Our hidden ‘Caleb’
I’m working on – pretty much finished – a novel that will hopefully find its way to print before I die. “Everyone has a novel in them,” a novelist acquaintance of mine said to me several years back, paused, and then added: “And that’s where it should stay.” It was a warning to me, and everyone else. Might we already have too many stories?
When my project was at a few stages further on, another well published novelist read a completed draft. She liked the characters and found the plot of this largely plotless tale engrossing. I should read Anne Tyler’s 1975 novel Searching for Caleb, she said. I have now. Slowly. It’s stunning.
Set largely in Maryland – and moving from 1973 to the early 20th century and back again – the novel depicts small town America, and a seemingly ordinary, proper family, doing seemingly ordinary things, except for Caleb, who disappeared a long time ago. The plot, such as it is, unfolds layers of relationships. It moves just enough to let her protagonist find her great uncle Caleb, and her own hidden Caleb. I puzzled over the ending, read it several times. And smiled.
It takes some daring and some constitutional strength to attempt a serious novel and to survive the marathon-like terrors of completing it. But any novel that an author brings into existence deserves its existence, in my view. If only because the warnings of friends and colleagues not to attempt it have all been ignored. But once a novel has been completed, the real terrors begin--questionable, suspiciously disappointed criticism from people once assumed to be allies, rejection from single-minded literary agents, rejection from over-busy and harried book publishers, and, worst of all, the potential loss of faith in oneself. And then, should the unbelievable occur, and the novel actually find a home with a major trade publisher, or an academic press, or even a small independent press, the response will range from gloriously appreciative to mendaciously jealous to inscrutably misinformed. Some readers will understand precisely what you meant in every sentence of the story. Others will be lost. Still others will find an entirely alien novel hiding deep within the one you have written. And of course, many readers, even some critics, will simply resist the idea of fiction itself and decide they have struck upon the evidence of a real and actual life lived by the author who hides behind the fictional pastiche of his work. Indeed, it sometimes seems that the better your novel is at seeing into a reader's secrets and deeply harbored fears, the more he will protest and declare that this, in fact, must be the author's secret life. Managing all of this, and more, is required of anyone who attempts in good faith to craft a pleasing work of fiction and to share it with the world. The reward? An author knows, ultimately, whether his novel has substance and value. Nothing can shake the certainty of that. Looking forward to hearing and learning more about your own "pretty much finished" novel.