Tabula Rasa (Vol. 1)
And then Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton start off on foot from a country inn. As they walk across a meadow and through rising woods and across high open fields and down to a stream, each successive sentence, in stairstep form, contains something of its predecessor and something new—repeating, advancing, repeating, advancing, like fracture zones on the bed of the ocean. It is not unaffective. It is lyrical. In future years, I would assign the passage to writing students, asking if they could see a way to shorten it without damaging the repetition.
It would be uncharitable to call Tabula Rasa an empty-your-drafts kind of book, like working. And I say that having quite light working. For starters, where Caro has written three books in the last two decades, McPhee has written 30. He is not wanting for output.
Books of this type often falter because they spend time focusing on the stuff that the various editors in an author's life have rightly designated to the cutting room floor. Or alternatively, they regurgitate press clippings and puff pieces that already exist elsewhere. And both things are, to a certain extent, true.
With Tabula Rasa, but I buy the central conceit that McPhee is writing this:
- to stay alive
- because he doesn't know what else to do
The earnestness in the material helps sell that story. Murakami (see novelist-as-a-vocation) and Caro's versions of these books still leave a great deal of distance between the reader and the writer; McPhee is affable and, at times, intimate, doing his best to erase any illusions a reader might have of his majesty without resorting to faux modesty or self-immolation.
And whether explicit or otherwise, it feels like one mission of this book was to turn deeply inward. There's a lot of time spent talking about Princeton, where McPhee grew up, about his life and his family, his colleagues, and the anecdotes that he is running out of time to share with people.
I had only really read McPhee through The New Yorker until last year, when I read and loved oranges. And I love this an equal amount. It is not transcendent nor brilliant, but worth reading.