With david levithan dutton books

Peter Van Houten, Novelist Emeritus
.
I didn’t read it until I got home, situated in my own huge and empty bed with no chance of
medical interruption. It took me forever to decode Van Houten’s sloped, scratchy script.
Dear Mr. Waters, 
I am in receipt of your electronic mail dated the 14th of April and duly impressed by the 
Shakespearean complexity of your tragedy. Everyone in this tale has a rock-solid 
hamartia
: hers, that she is so sick; yours, that you are so well. Were she better or you 
sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to cross, 
and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius note, “The fault, dear
Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.” Easy enough to say when you’re a Ro
man 
nobleman (or Shakespeare!), but there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars. 
While we’re on the topic of old Will’s insufficiencies, your writing about young
Hazel reminds me of the Bard’s Fifty
-
fifth sonnet, which of course begins, “Not m
arble, 
nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme; / But you shall 
shine more bright in these contents / Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.”
(Off topic, but: What a slut time is. She screws everybody.) It’s a fi
ne poem but a 
deceitful one: We do indeed remember Shakespeare’s powerful rhyme, but what do we
remember about the person it commemorates? Nothing. We’re pretty sure he was male;;
everything else is guesswork. Shakespeare told us precious little of the man whom he 
entombed in his linguistic sarcophagus. (Witness also that when we talk about literature, 
we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.) You do 
not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect. 
(Full disclosure: I am not the first to make this observation. cf, the MacLeish poem “Not
Marble, Nor the Gilded Monuments,” which contains the heroic line “I shall say you will
die and none will remember you.”)
I digress, but here’s the rub: The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of
memory. The living, thank heaven, retain the ability to surprise and to disappoint. Your 
Hazel is alive, Waters, and you mustn’t impose your will upon another’s decisio
n, 
particularly a decision arrived at thoughtfully. She wishes to spare you pain, and you 
should let her. You may not find young Hazel’s logic persuasive, but I have trod through
this vale of tears longer than you, and from where I’m sitting, she’s not the
lunatic.
Yours truly, 

---

Peter Van Houten 
It was really written by him. I licked my finger and dabbed the paper and the ink bled a little, 
so I knew it was really real.
“Mom,” I said. I did not say it loudly, but I didn’t have to. She was always waitin
g. She 
peeked her head around the door. 
“You okay, sweetie?”
“Can we call Dr. Maria and ask if international travel would kill me?”