The Art of the Novel #4:

ANOTHER AMUSING ANECDOTE IN WHICH I PRESAGE MY OWN DEATH BUT DISPLACE THE BURDEN ONTO A LITERARY CHARACTER TO AVOID MY FRIENDS AND FAMILY CALLING ME WITH FEIGNED CONCERN

Whoever said that nothing human is alien to him never lived in upstate New York. I bought a boat last weekend, a big boat. I offer this information to illustrate just how very far a man can fall. When I visit the boat on Saturday at noon with my family, I wink, and, shining in the sun, the boat winks back. We are in a great and secret communion, the boat and I—the deep blue sea, the message in a bottle, boys to men, these are metaphors which are false. I was once quite deep within the problems and question of metaphors. When I lived in Manhattan, for example, its own misleading metaphor, a city I also grew to distrust and dislike, like a sentence that cannot just come out and say what it means, I intended to write a novel, and I knew shit about boats. I said that word often, novel, and it became imbued with a sense of deep suffering whenever I mentioned it, as if, every time I went to work on my novel, I was secretly going to chemotherapy. My son, Butch, (yes, I know), often asks me about this, usually when we are boating. When are you going to finish the novel, dad, he asks me. Just as soon as I have sucked back these beers, son, I reply. It is a great joke between us, the kind of joke that makes you sick to your stomach, like when Butch pours bad milk into my cereal on April Fool’s day, or my wife forgets to look at her watch on Friday night when she is out with the girls, or when my neighbor snickers and guffaws over rising gas prices. Look, buddy, I never meant for this to happen. I wasn’t the kind of person who said buddy. I was the kind of person who said “my friend.” I am, I want to be honest here, terrified at the prospect that I no longer know myself. Alternatively, I am terrified by the prospect that I know myself all to well, and this is who I am, a man who boats, and so I have grown up and into myself, like a hand into a baseball mitt. I would rather, at the end of the day, remain mysterious to myself, for it was another wise man who said the day was darkest before the dawn, whereas in own my case I have found the day is darkest at noon, when the prow of my boat is beating and pulsing across the waves, and the beers are finished, and my wife and youngest daughter are waiting for me on the shore, waving wildly, holding up juice bottles or mock pirate flags to signal me home, and I want to do something reckless, very, very badly, but there they are, my wife and child, cheering at me, happy on this fine summer day, wanting Daddy to be brave.

Sent in from the Field by Luke West