What’s known and what’s unknown: how you are judged.

Paris 2017

When you arrive at a dinner party, there’s sure to be something unknown: perhaps it’s another guest’s name, the expected topic of conversation, or even the true reason that you were invited. All of these intricacies will be picked up along the way. Not knowing beforehand is perfectly acceptable. Ask for the name, follow the conversation, discover why you were invited. Ignorance is the expectation.

Yet there’s also something within every dinner party that you don’t know, but that, unfortunately, you’re supposed to know. Little secrets of manner. Unstated expectations. Unmentionable stories. All the habits and customs of those around you—these are implicit, unaddressed, and you’ll never be warned before an indiscretion is revealed. All of your peccadillos, instead, will be met with silent judgment.

Although these two categories—what’s acceptable to not know, what must already be known—do overlap, there’s no feasible way to learn the distinction in advance. A common tautology is useful: you don’t know what you don’t know.

Because these categories are slippery, nearly every gathering shows how people are forever struggling to navigate along a blurry line of acceptable discourse. Partial questions, reluctant answers, all the hesitations and calibrations and equivocations—ever changing notions of both decorum and comfort.

Yet these paradoxes form the writer’s playground. Here’s a sandbox in which the writer can always find stories: between what’s said and what’s meant, between what’s exposed and what’s concealed, between what’s wanted and what’s stated, between what happens and what’s perceived.

There’s only one true asset inside a novel, the sole tradable currency of literature: information. What’s known, what’s unknown, how that’s tweaked over time, teased out, obscured, dangled before the reader by a writer acting as a puppet master. For the poor characters trapped inside a good novel, life will always be hard, overrun by miscommunications, misdirections, imprecisions, in all the predicaments that readers find familiar.

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