Random Notes

To write in fast and furious mode is to leave the world completely. This kind of writing requires the self-involvement that the young do best. ... A novel written in a kind of hypergraphic mania often possesses an excitement and passion that survive the journey from the writer's mind to the reader's mind. These hurried novels have a recognizable urgency about them, while the slower ones tend to possess a careful stateliness. Neither is objectively "better," but personally I often like the fast ones more. They're feverish, eager and rarely bogged down with excess weight. More slowly written novels are bigger, more complicated, less sleek.

A writer starts a novel not knowing exactly what kind it's going to be or how long it will take, but the answers soon become apparent. F. Scott Fitzgerald spent a matter of months on much of The Great Gatsby, and nine years on Tender is the Night, a disparity that seems about right to me. They're both beloved books, but Gatsby is the one that's nearly perfect and practically recitable. Flaubert's Madame Bovary is an example of a "medium-slow" book (five years), full of suspended, minute description, but it reads in part as if it might actually have been written fast, so inevitable and whirling is Emma's downward spiral. And you just know that Henry James never wrote -- or did anything -- in a madcap rush. Fast and loose writers, however, sometimes have an impressionistic, intuitive, streamlined vision, as if their observations were made from the window seat of a bullet train. (Ed: Vikram Seth apparently wrote Golden Gate in seven days. i.e. the first draft)

Because what really bummed me out about the Amazon haters (Ed: here)wasn't that they disagreed with my politics, but that they immediately summoned such genuine outrage at me for deigning to express a political opinion at all.

They regarded Candyfreak as entertainment, which meant, basically, that I was supposed to serve as a candy monkey for them: swinging from my zany licorice ropes and making funny gibbering noises. By including my political views, I was in direct violation of The First Law of Social Apathy, which holds a popular culture should exist divorced from any of the moral facts of its current political condition. What folks want from the pop — hell, what we deserve as tax–paying Americans — is a nice soothing mind bath. ... This is the reason, for instance, that so many people can vote for a party that believes gays are sub–human but still watch "Queer Eye For the Straight Guy," (because fags are so darn funny!). It's also the reason liberals can drive around in SUVs, while decrying policies driven by oil–dependency. (Ed: Ouch! Now is the time to claim center-right beliefs - really, almost ...)

But of course it is one of the functions of art (yes, even popular art) to call people on such bullshit, to raise people's consciousness, to awaken their capacities for compassion. William Faulkner probably put this best in his 1951 speech, upon accepting the Nobel Prize: "The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail." It seems to me that the time has come answer this call.

RB: Are you suggesting that arts and writers are morally superior?

SA: No. I don’t think so. I wish they were. Because in my idealization of art I view someone like Saul Bellow— who is capable of writing such beautiful, compassionate, deeply empathetic works, so insightful and so merciful—I actually assume that if they are conscious enough to do that then they are good to the people around them. That’s a bunch of crap. It’s a bunch of nonsense. Not just in Bellow’s case, but in many people’s cases. I don’t think they are morally superior, but I think when they are good as writers, in the moment that they are creating, they are exquisitely human and in a way that is Christly. That is, they love their characters unconditionally and not for their nobility and good deeds but for their inequity, their wickedness and they are totally unjudgmental in the best moments.