AUTHOR ESSAY

At readings and interviews, I am often asked, “What started you writing?” It was this book that started me writing. Though Insect Dreams was my debut novel — the first to be published — it was the impetus to Golem Song which forced me to sit down to try to write a novel.

Back in late ’96, I think, I received a phone call from someone in NYC, asking me to buy him a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight, as these were easily obtainable in Vermont. “Why?” I asked. “So that I can kill black people in the park from my window.”

I thought this was some kind of a joke, or a metaphor, so I continued the discussion. “Why do you want to kill black people?” “Look,” the caller said, “There’s going to be a war in New York between the blacks and the Jews, and I want to try to take some with me, and any cops that might try to stop me.”

That there could be such a war — especially at that moment — was not implausible. In fact, I had just read Carl Rowan’s book, The Coming Race War in America: A Wake-Up Call, and was appropriately alarmed. That the possibility should surface so acutely with this phone call, was a stunning surprise. When I refused to become an arms-supplier I was nastily denounced for my Pollyannaish worldview, and the caller and I did not speak again for years.

This was not a phone call easily forgotten, and I sat down to record what I could recall of it — for what purpose, I didn’t know. I kept being drawn back to that document, as if it were asking me to use it somehow, and not just store it. And so, without any great ambitions in mind (“I’m going to be a novelist!”), I began to imagine the story of an interesting guy — almost a kind of genius — a widely-read musician, poet, writer, thinker — whose huge heartmind had somehow led him to this fall from grace. As the tale grew from speculative reporting to an actual story, I felt freer to invent, to roll other characters into his, other geniuses I had known, other proponents of extremity and the “Doctrine of Excess”. And lo and behold, it was becoming a novel, fun and stimulating to write. And so I was kick-started writing.

Even though “well-written”, I think, what came out was not very readable. As my Insect Dreams editor, Fred Ramey, said at the time, “Marc, you’ve created a monumental literary figure — but he’s so disgusting no one will read past page three.” And so we began an exhausting series of rewrites over five years.

The first rewrite, then, was to get Alan Krieger less disgusting, and perhaps even semi-attractive in a crazed, even if disgusting, sort of way. Allow his project to grow, allow his attitudes to hypertrophy and harden. Get the reader up to page 100 at least before they begin to really fight the character.

The second rewrite concerned Fred’s warning, “But they’ll burn your house down.” Who is they? Militant blacks who might be incensed at Alan’s racist ideation and speech. Militant Jews who might object to depicting a “bad Jew” (something Philip Roth suffered for many years). All those folks who want to see Huckleberry Finn taken off public library shelves. The proposed solution here was to introduce an authorial voice separate from the characters’. Then maybe “they” would burn the characters’ houses down, not mine. Or Unbridled’s. “Hey, I’m writing a novel about a psycho-social problem, not inciting race war. Look, [the author waves through the text], it’s only me. Don’t shoot. Douse those molotov cocktails. I’m only trying to explore and help.” Reading is hard.

And only after that, the final rewrites — cutting for better flow, tweaking the language, adding things to clarify, detailed work with a great editor.

The story of the book. I hope it’s stimulating to read. It was certainly a stimulating way to work.