Novels to Live In

Having completed my series So Are You to My Thoughts, and just now having re-read the series from beginning to end, I have some thoughts on the kind of work it is. First and foremost, I believe they are novels to live in. It might not even matter if you begin in the middle of the series, and later go back to the beginning. You are going to find the characters consistent, like people you might meet and then wonder about. “How did Line and Stephen meet?” you ask. “Why does Paul move to Alaska?” or “Why does Marty make poor choices?” In this case, you would be rewarded. Their stories are there for all to see.

In addition, the novels exemplify what I think of as my manifesto “against brilliance.” I have nothing against erudition, except when it is a masquerade, when there are no clothes under the king’s ermine robe. One does not need to go to an ivy league or big eight university to get an excellent education. Education is more in one’s own hands. Art doesn’t need to be larded with obfuscation and prizes. It needs to be meaningful. One doesn’t need to learn code, finance or go to law school to find good work. Work in the service of humans is everywhere. Glitz, glamour and fame are not how we should measure our success. But in simpler ways, by the trust others have in us and our fidelity to the lives and natures we have been given. By our ability to be happy. And our country does not need to be the biggest cheese in the world, saving other countries from themselves. Rather, we need to get back to our own basics, spending money on education, health care and justice rather than on armaments at every level.

None of us are perfect. Certainly my characters are not. But their stories leave space for the reader to live among them. They show the characters finding practices that fill them with delight and wonder: Paul finding a way to live with loss in the heart of the country he loves most; Marty finally learning to appreciate the beauty within herself and making a home for a family which expresses it; Line having to tame her fierce maternal energy into a watchful tolerance.

And they are stars, each with an epic story of their own movement from a fixed childhood firmament into an expanding universe. Their own dinner table conversations are thrilling, their houses and gardens are beautiful and they are proud of the lives they lead.

The great anthropologist and poet Frederick Turner, in Beauty, The Value of Values, published in 1991 imagines that the mid- 21^st century will be surprising to us, should we arrive there all of a sudden: We would be “most surprised not by the expected innovations but by the way that all of human cultural and biological history will have become part of the landscape; by how magically corny, how shamefully old-fashioned, how primate-like and tribal we will be among the almost invisible and intangible miracles of our technology; by how slow and quiet everything will be, how improvised, how richly ornamented; how closely we will live with the animals and plants, how much in the open air; how gorgeously and formally and anachronistically clothed we will be, how morally earnest and at the same time how lighthearted, how accepting of shame and tragedy; how much also as we lived in the great pedestrian cities of the civilized past.”

I loved this vision of the future, so quiet and peaceful. But we have far to go in that direction! Like Turner, I have written books which state my own values, as over against those around me. Technology assists me to assert them, whether anyone agrees or not. But one thing I can assure you. The writer is dressed plainly, in cotton t-shirt, ragged jeans and tevas on a warm day near the center of Los Angeles.