Lawrence Block - Step by Step

Then the book was published, whereupon it promptly vanished without a trace. No one knew what to make of it, and the line on the cover — “A New Novel for a New Age” — couldn’t have helped a whole lot. Nor did the cover art, which made the thing look like science fiction. Reviews tended to be negative, to the extent that the book got reviewed at all. Few copies found their way onto bookstore shelves, and fewer still found their way off those shelves.

A year or so after its hardcover publication, Random Walk had a second life in paperback — and that didn’t work, either. This time the cover managed to make the book look like some epic novel of the westward migration. Somehow prospective purchasers managed to find it within themselves to pick up something else instead.

It’s tempting to blame the publishers, and God knows I did at the time, but I don’t know that anyone could have made Random Walk work commercially. The experience of writing it had been extraordinary, and I was happy enough with the way the book had turned out, and if its destiny was to vanish without a trace, well, I wasn’t a twenty-two-year-old with a first book. I had written a lot of books, and many of them had vanished without a trace, and so what?

Well, not entirely without a trace.

One way or another, some copies must have found their way into readers’ hands. And over the years I heard from some of those readers.

“You know,” someone would say at a book signing, “I’ve read just about everything you’ve written, the light books and the dark ones, and I’ve pretty much liked all of them, but there was one book of yours I picked up a while back that I couldn’t make head or tail out of, and I can’t figure out what you were getting at or why you wrote it in the first place, and—”

And I’d know right away he was talking about Random Walk .

Or I might hear something along these lines: “I’ve read all your books, and I like them all, but there was one book of yours that I’ve read seventeen times, and I swear it changed the way I look at the world, and my life just hasn’t been the same since, and every year I read it again and get something else out of it, and—”

Random Walk.

The book went out of print quickly enough, and sometime in the mid-1990’s I was given the opportunity to make it available again through iUniverse, the print-on-demand publisher. They brought it out in trade paperback format, and for a while they had a relationship with Barnes & Noble that got the book on the store’s shelves. And it remains in print, and every six months or so I get a four-figure royalty check. Two of the four figures are after the decimal point, but at least the book is out there, and every once in a while somebody buys a copy.

One of these days I probably ought to persuade HarperCollins to publish the book, in mass-market or trade format, to give it a chance to find its audience. But when the thought occurs to me, I find myself thinking of an incident in Tom Robbins’s fine first novel, Another Roadside Attraction .

One of the book’s characters is upset over the fact that the life span of the butterfly is so short. So she goes into a trance to meditate on the phenomenon, and emerges therefrom with the insight that the life span of the butterfly is precisely as it ought to be, neither too long nor too short.

And so I wonder if one might not make a similar observation about Random Walk . Perhaps I don’t need to take any action so that the book might find its audience. Perhaps it has already found — and continues to find — as much of an audience as it deserves or requires. An audience that is neither too large nor too small, but precisely as it ought to be.

Random Walk didn’t have much impact on the world of American letters. And, notwithstanding the occasional hyperbole of the occasional fan, I don’t know that it changed many lives.

But it did change mine.

It was in the weeks immediately after my return from Virginia that Lynne and I realized our Florida experiment was a failure. Fort Myers Beach was a nice enough place, and the people we met were decent folks, but it just wasn’t where we belonged. We’d come, we now realized, because our life in New York had been an exhausting one; Lynne was running a demanding bookkeeping and accounting practice, I was writing books and a magazine column, and together we were flying around the country on weekends, putting on writing seminars. We were tired out, and one weekend back in 1985 we visited my aunt and uncle in Pompano Beach, Florida, and were struck by how much more relaxed their life was than ours.

Well, no kidding. My Uncle Hi was essentially retired, working maybe fifteen hours a week. My Aunt Mim was playing a lot of golf. We looked around and decided Florida was the answer, and the next thing you knew we were living there. But not in Pompano Beach. We picked the west coast, because we’d heard it was quieter there.

Right.

Two years later, we were pretty sure we didn’t want to stay. But where else would we go? Back to New York?

Maybe. But maybe not. We weren’t really ready to make that decision yet.

But suppose we were to close the Fort Myers Beach house and hit the road. Suppose we tried life without a fixed address, just breezing along with the breeze. It was a fantasy we’d both had for some years, and it looked as though we were now in a position to give it a whirl.

We set about packing things up, giving some of them away and putting the rest in storage. We planned our departure for early in 1988, but still didn’t know where we’d be heading. And I picked up that road atlas, and remembered the hours I’d spent with it in Virginia.

One thing I’d noted at the time was the great profusion of towns and villages named Buffalo. Growing up in that city, I’d been aware that it was not the only Buffalo in the nation. There was one in Wyoming, I knew, and it seemed to me there was one in Texas, and perhaps there were others.

While writing Random Walk, I learned that there were far more Buffalos than I’d ever suspected. The atlas’s index yielded quite a few, but I was soon to find out that there were far more places on the state maps than found their way into the index — and my list of Buffalos began to grow, including of course such permutations of the name as Buffalo Grove and Buffalo Gap and — eureka! — New Buffalo.

I reported all this to Lynne. “There’s something like twenty of these Buffalos,” I said, “and they’re mostly in the western part of the country, but there’s a batch in Pennsylvania and Virginia, and one in Alabama. What I was thinking, see, was when we’re driving around, with no place we absolutely have to get to, well, maybe just for the hell of it we could go to some of these Buffalos.”

“What a remarkably indulgent wife you have,” I’ve been told repeatedly. “To put up with your madness, and chase around the country after towns named Buffalo.”

It is, I suppose, a natural reaction for people to have. And mine is, to be sure, a remarkably indulgent wife in any number of respects. So I nod and smile and let it go.

But here, for the record, is my remarkably indulgent wife’s response to my tentative suggestion that we might, just might, try visiting some of those dots on the map:

“ I think,” Lynne announced, standing up very straight, and speaking in a tone that brooked no argument, “we should go to all of them.”

Well, we certainly tried.

In the months before we left Florida, I spent some time at the library, where I happened upon what I took to calling an industrial-strength atlas. Consequently, by the time we hit the road, our list of Buffalos had grown from around twenty to just over forty.