“In Brazil,” he continued, “you really see the things that make Updike great. Imagery and metaphor, and the keenness of detail. One of the things that make the book brilliant is the setting. In a Latin American literary context, baroquely ornate language doesn’t feel overwrought. Imagine if Brazil were set in the contemporary American west, and Isabel were the daughter of a white municipal banker, and Tristao a homeboy named Tyrone, from Harlem. I mean, Updike got so deep into the esthetic of writers like Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Amado that the book almost reads like it was translated from Portuguese or Spanish—those eighteen-clause sentences and all that. No, man, that book is sheer brilliance, man.” He thought for a bit. “And then there’s the whole weaving in of Brazilian history and politics. And the masterful control of the time sense—”

“I guess I know who you’re casting your Nobel vote for,” she said, feeling weak now, as though she’d been standing beneath a cataract of words. Literary passions were so seductive. “Who else do you stalk at readings?”

“Fiction or poetry?”

“Both.”

“Well, Updike, as I said. Naipaul. Henry Miller. Márquez. Carpentier—”

“Who’s Carpentier? I don’t know him.”

“A Cuban writer. He’s kinda considered the father of magic realism. He wrote Explosion in a Cathedral and The Kingdom of This World.”

She laughed inside, wanting to hug him for reading good books, for being able to share this passion with her.

“Wow, there are so many,” he said, faced now with an embarrassment of riches. “It’s hard for me to think—but I’d have to add Toni Morrison and D. H. Lawrence. In poetry, now, there’s Walcott, Neruda, Guillén, Yeats, Rita Dove, Philip Larkin … Kwame Dawes down in South Carolina … different people for different moods.”

“Do you write a lot of poetry?”

“Not anymore. Only when I get the inspiration.” She leaned against him. “Only when I feel the vibes. And you?” he asked, placing his arm behind her, on the back of the bench, where it perched in waiting—a jaguar in a tree. “Who do you like?”

“In fiction … Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and of course Updike—I’ll never forget reading Couples the first time—and Margaret Walker. And in poetry, I’d say Maya Angelou, and Margaret Atwood from Canada, and Langston Hughes and Rita Dove and of course Walcott. The funny thing about Rita Dove, though, is that I love her almost as much as a novelist.”

“Oh, I didn’t know she wrote novels.”

“She wrote only one, Through the Ivory Gate. It was published in the early nineties. It’s about this black woman who grows up very poor in a small town in Ohio. Her parents are migrant workers from the South in this mostly white place. So this woman grows up having her own identity struggles—y’know, northern versus southern, black versus white—and then she goes off to college in Wisconsin where she studies music and theater in this almost completely white environment. She becomes a puppeteer and ends up being the only black person in a traveling puppet troupe, and this group becomes her whole world for a while, so all her relationships are with people in the troupe—which means with white men. Anyway, she ends up leaving the troupe and going back to her hometown, where she takes up an artist’s residency at a school. So the whole going home then becomes this process of exploration … y’know … coming to terms with her past … separation … identity … reconnecting.”