Private Novelist by Nell Zink Page A

with the coming of the Messiah, and the port is now home to a religious revival. Buses arrive hourly from all over Israel, and banners proclaim, “Welcome, Mr. Pickwick, Our Messiah and King.”
    Â Â Â Â Â Â  Sociologists are speaking of a “cargo cult,” formed in response to reductions in U.S. military aid. . . .

    â€œIt’s funny,” Zohar said, “but not as funny as the Mishna.” He was referring, of course, to the section on a man’s duties to his dead brother’s wives when there are two of them, both orphans, and one is deaf and the other “small” (a midget? underage?).
    I’m trying to remember what book I’ve read that the present book ( Sailing Toward the Sunset ) reminds me of, and it’s not Possession or Dictionary of the Khazars . I’m afraid it might be Moby-Dick, because of all the jumping around.
    It is every author’s nightmare to provoke comparison to Moby-Dick, whose shoelaces he is not worthy to untie.
    The poets I knew in my teens called such a feeling the “Anxiety of Influence.” It’s what happens when you read “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” and get an overwhelming urge to write about your grandfather and snow globes. The term is also applied to the eternal recurrence of metaphors, similes, and rhymes. Its usual form of expression is “Everything has already been written.”
    Once I participated in a poetry workshop.
    My poem begins:

    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Sea lions hunt all the time.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  When they’re not hungry, they hunt mali mali.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Mali mali are big black fish, round in profile.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  They move glacially through the sunny upper layers of the Pacific.

    The sea lions, after biting off a mali mali’s fins, bat it around like a volleyball for a while before letting it sink to the bottom where, alive and helpless, it awaits their return.
    My poem concludes as the sea lions

    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  . . . whisper, while deciding at which end to begin, quoting Artaud,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  “In the state of degeneracy, in which we live, it is through the skin
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  That metaphysics will be made to reenter our minds.”

    â€œThey’re called mahi mahi, and they’re white,” remarked my uncle Charlie, who had told me about them in the first place. “Otherwise, it’s okay.” Years before, he had described to me his harrowing experience watching a seemingly innocent episode of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau in which the events indicated above transpired, and since then I had retailed “the mali mali story” as frequently as possible, never failing to mention both my uncle and Jacques Cousteau. The story, as I saw it, was so compelling that no artistic failure on my part could lessen its power.
    Also attending the poetry workshop, where most of the Anxiety-laden poets strove to combine the stumbling density of Hopkins with the double entendres of Nabokov, was a woman who said her favorite poet was Ogden Nash. Every week she read us her latest oeuvre, generally in eight lines rhymed ABAB CDCD, on the subject of springtime. I considered her hilariously thick, yet illiterate and stupid. How dismayed I was, years later in Washington, D.C., to meet her again and find that she had become an editor of National Geographic . In the intervening years she had acquired oval wire-rimmed glasses like those worn by Yigal and a collection of drab coatdresses, and the look of intelligence this gave her, combined with her absurdly sporty body, beautiful skin, piercing blue eyes, and long blond hair, had gained her a career for which others (me, for example—I had tried and failed to get a job at National Geographic as a clerk typist) were perhaps better qualified. “If everybody in editorial died