The perfect novel

Of my last nine dispatches, eight have had something to do with books. It's been way too much, and if I ever post on books again, I likely won't do so for months. So now is as good a time as any to define the perfect novel. Start with the following passage:

Once, while playing with my two-year-old, I pretended to drop a chair on my left foot, and then jumped around on my right one, holding my left one, "Ow! Ow! Ow!" One ow! for every jump. He thought it was one of the funniest things he had ever seen. And every parent knows that a child's laugh is one of the world's most precious resources.

This way he came to frequently stomp on my feet, hoping for the ridiculous scene at the end, dad bouncing on one foot, cluching the other, "Ouch! Ewch! Yeetch! Ow! Ouch!" I should have never opened this box, because it isn't easy to close.

My feet hurt anyway from too much running in old shoes. Last night he stomped on both of my bare feet, and then took a frozen corn on the cob and hurled it at the my toes, which are already black. My reaction wasn't even affected this time, and here is my son, doubled over from laughing at me.

It's too specific to be invented. The reader will intuit that some or most of this is taken from actual events. Maybe the boy is the narrator's nephew, maybe the original chair was actually a piano stool, maybe his sport is racketball, not distance running, and maybe the frozen corn on the cob was actually a geometry textbook. Maybe the writer simply heard this story at work, or maybe it came from a dream. But while certain details may be impeachable, the greater truth that they underscore is not: this box, once open, is not easy to close. Children know no temperance. Parents both adore this and combat this in their children. It is the great paradox of child rearing.

This is what is missing from modern fiction, and this is why I have largely abandoned it. Modern writers are too enamored with their research (Dan Brown, Michael Crichton), their intellect (Don Delillo, Thomas Pynchon), their experiment (Mark Z. Danielewski, Samuel Beckett), or their bottom line (and you know who I mean). It is the discovery of truth, not of fact, that causes us to turn the page. It is an excess of research, of intellect, of experiment, or of marketability that causes us to put a book down.