August 30, 2010 – Had a meaningful time with the Rouse’s at the Washington County Fair. Lots to think about. When I got home from the Fair last night, I waded into a novel I’ve been reading about a lovingly married couple, and the husband comes down with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and dies a slow and agonizing death for 100 pages. In a novel I just finished, a mother wastes away from cancer, and then in another, the protagonist gets a virulent form of cancer and suffers terribly from aggressive chemotherapy and kills herself. And another about a friendship that ended with a death from cancer.
The previous three novels I read dealt with post-911 angst and before that, I read a string of novels by writers in Brooklyn, N.Y. dealing with post recession depression, loss of purpose, and another about how technology is eroding our lives and culture. There are a lot of writers in Brooklyn, but few of them seem happy or optimistic. I am no Pollyanna. I’ve lost friends and family members to cancer and seen quite a bit of it in my hospice work.. I grasp the fragility of life, and its short and temporal nature. Maybe I’m reading the wrong books. Maybe I’m coming to understand why publishers are having a hard time choosing books people want to buy.
An exception: I’m almost done with my biography of Andrew Wyeth, and I am shocked at some of the similiarities in our personalities. He too immersed himself in the lives of his subjects and grasped the emotional power of ordinary people struggling to lift their lives. He had no interest in politics either, and loved to paint barns and lace curtain windows blowing in the wind.
I’m a story teller and I pay attention to endings. At my wedding in June, I said that Maria was my happy ending. And it is so. But I haven’t read a happy ending, or even a non-agonizing one, in awhile. I hate to look for books that are happy in a contrived way. Life is sometimes happy, sometimes not. A mix wouldn’t be bad. I got a usually reliable mystery out, and the detective’s wife got cancer by the third chapter. Enough.
I wonder why contemporary writers are so drawn to such a narrow sphere. When I turned in my short story collection, an editor said she was shocked by the fact that most of the stories were uplifting. I was glad to hear that.
The role of the writer and artist isn’t only to reflect the angst and drama of the world, but to use stories and images to help lift people up. We all know about the bad things in the world, you can’t escape them if you own a tv or computer or stand outside. They surround you, coming out of the ether. It seems to me the greater and more creative challenge for the writer is to challenge people to see the color, opportunity and promise in a difficult world. We’ve got the bad stuff covered.