A Few Burning Questions from Students

Earlier this week, I went to visit a creative writing class taught by my friend and highly-esteemed colleague Lauren Grodstein. Her students had read my novel Faith for Beginners, and I came to talk to them about the process of becoming a writer and writing that book.

The students came up with some interesting questions for me to answer. Two of them were questions I often get asked by readers, and yet each time I'm asked those questions, I feel somewhat surprised.

The first of these was, "How much of your book is autobiographical." (To find out the answer, you can go to the "bio" section of my site.) The thing that always strikes me about that question is that these days, the first question we ask a non-fiction writer, particularly if he or she has written a memoir, is "How much of your book is true?" It's as if we expect our non-fiction writers to be writing lies and our fiction writers to be writing the truth. In other words, we think that all writers are liars.

Of course, if Pablo Picasso is to be believed, all artists are liars, but it's been said that Picasso himself was a notorious fibber, so now we're getting all Star Trekky...

The other question was, "I don't know much about the Jewish faith, so I'm not sure if I'm getting everything in this book that I'm supposed to get." I've heard a number of readers, not just of my work but of fiction in general, say that to understand a work of fiction it should be universal or specific to their experience. To me it seems that the first condition is impossible, the second undesirable.

There is no universal experience. We all our individuated by our races, religions, nationalities, class levels, etc. However, many of us believe that to have a race, you must be black. Begin white means not having a race, which is therefore "universal." To have a religion, you must belong to a non-Christian religion. Being Christian is "universal." Being American, straight, and middle class, are all also universal. (I've heard that in a recent poll of Americans, 95% said they belonged to the middle class.) Being male is universal. Being female means you have a gender.

However, I wouldn't want to read fiction about the universal experience, which would seem to shave all the interesting edges off stories that make them unique. I also don't want to read fiction specific to my own experience all the time. When I read a book, one of the many things I hope for is the chance to get to know a world that isn't entirely mine. And yet somehow, by reading about the specifics of a world that is not my own, I find a way to relate to it, to imagine how my life compares to this new one I'm encountering on the page. That's why I love reading fiction that is set in such unfamiliar moonscapes as 1850s London (Bleak House by Dickens) early nineteenth century Russia (War and Peace by Tolstoy) or even imperial Rome (The Twelve Ceasers by Suetanious). I love finding out that I have more in common with British orphans, Russian aristocrats, and Roman emperors than I would ever have guessed before reading the books above.

As the student herself put it, "I'm not Jewish, but my grandmother, who's Catholic, worries about the same things as that character Helen in your book, so I could relate."

Exactly.

Another burning question I got this week, from a student in one of my own creative writing classes, was "Is writing a matter of hard work or talent?" This is a fantastic question, worthy of a blog in itself. I've never been a fan of the idea of talent because I've seen how much hard work goes into writing. Certainly I have never felt divinely inspired as I go along. I feel more like a coal miner, slowly hacking away at the page for years. However, I have also seen people diligently going about their work for years and get more and more frustrated with their writing, unable to produce work they're proud of. So what's the difference between someone who works for three years and then produces a book that gets published, and someone else who works a while and comes up with a manuscript to put in the back of a drawer?

I have no idea if you need talent, or if writing is something that can be mastered through hard work and study. But I do know that a number of talented people go nowhere because they don't put enough effort into their work and careers. So maybe the only thing to say about this question is, "Does it make any difference?" If you want to be a writer badly enough, in spite of all the difficulties of this career--and there are many--then go for it, and don't worry about talent. If it exists, it's out of your control whether you have it. But what is in your control is how hard you work to maximize the gifts you were born with, assuming that anyone is indeed born with any gifts. So work as hard as you can. Expect no rewards. Because no one should write for rewards. (The rewards you get for writing aren't worth it, except if you're Stephen King or John Grisham or Dan Brown, and we're not them.) You should write because you care so much about words and are so fascinated by the world of literature that you want to get into the game too, even when doing so seems difficult and discouraging and hopeless.

Bursting with Books

Last night as I was cleaning out my closet, my book tower fell over.

I love books. I always have. I'm the kind of person who has a hard time going into a bookstore and walking out empty-handed. As I've begun to publish, I have more friends who write books and publish as well, and so I feel it's important to support their work by buying their books. I also believe strongly that independent bookstores are a great resource on the endangered species list, so every time I go into one of those, I almost always buy something as well.

The result of all this is that almost every square inch of surface area in my apartment is packed with books. My bookshelves, of course, but also my desk, my nightstand, the floor beside my desk, are all taken up by books. For some years, I used to save every book I've ever acquired, even ones I didn't like. After moving several times, I began to wonder whether it was such a good idea to continue carting around that thousand-page copy of Iain Pairs's An Instance at the Fingerpost, a book that sat on my shelves for four years unread. Did I really need to save Gould's Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan, despite its rave review in the New York Times and beautiful gold spine? (Owned for six years, never opened once.) Or how about Jim McGreevey's Confession, or The Nanny Diaries, books I acquired for cheap, out of curiosity? My curiosity has now been satisfied. I'm ready to move on.

So every once in a while, I add a book to a tower of Babel that grows and grows in my closet until it reaches an absurd height, and then I remove the books from the apartment, sell them or donate them or give them away. The trouble is, the tower seems to grow ever more rapidly, and it's all I can do to keep up.

Still, it's hard to let go of a book. Maybe I will find time for Gould's fish after all. And maybe I'll want to refer to those Nanny Diaries for a scene to share with a creative writing class. (About how to write a fast-paced but ultimately shallow satire of a shallow subculture of upper crust New York with a deeply unsatisfying anticlimactic ending?) Tastes change. Maybe I'll regret letting of Mr. McGreevey. If I just squeezed those books together a bit more tightly on the shelf, there'd be room for one or two more...

So what do you do with books once you've read them? Keep them all? Some? How do you decide? I'd be interested to hear.

Return to Oz

For my current project, which features a Wizard of Oz fan as its main character, I've been rereading several books in the Oz series written by L. Frank Baum. (Baum wrote thirteen sequels to his bestselling hit novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. After his death, the series was continued by a few other authors. Even today, many hopefuls to the title Royal Historian of Oz continue to pen Oz sequels.)

One of the wonderful things about re-reading these books, which were written over a span of twenty years from 1900 until the author's death in 1919, is seeing the development of a writer over time, emotionally as well as stylistically. The first book was never intended to launch a series. Indeed, Baum wrote other stories about magical two-letter lands, like The Magical Monarch of Mo and Queen Zixi or Ix. Yet somehow the lands of Mo and Ix never made the same mark on the culture as Oz.

When Baum began writing his sequels to the original book, he tried to get around the problem of returning to the same territory by setting several of his books outside the land of Oz, telling stories about characters who traveled through other magical lands (including another two-letter country, Ev) to get to Oz. Finally, in 1910, with his sixth entry in the Oz series, The Emerald City of Oz, Baum announced that the land of Oz was forever cut off with the rest of the world and so he could no longer receive news of the latest Oz happenings to report in future Oz books. The series was therefore concluded.

For a few years, Baum wrote other fairy tale books, none of which approached the success of the Oz books in terms of sales, even when he tried to import a couple of Oz characters into his non-Oz stories. So in 1913, he "discovered" that he could resume communication with the land of Oz via the telegraph, and he wrote one Oz book a year from then on.

What accounts for these books' enduring charm? Baum certainly has his moments as a writer, particularly in the first chapter of The Wizard of Oz, in which his masterful interweaving of plot, character, setting, and word choice is as good as anything ever produced in American letters. Baum also has his weaker moments when he relies on a series of literary tics that get increasingly annoying with their repetition in each new book. Food is often "smoking hot." Trees are always "stately." Rooms in fairy castles are often scented with sprays of perfume and lit with a soft glow from an unknown source. He tends to do much better when he's tackling the flat landscape of Kansas than the enchanted halls of castles in the Emerald City and beyond. His characters can also seem to lack much variation. They're usually a combination of lucky girls like Dorothy, vain, silly, arrogant talking cats and villainous queens, good-hearted idiot savants like the beloved Scarecrow, resourceful, calm, unruffled boys, and villains whose silliness always seems more genuine than their cruelty.

At the same time, Baum tells his stories with remarkable sincerity, so much so that it's hard to believe that Oz is not a real place. He writes about his favorite characters as if they're good friends, and describes magical encounters with genuine wonder, as if they'd occurred to him rather than been invented by him. As a child reading these books, I used to dream of finding just the write cyclone to whisk me away to Oz. As an adult going back to them, I was surprised by how quickly the same longing recurred and how difficult it was for me to shake it off.

Good and Bad

This week I've asked my creative writing students to give me some feedback on how their work is progressing and how the class is going for them. I've gotten some very thoughtful and interesting responses. For example, I was surprised (and gratified to learn) how interested many of them were in the fine art of line-editing.

One thing that's stuck with me from these responses and others I've heard from students in the past is their desire to know what makes for "good" writing and what makes for "bad" writing. When I used to teach poetry, for example, one student asked me to bring in a good poem and a bad poem, explain to the class what made one good and the other bad, and then hand out a list of rules so that students could follow them and write only good poems in the future.

It's a perfectly reasonable thing to want to know, and if anyone out there could provide me with rules of "good" and "bad," I'd be grateful to hear about them so I could pass this information on to others. For myself, I no longer can claim to know what "good" and "bad" mean anymore, and increasingly I find that I no longer care.

I think that Zadie Smith's recent novel On Beauty is a textbook example of a "bad" book. In fact I think it represents some of the worst tendencies in contemporary literature and constitutes a fundamental misunderstanding of E. M. Forster's Howards End, the book that Smith claims inspired her own novel. The New York Times Book Review, however, names it as one of the top ten books of the previous year. They think it is a "good" book. Good for them, good for me. I have my opinion, and they have theirs.

I also think rum raisin ice cream is an example of "bad" ice cream. What if I said that the New York Times sang the praises of rum raisin ice cream? Would you care? Would I change my opinion of rum raisin?

For me, the only opinions about literature that mean anything are ones that engage with the essential qualities of the text. We can talk about characters and word choices and plot structure and setting and the use of time. We can talk about how tired we ought to be as readers of books detailing (yet again) the petty tempests in academic teapots, or the cloying contemporary fetish for "updating" plots of classic novels by transplanting them roots and all from the past to the present, ever so cutely substituting "emails" for "letters," for example. Then we can have a real discussion about the validity of these specific decisions.

As for what's good and what's bad, I can only say what I like. But you, reader, are equally entitled to like what you like. But by simply exchanging our opinions about good and bad, we immediately end the discussion because we can go no further. Because as much as I hate rum raisin, you'll still go on eating it, and as much as you want me to switch from cookie dough, I'm sticking to that too.

Straight to Hell

Research has taken me to some unsual places: a gay cruising park in Jerusalem, an institute for physics research in Berlin, a Cantonese class in Chinatown, a Communist bookstore off Fifth Avenue. But last weekend was a first: a research trip to hell.

First, a little background. I'm starting a new novel that features a number of evangelical Christians as main characters. The past couple of weeks I've done some digging to learn more about evangelical communities and what makes them tick. My great worry with this book is that I'll only portray these people satirically or superficially, because I know so little about them, and I'd really like to get at a deeper, more human rendering.

To that end, I've been doing some reading on the evangelical movement and keeping my eye out for anything related to it in the media. Then last week, an article on "Hell Houses" happened to catch my eye.

Halloween is not a very popular holiday among evangelicals (nor among religious Jews either) because of its pagan origins (though the Christmas tree has pagan origins too) and its association with witches and the like. As an alternative to staged haunted houses for Halloween, churches have begun organizing "hell houses," which feature the potrayal of various sins. On your tour of a hell house, you're likely to encounter a suicide or two (big no-no), a date rape, some drugs, STD's, a gay wedding, and most certainly, a very bloody abortion.

To set up your own hell house, the best way to go about it is to pay $300 for a hell house kit from Pastor Keenan Roberts. His handy manual will give you tips on everything from sound effects, staging, dialogue, to how to simulate an aborted child using meat products. For an extra $45 bucks a pop, you can purchase DVDs of various scenes that particularly interest you.

I was wondering how I would ever get to see one of these houses, when I learned that there was one available right here in this den of sin where I live. A local theater company, Les Freres Corbusier, has decided to stage an authentic haunted house in Dumbo. They've paid their $300, assembled the house according to official kit instructions, and stuck to the original text as provided by the good pastor. There was no choice for me. I had to go to hell.

My tour of hell house began with greetings from a devil dressed in makeup that resembled one of the bad guys from Star Wars. Mr. Devil took us to our first tableau, a rave at which a young woman takes a drug and passes out on the floor, at which point, a man yells, "She's out! Let's rape her!" (Why is it that tasteful art and evangelical Christianity are such unlikely bedfellows?) Other sins included a spectacularly bloody abortion scene, with the red stuff spurting from the womb of a hapless cheerleader. Tools included a rather nasty looking pair of forceps and a vacuum cleaner with a large hose. We also entered a womb where an actor sucking her thumb and cooing, "Gurgle, gurgle" was plucked from the scene by two giant wooden beams covered in aluminum foil. One of my favorite parts was the hallway of sinners, which included a Muslim terrorist, a pothead, and (incongruously) an effete man in a tuxedo warbling show tunes to his heart's content.

In case you were worried, at the end of the tour, we were all saved from Satan by an angel who took us to a white room where Jesus himself offered us salvation. (My friend who came with me was more interested in Jesus's chest hair.) Then we were led to a Christian hoedown, with folk music, powdered donuts, and watery punch.

Perhaps the scariest thing of all about Hell House is that Pastor Roberts claims it has a 33% success rate in converting people to the faith.

Thoughts on Yom Kippur

Yom Kippur may just be the most literary of Jewish holidays. Yes, there's Simchat Torah, a celebration dedicated the five books of Moses, but most of the Simchat Torah festivities are marked by drinking, singing, and dancing rather than an exploration of the words on the page. (If you ever want to see Orthodox boys gone wild, visit a synagogue on the eve of Simchat Torah.)

Yom Kippur, by contrast, is a day dedicated to the brain, and especially to words. It's a day to remove yourself from everyday concerns like eating or drinking or working or getting dressed up in your fanciest clothes (which is why you'll see Jews in suits with tennis shoes). And it's a day to reflect on stories of atonement and loss. The Yom Kippur service is filled with stories of martyrdom from the days of the first rabbis down to the Holocaust and the founding of Israel. It's also filled with stories of the high priests purifying their bodies and minds to atone for the sins of their people.

One of the creepiest of these stories is that of Aaron, the first high priest, brother of Moses, (yes, my namesake), whose two sons died on the spot for daring to enter the holiest part of the temple without God's permission. The Torah dispenses with them in half a sentence.

I'm also fascinated by an explanation I once heard for why the story of how the high priests used to prepare for Yom Kippur is filled with such drama. During the late years of the Second Temple, the post of High Priest was sold to the highest bidder, often to men who were far from holy and sometimes completely ignorant of religious practice. And yet on Yom Kippur this so-called High Priest had to learn how represent the entire community of Hebrews to God and to carry out the rituals without one mistake.

One of my favorite parts of the service is a recounting of a prophecy by Isaiah, in which he talks about people who went through the rituals of fasting and mourning but without reflecting on the meaning behind those rituals. "Is this the kind of fast that God wants?" Isaiah demands. (I'm paraphrasing here.)

These three stories illustrate how difficult faith was and is. There's a tendency among religious fanatics to think nostalgically of the good old days from the Bible, and to see our own time as one of horrific iniquity. They wish we could behave more like the characters of the Bible, in a time when questions of gay marriage or legalizing abortion didn't exist.

Yes, those were the good old days all right, when upstanding men like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob engaged in polygamy, kept slaves, cheated, lied, and swindled. In our time, we believe that each person should have a free choice about the kind of sexual relationship he or she wants to have, as long as that choice doesn't interfere with someone else's choice. But, no, it was far better in the old days, when women were bartered like cattle.

At the same time, we shouldn't indulge ourselves in the illusion that we are entirely more enlightened than we used to be. Isaiah's harangue about people who go through the motions of faith still rings true to us today for a reason. Sure, it's easy to point out the flaws of any number of characters from the Bible. But how many of us have the courage Abraham had, to abandon his homeland, his family, and the beliefs he'd been brought up with, in order to follow his ideals?

I don't have that kind of courage, and lately, I don't have that kind of faith, either. This morning, as I sat in synagogue, and read responsively, and stood, and sat, and even reflected, I found my attention drifting out the windows, at boats gliding across the river, and the miracle of a helicopter swooping down on Manhattan. And just outside of the large room where we prayed and wept as our stomachs rumbled, three construction workers stretched themselves out in the sun and enjoyed their lunch.

What's in a Name?

Recently in my creative writing classes, we've been considering the issue of names. The temptation for an author when trying to pick out a name for a character is to play the Dickens card. For example, if your character's a good guy, you want to call him "Mr. Goodman." Get it? This kind of cuteness becomes very au courant if you're one of those wink-nod po-mo type of writers for whom the whole thing's a joke anyway, so what's one more cheap ploy?

For me, the question of naming goes back to a fundamental issue of character: choice. We learn about characters from the choices they make. One thing that we as people have absolutely no choice over is the name our parents give us at birth. Also, at birth, our parents have no idea what kind of person we're going to be. We're just wet pink blobs. Therefore, using a name to signal some kind of trait about a character simply isn't true to life.

And yet, as one of my students pointed out, we as readers do get a kind of feeling for characters because of the names their authors (rather than their parents, since we as authors really are their parents) gave them. He pointed to the detective "Jack Bauer" on the program 24. Would Jack Bauer cut such a convincing figure as a detective if his name were "Worthington"? And as I mentioned in class, are we really prepared to accept a nuclear physicist named Tiffany?

Yes, argued a student who met with me later in office hours. Why not have a physicist named Tiffany? Why go the usual route and give her an intellectual-sounding name like Ernestine? Play with convention a little, and surprise your reader.

Jack or Worthington, Tiffany or Ernestine, either way naming comes back to the same core issue: we don't get to pick our names, so our names (by themselves) cannot tell us very much about the choices we'd make. Names can tell us gender, ethnicity, family heritage, sometimes age group, sometimes the type of family you grew up with (is your name John Marshall Scott III or Moonbeam Applebaum?). They can also tell us a lot about our parents, about the hopes they have for us, the way they go about choosing a name, the relatives they're honoring by naming us after them. But that's about it.

However, there is an important way in which names can tell us about character, which is, what is your character's relationship to his or her name? Does your character like her name? How does he feel when he hears it read aloud, on a class attendance list, for example? Does your character go by a nickname, and who chose that name? Does your character prefer the full version of his name, like Thomas, or does he go by Tom or Tommy for short? Does your character fantasize about changing his or her name? Does the name have a special meaning or story attached and does your character know it and tell it readily? This is all rich, fertile territory for name games.

If you happen to be a writer and still feel the Dickensian itch to get all cutsey with names then do me a favor. Give your character a nickname. Since the character's the one choosing it, you can go crazy. Think of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for example. (What is it about a grown man who goes by the moniker "Scooter"?)

As for Tiffany the physicist, well, I'm still deciding...

A Comma Obsession

Yesterday I took a one-day cooking class to learn how to make a birthday cake. As part of the class, we learned how to wish someone a happy birthday in chocolate drizzle on top of a layer of buttercream frosting. Our teacher advised us to start with "Birthday" across the center of the cake, then to add "Happy" above that, and finally the person's name underneath.

In other words:

Happy
Birthday
Aaron

The one thing she didn't tell us to do was to insert a comma between "Birthday" and the person's name. I admit, it would certainly seem odd to come across a birthday cake that read:

Happy
Birthday,
Aaron

But the rules of grammar require a comma there, and not simply for the sake of fussiness. Consider the following two lines of dialogue:

1. "Leave Mom!"
2. "Leave, Mom!"

Without the rule about inserting a comma when a person is addressed by name in speech, how would we ever know if Mom was being asked to leave, or if someone else was being asked to leave his mother. Or try these two:

1. "Kill ducks!"
2. "Kill, ducks!"

Here the comma is a matter of life and death. In the first example, the ducks are about to become dead meat. In the second, the ducks become the killers.

I first learned about this comma (sometimes known as the comma of address) in an undergraduate fiction workshop I took at the University of Michigan with the writer Tish Ezekiel. Since then, I've become fairly religious about using it. I've also become unusually sensitive to its ever-increasing absence in other people's work, especially with work that's been published. An omitted comma of address strikes me as a sign that the writer doesn't care enough about her craft to learn the rules of grammar, doesn't care enough about the comfort of her readers to make the cadences of her dialogue absolutely clear.

True, these little commas are probably not the most egregious error a writer could make. Many times, we can guess pretty easily what the writer had in mind. "Hi Mom" instead of "Hi, Mom," doesn't seem like a huge mental leap. So why do I get so bothered when I see "Hi Mom"?

Because the comma is probably the most difficult of all punctuation marks to deploy correctly. In fact, there are some rules of comma usage that seem pretty much a matter of taste, without hard and fast rules to follow. So when there is a perfectly good hard and fast rule for using a comma, like the rule about commas of address, why not stick to it?

A Few Thoughts about Plot

I'm getting together lesson plans for two courses on fiction writing I'm teaching this fall, and right now I'm thinking hard about "plot." Various writers have grappled with this term and tried to pin it down. I've always liked E. M. Forster's summation, which goes roughly: The king died and then the queen died--that's a story. The king died and then the queen died of grief--that's a plot.

One important distinction I think is important to make between plot and action is that action is a more rambling list of events that happen in a story, while plot is a succinct summation of what's important. Here's a quick mini-test to see how comfortable you are with the notion of plot. How do you typically answer the question, "What did you do yesterday?" If you're like me, you start from the second the alarm goes off, describe the way the window shade snaps up, linger over the bowl of cereal in the kitchen, until the person you're talking to screams, "Get to the point!" To which I always say, "But I want you to get the feeling of what my day was like!"

The trouble with plot for writers is that the activity of writing a story is all about these little details. You're spending most of your time mired in bits and details that you're trying to make vivid for the reader. But there's nothing more boring than listening to a writer trying to answer the question, "What's your book about?" if he or she hasn't prepared a twenty-five word or less standard description of it.

When people first asked me about the novel I'm writing now, I used to say, "Well, it's about this young woman who moves to Berlin with her new husband to get away from her old life, but then she finds the new one isn't all that she'd hoped for either, and the marriage isn't going that well, and she wants to have a baby, but she and her husband are having bedroom trouble, and then one day she meets this Russian immigrant by chance and forms a bond with him, and then she's..." By which point, my conversational partner's eyes have thoroughly glazed over.

These days I've learned to say, "It's about a love triangle set in contemporary Berlin." If I'm feeling frisky, I might add," involving a married couple from America and a Russian immigrant."

Now that's plot.

Bad Behavior

Last week I was scolded for my bad behavior at a reading. Well, not me personally. I was part of an audience who shared the collective blame. Our crime? To laugh at a passage read aloud by its author who hadn't intended her words to be funny.

The passage in question was a short story about psychoanalysts during the 1950's by author Sarah Schulman. Much of the dialogue was so loaded with psychological jargon that we as members of the audience had only two possible interpretations of it: either the author had a tin ear for realistic dialogue or the author was trying to make a joke. Being in a generous mood, we went for the latter option, and laughed.

When Schulman finished reading, we gave her a hearty round of applause, for which she thanked us with an indignant reprimand. "That story wasn't funny," she informed us, as if the reaction of a crowd of one hundred reasonably intelligent listeners could not have counted for as much as the author's opinion, since the author always knows best. Schulman went on to explain that the jargon that made us laugh came out of an impulse for positive change and healing and that our nervous laughter showed how inept and uncomfortable we as cynical modern people were at hearing that kind of language. In other words, we laughed because we were shallow, or at least, not as enlightened as Schulman presumably was.

Schulman's claim to authorial supremacy strikes me as quite astounding in an age when the "death of the author" has been proclaimed often and loudly. We've had schools of critics who've analyzed texts with complete disregard for the author's background, instead focusing only on the words on the page. We've had other schools of critics claim that the individual author is merely a function of complex social phenomena and therefore doesn't even exist. And yet here is Schluman demanding, almost like Stalin or Mao, that there is only one true path, the author's path, and that for a reader to take any other is heresy.

As an author, I'm often surprised by the reactions of readers, who sometimes miss what I was trying to say but often pick up on meanings that I hadn't consciously intended. I feel that as long as readers can point to places in the text that back up their response, their response is valid. But then I grew up in an educational system that promoted this same point of view. Schulman, who seems a little older than I am, may have been educated in a different way. Also, I am writing my work at a time when I am relatively free to write about gay subject matter and to be up front about my identity. This freedom is thanks to the pioneering efforts of writers like Schulman, who wrote about queer themes at a time when such writing was not so commonplace. Perhaps she found it necessary to develop a certain stridency of character, an "I'm right and all of you are wrong" philosophy, in order to simply do her work.

Whatever the reason for Schulman's beef with her audience last week, she could have reacted to the situation in any number of ways. She could have said, "I'm glad you enjoyed the story, but actually, it wasn't my intention to be funny. Here's what I was trying to do in this story..." She could have laughed at her own failure to convey her intended message that evening and hoped for better audiences in the future. She could have gone home and complained to her girlfriend, her therapist, or her dog. She could have realized that an author is often the person who understands her work least. She could have done nothing.

Instead Schulman told the crowd who had taken time from their busy lives to listen to her words and applaud her efforts that they were not smart enough to understand her work. Fair enough. Since I'm not smart enough, I won't bother making the attempt ever again.

P.S. Since I originally published this post, Sarah Schulman herself was kind enough to comment on it, as you'll see below. She says that she was simply surprised by the audience's reaction and didn't mean to come off a scold. Thank you, Sarah, for putting in your two cents. I'm happy to give our author-reader relationship another chance.

Passivity in American Letters

In a recent essay in the New York Times Book Review, author Benjamin Kunkel complained that the problem with today's memoirs isn't that they're untruthful but that their protagonists are too passive. Without citing specific examples (except for a quote from Running with Scissors), Kunkel argued that today's memoirs feature main characters whose only accomplishment is to have endured suffering and survived.

Last weekend, memoirist Mary Karr responded, in a letter to the Book Review, by referring Kunkel to his own novel Indecision, whose hero has so much trouble making up his mind about anything that he does just about nothing for about two hundred pages. Finally, after taking drugs and having sex in South America, Kunkel's hero decides to do something: he goes to his old prep school and delivers a lecture about something called "democratic socialism." Not exactly an edge-of-your-seat plot.

Passive heroes are not unique to memoirs. You can find plenty of passivity on both sides of the fiction/non-fiction divide. I agree with Kunkel's complaint (and said something similar in my own essay on memoirs in Poets and Writers) that too often American memoirists write about bad childhoods, abuse, drug addiction, surviving a fatal disease, any affliction you can name. However, a survey of American fiction turns up much the same thing.

Want to read about surviving child abuse? Try Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison. Surviving slavery? Start with Toni Morrison's Beloved or The Bluest Eye and then keep on going. Surviving the boss from hell? Try The Nanny Diaries or The Devil Wears Prada. From award winners to best-selling fluff, our fiction is filled with heroes and heroines who survive rather than act.

Why is this happening? For one thing, during the `90s, thanks to Oprah Winfrey and the increasing popularity of ethnic and gender studies, we became surrounded by the victim narrative. On TV, in school, in the movies, newspapers, and magazines, stories of manly straight white men doing bold deeds were replaced by tales of noble sufferers (often victims of those manly white men) whose act of courage was to tell a story that had not yet been told.

I also think the passive hero syndrome is a side effect of the growth in the teaching of creative writing. It's hard to make up stories and at the same time to make them believable. As a result, many creative writing teachers exhort students to "write what you know" (without adding, "or else, know about what you write.") And since most people who take creative writing classes in America are not rocket scientists, brain surgeons, or astronauts, the world that they know may not seem immense. They may not recognize the drama of everyday events like work, family, and love, but rather feel tempted to reach for that one awful time in their lives when everything seemed to go wrong.

One more thing. Our lives today in America can seem so easy and well-ordered. Anything we could want can be found in a moment on the Internet. We walk into a restaurant and within minutes we are served a tasty meal fusing tastes and spices from a variety of sources, Asian, Mexican, African, French, all in one bite. Credit cards arrive every day in the mail promising us more free money to shop with. In such a climate, maybe we enjoy the thrill of watching things go wrong instead of right so often.

Whatever the cause, all this passivity in American writing can't be good for us because the picture it paints is false. As Americans, we enjoy a position of privilege and power unmatched on the planet since the time of the Roman empire. And yet we turn a blind eye to the things that go on in our name around the globe and instead cry over re-runs of talk shows because we too were not hugged enough by our fathers or we too have trouble managing our alcohol intake. When will our writers stop re-enforcing our penchant for self-pity and start exhorting us to wake up, and act up?

How's Your Book Going?

At some point, every writer has probably had to answer the question "How's your book going?" I wonder, however, if other writers have had as much difficulty as I have in coming up with an honest answer.

For me the process of writing a book begins some time shortly after birth. It is the direct result of my collected life experiences, some large and meaningful, others seemingly insignificant, which together point me toward an interest in arcane subject matter. Sprinkle in some day dreaming and extended periods of self doubt. Then write. Read what you've written. Try not to throw up. Rewrite. Read again, preferably after hiding all sharp objects in the vicinity. Repeat this process one hundred times and you might end up with a first draft.

What is a first draft, anyway? Or more precisely, what is a draft? When I write a novel, I try to move logically from point A to point B and somehow always get waylaid at point Q and a half. I attempt to flesh out one character, only to discover that as I learn more about who she is, I learn that her interactions with my only fully realized character in the novel make absolutely no sense. And just how many rooms does Mrs. Hinckel's apartment have? Was the picture in her living room of a landscape or a naked woman straddling a unicorn? What does the interior of the synagogue on Rykestrasse in Berlin look like? What magazines would you find in the waiting room at a German doctor's office? Answering burning questions like these, that's the romantic life of a writer.

Right now, I've written and re-written the novel I'm working on so many times I've lost count of all the pages I've typed and torn up. My main character has gone from the age of 37 to 23. Her husband has changed careers several times (he's now an international lawyer specializing in real estate, and let's hope he sticks to it). Her boyfriend has changed nationalities several times and gone back to his original origins as of this writing. The book's length has gone from 160 (handwritten) to 350, streamlined down to 200 (a bit of a starvation diet), and now is hovering at a reasonable 250, where I hope it will linger.

It's a fine piece of work, but I'm the last person to know anything about it. Now is the stage when I begin passing it around to critics I trust so they can tell me about the holes I can't see because I've had my nose rubbed into this story for too long. I'm waiting for the advice I desperately need to bring this book home.

"I'm closer to the end than to the beginning," that's how my book is going. How much closer, I'm not sure yet.

Anne Tyler and the Art of the Middlebrow

As I closed the covers of Anne Tyler's new novel Digging to America, I found myself hard-pressed to think of another writer who's achieved as much success as she has to so little effect in literary circles. Here is a best-selling writer who's won the Pulitzer Prize, is a member of the American Academy of Letters, whose every new novel is treated as an event by the New York Times, and yet... Can you imagine a young writer of literary fiction citing Anne Tyler as an influence? Or just try walking into a literary gathering and mentioning that the latest book you've read and really enjoyed is the new novel by Anne Tyler. When I first moved to New York, I was surprised by the reactions I got when I mentioned her work. One writing teacher of mine, a Pulitzer-Prize winner himself, told me that when he'd first heard I was a Tyler fan he'd been seriously worried about my work. Another writer said, "Oh, her? She's so middlebrow."

Indeed, this is the chief charge against Tyler, that she's "middlebrow." (Type "Anne Tyler" plus "middlebrow" into Google and see how many hits you get.) Critics never explain this judgment with any specific objections to Tyler's work. There's simply a roll of the eyes, a wink-wink, and a "you know, middlebrow," dismissal. And then it's on to more serious stuff like a book by one of the Jonathans, or Zadie Smith (?).

So just how good is Anne Tyler? Is she a serious writer deserving of our attention or a hack who's managed to pull the wool over the eyes of a few select critics?

First, let's consider her weaknesses. Tyler's chief fault as a writer is that her characters never seem overly troubled by the drive for sex. (No less a writer than E. M. Forster had the same problem; Katherine Mansfield famously claimed to have come away from Howards End unsure of Helen Schlegel had been impregnated by Leonard Bast or a stolen umbrella.) I've read fifteen of Tyler's seventeen novels at this point, and am hard-pressed to remember a sexual act described in any of them. Often her characters express a desire for companionship, love, or even cuddling. (In her latest novel, a character memorably recalls sleeping curled up next to her husband like "two cashews.") Sex itself, however, is only alluded to (the two central couples of Digging to America have been trying to have kids, but you never get a sense of how they've been trying!), and rarely if ever glimpsed head on, discussed, or even contemplated in Tyler's world. This evasion comes off as all the more peculiar in relation to a literary landscape littered with authors like Michel Houellebecq or Philip Roth who seem unable to go without a few choice bits of porn for a few chapters, let alone an entire novel.

Tyler is also a relentlessly provincial writer. Digging to America like all her books since her fourth novel, The Clock Winder, is set in and around the city of Baltimore. Of course, Faulkner was provincial too, but somehow the provinces in his books, the decaying ante-bellum South, seem more important than the anonymous suburbs of Baltimore, whose sole element of local color seems to be a queer mispronunciation of Baltimore as "Balmer." Larger issues like politics rarely intrude in this gentle sheltered world, except as markers of time passing. It should be noted, however, that in Tyler's last two books, The Amateur Marriage and Digging to America, she has begun grappling with the effects of history (the turbulent social changes of the `60s and current concerns about immigration and the fluidity of identity) on private lives to fruitful effect.

Work is not Tyler's strong point either. Most of her characters are rarely shown in work settings, and seem to forget their jobs entirely once they leave the office, particularly if their professions are the usual ones, i.e. doctor, lawyer, teacher, real estate agent. The great exception to this rule is when her characters have odd self-created start-up businesses that run from home, running a "homesick restaurant," or writing guidebooks for people who hate to travel.

No sex, no politics, little work, nary a curse word, how do Tyler's characters pass the time? Mostly they chat together over meals or politely bicker on the phone, shop, attend parties, change diapers, or vacuum stubborn peanut-butter covered graham cracker crumbs out of rugs. Little is at stake but the human heart and perhaps a relationship or two, though the same might be said of Jane Austen as well, and look what happened to her career.

So what are Tyler's strengths? To begin with, few contemporary writers are able to generate as much liveliness and energy on the page as she does with so quiet a style. Contemporary writers tend to fall into one of two camps. Those like Philip Roth or Gary Shteyngart make you feel the pulse and rhythm of life with long sprawling somersaulting sentences that neatly echo the rhythms of life. Then you have writers more in the vein of Raymond Carver who use a hard-bitten minimalism to express alienation. Tyler walks a middle path, avoiding veering into extreme wildernesses of verbosity or abstemiousness. Yet her style is anything but boring, I think because of her word choices, which are marked by a clear-eyed precision matched with a somewhat whimsical wit. The following line from Digging to America is typically Tyler: "Her eyes were the shape of watermelon seeds, very black and cut very precisely into her small, solemn face." Or the wonderful surprise at the end of this sentence, from the novel Earthly Possessions, "I tripped over a mustard jar big enough to pickle a baby in." Or this crystalline description from The Amateur Marriage: "an upper lip that rose in two little points so sharp they might have been drawn with a pen."

Next, Tyler captures the complexity of family life and the difficult choice between being an individual versus belonging to a group. Her characters may not struggle against the usual bugbears of fiction, (bad sex, money trouble, unfulfilling job) but they are in a life and death struggle against the bonds of familial and societal expectations, sometimes barely detectable in today's less regimented world, but inexorably present all the same. Maryam, the Iranian-born matriarch at the center of Digging to America is a classic Tyler heroine, a capable woman, polite to a fault, yet troubled by her conflicting desires to be independent and to connect to others.

But Tyler's chief strength is how she makes you genuinely feel for characters, tugs at heart-strings more effectively than any writer alive. How does she do this? By focusing in like a laser beam on desire, each character's desire is clearly-marked, however strange, and they're so sure of what they want that we have to read on to see if they get it or not. This is not easy to do, especially when her characters themselves don’t seem to know. Perhaps this is the mysterious alchemy in her work that reviewers are constantly referring to.

So in the end, is Anne Tyler guilty of being middlebrow? Yes, but only in the sense that Lorrie Moore, John Updike, Michael Cunningham, or Tom Perrotta and any number of writers who explore the difficulties of modern suburban life are also middlebrow. It's not a fault, just the description of our times. Most of us in America today lead small, comfortable lives punctuated with trips to shopping malls. Few of us live next door to Beowulf. Why should we expect our novelists to compose epics about the way we live now?

Going Home

After almost a year of living in Rome, my Italian adventure is coming to a close. I've been trying to think about what it's all meant to me, and how the experiences I've had will stay with me in the future. I think the quality that characterizes this year for me best is "double-ness." Not a very elegant way for a writer to put it, but it's the best word I can think of for this year.

First, there's Italy itself, which is such a splendid contradiction. You have a country with such a rich and deep history going from the Etruscans to the Roman empire to the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods, a place that for so many years was the center of political power and cultural output that's almost unrivaled in history. And now? Since the unification, Italy has been ruled by a series of fragile, squabbling coalitions interrupted by periods of relative stability under the rule of a fascist (Mussolini) and a proto-fascist (Berlusconi). In terms of culture, Italy has gone from the dizzying heights of Virgil, Dante, Michelangelo, and Leonardo (to name a very very few stars in a vast solar system) to not a hell of a lot. There was opera, and directors like Fellini, De Sica, Visconti, and Pasolini. A few talented writers like Elias Canetti, Italo Calvino, and Primo Levi. And an art movement, Arte Povera, that was characterized by its ephermerality.

And then there's the Italian lifestyle, which can seem so laidback and easygoing. Italians can be so warm and informal. "Don't stand on ceremony," they seem to be saying. "Just come to my house for dinner and relax." Do whatever you like. Except don't use a knife to cut your pasta or put cheese on a dish with seafood or drink white wine with meat or red wine with fish or leave a party or a dinner too early (meaning less than four hours).

Which brings us to the question of rules in Italy. Sometimes they don't matter at all and sometimes they are dreadfully important. Witness the following two examples.

Example A: When I first came to Italy, I was on a bus when that rarest of rare events happened: an inspector boarded and asked to see if I'd bought a ticket. Misunderstanding what she meant, I replied in Italian, "I'm getting off in ten stops." The inspector heaved a great sigh and repeated her question in English, then said, "Okay, okay" and moved on to the next passenger. I tried to show her my valid ticket, but she couldn't have cared less.

Example B: A month ago, I went to buy a ticket to a movie that started at 8:00. I arrived at 8:04. The woman at the box office informed me I couldn't go in because it was after 8:00 and her computer now only printed tickets for the next show at 10:30. "But can't I buy a 10:30 ticket and go in now?" I asked. "No." "Why not?" "Because." "But why? It's the same price, and I've only missed a few minutes." "Because you can't. Next customer." "Are we in Germany?" I said. "I guess so," she said. A friend of mine who was there at the time said, "This theater is full of assholes," and we left the building. As we were standing outside, the woman got up out of her chair, came out of the booth, followed us outside, and said to me, "Excuse me, excuse me. You, here, are the asshole," and then returned to her desk.

Another time I was in a bakery and could smell the delicious perfume of some fresh rolls coming out of the oven. I asked if I could have one, and was told, "These rolls won't be ready for another half-hour." A minute or so later, another person behind the counter said, "Didn't you want one of these fresh rolls? How many do you want. I'll wrap them up for you now."

This kind of thing happens all the time. Depending on who you talk to and what mood she's in, you'll hear either, "Don't worry about it. Do whatever you want." Or "But you can't do that! It's against The Rules!"

But for me personally, the biggest source of double-ness of this past year has been living here while my partner of over five years remained back in New York. We visited each other every two months or so, taking turns crossing the Atlantic, but life without him hasn't been the same. With every new beautiful thing I see or place I visit or person I meet, the pleasure is that much less sweet because he can't be here to share the experience with me.

Going home, however, doesn't meant the end of double-ness. Though it may stand out in higher relief here in Italy, we in America have plenty of experience with it as well. (For example, fundamentalist Christians who believe abortion is murder while they whole-heartedly back the death penalty.) And maybe that's the lesson I've taken from my year, to take a second look at the mass of self-contradictions we live by, the unswervingly single-minded allegiance we pay to truths (political, religious, sexual, cultural) that seem self-evident, but upon closer examination just don't make sense.

A Trip to Sicily

A week and a half ago, I flew to the east coast of Sicily to see what was there. The plane arrived in Catania, the "other" major hub of Sicily, (Palermo being the one most of us probably think of first). I'd planned to take a bus directly to Siracusa, namesake of the American college basketball team that won the national championship a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, at the time the bus was scheduled to depart, a heavyset man with slick hair and glistening sunglasses strolled through the crowd at the bus stop and murmured, "Siracusa?" over and over in a low voice like a drug pusher in Washington Square Park. When enough of the passengers were paying attention, he then announced, in the same impassive tone, "No bus." No bus? Why no bus, demanded several irate passengers. "Problem," was the answer.

The next bus was an hour later, giving me ample opportunity to get to know the Catania airport, basically a giant shed which is being replaced by a glass cathedral next door, still under construction. After wilting in the shade of a giant rock for a while, I went back to the stop where there still wasn't any bus. Just as I was on the point of a nervous breakdown, it ambled up to the pavement, fifteen minutes late.

We were dropped off on an island called Ortygia, Siracusa's historic center, where the 17th century buildings are packed together in no discernible order, a bit like Venice without the canals. Most of the facades are crumbling apart, but that doesn't seem to bother anyone living on the island. I spent most of my first day wandering in the narrow alleys, eating delicious seafood, and visiting the Duomo, which is actually a Greek temple with a roof over it and a statue of the Virgin Mary where a statue of Athena used to stand. I also took a bike ride around the island and went for a swim at the local beach, a big rock underneath one of the battlements, from which people leap into the clear blue water. Unfortunately, many of the museums were closed or partially closed for renovations. This included the famous archeological museum, two-thirds of which was closed, though they were still charging the full price for a ticket. "Why is it closed?" demanded an indignant German tourist. "Problem," was the answer.

For dinner I went to a local trattoria and ate one of the most disgusting foods I have ever tasted: pasta with sardines, wild fennel, capers, and olives, a local specialty that I saw several other tourists enjoying. The waiters were very disappointed in me because I didn't manage to finish the whole heaping plate of the stuff. Afterward, I strolled to the main square, where in front of the city hall, embarrassed schoolchildren in togas performed Greek dances for a crowd of delighted parents toting handheld video cameras.

My next stop was Catania itself, a dark, bustling city of noisy, unfriendly people. I loved it, though I'm not sure it loved me. The architecture is high Sicilian baroque with lacy facades that warp and curve above wide boulevards with narrow sidewalks. In the markets, the vendors scream out their wares at passersby. I was bullied into buying a kilo of delicious fresh cherries by an ebullient grandmother with a set of lungs that would put Maria Callas to shame. Everyone in the city seemed to be the star of his or her own TV show.

And then there are the clothes. Having visited Catania, I now realize that Dolce and Gabbana are not fashion designers; they are documentary filmmakers who are simply reporting to the rest of the world how people dress on the streets of Catania. This particularly true of the men, who wear skin-tight T-shirts in day-glo colors (wearing bright pink doesn't make you any the less masculine in Catania) drizzled with gold, silver, and bronze paint, rhinestones, spangles, and extravagant stitching that matches the sparkling gel in their hair and their silver sunglasses and their gold and silver sneakers. Strutting around in their dizzying finery, they reminded me of giant lollipops. The next morning, I stopped by a clothes market and bought a few cheap silver-drizzled T-shirts of my own, which will probably remain at the back of my drawer for several years.

The last stop on my tour was Taormina, a town beautifully situated on the side of a mountain that heads straight into the Mediterranean Sea. This was where I took my best photographs, and had my worst misadventures. Getting off the bus, I managed to dodge the parade of flabby tourists from northern countries to get to my pension, where the old lady in charge informed me that due to technical difficulties in the reservation system (nobody had written it down in her notebook), I had no reservation. She sent me to another pension down the street which had a surplus of rooms (in fact, I was the only guest), probably because they had no air conditioning and were located across the street from a construction site.

The fun was just beginning. On my way to the justly famous Greek theater (which like almost everything else in Sicily that's called Greek is actually Roman), I paid an inflated price for a pair of batteries that turned out to be dead. After confronting the shop owner, I was told the fault was mine for wanting to use these batteries in such an unusual item as a camera, but if I paid two more Euros, I could have more powerful batteries. I asked to try them out first, and indeed, these more powerful batteries also turned out to be dead. At this point, I asked for my money back, and the shop owner invited me to bring the police, which I did, and after heaping much abuse upon my head for wasting his time and opening his packages of dead batteries which because they were opened he could no longer sell to credulous tourists, he returned the money.

The next day, tired of waking up to the sound of jackhammering, winding my way between enraptured tourists, and paying on average thirty-five Euros per meal, I was more than glad to get on the bus back to the Catania airport, which departed on time. All seemed to be well until about a mile from the airport, our bus sideswiped a machine that was paving the road. We pulled over and our driver got out to perform an operatic scene with the construction workers. One of the passengers got off too, flagged down another bus, and hopped on, leaving us to our fate. Finally, a second, empty bus arrived to take the rest of us to the airport, where our plane arrived an hour late, causing the old man sitting behind me and a flight attendant to get into a heated discussion over whether the airline was engaged in a conspiracy to deceive its passengers into believing its flights ever arrived on time.

I can't wait to go back to Sicily.

Adventures in Italian Travel

In a month and a few days, I'll be going back to New York, so lately I've been scrambling to see various things in Rome and Italy before I leave. Last week I traveled with a group from the American Academy to the Veneto region, near Venice, to see several villas designed by the Renaissance architect Antonio Palladio. (Unfortunately I also stupidly left my passport at an Internet cafe there, but I'm getting it back this afternoon.)

There's something solid and impressive about these villas, a something that proved pretty difficult for any of us on the trip to define, maybe because Palladio's designs have been copied so much that the effect they must have had on his contemporaries is probably lost on us. From what I could glean, his innovation was to use Greek temples as models for residential buildings, a choice that apparently seemed shocking to viewers in the 1500s, though not for a Michigander like me who's seen his share of Ionic columns in suburban subdivisions.

The day after I came back from up north, I went with an Italian friend to Naples, the city where he was born. The trip began with a hot, airless ride on an inter-city train crowded with noisy Neopolitans slurring their words and adjusting their glittering sunglasses and flashy silver belt buckles. That night, I stayed in an area called the Spanish Quarter, a tightly-packed neighborhood of buildings decorated with endless lines of laundry and improvised shrines to the Virgin Mary. Mopeds zip and swerve at dangeriously high speeds through the back alleys where kids play in dark, garbage-strewn puddles. The buildings were so close together that everywhere I walked through the streets I could hear ghostly voices echoicing out of the windows, though I could never tell where they were coming from. My room was a shed built on the roof of the building, from which I took in a magical view of the Bay of Naples lit up by night.

This week, a friend of mine is here to visit, and so the two of us have been exploring corners of the city I've haven't yet gotten to. We wanted to go for lunch on his first day, but the indignant waiter at the first restaurant we walked into reprimanded us, "We're closed. It's 3:00!" Apparently in Italy one is not allowed to be hungry after 3:00 because we tried several other restaurants with the same result. In the end, we settled for a take away joint serving the inevitable "pizza al taglio," or pizza by the slice.

Yesterday we rented bikes and rode down an old Roman highway that is closed to traffic on Sundays, except that yesterday it wasn't closed to traffic because of a wedding party taking place there. We've also visited a Christian catacomb, several churches with dazzling mosaics, and a market in Rome's immigrant neighborhood where you can get Arabic couscous, Indian spices, or Chinese pears. If I had my experience to do over again, I'd have spent much more time with Rome's immigrant community. I can only imagine the rich stories I might have uncovered.

The day after my friend leaves, I'll be going to Sicily to see the eastern tip of the island, and the cities of Syracuse, Catania, and Taormina. I called an inn in Taormina to make a reservation, and as I started to say my name, the man who picked up the phone interrupted me to ask, "Where are you from? England? Germany?" I told him I was American. "One American, the night of May 23rd," he said. "See you then. Bye."

How all these sights and sounds are going to impact my work is not immediately clear, but I'm glad to have had the chance to take them all in.

Prague, 10 Years Later

Ten years ago, I got off a train at the main station in Prague with an overstuffed backpack and duffel bag and began a yearlong adventure that ultimately resulted in my first book of stories, The View from Stalin's Head. Last Monday, I booked a last minute ticket on Czech Airlines and flew back there from Rome.

As I took bus 119 from the airport to the center, I was struck by how clearly I remembered so much of the landscape. Here I was again on Europe Avenue (which used to be Lenin Avenue), passing the Esso gas station that made a cameo appearance in one of my stories (with an inflated tiger on the roof who is no longer there). There was the Delvita supermarket, the path I used to climb uphill to my friend's house and my gym in Petriny, tram 26 that I used to ride to work every day, my old apartment.

In the city itself, I was glad to see so many of the little cafes where I used to go to write were still open, and even though they're smack in the middle of prime sightseeing land, they've somehow avoided being taken over by tourists. On the other hand, Dunkin' Donuts, which had staked out several posts in the city including prime territory on Wenceslas Square, is now out of business in Prague.

A lot has changed. Everywhere, prices are higher, even in state museums that used to charge Czechs lower entrance fees than tourists. Now everyone pays the same inflated price, which is still pretty reasonable by Western standards. There's a new museum of Communism, a period that is beginning to feel like ancient history. (I went in and stopped for a while in front of a display about the Stalin Monument that inspired the title of my book.)



Cinemas show American movies almost exclusively, and tickets that once cost two dollars are now up to seven. The food culture is also very different. Before, there were pretty much only Czech "hospody"--pubs--to choose from, all serving the usual national staples of pork, cabbage, and dumplings. Today, however, Italian restaurants, particularly pizzarias, have taken the country by storm, and you can find cappucino, tiramisu, and pizza margarita even in the most remote suburbs.

On a more serious note, I was glad to hear that the cause of gay rights had just scored a major victory when the Czech parliament overrode the veto of the conservative President Vaclav Klaus to legalize civil unions for same-sex partners. I was pretty disappointed in Klaus, who'd been the prime minister when I lived in Prague and whom I'd always liked because he bore an uncanny resemblance to Santa Claus, minus the beard.

The biggest change I noticed was the omnipresence of commercialism. Sometimes it seemed as if every last inch of free space had been plastered with advertisments. Drive a little ways out of the city, and you'll see the highways are lined with office buildings for Western companies, new apartment complexes, shopping malls that look as if they'd been airlifted from American suburbs, or megastores like Ikea and Bauhaus (the German version of Home Depot). A friend told me that the new Czech dream is to move to the suburbs, commute to work in town, and on weekends take your family for a stroll through a shopping mall. (Sound familiar, anyone?)

What made me happiest, though, was the most important thing that hadn't changed: friendship. Once again, I was chatting with my friend Milan about the latest squabbles in Prague's tiny and endlessly subdividing Jewish community, talking politics over tea with my friend Ivo, and communicating with a mixture of broken English, ersatz Czech, German, and hand gestures with my friend Pavel, who still has his same old earthy charm. I couldn't help tearing up when I visited Milan's "maminka," who as ever bubbled over with her infectious warmth. After cooking us a hearty lunch, she carefully wrapped a plastic box of cookies to take with me for the flight home.

Revisiting all these familiar people and places made me turn inward, to ask myself how have I changed since those days? I'd imagined that after living in Prague, I would come back home with a surer sense of my own identity, a strong drive to go after the things I wanted out of life. And it's true that since then I've accomplished quite a lot. I've been in a serious relationship for more than five years, I've moved to New York, I've gone to graduate school and written two books. And yet as I waved goodbye to Pavel and Milan at the airport, for a few dizzying seconds, I couldn't go forward, past the passport control and on to the security check. I still felt like that same scared kid who'd gotten off the train ten years ago and wondered, what next? What am I supposed to do now?

Kosher for Passover in Italy

Passover is upon us, and while most Italians are mobbing the stores to do some last-minute Easter shopping before everything closes for the "ponte" (literally, "bridge," but actually "long weekend"), I went hunting for non-bread products to keep me going for the duration of the holiday. For those not in the know, pasta is not kosher for Passover, though every year many of my non-Jewish friends try to convince me otherwise. Trust me on this one, guys. Even though it doesn't look like bread, pasta still counts.

Not being able to eat pasta in Italy presents a bit of a challenge. (I have a newfound appreciation for another of the fellows at the Academy who has a gluten intolerance.) As I wended my way through the aisles of my local grocery store, crammed with enormous overpriced hollow chocolate eggs wrapped in glistening cellophane and riots of ribbons, I tried to plan the next few days of meals. At the bread section, I paused, then went on wheeling my cart, in the odd hope of finding a box of matzah. (My copy-editor at Random House insists it's spelled matzo, but somehow the "o" spelling doesn't look right to me.)

Imagine my surprise to find a box of crackers called "Pane Azymo," imported from Strasbourg. As I looked over the ingredients, water, salt, unleavened flour, it was clear what I was holding: genuine matzah. True, if I were going strictly by the book, the Pane Azymo wouldn't count because though it had a symbol on the box indicating it was kosher, there was no mark that it was kosher for Passover, which is officially a different thing. However, I made a sign of the cross over the box, which in my book is just as good as paying off some ultra-Orthodox rabbi for the kosher-for-Passover stamp, and voila: matzah.

Some of my friends have trouble understanding my pick and choose attitude toward religion, and truly, I'm not sure I get it all either. At one of the Passover seders I went to this year, a debate erupted at the table over whether we're allowed to decide for ourselves the extent to which we keep the rituals and laws of religion. My view is that I'm not willing to run around wearing a yarmulke, only eating pre-approved foods, keeping the lights off on Shabbat (or setting them to go on and off on a timer, which always strikes me as a bit of a cheat). At the same time, I don't want to chuck all of the traditions I grew up with out the window. And so I nod to the past, rather than bow. I'm willing to give up bread, pasta, cookies, and cake for Passover, but I'm not going to chase bread crumbs with a feather and a candle.

This approach leads to some confusion, even hypocrisy it might be argued, on my part. I won't touch bread on Passover, but a slice of sandwich-less non-kosher salami doesn't bother me. "A-ha!" cry both my religious and atheist friends with satisfaction. "Your system of rules has no logic! Why bother keeping it at all?"

Suppose it was your husband's birthday, and you didn't want to take him out to the most expensive restaurant in town and buy him a new Mercedes. Would that mean you shouldn't recognize the occasion at all? Or that it's less valid to celebrate a birthday by baking him a cake and giving him a new tie?

My version of recognizing my Jewish identity connects me with my past in a way that I find satisfying. I don't ask anyone else to do as I do or to approve. It's just that for me, I don't get much out of pondering whether a box has a K stamp or a K for P stamp or a Mickey Mouse stamp on it. There are other questions in life I want to spend my time worrying about. That's not to say that a question of stamps might not prove extremely meaningful and satisfying to someone else. But for me, I'm sticking with my "pane azymo" topped with a few slices of tomato and mozzarella. Or, if I feel like it, some non-kosher salami.

A Matter of Style

While I can't speak for everyone, it's hard for me to imagine a writer who isn't prejudiced one way or the other about literary style. It won't come as a surprise to anyone who's read even a few sentences of my work that I prefer dry, clear, sharp writing to robust, purple prose. Given the choice between Jane Austen and Laurence Sterne, or to be more contemporary, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon, I'll go for Austen and Roth every time. That's not to say I haven't enjoyed the works of flashier writers ranging from Henry Fielding to Thomas Hardy to David Foster Wallace. But there's a difference in my appreciation of the two types of writing. With Hardy, I'll slug it out with his winding sentences and use of arcane vocabulary like "dumbledore" for the rewards of his bizarre plots and unforgettable characters. When I read a master of concision like E. M. Forster, however, I get pleasure out of his plot and characters as well as the cool elegance of a line like, "To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it."

During the `80s and for a part of the `90s, it seemed as though lush, muscular, flashy prose wasn't quite so commonplace. Minimalists like Raymond Carver held more sway, particularly among graduates of MFA programs. These days, however, walking through the literary fiction section of a bookstore you can't help but trip over plump four-hundred-plus page books jam-packed with zany characters, plot twists, and marathon-length sentences that you don't read so much as decipher, like a message written in Morse Code.

That's not to say the minimalists are inherently superior to other writers. At its worst, minimalism can be a cover for lazy, unimaginative, and dull writing, the kind you might encounter in a Dick and Jane reader. However, maximalism at its worst suffers from much the same disease, lazy, unimaginative, and dull writing that because it's so busy can sometimes seem more impressive than it actually is.

Take, for example, an excerpt from the novel "The Amalgamation Polka" by Stephen Wright, recently published to high acclaim. Here is a representative sentence: "She flung open the window, admitting the clemency of spring, its sweet pastoral breath, and the nervous twitter and rustle of sparrows on the roof." In English, this sentence means that she opened the window and felt a spring breeze and heard birds outside. But that's not good enough for Wright, who wants his character to "fling" open the window (for no apparent reason I could find other than to impress the reader with the choice of "fling" instead of "open"). He then gives us "the clemency of spring," a metaphor that made me pause, but for the wrong reasons. Clemency from what? Winter, I suppose. This leads me to wonder, what sin has been committed to earn the dire punishment of winter? Who handed down this stern judgment? And to whose grace do we owe this welcome "clemency"? "The nervous twitter and rustle of sparrows on the roof" sounds alright to me; that's a specific, if uninspired, bit of detail I can wrap my mind around. The same cannot be said for the cloying and vague "sweet pastoral breath." Maybe this phrase is an attempt to imitate or spoof an archaic, formalized style of writing. So why does it remain merely an attempt at parody instead of a direct hit? For me, it's because the choice of words seems like a forced reach for a kind of majestic tone that the writer isn't himself comfortable with. It reeks of the kind of pretense you often hear in public speakers like Jesse Jackson who are so anxious to pass themselves off as intellectuals that they confuse words like "tragical" and "tragic" or "orientate" and "orient."

Compare the laxness of these word choices with another pastoral image, this from the forthcoming novel by Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan: "The world was golden around me, the evening sun setting light to a row of swaying alders; the alders abuzz with the warble of siskin birds, those striped yellow fellows from our nursery rhymes. I turned pastoral for a moment, my thoughts running to Beloved Papa, who was born in a village and for whom village life should be prescribed, as only there--half asleep in a cowshed, naked and ugly, but sober all the same--do the soft tremors of what could be happiness cross his swollen Aramaic face." Wright gives us sparrows, but Shteyngart gives us "alders abuzz with the warble of siskin birds." Which writer would you rather go bird-watching with? Wright's sparrows are merely there for window dressing, to give us an idea of a real scene. Shteyngart's alders, however, are not only specifically observed, but also they connect the image of the countryside to the theme of childhood innocence ("those striped yellow fellows from our nursery rhymes,"), which in turn leads naturally and elegantly to memories of the narrator's father. Every word in Shteyngart's sentence seems chosen for a precise effect, and yet no one could accuse Shteyngart of dullness. His sentences are every bit as lively and lush as Wright's, with that added advantages of meaning and sense.

So how do we account for the acclaim Wright has received for "the vibrant beauty and savory brilliance of every paragraph" of his writing, "the untrammeled delight it offers to anyone lucky enough to read it"? I can't, except to say that when reading Maximialists, critics are often so distracted by the strangeness of the writing that they don't stop to take the sentences to task and rather accept their somersaulting on faith. It's a little like watching a movie with expensive special effects, when we're so dazed from all the fireworks on screen that when the smoke clears, we forget to notice there's nothing else there.

My Own Sex and the City

I'm still jet-lagged from the trip back to Rome, so instead of sleeping I've been watching borrowed DVD's on my Mac until 4 in the morning. A friend lent me the first two seasons of Sex and the City, which I'd never seen before, and that's what I've started with.

The show made its debut the same year that I moved to New York City, and watching it now is like opening a time capsule. This is pre-9/11, pre-dot-com bust, pre-George Bush (even pre-Monica Lewinsky) New York City. The World Trade Center still dominates the skyline. Jobs paying twenty dollars an hour to do little more than surf the internet all day are still plentiful. Manhattan is a big playground of fusion-cuisine restaurants and smoky bars where every night it seems possible you might meet The One, the man or woman you'd spend the rest of your life with.

Like the characters of Sex and the City, I went from date to date, trying to convince myself that despite each new flaw I'd discover in the latest guy I was seeing, this time things were different, this relationship would last. And though none of them did last, none of them ended my faith in the possibility that the next relationship would be different from the one before.

It was a confusing, heady time with daily miracles and catastrophes. I'd just started grad school and was meeting my writing friends in cafes to exchange our latest short stories, hot from our printers. The most ambitious of us would feverishly submit our work to literary magazines that would send back form rejection letters, occasionally scribbled with a cryptic handwritten "Sorry, but try us again!" Or "Nice work" and then an illegible signature as if to say, "Here's a compliment, but don't dare try to use this to establish a relationship with a real person on our staff."

Politics hardly seemed to matter. Certainly they mattered less than the brilliant screenplays we were going to write, the important sculptures we were going to create, the torrent of culture and cuisine we felt it was our duty to consume and comment on.

Back then, the one thing I knew for sure was that I wanted to leave New York as soon as I could. I hated the crowded sidewalks, the lines, the extravagant prices, the snobby bar scene, the stupid parties where you were expected to hold court with a drink in your hand and utter clever bon mots. I used to wander through Riverside Park, trying to find a corner where I'd be surrounded by trees and nothing and no one else. There I'd dream of living in a quiet, civilized college town with my own car and cheap, massive grocery stores with parking lots.

Where would I go? How would I earn a living? Who would I fall in love with? When would I be published? I was so consumed with trying to find the answers to these questions as quickly as possible that I completely missed that I was living in an enchanted fairyland. Many of the literary magazines I used to get rejection letters from have folded because no one reads anymore. The dot-com jobs have vanished. The friends from that time in my life have mostly moved away from the city and started different lives. New York grows ever more expensive, and the city's festive atmosphere has darkened under the shadow of the constant threat of terrorism. Even in our happy, reckless moments, at the back of our minds, our joy is tinged with the upsetting knowledge that elsewhere on the globe, war rages on.

By Hand

A week ago, I boarded a British Airways flight from Rome to New York (which included a harried transfer at London Heathrow). While on board, I opened up my notebook and began to write a new short story. When I say notebook, I mean the kind with paper inside and not microchips. When I say write, I mean write, not type. I've always written my first drafts by hand... until now.

Getting the pen to move across the paper was like pushing it through sludge. The words refused to suggest themselves. Characters refused to speak. The rooms they moved in remained featureless, unfurnished blank cubes without traces of human contact. I finally had to give it up.

For years, the only way I've been able to start a project has been with pen and paper. (It also makes for a handy parlor trick to pull out of my hat at readings. "You've written an entire book BY HAND?") But I wasn't doing it to impress anyone. It was the way I began writing as a kid, before computers were widely available. It felt natural to be able to flip back and forth through pages, to scribble notes to myself in the margins or on the back of the page. It felt satisfying to scratch, scratch, scratch through a sentence or paragraph that doesn't work, or to scribble in a brilliant new insight across the white space on the top.

Writing by hand also forced me to re-evaluate what I'm working on word by word as I type what I've written into my computer. It created a necessary extra step that gave me a second chance to consider my choices. Did I really believe deep down in that metaphor? Would a character from Georgia really speak like a princess born in London? Was this inside reference to my favorite Jane Austen novel worth an extra sentence that bogged down my forward narrative drive?

I've been a true believer on the subject of writing by hand for so long that now as I try to continue the habit, I'm all the more surprised by my failure. The trouble began with my novel, which I've written twice by hand, once a couple of years ago, and again all last fall in Rome. When I was dissatisfied with the results, I just couldn't face the idea of opening a notebook and starting at page one once more. Instead, I turned on my computer and began to type. My fingers flew. I didn't focus on getting scenes right word by word. I threw in details of setting and physical description when I felt like it, but didn't stop to worry over them. Instead I homed in on action and moved forward through time with each sentence. The characters seemed to dance across the screen, and all I had to do was keep up with them. After a month, I had a glistening new novel instead of the lumpy mess I'd been trying to polish without success for so long.

Recently, as I tried to begin a new story on paper, I experienced the same frustration. Somehow writing each word felt too slow for me. But when I turned on my computer, I felt liberated. Scenes, characters, settings could all be fleshed out later. The main thing was to race to the end, and to go back and fill in shadings later. The new approach worked like a dream. Within a week, I had my story.

I'm not convinced that this rejuvination I feel from working on a computer rather than with pen and paper has much to do with the physical properties of either medium. It's probably making a change for change's sake that helped me more than the nature of that change. If I were a writer who preferred to work afternoons and had decided to swtich to mornings, it might have done just as well. The important thing is to shake things up, not rely on what's worked in the past.

The same goes for the content of the work itself. In my previous work, I explored stable codes of behavior associated with Judaism or American middle class life. In the work I'm doing now, I'm beginning to consider more personal, completely invented codes of behavior that shift from scene to scene, chapter to chapter, plunging characters who believe themselves to be rational into life-shaking confusion. The results are thrillingly and achingly alive. More importantly, they present me with new problems to solve, new people to get to know, new questions to ask my readers who like me are trying to make sense of a world that seems to be teetering on the edge of chaos.

Back Home?

My stint in Berlin is over and I've just returned to Rome, which oddly enough, feels a bit like home.

The minute that I entered the gate and heard the Italian passengers greeting each loudly, as if they were hosting a private party for all one hundred of their closest friends, I knew I was leaving silent, somber Germany behind. When I arrived in Rome and headed back to the Academy, I noticed how the scenery had a lovely coherence, instead of the urban jumble of Berlin. And speaking and understanding Italian felt much more comfortable than the rigors of the German language.

All that said, I enjoyed my time in Berlin. I met writers and artists, Berliners and American transplants. A striking number of the latter were Jewish. When I mentioned to a Berliner friend that I was thinking about writing an essay on how strange it must seem to some to love Berlin and be Jewish at the same time, she told me, "You'd better hurry. There are so many Jews coming to this city."

Why do I love Berlin? It's nowhere near as beautiful as Paris or Prague. The people, though often polite, are hardly as effusive as the Romans. In comparison with the lilt of Italian or French, the language grates the ear. Culturally, I'm much more an Anglophile than a Deutsch-ophile. And no, I don't have any bizarre Nazi fetishes (though I've met Jews who do).

What I like about the city is that it's always been a special case, the kind of place that always has an asterik next to it, a work in progress that never seems near completion. I read a history of the city that argued that Berlin has always had a kind of angst because it's always been trying and never quite succeeding to earn the international cosmopolitan reputation of a London or Paris. Maybe that explains why over the past hundred and fifty years it's been constantly remodeled and reconceived. Yet each "New Berlin" that emerges always bears marks of the old, from the imperialist hopes of the Kaisers to the classical aspirations of the Nazis to the competing utopian reconstruction projects of the West and East Berliners after the war, to the current euphoric city of glass and steel being built post-reunification.

Still, the real Berlin always seems to be a bit beneath the dreams of its ambitious architects. To me, the soaring beauty of Berlin's latest crop of buildings with their clean lines and immaculate facades has a sterility that belies the liveliness of the city. You can sense that liveliness watching artists lugging home organic groceries on their bicycles, the meaty steam of doner kebab stands and Chinese-Thai "Asia Snack" restaurants, punks leading their dogs down the sidewalks, smoky cafes, crowded discount stores seemingly every few steps, subway passengers selling the unused portions of their tickets on their way out of the station.

It's the kind of city where you'll stumble on a modest brass cobblestone set into the sidewalk indicating that the building you're walking by was once the residence of a Jew who was deported to Terezin. Or while riding your bike, you'll cross an ordinary-looking street and suddenly realize you've just passed from the former West Berlin to the former East (even though you're riding toward the west). The past, though not always very nice, is often startlingly present.

It's also one of the few European cities where you can easily find bagels, sushi, cheeseburgers (good cheeseburgers, in fact), pad thai, felafel, and quesadillas. Thanks to the reunification, there seems to be at least two of everything: art museums, bohemian neighborhoods, operas, and symphonies. And the nice thing for artists is that it's very cheap. Rent, for example, is barely a quarter of what you'd pay in New York City.

It's a city that's difficult to sum up or categorize, but one that bears revisiting, as you'll never have the same experience twice. This last time, as I watched the slow demolition of the Communist Palast der Republik, I thought of how stupid I was not to have gone into the place when I had the chance. Or when I went to see a movie at the Berlin Film Festival in Potsdamer Platz, I remembered when the place was a vast field of cranes and dirt. My most magical memory of Berlin was my first hour in the city, back in 1997, when I rode Bus 100 from West to East and we approached the famous Brandenburg Gate, and then suddenly headed right through it! Today the route has changed, but it's still worth getting on. Who knows which way it will go tomorrow?

Sounds of Silence

So I'm actually not reporting from Rome this time, but Berlin, where keyboards reverse the y's and z's, so I have to keep remembering not to hit the wrong key as I tzpe this, or rather, as I type this.

Besides keyboards, one of the things I notice most about the difference between Berlin and Rome is the silence. This is partially due to the frigid weather, which means fewer people out on the street, but even the ones who are out walk
fairly silently and avoid each other's eyes. You notice it on the subway too. On my way to this internet cafe, I was in a crowded car during rush hour, and all the passengers were either completely silent or talking in hushed tones.

The other major difference I've noticed is that the food tastes blander, even if you're in an Italian or Asian or Turkish restaurant. Even the produce has a milder taste. Which is not to say that the food is bad, because I've had some very good meals here, but you don't get the extremes or the richness of Italian cuisine.

What am I doing here? I'm trying to put an end to my novel before it puts an end to me, and absorbing details of atmosphere and culture that can only be gleaned, at least in my case, from lived experience. It's a great city, rich with history and culture, but also a sense of flux that comes from how diverse it is. Not only do you have the collapsing of East and West, which has produced a rich variety of cultural venues, but also there are immigrants from all over the world. Walking down the street, you're sure to see various skin tones and facial structures, and many many women with head-scarves.

So far what's been most helpful is the silence. The studio apartment where I'm staying, and indeed the city as a whole, is so quiet that it's allowed me to focus and retreat into my own head so deeply I sometimes feel as if I'm in a trance. As a permanent state of affairs, this might not be healthy, but for now, it works well, and I'm feeling quite rosy about this new book. I think it may not only be the finest thing I have written, but also the deepest and most honest. And if I stay disciplined enough, this book will help me realize my dream of writing a short, dense 200 page novel like The End of the Affair or On the Black Hill, small books that you can never forget.

For inspiration, I've turned to two different sources. The first is Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee, which I loved when I first read it. Now that I'm rereading it closely, I'm astonished by it. I simply cannot understand how it's possible not to be bowled over by this book, which I still don't entirely comprehend, and for me, that's the point. The other book is Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame, whose life and work have been a longtime obssession of mine. Though the book is only about 160 pages, it's taken me a month to wade through its currents. The richness of Frame's language and her range of expressive tools reminds me more of poetry than prose. I also admire her dead-on feel for the meaningless rituals we give value to as children, adolescents, and then as adults. As with Coetzee, I have a hard time figuring out how her work hangs together as a coherent whole, but I don't mind either, when there are such rich rewards of langauge or insight on every page.

So that's what I'm hearing these days. And a little Joni Mitchell too. Not a bad life for now. I feel lucky to be able to have it while I can.

Some Italian Theater

It's cold here, but everyone seems to be in a little better mood than usual because the holidays are (finally!) over and we've had over a week of uninterrupted sunshine.

In America, our "holiday season," which is really a politely ecuminical way of referring to the breaks from work and school that we get because of Christmas, usually lasts around a week and creates barely a ripple in our regular lives. Here, where theater is a way of life, getting ready for, experiencing, and coming down from the holidays is a production that would make Verdi and Puccini proud. In addition, the holiday season gets stretched out for an extra week by "La Befana" Day on January 6, when an old ugly witch appears to give candy to good children and lumps of coal to bad ones. What this means in practical terms is that no one goes to work (which is actually the normal state of affairs in Italy) and that Piazza Navona turns into a street carnival with games, a carousel, cotton candy, candied apples, and helium balloon versions of SpongeBob Squarepants and the Power Puff Girls.

If Italian life is theatrical, Italian theater is even more theatrical. Last week I went to see the Edward Albee classic "Chi ha paura di Virginia Woolf?" starring Mariangela Melato, probably best known to American audiences for starring in the Lina Wertmuller film Swept Away. This is the second play I've seen in Rome, and both productions featured handheld video cameras, which the actors use to videotape each other while they're performing, so that their every facial expression is magnified on TV screens for the audience. This does not happen all the time, of course. Only during very emotional or dramatic moments, just in case the audience isn't aware that it's an emotional or dramatic moment. If that isn't enough, there's also dramatic music swelling in the background and chartreuse or magenta colored spotlights to key us in. This emotional underlining may seem unnecessary to American theatergoers, but you have to keep in mind that the Italian style of acting is to scream every line at a fever pitch, which therefore makes the detection of dramatic peaks and valleys that much more difficult.

The finest form of Italian theater, however, is not as you might expect opera, but rather politics, which are heating up in Italy because there's going to be an election in April. It's media magnate and rightist Silvio Berlusconi (who happens to control or influence just about every major TV and radio station in the country, not to mention several newspapers) against the candidate of the united left, Romano Prodi. Imagine John Kerry without the charisma, and that's Prodi.

To remind Prodi what his priorities ought to be, the Communist party sponsored a rally last weekend to advocate for civil unions. Almost as fascinating as the rally itself were the lovely posters fixed up on walls all over town of two gorgeous impeccably dressed Italian men holding hands while sitting on a white sofa. It could have been an Ikea ad, except that a large Communist flag with hammer and sickle was suspended between them. (For some reason there was no version of the ad with two women.) Actually, it seemed a little strange to me that the Communists should be in favor of gay rights given the dismal treatment of gays in Communist countries like the Soviet Union or today's China.

At the rally itself, a motley gang of groups (including athiests selling T-shirts that said "No God" and stickers that said "Danger! Catechism!") gathered to declare what ought to be an obvious statement: "Italy is a secular state." If you're not Italian, however, it may be difficult to imagine the emotional resonance of this sentence. Sadly, given the Pope's enormous influence on politics and culture here, Italy is not a secular state in reality, which may explain why it is the only country among the EU's original sixteen members that doesn't have some kind of domestic partnership arrangement on the books.

However, in this respect at least, as an American I have no cause to look down my nose at Italy. Certainly our own country does not answer to the Pope, but rather to a caricature of Jesus Christ whipped up by evangelicals who believe, for example, that God gives strokes to Prime Ministers who evacuate the Gaza Strip, or sends hurricanes to punish cities where people have too much fun. "America is a secular state." I think I'm still safe in saying that. We'll see if I feel the same after a few more years of a Republican White House. One thing, I do know for sure, however, is that I would feel very nervous walking down an American street dressed in a "No God" T-shirt, even in that bastion of liberalism, the People's Republic of New York City.

A New Year's Wish

Last night, I was talking with some friends at a New Year's party, and I suddenly said aloud, "This has been a really shitty decade." What a relief to admit it. Since the selection of 2000 (can we really call it an election?), very little seems to have gone right in the world.

My first thought, when I try to understand why things seem so terrible, is to blame the president. Even if you're a Bush supporter, can you possibly be satisfied with what he's produced? A war seemingly without end in Iraq? An exploding deficit that keeps ballooning more and more out of control each year? Newspapers filled with bombs exploding around the world (though none so far on our precious soil)? And despite Bush's grand promises to his conservative base on abortion and homosexuality, has he really managed to make any serious inroads on those issues?

Since this small-minded man has become president, we've become more divided as a nation (both from each other and our neighbors), our national culture has become coarser, our people have retreated out of fear into a blind imitation of faith that leaves us angry and bitter, and worst of all, we're constantly scared for our lives. We're afraid to fly, afraid to ride public buses or subways, afraid to travel to crowded cities like New York (tempting terrorist targets), afraid to write emails or do google searches that could be archived and some day come back to haunt us. We're even afraid to argue about politics with people who don't agree with us, afraid that the emotions underneath our political views will get the better of us and bring us to blows. Books, movies, and music are all tired and less accomplished retreads of things we've seen before. TV shows are becoming more violent, crude, and acrimonious. And the people who watch the shows and then imitate the behavior they see while speaking on their cell phones to teach other are becoming more violent, crude, and acrimonious. And no one cares. Why should they? They're behaving just like the man at the top, our violent, crude, and acrimonious president who will be remembered for two qualities: pettiness and vindictiveness. Oddly enough, he once claimed that his inspiration was Jesus Christ. Which specific characteristics do George Bush and Jesus Christ have in common?

Sadly, however, we can't heap the blame for all the troubles we're in on this one rather vile man. As powerful an office as he holds, and as powerful a nation as America is, we are not powerful enough to control the minds and destinies of the world's citizens, who are becoming increasingly selfish, shallow, and miserable. And for this state of affairs, each of us bears some responsibility. What have we done to make other people's lives easier, richer, happier? How often do we take a break from worrying about our petty concerns about our looks, our money, our inability to feel perfectly loved, entertained, and satisfied at all possible moments and instead think about the suffering of others? We don't need more iPods or cell phones or secret government agencies to spy on ourselves and others or consitutional amendments banning behavior we don't like. We don't need lavish vacations and parties with mountains of uneaten food that get thrown out at the end fo the evening and vulgar displays of jewelry and clothes and cosmetics. But what can I do, we ask ourselves. The world is big and its problems are bigger, and we are so small.

We can spread love, each one of us. And we can start now.

We need to love every person we know and every person we see and every person we think of, even George Bush, even terrorists hiding out in caves who may be planning our destruction. We need to turn off our cell phones and Tivos and iPods and all the unnecessary noise that's polluting our brains and we need to think seriously about who we are and why do we want to continue to live on this planet. And most of all, we need to stop being afraid, of terrorists, of ignorant presidents, or each other.

If we can just stop being afraid, that there won't be enough money for all of us, that some dark stranger is lurking around the corner who wants to kill us, that we're getting fat, old, ugly, boring, uninformed, that the world is going by so fast that if we don't race to keep up with our emails and voice mails and favorite websites it will pass us by--if we can just let go of the weight of all our fears, imagine how beautiful our world could become. It's so hard not to be afraid. And yet what has our fear given us? How has it protected us? Or has it only made us more vulnerable, causing us to spend more, worry more, argue more, and love so much less.

So that's my goal for this new year, and my wish for the world, that we all stop being afraid. Maybe not all the time, but maybe a few minutes each day, maybe an hour, an hour and a half, I will tell myself, I am not afraid. And I will wait for peace to come.