If on a winter's night a failure...

*While ransacking the Author’s domicile in search of anything that might give us hope for his recovery, the editors of Poets & Suicides came across these pages, apparently the beginning of a memoir intended to catalog (or at least summarize) the Author’s unstoried history of unsuccessful authoring. We find it ironic that, since the publication of ANTHROPICA two days ago, the Author has slipped into an authorial coma; apparently even the minor success incurred via Animal Riot Press was more than the Author’s delicate constitution could endure. We assume there is more to this missive or diatribe than what we have published below, and should the Author ever again open his eyes to face the blinding realities of another day, you may rest assured that we will force him to surrender the remaining words words words. — The Editors

In the fall of 2000—a few months before George W. Bush was elected President and nearly a year before 9/11 irrevocably altered the world I’d grown up knowing—my first novel was released from the great literary maw of the Random House conglomerate with much fanfare, its blue-toned cover splashed across the storefront windows of bookstores throughout the metropolis I called home and, if the rumors were to be believed, across the entirety of our great novel-reading republic. It was one of the more memorable times in my life. I was in love with the woman I would eventually marry, I was young and in shape and my feeling of invincibility was compounded by a literary success that felt at once sudden and preordained. The universe was telling me that I was special, and I moved through it with a false modesty so perfectly employed that it convinced even me. I remember passing through Grand Central one afternoon on my way to record an online interview (at a time when the idea of a digitally recorded online interview was cool, cutting-edge, possibly important) and pausing in front of the now-defunct Posman’s Books, where several dozen copies of my novel were arranged in an impressive window display whose basic orientation suggested an upward-pointing arrowhead, which in that moment—to a bright-eyed 30-year-old certain that his life was about to figuratively blast off from the Ground Zero of his humble, suburban, decidedly non-literary beginnings—seemed like yet another sign from God. I stood in front of that display and felt like Emerson’s transparent eyeball. The tumult of Grand Central—the bodies streaming around me like schools of mackerel, the smell of freshly-baked bread and of the less savory amalgamation of filth-and-decay odors, the pulsing light pouring through windows designed in some far-off place and imposed here upon this station a year prior, or ten years, or a hundred years, the present and the past and the future all converging upon this halcyon point in space-time that was Me—had never seemed so encrypted with meaning. Random House had decided upon an ambitious first hardcover print run of 25,000 copies and they’d flown me out to Book Expo America (in Chicago that year) to hobnob with industry people who might have the power to bolster my book’s sales, an intervention I did not believe I required but that I was more than happy to pretend to care about from the distance afforded me by my imagined greatness. There were early signs that perhaps my self-appointment to literature’s royalty-class was misguided or premature but I ignored them, relying instead upon the assurances of editors and agents, whose job it was to convince me, the “talent,” that everything was and would always remain Fantastic (which was exactly what I wanted and the last thing I needed to hear). Advance bookstore orders, for instance, were less impressive than we’d hoped. The 25,000 initial print-run was scaled back to 15,000, then to 10,000. “It’s better this way. There’s less pressure on you.” Early reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly were on the border of lukewarm and derisive. The foreign rights market, which had seemed ripe for exploitation, began to close its doors in response to these omens, each of which I spun (somehow) into a harbinger of future success. The telltale signs that a book was about to slip off the edge of the world and into the obscurity that swallows 99% of books was plain for anyone in the industry to see, but invisible to the young author who stuck to his proverbial guns. The ten-city book tour was scaled back to a five-city book tour. Then it was a New York book tour. Then it was a few readings out on Long Island, which—had I not still been blinded by my own starlight—might have registered as a delightful irony, given that my novel was gleefully vicious toward Long Island, calling it (among other things) “a place from which everything good in life had been systematically removed.” All I knew was that I arrived at those readings in a black Town Car, that the bookstore reps were assuring me that I was an exciting new voice and they were happy to have me. I typically read to between five and ten senior citizens, and despite the unlikelihood that this demographic would be charmed by the sex-laden passages I had decided upon for these public readings, I did not alter course or do anything that might sacrifice the artistic integrity that I had convinced myself was the one thing that truly mattered (or else was maybe just a central feature of my Brand). Meanwhile, I had already started work on a second novel, which my agent was attempting to gently dissuade me from, a relentlessly dark, linguistically dense (and, I now realize, largely unreadable) existential drama called No Man Is, which featured three protagonists who were all really the same protagonist, three versions or manifestations of a single soul (or something like that). By the time my sad little first book tour had run its course—and the sales figures of L.I.E. had succeeded in disappointing my happy-faced team of professional advocates—my editor quickly and vigorously exercised his right of first refusal on the second novel, unimpressed by its Kafkaesque dread. He tried really hard to be gentle, even as I was raising my voice in whatever milquetoast midtown eatery he’d taken me to (on the last of Random House’s dime) to insist that this book was far superior to L.I.E. and that he was a fool to turn his back on it (and me). My literary career was less than a year old. I was not yet aware that it was also already over and I would not become aware of it for a long time yet. Life was a vessel that existed primarily to contain my light.

It is not easy to reduce the next two decades of literary futility to anything ordered or rational. I was determined to publish No Man Is even if it meant “lowering myself” to the murky depths of the small press market, though my agent—who perhaps still had hope for me—argued for another approach. “It’s the sophomore jinx,” he told me one afternoon after I had basically forced myself into his well-furnished office in the towering glass obelisk that housed International Creative Management. “We’ll get through it.” He spoke with the confidence of someone who does not hate himself. The sunlight broke in hollow tubes through the tinted glass; the cumulonimbus clouds hung suspended in the air behind him as if curated; the mahogany desk gleamed like money. I couldn’t help but believe in him completely. This was an office where deals were made, where people who mattered sipped from celebratory glasses of scotch before abandoning the city for architecturally modern homes nestled deep within wooded communities. “Let’s table this book for now,” the agent suggested, “and see what you write next.” Deciding that he and I were on the same page—he was after all my savior, the one who had rescued the manuscript of L.I.E. from the slush pile and validated whatever small portion of my soul shone through its postmodern façade—and that together we would overcome the intellectual limitations of the naysayers and philistines (i.e., my potential readers), I begrudgingly accepted his advice and began work on not one, but two new novels. The first was a book about an Algerian terrorist dying of some inoperable disease, who tracks down his long-lost son (who is living in the US) and asks him to “write his story.” The second was a Cormac McCarthy-influenced book about a mentally unstable old man and his younger (and perhaps immortal) henchman, who are abducting and eating children. The first story might have had some potential, but it required that I do a lot of research and engage in the kind of in-depth character work that I, as an egomaniacal young person in love only with surfaces, couldn’t be bothered with (and, quite frankly, had little talent for). The second was more in line with the seemingly unpublishable No Man Is, in that its dense sentences and unrelenting awfulness were its primary selling points. 100 pages into both, I committed to the child-eater book, titled it Follow Down the Light (which I thought was vaguely Faulknerian), and put the pedal to the metal, by which I mean I worked on it occasionally while pondering how I would respond to all of Terry Gross’s interview questions.

Meanwhile, the same thing was happening to me that had happened to Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer on his peregrinations among misfits: I was growing up. The woman I had fallen in love with while writing L.I.E. and I were now married and, even as I worked on a novel about a child-eating serial killer, she was pregnant with our first child. I had started teaching writing at Sarah Lawrence College, where I’d attended graduate school (L.I.E. had been written in part during my time there), and where I was happy to hang my shingle for a year or two while awaiting the trumpets of my coronation day. (That was 19 years ago and guess what, dear Reader? Guess where I work today?) Work on the child-eater book proceeded slowly and painfully, given that I was now out to prove, with every sentence I composed, that I was the greatest writer to ever walk the earth. Sometimes I would imagine the weight of this greatness, and marvel at the fact that those I passed in the little kitchen of the communal Park Slope writing space that served as my daytime office had no idea what sort of genius resided in their midst. Writing fiction had once been a lot of fun, but now it felt more like medieval warfare, or like a Shakespearian blood-feud, an effort to inflict my brilliance upon all who had thus far failed to abdicate to my Beautiful Mind. Wait until James Wood reads this, I’d find myself thinking maliciously, before diving back into the depths of another opaque sentence, convincing myself that its crushing density was an indication that here, Reader, there be art!

There were (again) some signs that I might be on the wrong track. When I would summarize the plot of Follow Down the Light to friends and colleagues they would turn their noses in disgust. Public readings, which I was still being offered occasionally based on the lingering sheen of my Random House pedigree, were met with strained and tepid praise. I gave a couple of chapters to a dear friend, conversations with whom had been enormously influential back when I’d been writing L.I.E. We met in a dim, green-lit bar in Brooklyn and it took several stiff drinks for him to confess that he’d found the pages difficult to read, both in terms of style and subject matter. “You’re one of the funniest people I know,” he said. “Why is this work so unfunny?” My internal translator, who was trained to run remarks like this through a flow-chart whose every branch ended in “Genius Confirmed,” took these comments as proof that my efforts to forge a new prose style into existence through sheer rage were having success. Funny? Why would I want to be funny? I wanted to burn down the world! And I had created a convenient tautology to sustain my delusions of grandeur: the opinion of anyone criticizing my work was immediately invalidated by the bad taste revealed through their criticism. (It occurs to me now that this is similar to the way in which Donald Trump governs.)