On the train home for Easter break #parisreview
We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can. When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life. And now, when I finish a long day of CNN-related fear and loathing mixed with eyeballing my own resolutely white screen, I do not crawl into bed with 500-page comic novels about (God help me, but it’s OK; I’m going to call on the safety of quote marks) “multicultural” London. I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis’s essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn’t sound like me.
Sick of sound of own voice. Sick of trying to make own voice appear on that white screen. Sick of trying to pretend, for sake of agent and family, that idea of putting words on blank page feels important.
End of the week always demands celebration.
Most confusing lunch break ever.
Fresh graduate from biz school currently slaving away in a bank. This was just bound to happen.
His grief, it’s hinted, is all prospective. He’s mourning the future, not the past. While fondly shampooing his son’s hair, he remembers the day when his own body grew long enough to touch both ends of the bathtub at the same time. ”This is all too much for me,” he thinks, realizing that his son’s day will come, too. For now, Emmett couldn’t be happier, but tomorrow? His is a largely undiscovered species of male American midlife crisis, and one that most novelists wouldn’t know what do with, because its subtle menace is beyond them. Women unconquered and alpine summits unscaled aren’t what’s haunting Emmett. His demon is joy. The man is peaking, he’s hitting his stride — the horror!
I read the book and then I read Kirn’s fabulous (and enlightening) review.
(I always feel a bit guilty when I like a review better than the book it’s about - that happens frequently)
Had the most lovely lunch break last Tuesday, but as the empty bottle of wine suggests, I had quite a lot of alcohol in my body. It hasn’t been easy staying awake that afternoon.
