The word novel carries for me a weight as ominous, all-consuming and unforgiving as any Job encountered. I was 17 when I decided to write stories as big as cathedrals, overflowing with the kind of memorable and audacious characters Walker Percy, Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow created. I stayed up all night, writing description, dialogue, plot curlicues, stories within stories, convinced that anything fewer than 10 pages was wasted time. One wrote the way Thomas Wolfe did, I thought, with fury and hubris, translating everything one read, experienced and felt into glistening, unswerving prose. I didn’t need drugs, cigarettes or caffeine; writing was my drug of choice. And the novel was the high point of literary achievement.
Over the next 20 years I wrote novel after novel, all of which were rejected by publishers. They were about my experiences growing up in a family of Russian-Polish Jewish immigrants and various troubled relationships. But content was never more than an excuse to display my talents over hundreds of pages. I never doubted my talent. If talent was the circus, then I was its ringmaster and audience, applauding its every move. No single book inspired me more than Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March.” The gorgeous onslaught of highbrow thought and febrile emotion was conveyed in a poetry of intense, nonstop filibustering language unlike any I’d ever read before. Who remembered or cared what novels like his were about? Percy’s “The Moviegoer” was about a guy who went to movies and fell for his cousin Kate, whom he tried to save. One didn’t need much more plot than this. To me Bellow’s Augie was about great drive and a love of the English sentence and being a writer at the height of his creative passions. It was about writing a masterpiece.
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