Sometimes in the car, fed up with my own toddler-like need to be accompanied at all times by my own curated entertainment, I’ll turn on the radio. And when “Strawberry Wine” or “Juicy” or “Sweet Child O Mine” comes on I will, flush with the happiness of serendipity, think to myself, You see? I’d never have thought to play this right now, and this is the greatest song ever written. The song might not be technically sophisticated or culturally sanctioned, but it is perfect, and for the duration of my drive I will not hear otherwise.

I came to Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent in a similarly providential spirit, having handed over my usually orthorexic reading diet to the whims of the library holds and the recommendation of someone I met on vacation. And if it were possible to do so with a reading experience, I would have rolled down the windows and turned the volume to Gut-Shaking. The Correspondent is palpably a first novel — there are a few clumsy bits of exposition and an over-familiar emotional swell or two — but I haven’t enjoyed a book this much in months. I don’t know what a beach read is, exactly — the conditions on a beach (the scalding sand, the children who need help digging a tunnel) often seem antithetical to reading — but The Correspondent could, I’m confident, keep you absorbed through even the loudest and most nearby game of Kadima. I read it in two days, on trains, in bed, mere feet from eavesdrop-worthy conversations, and I might as well have been wearing noise-canceling headphones.

The main thing to know about the book — the secret to its engrossingness — is that it consists entirely of letters. Sybil Van Antwerp, the cantankerous but secretly tender sort of senior citizen who often gets described in book reviews as “unforgettable,” is an obsessive letter-writer. The Correspondent gathers a few years of her best exchanges — with her furious semi-estranged daughter; with a stately Syrian customer service agent; with a believably cool and steady Joan Didion. Things happen in the book — deaths, reconciliations, parentage mysteries resolved — but they mostly happen between the book’s pages. Epistolary novels work like flip-books — the action is there in the turning of the pages; the actual, excerpt-able scenes are very few.

And this, I kept thinking as I read, is the almost unfair advantage that Evans ingeniously exploits. In epistolary novels you can leap transitionlessly between plot-lines; you can refresh the proceedings with unlimited new voices; you can convey the passage of time with no more than a discreet date at the top of the page. And you can — in fact you must, in order to be convincing — appear before the reader in your linguistic gym clothes; the fine tailoring of Literature has no place in prose that is meant to have been composed in a hurry, without a glance at posterity.

A few pages in Sybil is writing one of the letters that has UNSENT printed across the top. These are her freest and most diaristic letters, and we won’t know their intended recipient — they continue throughout the book, loosely joined — until the very end. She’s describing her parents.

My mother died with cancer when I was eighteen. I wish you could have known her… She had these two odd duck adopted children [Sybil and her brother] and she treated us as if we were the king and queen!… Anyway, she had cancer on again off again through her life, and it killed her eventually, and when it did my father went to pieces.

This is a pair of stretched-out sweatpants, prose-wise. Odd duck… king and queen… anyway… went to pieces. These aren’t failures of originality; these are successful depictions of a mind that has, in the intimacy of a notebook, set aside the aspiration to originality.

Sybil continues:

Honestly, it was like my mother was the makeup of his skeletal system, she died and the bones POOF disappeared, and the rest of him, the meat, the organs, the skin, slopped to a pile.

Here the prose has, without slowing down or dressing up, become more interesting, more dyed with the colors of a particular self. That punctuation-less POOF is nicely audible, and the verb slopped has a vivid crudeness.

And then Evans-as-Sybil, having established the image of the widowed, deboned father, writes my favorite sentence in the book:

He was this way for about a year until he remarried (new bones, new skeleton).

There’s a whiff of (picnic, lightning) in this — the two-beat parentheses carrying more than its allotted load. But there is also a hyper-concentration of psychological intelligence: about the dismissive irritability of children toward new step-parents; about the uncomfortably hasty rehabilitations of widowers (that about a year is Sybil’s version of Hamlet’s gripe about funeral meats).

How many scenes would it take a standard novel to do all this? First we’d have to meet the future stepmother, and in a context that didn’t immediately give her away as such. Then we’d have to do the wedding; the children sulking in their room; the rosy-cheeked father gingerly professing his ongoing grief. In fifteen words Evans has done the work of chapters.

You turn the page, grateful, and see, as you almost always see in this novel, an inviting abundance of white space: a new format, a new subject, a new correspondent. You might as well read one more letter before you get up and jump in the ocean. And another. And fine, one more. It’s August already. No one asks a summer fling to slow down and elaborate.

Imagine, for a second, a world in which The Birds doesn’t exist. No Hitchcock movie, no Du Maurier story, no familiarity-dulled conviction that such an idea — a horror story in which the monsters are birds — could ever work. Now imagine that you are a writer, sitting sweatily at her desk, trying to pull it off. Some halfwitted assignment editor (or perhaps the halfwitted assignment editor within you) tasked you with bringing this avian nightmare to life. How do you do it? Maybe make the birds really big? Or give them a memorably terrifying screech? The whole endeavor flirts with — proposes marriage to — ridiculousness. You turn forlornly back to your list of fearsome animals — sharks, done, giant squid, done, bears, done… You open a new tab: how old is too old to apply to law school?

But here’s what Daphne Du Maurier, sitting at her desk in Cornwall in 1951, did:

Early in the story, when the threat is not much more than a vague intuition that the local birds seem to be hanging around in larger numbers this year, Nat Hocken (the Hemingway-esque protagonist, a war-wounded farmworker) is awoken by a tapping at the window.

… Nat got out of bed and went to the window. He opened it, and as he did so something brushed his hand, jabbing at his knuckles, grazing the skin.

So far, so manageable. Hand-brushes, knuckle-grazes — sensorily we are still in the realm of a man reaching into the garbage disposal to extract an errant fork. We are, with Nat, disturbed but unterrified.

The tapping continues, and now Nat’s wife is awake — she tells him to go deal with it.

He went to the window for the second time, and now when he opened it there was not one bird upon the sill but half a dozen; they flew straight into his face, attacking him.

He shouted, striking out at them with his arms, scattering them; like the first one, they flew over the roof and disappeared. Quickly he let the window fall and latched it.

The threat is escalating — first one bird, now half a dozen; first the hands, now the head. We aren’t quite frightened yet, but our distaste for these birds — our visceral sense of what it would feel like to suddenly have this noisy flapping tumult of dry angularity in our faces — is building. At this point we might, walking through a plaza, give the pigeons a wide berth.

Then Nat addresses his groggy wife.

“Did you hear that?” he said. “They went for me. Tried to peck my eyes.”

This is our first glimpse of Du Maurier’s solution — I imagine her like a student taking a test, realizing that she knows this one, sitting excitedly forward and bringing a shielding arm around the edge of her desk as her pencil skitters across the page. The eyes. But the horror, for the reader, is still in the distance.

Then there’s a cry from the children’s bedroom. Nat races in and finds their window wide open and the room full of dozens of darting, frantic birds. He hustles the kids into the hallway, picks up a blanket and:

… using it as a weapon flung it to right and left about him in the air. He felt the thud of bodies, heard the fluttering of wings, but they were not yet defeated, for again and again they returned to the assault, jabbing his hands, his head, the little stabbing beaks sharp as a pointed fork.

He finally, after who knows how much chaotic flapping, triumphs (though many of the combatants escape through the still-open window) and in the gray light he surveys the bedroom battlefield: dozens of dead little birds. “Some had lost feathers in the fight, others had blood, his blood, upon their beaks.” We, and Nat, are quietly disgusted (disgust being a useful horror-enhancer: a pinch of cinnamon to horror’s chocolate).

Nat shuts the window and returns to his own bedroom. His wife sits up in bed with the children in her arms.

“He’s sleeping now,” she whispered, “but only just. Something must have cut him, there was blood at the corner of his eyes.”

And this is the moment when Du Maurier turns around her paper in triumph. Something must have cut him, there was blood at the corner of his eyes.

Now we’re horrified. The flying at Nat’s face was no accident. These birds — these countless, mindless, fork-beaked birds — are out for people’s eyes, for children’s eyes. Du Maurier has, like Spielberg recognizing the latent energy between a shark’s gaping mouth and a swimmer’s oblivious belly, discovered the horror inherent in birds: that they are endowed with pointed probosces and that our most precious sense resides in a pair of unprotected jelly-puddles on the fronts of our heads.

Du Maurier enhances the horror by having Nat’s wife not quite yet understand (something cut him) and the attack not quite succeed (at the corner of his eyes). She’s like a jazz musician dancing around the resolving chord, making it play all the louder in our heads.

From this moment on, the story’s success is assured — we will be duly alarmed by the gulls gathering off the coast, by the birds’ discovery of chimneys — because she has successfully recruited the parts of us that have been warily wincing, squinting at every dust-storm, since before the invention of language. We’ve seen enough.

A father (a father who knows that his family is too polite to leave the room) begins to tell about a dream. And his daughter, witnessing this recitation, thinks to herself, Hey, that seems kinda fun! I can just make up any story at all — unbound by the laws of plausibility or coherence — and, so long as I say it was a dream, everyone will have to listen to me? And, since dreams unfold behind the opaque curtain of consciousness, my claim that I had this dream will be completely non-falsifiable? (The daughter in this imagined scene speaks to herself like a freshman philosophy student.)

And so off the girl goes, telling her “dream” — they were all in this weird blue room, only the room was filled with bats, and the bats had the faces of her classmates, etc etc.

And the strange thing is that the girls’ parents know, instantly and absolutely, that this dream is bullshit. That their daughter is making it up as she goes along. “Sounds weird!” they say. “Now go brush your teeth.”

But how did the parents know that the dream was fake? How do we recognize the difference between strings of narrative oddity that washed up on shore from the ocean’s true depths and those that were manufactured and placed in the sand?

A writer (which is to say, a person who has chosen to live his entire life as an attention-starved child at the breakfast table) may only be granted one or two true dreams in the course of his whole career. These are the stories that arrive spontaneously, dripping with unconscious potency — the ones that seem less to have been written by the writer than through him. The rest of the time he is miserably, willfully faking it (faking it not least with himself). The daughter at least knows that she’s pretending; the poor writer might anxiously wonder where a particular idea came from for the rest of his creative life. Is it possible that I was inspired not by a slurry of half-finished Netflix series but by… The Muse? How can I be sure?

Let’s take D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner” as an example — let’s subject it to the breakfast-table test.

You may remember “The Rocking-Horse Winner” from your high-school anthology. It’s the one about a boy who, in an attempt to relieve his financially stressed family, starts betting on horses. It’s a great and strange story — one of the more authentic-feeling dreams I’ve come across in years. But Lawrence is, I think, one of those authors that no one reads anymore — a jar of pickles in the back of the fridge that we intend to get to someday but meanwhile have begun to regard with suspicion and dread (Hey Siri, do old pickles become toxic?)

But if you do take him out, you will find him — despite the fusty cover designs, despite the wearying sense that he is best known for writing scandalous prose that today one can hardly decode, let alone get offended by — shockingly crisp and delicious.

Here’s how “The Rocking-Horse Winner” starts:

There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck. She married for love, and that love turned to dust. She had bonny children, yet she felt they had been thrust upon her, and she could not love them.

He writes like someone whose teacher is about to snatch his paper away — no time to tell you what features of this woman might make her beautiful, no time to tell you how her marriage went bad, no time even to name her. Whatever he wants to tell us, he apparently wants to tell it urgently, and this is the first indication that we might be hearing an authentic dream — he is racing to set it down before it evaporates.

The woman, with her crumbling marriage and her unloved children, is having money troubles;

And so the house came to be haunted by the unspoken phrase: There must be more money! There must be more money! The children could hear it all the time, though nobody ever said it aloud.

One of the children, Paul (we can’t go a whole story without giving anyone a name), decides he can no longer bear all this unspoken dread.

“Then what is luck, Mother?”

“It’s what causes you to have money. If you’re lucky you have money…”

“… And is father not lucky?”

“Very unlucky, I should say,” she said bitterly.

…

“Well anyhow,” [Paul] said stoutly, “I’m a lucky person.”

“Why?” said his mother, with a sudden laugh.

He stared at her. He didn’t even know why he had said it.

“God told me,” he asserted, brazening it out.

And so Paul, determined to break his family’s unlucky streak, wanders pensively off, and he happens to climb aboard the old rocking-horse in the nursery. And as his rides it with ever-mounting absorption (“…charging madly into space, with a frenzy that made the little girls peer at him uneasily,”) something extraordinary happens. In his rocking-horse-induced fugue, the name of a racehorse comes to him: Daffodil.

So he goes to his uncle, a regular at the racetrack, and excitedly gives him the horse’s name. The uncle, skeptical but kind, places a bet for them. And whaddaya know, Daffodil wins! In the midst of his hapless family, Paul has stumbled onto a good-luck mine!

A couple of dream-signs to note here:

1) The causal mechanism is strange but, from a certain cockeyed angle, sensible. A toy horse contains information about a real horse. To the dreamer it tracks perfectly.

2) Paul’s activity on the rocking-horse — all that frenzied rhythmic charging toward an otherworldly climax — is embarrassingly, obviously sexual. The dreaming mind traffics in imagery that the waking mind wouldn’t touch with a ten foot riding crop.

But the final assurance that Lawrence is not creating this story but receiving it — that he is actually in the state that all the morning pages and unedited first drafts are meant to steer us toward — is this: he’s made an enormous blunder.

Because I have made the story more sensible than it is. Paul doesn’t just give the horse’s name to his uncle. He shares it also with Basset, the family’s gardener (being financially luckless was different then). And Paul and Basset, it turns out, have been gambling like this for ages — Paul supplying the fugue-provided names, Basset placing the money.

“We’re partners!” Paul shouts to his understandably bewildered uncle. “We’ve been partners from the first!”

Which is to say that Lawrence has taken the entire logical track of his story (money trouble —> rocking-horse frenzy —> racetrack winnings) and introduced a rickety, senseless loop-de-loop. So Paul did already know that he was lucky? So he wasn’t, in climbing aboard his rocking-horse, discovering a genie’s lamp in the sand but rather was taking his genie’s lamp from its carefully labeled place on the shelf? Then why not tell us the story of how he got this gift in the first place? What are we even doing here?

Lawrence doesn’t know any more than you do. The story races on, just as if the Basset-detour had never happened, and Paul’s connection to the rocking-horse gets ever deeper, ever more queasily Jungian. The dreaming mind generates incoherencies and discards them without apology or explanation. Such is the eye-crossing frenzy of true unconscious composition. Siblings peer uneasily; critics uncap their red pens. Readers demand to hear what happened next.

When Jimi Hendrix, midway through “The Star-Spangled Banner,” lifts his guitar to his face and plays the solo with his teeth, he’s performing a kind of party trick, steering the bicycle of his performance with no hands. But he’s also expressing a deep and ecstatic impulse. Like a baby mashing a cupcake into her hair or a lover madly guzzling an ear, he is conducting a one-man protest against the body’s stubbornly rigid organizational chart.

We should, our inner Hendrixes insist, be able to taste with our hair and manipulate sets of strings with our teeth. At our most frenzied, which is somehow also our most transcendentally clear, we know that the self isn’t a loose coalitions of cubicle-bound hyper-specialists (Nose has worked in Smelling for forty-years, he doesn’t even know what Hearing does); beneath or before all that, the self is an undifferentiated sensory amoeba. Smell our cries.

No one would be much impressed, or even aware, if a writer were to lean down and peck out the last few words of his masterpiece with his teeth. But that doesn’t mean a writer can’t succumb to Hendrix’s synesthetic impulse. Watch how Philip Roth, twenty pages into his most frenzied solo of a book, starts hungrily eyeing his fretboard.

I’m talking, of course, about Sabbath’s Theater, which I’ve written about before and will write about again. Never have I felt so strongly that everyone should read a book that I’d blush to be seen with on the subway. I tell you that the book’s explicit and you think, Yes, well, I’m no prude, I’ve read Fifty Shades of Grey, and then I flip open Sabbath more or less at random and show you “the thrashing, the whimpering, the loud groaning, the opaque eyes staring fixedly upward, the fingernails digging into his scalp,” and you say, Hmm, thanks, I think I’ll try a Barbara Pym.

But trust me: it’s an insane, ingenious, mind-consuming forest fire of a book. You look up every now and then from reading it, your eyes opaque and fixed, and you feel like thanking Philip Roth for his service. He is, in Sabbath, shameless in the noblest sense; armed with his Henry Jamesian eloquence he free dives, on the reader’s behalf, into some of humanity’s most forbidden grottos.

Lately, when Sabbath suckled at Drenka’s uberous breasts — uberous, the root word of exuberant, which is itself ex but uberare, to be fruitful…

He comes up wreathed in seaweed, clutching pearls, elatedly panting with life.

Twenty pages in, though, he’s experiencing a brief spell of non-vulgarity. Lying with his Croatian mistress on a mountaintop in the Berkshires (“the triangular clearing they would have instead of a home,”) Sabbath is contemplating the wildflowers.

Each year she taught him the names of the flowers, in her language and in his…

They didn’t have wildflowers growing up on the Jersey Shore, he thinks. And this is enough to send Sabbath — and Roth — into one of his favorite reveries.

He was from the shore. There was sand and ocean, horizon and sky, daytime and nighttime — the light, the dark, the tide, the stars, the boats, the sun, the mists, the gulls.

The solo is gaining speed, and already a certain melodic shape is emerging — we have a Genesis-like fixation on the elemental (daytime and nighttime); and Roth, like Adam, running around just naming stuff.

The house. The porch. The screens. The icebox. The tub. The linoleum. The broom. The pantry. The ants. The sofa. The radio.

He’s entering a mnemonic frenzy, shedding all rhetorical fanciness.

The outside shower with the slatted wooden floor Morty [Sabbath’s late brother] had built and the drain that always clogged. In summer the salty sea breeze and the dazzling light…

But he’s still not quite getting across what he wants you to understand about the boundless bliss of his seaside childhood — you can feel Roth banging on the bars of what literary sentences are capable of; he would fling sand in your face if he could.

And then, in his mania, he happens upon a calendar.

… in September, the hurricanes; in January, the storms.

And now he’s getting somewhere. Now he will set down literariness altogether and play the goddamn instrument with his teeth.

They had January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December. And then January. And then again January, no end to the stockpile of Januaries, of Mays, of Marches. August, December, April — name a month, and they had it in spades. They had endlessness.

Is that first sentence — the one in which he simply names the twelve months in order — not an insane bit of non-erudition from a man with an entire Awards and Nominations subsection on Wikipedia? A second grade teacher would not subject her class to an actual syllable-by-syllable recitation of all twelve months; we get the point, we autofill the droning voice’s direction, by early spring.

But Roth, who can play anything on his instrument, who will devote half-a-dozen ornate subclauses to capturing the precise texture of an ex-lover’s facial expression, does it! He marches us through the year, offering us no more rhetorical goodies, no more artistic shape, than a calendar hanging in a gas station bathroom.

And precisely because this sentence is so non-virtuosic, because Roth here comes to us not only stripped of all his literary medals but literally like a child — reciting the months as if he were a six-year-old and we were the adults distractedly nodding at the dining table — we finally feel the unbearable simplicity of what he’s trying to express. All the eloquence in the world can’t touch the enormity of what he’s lost, can’t give him back the feeling of watching fireworks over the ocean. His parents are standing behind him and will never die. “The Star-Spangled Banner” is playing somewhere in the distance.

Happy Fourth of July.

If you were to ask me my favorite single piece of writing advice I’d probably mention Virginia Woolf’s diary entry about how she “dig[s] out beautiful caves behind her characters.”

And if you were then to say, That sounds neat, but can you give me an example of someone doing it?, I would walk you out of Classics and through Literature and across the hall into the sticky-floored, low-shelved realm of Children.

Specifically, I’d take you to book eight of Beverly Cleary’s Ramona series, and I’d turn to page 100. But before we take a look at what’s printed there, let me say something about the almost unreasonable goodness of these books.

Cleary, with Ramona, does the thing that every writer aspires to do but that almost no one manages: to make ordinary, deciding-what-to-have-for-dinner, watching-TV-commercials, staring-out-the-rainy-window-on-a-Sunday life feel like material enough. If someone gave Robert McKee the elevator pitch for the Ramona series (A girl grows up, and goes to the library, and sometimes wishes she had a different babysitter…), McKee would take that elevator to the roof and jump off. There are zero wizarding schools or secret powers or government agencies that for some reason need the help of a child. There isn’t even bullying, or puberty, or unusual familial agony. There is only a girl and her spectacularly vivid parents and siblings, living their unremarkable lives.

To get away with such mundanity, you need, of course, some compensatory offering. Nicholson Baker offsets his lack of incident with linguistically rich microscopy. Knausgård goes for hypnotic, punishing self-seriousness. And Cleary opts for the most audacious compensation of all: she writes characters so specific and true, so psychologically complete, that you forget that she’s even doing anything unusual. Plot, you realize reading Ramona, is how ordinary writers compensate for possessing sub-Cleary levels of insight into their characters.

Which brings me to page 100.

Ramona and her father have just driven Beezus — Ramona’s gawky and earnest older sister — to her first real middle school party. Beezus has been fretting for chapters about what she’ll wear and who she’ll dance with. Ramona’s been coming to understand, with uneasiness, that her parents worry about Beezus — that despite her formidability as Ramona’s sister, her social success is not assured. And now, with Beezus off at the party itself, a reflective quiet has settled over the Quimby house, as if Beezus were not on a dance floor but on an operating table.

When [Ramona and her father] returned home, Mrs. Quimby looked up from her book (she did not have many pages left) and said, as if her thoughts were far away, “I’ll never forget my first dance. It was in the school gym, and the only boy who asked me to dance I didn’t want to dance with. He was a weird little fellow who grew up to be an interesting man, but at the time I wanted to dance with a tall, handsome boy. Silly me.”

Note, first of all, the trusting, conversational complexity of Cleary’s prose. That first sentence — whose function is merely to steer us into the thicket of extended quotation — interrupts itself twice: first with a parenthetical (Mrs. Quimby’s been dutifully plodding through Moby-Dick for a book group), and then with a stage-direction (as if her thoughts were far away). And yet we’re never impatient, never confused. You know when you’ve kept a piece of paper in your wallet for so long that, when you take it out and unfold it, you discover that it’s turned almost into a kind of fabric? That’s how Cleary’s prose feels to me.

But the real marvel of the passage is Mrs. Quimby’s dialogue. I’ll never forget my first dance. This is the tone of someone staring off into the middle distance, someone communicating more with herself than with the family members in front of her. We are entering the cave that Cleary has carved out in back of Mrs. Quimby — the idiosyncratic, unknowably vast set of circumstances that have brought her to this moment as a middle-aged mother with a book in her lap.

Another step into the cave:

It was in the school gym, and the only boy who asked me to dance I didn’t want to dance with.

And then another:

He was a weird little fellow fellow who grew up to be an interesting man, but at the time I wanted to dance with a tall, handsome boy.

And with this sentence — my favorite in the book and quite possibly my favorite in the entire series — we fall reverentially still: our torches have illuminated a cave painting.

That phrase weird little fellow tells us that we are entirely within Mrs. Quimby’s private self; she would never be so rude about someone, not even a stranger, if she were playing the role of mother. And with her classmate’s transformation into an interesting man we experience the satisfying bewilderment of a high school reunion; how patiently and inventively life works on people.

But this is not Cleary providing a bit of adult service (like when the Minions screenwriters tuck some bit of innuendo into a scene to reward the chaperones for their perseverance). Because it isn’t just the reader who’s marveling at what we see in Mrs. Quimby’s cave — it’s Ramona too.

She is experiencing a childhood event no less momentous than a first boy-girl party: she is seeing her mother as a fellow planetary explorer, just a few years longer tenured than herself. She’s discovering that her mother’s life, her mother’s past, is not there to instruct her or to orient her, like the family tree at the front of Russian novel. No, her mother’s life, like her own life, is simply there, full of contingencies and embarrassments and secret thoughts. What if her mother had ended up with that weird little fellow? What if her actual father was just another weird little fellow? The implications are dizzying. Ramona scurries back the way she came, to the daylight of wondering how Beezus is doing and needing to go to bed.

But she is aware, now, of the network of caves that her creator (like the Creator) has carved out behind every person. Who needs wizarding school?

A forty-six year old painter opens the newspaper and is stunned to discover, there in the corner of the arts section, his own obituary.

Horrified, he calls to his wife, who comes racing in from the next room and — senselessly, sweetly — bursts into tears.

The painter storms into the newspaper’s office and confronts the editor, threatening to sue. The editor placates him (“‘We have a strange discrepancy here… I hope you appreciated the homage my newspaper rendered your art…’”) and then suggests that the painter consider the favorable side of the situation: what if the painter were to play along with the news of his death? Wouldn’t the value of his work inevitably increase?

Yes, the painter admits, the editor has a point. And the painter does after all have a brother (who looks just like the painter, except that he has a beard). The painter could grow out his beard, say that he is his own brother, and embrace his posthumous era.

And so the story is launched.

And — because we have an innate fervor for storytelling just as a yellow lab has an innate fervor for tennis-ball-catching — we know where it will land. Or we don’t “know” — not so that we could write it down — but we can feel it. We can run, jaws agape, to meet it.

But before we do:

The story is by Dino Buzzati — a mid-20th-century Italian fantasist who was something like Kafka’s friskier, sunnier cousin. Buzzati wrote novels and stories that unspooled their absurd premises (a man accidentally spends years waiting for a military invasion that never comes; a woman’s consciousness is uploaded into a complex of wires and sensors) with journalistic simplicity. “The Late Mistaken” — just five-and-a-half-pages long, written in a single day in February of 1958 — is the best thing he ever wrote.

And now, to demonstrate that you do in fact possess this narrative-tracking brain region, let me show you a bit more of the story’s trajectory.

The painter, now having decided to play along with the news of his death, retreats. And at first the plan unfolds just as the newspaper editor suggested it would:

Then the buyers began to arrive: dealers, collectors, people who had a nose for business. Paintings that before would barely fetch forty or fifty thousand were now selling for two hundred in a snap.

The painter’s beard grows out, and he starts venturing out into the world, claiming to be his own brother. He even visits the cemetery — where he encounters a new, beautiful coffin, with his name on the side.

With enigmatic fear he rapped his knuckles on the side of the box. The coffin sounded empty. Thank goodness.

Imagine, for a second, that the story ends here, with that superstitious Thank goodness. Does that give you the feeling, the satisfying thunk, of a well-caught ball? Well, it’s not awful. It has some of the shivery unresolvedness of a ghost story. It tells us that the painter is beginning to feel haunted by his impulsive deception.

But the potential energy contained in the premise has not yet been fully expended. We’re still racing across the field, legs a blur.

And now the painter’s posthumous burst of success is beginning to dissipate.

Citations of his name in newspaper columns and art magazines became increasingly rare. And very soon they ceased altogether.

With pained disbelief he observed that even without Lucio Predonzani the world managed fairly well. The sun would rise and set as before. As before housekeepers beat rugs in the morning, trains ran, people ate and amused themselves, and at night young guys and girls would kiss, standing against the black railings in the park, as before.

And we can feel the ball slowing. When the story opened the painter made a consequential decision, and now those consequences — ego-obliteration, a recognition of his own expendability — have begun to reveal themselves.

So could this be the ending? The painter standing wistfully by the railing, watching the him-less world go blissfully by?

No, but the zone of potential endings is narrowing. That visit to the cemetery was one telling bounce. This painful revelation in the park is another. There is only one page left in the story. We can taste the sweet chemical greenness of the tennis ball.

The painter comes home from his walk and discovers the coat of his oldest friend (a fellow painter, a former rival) hanging in his foyer. His wife has moved on. He is disappearing from his own life, just as he is disappearing from the world.

And now our eyes begin to fixate on a particular patch of air ahead of us. Because the painter, rather than confronting his wife, tiptoes back out of the house and heads for the cemetery. This feels right. The ball’s seams are becoming visible.

Without rushing, as night slowly fell, he used a penknife to remove the bolts that sealed the newest box, “his” coffin…

He opened it and quite calmly lay down inside, supine, assuming the pose that he imagined might serve the deceased for their eternal slumber. He found it more comfortable than he had anticipated.

Our jaws are open, our satisfaction is assured.

Without losing his composure, he slowly pulled the lid over himself. When a final narrow crack remained, he listened for a few moments, in case someone might have called him. But no one called.

Now the potential energy has fallen to almost zero. This — the painter climbing despondently into his own coffin — feels like the final, the fitting, consequence. The fuzz is touching our lips.

But Buzzati has one more line.

Then he let the lid close completely.

Thunk. The ball is caught.

That word completely describes not only the action of the lid, but the action of the story, the action of the painter’s psyche. He has, enclosed in final darkness, discovered what Walter White discovered when he pretended to be a criminal mastermind; what Gatsby discovered when he reinvented himself as a playboy; what Updike discovered when he became the famous author he’d always wanted to be — that a mask, worn long enough, replaces the face. The obituary was not a mistake; it was a portent. The painter had died; his body just hadn’t yet got the message.

And so we and Buzzati have, simply by allowing our own natural athletic abilities to briefly frolic, rendezvoused at a point that neither of us could have identified beforehand but that neither of us could have missed once the ball was in motion. The movement of the story, with all its many bounces and spins, is complete. We’re ready to do it again.

Often I’ll be reading a new book to my daughter — something I’ve brought home from the library with great excitement — and the first couple of pages will go well enough. We’ll be acquainting ourselves with an unfamiliar set of characters, working up a slight cognitive sweat sorting out that this one is that one’s step-sister and that their conversation is taking place while they wait to see the headmaster at their prestigious but sinister boarding school.

And then, just as the sweat is drying and we’re finally beginning to move along at a gallop, confident that we now know the landscape’s salient features well enough to avoid twisted ankles, there will be a chapter break, and suddenly we’ll meet an entirely new set of characters, in an entirely different setting.

And it’s at this point — just as my reading voice has taken on a slightly desperate pep — that my daughter will interrupt with a forlorn Who? I’m not sure a book has ever recovered from that Who?

Because while I, grizzled veteran of who knows how many skirmishes with novels, know that this apparently unrelated set of characters will soon reveal themselves to be the first set’s adoptive parents or future roommates or whatever, she, whose scrupulously maintained book-list is still only in double-digits, can’t be convinced that the author has not suffered a cognitive event.

Which means that an entire species of literary pleasure is foreclosed to her. Specifically: the pleasure of watching discrete drops of narrative mercury congeal. This is what we enjoy in, say, Alice Munro’s “The Albanian Virgin” (Wait, the kidnapped woman was Charlotte!) or Infinite Jest (That miserable kid with the drunken father is Hal’s dad!). Around the turn of the millennium there was a mini-genre of movies whose frisson derived entirely from the plenitude of, and the distance between, mercury drops (Babel, Traffic, Magnolia, Crash).

Faced with such a narrative-diffusing novel, for a long time all I could do was assure my daughter that this was a thing that stories sometimes did and that she would someday come to like it (just as I assure her that adults are not in fact kidding when they listen to folk music). Then we tried Louis Sachar’s Holes.

Sachar is a genius at mercury-drop arrangement — and, just as importantly, he is a genius at building a platform from which the skeptical reader can actually see the drops in their state of pre-congealment trembling.

But first, in case you missed the fanfare and the (quite good!) Shia LeBeouf movie: Holes is a multi-award-winner from 1998 about a dystopian Texas camp where juvenile delinquents are forced to dig holes in the desert all day. And Sachar is the frisky, Kurt-Vonnegut-esque author of the Wayside School books, among many others. Holes is my favorite — and one of the best books I know for that occasionally barren interval (Graphic novels count as reading, right? Right??) between the family dinners of Beverly Cleary and the makeout sessions and terminal illnesses of John Green.

The first 26 pages unfold linearly enough: a boy named Stanley Yelnats is headed off to Camp Green Lake because he stole (or anyway was convicted of stealing) a pair of collectible sneakers. We learn a bit about Stanley — his loony, impoverished parents; his insensitive teachers — and we get a glimpse of Camp Green Lake in all its bleakness (“Those two trees were the only plant life he could see. There weren’t even weeds.”) We meet the oddball kids with whom he’ll be digging and the dopey, sadistic adults who’ll be overseeing them. The reader couldn’t be de-horsed if she tried.

But then, 27 pages and 7 chapters in, Sachar takes a risk. Having crafted a shapely and gleaming mercury droplet with this relatable boy arriving at a dreadful camp, he now places a second droplet, some distance away. There’s a page-break (he even inserts, into the page break, one of those floating, imposing em-dashes) and then he writes:

Stanley’s great-great-grandfather was named Elya Yelnats. He was born in Latvia. When he was fifteen years old he fell in love with Myra Menke.

And already I can feel the who? gathering in my daughter’s throat. Because these three sentences have so many things not going for them — the great-great litany that signifies that we are in a past so long-ago as to be scarcely picturable. The unfamiliar country. The new names Elya and Menke, with their Old World combinations of consonants and their wearying suggestion that we might soon be faced with a family tree. Sachar needs to do this — his ability to tell the real story of Camp Green Lake, and of Stanley’s true, family-redeeming purpose there, depends on it — but he is losing readers with every reverse-turn of the calendar page.

Sachar knows all this, of course, and so, before the who? can make it to my daughter’s lips, he adds this, in a paragraph of its own:

[He didn’t know he was Stanley’s great-great-grandfather.]

And suddenly we’re equipped not merely to tolerate but to enjoy the four-and-a-half page historical interlude that follows.

That bracketed sentence manages such a feat, first of all, because of its brackets. Those rarely-used punctuation marks — the industrial-strength alternative to parentheses — invite the reader backstage; they create a distinct, narrating self; they indicate that we are not alone in this (briefly bewildering) stream of events. Yes, this is a brand new mercury drop, but look, here I am with my pipette.

And the content of the sentence — its footnote-esque tone of clarification — amounts to a frank acknowledgment of the reader’s distress. Approaching it I feel like a diner at a restaurant, credit card in hand, looking around with mounting alarm for a disappeared waiter — and then, like an old world maître d’, Sachar appears table-side to assure us that our server will be with us shortly. I know you don’t know who these people are, the sentence says. Well, I know who they are. And they themselves don’t! 

That mildly trippy twist — the reminder that our ancestors went about their lives under the misimpression that they were protagonists in their own right, not knowing that they were merely the means of creating the true protagonist who is us looking back at them — is the sentence’s final delight. The egotism that comes with being a self is both underscored and lightly teased.

And before we know it, before we have even remembered to suffer, the new mercury drop has leapt into — has been miraculously swallowed up by — the orb of the original. Our confusion has disappeared; our capacity for delight has grown.

“Joe smiled a lot, on the field and off, but his was a static smile of repose, rather like a dolphin’s.”

I realized recently that maybe it wasn’t Slaughterhouse-Five that made me a writer, as I’ve often claimed, but a floppy little book of photographs called Separated at Birth?. Separated at Birth? — a product of Spy magazine, present on the bookshelves of my childhood bedroom without ever seeming to have been placed there, like a boulder in a forest — consisted of nothing but side-by-side black-and-white photos of celebrities who were meant (often a bit meanly, or at least unexpectedly) to resemble one another. Michael Dukakis and Mr. Rogers. Norman Mailer and Robin Leach. George Shultz and the Cowardly Lion. I had heard of hardly any of these people, but knowing that someone had plucked out these photos and, with a bit of irreverent self-satisfaction, placed them side by side made me feel like the 2001 ape first lifting up a bone. I knew that this meant something.

And what it meant, I now think, was that comparing unlike things is, for me, the central delight of writing, perhaps the central delight of having a mind. There is no mental activity that feels more natural to me — that feels more innately me — than finding a resemblance, however tenuous, between people, objects, activities, feelings. In fact the more tenuous — the narrower the bridge you have to guide your listener across, the more fields of unlikeness you have to traverse en route — the more thrilling. Nicholson Baker comparing the crunch of a stapler to the sensation of biting through an ice cube; Proust comparing seeing the moon during the day to seeing an opera star peering in from the wings during rehearsal — these make something deep in me sigh with happiness.

When I’m reading a book of course I’m interested in characterization and sound and plot and a thousand other things, but what I’m really looking for, what I’m really hoping for, is a comparison that startles me with its aptness. Here, from a writer named Timothy Ferris (not that one), is one of my favorites:

Joe smiled a lot, on the field and off, but his was a static smile of repose, rather like a dolphin’s.

Before I explain my love for this particular sentence — which flits unbidden through the space of my mind every few months, like a bald eagle flashing across the sky above a riverbank — let me tell you where it comes from. (And let me assure you that appreciating it does not require interest in, or familiarity with, football.)

Timothy Ferris is a science writer in the mold of Robert Sapolsky or Steven Pinker. Your favorite professor after a drink or two, is the genre. His most famous book is Coming of Age in the Milky Way — which I’m told, by people who don’t share my particular inability to grasp anything even remotely cosmic, is wonderful. My favorite of his books is The Mind’s Sky, a giddily eclectic collection of essays from 1992.

My beloved sentence comes from “Joe Montana’s Premotor Cortex,” about the neurological marvels that underly great athleticism. This being the early 90’s, and Ferris being a Californian, his gaze naturally settles on the San Francisco 49ers.

Several of the players on that extraordinary club I would call geniuses, by which I mean that they played so creatively that they innovated the sport.

He enumerates the virtues of these players for a while (“…Jerry Rice, a wiry, buoyant wide receiver never more at east than when in motion… At full speed he looked as relaxed as a man in an easy chair…”) before he arrives at the natural summit of all 49er-appreciation: the peerless, unruffled quarterback Joe Montana.

He first explains the importance of quarterbacks with a great overfull car carrier of a sentence:

To play quarterback in the National Football League calls for speed (the quarterback has on average two and a half seconds in which to take the snap from center, drop back, set, spot a receiver, and throw a pass; a handoff play may take less than one second), deception (while doing all this he tries to appear to be doing something else, lest the defense read his intentions), precision (if you can *consistently *chuck a football into a trash can buckled into the passenger seat of a swerving jeep twenty yards away, you may have what it takes)…

But any good sportswriter could have written this. Ferris, as fluent in matters neurological as he is in matters cosmological, is going to guide us away from Joe Montana’s arm and into his brain.

To be a genius is to have genius, somewhere among the centers of the brain… I think the locus of Joe Montana’s genius was to be found in his premotor cortex.

And Ferris isn’t merely interested in accounting for Montana’s genius, on this neurological tour — he wants simultaneously to account for his famed emotional placidity. And Ferris’s basic, wonderful conjecture is that the strip of Montana’s premotor cortex devoted to his extremities — the throwing hands and dancing feet vital for carrying out the intricate series of actions listed above — borrowed tissue, like a blanket-snatching bedmate, from the adjacent brain-region, which just happens to control the face.

So it just may be that the cool, almost expressionless face of an athlete like Joe Montana is the outward badge of a motor cortex so skilled at managing the hands and feet that it has depleted the cortical territory normally employed to control facial muscles.

This hypothesis is pleasing and surprising enough that I might ordinarily remember it for a year or two after reading it, dimly. But because Ferris leads into his entire multi-page burst of speculation by comparing Joe Montana to a dolphin, I have worn it in a locket around my neck for twenty years.

Joe smiled a lot, on the field and off, but his was a static smile of repose, rather like a dolphin’s.

Static smile of repose is lucid and elegant — fitting but formal, it requires a bit of squinting and decoding on our part. Yes, we think, that’s about right, but our depths remain unmoved. But then we come to rather like a dolphin’s — and suddenly we are on our feet. So much latent mental material regarding both Joe Montana and dolphins (the precise degree of friendliness implied by an arbitrary curve of rubbery flesh; a thousand sideline interviews with unreadable virtuosos) comes bursting gloriously out of the ground. Joe Montana and a dolphin — like Prufrock and a pair of ragged claws; like Elizabeth Bishop’s fish’s swim-bladder and a peony — were separated at birth. And we are reborn.

Reading and rereading John Cheever’s “Goodbye, My Brother,” looking for a sentence to single out, I feel like a child racing around the beach in search of the one seashell his parents have agreed to let him bring home from vacation. Ooh, look at this purple one with the ridges! Or wait, what about this smooth little apricot one? No, no, it’s this big primeval clamshell I want!

I did settle on one, finally, but forgive me for taking a little time to say farewell to each of my treasures as I empty out the sandy pockets of my bathing suit.

Before I get to that, though, a bit about Cheever for those who know him only by his index terms: short stories, alcohol, Ossining. His pomegranate-colored Collected Stories has, I fear, become the literary equivalent of the White Pages, something you drop with only a token bit of regret into the gaping mouth of the contractor bag while cleaning out your grandparents’ den. Can you believe that people used to want this thing?

Well, fish it out and dust it off. Cheever is better and weirder than you remember. He is, I’ve come to believe, the Jerry West of 20th Century American fiction — a man of exceptional gifts and exceptional torments (check out his journals, if you’re feeling dangerously buoyant). Roth and Updike and Bellow generated highlights (A step-back trilogy at the buzzer!) that make Cheever’s mannerly set shots look stiff and outmoded. But he played the game — the unsexy business of capturing in glyphs what it feels like to be alive — as skillfully as any of them.

“Goodbye, My Brother” is about a WASPy, alcohol-soaked family called the Pommeroys. They’ve gathered, this mother and her four grown children, at Laud’s Head, their beloved, slightly rickety summer house on an island that sounds a lot like Martha’s Vineyard. Their father drowned years ago in a sailing accident, so there’s a tragic urgency to these regular reunions.

This gathering is singular, though, because Lawrence — the youngest Pommeroy, the one who scorns the family for all their drinking and house-worshiping and even for their daily games of backgammon — has deigned to come.

The other siblings spend the story sitting around loathing Lawrence, mostly for the crime of loathing them. Cheever gives this sitting around — and this loathing — the weight and eeriness of myth.

After supper, when we went back onto the terrace, the clouds held that kind of light that looks like blood, and I was glad that Lawrence had such a lurid sunset for his homecoming…

This is the essence of Cheever’s greatness — that his most ordinary sentences, the ones that Raymond Carver or Richard Ford would sand down to bland anonymity, arrive knobby with lyrical weirdness.

In the dark below below the cliff, the continual detonations of the surf sounded.

I could, and almost did, write an entire essay about that perfect word detonations. How it captures the broad and blocky bashing of Atlantic waves. (Imagine if he’d used the word explosions instead — suddenly, to put things in terms of Super Mario Bros. 2 (as all fine literary analyses do), we’d be dealing with Bob-ombs rather than the far more apt and oceanic POW blocks).

But don’t get sidetracked! That’s merely a runner-up seashell. I’m throwing that one back.

So: the Pommeroys swim in the ocean and, with clenched jaws and stiff drinks, tolerate Lawrence’s sour judgments.

“This house will be in the sea in five years,” Lawrence said.

They comfort their frail, widowed, alcoholic mother (whose lines sound best if you read them in the voice of Lucille Bluth).

“I know one thing,” she said hoarsely. “I know that if there is an afterlife, I’m going to have a very different kind of family. I’m going to have nothing but fabulously rich, witty, and enchanting children.”

By the end of the story, the narrator — a discontented schoolteacher with a stubbornly romantic attachment to both the family and the house — has decided that he can no longer bear Lawrence’s Debbie Downer-ism. They’re walking along a strip of bare beach one morning when their civility detonates.

“Come out of this gloominess… It’s only a summer day. You’re spoiling your own good time and you’re spoiling everyone else’s…”

Lawrence is unpersuaded.

“Mother is an alcoholic. If she doesn’t discipline herself, she’ll be in a hospital in a year or two. Chaddy is dishonest. He always has been. The house is going to fall into the sea.” He looked at me and added, as an afterthought, “You’re a fool.”

“You’re a gloomy son of a bitch,” I said. “You’re a gloomy son of a bitch.”

“Get your fat face out of mine,” he said. He walked along.

Never turn your back on someone whose face you’ve just called fat.

The narrator — this is the story’s famous moment — impulsively picks up a club-sized root (“heavy with sea water”) and swings it at the back of Lawrence’s head. Lawrence falls to his knees, his hair soaked with blood. The story’s mythic arc — prodigal son, (attempted) fratricide — is complete.

But the story isn’t. Lawrence, patched up and furious, storms back to the mainland. “Mother” says her sad goodbye. And Cheever, because a story’s last page often demands a bit of sustain-pedal-heavy exit music, begins to dilate on the weather.

Jesus, what a morning! The wind was northerly. The air was clear. In the early heat, the roses in the garden smelled like strawberry jam.

He presses the pedal perhaps a bit too hard:

The buoys would toll mournfully for Lawrence, and while the grace of the light would make it an exertion not to throw out your arms and swear exultantly, Lawrence’s eyes would trace the black sea as it fell astern; he would think of the bottom, dark and strange, where full fathom five our father lies.

Make what an exertion? Whose arms? By the time we get to that Shakespearean fusillade of f’s (full, fathom, five, father) we seem to have sunk into the realm of pure music. We wonder if Cheever has had one drink too many.

But watch how he pulls things back. He grants us the relief of a paragraph break, and then he writes:

Oh, what can do you do with a man like that? What can you do?

This is my favorite moment in the story. This is the seashell I’m keeping on my mantel until it’s my grandchildren’s turn with the Hefty bag.

I love it for its sudden conversational plainness, after all that lyrical murk. I love its sunny exasperation. And I love it for the fact that it doesn’t abandon music entirely — that it begins, like a sea-shanty, with that hearty Oh [rest].

Something about its run of monosyllables, and its phrasing as a rhetorical question, demands that it be sung, or chanted. To his peerless work of psychological realism, Cheever has — impulsively, it seems — appended a moment of children’s poetry. The sentence’s easy melodiousness reminds me of “The Walrus and the Carpenter” (The sun was shining on the sea/Shining with all his might…) or “Casey at the Bat” (But there is no joy in Mudville — mighty Casey has struck out.”) You read it and your foot begins to tap.

Laud’s Head probably will be in the sea in five years. Lawrence, like many people you’d like to bludgeon with a root, is often right. But moments of lyrical rapture don’t develop cracks in their foundations, or need new shingles, or go into the hospital. They are as eternal as the sea.

I ought to have a special font for writing about certain books, or maybe a little animated bugler who comes out and announces: THIS IS ONE TO HEED. Of course every book I write about here is one I think or hope you’ll like, but occasionally I come across something that doesn’t just impress or entertain me but that inspires the clicking of some inner Geiger counter — something so powerful it feels almost dangerous. Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March had me clicking like a pair of castanets.

The book comes cloaked in a set of jacket descriptors that might have you slinking respectfully away, putting it off for some imaginary future in which you’ll be feeling worthier or more boredom-proof: “Set against the doomed splendor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire… three generations… the darkening eve of World War One….”

Fear not. The Radetzky March is a certified classic — published in 1932, subjected to multiple English translations (Michael Hofmann’s is the best), included in many a best-of-the-century list — but as a reading experience it arrives entirely without epaulets. Roth writes, oddly, quite a lot like Philip Roth — his voice is robust and funny, animated by a kind of holy haste.

An old, distinguished man goes out for a stroll, in a good mood but bound by propriety:

Sometimes the District Commissioner swung his stick a little, occasional expression of an exuberance that knew to keep itself in check.

A patriotic soldier, at a drunken party that has been interrupted by rumors of the Archduke’s assassination, doesn’t know quite what to say:

But he stood there in shrugging, gesturing perplexity, an embodiment of love of country, like a banner that wants to be hung out somewhere, but can’t find a suitable roof ledge.

As a verbal athlete, Roth belongs in the ring with Tolstoy, Woolf, Proust. If for some reason my life depended on getting hold of a first-class description of a rainstorm or a particular flavor of summer melancholy, he would be one of my first calls.

But Roth’s greatest gift — and the thing that makes The Radetzy March so unusual — is something harder to describe, more resistant to critical demonstration.

Imagine you’re walking through Washington Square Park and you glance at the chessboard of a game in progress. The pieces are configured in such a way (the Queen precisely this distance from the Knight, the King partially shielded by the Rook) that they seem, to someone who knows chess, almost to hum with weird power, like electric guitars and amplifiers placed just so.

One of a novelist’s jobs is to generate these supercharged configurations: to work her characters around to a circumstance of almost unbearable tension and significance. In War and Peace, Andrei Bolkonsky, presumed dead, returns to his family estate at precisely the moment his wife is dying in childbirth. In Remains of the Day, Miss Kenton finally confesses her feelings to the repressed butler Stevens, and he just about bursts his uniform trying not to reciprocate. Usually these scenes takes the better part of a book to set up, if the novelist can manage it at all.

The weird thing about Joseph Roth is that he seems almost to breathe these fraught arrangements. And The Radetzky March is one long string of humming chessboards.

On the first page, an undistinguished soldier accidentally saves the Emperor’s life. You’d think Roth might milk that for a chapter or ten. But instead, three pages later, we’re already at the shabby home of the soldier’s retired and semi-estranged father, experiencing the full range of unease — the awkwardness, the rivalrousness, the surreality — that comes with having a national hero in the family.

Or, a few chapters later, that soldier’s grandson is having an affair with Frau Slama, the wife of a local Sergeant. Frau Slama gets sick and dies. The secretly grief-stricken soldier goes to the Sergeant’s home, to offer his condolences to the widower/cuckold. The Sergeant offers the soldier a drink of raspberry juice. But when he goes over to the sideboard to get it, the soldier knows, but can’t say, that the juice is actually kept in the white cupboard in the kitchen — that’s where his mistress always got it. All this — the affair, the death, the encounter with the husband — happens in the space an ordinary novelist would take to establish that Frau Slama and the soldier might be thinking of sleeping together.

It took me a while to put my finger on this peculiar savantitude of Roth’s — I just knew that, like an eight-year-old at a fireworks show, I kept wanting to ask someone, “Is this the Grand Finale? Is this the Grand Finale?”

The thing that crystallized it for me, strangely, was an aside about horses. Sixty-some pages in, Roth is — without a fraught configuration in sight — describing some military barracks. Highways, huts, gates — we’re settled in for a paragraph or two of simple scene-setting; literary roughage.

But then some horses appear:

The metallic blare of the trumpets interrupted, at regular intervals, the regular clatter of the horses’ hooves, and the red trousers of the riders on the sleek chestnut bodies of their mounts filled the town with a kind of sanguinary splendor.

OK, we think. We’ve got some fancy horses. Fine.

But then a few lines later, Roth points us toward some cab drivers sitting idly nearby — horse-cab drivers, naturally.

And the old horses seemed to greet the dazzling arrival of their younger and healthier fellows with dull equanimity. The cavalry steeds were distant cousins of those drab nags who, for fifteen years, had done nothing but pull cabs to the station and back.

Do you see that? This mother$^%er is so talented, so mentally fertile, that he can’t look at a dusty town square full of horses without immediately glimpsing the equine novella in it. For fifteen years those cab-horses have done their dull and thankless work, and now their gleaming, fancily bridled cousins have come clopping into town.

Imagine what he can do with the collapse of an empire.

Do all professions have their versions of “kill your darlings”? Do trial lawyers set aside their sharpest closing arguments, counting on the jurors to reward their restraint? Do physical therapists remove their most potent exercises from their programs ? It’s the knee extension you don’t do that truly heals you.

Or (this is my suspicion) is it only writers, whose products flirt with expendability from the moment they’re born, who must live by such ruthless maxims? The lovely landscape description that one can only hear in the voice poets use when reading aloud: kill it. The clever, sentence-exploding parenthetical: destroy. The reader is a barely-willing participant on a blind date; if your eyes won’t stop straying to the mirror, she will contrive a convenient emergency (Ooh, sorry, Raymond Carver just texted!) and flee.

But at some point, or at many points, the writer will encounter a sentence that he thinks probably ought to be cut — the paragraph would read just fine without it, the image is perfectly clear — and yet a protective, slightly crazed inner voice (mine sounds like a British nursemaid) will pipe up: Not this darling!

And this voice will, maddeningly, sometimes have a point. Because what are we doing writing books at all if we can’t occasionally indulge in a sentence that gives pleasure, that could only have been written by us? Why can’t we notice when — within the many hours of failure, when we can hardly match a subject to a verb — we manage to do something well? Did Joyce not murmur in surprised self-admiration when he scribbled down the last lines of “The Dead”? Surely our fondnesses aren’t perfectly anti-predictive of actual goodness? Some parents must walk out of parent-teacher conferences both beaming and un-deluded. Why not us?

For the writer so perplexed, John Updike serves as a useful specimen. He embodies so many writerly virtues and so many writerly vices, all in such florid proportions, that the reader feels like a medical student circling a Centaur: what musculature! what hoof-rot!

Updike is, among many other things, the most prolific generator of — and most ardent protector of — darlings in the history of American literature. If he had listened to his teachers, we would not have “A barn, in a day, is a small night,” or “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.” Entire Library of America volumes would vaporize on the shelves.

But there would also, on the other side of the ledger, be one more bit of perfection in the universe. We would have “My Father’s Tears” without its final sentence.

“My Father’s Tears” is a late and very nearly great Updike story, written about his father’s death. But it begins years earlier, when Updike was an undergraduate and his father was still teaching high school in their small town. Updike, telling the story, is in a state of rare linguistic sobriety.

I saw my father cry only once. It was at the Alton train station, back when the trains still ran. I was on my way to Philadelphia... to catch, at the Market Street station, the train that would return me to Boston and college.

Updike seems — movingly — to have been stunned by the memory of his father into a state of glassy-eyed affectlessness. I hear in this unimprovable account — of looking back at one’s own empty nest — a tone I recognize from funerals: the disbelieving plainspokenness (We got home from dinner and I saw I’d missed a bunch of calls) of the mourner.

I was going somewhere, and he was seeing me go. I was growing in my own sense of myself, and to him I was getting smaller. He had loved me, it came to me as never before. It was something that had not needed to be said before, and now his tears were saying it. Before, in all the years and small adventures we had shared, there was the sensation, stemming from him, that life was a pickle, and he and I were, for a time, in the pickle together.

The story goes on like this for a couple of pages — the young Updike guiltily relishing the glamor of college life, watching his father recede in the distance — and then it leaps forward to his marriage to his first wife, Deb. Deb’s parents are religious; Updike’s aren’t. Tensions emerge, the marriage frays.

But before he and Deb divorce, they go to Italy.

We had gone there, with another couple in trouble, to see if we couldn’t make the marriage “work.”

And it’s in Italy — while they’re sitting in the hotel cafe — that the phone call comes.

It was my mother, sounding very small and scratchy…

“I’m impressed you could find me.”

“The operators helped,” she explained.

“What’s happened, Mother?”

“Your father’s in the hospital. With his second heart attack.”

Finally, reluctantly, his mother tells him that he’d probably better come back to Pennsylvania. So he and Deb set out for home.

And all of this is so well and simply done that it pains me to think about the line that’s coming. Because to this point this story has been one of those rare narrative miracles: an account so truthful, so intrinsically moving and universal, that it seems hardly to require art. A fresh-caught literary fish, seasoned only with salt.

But then, while he and Deb are briefly delayed in London, Updike calls home.

I called my mother — it was suppertime in Pennsylvania — and learned that my father was dead.

Updike hangs up and tells Deb. We have come to the story’s final lines, and it seems impossible, at this point, that he could screw it up. Just place the fish on the table and walk away.

[Deb] put her arms around me in the bed and told me, “Cry.” Though I saw the opportunity, and the rightness of seizing it, I don’t believe I did.

End the story! You’ve done it! The narrator sitting dry-eyed on the bed, saying goodbye again to his father — at a distance this time, and permanently. A spare and minor-key ending fit for an anthology.

But Updike is now vibrating with the effort of restraint.

He has one more sentence he’d like to share.

My father’s tears had used up mine.

Smash, crash, clatter — no! After 13.999 pages of perfect self-mastery, Updike has glanced into the mirror with fatal self-admiration. It wasn’t enough to construct this elegant symmetry (the father’s tears on the first page rhyming with the son’s lack of tears on the last page); he needed to point it out to us, to be absolutely sure that we appreciated it.

And so our appreciation (in a bit of psychology familiar to anyone who has ever toured a fancy house) plummets, in direct proportion to the amount that our host seems to need it. The darlings that truly need killing are the ones born not from pleasure but from anxiety — the anxiety that the unescorted reader will fail to recognize our brilliance. These darlings promise to do our bidding and they sabotage us.

The writer’s adoration uses up the reader’s.

Kurt Vonnegut: “every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.”

Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall: “Martin Beck sneezed.”

So why did these grandmasters of Swedish crime fiction — the couple that more or less invented the modern police procedural — include such an ostentatiously character non-revealing, action-indifferent sentence? You’ll have to trust me that this is not a sneeze from which we’re meant to infer that Chief Inspector Martin Beck is, say, coming down with a fatal super-flu; neither is it meant to communicate — like a pointed clearing of the throat — some subtle piece of social business. It is just a sneeze, as meaningless as the sudden glug of an office water cooler.

And yet: this sneeze, in all its mundane insignificance, demonstrates the recycled-tissue-like thinness of Vonnegut’s sensible-sounding rule. It encapsulates much that is great in this tense, comforting, singular series of books.

But first, some background: in the ’60’s and ’70’s, a pair of Swedes (Wahlöö, a crime reporter, was the man; Sjöwall, a translator, the woman) wrote ten books about a group of Swedish homicide detectives. They intended to slyly promote their Marxist ideals and to expose the inadequacies of the Swedish state; instead they wrote one of the greatest series in the history of crime fiction.

Perhaps you associate Scandinavian crime fiction, as I do, with soul-crushing bleakness and a lurid streak of sadism. Perhaps you tried The Snowman and came to the severed head and thought, I think I’ll stick with Poirot in the dining car, thanks. The Wahlöö/Sjöwall books are nothing like that. They have a pervasive, glorious everydayness to them. Crimes do of course happen (murders, break-ins, explosions) but they happen against a backdrop of patient, unsexy, humorously endured Swedish bureaucracy. You can hear the ticking of the precinct clock; you can smell the sad cheese sandwiches. The series reads as if Ed McBain had happened to live somewhere with a more robust social safety net.

And the peculiar thing, the almost unprecedented thing, is that all ten of the books are good. The Laughing Policeman (book four) is probably the one that gets recommended most often, and Roseanna is the first, if you’re that sort of reader. My favorite (though truly this is like choosing a favorite from a bag of Swedish fish) is book five, The Fire Engine that Disappeared.

Fire Engine starts with a suicide and a house bursting into flames. The linkage between these two events — the intricate but never confusing causal tangle (I have a gift for losing the thread in crime fiction) — makes up the body of the novel.

Martin Beck’s sneeze — which, again, would not make it into even the most obsessively scrupulous plot outline — comes on page 29, when the police, who have not yet gotten much of anywhere with their investigation, are sitting grumpily around the precinct house, taking phone calls from the medical examiner, batting around their frustrations.

A telephone rang and Kollberg answered. He puled a notepad toward him and took a ballpoint pen out of his pocket.

…

“Madeleine Olsen probably won’t survive. She’s got eighty per cent burns plus concussion and multiple fracture of the femur.”

Two detectives — Rönn and Kollberg — have been squabbling with particular bitterness while Martin Beck, their superior and the series’ laconic quasi-hero, sits indifferently by.

The telephone rang and Kollberg snatched up the receiver like a drowning man grasping the proverbial straw.

Slowly Rönn’s face resumed its normal color. Only his nose remained red, but it was usually red anyway.

Martin Beck sneezed.

This sneeze, punctuating an ordinary scene, given its own paragraph, serves multiple functions. First and least interestingly, it acts like a rest in a piece of music. Novelists need lines like these (dogs barking in the distance, leaf blowers whining behind neighbors’ hedges) in order to give their fictional worlds a sense of space, both temporally and physically; I imagine a hand inside a paper lunch bag, flicking the fingers outward to puff the paper into sandwich-receiving readiness.

But the sneeze also does something subtler and more textural: it suggests that Beck may be getting a cold. And (world’s most boring spoiler alert) in fact he is; many pages later, again without the slightest bearing on the plot, we learn that he’s feeling a bit under the weather. Authors don’t often bother giving their characters colds — those mildly irritating, inconsequential dips in one’s wellbeing — and in this way they sacrifice a bit of fidelity to life. Joyce gets justly celebrated for following Leopold Bloom into the bathroom, but nobody applauds Wahlöö and Sjöwall for following Beck into the sour and achy little chamber that is a head-cold.

Finally, the sneeze does reveal character — not the character of Martin Beck, but the character of the book. It establishes what I think of as the series’ room-tone. What we love in a crime series is not its plot furniture (the crime syndicates, the simpering sociopaths) but the particular emotional flavor of its bare and weathered space. Lee Child establishes his series’ room tone, famously, with the constant refrain: Reacher said nothing. From this we get the crackle of menace, the feeling of great physical power barely restrained.

Conan Doyle’s room-tone is more Victorian and docile, with the scent of a fireplace and the sound of rain against glass: we imagine Holmes in a state of feline languor, awaiting a knock.

And Wahlöö and Sjöwall’s room-tone is unhurried, naturalistic, sensitive to the humorous indignities (bodily, spiritual) that come with being a mammal in a cold climate. They mean to tell us a gripping story — and they do — but every so often they hold up a finger and tilt back their heads and get the watery, ticklish, slightly ridiculous look of someone anticipating a nasal convulsion. God bless them.

I don’t know if Alice Munro’s writing should continue to move me — if it should still be the case that I feel, when I’m reading her stories, that I’m in the presence of a wise and beloved and trustworthy friend. I only know that it does.

After the facts of her familial nightmare came out a year or two ago — a nightmare in which she was, if not the primary villain, at least complicit; cowardly and cruel and, as a parent, unforgivable — I took a few months before I tentatively opened one of her books. It wasn’t inconceivable that they would have curdled. It had happened for me with Louis C.K.; the facts of what he’d done had waved a blacklight over the body of his work, causing a certain latent creepiness to fluoresce.

And there are Munro stories — “Vandals” is the much-discussed (and, I think, non-great) one, but there are maybe half a dozen others — in which she does seem to be grappling with, squirming under the pressure of, her secret shame. But most of the work, I am uneasy to report, remains unchanged. If “Simon’s Luck” once made you slowly shake your head in awe and recognition, then it will very likely do so still.

But there is a Munro story — a Munro sentence — that seems to me not only to stand apart from the miserable facts of her private life, but also to go some way toward explaining how it is that a work of art could stand apart from such a set of facts. The story is “Dance of the Happy Shades,” the last one in her first collection. She didn’t write it as an act of self-excoriation or self-defense. She first published it in 1961 — five years before her youngest daughter was born, fifteen years before her disastrous second marriage.

The story is about a child’s piano recital, put on by a small town’s elderly, absurd, legendary piano teacher.

Miss Marsalles is having another party. (Out of musical integrity, or heart’s bold yearning for festivity, she never calls it a recital.)

The narrator — and the narrator’s mother — are dreading this recital, and Munro displays, as always, a sommelier’s sensitivity for the flavor wheel of social unhappiness (are those notes of shame I’m picking up beneath the bouquet of obligation?).

There is a feeling that can hardly be put into words about Miss Marsalles’ parties… There is even a moment, driving in to such a party, when the question occurs: will anybody else be there?… Piano lessons are not so important now as they once were; everybody knows that… But how do you explain that to Miss Marsalles, who says, “All children need music. All children love music in their hearts”?… she has this way of speaking of children’s hearts as if they were something holy; it is hard for a parent to know what to say.

The claustrophobic bleakness of the recital is wonderfully, almost hallucinogenically, rendered. Munro is developing the free, allowing-one’s-memory-to-speak-in-tongues style that would stay with her for the rest of her writing life.

The plates of sandwiches are set out, as they must have been for several hours now; you can see how the ones on top are beginning to curl very slightly at the edges. Flies buzz over the table, settle on the sandwiches and crawl comfortably across the little iced cakes brought from the bakery.

The children play; the mothers suffer. And so far we could be reading some unusually talented person’s Morning Pages — vivid but ordinary memories allowed to burble spontaneously through the pen.

But then something unexpected happens — a group of children arrive.

They look like a group of children from a private school on an excursion of some kind (there is that drabness and sameness about their clothes) but their progress is too scrambling and disorderly for that.

They are, it turns out, children with developmental disabilities (the language, in 1961, was of course different). And the mothers, who were unhappy enough about having to sit through their own children’s performances in this sweltering living room, are now quietly apoplectic.

“Who are they?” my mother whispers, surely not aware of how upset she sounds.

“They’re from that class she has out at the Greenhill School. They’re nice little things and some of them quite musical but of course they’re not all there.”

And one by one, the visiting children do perform. They are “no worse — not much worse —” than the children who have already played. Still, there is a barely controllable desperation to stand up, to take a fake-nibble from those fly-contaminated pastries and get out of there.

But then Miss Marsalles calls Dolores Boyle — the last of the Greenhill girls — to the stage.

A girl as big as I am, a long-legged, rather thin and plaintive-looking girl… She sits down on the bench and after shifting around a bit and pushing her long hair back behind her ears she begins to play.

And what she plays is — to everyone’s astonishment — beautiful. More than beautiful; it is the first piece of actual music that anyone has heard all day.

It is something fragile, courtly and gay, that carries with it the freedom of a great unemotional happiness. And all that this girl does — but this is something you would not think could ever be done — is to play it so that this can be felt, all this can be felt, even in Miss Marsalles’ living-room on Bala Street on a preposterous afternoon.

The parents sit briefly awestruck. Even the children realize that something extraordinary has happened. As a reader this moment always feels to me as if a Great Horned Owl has just flown in through an open window and out through another. It was that there; it is that gone.

And so Miss Marsalles — whose rouge and nuttiness and poignant self-delusion we’ve spent the whole story laughing at — has won out. She was right about music, maybe even right about children’s hearts.

But because this is an Alice Munro story, her victory isn’t simple. A good, workaday short story writer (Tobias Wolff, Amy Hempel) might end with Miss Marsalles bidding the sheepish kids farewell at the door, knowing that she has had the last laugh.

Here’s how Munro handles the moment:

Miss Marsalles sits beside the piano and smiles at everybody in her usual way. Her smile is not triumphant, or modest. She does not look like a magician who is watching people’s faces to see the effect… You would think, now that at the very end of her life she has found someone whom she can teach — whom she must teach — to play the piano, she would light up with the importance of this discovery. But it seems that the girl’s playing like this is something she always expected… people who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one.

So Miss Marsalles has not won by proving herself to these condescending families — she had won before the recital even began. She, like all true artists, has access to invisible resources; she lives off the emotional grid.

The mothers, standing up, unsure how to address what’s just happened, reach for the nearest conversational handrail: they ask what the piece was called.

“The Dance of the Happy Shades,” says Miss Marsalles. Danse des ombres heureuses, she says, which leaves nobody any the wiser.

And now the story has only one paragraph left — we have that breath-held feeling of a being in a descending plane whose wheels are mere feet from the runway.

But then driving home, driving out of the red-brick street and out of the city and leaving Miss Marsalles and her no longer possible parties behind, quite certainly forever, why is it that we are unable to say — as we must have expected to say — Poor Miss Marsalles? It is the Dance of the Happy Shades that prevents us, it is that one communiqué from the other country where she lives.

This last sentence is the one I keep returning to, when I think of the catastrophe of Alice Munro’s life and the miracle of her art. That perfect word communiqué, with its suggestion of spycraft, of messages smuggled across hostile borders. And that wonderfully simple, almost ungainly formulation: the other country where she lives.

Munro did, here in the world, in the house she shared with her family, foul things up about as badly as a person could. She left all her relationships curling at the edges, covered in flies. Poor, wretched Alice Munro — every word of condemnation is deserved. But she also never gave up her passport from Miss Marsalles’ other country, that silent and spacious and infinitely wise place where all great human communications come from. And we can still, with a mixture of feelings it would take a Munro to document, visit her there.

A problem, or anyway a peculiarity, about studying creative writing is that you don’t, at the end of it, know anything new. Or at least not anything that you could write down on an index card. There isn’t a quadratic equation for novel-writing; there’s just a hazy deepening familiarity with what good work smells like. Your parents ask you at the end of a semester what you learned and you gesture pitifully at a pile of pages that you hate — but at least you now know to hate them!

I do, though, remember one particular lesson. It’s just about the only one I remember. I was in eleventh grade and the teacher had us go around the room and each name an item in a garage. We were describing a garage in a story, was the idea, and we needed a detail to bring it to life.

A broom, one of us said. An oilcan. A grease spot. A rake.

The teacher nodded at each attempt, but we were scraping away at a lock with an entire ring full of the wrong keys, we could feel it.

And then a girl who barely ever spoke said, A package of granola bars from Costco?

And our teacher’s face changed; the door unlocked.

Why was her answer so much better than ours? Why did the garage remain a flat and sepia thing — like a pencil illustration in Homer Price — no matter how many garden tools and oily rags we flung at it, but then burst into sensory inhabitability with the addition of a package of granola bars?

Well, the things we were putting into it were bullshit. The granola bars were true. We had merely typed garage into our mental emoji-search-bars and reported on the handful of use-deadened images that came up. She had instead taken a moment to walk into her actual garage, imaginatively, without worrying about whether what she saw would appear on the Family Feud Top Five Things You Find in a Garage list. And she had looked around.

And so I learned something: a good detail is one that you fear is so specific, so idiosyncratic and contingent, that it will make sense only to you. Or: specificity x honesty = universality.

Pema Chodron — in addition to all that she knows about Tibetan Buddhism and writing bestselling books and living comfortably with dread and uncertainty — knows this equation.

Before I get into it: Chodron is an American-born Buddhist nun. She grew up on the East coast in the 30’s and 40’s, went to Sarah Lawrence, got married and had a couple of kids. And then her life fell apart (a divorce, a remarriage, another divorce) and she fled, or ascended, into the embrace of a particularly rich and elaborate form of Buddhism. And she began to teach. And her teachings were periodically gathered into skinny little books, between whose covers hundreds of thousands of people — including me, including people who don’t know Tonglen from a t-shirt — have found wisdom and consolation.

Midway through her best and most famous book, When Things Fall Apart, Chodron is riffing, with characteristic humor and cheer, on the themes of hopelessness and death.

We long to have some reliable, comfortable ground under our feet, but we’ve tried a thousand ways to hide and a thousand ways to tie up all the loose ends, and the ground just keeps moving under us.

Only by giving up the hope that we will ever achieve some lasting and reliable comfort, Chodron believes, will we ever enjoy our lives. We happen to be born in a wave pool — we can either clench and curse and try to slap the water calm, or we can learn to bob.

There are, of course, infinite examples that Chodron could reach for, when seeking to illustrate the basic unsatisfactoriness of things. She could bring up illness, or heartbreak, or aging, or death — the universe buys its troubles at Costco.

But here is what she actually grabs:

Theism [i.e. refusing to accept the hopelessness of things] is a deep-seated conviction that there’s some hand to hold… It means thinking there’s always going to be a babysitter when we need one.

And at first we think — because her books, transcribed from talks, have a certain conversational blur — that maybe she means some sort of cosmic babysitter? As in someone to take care of us?

And then on the next page she writes:

Nontheism is finally realizing that there’s no babysitter you can count on.

And we think, Huh, she’s really liking this babysitter image.

But then we come to the very next sentence:

You just get a good one and then he or she is gone.

And finally we realize: she isn’t talking about a cosmic babysitter! She’s talking about the babysitter saved in your Contacts, the one who moved to California to pursue acting but who you haven’t deleted yet because she was so good and didn’t she say she’d be back over Christmas or something? With an entire cosmos of miseries to choose from, she went with one so trivial, so flimsy and first-world and modern, that you would hesitate to bring it up at carpool, let alone in a one-on-one with the Buddha.

And yet — because we can feel beneath it the tug of actual experience; because we can see Pema the single mother sighing beside a phone and a calendar of ruined plans — we are convinced by it, we are brought into fresh contact with one of reality’s thorns. She has, by risking expulsion from the Fellowship of Significant Buddhist Teachers, found a place on our skins that has not yet been calloused by repeated exposure (hmm, yes, dust to dust, how unfortunate, now where are people going after the service?).

So yes: human existence is a fundamentally hopeless affair, I am ready now to sign on the dotted line. But I also know, because of that moment of eye contact regarding babysitters, that I am not alone in bumping again and again, in realms trifling and weighty, against the unbearability of things.

Which helps me bear it.

For a long time I was under the misimpression that I liked true crime. So I would pick up some lurid little paperback — something with raised red letters on its cover and a full-color, forensically hideous photo insert — and I would, within a chapter or two, recoil. Who needs analyses of stomach contents and descriptions of blood-matted hair? Back to my elderly British ladies navigating the complexities of village life.

But then I’d remember Joe McGinnis’s Fatal Vision. This was a book — telling the story of an impossibly impressive young doctor who’d murdered his wife and children — that I’d read on vacation and found so compelling that it had eclipsed the vacation; the island of Tobago is, in my inner atlas, known primarily for the brilliant light it casts upon quickly turning pages of interrogation-transcripts.

What I love, I eventually realized, is not true crime: it is stories in which people lie extravagantly, and get caught, and then lie even more extravagantly, and get even more resoundingly caught, and so on. True crime happens to be a genre in which this particular pattern abounds, but I’ll take it in any form — New Yorker stories about con artists, novels about grifters, scraps of overheard playdate chatter.

Fatal Vision is the motherlode, though. You race through its six-hundred pages in a state of steady, galvanic incredulity: he couldn’t possibly continue to proclaim his innocence now. But he does, he does. And the baffling thing — the thing that makes the case of Jeffrey MacDonald so singularly compelling — is that many bright and otherwise-skeptical people believe him. There’s an entire cottage industry of books insisting that MacDonald is innocent (Errol Morris), or that the real outrage is how he was treated journalistically (Janet Malcolm). Half the people who know about the case see it as an O.J. Simpson-level exercise in ostentatious guilt; half see it as a precursor to the Innocence Project. And each sees the other as self-evidently deranged.

I am, you may have gathered, on team O.J., but rather than try to convince you of MacDonald’s guilt (though I do have a treatise on fiber transfer and stab patterns here in my bag), I will try to convince you of Fatal Vision’s excellence.

McGinniss — a workmanlike writer who became famous for The Selling of the President 1968, about Nixon — spends the first part of the book calmly recounting the events surrounding the murder. One February night in 1970 Jeffrey MacDonald was home with his sleeping family in Fort Bragg (MacDonald was once a Green Beret) when, prompted by marital strife and the frustrations of life with small children, he flew into a homicidal rage. OR: Jeffrey MacDonald was home with his sleeping family when a group of Manson-inspired lunatics burst in and attacked (but were oddly ineffectual in attacking him).

McGinniss is careful to treat these two possibilities with equal seriousness. The media and the public found the Manson narrative plausible (VICTIMS OF HIPPIE CULT?). More plausible, certainly, than the idea that Jeffrey MacDonald (prom king, most likely to succeed, most likely to have been witnessed by his neighbors saving a cat from a tree) could have hurt his family.

McGinniss undermines MacDonald’s story patiently, thoroughly — largely by letting MacDonald (to whom McGinniss had extraordinary access) talk and talk, slowly revealing the sociopathy beneath the smile. But he doesn’t write in the spirit of a crusading prosecutor. He writes like someone slowly realizing something horrifying about the person on the other side of the table. We feel every neck-shiver and microscopic flinch.

In Chapter 5, the laboratory team arrive at the MacDonald house. They gather threads (literal threads — fibers from MacDonald’s blue pajamas are everywhere) and record the bloody scene: … soaked the carpet, sheet, and bedspread… one blood-streaked indentation on the ceiling… Drops lead toward the cabinet beneath the sink, with its cleaning rags and boxes of latex gloves. The volume of blood that a human body contains becomes suddenly, horrifyingly vivid.

McGinnis grants himself a paragraph break — like a cigarette smoked hurriedly on the stoop — before resuming with this:

There were certain places, however, where blood was not found.

Oh?

It turns out that blood was not found on the phone that MacDonald used (gasping, barely audible) to call the police. Huh. So did he, in the midst of being savaged, stop to put on latex gloves? We — and the police — have some questions.

I love this sentence not for its artistry — it is a Home Depot birdhouse of a sentence, serviceable and blunt — but for its function, its placement. There it hangs, with its slightly disingenuous tone of neutral observation, silently rocking in a paragraph of its own, summoning into the open the doubts that have to that point only softly twittered in the bushes.

More — much more — is to come (I won’t get into the magazine that MacDonald happened to have on the coffee table, or what the neighbors heard) but this is the first moment when the possibility comes near to being spoken aloud; I hear it almost as an indrawn breath. The saintly, enviable doctor really is, you realize, lying. Something childlike in me stares, mouth agape. He — who I would not look twice at if I came across him in the dentist’s office or at a back-to-school night — actually did this. And now he is, with utter conviction, with his life at stake, acting — acting in a role that he’ll have to go on playing for as long as he lives (and he is still, at 82, playing it, now for his fellow prisoners in the Federal Correctional Institution of Cumberland, Maryland).

In a blood-soaked home, in a blood-soaked genre, the absence of blood has given him away.

Ergo, the first ever (annual?) I’m About to Finally Get Some Free Time, How Do I Not Waste It? December-to-Remember Reading Guide™:

The best serial killer thriller.

Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

The only good biography:

Robert Caro, The Path to Power

A romance novel for people who disdain romance novels:

Eca de Queiros, The Crime of Father Amaro

A Philip Roth book that will have you frantically reducing the font-size on your Kindle:

Philip Roth, Sabbath's Theater

The best novel for people who have/are elderly parents:

Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont

A novel that’s like sitting next to a genius during a manic episode:

Helen Dewitt, Last Samurai

Like Stephen King but better:

Dan Chaon, Ill Will

The funniest book I’ve ever read:

John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure

I hope there’s something in there — or elsewhere in the archives — for you. It’s been a joy, as always, reading with you. See you in 2026!

-Ben

Early in a project the writer toggles, like a bored kid playing with a light switch, between first and third person. I left the house in a tremendous hurry or He left the house in a tremendous hurry?

Which is brighter? Is the intimacy and urgency of the first person worth the slightly smothering feeling of closeness, the diminishment of freedom? (How am I going to smuggle a scene not witnessed by the narrator into this book? A letter?)

Is the perspective and cool professionalism of the third person (Tolstoy, Flaubert … and me??) worth the potential lapse into the language of SAT word problems, the feeling of narrative arbitrariness? (Who is telling this story? Why do I feel like I’m sitting on a tree stump, addressing a group of children?)

In Moon Tiger — a dreamy, ingenious, Booker-winning novel from 1987 — Penelope Lively sidesteps this entire morass. She gives us a scene in the first person, and then gives us the same scene in third, and then later she might give it to us again from yet another character’s third person. She makes light-switch-toggling an integral part of the performance.

She isn’t the first writer to try to have it both ways, of course. But usually this perspectival unsteadiness comes with a whiff of transgression, of smoke rising from a literary chemistry set. Think of Denis Johnson’s famous and mysteriously powerful lurch into the second person at the end of “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” (“And you, you ridiculous people…”) or the dizzying opening pages of Barry Hannah’s Ray (“Ray is thirty-three… Ray, you are a doctor… I have magnificent children.”)

In Moon Tiger the shifts between first and third, third and first, feel more like someone shuffling handwritten pages on a pleasantly cluttered wooden desk. You notice it, of course, but you’re never jarred by it. You’re refreshed, actually. It feels like the natural, fluid movements of a mind just on the edge of sleep.

And it ought to feel like that, because Moon Tiger is about a seventy-something historian, Claudia, sketching out a history of the world (in the course of which she can’t help but recollect her life) while dying in a hospital bed.

But I’m making the book sound awfully gauzy, when it is in fact wonderfully sharp.

Here’s Claudia remembering her blinkered, private mother, who could never quite bear to discuss Claudia’s father, killed in the Battle of the Somme:

On her dressing-table stood a photograph of Father, trim in his uniform, eternally young, his hair recently clipped, his moustache a neat shadow on his upper lip; no red hole in his stomach, no shit no screams no white singing pain.

(Singing!)

And here she is on Mexico (one of the pleasures of the history-of-the-world conceit is that we get lots of these lecturer-after-a-few-drinks sketches):

I wrote my Mexico book out of incredulity. Hernando Cortez cannot be true. There cannot have been a human being so brave, so charismatic, obstinate and apparently indestructible. How could anyone be so greedy, fanatical, and unimaginative as to lead a few hundred men into an alien continent of whose topography he was ignorant, swarming with a race devoted to the slaughter and sacrifice of strangers, in order to take prisoner their leader in his own capital city? And succeed.

But watch how expertly Lively manages the shifts between the third and first person; how she turns each movement into a little canteen sip of pleasure for the reader.

Two thirds of the way through, we’re watching Claudia, who’s spent World War II reporting on battles in Egypt, reunite with her brother Gordon. She and Gordon have, at various points, been almost scandalously close.

And then she steps forward and kisses him… She smells foreign and expensive… Claudia is talking about a mark on his face.

‘That’s my war wound. Some repellent Indian skin disease. Is it that conspicuous? You, I’m glad to see, are quite unscarred.’

‘Am I?’ she says. ‘Good.’

‘But your hair’s red. I remembered it brown.’

‘My hair was always considered red. It was one of the things Mother held against me, from infancy. How is she?’

We get a line break. And then this:

We went to some café and drank dense reeking tea out of those cups half an inch thick. I kept staring round me; London, the buildings, the people, the buses and taxes, had the same unreal quality as Gordon himself…

See that? The action is so seamless — she and Gordon are talking on the train platform and then they’re going out for tea — that the shift barely registers. The reader and Lively are a pair engaged in conversation, stepping mid-sentence off the curb and onto the cobblestone street, pace unaltered.

But that We, after all those she’s and he’s, does feel quietly intimate. We went to some café and drank dense reeking tea out of those cups half an inch thick. I experience it like the underwater fullness of the moment when, after listening to something on speakerphone for a while, you put in your AirPods and the voices are suddenly here. (And notice how Lively enhances the effect by accelerating through the transition: dense reeking tea — no comma; those cups half an inch thick — short words from which all the ordinary chatty interpolations (those cups, seen so often in cafés catering to commuters, with little handles so inhospitable to platform-chilled fingers…) have been trimmed).

You could, I think, write a fairly creditable English paper about how these shifts in perspective represent Claudia’s mental processes as she lets go of her identity, or the subjectivity of history. But I’m most interested in them as technical feats, as hosting moves to be copied. Readers, like party-guests, appreciate change. First we’re in the kitchen, then we’re in the living room. We’re eating crackers and then we’re eating deviled eggs. The overhead lights go off and the lamps come on. We register the pleasure but not the cause.

Every writer has entertained the (literally infantile) fantasy: what if an editor didn’t demand a grabby pitch, or a hook, or even a clearly established subject — what if it were enough that I am simply me? What if I were so intelligent, so witty, so helplessly fascinating, that I could merely be pointed in the general direction of a topic (a political convention, an amusement park) and trusted to return with thousands of conversational but unforgettable words?

Usually this ends in disaster: books that, a hundred pages in, are still telling you what this book will be about; wandering Substack essays as long as the special issues of the New Yorker devoted entirely to single articles about Hurricane Katrina or Syria. Ah, we think, chastened, slinking back to our outlines. So this is why editors exist.

But occasionally — maybe once a decade or so — a writer produces a book that pulls it off, a book that explores its idiosyncratic subject so freely, with such ecstatic and hilarious abandon, that the whole doomed fantasy is kindled in another generation. Nicholson Baker’s U and I is such a book.

U and I, published in 1991, is a book-length essay about Baker’s obsession with John Updike — but enjoying it does not require (seriously!) that you care about Updike at all. I’m not sure I’d read a word of Updike when I first fell in love with it, and it is now one of only three books (Munro’s Hateship, Friendship… and Martin Amis’s The War Against Cliche are the others) that I’ve read to the point of physical disintegration, so that its detached paperback-cover becomes available as a bookmark. It captures the peculiar agony of being a young artist — the dizziness that comes from breathing a compound of florid egomania and crushing insecurity — better than anything I know.

Sixty or so pages in Baker is imagining what it would be like to be friends with Updike:

I am friends with Updike — that’s what I really feel — I have, as I never had when I was a child, this imaginary friend constructed out of sodden crisscrossing strips of rivalry and gratefulness over an armature of remembered misquotation.

He remembers that Updike once won a Guggenheim, and that he himself once agonized over whether to apply for one (and agonized doubly over whether he could ask Updike, whom he didn’t know, to write him a letter of recommendation).

But I was sure I wouldn’t win the award and I was feeling very doubtful about my writing in general and disliked the idea of asking several people to write recommendations — that awful moment I imagined in the phone call where the exchange of news falters and you say, ‘Another reason I’m calling is…’ and suddenly your real motives are laid bare: you’re looking for a recommendation, that’s all, you wheedling wretch, you don’t really miss the professor or want to tell him how much you still think about his class, you just want further help in your dishonorable little battle up the grass-blade toward some sort of eminence.

I don’t know how it is for you, but I find this sentence so funny, so graceful, so subtly attuned to the micro-currents of the anxious mind, that it makes me want to lean close and stare at it, as if it were a particularly bright and well-stocked aquarium tank.

It starts with a straightforward comma-less confession of self-doubt (But I was sure I wouldn’t win the award…). Knowing how easily expressions of insecurity can knot into unappealing tangles of neediness, Baker dispatches this part calmly, reportorially, cordoning it off with an em-dash.

After which he launches into the sentence’s central scene, the imagined phone call with the professor. First he demonstrates the fineness of his sensory equipment: the awful moment… where the exchange of news falters. Here is a social tremor detected in the silences between words.

And then the dialogue: ‘Another reason I’m calling is…’ This has the wonderful, cruel specificity of a child imitating her parents’ false telephone manners. And now, within the safety of an imagined scene, the self-laceration can begin: the decision to italicize looking for a recommendation makes audible a particular horrified tone of voice (Baker was once a serious musician — a bassoonist — and his prose is always wonderfully heard). And you wheedling wretch has a Mrs. Trunchbull brutality — censorious Baker is standing bug-eyed over desperate Baker with a riding crop.

And then, in the sentence’s final turn (your dishonorable little battle up the grass-blade) Baker demonstrates, in that single unexpected word grass-blade, what sets him apart. Any number of good-enough cliches autofill in the reader’s mind when he reads battle up the…: mountain? greasy pole? ladder? But Baker does not autofill. He is forever tucking little bits of surplus pleasure, like chocolate coins hidden in a child’s lunchbox, into his prose.

He is a third of the way through a book that reads like a single run-on sentence, fully dilating thoughts within thoughts about subjects we may not care about at all, and insisting — with the precision of his thinking and the swing of his expression — that he is good enough to get away with it. And he is.

People don’t write great books about raising small children because small children systematically degrade your capacity to write great books. To harvest the source material — to be truly present for the physical drudgery; the bewildering emotional switchbacks; the dreaded calls from the school nurse’s office — you must obliterate the very things (solitude, quiet, profound unavailability) that would allow you to make use of it.

So literature’s Mount Olympus features no cubbies. Instead we find William Faulkner telling his daughter Jill, when she begged him to stop drinking for her thirteenth birthday: “No one remembers Shakespeare’s child.” Or Tolstoy furiously ignoring his fourteen (!) children in order to polish off another masterpiece (his son Ilya: “I never witnessed a single expression of tenderness on the part of my father during his lifetime.”) The great books can teach you how to live, how to love, how to die — they cannot teach you how to get Glitter Slime out of backpack fabric.

So Jane Smiley’s The Age of Grief — a great work of literature that happens also to be fluent in the language of carsickness and squabbling siblings and 104-degree fevers — is a rare creature. And it is, appropriately, a novella — its 92 pages fit neatly in the pockets of time between school and soccer practice, between demands for yet another snack.

The story is about a husband and wife — both dentists, curiously — whose marriage seems to be falling apart. The husband, Dave, narrates, and the tone is very Richard Ford: domestic realism with cracks through which you glimpse something strange and unspoken and perhaps unspeakable.

Dentists offices are very neat, and dentists are always washing their hands, and so their hands are cool and white and right under the nose, to be smelled. People would be offended if dentists weren’t as clean as possible, but they hold it against us. On television they always make us out to be prissy and compulsive. If a murder has been committed and a dentist is in the show, he will certainly have done it, and he will probably have lived with his mother well into his thirties, to boot.

Dave maintains this tone of slightly tranquilized lucidity throughout. He suspects that his wife is having an affair, but he can’t bear to find out, and much of the novel is dedicated to the unsettling comedy of him meticulously depriving her of opportunities to tell him. The voice, the plot mechanics, the lightly deployed research into the practicalities and economics of dentistry — are all expertly done.

But what I love best in the book is the relentless presence — the unsentimental, inconvenient physical reality — of the couples’ three children. The parents’ agony is the story’s substance, but Smiley doesn’t deploy the children merely as narrative intensifiers, popping up to eavesdrop on clandestine phone calls or to stand innocently in doorways during fights. They have lives and bodies and schedules of their own, and the parents’ drama must slither within this configuration, like snakes in a rock wall.

Listen to the quality of this reportage:

Lizzie began to cry because Stephanie didn’t want to play with her, and then we had an argument about whether Stephanie loves her or not, and then I sent her to her room, and then I went up and explained to her that people have to want to play with you on their own, you can’t make them, and they can’t make you, either. Then I recalled examples of Lizzie not wanting to play with Stephanie, which she denied, and then I gave up, and then I went over to the preschool, leaving Lizzie by herself briefly, and picked up Leah, who, I was told had put on her shoes and socks all by herself. She was very proud. I was, too.

The tone conveys an exhaustion — and a quietly ticking dread — that precludes ornamentation: the voice has something of the expressionless bewilderment of a man in a police station reciting what was happening before he picked up the gun. But what I love in that second sentence — the one beginning Then I recalled examples — is how it pushes past this exhaustion, or finds that it can’t honestly sustain it.

First the father tries to prove, by example, that his daughter ought not be feeling what she’s feeling. This fails, of course (then I gave up). But now it’s time to pick up his youngest daughter from preschool. This entails the slightly dicey decision to leave his second grader briefly alone (a new and non-exhausted sort of tension). And then, at the preschool (I can feel the classroom’s overheated-ness, can smell the disinfected mats) he learns that his youngest has put on her shoes and socks by herself. That little developmental miracle stands wonderfully, defiantly apart from the passage leading up to it, like a toddler telling you — at her own time-jellifying pace — some barely-followable things she’s learned. The delight is real, and brief, and gone like the flame of a match.

Storytelling is, I’ve read, a matter of conjunctions: BUT then this happened; SO she said this. BECAUSE he needed to avenge his father. This is the language of causation, of coherence, of accumulating meaning. Parenting, however, is governed by a much less purposeful conjunction: and. She showed me her new way of drawing faces AND she freaked out about not having any clean shirts AND she woke up when it was still dark out AND she told me on the way to school about her system for rating the friendliness of dogs.

Nobel laureates tremble before the narrative chaos. Smiley takes out her notebook.

My daughter is taking a dance class and so I recently learned the terrifying phrase cross the floor. Each student must learn, apparently, to get from one side of the room to the other, alone, under scrutiny, by dancing.

Writers are perpetually, and with a similar feeling of exposure, having to cross the floor — to get this character into a fight with her sister, to get that character to run away with his mistress — and the most obvious means of locomotion, the writer’s equivalent of a half-hearted cha-cha, is dialogue.

“There’s something I have to tell you. And it’s not going to be easy to hear.”

“OK…”

“There’s no good way to say this. I’m leaving.”

“Leaving…your job?”

“No. I’m so sorry. Leaving you.”

Dialogue has many alluring qualities: it takes up space on the page; it encourages endless tinkering (Should that something be a somethin’? Didn’t I say he was Southern?); it plucks your characters out of the murk of nonexistence and places them firmly in a scene.

It just happens to be entirely, catastrophically, the wrong way to get across the floor. A novel’s badness is very nearly in direct proportion to how much of its stage business, the actual substance of its scenes, its author conducts via dialogue. Flip open some cover-less Robin Cook paperback that you’ve salvaged from a Little Free Library and you will inevitably find yourself in the midst of a conversation. Flip open something good — flip open Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale, in fact — and you will find quotation used sparingly; a garnish, not a main.

(And before you batter me with your William Gaddises and your Henry Greens, yes, yes, there are great novels that consist of almost nothing but dialogue — but those books use dialogue (precisely heard, presented in all of its lifelike incoherence) to imply their characters’ comings and goings, which we then reconstruct busily, proudly in our minds. That is why these books hurt to read.)

But back to The Old Wives’ Tale. Bennett was a wildly prolific, unfairly condescended-to British writer in the early 20^th century. No less a snob than Virginia Woolf accused him of practicing “infantile realism.” This is absurd — he was a thoroughgoing pro, a forerunner to William Maxwell’s brand of sadly smiling wisdom. But he was accessible. You could breeze through The Old Wives’ Tale, all 600 pages of it, in the time it takes to brace yourself for another try at Orlando.

The book, published in 1908, tells the story of two provincial sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, over the course of fifty years. They work in the family drapery shop; they fall in love (or some approximation of it); they pursue happiness as well as the accidents of history and the idiosyncratic shapes of their personalities will allow.

But this makes the book sound dreary, when it is in fact enormous fun.

Here’s the Baines’ housekeeper Maggie reacting to the sudden death of the girls’ father:

Maggie, perceiving darkly that disaster was in the air, and instantly filled with importance and a sort of black joy, dropped her pail in the exact middle of the passage, and almost fell down the crooked stairs. One of Maggie’s deepest instincts, always held in check by the stern dominance of Mrs Baines, was to leave pails prominent on the main routes of the house; and now, divining what was at hand, it flamed into insurrection.

And a brief dilation on the mysterious and significant geometry that governs shared childhood bedrooms:

There was only one bed, the bedstead being of painted iron; they never interfered with each other in that bed, sleeping with a detachment as perfect as if they had slept on opposite sides of St Luke’s Square; yet if Constance had one night lain down on the half near the window instead of on the half near the door, the secret nature of the universe would have seemed to be altered.

Bennett skips lightly across the lily pads of these girls’ years. And that lightness is deftest in his approach to dialogue.

When Sophia (the wilder and more willful of the sisters) is a teenager, she falls in love with a traveling salesman named Gerald Scales. Her mother, horrified by the match, worries helplessly over every flutter of their courtship:

Still, she would have given much to see inside Sophia’s lovely head. Ah! Could she have done so, what sleep-destroying wonders she would have witnessed! By what bright lamps burning in what mysterious grottoes and caverns of the brain would her mature eyes have been dazzled! Sophia was living for months on the exhaustless ardent vitality absorbed during a magical two minutes in Wedgwood Street.

Because it turns out that Sophia and Gerald have had a brief and delicious rendezvous on the library steps. Without touching, without exchanging a single salacious word, they have secretly embarked on their affair.

And here’s how Bennett renders the scene:

“I was just looking at this inscription about Mr Gladstone.” “So you decided to come out as usual!” “And may I ask what book you have chosen?” These were the phrases she heard, and to which she responded with similar phrases.

Three quick bits of unremarkable, unattributed dialogue (though we know they belong to Gerald). And then a sentence of majestic mildness and opacity: These were the phrases she heard, and to which she responded with similar phrases.

Because of course the lovers wouldn’t, in the circumstance, say anything worth repeating — to suggest otherwise would be to betray the book’s non-infantile realism. The words they exchange are more akin to the inarticulate explorations of hands, or the grunts and sniffs of animals in the wild. Bennett gives us just the barest bits of set decoration and a few scraps of dialogue and he has given us plenty. He’s across the floor.