Vladimir(6)

Of course it was different. His book was already published by a major publishing house. It existed in the world and did not require my reflections or feedback—it was impervious to it. We had read the reviews and the accolades, we had seen it in the “Best of” lists when it came out. It wasn’t reviewed in the Times, but it got a review in the Washington Post, a mention in the New Yorker’s “Briefly Noted” book column, and a starred review in Booklist and Kirkus. When the first wave of allegations came against John and he was asked to leave the hiring committee, I was told I could stay on but I requested I be released. I knew the words that would be volleyed back and forth when I left the room, I knew that they would feel constrained by my presence because they couldn’t talk freely about hiring the kind of person who would never tarnish the department in the same way again. I was sure they wouldn’t hire a straight white man, but Vladimir had a better reputation than the writers that the college was accustomed to receiving applications from. With the splash that his first novel made in the literary world, if not the commercial one, he might have gone to many colleges closer to an urban area and still been competitive. And his interview, in which he apparently (again, I was not there) revealed some disturbing domestic details (of which I had heard), had been deemed extraordinarily compelling.

Which is all to say that until he brought his book by, I hadn’t read it out of spite and willful ignorance. And if he hadn’t brought it that night, and if I hadn’t caught his gaze in the reflection of the darkened window, and if he hadn’t dropped his eyes in tender and exposed self-consciousness, I don’t know if I ever would have.

I read all morning, until I had to hurry to my eleven thirty class. I had thought I would get a cup of coffee midway through but I didn’t, and I was so absorbed that I arrived to the classroom slightly late, disoriented, and had to spend some time asking the students about how they were faring before I could organize my thoughts enough to remember what we were covering that day. Luckily, all my students love nothing more than to speak about their psychological wellness, so my buying of time was met with some eager stories about medication, campus counseling, time management, and ADHD, told with wry self-awareness while I settled myself.

After class I drifted up to my office and was met there by Edwina, a devotee of mine asking about recommendation letters. Edwina wanted to complete two programs this summer—an internship with a Black, female-run film-production company whose last feature won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and a summer course in art semiotics at Brown. She wanted to be a producer, she told me, but a respected one, one who could bring about cultural change. She told me that when she had worked as an intern at another film company last summer there was this woman, one of the more powerful executive producers, who had her PhD in classics from Harvard. Every time she left a room her degree was mentioned in hushed and reverential tones. Edwina’s goal was to be like her: a cloud sweeper, weather controller, “bone-bringer,” as well as a revered mind with an impressive degree.

After agreeing to write them (I do believe that anyone who does not write recommendation letters if asked is monstrous, and even though I am the most selfish human being I know, I write them, and write them from scratch without asking the requestor to write a draft of them first) and dispensing with some quick advice, I urged her out. I could tell she was disappointed at not speaking more—I did quite like her and liked to see what she was reading and give her recommendations and hear her gossip about her other classes and classmates and professors, but I could not give her my full attention. All I could think about was Vladimir’s book. I didn’t pick it up to read it again—to do so in my office would be humiliating—but I wanted to see if I could think about it and re-create the passages in my mind.

When I was reading in the library, I was overwhelmed with a mixture of genuine admiration and seething jealousy. The book was funny, clear, awake, vivid. The prose was spare but the voice was not sacrificed in his exact word choice. It felt both like life and beyond life. He was a truly great writer, and though this book, an epigrammatic roman à clef, might not have catapulted him into fame, I had no doubt, reading it, that he would have it all—the bestseller; the interviews; the columns; the articles not only about his writing but about the decoration of his home, his fitness routines, his office, his food consumption, his work habits and sleep habits and opinions on politics.

For context, I have published two novels—my last one at forty-three years old. I have since then published mostly nonfiction work about literature for academic journals and occasionally, at more desperate times, written book reviews for our local newspaper. My first novel was deemed to hold promise; my second novel was deemed a disaster. The first I felt was a complete and utter lie, the second meant something to me but was roundly dismissed for being solipsistic. Since that time, for the past fifteen years, I have been trying to balance the important with the truthful. This has meant endless false starts, long projects of research that have been abandoned, mornings when I have woken up at five and prayed for an urgency of voice to come to me only to be disappointed. I have watched writing the female experience—particularly the motherhood experience (the subject of my second book) rise and reach praise and prominence in the past decade. I do not think I was ahead of my time; I think I wasn’t as unapologetic as this new crop of writers are. These new young mothers write with force and wit and humor. They embrace the I I I with fervor. They don’t shy away from talking about the banality of existence that comes with being a mother—the lunches in rest stops, the weariness of the body, the bad and mortifying toys and food and games and lackluster vacations and compromises that fall like an avalanche over the false totem of one’s own self-regard. I suppose I had always been too shy to address that banality head-on. My second book was a discussion of three women—a career woman, a mother, an artist. They begin in their own worlds, full chapters apiece. Then the narratives begin to intercut. Over the course of the book, it is revealed they are, in fact, one person. The response of critics at the time—some male, mostly female, boiled down to “who gives a fuck.” I won’t say I was undervalued, because I don’t believe that. Alice Munro was winning every award at the time, with her gentle, insightful stories of women’s lives. Generosity. Margaret Atwood wrote exciting books that practically lived inside of a uterus. Be a Fan. There were the others—Lorrie Moore, Joy Williams, Joyce Carol Oates, Barbara Kingsolver—the list is long—who wrote my kind of female experience. No, my work was simply not enough—not loud enough, not forceful enough, not realistic enough, not poetic enough, not funny enough, not speculative enough, not good enough.