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the Viking Portable Library, a book that remains in print to this day. Thanks to Cowley’s essay and the windfall of reappraisals that followed, Faulkner no longer had to “eke out a hack’s motion picture wages” to support his financially hopeless fiction. Five years later, he would win the Nobel Prize.
    I don’t doubt that many writers eventually receive their due returns, but the fact remains that many is not all. For those of us who love literature, only the all-encompassing justifies complacency. Our situation today is not altogether grim. In recent years, several writers have been revived thanks mainly to the efforts of individuals, my Norton colleague Robert Weil’s heroic republication of Henry Roth and Tim Page’s equally heroic salvage of Dawn Powell among them. Occasionally, I pull from my shelf my favorite contemporary novels—Robert Antoni’s Divina Trace , Philip Caputo’s Horn of Africa, Mark Jacobs’s Stone Cowboy, and Gayl Jones’s The Healing, to name a vastly underappreciated few—and wonder what will become of them. These questions were much less troubling when I was merely a reader who believed that the captains of the industry that now employs me were, at heart, attentive and just. Critics deserve their portion of blame—too many incapable of all but obvious commonplaces. Those few critics of higher caliber are often given to asking, “Will we be reading this fifty years from now?” The implication of this last-resort
rhetoric is clear: I am a noncombatant observer upon literature’s battlefield. The implication is also false. Whatever a book’s merits, it can do little to fulfill such prophecy by itself.
    What faith, then, can the poet or novelist place in his or her work’s survival? Is literary destiny simply yet another god that failed? Although I know what I now believe, I hope I am wrong. Nevertheless, I cannot help but imagine that literature is an airplane, and we are passengers on it. One might assume that behind the flimsy accordion door sit pilots of skill and accomplishment. But the cockpit is empty. It has always been empty. The controls are abandoned. They have always been abandoned. One needs only to touch them to know how mutable our course.
    Â 
    â€”2000

ESCANABA’S MAGIC HOUR
    Movies, Robot Deer, and the American Small Town
    MAGIC HOUR: The brief periods of dawn and dusk that allow enough time for shooting, but also create some striking effects on film.
    â€”The Complete Film Dictionary

EXT. ESCANABA AREA HIGH SCHOOL ATHLETIC FIELD—TWILIGHT
    I n the hard cold of a waning afternoon in early March, I stand on the hash-marked permafrost of my hometown football field in Escanaba, Michigan, and wait for a motion picture to be filmed. So far, I have seen almost nothing of what moviemaking is rumored to consist. I have seen a brief game of touch football break out among the crew. I have seen the film’s star, writer, and director, Jeff Daniels, field the same question from four different journalists. I have been introduced to one of those journalists by Daniels, an irreducibly dreamlike introduction, since that journalist happened to be my childhood best friend, Mike. I have seen many, many lights—enormous, mutant lights whose wattage is equal to a perpetual camera flash—moved all over the place and overheard complicated justifications for doing so. And I have listened to three Escanabans, standing together near the field’s
entrance gate, tell me what they think of the production: “It’s interesting,” “It’s interesting,” and “Pretty interesting.”
    The one scene on tonight’s call sheet is a nightmare sequence in which Daniels’s character realizes he is standing in his underwear before a stadium of Escanabans. The film’s producers were hoping for a turn-out of 4,000 local extras. What looks to be 600 have been herded into the center