by Sigrid Nunez
While she was still a student this woman achieved quite a coup, selling her MFA thesis, a first novel, before it was half finished, along with a second novel before it was even a gleam in her eye. Even before the first book was published she began winning prizes, and after receiving, in quick succession, every literary prize that exists for outstanding promise—a total of almost half a million dollars—she began to be known among us as O.P.
As expected, when it was published, the first novel received excellent reviews. But in spite of this, and in spite of its picking up yet another literary prize, the book did not sell. In our small world O.P. remains famous, she is “that girl who gets everything.” But in the wider world, even among those who pay attention to new fiction, two years after its debut neither the book’s name nor the author’s is likely to ring a bell.
Hardly a new story, and hardly the end of the world. But try telling O.P., who for two years now hasn’t been able to write at all.
She had thought teaching might help, or at least give her something useful to do. As a student, though introverted, she had radiated confidence. But as a teacher she is overwhelmed. She is about the same age as most of her students and even younger than some. She is fully aware how her inexperience shows, how lacking she is in projecting authority. She has a high, thin, naturally quavery voice and a tendency, when anxious, to flush.
She is bitter about her female students, who she senses have it in for her, and from whom she constantly gets the who-do-you-think-you-are vibe women often give off to other women, in particular striving and ambitious women. Among the male students, three have already come on to her. One is so successful at undressing her with his eyes that she finds herself sitting in class with her arms crossed over her breasts. Worse, she finds herself intensely attracted to him.
She sometimes has panic attacks before class. Hence the meditation, sometimes supplemented with benzodiazepine.
O.P. is tormented by the fear not only that she’ll never write again but that her whole life is a lie. Everything she has accomplished so far has been the result of some mistake. Why anyone had wanted to publish her—why anyone thought she could teach—baffling! As for that second novel, no matter how many extensions the publisher grants, she knows she’ll never pull it off.
O.P. lives in terror of being exposed: she is not just a failure, she is a fraud. And would everyone please stop calling her O.P.!
Useless to remind her that identical doubts have bedeviled other writers for all time, including, and perhaps even especially, some of the greatest. Useless to quote Kafka on The Metamorphosis: “Imperfect almost to its very marrow.”
Another teacher, who’s at school on the same days as O.P., reports sometimes hearing her weeping behind her closed door, once because she was hopelessly struggling to write a simple two-page student thesis report.
The day I sit in on one of her classes for a required department observation, I see how the student to whom she has confessed being attracted gazes at her with a tenderly gloating expression. I do not put in my observation report what I believe is the case, that she has started having an affair with this student. If I’m lucky she won’t confide in me, she won’t seek my advice.
I can see this happening one day: I’ll be in a certain place, maybe a store that sells beauty products, or some kind of salon, or the bathroom of a home where I happen to be a guest. I’ll get a whiff of a particular scent, mimosa or orange blossom, but I won’t remember the candles O.P. used to burn in our office, and so I’ll be bewildered by my response: a tremor of alarm, as if I’d just telepathically learned that someone I know is in trouble.
• • •
Across from the office I share with O.P. is the office of this year’s Distinguished Visiting Writer, but he is never there. He does not hold office hours and has instructed the program secretary to forward mail to his home rather than use his school mail slot. When he comes in to teach he goes straight to his workshop classroom. Few of his colleagues ever cross paths with him, and when they do he looks right through the person as if they’re not there. Before the semester began he instructed the chair to inform faculty that he does not do book blurbs. He himself informed students on the first day of class: I don’t do letters of recommendation. Don’t even ask.
When you heard this, you were indignant: I should’ve told him that back when he asked me to write him a letter for the Guggenheim.
Soon after the semester begins, he gives a reading at a Barnes & Noble. The fact that the audience is sparse does not discourage him; he reads for the good part of an hour.
During the Q&A, when someone asks why his book, whose form is highly unconventional, is called a novel, he responds, It’s a novel because I say it is.
During the signing, a woman urges him to write another book as quickly as possible. Because, you know, she says earnestly, there’s nothing out there.
In Barnes & Noble.
• • •
In the news: Thirty-two million adult Americans can’t read. The potential audience for poetry has shrunk by two-thirds since 1992. A “rent-burdened” woman worrying how she’s going to survive in New York City decides to try writing a novel (“and that’s going well”).
PART SEVEN
Wife One lives abroad. She had flown to New York for the memorial event, and one night before she flew home she and I went out to dinner.
“I know it’s worse for you,” she said kindly. “We were married, but that was so long ago. And after it was over, nothing. No friendship, no contact, nothing. That’s how it had to be. And I’ll be honest, at first I thought I wouldn’t even go to the memorial. But then I thought, you know, closure. Whatever that means.”
When it’s suicide, someone at the memorial said, there can be no closure.
“But you,” she said. “You two were such good friends for so long. How I used to envy that. I used to think, if only he and I hadn’t fallen in love, then we could have had a friendship like that!”
But there’d been no resisting, had there. A love so potent it might have been the effect of a spell. One of those grand passions given only to some to experience, the rest to hear tell and dream about.
Even now it has the force of legend for me: beautiful, terrible, doomed.
I remember when being near the two of you was like being near a furnace. And I remember thinking, when things went wrong, that one or the other of you was going to end up dead. You yourself said it sometimes felt like you were doing something forbidden, even criminal. And she, raised Catholic, was convinced that such idolizing love had to be a sin. And, of course, in the end it was this that drove Wife Two to despair: not all your womanizing but the belief that such love doesn’t come twice in a life, that whatever you felt for her could not equal what you’d felt for Wife One, who, she would always fear, still had your heart.
If only we hadn’t fallen in love: she said it over and over.
“I was just thinking about it on the cab ride here. Remember how we worshipped him? How we were all his little groupies? What did they call us back then?”
“A literary Manson family.”
“Oh God, yes. Ugh. How could I forget.”
Remember how we hung on your every word and ran out and bought every book or album you mentioned.
Remember how everything we wrote was some pathetic imitation of you.
Remember how you had us believing that one day you’d win the Nobel Prize.
Now he’s just another dead white male.
He did all right, I said. He did better than most writers.
“But I hear the last couple of years he didn’t write much.”
No.
“Did he seem that depressed? Did he talk about it? I’m not just asking, it’s been keeping me up nights. Why did he quit teaching?”
I recite your various gripes, which were not much different from those heard every day from
other teachers: how even students from top schools didn’t know a good sentence from a bad one, how nobody in publishing seemed to care how anything was written anymore, how books were dying, literature was dying, and the prestige of the writer had sunk so low that the biggest mystery of all was why everyone and their grandmother was turning to authorship as just the ticket to glory.
I tell her about your loss of conviction in the purpose of fiction—today, when no novel, no matter how brilliantly written or full of ideas, was going to have any meaningful effect on society, when it was impossible even to imagine anything like what had led Abraham Lincoln to say, meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, in 1862, So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.
If Abraham Lincoln really did say that.
That’s when I remember the interview.
How strange to have forgotten it, even for a time. The interview, which it now occurs to me was probably your last, for the inaugural issue of a midwestern literary journal.
The interview in which you made a prediction that there would be a wave of suicides among writers.
And when do you see this happening?
Soon.
I remember being surprised that you hadn’t mentioned that interview, which I might have missed altogether if another friend hadn’t forwarded it to me.
I didn’t mention it because I was embarrassed. It occurred to me later how it would sound—melodramatic, self-pitying. I’d had a few drinks.
I remember the interviewer asked the usual question about audience, whether you wrote with a particular reader in mind. Which set you off about the relationship between writer and reader and how much that relationship had changed. As a young writer you’d been told, Never assume your reader isn’t as intelligent as you are. Advice you’d taken to heart. You wrote with that reader in mind, you said, someone as smart as—or why not even smarter than!—yourself. Someone intellectually curious, who had the habit of reading, who loved books as much as you did. Who loved fiction. And then, with the internet, had come the possibility of reading the responses of actual readers, among whom you were pleased to find some who did indeed match, more or less, the reader in your head. But there were others—not just one or two but quite a number when you added them up—who had misread, or misunderstood, in some cases quite seriously, what you’d said. Troubling enough when the reader was someone who’d hated the book, but that was far from always the case. Like other writers, you now found yourself regularly damned or praised for things that had never occurred to you, things you had never expressed and never would express, things that represented pretty much the opposite of what you actually believed.
All this, you said, had thrown you for a loop. Because, although you knew you were supposed to be glad for each and every copy of a book that was sold, and you knew you were supposed to feel grateful for any reader, who after all might have chosen to read any one of millions of other books instead of yours, you honestly found it hard to be happy about a reader who got things all wrong, you honestly would just as soon a reader like that ignore your book and go read something else.
But hasn’t it always been this way?
No doubt. But in the past the writer didn’t have to know, the problem wasn’t right there in your face.
But what about “Trust the tale not the teller,” and how the critic’s job is to save the work from the writer?
By “critic,” you know, Lawrence did not mean self-appointed. I would love to see the consumer review that saved a book from its author.
Well, if I could just play devil’s advocate here: Let’s say I invite someone to dinner and cook them a fabulous beef stew and they gobble it up and say, Wow, yum, that’s the best lamb stew I ever had! So what? Isn’t the main thing that they enjoyed it?
Oh, were we talking about dinner? Well, let me say this: I don’t take it lightly if when I write the word beef someone chooses to read lamb. People talking about a book as if it were just another thing, like a dish, or a product like an electronic device or a pair of shoes, to be rated for consumer satisfaction—that was just the goddamn trouble, you said. Even those aspiring writers your students seemed never to judge a book on how well it fulfilled the author’s intentions but solely on whether it was the kind of book that they liked. And so you got papers stating things like “I hate Joyce, he’s so full of himself,” or “I don’t see why I should have to read about white people problems.” You got customer reviews full of umbrage, suggesting that if a book didn’t affirm what the reader already felt—what they could identify with, what they could relate to—the author had no business writing the book at all. Those hilarious stories that people loved, and loved to share—the book clubber who said, When I read a novel I want someone to die in it; the complaint against Anne Frank’s diary, in which nothing much happens and then the story just breaks off—did not make you laugh. Oh, you knew that a lot of people, including other writers, would accuse you of being precious. Some would say that, after all, the one sure way for an artist to know his work had failed was if everyone “got” it. But the truth was, you had become so dismayed by the ubiquity of careless reading that something had happened that you had thought never could happen: you had started not to care whether people read you or not. And though you knew your publisher would spit in your eye for saying so, you were inclined to agree with whoever it was who said that no truly good book would find more than three thousand readers.
“Oh dear,” says Wife One.
Near the end of the interview, you got on the subject of mentors and teaching and blasted the new rules forbidding romance between professors and students.
What a load of crap, this notion of making the university a safe place. Think of all the wonderful things in life that could never have happened—all the great things that would never have been created or discovered or even imagined—if the top priority had been to make everyone feel safe. Who’d want to live in such a world?
“Oh dear, oh dear.”
The only part of the interview I hadn’t heard before was the part about the suicides.
I’d had a few drinks. I asked to see the interview before it ran and was told yes of course, but then the prick never sent it.
I tell Wife One about the episode with the women students who would not be called dear. Something I don’t tell her, and which is another thing I’d forgotten but that has just now come back: on the day of the interview you were upset, and you told me why. You suspected that your agent had submitted your last novel to the publisher without having read it.
I’m glad to hear that magazine is folding. It was a shitty little magazine.
“This is what’s been keeping me up nights,” says Wife One. “Something I read, about how, among people who try to kill themselves and survive, almost all say they regretted it. Like jumpers who say that as soon as they hit the air they knew they’d made a mistake, they didn’t really want to die.”
I’ve heard this too, but also another story, from another era, about what coroners supposedly learned from the corpses of people who drowned themselves in, I believe it was, the Seine. Those whose reason for wanting to die was love had tried to scramble back out of the water. Those whose reason was financial ruin had sunk like stones.
Getting old. We know this must have been the hardest thing, much harder for you even than for other people. A man who once could have had any woman he wanted. Who had groupies hanging on his every word and believing he could win the Nobel Prize.
Even if it was just a bunch of silly, infatuated girls like us.
We had begun to draw attention. Two women bent over their entrées, holding hands, dabbing at their eyes with their napkins.
• • •
Later, when she gets her first look at Apollo, on Skype, she says, “Holy shit! I can’t believe they dumped a monster like that on you. No wonder no one wants him.”
I wince. I cannot be
ar to hear Apollo called unwanted. I remember Wife Three shrugging off my suggestion that there must be many people who’d want such a beautiful dog: Maybe if he was a puppy.
“And I don’t see how he could’ve expected you to adopt him if it meant losing your home.”
“I’m sure either I never told him I couldn’t have a dog or he forgot.”
“But the fact that he didn’t ask, never even ran it by you as if you had no say in the matter. I can’t imagine what he was thinking.”
But I can. For I have imagined it many times: how, among all the other questions certain to have come to you, was what will happen to the dog.
I know of another suicide, among whose last things was taking her dog to the pound. A farewell that does not bear thinking about.
Not that you put it in writing: like most suicides, you put nothing in writing. Nor did you change anything in the will you had made out years before. But you made sure your wife knew.
She lives alone, she doesn’t have a partner or any kids or pets, she works mostly at home, and she loves animals—that’s what he said.
Maybe at some point you did consider discussing it with me, maybe you were even planning to do so. But then. Suicides often choose their moment at random, I’m told, in a mood of it’s now or never, when even a pause to scribble farewell could mean time to lose one’s nerve. (He who hesitates is not lost.)
Maybe you were afraid that if we were actually to have that conversation—what would happen to your dog in the event of your death—I might guess, or at least suspect, what you were contemplating.
When I tell Wife One how old Apollo is, a senior dog of a short-lived breed that the vet gave maybe two more years, she says, “That makes it even worse. Maybe if he was a puppy I could understand. But what are you supposed to do with an old dog that size? How are you going to take care of him if he becomes infirm?”
This thought, with all its dire implications, has of course already occurred to me.
