Holding the Novel

Analysts understand the notion of holding in a way that creative writing faculty often don't. With this in mind, I set out to write an essay about the program I run, a post-MFA novel-polishing fellowship called BookEnds. I wanted to focus on the unique nature of the program, the way it endeavors to hold each writer's particular form of anxious fretting so that the writing can proceed with confidence. But each time I sat down to write the piece, I found myself remembering my father, who died in November of 2015, at the age of 85.

I kept thinking about a trip we took when I was 12, from New Haven to Manhattan. We were headed, I think, to see The Magic Flute. We got off the train and began walking to the Yale Club, a short distance away.

My father was not a brave man. Like many other immigrants of his generation of American Jews, he grew up both lauded for his intelligence and an impoverished outsider. He was naive about life, but he was gifted in mathematics and became a mathematical economist of international renown. His world was binary in the most fundamental sense: 0s and 1s. He was a romantic. He loved ballet and the opera, had season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera for many years. With him, I read all of Trollope, learned to cook, took many rambling walks around our neighborhood, through woods, and up mountains. Reader, cook, outdoor meditator: all those things I am that came from him. He was eager to please and almost always kind—with graduate students, with strangers, with his wife, and with his daughters. His heart was expansive. There seemed to be a seat inside it where you could linger quietly until you were complete again. He never failed to protect me from my own self-doubt, just long enough for me to realize I could master what was daunting.

So, that afternoon in the 1970s, we were walking from Grand Central to the Yale Club (no great distance) when a disturbed man began to follow us, insistently asking some incomprehensible question. It wasn't money