The Slippage: A Novel (30 page)

Authors: Ben Greenman

BOOK: The Slippage: A Novel

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I liked that graph when I thought of it. It seemed funny without also being mean. I even considered making it the sole graph in the body of the novel, reproduced below a normal old paragraph of prose. Instead, it ended up here. Later, it occurred to me that it (along with many of the other graphs) actually encodes a great deal of anxiety on my part about how artwork is received. This graph, the fire graph, is a metaphor of enthusiasm. It speaks to the odd process by which an audience (of critics, say, or students, or the reading public, whatever that means) does or does not take to a book.

What happens after a book comes out? People read it and have reactions, and some of them express those reactions, in print or online. It’s a perfectly workable process. But it’s also a strange process, reductive and confusing. Earlier, in telling my story about the reading I attended as a young writer, I mentioned that audience members asked two questions that have remained with me. The first, as I have said, was about connection. The second was this: “Is this your best book?” A young man asked that question. I believe he was wearing overalls, which is neither here nor there. The older (but still young) writer tilted his head as if he was thinking. He scratched his not quite beard. His answer was this: “No.” The audience laughed. “What I mean,” he said, “is that I think the best is yet to come.” Once more my heart fell a little, not because I didn’t see the wisdom of the writer’s answer, but because I thought I saw something false flickering at the heart of it. The chances that your next work will
always
be better than your last are slim indeed. Over the course of a career, work both draws closer to inspiration and moves farther away from it. Believing in steady improvement is an operating fiction. And yet, pride tells you to be more proud of the most recent work than the work that came before it, and to pretend that it is the most completely realized portrait of your inner state. Again, much of this becomes irrelevant if an artist signs up for a lifetime subscription to his or her own artwork. Long fallow periods can be followed by a new flowering. Movements can be profitably lateral instead of aggressively, deceptively vertical.

After I left that reading, I went to a restaurant and did some doodling on a napkin. One of the things I doodled was a graph that later inspired a piece of work by the conceptual artist who did not quite become the center of this book. It seems like an appropriate place to end.

Read on
Author Recommendations

T
HIS BOOK IS ABOUT MARRIAGE
: other things, too, but maybe mainly marriage. Here are some other works that also look closely at the idea.

Frederick Barthelme,
Second Marriage
. Frederick’s brother Donald has a grand literary reputation, deservedly so. Fewer people, maybe, know about Frederick. His novels are more realistic and also more comic, which combine to make people feel that they’re somehow miniatures. They’re not. They see sharply and they say what they see just as sharply.

Frederick Busch,
Harry and Catherine
. Busch is one of my favorites, for his clear-eyed prose and his devotion to real people. This novel takes place solidly in the real world, with politics and history underlying an adult love story. It’s beautifully written and expansive when it comes to ordinary human emotions.

Lorrie Moore, “Real Estate.”
For years, Moore has been putting up good work on this particular plot of land. This story is about illness and compromise and violence and the importance of humor in dissolving all those things, at least temporarily. It also contains a great working definition of marriage: “a fine arrangement generally, except one never got it generally. One got it very, very specifically.”

Alison Lurie,
The War Between the Tates
. This, in a way, is the counterweight or countermovement to the Moore story. The people may be specific, but the world they inhabit is very general, satirical in the broad sense. I thought about the Lurie book often as I wrote my own, though they have very little in common. Oh, also, Mick Jagger is in the TV-movie version of the Lurie book.

The Bible.
My book is a book about infidelity, at least somewhat, and it raises the question of whether it can be part of a healthy marriage. Statistics say yes. The Bible says no. But what else does the Bible say? Let’s look at Deuteronomy 22: “If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her, and give occasions of speech against her, and bring up an evil name upon her, and say, I took this woman, and when I came to her, I found her not a maid: Then shall the father of the damsel, and her mother, take and bring forth the tokens of the damsel’s virginity unto the elders of the city in the gate: And the damsel’s father shall say unto the elders, I gave my daughter unto this man to wife, and he hateth her; And, lo, he hath given occasions of speech against her, saying, I found not thy daughter a maid; and yet these are the tokens of my daughter’s virginity. And they shall spread the cloth before the elders of the city. And the elders of that city shall take that man and chastise him; And they shall amerce him in an hundred shekels of silver, and give them unto the father of the damsel, because he hath brought up an evil name upon a virgin of Israel: and she shall be his wife; he may not put her away all his days. But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel: Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father’s house: so shalt thou put evil away from among you.” Family values, I guess.

Donald Westlake,
Drowned Hopes
. Westlake’s the best, and this is one of his best, a heist book with a nearly perfect hopelessness. Why is it also a book about marriage? Because there’s one little subplot involving Bob, a guard at a reservoir, who is thrust into a hastily arranged marriage with his girlfriend, Tiffany. The marriage and its accompanying pressures proceed directly to Bob’s brain and attack it via nervous breakdown. Bob’s story only takes up a few short chapters—they’re central to the plot, but marginal to the main characters—and it functions like the cartoons around the edges of
Mad
magazine. Still, it’s one of my favorite portraits of American marriage.

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OTHER BOOKS BY BEN GREENMAN

Superbad

Superworse

A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both

Correspondences

Please Step Back

What He’s Poised to Do

Celebrity Chekhov

COPYRIGHT

Cover design by Jarrod Taylor

Cover art: Salute to Water Bodies by Amy Bennett, courtesy of the artist & Richard Heller Gallery

Background photograph © PMX/Alamy

T
HE SLIPPAGE
. Copyright © 2013 by Ben Greenman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-0-06-199051-9

EPub Edition © May 2013 ISBN 9780062100665

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