You Can’t Step Into the Same Book Twice

By Lisabet Sarai

All the members of the Grip could, I’m sure, tell you about books that changed who they are. We all know the power of the word. That’s part of what draws us together. Recently, though, I came to understood the ways in which we also change the books we read.

As birthday gifts, back in November, I gave my brother two of my all-time favorite novels: Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin and Little, Big by John Crowley. Both date from the early eighties. I’ve been hauling my paperback copies around with me since then, including half-way across the world to Asia. The bindings are brittle; pages are falling out. I was heartened to discover that both are still in print, in new editions.

After I sent them off, I decided I should re-read them, to refresh my memory. My kid brother’s pretty intense. When I sent him The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, he insisted on spending an hour and a half on the phone (long distance, from the U.S.) discussing it. This time I wanted to be prepared.

I believe this was the third time I’d read Winter’s Tale. The last was in the late nineties. It’s a long book (800 pages) and deliciously complex—something of a commitment. I had vivid recollections of various scenes and characters, but a lot of the details had faded.

Before I continue, I need to tell you something about this book. Winter’s Tale is an urban fantasy, but not in the sense that term is used now. It’s an epic imagining that centers on New York City. Indeed, the city is as much a character as Peter Lake, the master burglar and mechanic who returns from the dead after a hundred years, or Beverly Penn, the brilliant, beautiful, dying young woman whom he loves, or Pearly Soames, brutal and dandified gang leader who chases Peter Lake for a century, or Athansor, a massive white horse who can fly. The book begins just before the turn of the twentieth century and ends just after the millenium. The city has its roots in the past and its eyes on the future, creating a tension that provides much of the book’s energy.

I’ve never read anything like it. Hence, it’s rather difficult to describe. It chronicles the interlocking lives of its many remarkable characters, but it’s really, I believe, a book about time. Time appears to change everything, yet at some fundamental level is an illusion. Just behind modern New York City, you glimpse the ghosts of New York from earlier eras. If you could only focus your attention, you could make those ghosts solid and bring the past to life.

Winter’s Tale is in no sense erotica, yet it is exquisitely sensual. It does have one love scene, which I’ll quote just to give you a feeling for the wildly poetic language.

She had not counted on affection. It startled her. He kissed her temples, her cheeks and her hair, and stroked her shoulders as tenderly as if she had been a cat. She closed her eyes and cried, much satisfied by the tears as they forced their way past a dark curtain and rolled down her face.

Beverly Penn, who had the courage of someone who is often confronted by that which is gravely important, had not expected that someone else would be that way too. Peter Lake seemed to love her in exactly the way that she loved everything that she knew she would lose. He kissed her, and stroked her, and spoke to her. How surprised she was at what he said. He told her about the city, as if it were a live creature, pale and pink, that had a groin and blood and lips. He told her about spring in Prince Street, about the narrow alleys full of flowers, protected by trees, quiet and dark. He told her about the colors in coats and clothes and on the stage and in all kinds of lights, and that their random movements made them come alive. “Prince Street,” he said, “is alive. The buildings are as ruddy as flesh. I’ve seen them breathe. I swear it.” He surprised even himself.

This might not be the best passage to quote, but it may give you a sense for the rhythm in Helprin’s prose, a bit like verse.

In any case—I found in re-reading that for me, at least, the book hadn’t lost its magic. And yet, it was a different book, because of what I’d experienced since the last reading.

First, since that last reading, I had the opportunity to actually live in New York City for nine months. In other readings I’d taken the geography of the tale as realistic, but now I know it’s an imagined map superimposed on so-called reality. There is no “Printing House Square”, anymore than there is a village hidden in hills upriver called Lake of the Coheeries. At the same time, I’ve now seen first hand the constellations in the vault of Grand Central Station, so eloquently described in the novel. (Peter Lake hides out in a room just above the star-embroidered ceiling.) During my time in the city, I took a train every week day from Grand Central to the suburbs where I was working. No matter how much I was rushing, I always found time to gaze at the stars.

I understand in a much deeper sense now the way past and present entwine in New York. The book may be a fantasy, but it captures this essential reality, the core idea the drives the story forward.

The second change is the specter of 9/11, haunting me and casting its shadow over the novel. I don’t want to spoil your enjoyment should you decide to read the book, but let me just say that it ends with a disaster that almost destroys the city. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the chaos and terror that followed the fall of the Twin Towers, the legions of New Yorkers trudging on foot over the bridges, the stench of burning that hung in the air for weeks afterward. 9/11 occurred before my stay in the city, but as it happened, I had a job interview in lower Manhattan less than a month after the attacks. I vividly remember the smell, charred and chemical, stinging your nostrils and making your lungs ache—like someone had left a pot on the stove too long, until the BakeLite handle scorched and the metal buckled.

In this last reading, the book darkened. The wonder and beauty have been tempered by the pain of irrecoverable loss. This didn’t spoil the book for me. However, I have a fresh appreciation of the costs of time, and of human folly.

TIme is On My Side (In Fiction)

I'm good at writing the last lines in stories. Often, I have the final words figured out long before anything else. I like coming up with the neat ending, the perfect parting shot, the memorable farewell. Those final words are a bit like a punchline and, as someone who spent a few years writing greeting cards, I know the punchline is all important.

One of my favorite greeting cards I ever wrote was intended to be the last line of a story: "I'm glad you broke up with me. I was starting to feel guilty about cheating on you."

Zing! I love that. It's funny, it's bitter and it says so much about the character (or the giver of the card). It's the kind of closure one never gets in real life-- which maybe is why I'm a fiction writer.

I'm trying to recall moments in my life that offered the kind of real and final closure that fiction so often provides. I can't think of many. All the moments of closure I've experienced have been the result of big moves or death or having the circumstances take the choice out of my hands entirely. In the case of death, the closure was with my mother-- a relationship that was destined to never have any sort of real closure as long as we were both alive. And death is a rather unsatisfactory form of closure-- it takes away the options. There is no argument to fight, no tearful reunion, no epiphany to be had-- even when it brings a sense of guilty relief, death is a hollow, empty kind of closure.

For that matter, time itself is a kind of unsatisfactory closure. The failure to make up my mind about something often results in the decision being made for me. I thought I would be childless because I couldn't commit to the idea of having children. At almost 41, I decided to give it a whirl-- and here I am, three years later, weeks away from having my second baby. According to statistics, time wasn't on my side and I was likely to remain childless for having waited so long. Closure, as provided by mother nature. There's a resounding finality to the kind of closure that results in the slamming of a window, but I don't know how satisfactory it might be when its someone else doing the slamming.

Letting time in the form of deadlines provide closure on other things-- writing, education and job opportunities-- has led to a deep sense of discontent with myself. Sometimes, it is all well and good to go with the flow and see where life takes me-- but most of the time I reject the idea of letting life happen to me that way. I want to be in control of my decisions! I want to create my own closure! Even if control and closure are only illusions of my over active imagination.

But again, the most satisfactory end game moments are rarely found in real life. Friendships and relationships go out with a whimper, not a bang; lifelong goals wither on the vine as other responsibilities take precedent; choices we make are often balanced by the choices other people make: "I love you" is not closure-- "I don't love you" is.

The saying goes, "When one door closes, another opens." It's not always true. Some things, once gone, are gone forever and can never be replaced or forgotten. It's closure of the most bitter sort-- to lose something and know it was a one of a kind, whether a person or a dream or an experience, it's closure tinged with sadness and regret.

Time steals from us. It takes away options and choices and we say things like, "It wasn't meant to be" or "It happened for a reason." These are the statements of closure, of acceptance. True or not, we are forced to acknowledge that time is going to do the job for us if we can't do it ourselves. But when the closure is going to be painful-- as it so often is-- time softens the blow. Time takes away the litany of questions about what to do, what to do say, how to say it, when to say it, whether to pursue it any further. Time says, "Enough is enough. It's over. Move on."

In fiction, time stands still. I can dawdle over the ending, tweak the words until they hum with significance and resonate in my soul. I can say goodbye, I love you, fuck you, you will never hurt me again-- and I can take my sweet time saying it. This messy existence of mine is tidy in fiction, it makes sense, it takes the path I want it to go. And, if I decide I want to take another path, fiction provides me with endless roads not taken-- all of which are mine to explore at will. I can create the closure missing from my real life, I can commit to the decisions that are too big and scary to make, I can give the farewell speech that I was too tear choked and tongue tied to say. Fiction lets me create my own closure. Writing that closure is my salvation from regret.

Time?

Time Managment is not my forte. Not even close. In fact it is probably the single largest factor in the smallness of my paychecks. Scheduling, making lists, sticking to them...I know, at least in theory how to do these things, but they still never seem to happen. About the only way I can really motivate myself to maximize my output is with some sort of external deadline. I can write a 50,000 word book in two weeks. I've done it. So why did a 65K book take me a year? Who knows?

I am lucky enough to not have a regular out-of the house job anymore. My kids are teens, old enough to feed themselves, and my father who lives nearby absorbs a lot of the chauffering duties. I am convinced that all of us benefit from this arrangement, so I don't feel too guilty about it. But like any other person who works at their dining room table or couch (I don't have a desk--nowhere to put it) I find myself at the beck and call of family. My friends know better. Besides, most of them have real jobs. I try to sneak in a couple of hours a week doing exercise classes at the local pool, but then a one-hour class ends up taking three by the time you get ready and get home. Some days it's easier to "forget."

Balancing promotion and writing is probably the most difficult knife-edge to walk in this crazy business. I freely admit, I haven't found the right mix yet. Chats are time-consuming but necessary, and so, IMHO is the occasional "water-cooler" conversation with writer friends. That's necessary for my sanity. Writing is a lonely business with lots of emotional highs and lows. If I didn't have a chance to talk to others who understand, I would truly go nuts. Then there are blogs. Many of my friends manage them every day. I have trouble with once a week. And then there's MySpace (have one) and FaceBook (don't have one) and all those other things that eat, eat, eat away at our precious writing time. Today, for instance I have two all-day chats on loops, and another tomorrow. The exposure is great, but OY! I have three WIP's and am getting nowhere on any of them.

These and other great de-motivator posters are available at: http://www.despair.com/