chapter about very dull high-school characters who I assumed were hiding a secret passion, or a dead undertaker husband. Then it was revealed. The secret was that his parents were divorced. I promptly threw it in the trash, already learning to resent American publishing.
walks into the main character’s house, demanding a drink, followed by the sound of a bulldozer ratcheting up the plot by razing the neighbor’s house.
BUT I HAD been bitten by the bug. The homage bug, that is. The next year, I read Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist and was so astounded that someone could write about life after the 19th century that I immediately went home to begin my own version. I was still unable to do more than imitate, but my story had a crucial difference from Tyler’s novel about an uptight man who meets an eccentric woman. Mine was about an uptight woman who meets an eccentric woman. It was called Simplicity Itself and began like this: In her room, every red was red. No brick reds, or cinnamons, or neons, simply an unadulterated red as one sees in primary color wheels in paint stores. As a child, she had started out with a Crayola beginner’s set of crayons. Later, her mother brought forth the Deluxe version, full of Burnt Umbers, Goldenrods, Persimmons, palacial [sic] with its double balcony and fitted cardboard cover, dazzlingly efficient with a crayon sharpener cleverly built into the back, elegantly designed with triangular patterns in
BY THE AGE of 20, I had moved beyond Anne Tyler into a word of haunted and metaphorical fiction, such as Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Is there really any better story than that of a pill that makes you forget death? My novel was completely different, of course. It was about a pill that makes you forget regret. (I’ve heard a recent novel picked up the same idea.) I wrote it in college on the first Macintosh, which they claimed was “portable.” I carried the computer to Portugal, where I plugged it into the socket and watched as smoke billowed from the back of the thing. Some complication with currents, I later learned. I finished the book on a strange device a friend at Apple loaned me—a “laptop”—with which I rode on Lisbon buses, typing away, burping the thing to keep its prototype screen lit, and sure I was part of a future world where this was how writers would live. I moved to New York to sell this novel. “It just doesn’t ‘sing’ to me,” one agent wrote. “We are finding this sort of story hard to sell,” another advised. “And do not send chocolate with your manuscript next time, as it tends to melt.” An older friend told me that there was no such thing
THE MUSEUM OF MY BEGINNINGS
Yellow-Orange and Pine Green, but she had simply said, “Thank you, but I don’t need that. Those aren’t colors at all, they’re just pretend.” A pretty good pastiche, but I never got Simplicity Itself beyond the key meeting where the eccentric neighbor (in a pink dressing gown)
GREER
It began like this: “The stormclouds were violet over the village of Dieusang.” The novel that did win was called Buck, about a boy with a secret. I was eager to learn what made this a masterpiece, and read chapter after