Jeffrey Rotter’s book jumped out at me in hardcover, when I saw it in the catalog six months before it was originally published. Then life got in the way, stacks grew taller, my son got potty trained, and I started another novel. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to read The Unknown Knowns. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t, because it’s in trade paperback, at a great price, and he quotes Donald Rumsfeld, and I’d just like to say, through my experience, water is a tricky bastard, and relentless. -JR
When We Fell in Love - Jeffrey Rotter
When I was just beginning to read, pre-search engines, the most fertile source of truth in our house was The World Book Encyclopedia. We owned a late-seventies edition. It was so huge the set occupied its own shelf beneath my parents’ child psychology texts, The Whole Earth Catalog, and Erica Jong. The curdled, almost stony texture of the covers, the embossing, and the copious gold leaf lent the set an almost biblical authority. Actually, in my lapsed-Catholic, professorial household, it seemed more reliable than the Pentateuch. Truth was a scrimmage between Catholic school and In Search of (two fantastic sources), and World Book was the ref.
Many mornings my parents would rouse me for school only to find me buried under three or four butterflyed volumes of the World Book. I would wake from dreams about marsupial grooming habits, Anaximander, tectonic plates, the Krebs Cycle…. I’ve never been the best absorber of information, but I’m a pretty decent synthesizer. I suck at Trivial Pursuit and can’t remember what night 30 Rock is on. But on the rare occasions when it does, my mind works in the spaces between facts.
As a writer one of my more reliable working methods has been to troll the nonfiction stacks at the Brooklyn Public Library and draw themes, characters, settings, and so forth to form a seemingly arbitrary bibliography. The job then is to connect them with narrative. You can tie anything together in a meaningful way. Anything. That is one of the strengths of fiction over reality.
In the summer of 2006 I stacked Elaine Morgan’s Aquatic Ape atop Stephen Christopher Quinn’s Windows on Nature atop Jerome’s Chronicon, and there I had a few of the cultural tent poles for my first novel, The Unknown Knowns. The bibliography for the book I’m writing now would include a treatise on alligator hunting from the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, The Ten Thousand Things, court records from a 1997 custody battle in Georgia, and Henry Stommel’s Lost Islands. The glossaries merge, and I connect the entries to page numbers on a new manuscript, draw out characters and settings, and discard as much of the source texts as I can. This is an oversimplification, of course, and it doesn’t always pan out. But it has been one of many useful working methods for me. And I probably learned it from all those restless adolescent nights under a blanket of World Books.
Recent Comments