Reality Hunger (53 page)

I have a very vivid memory of being assigned to read
The Grapes of Wrath
as a junior in high school and playing hooky from my homework to read
Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72
. Steinbeck’s humorlessness, sentimentality, and sledgehammer symbolism hardly had a chance against Hunter Thompson’s comedy, nihilism, and free association. I loved how easily
Fear and Loathing
mixed reportage, or pseudo-reportage, with glimmers of autobiography. My sister and I had a rather fierce debate about the authenticity of a scene in which Thompson has a conversation with Richard Nixon at an adjoining urinal. She wrote to Thompson to ask which of us was right. I was wrong (if memory, that inveterate trickster, is accurate, he called me a “pencil-necked geek”), but still it was liberating to read a work open-ended enough that the thought could occur to you that some of this stuff had to be made up or, even better, you couldn’t quite tell.

During freshman orientation, I joined the
Brown Daily Herald
, but by February I’d quit—actually, I was fired—when there was a big brouhaha surrounding the fact that I’d made stuff
up. I started spending long hours in the Marxist bookstore just off campus, reading and eating my lunch bought at McDonald’s; I loved slurping coffee milkshakes while reading and rereading Sartre’s
The Words
. I closed the library nearly every night for four years; at the end of one particularly productive work session, I actually scratched into the concrete wall above my carrel, “I shall dethrone Shakespeare.” (Since I was a teenager, I’ve been going to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which mixes Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean plays. I recently saw the understudy—with twenty-four hours’ notice—play the lead in
Cyrano de Bergerac
. Every fifteen minutes or so, he’d call out to the assistant director, sitting in the front row, to provide the line for him. This Cyrano’s crippled eloquence, the actor’s grace, his refusal to wilt, was much more moving to me than anything in the play or any other play.)

As a sophomore at Brown, in 1976, I was trying to figure out how I wanted to write. One of my teachers was John Hawkes, who wrote, “Beyond the edge of town, past tar-covered poor houses and a low hill bare except for fallen electric poles, was the institution and it sent its delicate and isolated buildings trembling over the gravel and cinder floor of the valley.” Hawkes was an inspiring teacher, but I had no instinct for the symbolist surrealism of which he was a master; his work offered no guideposts for me. My other writing teacher in college was R. V. Cassill, who wrote, “Cory Johnson was shelling corn in the crib on his farm. He had a rattletrap old sheller that he was rather proud of. Some of its parts—the gears and the rust-pitted flywheel bored for a hand crank—had come from a machine in use on this farm for longer than Cory had lived.” I wasn’t connected to place in the way Cassill was—I knew virtually
nothing and didn’t care to know about the San Francisco suburb in which I grew up—and though he also was an exceptionally fine teacher, his work (beautifully crafted as it was) didn’t trigger anything particularly crucial for me, either.

My college girlfriend and I shared a summer house in the Catskills. We’d go to the general store and have a slightly off-kilter conversation with someone about, say, a lawn mower, then in the middle of the night she’d wake me up and ask if I wanted to read, say, a fourteen-page fantasia entitled “Monologue of the Lawn Mower.” This happened over and over again that summer, so much so that I came to dread doing anything very dramatic with her, lest she knock me over with her magnum opus.

On my breakneck tour of European capitals the summer after graduation, I carried in my backpack two books:
One Hundred Years of Solitude
and
Swann’s Way
. Just as Steinbeck’s allegory had bored me and Thompson’s meditation on the real had enthralled me, García Márquez failed to hold my attention and Proust became a years-long addiction. I loved how Marcel was both sort of the author and sort of a character; how the book was both a work of fiction and a philosophical treatise; how it could talk about whatever it wanted to for as long as it wanted to; how its deepest plot was uncovering the process by which it came into being.

In graduate school, where my first fictional instructor said she wished she were as famous to the world as she was to herself,
and my second fictional instructor said that if he had to do it over again, he’d have become a screenwriter, I was surrounded by older and better writers who wrote more relaxedly, whereas I was trying to sound like Thomas Hardy.
Oh, I see
, I remember realizing,
you write out of your own experience. You write in your own voice and don’t try to write literature per se
. I don’t know why I needed to learn this, but I did.
And if part of your childhood was spent watching
Get Smart,
it’s okay to mention that; don’t pretend you grew up in France
. This was hugely revelatory, though it seems self-evident now.

Perhaps under the influence of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which when I was there in the late 1970s was a citadel of traditionalism (as, for that matter, it still is), my first novel couldn’t have fit any more snugly inside the rubric of linear realistic novel and is the only book I’ve written that is pretty much whole-cloth invention. But I wanted to write a book whose loyalty wasn’t just to art but to life—my life. I wanted to be part of the process, part of the problem.

For quite a while I wrote in a fairly traditional manner—two linear, realistic novels and dozens of conventionally plotted stories. I’m not a big believer in major epiphanies, especially those that occur in the shower, but I had one nearly twenty years ago, and it occurred in the shower: I had the sudden intuition that I could take various fragments of things—aborted stories, outtakes from novels, journal entries, lit crit—and build a story out of them. I really had no idea what the story would be about; I just knew I needed to see what it would look like to set certain shards in juxtaposition to other shards. Now I have trouble working any other way, but I can’t emphasize
enough how strange it felt at the time, working in this modal mode. The initial hurdle (and much the most important one) was being willing to follow this inchoate intuition, yield to the prompting, not fight it off, not retreat to SOP. I thought the story probably had something to do with obsession; I wonder where I got that idea—rummaging through boxes of old papers, riffling through drawers and computer files, crawling around on my hands and knees on the living room floor, looking for bits and pieces I thought might cohere. Scissoring and taping together paragraphs from previous projects, moving them around in endless combinations, completely rewriting some sections, jettisoning others, I found a clipped, hard-bitten tone entering the pieces. My work had never been sweet, but this seemed harsher, sharper, even a little hysterical. That tone is, in a sense, the plot of the story. I thought I was writing a story about obsession. I was really writing a story about the hell of obsessive ego. It was exciting to see how part of something I had originally written as an exegesis of Joyce’s “The Dead” could now be turned sideways and used as the final, bruising insight into someone’s psyche. All literary possibilities opened up for me with this story. The way my mind thinks—everything is connected to everything else—suddenly seemed transportable into my writing. I could play all the roles I want to play (reporter, fantasist, autobiographer, essayist, critic). I could call on my writerly strengths, bury my writerly weaknesses, be as smart on the page as I wanted to be. I’d found a way to write that seemed true to how I am in the world.