“I think the novel has to stay attached to life somehow. It has to share the terrain of life.”

I had been told that the interviewer was waiting for me outside in the hotel garden. The ­muffled oceanic roar of traffic rose steadily from the nearby road. 

“I had a road to Damascus moment,” he said. “Last New Year’s Eve, of all times. I bloody hate New Year’s. That was part of it, realizing that I bloody hated New Year’s Eve.”

 

She had hardly done any writing lately—not that you got rich from writing plays, at least not the kind of plays she wrote. But something had happened to her writing. 

Mixed messages, my neighbor continued, as we approached the cove and started to slow down, were a cruel plot device that did sometimes have their counterpart in life.

These days, he said, I live very simply. In the mornings, at sunrise, I drive to a place I know twenty minutes outside of Athens and I swim all the way across the bay and all the way back again. 

Before the flight I was invited for lunch at a London club with a billionaire I’d been promised had liberal credentials. He talked in his open-necked shirt about the new software he was developing that could help organizations identify the employees most likely to rob and betray them in the future. We were meant to be discussing a literary magazine he was thinking of starting up: unfortunately I had to leave before we arrived at that subject. He insisted on paying for a taxi to the airport, which was useful since I was late and had a heavy suitcase.