He is a cold and childish man. He’s loving and intense, and he’s doesn’t do much with his time. He has no steady relationships. He seems incapable of building anything. He is paralyzed by complexity and criticism, especially of his loved ones. I experience the exotic thrill of finding my Oblomov. Some days I revel in his frenzied apathy. He’s my Stranger.

We met in 2008, at a party at Gary Shteyngart’s apartment. We sat on two stools Gary had bought at an auction that had once belonged to James Brown. (It was the night the DFW news broke. That may be why we bonded immediately. I had started teaching at Columbia, and I remember feeling awful, thinking about how Dave was going to become God.)

“You never let your characters just fuck. You never have them enjoy it and just leave it at that. There’s a conflict or anxiety or regret every fucking time! It’s like you don’t know that there’s actual pleasure in the world. It’s really puritanical.”

Also: “How come in Godspeed the bad news always breaks after someone fucks someone they aren’t supposed to? Like, Dad was supposed to pick up the kids after school, but he was late because he was banging his lover, so the kids go home on a friend’s helicopter and they die. Then people write about the helicopter metaphor, and they don’t even notice the function of pleasure in your work.

My take on this is: “You don’t solve loneliness with pleasure.”