Paul died last Friday. He was a brilliant author of inventive, funny, beautiful books. He was always willing to share so much wisdom and curiosity and humor. As I’m sure he did for so many—his students, his friends, his readers—he expanded my understanding of what fiction could do, what a book could be. There is still a feeling of unreality to the loss.
In the days since his death, no small comfort has come from seeing other people’s tributes to him pop up online, to feel my understanding of him expand through the kaleidoscope of those who knew him better and differently than I did. “He was as generous and witty with his prose as he was with his friends,” wrote Gary Shteyngart. “My family spent most of the pandemic with him and his wife Sarah Stern and every time their car rumbled up the driveway we found ourselves happy and transformed. He taught me how to grill, fill my tires with air, and hopefully be a better friend.” Andrew Sean Greer described meeting him “at Paraffin House, just a bunch of arty roommates in the mission in San Francisco in the 90s. I will always think of him that way, jovial and witty and kind.” His longtime editor Ed Park, who had worked with him since 2000, wrote that “it was all such fun, no drama, pure pleasure.” McSweeney’s, one of Paul’s publishers, called him “one of the most gentle and genuine of colleagues, and we miss him dearly.” The individual stars become a constellation. As my writing professor at Bard and a friend and mentor in the years following, Paul opened a gate into the world of fiction I don’t think I’d have had access to without him. I owe my college internship at McSweeney’s to him, as well as three published short stories whose editors he connected me with; the germ of my novel began at a reading I went to with him. For some, Paul was a daily presence, one of their closest confidantes. For others, he was a favorite book and a brief interaction in a signing line. What huge things, all.
This week I spent some time going through emails I’ve exchanged with him over the years. Certain details seem to stand for something: realizing, for example, that the last time I saw him was one year, nearly to the day, before he died. Or that the very first instance of his name in my inbox is from June 2010, an overdue notice from the San Francisco Library for his debut novel, The Artist of the Missing. I had checked it out in advance of taking his writing workshop that fall, during which, on Tuesdays from 4:40 til 7, Paul treated the eight young people in our class with seriousness, as though we really were writers. The last instance is my own email to my publisher on January 3, noting the small typo in Paul’s name in the acknowledgments of my book. I had hoped that this might be corrected before the advance copies were printed, as I’d planned to send him one directly when I received my set next month.
Over the course of my final year at college, Paul was my Senior Project advisor on a collection of short stories. Many of my emails from that time are filled with faintly embarrassing pleading for help getting “unstuck” in the writing I was working on and his are, I was entirely unsurprised to find, magnanimous thoughts on ways forward. Some of his suggestions are granular and specific to the problem story at hand, others more universally applicable.
I can't imagine that it's easy to write short fiction when you're reading Nabokov all the time -- the temptation to try to write like Nabokov would be irresistible.
I don't want to be the Creative Writing angel on one shoulder, scolding the Critical Writing angel who sits on your other shoulder; it's more that I think you should be aware of how much you are taking on, & in consequence the possibility that you won't always advance with equal speed on all fronts, and that this is OK.
And my enduring favorite: Go to a movie…nothing says, ‘writer at work’ like going to a movie in the afternoon.
It is a strange impulse, maybe, to dwell in short digital communications when I have such rich memories—meeting for a story discussion in the pizza shop just off campus in 2013, drinking herbal tea at his home with wonderful Sarah and their sweet dog Shandy last year—except that there is a sense of concrete answers in the short notes, a neatness and a permanency. It is tidier to write about them than about the past days’ tears, or about fretting over whether I was as generous to him as he was to me—I wonder if much of the regret one tends to feel in the wake of such a loss is the brain attempting to make a story out of sadness. But it’s also concretely devastating to look at those pages of emails (“1-50 of many”) and know that there will never be a new one.
But his writing, that’s here. What a gift, all his words. You could line up his work and throw a dart and get something good every time. The Facts of Winter, purportedly written in 1904 by a mysterious writer named Paul Poissel and translated from French by our Paul, is “a series of dreams, all dreamed by people in and around Paris during the winter of 1881, which is to say that it is a fictional account of the imaginary lives of people who may or may not be real.” In 2019 he published a brilliant ghost story called “All Included” in the Los Angeles Review of Books. “How did a story become a world?” one of its characters wonders. For The Believer he wrote about the state of the novel, and Dungeons and Dragons, and Idiots!
His most recent book, The Night Ocean, is about a woman searching for her husband; he became fixated on a mystery concerning the writer H.P. Lovecraft and then disappeared. Everyone except her is convinced he is dead. Here she is, floating in the ocean:
Who knows what might be down there? Sympathetic maidens, an endless party, a family that never fell apart. Whole streets under the water, a whole development going on, down there. A better world than the one he’d hitchhiked out of. I want to say that I was tempted to swim down and find it for myself, but not really. I’m too cautious, too hopeful, too bent on living.
The book—which is a poignant and terrifically bizarre Russian doll of a novel; one character describes sex acts with names like “the Cryptic Seal of Ulthar” and “the Ablo Ritual”—has an ending so perfect that when I need a creative lift or an alleviation of loneliness I sometimes take the novel off the shelf just to read its last chapter. After I read it the first time I told Paul how much I loved its final line. “Yes,” he said. “I was proud of that one.”
Luminous Airplanes, a wonderfully digressive book about cults, the hunt for underwater worlds, the invention of human flight, and coming of age in San Francisco’s dot com boom, came out in 2011. “What does a world leave behind when it goes?” the narrator asks at one point and, at another, “Was I accomplishing anything by revisiting the past? Wasn’t my problem that I lived too much in the past already?”
Paul created a digital “hyperromance” to live alongside the novel. It goes on and on, a not-quite-endless rabbit hole where references spawn references, each with its own contained narrative, some of which span dozens of pages. In An Interview with the Author of Luminous Airplanes, By Paul La Farge, “The Author” describes the project, saying:
I don’t expect anyone to finish Luminous Airplanes. At least, not in the sense that they will read the whole thing. Some persistent readers may get to the end—there is an end, and you can reach it, but that’s not the same thing as reading all of it.
What a beautiful remembrance of your teacher and friend. I wish I'd known him. I haven't read his books yet but your descriptions of them make me want to stop work early and zip down to the bookstore.