The book – the books, really, parts one and two, are now making their final approach. This entire holiday season is kind of a tinsel-y background blur, because here, from the desk, all I can see are the puppets . . . And if I’ve done my job well, then you, dear reader, won’t see the strings at all.

A friend who keeps up with both this and my other, YA-based blog asked me rather crossly, “How come you don’t mention that your novel Headlong was reviewed by the New Yorker online this week?  Not relevant, or what?” Well, yeah, tangentially: and I do briefly mention Under the Poppy in the interview.  Where the actual relevance occurs (besides, OK, the byline) is in the “Tool Bench” featurette, where I share my love of paper scraps, and the scraps in question are actual, in-use Garden Path notes.  So I guess my friend is right.  So here it is.

Which does beg a larger question – is it self-segregating, or just keeping the lanes clear, when you write two different kinds of books, and, what? Don’t cross the streams?  What makes Under the Poppy/Garden Path an adult novel, or a novel for adults, or however non-porn way you want to phrase it, is not so much the setting (brothel; war) or even the sex, but the major emotional concerns within: what is it to be faithful?  What is it to stay true to what you do, and who (and how) you desire, when the wind blows very hard indeed?  To me, these questions are not inappropriate for younger people so much as they are premature; the arc of a life is very different when seen from its rising, or its apogee.  And passion is a very different landscape when you’re fifteen, or you’re thirty, whether that passion is for a person, a calling, or both.

That said, the right book for any reader is the book that speaks most eloquently and directly to that reader.  So read away, those for whom the Poppy and its regulars, and the Garden Path‘s inhabitants, speak true. The writer is probably the last person who should make these kinds of judgments anyway!

One of the motifs of the second half of Under the Poppy, The Garden Path, is the garden: as fecund sanctuary, as repository of desire, as a kind of outlaw, out-of-real-time zone where paths cross and things can be said, amongst the greenery, that can be expressed nowhere else.  Some of this began brewing for me a good two – was it three? – years ago, when a very dear friend shared some memories of a beautifully sexual (though not at all physical) encounter in a garden setting.

So I started to read about formal flower gardens, rose gardens in particular – the working title for Part 2 was Floribunda, but the story took a turn that made that title less resonant, and I liked the idea of the garden path as a place of trickery, or deception; not everything in the garden is just as it seems. But there are roses aplenty in the story nonetheless . . . Have you ever been pierced, really hurt, by a thorn on a rose?

This variety is called “Imagine,” and was given to me by another dear friend, Jane, as my Christmas gift last year – quite independent of this project, she had no idea roses would figure prominently in this book, Part 2 wasn’t even a book, then.  But still she gave me a rose.

Here’s the set for Act Two in Breathe Art‘s production of Nicky Silver’s “Raised in Captivity,” that a friend and I saw yesterday.  I was particularly taken with the fencing as both motif and fourth wall – it made me consider that other fourth wall, the page.  Reading, we can hear and see everything onstage, but we can’t talk to the characters, even if, in the text, they talk to us. Haven’t you ever felt like yelliing out to a character who’s about to do something awful?  “No, Ophelia!  You can’t swim!”

What has been so odd and so much ferocious fun, all throughout the long working-out of this novel that turned into two novels – one, I thought, a sequel – before then coalescing back into one novel again, longer and more intricate than anything I have ever done, is the level of desire present in the writing.  That sounds academic; it’s not, it’s so not.

“Engaging with the text” – what this has been, from research through notes through the daily act of the writing itself – has sort of been more like having an affair with the text: rushing downstairs each morning to get to work; sneaking back into the file before I go to bed, reading through the day’s pages, tweaking and adjusting; and then up in the morning to dive in all over again.  Not to mention buttonholing my friends with progress reports and little snippets and snatches of the plot, the characters, etc., the way you do with a new love who’s just so, you know, fucking adorable.  Teilhard de Chardin talks about “the energies of love,” and love has powered this book, from beginning to the end that’s now in right.  What all this means, I have no idea, but if I’ve never had more fun with a book – and I haven’t – that’s got to translate into more joy for the reader, too.