IT GOES ON LIKE THAT FOR QUITE SOME TIME, FROM PARIS TO Florida, from sorrow to rapture, from miscue to false step, and now even the annotations themselves have, like the apparatus and tackle of some failed salvage operation, become encrusted with disuse and hold within them the evocative air of the time when I sent them unreeling down into the depths.
Reading through these chapters once again to prepare them for publication, mildly alert for typos, all hope of deriving some helpful lesson from them long since exhausted, I confess that I found myself grooving on them, just a little bit, here and there. And when I came to the end of this little sample I felt toward them the surprising stirring of what I might call a sense of fruitful incompletion, a desire, or at least a wish, that this book might, after all, have been steered to its intended destination. Surely, I thought, if I show these chapters to my wife, she would be able to figure out what parts of the story needed to be weeded or whacked into alignment—
And that was the moment that I realized, after eighteen years, what went wrong with Fountain City. I understood, at last, the lesson to be drawn from this disaster, the finding of my investigatory committee:
Marry a strong, talented, vocal, articulate, and above all persuasive reader.
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was written while I was in the MFA program at UC Irvine, and it had plenty of readers among my teachers and workshop-mates, many of them readers who were strong, talented, et cetera, sensitive alike to the corn and the bullshit in my language, the flaws and the untapped resources in my story construction, the overlong and the overhasty, the useless and the underexploited. But for one reason and another, some marital, some personal, some just the breaks, I wrote Fountain City pretty much alone. I had an editor and an agent, and they generously gave me their notes and support and intelligent suggestions, but I didn’t have anyone leaning on me, the way a good workshop leans on you, steadily, consistently, even daily, so that ultimately leaning becomes indistinguishable from holding you upright.
By the time I met Ayelet Waldman, it seemed to be too late. I was sick of the damn book beyond any hope of leaning or support. And yet in the years that followed, as I wrote other books, Ayelet managed to drag, hoist, cajole, or lure me across many such dread-filled patches, through many months during which I and my lame-ass novel, any of my lame-ass novels, felt fucked. But now I see that the reason Ayelet failed to pull off this feat that very first time, when, as my new girlfriend, she read what was to be the last complete draft of Fountain City, was not because she read it too late. It was because she read it too soon. She read it before she had settled in as my First Reader, as a novelist’s spouse. She read it before she had learned to harness the talent, strength, advocacy, and all the skills of articulate persuasion she possessed and had—unbeknownst to her or anyone—been cultivating all her life as a passionate and opinionated devourer of novels. She didn’t even really know, yet, that you could just get in there and hack a lousy novel all to pieces with a red pencil, and that—once he was through cursing and refuting and denying you—your novelist would actually thank you for having done so. Ayelet could have saved this book, I thought, when I had finished looking these chapters over. Maybe, someday, given time, she will. (2010)