I had a strange experience earlier this week while reading Thomas Mallon's WATERGATE, the new historical novel about the Nixon Administration and the eponymous burglary. The novel is great, not only for the way it juggles so many different characters (mostly real, though some seemingly invented from whole cloth), but also for maintaining a sense of narrative drive and tension-- which is really unique given that history largely dictates what was going to happen by the end of the novel (resignations & convictions).

Still, the strange part for me was that I found myself emotionally invested in this felonious cast of Nixon cronies. It helps, of course, that Mallon largely concentrates on the bit players who history has largely forgotten about.  Instead of a long scenes written from, say, G. Gordon Liddy’s or Henry Kissinger’s perspective, we get scenes centered on Fred LaRue (Deputy Director of Nixon’s ’72 campaign committee), Rose Mary Woods (the Nixon secretary who famously erased 18 minutes from one of the Watergate tapes), and First Lady Patricia Nixon.  But these are still people that I had not expected actually ROOTING for.



A confession: before reading most books, I read the author’s acknowledgements.  Within these acknowledgements, Mallon wrote this:

“In this book, as in my previous novels, I have operated along the always sliding scale of historical fiction.  The text contains deviations from fact that some readers will regard as unpardonable and others will deem unworthy of notice.  But this remains a work of fiction, not history.”

As near as I can tell, Mallon got most of the history right.  There are, after all, resignations and convictions. 

Still, as I became emotionally invested in the characters, I found myself hoping that Mallon would give himself license to let them off scot-free. 

People sometimes ask why I bother reading and/or writing fiction.  Sometimes, this question totally flummoxes me.  Sometimes I cannot figure out why I do anything.  Why do I even bother breathing, let alone read?  In moments of despair, it all seems so pointless, doesn’t it?  

Still, in more lucid and brighter times, I know the answer is empathy.  Ultimately, it does us good to imagine and understand lives that are not our own.  Fiction can accomplish this better than any other art form.  Fiction broadens our ability to understand what other people may be going through, and hopefully this empathy will make us richer, more compassionate and more forgiving.

Mallon’s novel is a page-turner churning with suspense.  We know the ultimate ending, but it’s exciting to see how the Nixon Administration crumbles.  Still though, it’s not the plot that gets us hooked, but the magical empathy that Mallon creates so brilliantly.

~~~

Many years ago, I was lucky enough to be in one of Thomas Mallon’s Bread Loaf workshops.  Mallon, who now directs the creative writing program at George Washington University, had once been the fiction editor at GQ back in the days when that magazine’s fiction rivaled that published in The New Yorker.  Friends had told me that Mallon was a phenomenally wise and gifted teacher, and they were right.

“I have never met a short story that couldn’t be improved by cutting 20% of it,” Mallon told us. 

This is the best writing advice I ever got.

At the time though, I was dumbfounded.  Cutting twenty percent of a manuscript means cutting one out of every five words.  Think about it: one out of every five words.  The figure seemed astronomical, unobtainable.  I had thought myself a writer of sparse prose and couldn’t figure out how I could accomplish such drastic revisions.

Mallon also said that the “fun” part of writing lay in revision.  Of this, I am less certain.  Revision always strikes me more like invasive surgery.

I was reminded of both these points a couple of weeks ago while revising a memoir-ish piece about the birth of Stephen, my first son.  What I had written weighed in at a baggy 7,500 words.  Eventually, after a solid week of amputations, I got it down to 4,800 words. 

Which made me feel kinda proud.

The piece is titled “Now He Lives.”  You can read it here at The Nervous Breakdown.

~~~

I was ten years old when Richard Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974. 

My family had been vacationing at an oceanside cottage in Nova Scotia.  My parents were union Democrats.  Throughout the vacation, they prohibited us from reading newspapers or listening to radio reports.  Instead, they wanted us to enjoy our surroundings.  And we did.  To this day, that vacation ranks as one of the best of my life.  I remember wading out into the ocean and inspecting tide pools for crabs and anemones.  We ate fresh mussels that we gathered ourselves.  And we ate plenty of lobster.  We saw whales from our cottage porch.  One day, we looked through our binoculars and saw a Canadian submarine that had surfaced maybe a quarter mile from shore. 

All vacations eventually come to an end.  We started driving home the night of August 8, a Friday. 

Crossing the border back into the United States, my father turned on the radio, lifting our news embargo.  The man on the radio spoke of an impending Constitutional crisis.  It was not inconceivable, he said, that the military was going to step in and take over the country.  This was how I learned that Nixon had declared earlier in the evening that he was going to resign the following day.

In hindsight, the radio commentator’s remarks seem impossibly rash.  He thought the nation was going to crumble just because one politician had been forced to resign.  He spoke of a crisis of confidence.  Revolution, he feared, was in the air.  Hippie demonstrators would take to the streets demanding more changes, plunging the nation into anarchy.

Yet the possibility of tumult enthralled me.  I was living through revolutionary times!

We drove for what seemed like hundreds of miles that night listening to that raving maniac.  Nearly every hotel and motel along the way was full.  We’d pull up to motels just as their “NO VACANCY” lights flickered on.  It was absurd.  The revolution was no more than a few hours old and we were already homeless vagrants.

Well after midnight, we pulled into one more motel lot.  There was good news: they had a vacancy. 

But there was also bad news: the room they had to offer was unfinished.  As in, it was still in a state of construction.  Walls were bare boards that had yet to be painted or papered.  No door separated the bathroom from the rest of the room.  Ceiling joists were exposed.  Lying on the bed that night, I could look straight up and see the underside of the motel roof. 

I’ve lived with the image of that half-finished motel room for decades.  Though my father groused about the room’s price, it seemed like such a perfect metaphor for the nation that we would be inventing on the fly in the wake of Nixon’s resignation. 

What country would we wake up to the following morning?  Would there be the anarchy of a military coup?  Or the anarchy of hippie demonstrators?  Would there even be a roof over the next motel room we’d need in our journey home?

~~~

Mallon writes a wonderful passage about what Nixon might have been thinking about his downfall the following morning as he flew home to California aboard Air Force One:

“I’m so… mystified!”  [Richard Nixon] groped for the word that [his wife] couldn’t remember him ever using, and once he found it he started to sob.  “I don’t even know how it happened, how it began.  Half the time I hear myself on the tapes I realize that I’m barely remembering who works for who over at [my re-election committee].  I hear myself acting like I know more than I do—pretending to be on top of the thing so I don’t embarrass myself with whoever’s in the room…. Christ, I can’t now apologize for what I can barely understand!”

This strikes me right.  Even if Nixon did not particularly think this way, it’s probably how most of us operate at one time or another.  Some of the most crucial decisions we make are done with only a half-knowledge of all the particulars because we’re too afraid to admit we don’t know everything we ought to know.

Odd, huh?

~~~

On Tuesday, the same day that I finished reading the Mallon novel, a crisis of another kind visited Sebastian, my ten-year-old son.  We were watching the AC Milan-FC Barcelona soccer match, when the referee called what surely was a bogus foul against Milan that would end up winning the match for Barcelona. 

It’s been a long time since I had seen my son so upset.  He couldn’t understand how the referee could make such a mistake in such an important match.  We were reasonably confident that the winner of the match would eventually win this year’s UEFA Champions League, the most important competition in European club soccer.  And to see the game being given to Barcelona because of this bad call… he was literally speechless.

And mystified. 

There’s a Carl Jung quote that now springs to mind:

“Error is just as important a condition to life as truth.”

Not that error is as valid as truth, but it factors into our decision-making just as much as truth.

But god, that supposed foul against Milan.  Ugh!  Take a look at the video—there’s no way Barcelona should have been awarded a penalty kick because of a little shirt-tugging.

~~~

I’ve been busy most of the past few months re-writing one of my novels.  The work’s gone well.  Several agents have asked to see my manuscript … so who knows?  For now, I’ll grant myself the illusion that something good may come of it.

Is this an error?

While I was revising, I couldn’t really read much.  Or blog much, for that matter.  Most nights, I was up until at least 2 a.m.  Lately though, I’ve been reading up a storm.  Besides the Mallon, I’ve read new or new-ish books by Nathan Englander, Erin Morgenstern, Ben Marcus, and Ann Patchett. 

Now, I’m reading Lionel Shriver’s SO MUCH FOR THAT, which I’ve meant to read ever since it came out a couple of years ago.  After that, hopefully I’ll be reading the new Adam Johnson, Ramona Ausubel, Sara Levine, and Amelia Gray novels. 

And writing.  Hopefully there’ll be more of that too.

_ I said that I did not wish to be imprisoned but Dearest Leader misinterprets the remark, for moments later I am being shackled into leg irons and marched through the mud-strewn paths that connect our villages.  Police officers driving ox-drawn carts yell at me to Run Run Run!!!, speed apparently being a measure of good police work, yet it difficult to run when shackled in leg irons (can they not see?) and every hundred meters I tumble to the ground, slowing our progress.  The wheels of their carts rut the road, making it yet harder to stagger to my feet to re-commence my Run Run Run!!!  

Along the way, villagers gather behind wire fences.  Sweat glistens from their sun-browned foreheads.  They are good people, my countrymen, subsisting on salted radishes and the hope that their infertile rice paddies may once again provide bountiful harvests.  Despite Dearest Leader’s dearest wish, diabolical Yankee imperialists have cursed the fertility of our lands.  My arrest is meant to serve as an example to these villagers of what can happen when one blatantly questions the agricultural manure-spread ratios advocated by Dearest Leader, for it is a well-established fact that Dearest Leader is a master agronomist who nightly scours crop yield production charts in search for better ways to feed our people.  Firewood has been scarce in recent years, so the good people scythe tall grasses and the spent remains of corn stalks, things that when dried can be burnt for heat.

When I arrive at Penitentiary, Dearest Leader asks the pleasure of my company.  Or that is how the request has been interpreted for me by guards, who flail my behind with flashlights in what they say is necessary inspection for lice.  Dearest Leader, they say, requires that all admitted in his company be vermin-free.  The guards take to the inspection in a particularly vigorous way.  With each swat of my behind, they chortle, speculating aloud about my manure yield potential.

“Is he lice-free?” Dearest Leader asks.

“Yes,” the guards respond.  “We have beaten him senseless.”

Ha!  I think.  Though I lay in a brutalized hump from the egregious inspection, I am not senseless.

Dearest Leader pours himself a cup of ginseng tea from an earthenware pot.  He is smaller, frailer, than the image on his official portrait, which must have been commissioned many many years ago, but like in the posters and murals that adorn public buildings, he wears a simple brown tunic, his thinning black hair appearing as a bush-like mass atop his head.  His hands shake with age.  For reasons I cannot understand, he has taken a personal interest in my alleged treachery.  Steam rises from the cup when he puts it to his lips.

The Penitentiary lies in the shadow of Mt. Paetku, the sacred mountain where Dearest Leader’s father, Great Leader, first organized The People’s Revolutionary Army in 1939 with the purpose of expelling Japanese occupiers from our land.  Though the mountain was covered with snow, azalea bushes spontaneously bloomed in Great Leader’s presence, Nature’s sign that Great Leader’s cause was just.  The Japanese armies were successfully routed.  Azaleas have become the national flower, a plant treasured throughout the peninsula. 

“Do you wish to be a patriot?” Dearest Leader asks.

I am confused.  Patriots are those who willingly rat out a brother’s minor offense so they can reap a kilogram of octopus meat.  I am brotherless, an only child with no living family members to forsake to achieve patriothood.

“Answer,” the guards say.  With a mighty walloping of their flashlights, they deliver one last inspection for lice, and in the woozy moments that follow, I affirm my patriotic desire. 

“Good,” Dearest Leader says, which makes me happy for it is impossible to know how many of my countrymen he has sentenced to live out their lives in work camps because of their unwillingness to be patriotic.  “You shall be an azalea.”

My heart leaps with joy.  If I could bounce to my feet, I would kiss Dearest Leader’s cheeks.  To be an azalea is to be of some great national importance, yet I am dumbfounded: somehow the guards have misinterpreted the command.  Dearest Leader departs, taking with him the earthenware pot.  One of the guards kicks me.  The other takes out his flashlight and commences to re-inspect me for lice.

“Let’s corn stalk him,” the guard with the flashlight says. 

I fear they have misheard.  “I am not a corn stalk, but an azalea!”

But soon they are dragging me to the Penitentiary furnaces, misapprehending Dearest Leader’s will for me to be a national treasure. 

_The new issue of REAL: Regarding Arts & Letters arrived in my mailbox on the day after Thanksgiving.  I had been looking forward to that issue for purely selfish reasons: a story of mine was included in it.  Most of my published stories fall within the Absurdist camp, but for the past year I’ve tried to throw myself at traditional realism—partly for the challenge of seeing whether I can pull off a “realist” story, but also because I’ve really become conscious of the limitations inherent in Absurdist aesthetics.

The REAL issue arrived with a kind note from the magazine’s outgoing editor, Christine Butterworth-McDermott, saying that my story was one of her favorites from her seven-year editorial tenure. 

Needless to say, this made my post-Thanksgiving weekend.

“You Okay?” is not only my most realistic published story, but also the most nakedly autobiographical.  Our first son had a latching problem.  Nothing messes with the one’s emotions more than the birth of a child.  Though we had worked with a lactation consultant at the hospital where Stephen was born, we were not able to get him to nurse naturally.  Eventually we rented a breast pump.  I’d feed Stephen from a bottle while Alison, my wife, sat beside me, pumping.  We were working together to care for our son, just not in the way we had imagined.

On the first night home from the hospital, I raised Stephen to my shoulder and burped him.  I was new to fatherhood and, fearing that I might harm him with too hard a pat, my attempts to burp him were woefully pathetic.  Somehow though, they worked.  His burps were loud, tremendous eruptions that filled the air with the scent of the milk he had drunk. 

For a baby, Stephen’s neck muscles were remarkably well-developed.  After burping, he lifted his head off my shoulder.  I still remember how warm he felt.  He brushed his cheek against the side of my neck, his skin soft and smooth and feeling of life.

Then, as I wrote in my story:

All of a sudden, a surge like electricity burst through me.  Something warm and wet had clamped onto my earlobe, so startling me that it took a moment to figure its source.  Stephen had raised his head off my shoulder and latched himself to my ear, plying my earlobe between his tongue and the soft roof of his mouth… Stephen’s lips remained on my ear.  Even when I turned to face [Alison], he hung on.  I tried to explain, but what Stephen was doing tickled, causing me to laugh.  It really was the nicest sensation, those lips at work on my earlobe.

As nice as he felt, I felt immediate guilt, for I imagined the sensation of Stephen’s lips was what Alison desperately wanted to feel for herself.

Try as I might, I just couldn’t figure any real way of making this story work outside traditional realism—mind you, I’ve written plenty of Absurd baby stories!—so I was tremendously thrilled last week to learn that Ms. Butterworth-McDermott had also nominated the story for a Pushcart Prize. 

Thank you, Christine!

In Other News: I’ve got a new piece up at The Nervous Breakdown, called “Rockstars: Lenny Dykstra and Dan Herman.”   Though it’s only a few thousand words long, it took me several drafts and several weeks to write, but I think it kinda works.  Check it out and tell me what you think!

Dykstra, the former New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies star, has been a bit of an obsession for me.  I’ve written about him before on this blog, and will likely do so again soon.  His over-the-top personality fascinates me.  Not that I’d ever want to personally meet the guy, for he really does seem to ooze bile into every life he touches, but he’s a good gawk if you’re careful to maintain a safe distance.

What else?  We spent most of Friday and Saturday in Roanoke doing fun stuff, including attending the Friday’s “A Dickens of a Christmas” festival at Market Square, a Saturday screening of “Der Golem” (1920) at the Taubman Museum of Art (with live musical accompaniment that our children loved!) and Katherine Devine’s Grandin Village studio party. 

More than anything though, I’ve had a lot of good feedback recently on my work, which makes me hopeful that more good things might soon be heading this way soon.

On Sunday, I went to the local Kroger with Stephen, my son, to get more diet cola. I'm addicted to the stuff, and my family agrees that the caffeinated version of me is much more tolerable than the uncaffeinated version. 

At the store entrance, high schoolers were handing out little flyers with a list of non-perishable food items they were collecting for a local Thanksgiving food drive. There were maybe 15 items on the list (flour, sugar, chicken broth, cream of mushroom soup, stuffing mix, canned yams, instant mashed potatoes, pie filling, etc). Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday, and it felt really good to be able to do something for those less fortunate that us. I mean, I know we're not in great shape financially but a can of soup costs, what? 75¢? So Stephen and I went about the store, filling our cart with those Thanksgiving items. And it was good seeing other people do the same. For once, I felt a part of some larger "community." A "community" in the full sense of the word.

At the check-out counter, the cashier asked if the items I bought were for the collection drive.

"Yes," I said. "Everything but the soda."

She smiled. And then pressed a discount key on the register, knocking off maybe three dollars from the total bill, which came to about $17 dollars. And I was happy-- it seemed liked $17 dollars well spent.

When we got home, Alison asked what took us so long.

I told her about the food drive, how we were racing through the store colleting items that were on the list.

Alison looked at me, scrunching her brows as if I was the biggest fool on the planet.

"I like Thanksgiving," I said, cracking open one of the soda bottles. "It's my favorite holiday."

She crossed her arms. "Nick, they were collecting food for us. We're on the list of people this year who are getting help this holiday."

Wow. I felt like a total fool.

There’s nothing like life to knock your off your pedestal.

Yesterday, I had stories accepted at two different magazines: The Journal and Secret Journal Magazine, which is a new start-up that I’ve heard through the grapevine is going to feature a number of really great writers.  Last week, another story was accepted by another great magazine--Tusculum Review— and the combination of these successes made me dizzy-headed.  I couldn’t much concentrate on work yesterday.  Every few moments, I’d re-read the emails that the editors of these publications had sent.  Or I’d re-read the stories themselves, basking in—what?—accomplishment?

Then life intervened.

The boys’ afternoon soccer practice didn’t go well.  Sebastian, my 10-year-old, was particularly frustrated—he’s been playing goalkeeper lately and was upset at himself for the goals he had allowed.  He was almost in tears.  So I took him out for ice cream so I could talk with him.

Which was nice.  It was one of those moments when, as a father, you think to yourself, I’m doing everything right.

Then I saw that the local theatre was hosting a one-night-only production of a play about the Civil War starting at 8 pm.  At school, he’s been studying the Civil War.  A couple of weeks ago, my wife took him to traveling museum exhibit that he thoroughly enjoyed, plus we went several times to an exhibition of Civil War drawings at Roanoke’s Taubman Museum of Art. 

So we rushed home. Sebastian took a quick bath.  We drove to the theatre, but for the first time in my life I couldn’t find a parking space in downtown Blacksburg.  We kept driving in circles as the rain starting coming down.

That's when I felt like a total failure.

I'm just glad we didn't buy tickets ahead of time.

Failure actually has been much on my mind lately.  Cue the snark, but both the stories yesterday had to do with a certain kind of failure.  I’m particularly proud of “Preludes,” the story which will be appearing in The Journal.  I’d been working on it for a number of years.  Over the summer, I revised it again and it finally seemed to hum.  Last week, Nick White (The Journal’s Associate Fiction Editor) emailed a request that I try to shave 500 words from the story (which n was then about 4,600 words).  He suggested one aspect in particular that might be cut.  So I tinkered with it again last weekend and was surprised to see how much more effectively the story worked with some cuts. 

It always amazes me, really, how important proper editorial suggestions can be. 

Last spring, I worked with an agent on a debut novel.  She suggested a couple of general changes and, after agonizing for maybe a week about how in the freak I was going to execute them, everything just started to hum.  I devoted three months to the revisions, working well into the early morning hours each day.  New scenes were constructed.  I line-edited the novel to deflate some of the razzle-dazzle and make things more “real.”  I delved deeper into characters’ thoughts to emphasize what they wanted.  The novel breathed more internally, the individual sections riffing more off each other and cohering into something more logical and less random than it had been before.

When I was through, the changes amazed and excited my agent.  She was going to start a round of submissions immediately, and I was particularly hopeful since she said that a couple of editors who had seen an earlier draft had specifically asked to see the revised version.

And then she just disappeared. 

I tried contacting her but she didn’t return my emails.  I was bewildered.  It was like some existential thing.  The emails I sent to her were like prayers to god.  I sent them expecting some kind of response and was left with abject silence.  I ran around Job-like, wondering what I may have done to deserve this kind of treatment.

And, yeah, I worked on a new novel too.

In September, I found out through a colleague that she abandoned most if not all of her agenting projects because of a sudden life change.  Even now, details are sketchy.  One invests a tremendous amount of emotional energy into a novel.  I was heartbroken.  Right now, I’m still trying to pick up the pieces.

It’s no secret: I’ve mentioned it before, but I envy visual artists for their ability/right to execute multiple versions of the same basic painting.  Think Albers, Rothko, and Mondrian, how they devoted the greater chunk of their careers to exploring the near-endless possibilities of one basic premise.

A few years ago, Erika Meitner led a discussion in the lone poetry workshop I ever took about the pros and cons of a poet devoting him- or herself to the exploration of one subject.  A lot of people in the workshop found the idea restricting.  Why limit oneself to one subject when there are so many subjects?  But I was of the opinion that we’re all limited in other ways—through our sensibilities and stylistic tics—so maybe there was advantage to embracing limitations.  If nothing else, repeated musings on the same subject likely will lead to a kind of accrued wisdom: with each attempt yielding slightly different, if not deeper, thoughts and results.

A couple of days ago, I finished the first draft of a “new” short story.  I used the term “new” cautiously because, after reading it over, it suddenly dawned on me that I had just written the same story I’d been writing for the past several years.  The recognition hit me like a sledge hammer.  I hadn’t meant to re-visit earlier territory, but I did.  I felt sick.  And depressed.  If anything, this “new” story is a more concise distillation of earlier subjects and themes. 

So is this “new” story any better than the previous ones?

Who knows?

Last week, Jonathan Franzen told a Denver audience*, “At this point in my life, I’m mostly influenced on my own past writing… Direct influence makes most sense only for very young writers.”

If I’m reading this right, he’s content to explore and re-explore the themes he’s introduced in his earlier works.

Read one way, Franzen exhibits a healthy self-awareness of his art.

But Franzen’s comment seems rather arrogant, doesn’t it?  Or callow, in that it expresses a smug, unseemly self-satisfaction. 

Yet really, if after a certain point one unconsciously circles around the same subjects and themes again and again, what is one to do?  Does one go, Oulipo-like, and set up conscious barriers to prevent one’s unconscious inclinations?  It’s not a question of disrupting “comfort zones” or “playing it safe.”  It’s more a question whether one should self-censor oneself from wandering through the same fields where one has already wandered.  What do you think?

*For a much more thorough discussion of Franzen’s comments, check out Mark Athitakis’s excellent blog post.  In some small way, this helped me better contextualize Philip Roth’s admission that he no longer reads fiction.

GOOD NEWS:

Earlier today, Brad Listi invited me to be a regular contributor at THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN, which is an excellent online magazine.  Hopefully, I’ll have my first contribution up in the next few days.

In the meantime, consider reading “Reality,” a short-short I’ve got up now at WONDERFORT.

Or, better yet, check out Jessica Francis Kane’s fun “Conversations with Hockney,” now up on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

Or buy Julian Barnes’s THE SENSE OF AN ENDING, which may very well win the Booker Prize next week.  I haven’t read much Barnes before (just FLAUBERT’S PARROT and a few of his short stories and essays here and there), but I read the English edition of this new book last night and was just floored by it.  It’s short but surely bears repeated readings.  Hopefully, I’ll write more about this novel soon.

[Hmm.  The American edition just been published by Knopf shows a page count of 176.  The English edition (published by Jonathan Cape) is only 150 pages long.  Now I’m curious about the page count differences—does it reflect a change of content? a larger American font?]

LASTLY:

The title story from my MFA thesis, Big Baby Hot.  Big Baby Cold.  Big Baby in the Pram Five Days Old, is now in the current FLORIDA REVIEW.  They sent me a few extra contributor copies.  If you want one, drop me a note with your address via the “CONTACT” tab.  I’ll mail one out to the first person who responds.

On the night after the earthquake, I was reading Virginia Woolf’s A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN when I came across these lines:

“[I]t is in this famous library that the manuscript of Thackeray’s ESMOND is also preserved. The critics often say that ESMOND is Thackeray’s most perfect novel.”

I’ve never read Thackeray, nor heard of this novel.  I put down the Woolf and Wikipedia’d Thackeray.  The novel in question might more rightly be called THE HISTORY OF HENRY ESMOND, or so Wikipedia informed me.  I wondered why I hadn’t read Thackeray before.  Why had I never read VANITY FAIR, which, despite Woolf’s 1928 assessment, is novel which critics today seem to agree was his best?

I struggled mightily to fight off the impulse to dash off to my nearest library and search out the Thackeray stacks.  There are times when I berate myself for being so poorly read.  This was one of them.  Never mind that it was nearing midnight: Project Gutenberg (god bless them!) listed 30+ Thackeray titles, each of which could be downloaded within seconds.   I stared at my laptop, my fingers poised over the keyboard, debating where to begin.

And then it hit me: I’m never going to read Thackeray.  Even if I live to 100, I’m never going to imbibe one of his sentences or wrap my hands around one of his bloated novels.

This realization came with both sadness and a feeling of liberation: as sad as it was to confront the limitations to the breadth of my reading, it felt good to let go of my lofty readerly aspirations.  

Every so often, one encounters a much-talked-about list of the books everyone ought to read.  Or a list of the greatest 20th century American novels.  These lists make their way around the internet with frightening regularity, momentarily halting whatever conversations are going on about contemporary letters.  Like everyone, I glance at these lists and pat myself on the back (good boy! what good taste!) for having read many of the listed books—but then, inevitably, comes the moment when I tally those I haven’t read.  And I think to myself: Dear boy, just what have you been doing with your life?

I was fortunate to grow up in a town that lavishly funded its school libraries.  The libraries at my middle school and high school were vast brightly-lit treasure lands staffed with several librarians to guide your journey if you became lost.  I remember checking out maybe seven or eight books from my middle school library on the cusp of my seventh grade spring break.  They were biographies mostly: John Charles Fremont and Sun Yat-sen were the two that I remember now.  I had vowed to read all the books over the upcoming week, but I fell short: perhaps the Fremont and Yat-sen books were the only ones that I finished.  I remember feeling foolish the following week when  returning the stack of books that mostly went unread.  Perhaps the librarians asked me about them, and I shrugged them off.

Why did I feel like such a failure?

It was the first time that my intellectual appetite outpaced my capabilities.

After my Thackeray epiphany the other day, I thought of the other writers I would never likely read: Dickens, Proust, Tolstoy, Mailer, George Eliot, Steinbeck, Rushdie, and Rilke.

The big names kept crashing down all around me: Christopher Marlowe, Simone de Beauvoir, Garcia Lorca, Swinburne, Colette, dos Passos, Styron.  All of them unread.

Then there were the writers whom I had merely sampled—a few stories or maybe a novel: Conrad, Twain, Henry James, Solzhenitsyn, Goethe, Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, Ring Lardner, Thomas Mann, Updike, Duras.  Given an endless amount of time, I would gladly refresh myself in their pages, but in this world one must make choices every time we step into a library or bookstore.

While I was doing my MFA, I took an independent study course on The Absurd with Dr. Christine Kiebuzinska.  It was one of the most remarkable experiences of my reading life.  Over the course of eight months, we read a couple of dozen books together.  She had me read multiple translation of Camus and Sartre (something every writer-in-training should try, if only to gander and the remarkable variations in which one can construct sentences) and exposed me to a number of writers (including Gombrowicz, Hugo von Hofmannsthal) I might not otherwise encounter.

Yet at the end of this remarkable experience, I came to the understanding that it was more important for me to keep abreast of the currents in contemporary literature than to delve deeply or exclusively in the past.

Contemporary literature is filled with as many hits as it is with misses.  There are times I shake my head and wonder why I wasted a few hours reading the blunder du jour, but (like most would-be writers) I read not only for my enjoyment but to sense contemporary possibilities, for no matter how good my writing might one day be, I’ll never be read in c. 1946 France.

Meaning, I guess, that Camus and Sartre have nothing to fear.

Part of being an American is making peace with one’s ignorance.  In this way, I am no different from the Tea Partiers who choose to turn their backs on a century of progressive American accomplishments.  When I step into the bookstore, picking up an old Henry James classic means foregoing at least temporarily the new Kevin Wilson and Caitlin Horrocks books (both of which I hope to read soon).

Yet, still there is sadness.

And no: the list of writers whom I’ll never read is not fixed.  If you had asked me last week, I probably would have included Jane Austin in that list.  However, reading Woolf’s fine opinion of Austin makes me want to check out PRIDE AND PREJUDICE the next time I’m in the library.  Would that be a good place to start?

~~~

  DYKSTRA ERRATA: That one-time baseball player who hit me up for money?  He's sleaze. You know that.  I know that.

Yesterday, he was charged with multiple counts of indecent exposure.

The incidents date from 2009 to just a few months ago. Lenny would place Craigslist ads for personal assistants, housekeepers, and chauffeurs. The ads would request candidates email pictures of themselves to him. He'd claim the jobs would be dream jobs, that he'd pay incredible salaries and that, through him, his employees would meet high-flying sports and entertainment celebrities.

Interviewing the candidates, all of them female and all of them having sent him pictures of themselves that he must have fancied, he'd disrobe and say that the job would also require "massages."  Some of the girls, bedazzled by the prospect of good money, probably serviced him-- Lenny, after all, isn't as outright stupid as he's often portrayed; I doubt he would have placed so many Craigslist ads if he was constantly being rebuffed.

The thing is, I wonder why law enforcement waited so long to charge him with these crimes, especially since it had been well-known from various published accounts and accusations that this was Lenny's modus operandi for getting hand jobs.  While the police waited, they allowed Lenny to do this again and again.

A friend of mine is going through an emotional upheaval.  She’s in her forties, married, with two children.  She is no longer effervescent.  She tells me that she is incapacitated by sadness and fear.  Things are happening in her life that drain her of her will to live.

“What kind of things?” I ask.

“Family things,” she whispers.

Because she won’t tell me, I fear the worst.  Though I’ve asked, she refuses to tell me exactly what is happening.  She’s painfully shy, secretive about the things she cherishes most.  To better cope with her inner turmoil, she’s taken up smoking again.  Whatever happened has affected her for months, yet she cannot bring herself to tell another living soul about it.

            In an email, she writes about the weight she’s lost since whatever happened happened—“down to down to [x lbs], my weight at time of marriage--but I look fabulous!”  Because I know her to be sensitive about her appearance, I read this as a proud boast.  I write back that this is good news, but what I really think is how profound her depression must be to have caused this loss of appetite.

A couple of weeks ago, an article on MSNBC.com caught my eye.  A woman who survived a lupus-induced stroke tells of how impressed her friends of her resulting severe weight loss. 

“The crazy thing was people thought I looked great because I was so thin.  They'd ask if I was working out and I didn't have one muscle. You could see every bone protruding out of my shoulders, my elbows, my wrists.”

She tried to tell people how dire her weight loss was, how much it jeopardized her health, yet her friends prodded her for diet tips.

“It was like the skinnier I got, the more I heard about how great I looked.  Men, in particular, thought my body looked fabulous.  I'm like, ‘Wow, that's really sick.  I have to be anorexic to make you think I'm attractive.’”

Stories like this get to me.  I’ve been writing a novel lampooning how obsessed we can be with false ideas of feminine beauty.  Much has been written elsewhere about the psychologically damaging effects that our culture’s focus on body image can have on women, yet it still startles me to see how alarmingly short-sighted people can be.  What’s the value of weight loss when it is achieved as a consequence of emotional despair?  Or life-threatening medical conditions?

When beauty is concerned, misplaced priorities are rampant. 

Earlier this month, Jane Fonda appeared in Harper’s Bazaar.  The occasion?  A new movie by the two-time Oscar-winning actress?  A new political cause for this activist who has helped shape public opinion about crucial events for over forty years?  Nope.  Appearing in a revealingly sheer Stella McCartney dress, the 73-year-old Fonda announces to the world that she is still beautiful. 

Fonda, who has an artificial hip and an artificial knee (“I set off as many bells and whistles at an airport as I did [at a Cannes fashion show.]”), freely concedes vanity.  She still has the need to show off her figure.  “I wear what will show off my best parts, which are my waist and my butt.”

While I have nothing against people taking pride in their personal appearance, it’s appalling that someone as accomplished as Fonda feels she can only assert her continued relevance through brash boasts of youthful beauty.  Beauty is confining pedestal.  One senses from reading Fonda’s comments that its pursuit has obscured her ability to take satisfaction from other facets of her life.

One needn’t be a cynic to suspect that a septuagenarian’s the outward appearance of beauty is maintained by a fair amount of make-up and, perhaps, cosmetic surgery.  Beauty is a wasteful pursuit.  Worldwide, the cosmetics industry raked in $170 billion in 2007 (the most recent year for which I can locate reliable figures).  Anti-aging facial serums are the most expensive products.  A 1.7 ounce jar of La Prairie “Cellular Cream Platinum Rare” will set you back a cool grand at Neiman Marcus. 

Do these products work?   A 2005 Forbes article suggested maybe not.  While the cosmetic industry touts these products as “clinically proven” to reduce wrinkles, their studies lacked clinical control groups to test their findings.  As Forbes writes, “If these studies were repeated using, say, olive oil, or even a generic lotion of any kind, it is possible that the results would be the same.”

Dollars are not the only thing that being wasted in the pursuit of beauty.  Anxieties and false expectations are being needlessly thrust upon women.

I feel sorry for Fonda.

“I was raised in the '50s,” Fonda says.  “I was taught by my father that how I looked was all that mattered, frankly.  He was a good man, and I was mad for him, but he sent messages to me that fathers should not send: Unless you look perfect, you're not going to be loved.”

As a father of a six-year-old girl, I hope never to wittingly or unwittingly impart that same message. 

As much as we like to believe that we’ve washed away the blatant sexism that has existed to subjugate or otherwise limit opportunities for women in our society, the expectations we place on women to maintain physical beauty place them at a tremendous disadvantage.  Just think of how much time Fonda put in over the years maintaining the comeliness of her butt.  Now think of all that she might have accomplished with that time had she devoted it to some other cause.

During the 2008 Presidential campaign, when Hillary Clinton still fiercely contested for the Democratic nomination, Michael Kinsley wrote a Washington Post thought piece about how much time candidates spent each morning readying their physical appearances.  Whereas a man can quickly shower, brush his hair, and toss on a suit, greater care is expected from women.  Attention must be given to the color co-ordination of their wardrobe.  They must apply make-up and style their hair.  Sadly, appearances matter as much as policy stances.  Should a hastily made-up female politician greet an audience or television interviewer, votes would likely be lost.

These extra preparations, Kinsley conservatively estimated, cost Hillary Clinton twenty minutes more each morning than Barack Obama.

“In most occupations this 20 minutes doesn't make much difference -- especially compared with the disproportionate time that women still spend housekeeping and child-rearing. It will make no difference after the election; no one will care if the president is well-coiffed when answering that 3 a.m. phone call. But in a close-fought election campaign, every minute counts. If you figure 20 minutes a day over a year and a half of 14-hour days and six-day weeks, it comes out to an extra two weeks of campaigning or sleep for a male candidate.”

Just as no one really cares what a president may look like at 3 a.m., I doubt anyone really cares about the state of an actress’s derriere.  When a friend emails us at three a.m. with her emotional woes, we don’t really care if she’s lost a lot of weight lately.  We don’t ask about the wrinkles that might be crowing her eyes, or the brand of lipstick she might be swishing over her lips.  What we want is her emotional well-being, which seems to be the first thing we lose sight of when our thoughts turn to beauty.

Raymond Carver, perhaps the most influential short story writer of his generation, wrote that his children were the single-greatest influence on his life.  He did not mean this in a Hallmark-y  Ain’t kids great? kind of way.

“I have to say that the greatest single influence on my life, and on my writing, directly and indirectly, has been my two children.  They were born before I was twenty, and from the beginning to the end of our habitation under the same roof—some nineteen years in all—there wasn’t any area of my life where their heavy and often baleful influence didn’t reach….[N]othing—and, brother, I mean nothing—that ever happened to me on this earth could come anywhere close, could possibly be as important to me, could make as much difference, as the fact that I had two children.  And that I would always have them and always find myself in this position of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction.”

I have three children of my own, and though I was older than Carver was when my first was born, I know that responsibility well.  My oldest, Stephen (12), is on the autistic spectrum.  Like many autistic children, he has other issues—sensory issues that make him alarmingly uncomfortable in confined spaces, anxiety disorders that at times can prompt him to act inappropriately in public.  Though he is funny and endearingly charming in his own unique way, he is not what you might call socially gifted; he asks awkward questions of strangers and cannot read body language well enough to understand when others would rather he keep to himself. 

My wife and I are acutely aware of how others perceive Stephen—and because of this, we keep to ourselves mostly, at home, renting Redbox DVDs rather than going to movie theaters.  We eat at home even when we’d love to go out for a pizza some nights.  Earlier this week, we had another appointment with Stephen’s psychiatrist.  We’ve been trying different medications, different anti-anxiety pills, but have yet to find the magic pharmaceutical that will alleviate his worst tendencies. 

Through our local autism support community, we’ve met other parents with children like Stephen, and most are just as insular as we are.  Actually, there are no other children *just* like Stephen: Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) can be incredibly broad.  Some ASD children can appear neurotypical, while others may be unable to talk.  Still, as parents, we all worried, perhaps too much, about how other people perceive and react towards our children.  We stay home.  As often as we can.

But there are times when we need to go out.  We need, for instance, to buy him clothes to wear to school, so we brace ourselves for what could very well be a challenging trip to the shopping mall.  Even a trip to local art museums, which he loves, can be disastrous.  He flaps his hands when excited.  He can pivot on his heels and point suddenly to a painting that he particularly enjoys.  Sometimes, he squeals.  Or, especially with Blue-period Picassos, he can plop himself on the floor and stare at a canvas for a half hour.  Though you would think museum officials would want all their patrons to be as ecstatic he can be when confronted with works of art, museum guards are decidedly less welcoming.  We’ve been told, for example, that museums are supposed to be quiet places (this, despite a distinct lack of signage), places where one can not so much as point from a distance across a gallery to a work of art.  Most commonly though, Stephen’s admittedly bizarre reactions have prompted guards to hover around us, surveilling us at very close distances—so close, in fact, as to cause his anxiety disorders to kick in.  Which lead to melt-downs and exactly the kind of behavior that is least tolerated of children in public places.

Sometimes, heaven forbid, we need to fly from across country to see relatives.  We practice coping behaviors with Stephen for weeks beforehand, yet the results are not always ideal.

Recently, I learned that a no-kids-allowed movement is apparently afoot.  “Brat bans” are in force at restaurants and movie theaters and trendy grocery stores.  Kids, even the best behaved, apparently make some people uncomfortable.  Kids squeal; they whine; they laugh too loudly.  And now, they are being banned.

Stephen gets overwhelmed easily.  He worries about things—things that strike me as trivial, like whether his hair is wavy enough, or whether his voice is too low.  Patience is not my biggest virtue.  Rarely do more than a few days go by without me feeling that I have failed Stephen in some fundamental way.  Did I react too harshly when he asked for the umpteenth time in a row whether his voice sounds okay?  He can be trying.

About the angriest I’ve been in recent years came when I found out that a couple in our ASD support community were getting divorced.  The father apparently just decided that being the day-to-day father of an autistic was not within his abilities or desires.  So he fled to Colorado after draining and/or hiding most of the couple’s joint assets.  A messy divorce ensued—which we heard about mostly from the beleaguered wife.

Okay, I know that other people’s marriages should be none of my concern.  Maybe there were other issues.  But what got me was that the couple’s ASD daughter was really sweet.  Our children played with her often.  She was well-mannered, a charmer, an intelligent and high-functioning girl.  While she may have presented her parents special challenges, those challenges we thought were likely small compared with Stephen’s.

I couldn’t believe that some guy would bail on her.                    

Especially since Stephen could be so challenging, so often.

Yet, the No-Kids-Allowed movement isn’t aimed at children like Stephen—it’s aimed at all children.  We are a nation that apparently values comfort over most other factors—and apparently the current message is that presence of children makes a whole lot of people uncomfortable.  That the allegedly uncomfortable people happen to be empty-nesters or DINKs with a lot of disposable income doesn’t help matters.  The reason that the movement is gaining traction is that retailers and restaurateurs and business owners are looking for any way possible to make its most well-heeled clientele happy—even if this comfort is obtained by banning other potential customers from their premises.

This tactic harkens back to the ugly era of segregation.  Southern business owners banned African-Americans from lunch counters and bus seats, because their presence apparently made a whole lot of Southern whites uncomfortable.

Last month, Malaysian Airlines banned babies from certain flights.  Other airlines are considering similar restrictions.  Mind you, Malaysia may very well be the poster-child of intolerance.  Consider how welcoming they are to religious minorities.  Or LGBT lifestyles. 

It’s ironic that this no-kids-allowed movement occurs just as tolerance overall is on the rise.  Last month, gay marriage finally became legal in our nation’s most populous city.  The nation’s Commander-in-Chief is an African American, yet fifty years ago, African Americans weren’t allowed to dine at many of our most exclusive restaurants.  Or country clubs.  Social conservatives still bristle at the sight of two men (or two women) holding hands in public.

When one restricts children from certain venues, one is also restricting access to their parents. 

I should also add that most children (even Stephen on most days) are incredibly well-behaved.

I should also add that nearly all of us, at times, can make others around us incredibly uncomfortable.  Grown adults yell at times, and what they yell usually is a lot fouler than what comes out of the mouth of a typical twelve-year-old.

Just as we have no right to ask that the fans sitting around us in a crowded sports stadium remain silent so that we may better enjoy the spectacle taking place on the field, what right do we have to exact silence on those around us in other public situations?  Can we use silence as or enforce other desired modes of behavior as a means to exclude whole classes of citizens?

AdWeek’s Jim Klara writes that businesses are going kid-free because of market pressure.  Apparently, there is a class of consumers with a “huge swath of discretionary spending dollars” that just would rather not see children in public places.

So what?  Must economic interests always out-rule questions of access?

I’m worried.  Not just for me and my children, but because this no-kids-allowed movement will be a back-door entry back to an era of intolerance.