When I was 30 I was obsessed with Jane Smiley. That year I spent a long beautiful summer in Norway. I loved being there. The never ending sunlight, the nice people, the fjords, the delicious fish, and the brown goat cheese that tasted like caramel which I ate on flatbread in the morning with raspberry jam and strong coffee. Everything was very expensive in Norway, like crazy expensive, and it taught me to stop paying attention to how much things cost and just focus on what I really need. I bought ripe strawberries that were amazing, long filets of salmon in a special bag. I bought ice cream on occasion and at some point a Jay-Z CD and a Johnny Cash one. #priorities
Books, however were not just prohibitively expensive (good thing I had a library card!), but certain new books in English were not available at all. Jane Smiley had just published a book about novel writing. I was dying to have it. But they didn’t have it in any of the local bookstores.
I did something I almost never do, as it’s the type of thing I abhor. I asked someone who was traveling to the States to buy it for me and bring it back. This is the kind of favor I consider unnecessarily annoying, but hey, desperate times…
By the time I got the book, it was time to leave Norway. I ended up reading it in Barcelona, in a hotel I had found very charming at twenty, but which at thirty I considered rather sad. One of the unpleasant side effects of acquiring experience. Oh well.
I don’t recall much about the book, except I found it disappointing. But there was something in it I still remember to this day. Jane Smiley said something akin to, you are finished writing a book when you can no longer think new thoughts about the characters. That struck me as profound and still does today.
So it was bittersweet that I realized I am starting to feel a certain level of detachment from Miss Vulpe and the constellation of characters surrounding her. Perhaps it’s time to send Book 3 to the editors.
