.

" Ridiculous. No one becomes a writer at sixty."

The former graduate student and literary scholar cleared his throat and begged to differ with me. There were no rules when it came to writing, he said. Take a close look at the lives of poets and novelists, and what you wound up with was unalloyed chaos, an infinite jumble of exceptions. That was because writing was a disease, Tom continued, what you might call an infection or influenza of the spirit, and therefore it could strike anyone  at any time. The young and the old, the strong and the weak, the drunk and the sober, the sane and the insane. Scan the roster of the giants and semi-giants, and you would discover writers who embraced every sexual proclivity, every political bent, and every human attribute - from the lofties idealism to the most insidious corruption. They were criminals and lawyers, spies and cotors, soldiers and spinsters, travelers and shut-ins. If no one could be excluded, what prevented an almost sixty-year-old-ex-life insurance agent from joining their ranks? What law declared that Nathan Glass had not been infected by the disease?

I shrugged.

"Joyce wrote three novels," Tom said. "Balzac wrote ninety. Does it make a difference to us now?"

"Not to me," I said.

"Kafka wrote his first story in one night. Stendhal wrote The Charterhouse of Parma in forty-nine days. Melville wrote Moby-Dick in sixteen months. Flaubert spent five years on Madame Bovary. Musil worked for eighteen years on The Man Without Qualities and died before before he could finish. Do we care abot any of that now?"

The question didn't seem to call for a response.

"Milton was blind. Cervantes had one arm. Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death in a barroom brawl before he was thirty. Apparently, the knife went straight through his eye. What are we supposed to think of that?"

"I don't know, Tom. You tell me."

"Nothing. A big fat nothing."

"I tend to agree with you."

Extract from The Brooklyn Follies, Paul Auster