Only after drafting my bus book Riding the Wheel did I recall Annie Dillard’s advice in The Writing Life: “It is the beginning of a work that the writer throws away.” Instead, I had followed her first chapter’s first sentence: “When you write, you lay out a line of words.” I had begun my first throwaway chapter by laying out a line of words about starting my runs: “It’s an irony to take a car to work when you drive a bus for CyRide, but drivers are the folks that the city of Ames depends on to get people to work.”
I continued my overview about my work until page 42 of the manuscript. I explained where I had worked odd jobs around the city to make ends meet, when I had taken the CDL test, what it had taken to drive a bus, who the other drivers had been, and why I hadn’t become a full-time benefited driver. I kidnapped potential readers into backstory instead of chauffeuring them.
But a good layover is actually a healthful, restorative bore. Layovers are enforced ellipses in life — temporary tenures in air-conditioned limbo. Once you’ve made it to your gate, there is, for the moment, nothing substantial left to achieve. You are free. (You might still have to send email, sometimes, but if you’re the kind of person who absolutely has to send email when at the airport, I wish you the best and cannot help you.) Airport terminals offer nothing to solve and nothing much to explore.
It's not hard to see why critics have labeled Helen DeWitt “brilliant.” After all, she has a PhD in Classics from Oxford, and her fiction spans languages and subjects with apparent ease: she slips from English to Japanese, French, German, and the programming language R as deftly as she displays a thorough understanding of computer science, mathematics, literary theory, economics, and philosophy. Fiction hardly seems the most straightforward tool to explore these topics. But in Some Trick, her new collection of 13 short stories, DeWitt uses fiction to elucidate the conditions that allow people to create brilliant and beautiful things. Sometimes her characters make literature, but they also make suits, compromises, money, music, businesses, deals, and love. DeWitt’s keen insights provide the reader with a distinctive glimpse at how these moments of creation blossom.
It all started with the building of collections for museums and zoos and culminated in attempts to protect native habitats. The BBC nature series have made immense contributions to this endeavor by showing the exceptional splendor of the natural world, which for as long as we can remember has been explained to us by the same caring voice belonging to a man who, as this book shows, has earned the trust we put in his expertise.
But it was also perversely generous, to be granted this strange intimacy in person, as if we were really his friends. Whether it’s a compulsion or a decision, Sedaris isn’t holding back anymore.