I recently saw a man wearing a t-shirt that said “I bring nothing to the table.” These t-shirts should be handed out at the orientation session of every MFA program in the country. Not as a rebuke, but as celebration and encouragement. It is not always a new angle, or a new approach, or a new gimmick that your book needs. Don’t add something just for the sake of adding. That’s destructive. How about bringing nothing to the table? How about thinking inside the damn box every once in a while?
Andrew Sean Greer, when considering and plotting out his book The Confessions of Max Tivoli, clearly thought the family itself—all that malarkey that occupied Austen, Tolstoy, etc.—not quite meaty enough.[1] The family, well there’s something to that, but what can one bring to the table? What if … what if the protagonist was a frog? No, that’ll never work. What if he ages backwards! Lightbulb above the head, agent on the telephone, the whole shebang.
It is possible that if this trick had been smoothly executed, if the character, having established himself as a backwards aging man, settled into a complicated and well-thought-out family/love story, it might be pretty fun, might even be welcome. But for Greer, the backwards-aging man is a crutch. It’s his substitute.
The Confessionsbegins in the playground; Max Tivoli sits in a sandbox, an old man in a youngster’s body. “There is a dead body to explain. A woman
