Notes for a Possible Book Review

As Ecclesiastes warned: “...of making many books there is no end...” and the more recently they are written the more likely they are to be “...a weariness to the flesh...” Bad enough in the days when it was hard to get published, worse now that everybody and her Aunt Jane are giving away books on Amazon.

But more frightening still is the proliferation of  'Works in Progress', the books that exist only as tickets to internet writers’ forums. I am thinking particularly of “RAQUEL [or] The Visiting Professor” the life work of Anthony J.Barker (assuming that is not a pen name) an egregious example of the ‘unwritten’ genre. Actually, it has been written, a half dozen different ways, but it has remained unfinished for thirty-four years. Written first one way, then another, tentatively published, then de-published, it remains a crippled narrative.

It cannot be an accident that Barker's protagonist, Jack Chambers, is not a very good writer, just successful enough to be an adjunct instructor at a provincial university (his title, ‘Writer in Residence’ meant to compensate for his low pay and lack of prospects.) Jack hasn’t sold anything recently. He doesn’t understand alternate realities, magic or vampires and is too inhibited for BDSM.

Ideally, he’d like to write something Faulknerian or Lawrence Durrellish, but Portland, Oregon, is neither rural Mississippi nor pre-war Alexandria ('the winepress of love'.)

He also admires the Jewish writers of the 1960’s. That’s not going to happen either. There is the attractive example of Bernard Malamud in Oregon, but he was an interloper who soon returned to his proper coast. Jack is a third generation native, completely lacking the New York edge. Modest to the point of diffidence (“with much to be modest about”) he is at risk of being effaced by invasive outlanders, including his lover, Rachel Bowers.
Still, he is tall, good looking and kind. He has quirky literary theories. His  female MFA candidates like to gossip about him, his ideas, and his girlfriend Rachel. (They don’t like her much.) 

Things have been a little touchy lately with Jack and Rachel. They’ve had some tentative disagreements and at the beginning of the story are carefully avoiding any discussion of marriage and babies.  

At this point ‘a stranger comes to town’ (MFA candidates will recognize one of the two universal plots, the other being ‘the hero’s journey’.)
Raquel is from Buenos Aires, author of a critical study of Borges. She is dark, warm and uncertain, the opposite of Rachel's cool Northern beauty, incisive rationality and metallic self assurance. 

As soon as Raquel arrives odd things begin to happen—events reminiscent of a Borges story. Rachel is pursued by a spectral girl who shows up at odd moments wearing Rachel’s clothes. Jack has a vision of a novel that will cure his writer’s block and make women laugh (the very novel we are reading, or would be if Barker were competent to write it) and just as he is at last beginning to write something good, the Dean fires him, the goddess Portlandia 

The goddess Portlandia who rules the city.

decides it is time for Jack to take up farming, and his graduate students conspire to get him married (not to Rachel, whom they don’t like.) 

The solution seems pretty straightforward—after a few plot complications Jack and Raquel should marry and live happily ever after. Well, it is a pleasant enough idea—not a real novel, just a bit of candy floss.  So what’s the problem? Why is it unwritten after thirty years? 

That’s why. 

Like Jack (and maybe Borges) Barker has ‘ideas’ about the relationship between ‘Reality’ and ‘Fiction’, particularly the idea that the three act structure is what makes Reality comprehensible. According to Jack: “Reality cannot be understood. It’s too random and diffuse. It has no boundaries. Reality becomes real when it most resembles Fiction. Things make sense when they have a beginning, middle and an end, when everything that doesn’t count has been left out. Call it what you will, history, biography, journalism, philosophy, religion—if it makes any sense it's Fiction.” 

While firing him, the Dean makes a practical suggestion:

“I know you fancy yourself an intellectual, Jack,” his scornful gesture sweeping aside all Jack’s theories. “Quit pissing around with academic novels. God knows you’re no Richard Russo. Write something people want to read--spies, car chases, a wedding. It can’t be worse than teaching. Get yourself a pay day.”

Sound advice.

My Excuse

Almost 60 years ago I took a course that (possibly) shaped my life. I sometimes think of it as the reason I didn't become a writer.

The professor was a young PhD, a graduate of Princeton and Johns Hopkins. He was much admired on campus for having engaged in a bristly battle with some famous critic (possibly Lionel Trilling or Jacques Barzun, I don't remember) in the letters to the editor section of a famous literary magazine. He was to become department chairman, a well known academic poet and a translator of  Hungarian poets.

In 1956, however, he was 'the new guy' doomed to teach the Freshman class in 'creative writing'.

I don't recall the curriculum--but we wrote frequently, and what we wrote was subject to his penetrating analysis and criticism. He was a fastidious man with a way of handling a student paper by the edges, like a girl picking up a toad--as if it might jump, or release some toxic fluid.

On one occasion he commented on my short story. I don't recall it, except that it was about a young white man in love with a black girl--something well outside my experience as I had never met a black girl, or even been in love. Still, he liked it, and said some positive things about it. But he had some questions and reservations.

Why had I done such and such? (I imagine the issue was something 'symbolic'--I have never understood 'symbols'.)

I had no explanation.

"Ah," he said, a little disappointed, "Apparently it wasn't written at a very high level of consciousness."

I don't say that this comment ended my career as a writer. I hadn't contemplated such a career--and I took his remark as a simple 'observation' rather than a 'criticism'. But his comment stuck with me, and many times in the intervening 59 years I have wondered whether something I have just finished was written at 'a level of consciousness' worthy of Bruce Berlind.

In other words, did I have complete control of my material? Was it worth showing to someone with critical standards?