Bad Writers

I’m not teaching any longer – another quickly exhausted career – yet even so, I’m spending the three months of summer in the hammock, imagining myself in other places, dredging up reflected memories like light in a drop of dew.

And I will write in the new rhythm that has evolved with the loss of deadlines. It has taken me some years to understand this pace and what expectations one should have. Those deadlines? Another past life, another half-career turned memory.

One book has been finished in this method. Two others are in process at the moment, in between spells in the hammock.

I had to admire the short story by Henry Roth in the current New Yorker called “God the Novelist.” Roth worked for decades on the novel this excerpt was adapted from. The unedited manuscript was over 2,000 pages long and he just kept writing. You can sense what that means in the story itself, how one becomes lost within one’s mind writing all the time.

In the subsequent two stories of the same issue, other writers are discussed. Harper Lee, the author of a single novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” is the subject of a new biography, written without the consent of a single interview. She refused publicity and never got over the publication and acclaim of that first novel. (The article also takes pains to demonstrate that, when all is said and done, the book is overrated and not that well written; the movie is better, the author claims.) Harper Lee, like Melville, and like her friend Truman Capote in a way, followed the writing life into a strange cul-de-sac. Nothing was published after a time. Decades passed.

The third article is yet another revisionist review of Dan Brown’s writing abilities for “The Da Vinci Code,” which has been roundly trounced for its prose style, opinions all given in retrospect and unrelated to the movie. I said from the outset that the book was ridiculous – I could probably dig up the emails I sent at the time to this effect – but I didn’t believe then or now that the writing was any worse than that of any other potboiler writers raking in fields of cash for their enterprise.

Actually, Anthony Lane’s review of the movie is a very funny, well-written review of the writing style of Dan Brown. (His review is fun to read, reminding one of Pauline Kael’s writing in the same magazine, something more often good to read than to rely upon as insightful criticism. I'm sure reading the review is more fun that going to the movie would be.)

One of the two new books I am writing took a decisive turn over the Memorial Day weekend. I was reading a seminal book of Mennonite theology, “The Politics of Jesus” by John Howard Yoder, as I rocked in the hammock, imagining I was on the diesel-smelling ferry between Brindisi, Italy, and Greece. Yoder’s book is almost impenetrable in reference and footnotes. It was written in 1972, but I’d never read it. And for the first time in recent memory, I found myself understanding Christian theology and practice with a positive and meaningful purpose.

I’m still elated at this discovery, made while doing nothing, far from my keyboard, swinging in shade, and reading what almost anyone would agree is a book rich, meaningful, valuable, and badly written.