A Plea for Eros

all meaning? When Daniel was in the second grade, he invented a place he called the “Half-World.” I think it was in outer space, and all the people who lived in it were literally cut in two. He wasn’t old enough to know why he had concocted this place, but when he told me about it, I suffered a sharp, terrible pang of recognition. I asked him if those people could ever be put back together again. He said yes. And I think he was right. There are ways to sew the Half-World together again, even though it is impossible to change its torn history. Daniel takes photographs, and some of them are remarkable. Many of them are images of places he has isolated in ways I would never have imagined. When I look at his shadows cast on sidewalks, his mirror images in windows, the cracks and ruined lines on his doors of abandoned houses, or the invasive vines that blur the architecture of a small building, I know that these pictures are threads of himself. He sews with his camera and in the darkroom. And no matter how derelict his subjects are, there is radiant order to each and every picture. They are precisely framed. Every line, every shadow, is exactly where he wants it to be.
    A photograph of a place is not a real place any more than a book is, but we inhabit photographs nevertheless as spectator or as identifying actor. Words are more abstract than images, but images are inevitably born of them. The pictorial drama of reading corresponds to the one of writing. You cannot have one without the other. Reading is active, but writing is more active. Making fiction is making a place for the reader in the text, and this brings up the eternal question of making a book: what to put in and what to leave out. One can argue that there are two kinds of writers in the world: the ones who put it all in and the ones who leave a lot of it out. Sweeping claims can be made about history and these impulses. Inclusion and volume can be understood as a literary idea that began in the eighteenth century, developed in the nineteenth, and lasted through Joyce. (He may have turned literature on its head, but he kept a lot in.) Exclusion, too, can be seen as essential to late modernism, most notably Kafka and Beckett. But these are not useful categories “here.” (The reader is “here” with me if he or she has come this far.) There are times when a detailed description of a living room and all its furnishings is annoying, when it gets in the way of reading, and then there are times when it does not. Austen is spare in description. Had she described every object in the Bennet parlor, Paul never would have squeezed in his New Jersey living room among all that clutter, and it seems to me the moral resonance of that book would have been partly lost. On the other hand, I cannot imagine Dickens without his full descriptions of places—-the stinking Thames and Mr. Venus’s ghastly workshop in
Our Mutual Friend,
for example; but these descriptions, like Sterne’s clock in
Tristram Shandy,
are always to a purpose. They accelerate the book. They don’t bog it down in pointless novelistic gab. Good books usually say enough about where they happen, but not too much. Enough can be more or less, but it’s bad books that treat the reader to his expectations about what a novel or a story or a poem is or
where
it is. There is something comforting about bad books, which is why people read them. Surprise can be a wonderful thing, but, on the whole, people don’t want it, any more than most children want their rooms changed. They want what they already know to be confirmed, and they have been richly supplied with these fictional comforts since the late eighteenth century, when the novel became popular with the rise in mass literacy. But the good reader (a quality not at all determined by literary sophistication) wants room to fill in the blanks. Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn’t there, and that creative invention becomes the book.
    For the past four years I’ve been writing a novel set in my hometown, or rather in a fictional version of Northfield. The town in the book is not the real town, but it resembles it strongly. It has another name, Webster, and although it resembles the real town, its geography is askew. I have taken real places—the Ideal Cafe, the Stuart Hotel, Tiny’s Smoke Shop, the Cannon River, and Heath Creek, with their names intact—but I relocated some of these places and gave them new inhabitants.