Eve, as I said, is an artist, was one when she hadn’t quite found her art, and is one now though she hasn’t made or written anything in twenty years. And she operates the way an artist operates, thinks the way an artist thinks: is both exquisitely sensitive and totally unfeeling; is simultaneously immersed in life and detached from it; is having the experience yet is already, even in the midst of it, transmuting it into something else; is there but not.
Paul Ruscha and I were in his car in the summer of 2015. We’d just had dinner—social, for fun, not an interview—at the restaurant we always go to, Il Forno Caldo, a little Italian place near his house in Beverly Hills. He was driving me to my hotel, and we were both stuffed and relaxed, a bit sleepy. As we turned onto Sunset, I mentioned that I’d taken Slow Days with me on the plane. It was the first book of Eve’s I bought, all the way back in 2010, and I was ravished by it, completely seduced. Eve’s voice was so alive and so happy and so forlorn and so bewildered and so delirious, and it was like nothing I’d ever heard before. The experience was transcendent, there’s no other word for it. And that’s why I’d avoided having it again. Or, rather, not having it. Was I so in need of a transcendent experience five years ago, when I couldn’t get anything going with my own writing career, was in a rut, spinning my wheels, that I’d invented one? Did I over-like—over-love—Slow Days? If that was indeed what had happened, I’d just as soon not find out. (Disillusionment is usually inevitable, a matter of time. Why court it?) Only I had to because I was under contract to Scribner for this book, so I dropped Slow Days in my bag as I left for the airport, giving myself no choice but to read it since the flight was six hours and since those tiny JetBlue TVs make me motion sick.
I needn’t have been afraid. After the second go-round, I was as under Slow Days’ spell as ever, deeper even. And knowing the principals as I did now added nuance to my appreciation. Paul was a stranger to me in 2010. He’d become a close friend. I told him how struck I was by Shawn, the character based on him, as richly conceived and finely wrought as any Eve ever wrote, how good he must’ve looked to her, how good she made him look to the reader. She’d captured his physical presence, but also his metaphysical—his deftness, his tact, his almost otherworldly radiance. (“[Shawn] always looked wonderful at a party, like a Henry James fortune-hunting prince—weak and kind—marrying the heiress from Poughkeepsie and being worth every penny she spent on him if it was only for how well he listened. How he looked in those white pants and blue blazers was extra. Slender and smiling with white teeth and sympathy.”) Paul was quiet for a moment, then spoke in that halting way people speak when they’re saying something that’s hard for them—hard emotionally, or hard because they’re expressing an idea they’ve never before put into language, or both. “I recognized myself in Eve’s books. I mean, I recognized that it was supposed to be me. But I never felt that it was me, or that I was really like that. I felt she made me up.” A disbelieving laugh. “But I liked what she made me and I tried to become it.”
In other words, Paul is Eve’s creation. Her imagination, roiling, surging, bursting, its potency enormous, staggering, is fundamentally generous. She makes things better than they are, which is lovely and sweet but, finally, incidental because the impulse is neither. Paul was already a creation, his own or God’s. For Eve, though, he was material, to do with what she chose. And looked at from a certain angle, her art—all art—is a form of exploitation, and totally and utterly barbarous, as amoral as it gets.