The Edge of Paradise (Random House, 1991)
I requested Ethiopia or Turkey, because
I’d been reading people like Graham Greene
and Lawrence Durrell. The Peace Corps sent me to the Pacific
Islands—Micronesia. The islands stayed with me and I’ve kept
returning, checking on places and people I care about. This
makes me like many other returned Peace Corps volunteers. But
in 1988 my best Micronesian friend, Lazarus Salii, president of
the Republic of Palau, committed suicide. His death gave the story an
edge and purpose that went beyond nostalgia. The book was well
reviewed and remains in print. A final note: my agent sent the
manuscript to James Michener, soliciting a blurb. We knew we’d never
hear from him. But we did: a kind note, typed on a rickety
manual typewriter like the one I use. I mention this because
there’s nothing more rare, especially in publishing, than
an act of disinterested kindness. This was such an act.
Alma Mater (Addison-Wesley,
1995)
I love islands. Micronesia—Saipan,
Palau, Pohnpei—is full of them. Gambier, Ohio is
another kind of island, a small, surrounded place where I live
and teach. My alma mater, my current employer. If you live in a
place, you write about it. Alma
Mater is a loving, scathing, funny
acount of a year in the life of Kenyon College. No names have
been changed. And I put myself in the way of as much experience
as I could bear: trustees, hiring searches, fraternity life,
dormitory grotesquerie, departmental meetings—I even
moved back into the same dorm I’d occupied as a college
freshman in 1960-61. For that alone I deserve Nobel Prize consideration.
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