What prompts a writer to pause after one brilliant book? What makes him or her escape into silence? Is it the burden of success or fear of failure? Then again, if a second book is indeed written, does it live up to the magic of the first?
It happened with Harper Lee, who didn’t write another novel after the spectacular success of To Kill a Mockingbird , in 1960, till Go Set a Watchman , which was published 55 years later. Watchman was clearly one of the drafts of or a prequel to Mockingbird , masquerading now as a second novel.
This when in one of her last interviews in 1961 before she became a recluse, Lee said she wanted to chronicle “small-town, middle class southern life”. She gave us a peek into what she would be chronicling if she continued to write. Mockingbird , which won the Pulitzer Prize, talks about race, class, justice, relationships and a father’s advice to a child: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
While Lee didn’t pick up the pen again, that is not exactly how Arundhati Roy spent the two decades between her first book — the Booker-winning The God of Small Things — and her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness . She wrote non-fiction, more than half a dozen, choosing to fight on behalf of the ‘Outsider’: the Dalit, the Adivasi, the Muslim, the Kashmiri, the farmer — experiences which tell on her second book of fiction.
Among a host of characters, she writes the story of Anjum, a hijra , “a living creature that is incapable of happiness”, always vulnerable and on the margins; and Tilo, a woman fighter in Kashmir, who will find a home in a graveyard — a “battered” soul watched over by “battered angels”. Ms. Roy concerns herself with the living and the dead of the entire country across its length and breadth, somewhere losing her grip.
This is unlike her début, that beautifully structured story of Rahel-Estha and Ammu-Velutha of the House of Ayemenem.
That brings us to another dazzling first book and its writer, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Published in 1952, it met with instant success. He continued to write, hoping to replicate the success of his début novel. In 1967, a fire at home destroyed his second manuscript.
He rewrote it, and a condensed version, Juneteenth , published after his death in 1999, didn’t quite live up to the powerful words of the first, the prologue of which set the tone: “I am an invisible man... I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me....”
