Writers & Lovers

Limpid, languid language that smoothly and slowly flows forward, pausing to puddle and pool in little eddies. It’s delightful, resonant text, and I realized about a third of the way into it, this was another MFA-esque novel.

There’s a difference between the thoroughly upscale, poetically rendered prose that comes out of the academic circles, and while most of the setting in the novel is the student ghetto, where I lived in squalor for years, it’s just not the same.

In the recent past, I’ve recalled this now, I’ve bought books, usually cheap digital, from a list or two that suggests the books are the latest and greatest. One set of reviews that I enjoy is one LA Review of Books, but the books themselves have been near-misses for me. Good but not great. A couple of those books, I never finished reading; just wasn’t motivated; the story didn’t engage me as much as the review did.

Another source is a weekly email list, and finally, there’s always the trusty New Yorker Magazine. I’ve gotten to where I have to look the books up in the digital libraries, first, see if it is really as good as the review suggests. Again, I’ve fallen prey to the “This is the next greatest novel, ever…” only to arrive at my own, rather different conclusion.

I had to wait for most near three weeks to get a library reading copy of Writers & Lovers, and I forgot which review source suggested it. The first paragraph hooked me until I got a further into but by then? I was too invested to back out.

So the author — I cheated and looked this up online — doesn’t have an MFA, but she does hold an MA in creative writing, and she did, according to the press material, work for a years as the English Teacher, so there’s some street cred there (literary street credit, I suppose).

It is a chronicle of the post-boomer, pre-hipster people, or, as I like to think, “My people.”

Before the fin de siecle really set in, I ran into a former colleague from school days. She was wondering why I hadn’t written and published a novel yet. My collegiate peers found my material novelistic in a writerly way.

I have completed two, now three, novel length manuscripts, but as anyone who participates in the annual November dash, that exercise, in and of itself, doesn’t matter, as novel-length documents are relatively easy, after some practice.

“The hardest thing about writing is getting in every day, breaking through the membrane. The second-hardest thing is getting out.” Page 66.

That much is true. Not just verisimilitude but hard fact.

Writers & Lovers

To my ear, it still sounded like one of the almost overly-polished novels, a slice of American life, just sailed out. Set at the peripheries of the academic worlds, set moments before the pandemic panic, the novel seems both breathless and hopeful, at once reality slightly skewed with a small dose of romanticism as it weaves and warps its way through the protagonist’s psyche.

The title suggests it all, and the conclusion, a little too hopeful this morning, seemed a “bit too much.” That being noted, the story-telling and the layers, the level of wordplay, and the pacing of the almost lyrical prose helps hold it together.

Writing about writing, though, can be dangerous ground. In this one? It was well-handled, carried, in part, by the perfect poetical prose. A master at the top of the literary class.

Writers & Lovers