TIMOTHY BRANDOFF

Cornelius Sky

Age: Sixty. Residence: New York City. Book: Cornelius Sky (Kaylie Jones Books, August 2019), a novel about a doorman at a posh Manhattan apartment building who wanders the city streets in search of life’s higher meaning while confronting unlikely angels as well as dark memories of a troubled childhood. Agent: None. Editor:

Johnny Temple.

IN 2013 I received a phone call from a stranger in another state. Her name was Laurie Loewenstein. Laurie, a wonderful writer and editor, let me know that based on the first hundred pages of the manuscript, Cornelius Sky was a runner-up for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. (Out of, as I recall, a satanic 666 applicants.) At a time in the process when I felt lost and disheartened, this news delivered a miraculous shot of encouragement. The kindest thing I could wish for any fellow writer is to have Laurie Loewenstein in their corner.

I hesitate to say it, lest it come off as a cloying appeal to the gods of quality, but the book took twelve years to write and publish. I started it when I was forty-eight. If my numbers are correct, that makes me sixty.

When, as a younger person, I expressed reluctance about spending an entire four years attending college, my then girlfriend said, “Well, those years are going to pass either way.” I thought she was a genius. And when they asked him how he felt about turning forty, David Mamet said it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

I wrote plays in the 1980s and screenplays in the ’90s while prose fiction sat on a pedestal marked “Real Writing.” I thought you had to know everything there was to know in order to write a novel. All that flora, all that fauna—thankfully, in my case, this was a seriously mistaken notion.

Believing that my take on the world was valid certainly helped. In a voice of my own I could write without explanation or apology. No need to illuminate the entire cosmos. I was taught to shine a flashlight’s small beam into a tight corner of experience and trust its chances to connect. Truth recognizes truth when it reads it.

Jennifer Egan said—I paraphrase—that you have to keep working on a book long after the sheen of excitement has tarnished. Time passed. I kept writing. I circled back to Laurie with a new draft of the full manuscript. She and others read it and offered suggestions for further revisions. They brought it to Kaylie Jones Books, an imprint of Akashic Books. Kaylie read it and said she would like to publish it. To Kaylie I said something like “Thank you.” To myself I said something like “OMFG.”

Johnny Temple, founder of Akashic Books, edited the manuscript, hammering out the awkward elbows of my prose. He did his best to protect me from a style that can sometimes become infatuated with itself. No one had ever paid such close attention to a manuscript of mine. Talk about validation.

I shopped and queried for an agent. No luck. For me I think it’s best not to assign great cachet to representation. Better I get the pages as good as I can, and if I’m meant to have an agent, I’ll have one when I need one.

I’m sixty, but it doesn’t matter. The book took twelve years, but it doesn’t matter. There is no correlation between those numbers and the work’s resonance. Not so long ago I read Anna Karenina. It felt like it was written that afternoon. Same with To the Lighthouse. Such compelling immediacy, such nowness. Human consciousness, captured on the page, seems to live outside time. Knowing the author’s age during the period of composition and/ or how long the book took might be an interesting aside, amounting to no more than academic gossip.

Richard Ford told his students not to give him anything to read that wasn’t important. Because he didn’t want to read anything unimportant. Are there advantages to writing as an older person? Can a visceral understanding of one’s mortality provide inspiration generally unavailable to the young? Probably not, but at this stage it’s a lovely thought.