Alumni Novelist Mark Powell
Chases the Monster

There’s a scene in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff: several washed-up test pilots sit around a bar discussing where a certain monster or demon of speed resides. Somewhere around Mach one, says an old timer. One point two, maybe. One point five, it must be. But the plane keeps flying, faster, faster. Rather than disavow this demon as speeds creep forward, the men merely shift the barrier. One point seven, is it? Maybe two flat. But it’s out there, waiting, lurking. Belief in the monster is total, and I don’t doubt its existence. I don’t doubt it because writing is like that. You finish something, you feel that envelope stretched a little further, but it’s hollow—where’s the monster? He was supposed to be here by now, right? You never find Him.

Don DeLillo said that somewhere in the middle of writing your second book you realize that you can do this, you can write something. The novel, he claims, is democracy at its best because anyone, any lucky sit-down-and-pound-it-out-the-Muse-has-struck everyman (or woman) can write a single book. The second book is the clincher. And that is where I now find myself. I wrote my first novel, Prodigals, because I lacked the sense to know what I was doing. I wrote the first draft over three weeks in December of 1997, straight out of college and boiling over with a story in my head. It felt like an exorcism: a lifetime of family stories, legends, old bumbling ghosts I kept tripping over. I was sweeping my head clean. Over the next two and a half years I rewrote it seven times, and in June of last year it was published by the University of Tennessee. When I think of it now, something wrenches inside me. Despite the wonderful guidance of my professors at USC—wonderful, generous, sincere guidance, there is no other way to put it—it feels like a shell of what I intended.

The exorcism didn’t take.

Now I’m nearing the end of what for the past four years I’ve called my “big book.” And the end is even in sight: God willing, it will be finished by September 26 of this year, the day I turn twenty-seven. At one point the manuscript was over 1,200 pages (in those days it was my stupid, ridiculously big book), but I’ve pared it now to less than half that. Last week I printed a draft and began reading, feeling elated, the heft of it in my hands, the sight of its sheer bulk there on the kitchen table. Then I felt it falling apart, all the work, all the effort, and it was what—a shell of what I intended? I keep writing, working, thinking about it most when I least want to which is all the time. But isn’t it beautiful in its corporeality? its physical presence? Remember Beckett: I can’t go on, I’ll go on. I see a copy of Prodigals on the shelf behind me and it makes me a little sad. But at least I know He’s still out there somewhere, waiting, lurking.

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Department of English

College of Liberal Arts

University of South Carolina

Copyright 2003. The University of South Carolina Department of English.