Now a prominent figure in Indian politics, Shashi Tharoor was just twenty-one when he sold this story to the New Review. Reminiscent in its comedy of Updike’s Henry Bech stories, it has for a protagonist a writer with a quite different problem to the perennially blocked Bech: Jennings Wilkes can’t stop writing.
This would be fine were it not for the “verisimilitude” of his work: “He never concocted his plots: he found them in the quotidian experiences of living. He never created characters: he borrowed his friends, and occasionally his enemies, and populated his manuscripts with their likenesses.” The result has been his systematic alienation from everyone he has ever known and cared about, as well as the torching of every new relationship he forms; he just cannot help laying bare their lives and weaknesses in print.
It’s a terrific conceit and Tharoor has great fun with it – as do we. The story can also be read more satirically, however: as a critique of those writers like Updike, Bellow and Roth (much of the story takes place on a psychiatrist’s couch) who did so unthinkingly lift straight from life. Tharoor reckons with the ethics of this – and in a prose every bit the equal of those writers’. It’s amazing he was just twenty-one.
First published in the New Review, March 1978. Collected in The New Review Anthology, Heinemann, 1985; also collected in The Five Dollar Smile and Other Stories, Viking, 1990, under the title ‘The Solitude of the Short-Story Writer’
A Personal Anthology 