Thomas Mullen

Tomorrow morning I'm off to Rutgers, the first of three visits in the next three weeks to colleges that assigned The Last Town on Earth to their incoming freshmen as their common summer read. I'm big with 18 year-olds, apparently. No, more accurately: I'm homework with 18 year-olds, which is such a weird thing. Here's hoping they liked the book and didn't feel the way I felt when I had to slog through The Caine Mutiny oh so many summers ago.

Seriously, it is hugely flattering to have the book read so widely--a neighborhood book club is cool enough, but getting a few hundred college students in one fell swoop is unbelievably wonderful. It should be interesting to hear what they thought of the book, what unique perspectives they bring to the table. On the one hand, relatively little time has passed since the book was published, but on the other hand, I wrote the first draft in 2003-2004, when current freshmen were in the seventh grade. They've grown up in a vastly different world than the one I stumbled through in my teen years, whether you're talking technology or global politics.

I am of course expecting to be flooded with nostalgia for my own college years the moment I find myself surrounded by institutional buildings and leafy Quads. I'm one of those rare writers these days who doesn't teach at a college and did not attend grad school, so it's been 13 years since I spent much time on a college campus.

Let's see, what was happening in 1992: Grunge rock, Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Rage Against the Machine, T-shirts worn three sizes too big, flannel flannel flannel, second-hand clothing, my awesome job working at a senior-citizen-run thrift store off-campus. Liberal politics ascendant, a Democrat winning a presidential election for the first time since I was two, and I volunteered during Christmas break for Clinton's inauguration in DC, catching mono soon thereafter and losing about 20 pounds in three weeks. Buying my first CD player, and those obnoxiously large cardboard boxes that music stores sold CDs in as a shop-lifting deterrant (little did we know just how easy to steal music would soon become!). The college film series and violent movies like Menace II Society and Reservoir Dogs by some new guy named Quentin, growing my hair long as Joshua Tree-era Bono, discovering that I didn't like creative writing class or even English classes very much.

Was that really 17 years ago?

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Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, and (please, God, let it be untrue) David Ortiz are merely the most recent baseball players to be outted by the ongoing steroids scandal -- which began, curiously enough, with the publication of a book: former slugger Jose Canseco's expose, Juiced.

Which has me wondering: What if writers doped, too?

Experts now trace the birth of baseball's Steroids Age to roughly 1995-1997, when the sport was suffering from fan disgust after the 1994 players strike. Today's publishing industry is suffering through its own moribund period. Writers have never gone on strike, but readers seem to think we have. Just as the 1998 home run race between the suddenly strapping Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa boosted ratings and attendance, today's writers could use a shot in the arm to save us from reader apathy.

Most outted ballplayers issue denials or claim they accidentally took some silly home remedy that set off the alarms. But a few contrite veterans will admit that they doped, claiming that they needed a competitive edge, sought help recovering from a bum knee, were worried about keeping up with all the young studs coming up from AAA, etc.

What if a few of us scribblers decided steroids would give us a competitive edge? Imagine the benefits! It could help us past the tricky plot hole that's been bedeviling us, help us fend off writers' block (the bum knee of the literary world), help us keep up with the Young Turks and bloggers and MFAs. The mental thesaurus would bulge, the ability to conjure unique imagery would be out-of-the-park, our sentences would remain energetic and youthful. And our literary stamina would be unmatched -- a 500-pager every year!

Granted, the obvious lack of parallel here is that steroids enhance you physically, not mentally. Bulging pecs and biceps are unlikely to help me ward off clunky prose, cliches, or existential crises.

But given the immense pharmacological creativity that goes into the design of new steroids, it shouldn't be too much to ask for some new, specially targeted, mental steroids for writers. Preferably ones that don't have nasty side effects like male breast enlargement and testicular shriveling. Would this be bad? Nonsense! Mental steroids in fact would help writers conquer our addictions to other creative and chemical props. For example, I've been drinking far too much coffee lately, hoping to jazz my brain towards inspiration. But the coffee messes with my stomach, and can leave me rather irritable and twitchy. Mental steroids would allow me cut back on the caffeine, all the while increasing my daily word count and helping me look much better in a swimsuit. I can already picture my next book-jacket photo!
In fact, maybe there already are mental steroids for writers, and I just don't know about them yet.

Scarily enough, in a recent article in The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot notes that an increasing number of college students are taking prescription ADHD drugs like Adderol under the assumption (not yet vetted by the FDA) that the drugs help them to focus and concentrate over long periods of time, without fatigue. Ms. Talbot ponders a frightening future in which professionals of all stripes are pressured in a sort of mental arms race to pop "neuroenhancing" drugs, thinking that it makes them smarter and more efficient, and fearing that, if they don't take the drugs that everyone else is taking, they'll fall behind. (Which is curiously similar to the dilemma of the mid-career second baseman who starts taking steroids in order to hit the fastball thrown by the pitcher who himself is doping. Or the young writer trying to win his first National Book Award.)

In this brave new world of mental steroids, I can't help but wonder if some of our most successful writers are already doping.

When I read The Corrections a few years ago, I recall thinking that Jonathan Franzen writes wonderfully muscular sentences. His prose seemed powerful, sinewy, with great bulges of fifty-point words and an overall well-proportioned physique. Now I can't help wondering: was Franzen doping? Should his National Book Award have an asterisk beside it?

And isn't Philip Roth's recent output of near-annual gems rather suspicious, given his advanced age? Doesn't it put you in mind of a certain 40-plus Texan pitcher who only seemed to get better and better (and more and more muscular) at an age when most flamethrowers lose their heat and retire? Some of Roth's more recent characters have waxed poetic about the virtues of Viagra; could the author himself have been secretly praising Adderol as well? Could -- gasp -- a national treasure like Roth be doping? Is this why the Nobel Committee keeps passing him up?

Suddenly, every scribe is a suspect. A couple years ago I attended a lecture by the amazing Edward P. Jones. During the Q&A phase, someone praised Jones for packing so much into his short stories, noting that they tend to have as much plot and as well-developed characters as other writers' novels. Jones replied that too many writers these days write novels that are just over-stuffed "stories on steroids." He won applause and laughter when he added, "I don't want to write stories on steroids." Clearly, Jones isn't doping. Unless, of course, his spoken contempt for 'roids is a case of the writer protesting too much, the literary equivalent of Rafael Palmeiro pointing at the congressional inquiry and swearing that he didn't juice, only to flunk his test months later.

(I'm kidding, of course, and am deliberately picking on three of my favorite authors. Still, the idea that writers might start popping the pills is alarming.)

Jones' comment begs the question: what is the difference between a "story on steroids" novel and a finely told, well-wrought, not-too-chemically-enhanced novel? Will readers be able to tell? More importantly, could I get away with it? Like the work of other young novelists, would my pharmaceutically enhanced fiction strike certain critics as "overly clever," would my prose "get in my own way," would it call too much attention to itself? Is it better for one's sentences and scenes to be as spare, elegant and nimble as an old-fashioned shortstop, or do readers prefer plots, characters and clauses to be as muscle-bound as A-Rod?

Oh well, time to get back to work. Where's my triple espresso?


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