At the New York State Writers Institute’s annual book festival, there’s a hall full of authors at tables flogging their work. It felt like entering a den of voracious lions. A phantasmagoria of escalating efforts to entice victims with glitz and razzle-dazzle.
Evoking Ulysses and the sirens as those writers beckoned and wheedled for attention. One affecting young gal latched onto me not with claws but sweetness; I’m not too old to be susceptible. I succumbed to at least peruse her poetry volume, but managed to extricate myself with wallet unopened. I felt bad. However, I did not wish to wallow in her verses about epilepsy.
I had some empathy for all these folks — been there, done that, myself. But I couldn’t compete now, with their gaudily decorated tables, and incandescent smiling.
Then a surprise: David Sylvester. He and his wife had been to our house for dinner only days earlier. With no talk about writing! But there he was, gamely behind a table. A bare-bones display, among all the extravagant ones.
Here I couldn’t demur to buying a book. A slim volume of stories titled Still Life.
Short stories are harder to write than long ones. If they’re any good. Mine never were. The thing about a short story is that the story doesn’t matter much; it’s more how you tell it.
One in the book had a subtext of 9/11, and people who jumped from the towers. Actually conveying a fresh thought: why no helicopters to evacuate them from that roof?
But the book starts (fittingly) with one titled, “The Start of Something.” The premise seems formulaic, depressing even: set in a bar, with a woman having earlier been picked up by Eric at a literary event. She seems pallid next to a female acquaintance of Eric, who turns up and intrudes upon their date.
I loved it.
I’m still reverberating from my own ancient misadventures in that game. Still fascinated by how people negotiate through it.
The story’s title hints that this hook-up will indeed start something. Unless, of course, the title is ironic.
An intriguing initial aspect is the tale being written in the first person — the narrator is the woman (unlike the writer). Is this a kind of “cultural appropriation?” Maybe the woke moral panic over that has thankfully subsided.
Sylvester’s story does not put a word wrong. Now that is really saying something. What I mean is that nothing struck me as being weak, pedestrian, insipid writing. No clichés. Like what’s so typically ubiquitous elsewhere.
And meantime it’s full of lines that crackle wryly. One example: “All my relationships end with, ‘what do you want me to say to you.’ I tell them, but they never say it.” Not an excess word there.
Near the end: “We had both been pretending to be someone else; now only I was.”
And how does it end? Where can it be going? Starting something — really? It felt kind of sad. With even a fingernails-on-blackboard vibe. Right up to the very last line, transfiguring that vibe. Making me smack the page.
This big fat book showed up unexpected in my mailbox. Harvey Havel is a fixture in the local literary scene. Chatting with him at a recent author talk, it had emerged that we’d both published blog essay collections. So he sent me his. He’s a sweet person. Also tormented.
So after reading some of this I decided to skip ahead to the later sections dealing with more personal matters, and stuff like sexual politics. This was much more engaging. Havel speaks from the heart with unsparing candor.
But, having indeed devoted his life to this, Havel cannot just shrug off the disappointment. He has quite a lot to say about it. Mostly he discusses this as a sociological/cultural phenomenon. But one essay tells of his reading a terrific short story. Bringing on an attack of FAS — “Failed Author Syndrome” — and its corrosive resentment of others’ literary success. (He doesn’t mention dissecting that story to tease out what made it so good.)
Havel also writes about rejection by women. This too resonated with my own history.
Of course that doesn’t mean all whites are good. But white people are, mainly, just people, and most people are good. Yet it almost seems as though Havel puts whites on a pedestal.
He seems to believe the ideal way to get such a woman is to fight for her — literally. Physically fighting other men. His writing so often of “winning” women does make it sound like a competition. And he posits that what a woman most wants from a man is to be protected by him.
The Rational Pessimist 
