The following piece was written in January 1997, under the pseudonym "Daedalus," for Alexis Massie's now-defunct Web site Pandora's Box of Tricks. I feel free now to reveal that the Thayne of this essay is in reality author Sean Stewart, and the book in question his excellent novel Clouds End. I did eventually finish reading the novel, and I wholeheartedly recommend that you pick up a copy.
I have this writer friend. Don't look so surprised—it happens. Particularly when one is a writer oneself. I mean, doctors have doctor friends, lawyers have lawyer friends, Indian chiefs—well, at the very least, they know a lot of Indians. When you hang out where other writers hang out, you're bound to hit it off with someone—unless you're Richard J. Herrnstein or Charles Murray, authors of The Bell Curve, and at least they have each other.
So anyway, I have this writer friend. Let's call him Thayne. Thayne's fourth novel was released a few months ago to a great deal of acclaim and huzzah. Having admired his first three novels immensely, I held the new book reverently and breathlessly when I spied it on the "New Fiction" racks at Barnes & Noble, like a new uncle might handle hold his brother's infant child. But I didn't buy it.
No, since I'm really a cheap bastard at heart, I finally worked up the nerve to ask Thayne if he might have an extra copy lying around that he would mail to me. Thayne allowed as how he did and he would. You may be turned off by my chutzpah, but it really wasn't such an unusual request between denizens of our particular literary ghetto—er, I mean, genre. We merry scribblers are sending one another copies of our stuff all the time, hoping that our fellows might deign to nominate our humble stories or novels for this award or that. It's the Way Things Are Done.
(To be honest, Thayne's first novel was the only book of his that I actually had to buy myself. I recommended it for an award, and the grateful author sent me a copy of his newly published second novel, inscribed and autographed, as his way of saying thank you. And thus our acquaintance was born.)
At last, the book arrived in the mail. I stripped the corrugated cardboard from about its snowy white covers as enthusiastically as a child on Christmas morning, and I turned it every which way, flushed with the excitement that can only come from the acquisition of a New Book. After I had riffled the pages a few times and felt that soft breeze caress my face, inhaled and savored that particular New Book smell, I laid the volume down on my desk until such time as I felt I could devote my full attention to it. And since I was working on a screenplay at the time, not to mention being somewhere in the middle of reading a different novel, I figured that would be a few days.
Before long Thayne had sent me email, inquiring as to whether or not the book had arrived. When I reported that it had, and that I was looking forward to diving in, Thayne wrote back to express his anxiety. He was worried that I might not like it. He, whose book has enthusiastic blurbs from Ursula K. Le Guin and William Gibson on the cover, was worried about me not liking his book. How charming and very flattering—and how perfectly like a writer.
The requisite few days passed, I finished both my screenplay and Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, and I finally had time to turn my attention to Thayne's novel. And I got about seven pages into it before I set it aside again, and raced through a Vietnam-era novel by another writer of my acquaintance. And then a book on the playwright's craft. And then a book on why Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot.
Conscious that the clock was ticking, and that the pages were dropping from the desk calendar like leaves in autumn, I turned my attention back to Thayne's book. This time I managed to forge all the way to page sixty before setting it aside in favor of a book of conservative essays on government, a book of liberal essays on government, and a staccato-paced noir crime novel of pre-Kennedy era Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, poor Thayne is sitting at home sweating bullets as my verdict on his novel continuously fails to arrive. What a bastard I am.
So what's the problem? Why can't I just sit down and force myself through it? Is the novel really as bad as all that?
No. The problem is that it's really as good as all that. Thayne is a damn fine writer, and his texts are thick with imagery, allegory, symbolism, archetypes, and resonance. His characters and their worlds don't unfold so much as they coalesce, as if from fog, the eventual shape of the whole inherent in each small bit—holographic images that achieve their ultimate sharpness on the final page. His plots rarely follow any predictable narrative path, yet in retrospect it seems they have traversed the only possible route. In short, each of Thayne's novels is a treasure—and this latest promises to be his best effort yet.
Unfortunately, I haven't enough attention to spare at the moment to do this book justice. So many other clamorous thoughts and schemes and worries are crowding the stage of my brain that I simply have not been able to devote to Thayne's novel the sort of intentness and regard that it demands, that it deserves.
But how can tell him that without sounding like an utter phony making pathetic excuses? It's like the time a former girlfriend called me to let me know she was in town for only a day, and I told her with perfect truthfulness that I couldn't come to her hotel because I was doing the laundry. It cut no ice that I had an important job interview the next morning and nothing to wear—her first impression from that conversation, however wrong, was of my pathetic phoniness, and that's the impression that has stuck through the intervening years.
So. I'm stuck waiting for the day that I'm whole enough to appreciate a truly challenging novel, while its poor author is stuck waiting for the other shoe to drop. At least my guilt over this issue can be milked for a few measly column-inches, thereby beating back my guilt over the fact that I've let more than a month since my last piece appeared here. I can only hope that Thayne gets as much mileage out of his anxiety.
Of course, with my luck he'll get a whole novel out of it, and then we'll be right back where we started.