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Book Bag
Men at extremes
The author of "Bad Behavior" picks five tales of guys at the end of their ropes.
By Mary Gaitskill
[11/15/99]

Reviews
"Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad" by David Haward Bain
It's sprawling and overloaded with facts, but this account of the building of the transcontinental railroad does justice to one of the great American achievements.
By Katharine Whittemore
[11/15/99]

Ivory Tower
The secret life of war
A historian exposes the unpredictably diverse feelings of ordinary soldiers, but fails to learn from their words.
By Annie Murphy Paul
[11/15/99]

Silence the snobs!
They may look down their noses at Oprah, but what have the literati done for books lately?
By Mary Elizabeth Williams
[11/12/99]

Reviews
"Nat King Cole" by Daniel Mark Epstein
A top-notch biography celebrates the jazz piano genius who gained his greatest fame as a pop singer.
By Greg Villepique
[11/12/99]

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"Surely a human life is worth more than a novel."

Now for sentence No. 2, which in many ways is even more important. It must fulfill the promise ...

At almost 3 o'clock, we e-mailed each other our efforts. It was a defining moment. Would the two chapters meld together like stripes of plaid or would they be a painful mess of inconsistency, redundancy and inanity, like a poor man's "Finnegan's Wake"? My eyes hungrily bounced along his text. Some lines were so delicious they made me want to retire. Others, so preposterous ... they made me want to retire. "Looks great," was all I told him. Thirty-eight more chapters to go. At this rate, there was no way we were going to make it.

As I collapsed into bed, Mark phoned. He said my first chapter was awesome, brilliant, perfect. "Except one thing ..."

Each muscle in my body throbbed in a different key of tiredness. "I don't even remember what the hell I wrote anymore," I snapped.

There was a pause. "We'll figure it out tomorrow."

The only good thing about a three-day contest was that it would be over in three days.

The Chasms: 6:03 a.m., Saturday morning

"J.D." sentences continued writing themselves on the parchment of my shut eyelids. The hamster wheel in my head kept spiraling. Every few minutes, I rolled over and jotted down a note. After a few hours of the old toss-turn, I poured a glass of wine. It only made my mouth taste like vinegar and my guts writhe. The ache traveled to my heart and then to my head.

I looked at the clock -- 5:03 -- and reached that point where you just look forward to morning so you have an excuse to stop faking sleep. Finally, I rolled off the torture-rack at 7. I glanced at myself in the bathroom mirror, and my eyes were so red they seemed sunburned.

Mark arrived at around 10, lugging two Big Gulp-size vats of coffee, and I almost hugged him. But this was no time for male bonding. We formulated a triage battle plan. One hour per chapter, max. No going back to rethink structure. No proofreading. "Normally I expect diamonds from you," Mark said, pacing like Gen. Patton. "Now all I demand is the cold, hard text."

I wrote like a fiend. Tiredness flowed numbly through my veins like molasses. I typed, "Hills and dales," about 20 times. I highlighted the text, deleted, just to keep my fingers moving, hoping my brain would follow suit. Somehow, pages filled themselves. And then, without prelude, twilight descended. We skidded to a finish. We looked at each other, dazed, unbelieving. We'd just output about 60 pages. We promised each other we'd edit the whole mess later.

He went home to watch a Mets game. I rented a bad Billy Baldwin video. Neither of us ended up editing a single thing.

The Cliff Face: 9:03 a.m., Sunday morning

My body learned to siphon all its energy directly from my brain to my fingertips, ignoring everything in between. I hunched at a desk, then reclined against the futon, then slumped on the floor. My spine felt like a Red Lobster crab leg. If we only won second prize with this thing, my half of the loot would just about cover the first chiropractic session.

Every time I reached an apex, Mark did something to shatter my crystal sphere of concentration. He was an endless polka of annoying little spot edits, random laughs out of nowhere, CD changes, chapter number confusions. Then I reached a bottleneck. I needed to know the name of the Cornish, N.H., baseball field -- the setting of the novel's denouement. I asked him, "Say ..."

He held up a finger without turning to look. "Dude, you're kind of annoying me." He slipped on his headphones.

Next page | Tempers flare as our heroes near the summit