A Big Little Life

mother, a good person with a kind heart, had died after much suffering at the age of fifty-three. My father, a selfish and violent man who never met a vice he didn’t like, lived to be eighty-three. Your sense of wonder relies in part on your perception that this world is founded on a system of natural law that is not only binding on humanity but that is expressed at least as often as not in the story of every life, in the choices people make and in the consequences thereof, a natural law that is like an awesome machine turning the gears of the world, a machine that is hidden under the surfaces of all things but is thrillinglyrevealed in occasional transcendent moments. My mother lived with faith and right reason, yearning for order, but reaped only disorder and an early death. My father, an apostle of disorder, had a long life full of the pleasures of the flesh that he prized, using and deceiving and betraying and defrauding people as a matter of routine, yet always escaping the punishment of the courts and the cosmos. The beautiful machine of natural law, of which I hoped to have a glimpse, remained hidden from me for a long time.
    In my first job after college, working in that federal anti-poverty initiative, I had expected to live my ideals. In mere months, I discovered that such programs didn’t work, that in fact they were enormously destructive, that they were designed by a political class less interested in solving society’s ills than in power and in using that power to enrich themselves and their cronies, whose appetites were as insatiable as those of hogs at a trough. Cynicism can corrode your sense of wonder.
    At Mechanicsburg High School, I enjoyed teaching and had a knack for it, but the educational bureaucracy and the theories on which it fed proved to be the opposite of that beautiful machine of natural law, was instead a big, ever-growing, mindless, mechanical leviathan wreaking havoc as it ground through the decades, certain to produce eventually a generation of perfect barbarians. Seeing through to the truth under the illusions that have shaped you is important, but it can be dispiriting and can tie knots in your wonder.
    Becoming a published and eventually a full-time writer was exciting and gratifying. But achieving success required a long, hard slog, during which the romance and the glamour and the nobility of the literary life proved to be more illusions waiting to be seen through. I had good literary agents and bad. The bad were horrendous, and the good ones never had a vision of my career that matched mine. My heroes had long been novelists, and although I met some writers who became good and cherished friends, Gerda and I found this community as a whole to be solipsistic and narcissistic and irrational to such a degree that when I showed her a newspaper story about a university study headlined 80 PERCENT OF PEOPLE WITH WRITING TALENT SHOW SIGNS OF SCHIZOPHRENIA , she said, “Can you believe it’s only eighty percent?”
    Even so, I remained happy and optimistic and industrious because three things kept my spirits high: Gerda and the love we shared; a deepening appreciation of the English language bound inextricably with a profound pleasure in storytelling; close friends, which included some people with whom I worked, such as my editor Tracy Devine.
    While restoring my diminished sense of wonder to the fullness and brightness that characterized it in childhood, Trixie inspired me also to share with readers my recovered delight in the mystery of life. At a time in most writing careers when the work has become cast in a mold that cannot be broken, when enthusiasm for new techniqueshas given way to a preference for the comfort of the familiar, when characters are old friends with new names and different wardrobes from those they wore before, when stories follow patterns long established, I felt a tide of creativity breaking me loose from the encrusting barnacles of thirty years of storytelling. I began writing novels unlike any I had done before, taking risks with narratives, themes, and characters that I would not have taken previously, that I would not have recognized could be taken. The greater challenge of these new books brought me enormous pleasure that at times approached a sustained rapture. The difficulty encouraged in me a devotion to the task that not only sharpened the fiction but also clarified my views on life, focused me on first things, returned me to a faith from which I