For the past four years I’ve been writing a novel set in my hometown, or rather in a fictional version of Northfield. The town in the book is not the real town, but it resembles it strongly. It has another name, Webster, and although it resembles the real town, its geography is askew. I have taken real places — the Ideal Cafe, the Stuart Hotel, Tiny’s Smoke Shop, the Cannon River, and Heath Creek, with their names intact — but I relocated some of these places and gave them new inhabitants. Oddly enough, these changes weren’t made for my convenience, and I didn’t make them without seeing them in my mind first. The collapsing and shifting of that known landscape came about because it “felt right.” The map of fictional Webster isn’t identical to the map of Northfield, because the one departs emotionally from the other. Since I began writing the book, I have been back to Northfield several times, every Christmas and once during the summer. When I walk past the Ideal Cafe, where Lily Dahl, the heroine of my book, works, I don’t feel much. I find myself looking closely at it, examining the windows on the second floor, behind which is Lily’s imaginary apartment, but it just isn’t the place I made for myself in fiction. That place exists in memory, but it isn’t “real” memory. My best friend, Heather Clark, and my sisters Liv and Astrid all worked in the Ideal Cafe in the 1970s, when it was in its heyday, and they told me stories about their customers that I have never forgotten. I stole some of them. I have eaten breakfast and lunch and wolfed down pieces of pie in the Ideal Cafe, and I think I remember pretty well what it looked like when I was in high school, but the imaginary cafe where Lily works has supplanted the one I remember and become more “real” to me. Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened. It mimics memory without being memory. Images appear as textual ground, because this is how the brain works. Ignorant as I am of the science of memory and the brain, I am convinced that the processes of memory and invention are linked in the mind. Homer evokes the muse of memory before beginning his tale. And the ancient memory systems developed to enhance recollection were always rooted to places. The speaker wandered through houses in his mind, either real or invented, and located words in its various rooms and objects. Cicero articulated an architecture of memory dependent on spaces that were well lit. Murky, cramped little hovels wouldn’t do as spatial tools for recollection. Every new draft of a book is the work not only of shrinking and expanding and shrinking again but of finding the book’s truth, which means throwing out the lies that tempt me. This work is like dredging up a memory that’s been obscured by some comfortable delusion and forcing it “to light,” a process that can be excruciating. Fiction exists in the borderland of dream and memory. Like dreams, it distorts for its own purpose, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, and, like memory, fiction requires an effort of concentration to recall how it really was. There have been a few extraordinary books written in the present tense, but by and large it’s an awkward form. Fiction usually takes place in the past. Somehow that’s its natural place.
Paul often says that it’s a strange business, this sitting alone in a room making up people and places, and that in the long run, nobody does it unless he has to. Years ago, he translated a French writer, Joseph Joubert, whose brief but startling journal entries have become part of our ongoing dialogue about art. Joubert wrote: “Those for whom the world is not enough: poets, philosophers and all lovers of books.” When I read Death on the Installment Plan in my early thirties, the book in which I imagined the hero in my grandparents’ house, I loved it so much I was sorry to finish it. I closed the book and shocked myself by thinking, “This is better than life.” I didn’t mean or want to think this, but I’m afraid I did. Certainly this feeling about a book is the one that makes people want to write. I don’t know why I feel more alive when I write, but I do. Maybe I imagine that if I scratch hard enough into the paper, I will last. Maybe the world isn’t enough, or maybe the distinction between the world and fiction is not so clear. Fiction is made from the stuff of the world, after all, which includes dreams and wishes and fantasies and memory. And it is never really made alone, but from the material between and among us: language. When Mikhail Bakhtin argues that the novel is dialogical — multivoiced, conflicted, in constant dialogue within itself — he is identifying all those jabbering voices every fiction writer hears in his or her head. Writing novels is a solitary act that is also plural, and its many voices are forever placing us somewhere — here or there or yonder. At the same time, writing collapses these spatial categories. Like a heartbeat or a breath, it marks the time of a living consciousness on the page, a consciousness that is present and here, but also absent. The page can resurrect what’s lost and what’s dead, what’s not there anymore and what was never there. Fiction is like the ghost twin of memory that moves through the myriad cities, landscapes, houses, and rooms of the mind.
Vermeer’s Annunciation
Every painting is always two paintings: the one you see and the one you remember, which is also to say that every painting worth talking about reveals itself over time and takes on its own story inside the viewer. With Vermeer’s work, that story probably lasts as long as the person who sees it. This is my own unfinished story of looking at one of his paintings. Before I walked through the doors of the National Gallery of Art in Washington to look at its historic gathering of twenty-one of Vermeer’s works, I hadn’t decided which painting I would write about. My job was to discuss only one, and while I was paging through the catalog and listening to the museum officials and curators talk about the show, I turned to Woman with a Pearl Necklace. I had never seen the original, although I had admired it in reproduction many times, but suddenly, for reasons I didn’t fully understand, this painting of a woman holding up a necklace in the light of a window jumped out at me. Although I didn’t have the slightest notion of what I would say about it, the choice had been made, and I walked up the stairs already in its grip.