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BooksDecember 23, 2010 Not My Book: The Endnotes is on its way back to New York by UPS. The moon is waning, the year is on its last legs: are these omens enough to suggest that it's gone for good? Here's hoping. I overnighted the parcel, though it's unlikely that anyone will do anything with it in calendar 2010. A parcel in transit retains some connection to its place of origin. Once it's delivered to the mailroom of Publisher Who Should Know Better, it's demonstrably, irrevocably Not My Book. I e-mailed the production editor that the parcel was en route, along with the tracking number. I seriously considered adding something along the lines of "If this book is pulled out of production, would you let me know? It would restore a little of my faith in U.S. corporate publishing." But I sat on my hands so my fingers could not type the words. The things we don't say, and the reasons we don't say them. Conspiracy theories give satisfyingly convoluted explanations for why crap happens, but most crap happens because of the things we don't say, and the reasons we don't say them. Good ol' Bismarck was, I believe, the one who observed that it is best not to watch laws or sausage being made. In my weekly newspaper days, I added "the news." Book publishing has to be as haphazard as the making of laws, sausage, and news, and it's true, the longer and deeper my acquaintance with "the trade," the less faith I have in the outcome. Once upon a time I was an avid reader. This has not been true for many years. I never decided to stop reading, it just happened. In 1996 I stopped writing the fantasy & science fiction column for Feminist Bookstore News. By the end of 1998 I'd gotten back into horses and started working on what became The Mud of the Place. There's a connection among all these things, but I don't want to examine it too closely or pin it down too precisely. My standard excuse for not reading much is "I read for a living." As Dryden said in Lawrence of Arabia, "The man who tells lies merely conceals the truth. The man who tells half lies has forgotten where he put it." So a couple of weeks ago I was hanging around Logan Airport waiting for Flight 630 to Reykjavik and the idea came upon me that it would be a good idea to buy a couple of books to read in transit. There was a bookstore handy (which is probably what gave me the idea), so I browsed. It had been a very long time since I browsed in a real-time bookstore, not looking for a particular title, just waiting for something interesting to catch my eye. The first interesting title was Vanessa & Virginia, by Susan Sellers. Aha, I thought: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, of course; this could be interesting. I bought it without realizing that it was a novel, even though it says "A Novel" on the cover. The second was Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna. I admire Kingsolver, though it's been quite a while since I've read anything by her, and someone had mentioned The Lacuna recently. I'd finished Vanessa & Virginia by the time I got back from Norway. I like it. It's beautifully written and, since it's told from Vanessa's point of view, the descriptions of painting are intriguing. I did find it a little thin -- there's a lot more to this story, I think. I'm halfway through The Lacuna. Already I know it's a great book. I laugh out loud, I'm stunned into silence; I'm awed by the way the author turns landscape into image into metaphor. When I pulled it off the bookshop shelf, I didn't know what it was about, or that such real-life characters as Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Leon Trotsky play major roles in it. Or that one of Kingsolver's intentions was to explore the connection of art and politics. Well. The astonishing incompetence of Not My Book was dragging me down to despair, but the magnificence of The Lacuna is providing an antidote of sorts. Human beings can spin the written word into multi-faceted worlds of light and shadow. I'd almost forgotten that.
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