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Jenga and the art of the novel

ON SUNDAY afternoon, a day of sparkling sunshine and unexpected warmth, I was sitting in a dark, windowless (though handsomely designed) room in one of the labyrinthine recesses of the grand Brooklyn Public Library. It could've been worse. I was there for a discussion between Nathan Englander, (a Manhattanite) author of the new novel "Ministry of Special Cases", and Rivka Galchen, whose first novel, "Atmospheric Disturbances", is expected next summer. (Read this satisfying NYT Op-Ed by her for a taste of her good judgment.)

The chat between these two friends, sponsored by BOMB magazine, was preceded by a great epistolary exchange on the site: 

RG: It must feel strange, having the book out of your head, out of your hands.

NE: One of the purest experiences of existential emptiness that I’ve known goes like this: You dedicate your life to craft, and then a specific book becomes the manifestation of that dedication. You work on it, basically, every day all day for years and years, and the second you finish, when you might have a weird post-partum reaction to finishing, you are then busy twenty-four hours a day promoting so you have no time to think, not a second. But you have replaced work—your craft, writing itself—with all the things that seem like writing but have nothing to do with it. That is, everything that should be unimportant to the writer, that should be stupid, and superfluous and a sign of nothing that matters suddenly seems to be hugely important. And just when that nonsense feels like all that matters, that part of the book business is over and you’re sent home. So now you’re back in your life and what was important, the work on that book, is no longer there. And your right-headedness, your focus on craft and story, and obligation to the characters and the text, the very order and rhythm to your world has been replaced with absolute nonsense.

With trademark neurotic self-effacement, Englander talked about what it was like to write his first novel (a decade in the making), set in 1976 in Buenos Aires during Argentina's "dirty war." The book, he said, is essentially about how communities fail their members. Though it takes place in Argentina (a place he visited for over a month after college, and then deliberately didn't revisit until he had finished the book, preferring instead to first dream his fictional world), it is really about any place that employs bureaucratic thuggery, Kafkaesque paper-pushing.

"What were you thinking, what were you trying to do with that one chapter that is so different from the others...I liked it but it was so strange, so different...why did you do that?", one man asked in the audience.

"Fiction writing", Englander replied, "is kind of a game of Jenga. You sort of have to pull out all the pieces to the point where the story threatens to topple. Just sort of push it to the point where it may collapse. And hope that it doesn't collapse." 

"That was a really interesting conversation," I said to Englander afterwards.

"Really? I was sort of miserable up there," he replied.

The life of a writer is a game of Jenga, too.