I wrote Ashley, the novel I most recently posted on Amazon as a Kindle book sometime before 2011. The title character was haunting me in a dim and indirect sort of way and so I thought I might dress her up and send her out into the world. When I read the novel through, I was pleased to discover it a much less humbling experience than I had feared. Ashley holds up, it turns out. There are, and this is to be expected, passages in the story that I would write differently today, these mostly her rambling literary musings, but I left them alone because they are representative of the girl’s strength and her youthful failings. The reader will, I hope, bear with her and see her through to the end.

A few years ago I heard a painter talk about her work. She offered the idea that the blank canvas is both a daunting void and a promise of boundless possibility and then went on to say that starting, that is, laying that first line, the first brush stroke on the blankness, dictates everything that will follow. It shapes the painting even before the artist has decided on a final direction, even before she knows the details. Whether all painters have that experience is not for me to say, as I haven’t held a brush since fifth grade (this excludes those wide items used for smearing color on walls and clapboards).

But I think the power of the first line might be true of writers; it is certainly true for me and I saw this with Ashley. In that book, the first sentence goes like this: “Ashley should have known that no one would care about Hawthorne.” That is not, I fear, destined to be an oft quoted beginning, but it does predict the rest of the narrative. Just out of college, Ashley discovers that her academic strength—she was a highly successful English major—makes no difference to the world at large. Her knowledge of the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne is extensive and deep, but no one cares. Her response to this realization is a critical remark on herself. She should have known. That she didn’t is testimony, I suppose, to the heady exhilaration of finding herself important, if only in the narrow safety of her small college. So taken was she with her own newly discovered academic ability that the question of it’s larger value never occurred to her. Her task now that she is but one of the many fish in the big pond that is Boston, is to repeat the achievement. She must find herself again; only this time she lacks the guidance of a shaped curriculum and the warm attention of her instructors. She is on her own.

But more: That she feels she should have known shows that she’s gained a critical self-awareness. It would be possible, I suppose, for her to sneer at the ignorance of those she meets in her after college life, but she sees, rightly so, that her unspoken expectation that her literary skills and knowledge would count for something has been an error. The fault, if there is one, lies in her. At the same time, her imagination, filled with the novels and stories she’s studied, gives her a framework by which she can understand, if only partially, her own experience. This may be, of course, one of the finer benefits of an education.

But what will she be? Will she find a place in her world that will bring her the same sense of meaning, the same satisfied feeling of importance that she had at school? That’s the puzzle that occupies her over the course of her story. At the novel’s close, it’s not clear that she’s solved her problem. She may have or she may have given up her quest in favor of the charms of romance or, perhaps, in favor of a quiet acceptance that life is full of unpredictable changes, that the best course is to swim with the current and make do as best you can.

Ashley’s dilemma is not hers alone. It is disconcerting for many young people to be, as it were, ejected by the alma mater (Latin for fostering mother), that is graduated, banished, sent out into the “real world” where you have to figure things out all on your own. You can’t go back and there is often no clear path forward. It’s daunting. It is not clear whether most adults ever come to satisfying terms with the question. How many become self-actualized? It’s hard to say. It may be that most of us simply grow old.

“Ashley should have known that no one would care about Hawthorne.” I did not know, when I wrote that, when I made my initial mark upon my own canvas, where that sentence would lead me. Those words closed some doors and opened others. Here are the opening words of Penny, a more recent novel: “Christmas. No one in the lot. Penny would have it all to herself.” They work the same way. Penny, it turns out, is an isolato, but I did not know that when I placed her, that Christmas morning, in the parking lot of her local wildlife refuge.

I wonder if the opening lines of other novels shape the narrative in the same way. Think of “Call me Ishmael,” the first sentence in Moby Dick. Those are the words of a reserved observer, someone whose role aboard the Pequod remains obscure, a fellow who holds back. He could have declared, “My name is Ishmael” and then we might have had a different tale. The Great Gatsby opens this way: “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.” Whatever else it might be, The Great Gatsby is most certainly a story about the effects of advantage. It’s not only a story about class difference; it’s the novel that best explains the meaning of class difference.

There is, for me at least, genuine excitement in staring down the blank canvas, or in my case, the blank computer screen and then, making my first mark. Doors open; doors close. It’s great fun to discover where the open ones lead.

You can download Ashley at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08ZJR44HC
You can download Penny at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08FHCMLCH

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