Novelist as a Vocation(5)

Another reason why so few stick it out is that someone with a fair amount of literary talent may have a single novel in them that they can roll out fairly easily, but no more. Or someone who is highly intelligent fails to find the payoff they anticipated. Such writers, after turning out one or two novels, may say, “Okay, now I get it,” shrug their shoulders, and move on to something that will use their time and energy more efficiently.

I understand these feelings. Novel writing is indeed a most inefficient undertaking, consisting of repeating “for instance” over and over. Say there is a personal theme you wish to develop. So you transpose it into a different context. “For instance, it could be like this,” you say. That transposition or paraphrase, however, is not complete: it has parts that are unclear and fuzzy. So you start a new section that basically says, “Let me give you another ‘for instance.’?” It can go on and on like that, a chain of paraphrased “for instances” that never ends. It’s like one of those Russian dolls that you open again and again, always to find still another, smaller doll inside. Could there be more circuitous, inefficient work than this? If a theme could be voiced clearly and rationally from the outset, then there would be no need for this incessant round of “for instances.” An extreme way of putting it is that novelists might be defined as a breed who feel the need, in spite of everything, to do that which is unnecessary.

Yet the novelist will claim that truth and reality are entrenched in precisely such unnecessary, roundabout places. I know it may sound pretentious, but it is in this belief that the novelist plies his craft. Thus it is natural that we find, on the one hand, people who believe that there is no need for novels and, on the other, those who maintain that novels are absolutely necessary. It all depends on the time span you adopt and the type of framework through which you view things. More precisely, our world is constructed in a multilayered way, so that the realm of the roundabout and the inefficient is in fact the flip side of that which is clever and efficient. If one or the other is missing (or if one is dominated by the other), then the world is distorted as a result.



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Writing novels is, to my way of thinking, basically a very uncool enterprise. I see hardly anything chic or stylish about it. Novelists sit cloistered in their rooms, intently fiddling with words, batting around one possibility after another. They may scratch their heads an entire day to improve the quality of a single line by a tiny bit. No one applauds, or says “Well done,” or pats them on the back. Sitting there alone, they look over what they’ve accomplished and quietly nod to themselves. It may be that later, when the novel comes out, not a single reader will notice the improvement they made that day. That is what novel writing is really all about. It is time-consuming, tedious work.



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I can’t help thinking that novelists share something in common with those who spend a year or more assembling miniature boats in bottles with long tweezers. I couldn’t possibly do that—my fingertips aren’t that dexterous—but on some essential level what I do and what they do seem quite similar. We spend our time behind closed doors doing the most intricate type of operations, day after day after day. The process is virtually endless. If you aren’t built for that sort of work and can’t shrug off all that it entails, there’s no way you’ll keep it up over the long haul.

I remember reading a book when I was a boy about two men who travel to learn what there is to know about Mount Fuji. Neither of them has ever seen Fuji before. The smarter of the two men sizes up the mountain from several vantage points at the foot of its slopes. Then he says, “So this is the famous Fuji-san. Now I see what makes it so special,” and heads back home, satisfied. His way is efficient. And fast. The less intelligent man can’t figure it out like that, so he stays behind to climb the mountain all the way to its summit. This takes a lot of time and effort. By the end he has used up all his strength and is completely pooped. “So that’s Mount Fuji, huh?” he thinks. Finally, he has understood it, or perhaps grasped its essence at a less conscious level.

Novelists (at least most of them) tend to be more like the second man—in other words, the stupider guy. They are the type who has to climb to the top to understand Mount Fuji. Or perhaps it is in their nature to climb the mountain over and over without ever figuring it out; or, again, to find that the more times they climb it, the less they understand. So much for efficiency! Whichever the case, it’s the sort of thing a smart person could never stand doing.

This is why a novelist is not alarmed when someone from another field writes a critically and publicly acclaimed novel, even if it goes on to become a bestseller. They do not feel threatened. Or (I think) angry. They know that the chances are small that such a writer will go on to a long career. Smart people work at their own special pace, intellectuals at theirs and scholars at theirs. None of these, however, is a pace suited to writing novels over the long term.

Of course there are smart people among the ranks of established authors. Some others are highly intelligent. That intelligence, however, is more than the normal kind—it is also a novelistic intelligence. Even in such cases, my experience has indicated that there is a limit—in simple terms, a novelist’s best-before date, which, in my estimation, is about ten years—to how far that can take you. After that point, intelligence has to be replaced by some larger, more enduring gift. Put another way, the razor’s edge must give way to the hatchet’s edge, which in turn must be superseded by the axe’s edge. Any novelist who is able to navigate those stages successfully is elevated—in all likelihood becoming a literary figure whose work transcends the times. Those who can’t make these adjustments, however, tend to see their stars fade or disappear altogether. Or they will find a spot to settle down, where they can live a more comfortable and leisurely life in a place amenable to smart people.