Writing, the New York Times Book Review, and needing a sense of yourself

by DRM


Every Sun­day, the young man who wanted to be a writer went out early to the cor­ner news­stand to buy The New York Times. He had a rou­tine. Shuf­fle and deal, like a casino hand: sports sec­tion, arts sec­tion, week in review, and last, because it would get the most time and con­sid­er­a­tion, the Book Review.

What do we think of the young man’s focus? He read the reviews long­ingly. His emo­tions were con­fused. Some reviews intim­i­dated him. If he couldn’t under­stand the review, how could he pos­si­bly under­stand the book, and if he couldn’t under­stand the book, how could he write a book that peo­ple would think was thought­ful and smart? Some reviews insulted him. The reviewer was so blithe, the book sounded so easy, and when he sat down at night after work he felt like he was mak­ing card­board out of peo­ple who were so dis­tinct and alive in his mind. Some reviews just dis­cour­aged him: there was a pan­theon of bril­liance that he couldn’t ever aspire to.

“Being a writer” (a phrase that con­tained as much mys­tery and desire for that young man as “find­ing the Lord” would for a man with a reli­gious voca­tion) was defined in its value through the prism of the Book Review, a vir­tual leaflet of judg­ment that appeared every weekend.

He stopped writ­ing even­tu­ally, intim­i­dated and defeated.

Why didn’t he look at the peo­ple in the sub­way, on the bus, sit­ting on park benches, at din­ers, all read­ing? Books every­where around him, path­ways to the imag­i­na­tion, the greater sense of human­ness. Those peo­ple, in their unas­sum­ing clothes, with their myr­iad degrees, maybe smat­ter­ings of edu­ca­tion, were the com­mu­nity, the peo­ple who read. He didn’t under­stand that he needed to respect the voice in his head, the feel­ing of excite­ment and under­stand­ing that he got if he just let him­self write, free and unfettered.

When he tried to write in antic­i­pa­tion of the approval of the pan­theon, what­ever that pan­theon might be, vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to antic­i­pate, he buried him­self. He wasn’t part of any world. He wanted to be part of a com­mu­nity, but he didn’t know the way in.

He wanted to be spe­cial, but he couldn’t really say who he was.

Today he rarely reads the Book Review. He just reads, book after book. He reads to learn, to dis­cover and to please. Him­self. He writes again, because some­one who loves him, and who he loves back in a true and hon­est way, showed him that he had gone away from writ­ing for the wrong rea­son. She sent him back to writ­ing for the right reason.