I finished An Obedient Father by Akhil Sharma. The novel’s main character, Ram, is a corrupt bureaucrat who raped his daughter when she was young and wouldn’t mind doing the same to the granddaughter. He’s odious and self-pitying, yet you can’t help but like him. Here is a striking passage:
No adult minded the small violences I perpetrated. Violence was common. Grown men used to rub kerosene on a bitch’s nipples and watch it bite itself to death. For a while, the men had a hobby of lashing together the tails of two cats with a cord and hanging the cats over a branch and betting on who would scratch whom to death. When the father of a friend of mine clubbed his wife’s head with a piece of wood, her speech became slurred and she started having fits, but not even the village women, friends of my friend’s mother, found this to be an unspeakable evil. Their lives were so sorrowful that they treated what had happened to her not as a crime committed by an individual but as an impersonal misfortune like a badly set bone that warps as it heals.
August 13, 2002
La Bagotière
Paul called on Sunday to say that he and Kathy are going to be parents. There were congratulations, etc., and then it was revealed that she was, by their estimation, possibly five hours pregnant. Most people wait a while before telling everyone that they’re expecting a baby. Andy and his wife kept the secret for three months. Paul and Kathy started calling people the moment they got the results from the home pregnancy test. By nine a.m. Raleigh time, they’d already phoned every member of the family, both his and hers, and were working on a list of possible names.
I stayed up all night on Sunday, working in the attic and leaving my desk every hour or so to explore the milking chamber with a flashlight. At three a.m. I discovered a beetle who’d crawled in under the door and was settled beneath a web eating discarded fly heads. I mean, that’s his diet. Fly heads! At four a.m. I found Gail. A member of family Dysderidae and genus Dysdera, she’s a female Dysdera crocota, a bright red, putty-textured spider who normally lives beneath logs and eats woodlice. I kept her overnight and let her loose in the shed yesterday afternoon.
I’ve exhausted Hugh’s patience as far as my spiders are concerned. Yesterday morning I found Paula’s drained, desiccated body on the floor beneath her old web. There’s really not much left but the legs. I invited Hugh to study the corpse with my magnifying glass, and he tossed a cigarette butt into one of my webs, threatening to clear them all out when the men arrive to begin reroofing.
August 28, 2002
Paris
Shannon called to tell me I’m at number nine. This makes fifty-two weeks—a year on the Times paperback list. While she was very excited and congratulatory, the news left me slightly embarrassed, the way you feel when you’ve stayed too long at the party and notice your hosts looking at their watches. The hosts, in this case, are all the superior writers whose books haven’t sold more than a few thousand copies. On the bright side, I think I can write something much better than Me Talk Pretty. And if it fails and no one buys it, I can really feel good about myself.
August 31, 2002
Paris
Along with some books, Amy sent me a carton of the new Kools. For decades the packs featured simple green letters on a white box. Two years ago they changed their design, adding a picture of a waterfall, and now they’ve changed again. The new pack is ice blue. Beneath the logo they’ve written “The House of Menthol.” Their way of discouraging smoking is to make the pack increasingly embarrassing. I counted yesterday and should have just enough cigarettes to last me to October.
October 5, 2002
New York
Since returning I’ve noticed how often the words New York are followed by the greatest city in the world. It’s on billboards, on the radio, in newspaper ads. “Where else but New York, the greatest city in the world?” An ad outside the Prince Street subway read WOULDN’T YOU RATHER BE GOING TO CHELSEA IN LONDON? and it struck me as insubordination. New York has always referred to itself as the greatest but more so after September 11. We’re the greatest, damn it. We’re the greatest, remember. You want to go along with it out of pity, but still, it’s hard. At two p.m. it takes an hour and a half to get from Kennedy to SoHo in the greatest city in the world. Cigarettes now cost $7 a pack in the greatest city in the world.
This is definitely not the greatest apartment in the world. Our subletter now has a dog and we’re thinking she must bathe it in the sink. Daily. Hugh made a snake out of a coat hanger and fished from the drain a wad of hair the size of a shrunken head. The halls are filthy. There’s an air conditioner lying on the kitchen floor and no place to put anything. The hotel that’s gone up next door has placed its exhaust system in what was once our backyard, and while we used to hear traffic on West Broadway, now we hear a dull, never-ending roar. They’ve opened an outdoor bar so in the evening the roar is accompanied by the sounds of lively drunks. It’s like a party held on an airport runway.
October 9, 2002
New York
While walking from the subway to the Letterman studio, Hugh and I passed a man asking for money. Because of the tourist trade you get hit up a lot in that neighborhood, at least twice on every block. I shook my head no and the man went off on me, saying that I looked terrible. “You don’t wear no striped shirt with a tie like that, asshole. Idiot. Fuck you with your scuffed-up raggedy-assed shoes.” He was basically a black version of my father, who, aside from the asshole and fuck you, will undoubtedly say the same thing.
October 10, 2002
Rochester, New York
A sniper or pair of snipers, a “marksman,” a “rifleman,” has shot eight people in DC, Virginia, and Maryland over the course of the past week, leading area restaurants to close their outdoor patios. The victims are random: a woman filling her car with gas, a thirteen-year-old on his way to school. A fortune-telling card was found at one of the murder sites, so I imagine that soon they’ll give him a name—the Tarot Killer or some such thing. We’re supposed to be outraged, but it’s basically a media wet dream. Number one at the box office this week is Red Dragon, the umpteenth movie this year about a “brilliant” serial killer. Our novels, our TV shows, featuring FBI profilers: we love mass murderers and the people who surround them. I’m sure the screenplays for this story are already in progress and that, in nine out of ten versions, the killer is not only superintelligent but handsome.
While ironing, I listened to a local jazz program hosted by the female equivalent of Don Congdon. “That was ‘I’ll Cry Alone’ by…oh, what was his name again? He reminds me of that other gypsy guitarist, the one with…oh, you know who I’m talking about. This is going to drive me crazy. Help me out here, folks. I know you know who I’m talking about. He’s dead and I think his name started with a J.”
October 18, 2002