Suetonius, the Roman biographer-to-the-stars, tells a story about Julius Caesar's visit to the temple of Hercules in Spain, where there was an enormous statue of Alexander the Great. (If nothing else, the ancients sure knew how to properly idolize someone.) Aged thirty-nine, Caesar was, at the time, the Roman equivalent of a middle manager, a minor government official in an obscure province. True, he'd done pretty well for himself—he was from a good family and had a pretty comfortable personal fortune—but seeing the statue of Alexander sent him into the first-century B.C.E. equivalent of a midlife crisis. Sighing that he had, of yet, accomplished nothing of note, whereas Alexander had conquered the known world by the age of thirty-three, Caesar immediately resigned his post and went to go conquer Gaul.
I know exactly why Julius quit his job and staked everything on a roll of the dice—I feel it too every time I read yet another story about some literary wunderkind making his mark on the world. The infamous New York Times profile of David Amsden, the 23-year-old author of Important Things That Don't Matter, filled me with bile. Worse was Christopher Paolini, the 17-year-old who published a fantasy novel about a guy named Eragon and his dragon sidekick, particularly since I wrote my own J.R.R. Tolkien rip-off at the age of 16. What I was really astounded by, though, was the Salon piece about "Zoe Trope," whose gender-bending high-school memoir Please Don't Kill the Freshman was written when she was 14. And these are only the most recent models to roll off the production line: Anyone remember Dave Eggers, Donna Tartt, or Gore Vidal?
What a drag it is getting old. We admire the prodigy, the precocious child, the young fresh talent, standing half-awed, half contemptuous at their accomplishments. We wonder: Is their talent is a flash in the pan, a brief moment of glory to pull out like wallet-sized pictures of children and grandchildren to enliven an ignoble life spent clerking at Wal-Mart? Will the kid who publishes a book at 18 be like so many adorable child stars who grew up to be ugly, convenience-store robbing adults? Will they forever be identified at weddings and bat mitzvahs as "that kid who published the book" by distant aunts who can't even remember the salient plot points? And, most of all-why is it them and not us who are getting the adulation and huge advances?
I wrote my fantasy novel from the ages of fourteen to sixteen, typing away in our Canarsie, Brooklyn basement on a Commodore 64 that was antique even in the late 1980s. It was no coincidence that the medieval military academy where the story began (shades of Hogwarts!) resembled the public school system where my classmates rejected and taunted me, or that the characters' rather pointless journey through my invented world resembled my own inchoate desire for escape. When it was finished, my parents really wanted to see it published, but we had no idea how. My father is an attorney and my mother a schoolteacher, but we lived in a blue-collar neighborhood of working-class Jews and Italians who adhered to the moral values of the McCarthy era. The breast cancer that finally killed my Aunt Arlene (who worked in young-adult publishing) on my sixteenth birthday, just as I finished the last chapter, also closed the door on my best chance of seeing my work in print. All I was left with were endless stacks of slush-pile rejection letters (not knowing anything of simultaneous submissions, I had sent it to every publisher at once), dot-matrix printouts covered with Aunt Arlene's notes (she had read my manuscript to get herself through her grueling chemo sessions), and mailings from Vantage Press, the vanity publisher on thirty-fourth street in Manhattan (where, ironically, I had my first job in publishing right out of grad school).
If you look at the majority of prodigies, there was someone pushing, some stroke of luck, some benefactor out of a Horatio Alger novel. A copy of Christopher Paolini's self-published and self-promoted first edition of Eragon was discovered by Carl Hiaasen, who passed it on to his editors at Knopf. Joseph Weisberg discovered the chapbook that would become Please Don't Kill the Freshman. Tartt was beloved of her writing teachers Willie Morris and Barry Hannah even before she met Bret Easton Ellis at Bennington College in Vermont in 1982 (where sleeping with your well-connected professors was virtually a graduation requirement). David Amsden, I'm sorry to report, is simply a genius, but in the other hand, those gigs at The New Yorker and New York magazine didn't hurt. (Note to self: if I have kids, be sure to send them to Ivy League schools even if it requires selling one or both kidneys.)
Understanding the mechanisms of precocity has helped to mollify me somewhat, but even more important has been stepping back to look at the reality of what the writing life is really like. The grand thing about being a writer is that, unlike the quickly-fading flowers kissed by the bastard muses of television and movies and pop music, our moment of glory can come at any time, regardless of age, looks, or early onset of male-pattern baldness. We can wear the printed page like a mask. Frank McCourt may have won the Pulitzer Prize in his sixties, but in Angela's Ashes, he'll forever be a young man with a Limerick lilt standing on the deck of a ship sailing into New York Harbor. Hell, there's even a bit of glory in being an old writer, evoking visions of Papa Ernesto sitting on the veranda of his house in Cuba, tap-tap-tapping away on his typewriter while the neighborhood children play about his feet, one of his sinewy hands reaching out now and again to grab at a glass of whiskey or the rump of one of those children's older sisters.
And all things considered, I'd rather be Hemingway.