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I honestly don’t know what made me think of this today (perhaps the utter calamity surrounding the Veep), but one of my very favorite books ever is The Public Burning, by Robert Coover. It is a brilliant book written in 1977 about Nixon, the Rosenbergs, J. Edgar Hoover, and a whole cast of very unsavoury characters (some still in office today). It is a bizarre, fictitious account of Nixon’s rise to power–with hysterical passages of Nixon talking to himself in his own head–and his role in the executions of Julias and Ethel Rosenberg. It is about more than that also … its a scathing view of America and its values … but the really amazing things are the trips through Nixon’s head and his discussions with Uncle Sam (I picture him looking like a drunken Slim Pinkins) while playing golf out at Burning Bush.

John’s Wife also is a great book by Coover. He is so adept at getting into character’s heads, and not just in the sense of a writer’s artifice, but he creates complex people who truly seem real and sadly believable, largely through listening inside their own thoughts. The story takes place in a small town, recounting events through several people’s, often conflicting memories, and is driven largely through a stream of concious narrative that is drawn from the thoughts of the characters.

It’s a very little known secret .. but I’ll share here. I wrote a novel years ago. Several in fact. They’re in boxes in the attic, along with a couple dozen short stories.

Years ago, after leaving the Conservatory in Boston, I got a gig in the library at MIT. I was not happy, in fact was feeling rather aimless and not sure what to do, and was looking for any reason to get out of town. An old friend called me one day from Bisbee, AZ. He was an aimless wanderer himself, but on a totally different order than myself. He told me was down there, hanging around this old cooper mining town (he was actually looking for his long lost father, hadn’t seen him in 15 years). He invited me to come … and he did not have to twist my arm. I quit my job, packed my things in storage, and spent the next year an absolute derelict in the bars of Bisbee and the border towns in Mexico.

I had brought my old manual Smith-Corona with me and wrote long crazy letters to my brother back East. Great rambling narratives of the characters in the town (Gene the Queen, Pills Richard, Black Widow), pages and pages of ridiculous madness and lawlessness. (It may be worth mentioning that this was a time when I was deep into reading anything and everything Kerouac wrote.) When I returned East, my brother told me how much he loved all those letters. I asked if I could have them, told him I was thinking of maybe trying to write a book about the adventure. He told me he was sorry … he really did love them …. but it had never occurred to him to keep them. They were all gone.

I spent the next few months typing, stream of consciousness, trying to recapture what went on down there. The result was a short novel called Bucky’s Breakfast, a reference to opening time and fare at one of the more down-trodden watering holes in town. While not an utter failure, it is mine and it does capture a period in my life (like all the writing I did in that vacumn back then; my little rent-controlled place in Cambridge, my refuge, and my spider’s den for luring unsuspecting young women … good times). The book is about 160 pages, and is followed by another of about 70 pages detailing when I left Bisbee to spend a year in New York City as a marble and tile setter for the Local 10 Marble Setters union in Queens. I helped to build the Health and Racquet Club down on Wall Street and that big creepy mansion for the Moonies up in Tarrytown.

As I write this, I recall one other truly great and little known author. Gilbert Sorrentino is writer who brilliantly captures and builds characters who, while sometimes entirely insane and bizzare, are also completely believable, especially if you have spent anytime in the music or art businesses. Mulligan Stew (which reminds me in a way of Nabokov’s Pale Fire) is a book about an author who gets lost inside his own narrative, the characters coming to life and ruining his book. And what makes his work so wonderful is the worlds he builds around his characters; he’ll mention one man’s favorite songs, creating a fabulous list of made-up song titles. Many of his books are like this, even bringing characters along from one book to another. The one that to me stands apart was Red, the Fiend, a gruellingly detailed book about an physically and verbally abused child, who himself grows up to be physically and verbally abusive to others. And again, the brilliance of Sorrentino, his worlds and his characters, make it one of those books you finish in a day.