The collision of Lethem and Talking Heads makes perfect sense. Both can’t escape being identified with New York – or, in Lethem’s case, Brooklyn – and despite working in disparate modes, each brings the formalism and precision of the high arts to popular forms. Lethem fans already know of his love of the band – composed of David Byrne (vocals and guitar), Tina Weymouth (bass), Chris Frantz (drums) and Jerry Harrison (keyboards, guitar) –  from his essay “The Beards.” There, he connected his love of  “Fear of Music” to the aftermath of his mother’s death from a brain tumor. “I have an obvious predisposition to handling the material of 1978 and ’79 with an exaggerated, personal intensity,” he told me. We spoke via Skype, Lethem from his office at Pomona College where he is the Roy E. Disney Professor in Creative Writing.

What drew you to Talking Heads’ music as a youth?

In 1978 I launched myself out of a very difficult Brooklyn public school and got into the High School of Music and Art, in Manhattan. It was like crossing the threshold. Suddenly I was hanging out in Harlem, trying to figure out who the cool kids were and how I could become one of them, or whether I somehow already qualified. Everyone had their band; it was pretty much like a menu: You could be into the Ramones or Cheap Trick or the Dictators. U.K. punk was this attractive signal coming in, but we had a special affinity for the New York bands. I had a friend that semester who was into Television — he was a little hipper than I was.

I was just at the right conjugation of nerdy, alienated and hyper-alert that I identified instantly with Talking Heads. They sang songs about books! I got it immediately.

In the book you call “Fear of Music” a paranoid album, and other works of art you’ve written about – some Stanley Kubrick films, and Philip K. Dick’s novels, for instance – have this bent as well. Are you a paranoid person?

Paranoia is closely related to a subject that’s right at the heart of the album: fear. Paranoia is an intellectual shading on a somatic experience, a physical reality that is fear. I experienced a lot of fear — not only my mother’s death, but I lived through a rather desperate chapter of New York’s urban history  —and it shaped me. Paranoia is a kind of utilization of fear, like “Let’s pick this fear up and shine it around like a flashlight and see what I can see with it.” As it invests itself in certain kinds of artworks, like in Philip K. Dick’s novels, paranoia tends to be a mode of inquiry and exploration — a philosophical mode, really. In that sense, it was attractive to me, because it was a lot less passive than just lying there and trembling.

But I try to disentwine my inclination for conspiracy and paranoia in artwork from its general lack of not only usefulness but interest in everyday life, where it’s actually a way of shutting possibilities down.

Do you have a favorite song on “Fear of Music”? From your description of “Heaven” – “If heaven’s impossible to know, ‘Heaven’s’ hard to recollect” – that seems to be your least favorite.

I received, in a very specific way, skepticism about “Heaven.” I have a friend, John Hilgart, who was a sounding board while I worked on this book. Hilgart said, quite passingly, “I always felt on Side 2, after ‘Air,’ there’s a three-song lull. I like ‘Heaven’ in principle, but to listen to it is kind of boring.” And then he felt, and I think this would be a much more common remark, that “Animals” and “Electric Guitar” are buried on Side 2 because they’re less inspired melodically or fully realized, and bear less relistening.

I had always held the whole album on this pedestal, where, in a way, it was all exactly as good as itself. I saw it as fractal, “This album is perfect, therefore everything on it is perfect.” Besides, I had always taken “Heaven” as a sacred object — everyone knows this is one of the masterpiece songs. But when Hilgart said that it was like – click! – “Heaven” is one of those things that I listen to and tell myself I’m loving it, but it’s actually boring. I started focusing on the idea of tedium, because the song’s self-referential; it wants to be boring.

In fact, I like “Heaven” a lot. The only song I’m uncomfortable with is “Electric Guitar.” The song is crippled by its disorganized quality, and it doesn’t seem as pure conceptually, because how do you put an electric guitar up there with air, heaven, animals, mind? It doesn’t belong on that stage. Also, it’s been played live barely ever. It’s a sitting duck if you need there to be a worst song on the album, though, really, I don’t know if “Fear of Music” needs to have one.

I do know that my favorites are the two side closers. I wouldn’t want to have to choose between “Drugs” and “Memories Can’t Wait.” Those became the most rewarding songs to write about; they just got richer and richer for me. I actually made myself like them even more, which I didn’t think was possible. Of course, “Life During Wartime”  is pretty good too. [laughs]

Did you find yourself liking the album more in general as a result of writing about it?

It was like having any subject before you when you’re writing a book — your own characters, your childhood, some stupid idea you made up about Tourette’s syndrome, whatever it might be that you’ve committed years of your life to — you love it and hate it a lot along the way. There were days when I felt utterly under its hobnailed boot, and there were days when I did not want to listen to “Fear of Music” again. I wrote through those feelings, of course, as you do with your contempt for all the different assignments life has given you, and I was enraptured by the end.

What’s weird is that I put it on for pleasure now. Your iTunes counts listenings, and my entire top 25 most-listened-to tracks on iTunes is all “Fear of Music” and different live versions of the songs. It was ceaseless, to the point where my wife would force me to switch to the headphones.

How did you start?

I rarely delay — and certainly proportionate to how many pages the piece was, I don’t think I’ve ever delayed starting a project as long. There are novels that I had in mind for three or four years, or even more than that before I began writing them, but those were very long novels. I took three years circling around this.

I kick-started myself in a really specific way. I accepted an invitation to the Experience Music Project Conference to be on a panel about urbanism. I said I would talk about Talking Heads’ relationship to urbanism and the evolution of their vanity as urban dwellers, starting with the “More Songs About Buildings and Food” song “Big Country,” which goes “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me,” to “Fear of Music’s” “Cities,” “I’m finding a city I’m going to check out,” and ending with “True Stories’” “People Like Us,” where they’re pretending to be hicks from Texas. I saw this as a topic I could make an interesting presentation on, but of course I was thinking, I’ll start writing about “Cities” and then I’ll have myself on the page about “Fear of Music.”

There are small traces of that presentation in the chapter on “Cities” in the book. A lot of it had to get thrown out, but at least it got me thinking about how to make something actually occur. I knew that I would write about each song directly and that I wanted to intersperse those chapters with provocative side questions about the album as a whole — I had that structure sitting there. I wrote about the commercial, the radio spot advertising “Fear of Music,” and then I wrote about the album jacket, and then I started writing about “I Zimbra.” Except that I had this weird chunk of thinking about “Cities,” which I incorporated, I wrote the book straight through as it reads.

Were there critical works or other texts that influenced your approach?

I was very conscious of the 33 1/3 books. I’ve been an eager customer, so I was thinking of some of the ones I loved best, like Franklin Bruno’s “Armed Forces,” Douglas Wolk’s James Brown book, “Live at the Apollo,” and Carl Wilson’s book on Celine Dion, “Let’s Talk About Love.” Not that I was going to ape their approaches, which are quite divergent anyway, but I write to enter into a conversation that books on shelves are having. I wanted to be a really exciting member of the 33 1/3 team, I wanted to come in with something that only I could do, but that also was recognizably a contribution to this recent but very interesting tradition.

In terms of critical writing, I followed less a specific example and more the general idea of close reading. I had written a book on the John Carpenter movie “They Live,” where I had just stared at the movie and free-associated. I wanted to do that but more so. “They Live” had a relatively high number of outside comparative texts brought in — other films, artworks and some theoretical things. With “Fear of Music” I thought, let me bring in fewer, and let me sometimes bring in none at all, let me just be with the sound of the songs and say what I’m hearing.

You write that it’s never unimportant asking what was going on in the artist’s life at the moment of creation. Let me turn that on you. Why write this book now?

How can I reconstruct or account for such a sprawling intention? I began fantasizing that I might do a 33 1/3 book before I had even agreed to do one, and “Fear of Music” was always the record that I knew I would write about. Then three years elapsed between agreeing to do it and actually starting.

I have been amazed to find myself doing so much critical and cultural writing, a lot of it being a weird mix of criticism and memoir, or covert memoir pieces pretending to be critical pieces. There’s a long evolution for me, thinking I would write fiction that was all going to be invented, and that I like to read criticism but I would never want to write it, then having it invest in the fiction itself. “Fortress of Solitude” is where that really starts, but “Chronic City” extends it. I incorporated a lot of critical impulses, cultural commentary — even things like liner notes crept into the voice of the book.

Having come into this hyper-developed critical voice without ever meaning to, I wanted to both do it service and quarantine it by writing this book. Like, you go over here and write a whole book about “Fear of Music,” then shut up. This and the “They Live” book would be both a summit and a farewell, which has to do with an intention for what I want to have happen in my fiction next, which is that I want to stop incorporating the critical voice into it in the same way.

Simultaneously, I think I’m also done with the tokens of my 14- or 15-year-old self. I can’t really imagine anything after this climax of “Fear of Music.” It’s like I finally came out of hiding, like once you show yourself you can slam the door, because the internal paparazzi are satisfied, they got their shot.

In the liner notes of “Sand in the Vaseline,” Jerry Harrison said, “There is a shared sensibility [with Talking Heads fans] that would make friendships immediate.” What’s that sensibility?

They’re pretty bookish. One of the things I thought interesting was how underwritten the songs are. They’re not wordy, really, but the sensibility is so fundamentally literary. Usually people think about Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan or somebody recent like Craig Finn, who have these cascades of descriptions and evocations. Byrne never did that and it doesn’t seem like there was ever a phase in his songwriting career where he was even thinking to do it. But in another way I think Talking Heads are a very literary band in their fundamental stance, their ambivalence and sense of inquiry. I think even when he’s switched to nonsense lyrics there’s a spirit of inquiry that pervades all of Byrne’s best work, and “Fear of Music” is dominated by it.

A man consumed with war, words and images, Busch served two combat tours in Iraq. He proved himself both exceptionally thoughtful and also terribly overconfident. In his first tour, beginning in April 2003, he was the commanding officer of a light armored reconnaissance unit, in a village near Iran. In his second tour, in an exploding Ramadi in 2005, Busch had the impossible job of trying to rebuild a town — and gain its trust — while insurgents and sniper fire added to the general lawlessness and lack of any power structure.

Oh, and in between those two tours, Busch returned home to play Sgt. Anthony Colicchio on “The Wire.” The military man who emphasized listening to Iraqis and learning what he didn’t know played a fictional Baltimore police officer of the exact opposite variety. The over-aggressive Colicchio loved nothing more than making arrests to show toughness and to pump up the Western District’s stats. He’s not interested in getting to know the streets he patrols, and he’s disgusted by covert efforts to legalize the drug trade in a part of Baltimore dubbed “Hamsterdam.”

In an interview this week, Busch said real-life frustrations in Iraq fueled Colicchio’s rage. But the challenge in Iraq, he says, was making sure those frustrations never, ever revealed themselves when working with Iraqis. Both roles, he said, were essentially acting jobs. We also talked about Robert Bales and how soldiers handle pressure, where the war plans went wrong and whether the Marines need more Vassar alums.

You were a student at Vassar during the first Gulf War, the 100-hour action that pushed Iraq out of Kuwait. You write about feeling disappointed that it was over so quickly – that this looked like your generation’s shot at war. You very much wanted to go to war.

I thought that. I pushed the extremes throughout my youth, as you can see from some of the small stories even as a child. I was always venturing into what I either considered unexplored territory or what I considered unwise territory to explore.  And war was certainly one of those things. Its mere existence is entirely an environment of threat. Although, as you learn in war, with the randomness of death, preparation is only partially useful. Looking forward to it, you think that you could develop skills which would make you impervious. I painted myself in that idea, that I had survived the poor wisdom of my youth, and it must be because I had certain endurance. I wanted to believe that that could be extended into an environment as ferocious as war. I covered myself in a certain invulnerability in my first tour as a commander, mostly because my Marines expected it.

There’s a vivid scene in the book where your helicopter is going down, and you see the side of a cliff rushing toward you, the small details of land getting clearer and clearer. But you have Marines in the back of the helicopter facing the other direction who don’t know what is happening. So you just calmly smiled at them.

What else can you do in the face of death but smile.

Some people might scream. 

I’m not a screamer. There’s a certain calm that comes with both a belief that you are invulnerable and a belief that you’re doomed.  It leads to a lack of anxiety: One you can’t affect, and the other you can’t be affected.

And that’s the change you describe during your two tours in Iraq. The first time, there’s an eerie confidence. But the second time, death is omnipresent.

Yes, between the two tours that became very pronounced. My first tour I was wearing it for show; I created my own myth and believed in it. My second tour I was wounded almost immediately and we were taking incredible casualties and Ramadi was just a caustic environment in 2005. It was entirely random; every day you expected that it was going to be your day. We almost had this fatalistic humor about it all. We’d walk out the door and say, “Oh, I’m probably going to be killed today, so you can have my uniforms.” People weren’t surviving.

This is post-insurgency, and in the capital of the Sunni province of Anbar. It was a very bloody time, and you suggest our presence didn’t help, which in some ways is a startling admission from a Marine.

It was teeming not just with insurgents — actual Sunnis which were fighting for their own destiny — but it was also overrun with Syrians who were real pure jihadists. They came across the border to fight and die – they came there for us. Many of them were funded by Saudis. So there was a strange triangle of danger created all around our mere presence. And what we would look at was the families. There were children living there and parents who wanted what everyone wants – a secure day, food on the table. And not to fear that something collateral will happen to them, either by insurgents or by us. It was hard to watch that every day, knowing that they were under threat because we were under threat. And that our job was to protect them and we really couldn’t.

Let me back up for a moment. Your memoir has nine chapters, structured among elements like water, metal, stone and blood. You recount stories involving those materials from your youth, and then connect those materials to your war stories. So how did your childhood prepare you for what you saw when you weren’t playing games?

Endless fascination. I think it was endless fascination that prepared me for everything in my life. I was always paying attention. I was put here to observe and build upon my fascinations.

You make it sound simple. But there’s another scene in the book where you are called to mediate an emergency council meeting in Jassan. Water had been diverted to Saddam Hussein’s family. The town wanted a pipe sealed so their water flow would improve. The people did not know what to do, and insurgents were threatening the village’s leaders and sent a message during the meeting that they would also kill you. How does a young American in that situation know what to do?

It’s my Lawrence of Arabia moment.

It’s also a moment where you teach the meaning of democracy. You empower them to put the matter to a vote, and then act. You see people hungry to solve problems together, and excited to find the power within themselves to do that. That’s in some ways what we said we would do there — and exactly what didn’t happen often enough.

It was my place not to impose that, but to let that native urge be successful. I just felt very early that they wanted direction, and the worst thing that I could do would be to give it, because that would make me in charge. That would make me the ruling class. What had been removed was any sense of structure – the Baath party had been dissolved at that point, and had not been replaced with anything. There was a huge vacuum and all that had been put into it was us. And I knew that our mistakes would be made by creating a dependency upon a new state order that was perhaps not sustainable. I had nothing to offer except advice and bullets. That’s what I had. We couldn’t even get our mail at the time. What I wanted to do was find native solutions to native problems that I could only reinforce their answers to their problems, in some ways.  And that was a big moment I wish I could have celebrated in some ways because it was their choice and it was just that brief moment where they felt like they were in charge of their destiny – they felt like they had done something. They had the power to achieve justice, and they did it against all the odds. We had to replace rule of law in a place that is entirely lawless.

So you pay attention. I just followed my fascinations. Why is the water not running? Where does the water come from? Let’s follow that. And we did. You begin to reverse engineer everything just by seeing what’s wrong at the end. I wouldn’t say that I was good at anything.

Good questions. Too bad we didn’t ask them more often.

We could have saved a lot of time and a lot of loss if we had done so. What I feel the most regret about is that I left those people. We had that place almost stabilized in some ways, and though it was not in any way efficient or in any way without corruption, there was a possibility of being quietly transformative in some of those communities.

How do you see what went wrong?

We tried to define them. It’s what we do. We’re Americans. We find ourselves in a position that’s generally comfortable and our vision can only extend so far as us, and who wouldn’t want to be like us. So, if we just offer this, then it will be accepted and embraced. We don’t have a lot of respect for cultural traditions because we barely have any.

And honestly, our own history, if you watch how we achieved our great comfort, it’s pretty ugly. We’d like to criticize everyone for their stages toward democracy but if you look at ours – we didn’t let women vote, we didn’t let blacks vote, we had slaves. We had issues. We eradicated an entire native population almost.  I went into the place knowing that I was the one with the least information, and so it was my job to spend as much time listening and not talking as I could. I wanted to make sure I kept track of the details, the names. I was rebuilding family trees because the environment was built out of family trees.

Unless you’re going to come in there like the British empire and establish infrastructure and reform an entire place in its image, then you’re going to be wholly ineffective. We are definitely not the British empire in the way that we do business. We went in there awkwardly, we built mistakes upon mistakes. And after a while, you know, we wore ourselves down being wrong about things. It just took a little perspective, and some specialists. The people in the State Department knew all about Iraq. I would have liked to have had them in my vehicle.

All that failure, all that pressure, the consecutive tours. Not everybody handles pressure the way you were able to. What do you think happens when a soldier snaps, like Sgt. Robert Bales in Afghanistan, and allegedly goes on a shooting rampage and kills 17 people.

I can’t diagnose him. We have people that do horrible things all the time. Everyone deals with stress in their own way. There were ideologues over there. There were people who were on crusades. You just name it – look at everyone’s background.

Is this the right way to put a military together? When you look at the background you had, and the very different way you approached problem-solving and building relationships with people, those don’t necessarily seem to be the skills most valued by the military right now. You were a visual artist from Vassar. You probably had many cultural issues to overcome. But would a more diverse military be beneficial? Even some sort of mandated public service of some sort

What I found intriguing was that I met America in the Marines. At Vassar, I met a certain intellectual group. Vassar doesn’t teach you how to do anything. Literally. You come out of Vassar with no skill other than that if you find yourself in any situation you’ll be able to think your way out of it. It’s a critical thinking environment. To constantly question, to constantly try to resolve, and to resolve by not talking over the problem but by engaging in it. Collectively in some ways.  The military obviously has a very hierarchical system, but I didn’t see them any differently. I took the discipline of critical thinking, much to the chagrin of certain people, and I employed it.

Now that led to its own kind of hubris in your second tour, when you thought what had been effective among the Shia might also work with the Sunni. It didn’t.

I said, well, I don’t understand anything that’s happening here, which should tell me something. Shut up and find out. I deluded myself into thinking that because I had been effective in that area, which was very rural, Shia, on the Iranian border, with completely different feelings, that when I went for my second tour in Ramadi, the opposite side of the country, Sunni, I thought I could apply these great collective, cooperative ideas of building a city to a place that was a shooting gallery. And I was exposed for being the most wrong person, ever. It was just one step short of delusional that I could take these ideas and apply them effectively to a place, thinking, Well, this has been effective in a small scale, on a small range, with almost no money. We repaired buildings, we established critical infrastructure, we fixed water lines. We did an awful lot of stuff in a small place and they liked it.

With the irony, of course, that we fixed what we blew up.

Right. I thought that if you give something to someone that they realize is of great value to them, then they will defend it and, in doing so, they will embrace some of the stability that comes with preserving things instead of destroying them. We knew very well what the Taliban did and what the insurgents could do, which was destroy things. They didn’t build things for people; they blew them up. Our message was, “We didn’t do that.” And of course, in order to fight them, we blew things up. So our message was lost in our own struggle, and we never could achieve the support of the locals because we could prove nothing. We couldn’t give them the one thing that was needed for all these things to be effective, which was security, peace. We couldn’t do it. And because they knew we couldn’t do it, they were forced to side with those who would use extreme measures.

“Hopelessness” is certainly a word that comes to mind. I mean, we fought the city every day, as one captain said when we were there. You don’t fight the Battle of Ramadi, you fight Ramadi every day.

An impossible bureaucracy, corrupt institutions, intractable problems — it’s almost like a David Simon TV show.  And in between tours in Iraq, you established an acting career, and played a Baltimore policeman on “The Wire.” How did one experience affect the other?

Sgt. Colicchio fed off that second tour of Iraq where I was so frustrated. Colicchio is the opposite, he has a very black-and-white sense of justice. There is no gray for him, and of course, Iraq was entirely gray. So I got to air all the things I had to bury while I was there.

What was the timeline like on the acting roles, and your military service?

Interestingly, I had just come back from my first tour when I got the role of Colicchio. And for a year, 2004, I did Season 3. Immediately at the end of the filming schedule, I went to Ramadi. For 2005, I came back just in time for the beginning of Season 4 and rushed to grow out some hair on my face. It was literally at the end of one experience and the beginning of a very different one.

How do you handle that psychologically — to go from a real war zone into playing a police officer?

It was all an acting of a certain kind. When you play a role, there is some of you in it, and the rest is what you’re burying yourself in to create a character. I did that in Iraq. I didn’t think I could be killed. I had to prove that by acting that way. And I did the same thing with Colicchio; Colicchio  was airing a lot of frustration I truly felt, that I kept to myself, and he gave it a voice. So it’s interesting that I think the war informed Colicchio in some ways, and then going back, I was once again placed in that environment where I had to create a certain person who was both real and partially imagined to deal with that environment. I couldn’t actively and visually be frustrated with Iraqis, because that was insulting. Even if they were saying the most outrageous stuff imaginable. It’s an area of conversation, most of which is a lie. Asking questions about the lie, you begin to get pieces of the truth, and eventually, you create something close to what’s really going on.

So this man offered to show me the city, grab a cup of coffee and talk for a while. He listened and gave me good advice. Then as dusk overtook the storm, he told me his tale.

At 30, he’d been a promising history scholar, on faculty at a major university and traveling the world. But after five years, he was denied tenure. And suddenly, everything in his life — teaching, research, sabbaticals — simply disappeared.

He fell apart briefly, then rallied and decided to write a book. It would be successful and he’d reclaim his rightful place. A few years into the project, he won a prestigious grant. And with that, he became obsessed. His marriage fell apart; he lived on next to nothing. When he finished the novel and his agent couldn’t sell it, the man hired a series of editors to help him revise.

One day, he woke up and realized that two decades had passed. His credentials were out-of-date, his novel a 10-pound weight on the shelf. He started a small business, writing corporate copy and people’s histories, and it took off. He was fine now, but sad.

By the time he finished, our cups were long empty. I touched his hand but hardly knew what to say.

A year later, my husband and I moved back to Minneapolis and I took a job in advertising. Was it simple cause and effect? Probably not. But I still credit that man with the smartest career decision I ever made.

- – - – - -

I was nearly 43 when I started in advertising, which is roughly equivalent to being drafted into the NFL at age 39.

For years, I’d supplemented teaching and fiction and freelance journalism — my real work — with small, lucrative commercial jobs. Over time, I put together a decent portfolio of posters, ads and annual reports. But this wasn’t something I talked about.

Advertising was, after all, a frat boy’s business ruled by wanton consumerism and outright lies. I didn’t belong. I’d earned an MFA at Iowa and established a credible byline. Copywriting was, for me, like the hooking that some women do to pay their way through law school. A necessary evil, but definitely not something you put on your CV.

Which is how I ended up on contract with a hot Twin Cities agency to do some medical writing in early 2010. It was like high school … and by that I mean my kids’ high school. I attended meetings with children who looked too young to drink (though two of them held beers) and we brainstormed strategy. Despite their Justin Bieber haircuts, these kids were smart. The ideas flew. People laughed. No one asked why someone’s mom was at the table. I was relieved.

One day I ducked into a conference room and overheard two women talking; one of them had recently turned 32 and she was panicked. She figured she had three years left in advertising, eight years max. I silently agreed.

So I was stunned when the agency offered me a job. The salary they threw out was double the last teaching job I’d applied for. The benefits were excellent. My hiring manager was a gentle hipster, a few years younger than I, who ran his neighborhood farmers’ market. A talented guy who’d come to Minnesota from a major television studio in New York so his kids could attend better schools.

Still, I accepted reluctantly, thinking of this as a year-long experiment. I was a novelist. To take this job long-term would be selling out.

In my world, advertising was something a serious writer did before doing something important. Augusten Burroughs. Don DeLillo. Salman Rushdie, for God’s sake. These guys didn’t keep up their copywriting after they got famous. If anything, they lampooned it. It was like the laughably bad marriage they’d had when they were young.

And yet, my conversation with that man in Seattle echoed through my head. What if you never become Burroughs or DeLillo or Rushdie? What if — horrifying as this was to contemplate — being Ann Bauer of 2005 was the peak? I shivered and vowed to treat this job as if it were real. I’d play the part. Act as if.

A lot of people asked me, once I enlisted, if modern advertising really was like “Mad Men.” Were there fevered all-night creative sessions? Client meetings where we hid our work behind curtains and dramatically revealed it? Wild, drunken parties where we dressed up and danced and people had sex under desks?

Yes, yes, and, uh, yes. (Except for the sex part. I’ve heard rumors, but I can’t say for sure.)

The truth is that advertising — at least in the agency where I practice — is just as fun as it looks on TV. But here’s the part I wasn’t prepared for: I also found it very good-natured. Stimulating. Strangely sweet.

I came to this field jaded, not only by nature but due to the experiences I’d had in the previous couple of years. My older son, who has autism, had gone through a hellish psychosis at age 20. My younger son was struggling to cope and floundering. Our year in Seattle had been mostly dark and grim.

But after six months I realized that despite my angsty temperament, I felt lighter. Who could stay melancholy when surrounded by interesting, funny kids who make paper hats out of their creative briefs, then spend 10 serious hours designing a bank logo that’s a perfect work of art?

If a baby was sick or a parent had a milestone birthday, people didn’t say, “What about your work?” they said, “Go home. Be with your family. Don’t worry. It’ll all get done.”

And slowly, I saw that some of my assumptions were wrong. Yes, most of the directors were male — and young. But a lot of this was circumstance. There were more men taking the training and applying for the jobs. The young, single ones were free to work nights and evenings. They had the voice and aesthetic for advertising’s bulwarks: national sports accounts, casual dining, retail, spirits and beer.

But when our agency acquired financial and medical clients, they tapped me. A middle-aged woman, but the best person for the job. No one was filling out those minority/ethnicity forms that universities make you sign. But taking age out of the equation, I walked into a pretty diverse work environment: Jews, Arabs, blacks and Hispanics. People with disabilities. The foreign-born, Republican, communist, Catholic and gay.

I watched as our agency hired a young Web developer who was in the middle of gender-reassignment surgery. She transitioned from male to female among computer nerds and tough, biker-y looking IT guys. They often go out for drinks as a group. She ran for, and won, the title of “queen” at our annual holiday party. Everyone cheered.

There were even a few more hires like me: women past the Peggy Olson ingénue phase. People who never went to ad school. Former lawyers and clerics who came in with wonderfully weird new slants.

Just as my experiment was due to end, management said it wanted to promote me. I was given the title associate creative director and put in charge of some of the brightest writers in the place.

And oddly, I was happy. My anniversary date came and went and I felt something unexpected: a reluctance to leave.

- – - – - -

I’ll admit, I waver sometimes.

I struggle with some of the messages we send out and I’ve drawn a few personal lines: I won’t work on pharma ads or have anything to do with gambling. I won’t market alcohol to young people. Twice, I’ve stood up in a meeting and said, “No, we will not say that. It would be wrong.”

I like to think it’s one of the reasons they keep me: I’ll speak up divisively when groupthink takes hold. And so far I’ve won every battle, pulling our copy to what I see as the ethical side.

But I also struggled with the ethics of teaching, my other career. It’s forbidden to say this in the ivory tower, but students pay tens of thousands of dollars for creative writing degrees then graduate into a world where there are no jobs. The only thing they can do is teach, breeding more creative writing majors. It’s an endless, self-serving cycle.

Most days, I take pride in being part of a company that stimulates the economy and employs more than 400 souls.
Even so, when every academic and writer I know converged at a conference in Chicago, while I was back home writing ad copy, I had another crisis of faith. For days, my Facebook was full of photos of people with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Posts like: “Met Pam Houston at AWP and she was really nice!” I felt, irrationally, left out.

Then I remembered: I hate conferences. Crowds, bad food, high entrance fees. People constantly whispering things like, “Did you hear about that fiction opening in South Bend? Some guy with like nine books and a screenplay in production got that job. Asshole.”

I avoided conferences even when I was in the academic world — one reason I wasn’t terribly successful. But teaching … that’s another story. Teaching, I miss.

In a way, I get to do this at the agency, too. I give random lectures on grammar and lead rhetoric seminars (we call them “presentation training”). Kids — sorry, junior designers — come to me with any number of issues: pregnant girlfriends, divorcing parents, money problems. On good days, it feels a little like office hours to me.

One winter afternoon while I was at work, my agent called to tell me he had an offer for my novel from a small but very well-respected press. He quoted the advance amount, then said cheerfully, “I’d tell you to buy champagne and celebrate, but you’d blow the whole thing.”

For the first time in my career, I didn’t have to care about the money. And make no mistake, it is about the money. All my conference-going friends were busily filling out 50-page grant applications, spending days on personal statements, making multiple copies, saving their receipts from FedEx. They support fiction in their way; I support it in mine.

Yet I knew, eventually, my way must end. Even a mid-list book requires attention: readings, bookstore signings, interviews and radio shows. When I received a letter asking me to teach a summer workshop at Iowa, I sent my acceptance but chose the last possible dates. I wanted to put off quitting as long as I could.

But eventually, I prepared a formal resignation letter requesting that the agency convert me back to contract so I could continue working with them when I come back from my tiny summer tour.

I took it to the chief creative officer (our Don Draper). He said no.

He said don’t be silly, we’ll work it out, take the time you need, we want your book to do well, we think it would be great if you teach at Iowa. Keep your job. Other writers stepped in without my asking to cover the time I’m gone. It felt kind of like a barn raising: Someone rang a bell and the forces converged.

Are there still things I don’t like about advertising? Sure.

The Nerf gun wars get to me. When the song about “itty-bitty titties,” played at ear-splitting volume for the fifth time, I leaned over and said, “Some women may not appreciate that, you know,” and got exactly the same eye roll my 17-year-old gives me. Occasionally, there’s an all-day client meeting in a hermetically sealed room that makes me feel like time has actually stopped.

But even then, I’m glad to be out of the frantic, impoverished, pure academic writer’s life.

I stay in touch with the man from Seattle. I’m happy to say his business is soaring, and he’s working on his novel again. Not for a job. Not because he has to “publish or perish.” But because he likes his book — a Gothic story about music and driving ambition and real human tragedy. Exactly the sort of novel I would love to read in a firelit coffee shop, safe from the falling rain.

This fictional family tours around to places like London and Copenhagen and Bavaria, and they go to Paris a lot, and skiing in the French Alps; we did all that too. They live in a duplex with a fireplace in the medieval center of Luxembourg, as we did; their children go to the British-run international school, as did ours. They buy a secondhand Audi in the downtrodden industrial city of Esch-sur-Alzette, but it takes them a frustratingly long time to figure out how to find the car they want, because the word for “station wagon” in French is, bizarrely, “break” (?), a word they choose to ignore when they come across it in the classifieds, because it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, meanwhile wondering why for the love of God there are no used station wagons for sale in the entire country.

You get the picture: There’s a lot of circumstantial overlap between the fiction and the reality.

Yes, now that I reread certain passages, I have to concede that some of the dialogue seems to be lifted more or less verbatim from real-life conversations in my household.  And, OK, I can’t deny that my nonfictional wife and my fictional heroine share some personality traits: They’re both smarter than their husbands, for example.

Here’s the part that’s not my fault: The book’s jacket is dominated by a silhouette of a woman who — there’s really no way around this — looks a great deal like my wife. My publisher designed the jacket, so this bit is entirely their fault. (I’m pretty sure they did it on purpose, as some weird type of Valerie Plame-like leak, possibly as retaliation for my wife’s habit of wandering around their building, barking orders at people. I lightly objected, something along the lines of “Doesn’t this look too much like my wife?” My editor stared at me as if to say, What are you, an idiot? Of course it looks like her.)

Actually, I’ve got to admit that there are certain, shall we say, holes in the narrative of my wife’s youth that I’ve chosen to not examine closely. Her internship in the U.S. Senate. Her year-long trip around the world with the boyfriend who, apparently, didn’t return to the States, and ended up, if I’m not mistaken, in Morocco. Her summer job in Venice. Her nonspecifically “European” godmother married to the British Lord with the houses in London and St. Tropez. Her months spent supposedly waitressing in Paris. What type of recent Harvard graduate in art history (supposedly) takes a job waitressing in Paris? At a vegetarian restaurant, for crying out loud? Vegetarians? In Paris? I don’t think so.

When it comes right down to it, I frankly don’t understand the point of all these “business” trips. To places like Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, Mallorca (Mallorca?), and, now that I think of it, Istanbul. What sort of business could an American book-publishing executive have in Istanbul? Absolutely none, that’s what.

Hmm.

OK, now that it’s all enumerated in detail like this, I can’t deny that it’s looking pretty bad. So maybe I’m not absolutely, definitely certain that my wife is not a spy.

This question came up recently in the response to an essay about Edith Wharton that appeared in the New Yorker. The author of the essay, Jonathan Franzen, has been a tennis ball of sorts in recent debates about the relative prestige awarded to male and female novelists: Batted around by the combatants as an example of male privilege, he’s mostly refrained from weighing in with his own views. The Edith Wharton piece has offered that rare chance to assail him for what he has said, rather than what others have said about him.

The premise of Franzen’s essay is that he has sometimes found Wharton “unsympathetic” because of her own privilege — of class and wealth, rather than gender — and her fairly imperious enjoyment of its benefits, but that an assortment of misfit traits, above all her desire to be a writer, ultimately won him over. This inspires a long exploration of the ways that novelists use a character’s desire and pursuit of some goal to kindle sympathy for that character even when he or she is an unpleasant person seeking a shabby prize. (The example he uses is the vulgar Undine Spragg in Wharton’s “The Custom of the Country.”)

What most irritates critics of the essay, however, are Franzen’s references to Wharton’s looks: She “did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage,” he writes, “she wasn’t pretty.” Although Franzen means this as a tick in the plus column for Wharton, it has been widely — and most eloquently by Victoria Patterson in the Los Angeles Review of Books — interpreted as “ranking a woman’s beauty before discussing her merits.” Patterson goes on to write, “Do we even have to say that physical beauty is beside the point when discussing the work of a major author? Was Tolstoy pretty? Is Franzen? Wharton’s appearance has no relevance to her work.” Patterson also insists that Wharton wasn’t “preoccupied with her own looks” and that her “appearance wasn’t problematic” in her own milieu.

Not being as conversant in Wharton’s biography as these two writers, I can’t speak to the truth of those two final claims, but if Wharton’s looks didn’t have some significant impact on her life, she’d be a very unusual woman indeed, for any period of history. Is her life relevant to her work? I would assume Patterson thinks so, since she has read more than one Wharton biography. And if her life is relevant to her work, then I’m sorry to say that her looks probably are, too.

It is, indeed, aggravating that for many male writers, as for most men, looks have had relatively little influence on their fates or reputations while the opposite is true for women. (That said, it’s difficult to imagine an ugly Lord Byron having cut so wide a swath in the imaginations of so many readers.) For women, prettiness or the lack thereof has long been treated as the most important measure of feminine worth: Accusing a woman of being unattractive is the fallback weapon for anyone trying to inflict a particular brand of shame, one designed to invalidate her as a woman. That’s why it’s seen as the lowest blow of all (apart, maybe, from calling someone a bad mother), an ad feminem tactic of last resort used by those who can’t win by fighting fair. Edith Wharton, a brilliant and successful novelist, could well have been the target of that sort of insult from her male contemporaries.

Disparaging a man’s looks simply doesn’t have the same impact. But a similar shame does attach itself to failures of “manhood,” such as the cuckolding of Saul Bellow, recently detailed in the Awl by Evan Hughes. In the late 1950s, Hughes explains, Bellow helped his “closest friend,” Jack Ludwig, get a job at the University of Minnesota, where Bellow himself was taking a position. Ludwig, unbeknownst to Bellow, was having an affair with Bellow’s wife, Sondra, who vented her frustration with the grim role of faculty spouse by adopting the “habit of criticizing Bellow’s sexual prowess to their friends,” most of whom were aware of the affair.

This is pretty bad, and no doubt Bellow’s eventual discovery of the affair was humiliating as well as infuriating. (Of course, the novelist was a philanderer himself, but the unfairness of the double standard has rarely prevented masculinist men like Bellow from raging over imputations against their virility.) The incident found its way into his work, as Hughes explains, becoming “the very engine of his next novel, ‘Herzog,’ which won another National Book Award after selling nearly 150,000 copies in hardcover.” Whether a bestseller and (eventually) a Nobel Prize make up for having the inadequacy of one’s penis a topic of wide conversation is a question only a man can answer.

Bellows’ marital problems and sexual potency may seem as irrelevant to his writing as Wharton’s looks are to hers, but only if all biographical facts are ruled equally superfluous. Byron’s clubfoot, Flannery O’Connor’s lupus, Coleridge’s opium addiction and whatever was wrong with Hemingway do interest many readers because these factors shaped the life experiences from which the great work sprang.

Franzen, who maintains that Wharton was considered plain, observes that “at the center of each of her three finest novels is a female character of exceptional beauty, chosen to deliberately complicate the problem of sympathy.” In one of Wharton’s most popular books, “The House of Mirth,” Lily Bart is a society beauty with expensive tastes who can either marry a rich dullard or the poor man she actually cares for. Because she lacks the resolve to make either choice, she ruins her own life.

Franzen feels this novel “can be read as a sustained effort by Wharton to imagine beauty from the inside and achieve sympathy for it, or, conversely, as a sadistically slow and thorough punishment of the pretty girl she couldn’t be.” (Several commentaries quote this sentence but omit the first clause, giving the incorrect impression that second option is the only interpretation offered.) This is more or less what George Eliot did in “Middlemarch,” with the character of Rosamond Vincy, who marries an idealistic doctor so entranced by her beauty that he can’t see how catastrophically ill-suited they are.

Eliot was famously homely, but the trait that was her misfortune as a woman was the making of her as a novelist. Rosamond is Eliot’s disquisition on just how oblivious a beautiful woman can afford to be, but for all its perceptiveness, the portrait is not free from spite. So what? Great novelists, male and female, often have personal qualities that sideline them socially but that also offer them a quiet perch from which to observe others. Frustration can spur them to write about what they see. And we’ve all seen plenty of women like Rosamond.

Given that the handsome, the charismatic and the well-connected already enjoy so many other advantages in life, it seems only fair that this perk should devolve to the world’s oddballs. In the long run, everyone remembers George Eliot while the Rosamonds who outshone her in her youth are all forgotten. Last laugh! Eliot was outshone in the looks department, but to make a taboo out of acknowledging that fact seems to give it more power rather than less, as if the mere mention of her unpretty face really could magic away all she that achieved.

I have a hard time writing off Franzen as biased against women writers per se, given that I only learned about geniuses like Christina Stead and Paula Fox because of his energetic efforts on behalf of their neglected books. The way I read it, he wants to see Wharton as, at heart, “an isolate and a misfit, which is to say a born writer,” and no doubt a lot like himself. In the same way that a novelist uses a character’s desire to coax readers into sympathy across boundaries of gender, class, race and time, for Franzen, teasing out this kinship is what stirs his sympathy and allows him to identify with Wharton. Unfortunately, it’s a strategy that seems to have had the reverse effect on how everyone else feels about him.

Further reading:

Jonathan Franzen on Edith Wharton and the novel of sympathy in the New Yorker

Victoria Patterson on Franzen and Wharton in the Los Angeles Review of Books