Diving into the Wreck
“Fountain City” and other novel-shaped objects
I laughed, earlier today, when I read Jared Young’s Note announcing his first post1 in a series titled ominously and promisingly “The Saga of a Bad Book.”
I’m not certain, but I think Young might be referring, above, to the heavily-annotated (by me) excerpt from Fountain City that McSweeney‘s included as a booklet in the revoltingly beautiful “head crate“ issue, number 36, in 2010.
Many years after having painfully failed, like Jared Young, to complete what was to have been my second novel, I failed again—this time in an attempt to extract, from my previous experience of failure, some useful lesson if not for myself, then for other writers. With the benefit of a hindsight that proved illusory, I planned to work my way through the last completed draft, annotating it line by line, page by page, and chapter by chapter; unfolding, uncovering and, I hoped, demystifying the process of trying to write a novel which, even when it goes fairly well, is like good hitting in baseball: much more about failure, on a daily basis, than about success. I was determined, in other words, to salvage something from the wreckage. I got as far as Chapter 4.
A few years after that, I salvaged my bits of salvage, bracketed them with a foreword and an afterword, and handed them over to the folks at McSweeney’s to put into their cheerily gruesome red box. I’m not sure what I was hoping to extract, this time around. Myself, perhaps, from Fountain City, once and for all.
The issue had a limited small print run, and since then Four Chapters From The Novel Fountain City, Which Was Wrecked In San Francisco In February, 1992 has been otherwise unobtainable. To be honest, until I saw Mr. Young’s note, I had kind of forgotten all about it.
Now it occurs to me that it might be of interest, and even possibly of some use, to some of you. So I’m making it available for paid subscribers to Tragic Magic, as a downloadable PDF, after the paywall break below.
