I am reading Paul Russell’s fifth novel, War Against the Animals. It pits the old-time inhabitants of a Hudson Valley town against the invading cultured, moneyed gay men fleeing Manhattan with their love for old things. The two protagonists come from the two camps. Cameron is an older gay man enjoying a remission in his AIDS illnesses. His last lover who had induced him to move to Arcadia had just left him. He reminisces about his past, about the boy who bullied him in grade school, about the Jewish boy he met in college who became his best friend, about the lover he was most fond of, the highlight of his love life. He talks about his continuing attraction to fresh, young men but when presented by the other protagonist, a 19-year-old closeted local, with the opportunity to act on his desires, Cameron chose to leave them in the realm of the imagination.
Writing fiction is beyond me. I recognize what makes up the artistic process. I dissected frogs in high school. That dissecting skill persists into the present. I can analyze how a group like Maroon5 worked to earn their first Platinum album. I can even see how a novel like War Against the Animals is constructed, how the Russell takes a piece of landscape and turns it into the stage for his work of fiction. I can see how characters are created and how they create the plot by being who they are. I can see how the reader can identify with the character and how this process too is created. On one hand, it appears so logical and too simple; on the other, how wonderful this sleight of hand!
Novels can be escapes from our ordinary lives. They can offer present conflicts beautifully solved. When written well, they are indistinguishable from the ordinary life we are living. Both, after all, are conceptual products, creations of the mind. What is real is long dead. When some event is happening, when it is still alive, we can't grasp it. We are in its grasp. Only after the moment to change direction has passed do we see what happened. The present flows through our fingers like the finest sand, impossible to keep in the hand; it must flow. Fiction is a reconstruction of flowing sand. It's art that I admire. It's art I envy but then if envy were horses, we'd all be riding!
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