Fitzgerald’s editor, Max Perkins, always liked The Great Gatsby. But Fitzgerald himself vacillated on the title right up until the book’s publication.
(I’m reading A. Scott Berg’s Max Perkins: Editor of Genius. Hence the recent Fitzgerald posts.)
David Foster Wallace to his editor re working on The Pale King: he said that working on the novel was “like wrestling sheets of balsa wood in a high wind.” (Quoted in a recent TPK review in the New York Review of Books.)
I’m a little afraid to read Wallace’s “unfinished” novel because, well, it’s unfinished, and also because he apparently struggled with the novel’s structure, and I’m currently struggling with the structure of my novel.
I will read it at some point. Just not now.
THINK NOVEL SPLENDID
More random quotes from my five-year-old son Ethan (who won’t be five much longer)…
“Everything you see is real. That’s the science term.”
“You can only joke on Chinese New Year.”
“What the heck is a parsnip?”
“Daddy, every day your mind is going blank.”
“Mommy, you’re freaking me out.”
“Mommy, I’m downloading these dinosaurs so I can bring them to life.”
“I wish I lived in the mailbox.”
“I’m going to make a toilet car when I grow up.”
“The Leapster malfunctioned.”
“What is Elvis talking about?”
“Christopher Columbus was the first person ever born.”
“I told you guys Star Wars was real.”
“I want to kill NPR.”
