Shine: The Genius Writer?

My husband was watching a spy-girl-with-tattoo-on-her-face-and-things-blow-up-and-lots-of-people-die flick on TV. He'd left the light in the family room on. Surreptitiously, I slid into the chair beside his, opened this week's New Yorker, and found a story I'd not have found had the circumstances been any different (a different movie, a blackened light, another night). It's the Malcolm Gladwell piece, "Late Bloomers." Ben Fountain and Jonathon Safran Foer are its literary stars.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

The story is about genius. It's about the 18 years and dozens of trips to Haiti and spousal sacrifice and just plain faith that it took Fountain to write his impeccable collection of short stories, Brief Encounters with Che Guevera (about which I wrote one of my very earliest blog entries). It's about Foer's almost random collision with literary fame; he's taking a class at Princeton, Joyce Carol Oates notices his work, he takes a brief trip to the Ukraine, and pow, the 19-year-old has a book (Everything is Illuminated), has a whirlwind tour, has the sort of fame that clings. Does Fountain's version of emergence (at the age of 48) qualify him for genius? Is precocity the measure that most matters? These are the issues that Gladwell is exploring in best-of-class Gladwell style.

I'm going to leave those questions floating there, leave them for you to decide. I'm going to say right up front that I can't speak for the workings of a genius mind, that all these books later I'm still struggling to write (to right) that one unyielding line.

I'm just going to say that I read the piece through a blur of tears. I read the piece as a love letter. For Fountain, a lawyer, had to quit his job to write his book. He had to rely on the income and confidence of his wife, a woman Gladwell refers to as Fountain's patron. He had to wake up each morning and go to his ambiguous, uncertain writerly job, not knowing how the cards might fall (Brief Encounters eventually won Fountain true literary fame).

"But she believed in her husband's art, or perhaps, more simply, she believed in her husband..." Gladwell writes. "We'd like to think that mundane matters like loyalty, steadfastness, and the willingness to keep writing checks to support what looks like failure have nothing to do with something as rarefied as genius. But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied, sometimes it's just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.

"'Sharie never once brought up money, not once—never,' Fountain said. She was sitting next to him, and he looked at her in a way that made it plain that he understood how much of the credit for Brief Encounters belonged to his wife. His eyes welled up with tears. 'I never felt any pressure from her,' he said. 'Not even covert, not even impied.'"

Yesterday, on her fabulously and deservedly famous blog, hipwritermama.blogspot.com, Vivian surprised the heck out of me with the kindest possible reference. Sometimes I think that's what we're doing out here for each other in the land of the blog. Pulsing out loyalty and steadfastness and faith while we all scratch away at our kitchen tables.