doesn’t intend for me (and the rest of the universe) to sigh at the notion of his having no one
to tell his dreams to, if you think he does not intend for me to find this letter someday—well, you should know that he makes
three or four copies of it and sprinkles them through his files.
He does more rewrites and contacts her again.
“The book is finished,” he writes to Ramona. “It contains:
2 murders
143 grammatical errors
6 acts of intercourse
847 misspellings
1 lesbian relationship
1,131 corrections made with Liquid Paper
6 B & Es
1 unlikely love story.”
I am tempted to say that a second unlikely love story ensues—that of Ramona Fallows’s affection for my father’s ugly-duckling
book. It is nearly impossible to like, but she embraces it anyway.
Alas, no one else does, although virtually everyone else agrees the ingredients for a very good novel seem to be moiling around
in the book’s innards.
“He writes with real humor and sensitivity—rarities both,” says one editor in a lengthy letter to Ramona Fallows about why,
ultimately, he is not taking the book. There are a lot of these letters, longer and more ambivalent than most rejection notes.
Reading them now, I feel a sense of helplessness on my father’s behalf, coupled with a slight unease, as if something in these
lettersmight be contagious, as if something might travel from him to me and push my writing one or two degrees south of saleable.
The letters themselves are so full of little apologies and half-compliments and flashes of enthusiasm that they make a kind
of blizzard before my father’s eyes, obscuring from him the inevitable truth. Nobody is going to buy this book because nobody
likes it. I mean “like” the way you like a dog or your best friend Fred, not the way you like Mozart or
Heaven Can Wait.
There’s something a little snarly and uncongenial about this novel.
“If only I’d liked this a little better, all of the above, it seems to me it could be cured by rewriting and editing,” writes
an editor at Random House. “But unfortunately, I simply don’t like it well enough to want to undertake the job…”
What is not in any of the letters to or from anybody, what is not confessed to Ramona Fallows, what is not detected by any
of the dozen or so editors to read the book is this:
Henry Nemo, our family giant, is afflicted by visions and dreams. Like my father, who can’t stop thinking in numbers whether
he is writing sex scenes or courting Ramona’s approval with unwieldy fractions, Henry has integers flying through his head.
Odd progressions pop into his mind, shards of memory from his obliterated life. Taken together, these fragments constitute
something my father is desperate to preserve between two covers, with a copyright date and a Library of Congress number.
Once
The Nemo Paradox
is published, you see, he plans to inform the world that these fragments, these prions of cognition sloshing around in Nemo’s
mind, constitute his refutation of Gödel’s “incompleteness.”
One day at a small family gathering, my father, in a tone of resigned good cheer, tells my future wife, “I have made every
mistake that a man can possibly make.”
Every family nurses, as part of its oral history, the plot twist of the missed opportunity, the fortune squandered, the unseized
chance that would have led to wealth. Everybody has a grandfather who turned down the offer to be fifty-fifty partners with
Henry Ford, or who drank and pissed away an enormous sum, picking up checks for ne’er-do-well friends, or who sold land for
a pittance, only to see it become part of the Atlantic City board-walk.
This is the Universal Fiasco, the Edenic fall of every clan. The only families exempted, I suppose, are Rockefellers and Gateses
and Buffets, people who cannot plausibly claim to have let prosperity slip away. What do they do for rue? I suppose it sprouts
up in other forms.
In my
to tell his dreams to, if you think he does not intend for me to find this letter someday—well, you should know that he makes
three or four copies of it and sprinkles them through his files.
He does more rewrites and contacts her again.
“The book is finished,” he writes to Ramona. “It contains:
2 murders
143 grammatical errors
6 acts of intercourse
847 misspellings
1 lesbian relationship
1,131 corrections made with Liquid Paper
6 B & Es
1 unlikely love story.”
I am tempted to say that a second unlikely love story ensues—that of Ramona Fallows’s affection for my father’s ugly-duckling
book. It is nearly impossible to like, but she embraces it anyway.
Alas, no one else does, although virtually everyone else agrees the ingredients for a very good novel seem to be moiling around
in the book’s innards.
“He writes with real humor and sensitivity—rarities both,” says one editor in a lengthy letter to Ramona Fallows about why,
ultimately, he is not taking the book. There are a lot of these letters, longer and more ambivalent than most rejection notes.
Reading them now, I feel a sense of helplessness on my father’s behalf, coupled with a slight unease, as if something in these
lettersmight be contagious, as if something might travel from him to me and push my writing one or two degrees south of saleable.
The letters themselves are so full of little apologies and half-compliments and flashes of enthusiasm that they make a kind
of blizzard before my father’s eyes, obscuring from him the inevitable truth. Nobody is going to buy this book because nobody
likes it. I mean “like” the way you like a dog or your best friend Fred, not the way you like Mozart or
Heaven Can Wait.
There’s something a little snarly and uncongenial about this novel.
“If only I’d liked this a little better, all of the above, it seems to me it could be cured by rewriting and editing,” writes
an editor at Random House. “But unfortunately, I simply don’t like it well enough to want to undertake the job…”
What is not in any of the letters to or from anybody, what is not confessed to Ramona Fallows, what is not detected by any
of the dozen or so editors to read the book is this:
Henry Nemo, our family giant, is afflicted by visions and dreams. Like my father, who can’t stop thinking in numbers whether
he is writing sex scenes or courting Ramona’s approval with unwieldy fractions, Henry has integers flying through his head.
Odd progressions pop into his mind, shards of memory from his obliterated life. Taken together, these fragments constitute
something my father is desperate to preserve between two covers, with a copyright date and a Library of Congress number.
Once
The Nemo Paradox
is published, you see, he plans to inform the world that these fragments, these prions of cognition sloshing around in Nemo’s
mind, constitute his refutation of Gödel’s “incompleteness.”
One day at a small family gathering, my father, in a tone of resigned good cheer, tells my future wife, “I have made every
mistake that a man can possibly make.”
Every family nurses, as part of its oral history, the plot twist of the missed opportunity, the fortune squandered, the unseized
chance that would have led to wealth. Everybody has a grandfather who turned down the offer to be fifty-fifty partners with
Henry Ford, or who drank and pissed away an enormous sum, picking up checks for ne’er-do-well friends, or who sold land for
a pittance, only to see it become part of the Atlantic City board-walk.
This is the Universal Fiasco, the Edenic fall of every clan. The only families exempted, I suppose, are Rockefellers and Gateses
and Buffets, people who cannot plausibly claim to have let prosperity slip away. What do they do for rue? I suppose it sprouts
up in other forms.
In my
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