Terminating The Ghosts

Yesterday, I finished my novel. The manuscript needs a great deal of editing, in my opinion, and some rewriting. But the bulk of the work is done.

My advice to aspiring novelists: Don't.

When my father's final book, a biography of the abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko, was published, my father wrote an essay that appeared in the New York Times Book Review. Of all the things my father wrote, this is my favorite, because it is the most personal. Entitled "Terminating Mark Rothko: Biography Is Mourning in Reverse," it's a first-person essay about my father, his father, how the death of my paternal grandfather affected my father, how sometimes writing a biography is like an attempted resurrection, and what it's like to live one's life haunted by the looming specter of one's dead father.

Suffice to say, it's a story with which I am familiar.

At the time of my father's death, a year and a half later, he had shifted gears professionally from his originally trajectory. For several decades, he was an English professor at UC Berkeley, but when he died, he had become chairman of the art practice department there. In the wake of his death -- from a heart attack, like his father before him, who had died while taking the Flatbush Avenue IRT to work one day -- the department created a memorial art installation. A series of rooms were painted what everyone called a Rothko blue. There was a small room with a desk and a chair and my father's book on the desk. On the walls, there were essays my father had written, blown up large, so one could read them. One was the "Terminating" essay, and I kept that oversized copy of it. After I finished my novel, I got the essay out again, because there was a line in it that I wanted to revisit, or remember, or something to that effect.

In the essay, my father equates the act of writing with a failed resurrection, "as if a biographer were a paramedic administering decade after decade of CPR to a patient he refuses to admit he has lost." Near the end, he recalls finishing the book: "As I neared completion of 'Mark Rothko: A Biography,' I imagined typing the last sentence at 2 o'clock in the morning, stepping out of my study into my backyard, and rolling around ecstatically on the grass under the apple tree. Instead, I dispatched the manuscript to my publisher, and I felt nothing."

I'm not yet ready to dispatch my own manuscript to my agent, but that's about how it felt to finish my novel. Ultimately, I didn't feel much of anything. In the apartment next door, someone was playing the drums. The late afternoon sun was seeping through the curtains. I could hear a child playing outside on the sidewalk, and a car drove by at a high rate of speed, and then there was nothing but silence.