Getting Hooked on a Writer

It’s happened to me again.

I’ve gotten hooked. On a writer. And now a long and expensive journey will ensue. But an exciting one, as well.

Long is self-explanatory. But I’ll explain it anyway. When I get hooked on a writer, I have to read all that she or he has written. Sometimes—say, in the case of Anthony Trollope—nearly fifty novels lay ahead of me. So what? I proceeded anyway. Right to the last damn word. (In Trollope’s case, he didn't finish his final novel, The Landleaguers, before his death in 1882. It’s now been published—incomplete—and the final sentence reads like this (a bit of dialogue in dialect):

What with Faynians, and moonlighters, and Home-Rulers, says Con, and now with thim Laaguers, they don’t lave a por boy any pace. 

I guess I kind of like it that the final word is pace (peace). Fitting.

And as for expensive? Well, in my dotage (!) I’ve felt that it’s absolutely necessary to have signed first printings of the works I’m reading. Well, not always. Sometimes the required sum exceeds the value of our house ... I don’t think Joyce would understand, you know?

Anyway, this has happened over and over and over again in recent decades. Right now I’m nearing the end of the Ian McEwan novels I’ve not previously read. But before McEwan? Jennifer Egan, Kate Atkinson, Rachel Kushner Elizabeth Strout, Richard Russo, Richard Ford, and on and on and on.

And all those older writers, too: Dickens, Thackeray, Smollett, Melville, Twain, Cather, Fitzgerald, Hemingway. (I do the same damn thing with those writers of thrillers that I love—Connelly, Child, Robert B. Parker, Jo Nesbø, et al.)

And now the New Kid on the Block: Arthur Phillips, whose 2020 novel, The King at the Edge of the World, I just finished this morning. A wonderful book (which I'll write more about in tomorrow's post).

I had previously read his The Tragedy of Arthur (2011), a novel about a recently discovered play by Shakespeare—or is it a forgery? Included in the novel—the entire text of that play! (Written, of course, by Phillips.)

I loved that novel—but didn’t take the hook. Not sure why ...

Now I’ve read another one—and the hook is permanently caught in my cheek—along with all those others. (Fortunately—or unfortunately?—there are only three others for Phillips. But ... he’s still young [compared with me] and writing!)

I just ordered his first novel, Prague (2002), so I'll be alternating McEwan and Phillips books until I finish them all, by which time, I'm certain, I will be hooked on someone else. And I’ll be flopping along in the ocean of that writing, as happy as I can possibly be.

As I hope I am until, as I've said before, Mr. Reaper comes a-knockin'.