She flashes him an elusive smile, more accepting than encouraging. He has seen this expression before, but he has never deciphered its meaning. Is it a mask, a protective barrier, veiling fears and insecurities as profound and as troubling as his own? Or is it merely a courtesy, a mode of interaction, an open admission that there truly are no monsters lurking behind those placid features? He has wondered; he has doubted. Now he will learn for certain.
“I have a lot to say,” says Larry. “I’ll respect your answer, whatever it is, but all I ask is that you hear me out from start to finish without interrupting. I only have the courage to go through with this once. Is that okay?”
Starshine nods. He feels that she is not looking at him, but through him. That her thoughts lie elsewhere and she has her own burden to unload. Never has she seemed so careworn, so drained. Larry fears he has chosen the wrong evening for their meeting.
“I’ll put all my cards on the table,” he says. “I’m in love with you.”
Starshine does not recoil. She does not reciprocate. She simply nods her head again and smiles pleasantly, honoring his request and withholding her judgment. Her eyes are glassy and opaque. If he didn’t know any better, he might conclude that she wasn’t even listening.
“I’ve been in love with you since the first moment I met you,” Larry continues. “Do you remember it? We spent all afternoon combing through the maps in Peter Smythe’s cellar. You probably don’t remember, but I do. Ever since that day, you’ve been the woman of my dreams, the one person with whom I’d want to spend the rest of my life. I know that sounds insane, Starshine, and maybe it is. But it’s also true.
“I’ll admit that I don’t have much to offer you. I’m certainly not the best-looking guy in the world or the most successful or even the most charismatic. I’m not going to inherit a beach chair fortune. I’ll never have the courage to overthrow the government. I’m not even very good in bed. But the bottom line is that I really do love you, and being with you makes me happy—and if you feel the same way about me, then none of those things should matter. Even a poor tour guide is entitled to some happiness.”
Larry is suddenly conscious that he is rambling, even pleading. An army of tears has encamped behind his eyes. He wipes his face with a napkin and attempts to regain his composure.
“I’ve written this book,” he says. “It’s a novel about you. About your life on the day I tell you how I feel. About today. I think it’s a pretty good book, maybe not up to par with Whitman and Melville, but a minor masterpiece in its own right. I’ve been working on it every night for the past two years and I promised myself that when the manuscript was complete, when I finally had something to offer you, I’d tell you how I felt. Well, I have a letter from a literary agency. A response to my manuscript. I’ve been waiting to open it all day until I heard your answer, but I thought maybe you’d be willing to open it for me. That’s really all I wanted to say. I wanted to tell you that I love you and that I’ve written a book for you and now I’ll shut up, before I make any more of a fool of myself, and I’ll let you determine my fate.”
Larry stops speaking and fumbles with his napkin ring. He fears he hasn’t done justice to the depth of his devotion, fears that he has left so much out, but nothing else he says will make any difference. Yet even as he slides the decisive letter onto the tabletop, his hands trembling, he longs to make one more pitch for her affections. His entire being hangs in the hope of the moment.
Starshine accepts the letter without speaking. Her delicate hands break the seal of the envelope and she reads to herself for an eternity. Then she looks up. Her expression is inscrutable, almost blank. For several seconds, it is impossible to tell whether she is aghast or aglow. Or merely astonished. She stares at Larry, speechless, like a woman who has been offered Captain Kidd’s treasures, like a woman who has been given a puppy she does not want, like a woman who is grappling with a life and death decision at the end of a very long day. Her lips part slowly; she delivers her answer in the softest, sweetest voice Larry has ever heard. It is the answer Larry has expected since his first night at the word processor, since his first crossing of the Brooklyn Bridge, since the first surge of affection and hope in Peter Smythe’s subterranean archive that has led to this decisive moment. It is the answer for which ships are launched, kingdoms imperiled, and epic novels written. It is an answer older than Larry, older than Starshine, older than the city, a magical phrase that loses nothing for time or repetition, inspiring each and every one of us to push forward, buoyed by the remotest hopes, through the tumult, through the trauma, through the cloud.
It is the only answer possible:
“Yes and no …”
AFTERWORD
A conversation between ERB publisher Jotham Burrello and author Jacob M. Appel.
Q: I have read love stories. I have read parallel narratives. I have read books that take place in a single day. I have read books in the present tense. I have not read books where one character has written a novel about another character’s day, and then said book is presented as a novel-within-a-novel. What challenges or surprises did this structure present?
A: I haven’t read a book like that either. That’s why I wrote this one. For many years, I studied dramatic writing with the brilliant Tina Howe at Hunter College. Howe’s advice to students is to create something onstage, something that you’ve never seen before. Creating something entirely new is also my goal whenever I write a story or novel. The challenge, of course, is that I didn’t have a model to work from. Writing this novel also proved difficult because it is very different, in both structure and tone, from most of my other writings, which often contain magical elements. Not being allowed to have a character spontaneously combust or turn into a penguin without warning proved a considerable constraint on my imagination, and one that took a while to adjust to.
Q: When you submitted the manuscript you labeled it the “anti-novel” and “a postmodern love story.” Can you break down these two terms in relation to the book?
A: I think of this as an “anti-novel” in that it defies as many of the rules of the traditional novel as possible and yet still remains a novel. I was partially inspired in this regard by architect Philip Johnson’s iconic “glass house,” which breaks as many of the traditional rule of home design as possible, yet remains a house. While the structure is “postmodern” in the spirit of Donald Barthelme or John Barth, that’s not what I meant when I wrote of a postmodern love story. Rather, I meant that the love itself is “postmodern”—hyper-aware, ambivalent, fragmented. That’s the world of romance that we live in today.
Q: For many readers this novel will be their first time experiencing your work. But you are a prolific writer of short stories and essays, plus an accomplished playwright, and work a demanding day job as a psychiatrist. When I sent out blurb requests for the novel, one writer whom I was trying to corral wrote back saying he no longer blurbed books, then added, “that’s one hell of a vita” upon reading your accomplishments. For the writers online who blog about you winning so many writing contests, I need to know, do you ever sleep? Are you really a cyborg? Or do you keep a stable of co-writers à la James Patterson?
A: Psychiatrists are notoriously bad at analyzing their own behavior. That being said, the primary reason I am so prolific is that I enjoy writing very much. I suppose there’s also some fear of literary inadequacy and a desire to be remembered after I shuffle off my mortal coil. But if I wrote all day, every day, for the next fifty years, I don’t think I could catch up with Joyce Carol Oates, so my subconscious feelings of inadequacy will remain.
Q: Pulitzer Prize winning author Robert Olen Butler described your work as “richly funny and quite smart about relationships.” How has your psychiatric training assisted you in depicting such keenly observed characters?
A: Everybody asks me that, but the irony is that most of my work is with the severely mentally ill—patients with schizophrenia and similar psychotic disorders. So while my int
erest in human nature inspired me to pursue a career in psychiatry, my actual clinic training has little bearing on the fictional world I create. If anything, it’s observing people in a social setting that has trained my mind in this way.
Q: At the time of this interview, I am certain I’ve read the book more than any other reader. And while I was struck by the humor and voice in my initial reads, subsequent tours reveal a darkness/despair beneath the surface of Larry’s and Starshine’s lives. I count numerous references to suicide. How did you craft and balance the lightness with the darkness in writing the book?
A: Having worked for years in various hospitals and psychiatric facilities, I’ve come to recognize that life is strikingly unkind and unfair—and anyone who hasn’t noticed this yet is either strikingly naive or dreadfully spoiled. Unfortunately, many people see their own lots as unfair, while not recognizing how others suffer. One of the goals of the novel is to make my readers aware of this blindness to the suffering of others through the parallel narratives. Of course, if my message were simply “Life is bleak,” people could look out their windows or visit the waiting room at their local prison, rather than reading my book. You have to offer a bit of comedy and joy to lure in the crowds.
Q: Larry Bloom traverses NYC one fine June day. In Joyce’s Ulysses Leopold Bloom does a walkabout of Dublin in a single June day. (The former English majors among us may recall the parallels between Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey.) This is good company to keep. What similarities did you intend or not intend between these seminal works and Biology?
A: The only thing I share with Homer and Joyce, I fear, is poor eyesight. (My mother once wrote an entire study on the role of poor vision in Ulysses, so maybe that’s how I first became aware of the novel.) But I’ll concede that I had grand ambitions to parallel the novel after both of its predecessors—although, at the end of the day, the structural parallels often gave way to the need for a compelling read. (Ulysses, as you may have noticed, isn’t exactly hopping off the shelves in airports.) That being said, I believe a number of the parallels still remain. I can’t wait for the day that a reader takes on the challenge of finding these parallels and writes an essay on the subject. I welcome anyone (except my mother) to give it a shot.
Q: I am charmed by the minor characters in the book: Colby Parker, Snipe, the Armenian florist, Peter Smythe, Ziggy Borasch, Eucalyptus, the list goes on. Each is individually unique and uniquely New York. What was your inspiration for this motley crew? And can you take us through how you created the backstory for Jack Bascomb or Bone?
A: In case you’re reading this novel and you believe these characters are based upon you and the people you know, they’re not. Really, they’re not. I don’t wander around the city looking for interesting people to transform into characters. I sit in my apartment and imagine people whom I wish existed. My building’s superintendent is nothing like Bone. Yet on numerous occasions, I’ve dreamed of a super who could get me anything, like an iron at four a.m. on New Year’s Eve, or a copy of Greta Garbo’s driver’s license—and since the managers of my apartment building are unlikely to hire one, I decided to create such a man whole cloth.
Q: Walt Whitman appears so often in the novel he could be considered a minor character. Early on Starshine imagines “that she is the corporeal incarnation of a Whitman poem.” Later in Battery Park, Larry pays homage to Whitman’s statue. You write, “Gazing up into the hero’s larger-than-life tribute, the maestro’s marble features beaming perpetually over a polished beard, Larry wonders if he has done justice to both master and model.” Whitman is one of the strings that bind them. Can you discuss the long shadow Whitman casts over the novel?
A: I did not discover Whitman until college. I took a summer class at Columbia with the late, legendary historian James Shenton— probably New York City’s most celebrated tour guide—on “New York City in the Era of Whitman and Melville.” If secular humanists believed in the notion of saints, Whitman would be the patron saint of New York, of hopeless romance, and of wandering—all of which are at the core of this novel. Anything seems possible after reading a Whitman poem….
Q: In an essay entitled “Effective Openings,” you wrote: “In writing, as in dating and business, initial reactions matter. You don’t get a second chance, as mouthwash commercials often remind us, to make a first impression.” You submitted The Biology of Luck to Elephant Rock Books during an open submission period. (It was not the first book I read, and in fact, it hibernated in the slush pile for three weeks before I thumbed the ink.) But when I did, the prose bounded off the page—BAM! Minty Fresh! I was sold. Take the opening line of one of the chapters and break it down using your “nine ideas on how to craft a perfect opening line.”
A: You’re asking me to apply what I preach to what I practice, which, as a writer, I find a terrifying prospect; sort of the equivalent of finding out what’s in the soup at one’s favorite restaurant. But I am grateful my manuscript only hibernated in the slush pile for three weeks. I can’t help wondering how many brilliant works of literature are left to hibernate at the offices of major commercial publishers for decades. I have little doubt there is a prominent literary agent somewhere using the unread draft of a masterwork as a doorstop.
Q: The genesis of Biology is grounded in you being a licensed New York City sightseeing guide. Two questions: How does one become a licensed tour guide? And you’ve said you wrote the book “to take a shot at creating a convincing and historically grounded paean to the tour guides of NYC.” Why do you think tour guides need convincing and historically grounded paeans?
A: One becomes a tour guide with great effort. At least back when I earned my license, one had to pass a grueling exam on the history and geography of New York City. I’ve taken the bar exam and the medical boards, but the NYC tour guide exam is certainly as difficult. And yes, tour guides certainly need a convincing and historically grounded paean. The movies make being a tour guide seem easy and glamorous. In reality, while it’s a fascinating experience, it’s also hard work.
Q: Larry and Starshine tour famous landmarks and neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs, exploring what you have called the underbelly of Gotham. If your long-lost Hoosier cousin Tom and his wife Helen were coming to town, where would you take them sightseeing?
A: My favorite sight in New York is a rather obscure memorial known as the “Amiable Child” monument located on Riverside Drive at 133rd Street. It’s the most moving and impressive New York City landmark you’ve never heard of. I’ve even written an essay in tribute to the monument that was published several years ago in the Palo Alto Review. The monument commemorates the life of Saint Claire Pollock, a child who died in the area in 1797. People in the neighborhood still bring flowers to honor the boy. After 9-11, people left candles and flowers, and it became a local shrine to suffering and commemoration. It says something wonderful about humanity that we pay our respects as a community to a child we never knew who died two centuries ago. (And if Tom and Helen are reading this, I want to remind them that they should book a hotel room; I don’t run a rooming house.)
Q: If you could break bread with any character from literature, which would it be?
A: I’ve always fantasizing of standing up Jordan Baker (from The Great Gatbsy) for a date, but I suppose that doesn’t count. So I’d have to say Elpinore. As you probably don’t recall, he’s the fellow in Homer’s Odyssey who gets drunk and falls off a roof to his death. That’s all that we really know of him. Ever since I read the Odyssey in high school, I’ve wanted to learn the back story. I’ve also had my dreams of eloping with Ántonia Shimerda from Willa Cather’s My Antonia, but what man hasn’t?
Q: The end of the book is open to interpretation. I’m curious what you think happened when Larry and Starshine leave the restaurant? Did Stroop & Stone sign Larry? Does he christen Starshine’s new water bed?
A: Did you really think I’d answer that?
Q: I thought I might catch you off guard.
A:
All I can promise is that if the book is a success, I’ll be glad to write a sequel, or even a series, of Larry and Starshine romances to be sold in airports. But that will require a seven-digit advance.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. When we first meet Larry Bloom, he’s striding up Broadway, the New York Times under his arm and a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket, musing about how there should be a civil rights movement for short, relatively unattractive Jewish men. What sort of first impression did this make on you? And how did your impression of Larry change over the course of the book?
2. What do you make of the André Aciman quote Appel uses as an epigraph? Which characters do you think it applies to? And how does it work in relation to Larry Bloom’s novel?
3. We learn little tidbits of Starshine’s personal history throughout the novel, but that history, dramatic as it is, never really gets that much airtime. Did her history surprise you? How did your impression of her evolve as you learned about her past?
4. Larry Bloom takes us through a good chunk of New York City, peppering his tour group with historical factoids while also trying to protect them from some disconcerting events. How does Appel’s New York City strike you—is he going for authenticity or hyperbole, or something in between?
5. Of the three love interests in Starshine’s life (reciprocated or not), which do you think is the most appealing? And which makes the most sense for Starshine?
6. How important do you think the book-within-a-book structure is to the overall book, and to your enjoyment or frustration as a reader? Can you think of structural comparisons from film, music, or art?
7. At the end of chapter one, Larry tucks the letter from Stroop & Stone into his pocket without reading it. Why did Appel make this decision? Can you think of a time when you put off finding out important news like that?
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