Don’t be put off! Works by WG Sebald, Roberto Bolaño and Wallace Shawn and others can help us to see ourselves more clearly and understand life better
“If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life,” wrote Thoreau, and this is roughly how I feel about the man giving me a book that will make me a better person. I dislike him, and yet here I am risking becoming him. Worse still, I seem to be suggesting that my own book bears mention in this dubious, self-approving category. Writing an “improving” book sounds like a terrific way of repelling readers.
When I wrote my book, Prodigals, I intended, if anything, no more than to give voice to the tensions I felt pulling me apart from the inside. Which tensions? The desire for community when we measure our worth against one another. The desire for fame when we know it is toxic. The need for other people when they are all unbearable. The need to do work that addresses the spirit when we live in a world that no longer believes in the spirit. The desire for identity when we know it will never be more than a convenient fiction … Could I turn my confusion into a suspended ambivalence, a scattered sand stilled and blown into glass, in which someone else might see himself, herself?
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