The Human Zoo Of a Writer Uncaged

Ben Dolnick Got the Bug Early, and It Seems to Have Legs

Are you the concerned parent of a child who wants to be a novelist? Do you worry that he or she is headed for a life of undercompensated scribbling in an era when digital literacy is the only literacy that counts?

Consider the cautionary tale of former Chevy Chase teenager Ben Dolnick -- now 24 years old and hopelessly hooked on fiction -- and watch for the early warning signs.

For his 13th birthday, young Dolnick's well-meaning parents gave him a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five." Before they could say "So it goes," he'd inhaled every word Vonnegut ever wrote and thrown himself at the mercy of his local independent bookseller to find out whom to read next. (Among the suggestions: Tim O'Brien, Tobias Wolff, Barry Hannah and Ken Kesey, whose "Sometimes a Great Notion" he especially loved.)

In middle school, he demonstrated strong resistance to tasks like mapping the Chesapeake Bay watershed but fell under the sway of a passionate and demanding eighth-grade English teacher. Pretty soon he was showing the teacher stories he'd written on his own.

Beginning high school, he drew a freshman English teacher with whom, to put it mildly, he failed to bond. His adolescent coping strategy -- sulking furiously and refusing to do what he considered mindless work -- earned him a first-quarter F.

A couple of years later, still looking to replace his middle-school mentor, he sought out another teacher with a reputation for enthusiastic rigor and asked him to read a three-page poem. Dolnick knew he'd found his man when the teacher sat right down in the hallway, read the poem attentively, then Xed out the second page.

In college, at Columbia University, Dolnick took a summer job at the children's zoo in Central Park. The plan was to work on "a giant, complicated, brilliant first novel" by night -- but the giant, complicated novel went nowhere. He started taking detailed notes on the zoo animals, using index cards he could stuff into pockets if his boss walked by.

By then, of course, it was far too late for warning signs.

Vintage published Dolnick's novel "Zoology" in May as a paperback original.

Perhaps it's time to note that his parents, Lynn and Ed Dolnick, aren't really fretting about their son's choice of vocation. They were grateful to those teachers he connected with at Georgetown Day School, just as they were grateful when his Vonnegut obsession came along.

It helped snap him out of "a long stretch when he was one of those kids who was very bright and not very engaged," his father says. "Good for you, Kurt!"

"The least surprising thing on earth is that he continued writing," says John Burghardt, the teacher who critiqued Dolnick's poem in the hallway. "He found in Vonnegut a model of how to live."