An aging archsnob clinging to the last shred of society; a rich debutante whose husband loses their fortune; an ugly model pursuing beautiful painters.
And Larry. Oh, Larry. Torn between living the life that's been laid out for him and searching for something he's not sure exists.
If only I could write like that!
I first read The Razor's Edge in college. It wasn't assigned. I remember sprawling on a blanket behind my dorm, strolling through the fictitious cafes of 1930s Paris, smelling the stale champagne, overhearing the artists arguing, following Larry through a coal mine, across a farm, all the way to India.
"I want to make up my mind whether God is or God is not. I want to find out why evil exists," the hero says at the beginning of the book.
I wanted that, too. At least I did then. I wanted to see everything, taste everything, experience everything the world had waiting for me.
But mostly, I wanted to write like Somerset Maugham.
His characters seemed so real - so flawed and perfect - pursuing ultimate knowledge one moment, forgetting to shave the next. They dream, they weep, they surprise and grow. And to think: Maugham made them up!
I wanted to create characters that could help illuminate the human condition. I wanted to tell stories that would resonate around the world. I wanted to write about ideas and issues and show people places they never knew existed.
"Those are the sort of things sophomores get excited about and then when they leave college, they forget about them," Isabel says in the novel. "They have to earn a living."
So did I.
After college, I took a job at a little newspaper in Charlottesville, Va. I covered school board meetings and car crashes and Eagle Scout ceremonies. At night, I told myself, I'd finish writing my great American novel.
Then I got married. Then I got pregnant. Soon I had two dogs and two babies and a house with a leaky roof.
My masterpiece still sits, unfinished, in my nightstand. A decade has sped by since I looked at those yellowed pages. I'd almost forgotten about them, until I reread The Razor's Edge.
This time, when I dove into the book, it didn't seem as deep. The situations felt more forced. The characters seemed more like caricatures.
Then I realized: I no longer want to write a novel.
Why search the depth of your soul to come up with something that might sound authentic when real people, real life, are surging all around you? When all you have to do is look out the window, walk down the street, turn and talk to that person next to you in the grocery line to hear a good story, why bother making them up?
The characters I've covered for the newspaper have been far more forthcoming with their thoughts than the ones floating around in the back of my brain. No matter how hard I tried, I could never create people like the real ones I've interviewed. I couldn't invent a World War II nurse who is now the grand dame of a VFW post; or an old side-show talker who still treks across the country with a fat man and a midget; or a cop who used to babysit the girl next door, then years later arrested her for prostitution.
I couldn't make them up - and I don't have to.
They're all around us.
To find them, all we have to do is get our noses out of old novels.
