Reading in Springtime

And only one week until my third book in seven months finally comes out

Recently I’ve been listening, on my desultory drives back and forth over the harbor bridge to take my son to Montessori, to a novel called Point of No Return, which sounds like it should be a spy thriller, but which is instead a quiet domestic drama about white male class anxiety in New England in the 1940s by John P. Marquand. Marquand is remembered - that’s actually too strong a word, as my impression is that Marquand is neither read nor analyzed much in American letters anymore, so it’s certainly an overstatement to suggest he is remembered - as the author of the satirical epistolary novel The Late George Apley, which won the Pulitzer in 1938. He sets many of his novels in Clyde, Massachusetts, a thinly veiled version of Newburyport, where grew up, and where he died, and which is itself a thinly veiled version of Marblehead, if the Headers are to be believed.

I can understand why Marquand has slipped below the surface of American literary consciousness and gone bubbling into the depths of obscurity. Public appetite for fiction detailing the dense interiority of privileged Yankee men has perhaps at last been exhausted, and Marquand, for all his perceptiveness about subtle gradations of status and his perfect command of coastal New England town life, missed the fact that women are also people. Women stiff-leg their way though his narratives like cardboard cutouts while men ruminate and dwell on the sensitivities nourished in their boyhoods and the ways they were hardened in war. But the truth is, despite the vacant space where half the population ought to reside and despite that spoiler of a title, the first time I read George Apley I cried.

(The azaleas are blooming, and so is the cherry. And just this morning I saw a goldfinch flitting into the hemlock.)

The idea that Point of No Return, which details the anxiety of a middle-aged father worrying if he will be chosen for the vacant vice-presidency at his small New York bank, reached #1 on the New York Times list is, perhaps, surprising. But most surprising at all, at least from my perspective, is that I am at last ready to read it. And by it, I mean read anything fictional at all. My readiness to read fiction suggests that I am almost through shaking Astor, A True Account, and The Penguin Book of Pirates out of my head. They’ve been sitting in there, clotting everything up, gumming up the works for the past two or three years. I’m ready to set them down. Ready to start dreaming up something new.

Not just ready. Desperate. Desperate to think about something, anything new.

But first, I have one last book to launch, to cap off the Year of Three Books. It’s coming out next Tuesday. The fanfare will be small, I think. But that’s okay. The Penguin Book of Pirates is my tenth book. Just a few more feet, and this boulder I’ve been pushing will finally be balanced on top of the hill.

So what’s next?

I got a new author photo done. I had a few options to choose from and went with the one that says “buy this book or I’ll use my grandmother’s engagement ring to poke out your eye.”

“That’s not you,” my son said when he saw this picture.

“Yes it is,” I insisted.

He laughed and cupped my cheek. “No, it isn’t.”

Why not come see for yourself?

April 30 at Charter Books in Newport.

May 2 at RJ Julia.

May 4 in Salem at a fundraiser for the Salem Lit Fest.

May 6 at Belmont Books.

May 11 at the Greater Pittsburgh Festival of the Book.

May 18 at the Gaithersburg Book Festival.

June 13 at the Nantucket Book Festival.

July 7 at the Marblehead Festival of the Arts

And then some events are already coming together in the autumn. Autumn! I wonder what the world will look like then.