Authors Lounging

posted by Pearl Abraham

My friend Patricia (author of the very sexy and musical Mambo Peligroso) and I were overdue for one of our regular lounge sessions, and although the timing wasn’t right–we usually meet at 3 in the afternoon since we’re both writers without regular jobs (also without regular salaries) and this should be one of the perks–because Patricia didn’t get out of work until 6 and was tired after a long day, we met anyway. This time we went to the lounge of The Hudson Hotel, located precisely at the halfway point between us, and caught up on books, bags, boyfriends, then went straight from the b’s to p, for psychics, because Patricia had not only had a reading done, she was also advised to become a psychic herself and finance the writing of her next project with the proceeds.

Here’s what we could have been, but weren’t, doing: We could have attended the “Lolita at 50” event at the Miller Theatre at Columbia University, or heard Neil Gaiman talk about Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange… at the Thalia. This brought up the question of whether writers should attend readings, read the NYTBR, Amazon rankings and customer reviews. One ICM agent’s advice to his client, a young Hollywood actress, goes something like this:

Racehorses wear blinkers. They don’t look to the left or right at the other horses. They’re focused only on their own singular path to glory.

Of course, writers are not racehorses, or Hollywood actresses.

I was happier when I published Monkey King (1997), Patricia said, since I didn’t yet know about Amazon rankings and reviews. I could still focus, not on sales, but on the goodness of having the book published, of having completed a project.

The Amazon customer reviews, we both agree, should be abolished since they’re rigged either way. The positive reviews are written by family and friends (and some writers have more than others), the negative ones by the School of Resentment made up of ex-boyfriends, ex-students, writers who couldn’t finish or publish their manuscripts. In my case, the reviewers are also resentful young women who have either found religion or can’t get away from it, and much of the writing is confused and misinformed. The good reader reading for the right reasons is not desperate for the public forum that Amazon provides, and, claims to the contrary notwithstanding, Amazon does not screen for inappropriate comments, plot details revealed, etc.

On the NYTBR, Brian Morton (A Window Across the River) wrote that everyone is happier when he doesn’t read it. I read the book reviews, Patricia says, when I am about to or have just published. But the NYTBR has changed. It used to be worthy reading. I used to think of it as a weekend treat and read it cover to cover and came away feeling that I had learned something about literature.

I agree. Given what it has become, the Book Review is now merely a “book announcer” and should be referred to as the NYTBA.

The New Yorker’s Books in Brief section is still okay, Patricia says, but I can no longer read John Updike on other writers. He’s gotten so strange.

He’s gone off the rails, I agree. Last year, in his review of Alter’s translation of the Five Books of Moses, Updike ridiculed the Bible for its archaisms (as if the New Testament is free of them) and criticized the Jews for the Israel-Palestine conflict, neither of which had anything to do with the translation at hand. Perhaps he was on his third margarita and tipsy, as we are just now, but the piece had, dare I say it, a generous dollop of old-fashioned wasp anti-Semitism. Astonishingly, this went unremarked.

This morning, Patricia wrote: It did my heart good. A little lounging is better than none. I think of our time together as one long lounge, and last night was a small piece of it.

20 September 2005 | uncategorized |