Sooner or Later, Their Feet Can’t Touch the Bottom

My novels begin inside private lives, but they do not stay private. My characters keep moving until the world reveals itself through them. When they are free to become fully themselves, they show us the world we had not yet learned how to see.

I do not use characters to carry ideas. I give them the freedom to discover the world.

I allow my characters to wander beyond the bounds where literary fiction often asks them to stop. I give them no rules except the ones that come from who they are—their instincts, their curiosity, their refusal to accept the definitions the world has given them. They are exceptional people because they keep going into deep water, past certainty, past guardrails, past the rules that once seemed to govern their lives. They keep going until their feet can no longer touch the bottom.

Julian Weissman in FERADIM keeps going until a scholarly search becomes a confrontation with the origins of civilization. Isabel Markson in The Narcissism of the Sacred is afraid of courage. Then she finds a manuscript that is fearless to the core and follows it until she discovers that her own powerful family helped bury it.

Whitman Kessler in 001-054 keeps going until the literary world can no longer contain the person he knows himself to be. In Lord Atlas, Carson McCready keeps going until normality is no longer sustainable, because truth, responsibility, and the people he loves leave him no other choice.

Suzanne Dreyfus writes a satire for the man she loves and watches him turn it into a political religion. Then she watches him destroy love for the sake of ideology until she has no choice but to destroy him.

These are exceptional people because they reach beyond the normal, the conventional. They wade into deep water. And once their feet can’t touch the bottom, the serendipity of story takes over.

In Lord Atlas, each of the central characters reaches deep water by a different path.

Suzanne gets there through love. She writes a satire for Garrick because she loves him. He takes the language she created in intimacy and turns it into a political religion. Suzanne watches the man she loves choose ideology over love, power over human connection, until the thing she gave him becomes a weapon of domination. She hands that betrayal to the one man she knows who could destroy Garrick: Carson McCready. Suzanne becomes more fully herself through love and its opposite, revenge

Carson gets there through responsibility. He wants very little from history. He has already given it enough. He wants his son, his dog, a woman he loves, meaningful work, an ordinary life after years of war. But responsibility keeps finding him. His son calls from Flagstaff because he can no longer tell the difference between a man who has lived courage and a man who performs it. Carson gets on a plane to Flagstaff. Later, when Garrick’s revolution takes everything from him, Carson does not retreat from the world. He goes deeper into the murkiest parts of civilization until there is no turning back. Carson becomes more fully Carson through responsibility and its opposite, lawlessness.

Laura gets there through wonder. She is a scientist. She understands what light does at the horizon. She has waited nearly her whole life to see the Green Flash and knows perfectly well that physics can explain it. Then she finally sees it, standing in the Nevada desert with Carson, and explanation is no longer enough. She walks into the sage and cries because for one instant she sees love painted across the sky. Laura becomes more fully herself through wonder, and then through transcendence.

Garrick gets there by surrendering himself to an idea. Suzanne gives him a satire, and he turns it into a creed. He uses it to justify everything he already wants: power, purity, freedom without obligation. Love becomes weakness. Other people become obstacles or tools. The idea becomes his reason for being. Garrick gives himself to freedom, and finally, to its opposite: domination.

I do not know in advance what my characters will become when they reach that point. I know who they are. I know the circumstances they have entered. Then I let them choose, the consequences be damned.

Those consequences may include my own legibility as a novelist in the literary world. I only know that I am willing to do what my characters do: wade into the deep water until my feet can no longer touch the bottom.

Lord Atlas is not alone.

Julian Weissman in FERADIM is driven by an instinct for justice. He learned early, through the antisemitism he experienced as a child, how easily people hand their power to authority. As a clinician, he saw the same surrender in another form: people accepting symbols of love for love itself, giving themselves over to whatever promised safety, belonging, or salvation. As a historian, he follows that instinct to the first century and finds the DNA of narcissistic power stamped into the very origins of western civilization.

In The Narcissism of the Sacred, Isabel Markson is afraid of being fearless, yet she is strangely attracted to her own fear. She has built a successful, comfortable life around that fear, teaching and thinking about power from a place that still protects her from its deepest consequences. Then she finds a strange manuscript about a carpenter named Galen that is fearless to the core. She is seduced by her own fear and follows the origins of the manuscript until her feet finally lose the bottom, when she discovers that her powerful family made Galen and his dangerous ideas disappear.

Whitman Kessler in 001-054 has spent his life resisting the identities other people try to hand him. He is a mixed-race Black man with a Jewish name, a tennis player, a novelist, a man whose imagination refuses to stay inside the categories prepared for him. The literary world keeps trying to tell him what kind of writer he is and what his work means. Whitman keeps going. He writes the book only he could write, then keeps going beyond the approval of the people who want to define it. By the end, even the prize that bears his name is too small. He leaves that world behind and drives to the Oregon coast, where the rocks offshore become an audience of a thousand years.

Jerry Falade, a Black debut novelist, saw a reported $2 million publishing deal collapse over suspicions that he had used AI to write his novel—an allegation he denied. [1]

That is the crazy part. You no longer know exactly where the character will go because you have stopped protecting the story from its own consequences. And sometimes, as the Falade story showed me, that unpredictable path through fiction ends up uncannily close to the world outside it. We say truth is stranger than fiction because fiction is usually expected to obey rules that don't exist in the real world. Set fiction free of those rules, and it can begin to look like reality in living color.

The Falade story frightened me because Whitman had already found his way into that world. I had not predicted anything. I had allowed a character to keep going until he revealed something about the world that was already there.

Maybe this is part of the immense power of the novel. Fiction can sometimes see reality before reality has made itself fully legible to us. A character can wander into forces that already exist but have not yet announced themselves clearly in public life.

I find that frightening, or perhaps exhilarating, because I never know where a character will lead me. I give them the freedom to discover the world for themselves, and sometimes they show me a world I sensed we were living in but had yet to see clearly.

At its highest level, literary fiction has often done exactly that: it makes the world legible before ordinary language, institutions, or public consensus can quite name what is happening.

They do this through character and situation. The character is placed inside pressures that already exist. Then the novelist allows those pressures to run farther than ordinary life or ordinary discourse usually permits. The novel becomes a laboratory for reality, except the experiment is on the human being, not an idea of a human being.

I also wonder if a significant strain of contemporary literary fiction tends to stop short of the deep water where the character can no longer touch the bottom. Interior life, family history, identity can produce compelling stories. But if the character is repeatedly brought back to the private self, then one of the novel’s oldest powers gets diminished.

The great novel has often been dangerous precisely because the private person cannot stay private. Raskolnikov commits a murder and suddenly we are inside morality, God, and the human capacity to justify anything. Josef K. wakes up under arrest and we see power through a single bewildered man.

The fiction I care about does not merely represent a reality we already recognize. It sends a human being into that reality far enough that we discover what was there before we know how to see it. And then, almost miraculously, we see it, and we say to ourselves, it was there all along, why didn't I see it?

The novelists I admire peer into reality and make visible what we did not yet realize was there. That feels like the way Laura longs to see the Green Flash emerge from the Pacific Ocean, but could never see it, no matter how hard she tried. It feels like the way she finally sees a painted sky in the outback of the American West, falls to her knees, and cries. Because, finally, she sees love.