William Conescu. Being Written. New York: Harper, 2008. E-book.

A few years ago a fellow Advanced Placement Test reader told me about this book. I finally had a chance to check it out. Being Written is metafiction or magical realism in the vein of Tim O’Brien, only there is no war. Instead of an army patrol, this concerns a group of oversexed millennials navigating their relationships. Though perhaps not as moving as The Art of Fielding, Being Written is clever in one respect. The main character, Daniel, tells us that he is a character in a book that someone else is writing. Whenever something is about to happen to him, he hears the scratching of a pencil on paper.

Daniel is trying to win the love of Delia, a girl whom he meets in a bar and has a one-night stand with. We begin to see that Daniel may be something of loser, but it appears that Delia’s current live-in boyfriend may be more of a loser. That young man earns a living as a homosexual prostitute. As with The Art of Fielding, I could not help thinking of Tim Buckley’s song that says:

Godless and sexless directionless loons…

Exactly two-thirds of the way through the story (67% on my Kindle) a very surprising turn of events takes place. There are no spoilers here, but maybe a hint. Daniel suddenly shouts out, “Chekhov!” He paraphrases the Russian playwright: “If a gun shows up in the first act, it has to go off by the end of the story.” (1865)

Most of the story is told from Daniel’s point of view with occasional chapters from others’: Delia; Graham, her boyfriend; Monty, a co-worker of Daniel and family friend of Delia; and Jon, the token gay. Daniel is worried that he will be a minor character in the book, maybe like J. Alfred Prufrock:

No! I am no Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt an easy tool…

No, he does not become a mere minor character, though one could argue he is a superficial character. They all are.

To really understand the book, I recommend that the reader consider a true minor character in this story, one who does appear to merely swell a scene—the Broadway lady. She is a mentally disturbed lady who sings Broadway tunes in the subway station that Daniel frequents .

Alas, like many of the novels I have read coming from the author’s generation, there are some explicit and even degrading sex scenes. For that reason, this book is not for everyone.