Throwback Thursday: Writing is Magic in Fool on the Hill

Matt Ruff’s 1988 debut Fool on the Hill is a book about that moment, about characters moving on their own. It’s a fantasy about the power of really good writing to create worlds, to move even the toughest of crowds, to create something magical. And for that, and because it’s so earnest and optimistic about fairy tales, and writing, and magic, and just about everything else it does, it’s one of my all-time favorite books.
The story goes like this: Stephen Titus George (“George” to his friends) goes up a hill in Ithaca, just outside Cornell, to fly a kite. Around him,fantastical storylines emerge: the fairies of The Hill go about their daily lives, speaking in hushed tones of ancient evils; a dog and a cat set out to find Heaven; and a colorful Round Table of anarchists and non-conformists known as the Bohemians descend upon Cornell on horseback for another year. These disparate threads slowly begin to crisscross over the course of the novel, but in a self-contained way. And they all seem to revolve around George.
Because, see, there’s another important character who goes by the name of Mr. Sunshine. He’s been using Ithaca to bang out a capital-S Story for longer than anyone could possibly fathom, and it’s his job to create something interesting, something worth reading, for his own amusement. While he initially leaves the story to one of his typewriter monkeys, something causes him to take direct control: George is his hero, and George seems able to make the story move all on his own. It becomes a battle of wills: Mr. Sunshine wants a classic Greek tragedy, George is a fan of fairy tales and King Arthur, and both of them are damned if they’re going to let the other write the thing.
What happens after that is magic.
There is lyricism here, too: Ruff’s paragraph are like poetry, every sentence so full of detail it rolls off the page. The picture he paints is vivid and gorgeous; even when he’s writing of the pitch black dead of winter, it’s still got a kind of beauty. This would be enough, but his world also feels alive and full of characters in a way that few books can manage. I cared about these people. As things grew darker around them (and things get really dark) I wanted them to make it through. I wanted them to be happy, because they felt like friends. When I reached the end, I was sad, because it was over, and there was nothing left to discover.
But it wasn’t the end, because it made me want to write for myself. To create something, anything. To tell a good story. I wanted that magic for myself, and I still do. I want to make other people feel the way this book made me feel. I’m still searching for the right words to put in the right order, but I’m glad to have a book like this, one that reminds me why I set out to write anything in the first place. A book that makes me fall in love with the written word over and over again.
And if that’s not worth a read, I don’t know what is.