Jeremy, my 11-year-old, writes furiously these days. He fashions cartoon strips and rapper lyrics, rhyming poems and complex novels.
It all started with “Marcus Wayne and the Robbers,” a sprawling, many-chaptered book that features a cat named Wood, a two-headed boy and an airplane pilot who is “mightified” with the power of X-ray vision.
“The Cartoon Studio,” a work-in-progress, transports readers to an Argentine animation company, where managers are power hungry if creatively ambivalent, and where married Mrs. Elli Fasiz has a thing for young Paco Beilas. Chapter 1 opens with an office argument that is settled with the flip of a coin. It ends with an all-out scuffle.
“Mom?” Jeremy looks up in the heat of scribbling, erasing, mentally rehearsing Chapter 2. He has been laboring noisily this early morning, biting his lower lip, pacing, interrupting the main action every once in a while with hectic sidebar notes on character idiosyncrasies and plot, with little calculations intelligible only to himself. “I have a question.”
“What’s that?” I peer at him across a kitchen table spread with book reviews and magazines, The New York Times, an early draft of my own journalism project. He has quit his work, laid his blunted pencil down. He has the look he gets when he’s up against a tough one.
“Mom, what I want to know is this. Is it only nonfiction that counts, that makes a difference?”
Startled, I repeat his question, make sure I have it right.
“I mean,” clarifies this fledgling plotter of crooked story lines, this near-master of the absurd, this writer of verve, imagination, heart, “can only nonfiction change the world? Change people’s hearts? What they believe?”
He looks around the table at all the newsy journals, looks at me and my mess of data, the report I’m making, the stringent pile-up of facts. He looks particularly at a magazine I’ve left open to the letters-to-the-editor page. He’d been studying that one earlier with me, measuring the temper of the reader letters, sorting through them, noting how something written by a stranger the week before had roused others into caring.
“Well,” I say, for want of a better comeback. And then, just as quickly, “Well.”
“Yeah,” Jeremy sighs. “That’s what I figured.”
He sets aside his story and packs up his things. I drive him to school and return home. I walk through our old, few-room house mulling his question, thinking of all the ways fiction changes the world. Yes, there’s no question, fiction changes the world. I should have said this. Gut reaction. No hesitation. Point of fact. Fiction cures, redeems and leavens; it preserves and it forgives. Your fiction will change the world, I should have said. The best of fiction always does.
Now, in Jeremy’s absence, I retreat to my long wall of double-stacked books, pull my favorite volumes to the floor, and read. I sit and I think about all the ways I’ve been rescued by characters who only ever lived on paper. Rescued from loneliness. Rescued from boredom. Rescued from sleeplessness and sickness, tedium and trials. I think of the sympathies fiction has riled up in me, the sudden swells of terror, heartbreak, hope and calm. Think of the adventures, geographies, cultures, politics, possibilities I’ve encountered. I have found myself in the fiction I’ve leaned into, and I have, fantastically, lost myself–both essential to the considered, compassionate life.
Can only nonfiction change the world? Jeremy asked and I didn’t answer, and now in my wise son’s absence I think about the narrator of William Maxwell’s atonement novel, “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” and also about the Richard of Paul Horgan’s “The Richard Trilogy,” both of whom I have turned to, and turned to often, when I am lonely with my shame. “So Long” is the tale of a man who cannot subdue the past. It is the memory of betrayal, it is heartache, it is lines–“There is a limit, surely, to what one can demand of one’s adolescent self”–that hook the soul and appease. “Trilogy” is the story of a boy who drowns a kitten, a teen who betrays a friend, a young man who depraves himself one night and can never get loose of the remorse. It is the story, ultimately, of a son who hoards his own regrets only to discover that his father lives with moral failure too:
” `In every life, Richard, there is something, great or small, to be ashamed of,’ said my father with more force than necessary, and with reference to a concern unknown to me then; for we were simply conversing in general. But the priest hidden in every Irishman was being eloquent in him, and his eyes flashed, even as he smiled with scowling charm. `Just as there is something noble. Never fail to be ashamed of the first, and never take credit for the second. You’ll remember this. . . .’ He paused. Then, `I’ve tried to.’ “
“Trilogy” offers sanctuary to those who choose to read it. We enter its gates. We take communion. We return our spirits to the world: changed spirits. We need “Charming Billy,” Alice McDermott’s tale of a ruined drunk, to understand how killing a lie meant kindly can be. That’s what I should have said to Jeremy. We need Wallace Stegner’s “Angle of Repose” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” and Michael Ondaatje’s “The English Patient” to calculate the half-life of treachery, deception. We need the stories told by Chang-rae Lee and Olaf Olafsson, Bernhard Schlink and Fae Myenne Ng, Tillie Olsen and David Long and Patricia Sagastizabal to survive the cancer of our regret, our shame.
And then again, of course, we wouldn’t survive were it not for the rare, unthwarted goodness that some writers bring our way–the brothers McPheron of Kent Haruf’s “Plainsong,” the eccentric Aunt Sylvie of Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping,” the boy who cared, the boy who believed when the old man returned from Hemingway’s sea. We need what fiction brings, we are persuaded by it, and yes, therefore and certainly, fiction changes the world.
I leave the books on the floor and return to the kitchen where the loose-leaf pages of Jeremy’s novels and poems are stacked haphazardly beside the journalism I’ve left undone, among the magazines and The New York Times, among the editorials and the reviews of books; there are always so many complicating and tempting books. In the advancing morning light, I re-read Jeremy’s tales of adventure and magic, his sly asides, his inside jokes. I study his crowded character charts, the dialogue he snuggles into quart-size quotation marks.
It’s the work of a boy who hopes to change the world with what he writes, or the work of a boy who hopes, at the very least, that the world can be shifted, tendered, rearranged, awakened by all that is grander and better than truth. We need courage like this, in the face of the facts. We need the lyric irony, the redemptive power, the rescue, the light, the heart, the grace of stories that simply are not true; we need the staunch, heroic souls who write them.
