The Times, They Are(n't) A-Changin'

An Allegory of Man and His Sahara
        from the New York Times Book Review, December 4, 1949


        “After several literary seasons given over, mostly, to the frisky antics of kids, precociously knowing and singularly charming, but not to be counted on for those gifts that arrive by no other way than the experience and contemplation of a truly adult mind, now is obviously the perfect time for a writer with such a mind to engage our attention. That is precisely the event to be celebrated in the appearance of The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles’s first novel.
        It has been a good while since first novels in America have come from men in their middle or late thirties (Paul Bowles is thirty-eight). Even in past decades the first novel has usually been written during the writer’s first years out of college. Moreover, because success and public attention operate as a sort of pressure cooker or freezer, there has been a discouraging tendency for the talent to bake or congeal at a premature level of inner development.
        In America, the career almost invariably becomes an obsession. The ”get-ahead“ principle, carried to such an extreme, inspires our writers to enormous efforts. A new book must come out every year. Otherwise, they get panicky, and the first thing you know they belong to Alcoholics Anonymous or have embraced religion or have plunged headlong into some political activity with nothing but an inchoate emotionalism to bring to it or be derived from it. I think that this stems from a misconception of what it means to be a writer or any kind of creative artist. They feel it is something to adopt in the place of actual living, without understanding that art is a by-product of existence.”

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I found that this morning as I was sitting in front of my computer writing nonsense phrases and wondering why nothing worthwhile seems to come out of me very much anymore. Or, if something does, it dies after a few weeks. So, I got up, pulled my 50th Anniversary edition of The Sheltering Sky off the shelf with the intention of taking Mr. Bowles’s first line and using it as a trigger. Instead, turning slowly through the first pages, I stumbled upon the reprinted review. I found those first three paragraphs to be rather soothing.

It also reminded me of a post by Bookfraud called The Write Stuff, The Wrong Age. It seems America is perpetually given over to literary seasons dominated by precocious young “talent.” Not only that but our publishing industry has added an element of “America’s Next Top Model” to it.

But, then there are people like Khaled Hosseni, who published The Kite Runner at the age of thirty-six.

Yes, we have passed our window of opportunity to be the young turks of the literary world. But how many of them will make it to the old lion part of their writing lives? Eventually, an editor will get tired of the burn-out kids. Our job is to stick with it long enough for that editor to realize there’s something much more satisfying about a mature novelist, even if they’re seeing him (or her) for the first time.