write white like me.

my old friend & professor had told me she was excited for ian mcewan's new book, saturday. this morning i saw an interview with mcewan on salon.com, so i clicked it and let my eyes scan along the lines, absent of any definite expectation. before i'd reached the bottom of page one, though, i realized: here is a guy who speaks with a trained, easy precision at the same time that he fairly reeks of perspective. heretofore, my response to author interviews was either a) reflexive disdain when i sense that there's a hole where a sense of humor should be or b) chummy excitement--partly for the warmth or intelligence of the author, but mostly for an accessibility and style of prose that clicks with me; that allows me to think practical thoughts along the lines of i am so going to do this--i am going to write loads of books and be popular, hello. but ian.m provoked a variant response, due to the almost preternatural ease with which he said things like,

"One of the privileges of writing novels is to give characters views that you have fleetingly but that are too irresponsible for you ever to defend. You can give them to a character. His [the lead protagonist in saturday] views on magical realism, I could never really ... I know there are some great novels in that vein. But still..."

i read this and laughed at the memory of trying Really Hard to like magical realism in college, but never quite getting there. then i glanced to the right end of my desk at a printout of the latest chapter of my story, wherein the narrator agrees, on a dare, to go gay for one month. huh, i said.

and, also, here's another of mcewan's parcels -

"I thought I'd have a go at challenging the notion that happiness 'writes white.' That we're drawn to forms of misery and conflict because they're easier to describe, while happiness is bland. There's supposed to be a universality to happiness while there's a distinctly individual quality about misery."

that one struck with particular acuity, since, at this particular point, writing with self-congratulatory irony requires a minimum of effort. sarcasm is a kind of muscle memory. and it's not like i am not aware of it--just yesterday, in the closing moments of the night, it struck me that how i choose to write plays into the regard with which i hold both my inside self and the outside world. so then to wake up, pour coffee and read those words even before i'd had time to settle into my niche of sarcastic awareness--it made me think.

if, in the coming days, i come across as rather unnecessarily bland or boring or needlessly glib, please do not take offense; i am practicing with dedication before breakfast-time each day. one day i shall be content and interesting. at the same time. and, while the characters i write will be the only ones allowed to hold views one might consider questionable, i've never had a particular feel for the dramatic anyway.