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  A lesson in comedy.

  Which leads one also to that paradox, or at least that paradoxical term autobiographical fiction. Fiction writers are constantly asked, Is this autobiographical? Book reviewers aren’t asked this; and neither are concert violinists, though, in my opinion, there is nothing more autobiographical than a book review or a violin solo. But because literature has always functioned as a means by which to figure out what is happening to us, as well as what we think about it, fiction writers do get asked: “What is the relationship of this story/novel/play to the events of your own life (whatever they may be)?”

  I do think that the proper relationship of a writer to his or her own life is similar to a cook with a cupboard. What that cook makes from what’s in the cupboard is not the same thing as what’s in the cupboard—and, of course, everyone understands that. Even in the most autobiographical fiction there is a kind of paraphrase going on, which is Katherine Anne Porter’s word, and which is a good one for use in connection with her, but also for general use. I personally have never written autobiographically in the sense of using and transcribing events from my life. None—or at least very few—of the things that have happened to my characters have ever happened to me. But one’s life is there constantly collecting and providing, and it will creep into one’s work regardless—in emotional ways. I often think of a writing student I had once who was blind. He never once wrote about a blind person—never wrote about blindness at all. But he wrote about characters who constantly bumped into things, who tripped, who got bruised; and that seemed to me a true and characteristic transformation of life into art. He wanted to imagine a person other than himself; but his journey toward that person was paradoxically and necessarily through his own life. Like a parent with children, he gave his characters a little of what he knew—but not everything. He nurtured rather than replicated or transcribed.

  Autobiography can be a useful tool: it coaxes out the invention—actually, invention and autobiography coax out each other; the pen takes refuge from one in the other, looking for moral dignity and purpose in each, and then flying to the arms of the other. All the energy that goes into the work, the force of imagination and concentration, is a kind of autobiographical energy, no matter what one is actually writing about. One has to give to one’s work like a lover. One must give of oneself and try not to pick fights. Perhaps it is something of a sickness—halfway between “quarantine and operetta” (to steal a phrase from Céline)—to write intensely, closely—not with one’s pen at arm’s length, but perhaps with one’s arm out of the way entirely, one’s hand up under one’s arm, near the heart, thrashing out like a flipper, one’s face hovering close above the page, listening with ear and cheek, lips forming the words. Martha Graham speaks of the Icelandic term doom eager to denote that ordeal of isolation, restlessness, caughtness an artist experiences when he or she is sick with an idea.

  When a writer is doom eager, the writing won’t be sludge on the page; it will give readers—and the writer, of course, is the very first reader—an experience they’ve never had before, or perhaps a little and at last the words for an experience they have. The writing will disclose a world; it will be that Heideggerian “setting-itself-into-work of the truth of what is.” But it will not have lost the detail; detail, on its own, contains the universe. As Flannery O’Connor said, “It’s always necessary to remember that the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks.” One must think of the craft—that impulse to make an object from the materials lying about, as much as of the spiritual longing, the philosophical sweep. “It is impossible to experience one’s own death objectively,” Woody Allen once said, “and still carry a tune.”

  Obviously one must keep a certain amount of literary faith, and not be afraid to travel with one’s work into margins and jungles and danger zones, and one should also live with someone who can cook and who will both be with one and leave one alone. But there is no formula, to the life or to the work, and all any writer finally knows are the little decisions he or she has been forced to make, given the particular choices. There’s no golden recipe. Most things literary are stubborn as colds; they resist all formulas—a chemist’s, a wet nurse’s, a magician’s. There is no formula outside the sick devotion to the work. Perhaps one would be wise when young even to avoid thinking of oneself as a writer—for there’s something a little stopped and satisfied, too healthy, in that. Better to think of writing, of what one does as an activity, rather than an identity—to write, I write, we write; to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun; to keep working at the thing, at all hours, in all places, so that your life does not become a pose, a pornography of wishing. William Carlos Williams said, “Catch an eyeful, catch an earful, and don’t drop what you’ve caught.” He was a doctor. So presumably he knew about sicker and better and how they are often quite close.

  (1994)

  Amos Oz

  Amos Oz could not have chosen a more poetically suited name: Amos, the first literary Jewish prophet; Oz, land of the Wizard (and Hebrew for “determination”). In its mix of scold and humbug, its marriage of God and godlessness, Oz’s name perfectly expresses the paradoxes of his native country. Born in Israel and the son of a Zionist, Oz has often been seen as one of the few strictly Israeli literary voices, rooted and homegrown, a Sabra, and as such he has often been read by his compatriots for whatever ideas of literary nationhood might emerge in his words. A prophet is not without honor even in his own country, if he plays his cards right. But a prophet will nonetheless overhear all those nagging questions around him: What is it that we have made? Who are we, really? What is this guy going to say about us next?

  Oz’s eleventh novel, Don’t Call It Night, is full of people drinking iced tea; it turns up every few pages. Set in the desert town of Tel Kedar, the book is a modest one, simply revealing the lives of Theo, a sixty-year-old civil engineer, and his lover, No’a, a schoolteacher, both of them beset by the lassitude of their ordinary compromises and isolation. The desert—“no longer hills but like the notes of a muffled tune”—has parched them. The bloom is off their romance. But Oz’s book is interested in the ways these two people fight back a little, mostly via their domestic rituals—the coffees, teas, baths, and suppers—and it reveals a resigned but romantic belief that such rituals not only are full of beauty but perhaps make up all there is of pleasure in life. Certainly in Oz’s careful, lyrical prose they possess a loveliness and truthfulness, and may be the book’s primary substance. “Anyone who has some good will can find good will everywhere,” says an Irish traveler; it becomes one of the novel’s refrains.

  The plot consists mostly of a collection of circumstances, small standoffs and retreats. It is a story primarily of misorchestrated good intentions. A former student of No’a’s has died of a drug overdose, and the boy’s father, suspected of being an arms dealer, approaches No’a with the idea for a drug rehabilitation center dedicated to the memory of his son. The father will donate much of the money needed to establish it. No’a, flattered and amazed to be asked to head the center, runs some distance with the project. She organizes a small group of people to help her plan the clinic and its programs, and to raise money. The idea of the clinic becomes an opportunity for the novelist to look at the stresses and petty dramas of the community. Oz has a particular affection for the local eccentrics, and he writes from several points of view. He even eliminates quotation marks, as if to say: This is all one community; there is no important difference between one member and another, between inner life and outer, between voice and description, between people and land; it is all the same.

  Nonetheless, the reader will be most interested in the many parts of the story that focus on No’a. She is a terrific character. When we first meet her, her voice is “young and bright, abandoning the ends of her sentences.” She wafts “a trail of honeysuckle scent” through the apar
tment. She has recently been enlivened by the idea of the clinic, though the project has whisked her away from the older Theo, who watches her comings and goings and bursts of enthusiasm with a certain patient skepticism. After all their years together, Theo feels himself still filled with ardor for her, though his condition is perhaps, more accurately, a low-grade longing. She has wandered off from him a little bit (they sleep in separate bedrooms; her kiss has grown “cousinly”), and he spends his time waiting for her to return. When he attempts to help her out (as a city planner he is better connected to the municipal powers that be, especially the mayor of Tel Kadar, and runs interference for No’a, establishing some critical public relations groundwork for the clinic), No’a wanders off from the project, too, seeming to lose focus, as if the whole thing has been spoiled for her by Theo’s own interest and participation.

  The truth is that she is haunted by news she’s received from a young woman named Tali that the dead student was slightly in love with No’a. Also, she is told by Tali, drug use in the community is not widespread or a serious problem. This causes No’a to lose concentration; she suddenly begins spending inordinate time shopping and going to movies with the young woman. Is Tali a daughter substitute, or is No’a’s preoccupation with her simply a denial of her own middle age? Perhaps it doesn’t matter. “No’a smoke without a fire,” says someone of No’a’s sudden attention deficit, and we are asked to see this as a vulnerability that she has always had, a dreaminess and restlessness she shares with Theo.

  Theo himself is a character one may recognize from Oz’s other novels. He perhaps most closely resembles Fima, from the 1993 novel of the same name. Both men share a certain kind of insomnia, drink much coffee and tea, do calisthenics, and love BBC news broadcasts. Both have complicated histories with women, which are filled with flight and impetuousness, yet which they see, in a somewhat blinded way, as essentially decent and generous. Both men are almost completely if gently self-absorbed. Their own gentleness hides them from themselves. They share as well, with their author and with each other, a love of the absurd and overstudied detail, such as this arithmetical bit from Fima: “They say that at the beginning of this passion Fima weighed 159 pounds and that in September, in the prison hospital, he weighed less than 132.” Or this strange, sly anecdote in Don’t Call It Night:

  Bozo’s wife and baby son were killed in a tragic event here four years ago, when a young love-crossed soldier barricaded himself in the shoe shop, started shooting with a submachine gun and hit nine people. Bozo himself was saved only because he happened to go to the Social Security that morning to appeal against his assessment. To commemorate his wife and child he has donated an ark made of Scandinavian wood to the synagogue, and he is about to give an air conditioner in their memory to the changing room at the soccer field, so that the players can get some air at halftime.

  Is God in the details? Certainly God—or God’s heedless wit and painterly pen—is in Amos Oz’s details. Like many of his novels, Don’t Call It Night—published in Israel in 1994 and now translated by Nicholas de Lange—concerns itself with the tiny and extraordinary business of daily life in Israel. Such a narrative is invaluable, and in Oz’s hands it is also vivid, convincing, and haunting. Yet one imagines that in a country as new and complicated as Israel, a more politically uncertain writer would not write such a tame and domestic book. (Consider the angry, brilliant novels of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee, whose recent narratives are so searching and searing, simultaneously antirevolutionary and antigovernment.) Despite the presence among its characters of a possible arms dealer, despite a reference to “a wide valley full of secret installations,” and despite the casual discussion of various Israeli military victories and defeats, Don’t Call It Night is really a novel about “neglected bougainvillea.” It is about being old enough to glimpse at last one’s own death, to see the set stage of one’s own final years, and to accept it with only the shortest, politest bursts of argument. This novel is a piece of sweet but melancholy chamber music—light but not necessarily insubstantial. It belongs to a genre of restful novel that is ruled by an aesthetic of peace and a yearning for peace. If one is looking for politics, there is that—clearly, if quietly.

  (1996)

  Christmas for Everyone

  Oy. The holidays with our two-year-old boy. Despite our anticeremonialist leanings, it is time to do something commemorative at home. There is, after all, a possibility that, at two, he will remember this as his first “holiday season.” Performance anxiety pervades the household. We have to do all the holidays if we do any: Hanukkah for my husband, Kwanzaa for my son, and, of course, Christmas (I think in my Gentile-centric way) for everyone. Our family is an improvisation…“Do we have to do Kwanzaa? It’s really just an invention,” my husband says. “It’s artificial.”

  “Unlike Santa Claus, who is so natural?” I own a book on Kwanzaa. I’ve opened it, spotted a lot of illustrations of craft items to make at home, then shut it in a sweat. I need more help with this. My husband’s holiday indifference now seems like laziness. He hasn’t a clue when Hanukkah begins this year. I find myself saying loudly, “Why does the shiksa have to get out the menorah every year? Why does the shiksa always have to light the candles?…”

  All our two-year-old wants out of the holidays is gum. He spotted some once in the mouth of a babysitter, and since then he has staged his own toddler version of a radio pledge drive. Gum, gum, gum! He studies my mouth for telltale movements…If I bite my tongue, or if I have my marital tongue in my cheek, he says hopefully, “Mommy, what’s in your mouth? You have gum?”

  This year—it’s 1996—we get a slightly dehydrated Christmas tree, park it close to the radiator, and decorate it in a crazed, slapdash way. Next morning, all the needles drop. The tree now resembles a giant TV antenna. On Christmas Eve, we build a fire, then snuff it out with an old wet towel, realizing, fearfully, that we haven’t cleaned the flue in five years. Then the boiler breaks down. We plug in the space heaters. We order takeout Chinese.

  Only then, when almost all is lost and I am feeling so unexpectedly sad, do I realize what a sucker I am for the beautiful fake Christmas that German-American commerce concocted for us years ago. I actually like the shopping, the gift wrap, the carols…I like the invented holiday miracles, the unexpected kindnesses and transformations—at least as they are portrayed on the TV specials. And, looking out the window and seeing only sleet, I realize that I even like the snow. Where, now, is that lovely perfect Christmas? On whose open fire are those goddamn chestnuts roasting? I have a fiction writer’s weakness for fiction. It’s an occupational hazard.

  “Well,” I say, serving sliced water chestnuts instead. Can I serve up some cheer as well? “Merry Christmas, you guys! Merry, merry Christmas!”

  Our two-year-old is watching my lips and jaw. His eyebrows lift, and his eyes grow knowing and bright. “Mommy?” he says. “You have gum?”

  (1997)

  Starr–Clinton–Lewinsky

  Oh, the autoimmune disorder that is the Starr–Clinton–Lewinsky matter. Inadequate foes—or somehow unimpressive ones—have our government geared up and attacking itself. We are paralyzed—and thrilled in that sickened sort of way. Terrorists can’t bomb the scandal away; planes and stock markets can’t crash it away; JonBenét Ramsey and Neil LaBute can’t frighten it away. As was said in Chicago in 1968, “The whole world is watching”—while we collapse into our wheelchair (parked in front of CNN) and have our nervous breakdown.

  Full disclosure: I find Linda Tripp’s moral position intriguing and literary. I believe Paula Jones was degraded by her boss, probably illegally so. And I did not vote for Bill Clinton. (Though now I feel sorry for him, in the same way I felt sorry for Pee-wee Herman when he was arrested in that Florida movie theater.) I voted in various primaries and elections for Jesse Jackson, Jerry Brown, and Ralph Nader. Clinton, in office, has been dismaying in predictable ways: his centrist
judiciary appointments, his botched national health plan, his gays-in-the-military debacle, his generally compromised or meretricious or dithering policy-making. I have mostly thought that he was a charming shark, a user, a yuppie, a bad actor, and a sexy, lying fool. This he has in common with many people (perhaps even poor Pee-wee Herman).

  Still, at no point in his life did Bill Clinton ever say, “I am not a sex addict.” Those who voted for him knew something of his unfortunate and compulsive personal life and decided they didn’t care. Now, suddenly, voters care? (I don’t think so.) Now, suddenly, Congress is shocked? Where are the true and the brave? Now, suddenly, congressional Democrats (and the First Lady herself) are feigning sad or angry surprise in order to effect a kind of independence from this guy and keep their pathetically unproductive jobs. Is the paycheck really that good?

  Surely there are many reasons that the Lewinsky affair has taken over our national conversation.

  (1) The political emptiness of the Clinton White House. Both nature and political theater abhor a vacuum: caught in a kind of Beckettian holding pattern, the Clinton presidency got overtaken by a sex comedy more popular with the summer-stock crowd.

  (2) The fudged look of the Clinton marriage. We gaze upon the First Family the way children would—imagining we are part of it, always feeling on behalf of Chelsea and wondering what the heck Mom and Dad are up to. Yet Bill and Hillary’s weird unhappiness repels us. Weird unhappiness is never as attractive as weird fun. And what is even more interesting is weird fun paid for with union support, cabinet trust, grand-jury testimony, public humiliation, and impeachment talk.