In the wee small hours of the morning -- about 10:05 PM Mountain Time last night -- I turned to the final page of the novel David Copperfield by Charles Dickens: no small feat, when you consider the final page in my phat falling-to-pieces paperback is number 734.
With this amazing book, a page-turner, Charles Dickens saved my life by reminding me what it means to be a novelist.
I am, you see, such a creature, though most of the people in my immediate semi-circle barely know. Getting published has been a bit of bitter challenge: let's just say in the novel-publishing business I'm pitching an ohfer -- 0 for 30 years. And yet I soldier on every morning, no longer mourning a lifetime of obscurity in a discipline that nobody much gives a damn about unless they see you on the TV.
How many novels have I written? I've literally lost count. There was Last Call: I spent seven years on it and my first wife ultimately tossed it out with the trash before we left for Florida. (I'm not making this up.) There was Hurt So Bad, but that was not good enough to survive. There was a mystery lost to the mists of time whose name I can't even remember though one of the characters, Amanda Madison, lives on. There were two more mysteries and at least three full-blown novels, not to mention the one I'm working on now... on Facebook.
I just did the math: I'm at work on my ninth novel... or maybe the tenth.
I don't care that nobody cares, as long as I still do. The problem was not that I was not being published -- the problem is I had stopped reading novels by other people. Aside from the occasional fling with Robert P. Parker and his Spenser character, I was shooting blanks on the bedside stand. When contemporary novels were too annoying -- too temporary -- I turned to classics. I decided to go back to the beginning with Homer's Odyssey, but that was deathly slow going until I lost my Kindle and with it my will to read fiction.
Consider my predicament in the context of a person (me) who reads like there is no tomorrow and keeps at least three or four books going in history, biography, sports, and media. That's not counting newspapers and magazines and whatever I can glean from the web.
It's not that I had stopped reading: I had just stone-cold stopped reading fiction.
And that's when Dickens saved me. I had read David Copperfield before, probably forty years ago, and I remembered Mr. Micawber and Uriah Heep. I had forgotten about Mr. Peggotty and Mr. Peggoty and Steerfoth and Traddles -- and Dickens' unmatched ability to bestow names on characters that they wear like a first skin. I had forgotten the novelist's ability to portray both pure evil and pure good and pretty much everything in between.
David Copperfield brought me back to life as a lover of the made-up story. The moment I had finished page 734 I went to the list of classic novels on the facing page to choose my next flight. Funny: I had read most of them already: Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter and Silas Marner and so on. But that was in a different time, when the greatness of novels was a given, and you were expected to read the classics without further explanation.
What's next? In the present era (today) I went to the shelf and chose the slimmest paperback I could find: No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. I've seen the movie and await the sight of modern greatness. If it's a stinker, no matter: there's plenty more where that came from.