The Sense of A Middle
A box of books under my bed. Why did I ever think of getting rid of these?
Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag, by Sigrid Nunez.
I met Nunez last week outside the World Trade Center. I had come out of the lobby and was about to make conversation with the doorman. We had talked earlier. But I saw he was speaking with a short, round-faced woman wearing glasses and a black beret. I drifted over to the two. He was asking her name.
“Sigrid,” she said kindly.
I had only heard this name once.
“Are you… Sigrid Nunez?” I asked, fumbling the pronunciation of her last name.
“Yes, I am,” she said, outstretching her hand to shake mine.
“Oh, I know you. It’s a pleasure to meet you,” I said, bowing slightly and putting my hand over my heart in modesty before shaking her hand. “Ben.”
The doorman asked who she was and she said she was a writer.
“Oh, yeah? What do you write?” he asked.
She looked at me, testing, unintentionally, whether I knew the answer.
“You write, uh, art criticism, right?”
I was already embarrassed by my hesitation. I was picturing the cover of Julia Alvarez’s Afterlife in my head.
“Fiction,” she said to both of us.
The doorman was floored in the respectful way only a New York doorman who has met plenty of celebrities can be. Not excited, but still curious.
“What have you written? I’m gonna look you up,” he said.
“I wrote a book called The Friend,” she said with a question mark.
“The Friend?” he asked to clarify.
“The Frand.” It sounded different this time she said it.
“The Frand?” Now he was mispronouncing it.
“Yeah, The Frand.”
“Okay — The Frand. I’m gonna look you up.”
“They’re making a movie out of it. Bill Murray is in it.”
My eyes lit up as I remembered Caddyshack, which I would never mention because it’s the most obvious one.
“I met Bill Murray once,” the doorman said.
“Oh, yeah?” I asked. “What was he like?” Too excited.
They laughed over Bill Murray’s infamous antics, unknown to me.
Tall white couples with baseball caps and athletic shorts were walking up to the lobby tours.
“That way!” the doorman shouted. And shouted. The tourists wouldn’t stop coming.
“You need a sign,” Nunez said.
“How do you know they’re tourists?” I said, stupidly, stupidly, stupidly. I knew they were, too.
“Oh, you can just tell,” they both said almost in unison, me regretting that I couldn’t join them in harmony.
“You really need a sign,” she said again.
“I feel like a sign would be kinda tacky, right?” I said. I needed to say something insightful that Nunez would remember me by. But neither of them acknowledged it.
“They tried that once,” the doorman said.
“Or some lights above the entryway or something,” she added.
“I feel like that would be kinda tacky though, would kinda ruin the austere look of the building.” I did not actually say “austere.”
She looked at me, mouth slightly ajar, and slowly nodded her head in agreement. But there would be no final decision on the sign question today.
“Well, I’ve got to go, but look it up — The Frand.”
The doorman said goodbye and I told her how nice it was to meet her. He nudged my arm after she walked away.
“You shoulda told her your last name, man.” Now that would be tacky, I thought.
“Nah, I didn’t wanna…” I said, trying to make my anxious caution sound like a tactful social strategy.
“The Friend, huh,” he said.
“Was she saying ‘frand’ or ‘friend’?”
“The Friend, yeah.” He wasn’t as dumbstruck at the pronunciation as I was. We shook hands and he told me his name, which I’ve forgotten. And I had forgotten that Nunez wrote this book about Sontag, one of my idols. I haven’t read it.
Maybe if my books weren’t under my bed, I wouldn’t have said she wrote art criticism.
The Brooklyn Follies, by Paul Auster.
I’ve never read this one. But when I moved to New York, I heard Auster speak alongside Joyce Carol Oates at the Brooklyn Book Festival. He was decrepit and raspy and said nothing I remember. Oates looked and sounded the same. But it was a relief after listening to Lauren Oyler talk about Fake Accounts while hundreds of proto-brats and me sat on the steps of Borough Hall. Oyler was cool; you could tell she was uncomfortable with the fame. But I was annoyed at how many people liked her. Not so many now, after Ann Manov exposed the inauthenticities of No Judgement in her Bookforum review. The guys who used to promote Oyler’s writing, like Christian Lorenzten, don’t anymore. At the time, I tried to force myself to be excited about being so close to a famous writer. I had not realized that just going to see writers speak didn’t made you a part of the New York literary world. And I had not begun to master the art of doorman-excited.
Robert Gottlieb’s autobiography, Avid Reader, is in the box, too.
I want to read this one now. I had started it, but got bored of learning about his early life. I wanted a handbook, not a story. I was about to call it a “memoir of editing” above; that’s what I wished it had been. I thought rules made you a good editor. I was against narrative. I sometimes still tell people I am.
I read a New Yorker article by Katy Waldman yesterday that cited Giancarlo DiTrapano, the publisher of Honor Levy’s brat-summer novel, My First Book, who once tweeted about “5 things that dont matter.” They were “arc, narrative, characters, plot, epiphany.” The one thing that does matter, he wrote, is style. This is not my one thing. My one thing would be substance, which might be the opposite of style, though the two can exist at once. Besides, everything has those “5 things” whether you like it or not. A collage of images written in book-form still has a narrative, even if that narrative only exists in an extratextual form: I walk to the bookstore, buy the book, and walk back — a story. Or, I read the first ten pages at home on the couch, I walk to the park, I read fifty pages on a bench, I walk home. I have changed from the person who read those first ten pages, if only because I’ve burned a few calories. Or, the narrative can exist in pre/post-textual form — the form of the author starting off thinking “I will write this book that will have no narrative but will be a collage of images” and then finishing up thinking “I have written this book that has no narrative and is a collage of images.” Surely, something must have happened to them in the interceding period. As long as there is a front and back cover of a book, there will be narrative. (Even with ebooks, there is an initial click, or the equivalent, to buy, another click to begin reading, and an exit-click when you finish the book). We have to stop thinking of narrative in terms of “what happens in this book and to whom” and start thinking of it in terms of “how does this book change as the text goes from the first word to the last word.” If that’s too much of a stretch, then just think of those diagrams that Laurence Sterne drew in Tristram Shandy. The events and characters zigzag and crash into each other but there is always a beginning and an end. Yes, I am defining narrative as “isolated period in time having a beginning and an end.” So if rules don’t make you a good editor, then let’s stop reading DiTrapano’s tweets and start reading some stories. I’m going to start by maybe reading Avid Reader.
That’s the longest paragraph I’m going to include here, and I hope when you saw it coming you got the feeling of “oh, boy, a meaty one; this must mean there’s something good in here” and not “is this where he’s going to get to the point?”
The point is, I have recently started believing that stories matter.
I used to hate telling stories. One reason is I worry about getting interrupted. I can usually tell who’s going to interrupt me, so I don’t even try. Another reason is I give away the ending at the beginning. This has already happened to me twice in the past few months.
One night, at a party, I was talking to a couple who had just told me how a homeless man had attacked them, beaten one of them up, and stolen his phone, leading to a foot chase in the East Village. They were moving to DC the next day. I asked if they had heard a story that was circulating within our friend group. A crazy story. You wouldn’t believe it if I told you. But I can’t because it’s gossip about maybe one of the top five most famous people on Earth. It’s the best story I’ve ever heard. I will probably tell it to you if you ask me in person.
They said they hadn’t heard it. I wanted my friend to tell it because he does it better, and he’s the one I got it from. So we gathered a bunch of people in the kitchen and I said to him, “Tell the——— story! Tell the ——— story!” “The ——— story” is how I referred to it when I told the couple. He looked at me with comic disdain and informed me that when I had said the name that filled those blanks when referring to the story, that gave away the ending. He told it anyway and it was a hit, but I was disappointed in myself.
It happened again last month with the same friend, when, live on Radio Free Brooklyn, I told about the time I went to a sober casino outside San Diego. One of my best stories. I started by saying some friends drove me into the parking lot and we saw a huge sign that said, “World’s Largest Sober Casino.” But what had actually happened was I thought it was a regular casino and when I got inside and asked for a drink, the waitress told me they only had orange juice and cranberry juice, which caused me to look around, clock the silence, and realize why this was the most depressing casino I had ever been in.
I still find the endings of stories—the endings of any written piece, including this one—brainfreezingly difficult to write. But the easiest way to get by that, I’ve found recently, is to tell a true story and end it when it ends. An ending doesn’t have to be neat and it doesn’t have to be revealing. Or punchy. It doesn’t have to exist at all, because it will exist anyway.
It’s like our obsession with the orgasm. Sex isn’t just about coming. It’s everything in between. When I imagine sex I’ve had, I don’t remember the orgasms (I see you smirking, knowing how this could just mean that the other person didn’t come, but I’m serious); I remember the sex itself. How her hips moved, how it sounded when she started kissing my ear, how sweaty we were and yet we didn’t smell, how her hair looked draped over her shoulders, how we started laughing in the middle because it was so good.