What are you working on?
A novel or whatever comes out of attempting one. I do think that there’s something to Laura Miller’s warning about writing a “poet’s novel” – something “replete with long passages of description, and scant of plot” – but that’s also a bit of a cliché. Robert Penn Warren and James Dickey made steel-trap plots. Jim Carroll’s Basketball Diaries is a straightforward growing-up tale. I think the secret is being willing to do something unfamiliar with familiar tools. Weightlifting’s the immediate analogue that comes to mind. Powerlifters and fighters, for example, push the same iron, but with different regimens suited to different outcomes. What I am working on is a historical novel, and the past has moved toward us in its unalterable course. Its plot exerts the constant forces of verisimilitude and change against my introspective tendencies. In this instance, I retrain myself for it.
One strand of plot follows the “missing” years of James Fenimore Cooper’s mythical Leather-Stocking during the American Revolution. A second strand takes place in New York’s infamous Five Points neighborhood during the 1830s. The frame narrative follows a twenty-four-hour period in the life of a suspended NYPD detective this past summer. I think of these like geological stratum. In the United States, there seems to be a heightened awareness of how institutions and civic mythologies mask forms of originating violence. René Girard would call these “things hidden since the foundation of the world.” For John Henry Newman, this is because the “human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity. It is out of joint.” As a novelist, I pick a limited instance of this and cover it over with progressive times, situations, and descriptions. The poet in me is more aligned, though, with the characters I invent who must dig it up again through reflection.
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