A funny thing about working on this second book: it comes much more easily than did the first. Of course, That Summertime Sound wasn’t the first (the two before it live in my virtual filing cabinet), but my expectation was to find writing American Dream Machine much harder. Aren’t novelists supposed to be freaked out by the shock of publication, crippled by self-consciousness as they realize they now have readers, etc etc?
Not the case, for me. Who knows why? In part, I think, it’s being inured to rejection–and by extension, inured to acceptance, which is a much bigger pill to swallow. I read the first negative review of That Summertime Sound with a kind of detached curiosity. It bugged me for about eight seconds, and then I figured they were talking about someone else, which they were. I read the first positive review with a similarly muffled excitement. It was more pleasurable, but it really wasn’t any more profound. In the end, they’re talking about a book I’ve written, which isn’t anything I can–or care to–correct. And that book is very far away from the one I am writing now, which feels more fiercely lucid, liberated in some way by the fact of That Summertime Sound’s existence. The first draft came in a fluid rush, and the revisions too feel logical, elastic. It’s as if knowing, now, (at least some of) the pain, joys and limits of publicity, I can write whatever the fuck I want. So I do. With more pleasure than anyone can imagine, I do.