Found Another One!

Juliet, Naked, is Nick Hornby’s newest novel. I loved High Fidelity, so in a minor fit of extravagance, I bought Juliet in hard cover because it isn’t out in paperback yet. Hard cover lasts longer passed around among friends, and I certainly want to pass this one around. As a lesbian trapped in a redneck ex-jock’s body, I just can’t resist a good romantic comedy, and Hornby is an insightful investigator of the unending permutations of one heart’s attraction to another.

A common motif in Hornby’s writing is the influence of and obsession with music. In this case, we have a man obsessed with a reclusive rock star who hasn’t recorded in twenty years, the fixated but formal stalker’s long suffering girlfriend, and a bitter, retired musician with too many ex-wives, children he doesn’t know, no money and a creative well run dry.

I read the 406 pages in two days. I just don’t do that. Not since Lonesome Dove, anyway. Hornby manages to explore the role of artifice in art, the question of whether obsession can be benign, and the possibility of romance anchored in the messy real world, all while making me laugh out loud nearly every other page.

Buy it now. Hornby deserves to be rich for helping renew my faith in fiction. If this isn’t in production as the third Hornby screenplay adaptation (About a Boy, High Fidelity) then it will be soon.

What's Behind Me

My blogger friend over at The Writer’s Closet has put up a list of things she likes. I like lists. I’m a list maker. Usually, it’s things to do. I once made a list of every sport I’ve ever played. I listed all the cities in which I’ve lived. All the jobs I’ve had. And, like every pig-of-a-man I have ever known, a secret list of women with whom I’ve slept. It’s way shorter than my friends' lists. I also made a list of all the liars I know.

There’s all kinds of top ten or twenty or hundred lists, like lists of the best cities to get a latte, the best women’s shoe brands, the nineteen best beaches in the world for seeing men in Speedos without gagging. The fifteen mistakes men make in relationships. (Are you sure it’s just fifteen?) But being that I am middle aged and my tank full of youthful optimism is down to reserves, I thought I’d make a list of everything that is behind me, the things I will never experience again. That’s the list I’m in the mood for tonight.

1. I will never hike the back country of Yellowstone again. This one hurts. Even more than the knees that make it impossible to see that tiny fraction of unsoiled America again. There can be no joy like a first cup of coffee made over burning Lodge Pole pine branches, the smell of wood smoke in my hair, as the sun creeps over the ridge above Howell Creek. I rose before the others to just sit with the wind and Mountain Bluebirds.

2. I will never hit another home run. My days as an athlete are over. Sports defined me for three decades. Even now I coach. But the sound produced when the barrel of a thirty-five ounce bat makes contact with a low, outside fastball is one I will never hear from the batters box again. The solid jolt that shoots through the hands and wrists, the sudden tremor, gone so quickly, but filled with so much meaning as the ball takes off. Only a memory now.

3. I will never be “so full of potential” again. That is for college kids clutching a new diplomas, a newlywed couple, a highly recruited high school quarterback. Or a smart kid with no direction and no family history of success. The problem with being so full of potential is, if you don’t reach it, you are the protagonist in one of the sadder stories in the world.

4. I will never have another chance to straighten things out with my father. He died almost three years ago. I was going to say I’m sorry. So was he. We never did.

5. I will never fall in love again. Well, I guess I can’t say that for certain, but if ever something felt like it belongs on this list, I guess this does. I have found about every way a relationship doesn’t work and can’t last—and none that do work or do last. Testosterone and ego drove me past failure in one love after another, blinded to pain, incompatibility, or even the notion that it might not be love, but a potent amalgam of raw sex drive, pathetic need for validation, and loneliness. It could just be that I don’t really know what love is at all. Now that age has lowered the flame on the sex kettle, and my ego has less need for validation, there’s just loneliness. And that’s not much on which to build a relationship. It’s barely a decent reason to date.

6. I’ll never go pheasant hunting with Zack again. Best dog I ever had. (Yeah, I made that list, too) Not even a bird dog. A German Shepherd. Stayed close, pointed like the best Springer Spaniel. Loved people like they were made of bacon. Goddamn good dog.

I think that’s about all of this kind of list I can stand for tonight. What’s on yours? Aren’t we all just a little tired of the “best” lists and the “top 10” lists and the “five-ways-you-can-intensify-your-orgasm” lists? Lets have a little melancholy in this joint! Let’s look back, not forward. Let’s look in the dark corners, not toward the light. Just for a night, now. Then we can go back to Disney-fying our lives. Then we can be thankful for walking, breathing, brothers and ice cream. And I am. Just not tonight.

The Value of One Life

I haven’t posted in a long time. There are days when I feel pretty worthless, and sometimes those days string together until everything I touch feels empty and valueless. I fall into self-pity. I dwell on love I’ve lost or never had, on misty dreams burned away by the uncompromising light of reality, on all the ways and times I have fallen short. My failures rise to the surface like an oil leak from a long sunken hulk. Slowly, imperceptibly, a pall settles over me. I can’t write. I can’t see why I should write. In my worst moments, I feel my life hasn’t amounted to much and never will. But one thing I can’t diminish or dismiss, cannot minimize or forget, is that I saved a man’s life once.

I was on a boat with several friends, a big charter yacht. There were four women and five men. Three of the other men were friends of mine and one a friend of a friend whom I had just met. We cruised out to the Gulf Stream from Key Largo, far out of sight of land, and anchored in about 90 feet of clear water. My three friends donned scuba gear and went spear fishing for our dinner. There were only three sets of scuba gear aboard, so I stayed on deck with the new guy. All the women went to the foredeck to lay in the sun and tan. The man I had just met—and I don’t even remember his name—decided to go snorkeling. I told him that in 90 feet of water, with no reefs around, there was nothing to see. I told him the current was pretty strong. It had pulled the boat taught on the anchor line. The divers used the anchor line to haul themselves to the bottom, where the current was slower. He had no experience away from a beach and ignored me.

I worked for a while in a scuba shop, taught scuba diving, and worked as a dive master on many group dives. I had been trained to look for trouble and the signs of trouble. A big red flag is when someone surfaces with their mask on top of their head and no regulator or snorkel in their mouth.

I watched the guy I had just met dive next to the boat. He came up twenty yards astern. He dove again, surfacing farther away. On his third or fourth dive, he came up fifty or more yards from the boat and began trying to swim back. The current was far stronger than he imagined. He swam in place and went under. When he came up, his mask was on his forehead, snorkel lost, and he gasped, unable to yell or talk. He stopped swimming and began to drift farther away with the current.

I was taught that all cushions on a boat have to be floatation devices. I ran to the foredeck, where one of the women lay on a bench with her head resting on a large, round cushion. I jerked it out from under her head to curses and ran down the gunwale walkway. I gave the cushion the heave of my life, for the guy was far off, now. It skipped on the water once, twice, and hit him right in the face. He grabbed the cushion like the drowning man he was. Nearby, down-current from him, was a channel marker buoy. I yelled at him to swim to it, as the current would help, rather than hinder him. He gathered his strength and did so. He clung to the buoy, letting the cushion drift off. It disappeared in the chop in just a minute or so, going north with the Gulf Stream.

When my friends came up from spear fishing a few minutes later, we quickly got the anchor up and drew along side him. He was cold and shaken, but all right when we pulled him aboard.

At my worst times, I remember that had I not been there, knowing what I knew, doing what only I could do in that instant, a man would have died. Waiting a few minutes for my friends to come up would have had him a mile from us, lost in the chop or already drowned. I mattered more than anything in the world to one man, for one moment.

So what? Doctors, EMT’s, Navy corpsmen, firefighters and many others do it every day, all over the world. Some have saved thousands. It does not make me special or particularly important in any way. Except to that one guy. And I try not to think about it much, because it feels inappropriate, like bragging, even to myself. I’ve told a few people, I think. And these days, if that guy is still alive, I’d bet he thinks about it less often than I do. But that few seconds of my life are at times as much a lifeline for me as I threw to him. When I remember it, I don’t feel as worthless, as helpless, as doomed to fail. I wish I remembered that guy’s name. I’d like to call him and thank him. I saved him once, but he has saved me many times over.

Death of a Rival

A man I never knew is being buried today. I didn’t get a chance to know him, but I had quite a bit of contact with him—violent contact, on a high school football field. The same age as me, we faced off over three years as starters for our respective teams. I have never been hit harder in my life than Taylor Pniewski hit me. He figured in many of my circle’s “Pniewski hit me so hard . . .” football war stories. Taylor and I split each others helmets open. We caved in face masks. We shed blood together in a ritual that bonds rivals as well as teammates. I never knew him but I will remember him until I am the subject of an obituary.

On most high school teams, there is at least one guy for whom you must account and adjust. I was one of those guys for my team. So I always drew that guy from the other team. For Ledgemont High School, that was Taylor Pniewski. He was all of 5’8”, but about that wide as well. I remember him being so much faster than he looked, and that blocking him was akin to pushing a dump truck. When I was on defense, he neutralized my quickness and forced me to beat him on even terms. He changed my goal from domination to don’t-embarrass-myself. He forced me to dig deep for strength I didn’t know I had. He beat me and forced me to forget my defeat by the next play and try again. He gave me the chance not to quit when confronted with what seemed an impossible task—beat Taylor Pniewski the next play. Not the entire game, not for a series, but one play, beat that one guy whose nose was twelve inches from mine, one time. Then I could think about the next play.

I thought about that lesson today as I struggle to write my second novel. I have three long starts on the second book that have all petered out by page 100. I have been forced to set them all aside and figure out how to proceed. I have to figure out how to get one page at a time and keep going, no matter how confusing and impossible the task seems. I don’t have to write an entire novel today. I have to write a good sentence and then another and another, and maybe get a page at the end of the day.

And it won’t be a perfect page. There will be some blood and sweat on it. But I will have pulled off that one page because people like Taylor Pniewski helped me see I could do it if I refuse to quit. Guys like Taylor taught me that even if I am beaten this time, and the time after that and the time after that, I can triumph on the next if I just get up off the ground, scrape the mud out of my eyes, and know that I can succeed.

That is how people accomplish things. They accept that there is no success without trials, no wins without losses, and they keep going. They get smacked down and they keep going. The get told they aren’t smart enough or old enough or experienced enough or talented enough and they keep going. By doing so, they often , in the words of Henry David Thoreau, “. . . meet with success unexpected in common hours.” Taylor Pniewski was one of my important teachers of that lesson. I didn’t know him, but I would never be who I am without him. Rest in Peace, my rival.

Finally! A New Novel I Can Love

As my four regular readers can attest, I do not have much good to say about the contemporary novelists held in high regard by literary critics and prize juries. As a rule, I don't trust the taste of book critics. Too many have joined the Cult of the Sentence, deeming that fiction best that piles up the most standout sentences, imagery and “lyrical” language, the accumulated weight of which apparently makes a novel literature with a capital L. It's been a long time since I picked up a book from the New Fiction shelf at the bookstore, read the first page and walked to the register with it. The triumph of style over story in modern literary fiction leaves me cold, bitter and buying classics.

Then I read a couple of reviews of American Rust. (Yes, I still do read reviews, even the New York Times Book Review, hoping against all evidence for change, going back again and again like an abused spouse.) The only thing in the reviews that got me looking for the novel was the subject matter: the effect of industrial collapse on American workers. Being from a long line of working class rednecks, I decided to give another new author a chance based on that alone.

And I'm glad I did. Philipp Meyer has produced a book that, by the end, had me comparing his novel to Richard Wright's Native Son and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Like them, he masterfully weaves into the story the socioeconomic and political pressures that bear on the lives of his characters without preaching, without beating us over the head with a morality tale. Yet you can't come away from it without knowing in your bones the corrosive effects of industrial decline on the lives of his working class characters. He has deep sympathy for all of his characters, the “good” and the “bad.” Each character has their own trajectory, and Meyer makes it inseparable from the collision that sent them on their way.

While Meyer does have one stylistic quirk I found annoying—he sometimes drops commas and periods that interrupt the natural flow of his sentences—for the most part the writing is straight forward, lacking the self-conscious poetic flourishes so much a part of contemporary literary writing. His prose serves the story rather than call attention to the author.

Buy American Rust. Don't take it out of the library. The author deserves the royalty, and I don't say that about many authors these days. I look forward to more from Philipp Meyer.

Fear and Work

What if I don't make it as a writer? That is the terrifying question that pops into my head every morning I don't write, every time I intend to work on my second novel and find a way to avoid it. I check my e-mail with a deep undercurrent of dread, knowing that I'm checking it for the fifth time in the hope that there will be something to which I must respond, so I might duck the writing I should be doing. I check my friends' blogs to see if they wrote anything of interest, rationalizing away my need to tell the story I set out to tell. I will be sure to get a lot done on it tomorrow. I just have to think about the characters a little more. That's actually part of the writing process, isn't it? And another day of writing disappears into a past from which it cannot be retrieved. And at some point during that day, the question that freezes my guts makes it's way up from the chilly depths of my personal hell: If I'm not a writer, what am I?

Thirty years ago, my possibilities were endless. I was smart and strong and healthy and capable. I had a future to fill with nearly anything I chose. So I chose to dabble in nearly everything, never mastering anything. I squandered opportunities, spit on good luck and assumed there would always be a second or third or tenth chance. I attended and quit college so many times I can't recall each instance, but I never did finish a degree. I moved from job to job to job without ever holding one for two full years. I expanded the breadth of my experience to the horizons without ever going deeper than the grass at my feet. If for nothing else, it was ideal preparation for writing fiction. But what if I don't use it to write and succeed as a writer?

I'm fifty-two, single, and broke, having accumulated none of the limited wealth that even the lowliest laborer expects by this age. My joints are trashed from years of manual labor and a passion for the slow demolition of the human frame that is sports. I can scrape by suffering through days of construction and handyman work for another decade or so, but to what end? The end? I cannot simply make a living anymore. If I have amassed nothing else in this world, I have accrued expectations of myself that I cannot shake. Having lost much, I am still a smart guy with some writing talent and broad experience to draw upon. I can use that to write and, if I work hard at it, write well.

I hope I am not too lazy to do that. Recent evidence leads me to believe it sometimes. Long and hard work can lift the less talented. Sloth and procrastination have bedeviled the talented and left them anonymous since we started scratching on cave walls. I think it is fear that keeps me from working hard, however. In the past, I have thought that passion dispels sloth. Perhaps I was wrong. I am passionate about writing, about fiction, about storytelling in any form. Do I fit the classical mold of Talented But Lazy? Maybe. But I think its more about being scared to find out I don't have the Talent part of that equation. Which leaves me back at the beginning: If I'm not a writer, what am I? And here is where I merge with the fears of every person who has ever been born or ever will be born. I fear that if I am not a writer, my life will not have mattered at all. If I cannot become an accomplished writer, I will fade to insignificance without ever having the compensations of love or wealth. I will die having been nothing special at all.

Can a guy have a deeper motivation to write than that?! I have been reading John Steinbeck's letters to his editor during the process of writing East of Eden. The man who had previously written Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath was scared he wasn't up to the task. He admitted to his hope that writing a novel would get easier with each success and his realization that this was a false hope. It is never easy or effortless. But he put his head down and marched forward anyway. For which we can all be thankful. So I suppose I will put my shoulder into it and work. Work and hope. But as has been said by many before me, I must never hope more than I work. I have to trust that work will dissipate my fear.

It's About Me

Since my not-so-glowing review of Wally Lamb’s novel I Know This Much Is True, I’ve been thinking about the kind of story I do like and why. I got a clue listening to the radio the other day. Trace Adkins said it in a song that is brilliantly honest and succinct in expressing the reason for his love of country music: “because they’re songs about me.”

Watching Trace’s stage persona, it would be easy to take that as mere narcissism, but that would be a mistake. Country music’s themes are few, simple and personal. Even the rare political songs rely on personal touchstones. Heartbreak, faith, nostalgia, love, sacrifice and the comforts of home bring those songs right into country fans own lives. Even rich and successful professionals like Trace Adkins don’t leave the poverty, hard work and disappointment behind when they make it big. They make art with it and touch others like them.

Two of my favorite novels are Nobody’s Fool, by Richard Russo, and Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry. It has been years since I first read them, but I still think about the protagonists in these novels often. The “hero” of Nobody’s Fool is Donald Sullivan, a.k.a. Sully, a broken-down, small-town carpenter on the wrong side of fifty, a failure in marriage, business and fatherhood. He has made bad choices at nearly every turn in his life, yet the character is charming, genuinely loves women, is a loyal friend and a worthy opponent for his sometime boss. The inseparable partners and friends of Lonesome Dove, retired Texas Ranger Captains Augustus McCrae and William F. Call are two sides of the same stubborn, independent coin, wanderers by nature and the most unnatural of businessmen. McCrae is the charming ladies man who blew it with the love of his life, Call is taciturn and repressed, unable to express even the simplest of emotions except frustration with his longtime Rangering partner. Their attempts at settling down and living a normal life are half-hearted and often pathetic. But they are each endearing for their courage, sense of duty and justice, their respect for even their enemies, and their awkward expressions of affection.

I love Sully, Call and McCrae more than any other characters I’ve encountered in literature. After much thought, I know why. I am late middle aged, a broken down carpenter and, like Sully, limping into what little future remains to me. I have the business acumen of Sully, McCrae and Call. I can be charming like Augustus McCrae—and as non-committal. I suffer from Call’s inability to express intense emotion and share his reluctance in the face of any confrontation that is not violent. I am also a loyal friend and, like Augustus, would rather spend my time with women than men, with a couple notable exceptions.

These three characters encompass much of what I see in myself, or in some cases dearly hope is there, my good points and my flaws, my rare successes and my failures, my potential to do the right thing or become what I have not so far been. No one character is all me, but significant aspects of their made-up personalities reflect my own. While McMurtry’s and Russo’s writing styles differ significantly, what they had to say with and about their characters struck the same chords in me.

I hope I can make some good stories of my missteps and failures, my ragged attempts at love and moneymaking. I want to write stories that touch others’ lives the way Russo and McMurtry have touched mine. If I work long and hard, I think I can take this misspent life and create something good, a novel of which someone can one day say, “that story’s about me.”