JUST US, CHATTNG

I am sitting in the near-dark listening to the music of Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died in 2023. I have wandered the streets with headphones, listening to his stuff, many hundreds of times (often early evening, the light failing). His work soundtracks significant parts of my life, rendering me almost unbearably sad and at the same time exquisitely, wordlessly happy. He moves me, always, and changes the way I see, the way I feel about my life, the world.

Sometimes I use him to colour the background enough that the awful silence of the universe (I am usually alone) is tamped down a little. This is how I am able to write, to narrow the gap between what I imagine saying and what actually appears on the page.

Tonight I started out irritated, even with Sakamoto beside me, and was writing a bit about the arrogance and bad behaviour (as I saw it) of a young agent. The business is tougher than ever, and anyone who got in in the last half-dozen years has never seen a normal market. They are force to wing it, and are doing their level best to merely survive. I do understand. I picture bedraggled dump-bears sliding into an oiled pit. They will eat each other, clamber claws-first over anyone that might offer a foothold, a way out. I was going to talk about that at irritating, self-serving length, and I still might, only down the road a little.

But instead the music calms me, elevates me slightly above the frayed threads that line my gut like ever-awake centipedal legs. I am thinking instead about the Andrew Miller’s new novel, The Land In Winter, just short-listed for this year’s Booker Prize. I last read him a quarter-century ago (his fantastic novel, Oxygen) and this latest is marked by a ridiculously convincing evocation of a stormy England in the 1960s, and a sentence on every page, I swear, that leaves me swooning, in that back of hand against your forehead sort of way. His is a talent that makes me wonder whether there is any point at all in my trying to write stories of my own.

There are similarities in The Land In Winter to the writing of Ian McEwan (though I find Miller slightly more sympathetic to his characters, more willing to let them breathe for themselves, to be flawed in ways that aren’t necessarily essential to the narrative’s geometries). McEwan’s latest, What We Can Know, is sitting on the arm of my chair. I know nothing about it (didn’t even know it was coming) and will just plunge in tomorrow, as if into deep, cold water, knowing only that I will likely rise to the surface feeling slightly more alive, more in tune with what it is possible and impossible to say on the page. My one slightly bitter note, is that my own not-quite-finished next novel is titled What Must You Think, which is a better title than McEwan’s, but one I will likely now have to re-work. Bastard.

This morning I listened to the new album by the Brooklyn band, Geese. Their frontman, Cameron Winter, is charismatic in a lackadaisical street-poet-and-red-wine-straight-from-the-bottle-in-a-park sort of way, and also unknowable, as all young people thirty years younger than me are complete mysteries. My son Lucian loves them in an entirely different way (they are his peers, after all) and we will find them together on tour.

You’re all caught up. And I enthused here, rather than railed, for the most part. I’m happy about that. I am learning, maybe - for extended moments at least - to be kinder, more understanding. Tomorrow may be different, of course; we’ll see.