The Westland Petrel is a rare pelagic bird that nests in burrows in the rain forests on the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island. They are fairly large birds, the color of old earth. On land the petrels are hopelessly clumsy, but they find their grace when they take to the air, gliding over the surface of the water. They will stay at sea for months or even years, ranging as far as Australia and South America, returning to land only to breed. And when they do, they return always to the same small stretch of forest in New Zealand.

I learned about the Westland Petrel when my wife and I were traveling the South Island late in the Austral summer, having recently decided that we were not long for New Zealand. We wanted soon to make our way back to Denver, the city we both consider home. Before we left, we intended to see as much of the country as possible.

A friend of mine bought a plot of land not far from the Westland Petrel Reserve nearly twenty years ago. In the intervening decades he has done his own share of wandering, to Colorado and to Wyoming, to Spain and Norway and South America, and this little patch of land has been one of the few constants in his life. When my wife and I were staying with him, he led us one evening through thick bush over tracks we never would have found on our own to an isolated stretch of beach overlooking the Tasman Sea. The raging waves had worn away the limestone to reveal a series of shallow caves and tunnels. We came to one patch where the rock provided enough shelter for the vegetation to carve out some kind of precarious life. The algae gave way to lichen gave way to moss and eventually to shrubs and trees. My friend called our attention to what he told us was his favorite tree, a Nikau palm that had toppled over several years earlier. Its shallow roots were exposed, perpendicular to the ground. At its base and for about fifteen or twenty feet, the tree looked like it had succumbed to the elements, resting horizontal like a fallen log, draped with a patchwork quilt of moss.

But it still got enough sun and rainwater to thrive, and not long after it had fallen it started growing up again, snaking between the trees surrounding it, breaking toward the sky. When my friend showed it to us, it was alive and hale, flowering. It looked now like it was working its way back around toward its roots.  “Some day,” my friend said, standing by the elbow where the tree had begun its recovery, “I like to think it will come full circle.”

In the summer of 2001, my Bachelor’s degree still had the shine of the new and my first novel was nearly half written. I was living in my childhood bedroom while I looked for the sort of fulfilling, high-paying job I figured my college education entitled me to. Holding onto my modest savings didn’t seem like a priority, since I’d be earning serious money in no time.

After several months of fruitless searching, I abandoned my dreams of wealth to take a job that paid only a symbolic fraction of a dollar more than minimum wage at the independent Denver book shop where I had recently purchased a copy of An Underachiever’s Diary, the first novel by Benjamin Anastas. It was a slim little book with a white cover, and I really remember little more of it now than the minimalist cover design, and maybe something about cults. I did enjoy it, thought it was funny and smart and cool, but slight. I liked it at least enough to pick up the Advance Reading Copy of the author’s follow-up, The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor’s Disappearance, when I saw it in the staff break room early the next year.

I made a point in those days of keeping up on the new fiction. Even as I was sure I would not be a bookseller for much longer, it seemed important to know what was being published, and who was publishing it. I read the authors who were being talked about—Leif Enger and Richard Russo and Jonathan Franzen—and maybe their failure to make much of an impression on me was part of what kept the fires of my ambitions stoked. The what I considered mediocrity of those books made the whole notion of getting published seem less abstract, not just possible, but inevitable.

Anastas’s FNPD was something else. I won’t say that I admired Anastas more than every other author I was reading, but I suspect that he was the one I most emulated. His second novel exceeded the promise of Diary, with all of that book’s wit, but with a greater sense of purpose, a confidence and an emotional core that the debut novel lacked.

When I write about those books now, I’m writing more about the impression they left on me. I’ve long since forgotten the details, but the impression lasted for years. After I left Denver I worked at a shop in Missoula that traded in used and remaindered books, and I hand-sold as many copies of The FNPD as I could there, without giving much thought to what it might mean that so many copies were available to us at such a reduced rate. I didn’t, for example, consider that I might have been part of a very, very, very small sliver of the literary world who thought Anastas had lived up to the hype that surrounded his first novel.

Even as I noticed that I was no longer seeing his name, I held Anastas in my head as a model: Make your reputation with a respectable independent press, get an agent, and land a deal with the likes of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. From there, everything’s easy. Quit your job, write full-time. Maybe move to Europe.

Instead, I went on collecting rejection letters for my own first novel, and I would go on collecting them for the next several years, until I finally accepted the possibility that maybe it just wasn’t very good. I stopped trying to fix up the manuscript. I admitted defeat. I was never going to be as successful as Benjamin Anastas.

*

Ten years after the publication of The FNPD I finally discovered what success, for Anastas, entailed. His memoir Too Good To Be True was published last year by Amazon’s smokescreen publishing imprint New Harvest. For a writer who admired Anastas so keenly in his younger days, the book reads almost as a cautionary tale.

FSG was disappointed with the poor sales of The FNPD, and they opted against publishing the next novel Anastas sent them. “That was quick,” he recalls saying to his agent. “Being an author, I mean… It didn’t last very long. You know, We don’t publish books, we publish authors.” That sentiment, which had so attracted him to FSG when the publisher was engaged in a bidding war over the rights to The FNPD, would ring hollow when they rejected his follow-up, as every other major U.S. publisher did.

Over the course of a brisk 176 pages in Too Good To Be True, Anastas recounts the ugly story not only of his literary failures, but of a broken marriage, of infidelity, and of debt so crippling that he is compelled to scrounge loose change to pay for groceries to feed his son.

As admirable as his reluctance to cast himself as a victim might be, the book could probably use more of the righteous anger that colors his description of his bank’s brutal shakedowns, “the price the broke pay for playing the zero line,” which seems nobler somehow than the discussions of his ex-wife and her new husband, where the complaints feel petty and too personal.

It’s those personal moments that stuck with me after I closed the book. For all the times I might have asked myself over the years “Whatever happened to Benjamin Anastas?” he’s got a story that could fill hours of barstool commiseration. Often, the writing feels well-served by the baring of his soul, as when Anastas describes going to the Frankfurt book fair and “discovering just how insignificant [he] was as a writer, just one name on the spine among the untold thousands, in a hundred languages, only dimly recalled by a handful of people…” But occasionally it can all start to feel tedious. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the decision to include transcripts of the e-mail exchanges with his girlfriend in the early stages of their relationship. It’s not that they’re too racy, or too cnadid, but that they’re so numbingly banal. They seem to illustrate no greater point than that even great writers are prone to fits of cuteness.

Anastas shows himself as too canny to be oblivious to the kind of demystification such writing leads to. Early in the book, he talks about going to graduate school in Iowa, “sitting in workshops led by writers I’d admired on the page before I considered that they might be real people who used urinals and didn’t know how to drive a manual.” Of course, in the years since Anastas was in graduate school, the line separating the personal from the private has been virtually obliterated by Facebook. Writers are expected to maintain blogs and Twitter accounts, to connect with readers beyond the page.

What it all leads to is a culture that thrives on confessionals, on intimacy or at least the illusion of intimacy. But while you might get a better idea of the kind of person an author is if you’re, say, standing next to him at a urinal trading drunken banter than if you’re reading his novel, the former experience is probably less likely to move you.

*

I appreciated the chance to read Anastas again after so many years, and to find his writing as funny and crisp and wise as I remember it being. His candor provided a good check on my visions of fantastic success. I still find myself hoping that maybe my next novel will do better than the last. Maybe the royalty checks will get bigger. Maybe I’ll get a proper advance. But Anastas warns against the temptation to think that any of that is bound to make a difference, even if he never does so explicitly. In fact, he goes out of his way to stress how little right he has to offer anything like advice.

“I was through pretending I had it figured out,” he writes. He dismisses the idea that he could stand in front of a room full of college students and teach them anything about writing beyond the “disappointments [he] had known at its hands, the mistakes, the uncertainties, the vanities it engorged, the grievances.” But maybe that’s exactly what he should be teaching. Learning about the disappointments, mistakes, and uncertainties might give students a better idea of what to expect than what typically passes for the teaching of writing, all the railing against cliches, the passing on of trends, the watering down of individual style. To that end, Too Good To Be True might be the best book any student of writing could ask for.

Or are you the sort of person who likes to run around, say, a park, or in place on elaborate gymnastic machines, and find yourself wishing for some way to divert your mind from the tedium?

Or do you find sometimes that you are simply too intoxicated to focus on little printed letters on a page (paper or otherwise)?

Well, have we got a plan for you? (A: Yes, we do.)

Lawrence & Gibson and Maybeparade have teamed up to bring you an unprecedented new medium for literature, recording the author reading his work (out loud) with the very same kind of highly advanced technological equipment you might expect to find in a studio where heretofore only musicians would have dared to tread.

Beginning in 2013, you will be able to listen to The Homeland of Pure Joy.

Check back in the coming days for updates.

This one’s a ticketed event, $10 a pop, or $5 for Book Council members. You can buy at the door, unless you’re a cautious, planning sort, in which case you can reserve your tickets online now.

Here’re the details in orderly list form:

Meow Café | 9 Edward St | Wellington | 4 December 2012 | 6-8pm

Enjoyed a successful launch of the New Zealand edition of The Homeland of Pure Joy last night at Unity Books. Also being released were Easy Whistle Solo, by Richard Meros, and Haiku News Anthology, edited by Dick Whyte and Laurence Stacey.

Big thanks to all who came out, and to those behind the scenes.

THE HOMELAND OF PURE JOY live!

Thanks to everyone involved, and to all the creepers who came out that night to cheer us on.

Expect video of the latter in the coming days.

At the end of the month I will be celebrating the electronic release of The Homeland of Pure Joy, with many remarkable special guests to be announced.

Then in September I will be heading to the Southern Hemisphere to kick off the New Zealand book tour. Details, again, TBA.

On a cold and wet Wellington morning, expatriate actor Parker Flynn sees a ghost from a past life. The vision unleashes a torrent of memories about his tumultuous first love, sending Parker on a hopeless search that threatens to derail his pursuit of happiness. In a misadventure that could prove disastrous or enlightening, he must reconcile his feelings for the people and places of his past with the vivid opportunities of the present.

Purchase in
the United States

Purchase in
New Zealand

But, hey, why stop there? We’ve got the Pacific Northwest leg funded. With a few more thousand dollars, we can take this book all over the country!

If you pledge $1000 on Kickstarter right now, I will fly to whatever city you want me to (within the continental United States and maybe New Zealand).

I will bring with me 20 books, plus a bottle of fine single malt ScotchWhisky, probably Ardbeg Uigeadail, and we will drink whisky and I will read to you and whichever of your friends you choose to invite along.

You can make a fire and we can read in front of the flames.

Or we can have a picnic at the park. I have a strong voice. I can yell over the sounds of playful children and barking dogs.

What are you waiting for? Get your pocketbook! I’ll wait here.

After having just returned from his own trip to Portland, he has finally gotten around to uploading the Narrators show from two months back.

The theme for that evening was “Awkward,” and I delivered from the stage the true[ish] version of an episode readers of The Homeland of Pure Joy might recognize.

You can subscribe to the podcast from the iTunes Store. And why not leave a review for it while you’re there?