Cynthia Zarin has been hiding in plain sight. Or maybe it’s more appropriate to say the culture hasn’t pigeonholed her. At 64, she’s had a career as gloriously peripatetic as any I’ve encountered: a longtime New Yorker staff writer; the author of five volumes of poetry, two books of nonfiction and several works for children; a Guggenheim fellow who has seen two of her poems staged as ballets; and for some time a poet in residence at Manhattan’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where she was given an office up a “very, very windy stairway” overlooking its vaulted Gothic Revival interior.
Now Zarin has made another exhilarating pivot, publishing her first novel. The spare and impressionistic “Inverno,” out this week, functions in a lot of ways like a poem. Opening in February “near the north ball fields in Central Park in the snow,” the book relies less on narrative than on a series of overlapping memories and references, moving back and forth through space and time, reflecting both a keen sense of immediacy and a lifetime of experience.
Sam took the billet of steel, holding it by the rebar handle in a heavy blacksmith’s glove, and he carried it to the forge, with its interior of tangerine flame. The forge is a black cylindrical furnace, 16 inches long, as big around as a gallon of paint, and open at both ends. Two propane torch nozzles entered the top to provide the fire. The floor of the forge was populated by glowing white rocks of fractured firebrick. And it roared like a lion. The heat rising from it was so intense that the waves appeared to be dissolving the brick building I could see across the alley through the open roll-up door. I sat at Sam’s workbench. Although I was 20 feet away, the heat on my face was like summer sun.
Sam placed the billet among the white-hot rocks and we waited. He talked of the metal’s need to heat all the way through and “relax.” As we watched, the dull deck of gray cards began to wake up and take on the qualities of a living thing. Among the glowing rocks, it seemed to stir and issued a low, dark color. He had put two kinds of steel in the stack that became the billet, 1095 and 15N20, because he was making Damascus steel, a special kind of steel for swords and knives that combines metals to form beautiful patterns by way of forging and pounding, crushing (called “upsetting”) and twisting. Damascus is not particularly superior to other steels. It’s just prettier. But it has acquired a special mystique because hundreds of years ago, as early as the fourth century B.C., it came into Europe from the East by way of Syria. That steel had a wavy pattern in it. So by analogy, people today call steel that has a wavy pattern “Damascus.” The Crusaders were armed with Damascus blades. It was said that theirs were quenched in the blood of dragons. And it was also said that those blades could do battle with the Saracens and afterward still sever a feather floating in midair.
I realized many authors have “apprenticeship novels”—novels written before the author’s published debut, which don’t get published but which help the author grow. Novels the author now agrees should never have been published. Novels the author has no desire to revisit. It’s not for the faint of heart: pouring huge amounts of time and energy into writing that might never end up on anyone’s shelves. But in today’s frenetic, time-optimizing, productivity-worshiping culture, there’s something beautiful to me about the patience and commitment of the apprenticeship novel.
And so my thoughts, as thoughts about writing often do, take me back to Mom.
Playing Monopoly may be objectively flawed—stolen property, wealth inequality, family feuds, socioeconomic disparity—but its place in modern culture is more robust than ever. And ironically, Monopoly’s applications in the real world often critique the very things the game itself champions. We may never get to play the anti-monopolist version of Magie’s The Landlord’s Game anymore, but maybe we could try living it.
Readers familiar with Barrett’s work will immediately recognise the world of Wild Houses. Small-time County Mayo crooks Gabe and Sketch abduct Doll English, the younger brother of a local lad who owes them a few grand in drug debts. They all hole up for the weekend with Dev, a troubled and introverted soul whose remote farmhouse doubles as a convenient location to keep a hostage. From here we follow Doll’s girlfriend Nicky as she attempts to uncover what has happened and to bring Doll back home unharmed. In essence, the novel is a caper, the heaviness of the criminality undercut by bungles and incompetence. On the face of it the story is slight, but what elevates Wild Houses is the deftness of its telling. Barrett leans heavily on a type of proleptic plotting, flashing forward to points of crisis and then rolling the clock back to allow the reader to discover how things ended up that way. A genre convention most commonly used in thrillers, it’s executed here with an impressive lightness of touch.
A COLOPHON IS THE DESIGN OR SYMBOL publishers place on the spines of their books. Glance at your bookshelves, at the bottom edge of each volume, and you might see the Knopf borzoi, the three fish of FSG, the interlocking geometric shapes of Graywolf. They are designed to be clean and distinctive but unobtrusive. The colophon is not what sells the book, after all. The author does. One doesn’t buy A Dance with Dragons because it’s published by Bantam. One buys it because it’s written by George R.R. Martin.
Yet Dan Sinykin, a scholar and critic, has made the colophon and the commercial realities it represents his primary field of inquiry. His new book, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, tracks the progress of U.S. fiction from the postwar era to the present from the perspective of the colophon. Harcourt, Brace; Pantheon; New American Library: these and countless other publishers provide the institutional setting of Sinykin’s account. His cast of characters includes editors, agents, publicists, fundraisers, accountants, and others who belong to the ranks of literature’s wage laborers, toiling away behind the veil of the colophon. Though often unknown, they take center stage here, their talents, idiosyncrasies, and shortcomings on full display.