David Klein's Blog, page 57

Dreaming of COVID

Just a few short weeks ago I wrote about how COVID was getting inside of me and impacting my fiction writing.

Admittedly, having COVID infiltrating my thoughts when writing isn’t nearly as bad as getting the virus itself, which I’ve been fortunate enough to avoid. So far.

But now COVID has found another way in. Last night I dreamed about COVID for the first time. I was hungry and in an area with bars and restaurants, searching, and each one I walked into was crowded, with customers and employees all unmasked. I recoiled each time. It was a distressing dream.

But just a dream. Unless I was in South Dakota or some such state.

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Push Yourself Up!

To be on the team, you have to perform twenty pushups. There’s no getting around that requirement because if you can’t do twenty pushups you won’t have the strength to help the team. You’d be a burden on your teammates. You’d be unwanted.

So twenty pushups it is, no exceptions. Plus eight pullups, running a mile in seven minutes or less, and scoring at least eighteen out of twenty on the team aptitude exam.

Running, pullups, exam-taking—all easy. But pushups: I can only do fifteen. I’ve tried and tried. I do pushups in the morning, pushups in the afternoon, pushups in the evening. I can never get past fifteen. Sometimes I can only do twelve. At night sometimes only seven.

I really, really need to be on the team. The team is everything. Without the team, I will have nothing. I will be nobody.

Tryouts are in three weeks.

I hire a pushup coach. Don’t do your maximum number every time, coach says. Do five sets of five. Do four sets of eight. Six sets of ten. Then do as many as you can only every third day.

I follow the instructions from my coach, but I’m still stuck at fifteen. I lower myself for pushup number sixteen, and coach calls, “Push yourself up!” But I collapse.

I hire a different pushup coach. Coach says no more pushups. Focus on complementary exercises, he says. One arm rows and pull downs and bench presses and shoulder lifts. Every day I do the complementary exercises, then try pushups at the end of the week. Still I can do only fifteen pushups.

I’ll never do twenty pushups. It’s too hard. I’m not good enough. I won’t be on the team. Everyone else will be on the team and I won’t be on the team.

I hire a meditative pushup consultant who says to close my eyes and visualize myself doing twenty pushups, counting each one. Sure, in my mind I can do twenty, but my body is stuck on fifteen.

I stop trying. I stop doing anything at all. For three days I do nothing, absolutely nothing. I sit around and feel awful: shame and disappointment and failure. I used to think about pushups all the time, that’s how badly I wanted to be on the team. Now, not so much. I don’t think about pushups because I no longer care about being on the team. The hell with the team. Who needs the team?

And yet, even though I’ve abandoned the idea of being on the team, I start thinking about pushups again. Just a little bit. I can’t help it. I kind of miss them. They were a significant part of my life goals and challenges, back then.

In fact, I can’t stop thinking about pushups. Suddenly, it’s all I can think about. So I do some, even though I’ve stopped trying. To my surprise, I do eighteen.

There’s four days until the test. I’m not sure what to do. I’ll do nothing.

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Savoring the Winter Hike

I have a new quest: hike all 35 Catskill Mountain peaks over 3500 feet in elevation. I’ve got one down, 34 to go.

Today I hiked Westkill Mountain, joining an organized small group because this was my first mountain hiking in winter conditions. It was wet on the lower elevations, snowy with some ice up higher.

The sun wasn’t out . . .but the view still inspired.

Hiking is one of those savoring activities for me. I’ve been trying to embrace the concept of savoring after taking a course called “The Scient of Well-Being.” I believe in science, and I want well-being.

I’ve savored the art of shaving, I’ve savored my wind chimes, I’ve even savored my raspberry bushes.

Today I savored hiking. It fits me well. Like writing a novel, it’s goal-oriented and involves a routine: putting one foot in front of the other, over and over and over again until you’ve reached your destination. I also like trails that might offer a crumb of excitement: the ledge you have to climb over, the steep and rooty descent, the 20-degree temperatures, the possibility of getting lost.

You could hear the falling —the water and the snow.

The Westkill trail was well-marked and easy to follow (no potential for excitement due to getting lost), a 6.5 mile trek up and back. My boots held back the water. My microspikes helped my footing on the initial icy descent from the top. There were only a few tricky spots where you absolutely had to focus, which I did, even though the writer’s mind likes to wander elsewhere.

I spent a lot of time the night before trying to decide how to layer, what to wear, what extra to pack. I pretty much nailed it, never getting too cold or too hot, carrying exactly what I needed.

Hiking in winter conditions can be serene. Today, the snow fell only lightly, the wind behaved like a breeze in the tops of the pines, the company was pleasant. I was lucky. And I savored it.

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I’ve Been Writing This Novel Seemingly Forever

FLIGHT RISK: After surviving a plane crash but wandering off into a trauma-induced fugue state, a previously reliable husband, father, and successful businessman attempts to put his life back together while enduring the stigma of his psychological collapse.   

It’s unsettling to be working on a novel I thought I’d finished writing several years ago. It was called A SERIOUS LAPSE back then. My agent had thought it complete. She submitted to editors. Some kind words in return, but no publishers bought. Disappointed and angry, I shelved the novel.

I moved on and wrote a dystopian novel of the most commercial variety I could imagine, THE CULLING. My agent wanted nothing to do with it. Neither did anyone else, except me. Yet the novel gripped my heart, of course—it was one of my children.

So I moved on once again and wrote another novel, THIS GAME WE PLAY, and my entire inner circle mostly loved it. Agent is also excited. But the publishing market is in a state of shock, and my agent won’t be submitting the novel to publishers until after the new year.

Meanwhile, and all along, I have been unable to get A SERIOUS LAPSE out of my mind. I’ve begun working on it yet again. I’ve renamed it to FLIGHT RISK. I’m spending a lot of writing time reimagining the story, the characters, the central questions, the narrative arc and subplots and pacing and structure and scene arrangement and meaning.

On a novel that was supposedly already finished.

This brings up two thoughts:

A SERIOUS LAPSE was nowhere near as good as I pretended it to be or thought it was, because look at all the work I’ve continued putting into it. I knew all along that something wasn’t right about the novel and I’m trying to make it right now, which I may or may not be able to do.

Both of these statements are true. What’s also true is that I’ve been working on this novel forever. My first notes on the novel date back to 2013. My first draft was complete in 2015. It was submitted to publishers in 2017.

All I can say is: A writer gonna write what the muse demands to be written. Even if that means dozens of rewrites, episodes of self-doubt, occasional periods of confidence, and unwavering determination.

The first chapter is mostly the same across versions. After that, new directions abound.

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A New Game I Want to Play

It’s the day after Thanksgiving and I need to get moving so I head out on my bike because my legs are too tired and toes too achy for running today. I ride as far as the town park and pass by the tennis courts where I play during the summer.

The courts are full of pickleball players. I stop and watch.

I’ve never played, but I pick up most of the tactics and rules watching the four players on the court in front of me. It’s a game of quick-reactions and volleying, a less mobile version of tennis, a more athletic ping pong.

I playing both tennis and ping pong, so I think I would like pickleball, but I’ll never like the name pickleball. It’s off-putting, as if it were a goofy game. I can see it’s not. These guys are skilled, quick with their paddles, some rallies long and intense.

I might not be as good as I think I might be, but I’d be decent and I wish I had the chance to find out.

There’s one guy that has to rotate in on one of the courts, because their group has five players. He sees me standing around and I ask him what the rule is on a let serve. This leads to another question about the line drawn near the net, which I learn denotes an area called the kitchen sink, which has some entry rules associated with it.

He says his group used to play at the Y and now they come here to play outside during the pandemic. I remember once seeing pickleball at the Y a few years ago and random players just showed up and took turns playing.

“Is that how you do it here?” I ask.

“No, we come here together. We’re a group.”

“It looks like a lot of fun. I’d love to play sometime. I’d have to get a paddle first.” Ping pong paddles I’ve got. Tennis rackets I’ve got.

 “I recommend you find a group to play with. We’re all friends. If you showed up we wouldn’t let you play with us.”

“No, of course not.”

“Half of the fun of it is we just rib on each other and talk trash,” he says.

“Hey, what are friends for,” I say.

Someday I’ll play. It would be a good game for me. I still love tennis best, but some days, before or during or after playing tennis on hard courts, it’s the shoulder, or the knee, or the back. Or all three. Pickleball I could handle. If I get a chance to play.

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Giving Thanks Should Be a Daily Duty For Me

Taking a run at Five Rivers and thankful for it.

I don’t think about what I’m thankful for often enough.

Instead, I tend to get caught up in the negative, I dwell in the dark rooms: things gone wrong, failures, mishaps, misfortunes.

It’s hard for me to admit this, and nothing to be proud of. I have to fight against the shadows and remind myself to experience gratitude.

I have family and friends who love me and I love in return. That alone makes me a lucky man.

I have good health, a stable home. I have time to explore my desires and passions. I have beauty all around me. Some of my dreams have come true.

For this day I give thanks to all the positive forces and influences and people in my life.  I hope I have the good sense to feel the same way tomorrow.

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It’s Time to Play Keep or Cull

I have left the era of acquiring and now entered the age of dispersing.

There are 14 bookcases in my house, most of them stuffed. The kids each have a bookcase in their rooms. Harriet has one for all her cookbooks. The rest are mostly mine. Our two feature bookcases, on either side of the fireplace, I’m trimming out and painting.

It’s time to do something about the all books. The time of the culling has begun.

After Trump was elected in 2016, I was inspired to write a dystopian novel called THE CULLING.

But culling books is not the same as culling humans through a simple lottery. I’m finding it complicated. What books are worth saving – and which ones do I let go?

I don’t know how many books I have. Hundreds. Like most writers, I’ve always collected books. I like having them around. I reference some, reread others. I like when people come in my house see bookcases full of books.

But it’s time to let some go. I have to develop criteria, like I did to make judgments and selections for The Most Important Novels in My Life and My List of Must-See Movies.

Books to Keep:



Any book that influenced me as a writer, or any author who has (So many).Any small or large collection of books by an author I admire (Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, Lorrie Moore, Ernest Hemingway).Any book by an author I admire, whether I’ve read it or not (Women, Charles Bukowski).Any book I haven’t read yet but might/should someday (The House of Seven Gables, Anna Karenina).Any book I believe is important but have no hope of reading (War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy).



Books to Cull:



Any book that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone under any circumstances (Night Train, Martin Amis).Books I’ll never read and don’t care about.Books I’ve read but feel indifferent about (Most will come from this category).

I’ll probably have to make a couple of passes through the collection, then I’ll have to figure out how to arrange the survivors back on my shelves.

The post It’s Time to Play Keep or Cull appeared first on by David Klein.

LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND — Rumaan Alam

I eagerly awaited my opportunity to read LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND, by Rumaan Alam, a novel that has received a lot of attention and hype this season.

I have mixed feelings.

First, what I really liked.

Some of the writing is stellar, the novel moves briskly along, and it clocks in at a trim, bloat-free 241 pages.

The premise itself is powerful and promising: a white Brooklyn family heads out to the tip of Long Island for a week’s vacation at a remote Airbnb rental house. A day after their arrival, the owners of the house—a wealthy and older Black couple—show up, having fled their own Manhattan apartment following an unexplained blackout in the city. Guess who’s coming to dinner, except who has claim to the house?

This premise comes with a lot of thematic and storytelling possibilities: racial tension, a reverse wealth gap, the cause of the blackout. The author doesn’t fully commit to any of them.

I was uneasy at the beginning, when the white characters—parents Clay (professor) and Amanda (advertising exec), and young teenage children Archie and Rose—are described rather than developed. They come right from central casting.

Immediately I thought: Is this how Black authors see white characters? Is this some kind of karma for how legions of white authors have stereotyped their Black characters?

But then when the owners, George and Ruth Washington show up, it’s clear they don’t have much in way of character depth about them, either. George got wealthy doing something in finance; Ruth’s raison d’etre seems to be that she’s a mother and a grandmother.

The scene of Ruth and George showing up at night and ringing the doorbell, which elicits racist suspicions on the part of Amanda and Clay, is both believable and not believable. Who are these Black people? Are they going to cut our throats? But the Washingtons are older, well-dressed, well-mannered, driving an $80,000 car. Home invaders? Hardly.

And yet, Clay and Amanda react badly. In fact, they never react well or honorably to anything, which becomes apparent as the novel continues and the blackout turns out to be more of a near-apocalyptic event that is never completely defined.

My main issue with the novel is that Clay and Amanda are almost embarrassing, while Ruth and George are uninteresting. What keeps the momentum going are the kids, who seem more real than the adults, and the unnamed disaster, which manifests itself through downed communications networks (no cell service, no WiFi, but the lights are still on at the house), followed by several loud noises, and then strange animal behaviors, and a constant reminder from the omniscient narrator that something bad happened.

I found the omniscient narrator a good choice when it came to the unfolding of the horrible event, but a failure when it came to the characters. A closer point-of-view would have helped us know the characters better, and the constant shifts of perspective, even paragraph to paragraph, were disorienting. Whose mind are we in now?

Another disappointment is that the narrator seems to have little empathy toward his characters. The choices made in terms of character thought, action, and dialog are not generous. It’s not only that I didn’t like the characters enough, they weren’t complex or interesting enough. They weren’t cared for enough by the author. The themes of wealth disparity and racial tensions died on the vine in the face of disaster.

Still, I recommend the book. It’s ambitious in many ways and worth reading. I’d love to hear what other people think.

The post LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND — Rumaan Alam appeared first on by David Klein.

It Gets Inside You

I haven’t tested positive for COVID yet, but it’s gotten inside me in other insidious little ways.

Here’s a first-time occurrence for me:

I’m at my desk novel writing, deep in a chapter. I pause. Part of the work of storytelling is asking questions: Is this authentic? Could this happen? Is this behavior believable? These questions came to mind and I’m suddenly wondering whether my characters should be more socially distanced, or wearing a mask. I wonder should I even include the cocktail gathering scene at a friend’s house.

But my novel has nothing to do with COVID. There’s no global pandemic or masks or even awareness there could be any such thing. Not once does a character in this novel think or say anything about out-of-control viruses.

This book was well underway long before COVID struck.

Yet there I am asking these questions about my writing. It’s another way COVID can get inside. So many impacts from this pandemic, both large and small, visible and hidden, tragic and trivial.

Worry not, dear readers. It was a momentary lapse. I’m tempted not in the least to start writing a “pandemic” book.

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A PALE VIEW OF THE HILLS–Kazuo Ishiguro

Delicate, elegiac, mysterious, haunting. If those words describe the kind of novel you like, A PALE VIEW OF THE HILLS is for you. It’s on my list of The Most Important Novels in My Life, which I’ve been revisiting during the coronavirus pandemic, and a recent rereading of Ishiguro’s first novel reminds me that it belongs.

I first came to this novel in 1993, while I was working on a novel of my own, and Ishiguro’s writing, and in particular, his confused and unreliable narrator, Etsuko, influenced me.

The novel opens with Etsuko, who moved years ago from the ruins of post-WWII Nagasaki to England, receiving a visit from her daughter, Niki, who lives with friends in London. There was another daughter, Keiko, from Etsuko’s first marriage in Japan. Keiko was troubled, never fit in properly in England, and eventually hung herself.

The narrative consists of Etsuko’s memories of her life in Nagasaki, framed by the present-day visit of her daughter.

In Nagasaki, Etsuko is pregnant with Keiko. She strikes up a friendship with Sachiko, a somewhat older woman who has a difficult daughter, Mariko, and much of the novel consists of unreliable memories about Sachiko, who claims an American man is going to take her to the U.S.

The mystery, the haunting, comes from Etsuko confusing memories of her friend’s daughter and her own daughter, from repeated references to hanging and even the appearance several times of a coil of rope. It comes from the uneasiness Niki feels while visiting her mother—perhaps it’s the ghost of her half-sister, or her mother’s unspoken disapproval of her daughter’s lifestyle. We never know what became of Etsuko’s first husband, Jiro, and whether the American man who was going to take Sachiko out of Japan, was actually the man who takes Etsuko.

The novel is less than 200 pages, but it’s no page-turner. It moves slowly and with a delicate, understated narrative formality the way all Ishiguro novels do. It was his first novel, and Ishiguro has gone on to write much bigger and more important books (REMAINS OF THE DAY, NEVER LET ME GO), but I could see back then, and still see now, the Nobel-prize winner in waiting.

5/5 Stars

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