Exceptional Excerpts: Adam Mansbach’s The End of the Jews

I’ve always been fascinated by an author’s relationship with his or her characters. No one does this better of course than J. M. Coetzee (Foe, Elizabeth Costello). But this passage by Adam Mansbach from The End of the Jews is a good one. 

Tristan Brodsky is an aging writer who has never been extremely prolific anyway. Now on the downside of his career he finds it more and more difficult to write:

Tristan sat at his desk, furious, staring into space. There was no getting around it: he wrote like an old man now. The simple slowing of his recall, the fact that the right word no longer bobbed straight to the surface of his mind but swam languorously upward and broke through gasping for air, was the least of it. More crippling by far was that his understanding of people had eroded. The world had grayed as he had. It was not the gray of complexity, but the gray of remoteness, the gray that faded to black. He questioned his footing with every step. Was he interpreting things right? Did people think the way he believed they did? Act for the thin reasons he gave them?

His characters noticed his unsteadiness and began to mistrust him. They looked at Tristan and saw an old man who would muddle or forget their secrets, and so they divulged nothing, humored him by making meaningless conversation. It was infuriating, trying to work with such people. Tristan had had reluctant characters in the past, but he’d overpowered them with persistence and wile, stalked them until he caught them in some moment of privacy or paradox and then black-mailed them for everything he needed. All he could do now was play the sympathetic geezer. Sit on a park bench, throwing crumbs to pigeons, and hope someone would shoulder in beside him and start telling his life story.