A Writer’s Writer
What it takes to finish the novel.
New Orleans 2015
Desk Notes explores writing, travel, and literature—with a new issue every Friday.
High on the list of great fictional detectives—Jules Maigret, Phillip Marlow, among many others—is Lew Griffin, an amateur detective with a strong emphasis on the word amateur. Over seven dreamlike novels, James Sallis stretches the designation of detective to its limits. We don’t proceed with much detecting, but do spend much time with the drunken, pensive Griffin, living in the dregs of New Orleans, where he tries to find the occasional missing person, and, yes indeed, writes his own detective novels and gives a background commentary of French philosophy and literary greats to punctuate his violence.
Nearly every description of Sallis calls him a writer’s writer. Endlessly repeated, without a clear origin, the designation appears suspicious, yet I can’t deny how it rings true. One clue probably comes from his sentences: most writers give the reader a trajectory, a flow from point-to-point, while Sallis gives us sentences that seem to unfold. What we have is a book that’s written from the inside.
All novels do end up being spy novels, as goes a quote from Ian McEwan, because every writer withholds, denies, and misleads just a like a spy, toying with the primary currency of novels: information. In Lew Griffin we have a fictional detective who happens to be a writer; In James Sallis we have a real writer who happens to be, in these first-person novels, a detective.
I had no idea any longer what it was I might be writing—memoir, essay, biography, fiction. And as the book progressed in following weeks I grew forever less certain. But I found, as well, that I didn’t care. Often before, I’d written close to my life and at the same time from a distance.
Amid the muck and brutality and fringes of New Orleans, we find a character quoting Joyce, Balzac, wondering about Camus. We see him teaching, too, but those authors don’t seem relevant, or even that useful, when confined to his classroom: they only come alive and feel meaningful in the streets.
Our writer, Lew Griffin, who pretends to be a detective—the reverse is just as true—is sure to carry a notebook:
As with many good ideas, at first I’d used the notebook readily and often, before letting it slip into neglect. A dozen pages or so bore scribbled notes for classes and stories, snippets of overheard conversations, bits of description, the occasional address or phone number, errand lists, wobbly columns of Dewey decimal numbers copied from the school library’s computerized catalog, lists of trees or lawyers’ and street names. Some of the notes were impenetrable, whatever import they once may have had now lost in the folds and trouser cuffs of time.
These quotes come from Eye of the Cricket, a midpoint in the series. Our character is now a novelist, writing fictional accounts of the fictional story which we’re reading, though his flavor for notation will suit those readers who wouldn’t even think of filling a page. As those readers still have jottings and tallies and accounts. A lifetime of scribbled grocery lists. A lifetime of paper scraps hidden in the corners and within drawers.
The past is no insubstantial, thready thing, sunlight through shutters into cool rooms, pools and standards of mist adrift at roadside, memories that flutter from our hands the instant we open them. Rather is it all too substantial, bluntly physical, like a boulder or cement block growing ever denser, ever larger, there behind us, displacing and pushing us forward.
Remember that we’re still reading a grimy detective story, where no character escapes the filth and violence, where a few chapters are lost in a daze, sleeping underneath a park bench. Here we have an amateur detective trapped in a novel, trying to write his way out.
Once, I’d begun a short story comprised of a series of footnotes to another, undivulged text, footnotes that were to form among themselves a coherent, though discrete, text. Another time I planned a novel each chapter of which would end mid sentence, the next chapter scooping up the rest for its own beginning.
But in these passages we can began to discern how Sallis has been bequeathed with that grandiose label, a writer’s writer, as we watch the symmetry and nod along: what it takes to find the missing-person is also what it takes to complete the novel.
What I did here, in this extraordinary thing sitting beside me, is this: I quit trying. Quit trying to finesse the failures and forfeitures of my life into fiction. To tuck people I’d loved safely away in the corners of my novels. Quit trying to force patterns, however comforting and fetching and artistic these patterns might be, onto the catch-as-catch-can of what I actually lived, the rigorous disorder of my days.
Our nod of recognition arrives, unfortunately, with a hint of irony. Lew Griffin has found the ideal. His extraordinary thing is a new novel, just the way, for once, that he wants it. Free from all the usual constrains. Free from the pitfalls every writer recognizes. Good for Lew Griffin: he’s revealed the path forward. Telling us how it should be done. Now what about James Sallis?
Explore writing, travel, and literature—with a new issue every Friday.
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