A novel is never really finished until the final set of galleys are turned in to the publisher, but I finished a third draft of my latest in June and finalized the details of a deal with Knopf, my longtime publisher this past Friday. The working title is Thin City, which I like a lot, though I’m not sure my editor shares my enthusiasm. We shall see. Titles are a bitch. For me they usually come right at the beginning or at the last minute, as pub date looms, though this one came to me somewhere between the writing of the second and third drafts. Manhattan is literally a skinny island, and many of its inhabitants are obsessed with their weight. The book finishes with the middle of the recession that began in 2008, a time of thinning portfolios, shrinking net worth and receding expectations. And I think of Nick Caraway looking forward to “a thinning briefcase of enthusiasms, thinning hair…” as he contemplates his thirtieth birthday and beyond. These characters by contrast are approaching their fiftieth birthdays. (Fitzgerald never got there so perhaps it was appropriate for his protagonist to be so depressed about thirty.) My new novel picks up the story of Russell and Corrine Calloway, the married couple who made their first appearance in a short story I wrote in 1985 called “Smoke” and who subsequently appeared in Brightness Falls and The Good Life.

Now comes editing and copy editing, second and third thoughts, last minute tweaks and reversals. But in the meantime, I’m on vacation. For more than two years the novel has usually been the first thing I think about when I wake up and even if I chose to ignore it, it was always there waiting—beckoning, nagging, demanding attention. For the past five or six weeks, while I awaited word from my editor and publisher, I was able to put it out of my mind. I look forward to its return. But for the moment, I’m happily rereading Custom of the Country , Portnoy’s Complaint, Tender is the Night and the Stories of Roald Dahl. The former is even better than I remembered. Is there a badder-ass female protagonist in literature than Undine Spragg? Maybe Becky Sharp. As a world-class narcissist, Undine gives Donald Trump a run for his money. They would have made a great couple.

— Jay

More of my friends seemed distressed than impressed when I quit drinking for August. The feeling seemed to be that I was letting the team down at the height of the season. “Why the hell would you pick August of all months,” asked one friend. The answer is that toward the end of July I realized I was entering a crucial period in the composition of the novel I was working on, closing in on the end of the first draft. When I looked at the calendar it was all cluttered up with cocktail parties and clambakes and semi formal dinners for a hundred in Southampton. August in the Hamptons is not for the shy and retiring. I didn’t want to offend my friends by skipping all of these events but neither did I necessarily want to wake up every morning with what the French euphemistically refer to as a wooden head. Memories of Augusts past, fuzzy as they were, suggested that my productivity would not be peaking. So I took the pledge. And I can genuinely say, 1. That I’m glad I did and 2. I have new respect for my sober friends and 3. Thank God it’s September.

Days were good; nights long. Cocktail parties, by definition, are much less tolerable without alcohol, that greatest of social lubricants, solvent of self-consciousness, which loosens tongues and inhibitions. And allows one to suffer fools gladly. Sobriety makes it harder to feign interest in inane banter. It also makes one eager to sit down to dinner and get on with it. I thought I’d lose weight but I think if anything I gained because I ended up eating everything in sight, including desert, a course I normally shun. But the days were productive and the memory of the day’s work sustained me at night. I did take two holidays, having in both cases sold my services for charity to host a wine dinner. I was grateful for these interludes.

I had a rather touching moment at a big Hamptons dinner party when I was explaining to my host that I wasn’t drinking. A famous writer overheard part of the conversation and rushed over, clasping my by the hand. “Hey, Jay, I feel what you’re going through. I’m seventeen years sober. If you ever need to talk, just call me, any time. I’m here for you.” I was genuinely touched and didn’t have the heart to tell the man, whom I’ve known for twenty five years, that I was just taking the month off, that I would leaping off the wagon in a few more days. Though it’s good to know that if I need help some day, it would appear to be out there.

Among the books I was reading at the time, dipping in and out of five or six, was The Trip to Echo Springs: Why Writer’s Drink, by Olivia Laing, which, thank God, never reductively answers the question but thoughtfully explores it through an examination of the lives and careers of Tennessee Williams, John Cheever and Raymond Carver among others. Carver, to whom I became very close in the years after I followed him to Syracuse, was sober by the time I met him and liked to say that writers were no more prone to alcoholism than plumbers or carpenters, citing his experience in AA. I think this belief was a reflection of Carver’s deep humility, of his refusal to see himself as a special case and of his deep identification with the working class. I see it slightly differently—there may or may not be a psychological correlation between thirst and the literary enterprise but there is certainly a cult of Drinking writers, a folk tradition which associates literary genius with Dionysian excess, with the pursuit of altered consciousness—a notion which you can trace from Hemingway through Ginsberg and Bukowski down to Tao Lin’s new novel Taipei, which I was also reading in August.

Thousands of MFA students from Stanford to Iowa have drunkenly quoted Blake’s maxim, “The road of excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom,” as they ordered another round. As a young writer I was possessed of the misguided faith that if I drank enough and did enough drugs I might become as accomplished as the writers I admired—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Carver, Cheever—being too callow to consider the possibility that their great literary monuments were produced in spite of, rather than because of, their addictions.

Tao Lin’s protagonist in Taipei is usually deranged on some combination of legal and illegal pharmaceuticals, and his perception—and the prose—reflects a kind of druggy, hyperconscious attention to the minutiae of daily existence, the complicated mechanics of moving across a crowded room for instance, which struck me as original even as it occasionally reminded me of Bret Easton Ellis, who is name-checked in Taipei’s pages, although the fact that sex doesn’t seem to occur until page 134 makes it terrifyingly clear that we’re not reading Ellis. Taipei is ultimately more conventional than it at first appears, its glacial affectlessness eventually thawing, allowing a glimmer of something like human emotion to appear unexpectedly.

The fact that I’d just finished Adele Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. made it tempting to posit a new genre, the Brooklyn Literary Bildungsroman. Both books have Brooklyn based twenty something male protagonists pursuing literary careers and love, although pursuing is perhaps too active a verb for Tao Lin’s main character. Waldman’s protagonist, Nate, is far more ambitious and sexually aggressive than Paul, more inclined to drink than to pop pills, and her book is especially intriguing in part because of how well she writes from the male point of view. Here’s just one gem of genre parsing from the novel: “As a rule, men want a reason to end a relationship, while women want a reason to keep it going….That’s why after the fact men look to all the things that were wrong with the relationship, to confirm the rightness of ending it. Women on the other hand, go back and search for what might have been different, what might have made it work.”

I tweeted about the book and subsequently got a request to do a Q and A with Waldman at Barnes and Noble on 86th Street a couple of weeks ago. In response to a question from the audience she said it had taken her four and a half years to complete the book. I hope it won’t take nearly as long to finish the next.

After the event I repaired to CookShop and split a bottle of Condrieu with a friend. Cheers.

—- Jay

At five in the morning on October 3, 2011, Turkish police raided the home of Ayse Berktay, a writer and translator, seizing personal papers and files, without an arrest or search warrant. She was eventually charged under Turkey’s anti-terror legislation with “membership in an illegal organization” for allegedly “planning to stage demonstrations aimed at destabilizing the state, plotting to encourage women to throw themselves under police vehicles so as to create a furor, and attending meetings outside Turkey on behalf of the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK),” a banned pro-Kurdish party.

Berktay is one of more than 1,800 people, including writers and academics swept up in mass arrests of supporters of Kurdish rights in Turkey. She is a member of the pro-Kurdish Party for Peace and Democracy, which has 36 elected members in the Turkish Parliament. This past Tuesday she received the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award, at the annual Pen benefit gala at the Museum of Natural History, of which I was a co-chair. I’ve been a member of PEN for many years, and I’m deeply impressed with the work the organization does on behalf of imprisoned writers around the world.

The winner of the 2009 Freedom to Write Award was imprisoned writer and politicial activist Liu Xiobao, who went on to win the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize and was represented at the ceremony by an empty chair since the Chinese government refused to let him travel to Stockholm. Xioboa is serving an eleven-year sentence for “inciting subversion of state power,” as one of the co-authors of Charter 8, which called for expanded human rights and an end to one party rule. In the meantime his wife Liu Xia is under house arrest, without phone or internet access. Two weeks ago she was allowed a brief respite to attend the trial of her brother on fraud charges. I’m not free,” she shouted to reporters from a car window after leaving the court. “When they tell you I’m free, tell them I’m not.” (As part of its World Voices festival PEN released a “Creativity and Constraint in Today’s China,” detailing China’s censorship and persecution of writers and artists, which you can read here)

PEN also honored the great Philip Roth on Tuesday night with its Literary Service Award. In addition to his many services to literature Roth was being recognized for his support of Eastern European writers struggling under Soviet occupation, when he devised a system whereby leading American authors including himself, Arthur Miller, Arthur Schlesinger, William Styron and others were able to send cash envelopes every month to writers like Milan Kundera, Ivan Klima who’d been forced to work in menial jobs—Klima for instance, worked as a messenger, a train driver and a surveyor’s assistant—and would otherwise have been unable to support themselves while continuing to write.

Elegantly MCed by NBC’s Willie Geist, the gala concluded with a short plea from me—briefly interrupted by an intoxicated writer at my table exercising her right to free speech—to support PEN and the work it’s doing to protect freedom of expression around the world. I’d like to reiterate that request here.

—Jay

The timing was eerie. Last week the Boston Marathon bombings reminded New Yorkers of that day almost twelve years ago when our city was thrown into chaos and our sense of invulnerability shattered forever. And now the apparent discovery of a piece of the wreckage from one of the two airliners that crashed into the World Trade Center, wedged in a narrow alley near Ground Zero, the improbability of the discovery, and of its remaining undiscovered for so long underlined by the fact that the alley is only an inch wider than the seventeen inch width of the fragment. If not for the events in Boston this piece of metal might seem even more like an ancient relic, a reminder of a long ago era, because in recent years the memory of those incredibly vivid days after Sept 11th 2001 has inevitably faded. Unlike Boston, the cradle of the American revolution, New York is not a city that clings to its history. New Yorkers live in the present. As traumatic and stirring as the events of the Sept 11th and its aftermath were for those of us who lived through them, they seem farther and farther away as we go about our business, while the stock market soars and new generations of restaurants spring up like weeds between the cracks in the sidewalk and the so-called Freedom tower rises inexorably, floor by floor, on the site once occupied by the World Trade Towers.

And then this piece of wreckage, this piece of landing gear which failed to land, suddenly appears like Banquo’s ghost, like a disheveled, uninvited guest at our party, to remind us of our history, our scarred-over metropolitan wound, our mortality.

The subject of mortality also hovered over the lawn of a party in Sag Harbor this weekend celebrating the publication of James Salter’s All That Is. The party, thrown by editor Steve Byers, was packed with writers and editors that occupied the front tables of Elaine’s in the 1970s and shifted their headquarters to the American Hotel in the summer. Salter has recently turned 88 and has survived a great many of his contemporaries, including George Plimpton, who was a year younger than the guest of honor, whose absence seemed particularly conspicuous, at least to me, even though he died a decade ago. It was George’s crowd, as well as Jim’s, and his son Taylor Plimpton was there, the youngest guest by at least a decade. George’s friend Bill Becker told me that back in the 1966 he’d passed along the manuscript of Salter’s classic A Sport and a Pastime to George, who’d subsequently published it in The Paris Review.

Anyone who hasn’t read A Sport and a Pastime is strongly admonished to get to a bookstore today and buy it. I’ve reread it every four or five years and I never cease to be amazed by the shimmering magic of the prose, by Salter’s uncanny ability to evoke setting and mood, and—less this sounds precious—his unflinching examination of sexuality. It’s been a while since I read Light Years, his beautiful portrait of an enviable but ultimately doomed marriage, and I think I will have to wait until I finish this latest book, because I suspect that Light Years strongly influenced my novel Brightness Falls, and this novel in progress is a continuation of the story of Russell and Corrine Calloway, the third installment in their story. I’m getting close to the end of the first draft and think I will wait to finish before I return to Light Years. In the meantime, though, I read Salter’s new novel, which has many of the virtues of his earlier work, spanning decades of the life of Phillip Bowman, a former naval officer who becomes an editor at a prestigious New York publishing house after World War II. It’s a book full of beautiful set pieces, which somehow gains weight as it captures the passing of the years and decades. The party in Sag Harbor would have fit beautifully into the book, somewhere near the end, a fact which could hardly be lost on Salter, who seemed as wry and skeptical and observant as he was when I first him almost thirty years ago. I wonder whether, had he written the scene, he would have chosen to have set the party on the very day that most of the guests would have opened their New York Times to find a stellar review of the novel being celebrated.

—Jay

My two New Year’s resolutions are: to do more fly fishing, and to read more Edward St. Aubyn. I’ve been aware of his work for a long time; Donna Tartt is among quite a few readers I admire who have urged it on me. I finally got around to reading the Patrick Melrose novels over the holiday and I was blown away. I was also thinking about Truman Capote around the same time since I’ve accepted an assignment to write an introduction to Breakfast at Tiffany’s for the Folio Society. Not that that novel has much in common with St. Aubyn’s work. But Capote’s often announced, long-awaited and never completed final novel, Answered Prayers, was supposed to be a big panoramic satire about the beau monde, about postwar high society, that conglomerate tribe composed of pedigreed Americans, Hollywood celebrities and various species of arrivistes possessed of money or beauty or even wit (a la Capote), presided over by the European aristocracy, who embody the idea of privileged exclusivity. It’s a strata of society seldom examined in serious fiction, as opposed to pop fiction, for a variety of reasons, not least the difficulty of access.

Capote managed to corral this group into the Plaza hotel for his famous Black and White ball in 1966—for five hundred of his closest friends, he remarked at the time, a year after In Cold Blood had made him even more famous—but he wasn’t finally able to write about it. Not really. Drugs and alcohol didn’t help, nor did his ambivalent feelings about a world to which he so clearly wished to belong. The three alleged excerpts that were published over the years weren’t all that compelling and the last, “La Cote Basque” purveyed several scandalous anecdotes about his glamorous friends which led to his becoming something of a social pariah, a fact which seems to have caught him by surprise and further eroded whatever will he had to finish his big masterpiece. The book that was finally published posthumously, under the title Answered Prayers, was composed of the three controversial stories without connective material, although rumors of lost chapters abounded.

Unlike Capote, Edward St. Aubyn was born into the world about which he writes, the English aristocracy, his titled family having arrived in Cornwall with William the Conqueror; as such he belongs to a class you can’t choose to join, and that you can’t really be kicked out of. His view of his own tribe is utterly remorseless. His upper crust Brits are either stupid twits or nasty snobs. They would have looked down their noses at most of Capote’s guests. Patrick Melrose, the central figure of five novels, is a mean son of a bitch, though unlike most of his peers he is fiercely intelligent, and self-aware; he’s also the victim of a nasty childhood in which he is ignored by his alcoholic mother and raped by his father. This act is described in a scene in Never Mind, the first novel of the series, that is as masterful as it is harrowing. You find yourself not quite believing you are reading on and not able to look away. No glamorizing of the good old British aristocracy here. Patrick’s father is much admired by other aristos for so thoroughly embodying the virtues of their class, which include despising ambition and achievement. Indolent, stylish languor—spiced with cruel wit— is the highest plane of existence.

The second novel in the series, Bad News, takes place in New York in the eighties, where Patrick flies via Concorde to pick up his father’s ashes; as someone who feels proprietary about the drugged-out-in-New-York-in-the-80s genre, I feel well qualified to declare it a masterpiece. The 22-year-old Patrick has become a superhuman consumer of heroin, cocaine, speed, barbiturates and alcohol, and endures an epic forty eight hour binge in the city, which includes stops in the Mudd Club, the Lower East Side and the South Bronx, without ever losing consciousness, or the ashes of his fiend of a father. I was seriously curious about whether he was going to be able to get it up after bringing a girl back to the Pierre from the Mudd Club, but she pleaded nolo contendre before a verdict was reached.

In Some Hope, the third novel in the series, we find a contemplative Patrick sober at the age of thirty: “In the eight years since his father’s death, Patrick’s youth had slipped away without being replaced by any signs of maturity, unless the tendency for sadness and exhaustion to eclipse hatred and insanity could be called ‘mature.’ The sense of multiplying alternatives and bifurcating paths, had been replaced by a quayside desolation, contemplating the long list of missed boats. He had been weaned from his drug addiction in several clinics, leaving promiscuity and party-going to solider on uncertainly, like troops who have lost their commander.” Incest aside, not much happens, plotwise, in these novels, the joys residing in the prose, and in the acidulous intelligence of the narrator. Some Hope takes place at a grand country house weekend, celebrating the birthday of its pompous titled proprietor, and includes an appearance by Princess Margaret as a fatuous, self-important dolt. The party-goers seem to be united in their witty disdain for each other. One of them, after informing her best friend that her husband is having an affair, advises her “’to go on the warpath,’ thinking this was the policy likely to yield the largest number of amusing anecdotes.”

After the fierce satire of Some Hope, it’s almost shocking to read the opening chapter of Mother’s Milk, with it’s uncanny rendition of birth from the point of view of the infant. “Towards the end he was desperate to get out, but he had imagined himself expanding back into the boundless ocean of his youth, not exiled in this harsh land. Perhaps he could revisit the ocean in his dreams, if it weren’t for the veil of violence that hung between him and the past.” It seems St. Aubyn’s gifts extend well beyond satire.

I’m now waiting for Fed Ex to deliver the latest installment of the Patrick Melrose saga, On the Edge, along with a new copy of Gerald Clarke’s biography of Capote, which I can’t seem to locate here among my bookshelves. I have a pretty good idea of which one I’m going to read first.

—Jay

The last time I saw Gore Vidal was at a book fair in Austin a few years ago, and I was saddened to see him in a wheelchair, looking terribly shrunken. I prefer to remember the night of our first meeting at his grand apartment in Rome, where I was spending a week promoting the Italian publication of Bright Lights, Big City. At that time we shared an editor, Gary Fisketjon, and Gore had invited me to dinner when he heard through Gary that I was coming to Rome. The first time I ever met him was when he answered the door, and while I’d seen him often on television I wasn’t prepared for the scale of the man—he was tall and broad and he seemed more like a movie star than an author. Even before he opened his mouth he was impressive, and the voice was also powerful—like a Shakespearean actor’s voice, coming from deep in his chest. He seemed to combine chiseled enunciation with a hint of a drawl. His eyebrows appeared always to be on the verge of rising to express skepticism and there was always the lurking suspicion of a sneer. He was tremendously funny, and courtly, and entertaining. Among the other guests was a very pretty English girl who worked for Valentino whom he later informed me, taking me aside, that he had invited her for my benefit—implying that he was aware of my boring heterosexual proclivities. And indeed we hit it off, though the most vivid person at the table was Vidal.

The living room and the dining room had magnificent views of the Pantheon, the dome of which seemed to be floating just outside the windows. We had a rather spirited argument that night, about whether or not The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald’s unfinished final novel, had the potential for greatness. I thought it did. He thought not. His argument was that Irving Thalberg, the model for Fitzgerald’s Monroe Stahr, was not a great or a heroic figure in the flesh. I argued that this was utterly irrelevant, that the whole point of fiction was to transform the raw ingredients of daily life, to interpret and give shape and meaning to the flux of events. Irving Thalberg was just a starting point, the clay for Fitzgerald’s mythic imagination. He declared it a failed roman a clef. It was a little scary arguing with Vidal, who was brilliant and scathing and extraordinarily erudite, but also exhilarating. And of course cocktails helped. The argument got pretty warm but somehow never got nasty. In retrospect I can see that most of the novels that Gore wrote were historical. As brilliantly animated as they were—I love Gore, Lincoln, Julian and Washington DC—they were ultimately circumscribed by the historical record, by the biographies of their protagonists. There were no Gatsby’s in his fiction, no mythical creatures.

In his review of Michael Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, Colm Toibin makes the point I was trying to press all those years ago in talking about how Henry James created the character of Isabel Archer. “Although Mr. Gorra realizes how much use Henry James made of his cousin Minnie Temple in the creation of Isabel…he does Henry James the justice of recognizing that, in the making of the novel, there was artistry at work rather than representation.” I’m pretty certain I didn’t sway Vidal—I’m not sure anyone ever did—but I had a good time trying.

Vidal’s companion, Howard Austen, had the flu that night and wasn’t among the party that night, though he made a brief appearance. This was 1986, in the early days of the AIDS crisis and the subject inevitably came up. I had just had lunch in Milan with a fashion designer whose boyfriend had recently died, reportedly of AIDs, and when Gore asked me how the designer was, I’d said that he seemed to be very healthy. “Why wouldn’t he be?” asked Gore. And I said that given the death of his companion, one couldn’t help but worry about the health of the surviving half of the couple. He laughed at my apparent naivety. “My dear boy,” he said, “don’t you realize, there are pitchers and there are catchers.” And later, when Howard appeared briefly at the door of the dining room, honking and sniffling, to wave to us, Gore said, “Behold, the catcher.” A little harsh. And in retrospect, a little naïve, not usually a word associated with Vidal. But very Gore. We ended the night on very matey terms, friendly enough to arrange a rendezvous in New York.

I left very late, not very sober, and I had to go back to his apartment the next morning to collect my wallet, which I’d left behind. When he opened the door he looked a little the worse for wear himself. “Welcome,” he said, “to this special meeting of the central Rome chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous.”

I had a couple of very stimulating encounters with him and several more arguments with him, the last one I remember about being about Norman Mailer’s fiction over dinner at Daniel, although for some reason our first encounter remains the most vivid. When Mailer died in 2007 Vidal became the last man standing in that triumvirate of postwar literary celebrities that included Mailer and Truman Capote, two gay men and one hyper macho heterosexual who were at least as well known for their non-fiction and for their public personae as for their novels. In the forties and the fifties, the great America novel was the big white whale of the landscape of letters, but in the end Capote will certainly be best remembered for In Cold Blood, his non-fiction account of a quadruple murder and Mailer’s legacy seems divided; non fiction books like Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song may be more durable than An American Dream and The Deer Park. Like Vidal, he was obsessed with American history and politics and much of his fictional creation takes place within the interstices of historical events and characters. As for Vidal, it’s the essays I’m going to return to now—those pithy, bitchy, shapely, elegant and erudite jeremiads that sound just like the man himself, berating and instructing his slightly misguided, less intelligent listeners. I don’t always agree, but I’m always impressed, even dazzled.

—Jay

Back to work on the novel after a hiatus. I work in the mornings and later in the afternoon I either go to the ocean to swim or the bay to paddleboard. My house in Sag Harbor is on Upper Cove, and about mile down the shore is the house where John Steinbeck spent much of the last two and a half decades of his life. It’s a beautiful property, a peninsula shaded by oaks. The current owner called me up last year and kindly offered a tour and a cocktail. The house itself is a modest mid century two-bedroom which has most of Steinbeck’s furnishing and books intact. He wrote The Winter of Our Discontent here, in a little hexagonal hut perched above the water, and watched the ospreys, who infuriated him by failing to use the nest he built on his property, instead nesting across the cove. I too have built an osprey platform on a twenty-foot post at the end of my dock, but the ospreys have so far spurned it, although they seem to be thriving. I see one or two every day that I’m on the water, and sometimes they use the nesting platform to devour a fish they’ve plucked from the cove.

Sag Harbor has long attracted writers; James Fenimore Cooper spent a few seasons here, dabbling in the whaling business when it was the second busiest whaling port on the eastern seaboard. Nelson Algren spent his later years here, just down the road from Canio’s Bookstore. (Until recently we had three bookstores but I think we’re down to two with the closing of the second-hand bookstore just off Main Street) Thomas Harrison created Hannibal Lecter during here and is still rumored to be in the vicinity. Alan Furst also lives in Sag Harbor and E.L. Doctorow lives just a few doors down the road from me. Haven’t seen Colson Whitehead around though he spent his childhood summers here, and reimagined them very memorably in his novel “Sag Harbor.” Jason Epstein, who pretty much invented the trade paperback book, and founded the New York Review of Books and rare book dealer Glenn Horowitz lend extra literary cachet.

For many years Sag attracted the literati in part because it was cheaper and scruffier than the other hamlets of the Hamptons, and Main Street is still a Ralph Lauren free zone, a place where merchants stay open on Halloween night to give out candy to trick or treaters. The illusion of Mayberry RFD on the sea survives for the moment, although real estate prices continue to escalate and the old Bulova Watch factory, abandoned for decades is being renovated and turned into luxury condos by my friend Curtis Bashaw. I toured the building with him recently and I have no doubt the results will be spectacular. But it represents a continuing trend of gentrification which will make harder to pretend that Sag Harbor is still a blue-collar town with resident writers.

In the meantime, though, Bob Hand is still carving his award-winning decoys out of his home on Madison Street. I just bought a pair of canvasback ducks from him and I have commissioned a redtail hawk, which should be ready this fall. Bob carved a loon for Doctorow in honor of his novel Loon Lake some years ago, and he is pleased to show visitors the picture of it in a yellowing copy of People magazine. You can see his work on display in his windows as you drive past.

—Jay

I’ve unsequestered myself with a vengeance. Returning to the city after a two month absence, to a premature spring no less, is like falling in love again. I’ve eaten at some of my favorite places, Babbo and le Bernardin and Il Posto Accanto, as well as Danny Meyer/Floyd Cardozzo’s new place in the financial district, North End Grill. And in the interest of helping others eat a little better I attended Topaz Paige Green’s star studded benefit for the Lunchbox Fund at Del Posto. Topaz knows everybody and she’s a great philanthropist, having created the Lunchbox Fund to fund meals for schoolchildren in her native South Africa. Check out their website.

It’s an interesting experience too, returning to Manhattan in the present after being absorbed in Manhattan 2005 and 2008 for two months, the timeframe for the novel. It’s a different city, the present one. My novel will probably end on election night, 2008 and by coincidence I went to the premiere of Game Change, the HBO Sarah Palin biopic, which I thought was great. Julianne Moore was uncanny inhabiting Palin. And she humanized her in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible. The flick let McCain off extraordinarily easy, painting him as the guy who refused to get involved in negative campaigning. WTF? It wasn’t that long ago, guys, and I seem to remember watching McCain transform from the cool Republican of 2000 into the mean and angry and pandering candidate of ‘08. McCain should love this movie. But it’s a hoot. And Julianne Moore, who was sitting across the aisle from me, is amazing.

Speaking of movies, some troll writing for one of the big financial magazines got absolutely hysterical about my Woody Allen remarks in the last blog. He seems not to have a sense of humor, nor to have noticed that my advice to Woody Allen was posed in a conditional rather than a declarative sentence. As for the charge that I’m a literary poseur, I’m not sure what that means. Maybe he read my 2010 Williams College Commencement address , Faking your Way To Authenticity, in which I proposed that young people shouldn’t feel bad pretending to know more than they did, and creating a persona to try to arm themselves for the hard job of forging a real identity. I proposed that you pretend you know what you’re doing until one day you wake up no longer needing to. I certainly pretended to be a writer. After a Masters Degree in English and ten odd books, I’m still not entirely sure I know what I’m doing. So maybe I’m guilty as charged. Although it seems my greatest sin is writing in a nice house. This very angry commentator posted pictures of our house in Water Mill, which is pretty photogenic. Apparently his idea being that living well is incompatible with the production of literature. I’m pretty sure that’s not the case, but I do know it’s the best revenge.

They said it couldn’t be done—well, a few friends and blood relatives expressed skepticism about my intention to spend two monastic months writing in Bridgehampton. But until the last day of February I hadn’t once moved more than a few miles from my desk. Last Wednesday I finished off Chapter 21 before heading in to the city for Nicole and Kim’s anniversary dinner at Indochine, which was a thorough re-immersion into the Manhattan high life. I then flew to Chicago to eat (twice) at Charlie Trotter’s before this great chef retires. Also eating one night at Ria, chef Danny Grant’s place, which recently got two stars from Michelin. And I even managed to eat at least one Chicago-style dog.

I wish there was a word to denote a period of work sequestration (in the sense of “the act of isolating a jury during a trial”) but I can’t think of one—sabbatical isn’t quite it. At any rate, it’s over, and I’m ready for it to be over. I’ve been getting stir crazy, and I’m starting to resent the long days and the stiff neck to the extent that I was actually happy to go the dentist last Tuesday. Jesus. Time to move. Two months seems to be about right, for me.

In terms of word count I’ve exceeded my goals, but I’m way too close at this point to begin to make any guess about whether this novel is really on the right track and as good as I want it to be. I could realize six months from now that it sucks. But I don’t think so. That happened to me last time and it’s a shitty feeling—realizing that a book you wrote doesn’t measure up to your standards. Although I think I may eventually return to that last manuscript, which started out life with the title “Tides and Currents.”

This past month, in an effort to feel less isolated from the world I watched not only the Super Bowl but also the Oscars, and I was appalled, though not necessarily surprised, that “Midnight in Paris” won best screenplay. Let me just cite one example of it’s cartoonish view of the great American Modernists: Fitzgerald has Jay Gatsby use the expression “old sport” as a way of pointing out that he’s kind of a clueless parvenu. When Woody Allen puts that phrase in Fitzgerald’s mouth he would seem to be suggesting the same about the author of The Great Gatsby. I don’t think that’s what he intends to do but if he does—fuck him.

See you back in the world.

— Jay

Some friends came over for dinner on Saturday, one a writer finishing a novel, who didn’t ask any questions about my novel or my schedule. The last thing he wanted to talk about was writing and I don’t blame him. Another friend, visiting form the city, said he felt sorry for me, isolated out here in the winter—he knew Anne had been in Florida all last week. I tried my best to convince him there was no need to feel bad for me, that I was actually having a good time and glad to be writing full time. New York and all the rest of the world will be waiting when I get back. In the meantime solitude is welcome, and in fact, when you’re really writing there’s a powerful feeling that company of any kind is the enemy. You have to be careful not to make it personal, not to get mad at your wife when she buzzes on the intercom to ask if you can help her open a water bottle, because she’s semi-incapacitated with a cast on her right arm. (Actually, the cast is coming off Friday afternoon, finally.) You have to be careful not to get irritated at a friend who calls with all good intentions, to see how you’re faring.

Haven’t been doing much reading this past week though I have read a hundred pages of a galley—a forthcoming novel by a friend who wants a blurb. The book is good, I think it will be well-received in some quarters and might sell very well, but it’s just not doing it for me. I lost at least one friend over this issue, when I was so fastidious that I let a few minor scruples convince me to withhold my endorsement—which was stupid and self-important. And subsequently I’ve lost my self-respect once or twice endorsing books by friends that I didn’t think were very good. Not sure what to do with this one.

On a happier note, just got a hardcover copy of a newly-published novel which has a blurb from me on the back cover. I’ve never met Cristina Alger, so there was never a nagging moral issue about giving her a blurb. Her novel The Darlings is one of the best literary products of the financial crisis to date (right up there with Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic.) Alger writes very knowingly about Wall Street, about investment banks and the law firms that serve them, as well as about that rarefied Manhattan social world that still chooses to refer to itself as “society.” Great book. Smart with heart.

Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory was very good, almost at the level of the Elementary Particles. And I was very happy to learn that James Salter is publishing a new novel, allegedly this year—it’s in the Knopf fall lineup, but he’s still laboring away so we shall see. I think I set him back a few hours this past weekend. Among other things we drank some 1995 Domaine Dujac Gevrey Chambertin Combottes, a gorgeous wine that’s just beginning to hit its peak.

Another blank page, this one with the heading Sixteen. No idea what I’m going to do next, although I’m pretty confident something will come.