Out & About
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The New York Public Library’s spring literary luncheon, held Wednesday in the Celeste Bartos Forum, was a visual feast. The tables popped with bright green napkins and exquisite arrangements of flowers, big and wild bundles of hydrangeas, peonies, roses. Even the food seemed more about color than taste: Eleven Madison Park served very green sweet pea soup and very orange arctic char, while the chocolate dessert was burnished with gold.
Guests seemed to plan their attire to match the decor. They sported bold jewelry, check and floral prints, elegant white and cream suits, and lots of orange and green, too.
Judged on looks alone, the event was a most bubbly and joyous affair.
The substance of the event added some interesting dimensions. Three luminaries in contemporary fiction, Gish Jen, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Gary Shteyngart, spoke about their craft.
Ms. Jen, a Harvard graduate, whose first novel, “Typical American,” was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was the circumspect one. Asked when she knows a novel is finished, she said: “Novels have a length they want to be written at.” Asked about her current project, she said: “I’m growing grass. I’m in the very early part of the process – trying to see what I really have to say.”
Mr. Shteyngart was dark and funny, true to his Russian roots: Born in Leningrad, he emigrated to America at age 7.
“The sad thing is, less and less people are reading, and more and more people are writing,” Mr. Shteyngart said. He is the author of “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook,” which won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award.
Indeed, he sees people reading in only two places, New York and Leningrad.
“On the subway, it’s so beautiful to see people read,” he said. “I was just in Los Angeles, and there, you see people arm-wrestling and wrapping spitballs.”
Of his own work, Mr. Shteyngart said no matter how he starts a story, “a terrible ending comes of it.”
So what terrible ending can we expect next? “I’m finishing a novel called ‘Absurdistan.’ It’s about a very fat man who destroys a very small country,” he said.
Ms. Lahiri, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her first book of short stories, “Interpreter of Maladies,” was the intimate panelist. She shared her experience of writing during pregnancy.
In the first trimester of her pregnancy with her daughter, she didn’t accomplish much. “I would go to my studio, put my head down, and sleep,” she said.
In the middle trimester, when she was feeling much better physically, she nearly finished her book.
The final weeks of her pregnancy posed a new challenge. She decided the book might be better if written in the past tense instead of the present, so she went through the manuscript and changed every verb.
It was “an easy mechanical task that kept me at my desk and in the world of the book,” Ms. Lahiri said.
After the birth of her daughter, though, she reread the manuscript and decided the original present tense was right for the story. So again, she went through the manuscript and changed every verb.
The experience taught her that “sometimes you have to do that menial work” – a valuable lesson for both writing and motherhood.
“I think the whole experience of pregnancy is profound. It’s a metaphor for writing,” Ms. Lahiri said. “Everything I write, it’s like raising a child. You’re not sure what will come out on the other end, but there’s always something wonderful there to greet you.”
The chairmen of the luncheon were library trustees Joan Hardy Clark and Calvin Trillin.