With Andy gone, I was left with the Lamberts and their three grown children, who’d been haunting the novel’s margins all along. I will skip over the many further contractions and subtractions the story had to undergo to become writable, and mention just two other obstacles I had to surmount, at least partially, to become the person who could write it.
The first of these obstacles was shame. By my mid-thirties, I was ashamed of almost everything I’d done in my personal life for the previous fifteen years. I was ashamed of having married so early, ashamed of my guilt, ashamed of the years of moral contortions I’d undergone on my way to divorce, ashamed of my sexual inexperience, ashamed of my longtime social isolation, ashamed of what an outrageous and judgmental mother I had, ashamed of being a bleeding and undefended person instead of a tower of remoteness and command and intellect like DeLillo or Pynchon, ashamed to be writing a book that seemed to want to turn on the question of whether an outrageous midwestern mother will get one last Christmas at home with her family. I wanted to write a novel about the big issues of my day, and instead, like Josef K., who is dismayed and maddened by having to deal with his trial while his colleagues all pursue their professional advantage, I was mired in shame about my innocence.
Much of this shame became concentrated in the character of Chip Lambert. I worked for a full year to get his story going, and at the end of that year I had about thirty usable pages. In the last days of my marriage, I’d had a brief relationship with a young woman I’d met when I was teaching. She wasn’t a student and had never been my student, and she was much sweeter and more patient than the girl Chip Lambert gets involved with. But it was a very awkward and unsatisfactory relationship, a relationship that I now literally writhed with shame to think about, and for some reason it seemed necessary to incorporate it into Chip’s story. The problem was that every time I tried to put Chip into a situation like mine, he became horribly repellent to me. To make his situation plausible and understandable, I kept trying to invent a backstory for him that bore some resemblance to my own, but I couldn’t stop hating my own innocence. When I tried to make Chip less innocent, more worldly-wise and sexually experienced, the story simply seemed dishonest and uninteresting. I was haunted by the ghost of Andy Aberant, haunted also by two early novels of Ian McEwan, The Innocent and The Comfort of Strangers, both of which were so powerfully icky that I’d wanted to take a hot shower after reading them. They were my prime example of what I didn’t want to write but couldn’t seem to help writing. Every time I held my breath for a few days and produced a new batch of Chip pages, I ended up with stuff that made me want to take a shower. The pages would start out funny but quickly devolve into a confession of shame. There seemed to be simply no way to translate my singular weird experience into a more general and forgiving and entertaining narrative.
A lot happened to me in that year of struggling with Chip Lambert, but two things that people said to me that year stand out in particular. One was said by my mother, on the last afternoon I spent with her, when we knew she was going to die soon. A piece of The Corrections had appeared in The New Yorker, and although my mother, to her immense credit, had chosen not to read the piece while she was dying, I decided to confess some things I’d always kept secret from her. They weren’t terribly dark secrets—this was simply my attempt to explain why I hadn’t turned out to have the kind of life she’d wanted for me. I wanted to reassure her that, strange though my life might look to her, I was still going to be okay after she was gone. And, as with the New Yorker story, she mostly didn’t want to hear about all the times I’d climbed out of my bedroom window at night, and how sure I’d always been of wanting to be a writer, even when I’d pretended otherwise. But late in the afternoon she made it clear that she had been listening. She nodded and said, in a kind of vague summation: “Well, you’re an eccentric.” This was, partly, her best effort to recognize and forgive who I was. But the statement was mainly, in its vague and summary quality—its almost dismissive tone—her way of saying that it finally didn’t matter to her what kind of person I was. That my life was more important to me than it was to her. That what mattered most to her now was her own life, which was about to end. And this was one of her last gifts to me: the implicit instruction not to worry so much about what she, or anybody else, might think of me. To be myself, as she, in her dying, was being herself.
The other really helpful comment came from my friend David Means a few months later, when I was complaining to him about how mad I was being driven by the problem of Chip Lambert’s sexual history. David is a true artist, and his most insightful comments tend also to be his most opaque and mysterious. He said to me, on the subject of shame: “You don’t write through shame, you write around it.” I still couldn’t tell you exactly what he meant by these contrasting prepositions, but it was immediately clear to me that those two early McEwan novels were examples of somebody writing through shame, and that my task, with Chip Lambert, was to find some way to include shame in the narrative without being overcome by it: some way to isolate and quarantine shame as an object, ideally as an object of comedy, rather than letting it permeate and poison every sentence. From here it was a short step to imagining that Chip Lambert, while having his dalliance with his student, takes an illegal drug whose primary effect is to eliminate shame. Once I had that idea, and could finally begin to laugh at shame, I wrote the rest of the Chip section in a few weeks and the rest of the novel in a year.
The biggest remaining problem during that year was loyalty. It arose particularly in the writing of the chapter about Gary Lambert, who bore a certain superficial resemblance to my oldest brother. There was, for example, Gary’s project of assembling an album of his favorite family photographs: my brother was involved with a project like that himself. And since my brother is the most sensitive and sentimental person in my family, I didn’t see how I could use details from his life without hurting him and jeopardizing our good relations. I felt afraid of his anger, guilty about laughing at real-life details that weren’t funny to him, disloyal to be airing private family matters in a public narrative, and all-around morally dubious to be appropriating, for my own professional purposes, the private life of a nonwriter. These were all reasons I’d resisted “autobiographical” fiction in the past. And yet the details were too meaningful not to use, and it wasn’t as if I’d ever concealed from my family that I was a writer listening carefully to everything they said. So I went around and around and finally ended up discussing the matter with a wise older friend of mine. To my surprise, she became angry with me and reproached me for my narcissism. What she said was akin to my mother’s message on our last afternoon together. She said, “Do you think your brother’s life revolves around you? Do you think he’s not an adult with a life of his own, full of things more important than you are? Do you think you’re so powerful that something you write in a novel is going to harm him?”
All loyalties, both in writing and elsewhere, are meaningful only when they’re tested. Being loyal to yourself as a writer is most difficult when you’re just starting out—when being a writer hasn’t yet given you enough of a public return to justify your loyalty to it. The benefits of being on good terms with your friends and family are obvious and concrete; the benefits of writing about them are still largely speculative. There comes a point, though, when the benefits begin to equalize. And the question then becomes: Am I willing to risk alienating somebody I love in order to continue becoming the writer I need to be? For a long time, in my marriage, my answer to this was no. Even today there are relationships so important to me that I’m at pains to write around them, rather than through them. But what I’ve learned is that there’s potential value, not only for your writing but also for your relationships, in taking autobiographical risks: that you may, in fact, be doing your brother or your mother or your best friend a favor by giving them the opportunity to rise to the occasion of being written about—by trusting them to love the whole you, including the writer part. What tur
ns out to matter most is that you write as truthfully as possible. If you really love the person whose material you’re writing about, the writing has to reflect that love. There’s still always a risk that the person won’t be able to see the love, and that your relationship may suffer, but you’ve done what all writers finally reach the point of having to do, which is to be loyal to themselves.
I’m happy to report, in closing, that my brother and I are now on better terms than ever. When I was about to send him an advance copy of The Corrections, I told him, on the phone, that he might hate the book and might even hate me. His reply, for which I remain deeply grateful, was “Hating you is not an option.” The next time I heard from him, after he’d read the book, he began by saying, “Hello, Jon. It’s your brother—Gary.” He has since gone on, when talking to his friends about the book, to make no secret of the resemblance. He has his own life, with its own trials and satisfactions, and having a writer for a brother is just another piece of his own story. We love each other dearly.
I JUST CALLED TO SAY I LOVE YOU
One of the great irritations of modern technology is that when some new development has made my life palpably worse and is continuing to find new and different ways to bedevil it, I’m still allowed to complain for only a year or two before the peddlers of coolness start telling me to get over it already, Grampaw—this is just the way life is now.
I’m not opposed to technological developments. Digital voice mail and caller ID, which together destroyed the tyranny of the ringing telephone, seem to me two of the truly great inventions of the late twentieth century. And how I love my BlackBerry, which lets me deal with lengthy, unwelcome e-mails in a few breathless telegraphic lines for which the recipient is nevertheless obliged to feel grateful, because I did it with my thumbs. And my noise-canceling headphones, on which I can blast frequency-shifted white noise that drowns out even the most determined woofing of a neighbor’s television set. And the whole wonderful world of DVD technology and high-definition screens, which have already spared me from so many sticky theater floors, so many rudely whispering cinemagoers, so many openmouthed crunchers of popcorn.
Privacy, to me, is not about keeping my personal life hidden from other people. It’s about sparing me from the intrusion of other people’s personal lives. And so, although my very favorite gadgets are actively privacy-enhancing, I look kindly on pretty much any development that doesn’t force me to interact with it. If you choose to spend an hour every day tinkering with your Facebook profile, or if you don’t see any difference between reading Jane Austen on a Kindle and reading her on a printed page, or if you think Grand Theft Auto IV is the greatest Gesamtkunstwerk since Wagner, I’m very happy for you, as long as you keep it to yourself. The developments I have a problem with are the insults that keep on insulting, the injuries of yesteryear that keep on giving pain. Airport TV, for example: it seems to be actively watched by about one traveler in ten (unless there’s football on) while creating an active nuisance for the other nine. Year after year; in airport after airport; a small but apparently permanent diminution in the quality of the average traveler’s life. Or, another example, the planned obsolescence of great software and its replacement by bad software. I’m still unable to accept that the best word-processing program ever written, WordPerfect 5.0 for DOS, won’t even run on any computer I can buy now. Oh, sure, in theory you can still run it in Windows’ little DOS-emulating window, but the tininess and graphical crudeness of that emulator are like a deliberate insult on Microsoft’s part to those of us who would prefer not to use a feature-heavy behemoth. WordPerfect 5.0 was hopelessly primitive for desktop publishing but unsurpassable for writers who wanted only to write. Elegant, bug-free, negligible in size, it was bludgeoned out of existence by the obese, intrusive, monopolistic, crash-prone Word. If I hadn’t been collecting old cast-off computers in my office closet, I wouldn’t be able to use WordPerfect at all by now. And already I’m down to my last spare computer! And yet people have the nerve to be annoyed with me if I won’t send them texts in a format intelligible to all-powerful Word. We live in a Word world now, Grampaw. Time to take your GOI pill.
But these are mere annoyances. The technological development that has done lasting harm of real social significance—the development that, despite the continuing harm it does, you risk ridicule if you publicly complain about today—is the cell phone.
Just ten years ago, New York City (where I live) still abounded with collectively maintained public spaces in which citizens demonstrated respect for their community by not inflicting their banal bedroom lives on it. The world ten years ago was not yet fully conquered by yak. It was still possible to see the use of Nokias as an ostentation or an affectation of the affluent. Or, more generously, as an affliction or a disability or a crutch. There was unfolding, after all, in New York in the late nineties, a seamless citywide transition from nicotine culture to cellular culture. One day the lump in the shirt pocket was Marlboros, the next day it was Motorola. One day the vulnerably unaccompanied pretty girl was occupying her hands and mouth and attention with a cigarette, the next day she was occupying them with a very important conversation with a person who wasn’t you. One day a crowd gathered around the first kid on the playground with a pack of Kools, the next day around the first kid with a color screen. One day travelers were clicking lighters the second they were off an airplane, the next day they were speed-dialing. Pack-a-day habits became hundred-dollar monthly Verizon bills. Smoke pollution became sonic pollution. Although the irritant changed overnight, the suffering of a self-restrained majority at the hands of a compulsive minority, in restaurants and airports and other public spaces, remained eerily constant. Back in 1998, not long after I’d quit cigarettes, I would sit on the subway and watch other riders nervously folding and unfolding phones, or nibbling on the teatlike antennae that all the phones then had, or just quietly clutching their devices like a mother’s hand, and I would feel something close to sorry for them. It still seemed to me an open question how far the trend would go: whether New York truly wanted to become a city of phone addicts sleepwalking down the sidewalks in off-putting little clouds of private life, or whether the notion of a more restrained public self might somehow prevail.
Needless to say, there wasn’t any contest. The cell phone wasn’t one of those modern developments, like Ritalin or oversize umbrellas, for which significant pockets of civilian resistance hearteningly persist. Its triumph was swift and total. Its abuses were lamented and bitched about in essays and columns and letters to various editors, and then lamented and bitched about more trenchantly when the abuses seemed only to be getting worse, but that was the end of it. The complaints had been registered, some small token adjustments had been made (the “quiet car” on Amtrak trains; discreet little signs poignantly pleading for restraint in restaurants and gyms), and cellular technology was then free to continue doing its damage without fear of further criticism, because further criticism would be unfresh and uncool. Grampaw.
But just because the problem is familiar to us now doesn’t mean steam stops issuing from the ears of drivers trapped behind a guy chatting on his phone in a passing lane and staying perfectly abreast of a vehicle in the slow lane. And yet: everything in our commercial culture tells the chatty driver that he is in the right and tells everybody else that we are in the wrong—that we are failing to get with the attractively priced program of freedom and mobility and unlimited minutes. Commercial culture tells us that if we’re sore with the chatty driver it must be because we’re not having as good a time as he is. What is wrong with us, anyway? Why can’t we lighten up a little and take out our own phones, with our own Friends and Family plans, and start having a better time ourselves, right there in the passing lane?
Socially retarded people don’t suddenly start acting more adult when social critics are peer-pressured into silence. They only get ruder. One currently worsening national plague is the shopper who remains engrossed in a call throughout a transaction wi
th a checkout clerk. The typical combination in my own neighborhood, in Manhattan, involves a young white woman, recently graduated from someplace expensive, and a local black or Hispanic woman of roughly the same age but fewer advantages. It is, of course, a liberal vanity to expect your checkout clerk to interact with you or to appreciate the scrupulousness of your determination to interact with her. Given the repetitive and low-paying nature of her job, she’s allowed to treat you with boredom or indifference; at worst, it’s unprofessional of her. But this does not relieve you of your own moral obligation to acknowledge her existence as a person. And while it’s true that some clerks don’t seem to mind being ignored, a notably large percentage do become visibly irritated or angered or saddened when a customer is unable to tear herself off her phone for even two seconds of direct interaction. Needless to say, the offender herself, like the chatty freeway driver, is blissfully unaware of pissing anybody off. In my experience, the longer the line behind her, the more likely it is she’ll pay for her $1.98 purchase with a credit card. And not the tap-and-go microchip kind of credit card, either, but the wait-for-the-printed-receipt-and-then-(only-then)-with-zombiesh-clumsiness-begin-shifting-the-cell-phone-from-one-ear-to-the-other-and-awkwardly-pin-the-phone-with-ear-to-shoulder-while-signing-the-receipt-and-continuing-to-express-doubt-about-whether-she-really-feels-like-meeting-up-with-that-Morgan-Stanley-guy-Zachary-at-the-Etats-Unis-wine-bar-again-tonight kind of credit card.
Farther Away: Essays Page 12