A Late Encounter with a Young Novelist, Ross Barkan

 

For some time now, I’ve been in a fiction-reading funk. Part of this has to do with the brave new digital world and getting wrapped up in the hyperventilating coverage of our American carnage. But perhaps leaning into that feeling is also the passing—or gradual silencing—of my literary heroes.

 

I particularly related to John Updike’s fiction. He was about ten years older than I am. His five Rabbit novels, chronicling the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, were published between 1960 and 2001—years that coincided with the most formative period of my adult life. I read all of his fiction and was struck by how far afield he sometimes went from the Rabbit books: the epic The Beauty of the Lilies; the visionary Toward the End of Time (a remarkable 1997 novel set in the then-future year of 2020, with society on the verge of collapse even as the outward normalcy of life continues); and Terrorist (2007), the last major novel of his lifetime, where he took on the problem of modern extremism.

 

Even if Updike had only been a short-story writer, his 200-plus stories would have placed him on a plane with John Cheever. Add to that his essays and poems, many written for The New Yorker, the publication with which he is most closely associated. There is no writer who can match his productivity and level of art. He was the Babe Ruth of American letters.

 

Philip Roth is a close second in my mind: a great novelist expressing other aspects of American—and Jewish—angst. Between Updike and Roth I felt I had a miner’s safety hat and beacon with which to plumb the depths of the contemporary American soul.

They were writing the great American novels of my time—the golden ring earlier chased by Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Ernest Hemingway.

 

There are many other contemporary American writers I continue to try to read—Richard Russo, Anne Tyler, Jonathan Franzen, et al. But others, Richard Yates, Paul Auster, and James Salter have passed away, and Richard Ford and Louis Begley have succumbed to aging. Ford’s five Frank Bascombe novels are reminiscent of Updike’s Rabbit quintet, with Be Mine (2023 bringing closure to the character and making it unlikely that others will follow. His 2017 memoir, Between Them: Remembering My Parents, helped spur the idea of writing my own.

 

Nonetheless, I continued my quest to seek a new novelist who writes in the vein I so admired when younger—a writer who simply speaks to me and my era, passé though I may be in my references and sentimentalism.

 

The times hang heavily—and by times I mean both the temper of the era and my remaining time. The combination is a toxic mix for reading fiction, though not necessarily for consuming the political disaster du jour, which The New York Times and a number of Substack essayists report on repeatedly. The New Yorker recently reported that “in the past two decades, daily reading for pleasure has declined by about three per cent per year. It is a sustained, steady erosion, one that is unlikely to reverse itself anytime soon,” a trend I found myself embodying.

 

 

It was probably through Substack, a year or two ago, that I came across Ross Barkan. Two attributes hooked me: he is a New York City boy (I can call him that as he’s less than half my age), and if you set him loose on a topic—frequently NYC politics, something I’m far removed from now—he can write up a storm.

 

He wears another writing hat as a cofounder and Editor in Chief of The Metropolitan Review.  It harks back to the traditions of the Parisian literary salon and is reminiscent to the “Little Magazines” of the 20’s and 30’s devoted to literature, culture and intellectual thought.  It’s quite an undertaking, and seemingly effortless on his part.   

When I first “met” him on Substack, he was hawking a book he was writing, Glass Century, even having the chutzpah to imply it might be the next great American novel (I don’t recall him saying that exactly, but the implication was there). He had published a few things before, but nothing on that scale. I said to myself: fine—publish the book, I’ll read the reviews, and then I’ll consider it.

 

He easily got blurbs and some notices, but not even The New York Times reviewed the book when it was published in early May of this year. (Unfortunately, the major publishers all passed on the book, which was finally published by Tough Poets Press. It’s difficult for small presses to get exposure in the major review media. Those major publishers may regret their decision one day.) So I still hung back, occupied with finishing my own memoir, Explaining It: A Life Between the Lines, getting through the summer, and then recovering from an illness that further delayed my return to possibly reading fiction.

 

Unread novels are now stacked in my study. I occasionally pick one up, read a few pages, lose interest, and guiltily put it back on my “to be read” shelf—only to repeat the process weeks later. Nothing seemed to hold my attention long enough. There was a time when I lived for the next novel by my favorite writers.

 

So it was a kind of stalemate. Yet Barkan’s Substack essays kept arriving, each one meaningful. I learned he had even run for office, with a young Zohran Mamdani as his campaign manager. He didn’t win (seen in retrospect, a victory for both of them in terms of life paths).

 

Eventually though I ordered Glass Century for my ever-expanding “to be read” shelves. When it arrived, I looked it over carefully and read about the contents. The cover unsettled me: the Twin Towers are pictured, and that wound still runs deep in my psyche.

Did I really want to read fiction about the agony of that day? It was clear that some characters would be victims and others left to grieve. If I became emotionally invested, I too would be impacted. Did I want to relive 9/11 yet again?

 

For weeks, the book sat untouched.

 

Eventually, curiosity—or perhaps the need to break the silence of my study—won out.  I finally picked it up, perhaps hoping the NYC focus would help me snap out of the reading funk.

 

It begins with a most improbable event: an ersatz wedding between the two main characters, Saul Plotz and Mona Glass, in 1973. The wedding is staged for Mona’s conventional Jewish parents, who want her to settle down and produce grandchildren. She’s in her early twenties, but those were still the times. She and Saul have been carrying on an affair; she was his student at City College. Saul is already married, with two children, and ten years older.

 

Hold the presses! How unlikely is this plot device? Even if only a few know the truth at this pretend wedding, how could it not eventually be discovered by the parents? I found the premise nearly preposterous. But I read on, perhaps because Mona was described as an up-and-coming tennis star and, as tennis is the one sport I still play, I thought: show me what you’ve got in your imagination, Barkan, when it comes to tennis.

 

Well, a few dozen pages into the book, he did.

 

I set the stage. The protagonist, Mona Glass, is playing tennis as a 24-year-old on New York City courts around the time Billie Jean King played Bobby Riggs (oh, how I remember the hoopla over that event). Mona is a naturally gifted player who didn’t have the advantages of private lessons enjoyed by many of the women she plays, including her best friend, Liv, whom she now routinely beats.

 

On this particular day, Mona is playing—no, destroying—Liv on a court adjacent to two men pounding the ball. A couple of times, Mona’s ball rolls onto their court, interfering with their play. The third time it happens, one of the men, Alec, snaps: “Ladies, if you can’t keep your ball on your own court, you shouldn’t be out here.”

 

Mona goes ballistic. She is intense on the tennis court, her skill and moxie making up for a shortage of lessons. She challenges him to a one-on-one match, best of three. He is goaded into accepting, and that’s where the following six pages pick up. The first sentence of the first page is not complete, so add: “She had hardly noticed how he played. He was a man,” and then the text continues below.

 

 

To me, this writing captures the raw truth of the sport in the way a piece of program music captures a feeling. By then, I was not only hooked on the novel but, coincidentally, at about the same time, Barkan published a remarkable essay on Substack, “On the Beach: Glass Century, and the relationships that make up a life.”

 

Having just published my memoir, I was particularly drawn to this observation: “The act of writing creates a counter, an immediate parallel universe. Even memoir is a form of fabrication, memories leaky unless they’re eidetic, and you’re left to plumb what is essentially a form of darkness—not evil, but the absence of immediacy.”

 

His novel is indeed a window into his life. I had been asking myself how Barkan could have dreamed up this material—the development of two parallel families sharing the same father. Reading his essay clarified that question. It made clear how what I had initially dismissed as preposterous plot devices made perfect sense within the context of his life and became natural in the novel.

 

The frankness and transparency of the essay reveal the novelist’s mind at work. And at long last, here was a novel in the form I love: an epic spanning roughly fifty years—from the era of my second marriage through the Covid years—set in the city I still love, even from a distance.

 

Barkan’s father was a distinctly Philip Roth–like character. In my opinion, Roth’s finest novel is American Pastoral. Writing about Jewish fathers and sons, Roth observes: “[The fathers] were men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them.” The heart of Glass Century is the father/son relationship and Barkan’s love for his own father—while the mother who raised Barkan becomes the foundation for the central character of Mona Glass.

 

My own memoir includes a few short stories, not because I consider myself an accomplished creative writer—far from it, having no such formal education—but because they indirectly reflect my life in some way. While those stories are not memoir, they carry the redolence of lived experience. They inhabit an imagined world of what might have been, not necessarily what was. There is always some form of memoir in fiction and fiction in memoir. Barkan, I think, would agree with this.

 

His essay “On the Beach” explicitly ties events and characters to aspects of the novel. Barkan describes himself as an “unrepentant beach obsessive,” sharing his father’s interests in baseball and politics, describing him as “an inveterate yenta on politics and sports and the city.” Details such as his father living a double life; seeing Richard Nixon in an elevator and talking Mets; attending high school with the man who later became right-wing radio star Michael Savage; the Chinese buffet Barkan and his father frequented; and the fact that his father had a doctor’s appointment on 9/11 drawing him away from a Twin Tower office, all make oblique appearances in the novel.

 

Here are some of Barkan’s key observations on how the novel came into being:

 

“My parents’ drive for secrecy had convinced me it was best to swat away inconvenience. I could imagine, rather, nothing was wrong. And isn’t that what writers do anyway? Imagine? … [T]here remained an unexplained psychic barrier to such probing, one that held my tongue in place. In these lacunae, at least, I could devise my own fictions… The novel, as antediluvian as it might seem in this tech-addled age, was my totem, and I considered it the highest art form—or the art form, at least, where I could channel my skill into an object that would achieve permanence.”

 

The self-revelatory nature of the essay is evident:

 

“Fiction, fiction! I love it so. My father would have liked to have read all of this, and I lament that I never showed him a draft of the novel before he died. If he was secretive, he appreciated a good show, and as a deep admirer of Roth, he could never begrudge the writers who raided their own lives. A meditative memoir and essay like this one would conventionally conclude, in some form, with the old father-son heart-to-heart, all secrets revealed, all threads tied, closure obtained. That’s not how it works with flawed people.”

 

I will leave the rest of the novel’s machinery for the reader to discover. Even without the roadmap of Barkan's essays, I would still have found Glass Century a satisfying journey, though some elements of the resolution strain credulity. I needn’t go into those here; as a first effort, this is a meaningful page-turner. I’m grateful simply to be back in the swing of reading fiction, and I have Ross Barkan to thank for that.

 

Reading Barkan reminded me of a conviction I shared in a 2012 essay, “The Novel as Social History,” where I made the case that few historians can capture the zeitgeist of an era better than some of our novelists. In my time, Updike and Philip Roth were on the cutting edge, and before them John Dos Passos, among others. I think of Glass Century as belonging to that tradition of social commentary and lived history.

 

Barkan is dreaming big. He has a forthcoming novel, Colossus, and another (yet to be titled) that he is presently completing. As if he hasn’t already thoroughly examined the writing process in his “On the Beach” Substack essay, he goes further in “The Alchemy of the Novel,” a recent piece published in Arcade Publishing’s newsletter (Arcade being the publisher of Colossus, scheduled for April 2026, roughly a year after Glass Century).

 

There he writes:

 

“Describing a novel is always a challenge, especially one you wrote, but I can say it’s about a successful, wealthy pastor [Teddy Starr] in a rural Michigan town who is harboring a dark secret. Set in the present day—this is a novel for our new Trump age, and our pastor is certainly an admirer of the president—and written in the first person, it’s both a departure from my last novel, Glass Century, and a continuation of a project that I hope will fully see the light of day soon. I am in the process of a loose trilogy, what I’m calling my American Saga, that will grapple with the American condition from the 1970s through the 2020s. The untitled third novel in this set, which is nearly done, will share a certain current, and maybe a universe, with Colossus.”

 

“The Alchemy of the Novel,” along with “On the Beach,” is an important examination of the urgency to write and publish relevant fiction for our times. As Barkan says, “Readers are weary of the moralistic fiction that peaked sometime in the 2010s or early 2020s, and they want literature, I believe, that more properly reflects the curiosity and even chaos of the human condition.” Indeed!

 

I was accustomed to waiting years—sometimes decades—for a new Rabbit novel by John Updike or a new Frank Bascombe novel by Richard Ford. Not one a year, but spaced out over a lifetime. Now, suddenly, that old sense of anticipation has come rushing back.

 

 

More than a Drive to Asheville

  

It was a trip we’d long planned but, in retrospect, poorly thought out. That is the problem of being an octogenarian while your mind insists you’re half that age. I used to love jumping in the car and taking a road trip. This one was a week-long visit to our beloved Asheville, to see how it had fared after the destruction of Helene a year ago, and to visit our dear friend, Joyce. Unlike our dozen or so other stays—usually extended periods in a condo or rental home—this one was only four days, staying at a “hip” downtown hotel.

 

First, though, we stopped in Savannah for the night. Even though we could have driven straight to Asheville in one long day, a midway stop is always a welcome break. Unfortunately, a monster accident on I-95 shut down the highway for 12 hours, forcing us onto the Turnpike and adding another 100 miles and an hour and a half to our first leg. Still, at the unassuming Hampton Inn by the Savannah airport we were rewarded with a spectacular sunrise, which I hoped was a good omen for the rest of the trip.

 

We thought staying downtown Asheville would allow us to ditch the car and walk everywhere—forgetting that its topography is, well, mountainous. Not like our recent trip to NYC or, of course, where we live in “the Free State of Florida,” flatter than a pancake. Walking those hills and dragging our luggage through three destinations took its toll. I did all 1,500 miles of driving (Ann offered, but I foolishly declined) and most of the heavy lifting. Add in the strange hotel beds and my usual back problems, and soon I had what I thought was sciatica.

 

By the time we finished the last leg—twelve straight hours in inexplicably dense Sunday traffic and two major accidents—I arrived home nearly a cripple, the pain in my right leg and hip extreme. My primary care physician ordered X-rays, which only revealed my usual back issues. My spine compression issue apparently reached its tipping point.  I’ve been on medications and rest, unable to do my daily walk or play tennis. Depressing, but I’ll soon start physical therapy to try to break the cycle and get back on track.

 

Still, Asheville worked its magic. We love its laid-back ambiance and mountain beauty. It’s a little oasis in a sea of Christian fundamentalism—as the local TV stations and billboards in Georgia and the Western Carolinas make clear, reflecting deep conservatism and vehement pro-T***p sentiments. But Asheville is different. If you don’t have a tattoo, you’re obviously a visitor. I’ve said this before: it reminds me of my brief stay in NYC’s East Village in the 1960s, or often resembles parts of the once-bohemian, now-gentrified Upper West Side where we lived for years.

 

That first night we ate at the hotel’s rooftop restaurant, which had panoramic views of the town, with the Grove Park Inn in the distance, where we had stayed several times before.

 

One of Ann’s dearest friends, Joyce, now lives in Asheville. Though approaching 100, she just had a successful hip replacement and acts and looks thirty years younger. After our first full day, we had dinner with Joyce and her daughter Pattie at The Chestnut—one of Asheville’s many great restaurants.

 

As for the city itself, it has received only a fraction of the funds promised by FEMA after Helene’s devastation. Perhaps the administration sees it as punishment for the city’s politics. Revenge seems high on their list. Still, downtown was mostly spared, though there seemed to be fewer tourists.

 

Oddly enough, two of our main destinations were bookstores. At Malaprop’s, Asheville’s great independent shop, I found a special annotated edition of Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, complete with her handwritten notes about the characters and themes—a treasure. 

 

Then a visit to the Asheville Public Library’s used bookstore, where we found a few gems for $1 each finally stowing them in the trunk of our car after that first day’s walk.

 

No trip to Asheville feels complete without lunch at the Pisgah Inn, some 5,000 feet above sea level at Milepost 408.6 on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Although parts of the Parkway had been washed out by the storm, it has mostly reopened. After lunch, we drove in the other direction to the Folk Art Center, where we bought gifts for our hosts, Joe and Kyle, in Big Canoe, Georgia, where we would spend the last two days of our trip.

 

The following day we stayed downtown, particularly Pack Square with its quirky sculptures.

 

And, then, the Asheville Museum of Art which now occupies a relatively new building, and the first thing you see when entering is Wesley Clark’s My Big Black America (2015), an ingenious sculpture of salvaged wood stained and spray painted. I would like to still believe “E pluribus unum.”

 

The museum also gave us a hilarious moment. Just look at this photo:

 

It shows three sculptures—except one wasn’t. When Ann quietly went to sit on what she thought was an empty bench, she startled a young woman already sitting there (very still, looking like an artwork). Both jumped at the sudden appearance of the other!

 

After four wonderful days in Asheville, we drove 200 miles to Joe and Kyle’s vacation home in Big Canoe, about ninety minutes north of Atlanta. The community is filled with gorgeous mountain-style homes perched at different elevations around a large lake, with the requisite golf course, tennis courts, clubhouse, and marina. The weather was perfect, though by now walking was difficult for me. Still, we were treated to a relaxing pontoon boat ride around the lake, its quiet electric engine gliding us along.

 

But soon it was time to pack up and head home—a drive I dreaded, since we were determined not to stop for a hotel. Thankfully, Joe loaded the luggage (I couldn’t manage it) and even guided us out of the community’s winding roads. The last time I relied on GPS it led us to a false exit at the top of a mountain; it took 40 minutes to escape.

 

The drive home was simply awful. I made it in 10 hours last time, but this trip stretched to 12 thanks to traffic, frequent stops to stretch, and two Turnpike accidents. When that road narrows to two lanes, it becomes impassable. Welcome to Florida!

 

It was my intention to write about the unreal news events that unfolded during our trip, but there are so many that including them here would only complicate this entry. Better to save that for a follow-up – perhaps!

“Hitch”

 

From the Booknook Web Site

Is it possible to grow close to a person while never having met her, or even spoken to her? 

Yes, I had that kind of relationship with Kimberly Hitchens, the proprietor of Booknook.biz, a digital book conversion company, one she developed over the years. 

She (and her staff) was the midwife to my three books, which I am informally calling the “Explaining It” trilogy.  My final book is now being readied for printing, with an eBook to follow a few months later.  It is a memoir, Explaining It; A Life Between the Lines.  Details will follow in these pages soon.

Tragically, “Hitch” passed away while we were working on this project.

She felt like a best friend, despite the fact that we hadn't met.  Both of us were from the production side of publishing, but from different eras and our extensive emails over the years mused about the business.

Our digital epistolary relationship revealed her to be smart, idiosyncratic, and professional, dedicated as much to her staff as to her clients.  She knew her stuff and her enthusiasm for all aspects of pre-press production was clearly abundant.  Hitch was a joy to work with.

Ironically, the only time our relationship hit a speed bump was concerning this memoir.  Their new system was different than the one when I published Explaining It to Someone; Learning from the Arts five years earlier.

I don’t easily adapt to change and I incorrectly attributed my difficulty to perhaps they were using AI.  Hitch really took me to the woodshed on that.  Mea culpa I cried!

Although she did say AI technology might account for some increase in the volume of projects they were handling and they were slammed with work at the same time my book was submitted.  As a peace offering I said my project was not urgent so if she had to put it in a lower priority queue, I’d understand.

Her reply was long and detailed mostly about the ton of imaging and digital conversion software and AI’s impact there, revealing an instinctive deep knowledge about each, a foreign language to me.  But then, as far as my offer was concerned, here’s Hitch-speak at its finest:

In a billion years, Robert, I would NOT move you back in the queue! NONE of our repeat, much-loved real clients go there. NOPE, not happening. That's the very last thing I'd do.

All our repeat, solid, trade-pubbed clients are where they should be, queue-wise. Not to be a writing snob (moi?! NEVAH!), but our real author clients go where they should, and if I'm moving anybody down the queue--which I do, truly, try not to ever do; I do try to remain FIFO--it's the AI clients.

BUT, that's not to say that I don't truly appreciate your sentiment. I do. It's greatly appreciated.

Have a nice Mother's Day!  I mean...well, you know what I mean.

        H

That was the day before Mother’s Day, less than a month before she died.  I knew she had some health issues, but “NEVAH” anything life threatening.

So on Mother’s Day I replied:

Hitch.  That’s one hell of an email.  I used to have an employee, Carolyn, who started as my secretary but as soon as I got my hands on an Apple II in 1979 (and could do my own typing -80 WPM BTW-via a primitive word processor) I made her my administrative assistant.  Frankly, she tried to outwork me, always to the point of exhaustion— this is how the story relates to you.  I saw a cartoon in the New Yorker which I had framed to hang over her desk.  It pictured a young woman draped over her typewriter, clearly exhausted, with the caption “God, I love this job.”

Hitch, you protest too much.  You love your work.  It doesn’t get much better than that.

Remind me to buy a copy of YOUR memoir.  You are a spontaneous writer and the stories you could tell.

In any case, indeed Happy Mother’s Day.  Yours, Bob

Where she found the time for our personal, behind the scenes email, I have no idea.  There were so many over the years that did not necessarily relate to my projects.

Her last email to me was in reply:

Mon, May 12 at 11:02 AM

LOL...Bob:

Well, there are days when, yes, I do love my job--but there are the others, too.  Thanks for the kind words.

Ye Gods, the Apple II.  We started out a) Heathkit! (yowzers) and then b) the 8080 (which was really the 8088).  Yup, ye olden IBM 8088 which was...when, '81? Yes, I think that's right.

My Bob--My Robert, to whom I am wed--built our first few computers and that was the take-off for us. It helped me conquer the pink ghetto, in those early years. I was the only one that knew how to use the then-word-processor, which was WordStar and then CPM whatsits and I was the QUEEN of the first Lotus 123, which allowed some of us to conquer the world. Ah, the good old days.  Computers, in many ways, allowed women to break out.

LOL

Hitch

The reflective and self-congratulatory tone (albeit well deserved), was unusual for Hitch.  I replied, trying to do her one better, with my early knowledge of Visicalc (the precursor of Lotus 123) as well as PFS software which was an early word processing / data base software, each of these requiring dual floppy disk drives on the Apple II, and then my pride about being involved in the precursor of the Web, The Source, dialing up at 300 baud.   

I thought for sure she would laugh at that, but, uncharacteristically, I heard nothing.  I was stunned to learn that she passed away after a brief hospitalization on June 7.   

RIP Dear Hitch

 

 

Paul Auster’s Ethereal ‘Baumgartner’

 

I referenced this book in my prior entry and decided not burden an already long entry with a review.  Now that I’ve sat down with this lovely slender book in hand, this is not a formal “review” but, instead, an impression, and how it relates to my own life. 

 

Thankfully, I have not experienced a loss of a spouse, the main theme hanging over the protagonist, Sy Baumgartner who lost his wife, Anna to a drowning accident, after 40 loving years of being together.  She becomes almost a ghost which follows his next ten years.  It is a skillful memory novel, the author stepping into the past and then back to the present, and as a metafictional piece, into the process of writing, even giving Anna a voice from her poems and essays, and frequently blending Baumgartner the protagonist with the author, Auster.  There are so many tributaries he sets sails on, including his most personal one; a trip to Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine in 2017 which Auster had written about before and now reiterates as Baumgartner’s journey to find traces of his grandfather and his Jewish roots, but they are all skillfully connected. 

 

Three important characters fall into his life, Ed Papadopoulos, a seemingly ungainly new employee of the Public Service Electric and Gas Company, but a man with a heart of gold, and watch how he comes back into Sy’s life later in the novel.  Judith, the first woman he allows himself to love after dealing with such a prolonged bereavement, and, finally a young scholar, Beatrix Coen, who has discovered Anna’s work, wants to write her doctorate thesis on the thinly published poems, as well as her unpublished works and essays.  This gives Sy (and thus Auster) a reason for the next chapter in the book, one which is not there.  The book ends abruptly.  I have my ideas where that goes; yours may be different. I think Auster carefully thought through the unusual conclusion. As with his own his life, abrupt endings can be expected but not easily anticipated.

 

I said that there were also connections to my own life noted in my review of his novel, Brooklyn Follies.  There the main character (Auster as well) lived in Park Slope, as I did earlier in my life.

 

In Baumgartner his early adult years, where he connected with Anna, were on 85^th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam on NYC’s upper West Side, Mine were on the same street just off Columbus when I connected with my own wife-to-be, Ann.  Auster and I apparently missed each other by a year.  He doesn’t go into the detail about the UWS as he does about Park Slope in Brooklyn Follies, but the coincidence was a little eerie.

 

More significant, to me, the book serves as a wake-up call to finish my memoir, not that the story of my life or writing can compare to Auster’s, but we all share mortality and I think his later works reflect an acceptance of this reality.  When he (Baumgartner – now a retired philosophy professor -- and no doubt, Auster, who died only last April) has an epiphany about time running out, and the need to tie things together, Baumgartner thinks about a book he has not yet completed, interestingly entitled Mysteries of the Wheel.  He is seventy one while having this thought, daydreaming in his backyard, living in Princeton, now, about deceased friends, increasing memory lapses.  His writing is exquisite, greatly introspective and stream of consciousness, moving from amusing anecdotes to profundity, and he might as well personally be relating a cautionary tale to me:

 

Nothing to be done, he thinks, nothing at all. Short-term memory loss is an inevitable part of growing old, and if it’s not forgetting to zip your zipper, it’s marching off to search the house for your reading glasses while you’re holding the glasses in your hand, or going downstairs to accomplish two small tasks, to retriever book from the living room, and to pour yourself a glass of juice of the kitchen, and then returning to the second floor with the book, but not the juice, or the juice, but not the book, or else neither one because some third thing has distracted you on the ground floor and you’ve gone back upstairs empty-handed, having forgotten why you went down there in the first place. It’s not that he didn’t do those kinds of things when he was young, or forget the name of this actress, or that writer or blank out the name of the secretary of commerce, but the older you become the more often these things happen to you, and if they begin to happen so often, that you barely know where you are anymore and can no longer keep track of yourself in the present, you’ve gone, still alive but gone. They used to call it senility. But the term is Dementia, but one way or another Baumgartner knows, and even if he winds up there in the end, he still has a long way to go. He can still think, and because he can think, he can still write, and while it takes a little longer for him to finish his sentences now, the results are more or less the same. Good. Good that Mysteries of the Wheel is coming along and good that he has stopped work early today and is sitting in the backyard on this magnificent afternoon, letting his thoughts drift wherever they want to go, and with all the circling around the business of short term memory, he is beginning to think about long-term memory as well, and with that word, long, images from the distant past star flickering in a remote corner of his mind, and suddenly he feels an urge to start foraging  around in the thickets and underbrush of that place to see what he might discover there. So rather than go on looking at the white clouds and the blue sky and the green grass, Baumgartner shuts his eyes leans back in his chair, tilts his face toward the sun, and tells himself to relax. The world is a red flame burning on the surface of his eyelids. He goes on breathing in and out, in and out, inhaling the air through his nostrils, exhale through his partially open lips and then, after 20 or 30 seconds, he tells himself to remember.

 

And so I try “to remember” writing what is tentatively entitled “Explaining It To Me.”  It is a race with time to finish and publish it so it may accompany the ones I’ve already published, Waiting for Someone to Explain It: The Rise of Contempt and Decline of Sense, my 2019 book dealing with my times’ social, political, and economic breakdowns, and Explaining It to Someone: Learning From the Arts, published in 2020, a collection of hundreds of my theatre and book reviews, which might suggest some answers from our writers and playwrights.  “Explaining It To Me” will be personal and therefore even more challenging to write and finish.  Maybe I can complete and publish it next year if there is enough time to “forage around in the thickets and underbrush.” I have a first draft but it needs much more work and there are so many appointments to keep.