This came in today. It’s the final publication hardcover of Elegy Beach.
It’s funny, I’ve been Mister Matter-of-Fact ever since my agent sold the book almost exactly a year ago. I’ve been happy, grateful, anxious, appreciative, responsible, cooperative, parental, all kinds of emotions. Not to mention busy as hell.
What I haven’t been is hugely excited. I’ve written elsewhere (mainly in the Elegy Beach Afterword) that I had to compartmentalize myself in order to write this book at all. To get out of the way and let Writer Steve do it, but only let him to that, and leave the rest of my life alone. I think that necessary distancing may be why I haven’t gone all schoolgirly on everyone about the novel’s imminent publication.
Then the book showed up today. And I got excited as hell. I mean I was giddy all day long. Stoopid giddy. Making silly noises and laughing at my own jokes kind of giddy. Playing with a new puppydog kind of giddy. Because the book is gorgeous.* And because no amount of immersion or envisioning or daily attending to the tiny details that go into putting something like this together, prepared me for the unexpected, unalloyed joy I felt on holding the thing in my hands. I didn’t feel that way when I got copies of my first novel. I dunno why not. But this. This.
And now I’m horribly excited. It’s been a long time coming, folks.
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*Bless jacket designer Judith Lagerman, the art director at Penguin, and everyone who had anything to do with the production end of this book.
Samuel R. Delany’s DHALGREN remains my favorite novel, though I no longer think it’s the best novel I’ve read (it’s still up there, though). I must have read it 10 or 12 times. It came out when I was in seventh grade. I bought it for the cover, the wonderful and misleading jacket copy, and the fact that the book was huge.
The front cover reads:
Stranger in a Strange Land,
Then Dune and now,
The Major Novel of Love
And Terror at the End of Time
Well, sign my ass up! “The major novel of love and terror at the end of time” — I would kill to have a line that good on a cover. And I’m in seventh grade and nuts about postapocalyptic stories (back then we just called them “end of the world books”), and comparing something to Stranger in a Strange Land and Dune was pretty much a guarantee to get me to shell out my $1.95 (Wow! 1975! Wow!)
The back cover reads:
The sun has grown deadly… The world has gone mad, society has perished, savagery rules over all. All that was known is over. All that was familiar is strange and terrible. Today and yesterday collide with tomorrow. In these dying days of earth, a young drifter enters the city…
And the catchpage (first page you see) reads:
In the crippled city
where time has lost its meaning
and violence is swift and sudden,
a nameless young man with no memory appears…
He shares his great strength
in a loving trinity with a young boy
and a haunted, beautiful woman
in that time before the end of time…
Good lord! All of it off the mark but not untrue, exactly, and all of it just gorgeous.
The book begins in midsentence and ends midsentence. There in the bookstore I looked to see if they joined up, and they did: the book looped. (Though now I would offer that there’s a halftwist in the narrative that makes the book a Mobius strip.) At the time I had not read FINNEGAN’S WAKE, so the idea that an author could reach out through a page and make me do that and by implication serve me notice that I was in for a deeper, more involving experience than I might be accustomed to, had me from the first line. It opened up the idea of fiction for me, something like the way 2001: A Space Odyssey opened up the idea of movie when it was released. And the rest of the novel only continued unfolding and subverting the conventions of the novel. This guy was using fiction to write about language. Holy shit.
I’d been writing fiction since I was about five, but I clearly remember the moment I realized I wanted to write for a living. I was in the school cafeteria about to be late to class because I couldn’t stop reading this book. Everyone had picked up their trays and gone to class and I was almost alone in the big room and totally absorbed. And it hit me: I want to do this. I want to write something that does for someone somewhere what this book is doing to me. I’m thirteen years old, and I want to do this for a living.
The only time I have ever been starstruck was when I briefly met Delany in the con suite at some convention. I was too tongue-tied to tell him any of the above. Which maybe he’s heard a thousand times, I dunno, but I can’t imagine getting tired of it. My friends were astonished. Boyett? Tonguetied? Starstruck? Are you freaking kidding me?
I return to DHALGREN every few years and find it a different novel every time. What I bring to it is different, what I glean from it is different. To me this is a hallmark of a book that stands the test of time: it is not the same book always. What it even seems to be about transforms. In seventh grade that spoke to my very marrow. That height was where I set my sights. It speaks to me still.
How about you? Do you have a watershed moment associated with a favorite novel? I hope you do.
This came in today. It’s the final publication hardcover of Elegy Beach.