Since I began this blog sometime in May, I have been working on a new novel—well, I am always at work on a new novel, but I thought it was high time I mentioned this particular one—called Spuyten Duyvil. The title is taken from a place just north of Manhattan, a part of Riverdale named after the Spuyten Duyvil Creek, the creek running from the Hudson to the Harlem River. In the early days of Manhattan, before the creek was altered to facilitate boat passage, its strong currents made crossing difficult. Hence the Dutch settlers called it Spuyten Duyvil which means —depending on your source—“spinning devil” or “to spite the devil.” The novel is so-called because my narrator has just moved—retreated—from Manhattan to Spuyten Duyvil.

As usual, the particular challenges of this new novel make it feel as if I have never written a novel before; in a sense that is true, as every novel poses its own unique set of challenges. One of the adventures of this novel is that it is the first time I am using a first person narrator. I have written first person stories before, but never a first person novel. I have long been aware of the hidden difficulties of writing in the first person and have several times taught a course called “First Person Narratives” in which I’ve spent a considerable amount of time warning students of these landmines!

The other more immediately pressing challenge is that I have created, in the first twenty to thirty pages, a huge inventory (I credit Ron Carlson for that oh-so-useful terminology), meaning there are many elements that might be expanded, and some are already competing for supremacy. How will they weave together? What is the spine that unites them? Which of them will fall by the wayside?

There is no way of rushing to the answers to these questions which still, over a hundred pages into the book, remain unanswered. The answers reveal themselves slowly, over days, weeks, months. I must trust my unconscious to serve me, suspend judgment, forestall the urge to draw facile conclusions. In short, I must dwell in the state Keats called negative capability.

“I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Keats

It is a difficult place to reside and yet, it is the condition under which we all live—not only writers, all of us. We never know for certain what life might deliver, a disturbing fact certainly, but also the very thing that makes life interesting.

As I struggle with the uncertainty of this novel’s destination, I try—in my best moments—to revel in the mystery, the discoveries along the way, the slow emergence of a narrative that coheres without falsely resolving things. Much of the time it is akin to swimming Spuyten Duyvil Creek.