News

The reading at Macalester took place at the college’s art gallery. (It’s currently showing an installation that consists of pieces of insulation material hanging on strings from the ceiling; yeah, I don’t get it either.) I was introduced by my friend Marlon James, who teaches fiction here. I’m in the middle of his new novel, The Book of Night Women; it’s very good. I’m particularly fond of what he does with language.

I read from a short personal essay I’ve been working on and then from Secret Son. The most interesting question for me came when someone in the audience wondered why my main character is a man. It’s true (and this isn’t my first time.) But, with apologies to Flaubert, Youssef, c’est moi.

I just got back from dinner and I’m tired. More soon, I hope.

I am in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the weather is surprisingly (and thankfully) mild. On the way to dinner last night, we drove past Summit Terrace, the home of Francis Scott Fitzgerald, and the place where he supposedly rewrote This Side of Paradise. There are several homes associated with Fitzgerald in the area, and I hope at least one of them will be open for visits.

As I was getting ready for bed, I noticed a thick book on the shelf beneath the nightstand; it was a 1920 edition of Old French Fairy Tales by the Comtesse de Ségur. I grew up reading de Ségur in Morocco, so it was strange yet wonderful to encounter her characters in English, in a bed-and-breakfast in St. Paul, of all places.

I’ll be doing an event at Macalester College on Monday. Here are the details:

March 23, 2009
5:30 – 7:30 PM
Reading from Secret Son
Old Main Room 210
Macalester College
St. Paul, Minnesota

If you live in the Twin Cities area, do come. I’d love to see you.

PEN and 59 other organizations have signed a letter calling on attorney general Eric Holder to stop the practice of denying U.S. visas to foreign writers and intellectuals whose views do not appeal to the State Department. The practice (started during the Cold War) was revived during the Bush administration. One of its victims is the Swiss-Egyptian scholar Tariq Ramadan, whose case will be appealed in court in a few days. It will be interesting to see what happens.

When John Cheever died in 1982, he left behind a 4,300-page journal that was later (and fortunately for the reader) made available to the literary biographer Blake Bailey. His book John Cheever: A Life has just been published and Maud Newton reviews it for the Barnes and Noble Review.

Originally the author’s plans for this massive chronicle of his own evolution were unclear, but as the years passed and bisexuality entered his fiction more freely, Cheever took to showing explicit passages from his journals to visitors (although he never received the excoriation or absolution — whichever it was — that he craved). He also, notes Bailey, “became increasingly convinced that the journal was not only a crucial part of his own oeuvre, but an essential contribution to the genre,” despite or perhaps because of its focus on sex. “I read last year’s journal with the idea of giving it to a library,” he wrote. “I am shocked at the frequency with which I refer to my member.” It is a testament both to Bailey’s gift for storytelling and to the multitudinous variations of Cheever’s capacity for self-deception and self-loathing that this massive biography engages throughout its 700-plus pages.

The piece gives a clear sense of how troubled and isolated Cheever’s life was. I’m going to put this book on my to-read list.