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My second book came out and it was a great success. This is a completely accurate description of the book, but it is a flaw only if you think that the interesting part of the book is not the pedestal-the astonishing mind that can describe how it feels to step on a dead man’s hand or capture the image of smoke from a train dancing on the grass. Flaubert once said that the “enormous defect” of his novel “ Salammbo” was that he had made the pedestal too big for the statue. William James said this more than a hundred years ago: “The thought itself is the thinker.” This is why great works can also be deeply flawed. Books have subjects, of course, but what they are really about is the author struggling to address the subject through language. For the most part, books are impressions of their author’s sensibility. My first novel received so much admiration, I think, because it had a palpable voice.
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Other writers also periodically got in touch and once, in a radio interview, an esteemed author said that one of the reasons he didn’t kill himself was the possibility that I’d write another book. And then, as I sat there staring at my computer screen, it occurred to me that perhaps John Coetzee could help me get a teaching job (and he did later write a letter for me). To have an author of such weight and dignity praise me made me feel that there was weight and dignity to my work also. Coetzee, the Nobel Prize winner? It was a two-sentence e-mail in which he thanked me for “An Obedient Father” and called it a “tremendous book.” I kept reading it over and over.
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I was at the end of another awful day of trying to write. I remember the evening that his e-mail popped up on my computer. Once, in year six or seven, John Coetzee wrote to me. The difference has to do partly with the subjects of the books and what those subjects require, but it also emerged from my new understanding that the reader needs to do as much work as the author.ĭuring the years that I was working on the second novel, I periodically heard from famous writers about the first book. In the second, the paragraphs follow each other, but they do not push and pull. In the first novel, paragraphs end by pushing the reader into the next paragraph, and the next paragraph begins by reaching out and grabbing the reader.
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Whereas with my first novel I had been full of mad ambition, by my second, humility had been beaten into me. During this time I got married and began to live a middle-class life. The second novel was even harder to write, and it took me twelve and a half years instead of nine. I started a new novel and was soon as lost as I had been with the first one. The period of believing that I was a genius did not last long. Once, I cleaned the house that I shared with several drunks simply so that I could get all the nickels from returning their beer bottles. To give a sense of what my life was like back then: I couldn’t afford furniture, so I slept on a strip of foam on the floor my great luxury was buying day-old pastries from a bakery. And at that point I was twenty-nine and just wanted to put the long nightmare of writing the book behind me. I had asked for help from various friends who were writers, but they hadn’t known what to do, either.
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The reason that I had published my novel knowing that parts of it weren’t good was that I didn’t know how to fix them. The belief took hold of me to such a degree that, when a fellow-author told me that his mother, who comments on my weight whenever I see her, had liked neither his book nor mine, it made sense to me that she would be dismissive of her son’s work, but the fact that she did not like mine seemed evidence that she was unsophisticated. Then a chapter was excerpted in The New Yorker, and the book received very positive reviews, and I started believing that I had written a work of genius. At that point, I thought I had written an ordinary book, in that it had some good parts and some parts that were not so good. I had been working on my first novel, “ An Obedient Father,” for nine years when it was accepted for publication.