In praise of great writers

Image and excerpt © 2020 Conde Nast

2020 has not been one of our better years (the entire century has been a big disappointment, really), but it did bring us the second novel by the great storyteller Susanna Clarke. Her first, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, remains one of my favorite books ever. (Neil Gaiman called it “unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years.”) Sadly, not long after that, she was afflicted with chronic fatigue syndrome or something very much like it, and was not able to write at length again until last year. The gorgeous, mournful Piranesi, her second book, was released earlier this autumn.

Laura Miller wrote a wonderful piece on Clarke and her work in The New Yorker. I commented on Twitter that the article was worth the price of a year’s subscription. The first paragraph in particular, referencing both the book and the process of writing itself, is amazing:

“Writing a book is like moving into an imaginary house. The author, the sole inhabitant, wanders from room to room, choosing the furnishings, correcting imperfections, adding new wings. Often, this space feels like a sanctuary. But sometimes it is a ramshackle fixer-upper that consumes time rather than cash, or a claustrophobic haunted mansion whose intractable problems nearly drive its creator mad. No one else can truly enter this house until the book is launched into the world, and once the work is completed the author becomes a kind of exile: the experience of living there can only be remembered.”

“ … a claustrophobic haunted mansion whose intractable problems nearly drive its creator mad” pretty much sums it up for me.