Ain’t That Pretty at All; Or, Going to the Tigers

One day back in grad school my advisor, a savvy and successful novelist whose books meant a great deal to me, whom I had just gone five grand into debt and traveled three thousand miles to work with, called me into his office and sat me down to talk about the chapter I had submitted from my novel in progress. His expression was purposeful, intense; he seemed eager to get down to business. Clearly the work I’d submitted had impressed him in some particular way, elevated me a little from the other surly, miserable students in the workshop. I could all but feel him weighing the manuscript in his hand, as if deliberating how much postage to apply when he sent it to his agent.

“Look,” he said, and I did, at a piece of parchment bond paper so capillaried with red marks it might have been the face of a stroke victim, “cut the crap, okay? Enough with these F. Scott Fitzgerald sentences.”

This was, on one level, the nicest, most fulsome compliment the man would ever give me. After all it was my love for Fitzgerald and his sentences that had inspired me to write in the first place. If every writer, as Saul Bellow once claimed, is a reader moved to emulation (and my advisor wasn’t so hot on Bellow’s sentences either), then to be accused of writing the kinds of sentences that had made me want to write those kinds of sentences? On one level it was very nice to hear.

Unfortunately my advisor didn’t mean it on that level. He meant it on a different level, a lower level. He meant that being enthralled as I was to lovely, thrilling, Daisy Buchanan-ish prose was an infatuation I had to grow out of fast, lest my work wind up face-down in an abandoned pool. He himself was a rough-and-tumble realist, streety and sharp—a Redskin, in ’s famous phrase. Already he had me pegged as a member of that wan lesser tribe, the Palefaces, those cerebral, overly refined aesthetes who hung out in cafes, reading French poetry and doodling precious in overpriced notebooks.  That this judgment was ludicrously unfair, presumptuous, and reductive did not make it, alas, any less true. I hurried out of his office that day like the kid in ’s the soft underbelly of my assumptions exposed, my face burning, my hands clenched, shadow-boxing with shame.