Berlin novel. It's all a matter of putting in the work, I thought. You write, revise, write, revise, show it to people who tell you what's gone wrong, which you fix, show it a few more people who help you tweak the rest, which you do, and then it's reasonably okay and you're done.

The process of writing this book, however, hasn't turned out quite so easy. I was a little naive about how distracting the process of publication can be. First, I had to put the Berlin novel aside to do revisions on Faith for Beginners in the winter of 2003. Then when Stalin's Head came out, I went slightly insane, which is pretty good if you consider that most writers need to undergo a combination of psychiatric drugs and electroshock therapy when they make their debuts. Suddenly, when I typed in my name in Google, I got hundreds of hits, with people I didn't know saying things about me in reviews or on blogs. (And this is for a first collection of literary short fiction. I can only imagine what the process must have been like for higher profile writers.) I also had to do several readings and travel to promote the book (on my own dime), while holding down my regular job, all of which took some valuable time away from Berlin.

It wasn't until the summer after Stalin came out, I finally had some quality time to work on the new novel, but then in the fall, I began teaching creative writing classes at night in addition to my day job, which I enjoyed, but again consumed a good deal of thought and time. My Berlin novel was like a resentful neglected cat mewing at me from the corner of my desk for attention, which I gave when I could, but not as much as it needed.

Finally, this summer I've had a chance to really sit and face down this novel after a crazy two years, in which I've changed personally and professionally. What was in front of me, however, reflected an earlier version of myself. I liked the writing and some of the characters, but the ideas behind them didn't excite me anymore. The purpose of the book felt out of date. The books I've read since that writing that first draft, especially Sholem Asch's Three Cities, Michel Houellebecq's Platform, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, and Graham Greene's novels, have tempted me to seek a larger vision from fiction, something with greater scope and daring, a goal that this current draft couldn't sustain.

Furthermore, the experiences of working on Stalin's Head and Faith as well as of teaching creative writing have challenged what I thought I knew for sure about literature. I don't want to simply repeat what I've done in the past. I have to grow and feel stimulated. Working on this new project, I keep feeling lost, unsure of what I'm writing about. It's become drudgery.

So I'm declaring my independence. I've come to the painful yet liberating conclusion that it's time to put two years of work aside and start over from page one. That doesn't mean the work I've put in is fruitless garbage. I suspect a lot of it will prove useful in the new book about Berlin I plan to write. But I've got to forge ahead unencumbered by the past. I know how difficult it is when you're editing to cut out a scene or even a sentence you've worked hard on. But in writing, hard work doesn't mean you've done your job as a writer. And correcting past mistakes or repeating past successes won't work either. You simply have to face the darkness again and again, and hope that inspiration will come once more.

A Bias Worth Having

Whenever a piece of writing gets criticized, an easy way to take comfort is to accuse the reader in question of having such a system, of being "biased." But then aren't all readers biased in some way? Do we really want an unbiased reader? After all, there's no one so objective as a robot, except for a corpse. The question isn't of bias, but whether the bias of a given reader is worth having.

One bias I have as a reader is an overly-sensitive bullshit meter. If a writer goes to great pains to impress with grandiose rhetoric, my internal radar goes off. "Did you think of that phrase yourself or are you just parroting some received wisdom because you think it makes you look smart?" "Are you using those words because you like the sound of them even though you haven't thought about what they mean?" "Did you choose those words because you observed something in life that made you think of them, or because you just couldn't think of anything better?" If forced to decide between prose that's too modest or too overblown and purple, I'll take modesty any day. The decision isn't simply a matter of taste like a preference for chocolate or vanilla. These choices reflect a larger vision of the purpose of writing.

Consider the following two passages by Saul Bellow:

#1 "If they didn't breathe the most difficult air of effort and nobility, then she wished for them the commonplace death in the gas cloud of settled existence, office bondage, quiet, store-festering, unrecognized despair of marriage without hope, or the commonness of resentment that grows unknown boils in one's heart or bulbs of snarling flowers."

#2 "It came into his head that he was like a man in a mine who could smell smoke and feel heat but never see the flames. And then the cramp and the enigmatic opportunity ended together. His legs quivered as he worked his feet back and forth on the carpet. He walked over to the window and he heard the loud crack of the wind. It was pumping the trees in the small wedge of the park six stories below, tearing at the wires on rooftops, fanning the smoke out under the clouds, scattering it like soot on paraffin."#1 is from The Adventures of Augie March, a novel generally held to be superior to the source of #2, a novel called The Victim. Each quote is a good example of why critics prefer #1 to #2 and why I think just the opposite.

Various writers and critics have looked at The Victim and nodded approvingly. They applaud the small, correct word choices that carefully evoke the object being described. They find the quality of the prose solid, yet uninspired, maybe even a bit pinched, passionless.

But when Augie March comes along, these same readers get really excited. Now there we have narrative exuberance, excitement, whirling turns of phrase with surprises like "snarling flowers," grand sociological pronouncements like "the gas cloud of settled existence," the chance to sneer at bourgeois values, adventure, risk-taking. What a lark! What a plunge! Almost as fun as a ride at Coney Island!

I understand this point of view. Maybe it is the correct one to have. But I can't agree with it. Take another look at the language in the quote from Augie March. Notice how vague and inflated it is: "difficult air of effort and nobility" "commonplace death" "settled existence" "unrecognized despair of marriage without hope" "the commonness of resentment." (Notice too the sloppy repetition of "common.") The only tangible objects in this litany are the boils and "snarling flowers," though I'm not sure why a flower would ever snarl or why it should. I suppose it sounds catchy and makes for a cute metaphor about seemingly nice things that are actually mean and angry. But couldn't Bellow have done a bit more homework here and found an actual object in life that has these qualities, like the lovely but poisonous rhododendron, which can be found in so many suburban lawns?

More importantly, what do these vague language choices really refer to? They're meant to satirize the stultifying effects of puritanical American suburban middle-class values, like putting the nose to the grindstone in some nine to five job while neglecting to feed the soul. The problem is that the grandiose rhetoric Bellow uses to malign these values is the same kind of empty discourse that's too often used to glorify them, for example in a politician's stump speech. Bellow's passage could very readily be re-written as follows:

"the commonplace life in the airy cloud of settled existence, the liberation of work, quiet, store-blossoming, unrecognized joy of marriage without disruption, or the commonness of contentment that bubbles up unknown in one's heart or in bulbs of laughing flowers."

The passage from The Victim, however, demands to be read as written because of its wondrous specificity. The concrete language dramatically re-enacts the same kind of despair of modern life that's only described in Augie March. The passage begins with a far more intriguing metaphor than "snarling flowers," because a man in a mine who smells smoke but doesn't see fire makes literal as well as metaphorical sense. It has a meaning that can be worked out and isn't just there to startle us with its sound or vague poetry. As the passage goes on, Bellow makes us feel the physical effects of the narrator's despair. We experience the emotional turbulence directly through the pain in his body and then indirectly, through the raging weather outside his window which almost seems to have been affected by his mood. After we feel the emotion, we gradually realize its significance, unconsciously at first, and then after some thought, consciously. To me, that's a miracle far greater than simply spelling out your point to readers like a priest preaching his Sunday sermon to an amen corner in church.

In a way, my preference for earned effects instead of purple prose makes me a bit homespun, guilty of the same middle class crimes Bellow indicts in Augie March. I want language to do its job instead of meandering aimlessly to Mexico on a road trip. But the alternative strikes me as too easy, and more than a bit fake. It's like watching a blindfolded cowboy wildly swinging a lasso in a rodeo, in hopes of roping a steer. If he's successful, good for him. But I don't feel like waiting around for it to happen. And I certainly wouldn't advocate his method as a model for young cowboys in training to emulate.

A Call to Arms

It's the weekend of B. E. A., the publishing industry's annual grand convention, and lately I've been hearing gloomy forecasts about the state of the business from a number of writers I know. No one's buying fiction any more (Da Vinci Code excepted). Of course, as long as publishing has been around, there have been writers complaining that no one buys books. But recently I was having a conference with a student of mine that made me wonder if maybe this problem really is becoming more acute. The student in question and I were discussing his final grade, and I asked him what writers he liked to read. “I don't like to read,” he replied. “Not that I think there's anything wrong with that if I want to be a writer. Other people will read what I write, but I don't have to read what other people write.”

As outrageous as this statement may sound coming from someone who's studying creative writing, it really isn't that abnormal if you stop to consider the rising popularity of creative writing classes, as contrasted with the falling numbers of book sales. Or think about the staggering volume of submissions to literary magazines contrasted with subscriptions to those same magazines. Or the query letters to agents versus the number of books sold by clients represented by those same agents.

We are all like the student I described earlier. We want to express ourselves, but we're far less interested in hearing other people express ourselves. Imagine a room filled with millions of people screaming past each other. Is that what being a member of the community of letters should look like?

The question is what can we do about falling book sales. We can't force people to buy books because it's good for them. Or even if we could do that, should we? Why do we expect anyone to support our work?

But there is something we as writers, publishers, and book lovers can do, which is to buy more books.

Many of you may be thinking, but I do buy books. Remember, I'm not talking about reading books. I'm talking about buying them. Those of us who are in the publishing world get books for free from publishers or magazines we review for, or friends who work in the business. Or sometimes we just borrow them, or buy them at used bookstores (or buy used copies from Amazon). But how many hardcover books have you bought last year? (At an independent bookstore?) Buying hardcovers may seem like an expensive habit. But if you paid twenty-five bucks for a theater seat, a concert ticket, a nice dinner, a sweater, or anything other than a book, you'd think, great, what a bargain. Most of us don't have any trouble plunking down ten bucks for the latest shlock from Hollywood, but that's half the price of a hardback book right there.

I'm not suggesting skipping Star Wars to buy a book. But every time you do go to the movies or spend fifty bucks on an evening of beer, stop and think, have I bought a book recently?

Some people may think, why bother? It's not going to make any difference if I buy one more book. Sadly, the state of publishing is such that each purchase of fiction does make a difference. And it's about more than dollars and cents. Each time people see you handling a book in a store, or each time that book crosses a cashier's desk, or when you hold it up on the subway or the beach, you're creating a ripple effect that gets that book out into the world in a way that's more powerful than any ad in the New York Times Book Review.

Also, I'm not reminding you to buy books the way doctors exhort us to take our medicine when we're sick. Reading isn't an onerous burden. It's rewarding, enlightening, and yes, it's fun. That's why you're reading blogs like these and taking creative writing classes, and scribbling in your journals in cafes. Yet how easy it is to forget in the age of TV and internet and iPods that reading is a pleasurable activity.

So set yourself a goal. Every month, buy at least one book for its retail price, possibly a hardcover, possibly at an independent bookstore. This will cost you about three hundred bucks a year at most (which is tax deductible if you're a writer). If you can't afford that much, try going without a Starbucks coffee once a week. There's twenty bucks a month right there. Ask for books as birthday presents. Give them as wedding presents along with cookware and linens.

Or give them for absolutely no reason, which is the best reason.

Joining the Club

I'm sorry for being a bit later than usual with my latest posting, but I've had an amazing week. I have now been to my first literary conference as well as my first literary award ceremony, so I thought I'd write about both, from the perspective of a first-timer.

I'll start with the conference: the Saints and Sinners Festival in New Orleans (which is now one of my favorite cities). If you're like me, you've probably seen literary conferences advertised in Poets and Writers and wondered what they were like or why someone might go to one. For me, the best part of going to Saints and Sinners, a festival for queer writers and readers, was its sense of community, all-important for our necessarily lonely profession.

All the events took place in the same three gay bars, all on the same corner, so I kept running into other conference-goers coming from or going to the readings, panels, classes, and parties. Though Saints and Sinners is a gay literary festival, the things we talked about most were relevant to all writers: issues of craft, favorite authors, how to make a living, and the book business. (I even attended a class on designing author websites.) The line between the presenters and audience members was, appropriately, porous. On Friday, I attended a very helpful presentation by author Jim Grimsley on how to get through the "murk" in the middle of your novel. On Saturday, I was on a panel about virtually the same subject, how to finish your novel. Immediately after that panel, I attended a poetry reading where fellow writers, MFA students, and self-taught writers who'd been in the audience at my panel now read their work aloud while I listened. The writers I met in New Orleans were a mix of slam poets, academics, performance artists, and authors published by small presses as well as major houses. Some of us had only published in journals or anthologies while others had several books under their belt. But everyone seemed to share the same sense of seriousness about their work and the same love of reading.

A couple of days after I got back from New Orleans, I went to a much more formal gathering at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, where I officially received the Rome Prize. I had no idea of the Academy's existence until I was notified that they'd given me a prize (an unexpected honor, for which I am deeply grateful). When I first dreamed of becoming a writer, I imagined the "literary establishment" quite literally as a club with mahogany tables and Greek columns. If such a club actually exists, then yesterday I wandered into it.

My day began by running into the Pulitzer-prize winning playwright Donald Margulies and his wife on the steps of the building. Once inside, I stopped in a room of signed photos of famous Academy members, everyone from Henry James to Eudora Welty to Bernard Malamud, Edward Albee, on and on. Upstairs, I listened to a pleasant bearded man (who turned out to be novelist E. L. Doctorow) tell a story about watching a drunken Robert Penn Warren fall asleep in his seat during an Academy ceremony years ago. I also met John Updike, who examined my nametag and said, "Oh, you've won a prize. How nice for you."

At lunch, my father and I were seated at a table with the poet Mark Strand and novelist Alison Lurie, who made smart and funny observations about the people in the room as if they were characters in one of her novels. Then came the ceremony itself, during which I sat on a stage with one hundred other writers, composers, and artists, including Maya Lin, Cindy Sherman, August Wilson, Edwidge Danticat, Robert Pinsky, Cynthia Ozyck, and Stephen Sondheim. My assigned seat was between Edmund White and the peppery Grace Paley, who gave a rousing cheer when my name was called. I was just hoping I wouldn't trip over Tony Kushner and Edward P. Jones on my way to the podium.

The whole situation was wonderful and more than a little overwhelming, and while I was there I kept wondering what it all meant. Was I truly admitted into that club I'd always hoped to join? Yet now that I've had some time to reflect on that question, I realize I've always been a member without realizing it. The person accepting the award on that stage and the writing student I'd once been, the one who'd never published a word, have a lot in common. The only difference is that hazy term "success." But what is success or failure, really? In five hundred years, none of our work will be read. Or if it is, we'll all be long gone and unable to glory in that fact.

Just as Pulitzer Prize winners still get hungry and get sick and get depressed, they also still have to struggle with sentences, the same work we all do as writers. What matters is the pleasure that struggle gives us now, at this moment. I can take pleasure in award ceremonies and literary conferences, but I also take greater pleasure in arranging words on a page, reading work I love, guiding a student toward progress. The meaning comes from the pleasure, not the other way around. That's not to say that every moment of writing is wonderful, just as not every moment of a party or a literary gathering is wonderful. But the highs you get make the lows bearable, and in life, it really doesn't get much better than that.

What Teaching Has Taught Me

The academic year is winding down, and I'm about to be deluged with student portfolios to grade. This has been my first full year of teaching creative writing to undergraduates, and I'm reminded of J. M. Coetzee's observation from his novel Disgrace:

“He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.”

I'm not convinced my students have learned nothing, but I have surely learned as much from them as I have taught. Their questions have forced me to clarify my own ideas about writing. Their work reminds me of the infinite variety of forms writing can take. And their progress suggests paths for me to explore in my own work.

One example. At the beginning of this term, some of my students have been having problems with the use of time in their work. Their narratives can skid disconcertingly from present to past to future, sometimes within the same sentence. To study control of time and pacing, we took a look at the first chapter of Anne Tyler's Earthly Possessions and timed the narrative to see how many sentences she used to move her story forward. (You can read an essay I wrote about this here.) One of the things we noticed was that by eschewing flashbacks as much as possible and folding the effects of the past into her present narrative, Tyler was able to build her narrative momentum and keep the reader hooked.

Gradually, I began noticing the salutary effects of this exercise on students' writing. Stories that were once confusing, distanced, dragging summaries suddenly came alive on the page, thrillingly. Characters we'd only heard about now breathed, felt, fought in front of our eyes. The prose seemed to clean itself up, as if of its own accord.

Glad to see my students' progress, I turned to my own work, the novel about Berlin I'm working on right now. I'd shown the first few chapters to a few friends who all agreed that as it went along it became more and more engrossing, despite a bumpy start. I re-read the first two chapters. What was going wrong?

Then I thought of the lesson I'd just taught my students about chronology. The present day action was getting dragged down by relentless flashbacks, flashbacks that I'd thought were necessary for the reader to appreciate the significance of the current story. So what if I did what my students had done and removed those flashbacks?

As an experiment, I opened a new file and removed every flashback I could find and laid them out in order. My new arrangement was a strong, swift Chapter One that introduced the present-day plot with little background, then a chapter two that contained the entire backstory as a separate, linear story, followed by a strong, swift chapter three that picked up where chapter one had left off and zoomed forward. It was an elegant solution to a difficult problem that might have taken me a lot longer to solve, if not for the lesson on chronology that my students and I had worked on together.

The other thing I've gained from teaching is a newfound love and appreciation for literary works outside of my main genre: fiction. As part of my Structure and Style class at Columbia, I was required to introduce students to poetry and playwriting. For my Fiction and Personal Narrative class at Barnard, I had to examine fiction as well as creative non-fiction. I've realized that I've been missing out on a rich variety of literary genres because I've focused my reading diet on fiction. Poetry has taught me about the power of language in distilled form, while playwriting has taught me how to tell a story wholly through dialogue, and non-fiction has helped me appreciate the rigorous art of shaping a narrative from true events.

This fall I'll be taking a year off from teaching, and I know I will miss the dynamic atmosphere of my creative writing classes, where rooms full of students have challenged, enlightened, and stimulated me this past academic year. I'd like to wish them all good luck and especially to say thank you, for all you've taught me.

Research? What Research?

Research seems like much too official a word for what I do as a writer to find out information I don't know offhand, but I can't think of a better term. Whenever I tell people I'm researching something for a book, I imagine they imagine me pouring over ancient texts in a library or scanning microfilms or strolling with university professors on ivy-strewn campuses.

I remember when I was traveling in Israel to research FAITH FOR BEGINNERS, and I described what I'd been doing to an Israeli I was interviewing, he said to me, "That's not research. That's going on vacation!" But then that's the beauty of researching as a fiction writer. It's the intellectual equivalent of taking a vacation.

Each writer addresses this issue in his or her own way. Some can spend years in libraries or archives or museums, but that's not what I do. Here's how my process works:

After I come up with an idea to write something set in a specific place, I'll make plans to go there. Before going, I might do some reading on the history of the city, country, or the particular community I'm going to be seeing. Usually it's a subject I'm already interested in and have been reading about anyway. While I'm in a bookstore, I might casually drift by the section devoted to the history of this place or the religion or bit of sociology I plan to tackle, leaf through a few books, maybe buy one. I might do a google-search, or I might not. I'll probably send emails to everyone I know asking if they know people who live there or know something about what I'm interested in.

Next, I'll visit the place I'm writing about. (Hopefully I'll have earned enough frequent flyer miles on my credit card to score a free flight.) While I'm there I will walk, eat, sightsee, participate in local functions, meet up with friends of friends. The only organizing principle is that whatever I'm doing has to interest in me. I'll keep a journal and keep track of everything I'm doing, every fleeting impression that comes to mind. I collect bits of scrap paper, advertising, free magazines, leaflets, newspapers, packaging, anything that could later give me some sense of the place. I'll take pictures too, not usually of tourist attractions so much as of local streets, city views, a restaurant, a park, an interesting block or public square. Local graffiti and bumper stickers are often very helpful. The most important thing I do is talk to people. The conversations I've had (or listened in on) have given me much more than anything I've gleaned from a book or an article.

So far, in my limited experience as a writer, I've found that this kind of traveling will lead to some encounter or question that suggests a story. And when I come home, usually several months after my return, I'll scribble down a first draft of that story as quickly as I can. In the case of FAITH, it took me a month or so before I was able to start writing. With the novel I'm working on now, set in Berlin, I waited half a year after coming home from Germany to begin.

When that first draft is done, I'll read over what I have and then and only then do I know what I have to find out. For example, with my current project, after writing my first draft, I realized I'd have to learn about physics, childbirth, missing persons cases and the Berlin police department, the German language and German classes for foreigners, immigration rules for Germany, Russian immigrants to Germany, American communists, Disneyworld, a city called Magdeburg, Albert Einstein, and the British royal family, Prince William in particular. (I think I've left a few things out.) A lot of people ask me which comes first, the writing or the research? I find that generally speaking, the two processes are mostly interdependent. In the case of the Berlin book, I traveled to Berlin, wrote a draft, then went back to find out the information I needed, came back and wrote some more, and may probably go back again one more time. Yet the most serious in-depth research could begin only when I had a working draft of my novel.

Although the amount of topics you have to familiarize yourself with can seem daunting, what's wonderful about being a fiction writer as opposed to a journalist or a non-fiction writer, is that the depth of knowledge required can actually be pretty shallow. This will depend heavily on your plot or the angle of your story, or if you're writing historical or science fiction (which James Wood argues are pretty much the same thing and I agree with him). Still, I don't like to over-research as if my Ph.D. depends on it because I'm writing novels, not operating manuals. So I read. I talk to more people, I keep my eyes open for articles related to what I'm doing. I check out things on-line. I tell my friends what I'm doing and nine times out of ten, someone will say, "Oh, I have a friend you should talk to!" or "I know the perfect book you should read." And I hunt down their leads. But I don't become obsessive. Reading too many books, scanning the Internet, and rummaging through libraries can turn up useful information, but more often than not it can lead to dead ends or down avenues that aren't relevant to what I'm working on. Then I end up wasting time researching that I could have spent writing or focusing on the works of fiction writers I'm looking toward for stylistic guidance. Also, sometimes the research can be so fascinating that I feel daunted coming up with my own fresh details. Tidbits from real life often seem so much better than anything I could make up and I feel stuck. These are the times when I'd prefer not to know everything, but rather just enough to get the shadings right. Then I can close my eyes and imagine myself as my character going through an experience and I find the details I need that way.

In other words, I usually research until I get bored. Then I go back to telling a story. After all, in the end, isn't that the job I'm really supposed to be doing?

War of the Words

At first glance, you might easily mistake Jonathan Safran Foer's new novel for a human interest magazine. Between its covers, you can find pictures of the World Trade Center, tennis player Lleyton Hewitt, and Laurence Olivier as Hamlet. Foer isn't alone in including non-typographical embellishments in his work. Ever since Dave Eggers's celebrated memoir came illustrated with various charts and graphs, young literary writers of fiction and non-fiction have rushed to furnish their texts with all manner of pictorial elements to liven up the tedium of all that black ink. Add to that the critical acclaim accorded to the prose of the late W. G. Sebald, and the practice of mixing image with text now comes stamped with a highbrow pedigree. If a European middle-aged man (who met an early and tragic demise) writing about the Holocaust can illustrate his prose with pictures, surely nice young middle class American boys and girls can do it too.

This generation isn't the first to use extra-textual decoration in their work, as anyone who's read Jon Dos Passos or Donald Barthelme knows. However, Dos Passos and Barthelme were writing in a time when there was no Tivo or HBO on Demand, when people filled their home libraries with books instead of DVD sets, when the written word wasn't constantly being debased in favor of visual excitement.

Now more than ever, we as writers need to cling firmly to our belief in words. We need to venerate the magic transaction that occurs when black ink marks on a page paint pictures, when black ink marks make us feel more in one sentence than reams of celebrity photos or hours of our favorite Sex in the City episodes.

This is not to argue against experimental writing, but rather to argue for authors to conduct their experiments with language. Have we really exhausted the possibilities of language so thoroughly that we have to resort to telling stories with pictures? If that's so, then how do you explain the glorious surprises achieved by David Foster Wallace's footnotes, Lorrie Moore's self-help stories, Rick Moody's italicized snarls, and yes, Safran Foer's enchanting play with English as a second language in his first novel, Everything is Illuminated? And what about writers like Michel Houellebecq whose work leaps off the page without the help of Lleyton Hewitt or footnotes or any other stylistic fireworks, but simply because of the powerful clarity of his voice and his vision?

If you feel that no word or combination of words can express your vision as powerfully as an image, then the question must be asked, what business do you have working with words? Why not be bold and honest enough to go all the way and declare yourself a visual artist? It's much easier to compete as a writer among artists than with other writers. And these days you don't even need to take your own photographs or paint your own pictures to be taken seriously as a young artist. Simply select a nice image, add your text above or below, choose a sleek black frame, and you've arrived.

To be fair, I haven't read Foer's book, so I can't comment on whether his particular experiment has failed or succeeded. Perhaps he has succeeded brilliantly and his book is a worthy heir to writers like W. G. Sebald and Donald Barthelme and others who effectively use elements other than texts in their books. Still, as much as I admire them, I want these writers to remain glorious exceptions, not models for the future. Also, writers like Sebald and Barthelme are prose magicians, who use pictures to amplify their already finely-wrought sentences, not as substitutes for places in their writing where they're stuck and don't want to bother searching for just the right word any longer. Can the young practitioners of scrapbooks as literature honestly say the same thing about their own work?

In Praise of Dribs and Drabs

People often ask me, "How do you find the time to write a novel?" To tell the truth, I wish I could produce more work that I have so far. But for what it's worth, here's my secret.

Last week I was off from work and decided to catch up on some well-needed rest. This semester I'm teaching seven classes in addition to working on my writing, so sleep is one of the several activities that have gotten short shrift recently, meaning I usually manage about five, six hours a night during the week, sometimes as much as six and a half.

So last week I slept as long as I wanted, enjoyed nine to ten hours of sleep a night, and during the day I was a zombie, drifting around Manhattan like poor shell-shocked Septimus Smith from Mrs. Dalloway wandering around Hyde Park. By contrast, now that I'm back to my regular sleep-deprived schedule, I'm buzzing from class to class, tearing through a staggeringly accomplished lost classic novel called Three Cities by Sholem Asch, churning out revisions on my new novel, a couple of essays, and this blog that's in front of you right now.

In the same way, I've often found that when I've had plenty of free time to write, long empty stretches of hours with nothing to do but focus on my work, it can take me forever to get anything done. But when my schedule is full and I'm forced to carve out half an hour on the subway, an hour when I get home, plus another hour after dinner and then maybe sneak in another fifteen minutes before bed, I'm much more productive.

You'd think that working in these dribs and drabs would result in a pile of scraps with little relation to each other. In fact, my new novel Faith for Beginners was almost entirely completed this way, and I'm knee-deep in the middle of another novel whose first draft was composed drib by drab on the subway ride home from Brooklyn.

How many times have you heard the complaint, "I wish I could write more, but I just don't have the time"? Or "I'd write if I didn't have to work, but I can't afford to quit my job to be a writer."

The reality is that few writers, even ones who've been published, have the luxury of quitting their jobs to pursue their life's calling. Luckily, there are always little wasted bits of time every day that can be recaptured and used for valuable work time. I recently read that the effects of exercise are cumulative, and four fifteen-minute blocks of exercise scattered throughout the day are equal to a continuous one-hour workout. It's my firm belief that the writing process works in much the same way.

Many writers I know invest an almost mystical belief in the necessity of deep concentration to get their pens moving. Maybe that's why there seems to be a general belief out there that if you can't work for three hours at a time, there's no use in trying to get anything done in two hours, one hour, or even half an hour. For me, the trick has been to break down the process into smaller tasks that can be completed in thirty minutes to an hour and a half. These tasks might include re-reading the previous day's work and making light revisions, re-writing a stubborn paragraph that hasn't been working, or jotting down notes for a scene that hasn't been written yet. Sometimes I'll just work on one or two pages that seem to form some kind of thematic unit in themselves, then take a break to tackle some chore I need to get done, and then pick up my book where I left off.

I'll confess that at some point in whatever project I've worked on, I've needed stretches of uninterrupted time when I could focus for longer than an hour or so. In the past, I've used holidays or vacations to block out that kind of prime writing time. However, those precious stretches of free time would have been worthless if I hadn't generated raw material during my usual hectic workweeks. So if you have a life outside of writing, as most of us are required to do, and you want to generate enough material for a collection of stories, a novel, or a book of poems, you may find the drib-and-drab method could work for you.

I recently finished a book called Literary Feuds by Anthony Arthur, which detailed the history of some famous author versus author squabbles, like Ernest Hemingway against Gertrude Stein, Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal, and recently Tom Wolfe and John Updike. Part of our interest in these feuds has more to do with gossip than serious literary study, yet interestingly, the disagreements between these writers was almost always related to their conflicting visions of what makes for good literature.

The other week in the New York Times Book Review, essayist Wendy Shalit laid down the gauntlet for a new literary feud in her opinion piece attacking Jewish fiction writers like Nathan Englander and Tova Mirvis, whom she labels as "insider outsiders." Her complaint was that these writers make their living by portraying themselves as dissidents who were once in the fold of Orthodox Judaism, but have now broken away and are explosing the dirty laundry of extremist religious freaks. Shalit argues that Mirvis and Englander not only fail to paint a full and true portrait of observant Jews but also have no right to claim any special knowledge of that world because they themselves are not part of the community.

To read Shalit's essay, click here.

Writing in the Forward, Mirvis composed a rather brilliant response to Shalit's critique. First, she points out that a writer need not share the lives of the characters she's writing about to understand them. "Since when must one be a murderer to write Crime and Punishment, a pedophile to write Lolita, a hermaphrodite to write Middlesex, a boy on a boat with a tiger to write Life of Pi? Yes, it seems, Shalit has outed the whole tawdry lot of us. She's revealed to the public the terrible truth: Fiction writers make up things."

Second, Mirvis says that experience and opinion are unique to the individual. Since writing fiction is an individual act, it necessitates an individualized point of view that should not be judged by its verisimilitude. Novels should not be confused with documentary films. "People like Shalit attack a story by saying, "But not everyone is like this." Of course not. But the fiction writer is saying, "Let's imagine one person who is.""

To read Mirvis's response, click here.

Frankly, Shalit's take on what a book ought to be is simplistic and dangerous. [Full disclosure: I know both Mirvis and Englander and admire their work.] However, there's an undercurrent in Shalit's essay that's worth exploring. It's her argument that works that attack religious people are celebrated by the literary community while works that celebrate religious people are attacked, or even more devastatingly, overlooked. Why? Because of the prejudices of the literary intelligentsia, who are more likely to be secular than religious, liberal rather than conservative, blue state rather than red state.

These days, I myself would probably be categorized as "secular," though I have a deeply spiritual outlook on the world that's informed by my religious upbringing. I am also a dyed-in-the-wool blue state liberal who's never voted for a Republican, though I don't rule out doing so. I admire several Republican politicians as well as despise many thoughtless Big-Government Democrats who believe the free market is the root of all evil (just as simpletons like our president believe the free market is the cure for all evil).

Do I believe an author must share my political opinions to write a great work? Definitely not. Knut Hamsun was a Nazi sympathizer, yet I loved his novel Pan. I do not share Toni Morrison's views on race in literature (as expressed in her book Playing in the Dark), yet I would gladly trade a limb to have written Beloved. And I can't count the number of times I've read books where writers make wink-wink, nod-nod anti-Semitic or homophobic asides that briefly jolt my reading experience. It's as if by continuing to read their works, I'm buying into their views of simpering gays and greedy Jews, though of course that's not true.

The books above focus more on story than political agendas. However, there are books that are intentionally political, that are meant to jolt us with their views. Can we enjoy them even if we don't agree with their politics? And can a book be ruined by its moral or political failings? Could I enjoy a book that featured a Bush-loving general who recounted his exploits in building democracy in Iraq? (That would have to be science fiction, since an election in which the majority of voters shows up to the polls to support an Iran-style theocracy because they've been told by their religious leaders they'll go to hell if they don't is not an example of Jeffersonian democracy.) Or how about a book about a religious leader who succeeds in converting gay people into straights? A book by a racist? A book about how ignorant and dirty poor people are? About how immigrants ought to be vaporized, and women put back in their place?

My answer is an emphatic yes. If you go to the recommended books section of this site, you'll find one book I'm recommending is by the French writer Michel Houellebecq, whose politics I often find repugnant. His fiction, however, is brilliant. I wouldn't want to be stranded on a desert island with this man. I also wouldn't want to live in a world in which he couldn't continue to write his vital and brilliant screeds that bristle with resentment against p.c. pieties and puritanical dishonesty about gender roles. When I read, I want to taste life, and life includes Eminem as well as Pollyanna, George Bush as well as John Kerry, Pope John Paul II as well as Sinead O'Connor. I don't mind reading a "biased" or political work of fiction. The test for me is whether I believe the book is honest (not to reality, but to the writer's own voice and vision), urgent, and above all, magical (which unfortunately is not a quantifiable quality). I don't want "fair and balanced" portraits all the time. Sometimes I want a slant. Yes, the world is complex, but why does fiction always need to recreate that complexity? It doesn't. Not if you're a curious reader.

Looking for Inspiration

The high volume of books on writing available in stores suggests we writers are an insecure, skittish lot, in constant need of reassurance. (I plead guilty.) It makes a lot of sense for us to feel lonely and insecure since writing is probably the most private of the major art forms as well as the one with the smallest earning potential. No wonder these guides tend to sell. Writers need all the help we can get.

Another reason for these books' ubiquity is that they seem fairly easy to write. Just jot down your random musings on what you do every day, with a brief nod to young, developing writers, and voila–you've fulfilled a book contract. I've noticed that the more famous the writer is, the thinner her book on writing tends to be, both in terms of length and content. Joyce Carol Oates's guide, for example, is a slim collection of essays already published elsewhere and doesn't get that much more specific than "Write your heart out." On the other side of the spectrum, John DuFresne's The Lie that Tells a Truth is chock full of concrete, eminently practical advice on everything from character development to finding your voice to step-by-step writing exercises to get your budding career started.

Recently, to get ready for some creative writing classes I'm teaching this semester, I looked over a few of these guides, starting with one of the classics of the genre, Annie Dillard's The Writing Life. Dillard's book takes the Oates approach, which depending on your point of view can be described as spare and poetic or cynically empty. Much of the book is devoted to describing Dillard's sojourns in quiet, tucked-away places like friends' vacation cabins, where she finishes her books. (Anyone out there have a cabin they'd like to lend me?) There are also several evocative anecdotes that lead up to cryptic maxims like, when chopping wood, aim for the chopping block and not the wood. That's definitely richly suggestive of something, though I'm not sure what. Dillard herself seems to be aware of a tendency toward obscurity in her work, which she highlights in a chapter where she confesses that the only people who seem to understand her writing are a few critics. So then why write? Stymied, she indulges in a bowl of popcorn with a few neighborhood kids, and then discovers to her surprise that one of them has read and enjoyed her work. I smiled in recognition when I read that story. You really can never predict who'll be affected by what you write.

I was browsing in Three Lives Bookstore in Manhattan when I picked up If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence, and Spirit by Brenda Ueland, whom I'd never heard of. The book was originally published in 1938 and was brought out again in paperback by Graywolf Press. Judging from her bio page, Ueland was quite a woman. She lived the bohemian life in Greenwich Village, then set a world swimming record for women over 80 years old, and was knighted by the king of Norway. Her book is a delightfully cranky exhortation to enjoy the art-making process, regardless of its ultimate product or material success. She cites the familiar Van Gogh example of the artist who labored seemingly in vain all his life to show that the work itself ought to be more than ample reward for its own sake: "By painting the sky, Van Gogh was really able to see it and adore it better than if he had just looked at it," she writes. That may be cold comfort to aspiring unpublished writers (or writers who have published but have found the experience less than life-fulfilling), but it's the best, noblest reason to slog away at this business. I also enjoyed when Ueland compared her writing students' work to published stories and essays and concluded that her students' work was more imaginative, passionately-observed, and wise. I was glad to learn Ueland's thoughts on how the imagination works (slowly and quietly) as well as the importance of long, solitary, and quiet walks. (Turn off your cell phones if you have them—I still haven't got one.) Most importantly, Ueland advises writers to write first and plan what they're going to write afterwards. I agree. I've found the surest way to kill a potential story is to think it all through beforehand and leave no room for improvisation while writing.

My favorite of these writing guides, though, continues to be Anne Lamott's oft-prescribed Bird by Bird. The first time I read it, I thought Lamott's insights and humor were a bit facile and coy. But the longer I've worked at writing, the more I recognize how wise this book is. What I like most about Bird by Bird is that it's a mix of the practical and spiritual, with chapters on jealousy alternating with advice on plot development. When I started out as a writer, I took solace from her thoughts on the necessity of writing shitty first drafts, a concept I'll forever emphasize to my students. When my first book came out, I studied her notes on the process of getting published, and laughed out loud at her description of how a bad review made her feel like streaks of feces on the underpants of life. Lamott makes you feel like you're not alone in this lonely craft, which I suppose is the true reason these books on writing are out there and do so well.

All in all, I've found each of these books on writing helpful in its own way. Someday I'd even like to write one, though at the rate new ones keep coming out, by the time I get around to doing it, I'm not sure how much there'll be left to say.

The Romance of Solitude

I remember the thrilling sense of relief I felt when I first learned the difference between "lonely" and "alone." While growing up, I enjoyed spending much of my time on my own and I was beginning to wonder if there wasn't something wrong with me. I loved to read, think, and retreat into my imagination to make up stories. The world seemed to me a complex and confusing place, with so much to think over and try to understand. Being around other people could sometimes be a welcome respite from my own thoughts, but they also brought up new problems to consider.

Somehow I thought I'd lose my taste for being alone when I got older, but now as an adult, I find that I continue to gravitate toward doing things on my own. I eat out, shop, go to the movies, the theater, even go on trips by myself. Many people I know would never dream of doing these things without a partner or five, maybe because they're afraid other people will see them by themselves and think they're lonely, as if there's no difference between not being in the mood to see other people and not having other people to see.

Solitude is becoming increasingly freakish in a culture where singers appear onstage backed by a line of dancers in cute outfits, politicians front a backdrop of carefully-picked everyday people, live audiences clamber up to talk show stages to throw chairs at each other, win cars, or (if they're on Ellen Degeneres's show) dance, and news anchors come in pairs, triples, and quartets. The concept of the entourage has become so de rigeur that there's even a TV show by that title. When was the last time you saw anyone alone on TV or in a movie? (Answer: Tom Hanks in Cast Away, in which his alone-ness was considered something of a special effect in itself.)

What I love about being alone is that things get very still, even if I'm in a crowded restaurant, or walking down the street. I'm lifted out of the place where I happen to be physically into my mind's remove, where I can be in several different places at once. There's no one to negotiate with, to see your dumb mistakes, to hear your passing thoughts. There's nothing you need to buy (which may be why being alone seems so discouraged in America) or do or say or be. Time slows down and often seems to stop.

Is solitude a necessary state for a writer? It can be helpful for a writer to play the observer, to gain some distance from others to understand the world better, to note useful details about people and places to use in a story or essay. And certainly it's crucial for a writer to have space and time alone to produce her work. Sometimes when I answer the phone after I've been writing, people will say to me, "Did I wake you up?" As a matter of fact, they have woken me up from a meditative state, a dream I've willed myself into to access the hidden places in my head where my characters live, breathe, and speak.

However, solitude has its degrees, and each writer confronts solitude in his own way. Some writers are like coal miners who punch the clock, go down the chute, and come back up when they've finished their job. Others, like me, show up early, leave late, and come back to the mines at odd hours, not necessarily to do extra work, but because we like the condition of being underground. We're attracted to writing because it gives form to those odd hours we spend cut off from the world.

When I read certain writers' books (or look at their jacket photos), I sometimes imagine I can tell what kind of relationship to solitude they have. For example, I've often that that Bernard Malamud's work has a much lonelier quality than Philip Roth's (though from what I understand, Roth lives alone in rural Connecticut, spends hours in isolation working on his books, and shuns publicity). When I think of Dickens, Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, as well as the slew of young writers like Dave Eggers, Safran Foer, and Shteyngart, I imagine them in a brightly-lit room filled with people holding drinks. On the other hand, Woolf, Joyce, Hemingway, W. G. Sebald, and frankly most European writers always strike me as detached souls shut up in drafty garrets and thinking deep thoughts. Jane Austen was famous for craving solitude and never getting any, while Proust retreated into it. Janet Frame, who grew up in a raucous rabble of a household, became something of a high priestess of solitude. Jonathan Franzen wrote a book with the title How to Be Alone, (which, embarrassingly, I have yet to read).

I was telling a friend my feelings about this subject, and he said to me, "But, Aaron, you know everyone!" I'm not sure that's true, but there are many times when I've been in group situations and felt like I was standing in the eye of a hurricane. I watched the noise and energy swirl around me, while I remained at the center in the calm and the quiet, where not a breath of wind or drop of rain could reach me. It's a scary, dizzying perch, not without its dangers, though if you can stand them, there are sometimes rewards.