Back In The Saddle
After seasonal excess and indulgence of Manhattan in December, had Christmas in Bridgehampton with kids, then flew to the Turks and Caicos with Candace Bushnell, Patrick McMullan and a few other friends, since our kids bailed on us. We were on Ambergris Cay, a small, sparsely inhabited Island where I did some fly fishing for bonefish, one of my favorite earthly pursuits, while Anne managed to break her wrist negotiating some slippery rocks above the beach. Since I wasn’t there, Candace immediately summoned the bartender for assistance. In Candace’s view, apparently, many of the world’s problems can be solved by bartenders. Then she woke Patrick McMullan, the legendary nightlife photographer, who keeps vampire hours, and demanded to know if he had any painkillers.
Read Denis Johnson’s haunting Train Dreams on the plane. On the island read Bob Mould’s memoir, See a Little Light, probably more than I needed to know about Husker Du front man and Jonathan Lethem’s essays, including the rather strange one about my buddies Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis at Bennington. (On consulting with both found Donna hated the essay, Bret was amused by it.) Also read some Wodehouse and galleys of some forthcoming novels.
I started the New Year back in the saddle in Bridgehamptom, working on my next novel, which is essentially the sequel to the Good Life. In 2010 I wrote another novel which I have shelved for the moment—just not really sure it worked, and I haven’t yet figured out how to fix it if indeed it can be fixed. In the meantime. I always suspected that I would write again about Russell and Corrine Calloway, the couple that first appeared in my short story “Smoke” and later in the novel Brightness Falls, published in 1992. The Good Life followed them in the weeks and months after 9/11 and the new book, it turns out begins on election night 2004.
I started the book about ten months ago, but I had to take a break to prepare my new wine book, The Juice, for publication, and I really needed to set aside a sustained period of writing, so I’ve decided to stay out here for January and February. I always do this at a certain stage of a book, although some of my friends don’t seem to believe I will be able to stay away from Manhattan. My daughter is one of the skeptics. She said, “that’s like you saying you won’t drink for two months.”
—Jay