This past summer I revisited The Red Wheelbarrow, a novel I worked on for a long time. Those who’ve attended workshops with me might remember it as Glass Balls.
With a quieter life schedule thanks to the pandemic, I had time to dive back into that stalled project and see if I could find a way through what, nine years ago, seemed insurmountable problems with its structure. It’s been fun to revisit my old work and discover I like it better today than I did in 2011. I know other writers who’ve done what I did—drop a novel because they were sick of trying to make it work or because it never satisfied their standards. I wonder how many millions (billions?) of attempted novels are out there, never to find an audience.
Some of the novels my friends set aside still have a hold on me. I feel particularly wistful about three novels, works-in-progress, that I love. I respect their creators’ decisions to set them aside, but I’m sad I may not see their promise realized. The authors were fellow members of writing groups, and all completed a full first draft. I got to read their work in pieces, some of it from the very first scene. Over periods of months, even in some cases for years, I watched them evolve. The characters and settings remain vivid despite the passage of years.
I was relatively new to New Hampshire when I met Jeff Hastings’s central character, an ornery old guy who emptied septic tanks, collected and froze roadkill, and performed an act of pure love as poignant as any I’ve seen rendered in fiction. I would read the book again simply to spend time with this character, but Jeff delivers a rarity—a riveting plot, full of surprises, within a literary novel. His version of New Hampshire’s hardscrabble terrain is sharp and authentic. This is not the precious New England landscape of calendars and postcards.
The world Jennifer Goss Duby created in her police procedural overlaps with Jeff’s. As it happens, the real life inspirations for their fictional towns are only a few miles apart. Jennifer, like Jeff, nails small town New England—its landscape and occupants. Her mystery had me hooked from the start as did the romantic thread. I needed to know who murdered that young man years earlier and if the central characters would be brave enough to act on their attraction. Specific details linger—the magic eight ball in an unlikely setting, the little dog named Caliope, the characters’ idiosyncratic homes. I can still see the novel’s hero crouched on the hillside behind a boulder as suspense builds to the final confrontation.
Jessica Eakin’s imagined location was less specific. I pictured Vermont as I read it, but it could have been any town in America in the 1960s when new interstates bisected farms and the country was transitioning to different cultural norms. Jessica, a poet as well as novelist, writes prose that sings, yet is spare and precise. I recall a particular paragraph in which she describes the interior of a barn wall with the kind of elegant and light touch that inspires me to aim higher in my own writing. A summer afternoon she captured still radiates heat in my memory, and the narrative voice remains as memorable as Scout’s in To Kill a Mockingbird.
I think of these books as the lost novels. Real and yet not. They exist in limbo. They are not the only novels that never find their audience. Publishers decline gorgeous novels all the time. Even published novels, highly acclaimed ones, go unread, but they at least exist in a tangible way. We can find them in bookstores, on Amazon, in libraries and used bookshops. We can share them with others. Their creators have released them to the world, giving them life beyond the writer’s control.
Several years ago, a friend introduced me to one of my all-time favorite novels, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page. Gerard Basil Edwards wrote the book late in his life and died in obscurity five years before it was published in 1981. This masterpiece nearly disappeared into that Neverland of lost books. Thankfully, Edwards trusted a friend to share it with the world and eventually a publisher recognized its brilliance. Once published, it was critically acclaimed as one of the great novels of the 20th century and included by Harold Bloom in The Western Canon. It’s the Cinderella tale writers dream of—though I think it’s safe to say we’d all rather it happen in our lifetime—but also a reminder of what a near miracle it can be for any book to find its audience.
Any creative effort, brilliant or flawed, springs from an impulse to express something—a feeling, an insight, a resonant moment—and that creative act requires courage, especially in the decision to share it with others. For my high school senior quote, I borrowed John Whiting’s line, “you can’t shut out the human voice—especially when it’s expressing itself in an act of faith,” from his play, Marching Song. I had only a vague grasp of its meaning back then, but it’s stayed with me. I wonder if my sadness for the lost novels is a part of a broader sadness for all the unheard human voices.
I have no authority to say whether Jeff’s, Jennifer’s, and Jessica’s novels would be published and applauded if offered to the market. And, of course, only they can decide if and when their book is ready to be shared. Still. I would love to have these three books on my shelf where I could revisit them and be reminded of the diverse ways love and goodness can manifest, smile again at the banter in a police station, feel the heartbreak that impersonal forces can inflict on individuals and families. Whatever the novels’ fate, I’m grateful for the human voices that created them.