Memory and Desire is my 18th book, my 11th work of fiction, and something of a departure for me.
It is essentially a love story, a tale about the conflict between desire and duty, about a middle-aged man’s reunion with a son he fathered out of wedlock in his youth, and the consequences of a long-buried passion. Memory and Desire takes place in the months spanning the twilight of the last century and the dawn of the 21st, and has a domestic setting—South Florida.
By contrast, most of my previous novels, and my nonfiction too, have had foreign settings—Vietnam, Sudan, the Mideast—and have dealt with people confronting moral dilemmas in places or situations in which the guardrails to civilized behavior are not clear, or have vanished altogether. You might say I’ve been an extremophile, a biological term for organisms that thrive in extreme environments.
I had a fatal attraction to extremes, an antipathyfor ordinary life, with its predictable rhythms (go to work, come home, have dinner, watch TV before bed) and quotidian concerns (pay bills, help the kids with their homework). I was a restless wanderer, a geographical as well as a sexual nomad who had fought in one distant war, covered several others as a correspondent, traveled to 58 countries on four continents, and burned through two marriages, not to mention any number of love affairs.
My literary soulmates were writers similarly afflicted: Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Graham Greene, etc. At the same time, curiously enough, I admired novelists whose imaginations and talent enabled them to weave compelling stories of great beauty from the threads of everyday experience. John Updike comes immediately to mind, so does Alice Munro, especially Munro. Their alchemy made poetry out of the prosaic.
I cannot fix the time, with any precision, when I began to reject violent events in intemperate climates—dark doings in sunny places in Greene’s phrase—as grist for my own work. My age—I will be 82 on June 10—had a lot to do with it. Anyway, the publication, in 2017, of Hunter’s Moon seems as good a turning point as any. That collection of interwoven short stories is set in a small-town Michigan, and its characters—a tavern keeper, a college professor, a B&B owner, among others—belong to a world most people would find recognizable.
Memory and Desire is a further step in that direction. I cannot say it’s the best book I’ve ever written; I can say without qualification that it is the best I was able to write at the time I wrote it.
Memory and Desire publishes in September 2023. Find out more here.
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