Authors And Acolytes

. Exploring the enduring appeal of the written word.

Novelist Nicholson Baker narrowly beat me to the punch with his 1991 account of his obsession with writer John Updike '54, U and I. It was the book which I had planned to write. Baker, an effective chronicler of life's minutiae, paid homage to the novelist whose rendering of America's interior life is yet unmatched.

Updike seems to be the quarry of choice for young hunter/writers. We're obsessed with him, his prolific output, his sterling prose, his house in Ipswich, his psoriasis.

The intensely obsessive feelings which some authors inspire in their readers can be transmuted into unnatural, often aberrant behavior. This may occasionally take the from of, say, unearthing every piece of the author's juvenilia.

There's a particularly revealing moment in the otherwise pedestrian movie Shadowlands, where a young fan, on meeting the author C.S. Lewis, whispers in hushed awe, "Are you him?" The youngster found his idol to be suitably impressive.

Tragically, this is not always the case. Some authors fail to impress in person. Others perform satisfactorily in this respect. The scrumptious Ethan Canin, for example, unfailingly attracts hordes of female fans to readings-a small fact which does not escape his publisher.

It's been a gloriously heady month for those of us who love books. The literary offerings from essayists and raconteurs like Martin Amis and Roger Rosenblatt have been particularly exciting. They've written the kinds of books which entice readers into area bookstores, from which they emerge days later, simultaneously exhilarated and spent.

In spite of competing forms of entertainment, people continue to read and, most importantly, to want to write. The aspiring writer faces a number of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The most daunting, of course, is securing a publisher.

In Visiting Mrs. Nabokov, Martin Amis notes that as a student at Oxford, he "sometimes wished that E.B. White would call by, in a chauffeur-driven limousine, to offer me a job on the New Yorker. It never happened. But it happened to Updike."

Similar contemporary fantasies abound, although Mike Ovitz does tend to replace E.B. White in these confections.

Yet, in every garret somewhere, young writers languish, pursuing the muse. It's a funny business, writing. Some of us write best while languidly recovering from the excesses of the weekend, secure in the knowledge that with the rented dog returned, epiphanies will be abundant.

Committed, if misguided, young writers can spend days crafting a single lapidary phrase, convinced that on a good day their prose is Joycean, on a bad day Hemingwayesque.

The enterprise of writing is a perilous one. How does one avoid Naomi Wolf-type indulgent autobiographical references while infusing one's work with poignant yet transcendent moments?

Here at Harvard we're lucky. Widener's intoxicating stacks provide inspiration for those who cannot ignore writing's siren call.

Almost 15 years ago, Updike, writing in the New Yorker (when it was the New Yorker), observed that a book was "a demonstration of the the mind's play and a reexcitation of our joy in the word." He was, of course, right.

The destination of all writers is ultimately the same: revelation. I think I'll make a detour in Ipswich.

Lorraine A. Lezama's column appears on alternate Tuesdays.