The Two Kinds of Genius Writers and Nantucket!
Spoiler: Donna Tartt has been both.
Editor Break Down: Genius, A Publishing Strategy
A few weeks ago, I wrote about The Secret History by Donna Tartt, a modern classic that editors, writers, and readers still turn to as a book to emulate. The biggest influence of The Secret History is undoubtably its themes, construction, style, and overall success as a great novel. But it is also a part of a deeper seeded mythology in publishing, a kind of author story that we tell ourselves, booksellers, and readers. Of Donna Tartt’s early success I wrote:
At 28, she received a cool two million dollars for her debut novel The Secret History and no one at the time seemed to begrudge her for it—the book was that good. Nothing captures attention quite like a preternatural genius—it’s as enchanting a thought in the popular imagination as winning the lottery or waking up with super powers.
This is the Genius Narrative at work. It’s not unique to books. Young, talented people, prodigies, are always a fascination in a number of fields. But it is instructive, especially in the publishing world, where this story is used more frequently as a talking point than in most other arts. The Secret History is a shining example of the lightning-in-a-bottle variety of genius narrative that’s used consistently as a selling tool. Usually, but not always, this narrative is mixed in with some element of youth. If writing something in a short time is impressive, writing something while only having lived for a short time is even more so. This is the Donna Tartt story; this is Donna’s classmate Bret Easton Ellis’ story; it's the Zadie Smith story; it’s the 19-year-old novelist’s story.
But a quick turnaround can add to youthful genius in a potent combination: here’s the quick flash brilliance, those three-week (or four month) bursts of creative intensity—like a montage of someone eating and breathing a clandestine endeavor until they come out the other side with a masterpiece (the way in which every legal case in a movie has ever been solved).
The genius narrative is an extreme example, but it also exists, to a certain extent, with how almost every debut novel is published and talked about. Debut novels all have a certain kind of fairy dust, it’s why publishers pay more for them, why media covers them more, and why readers pay attention more. Like the young genius, it’s because a debut novelist has promise and possibility that is limitless, everything is potential, until delusions are broken and readers realize that people usually aren’t the greatest that they will ever be at something the first time they attempt it (yes, okay, it does happen enough to keep the dream alive in our imaginations: Jane Eyre, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Frankenstein were all first novels).
But there are two kinds of Genius Narratives, and the second is the opposite of the first. If possibility is on one end of the genius spectrum, then painstaking is staring at these young, lightning-struck geniuses from the other side. These disgruntled intellectuals are who we form the tortured genius variety of the narrative around. They are obsessive, meticulous, depressed, relentlessly chiseling away at their masterpiece one controlled tap or pen stroke at a time.
Usually, the story of tortured genius is measured in many years—even better, decades—and typically, but not always, a high page count. A recent example of this story at work is Three Women by Lisa Taddeo, in which the first line of every review and interview seemed to start with the fact that the author spent eight tireless years traversing multiple states to follow three women in excruciating detail. This leant credibility to the book and it played out to perfection: Three Women became a #1 New York Times bestseller and inked a massive tv deal. Or there are the kinds of books that take 20 years to write. Basically, every book over 600 pages is ripe for this kind of mythologizing, and it’s actually kind of necessary—how can you ask a reader to embark on a six, seven, or eight hundred page book if the author just dashed it off and didn’t fastidiously work on it for years creating some grand vision? In fact, if that isn’t the story, you might be right to be skeptical that the author/editor just couldn’t reign the book in enough.
Donna Tartt amazingly has actually benefitted from both of these narrativizing mythologies. After the freight train of early success with The Secret History, she would go on to win the Pulitzer, two books and two decades later, with The Goldfinch, which was ten years in the making and clocks in at nearly 800 pages. The fact that she has been both prodigy and tortured genius is remarkable in and of itself, but it is even more remarkable because her entire career consists of three books. A fact that still boggles the mind given her influence and success.
It’s unarguable that Tartt has also always looked the part of genius as well.
The truth, of course, is that most great books are not written in six weeks and also that not everyone who spends ten years on a book is going to sweat their way into something that is gold. There’s such a thing as “overworked” just as there is “underbaked.” Most really good books probably take a considerable amount of time to write, 1-3 years maybe. And it’s also true that with extra time to write—more than the 6-12 months that seems to be the humane minimum for writing a decent book—one can almost always produce a better book.
But the point is that while it does take a considerable amount of time to write and rewrite, research, and think, to make an excellent book, it’s rarely ever pure talent or a unstoppable burst of creativity or extreme obsessiveness. Tartt sold her debut novel at 28. Since, according to reporting, she started it in college, that means it took at least six, but probably more than six years to write The Secret History with the understanding that most novels don’t just start at the moment when writers first sit down to write them. And this makes sense given her later history with her one-novel-a-decade approach, but that wouldn’t have made for a very exciting narrative to sell back when she was a debut novelist.
A Page at a Time: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, or The Reading of a Daunting Classic
Progress: Days 15, Pages 75
How to Set a Scene
It’s dawning on me that we might have to speed up our reading to a little more than one chapter a day (I’ve already added one chapter for Saturday and Sunday, if you’re reading along and checking the math). However, there is something pleasant about taking the journey at a pace that is as slow as Ishmael getting out to sea, but at that rate we’ll seemingly never finish (synchronicity?). I’ll try not to get too deep into recapping plot here, but we haven’t gone far since last week: the one-dimensional Queequeg and Ishmael are bonding and palling around ports. But they do go to Nantucket, which makes for about as masterful of an introduction to a place and its essence as you can get in a novel. The two pages are well worth reading in full but I’ll just quote the last part here, which contains many of the Melville signature run-on, semi-colon’d sentences:
“…two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the seas is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seaman having but a right of way through it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, through following the sea as highwayman the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and rests on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For yeas he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.”
What makes Melville’s description of Nantucket and the prototypical Nantucketer so good is that it is so densely packed with ideas, so specific and rich, yet all relentlessly coming at the same point from a million different angles: Nantucket is a sea town and these are people of the sea more than they are of the parcel of land that’s called Nantucket. The subtext of that old cliché “write what you know,” is that when people write about what they care about they tend to have more original, interesting thoughts to share, and that’s certainly the case here. You can tell how passionate Melville is about seaside towns and, paradoxically, this narrowed intensity gives his descriptions a sort of timeless quality—describing not just Nantucket in the 1800s, but many places that are defined more by their reach of trade and specialty than by their small piece of town or city. In contrast to the more minimalist, realist style that is dominant in most of today’s fiction, this is also a great example of an author taking a swing at a description to end all descriptions. From this point on, Melville doesn’t have to sprinkle hard details about what Nantucketers are like, what they wear, or how they got that way, meting out setting a snippet at a time, because after you read his description of Nantucket you never have to question what the attitude of the place and its people is again.
Back Matter: Links and Other Happenings
A famous conductor leaves LA for the New York. It’s time to pick up reading as a hobby as Netflix inches ever closer to kicking us all off. Fashion month is here. Musings on why “work wife/husband” remains a term and what relationship it really describes. The biggest American cultural event is this weekend, The Superbowl: “Why You Should Root for the Eagles This Sunday,” was a real bait and switch headline as a Philadelphian who has never experienced positive coverage of our sports teams outside of the city (the article gives reasons you should root for both teams, but the headline is probably hot-take clickbait outside of the City of Brotherly Love, ouch. Go birds.).