The Slippage: A Novel (29 page)

Do you worry about hurting people close to you when you write?

Yes. I know a writer (I won’t say who) who seems to take delight in calling out friends and lovers in his or her fiction. Is that bravery? Is that narcissism? I suppose I am not answering the question so much as asking more questions.

How else have you changed as a person, and how has it changed you as a writer?

When I published my first book, I was just recently married. I had no children. Now I’ve been married more than a decade and I have two children. Somewhere along the way, I crossed an invisible line that made those things more important than books. Or at least more important than what happens to a book once it’s published. At times, I would agonize over every little detail of a book’s publication and reception. Now, it seems like a somewhat arbitrary process that shouldn’t really be overthought, because it’s not purely predictable and not an enjoyable source of speculation.

How do you handle reviews?

At first, I read them all. Now, I try to avoid them all. I know lots of reviewers. I have worked as a reviewer. I respect the profession and think it’s vital to the future of literature that people continue to have conversations about books: what works, what doesn’t, why certain trends intensify while others wane. But I’m not sure it’s vital for the future of authors. More specifically: investing too much in reviews can be fatal for authors.

You have written a wide variety of kinds of books, from a collection of experimental short stories (
Superbad
) to a novel about a funk-rock star (
Please Step Back
). Do you have a mental list of other kinds of books you want to write but haven’t yet?

Sure. A political novel, a crime novel, a purely comic novel, a form of scripture, a novel in verse, a single-word novel, a memoir of a word, a travel book about imaginary places.

W
HEN
I
WAS YOUNG
, I went to see an author read at a bookstore. He was older, though probably not as old as I am now. He was not exactly famous, but he had done good work for years. He was proud of what he had achieved, and rightly so. I sat on an uncomfortable chair with two dozen other youngish people and admired his reading for the clarity of vision, the lack of histrionics, and the evident pleasure he took in his sentences. He was not self-satisfied. He was not foolish. He did not talk about things like advances or sales. He was a good role model for a young writer.

Afterward, the audience asked questions. Two of them have remained with me. The second, I’ll talk about later. The first came from a young woman in the crowd who stood to ask it. She asked the writer why he wrote at all. The audience laughed, but it wasn’t a combative question. I think she just wanted to know why an intelligent person with other options would devote his life to the art of prose, which is often a prescription for obscurity. He thought about it. He scratched his not quite beard. “Well,” he said. “I guess to connect with people.”

At that moment, my heart fell a little bit. I didn’t measure it, but I’d guess a centimeter. It fell because his answer was incomprehensible to me, and it was incomprehensible to me because, up to that point, my own fiction had approached the question from the opposite direction. I wrote not to connect with others, but to prove the impossibility of connecting with others. One of the first stories I had finished was from the perspective of a dog about to get put down in an animal shelter. The dog was uncertain what his life had meant, if anything. The dog had loved the human to whom he had been attached, or thought he had, but his current state cast that entire set of memories into doubt. The dog was exiting life with only slightly more information than he possessed when he entered it, and less certainty that any of that information had value. I’m not sure the story was any good, though it contained at least one nice touch, which was that the dog could express himself, but only within his own head. He was narrating, but not communicating. He had thoughts, but no one understood him, or even heard him.

It is possible that if I had stayed after the reading and approached the author to talk about his answer, he would have reconciled his worldview and mine. He might have said that the impossibility of connecting was exactly what motivated his attempt to connect. We might have been speaking the same language. But I left. I thought I was proving my point by leaving, but maybe I had proven his point by going to the reading in the first place. Maybe I had proven his point by reading at all, his work and the work of others, or by feeling, as I encountered any book, a mix of attraction and repulsion: to the prose, to characters, to an author’s ear for language, to imagery, to plots. Maybe I had proven no one’s point.

The story about the dog was published in a college literary magazine a few years later. The writer from the reading got a little more famous, then a little less famous, then a little more, then a little less. It was and remains an admirable course. A while later, I got a deal with a publishing house. When the first copy of my first book came off the press, I flashed back to that reading, and to that question. Was writing about connecting with people, or about erecting a monument to the fact that connection was impossible? In that first book, and for many years afterward, I answered that question indirectly: aggressively, but indirectly. I wrote high-concept short stories, often comic, that had a certain amount of alienation or ruptured communication baked right into the dough.

Then it came time to write a more traditional novel. “The time has come,” said a voice from on high. It turned out to be my editor. The first thing I did was reject the suggestion out of hand. Instead of taking up a traditional story, or a traditional mode of storytelling, I created a new character who was the enemy of tradition: a conceptual artist who distilled his fears about the way the world (mal)functioned into a series of graphs. His approach, I decided, would be to burlesque any attempt to make sense of the chaos and randomness of the world. Shortly after I thought of him, I started to make graphs on his behalf. One of the first was a recursive commentary on the way comprehension slips away from you even as you reach for it.

That graph made me laugh, once, and then it made me sad. It contains both sadistic and masochistic elements. It has also landed differently in my mind at different times: it has seemed like a superficial paradox but also a profound abyss. A little while later, I was looking at it upside down and thought of a companion graph.

That one was also sad, maybe even sadder. Look at the line: It goes up like something optimistic: a bird on the wing, an answered prayer. But it’s measuring the dishonesty needed to falsify that optimism. I tacked that one up next to the first one and looked at it until the gray line went even grayer, at which point I made another graph about dishonesty.

At around that point, the idea of a novel-length work based on that character fell apart. Maybe that’s an exaggeration. I found myself backing off of the graphs slightly. It wasn’t because my editor and I had talked about a more traditional novel. It was because the graphs were comfortable for me in every way. They were habit. I made dozens of them. And while part of creative work is doing the things that you do well, part is deciding when to disrupt your own habits. In terms of that question from the reading decades ago, the graphs were not a way of connecting with others, or even a way of admitting that connection was impossible. They were a way of forestalling the question by communicating primarily with myself.

I printed out the graphs, set them aside, and moved forward with the novel. It became something different, less a staging ground for conceptual pieces, more a straightforward investigation of marriage, of childlessness, of emotional and sexual infidelity. These were common topics, I knew, because they engirdled the lives of many people I knew.

Then a strange thing happened. A guy I had communicated with a little bit online started posting the graphs on his website, and the graphs began to acquire some measure of popularity. People responded to them. There was, briefly, some talk of making a book of the graphs.

At that point, I knew I had to abandon them, or at least move them farther and farther away from the novel I was creating. I went back to the book. The conceptual artist became a secondary character. His sister and her husband came to the fore, along with those questions about marriage and fidelity and suburban emptiness and disappearing youth. The charts were still over my desk, addressing some of the same questions, but they were no longer presiding over the book. The charts were now a set of ideas that had been abandoned by another set of ideas. What better way to explore loneliness?

So, what is loneliness? It’s everything except for the few things that it is not. Last year in the
Guardian
, Teju Cole made an excellent list of books about loneliness. He picked works by W. G. Sebald, Ralph Ellison, Lydia Davis, and more. All his selections were good, but they were also primarily books about solitude, books about lives without connections. The deeper I got into this book, the more it seemed to be about the opposite: a highly connected life that was nevertheless lonely. (I started to write “that was full of loneliness,” but it seems strange to say that something is full of loneliness. It’s like saying a room is full of emptiness.) The main character, William, is married, without children. He works at an office with coworkers he sees nearly every day. At some point, he starts sleeping with a woman who is not his wife. Does he ever make a meaningful connection? Is it even possible? (There is a moment in the book where he forges a relationship with a boy, the son of an old friend. Briefly, that nourishes him, but it is short-lived as well.) Some might argue that William does what everyone does: he enjoys a series of temporary connections that, over the course of a life, add up. They would not necessarily be wrong. But I would ask them a follow-up question: Add up to what?

So is that the real question? Is
The Slippage
an attempt to discover life’s ultimate purpose—or, alternatively, to discover that there isn’t one? That seems grandiose, though it may also be accurate. For most of my own life, I have assumed that the thing that makes life tolerable is meaning, and that the thing that makes meaning is art. Facts are necessary things, but they are just the footholds in the wall you use to climb higher so you can see (or hear) art. And even when you get within reach of art, there’s often not enough of it, or at least not enough of the right kind. I don’t mean to say that you can’t find art you like. That’s not hard to do. But liking is only the beginning. Each and every piece of art, whether a short story or a painting or a pop song, has a specific effect on a certain reader/viewer/listener at a certain time. And art, like medicine, can save or doom. Sometimes the art you like isn’t the art that challenges you. Sometimes the art that challenges you isn’t the art that enlarges you. Sometimes a piece of art grabs you tight but lets you go too soon: disappointment. Sometimes you depend on a piece of art to rescue you and it leaves you cold: more loneliness. If you could locate exactly the right kind of art exactly when you needed it, that would be great. But believing in that kind of efficient delivery requires an implausibly optimistic view of the world and how it operates. How things really work, I think, is that we need to clear away much of what’s created so we can find the things that are meaningful to us. And so, in the novel, I found a role for the chart artist by setting up a subplot in which two forces are locked in battle: art and fire. Both are refining forces, though one is an agent of creation and the other an agent of destruction. At one point, following a rash of arsons in town, the chart artist develops what some might call an unhealthy obsession with fire, and then translates his obsession into artwork: