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Friday, March 24, 2004
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On Tuesday, Barnaby Sandwich wandered into a reading at Columbia University’s Miller Theater, sponsored by The New Yorker,
a local magazine. Under an enormous New Yorker banner in the colors of
Communist China sat writers A. M. Homes and Jonathan Lethem, and
fiction editor Deborah Triesman, as well as some bottled water and an
aspidistra plant. Barnaby sat in the front row, in a turquoise suit and
green eyeshade, with a stenographer’s pad for notes, and a bottle of
ink balanced on his knee, and a steel-nib pen, and his
peanut-butter-and-celeries lined up carefully in his pocket. During the
introductions, he drew himself a PRESS card on the back of his ticket
and stuck it behind his ear.
Ms. Homes read first, a condensed version of the first chapter of her
new novel This Book Will Save Your Life. A rich and empty man in Los
Angeles realizes, despite his native lack of self-consciousness, that
he is having a heart attack, literally as well as metaphorically, that
he is alone and empty, that his life has been wasted on the purposeless
purpose of accumulating money, and that despite, or else because of,
abundant electronic media of communication, no one can hear him at all.
(Homes later explained apologetically that the book was not conceived
of as an indictment of America, but only turned out that way.) To
Barnaby’s ear, the piece seemed to have the sort of sympathetic
neutrality that would leave his own lurid schadenfreude plenty of room
to operate. He carefully noted down the title: This Book Will Save Your
Life.
Then Mr. Lethem read his short story “Vivian Relf,” which struck
Barnaby, who has Vienna on the brain, as a very entertaining reworking
of “Letter from an Unknown Woman” by Stefan Zweig. Lethem was a fine
reader, and he wore a bright orange shirt, but Barnaby did not get
around to asking him if he had read Stefan Zweig. (Dear Mr. Lethem,
Have you read “Letter from an Unknown Woman” by Stefan Zweig? Please
reply to Barnaby Sandwich, Poste Restante, Vienna.)
After the readings came questions, first from the editor, on behalf of
the people, and then from the people themselves; and Barnaby carefully
noted down that it is best to write in the morning, not the evening,
and at Yaddo, if possible, but certainly not in New York or near
telephones. Writing at the Yaddo colony struck Barnaby as something of
a catch-22, since you have to submit writing to be admitted—where to
begin? He decided, in the end, that this must have been a deliberate
instructional paradox—the Yaddo koan, very similar to “it takes money
to make money.”
He was glad to hear Mr. Lethem say that he did not write to please an
audience, but only to please himself, or else to impress himself as he
was at fifteen or sixteen; this writer concurs exactly. He was also
glad to hear A. M. Homes say that autobiography does not interest her:
God bless her! We could use more like her. Lethem said that the hero of
his story “flirts like a Nabokovian ass.” Homes described researching
stab wounds in the back of Barnes & Noble. Barnaby broke wind like
a tuba and then glared at an elderly librarian, hoping to mislead Ms.
Triesman into thinking that the noise had come from her; Triesman did
not seem convinced.
Finally, as the red-and-gold New Yorker banner was rolled up, and the
elves sang the New Yorker theme song, after Homes and Lethem had signed
books and shaken hands, Barnaby slipped out onto the street and took
himself out for some pork tamales. Over his tamales, he fell into
conversation with a Macintosh computer tech who had a scar or birthmark
on his cheek that looked like the long trail of a bloody tear. For the
first three or four sentences this amiable tech attempted to explain
what he meant, but quickly he began talking about his work at full
speed, and became, to Barnaby, who still writes with a chisel,
completely impenetrable; Barnaby wondered if he sounds equally
impenetrable when he discusses books.
“I mean, come on! You’re talking about putting a thirty gigahertz
psychology into the antagonist of a fin-de-siècle bildungsroman with
sixteen RTF nozzles integrated into the media convection! For under a
thousand bucks! Are you kidding me? This guy’s a genius!”
And then Barnaby Sandwich drank three pints of delicious horchata, went
home, flossed his teeth, cursed wildly, and lay in a sugar fit tossing
and turning almost until dawn.
(This Book Will Save Your Life by A.M. Homes comes out in April. Men
and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem contains “Vivian Relf.” You may also
wish to consider picking up The Latin Sexual Vocabulary by J. N. Adams.
It has a bright orange cover and explains the difference between
fellatio and irrumatio, which may save you some embarrassment,
depending on what kind of day you’re having.) |
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