After graduate school, but before selling my first novel, I spent much of late 2003 looking for a job to keep me afloat. My fiancée (now my wife) and I had just moved to New York City, and I applied to work at companies ranging from non-profits to hedge funds. It was at one of the latter that I had a most unusual experience, one that has become illuminating in recent days.
Like many other hedge funds, this particular fund was the brainchild of a single brilliant investor, a former bigwig at a major investment bank. I’ll call him Bob Green. A computer scientist by training, Green had used algorithms of his own invention to earn billions of dollars during the 1990s. By the time I arrived to interview at Green, Inc., the structure of the company had mutated somewhat. In addition to trading equities, they had added a research arm doing original work in biochemistry. This might not be the most obvious choice for a hedge fund, but it reflected the culture of the company as a whole, a culture that was in turn a reflection of its founder’s personality. At some point Bob Green had developed an interest in biochemistry, and with billions of dollars to play with, he decided to hire his own army of biochemists. He was the boss; it was his money; it was that simple.
My first interview took place at Green Inc.’s sleek midtown offices, where I was greeted by a young man of about twenty-five wearing shorts and a polo shirt. The informality caught me off guard. I’d worn a jacket and tie. I suppose it would’ve been silly of me to presume to show up in shorts. Still, as he guided me past the glowing white reception desk and its ravishingly beautiful occupant, I felt like I’d misread the invitation. My discomfort increased as I was led to a large, open room bustling with the activity of a dozen or so other young people, all of them wearing jeans and flip-flops and graphic t’s.
The receptionist had given me a nondisclosure agreement to sign, but as my interview got underway, I decided the precaution had been excessive: I had no idea what I was interviewing for, and the questions I was asked did not help to clarify one bit. I was told straightaway that Green, Inc. preferred to hire the smartest people available, regardless of experience and without heed of the company’s specific needs. If you impressed them, they would find a place for you somewhere. It was an intriguing approach to staffing. I talked to a couple of other people that day, and as far as I could tell, everyone seemed very happy and well-compensated. I still didn’t know what they did, but they seemed delighted to be doing it. Almost all the staff were Ivy Leaguers of recent vintage, many of whom were frank about their intentions to stay no more than three or four years before leaving to pursue careers of their own. Several times I was asked about my writing. I tried to dodge the questions, afraid that if I told the truth—i.e., that I only wanted this job to support myself until I could get my writing career up and running—I would be dismissed out of hand. But they persisted, and eventually I decided to fess up. To my surprise they nodded approvingly. I was, they said, Green Inc.’s ideal applicant, what they called an other-interest candidate. At almost any other company this would be seen as a negative: a lack of commitment, a potential distraction. Bob Green disagreed. He thought that having outside interests was a marker for creativity and independence. According to this theory, my writing was not a liability but an asset. Accordingly, I was called back a few weeks later for a follow-up interview, and then another a few weeks after that. Each time I met with the head of a different department, each evaluating me to see where might I best fit in. In the end there were to be thirteen such interviews, spanning more than six months—a staggering amount of man-hours to expend on an entry-level applicant. I did question the wisdom of spending so much company time asking me about what I did on weekends, but I kept coming back, driven as much by my own curiosity as my desire for a job. Eventually they offered me one. (Doing what, nobody could say.)
It should have been cause for celebration: I had beaten out something like six thousand other candidates. But the interview process had taken so long that by that point I’d sold Sunstroke and no longer needed a job. I turned them down. They were, I think, flabbergasted. I got at least a half-dozen phone calls, first from people who wanted to make sure I was serious (I was), then from other people who wanted to know if I could recommend any similarly-qualified friends (I could, and did). The whole experience was surreal, and although I’m very happy writing for a living, part of me wishes I’d given working there a try, just for kicks.
Anyway, the point of this story is tell you about the strangest of these thirteen interviews, which took place not at Green, Inc. HQ but at Bob Green’s very own apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
I arrived at the address, a luxury high-rise, with instructions to proceed to the seventh floor, stepping from the elevator not into a residence but a warren of cubicles. It seemed that Bob Green had purchased two entire floors. He and his family lived upstairs, on the eighth. I was standing in the operations center, home to the IT team, the security team, the housekeeping staff, and the Greens’ private chef, a Brown graduate with no prior culinary experience but a passion for food. A man with a beard escorted me down the hall to a small office, where he sat me down and proceeded to talk to me about the possibility of my joining Green Team.
Bob Green was a genius, he explained, and geniuses are busy people. Between work and family, Green had very little free time, and so whenever he had to make a decision that was in any way trivial (“trivial” in this case defined as “unrelated to work or spending time with family”) he outsourced it. How? This is how: he’d hired a team of twelve Ivy Leaguers to make those decisions for him.
Example: Bob Green’s daughter wants a parakeet. He wants to get her a parakeet. He wants to get her the best parakeet money can buy, because he’s got money. He calls in the twelve members of Green Team and says, Parakeet. And like that, twelve Ivy League-educated individuals, for whom the collective cost of higher education easily exceeded a million and a half dollars, go swooping into action, grabbing and digesting every single available datum on parakeets. The average lifespan of a parakeet. Parakeets best suited to urban environments. The history of parakeets in North America. The etymology of “parakeet” (from Chambers: “Spanish periquito, Ital parrochetto, or OFr paroquet [Fr perroquet]; the origin and relations of these have not been determined”). The world’s best parakeet trainer. Diseases are parakeets subject to, and warning signs. Parakeet phylogeny. Jokes involving parakeets. Sad stories involving parakeets. Lists of notable parakeet owners. The symbolism of the parakeet in post-colonial literature, 1939-1975. And so on. They collate, these twelve Ivy Leaguers, their findings into a massive report, which is then edited down to a series of bullet points, which are then presented, via Power Point, to Bob Green, who signs off on the Team’s recommendation to purchase Parakeet Type X.
This is a true thing. This really happens.
I remember listening to the bearded man and feeling kind of sad. As someone who has always taken a certain amount of pleasure in the mundanities of life, such as going to the supermarket, I couldn’t get where this Green dude was coming from. Who would want to be that removed from the real world? It seemed like a grotesque waste of brainpower—to mention money—to put all these bright young people to work amassing huge quantities of data on subjects of dubious significance. It was true that having his own Team enabled Bob Green to squeeze every minute out of every day, but, seriously, was anyone so busy that he couldn’t afford to do things like pick out his own socks? Come on, I thought. That was what I thought then, anyway: I’ll never understand.
Now I have a child.
Now I understand.
I’ll never be able to afford twelve Ivy Leaguers to do my thinking for me, but now that I’m a father, I’ve begun to appreciate why someone would want to. For the last ten months I have been simply crushed. It’s been tough coming to grips with the fact that I have only two real obligations—parenting and writing—and yet I’m failing at both. If I lock myself in my office long enough to get some good writing done, I barely see my son. If I open the door and play with my son, I don’t work. If I compromise and divide my time, I do neither task particularly well.
Socks?
Picking out socks?
Forget it.
Shortly after Oscar was born I revised the title of my future memoirs. Once upon a time they were to be called Diary of a Poetaster or The Epigone Strikes Back or something jazzy like that. Now it’s going to be called Just Another Asshole in a Bathrobe. Seriously, I didn’t get dressed for like fourteen weeks. I shaved even less often than usual. I looked like the Unabomber. The major achievement of my first six months of fatherhood was going to get a haircut.
All of this is meant to explain why it’s taken me some time to post anything new. Much as I love the website, if I’m writing for it, that means I’m not writing my book or spending time with my son, and goddammit I don’t have time to do anything else, at least not if I want to do it semi-decently. Maybe I would if I had a Team, but I don’t. In fact, the only reason I’m writing this here piece is that I’m taking a brief hiatus from my novel-in-progress to give my brain a break before I begin the next section.
I’ll admit that I’ve felt guilty, neglecting the site as long as I have. But it’s started me wondering: why do I feel so guilty? Which is really another way of asking why I have to maintain a website in the first place. Why does any writer, for that matter? It’s somehow become obligatory, but when I stop to consider the nature of this obligation I feel deeply unsettled. We have come to expect writers to make themselves available, whether through a website or through public appearances (often both). To a certain extent, this is simply one manifestation of a more general loss of privacy experienced by everyone living in the Information Age. And writers are most assuredly not public figures in the way that real celebrities are. I can’t remember the last time I opened US Weekly and saw a photo of Philip Roth picking up his dry-cleaning (“Novelists! They’re just like US!”). But the idea that you can Google a writer and have his or her e-mail address within minutes is profoundly weird. There are exceptions, of course—Salinger and Pynchon—but for the most part our culture demands that writers engage with the reading public in what I believe is a truly unprecedented way. It’s a phenomenon highly at odds with the nature of writing.
In Ernest Hemingway’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech (which was actually delivered by John C. Cabot, the U.S. Ambassador to Sweden, with Papa himself recovering from an airplane crash), he states that “writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.”
I’ve often thought of these words during rough stretches. I find them comforting. Yes, writing is lonely, but it is precisely that loneliness that allows a writer to fully inhabit a fictional world, and to render it most richly for the reader. You must subjugate yourself to your work, and you can only do that when you are totally alone. The madness brought upon one who lives in solitude is the very same force that animates imaginary characters. When a writer loses his privacy he loses his individuality, and with that, his voice.
The overexposure of the writer has drawbacks not only for him but for the reader, as well. It’s my belief that the demand for personal interaction with writers limits our ability to read their work freely. The more you know about the creator, the narrower your interpretive lens becomes, and the less able you are to experience the work on your own terms. Almost every great book is great because the author is invisible. This explains why writers who themselves become the story—who become drunk on their own celebrity—tend to start producing bad books (“He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates”). The minute you begin to beat your own chest and draw attention to yourself, you ripple the surface of your work, disturbing the reader’s ability to sink into its illusion.
Relatedly, many writers are more interesting in print than in person, and it’s often a great disappointment to meet one you admire. Three times I’ve had the (mis-)fortune to meet one of my favorite writers in the world—someone I worship as an artist—and all three times I found the guy to be a total putz. I can’t say that the experience made me like his writing a lot less, but I regret having had it. I liked him and his work better when he was a distant, mythical figure. I mean, it’s not really his fault. He doesn’t know me from Adam, and to have been dragged out to a public event to meet his readers probably made him crabby. Wouldn’t both of us have been better off, then, if he had just stayed at home and typed?
The foregoing makes it sound as though I resent having to interact with readers, which is very far from the truth. In fact I enjoy my speaking engagements. I read and answer every e-mail I get (except the rare nasty one, which I’ve learned to delete). And I enjoy writing for the website, or at least I used before my time became so much more limited. It’s not that I dislike these things, but rather that I dislike feeling obligated to do these things. My job as a novelist is, foremost, to write novels, and when anything interferes with that, I get frustrated. Moreover, I have to assume that my readership would rather I spend my time working on the next book, anyway.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if I just shut down the site. I mean, I won’t—I can’t; my publisher would go bananas—but to be honest I doubt it would have an appreciable effect on my sales. Even if it did I wonder if it might not actually help me. I could cultivate a shadowy, Salinger-like persona. Well, maybe not. I’m not about to start drinking my own urine, see. Still, I do kind of miss the days when all writers were mythical and distant figures. The false sense of intimacy created by the Internet is, I think, an alarming thing. But I suppose the genie’s out of the bottle, so this is more or less futile.
In the course of scribbling this out I’ve thought of a few other questions, larger questions related to the writer in public, the writer and the Internet, the Internet and privacy, the Internet and etiquette, etc., and I think that’s what I’m going to write about next time I sit down to do something for the site. (Maybe I’ll tackle it in about a year.) But one other semi-related thing I want to note before I sign off: since revamping this website I’ve grappled with how to best use its new format. I used to write long-form pieces (like this one) every two to three months. Then I got a snazzy new blog, and I decided to make use of that instead, writing a bunch of these short little abortive Tweet-like snippets. Unfortunately, I’m not very good at the short-form communiqué. I have a hard time confining myself to a few dozen words; for the same reason, I don’t have an actual Twitter account. I did give it my best shot, but I knew it wasn’t working, and my suspicions were confirmed on tour when a nice young Irish woman approached me following a signing and said she liked the old blog format better.
Well, nice young Irish woman, you’re right. This blathery blather is for you.