The other day I was having a conversation with Austin and I said—thinking of people like James Wood, mostly, whose first novel I read a long time ago—something like, “it’s hard for critics to write a novel.” That first novel, The Book Against God, is highly self-conscious1 about being not only a novel by James Wood, Big Time Book Critic, but also in mimicking the kind of novels Wood himself might review positively, i.e., there’s a lot of arguing about the existence of God in there.2 To me, the book’s flaws seemed so intimately tied up in Wood’s critical reputation that the moral was, simply, “critics are mostly bad novelists.”
To this, Austin said, “I think you’re underestimating how hard it is for anybody to write a novel.” I was like, but Edmund Wilson’s novel is supposed to be bad… Lionel Trilling’s too… not that I’ve read them… et cetera… and so forth… And he said yeah—because it’s hard to write a novel.
And now that I think about it, that’s true. Being “good at criticism” doesn’t doom you to being “okay at novels.” Yes, when you write it out, that seems a bit obvious but we make these kinds of dumb bargains in our heads all the time, down to who is the smart one and who is the pretty one. In the end, creating something out of nothing is hard to do. If somebody who is a good critic writes a mediocre novel, that puts in them in the same category as most people who have ever managed to finish a novel. A category that does not include me—the furthest I ever got in a novel draft was a hundred pages.3 I’ve probably finished only one short story.4
Why am I dwelling on this? Mostly because I’m trying to do something hard. Not write a novel, but write a book, which at this stage is a book proposal. And while I do not want to talk5 about what the book proposal is yet6 it’s something that will require more from me than writing an essay. If I let myself think about this beyond the next couple steps, I feel a lot of panic and vertigo and I wonder why I didn’t pick an easier kind of book proposal to write, or book to write, or whatever—to pick something that I knew I could do because I had already done it in part, like a book of essays.
But the answer is that actually I did! I tried for a long time to write a book proposal for a “book of essays,” but I was totally stalled out. Whenever I thought about the essays it just felt like something I’d do because I was at the point in my career where I should write a book.7 I had a kind of image of its afterlife of being politely reviewed in one or two places and selling two hundred copies and then disappearing. That would be OK if it was something I really believed in, wanted to write, whatever. But not OK if I spent a lot of effort on something that was supposed to launch me into whatever upper echelon of writers still exists.
My life is mostly very easy but it feels intimidatingly hard a lot of the time. When things seem to be getting better something happens and it feels like my whole sandcastle gets knocked down.8 But objectively I have an easy life—I live in my parents’ basement and I guess I also watch anime down there, which is, yes, kind of code for “loser” but that’s all right… you know… Sometimes you’re just a loser. Am I unemployed, yes, am I currently digging myself out of a perfume sample–shaped financial hole, yes, am I unsure of how I will pay my taxes, yes, do I have a bum pancreas, yes, do I sleep an absurd amount while also somehow not sleeping ever, yes, but in the end I have a place to live and food to eat and good people in my life and also a great if slightly insane dog.
However, the difficult thing I’m trying to do really is difficult, and if I succeed at getting it through the stage I’m at, it’s just going to get more difficult. So lately I’ve been trying to lean into this fact to keep myself on track and actually it works pretty well. Yeah, this is hard, but it’s what you chose and it’s what you want to do. So, you know. Start building the sandcastle again.
In “The Fun Stuff,” one of my favorite essays by Wood, and which appeared about seven years after The Book Against God, he laments this self-consciousness of his in general in terms I find quite moving and think about often:
For me, this playing is like an ideal sentence, a sentence I have always wanted to write and never quite had the confidence to do: a long, passionate onrush, formally controlled and joyously messy, propulsive but digressively self-interrupted, attired but dishevelled, careful and lawless, right and wrong. Such a sentence would be a breaking out, an escape. And drumming has always represented for me that dream of escape, when the body surrenders its awful self-consciousness. I taught myself the drums, but for years I was so busy being a good boy that I lacked the courage to own any drums.… Nowadays, I see schoolkids bustling along the sidewalk, their large instrument cases strapped to them like coffins, and I know their weight of obedience. Happy obedience, too: that cello or French horn brings lasting joy, and a repertoire more demanding and subtle than rock music’s. But fuck the laudable ideologies, as Roth’s Mickey Sabbath puts it: subtlety is not rebellion, and subtlety is not freedom, and it is rebellious freedom that one wants, and, most of the time, only rock music can deliver it. And sometimes one despises oneself, in near-middle age, for being so good.
He wrote a second novel, which I haven’t read. It might be better!
Around the age of eleven I began work on one giant fantasy epic and with one exception every single novel-length project I’ve ever tried to write has just slowly turned into the novel I was writing when I was eleven.
I used to have all of the many, many drafts of this novel carefully archived but they were I believe lost when my computer failed and then my external backup harddrive fell off my desk. That’s okay. I can recite everything that happens in them from memory.
I once tried to write a sort of self-satire / send-up of “Cat Person” that was called “Dog Person” which never saw completion. Actually, whenever I pull out the draft, I still think it’s pretty funny. It just didn’t go anywhere.
I have certain superstitions in this area.
It is not about Taylor Swift.
I am not casting aspersions here on your essay collections—or even any future ones I migt write—just this one in this form.
But this year has been better than the last two—I have, knock on wood, not gone to the hospital once.
I think might need to let go of my fear of flopping or causing secondhand embarrassment if I ever actually want to do anything worthwhile.
I agree! But I'd be excited to read your book someday, and I hope it does actually go somewhere =]