The terms of the book tour for my new novel, "The End of the Jews," are these: My cellphone must stay on, charged, and within reach. There is only a five-week differential between the book's drop date and my first child's. I am sprinting through seven cities in 11 days, so as to be home in Berkeley, Calif., a se emingly safe two weeks before that second date. All my flights are changeable. I'd like to avoid answering a spousal call from behind a podium, but I'm prepared to do so. I even have my Rudy Giuliani joke worked out in advance.
Author on tour adds a page, but not to this book
The timing is tricky, but it could be worse. My book could come out a month from now.
New York
My strategy here is to make all the people I want to see meet me at restaurants or record stores. I lived here for 10 years, so I've whittled the city down to its essentials: Senegalese fish with okra sauce at Joloff in Bed-Stuy, hearty Dominican breakfasts at any restaurant in Washington Heights, Venezuelan ceviche and arepas at tiny Flor's Kitchen, just south of Union Square. Pizza at Ben's on West 3d Street, catty-corner from the Blue Note, and where the musicians eat between sets unless they favor the falafel spot up the street.
The city's used-vinyl district comprises 10 square blocks in the East Village. Sound Library on Orchard Street is where hip-hop's royalty cop rare, expensive slabs of funk on the way to the recording studio. I leave empty-handed, then get my fingers dusty at Academy Records on East 10th, A-1 on East 6th, Good Records on East 3d. If I had time, I'd trek to Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn, where a gentleman named Israel operates a store you enter through a basement bulkhead. There is no shelving system, just countless teetering stacks of mysterious wax. Israel stands tall in the middle of everything, before a chessboard. I'm about 1-15 against him. But when I won, the records were practically free.
At McNally Robinson Booksellers on Prince Street, a beautiful independent bookstore in a city - a country - overrun by chains, I have my first great tour moment: I see somebody buy my novel. I resist the urge to pop out from behind a banquette like Marshall McLuhan in "Annie Hall," but this is huge. Publishing is an enormously fraught enterprise - waiting for reviews, hoping people show up to events, sometimes praying the friends who promised to come will bail, so they don't see you playing to an empty room - and even the most anecdotal affirmation matters.
Joe's Pub is packed for my event . . . well, the event I'm doing along with six other people. My cellphone does ring while I'm onstage, but it's not Victoria.
Boston
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