Read Great House for Free Online

if I did. Furthermore, after the story was published, I stopped thinking about the mother and her children who had burned to death in a car, as if by writing about them I had made them disappear.
    I continued to write. I wrote another novel at the desk of Daniel Varsky, and another after that, largely based on my father who had died the year before. It was a novel I could not have written while he was alive. Had he been able to read it, I have little doubt that he would have felt betrayed. Toward the end of his life he lost control of his body and was abandoned by his dignity, something he remained painfully aware of until his final days. In the novel I chronicled these humiliations in vivid detail, even the time he defecated in his pants and I had to clean him, an incident he found so shameful that for many days afterwards he was unable to look me in the eye, and which, it goes without saying, he would have pleaded with me, if he could have brought himself to mention it, never to repeat to anyone. But I did not stop at these torturous, intimate scenes, scenes which, could my father momentarily suspend his sense of shame, he might have acknowledged as reflecting less on him than the universal plight of growing old and facing one’s death—I did not stop there, but instead took his illness and suffering, with all of its pungent detail, and finally even his death, as an opportunity to write about his life, and more specifically about his failings, as both a person and a father, failings whose precise and abundant detail could be ascribed to him alone. I paraded his faults and my misgivings, the high drama of my young life with him, thinly disguised (mostly by exaggeration) across the pages of the book. I gave unforgiving descriptions of his crimes as I saw them, and then I forgave him. And yet even if in the end itwas all for the sake of hard-won compassion, even if the final notes of the book were of triumphant love and grief at the loss of him, in the weeks and months leading up to its publication a sickening feeling sometimes took hold of me and dumped its blackness before moving on. In the publicity interviews I gave, I emphasized that the book was fiction and professed my frustration with journalists and readers alike who insisted on reading novels as the autobiographies of their authors, as if there were no such thing as the writer’s imagination, as if the writer’s work lay only in dutiful chronicling and not fierce invention. I championed the writer’s freedom—to create, to alter and amend, to collapse and expand, to ascribe meaning, to design, to perform, to affect, to choose a life, to experiment, and on and on—and quoted Henry James on the “immense increase” of that freedom, a “revelation,” as he calls it, that anyone who has made a serious artistic attempt cannot help but become conscious of. Yes, with the novel based on my father if not flying then at least migrating off the shelves in bookstores across the country, I celebrated the writer’s unparalleled freedom, freedom from responsibility to anything and anyone but her own instincts and vision. Perhaps I did not exactly say but certainly implied that the writer served a higher calling, what one calls only in art and religion a vocation, and cannot worry too much about the feelings of those whose lives she borrows from.
    Yes, I believed—perhaps even still believe—that the writer should not be cramped by the possible consequences of her work. She has no duty to earthly accuracy or verisimilitude. She is not an accountant; nor is she required to be something as ridiculous and misguided as a moral compass. In her work the writer is free of laws. But in her life, Your Honor, she is not free.
    Â 
    S OME MONTHS after the novel about my father was published, I was out walking and passed a bookstore near Washington Square Park.Out of habit, I slowed as I reached the window to see whether my book was on