The Destiny Thief by Richard Russo

Author:Richard Russo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-05-08T04:00:00+00:00

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That art should be so elusive is deeply mysterious. In many respects it seems so straightforward. What art demands of us has remained constant down through the centuries—that we slow down, observe, contemplate, court quiet, practice stillness, live as if we have all the time in the world, knowing full well that we don’t. To my glove-cutting grandfather, time was something you spent, not saved. It was a necessary investment, whether you could afford it or not. Yes, joining a guild saved time by allowing him to learn from professionals, but once his apprenticeship was complete, saving additional time meant cutting corners, which no true craftsman can abide. In retrospect, what I find most fascinating is how often his artistic impulses were at odds with his political convictions. He’d fought in two world wars in defense of democracy, something he believed in to the marrow of his bones. He had no great affection for money or power, especially used unwisely or against the defenseless, which was why he spent much of his life opposing the shop owners, who always had things pretty much their own way. In the end, though, they weren’t the ones who did him in. Technology did that. Once the clicker-cutting machines came in, there was little need for a man with his skills, his craft. Maybe that’s a more significant difference between craft and art. The former is linked to economics more intrinsically than the latter, which makes craft more vulnerable to disruptive technology. Craft isn’t necessarily superficial but is often about surfaces, the feel and texture of a cowhide, the arrangement of teeth in a human mouth. Art goes deeper and lives deeper, perhaps protected by the surface it lies beneath. Anyway, my grandfather made his choice. He sided with the men who worked those machines by helping them to unionize, and thus became complicit in his own demise.

If art values stillness, quiet and contemplation, commerce has always been about speed (efficiency) and noise (advertising). Commerce, abhorring stillness, demands more or less constant motion. In the glove shops where my grandfather worked, going fast seemed like a good idea because going slower clearly wasn’t. Many of today’s self-published writers seem to feel this same technology-driven need for speed, which might be why they spend so much online time sharing secrets for greater productivity. One writer of historical thrillers realized that he was wasting valuable time by actually visiting the places where his books were set when most of the information he sought was already waiting there on his computer. “Three books a year is a job,” one indie blogger recently sneered, “one every three years is a hobby.” By such a metric Donna Tartt—The Secret History and The Goldfinch each took her ten years to write—is the laziest of writers. In that same time frame most indie authors would have written thirty e-books, and readers could have purchased all of them for the price of The Goldfinch in hardcover. For many indies, traditional publishing isn’t just too exclusive and undemocratic, it’s too damn slow.

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