Rafael Yglesias - The Work Is Innocent

He escaped by joining his mother in her room where she was writing out cards for the presents. He told her about Louise’s behavior, frustrated at his inability to stop her without a fight.

“That’s the way people are, Richard,” she said. “They never get it out of their heads if you tell them something about yourself.”

“My God, I wrote a whole novel full of feelings that I no longer have and everybody assumes I’ve still got them. There are people who seriously ask me if I ever see my parents. It’s bad enough they assume everything in it is true of me, but at least they could realize I’m bound to change in five years.”

“Well,” she smiled. “They won’t.”

“Sorry, huh? I just gotta take it.”

“It has its advantages, doesn’t it? Don’t let that bother you. So Louise has made up some crazy story in her brain about you and your father. She’s a good friend of yours. She means you no harm.”

“She thinks Leo is under constant attack in this family. You know that, don’t you?”

“Well, she loves him.”

“It drives me crazy. She protects us all. That hopeless neurotic protecting us! There, you see. She makes me talk like her. How do I know she’s neurotic?”

“Who isn’t?” Betty laughed, delighted with the thought. “Don’t let it bother you. It doesn’t affect your father, you realize that?”

“No. That’s why it bothers me. I’m unhappy that Dad and I had so much trouble about school.”

“You were right about school. He doesn’t bear you any ill will for that. He’s very proud of you.”

Richard was pleased to hear her say so, but embarrassed by the intensity of the satisfaction. “Anyway, it bothers me. I’ve been able to straighten things out with Dad and she won’t, the world won’t, realize it.”

“That’s what you get for being such a wise guy and publishing a novel.”

Betty got him to laugh and relax about it so that when he rejoined the group downstairs he could tell himself that he’d let Louise retain her fantasy world in which Richard was harassed by his father, overprotected by his mother, all of them burdened with guilt and repressed anger. He wasn’t upset by the faces she made at Aaron’s admiration of John’s work while they had their huge meal. He knew she was thinking of what she had once told him: that his parents had hit Leo over the head with John’s hard work while they thought of Leo as a bum. He would have fought her so hard in the past. But he would have been forgiven for vehemence as an adolescent. He had the innate power of an adult now and must practice nuclear restraint.

He watched as they sat about the table, feeling the strength and independence that Joan’s presence gave him, and listened to the secret thoughts that he knew ran like the currents of a stream beneath the quiet surface of their conversation—like a brook babbling now, but it used to have the deafening roar of the ocean’s surf.

He felt absolutely different. He watched all night while they played charades, the house busy with their laughter and inventiveness. He studied them one by one while they performed. Their faults and virtues popped up in his mind’s eye like sums on a cash register.

He thought his own pantomime was apt, his silence about their faults, and his own, the saving device that life gives. He sat with Joan while she laughed at their antics, at the masks they put on, and decided to believe in those mock faces along with her.

This was life’s sadness—standing mute before the people one loves. He had lost his awe of them but he was freed of its bewilderment. Naomi was not Tolstoy, a forbidding hypocritical philosopher who had to be either overthrown or obeyed without question. Beckett’s beautiful understanding of silence, her paranoid hatred of New York, her naïveté about the corruption and decadence of American life didn’t have to be believed or fought. It was absurd that he had been unable to see her plainly without feeling guilt over his discoveries. It was possible to love her only by accepting those things without contempt, without terror at losing a prophet.

He had lived in a wax museum of heroes. Leo playing Fidel to his Raul, Naomi’s Don Juan to his Castaneda, John’s cool masculine instincts to his Jewish schleppiness. He had blamed them for their melting under the steady, dull heat of reality. He couldn’t face what was weak and ridiculous in people.

But he had had to face it in himself.

Rafael Yglesias (b. 1954) is a master American storyteller whose career began with the publication of his first novel at seventeen. Through four decades of writing, Yglesias has produced numerous highly acclaimed novels and screenplays, and his fiction is distinguished by its clear-eyed realism and keen insight into human behavior. His books range in style and scope from novels of ideas, psychological thrillers, and biting satires, to self-portraits and portraits of New York society.

Yglesias was born and raised in Washington Heights, a working-class neighborhood in northern Manhattan. Both his parents were writers. His father, Jose, was the son of Cuban and Spanish parents and wrote articles for the New Yorker , the New York Times , and the Daily Worker , as well as novels. His mother, Helen, was the daughter of Yiddish-speaking Russian and Polish immigrants and worked as literary editor of the Nation . Rafael was educated mainly at public schools, but the Yglesiases did send him to the prestigious Horace Mann School for three years. Inspired by his parents’ burgeoning literary careers, Rafael left school in the tenth grade in order to finish his first book. The largely autobiographical Hide Fox, and All After (1972) is the story of a bright young student who drops out of private school against his parents’ wishes to pursue his artistic ambitions.

Many of Yglesias’s subsequent novels would also draw heavily from his own life experiences. Yglesias wrote The Work Is Innocent (1976), a novel that candidly examines the pressures of youthful literary success, in his early twenties. Hot Properties (1986) follows the up-and-down fortunes of young literary upstarts drawn to New York’s entertainment and media worlds. In 1977, Yglesias married artist Margaret Joskow and the couple had two sons: Matthew, now a renowned political pundit and blogger, and Nicholas, a science-fiction writer. Yglesias’s experiences as a parent in Manhattan would help shape Only Children (1988), a novel about wealthy and ambitious new parents in the city. Margaret would later battle cancer, which she died from in 2004. Yglesias chronicled their relationship in the loving, honest, and unsparing A Happy Marriage (2009).

After marrying Joskow, Ylgesias took nearly a decade away from writing novels to dedicate himself to family life. During this break from book-writing, Yglesias began producing screenplays. He would eventually have great success adapting his novel Fearless (1992), a story of trauma and recovery, into a critically acclaimed motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Rosie Perez. Other notable screenplays and adaptations include From Hell , Les Misérables , and Death and the Maiden . He has collaborated with such directors as Roman Polanski and the Hughes brothers.

A lifelong New Yorker, Yglesias’s eye for city life—ambition, privilege, class struggle, and the clash of cultures—informs much of his work. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts are often primary characters in Yglesias’s narratives, and titles such as The Murderer Next Door (1991) and Dr. Neruda’s Cure for Evil (1998) draw heavily on the intellectual traditions of psychology.