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Chapters (60)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Personae
  4. I: Early Days
  5. One. Control
  6. Two. Doubt
  7. Three. Fate
  8. Four. Same
  9. Five. Fine Arts
  10. Six. In Loco Parentis
  11. Seven. Settling
  12. Eight. Neighbors
  13. Nine. Prospects
  14. Ten. The Lucky
  15. Eleven. Instruction
  16. Twelve. Same
  17. Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
  18. Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
  19. Fifteen. The Reason
  20. Sixteen. That Person
  21. Seventeen. Predictably
  22. II: Writing Teacher
  23. Eighteen. Early Poems
  24. Nineteen. Motivation
  25. Twenty. Allegory
  26. Twenty-One. Grief
  27. Twenty-Two. A Portrait
  28. Twenty-Three. Veils
  29. Twenty-Four. Soft Power
  30. Twenty-Five. Lists
  31. Twenty-Six. A Break
  32. Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
  33. Twenty-Eight. Custom
  34. Twenty-Nine. Parity
  35. Thirty. Fortune
  36. III: Volta
  37. Thirty-One. Images
  38. Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
  39. Thirty-Three. Letters
  40. Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
  41. Thirty-Five. Love
  42. Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
  43. IV: Your Best Reader
  44. Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
  45. Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
  46. Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
  47. Forty. Détente
  48. Forty-One. Worlds
  49. Forty-Two. Recognition
  50. Forty-Three. Persistence
  51. Forty-Four. And Then
  52. Forty-Five. Mingling
  53. Forty-Six. You
  54. Forty-Seven. Persona
  55. Forty-Eight. Est et Non
  56. Forty-Nine. The Author
  57. Epilogue
  58. Afterword: The Libertine
  59. Acknowledgments
  60. About the Authors

“You really know how to make a guy wait,” he jovially informs her. It seems like a good way to break the ice, and the double entendre nicely masks any actual eagerness on his part to read her work, he thinks. She’ll have to puzzle through what it seems like he really means before she can get to the fact that he’s just asking her to hand in some work. There’s no way she can know that he only considers her another writer—and a worthy competitor, at that. She’ll never know that he’s completely uninterested in her physically.

The student stares at him. “Oh, I already stopped writing! Isn’t that what you wanted?”

It’s very strange, because it seems so matter-of-fact. The writing teacher wonders for a moment if he is still dreaming.

“You stopped writing?” he repeats.

“Yes. Yes, I did.” The student smiles. She turns back to her acquaintances.

The writing teacher walks slowly back to his office. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t totally elated by this turn of events. He hears laughter in the hallway behind him and stops for a moment to listen. He can’t hear what they are saying, but he reflects that it must be nice to still be so young.

Afterword: The Libertine

Afterword

The Libertine

The state of society and the Constitution in America are democratic, but there has been no democratic revolution. They were pretty well as they are now when they first arrived in the land. That is a very important point.

—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE,

Democracy in America

When I began writing this novel, I was, mostly without knowing it, reproducing a trope from the libertine canon. I was rehearsing an archaic situation-comedy format I had first learned about by watching the 1987 film Roxanne, in which Steve Martin attempts to seduce Daryl Hannah, the titular Roxanne, by way of a hunky proxy played by Rick Rossovich, an actor I don’t think I saw anywhere else ever again but who apparently had an important role in Top Gun. Martin’s character, C. D. Bales, is a philosophically inclined fireman with a very (unbelievably) large nose. I don’t need to explain why this proboscis presents a problem in mid-1980s America, though of course today we’d probably just think of it as an additional genital. Through a series of mishaps and happy coincidences, Martin/Bales woos Hannah/Roxanne, and true love conquers all, forestalling forever the false promise of a nose job looming, in true eighties-fantasy fashion, on an earlier horizon.