Smudge Lines

The Confessions of Max Tivoli and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle perched on top of a long-neglected reading pile over the weekend, and I've just now settled them back into my over-burdened shelves. Read, yes. Fully fathomed? I'm not so sure.

For while I have great admiration for both Andrew Sean Greer and David Wroblewski (and celebrate their success as literary authors with heart), I am left wondering about the emotive power that concept novels such as these can have. Tivoli is a freak of nature—one born with the appearance of an old man whose mind ages as his body yearly grows younger. Edgar is a mute growing up among dog breeders whose existence is patterned (uncomfortably closely) after Hamlet.

Reading each, I empathized with the authors who, having given themselves these tight, not exactly permissible outlines to work within, could not ever imagine past them. Wroblewski had, for example, to place before his poor Edgar the ghost of a murdered father. He had to manipulate the plot to accommodate poison. He had to decimate and devastate. Greer gave himself no choice but to write first to Tivoli's peculiar condition—explain it, hypothesize through it, sacrifice the messiness of real life to the restraining oddness of poor Max. The concepts had to rule, therefore, and with writers as verbally talented as these two writers indisputably are, one hopes (or at least this reader hopes) for the big, unexpected, unpredictable moments. The smudge lines that account for the greatness of great books.

It was, of course, a pleasure, just to sit and to read. To let the wind of others' words to blow through.